Category: Longform
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Living and breathing
I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.
Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009
Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.
All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.
By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.
My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!
At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.
Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.
One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.
I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.
This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.
Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.
Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,’” Welch sings in the chorus of “Between Two Lungs"
I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the song is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.
No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last
Sausages
Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.
I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.
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.
In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.
She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.
I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.
They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.
Got Carter
I started watching Person of Interest almost three months ago thanks to a recommendation from Hippy Steve. Obviously I’m about thirteen years after everyone else, as it first aired in 2011. At that time, I was busy singing songs about one J Carter….
Person of Interest is a post 9/11 surveillance thriller, although I still think my initial impression of the first episode - Minority Report meets Police Squad! wasn’t far off. After watching two and a half seasons, I’d add a good old dollop of Reservoir Dogs into the mix.
Luckily for me, the whole five seasons was free to watch on Amazon Prime, with just a thirty second ad break halfway through each episode.
The basic premise for the show is that we are surrounded by cameras recording our every move. The US government wanted to create an automatic means of harnessing all this information for the greater good - preventing terror attacks on its territory.
The creator of this artificial intelligence - known as The Machine - now has sole access to it. And he is using it to prevent not just terror attacks, but also everyday attacks on ordinary people. People who the government were never interested in because they were irrelevant to national security.
Finch, who is obviously the brains of the operation, hires some brawn - Reese - to do the dangerous work of physically intervening to prevent daily murders. In fact, Finch rescues Reese from whisky-fuelled vagrancy after his former life as a CIA special agent has fallen apart, and offers him redemption. He’s still a hired hitman, but he doesn’t have to kill anyone anymore, just save them from murder.
Luckily there’s only one murder a day, and Reese is just as capable sloshed, slashed, shot, and tied up. He’s the human embodiment of The Machine - Superman, infallible, with all the (ir)relevant information fed to him by Finch via an earpiece and every conceivable weapon, perfect timing and lucky escape available to him, along with miraculous recovery from injury.
Between them, they are all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent, and the recipient of mysterious cryptic phone calls revealing the social security number of the next murder victim or perpetrator.
Soon we start meeting new regular characters. The would-be mob boss working undercover as a shy, socially conscious high school teacher in the toughest area in town. The police homicide detective (one J Carter) looking for “The man in the suit” - Reese - who keeps being seen at the scene of the incredible deaths of various villains. The corrupt police officers (dirty cops known collectively as HR) who protect and serve themselves and their criminal and mob friends. Including Fusco, who is assigned to work with Carter, and recruited by Reese as an inside source and dirty worker.
You can’t run from the past forever, but love is real
Season Two is definitely a cut above Season One. The characters are more rounded, there are more of them, their interactions and back stories are playing out and getting entangled. Finch and Fusco have, or had, love lives. Reese is looking out for Carter even though she’s still officially hunting him. Reese acquires a killer Dutch dog called Bear and keeps him as a pet to protect Finch from the mysterious and powerful root who has been watching everything he does and who wants access to The Machine.
Then, out of the blue, halfway through S2, I can’t watch it anymore! Not without parting with £17.99! But by now I’m hooked, watching an episode almost every evening. £17.99 gets me the information that it was Finch who ordered Reese and his duplicitous CIA partner to be killed in China, and sociopath Shaw joins the team after her old boss Control tried to kill her. My old boss’s doppelganger turns up in one episode as a serial killer identity thief in a good old-fashioned Columbo episode where everyone is stuck on an island in the middle of a hurricane, and everyone except the killer is a suspect until it’s (almost) too late. Fusco killed his old dirty cop partner Stills and buried him in the woods.
Carter and Bear dig up Stills’ body to save Fusco’s ass
Finch gets captured by root. She wants to set The Machine free. It turns out Finch programmed The Machine to forget everything at the end of every day in an act of self-deletion. root seems to have some kind of connection with The Machine and sees it as a living organism.
In Season Three, Carter brings down HR, including HR’s chief henchman and all round bad guy Simmons. Or does she? No, she doesn’t. He’s somehow still alive. It’s getting silly.
Reese’s number is up. By now, he’s in love with Carter, and she’s in love with him. She dies in his arms, shot in the chest by the evil Simmons, who escapes yet again. Simmons brutally tortures the now extremely likeable Fusco, breaking three of his fingers before sentencing both Fusco and his young son to death. Shaw manages to save Fusco’s son, but she can’t be in two places at once….
Dirty cop turned hero
Somehow, Fusco manages to free his ties and garrote his executioner before he can pull the trigger. Then he finds a strangely unarmed Simmons before he can fly to safety. But instead of shooting him, or even arresting him, he first decides to fist fight him with three broken fingers. Bear in mind that Simmons is hard as nails, and Fusco is short, fat, and a bit of a softie at heart.
Against all the odds, Fusco wins and takes cop-killer Simmons in.
After Carter’s death, Reese goes AWOL and back on the bottle. Fusco finds him out west and they end up in a slapstick brawl in the rain. Meanwhile, Finch and Shaw are captured by the evil Control and her evil Odd Bod henchman Hersh, but miraculously saved by root (who by now had been captured and caged by Finch).
I got bored
Halfway through S3 I gave up. Reese and Fusco miraculously saved Finch and Shaw, who were themselves captured by Vigilance (a violent pro-privacy campaign group), then Hersh. root was captured by Control and brutally tortured, but somehow managed to escape, turn the tables and then save everyone.
I haven’t mentioned the mysterious, sinister and extremely evil elderly Englishman who seemed to be running the whole show (actually the show’s creator’s grandfather in real life), who managed to look like death and worse than Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective.
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. I was into it for around fifty or so episodes, but it became too much, too repetitive, too cliched. They killed off the only J Carter, and I can’t have that, even if J Bezos has another £17.99 from me.
People Don't Change
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions.
This is a quote, or the gist of a quote, from an episode of Person of Interest, a TV show I watched avidly for two and a half seasons before rapidly losing interest after the scriptwriters killed off one of the only characters with a fully functioning sense of empathy (who happened to be a black woman) and which therewith descended into a cliched, repetitive, and all-too predictable (yet surprising) slapstick parody of itself.
If I wanted to watch a bunch of psychopaths endlessly escalate a brutal war on humanity I could just look at the news. Americans sure like their guns and shooting people for entertainment. Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea and a good book, and a bit of peace and quiet.
Anyway, people don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Especially when they have enough guns pointed at their head. That’s the takeaway, or the moral of this story. But they always escape, and then they’re back to making bad decisions all over again, usually involving pointing guns at other people’s heads.
And maybe that’s right. People don’t change. Not until there’s a compelling reason to. We carry on mindlessly making the same old bad decisions over and over again like in Einstein’s theory of insanity, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.
It’s a horrible take. But it’s true to some extent. Getting better (it can’t get much worse) can be a bit of a song (and a dance). Recovery is a long and winding road. They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said “No, no, no!” There’s a lot of resistance to change, and even to making good decisions.
But is much of this also a result of the world we live in, and who we are? We live in a world consumed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We are in thrall to the ideas of freedom of the market, the decimation of government and public services, and the freedom of individuals (and individual responsibility, even while what’s left of the state bails out the greed and mistakes of unaccountable banks and corporations).
There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher told us. There is no alternative.
Trump was right, Americans will never vote for a black woman. Hell, they wouldn’t even vote for a warmongering white woman. The white supremacist patriarchy is strong. Yes, they voted for a black man, but he turned out to be the most murderous president in history.
Is there an alternative? There’s always an alternative. It’s just that usually the alternative is more of the same, or worse. Take it or leave it. And even when there is a different option, one which might slightly rein in the excesses of this neoliberal onslaught, it’s demonised as a Stalinist coup that will murder Jews. “Nothing. Has. Changed.” implored Theresa May, quite rightly, as she continued as Prime Minister despite losing her massive parliamentary majority and failing to obtain a mandate to deliver Brexit, or anything other than her own resignation. Calling that election was the most audacious thing she ever did, aside from running through a field of wheat as a child.
Despite the people obviously voting for change, and genuine hope, it was clear that what we really needed instead was a lying, racist killer clown to run the country into the ground.
At least he had a plan. An oven-ready plan to deliver Brexit on a plate just in time for the New Year. It would be served cold, and thoroughly unappetising to everyone, toxic even. But it was the will of the people. It’s what we wanted. We voted for it! We wanted to sever our economic ties to our nearest and biggest trading partner and experience the freedom of going it alone in the big wide world, unleashed!
But that wasn’t enough! The killer clown told too many lies, and hosted too many parties in covid lockdown. He had to go. A tiny minority of elderly rich right wingers then voted for a new leader for us. One who would be more honest, less racist, less murderous, and not as stupid. Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.
Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline, all in less than a month. Talk about a whirlwind. And some bad decisions. She now has a very nice pension. You reap what you sow.
People don’t change, but they can make good decisions. 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.
DPD FFS!
DPD notified me that their driver had delivered my parcel. “Parcel received by Rhanderg”.
That’s obviously not me, and neither did I have my parcel.
I saw the DPD van outside my neighbour’s block opposite, so figured he must have delivered there by mistake. But, no, my neighbour didn’t have it (and he’s not called Rhanderg either).
I opened a chat on the DPD app. The proof of delivery photo was taken at my neighbour’s door. I was assured the driver would come back later, retrieve my parcel and deliver it to me. But I’d already checked with my neighbour and they didn’t have it.
Two minutes later, the driver turns up with my parcel. He said he dropped his phone in the mud (and accidentally took a photo of him not delivering it to my neighbour’s flat?).
My Cheese-o-meter
For the best sensation, please read this post at room temperature.
What’s so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Now, I’m going to milk this for all it’s worth, but I would question the last sentence. I’m going to stick to cheese. Not literally, of course. That would be messy and smelly. Always wash your hands after operating cheese.
I’m going to stick to cheese, metaphorically - for the benefit of the cheeseless.
[@davidmarsden](https://micro.blog/davidmarsden) I am still waiting, cheeseless.
Cheeseboard Disclaimer
While I don’t consider myself to be any kind of big cheese - I’m not a cheese authority or cheese expert - I’m perfectly qualified to write a cheesy summary of my life in cheese.
Please note that I am not affiliated to the Cheese Marketing Board, and clicking any of the links in this post will not help to feed my hungry cheese-loving children.
Cheese-o-meter
Without further fondue, here’s my Cheese List.
- Triple Gloucester. The elusive holy grail of cheeses. From Gloucester.
- Double Gloucester. If you have trouble finding Triple Gloucester, then you can’t go wrong with its populist sibling Double. 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. Used in cheese rolling competitions. From Gloucester.
- Single Gloucester. Pale and aloof, Double’s estranged half-sister. From Gloucester.
- Mature Cheddar. Hard, white, crumbles under pressure. The epitome of Englishness in cheese form. Ideal in a cheese and tomato sandwich, or a Ploughman’s lunch. Mixes well (grated) with Double Gloucester. From Cheddar.
- Vintage Mature Cheddar. See 4, but harder, whiter and crumblier.
- Mild Cheddar. See 4, but less pale, slightly softer, and less crumbly. Almost tasteless. Pointless waste of milk.
- Red Leicester. Underrated cheese. Red. Makes a fine cheese sauce for cauliflower or macaroni. Makes a great topping for a Shepherd’s Pie (better than mixing Cheddar and Gloucester - Gloucester can get a bit oily). From Leicester.
- Wensleydale. White, crumbly. Perfect with a mince pie. From Wensleydale.
- Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Cheshire. Lumping these all together not because they’re are all the same, but because it’s so long since I tried them I can’t remember what they are like. From Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Cheshire.
- Gouda. Sliced foreign cheese. Kids eat it.
- Edam. A very special Dutch cheese which is made backwards. Don’t eat the rind!
- Jarlsberg. Sliced foreign cheese. Full of holes.
- Emmental. Stringy cheese. Good for toasties and the bin.
- Swiss cheese. American cheese. From Switzerland.
- Brie. Fancy French cheese. Round, rindy, soft and stinky. Nice with a cracker.
- Camembert. See 16. It’s like no cheese I’ve ever tasted.
- Blue cheese. French. Mouldy. No thanks.
- Stilton. See 18. Not French. From Stilton.
- Ricotta. Soft, creamy. Perfect with spinach on a pizza, or better still in a calzone at Pizza World.
- Mozzarella. On a pizza.
- Mascarpone. In a cheesecake. Not a cake.
- Halloumi. Fried. On its own or with olives, hummus, pitta. From Cyprus.
- Feta. Greek salad. From Greece.
- Cottage cheese. My Mum loves it. From a cottage. From-age?
- Goats’ cheese. From goats.
- Sheep’s cheese. See 26, but from sheep.
- Parmesan. Baby sick.
- Smegma. You don’t want to know where it’s from. One of the first bands I was in at school was called The Amgems. We weren’t as good or as funny as we thought we were.
- Lung cheese.
WFH Saved My Life
I’ve worked from home since the end of February 2020. I transferred all my work and systems online to do so, and while I’m still part-time, in practice I’m now available 24/7 for every conceivable administrative emergency (“Hi David. Please order me some large coloured post-it notes and have them delivered to my home tomorrow” or “Hi David. Please bring £200 in cash to my house this morning so I can pay for my lunch meeting today.”).
I won’t pretend I’ve always been highly productive, in the office or at home. But I always get everything done that needs to be done, and I’m super-flexible and adaptable. I’ve been asked to do - and done - huge, complex projects at short notice and with short deadlines that are outside of my remit and frankly beyond my skill set, but I’ve done them, learned how to do it on the spot or got help.
I do go into the office for occasional in-person meetings and social gatherings (“xmas lunch” looms) when necessary, and indeed spent a solid three hours working last Thursday with a masked colleague (she had a fever) in a freezing cold office. I’d just recovered from a bad reaction to the covid vaccine. Next day was a write-off. I was exhausted and worried about whether the work we did was really good enough. The day after and since I’ve had a terrible cough and cold, shortness of breath, wheezing. (Since my COPD diagnosis, every rasping breath I take is assessed and rediagnosed by my non-medic wife as requiring medical attention.)
My workplace is bad for my health. Pre-covid I had multiple chest infections that kept me away from work and reduced my productivity to zero for weeks at a time. Since I worked from home, and catching covid aside, I’ve had zero time where I’ve been unable to go to the office for essential work that can only be done there. Even when I’ve had coughs and colds, I’ve felt well enough to do the work that needed to be done. Somehow (until now with this new cough) I don’t seem to get so ill or feel so bad when I’m at 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 work space.
And, yes, being part-time, and flexible, I can take a nap if I need one.
Why should people work at home? https://youtu.be/bQN_Fb03RfE?si=CZoQagrotTA_urw8 The ‘return to work’ now being enforced by many organisations makes no sense for many people, or the planet. It really is time that we have some enlightened managers who did what is best for people and the world, and not what they see as being best for them.
Not Fake News
Convicted felon, fascist and fake news king, the 45ᵗʰ President of the United States paid the porn star ‘stormy Daniels’ hundreds of thousands of dollars not to tell anyone that she had sex with him.
Last night, she appeared on a Channel 4 US election special with disgraced former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was there to plug his memoir “Unleashed.”
Daniels wanted to know if Johnson had any children, and wondered if Johnson would leave his daughter alone with Trump. (Trump has a whole series of very serious sexual misconduct allegations against him.)
Johnson explained that he has met Trump and he’s perfectly polite and well-mannered, so of course he would have no problem with him.
Johnson himself, of course, is famous among other things for being a serial liar and not knowing how many children he has.
Needless to say, Trump won the election, and Johnson is trying to make a comeback.
Liz Kendall - Mad, Bad and Dangerous
Trials of employment advisers giving CV and interview advice in hospitals produced “dramatic results”, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC.
The Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions was referring to her experience of visiting a severe mental illness Individual Placement and Support (IPS) programme.
In the community.
Mental health patients are in hospital usually because they are incapable of living life in general let alone getting a job. Plus, mental health units are usually secure wards, so they can’t get out.
IPS works because people are in recovery, receiving treatment that makes them feel better and well enough to start thinking about work.