Category: Longform
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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:
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The speeding cars as I turn out of our cul-de-sac on to the notionally 20 mph limit “main” road.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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.
Bye Bye Biden
Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚
Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)
This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.
Foreign policy
“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”
Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.
”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)
Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.
Israel
Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.
Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.
Yugoslavia
Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)
Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.
If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
Iraq
Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)
George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.
Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.
He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.
A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.
Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)
Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged' from an oppressed religious minority.
War on Terror
Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.
That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.
Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)
Domestic policy
Race relations
Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.
This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.
Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)
Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states' rights over a united federal states of America.
Women’s rights
”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)
Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974
Biden’s neoliberalism
Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.
At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.
Supporting spending cuts
Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).
Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.
”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”
Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.
Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.
Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)
No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.
”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)
Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.
Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)
Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.
Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.
As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)
The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)
Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)
By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.
Dua Lipa's Tiny Desk concerts
Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.
Love Again is my favourite.
She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.
On Journaling
I wrote this a week ago.
My last journal was over a week ago, last Saturday.
I’ve had a week off work with a really bad cough, wheezing, shortness of breath. Generally feeling better these last couple of days, but also still coughing. Last two days I had coughing fits in the afternoons leaving me dizzy, and exhausted. I haven’t slept well some nights either, due to coughing, wheezing and breathlessness.
But sitting here right now, I feel as good as I have done in two weeks or more.
Time off from work has allowed me to go through 90 days of journal entries to categorise and summarise them, and then outline or tease out the key themes or ideas in each area of interest. Why? Well, 1) what are all these journal entries for? I mean, I get the process, but am I missing out on something greater? 2) Lots of people publish weekly summaries and some people like reading them. But why?
I think I get it now. 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 lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half working. Better than nothing, but a lot of stress.
And another surprising fact. While I started - and soon stopped - journaling in March, then restarted in August, I had wondered if spending the time to write in a private journal would take away from writing for my blog? Actually (and unsurprisingly, really) the opposite has occurred. I have written more than ever, privately and publicly.
I’ve also generally felt better in myself, although I’ve still had my usual ups and downs, and I’m still quite easily uplifted and dragged down.
It’s also made me realise I do a lot more things than I imagined, and do them OK.
It’s helped me to better understand some of my relationships, particularly with family.
I’m reading more, and listening to music more.
It would be useful (although perhaps less fun)to do the same exercise with my work journal. (41 pages, 46 days).
244 pages over 90 days for my personal journal.
Unfortunately, I haven’t journaled since.