I was saddened to read this morning of the death of Algia Mae Hinton, the piedmont blues guitarist and singer, whose album, Honey Babe, I have embedded here.
I bought Honey Babe several years ago from Bandcamp,1 and it has become a favourite. Through purchasing it, I learned of the work of the Music Maker Relief Foundation((https://musicmaker.org/)), which supports musicians from the American folk traditions who have made some of the purest of American art, without seeing much profit from their creativity. Ms Hinton’s page on the foundation’s website is here.
Have a click on the album embed above and, if you like it, buy a copy. At the same time, if you can spare $5 or so, or even a little more, please donate to the GoFundMe appeal2 to cover Ms Hinton’s funeral costs.
Image copyright: 2000 Scott Sharpe, Raleigh News & Observer, used with permission.
There is a very affecting profile of Ms Hinton in the local paper of her city, Raleigh, North Carolina,3 published last year. It describes a difficult life, but a life well lived. Reading it, I regretted that I had not clicked on the “contact the artist” link on Ms Hinton’s Bandcamp page,4 and told her how much her album means to me.
I have been back at work for a month and, in any other year, I think Christmas would have been largely forgotten by this point. This year, though, even as we enter February and we begin to notice that nightfall is getting later, I am nagged by a lingering nostalgia for my Christmas holidays. I keep bringing it up in conversation, this sense of a break, not just from work, but from the dull trudge of life itself, as if some spell was cast around our lives for a fleeting, precious fortnight.
My parents had said that they wanted Christmas alone, to celebrate my father having had a year without needing hospital treatment. In the week before the Christmas holidays, my boss had cancelled classes for training and paperwork which, in the end, amounted to only one day’s compulsory attendance, so there was a lazy week running up to the break. Thus, time between my last class of 2017 and the first class of 2018 was, unofficially, my own. Best of all, the holiday itself was calendrically perfect. Christmas day was a Monday, so we had a clear week off: a weekend, followed by a week, then another weekend and a bank holiday Monday before I had to return to teaching. It felt like the ur-holiday: the holiday upon which all holidays should be patterned.
I did not read or write, other than a few (now deleted) blog posts. Instead, I listened to Harry Potter audiobooks as I cooked, or sat staring out of the window, or as I walked the dog.
Tia sniffing, as she does.
I walked the dog a lot. I loaded her into the car and took her to Firestone Copse, where I let her run gleefully through the woods as I ambled in an autonomous daze on the circuit round the main path, letting Stephen Fry’s beautiful reading of Rowling’s richly layered fantasy insulate me from any serious thought. I puffed on my vape and enjoyed bright cold or grey drizzle in the same steady happiness.
Amanda stayed busy, and was often out, buying stuff or meeting friends or family. When she had the car I took Tia through the new estate at the top of East Cowes, out of town to Whippingham village, and then along the footpath behind the church, and over the stile into the farm by the river. There I could let Tia off her lead and walk across the sodden meadow, staring down at the grey arc of the river Medina, while Harry, Ron and Hermione puzzled over the escape of Sirius Black. Tia ran great, delighted circles in the long, rough grass, stopping only to come running up to me, to collect a treat, before haring away again.
The sodden meadow and the grey arc of the Medina.
At the far end of that field is another stile into another field and, at that one’s far end is the wood with the demolished factory site, fenced off because of contamination. The woods have a poisoned character; bewitched by their pollution, but there is a path through them that leads to the road down to the Folly Inn. On a particularly heavily-clouded, drizzly morning, I went through the woods with Tia and we walked down to the pub. Inside, the pre-Christmas weekday feeling was like manufactured cosiness: I bought a pint and Tia sat beneath my chair as I drank it, lost to real life.
One afternoon, in the week before the official start of the holidays, when my boss had let me know that I could work from home, I finished updating a load of student folders and took Tia out in the mid-afternoon, with perhaps an hour and a half of daylight left. We walked along the top of the new estate, and I intended to go along to the Whippingham field, but as I crossed the road at the far end of the estate, I looked back and realised that there was a path down the final street, behind the line of trees that marks the edge of the housing before the new road. A woman was walking a dog there, and I noticed, for the first time, that the houses, modern and cramped as they are, are built in the style of Georgian town houses, in a sort of model-village style. I was intrigued. I walked back and took the dog down the road that the woman had come from, imagining that there was a village, with life and interest here, rather than a dormitory development of off-the-shelf compartment houses for people who never interacted.
The bizarre sterility and isolation-in-a-crowd nature of the estate is belied by some clever but deceptive design. There is a fake village green, around which some fake-georgian terraced houses with attic room gables are painted in various ‘authentic’ colours, but the residents have already let the upkeep slide, so that mould is showing on the fascia and soffits, and the blue-painted houses, in particular, are looking weathered. And, apart from the occasional dog-walker, there is no one about. This is an estate designed for driving to and from. You have your allotted parking spaces and you lock your door, and you live your life away from the place where you live. There are no shops, no pubs, no church or community centre. The estate is a lot of bedrooms and TV rooms. The closest thing to a community facility are the construction business offices: Barratts, Wilson Homes and one other, whose name escapes me, maintain showrooms there, to persuade people to make their homes in this abandoned filmset of a non-community.
Harry Potter seemed to suit this bizarre environment perfectly. The place is the Muggle state in redbrick, render and wood-frame. It is even less life-enhancing than Little Whinging, in that most of the houses here do not have gardens. They have strips, with pots. There is quite a lot of artificial grass.
I became a little fascinated with the area.
The flatpack palaces of homo-Alexa
Further down the new road, as it bends back along the bottom of the estate, and follows the river back towards East Cowes, there is a small development of ‘self-build’ plots. These challenge the uniformity of the rest of the estate with an alternative conformity of cuboid grandiosity, all cladding and glass. At dusk and after dark, the lives within the ones which have been completed and are occupied are on display to every passer-by. You have to remind yourself that these are private dwellings, and it is rude to look, because their lights seeps out across the road, like pollution. Wall-mounted TVs of migraine-inducing vastness make it appear as though the flatpack palaces are inhabited by two-dimensional giants. The people within might be projections; a new Google project of a pixelated populace: Homo Alexa.
At the end of the self-build development there is one house, not yet complete, that defies the pattern, in detail if not in dimensions. Like all the others, it is a vast, three-storey cuboid block, occupying the entire space of its uniform plot, except for the obligatory multiple car parking space that replaces any garden. However, instead of the wall of windows, it is plain-fronted, with a long, Elizabethan-style gable of nine small windows. It is strange and rather beautiful, this defiance of the Grand Designs norm. It hints at a shadowed interior lit by reading lights and standard lamps, rather than LED spots: dark wood panelling and bookshelves rather than magnolia paint and flatscreen hugeness.
We walked on. The elite section, with the self build plots, is bounded on its far end by a large area of grass and woods, creating a break between that odd island of conformist cut-out creativity and the brick homogeneity of the rest of the estate. A drainage ditch that will probably be known as ‘the stream’ by generations of children who grow up in the area runs round the edge of the wood. There is litter in there: a plastic barrier section, and a fire extinguisher, barbed wire that the builders didn’t bother to remove trails through the undergrowth. I let Tia off and she disappeared into the woods. On my headphones, Harry, Ron and Hermione heard the execution of Buckbeak in horror.
Over the following week, I explored the estate. I tried to get out of the house by about half past three, although I was not putting my watch on most days, so got it wrong sometimes. Some days I took Tia out on my own, and on a few days Amanda was free and would come with me, and we might go up to Carisbrooke Castle or to Firestone Copse, but I kept drifting back to the estate. Darkness fell by four thirty, and I often walked in the dark, although I liked to be home by five, ideally, to start supper, with Stephen Fry transferred to the bluetooth speaker in the kitchen.
On New Year’s Eve, Amanda and I took a walk and I tried to explain my fascination with the place. We walked around the estate on the route I had taken on my first exploration, then, as I had done on that first occasion, we let Tia off her lead to run in the woods. Amanda became nervous when Tia didn’t come back after five minutes, so we walked around the edge of the woods, to the top, where the bottom of the main estate reaches. Tia appeared, bounding ecstatically up to us, her ears flying behind her and, instead of going back down to the bottom road, along the Medina, through the new road that is as yet undeveloped, we walked up through the middle of the estate.
Amanda’s not a Harry Potter fan, and is amused and slightly embarrassed by my enthusiasm for it, but, in the gathering dark, she listened sympathetically to my explanation of how the events of the audiobooks had laid themselves into my memories of the estate. I was close to the end of The Goblet of Fire by now, and the wonderful sense of time passing, and events piling up like lived memory that is such a strength of the series, had taken full hold of me. We held hands, in thick gloves, and our conversation drifted. We were gearing ourselves to go out for the night, which we both knew we would enjoy, but which felt like hard work just then. Neither of us was eager to get home, to get dressed and ready to go out, or to be sociable. We were savouring one another, reflecting on the lazy week we had shared and wishing that life could be like this all the time.
It was, though, a wonderful evening. Several of our friends were planning to give up alcohol for 2018. I had drunk steadily through the holiday, usually having a first whisky as I cooked and drinking a couple of cans of beer through the evening, so I was planning to do dry January. New Years Eve was, therefore, a blowout. Amy, a dear friend of Amanda’s and the wife of my friend Andy, was on particularly fine form, her gift for acerbic comedy at its sharpest. We had planned to get home early, because we were worried about fireworks disturbing Tia and the cat, but we stayed until two, playing a card game1 that I had not heard of before, but which suits the sort of vulgar humour we enjoy with our friends.
In the morning, I was hungover. Not blindly, agonisingly hungover, but low-battery and grateful for Amanda’s painkiller stash. We had arranged for Amanda’s parents to visit for lunch and so I cooked and she cleaned and we had a very nice lunch. In the afternoon, Amanda’s sister and her partner came round and we all sat in the sitting room, drinking tea and chatting. The afternoon drew on and we realised Tia needed a walk. I got my coat, scarf, hat and gloves on and left the warm family gathering to take her out.
We walked up to the rec, by the old estate, onto which the new one, which had been my weird stomping ground for the past week, has been grafted. Harry Potter was in the maze, on the final challenge of the Triwizard Tournament, still trusting the fake Mad-eye Moody, being drawn towards his nemesis and the final destruction of his childhood innocence. Half in Hogwarts, half in East Cowes, I pulled Tia into the old estate, finding my way through streets that I hadn’t visited yet, of well-established houses, with some tidy front gardens, some messy; with cars on blocks and bicycles leaning against front walls; some litter, some mess, but the clutter of an established community. I got a little lost, finding my way down a street that ended in a communal car park and a wall and retraced my steps, passing a Victorian house outside which a discrete noticeboard advertised that it serves as a residential home for people recovering from substance abuse. There was a brightly lit kitchen with posters and artwork tacked all round it, but no one there. All the same, it looked warm, protective, loving.
The road bent round, but an unpaved alley led up to the main road, Beatrice Avenue. I took the alley, which was lined with winter-bare trees, and Tia sniffed her way along it, pulling at her lead, enjoying the rich stench of litter and leaf moss. As the view ahead cleared, I could see across the field beyond, up towards Osborne House Park and, slightly dimmed by a streetlamp, a glorious moon dominated the sky. Remus Lupin leapt into my thoughts, but so did the love by which I am surrounded and the sheer luck I enjoy, to be alive, housed, married to Amanda, free to take the time to daydream and waste my consciousness on a silly fantasy like the Harry Potter books. The awareness that I would be returning to work the next day had been playing on me, but it suddenly seemed less of a hardship, and more like a privilege. I stopped to take some photos, struggling with gloves, pockets, and Tia’s excited rummaging, and these were the shaky results.
Last night, a Saturday night, the night after the first full moon since New Year and a month into my back at work routine, I made soup. I had finished the Harry Potter audiobooks in the second week of January and resisted the urge to go back to the beginning or start reading the books again. Instead, I was listening to a recording of The Daughter of Time, by Jospehine Tey,2 from iplayer, beautifully read by Paul Young.
The soup was just about ready, the bread baked. I was tasting and seasoning and I grated some nutmeg into the pan. As I do with spices, I sniffed the nutmeg pot as I put the clove back and something about the smell seemed to stop time. I was a month back, and the Christmas holiday flashed across my inner eye like a tapestry suddenly lit up: the memory of discovering the strange estate on the edge of my hometown; the precious comfort of Christmas Eve, decorating the tree with Amanda, the smell of a glass of whisky and a lit fire; the peace of walking home from midnight mass3 at one o’clock on Christmas morning; watching the new Star Wars with Iain and Jo and enjoying their friendship; the feeling of wet clothes and waterlogged ground underfoot as I trudged across the field behind Whippingham Church.
I had tears in my eyes. I thought to myself, “I’m happy,” and it seemed like a weird condition, although I do not think of myself as an unhappy person. I took the food through to Amanda, but couldn’t find a way to tell her what had just happened to me. It didn’t matter: it was good soup, and to enjoy a meal with her, in front of the fire, with the dog sleeping in the corner, was enough.
It’s half-past-nine on Christmas Eve, 2017, and we’re still here. The world still lives and breathes. Eight hours ahead of us in the U.S., Donald Trump will be waking up in an hour, all excited about what naughty Santa has brought him, and preparing his tantrum if he hasn’t got what he wants, but we are still here. It’s been a funny old year, but we’ve almost made it through it.
In Danceswithcats Towers, we have a fire lit, and we have put the tree up. It’s a somewhat reduced tree this year, as we have to raise it out of reach of Tia, who is not routinely destructive but tends to express her curiosity by eating things. Still, it looks lovely, and its presence has made me feel, at last, that sense of security and warmth that is loaded onto the mid-winter festival.
Each year, my anticipation of Christmas has to war with the clamour of obligation and commercial pressure that Christmas imposes. We spent yesterday in a bit of a panic shop, as we lost the previous day to a strange adventure: I had, we think, given myself nicotine poisoning making e-cigarette liquid and passed out three times in twenty four hours. Doctors don’t like to hear about fifty-year old men passing out, and so we spent several hours in A&E as I was given blood-pressure tests, blood sugar tests and an E.C.G. All perfect, I’m proud to report, but I’m fairly sure the doctor who interviewed me has me marked as a drug addict.
Anyway, the fridge is full, our presents to one another are wrapped, our cards to our neighbours have been distributed and we have finally relaxed. We don’t put up Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve: I’m fussy about that. I hate the way seasonal decorations gather dust over a festival extended by commercial exploitation: twelve days is quite long enough to have silly lights on a plastic tree, and it gives Christmas Eve its own purpose.
Image: Deutsche Gramaphon
We have also had the Sting Christmas album on for the first time this year and it sounds as good as it has every year for almost as long as we have been together. I am not a particular fan of his, but Amanda has a soft spot for him and I bought her the album the year we married. We played it to death that Christmas and then put it away, not to be touched again until the following year and we have continued to do that every Christmas since. It is a very beautiful thing: mysterious, familiar and old.
Amanda had an early start this morning, so she could make biscuits and chocolates as presents for friends and family which she distributed this afternoon. She’s off to bed now but I’m staying up to go to midnight mass in an hour or so. I’ve got another favourite album on: An Evening With Bach1 by Voices of Music.2This is an album I had forgotten that I owned. I’d downloaded it when I was a member of the wonderful-but-odd Magnatune.com.3 I paid a monthly fee and had access to its entire library and this was one of the gems.4 I was reminded of it this evening as I was cooking supper and doing some prep for tomorrow. I had the radio on and Radio 3 had an evening of Bach, including a Bach-themed episode5 of their wonderful series, Words and Music.6 It included a snippet of Schlummert Ein from the cantata Ich Habe Genug, BMV 82:7I can’t tell you how beautiful I think this little aria is. It is both sad and wondrous, vast in tone and yet a small, modest piece. It has the same underlying awe of God that marks his Masses and Oratorio and yet, it is just a single voice, singing for only a few minutes; a few repeated phrases and some very contained ornamentation in the string quartet accompaniment.
Unfortunately, they haven’t posted their recording of the aria on their excellent You tube channel so, to hear their performance, you’ll have to buy the CD or join Magnatune, which is now very expensive, to get a download. Most of the Youtube versions of the aria seem to be sung by tenors, which I don’t like the sound of at all, but there is this one by Janet Baker8 (Warning! Youtube, so no privacy protections whatsoever). It’s with a full orchestra and it’s all a bit richer and more flowery than the Voices of Music recording, but I love Janet Baker’s voice and the music, speaking as it does of the longing for God with simple perfection, transcends the differences.
I am gradually coming to terms with dog-ownership.((http://An end to)) I still struggle with the presence of a restless and demanding animal1 in the house and her talent for destruction. This afternoon, for instance, she has eaten the lace on my new pair of vegan boots, for which I have saved for some time. Nevertheless, on the whole, Tia is extremely sweet-natured and is beginning to understand commands and, when she’s not distracted by smells, birds, the cat or other dogs, is attentive and obedient enough. I’ve walked her without Amanda a fair bit, and I am beginning to really enjoy the time I spend with her.
One advantage is that she has made having an English Heritage2 membership worthwhile. Apart from Osborne House3, the card gains us entry to Carisbrooke Castle4, which is a proper castle, in just the right state of decay.
It’s a Norman castle, with a high keep and a large bailey that has a variety of buildings within it, as well as a lovely walled garden. The bailey walls are almost complete and you can walk around them, which offers amazing views of the Island in all directions. The first picture above shows Tia, on guard, this morning.
There are fields and outer battlements, mostly Elizabethan and eighteenth century, around the outside, and dogs are free to run off-lead there. We started our visit with a circuit round the outside of the castle and Tia galloped about, inquisitive and gleeful, disappearing into the woods that ring the area before reappearing, with a look of joy, and racing towards me like a happy hare. One of the tricks a dog owner needs to develop is confidence in their animal. I am gradually learning that she will always return. She may wander, but she won’t go far without checking back with me.
After we’d had our gallop, we went into the castle. It was still early and the staff were getting ready for the last day of half-term events. We stopped at the donkey stables, which Tia wasn’t sure about, and then went up to the tea room, which is in a beautiful castle building, nestled against the bailey wall. We sat in the courtyard and I had my coffee and, unasked, a member of staff brought out a dog bowl of water for Tia. I was very moved by the kindness.
We were up in Suffolk for a few days this week, visiting my parents, who were charmed by the dog. Amanda wanted to do various bits of shopping, so on Friday I took Tia over to West Stow Country Park,5 which I loved when I was a child. There is a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village there, but it is fenced and dogs are forbidden. However, the park itself is large and contains a lake, made from an old gravel pit, and has several long trails looping through it. When I was last there, fifteen years ago, it was still quite a bare place, with only young trees. The woods have thickened and matured now, and the lake looks quite natural. A river, the Lark, is well-maintained and is the only place I have ever seen otter trail in the wild, although that was when I was in my teens.
Tia and I walked around the lake, on a lovely late-autumn afternoon, with the sun low in the sky. We saw only a few other people and she was in her element. Unfortunately, there is a “dogs-on-leads-only” rule; Bury St Edmunds, being Tory to its very core, seems to be a place that loves rules for their own sake, as I can’t see what harm a dog running around in that large open space could do. However, I am an example of obedience, so Tia didn’t get to canter about, beyond the speed I can manage.
She seemed to enjoy it, though, and I achieved the peace that, as I am learning, a long walk in the company of a dog can inspire.
Yesterday, before we left Bury for the tedious journey home, we went into town to do some last-minute shopping. There is a science fiction exhibition on at Moyses Hall Museum6 and various cosplay people were standing outside, wearing Star Wars and Judge Dredd costumes and that expression of defiant embarrassment that cosplay fantasists maintain. I asked the stormtrooper to hold Tia’s lead while I took a photo, but she was unimpressed and failed to pose. The sweet young jedi made up for Tia’s failure. I have a feeling I will treasure this image.
I’m not sure I really have the time to maintain this blog any more. The part of it that matters to me most, the book reviews, take a day to write, at least, and, lately, a spare day has not been available.
Work, like a noxious gas, expands to fill all space. My job is supposed to be part time, twenty-four hours per week but it is not. I gave up the memory group work last month, so that I had more time to keep up with admin for my teaching job, but I seem to have even less time this year, with large classes and an enrolment and assessment system that demands huge amounts of repetitive paperwork.
Nevertheless, I am keeping up with that, and my learners seem, for the most part, happy. With the first half term over, my classes are making progress: we will be entering the English learners for reading exams for the end of term and I am optimistic that it will be a successful round of assessments. In maths, my classes are progressing well through the basic calculation material and we will be able to get on to application before Christmas.
Besides work, however, I have started an Open University course in Science, Technology and Maths. I am hoping to progress to a computing and IT degree next year. I wanted to improve my maths knowledge to underpin my teaching, but am also thinking ahead: I don’t want to be trapped in this job until I drop, as it is quite physically demanding. I have to cart large amounts of paperwork, books and a laptop around to different venues, put out tables, and am on my feet for two hours at a time as I teach. Even the act of crouching beside a desk as I guide a learner is something that I will not be able to do for many more years. I am fit enough, but my feet aren’t great and the aches and pains of middle age are beginning to catch up with me.
So, I thought that an IT degree, finished before I’m sixty, might offer me a few options. It is a sort of interest of mine: I am dubious about the mainstream methods of communication and would like to be able to set up my own channels. Not being on Facebook1 and Twitter2 is a major impediment to participation in some things, particularly politics and social events, but I sense that their high water marks may be about to pass. I would like to keep up with the tech, but not be dependent upon having to pay through the nose for new machines every time things change. For that, I need better skills in open source software, and for that, I need training.
So far, the OU course is only two weeks old and is, mostly, about study skills and a bit of environmental science. It’s an access course, so it’s about preparing learners for degree study. I’ve learnt a little bit, but not been seriously challenged yet. However, an upcoming task is to master a scientific calculator, which I am both dreading and looking forward to.
I intended to do that yesterday, but Ubuntu3 released its new version on Thursday and, like a fool, I set my desktop computer to upgrade on Friday. I should have remembered that every upgrade means I am dazzled into tinkering with my set-up.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.A search for my first ever blog, listentopete.blogspot, about which I had completely forgotten. The gmail address is long-deleted, so don’t get excited.Ubuntu 2014ish? It’s the Unity desktop, still with BUUF icons. I was having a jazz phase, as you can see.Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.2015. I bought one of those phones: an absolute disaster.
That is particularly true of this upgrade, which is quite a fundamental change. Ubuntu has reverted to a Gnome Desktop,((http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/06/latest-ubuntu-17-10-update-ditches-unity-desktop-installs-gnome)) which is a shame in some ways. I have come to like the Unity desktop, but its rationale has been superseded by developments. The huge advantage of Gnome is its maturity and its integrated applications. Yesterday, I spent most of the day changing applications: I have, for instance, removed Evolution email and Calendar, because Gnome comes with a lovely calendar app and works beautifully with the simple but superb Geary email app.4
I also set up back ups, for the first time. I have relied upon an external hard drive for keeping copies of things, but it is old and becoming more of a risk than a safeguard. Last year, in a fit of optimism, I bought a 1TB hard drive and a caddy in which to run it. It is now almost full with a full set of Deja-Dup files and, if my six-year-old desktop suffers a catastrophic failure, I should have some recourse. I’d like to set up a Nextcloud server to be a secondary backup, but that takes time, resources and knowledge: all in short supply. Without those qualities, it takes money, and I really can’t afford to rent a cloud service: I’m already paying nearly £200 per year to keep this site running.
So, work and computers are my main time suckers. What else?
Well, Amanda, very skillfully, has organised the renovation of our kitchen. We went over to Ikea in Southampton on a couple of beautiful days this summer, and bought nearly two grands worth of boxes, which are currently piled up in our dining room. Last week, a very nice electrician did the wiring of the kitchen, although I think he’s done one fewer sockets than we asked for, which could mean I will be stuck with making a choice between the kettle and music when I’m cooking.
So, this half term break has a task hanging over it: assembling and installing kitchen units, getting it finished off by various trades people who know what they’re doing, and decorating the kitchen. I loathe DIY.
The other time killer is the bloody dog. She is a sweet enough animal, and I do have moments of adoration, but, Oh God! What a fucking palaver owning a dog is! As dogs go, she’s not that noisy, but there’s just that constant inquisitive presence, demanding attention, whenever I move around the house. The house smells of her, and the carpets all need deep cleaning because she whines so much in the morning that we don’t know when she’s whining to go out for a piss and when she’s just whining because we’re not in the same room as her.
Amanda and Tia in Firestone Copse, September 2017
Having said that, the walks are nice. We went to Firestone Copse on Friday and had a really good wander. She can be let off the lead now, which means Amanda and I can talk, when Amanda’s not trying to turn the whole thing into a ‘training session’. On days when long walks aren’t possible, we are lucky to have two recreation grounds within five minutes’ walk. Also, I have got into the practice of taking Tia up to Osborne House if Amanda wants a sleep in the afternoon and I’ve finished work. Dogs have to be kept on leads there, but Tia’s happy enough sniffing around. The grounds are beautiful and I get an hour of daydreaming. We wander along the valley walk path, through Prince Albert’s landscaped park, down to the beach, and then back up through the woods, past the cottage and along the top field. We have had quite a lot of good autumn weather this year, although it has been punctuated by extreme bizarreness, and it has been lovely to have a reason to get out and enjoy it.
So, yes, I am busy. Having laid it all out here, though, it sounds less awful than it has seemed. I have a lot to be grateful for, really, even if it does include a bloody dog. The cat’s adapted;5 so shall I.
Update December ’21: I was wrong: Geary was a nightmare and the Gnome Calendar sacrifices flexibility for beauty. I now use Thunderbird for both functions. [↩]
When we were considering getting a dog,1 I repeatedly expressed concern about the cat and the response (from, as I now realise, mainly dog lovers) was invariably, “Don’t worry about it; they’ll work it out.”
This is a comforting lie. What has happened is that the cat’s indoor territory and his freedom of movement through the house has been drastically reduced. Tia, the dog, can be taught to sit, lie down, be quiet and wait, but only if the cat isn’t about. If he is, she will terrorise him, and the cat has had to confine himself to upstairs, beyond the incredibly inconvenient stairgate we’ve fitted to keep Tia downstairs. She is jealous of any attention he receives and will whine and yap as I pet him. She regards him as an intrusion to be driven out.
While I am enjoying the walks with Tia, despite the fact that they eat up huge chunks of time and fill up my already over-allotted days, making time to think, write or read even rarer than it was, I do not really like her. She is like a charming, beautiful, spoilt princess who has disrupted my life when it didn’t really have time for disruption.
Fortunately, Albee is a stoic, and has claws, so he gets in and out of the house with a little help and can find peace on our bed or in my study. However, I miss his presence in the sitting room or in the garden, from which the little princess has entirely driven him. He goes over the road now, to the garden opposite, and no doubt annoys our neighbours’ cats, passing on the misery.I’m sorry, Albee.
The cat is not amused and I am bewildered, but Amanda wanted one, researched the whole process and procured Tia, a Cypriot refugee, from a rescue charity.
She is a sort of miniature labrador, spaniel-sized and very hectic, but gentle and sweet-natured with it. My cat lover’s heart has been somewhat won over, despite the destruction she has wrought. Amanda is besotted and very happy, and that’s good enough for me.
Amanda and me on the Undercliff path. Photo: Charlotte Kirin
My sister, Charlotte, and Amanda’s friend, Marny, stayed with us this weekend, arriving on Friday night and leaving this morning, Sunday.
Beside the pleasure of a couple of drunken suppers in the company of three intelligent, amazing women, I was reminded by their visit just how lucky I am to live on the Isle of Wight. Yesterday, after a lazy breakfast, sitting in our garden until lunchtime, drinking coffee and enjoying Marny and Charlotte’s demolitions of their respective ex-husbands, we drove to the south coast of the Island and had a walk down beneath the Undercliff between St Catherine’s Point and St Lawrence.1
The day was clear and bright, with a decent breeze: perfect walking weather. Our guests were dazzled by the beauty of the coast and we rediscovered how lucky we are to live in an area where such beauty is a short journey away. Charlotte had brought her dog, Jasper, who responded to the open space of the beach with the sort of glee only a dog off its lead can project. It was a bit of a clamber to get to the isolated beach, but it was a wonderful outing.
In the photo above, you can see the point that marks the start of Binnel Bay. We walked to just before the Point, and then, thoughts of beer and chips calling, made our way back, before climbing back up the Undercliff Path to The Buddle Inn,((http://www.buddleinn.co.uk/)) where we had a pint in their gorgeous garden.
We drove on into Ventnor for our chips, which was a stage too far for my energy levels, really, but was an experience of faded seaside glory at its most Islandy. When we got home, we ended up collapsed on our sofas, knackered, and I abandoned plans to cook supper, in favour of phoning for a takeaway from the excellent Taste of India2 in East Cowes, where Amanda and I had spent a lovely evening last summer.
Forgive me allowing myself a little boast, but I feel as though, for once in my life, I was ahead of the herd. I joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn, have voted for him for leader twice, and have never lost faith in his power to be a potent influence for good in British life. I have a ‘Corbynista’ shirt which I have worn to local party meetings throughout the Blairite fightback, and I have held out hope, through two turbulent, contentious years, that a lucid, honest politician, who talks about real life rather than rarefied, contained abstractions, could bring British politics back to sanity.
Of course, I am in the lowest twenty percent of median average household incomes, and approximately £500 per year worse off than I was before 2008, which is probably, when we get past the hypnotised fixation with media control, a pretty good driver of mood. I’ve also been working in public service throughout the period in which the Tory hit squads have been “working tirelessly” to destroy them.
Until a couple of weeks ago, being a Corbyn supporting member of the Labour Party was seen widely as an extreme position, but it suddenly appears mainstream, and the violent, corrupt, brutish, hateful extremism that has passed as the political centre-ground for most of my life, just as suddenly, seems like a marginal, confused, farcical and outmoded embarrassment. It’s not gone; it’s still hanging on and still a danger, but a visible one, stripped of its disguising power to confuse. Neo-liberalism is looking vulnerable, fragile.
Nine weeks ago, it seemed as though we were enduring business as usual and that it was fixed and eternal. True, the Labour Party continued to make dangerously reasonable and realistic policy statements, as they had been doing for the last year, but they were drowned beneath news stories that all started with “the trouble with these ideas is that they’re not part of the proper political dialogue”. I was avoiding media, reading the LRB but staying away from the ‘news’, because its hypocrisy just enraged me. Every time I heard a commentator who was, supposedly, ‘in the loop’, I was reminded of my favourite piece of cartoon art.
So, we had a government committed to an ideology that was impossible to pin down, but amounted to the idea that the state and state institutions are somehow inherently evil and must be dismantled. In practice, what that meant was that they had to make life as hard as possible for ordinary people. There was a crisis, which, again, they couldn’t clearly identify, but it involved, variously,
* being threatened by refugees, who were about to “flood” this country and destroy some, again unidentifiable, quality of Britishness. The fact that those refugees were mainly children, starving in abject, wretched poverty in a field in Calais, didn’t reduce the threat.
* being ripped off by an endless horde of people who pretended to be ill, or disabled, or dying, or old, so that they could live at the expense of Tory voters whose property is more sacrosanct than the lives of people with disabilities.
* being incandescently offended by a failure to worship at the altar of the military, or the royal family, or “traitors” not eating fish and chips in a suitably patriotic manner.
The method they chose for addressing the nagging sense of threat they were so busy maintaining was to impoverish the majority of British people and tell us that it was for our own good. In the meantime, the publicly owned structures – our shared wealth – was to be stolen from us and given to various privatisation parasites, prominent among whom were Richard Branson, American banks and Rupert Murdoch’s advertisers, all of whom seemed to be, mysteriously, clients of Theresa May’s husband.
It also meant, as Chris Riddell’s brilliant depiction of the establishment delusion illustrates, that they were compelled to continue making more refugees, by manufacturing excuses for constant, unending war. And, it turns out with only a very little googling, that most of the government had financial interests in that process as well.
Michael Gove. Penfold. Not my image.
It sounds as though it should be a story about evil genius, but the truth is they’re not geniuses. To list the parade of fools who make up the front row of our current government is to court despair: Michael Gove, the Penfold lookalike who dreams of an illiterate peasantry; Chris Grayling, who reversed a decade’ improvements in the criminal justice system in a few short years of amateurish profiteering; David Davis, who is currently humiliating us with his cluelessness in the Brexit ‘negotiations’, and Boris Johnson, who Marina Hyde brilliantly described last week1 as “Britain’s foremost stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person”. Then there’s the odious and openly corrupt Jeremy Hunt, who never saw a piece of public property he didn’t try to flog and the floundering and out-of-his-depth chancellor Philip Hammond: they’re all dim-witted crooks, propped up by worn-out spin and at one another’s throats because they serve the deepest right-wing lie: look after number one and never tell the truth when a good lie will do. They are, as Frankie Boyle says in the video below, “…some of the worst people in the world…broken sociopaths.”2
The battles they’re really concerned with are not the challenges of taking responsibility for the safety, well-being and prosperity of this country. Rather, they are fixed on their own in-fighting; the maintenance of their individual positions in a deeply antagonistic and futile occupation: professional establishment politicking. It’s a game to them. When we ask what on Earth Theresa May was thinking, calling an early election just after having declared to the EU that we were off, we have to remember: it wasn’t about us. Their game-playing is never about us. It’s about their strange little world, in which their concerns, their insecurities and their weird fantasy bubbles are all that matter.
Theresa May, it turned out, is no brighter than the rest of them. An element of the game-players’ corruption was a sense of entitlement, buttressed by the belief that the Labour Party, having stepped out of the establishment bubble with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader, was out of the game. Who’d listen to a party that wanted to * snort * renationalise the railways?
Anyway, they had the media on their side.
Except, the suspicion that the backbone of establishment power, a uniform and breathtakingly malign press, was on the wane was a key reason why, when May called the election, I had real hope that she had made a mistake. The overwhelming prejudice of the public environment in the UK said that it would be a foregone conclusion, but that didn’t ring true in the way it had in 2015, when the media had actually worked to try to make the election seem tighter than it was. The people I knew, who in 2015 were reliably parroting the approved lines from The Sun and The Mail about Europe and immigrants, had lost track of what they were supposed to believe and had started focussing on the difficulties in their lives. Very few of them thought by this time that those difficulties had anything to do with immigrants or terrorism: they could see that their enemies were the increasingly fascist dole office, the eviscerated council, the absence of the police in their communities, the rising costs of food, electricity and other luxuries.
Perhaps most hurtfully, they saw their children being victimised. They moaned about the impossibility of getting a place at the few good schools around here. They spoke in resentful rather than aspirational tones about the ‘free’ schools, the fee-paying schools and the ‘academies’ that were sucking all the educational resources out of the Island for the profit of a group of foreign investors and that were, effectively, if not explicitly, establishments reserved for the children of people who had large houses and big cars and friends on the Council.
In the children’s centres where I do a lot of my work, the service users were presented with the steady reduction of options. My own learners had gone through the period of uncertainty about their chances of completing their courses. The Tory/UKip council had abolished our council funding, almost as an afterthought, and the contempt behind that act had registered. My learners knew that we were (and still are) hanging on by a thread, and that the abandonment of all these services is a process of calculated insult, class-to-class.
Beneath all these frustrations, there was the nagging knowledge that our positions within society are becoming embedded and inherited: the Samanthas and Tobies who go to the ‘free’ (private, exclusive, racially and class homogenous) school up the road will be richer, happier, fitter and will live longer than the children of my community, however good the teachers and leadership in the local council school are.
Awareness had cut through all the bullshit about immigration and ‘our brave troops’. The word ‘inequality’ had gone from a slogan to an experienced truth in the two years between the two elections. I felt that there was a chance to connect people with politics in a way I hadn’t seen in my adult lifetime and, thank God, so did the leadership of the Labour Party. They pushed fairness, they pushed change and they made the approved establishment narrative seem what it truly is: the visceral hatred of the bullying classes who gain their sense of undeserved self-worth from their loathing of the mass of their fellow citizens.
So, telling the corrupt rich that their shit does smell was the right message at the right time, but what had made it so? Was it really that people had put two and two together over the previous two years? Well, yes, in part. Poor people aren’t stupid, but they have been persuaded, by the very political environment that causes their dis-empowerment, to believe that politics was inherently corrupt and they were powerless. Other voices, [some well-intentioned][5], but many less so, had turned disengagement into a form of rebellion: a political anorexia that imagined it was hitting back while playing into the hands of its abusers.
Certainly, the Labour Party offered something completely new in this election: a genuine, meaningful political alternative from a major party with a real prospect of having an effect. In our first past the post system, it may be nice to vote Green, but it’s pretty useless. Labour, on the other hand, even though it lost the election in terms of both votes and seats, has already shaped government policy to a degree that has scared3 the establishment,4 and its rabid lackeys,5 to their shrivelled souls. Click those three links. I love the undertone of panic in Andrea Leadsom’s stupid drift towards totalitarianism, and even more so the failure of certainty in the Guido Fawkes piece, piercing his habitual above-the-fray affectation. It’s like his smirk has faltered, but then, he’s suddenly got a lot less to smirk about. He’s a true believer whose world-view has just collapsed. What is the point of selling yourself to Satan if you can’t spit on the poor?
Amid the glory of the election campaign’s powerful attack upon the status quo, we suffered four outrages to decency that were all symptomatic of the hatred that is at the heart of neo-liberal capitalist politics: two horrible ‘blowback’ incidents from the genocidal warfare of the capitalist war machine, an attack on faith by a far-right lackey of the ruling classes and a mass-killing as a result of reduced state oversight of housing and safety systems. We must not let the anger these events inspire divert us from focussing on the true enemy: the ruling classes of this country. Magnificently, it seems that the purpose of the never-ending, racist ‘terrorist’ emergency that the establishment maintains has lost its power to sway mass opinion: the response has been, overwhelmingly, to choose love,6 rather than division.
We are, for the first time in my lifetime, fighting fit to resist the divisive power of racist hatred, and we see where our anger should, rightfully, be directed.
It’s not over.
Live a good life, because living a good life is a good in itself. Go vegan, recycle, ride a bike to work rather than using your car.
But, more than anything, it is time to get involved in the political process, and to fight the power of insane, self-serving neo-liberal capitalism.
Tomorrow, Amanda and I and a group of Isle of Wight Labour comrades will be in London, marching for better housing, better wages and better public services. Will we see you there?
WARNING: YouTube! No privacy protections whatsoever, despite all their pop-ups saying otherwise. Click on this and they own you. However, it’s the only place to see this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyFZX39joSM [↩]
When I have had a really overwhelming book experience, as I had with Becky Chambers’ Books, I am often lost to reading for a week or two, unable to recapture the feeling inspired by the book I have just finished. Thanks to Kobo’s recommended books feature, that difficulty is somewhat mitigated, although, for the first half of All The Birds In The Sky, I did feel a little disengaged.
To an extent, that may have been simply that this book suffered by comparison. It is a clever and beautiful premise, that moves steadily and gracefully from American high-school realism into a fantasy/SF mix that charts the collapse of the world into ecological and economic disaster. At first, it felt a little pedestrian after Becky Chambers’ beautiful companionship, despite its early magical elements which lay the groundwork for what is to come. A part of my discomfort, however, was with Anders’ tone: she writes with a sort of glib, coffee-shop blogger’s self-assurance that it took me a while to come to terms with.
However, her characters and, particularly, her settings, which get more other-worldly as she moves away from the familiar now, grow to suit her cosmopolitan, Californian writer voice. This is a world of bloggers, web-comic artists, start-up sharks, musicians, magicians and inventors. The two protagonists, Patricia and Laurence, each start out as outcasts and grow to be extraordinary: she, as a witch who is discovered, educated and manipulated by the magical underworld, and he as an engineer who is taken under the wing of a technological visionary who has made it his business to save the human race from its own folly.
The greatness into which this book develops is the balance between two outlooks, the technocratic and the mystical, which, while it produces a really powerful fantasy, at least in its second half, achieves a balance between the two. In other words, the artistic product becomes representative of its own plot theme. Last Saturday, despite having had a long, tiring day, I stayed awake after we’d gone to bed, reading for two hours until I’d finished the book. By the end, I was entirely seduced.
She skirted some considerable risks in the writing of this book. It cannot be easy to do a ‘realist’ SF book in which there is a school for witches. Somehow, she managed to avoid the Hogwarts comparisons, and produce an experience of magical polity that is true to its own vision without being parody. In the same way, her fictional tech is brilliantly persuasive. I felt as though I had seen a caddy and really needed to get one.
The resolution of the plot is a surprise. It is preceded by utter devastation and apparently irremediable defeat. I felt real grief during the descriptions of the catastrophes that begin the collapse of civilization, as global warming begins to bite into American civilization. It was, I realized, something that SF should do all the time, but seldom achieves: to visualize what the currents of contemporary experience predict, and to make them seem as though they are already happening. This novel is a fine achievement, and I will look out for her next with eagerness.
In the photo above, you can see the point that marks the start of Binnel Bay. We walked to just before the Point, and then, thoughts of beer and chips calling, made our way back, before climbing back up the Undercliff Path to The Buddle Inn,((
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