My year on micro.blog

I had a lot fun writing and publishing on micro.blog this year, and also looking back and picking out these (for me) highlights.

I started the year with the final (so far) part of my curriculum vitae series. The one where I found my dream job:

There was no welcome… it stank of piss. The only redeeming factor was that none of the inmates seemed able to move.

The beauty of the whole endeavour was that people needing care were no longer seen as tasks to be performed and checked off on a list, but as people who had lives, stories, senses of humour, wants and needs like everyone else.

Such a great thing could obviously have no future.

On the power of writing:

Having an hour or so in relatively undisturbed peace and quiet just to write whatever comes into my head has felt very therapeutic. I feel like something significant has changed within me, for the better.

On journaling:

Journaling is like legacy microblogging minus the passive aggressive bullshit and wit.

On the power of memory:

Nothing was where Jim remembered it. Like his hat, they were very much alive in Jim’s memory, but in the world we walked in the goalposts had literally moved, the final whistle had blown, and everyone had gone home except Jim.

On travelling abroad for the first time:

It all felt utterly surreal to me then, like being stranded on another planet, adrift in my bunk bed, alone in the halls of a spacecraft listening to the crickets and the ghostly sounds of train hours.

On local democracy:

The event itself was a repeat of several resident surveys and failed plans over the past twenty years or so. The problems are always the same. The responses from the council are always the same.

On my four year old’s analysis of the state of British politics after the results of the May General Election:

You can clearly see the Labour supermajority in red, and the Tory wipeout in blue. That they are two cheeks of the same backside is encapsulated in the red triangle atop the blue square in the centre.

On the state of our national game:

Nowadays managers - or coaches - are often restricted to, well, coaching players in training and on match days, and speaking to the media before and after games. They are seen as specialists rather than all-rounders, and more specialists from the world of finance are brought in to fire the tea ladies…

On United under Ten Hag:

A clear and obvious error, if ever there was one, and yet we are forced to watch repeat after repeat, week after week of him getting it wrong. A bald man somehow getting balder…

On working from home:

Working from home has given me the time and space to transform how I work for the better. I’m better organised, more thoughtful, less rushed and distracted. I can honestly say that I’m now the most productive I’ve ever been thanks to a more comfortable, relaxed and focussed personal workspace.

On cheese:

Double Gloucester. Trump-like appearance, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a vote-winner. Biden-like quality: good all-rounder, mild, creamy, child-friendly, goes with most things, melts easily. Oily.

On the death-grip of neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism doesn’t change, and the more that the people are subjected to its bad decisions, its lust for war, for death, for oil, for money, for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the harder it gets for people to change, and the fewer good decisions are made.

On Person Of Interest:

If you like guns, shooting people, torture, (mock) executions, (child) kidnapping, (attempted) murder, blackmail, gambling, Russian Roulette, cyber-stalking, identity theft, mob rule and police corruption, you’ll probably like Person of Interest.

On Lincolnshire sausages:

A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.

On living and breathing music:

It’s hard not to love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment.

And:

I do wonder if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? When I do pay attention to the words they do carry meaning for me. They just needed to be heard.

On journaling (again):

Doing this work has made sense of a lot of daily, weekly and monthly events, habits, routines, scenarios, relationships, that otherwise would have remained loosely connected, strung together like the Christmas tree lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half-working.

On the bales:

My fingertips took several days to regrow. I had fifty pence deducted from my wages for the cost of replenishing the first aid kit, and received a straight knockout for bleeding on the ropes.

On writing (again):

I write for me. It helps me breathe and to feel alive.

On local democracy (again):

If you’re lucky, you might see something done after a year or two of complaining.

On driving (and living):

Always look ahead as far as possible.

On Al:

We think Al is dumb. But we elect dumber, and Al will only get less dumb.

Toast in the Machine

Some people seem to find the idea of machine intelligence frightening. And with good reason. Because from where I’m sitting at the breakfast table, the machines around me are mostly dumber than a rock (although that’s a bit unfair to rocks, who are actually very smart).

  • My music player has forgotten my wifi name and password and refuses to reconnect.

  • My wife’s work laptop is making all kinds of noises trying to attract her attention, oblivious to the fact that she’s not here, and hasn’t been for a good ten minutes.

  • There’s our microwave. So many buttons, settings and options. We use it several times a day and only ever tell it to heat food or drink for x number of seconds or minutes. But it’s brainless, and if you don’t keep an eye on it like a small child it will spill your drink or chuck food everywhere.

  • My kettle sits quietly now, but I know that when I go to boil water for my tea later it will keep on boiling the water until I manually switch it off, despite all its various settings for different boil temperatures and offers to the keep the water warm.

  • And then there’s the expensive toaster. Another one like the kettle that promises to toast (or defrost) every possible variety of bread-based product on its own individual setting, and with six settings for how brown you want it. Wonderful! The grim reality is that there are just two settings. “Untoasted “and “Set the smoke alarm off”.

I’m showing my space-obsessed four year old pictures of Pluto taken by a telescope on a spaceship launched from Earth twenty years ago and I still can’t get a toaster that can do somewhere in between soft, cold bread and cremation.

We shouldn’t laugh. We think Al is dumb, but we elect dumber, and Al will only get less dumb (and more dangerous).

How long before The Mossad detonates my toaster?

In fact, eighteen years ago (I mean, really?) I bought the cheapest toaster I could find in Argos for £10. I plugged it in, put in my rounds of bread and pressed play. Two minutes later, the plastic surround had literally melted.

I would go back to holding a toasting fork over an open fire, but/as my kids point out every Xmas) we don’t have a chimney.

The Last Supper

Work xmas lunch today was delicious, especially the spiced pear cake for dessert (albeit with the tiniest slice of pear I’ve ever seen).

Company was good, and highlighted how socially inept I am without a couple of pints inside me.

Service was excellent apart from the ridiculous length of time it took to pay the bill. They seemed to need to input each individual course into the till, but couldn’t work out why the total didn’t equal 13 x £16.95 - one of us didn’t order dessert.

Another one of our gathering is likely soon to be deported, which I felt uncomfortably aware of throughout.

Road Rage

My driving instructor told me that I would have to learn to drive twice. Once to pass my driving test (which I did first time, rather fortuitously), and once to learn to drive like everyone else does (i.e., with little regard to the laws of the land, the rules of the road, or the Highway Code).

He also gave me some more sound advice to be a good driver: in addition to getting from A to B, my aim should be to avoid causing other road users to brake, stop or get out of my way. I’m not perfect, so I don’t always get this right, but it’s something I always remember and try to do.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a friend who was totally into cars and bikes, driving them, riding them, taking them apart and putting them back together again.

His advice was to always look ahead as far as possible. It sounds obvious, but most drivers used to look no further than the end of their bonnet (and nowadays, of course, most are looking down at their phones).

Looking head as far as possible means you can see what’s going on and get a literal heads-up on any possible hazards approaching - children, people approaching a crossing point, slow moving vehicles, vehicles approaching a turning, emergency vehicles, etc.

(If only I’d applied this advice to the rest of my life! So many wrong turns, dead ends, car crash moments, write-offs, months getting roadworthy again….)

I also like to give way to other road users (small acts of solidarity) so that they can turn or perform whatever manoeuvre they need to do, or walk and cross safely. Although this sometimes results in drivers behind me (who obviously have no idea what I’m playing at) honking their horns at me or even overtaking me (this actually happens surprisingly often at the zebra crossing next to my sons’ school).

As a bonus, this strategy means that every weekday on the school run I get my road rage going by holding every other driver to my own standards:

  • The speeding cars as I turn out of our cul-de-sac on to the notionally 20 mph limit “main” road.

  • At the junction by our local pub where cars crossing are supposed to give way. Every day I pass there I slow down in anticipation of someone speeding through regardless, and I often have to brake sharply or stop to allow someone to turn into my lane.

  • Directly ahead, the pinch point that stops lorries from getting stuck further down gives priority to drivers going in my direction, and while it’s badly designed, I usually have to give way to oncoming drivers.

  • The road it leads on to is effectively a one way street as the exit is marked with a no entry sign for vehicles who would otherwise turn into it. But it’s routinely ignored and drivers coming the other way always seem to be in a great hurry in between the cars parked on either side.

  • Then there’s the turn into the big main road from another one way street. The number of times I’m stuck behind someone turning right, who could have moved over to the right to allow me to turn left, but no, they need to take up the middle of the road. It’s easier now the council repainted the “Keep Clear” road markings, and that also has encouraged more drivers on the main road to give way and allow us to turn left and right.

  • Speaking of the middle of the road, that appears to be the preferred place for drivers of ever larger vehicles to drive. Maybe they’re frightened of hitting a parked car or they can’t envisage exactly how wide their vehicle is?

Of course, I have to get out of their way as they’re probably not even looking.

Southall Odours

I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021.

Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018. Bad enough to wake us up in the night during the long hot summer.

And it’s better than the smell of tar, which we still get when the wind is blowing from the west. Before the asphalt plant was built, we didn’t get any odours even though there is also a Tarmac plant nearby. The Asphalt plant owners say that is because the Nestle coffee plant closed. The (burnt?) coffee smell masked the tar.

I get around the corner of my block, on my morning walk, and see the small industrial estate that was the bane of our life for months in 2022. The main culprits were the paper recylcling company, which had its own incinerator for burning (believe it or not) plastics and coated wooden pallets.

Their neighbour opposite was a custom kitchen furniture maker, which also had its own incinerator for burning laminated particle fibreboard. The garage at the front regularly burns stuff in an old oil barrel.

All of which contributed to some of the most disgusting odours imaginable blowing into our kitchen, bathroom and hallway whe the wind blew from the north-east.

I walked down the street to the corner where the local council installed a tiny corner “wildflower garden”, which my wife and kids loved because it smelled so good. Two years later, it’s reduced to a dumping ground (no one could have foreseen this).

Auto-generated description: A pile of mattresses, wooden pallets, and other debris is stacked on a sidewalk next to a white car and a trailer.

Further on my walk, past the homes reeking of marijuana, and weaving in and out of the obstacle course of bed bases mattresses and pallets stren across the pavements, I reach the town and smell the food aromas.

I’m reminded of the old Honey Monster factory, which used to regale us with the smell of roasted (burnt?) onions (I know, right?).

And my first visit to Southall (in daylight hours), twenty odd years ago, turning left out of the old station and naively going into the underpass. The stench of piss that hit me! “Welcome to Southall!” indeed.

I finished my walk through the town and back up round and through the park. If I’d gone further up the canal by my sons’ school I would have got the smell of the narrowboats’ wood-burning stoves, which sometimes fills the school playground and causes kids to have to use their inhalers.

And if I’d walked along the main road home or by the junction with the big industrial estate I would have choked on the heavy air filled with the exhaust fumes from cars and lorries.

Southall stinks so bad that the council set up its own Southall Odours web page, email and hotline where you can report bad smells. Because if you don’t report it, the council can’t do anything.

If you’re lucky, you might see something done after a year or two of complaining, as long as you can withstand the constant gaslighting.

If you’re unlucky, and you’re not already dead or too ill to complain, you’ll be branded a troublemaker and excluded from local democracy.

Or you’ll be told to move by the council’s community safety director.

What's going on in Syria?

If I understand this correctly: it’s illegal in the UK to say or do anything that could be construed as support for the democratically elected government of Gaza and likewise for a party of the democratically elected government of Lebanon because we designate them as proscribed terrorist organisations.

The outgoing US president brokered a one-sided ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, which allows Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory.

As soon as this ceasefire was in place, the Israeli prime minister threatened the president of Syria, and the armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra (who we designate as proscribed terrorist organisations) proceeded to violently overthrow the government of Syria (who we did not designate as a terrorist organisation despite all the bad press).

Incidentally, the leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra was previously held in US detention facilities in Iraq for several years and was coincidentally released just in time to form Al-Nusra at the start of Syrian Civil War in 2011.

The leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra has now formed the new government in Syria.

They are the good guys and are really very moderate compared to the former government of Syria - the bad guys (which is presumably why we didn’t proscribe them as a terrorist organisation).

While all this is happening, Israel is bombing Syria and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory. And Israel continues to obliterate Gaza. All paid for by the good ol’ US of A.

No room at the inn

Immigration case I’ve been working on since almost exactly a year ago has finally gone kaput with devastating and life changing consequences for the person involved.

They’ve lived here since they were eighteen. They volunteer to run a wellbeing cafe in a local church. They applied for grant funding to keep the cafe open over winter. We wanted to employ them as a community development worker.

They now have to leave the UK by the day of our office xmas lunch or face deportation.

What you writing FOR?

I was in Hounslow, west London last year. I went to a cafe in a leisure centre. I’m not proud of it, I was volunteering with my son’s school. And I’m alone, I’m not eating or drinking and I’m writing in my notebook, right? Teacher walks over to me: “Hey, what you writing for?” Isn’t that the weirdest fucking question you’ve ever heard? Not what am I writING, but what am I writing FOR? Well, god dammit, you stumped me! Why do I write? Well… hmmm… I dunno… I guess I write for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don’t end up being a fucking teacher!

Of course, this didn’t happen, and it the joke doesn’t really work like this. Leaving aside Bill Hicks unnecessary misogyny and condescending attitude towards our sisters in the hospitality industry - you have to admit, though, he would have been funnier than the (ri)bald bloke on Masterchef - the question stands. What am I writing for? Why do I write?

Well, the truth is, I write for a number of reasons. The main one being because it’s something I enjoy doing. Typing up blog posts on the fly in the cafe of the leisure centre where my son and his class did their weekly swimming lesson allowed me an hour to create something with no internal editor or censor stopping me. It was very cathartic. Writing this now with a pen and paper at the kitchen table is the same.

So, mainly I write for me, which is liberating. It helps me breathe and to feel alive.

But I also write for my sons. One day I’ll be gone, probably while they are still too young, and I’d like to leave them with something of me that they can get to know when that time comes. My oldest is always asking me to tell him stories about when I was young, but I’m very bad at that, and can’t remember much that’s appropriate for a ten year old anyway.

In my twenties, I used to write and receive back copious letters from friends, but also from my Dad and his Mum, my Grannie. One day my Dad’s letters stopped coming. There was no reason, or even hint of a reason. I was several thousand miles away at the time, so unable to investigate. The story I was told turned out to be a spiteful load of old bollocks, but at the time it was the only one I had, and so I believed it. I don’t feel like I know my Dad very well at all, but what I do know is that he seemed to find most enjoyment and fulfilment in his life when he was away.

After I explained to my son’s teacher that I was writing for pleasure, one of the swimming instructors at the next table gets up, stands over me and goes, “Well, looks like we got ourselves a writer!” while all the kids in their swimming costumes tried to peer over my shoulder from behind the glass screen to see what I was writing, laughing and pointing at me. That only lasted a few seconds, thankfully, before they all got on with their swimming lesson and left me in peace.

Bad Santa

Big kid is getting too clever.

I got him a surprise xmas gift he’ll love and set up an online account for him in advance so it’s ready to use on the big day.

This morning he switched his alarm off on his old cheapo kids smart watch and asked me what the notification about the order is.

I played dumb, but I’m sure he’s putting it all together.

On The Bales

The recent farmers’ protests in the UK and a comment on micro.blog about old style rectangular straw bales reminded me (again) of my own farming history.

[@Miraz](https://micro.blog/Miraz) It has taken me many years to get used to this way of packing hay. I grew up with the old rectangular bales that we had to fill the loft with for the horses' winter. What do they call this big rolls of hay? Also "bales"?

Now, obviously, without farmers we don’t eat. All those fields left to grow wild kindly paid for by the European Union… oh, wait, that freebie blew away in the Farage wind and now costs us £2.4 billion of our own money every year.

Talking of wind, apparently the new inheritance tax farmers are protesting will incentivise them to use or sell their farmland for use as wind or solar farms. Presumably to keep the lights and the air conditioning on for the rich when it all goes tits up, while the rest of us scrabble around blaming immigrants and woke lefties.

Farmers are notoriously tight-fisted, as I related in my own story about having my farm labouring wages deducted by the farmer after he gave me a lift home. Tight as a duck’s arse as we used to say. Steve, the farmer’s foreman, walked like a duck. Probably because he spent all day sitting on a tractor shovelling straw bales on to trailers for us to stack.

My first day on the bales ended in disaster. Steve could have lifted me down on his tractor shovel thing, as he he did many times thereafter, but instead allowed newbie me to slide down the ropes we’d just tightened.

My fingertips took several days to regrow. I had fifty pence deducted from my wages for the cost of replenishing the first aid kit, and received a straight knockout for bleeding on the ropes.

Baling was actually decent fun when you got used to the physical aspect of the work. I worked with my mate who lived on the same road, and it was a challenge to stack the bales in the right way and learn particular tricks for making them fit into impossibly small spaces. The lorry drivers often helped and, being Northumbrians, they were usually a good crack. They wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible and to make sure their load wasn’t going to topple over on the long road back to Cockermouth.

The days were often hot and long, and I would spend a lot of time visualising my first pint of the evening when we were done. But invariably, by the time I’d got home, soaked in the bath, eaten and gone out, the last thing I wanted was beer. I usually drank a shandy instead and went home for an early night.