- Independent support broker helping disabled and older people get the personalised health and social care they want, accredited with the London Brokerage Network in November 2012
- Completed PTLLS (Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector) in March 2013, accredited at Level 4 (May 2013).
- Twelve years experience facilitating employability training programmes for people with mental health disabilities
- Volunteer mentoring a young person in employability skills with Inspire, Motivate & Engage since March 2013
- Teaching a six year old how to play the guitar since January 2013
- Licensed Football Association coach with a Certificate in Coaching Football Level 1 Award at Middlesex County FA since November 2012
- Not a podcaster since April 2010
Support4Life is the trading name I'm using to work as an independent support broker. This means that I help older and disabled people plan their own support to get the personalised health and social care they want, so that they can stay in control of their lives.
Chief cook and bottle washer.
Not in Richmond. Not a fellowship.
Co-creator and designer of unique and beautiful triangular stained glass lamps, Spitalfields Market stallholder, white van man (furniture removals), careers advisor and mental health trainer.
Design and implementation of a comprehensive therapeutic activities programme for frail elderly people with physical, sensory and memory impairments. All singing, all dancing, quizmaster, bingo caller, party planner, minibus driver, cake maker, counsellor, advocate and befriender of the infirm and the incontinent. Friday afternoons in the pub.
Wiping arses.
Playing a football manager demo over and over again. Late mornings, early lunches, afternoons in the pub. European travel. I'm genuinely surprised I lasted so long.
Back in November last year, I shared some of my experiences of teaching my mother to use Google Talk to chat with me online.
While I was writing it, I worried that people might think that I was, in effect, putting my Mum's difficulties with this new-fangled internet thing up for public ridicule and humiliation, and that my motivations for doing so were based on not just my current frustrations with her techno-disability, but an expression of long held, childish resentments and anger, too thinly disguised in somewhat black humour.
Then I thought 'Fuck it! Publish and be damned!'
I needn't have worried too much. My experiences seemed to resonate with sons, Facebook mothers and cousins, Markov chain text generators, and sons, from Zurich to Norfolk and back again.
As well as forgiving my mother for unresolved hurts and disappointments, I wanted to try to be a bit more understanding and helpful in my online communications with her, and not to come over as such a grumpy bastard. Better late than never, it occurred to me that this really wasn't so much about my mother's apparent lack of computer sense, or my own deficiencies as a teacher. As Andy C pointed out three years ago, when thinking aloud about his wife Norma's browsing habits,
'I think the key issue here is more about usability.'
Furthermore,
'This isn’t being patronising but I don’t believe she knows what the address bar is. Until recently, she didn’t know what the search bar was.'
And:
'I am sure this mentality isn’t unique among novice and non technical users.'
Indeed, my mother doesn't know her Unity Dash from her Start Menu, but she can still dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, and download, install and start Teamviewer from the command line when necessary.
So, hot on the heels of that success, I bring you further comedic news of Mother's progress, this time focussing on email. But first, a brief recap of where we left off....
Mum: hi david
Mum: hi david
me: why are you saying everything twice?
Mum: because you did not reply
me: I can't reply while I'm cooking breakfast. And I'll still get your message even if I don't reply for weeks, months or even years.
Mum: sorry
me: no need to apologise for that. Point is, there it's not like the telephone where you need to know the other person is actually there and listening before you start speaking. It's more like email. So no need to start with 'hi david' every time. Just get straight into whatever it is you wanted to say. And I'll reply whenever I get the message and/or feel like replying to it.
Mum: ok
Mum: hi david
me: hi Mum
Mum: how are you doing
me: ok. You?
Mum: not bad couldnt get onto firefox tonight had to sign in but didnt know my password so i have changed it
me: you don't have or need a password to use Firefox, but nevermind
Mum: its ok now
me: you sure it wasn't some kind of virus/phishing scam?
Mum: dont say that
Mum: how would i know
me: well, firstly, you don't have or need a password to use Firefox...
Mum: it said i had to sign in
me: yes, I believe you. That's how some viruses work
me: you sure you don't mean you had to sign in to your email or something else?
Mum: well i have done it now
me: yes, I know, you told me
me: how did you change your password?
Mum: when i wanted to go on google talk i had to put my new pass word
me: right, but Google Talk isn't Firefox, is it?
Mum: i dont know what i have done
me: well, if it was Google Talk asking you for your password and you didn't know it and then clicked on a link saying 'forgotten password' or similar which then opened up Firefox you should be ok.
Mum: it was firefox that asked for the password first
Mum: lets forget about this or i wont sleep tonight
me: ok. But you don't have or need a password to use Firefox. What were you doing on Firefox? What page were you on?
Mum: just tried it now
Mum: i click mozilla firefox on the bottom left to open up my google page and it says you have been signed out sign in which opens up a box which wants my email address and password
me: right, ok. So Google wanted your password, not Firefox. It does that sometimes. You can sleep peacefully, now :-)
Mum: thanks
Mum registered for online banking with her bank, but had a problem with her router not working for a week. Being offline, she had not received any emails, including one she was expecting from her bank, and one from me with some photos attached. She had just got off the phone to her ISP, who had managed to get her back online:
Mum: i have just had a look and no email from bank
me: have you checked your spam folder?
Mum: no will do
Mum: nothing there
me: what email address did you give them?
Mum: tiscali
me: which email account are you looking in for this email?
Mum: they did not ask about lower key looking in windows mail
me: why are you using Windows Mail? I set it up for you to use Google Mail didn't I?
me: lower key?
Mum: no capitals
Mum: just going to look on the bank web sight
me: your email won't be there, will it?
Mum: why did i spell site like i did
me: because you are looking for an email?
Mum: no i have had a letter from them
me: I thought you said you are expecting an email from them?
Mum: i will have to ring them again
me: why?
Mum: i dont know my user name
me: that is probably in the email they sent you
Mum: i think it is but i have not received it
me: have you checked in your Google Mail?
Mum: yes
me: in spam?
Mum: no will do
Mum: not in spam
me: have you checked your Tiscali mail online and spam/junk?
Mum: yes
me: when did they say they would email you?
Mum: the letter contains a temporary password but i need the user name
me: yes, I know
me: when did they say they would email you?
Mum: it should have been in the email before i came off the phone she said i will email you
me: and what was she going to put in the email?
Mum: my user name
me: so you gave her your email address over the phone?
Mum: yes
me: what is your email address?
Mum: mrsmrsdn@tiscali.co.uk
Mum: it says in the letter to ring if i have any problems
me: yes, I know. But they can't help you if you have a problem receiving email can they?
Mum: i have no problems receiving emails got yours
me: right, well you didn't tell me that did you? In that case they haven't sent it to you
Mum: i know that so i will ring tomorrow
me: well, I've just spent 28 minutes trying to help you locate it
Mum: sorry
When she retired a couple of years ago, Mum started knitting jumpers for dogs, as you do, and selling them on eBay.
Mum: i have not gone to prison yet you were joking about keeping a record of what i sell
me: not really.
Mum: stop kidding me or i won't sleep tonight
me: I'm not kidding
Mum: what about all the other people who sell on ebay
me: what about them?
me: Anyway, I suppose you have a record on your ebay account
Mum: true
Mum: that won't stay on forever will it
me: I don't know. I don't see why not. Anyway, you also get email confirmation, which will last forever (unless you delete it)
Mum: emails only stay on for 30 days
me: No they don't.
Mum: mine go to trash
me: Only if you send them there. My, for someone who couldn't register for an Etsy account last week, you are now an expert!
Mum: very funny
me: if it is in your gmail, unless you send it to trash (which there is no reason to do, ever - you should 'archive' instead), they will always be available to you.
Mum: i have never sent anything to archive just tried sending one how do i see if it is there
me: look in all mail, or just search
Mum: search what
me: at the top of your gmail screen there is a search box. You can use it to search for archived emails just like you would do on Google
Mum: found it in all mail
Mum: can send it back to inbox
Mum: do you know my password for googlemail
Mum: i put in my password but it says it was changed 4 months ago
me: did you change it?
Mum: no
me: click on this link and try again: http://mail.google.com
Mum: that only brings my emails up
me: isn't that what you want?
me: cod or haddock?
Mum: cod
Mum: only eat haddock
me: what?
Mum: only eat haddock never cod
me: but you prefer cod?
Mum: no pressed the enter button by mistake
Mum: cod has worms
If you wish to discuss the price of fish, you can do so over at the Freedom-loving microblogging site Identi.ca by following this link: http://identi.ca/notice/100672322.
Alternatively, and if you hate Freedom, please Tweet, Plus or Facebook me, if you really have to.
No emails.
Mum: hi david did you get my email
Let me reassure you:
Tinap is not closing.
There is not a summary of the changes coming to Tinap on the Tinap blog.
Part of that includes stopping new podcasts on Tinap.
Existing podcasts will continue to be available, but new podcasts are no longer allowed.
Tinap is going to start using new CAT PISS DELUXE software - Levelator - instead of piss poor, paprika-less Audacity. This will 'evan' out the sound levels to zero, so that everyone can hear and be heard equally, in stereo, mono, ogg and mp3. Even with the volume dial turned up to 11.
All active podcasts will continue to be available for download automatically. Active means one release in the last 12 years.
Even after the change, "old" podcasts will still be available to download.
If you'd like to listen to a federated anti-social podcast, we suggest trying The Dick Turnip Roadshow. You'll get a new podcast on one of the two free public podcast feeds available (with more coming every fortnight). You won't be able to listen to Tinap right now, but when Tinap switches over to the new software, you'll be fully compatible.
You can also download Tinap and install it on your own server. If you think there's some emergency reason to create a new Tinap, send me a request at #tinap, and I'll most probably ignore it.
Thanks to all the Tinap listeners who've encouraged others to listen to the podcast. I hope that getting people to listen to the CAT PISS DELUXE version will be as fun and rewarding.
Here are some things you can do if you're freaking out about Tinap:
Thanks, David.
If you wish to leave feedback, suggestions on how we can improve our workflow, or other appropriately equalised comments on this post, you can do so over at the Freedom-loving microblogging site Identi.ca by following this link: http://identi.ca/notice/100656224.
I recently began a course of rational emotive behavioural therapy (REBT) in a further effort to address my experience of mental health problems (what I usually refer to as my 'depression', but which other people may refer to as being 'clinically fed up', or they may not refer to it all and, instead, drink themselves into a near-coma every night).
REBT is based on the idea that unhealthy emotions that we find disturbing are generally the result of irrational beliefs, i.e., firmly-held beliefs or opinions about ourselves, other people, life, the universe and everything, which, under rational scrutiny, just don't add up or make any sense.
That is not to say that we cannot experience healthy negative emotions - we can, and do. The difference is that healthy negative emotions do not leave us sludging around our inner spaces projecting our own shit1 on to the world, or furiously waving our arms about at inconsiderate car drivers on a daily basis. Yes, the world can be shitty sometimes, but it's really not the end of the world as we know it, and we can feel fine about that, even if we'd prefer it if it wasn't shitty. Likewise, I'd like car drivers to show more consideration to other road users, but they don't have to. And when they don't, I don't have to walk into oncoming traffic to remonstrate with them non-verbally.
So, it's not simply a case of positive thinking or blind optimism in the face of adversity, but sensible advice about how we might prefer to behave and feel if we didn't let our emotions get the better of us. And there appears to be plenty of evidence that REBT is much more effective in helping people feel better than other talking therapies or anti-depressant medication.
That said, I'd already decided to go back to my GP and ask him to prescribe me anti-depressants again, as I've felt myself sinking ever lower into typical depressive thinking and feeling for several weeks. I've tried citalopram and sertraline before, and maybe a different one will work better for me and/or at least give me a little placebo boost in my mood, take the edge off my anger and give me and those around me a bit of respite while I wait for the REBT to kick in.
It's always nice to have a plan and I felt good about it. I made an appointment to see my GP for today, and to see the nurse tomorrow for two much needed ear massages. I was up bright and early this morning and trolled Andrew 'Apocalypse Tomorrow' Felske on Identi.ca for amusement while I waited.
I went to the surgery at my appointed time and checked in with the new computerised reception kiosk.
'Sorry, your appointment has not been recognised. Please speak to a human at the Reception desk.'
I tried again. Same thing. Odd. I spoke to a human at the Reception desk.
'You don't have an appointment to see the doctor, today, Mr Marsden. Your appointment is tomorrow to see the nurse.'
'No. I definitely made an appointment to see the doctor today. I wouldn't be here otherwise, would I?'
'I'm looking on the system.... It says you cancelled your appointment to see the doctor.'
'No, I didn't cancel my appointment to see the doctor. Why would I do that? I made an appointment to see the doctor, today. The person I spoke to when I made the appointment hung up before I could add that I also wanted an appointment to see the nurse about a totally separate issue, in addition to seeing the doctor today. So I rang back straight away and made an appointment to see the nurse, tomorrow. I'd like to see the doctor today, please, like I made an appointment to do so, which is why I'm here, right now, at the appointed time. I'm sorry for getting angry with you. I know it's not your fault.'
(Of course what I should have said was:
'An appointment to see the doctor? Moi? I don't think so! I'm as fit as a fiddle! Nothing wrong with me! Nothing that a good seeing to wouldn't soon put right, at any rate! I don't need an appointment to see the doctor! I'd like to see the doctor, of course. He's a jolly fine chap! But if I can't see the doctor, because I don't actually have an appointment to see him, well, you know what? It's not the end of the world as we know it, is it! And I feel fine! Hey ho! Pip and dandy!2)
'The doctor will see you now, Mr Marsden.'
I told the doctor I'd been feeling depressed and miserable for weeks and that it felt worse since I last saw him a fortnight earlier about some other bodily grievance. We talked a bit about other anti-depressants I'd tried before and how they didn't seem to have much positive effect on my mood, but left me unable to sleep. I scored 14 on the PHQ-9. I told him I'd scored myself at 65 on the Burns Depression Checklist. He wrote me a prescription for fluoxetine (more commonly known as Prozac). I was pleased with this. Then he looked at my file. He took the prescription back.
'Oh, no. I don't feel comfortable doing this. The psychotherapy group you go to is run by a psychiatrist. He should be making this decision.'
'Well, he knows I'm here. We talked about it in the group. But it's not his job to prescribe my medication!'
'OK, well, let's wait until he writes to me to say so.'
'Nooooo! Please, doctor! I'm desperate! I don't know how I'm going to cope, especially over Xmas!'
'Ah, but fluoxetine will take maybe six to eight weeks before you feel any beneficial effect anyway.'
'Yes, but I might get some more immediate benefit from the placebo effect, doctor!'
'Your argument doesn't make any sense!'
'My belief that anti-depressant medication will help me feel better is irrational, doctor? Well, I'd like it if it does help me to feel a bit better, but I realise that it might not. If it doesn't, it's not the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine about it. But I'd like to try.'
If you wish to express your rational or irrational beliefs in relation to this post, you can do so over at the Freedom-loving microblogging site Identi.ca by following this link: http://identi.ca/notice/98572829.
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E.g., 'Can you never ever succeed at anything?! You useless, rancid, cancerous sack of shit!' - Arnold J. 'Ace' Rimmer, Red Dwarf X, episode 1. ↩
'I've decided not to be so hard on myself. If I pass, "Splendissimo!" If I fail, "Hey ho! Pip and dandy!" That's my new life slogan.' - Arnold J. 'Ace' Rimmer, Red Dwarf X, episode 1. ↩
I have been chatting with my mother on Google Talk since I first taught her how to use it in August 2008. I thought it would be a good way to keep in touch in addition to - and preferably instead of - those awkward fortnightly phone calls where neither of us had anything to say, and definitely to replace those horrible answer phone messages ('It's only Mum...').
This personal project has been a huge success. In the intervening four and a bit years, we have chatted online in this way exactly four hundred times, roughly twice a week (although our 'conversation rate' is actually just 52%1).
Supporting my mother to learn how to use a (Windows) computer and the internet has not been easy. Indeed, mum's GTalk online 'status' has said 'hi david'2 since October 2008, and in late 2009 I had a mental breakdown. So I do not advise that you try this at home without an adult present.
Still, for those of you you who are interested, I thought it might be useful and fun to share a sample of my experience.
Mum: hi david
me: hi
Mum: hi david
me: hi
Mum: hi
Mum: hi david
Mum: are you not there?
me: hello Mum
Mum: hello
me: hello
Mum: hi david
Mum: hi david
Mum: if you are not there i can not stop as i am going to do my shopping
Mum: hello
Mum: hi david
me: sry breakfast has just arrived
Mum: just arrived?
me: courtesy of Fred the Frying Pan and Timmy The Toaster
Mum: what do you mean
me: all nicely served by Peter The Plate
Mum: tell me what you mean
me: I'm eating my breakfast
Mum: is that why you were not available last night i tried several times
me: tried what?
Mum: to speak to you
me: on phone?
Mum: no on line
me: I didn't see you
Mum: well it said you were busy
me: I forgot to turn busy off. But you should still be able to send me a message anyway. Even if it says I'm here I might not be. But I will answer you when I get back. If you are offline, you will get the message when you login again next time
me: so remember that if you login at 7am on Saturday morning and get a message from me - it means I sent it on Friday night after you went to bed. And I will still BE in bed on Saturday at 7am!!!
Mum: i wouldnt send you a message when it says busy
me: why not?
Mum: because you were busy
me: It doesn't matter. You can message me anytime you like. If I'm busy I'll tell you I'm busy. If I'm watching TV, on the phone or out I probably won't respond until later
Mum: ok
Mum: can i put photos onto my lap top
me: yes
me: I thought I showed you how to do that
Mum: not off my camera but old ones so that i could send them to you
me: oh, ok. You have a scanner?
Mum: yes
me: you know how to use it?
Mum: think so
me: then scan them in
me: Picasa should find them automagically
me: then email them to me
Mum: what to the printer
me: scan them with the scanner
me: that will create a digital image on your laptop
Mum: i will have a go at weekend
me: don't answer the bloody phone, then!
Mum: hi david
me: don't you want to skype?
Mum: what do you mean
Mum: i did not mean to end it like that
me: how did you mean to end it?
Mum: caught the button
Mum: speak to you tomorrow nite
me: ok, nite
Mum: who is going to win
me: 6-0 to Utd!
Mum: hi david
me: hi
Mum: made it half way to 6-0
Mum: i read today that fergie is going to get rid of vidic next summer
me: News of the World?
Mum: how did you guess
me: because that's what newspaper you buy and it's also well
known to be full of crap
Mum: true
Mum: but we will see
me: what else does the NotW have to say?
Mum: he is too aggressive with team mates in training
me: oh and it's taken how many years for Fergie to see this?
Mum: hes not been there for many years
me: nearly 4
Mum: i am going to bed soon got a headache
me: I'm not surprised trying to make sense out of the NotW
Mum: very funny
Mum: anyway how are you
me: ok, how are you?
Mum: fine thanks apart from headache
Mum: what is java
me: just click on update or yes or ok
Mum: says there is a new update
Mum: shall i install
me: yes
Mum: i can do it later it says
me: you'll be in bed
Mum: i will do it now then it says failed to download required
installation files
Mum: its gone now
Mum: off to bed now up early in morning for work
me: nite
Mum: nite
me: just going to log out and back in again
Mum: what do you mean
me: I mean I'm going to log out and then log back in again
These messages were sent while you were offline.
Mum: ok
Mum: are you back now
Mum: now you have gone off line
Mum: why do you keep going on and off
Mum: hello
me: ok, back
Mum: thats better
Mum: have you gone
me: Can you see a green light next to my name?
Mum: a green circle
Mum: going to bed now nite
me: that means I'm here
Mum: i see
me: no green light = not here
Mum: ok
me: good night
Mum: nite
Mum: wht does idle mean
Mum: hi david will speak to you later
Mum: have you gone
me: what do you think?
Mum: about what
me: if I have gone or not
If you wish to leave a short, to the point, and possibly hairy comment on this post, you can do so over at the Freedom-loving microblogging site Identi.ca by following this link: http://identi.ca/notice/98162689
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193 out of all 400 chat sessions are one line in total. ↩
266 out of all 400 chat sessions begin with 'hi david' or 'hello david'.
5 begin with 'david are you there'.
5 begin with 'david please speak to me'.
3 begin with 'are you busy'.
1 begins with 'i won't talk now if you are busy'.
1 begins with 'are you still not there david'. ↩
Marsden United today completed the £75.00 (plus add ons) transfer of perennial bed-warmer Barcelona, who has been on trial with the club for the past two weeks. United manager David Marsden said that signing Barcelona was a signal of United's intent this season and in seasons to come:
'Barcelona is an exciting prospect and addition to our team and gives us more options to go for a walk in the middle of the park. Barcelona is also well used to being on top of the table (eating food from her owners' plates), which is where we obviously want to be, too.'
Barcelona's signing went through after the transfer deadline because she was, in effect, a free agent, having been found collapsed outside a nightclub in London, and because the local cattery is not affiliated to the Football Association.
In addition to the signing on fee, United are understood to have paid £20.00 for the special Generation Game Cat Owners' Starter Pack cat bed (which she violently refuses to use) a litter tray (which, thank God, she is perfectly happy to use), a fetching pink collar, one month's instalment of food and litter, a tiny football, and a cuddly toy. As part of the deal, United also signed a one-legged catnip-infested 'scratching' post, which - like the cat basket - is studiously ignored in favour of the sofa and bedroom carpet, for the bargain price of £17.50.
Despite missing the first week's training because she was hiding under the sofa, Barcelona appears to be settling in well with her new team mates:
'She's very cute, four-footed and can pass that blasted little football about kita-kata style all night bloody long,' added Marsden, bleary-eyed. 'I think she'll be a great asset to this club and she'll win us many admirers with her fine play, although some might not like the fact that she'll also get us a lot of penalties as she rolls over to have her belly rubbed at the slightest touch. But that's football for you.'
Marsden also added that, as Barcelona is a bloody stupid name for a cat, she will now be known as Lola (Lol for short), a kind of bastardisation of a shortened form of Barce-Lona. It was either that or Alan, which the wife didn't like at all. (Cat. Alan. Get it?)
Or anyone, for that matter. Especially if they have some seemingly arbitrary power over you. Like paying you for your labour.
Of course, there have been some cracking Quakers. And as religions go, if I had to choose one, the Religious Society of Friends wouldn't be the worst choice by a long way (at least they appreciate a bit of unostentatious peace and quiet).
The only Quaker I know (or, the only person I know, who I know is a Quaker), turned out to be a total cunt. Let's call him Richard Nixon. Or Tricky Dicky, for short. He was my employer for a few years, and had always seemed a decent one at that. That is, until my line manager (let's call him King George III, or The Mad King) started throwing his vast weight around the office to get people (me included) to do extra work that was in his job description (dumping, not delegation), and generally just being quite unpleasant, discriminatory and dictatorial about it all.
Soon, it all went pear-shaped.
I started complaining about things. You know, the unpleasantness. The discrimination. The dictatorship. I blew the whistle. His Barking Majesty went ballistic. He told me he would have me sacked if I carried on. He accused me of being an alcoholic, and of sexually harassing female colleagues, all without a shred of evidence to back it up (because there was none). He criticised me, verbally abused me, and humiliated me in front of colleagues and members of the public. He told colleagues I was incompetent.
This all happened over a period of about three months, during which time Tricky Dicky tried to act as a mediator, and also attended a gathering of colleagues to hear their similar grievances against the Bonkers King. Nixon's only response was to warn me that His Majesty would raise a retaliatory grievance against me, and that, if that were the case, Nixon would support the King.
Finally, I could take no more and got signed off sick by my GP suffering from 'stress at work'. My symptoms included fainting, shortness of breath, and panic attacks, for which no physical cause was ever found by a consultant, who conducted various cardiology examinations. The Mad King told Tricky Dicky that my absence was unauthorised, even though, as I later discovered, His Royal Ravingness had signed off my absence notification himself. This convenient 'lapse of memory' allowed Nixon to stop my wages that month for 'unauthorised absence', and to write to me asking me to confirm my 'resignation'. While I was able to put Nixon straight on what had happened, and the Mad King's duplicitous part in it, Nixon decided it warranted no further action on his part.
While I was still off sick, Nixon asked me to do some work, as he and Mad King George were getting into a bit of a pickle without me. (Who's incompetent now?) Nixon and the King also told colleagues and clients why I was off sick (in breach of confidentiality) and His Majesty reportedly enjoyed telling anyone who would listen, 'But stress isn't an illness!' (This would be somewhat less interesting if it wasn't for the fact that our field of work was supporting people who have mental health problems.) I was only off for six weeks, but during that time they also told everyone that my work project was 'failing', that it was all my fault, and tried to close it down - it was only the protests of colleagues and clients that kept it running.
When I returned to work, Nixon issued me with redundancy, which I appealed. I raised a formal grievance about the King's tyrannical behaviour towards me, which Nixon dismissed without conducting a proper, fair and independent investigation or hearing. Indeed, he went on to question my competence and conduct, and tried to blame me for His Majesty's bad behaviour. Again, he threatened me with the prospect of the King raising a retaliatory grievance against me if I appealed against his decision, which I felt I had to do. The King thusly raised his retaliatory grievance, which Nixon heard alone, finding in favour of the King. He refused to hear my appeal against my redundancy.
Meantime, newly unemployed, I started applying for jobs and got a few interviews. I also decided to fill in the forms and take my case to an Employment Tribunal, which would meet several months later. Before the tribunal happened, I got a couple of job offers, one of which I accepted. A few days later, however, the offer was withdrawn. Apparently, Tricky Dicky had written me a bad reference, which I was able to verify thanks to the Data Protection Act. I was also able to get a copy of a good reference he'd written for me for another job that I didn't get, but which had been before I submitted my case to the Employment Tribunal. Funny that.
Anyway, that's Quakers for you.
Not so long ago, before the brave new world of its doubleplusgood Facebook-killing anti-social network, Google provided the best blog and news feed reader out there called, simply, Google Reader. It's still the best blog and news feed reader out there, and believe me, I've looked at alternatives. Reader always had something of a social side to it - you could share what you read via your own rss feed (or somehow) and subscribe to the feeds of others in the same way, and you and other readers could comment on those shares, if that was your kind of thing.
Since Google Plus came along, all that has changed. There is no feed to share your reading with any more. If you want to share what you are reading you are compelled to share it on Plus. I don't know about anyone else, but I find myself sharing less than I might do otherwise, simply because I don't want to overwhelm anyone who has me in one of their circles. And, of course, I can always just star (Reader's built-in basic bookmarking feature) items I want to be able to find again for myself. I suppose I could just Plus One items I want to bookmark (and share) in that way, or even post to a circle containing only me, but neither seems a very satisfactory or useful way to do it to me.
I suppose, initially, my main motivation for wanting to find another way to share what I'm reading via a feed is because I signed up to Flavours.me, which does what it says on the tin and combines all your online profiles together in one shiny place. And who doesn't want shiny?
That just wouldn't work with Google Plus as it is now.
Apart from being just a vanity project, and potentially sharing what I've read with random strangers, sharing my Google Reader starred items via If This Then That and Tumblr (I could have used Wordpress.com or another blogging platform, but Tumblr seemed the most appropriate) has allowed me to revisit all those blog posts and news items I felt were interesting and amazing two or three years ago and curate them for posterity. Another thing I've noticed is that quite a few blogs and news sites are either no longer with us or have paid the shiny dollar and 'upgraded' leaving their old stories homeless. Re-publishing to Tumblr is a way of preserving web content that has or had value to me, and may have for others, too. (If I re-published something of yours that you would prefer I didn't, just let me know and we can negotiate a price for me to remove it.)
For example, I now have an easy way to find and share all my favourite articles on, about or containing:
And as a result of all this work (although I'm no where near done), I now know (or am reminded) that, as well as being a complete shyster with no taste in music, Duncan Bannatyne is a prosopagnosic fuckface as well.
Today I went to see a woman about a cat. Several women and several cats, as it turned out. I finally persuaded the wife that we should take a walk down the canal path to the local cattery, with a view to adopting one of the poor strays that live there.
We both love cats. We'd talked about getting one. I just wanted us to visit the cattery to find out what the procedure was and to get their advice on if we should have a house cat (as we live in a first floor flat) or a cat that likes to go out (obviously more of a problem, but we weren't sure if that was really out of the question). My wife's concern was that, once there, she would be unable to leave without one.
Once there, I was almost unable to leave without one. As soon as you walk in, every cat (bar the few that have been there the longest), looks at you with pleading desperation (or maybe I'm over-anthropomorphising?) that just breaks your heart. We were greeted at reception by George, a very affectionate three-legged ginger tom, who got very jealous of the attention I gave to the pen I was using to fill in the adoption form. Inside the cattery itself, we were introduced to Barcelona (yes, what a silly name for a cat - can you imagine calling it?
'BARCE-LO-NA! BARCE-LO-NA!' You'd be locked up in no time.)
Barcelona, however, is just about the loveliest cat you could ever wish to meet. Young, pretty, healthy, a little shy, but just delighted to be held and stroked. It was somewhat gutting to be told that she was not a house cat, after all, as we'd been told. My wife is planning a midnight raid right now.
We were then introduced to two older cats, Lucy and Gilly, whose owner had died. Lucy is quite severely depressed. She hardly ever goes out, doesn't move much, and is generally just quite unresponsive and unhappy looking. What a sorry sight. And, God, it was like looking in a bloody mirror just a few months ago! You could see that she did like having her chin gently stroked, but that also it made her a bit agitated. She's not young, pretty or healthy, and she's quite miserable, but it would be so nice to give her a safe, loving home again, along with her pal. We're not sure we have room for two cats, though.
Anyway, we're going to be vetted with a home visit soon enough, so expect cat pictures if and when....
UPDATE: I awoke to the sound of meowing coming from the kitchen, only to find that it was just my wife making pancakes.
UPDATE: now with picture!
At the moment, not a lot.
I do have several personal 'projects' on the go, however.
I'm working on getting out a bit more. I'm planning to start a little community garden where I live. We have a patch of communal grass, which no one ever uses, and I want to start growing a few vegetables and maybe some fruit and flowers to share with the neighbours. Not the best time of year to start, but yesterday, as I wandered over to the the post box to post a letter I noticed some people dumping what looked like bed slats, which I promptly dismantled and procured for making my raised garden beds. I'm no gardener, and a bit cack-handed, so to make such a find and to pull it off with such brazen dexterity made me feel really good!
I'm starting a five week, one day a week training course to equip me with the skills and knowledge to become a support broker for people with disabilities who are now able to purchase the social care services they need directly rather than rely on social services to do it for them. This is quite closely related to the work I've been doing for thirteen years until I became ill, and could lead to some handy self-employed work in the future.
I've signed up for one of the FA's schemes to train as a youth coach, starting November. It's another five day course spread over a couple of weeks and it's local to where I live. Before I came to London in 1999, I did a little bit of youth coaching in the community where I worked, and it will be a good opportunity to make one or two local contacts and see if I can get involved in anything round here. I see a lot of kids playing footy on the streets and on the odd occasion we've had a little chat, none of them seem to be in a team or even bother going to play in the local park where there are goalposts to use.
Inside the house, and as I mentioned yesterday, I am in the early doors stages of the long-drawn-out process of moving all my worthy old blog posts here, fixing up all the old broken links along the way. This could take months or even years, if I ever finish it at all. I will start re-publishing some cleaned-up old posts again at some point, therefore. Apologies to my subscriber.
Easily side-tracked from such monotonous and mundane work, I found a workaround to share all my Google Reader shared items (well, my starred items, at least), like I used to be able to do until Google Plus came along and broke everything. So now I'm also in the early doors stages of the long-drawn-out process of going back through all my starred items, un-starring and starring them again so that they re-appear, as if by magic!
That's probably enough to be going on with, especially when you add that to my full-time job as a househusband.
The cocky, shaven-headed (i.e., bald) guy asked me:
'What do you do?'
It was the same question I'd heard earlier in the day as we all sat down together as strangers at our mutual friends' after-wedding lunch. What do you do?
I kept my head down and my mouth shut. After all, it's rude to talk with your mouth full. I averted my gaze as we went around the table introducing ourselves and our partners and saying a little bit about what we do. Thankfully, the fat chap next to me droned on about how he was big in mobile apps, or some crap, and everyone seemed to lose interest by the time it got around to what would have been my turn to answer.
I remember once, a few years ago, pre-empting that very same question - what do you do? - on behalf of a good friend and drinking buddy as I introduced him to another friend of mine.
'This is Lou,' I said. 'He's a teacher.'
Lou gave me a bollocking for that, and quite rightly so.
'This is my friend, Lou,' or 'This is my good friend and drinking buddy, Lou,' would have been much better.
Several drinks (three glasses of wine, two of champagne, two rum-and-cokes, and a couple of beers) later - back at the wedding this is - and this jumped-up, naturally de-follicled babyman asked me:
'What do you do?'
With my defences down, and my trousers still up (I'd forgotten to pack a belt), I began my tale of woe.
(At this point, I would normally link you, dear reader, to one or two, or even several, of my earlier posts describing my recent health and (un)employment related problems, but one thing I did do recently is to bury alive my old blog under a shiny new tombstone. It's all still there, just you can't see it. If you're really desperate, you can catch a glimpse of some of it via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I could fix it, but all this messing around with CNAMEs and A records and the like is starting to fry my brain. Instead I have started the painfully slow process of manually copying and pasting all my oldfangled blog posts worthy of merit into this newfangled Blogger, and fixing up all the old broken links along the way. I should have it finished by 2013 at the earliest.)
Anyway, I didn't tell him that. Actually, I can't remember anything I said to him at all (although I know we did disagree about politics). But I figure it must have been something about my recent health problems and subsequent lack of employment that prompted his unwelcome _condemnatory _retort:
'You've given up!'
All I can remember after that is being restrained by the bride, who, it turns out, is his sister.
He’s funny, doesn’t mind telling people to fuck off, and he even votes Labour.
Glass is not vapourware. It is due for general release early next year. Available colours will include black, orange, grey, white and blue, or to put it in Google-speak: ‘charcoal, tangerine, shale, cotton, sky’.
The popular idea is that you meditate to achieve enlightenment, or transcendence, or oneness, to permanently ascend to a higher state. But experienced meditators say that's all a distraction, and meditation is about getting more skilled at noticing and appreciating whatever you are sensing right now.
The fact that there are groups of people scaring the population in to changing the way they live, creating fear and intimidation, means there are terrorists - people creating terror. Sadly it is the governments and law makers and police that are causing this fear. People are afraid they will be victim of terrorism laws or interpretation of those laws by police. So they (the governments and the police) are, by any definition, the terrorists - creating the terror - no?
we sleep when we are tired, eat when we are hungry
What we brought, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, are the world’s most corrupt governments. According to the widely respected Transparency International, Iraq is the 169th most corrupt country in the world and Afghanistan the 174th. Out of 174.
I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
what the major economic goal of the progressive movement should be: "It’s time to separate income from work."
Kafka - that noted happiness-hound - wrote: "It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet."
we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness
Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy.
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.
The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.
The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics.
“It should not be underestimated how far Rusbridger saw himself as an intrinsic part of The Project ” – The Project being Tony Blair’s plan to move the old Labour Party to a neo-con position and continue the Thatcher revolution (not that they called it that, even to themselves. Modernisation, Third Way etc.)
What America means by terrorist violence is “public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.”
Public confidence in the Westminster government has fallen to historically low levels, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the coalition, new data shows.
Boston was placed under martial law, with heavily armed troops patrolling the streets, pointing machine guns at civilians who dared so much as to look out their windows. A large part of the city was placed under lockdown, supposedly because a single 19-year-old, on foot, was on the loose. (There may be dozens of armed teenagers on the loose in Boston on any given Friday.) The official story makes little sense. Do you think the Tsarnaev brothers did it?
How did we get here? 238 years ago to the day, the inhabitants of the very same city started a war and seceded from their union over a mere infantry brigade attempting to disarm them. Now they cheer those who violate their rights much worse than the British ever did.
'Chat with Mother' update... http://anotherurl.info/post/email-with-mother
Worth a look. Free if you're an Amazon Prime member, too. http://inbedwithmaradona.com/subculture/2013/3/25/all-or-nothing-magazine
Captain. Leader. Legend. https://plus.google.com/photos/113401713663505134193/albums/5853820314774011761/5853820315080212978?authkey=CKGt56HWxsv_SQ
Worth supporting. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1530866568/phil-cohen-releases-new-studio-album
'the country's best manager of the past 48 hours' http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21499452?postId=115387755#comment_115387755
Reshared post from Evan Prodromou https://plus.google.com/113401713663505134193/posts/5AexF97BcDf
Reshared post from Dan Lynch https://plus.google.com/113401713663505134193/posts/3PudNzAYaDY
I reckon we're all gonna fry. http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-human-response-function-to-climate.html
Judan Ali, a community youth coach in Dagenham, and rumoured to be the new coach at managerless laughing-stock Blackburn, 'speaking some words about things' in Latvia. I hope this makes sense.
Via: http://bornoffside.net/2012/12/bornoffside-tv-judan-ali-before-he-was-famous/
P.S. Venkys - I am a level 1 FA youth coach and available for the manager's job. I have no experience and guarantee mid-table mediocrity and a good cup run (based on my Soccer Manager performances). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3zTtuWx710
Reshared post from Jackie Plage https://plus.google.com/113401713663505134193/posts/RstMGWrd3Kp
Reshared post from Matthew Copperwaite https://plus.google.com/113401713663505134193/posts/agvpnrMe33i
Reshared post from David Planella https://plus.google.com/113401713663505134193/posts/WxN1qU3keRy
Available on Amazon for £289.00. Who's in? http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2013/01/dronenet-the-next-big-thing.html
Some highlights:
'In June 2010, in his first budget, Osborne said the structural deficit was 4.8 per cent, and that with three years of reduced spending, the figure would be down to 1.9 per cent.'
'So how’s that going? Well, by the end of those three years, after £59 billion of tax rises and spending cuts, the figure is set to be 4.3 per cent.'
'there are more than half a million public sector jobs still to be cut over the next five years.... That’s 10,000 public sector jobs going every month...'
'Pensioners haven’t been explicitly protected from cuts, but they have in practice been shielded, principally because they possess a magic power undreamed of by the young: a willingness to turn up at the ballot box on general election day.'
'Since hospitals, schools and pensioners taken together represent the vast majority of government spending, it isn’t possible to achieve a real reduction in spending without tackling all three of them.'
'In effect, the Tories have been saying that the trouble with the poor is that they have too much money.'
'the single most important fact about the welfare bill is largely absent from the debate: the fact that two-thirds of the welfare budget is spent on pensioners.'
'we have a country where things feel as if they’ve been bad for a long while, and yet on the figures, most of the hard times are still ahead.' http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/john-lanchester/lets-call-it-failure
“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.Zygielbojm’s suicide was a deeply reasoned and socially responsible act. But according to the values prevailing in our own society, it should be dismissed or even condemned as a “futile gesture”, a “pointless sacrifice” – and therefore something pathological, neurotic, “self-indulgent”. All my political life I have heard this said about any sacrifice made for a just cause. It was said in the 80s about the miners who tried and failed to save their communities, and about the councillors who stood up for local democracy against rate capping and got surcharged and chucked out of politics for their pains. It’s being said now about Palestinian hunger strikers. It has been the stock-in-trade of Third Way, post-social democratic politics, where to sacrifice one’s political career or “viability” by standing up against power and prejudice is viewed as a self-evidently self-defeating folly. Surely it is this ideology of self-serving “pragmatism” that ought to be dubbed “self-indulgent”? What’s truly pathological and neurotic is the “common sense” of egocentric individualism, the obsession with personal success and status, the desperation to conform to an inhuman, destructive social order.
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenceless millions – tortured children, women and men – they have become partners to the responsibility.
… I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, in their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but since I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility even now, at the last moment, to save the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive from certain annihilation.
… My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about…”
This is a neat idea for bringing a street or community together. The South Norwood Tourist Board are currently working with a local primary school on it and I first saw it work in Totterdown in Bristol.
On one day everyone sticks a blue plaque on the front of their house. The plaque is a simple paper plate painted blue. On the plaque is written some thing about someone who lived in the house before you e.g. Mary Wills plumber lived here 1943-67 or Fred Smith grandfather lived here 1932 – 45 or whatever you can dig up from chats or censuses or wherever. kids will love finding out stuff abut their house. Then declare the street day open and wander up and down sharing your new knowledge with everyone and having a chance to talk to neighbours you’ve never spoken to before. Simples.
My heart sank today when I read that the QPR striker, Loïc Rémy has been arrested on suspicion of rape. It sank because once again we were reminded of the rape endemic that is found in the UK. This story centers around three guys and one girl, but reminds me of the 85,000 women who are […]
by steve4319 on May 15, 2013 at 03:33PM via Hynd’s Blog http://stevehynd.com/2013/05/15/on-loic-remy-and-how-football-fans-contribute-to-the-uks-rape-culture/
The greater joy lies not in crossing the finish line, but in rising to the challenge. We thrive less on our achievements than on our challenges. Achievement’s pleasure is fleeting, but it leaves behind an encouragement to spur us on to the next success.
Set goals, create plans, measure progress, course correct, and celebrate upon arrival. Learn to make life a series of milestones and reaching those milestones a lifestyle. Look back for encouragement and forward for direction.
A life spent in the past or in the future is thoroughly dissatisfying. If all hope lies in the past, life is already over. If all hope lies in the future, life never begins.
The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder?
The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fond of pointing to famous people, past and present, who suffered from a psychiatric disorder.
The hope is that highlighting these ‘role models’ will fight stigma and provide hope. Winston Churchill and Steven Fry are especially popular in this regard.
But, as Brown argues, these well-intentioned campaigns may not be so helpful -
“Look,” they say. “Here is a person who has achieved so much. Do not lose heart, you too can overcome your disability if you follow their example.”
…but where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too great, the effect is not one of encouragement but of disillusionment – especially if their story is told in terms of personal qualities like bravery or persistence.
Knowing that a famous person has the same impairment as you can be reassuring, but only in the vague way that hearing of a successful distant relative is reassuring.
Most of us will never scale Everest, compete for our country at sports or have a showbiz career. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed.
I agree. “He’s got it, and so do you, so you can be like him” is perilously close to “He’s got it, and so do you, so you should be like him – what’s your excuse?”
That said, I think some of these celebrity examples are useful, not as generic inspirations for ‘the mentally ill’ but as concrete answers to particular attitudes. Against the simplistic view that there’s a single ‘stigma of mental illness’, I think there are many different stigmas and they have to be tackled separately.
In the case of depression, the core stigma is that depression is a weakness, a moral failing. That depressed people are soft, weak, pitiable. This attitude is specific to depression – not even bipolar disorder is seen in the same way, let alone the other diagnoses. They have their own stigmas. Depression’s is weakness.
Now this is why Churchill is a good counterexample. Not just because he’s famous or ‘great’, but because he was famously tough. He faced down Hitler. He was blood, sweat and tears. In the most famous photos of him (and they are famous, out of all his photos, because they correspond to the mental image) he is almost unsmiling – but never despairing. Just resolute.
That he experienced depression undermines the myths surrounding that condition, in a way that an entertainer or other generic celebrity wouldn’t.
Never mind, let’s see what’s in the news to cheer us up. How about this? A brand new UK Independence Party councillor, Eric Kitson, has made racist ‘jokes’ and shared ‘a cartoon of Muslim people being burnt at the stake with copies of the Koran fuelling the flames’, on his Facebook page. The following sentence seems to be his explanation for why Ukip have not suspended him:
‘I’m not a politician - I’m a bit of a fool really.’
Meanwhile, Colin Brewer, the previously mentioned independent councillor in Cornwall who said that disabled children should be put down, apparently was re-elected in the same round of elections: according to the Indy, ‘with 335 votes – a winning margin of four votes.’ Brewer compared disabled children with deformed lambs that are dealt with at birth by ‘smashing them against a wall.’ His presence on the candidate list would certainly get me out to the polling station.
In both cases, I’m perversely curious about whether some voters put their cross against these names without at least some understanding of what they stood for. The logic of democracy means that you have to believe that a majority of those who voted for these people knew what they were doing. Something is very rotten in the state of England.
by (author unknown) on Thursday May 23, 2013 via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts
Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder.
by (author unknown) on Thursday May 23, 2013 via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/mike-jay/argument-with-myself
| Zeger Reyes |
The Universal Basic Income hit the Washington Post again this weekend, courtesy of Mike Konczal. He focuses on left objections to the UBI proposal, ranging from its effect on gender equality to its relationship with the existing welfare state to its interaction with the struggle for workplace democracy. In the end, he emphasizes the benefits of the UBI, and insists that while we’re unlikely to see basic income in the United States anytime soon, it’s still worth “taking a moment to think Utopian”.
Matt Bruenig objects to Konczal’s characterization of the basic income as “utopian”, on the grounds that it is not something that “proposes to dramatically overhaul society into an entirely unprecedented structure that will usher in a nearly perfect world.” It is only utopian in the very weak sense that it is not currently on the political agenda as something that is likely to be enacted.
It’s certainly true that basic income is hardly utopian in its etymological sense of meaning “nowhere”. A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique describes an experiment with UBI in an Indian village. The experiment is run by a trade union called the Self Employed Women’s Association, and it found that with just an extra $3.65 per month, “people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.” This is consistent with the results found in basic income experiments in Namibia and in 1970′s Canada.
Meanwhile, there have long been critics on the Left who criticize basic income proposals precisely for their perceived lack of utopianism. As Konczal notes, Barbara Bergmann argues that it is more important to secure broader access too specific goods like child care, health care, and education: “The fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” In a New Left Review essay, Göran Therborn strikes a similar tone, referring to the basic income as a “curious utopia of resignation” arising in response to welfare state retrenchment and diminished prospects for working class control over the workplace or the means of production.
From the perspective of the basic income’s leftist advocates, however, there is another way in which it can be considered a deeply utopian project. Fredric Jameson discusses two different meanings of utopia in his study of utopian politics and science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future. The first is utopia as a fully-elaborated program for the future society, which is close to Bruenig’s sense of the proposal to dramatically overhaul society. But the second is the utopian impulse, which appears across much broader domains of everyday life and politics, including even “piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms”. Such impulses may not themselves be the program for a utopian society, but they can point in the direction of future programmatic realizations.
The French writer André Gorz was a longtime proponent of the basic income, and is also responsible for a well-known theorization of its utopian transformative potential. In one of his early works, Strategy for Labor, he attempted to do away with the tired Left debate over “reform or revolution” and replace it with a new distinction:
Is it possible from within—that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism—to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system? This is the old question of “reform or revolution.” This was (or is) a paramount question when the movement had (or has) the choice between a struggle for reforms and armed insurrection. Such is no longer the case in Western Europe; here there is no longer an alternative. The question here revolves around the possibility of “revolutionary reforms,” that is to say, of reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society. Is this possible?
Gorz goes on to distinguish “reformist reforms”, which subordinate themselves to the need to preserve the functioning of the existing system, from the radical alternative:
A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. And finally, it bases the possibility of attaining its objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints. They assume structural reforms.
One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemically viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform. Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure. One of my favorite gestures in this direction is Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs’ 1986 essay, “A Capitalist Road to Communism”.
The essay begins from the proposition that Marxism’s ultimate end is not socialism, but rather a communist society that abolishes not merely exploitation (the unjust distribution of the social product relative to work performed) but also alienation: “productive activities need no longer be prompted by external rewards”.
They then go on to sketch out a scenario in which a reform instituted under capitalism leads to communism without the intermediary stage of socialist construction. This thought experiment revolves around the achievement of an unconditional, universal basic income. Suppose, they say, “that it is possible to provide everyone with a universal grant sufficient to cover his or her ‘fundamental needs’ without this involving the economy in a downward spiral. How does the economy evolve once such a universal grant is introduced?”
Their answer is that the basic income would “twist” the capitalist drive to increase productivity, such that:
Entitlement to a substantial universal grant will simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding work (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway, people can now accept a high-quality job paid far below the guaranteed income level). Consequently, the capitalist logic of profit will, much more than previously, foster technical innovation and organizational change that improve the quality of work and thereby reduce the drudgery required per unit of product.
If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs. As Gorz puts it in a later work, the Critique of Economic Reason, certain activities “may be partially repatriated into the sphere of autonomous activities and reduce the demand for these things to be provided by external services, whether public or commercial.”
The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary co-operative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.
Consider, for example, a basic income that was linked to the size of Gross Domestic Product. We are used to a capitalist world in which the increase in material prosperity corresponds to a rise in GDP, the measured value of economic activity in money. But as wage labor comes to be replaced either by automation or voluntary activity, GDP would begin to fall, and the basic income with it. This would not lead to lowered standards of living, because the falling GDP here also denotes a decline in the cost of living. Just like the socialist state in certain versions of traditional Marxism, the basic income withers away. As van der Veen and van Parijs put it, “capitalist societies will smoothly move toward full communism.”
The capitalist road to communism is truly a utopia. Not only in the colloquial sense of a total transformation of a society, but also in its overly simplified and rationalistic picture of social evolution. As Jameson notes, utopias are defined as much by their closures and exclusions as their positive programs, as much by what they cannot say as what they can. A utopia often says more about the present in which it was written than it does about the future it depicts.
In the case of the capitalist road to communism, the things left out include the political struggles that would ensue if social development threatened to evolve the capitalist class out of existence, gradually sapping their profits and their social power. This began to manifest itself even under the meager basic income in the Namibian experiment: white landlords were deeply hostile to the basic income and denied the evidence of its benefits, perhaps because they are “afraid that the poor will gain some influence and deprive the rich, white 20 percent of the population of some of their power.” Also brushed aside are the ecological limits that might make true abundance elusive. Both of these are themes I attempted to flesh out in “Four Futures”. A third issue, which I’ve discussed a bit elsewhere, is the ingrained gender norms that may be reinforced by expanding the domain of “voluntary” labor, which often amounts the imposition of unpaid work on women. But the conceptual clarity of van der Veen and van Parijs’ rendition is enlightening in its very implausibility and incompleteness, a demonstration of the utopian impulse contained in an apparently timid policy proposal.
For the past 10 years or so, my work has been in the area of disability rights, especially from a user perspective.
One of the great privileges of that work is observing the reactions of people – disabled and non-disabled people alike – when they are introduced to the Social Model of Disability, and how it affects their attitudes and everyday life in the subsequent weeks, months and years.
To recap: there are various models of disability. The two most common are the “medical” model and the “social” model.
The medical model focuses on the medical condition of a person – their impairment; their condition; their disease. And it looks for ways for these to be diagnosed, categorised and ultimately cured. What flows from the medical model of disability is typically a focus on someone’s physical or mental condition rather than the person themselves.
The social model of disability puts the person at the centre. It says that a person is disabled by society around them – not just physical barriers such as steps or revolving doors, but also by attitudes towards disabled people (such as pity, charity or fear). Though a disabled person still has an impairment (i.e. in the broadest sense their condition), what makes them disabled is not their condition, it’s society.
Many important things flow from this shift in thinking, and it’s how people approach this shift in thinking that’s such a great privilege to observe.
(For anyone who is interested in more about different models of disability and their implications this guide is an excellent introduction, and I’ve written at further length about this here.)
Why am I blogging on this now? It’s because there’s a fascinating debate at the moment about how the social model of disability (or other models) apply, or not, or some version of it, specifically to the area of mental health.
The latest manifestation of this debate is prompted by the division of clinical psychology (DCP), part of the British Psychological Society, who will be publishing a statement that calls for a “paradigm shift” in how mental health is understood.
(Update: here’s the statement (pdf)).
It’s great that this professional body is engaging in the debate in this way. It draws on a significant literature that mental health users/survivors and others have been writing for a considerable time – see, for example, this paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from 2010 or pretty much anything on the social model from the Centre for Disability Studies at Leeds. This is also a significant theme that runs through the literature on recovery and mental health (such as these papers from the Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change project).
It will be interesting to see how the debate progresses, and good on DCP for going with it.
In their usual subtle contribution to the issue at hand, the Guardian’s sub-editors have called this a “battle” between the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. To ensure maximum helpfulness, the Guardian also poses the question “Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness?” and asks people from both “sides” to argue either “yes” (clinical psychologist) or “no” (clinical psychiatrist).
In understanding this to be a debate that perhaps can’t be characterised in such black and white terms, below are 3 principles I modestly suggest it will be useful to keep in mind:
Eighteen months ago I was sitting in the North Stand with my dad ahead of our game against Sunderland when David Gill took to the microphone. He announced that they were going to do something unprecedented, really trying to hype the occasion up, with Sir Alex Ferguson standing next to him. “Oh wow, they’re going to let the manager give a speech,” I said sarcastically to my dad, totally bemused by Gill making a big song and dance. Then Gill announced that the stand we were sitting in had been named the Sir Alex Ferguson stand, in commemoration of his 25 years as our manager. Not wanting to come across as a drama queen but it took my breath away and gave me goosebumps. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that they would mark the occasion in such a way. Ferguson, seemingly even more shocked than all of us, then took to the microphone and was audibly moved.
After the game, Ferguson commented on how much it meant to him. “I was really emotional,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t expect that. I have to thank the club, it’s fantastic of them to do that.”
Apparently Sir Alex Ferguson was planning on breaking the news of his retirement over the mic after our game today. Given how gobsmacked I was to hear of the renamed stand, I can only imagine my, and everyone else’s, reaction to learning he was retiring in such a way. Having spoken in his last programme notes about looking forward to next season, I assumed we had at least another year of him left. But as the news started trickling through from journalists earlier this week that his retirement was on the cards, you gradually had some time to adjust to what was happening. Imagine listening to his standard post-championship speech and having that bombshell dropped on us.
Today is going to be a difficult day. We are going to say goodbye to a man who has shaped our lives, who has brought us immeasurable joy, who has transformed our club from a sleeping giant to a world force in football, who felt so strongly connected and indebted to Sir Matt Busby and his philosophy, and who has fought tooth and nail to make our club the best year after year. Maybe heartbreaking is an exaggeration, but I am truly gutted he is going, and I don’t think there are any words to adequately describe how it feels. For those of us who are fairly in tune with our emotional side, this afternoon is going to be a struggle!
My dad always told me to “bottle up” the feelings on big occasions. The best moments, the best emotions, try and bottle them up. Try and save them away somewhere you can relive it and feel it again upon reflection whenever you want. Well today is going to be full of those moments. Walking up to the ground for the last time with Fergie as our manager, taking your seat, applauding the manager and players on to the pitch, singing songs about Ferguson, (hopefully) celebrating goals, watching the trophy being lifted and the lap of honour. I’m not going to want to start the journey there as much as I’m not going to want to leave at the end. This is the end of an era, an absolutely magnificent time of our lives, and I’m going to miss every minute of it.
I’m going to miss seeing him marching up to the touchline, turning to the Stretford End and geeing up the crowd during big games. I’m going to miss his doddery old man shuffle to celebrate an important goal. I’m going to miss him going fucking mental at the officials when they’ve missed a bad tackle on one of our lads or a handball in the box. I’m going to miss him singing along to our chants on the day the title is won. I’m going to miss the security of knowing everything will be alright in the end because we’ve got him in charge.
Only United fans get it, rival fans won’t even be able to imagine what an impact he’s had on our lives, and there’s nothing I can say here to do justice to the man or his career.
Every single one of us, loves Alex Ferguson.
———–
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Gary Neville in The Daily Mail:
It was a Saturday morning game for the youth team at the old Cliff training ground. I was lucky. I was in a side that had Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt, who had scored a hat-trick, and at half-time we were 3-0 up against Chester.
We were all 16 or 17 so we must have felt pretty pleased with ourselves. That was until we got to the dressing room. Sir Alex Ferguson was there. The room went quiet. It was not a surprise for him to come to watch, but on this occasion he had decided he wanted to take the half-time team talk. And he set about us.
There was something he had seen, maybe a slackness or an over-confidence, that he wanted to address. And he let us know about it. We would have been terrified even if he had not been the manager. He had an aura, as did his assistant, Archie Knox. You would hear those deep Scottish accents and they would walk into a room and everything would go quiet immediately.
It has been a momentous week with Sir Alex announcing his intention to retire at the end of the season, and though we all knew it had to come, it is still hard to process. It is impossible to identify exactly what has made him unique in football, such a gigantic force. There are many complex reasons why he is as successful as he is.
But a few memories do come back from the years I spent playing under him that perhaps provide some clues. and that team talk at the Cliff is one. It tells you so much about Sir Alex; about his work ethic for one thing. Both he and his assistants would work every single minute God sent with every single footballer at that club. It was not just youth team games he would come to watch. When we were 14-years-old he would even come down to watch us train as schoolboys on a Thursday night.
Back then we trained in a gym – the coldest gym I have known, more like a freezer – and sometimes Archie would take the session. You wouldn’t ever hear of it now, the manager coming to watch kids training and his assistant coaching them. Archie would stand in the hall and you would pass the ball at him with a sidefoot. And he would say: ‘Take that ball back, son! Drive that pass.’ It also demonstrates Sir Alex’s passion for developing the talent of young people, the fact that he has always seen it as a duty to bring through home-grown players.
And then there is his attitude, his absolute determination to reach the highest standards. Even though we were 3-0 up, he had seen something in that game that he wanted to correct and it mattered deeply to him. He wanted to mould us into what he wanted in terms of attitude, spirit, flair, skill, mentality and being a winner. And, yes, there was an element of fear about his presence, though people who think that he ruled by fear or was constantly intimidating people do not know him.
But in those days, when we were kids, there was fear. Or you could call it respect for someone who was in charge of our football destinies, appropriate deference to an elder. Because fear hampers you but he never inhibited us, never bullied us. He was teaching us to be better. And we believed in him and would have hung on every word he said.
Later, as a group of us progressed to the first team, he would keep teaching us about what it meant to be a team. He was always impressing on us that we should look after our own. It was the upbringing he had in Glasgow, that sense that you all work bloody hard together but that you stick together through that.
So I can remember a couple of occasions when individual players had got into trouble and he was angrier with the team rather than the individuals concerned. His reasoning was: ‘why did you let your team-mate get into trouble? Why weren’t you there to protect him? You’re all responsible for not looking after him. You make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.’
He very rarely fines footballers because he does not believe in it as a means of discipline. But often when he did, it would be the whole squad who were fined because he believed we had failed to meet those standards of collective responsibility. On one occasion when Roy Keane had been wrongly arrested – he was subsequently freed after a night in the cells and no charges were ever brought – the manager was furious and tore into us.
‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was happening? You’ve all gone home and got into your beds and left one of your team-mates on his own! Why didn’t any of you think to tell me?’
A few years later, when I was captain and a similar incident had taken place, I questioned him in a team meeting as to whether he should fine the whole squad. It was a situation where I thought the senior players, including myself, should bear the responsibility rather than the younger ones. He pulled me aside afterwards and said: ‘Never question me again in front of the players.’ His belief was that if one falls, we all suffer. He wanted to instil that into his players, to drive into them the sense of solidarity he so values.
But the idea he is somebody who is continually abrasive is absolutely incorrect. He is a very relaxed individual, somebody who until a few years ago would join in warm-up drills, where two players try to get the ball back from eight players who are passing it around.
He could talk to his players on all manner of different subjects, far beyond football, and the myth he is someone always looking for confrontation is absolutely wrong. Training had to be hard, it had to be 100 per cent. But it was a relaxed environment, with fun and enjoyment because for him it was important the players were not inhibited. Everything was about expressing yourself and taking risks.
He has never been a conservative coach. His mantra is that you had to take risks to win football matches. He wants his players to have freedom to take players on and beat people and believe wholeheartedly in the Manchester United way.
Manchester United cannot play a 4-5-1, deep in their own box, getting behind the ball. Manchester United have to attack. He embraced that. He would never turn around and say: ‘You’re 1-0 up so now shut up shop.’ He was always giving out positive messages. ‘Go and get a second goal and kill the game.’ And when you had the second goal it was: ‘Think about the goal difference. Get that third goal.’
When you try to identify Sir Alex’s greatest achievements it becomes an impossible task. As soon as you decide on one, you come up with another that surpasses it.
Some have spoken this week about his ability to keep building winning teams in the last decade in the face of new challenges from Chelsea and then Manchester City. As a United fan, winning that first Premier League title in 1993 to remove that burden from the club, the team and the fans, would have to rank as his greatest accomplishment.
You cannot call yourself one of the best clubs in the world if you can’t win the championship in your country for 26 years. He had made Manchester United great again. The floodgates opened from there. It re-energised the club and the way players and fans felt about themselves.
But from my player’s perspective, winning the Treble, an unprecedented achievement, with seven players who had come through the youth ranks as the core of the squad, was his moment of personal utopia. That is when you sense he must have felt: ‘That’s why I was in that gym on a Thursday night watching a 15-year-old David Beckham and Paul Scholes passing a football. Because I knew 10 years later they’d be lifting the European Cup. That’s what I came down from Aberdeen to do.’
“Gary Neville: We believed in Fergie and hung on to his every word” was originally published at The Republik of Mancunia.I’ve written much over the past couple of weeks about the DWP’s apparent determination to persecute unemployed benefit-claimants by forcing them to undergo activities and tests which are totally unsuitable or even fake.
That this trend reflects a deliberate vendetta rather than mere incompetence is something that appears inescapably obvious while at the same time suggesting some kind of ‘conspiracy theory’ that some would dismiss as far-fetched. But I’ve come across evidence that this is exactly how the DWP regards claimants.
I’ve been reading some information released by the DWP as part of a response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request in 2011 – just over a year after the coalition government took office.
This information includes guidance documents to Jobcentre Plus (JCP) personnel that reveal exactly how the government regards benefit claimants – and the process of cutting off their benefits: as an ‘achievement‘ and a ‘positive outcome‘.
Achievement
In a section of the guidance titled “05 Completing the MF47 statement“, the DWP instructs JCP ‘advisors’ about how to handle new information that is gathered during a ‘compliance interview’:
8. New and substantial information is defined as:
New – a different offence type than the specific FRF given for the Customer Compliance case;
Substantial – will have sufficient grounds to raise a new FRF that would have the potential to achieve a sanction.
The ‘potential to achieve a sanction’. You only achieve something you’re aiming for – if it’s accidental or negative (in your eyes), you don’t ‘achieve’ it.
This is substantiated by further guidance that tells JCP advisors to pressure claimants to sign incriminating statements agreeing that they falsely claimed benefits (whether this has to be true or not is not mentioned by the form) because without the signed form the funds cannot be reclaimed:
Small overpayment statement from customer
4. In order for small overpayments of £65.00 and under to be recovered from the customer, the following exact form of words must be used on the MF47 statement:
“I admit I knowingly gave false information” or “I admit I knowingly failed to declare a change of circumstance” (as applicable).
5. Ask the customer to sign and date the statement immediately after the last word. The CCO must witness and date the statement and score through any unused parts to ensure no additions to the statement can be made once the customer has signed it.
Remember, this is just an interview. Nothing has been investigated or proven. But the advisor is told that the claimant must sign one of the two statements because otherwise the money cannot be claimed back.
This is already twisted enough, but we’re not done yet. The DWP has a specific description for ending claimants’ benefits.
A ‘positive outcome’
In a section of the guidance titled “Recording Outcomes“, the DWP tells advisors what constitutes a ‘positive outcome’:
Claiming a positive outcome
17. A positive outcome can be recorded when:
a customer reports a change in circumstances to a Customer Compliance Officer (CCO) at the interview that leads to benefit being adjusted or a change to the amount of the CCG – See example 2 Appendix 5
following a telephone call to arrange the CCG visit the customer withdraws the application;
following receipt of a Customer Compliance interview letter and prior to the interview the customer contacts the CCO or Customer Compliance section and notifies a pre-existing change in circumstances leading to a change in benefit – See example 1 Appendix 5
at an ineffective visit the CCO gathers information for example, property is empty which allows the DM to make a decision to reduce or disallow benefit;
a customer fails to attend two interviews and the case is referred to the DM to suspend payment of benefit. The customer does not make any contact within one calendar month and their claim to benefit is terminated;
Withdrawn applications – ‘positive’. Circumstances that allow benefits to be ‘reduced or disallowed‘ – ‘positive’. If a benefit can be suspended – great. If the claimant misses enough appointments to allow his/her benefit to be terminated altogether – fantastic, Christmas has come early!
In March, the Guardian revealed that JCPs are being set targets for ‘sanctioning’ the benefits of people who will have nothing if their payments are stopped (no wonder Foodbanks are having to provide food to vast, record numbers of people in crisis).
The DWP denied that any targets were being set, in spite of clear evidence that they were. But now we have it straight from the horse’s mouth – from the DWP’s own guidance notes to its JCP operatives: sanctions are good, great. Positive. Something to be ‘achieved‘ – something to be aimed for and actively worked toward.
The Guardian today claimed that the unemployed are treated as sub-human under this government. The DWP’s own documents show beyond doubt that this is no mere accident or ‘unintended consequence’.
The BBC, Mail, Telegraph, Indy and other sources report that a ten year old girl was reprimanded by passing police officers for chalking a hopscotch grid on the pavement. Tsk.
I’ve commented on a few examples before, but they’ve always been confirmed. Lots of people have jumped on the copper-bashing bandwagon in this instance but it’s worth noting that the force so far has not accepted any involvement:
‘We cannot currently trace any car being in the area at the time.’
Let’s wait and see shall we. Rain may not wash this one away so quickly.
Previously:
Today’s Gloucester Citizen carries a remarkable story about “husband and wife councillors who watch CCTV of kids on their living room telly”.
As the paper reports, “Hardwicke Parish Council duo Fran and Lyn Welbourne have been so pro-active in monitoring the village youth shelter that they have the live footage beamed right into their home.”
It beggars belief that someone thought it appropriate to allow Councillors to have public CCTV of a youth centre piped into their living rooms.
These people are not trained employees, nor licensed CCTV operators. It smacks of taxpayer-funded voyeurism and will do nothing to actually tackle the problem that is causing concern. It would be more effective to have the councillors actually stood at the youth shelter, if they are so keen to keep an eye on what is going on.
As we have repeatedly highlighted, CCTV does little to deter or prevent crime, and at best displaces the activity a short distance.
Perhaps the Councillors should spend some of their evidently quiet evenings asking why there is a problem rather than indulging their new hobby of sofa snooping.
The 14 previously unreleased tracks tacked on to Sony Legacy’s new reissue of Shuggie Otis’s cult-classic 1974 album Inspiration Information, most of the extra material collected as a second disc under the title Wings of Love, remind us of what a singular talent has lain half-hidden for most of the past 40 years.
The son of Johnny Otis, the remarkable bandleader, songwriter, vibraphone player, talent scout, record producer, disc-jockey, civil rights activist, local politician and author who died just over a year ago at the age of 90, Shuggie made his first trip from California to London in August 1972, arriving as an 18-year-old guitarist with his father’s rhythm and blues troupe. Before they played a memorable gig at the 100 Club, I interviewed Johnny for the Melody Maker and asked him to tell me how Shuggie’s talent had emerged.
In 1967, he said, a fallow period in his own career came to an end when a promoter offered him a gig. He needed to put a band together, and there wasn’t much money involved, so he asked his son to make up the numbers. “Shuggie knew T-Bone Walker and all them guys as a little boy — he was always under my chair, and I didn’t realise how much of an impression they’d made on him,” he said. “So we got a show together, and lo and behold the young white audience turned up, asking me for tunes that they shouldn’t know about!” And they responded to Shuggie’s prodigious talent — as, soon, did Al Kooper, who recorded with him and got him his first deal with Columbia Records. Before long he was turning down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones.
Shuggie is 59 years old now, and turned up in London again before Christmas to play at the Jazz Cafe, receiving this rather lukewarm review from Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian. But, great blues-rock guitarist as he undoubtedly is, his most fruitful environment has always been the recording studio, where he can overdub himself on the many instruments at his command and weave gorgeous tapestries around his unassuming but memorable songs.
Inspiration Information was his third album, following Here Comes Shuggie Otis! (1969) and Freedom Flight (1971), the latter introducing the world to the sublime “Strawberry Letter 23″, which became a hit for the Brothers Johnson. Shuggie claims that the subsequent silence was not of his own volition. “There were little lapses here and there, little breaks from time to time,” he says in the sleeve notes to the new package, “but I never stopped playing, writing, recording. I was still going round to record companies, still pitching my tapes.”
The conventional wisdom is that he had a lot in common with Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder, and echoes of his music would permeate that of Prince. The third album’s best known tracks are the title song, where his slow funk resembles that of Sly without the dark undertow, and “Aht Uh Mi Hed”, whose cool organ stabs remind me of Timmy Thomas’s immortal “Why Can’t We Live Together”. It’s followed by “Happy House”, which lasts no more than 1min 21sec, probably for the very good reason that it doesn’t need to be any longer to make its point. The album finishes in an unorthodox way with three modest but charming home-made instrumentals, mostly keyboards and the drum machine Shuggie so loves. “XL-30″ and “Pling!” are mood pieces, almost tone poems: like an R&B musician’s equivalent of “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter” from the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile. The concluding “Not Available” is a lovely exercise in bright-eyed funk.
The tracks on the second disc, gathered under the title Wings of Love, were recorded — with one outstanding exception — between 1975 and 1990, and although most of the work was again done by Shuggie, they are rather more elaborate in approach and texture, also making use of strings and horns, which he arranged. The song “Wings of Love” is an 11 and a half minute epic ballad from a 1990 session, bookended by ocean sound effects, and “Give Me a Chance”, recorded three years earlier, sounds like a great lost disco classic, as if bathed in the light of a giant glitter ball, with a raging old-school rock-out finale on which Shuggie’s guitar battles with his Hammond B3.
The one that really pins my ears back, though, is “Black Belt Sheriff”, a spellbinding solo performance for voice and acoustic guitar recorded during a concert 13 years ago in Long Beach, the city from where his father broadcast his influential R&B radio show on KFOX in the 1950s. It’s a six and a half minute reverie of self-examination in the form of a conversation with a friend (possibly one of his brothers, to whom it is dedicated), the singer’s thoughts drifting through the dreamscape of a Los Angeles night, with glimpses of cars, bars, girls and celebrities as he vows to “give up my dreams and transgressions”. There’s a fine bottleneck interlude, followed by a tantalisingly enigmatic closure: “I’d like to stay and tell you what it’s all about / Hear you play, brother, laugh, sing and shout / But I got to go turn around again / So I’ll see you soon…” This has nothing to do with his mastery of studio overdubbing technology or his ability to play many different instruments. It’s his equivalent of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” or Marley’s “Redemption Song”: the artist stands alone and unadorned, his true power revealed.
* The portrait of Shuggie Otis was made 1971 by his wife, Teri, who happens to be the daughter of the great composer and bandleader Gerald Wilson. It’s taken from the insert in the Inspiration Information/Wings of Love 2-CD set.
When I first wrote this post in 2012, you couldn’t buy a potato barrel outside the UK. (As far as I could tell). Now, nearly a year later, that’s changed.
You can buy a potato barrel at Amazon.com — two different kinds, actually. Beyond that, there are several grow bags and containers to grow potatoes in.
Wooden Potato Barrel
As a general concept, growing potatoes in a container seems to make complete sense. We’ll look at a potato barrel or two (and the mixed reviews). And also how some gardeners are making their own DIY versions.
This is the first one I saw last summer. It’s a beauty to look at.
You can buy it now in the U.S. at Amazon for $140.
It was (and is) being sold by the UK garden retailers, like Primrose.
It’s made of wood, assembles in minutes, and holds up to 4 plants. Is it as good as the picture? The one U.S. Amazon review is negative, but the 6 reviews on Primrose are more positive.
The reviews note this “potato barrel” doesn’t have a bottom. Instead, it’s a grow bag with wooden slats (connected by wire) that wrap around to form the barrel shape.
Plastic Potato Barrel
Compared with the wooden planter, this plastic potato barrel is cheaper. It sells for 95 bucks (not including shipping) at Amazon. In the UK, at least at the garden site (withoutPrimrose it’s WAY less expensive. So maybe the U.S. price will drop down the road?
Either way, it’s made of polypropylene. (A plastic used to used these days to make everything from chairs to the Tic Tac box lids!)
The reviews are pretty strong. Amazon has one negative review, but the 94 reviews on Primrose average 4 out of 5 stars. In general, people say it’s a bit tough to assemble, but works well.
The sales copy says this planter holds up to 5 potato plants. That’s 21 gallons (80 liters) of compost.
New Potato Barrel
This potato barrel looks new to me. I didn’t see it anywhere last summer, and I don’t see in the U.S. yet. BUT if the planters above made it to the U.S. in the last 9 months, maybe this one will be here soon.
I hope so.
It’s intriguing because the price looks lower, and the reviews are very strong. Five stars out of five at GreenFinger.com. Reviewers note that it’s easy to put together.
It also holds 5 potato plants and 24 gallons (90 liters) of compost.
DIY: Find A Container
Timothy Hurst built his own potato barrels and wrote about them on Green Upgrader.
He says they reduce weeds, pests, fungi, and eliminate shovel damage to potatoes.
He started by getting containers, like these old wooden barrels. “Just about any 2- to 3-foot tall container will work,” he says.
Pick a container you can drill drain holes in, and clean it with a mild bleach solution, as he puts it, “to get out the nasties.”
How to Plant Potatoes
This will apply whether you buy a potato barrel like the ones above, or make one for yourself, like like Timothy’s DIY potato planter.
“Fill the bottom of your container with about 6 inches of loose planting mix,” says Timothy.
“Add seed potatoes on the layer of soil… You can use the whole potato but I like to cut the potatoes into 1- to 2-inch cubes for planting.”
“Loosely backfill the potatoes with another 6 inches of your soil and compost mix. Then water.”
Growing More Sprouts
Timothy’s next step — whatever barrel, bucket, or bag you’re using — is what can give you 100 POUNDS of potatoes in one container!
You have to wait for the plants to have 6 to 8 inches of foliage.
Then, says Timothy, “add another layer of soil mix covering half to three-quarters of the visible stems and foliage.”
Repeat this with every 6 to 8 inches of foliage growth.
You’ll be creating more potato sprouts, Timothy says, “as the plants grow up toward the top of the barrel.”
Time to Harvest
Think ahead about 10 weeks to harvest time. This is when your potato barrel planting (whether it’s in a barrel, an old wood bucket, or even a bag) really pays off.
There’s no shoveling your potatoes out of the ground! No shovel? No damage!
“When the plants flower and start to yellow, the potatoes should be ready to harvest. ” says Timothy.
“Carefully dig down with your hands to inspect the top layer.” Do the potatoes feel ready?
“Dump the barrel out on a tarp and inspect your bounty.”
Some Final Tips
You reap what you sow.
Here are a few more potato barrel tips from Timothy.
- Keep a few potatoes to use as seeds next year.
- Bush beans are a great companion plant.
- Try growing potatoes in sawdust instead of soil.
For much more detail and even more tips, don’t miss his story on Green Upgrader!
The post The Potato Barrel: How to Plant Potatoes appeared first on Bombay Outdoors.
Football serves an odd function – and if you are reading this there’s a good chance that you really care about it. I am endlessly fascinated by what football represents to those of us who become so invested in the outcome of a few men kicking a ball around that it is transformed into drama, beauty, frustration, sadness, joy, love, hate (more’s the pity), escape, togetherness. Family.
Manchester United are often called a family club – a massive global enterprise, at the centre of which, administratively at least, are a bunch of the same people that have been around long enough to remember the first Sir Alex Ferguson title win.
[Of course, United are literally a family club, in the worst possible way, given that the club is run by a family of financial parasites, leeching millions away to line their own nest eggs, where presumably they nest their next generation who will grow up to do a leveraged buyout of a club in a developing market somewhere.]
Like all football clubs, United are also something families share, passed down from mother or father to son or daughter, from your uncle who cares about football when your dad doesn’t, or your best friend’s dad’s wife, since this is the modern age. Football has long been regarded as a place where it is acceptable for men to show emotion, letting out the tears that are borne of a deeper loss, but that manifest in the delight or devastation you experience because of the good or not-so-good kicking of a ball.
Somewhere in this mix, where the human unconscious is given an escape valve for emotions that can’t be expressed elsewhere, profound attachments form. And there can’t be many sporting attachments greater than that between United fans and Alex.
Forget the Sir, not just because it’s a weird relic of the feudal age, but also because it’s a latter day addition, it’s a millennial thing, arriving in time to make a handy three letter acronym for the internet age. Before he was Sir Alex, he was Fergie or Alec, and he represented something to me, to us. He was our family club’s dad.
It started straight away. Alex came in and replaced ‘Big Ron’, an avuncular, friendly figure (how little we knew…), and he was quite scary. I was nine, so I didn’t have a drinking culture, but United did and Ferguson put a stop to it, making the club professional, hitting some stumbling blocks, but building, always building.
I never lost faith in him, but I was only 12 when there were “three years of excuses” and living exiled in Zimbabwe, climbing rocks and preoccupied with working out if I could design a hoverboard. By the time I really really cared about football, he became the best dad ever, buying Eric Cantona and winning the league in the year I started sixth form college.
Ferguson brought through a whole generation of kids, and the surrogate father bit was given a whole new dimension. Those of the class of 1992 who became the heart of Ferguson’s team must surely be the players with the deepest relationship with him – David became the black sheep, Ryan, Paul and Gary stayed loyal. Little brother Philip was sent to live up the road with Uncle David so he could come back a few years later and tell us it would all be ok.
Then came the knighthood, and with it the passage to grand-parenthood. Cristiano Ronaldo certainly needed a father figure, and another generation removed, Sir Alex became one. We all watched on, as Fergie became an elder statesman, this great manager becoming the greatest of all time in front of our grateful eyes.
Like all families, there was betrayal and tragedy. He sided with the Glazers rather than the supporters, perhaps because he felt it was in the fans’ best interests to act as a buffer between them and us. Perhaps for less noble reasons. Fergie said that if we didn’t like it we could go and support Chelsea. (Or – we could go to our rooms without any supper, as it were).
Like all dads he embarrassed us, not with his bad dancing – the fist pumped goal celebrations were joyous, not cringeworthy – but his ruthlessness could grate on those with a more sensitive bearing. Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy, the weird goalkeeping blind spot. But as you grow up you learn that your parents aren’t perfect, and nor is your football manager.
I’m in my 30s now, and I try to keep the level of emotional investment in men, with a certain colour top, who kick a football, to a manageable level. But Fergie pre-dates my attempts to do that.
I’m so sad that he’s not United’s manager any more, even though I’m happy he gets to retire. I didn’t cry at the montages or the announcement, but I did cry when I recorded Rant Cast and I tried to list all his positive qualities as a human being. A day later, I realise why that was the trigger for me
It’s because it’s complicated. Fergie has been ruthless, and leaves our club registered in the Cayman Islands. He hurt a lot of people. But that’s not the full story.
There has been so much human goodness – the generosity to those in need, the support to other managers in hard times. He is a trade union man, after all. The thousands of letters of condolence and congratulations, done without fanfare.
And whilst there have been times of apparent obstinacy, and masses of footballing frustration, Sir Alex has brought joy to those of us lucky enough to be United fans that no other club anywhere in the land has been even nearly slightly close to experiencing.
I love my dad, even though he is not perfect, and I love Ferguson, even though he is not either. So, thank you, Alex, for dedicating your life to doing something which has made the fans so happy, so often. It’s been absolutely amazing and I honestly cannot believe that it is over.
I understand that impermanence is the fundamental nature of the universe, but I sort of thought you’d be the exception. I am going to remember the joy you brought for the rest of my life, and the pain will fade.
Most of all I will try to remember a mantra I try to live by, something which gives perspective when that inevitable impermanence shows itself: don’t be sad that it is over, be glad that it happened.
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