Postscript

Hello to everyone,

I'm Anne's brother and I have some sad news.

After 20 years of living with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, Anne died peacefully on 24th June, in the afternoon, surrounded by her close family.

I think that this blog was a great source of strength and comfort for Anne and she really enjoyed the freedom that writing it gave her and equally importantly enjoyed the postings she received in response to her "rants".

Many thanks for reading/contributing and all the best to all of you.

Ian

So this is the end, my friends...

Thanks for reading your way to the end of this blog (and to Margo for having the patience to do it). This is me as I am and have always been and I promise you I am not going to leave you alone in your head ever!! You've all contributed to my life in so many millions of ways that all I can do is leave you with my love. 

Anne.

oh so many yeara ago

I wrote this whwn I was 17..............

Sitting watching the digital clock-12.19 is an eternity.
look at the clones moving up & down the effortlees escalator, Don't move! Don't think!
That's not the way to work, just sit and wait for your orders.
But even then, it doesn't matter
Unimportant work created by unimpotant people.
We've all got to do something haven't we?
It's true, what is said, work is an illusion, Heaven on earth for some, a nightmare for others.
You will be hungry between 12.00 and 14.00.
You too, will marvel too at it's cold blackneess, like some vast cold memorial to the monotonous death within.
T o be happy is to be equal-in action thought and speech equal and identical - o brave new world!
All be happy with your mindless chatter, your distorted view of reality.
If reality is televised, they only get one programme here.
Corretion, they are only allowed one programme- any more and they might have to choose - choice is a dangerous thing.
Name, rank & number as you pass into the great glass mausoleum, ignorance is strength.
Don't discuss anything - you may begin to wonder.
Unproductive, uncreative and repetitive, and worst of all, irrelevant.
You cannot create, you must not destroy - just be and be content. You may think in your lunch hour,
but only for an hour, or the work quotas will not be filled. Ruled by the green light of home.
But they're only numbers, faking what is yours, What rigt have they? By what authority?
And your reward for all this self - destruction? Money.
Make of thet what you will be faithful and true to the company.
Bow down and worship the great glass idol, and all will be well,
but stand up and shout & you will be shot down.
Do not try to change, but merely accept. Cry out loud for what you have lost.
for fear that it may never be regained - stand alone, if you can!


Anne, 1978 while working for Willis Faber & Dumas.

annebala 08 - part two

OK, before I attempt any more photos, here's the cast list
Me,Anton, Yeney
Nat, Emma
Ian, Ellie, Amy
Tim, Gabby, Jack, James, Pam
Margo Bryan, Max, Oscar
Heth, Dave, Hexy
Jennifer
Gareth
Denis
Julian
Marie
Jenny, Dave, Amber
Jonno, Naomi
Deb, Zillah, Tom
Simon
Andy

annebala 08 - part one

my poor toe










Anton looking for his car









Denis - a man no campsite should be without







happy campers









a bunch of roses

annefest 08

OK,its sorted - we're going here -

http://www.cliffhousepark.co.uk/

from 22 to 26 Aug - thats the bank holiday weekend

more detail s soon.........

here is the email my brother sent me ....

If you can you will see its quite a popular site. I could not find
anyone to ask about booking 4 more pitches, so I suggest you ask yer
mates to book their own as I get the feeling from the site that if you
tried to place a multiple pitch booking they would think your planing a

rave.....

Plain Text Attachment [ Scan and Save to Computer ]

pics are self explan, there is one of a small path, this is adjacent to

the site and leads to the beach (about 1 minute walk), so good for the
kids. The pics of the power station show how close you are to it which
as you can see is not that close. The 'club house' is also about 1 min
walk and overlooks the sea. Nice view of the power station from the
club house !

idh

here are a few photos......

their phone no is

01728 830 724

..........and endings

I've been writing this blog for over a year now, and I think the time is coming to wind it up. I've written and ranted about all the stuff that has amused/entertained/enraged me, but I haven't really talked about the serious stuff that I spend my life dealing with - you know what I'm talking about. So I think it's time to address the big stuff - my MS.

Nearly 20 years ago now, my vision went blurry one evening as I was driving to the theatre. I didn't really think anything of it at the time, other than that maybe I ought to get my eyes tested. But the next day I felt fine, so just forgot about it. A while later, my right leg started to ache a bit if I walked a long way, and from then on, little by little, my body has lost various functions, some temporarily, but most permanently. Without giving a blow bu blow account of what went when, which would frankly be as tedious for you to read as as it would be for me to write, suffice it to to say that the only things I can still do are speak, eat, and use my right hand to a limited extent. Having MS is like being on a journey, a very long journey, with no destination in sight, not even death. You don't die of MS, you die with it, Bummer.
So this is why I'm writing this now, while I still can.....As you may know, assisted suicide is illegal, whilst ordinary suicide is perfectly OK. If I were mentally deranged I would be quite within my rights to top myself, but as I'm now physically incapable of throwing myself off a very tall building, or overdosing on an exotic cocktail of drugs, yhe law doesn't leave me many options except this one.....
This is an extract from my living will. or 'advance directive' as it's known in the trade

1. When my quality of life has deteriorated to the point which I consider to be unacceptable, I will cease to accept nutritiion
and hydration.

2. From that point onwards I will only accept palliative care, i.e pain relief.

3. Whilst I would prefer to be cared for at home, should this become impractical or distressing to those caring for me, I will
consent to hospice care. I do not consent to being cared for in hospital.

I know it makes grim reading, but don't panic - it's not so much that I've got a death wish (I haven't), as I'm someone who is absolutely) determined to retain control over my own life.I don't know how much longer I will still be able to speak, as in the later stages of MS the voice is usually affected - difficulty in speaking and swallowing is common, and I do NOT intend to spend who knows how many years lying here, completely unable to communicate whilst remaining totally aware of what's happening around me. I am primarily a person of language ( well, of sarcasm, anyway), and without the ability to express myself verbally, I would no longer be me.



Pretty, innit? Anyway, to give you an idea of how my MS affects me now, here's a little list of a few of the things I really miss.....
- reading, in the sense of physically being able to hold a book
- writing, in the sense of being able to hold a pen
- cooking (well, I wasn't THAT bad at it)
- skinning up - I was pretty good at that


Having written this much. I realise I;'ve got plenty more to say but.............later

The Suffolk tsunami..........almost

So here we were on Thursday evening, watching the news and looking at the flood risk map, when it suddenly dawned on us that it might really be real. Fuck. We checked the relevant website and yes, my ground floor flat was, technically at least, in the danger zone. So we put contigency plan A into effect. (Anton loves that kind of thing - it brings out the SAS in him. As a two-year old he was rescued by boat in the 1953 flood)It was one of those classic 'what would you take with you if your house was burning/flooding/being attacked by aliens?' scenarios. I knew exactly - imac, stash,insurance documents. Oh yes, and wheelchair. Went to bed prepared to be woken up by the police hammering on the door at 2am, telling us we had ten minutes to evacuate. Woke up in the morning and nothing had happened. Good. It was however, a near miss. The flood defences just about held, but had the tide been just a little higher.........

Blobbiness

You've heard all the govermental hand-wringing about the 'obesity epidemic', haven't you? And about chavvy binge-drinking and its middle-class equivalent, the Chardonnay-swiggers? And now they've all but criminalised smoking, there aren't many methods of enjoyable self-abuse left. (Although it's said that senior police officers are now in favour of the legalisation of hard drugs, so it's not all bad.)
Anyway, not to get sidetracked, the main target of today's rant is blobbiness, mental as well as physical. The two seem to go hand in hand - listen to someone who is overweight moaning about how tired they are. If you suggest that they lay off the cream cakes and go for a walk, they look at you with the same horrified expression as if you'd told them to throw their television out the window, which would probably kill them anyway.
It's interesting to note that only in the developed world are the rich people thin - and the poor people fat. Now why is that? Well, food is cheap, especially the unhealthy kind, and British people unlike say, the Italians, seem very unenthusiastic about the quality of what they shove down their throats. As long as it takes no longer than five minutes from freezer to microwave to table, and tastes sufficiently fatty/salty/sugary we really don't give a fuck. And we just LOVE cookery programmes on the telly, but only as a spectator sport.
Our cultural decline, if that's what is is, seems to have taken us into a state of mind where we expect everything to be easy. We really don't think that we should have to make an effort for anything, ever, including our health. People really do seem to want an easy solution to every problem - fat? take a pill, depressed? take a pill. Take a pill, or ....... what? Drink yourself into oblivion, it's cheap enough. The more we have, the more we want, and the more unhappy we are when we get it, and it still doesn't make us happy. Will we ever learn that anything worth having doesn't come easy?

All our tomorrows

Have you noticed how everyone's been leaping on the green bandwagon lately? Every advertiser you can think of, from washing powder manufacturers to McDonalds, is enthusiastically trying to flog us their oh so greener than greenery. Now, this is obviously a load of bollocks on so many levels - firstly because the first law of advertising states that whatever they are trying to convince you of patently isn't true, otherwise why would they need to spends millions trying to make you believe that it is, and secondly, because despite what they say, saving the planet ain't anywhere near as high on their list of priorities as making a big fat profit. The third and most important point is the one that everyone from governments to Greenpeace to you and me, is desperately avoiding because it is so scarily unimaginable is this - IT'S TOO BLOODY LATE.




Let's go back a little way in history, shall we. In the beginning was the World, and there it was, quietly minding its own busines, evolving away, experimenting with dinosaurs and ice ages and stuff, until one day who should turn up but Man, who enthusiatically set about inventing stuff -loads of stuff - language, pornography, war - you name it, man just had to start messing around with it, all in the name of Progress, because Progress is a Good Thing.



Now this progress thing was all fine and dandy until some bright spark came up with the idea of taking all that black stuff which was laying around in Wales, and setting fire to it, cos it it made everything all nice and warm and toasty and lasted loads longer than trees. And then some other bright spark worked out how to turn it into electricity (don't ask me how, I ain't THAT bright) and that was when the trouble started - except no-one realised that at the time, because everyone was having such a good time with Progress, which was just getting better and better and then some other bright spark (there was a lot of 'em around in those days) noticed there was a lot of other black stuff sloshing around in Arabia which was even better than the Welsh stuff 'cos there was LOADS of it, and it made really good electricity and therefore there was just squillons of dollars to be made, mainly by Americans, who have always been very keen on Progress, especially if it helps to make a Profit.



Now, the interesting thing about the black stuff, wherever it comes from, is it had been sitting around under the surface for literally AGES waiting to be discovered, and once it was, we started using it up so enthusiastically that it never occured to us to stop and think about what we were gonna do if it ran out. Which it will do. Soon.. So that makes us look pretty stupid, doesn't it? Did it really never dawn on anybody that fossil fuels which the Earth takes millions of years to produce wouldn't last more than 300 years or so? And have we come up with a viable alternative? Have we fuck.



So what are we going to do now? We've used up all the nice black stuff, unleashed cataclysmic climate chaos by charging around with our huge great carbon footprints, sown the seeds of our own extinction as a species (which is something no other animal has ever achieved), and still haven't found a new planet to escape to. It's no good - even if everyone on Earth switched to low-energy light-bulbs TODAY it still wouldn't save us. Like I said at the beginning - IT'S TOO BLOODY LATE.

annefest '07 - more photos........

Because there are so many more good pix...........

annefest '07

Cast - in order of arrival.......

anne
anton
sheila
stefan
heth
hexy
margo
bryan
max
oscar
tim a
gabby
jack
james
jac
jamie
sam
alfie
/a>


bobby
gareth
emma
dave
finlay
jo
jay
andy
kean
simon

Well, who'd have thought it? What started as a vague idea last November and travelled onwards, narrowly avoiding major flooding, and being derailed by an incompetent hire company, ended up as the totally wonderful weekend that I never imagined would be possible.Thank you so much to everyone who made it happen.
It all started when we left Ippy on Thursday lunchtime and arrived at Hardhurst Farm six hours later, by which tine I was in urgent need of codeine and a big fat spliff. Believe me, my arthritic hip had not enjoyed being bounced along the M1, and part of my head was telling me that I was stupid for even imagining that that my body was going to going to get through this. Oh me of little faith.
But then Heth and Hexy arrived, so party on! (Well, you know Heth - wherever she goes, the party's not far behind)As Friday dawned, so did the realisation thaat this was gonna be cool - the cafe was good (and cheap, a major concern of Stefan's), the weather was good and, as everyone started to arrive, I started to perk up considerably.
My personal highlights included - getting to spend quality time with my mates and their gorgeous kids,
watching Anton explain putting up a tent to Stefan without losing his temper, Heth's duffle coat, the mudslide boys, and the feeling of being at our own personal festival. What do you remember?
OK, enough words, more pictures.......
all these black and white ones taken by Tim a(exept this colour one which IS Tim)<

Right then, I could go on adding photos ad nauseum, but I wouldn't want to get boring...............so all I'm gonna say is cheers everybody, it was fucking wonderful - how about Southwold next summer?????

Chapter Two

Hello everybody - just to say that the closed season on blogging is now over. and I'm back. Forthcoming attractions will include my holiday blog (with photos), a big rant about climate chaos, and anything else that occurs to me. Pity I wasn't blogging during the monsoon season, nor during the demise of our beloved Tony (who??), but I'm sure the scary place we call The World will keep keep providing me with material/ammunition. Stay tuned.......

Hope lost.......and then restored!

so here's how it goes - I book a beautiful wheelchair-friendly motor home way back in November (NOVEMBER!!), and a few days ago I phone just to check a few details and discover that the incompetent fuckwits have double-booked it, and I can't have it when I want it. They are grovellingly apologetic, but that really doesn't count for a lot, and I'm extremely pissed off, to put it mildly. So, to cut a long story short, I take my money elsewhere, and rebook with someone else. That's all cool and groovy, but obviously too late now to get the dates I want, so I have to change all my plans - mine, my carers, my friends, everybodys. So here's the new deal - we're going on Thurs Sept 6th, to the same campsite, and will be there until Tues 10th. I'm really sorry to mess everyone around so much, but it takes more than a couple of brain-dead morons to stop me doing what I want. And we WILL have a great time.

Hope......

.....is where I always wanted to live when I was in Sheffield, just so I could say I live in Hope. Naff, but true. Anyway, at least now I can say I spent my holiday there. God, I hope the weather cheers up. Click on the title of this post for a link giving details.
The plan is that me and my entourage (Anton, Stefan, Sheila, and Mac the dog) will arrive Thurs 21st in the afternoon sometime, and stay til Tuesday. All visitors welcome. Give me a ring if you want to know anythng.
http://www.ukcampsite.co.uk/sites/reviews.asp?revid=2596

little girl lost

As suggested by Margo, a few words about the case of Madelaine McCann. If I were one of her parents, I would be sick with worry, fear, grief and guilt. We all understand that they're going through hell. However, having said that, let's move away from private suffering for a moment and look at the wider picture. The situation in Portugal is the whole media circus trip - reminds me of what it was like here during the prostitute murders - and also reminds me of the vulpine nature of journalists. But thats somewhat by the by here - what's interesting about this case is the determination of her family to keep her name in the headlines come what may, as if, through sheer effort of will, publicity alone will bring her back. It won't. Let's be honest here - she's probably already dead. The other interesting thing here is what has already been called 'the globalisation of Maddy'. In a way reminiscent of the death of Diana, everyone's leaping onto the band-wagon - MP's sporting yellow ribbons in Parliament the other day, David Beckham's stilted plea for information.......Christ, someone will bring out a pop song about her soon, which will inevitably go straight to the top of the charts. The world we live in is, unfortunately, full of suffering and loss. How many children have been blown to pieces in Iraq this week? How many kids have died in Africa from entirely preventable diseases? Full of mawkish sentimentality, we shed crocodile tears for one pretty little blonde girl because it's so much easier than to cry for a million unnamed others. Am I being too cynical?

Gimme some space.......please

Thanks to Deb for sending me this excellent picture, which illustrates perfectly how pissed off I get with people who park in disabled spaces. Have you any idea how impossible it is to get a person and their wheelchair in and out of a normal parking space with a clearance of 12 inches between cars? Obviously no-one reading this would be so selfish, but all those other gits out there........... If I ruled the world, then they would be machine-gunned down as soon as they returned to their vehicle. That's possibly a bit fascistic, but hey, it's a jungle out there. Feel free to copy this pic, keep a few copies in your car, and attach one to the windscreens of any transgressors you come across. Happy motoring!

F*ck a duck!

Literally, as it happens. There's a canally bit of river just close to where I live and we went over there yesterday for a stroll and a sit in the sunshine. We were watching a mother duck taking her six fluffy ducklings out for some training, gently nudging them up the bum when one of them strayed a bit off course, when suddenly a drake arrived on the scene. He had a glint in his eye which could only mean one thing. This was a mallard with a mission. He swam up to the object of his affections.......and then all hell broke loose. He chased her up onto the bank, much flapping and squawking ensued, and she clearly wasn't havng any of it. She flew off in high dudgeon, marched up and down the bank a bit in a threatening manner, and then tried to dive bomb him. He mooched around, clearly trying to work out what he was doing wrong, and then another, bigger, male arrived. First drake, obviously twigging that it was all over for him, sloped off as casually as possible. whilst second drake took charge of the situation. He chased her up onto the bank again, more squawking broke out, and then.......it all went very quiet. A few seconds later second drake slides coolly down into the water, bobs his head up and down a few times, and glides off looking incredibly pleased with himself, whilst the lucky lady stays on the bank looking......well, satisfied.
Isn't nature amazing?

Kurt Vonnegut - America's finest

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the ripe old age of 84, one of the sharpest, wisest and funniest Americans I have ever read, and here I would like to say a little about how important he was to me and also, because my words could never rival his, reprint some of his.
I first read him, in either Slaughthouse 5, or possibly Cats Cradle, when I was about 16 or 17, not because I was any particular fan of science-fiction per se, but because of my vagely hippy, anti-war cast of mind. I loved his satirical, occasionally whimsical turn of phrase, especially when he finished paragraphs like this. So it goes.
I think I must have read most of his books over the last 20 years or so, but I'm not going to give a list of them here. So go google.
Here's a chunk of his last book, A Man without a Country. Read it and, if you like what you find, go search him out.

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.

"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

hello......

....it's me. Yes, I know I haven't done any proper blogging for ages, and I know it's really slack of me, but I've got loads of really good excuses, like I've got loads of backgammon tournaments on the go, and I had a really major computer crisis when my hard disk got wiped clean and I was really stressed, and before that I was a bit mizzy and uninspired feeling, and....and.....well, you know how it is, but hey, here I am, raring to go again, so stay tuned.......

radio radio

A beautiful Sunday morning, lying in bed listening to Andy Kershaw on Desert Island Discs. His enthusiasm and passion a joy to hear. Made me feel more enthused and inspired than I have for a while. The first really lovely spring day. And from there on the day just got better and better.
I often use this space to write about things which piss me off, but this time I want to write about one of my great loves - Radio 4. Now, for those amongst you who are not R4 fans, which is probably most of you, let me tell you what you're missing.
- some of the sharpest, funniest, most libellous comedy anywhere, provided by the likes of Andy Hamilton and Punt&Dennis (The Now Show), from whence a lot of TV comedy (Little Britain, Goodness Gracious Me, Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy to name but a few) originated
- some fascinating documentaries and drama......
- Gardeners Question Time, even though I know sod-all about gardening
- the wonderfully hypnotic, soporific catechism of the shipping forecast
I could go on and on givinng lists of programmes, which would be pretty boring and make me sound like a bloody advert, but the point I think I'm trying to make is twofold - firstly, radio 4 is better than an awful lot of telly, and secondly, that it keeps me sane. And the pictures are better on the radio.......

Hip, hip........ho hum

OK, so how fair is this? Because of years of contracted leg muscles, courtesy of MS, the osteoarthritis in my right hip is now so bad that even an operation to remove the head of the femur won't help - they would have to remove the top third of the femur to give even a 70% chance of some reduction of pain, in a long and complex procedure with no guarantee of success, and an estimated recovery time at least a year. Ermm, think I'll pass, thanks. So the only alternative is more codeine. And I never wanted to become a junkie. Ho hum

bored bored bored

It's a gloomy miserable day in Febuary and I'm BORED. I got excited briefly when the post arrived, but all it was was a letter from the council telling me I'm thirteen quid in arrears with my garage rent, and if I don't pay up IMMEDIATELY they're gonna get nasty. Whoopee doo.

Urban Nature

Today we'll be taking a look at that fascinating creature Artesano Municipalis or, as it''s better known, the common council workman. Once a frequent visitor to housing estates all over the country, this charming little creature, distintive in its coat of bright green or yellow fluorescent polyurethane, is now an endangered species, thanks to budgetary cutbacks and global warming. The workman is a sociable animal which prefers to hunt in twos and threes and can often be seen standing staring into holes scratching its head, sometimes with a clipboard tucked jauntily under an arm.The workman is ill-equipped to deal with difficult weather conditions however, and the first drops of rain will see it scuttling back to it's burrow, or 'van' in search of tea, its staple diet, or to take refuge in its colourful bedding, dailymirror, which it collects daily, as the name implies and from which it clearly derives much warmth and security. The workman is naturally shy of contact with humans, or 'tenants' as it calls them, and tries to spend as little time near them as possible, although if you are patient it may take a biscuit from your hand. The workman's primary occupation is trying to mend things, or 'bodging', and it really is charming to watch as it wanders around, apparently aimlessly, clutching bits of wood and tools, trying to work out what to do with them Mention must also be made here of the workman's unusual headgear, the apparently pointless 'hardhat', which appears to have some part to play in the workman's cognitive processes, although so far researchers have been unable to find any concrete evidence. Finally, we must consider the workman's manner of reproduction and, since no mating ritual has ever been observed, we can only conclude that all workmen are cloned asexually from the original proto-workman, provisionally known as 'Doug'.

Love is.....

the sweetest thing, so they say. However, what love is most definitely NOT is the commercialized claptrap they try to flog you at this time of year. And love isn't just the romantic, icky-sticky sentimentalised candy-floss kind that gets shoved down our throats, either. The Greeks identified five kinds of love - erotiic, platonic, affectionate, brotherly, and ........another one that I can't remember, so why do we assume that romance is the only one thats counts?From childhood, women of each generation are inculcated with the myth of 'grow up, fall in love, live happily ever after' A fifty per cent divorce rate does nothing to put us off, either. We remain stubborn in our belief that we just have to find the right person, and then the rest will take care of itself.
Love is many things, indeed the only thing that really counts for anything, and you can't put a price on it. Neither can you make anyone love you, or make yourself love them. You can't find love by looking for it, it will find you in its own time.

The killing fields

Fresh from its murderous debut on the international media circuit, Suffolk once again has news of slaughter and death. This time it's turkey. Bernard Matthews no less, All together now - 'IT'S BOOOOOTIFUL'. Yeah right. Memories of the foot -and- mouth fiasco spring unbidden into the mind. Will buying a turkey sandwich from M&S cause a global epidemic of 1918-style killer flu? Er, probably not.

All you ever wanted to know about......

Drugs. There's so much misinformation, scaremongering and downright bullshit out there about the things we choose to put into our bodies, I thought it was about time to tell it like it is. Whatever you think, or think you think, about drugs, read this.

1. Heroin. The big one. The one which features in all our worst nightmares, and not without reason. It is extremely addictive and thus can seriously fuck your life up. Best not to go near it, really. Of course, if you've ever taken codeine, or any derivative of it, you have taken heroin. Heroin is synthesised from opium, which is a naturally occuring substance derived from the opium poppy. In a medical context, opium is called morphine or, in a milder form, codeine. So, we've all taken it, in one form or another. However, as a recreational drug, heroin, or smack as it is more often called, is not a good idea. I only ever took it once, a very long time ago, and it was lovely. That's the problem. I remember feeling soft and warm, cocooned in cotton wool. Sheer heaven. Anything that feels that good is a bad idea, because pretty soon, NOT feeling like that starts to feel pretty bad and very soon after that, taking it again doesn't make you feel good, it just stops you feeling bad, so in order to regaiin that first high, you have to take even more, and then that's not enough, so you take more, and on and on it goes, until it's taken all your money, your health, your friends, your self-respect, your life. So just don't even go there, OK?
2. Cocaine. Nothing like smack, yet so similar. If you take smack, you'll just lie down and mumble incoherently, whereas with coke, you'll be chatty, gregarious and feel that you can do anything. Smack has a sleazy, grungy reputation, coke is sparkly and shiny, the darling of the media crowd. Coke is fashionable and cool. Things go better with Coke. Oh, how true that is. And, as with heroin, coke has it's place in the medical pharmucopoeia - derived from the coca leaves chewed by South American Indians to help survive at high altitudes, it is used as an anaesthetic in dentistry, and was once the active ingredient in Coca-Cola. Now its recreational use is widespread, its cost is cheap, and when it's made into crack, it's even more addictive. Oh good. Trouble is with coke that it makes you feel great, but if you get too fond of it, it'll turn you into a gibbering, paranoid psychotic wreck. A very good reason not to get too friendly with it.
3. Amphetamines. Better known as speed. A close relative of caffeine, but.....faster. A bit down-market these days, but cheap, so used by nasty unscrupulous drug dealers ( yes, such people really exist) to make more expensive drugs go a little further.
4. Ecstasy. Definitely the most fun of the Class A drugs. Probably shouldn't even classified as such, given that it isn't addictive, and recent research has shown that it doesn't appear to do any long-term damage. Take an E, and you just feel lovely - everyone is your friend, all music is brilliant, and having sex is , well, ecstasy. Depressed old people should be given it on prescription. You have to make sure you drink plenty of water with it though, because dehydration could be a bit dangerous. Downsides? Well, not many really, other than feeling a bit grumpy a few days later. If you're only ever going to try one illegal drug, this would be it.

Right, this concludes my quick scan of Class A's - I'll talk about other things we take in my next post.

........a short interlude........

Oh my God - my internet access has died again. This is hell. I’m writing this on an Appleworks doc, and hopefully will be able to cut and paste it into my blog later, but it's not the same - I feel entirely cut off from the outside world. Strange isn’t it - I managed to live the first 40-odd years of my life off-line,without even knowing what I was missing, and now, not even 24 hours without and I feel like a deaf-mute whose right arm has been chopped off. Oh well, mustn’t grumble - not that anyone could hear me anyway.

on being british....

What's to say? Other than I don't like it much. When I'm speaking another language I tend to say 'I'm English', not that many foreigners get the distinction anyway. 'British' has so many inflections to it, most of them negative - British Empire, British Bulldog, BNP, No Sex Please, We're British........need I go on? Being Englsh isn't much better, though. The Scots, Welsh and Irish all despise us for our arrogant discrimination against them during various periods of our joint history, and we undoubtedly deserve it.
A lot of our problems stem from our imperial past, I think. As an Empire, we thought we were just great, that we were smarter, more civilised and and more worthy of respect than any other people on earth. Bit like the Americans today. But our empire crumbled away to almost nothing, unless you count Gibralter or the Falklands, and we were left with nothing more than a vague sense of superiority. Our European neighbours view ous with the kind of bemused tolerance usually reserved for senile old aunties, and our American rulers just get us to do their dirty work for them, knowing that our fond belief in the 'special relationship' is really no more than sucking up to the school bully.
There are some good things about Britain, if you ignore the weather, the food, and our international sports teams, but I'll come to those later. Things that are no so great about us include -
- the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe
- our complete inability to deal with alcohol intelligently
- our gross tendency to obesity (no, chips do NOT count as vegetables)
- our obsession with owning property, even if having a huge mortgage on aa tiny flat means the bank owning us body and soul
- our intense xenophobia and dislike of immigrants, despite a pathetic reliance on Indian takeaways, Chinese restaurants, and Italian pizzerias
- an unhealthy level of consumption when it comes to hard drugs (well, they really are SO cost-effective these days)
- a creaking, inefficient, bug-ridden health service which, in view of all the above, is hardly surprising
And now, in the interests of fairness and balance (ooh, that's so British) , the good things about these depised isles -
- the music (John Peel, we miss you)
- the TV (yes, really)
- our wonderfully ironic, sardonic sense of humour (God help us, we need it!)

Life......

I want to live my next life backwards:
You start out dead and get that out of the way.
Then you wake up in an old age home feeling better every day.
Then you get kicked out for being too healthy.
Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension.
Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.
You work 40 years until you're too young to work.
You get ready for college: drink alcohol, party, and you're generally promiscuous.
Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no responsibilities.
Then you become a baby, and then...

You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then...
You finish off as an orgasm.
I rest my case.

How to die

It's a cold bright morning in January, and you are going to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not this year or next, but one day you are going to die. I'm sorry to be so blunt about it, but death is, and will be, part of all our lives, and we are all so terrified of talking about it, or even thinking about it, that it really is the last taboo.
If I believed in God and Heaven it would be easy, I suppose. I could leave it all in His hands, and know that He would take me when it was time.Before the invention of antibiotics and such, life was a much more chancey business than it is today and I guess a degree of fatalism (or faith) was pretty essential for sanity's sake. Warding off evil spirits by touching wood, or saying your prayers was just about your only defence.
As a society we have lost our religious faith, but not found anything to replace it with unless you count consumerist acquisition. However, buying a new plasma screen TV as a way of insuring immortality is not gonna serve you very well. Far be it from me to be an apologist for God, but He did have His uses.
So how do we face up to our own mortality in the 21st century? Well, we could go down the route favoured by some crazy Yanks with considerably more money than sense, and have ourselves cryogenically frozen until such time as the elixir of eternal life has been discovered/patented/flogged off to the highest bidder, but ask yourself, would you want to come back to a world populated by centenarian egomaniacs? Thought not.
Another way of dealing with it, of course, is the' live-fast-die-young-have-a-goodlooking-corpse' approach favoured by the likes of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Keith Richard (oh hang on, he's still going.....), but for that to really work you need to have access to plenty of fast cars, fun drugs and unlimited sex. You should be so lucky.
So, for the rest of us mere mortals (for that is all we are) how are we to face the certainty of our own demise with equanimity and dignity? Maybe it depends on how we have lived - in which case this blog should be entitled 'How to live'. Ho hum. There are many platitudes I could come out with here, like 'you might get run over by a bus tomorow', (although given the grievous state of our public trannsport system, you really would be lucky), or 'life's what you make it', and many more. They're all true, but that's not the point. The real truth of the matter is that life is beautiful. Enjoy every day.

the aftermath

OK, remember my October rant 'The C Word....'? Good. Now read it again. I hate to sound smug, but I was right, wasn't I? All that stress and expense, and what did you end up with? A maxed out credit card, a house full of tired decorations, and a load of naff pressies. Well, don't say you weren't warned. And when you turn on the telly, a load of adverts trying to flog you all the stuff you bought last month, only at less than half price now, offers of free membership to Weightwatchers, and so many kinds of nictotine replacement stuff that you reach in desperation for the fags......The funny thing is, when you say to people 'Did you hve a good Christmas?' they say 'Well, you know......quiet.' I rest my case.

Here's another one

Tick tock, tick tock.......Ooh look, another New Year. Ten minutes in, and my first disappointment of the year - finding out that Jools Holland's Hootenanny isn't recorded live. You mean they were just pretending? Bummer.

So it's another year - we all get a little older (except Saddam), and hopefully some of us get a little wiser. Not holding my breath on that one, though. What will 2007 bring, I wonder? More fuckwittedness from politicians the world over for sure, plus maybe some laughter and sunshine too, though God knows where thats gonna come from..... And from me? Dunno, but I promise to bring you more unexpurgated ranting (well, someone's got to do it....) and maybe some serious stuff too. Stay tuned......

Back in the (former) USSR - again

Post Christmas, post Ipswich murders, I need to go back to some sensible writing, so here's a bit more of my Soviet memoirs...

__________________________________________

I was supposed to go back to Russia in 1986, when I was due to spend three months in Volgograd, an industrial city in the middle of bloody no-where, but fortunately (for me, anyway), a slight problem cropped up. You might have heard of it - Chernobyl. It may well have been the worst nuclear disaster in history, and one of the seminal events which helped bring about the downfall of Communist rule, but it was good news for me. The university gave us the option not to go, and we gratefully took it.
Thus it was that the next time I went to Russia was September 1988, when things were really starting to change. Gorbachev was in power by then, nicknamed Lemonade Joe because of his attempts to do something about the chronic alcoholism which plagued Soviet society then as now. My second visit was very different - it started the same ., the obligatory stay in Moscow, the trip to Red Square (yawn), but then it got more interesting - an 18 hour train journey to Donetsk in the Ukraine. This time we were on a trip organised by Sheffield City Council to our twin city of Donetsk which, like Sheffield, is a city founded on coalmining and steel. There were about 20 of us from Sheffield - 15 or so nice respectable people, and us five - Swamp Circus Collective, vegan, animal free circus types, who had blagged a freebie from somewhere or other with the vague aim of fostering international friendship thru circus, or something. (A quick Google has just shown me that they do still exist, which surprises me...)
Anyway, so 18 hours on a train with beautiful white bed-linen, and a lady at the end of the carriage serving tea from a samovar. All very Dr Zhivago, except for the snow. While we were in Moscow we'd gone onto the Arbat, the main shopping street, and treated the locals to a display of juggling and acrobatics the like of which they'd never seen before. They threw money and flowers at us, and it was ages before the police turned up. In the old days we wouldn't have lasted two minutes.
When we arrived in Donetsk, it was clear this wasn't the kind of city you could go busking in. Very grey, dour and well, Soviet. Everything in town was named SHAXTOR - hotels, railway station, everything. It means 'Miner'. Not much imagination, those old-style Soviet town-planners. Still plenty of old-style Soviet shortages, though. When we were there, there was no petrol. No explanation, no reason, just no petrol.

Game over?

Hooray - they've charged him and he's in court today. Watching the press conference last night did have something of the final of X Factor about it though - and the winner is.......... Hope they've got the right guy, and that all the excessive media coverage doesn't screw up the due legal process, but we'll have to wait and see. At least the media will sod off now and leave us in peace to have an uneventfully crap Christmas.

hicks from the sticks

Yes, I know I said I was gonna stop going on about it, but it still interests me, and in my self-appointed role as your on the spot local observer, I reckon I can still get a bit of mileage out of it, so......
Ths is hopefully the only time that my crap little town is ever going to have the spotlight of media attention focussed so intently on it and I wonder what effect it's all going to have on the psyche of our 'community' (I loathe that word - it implies a degree of social cohesion which frankly doesn't exist, here or anywhere else, except in the shorthand of politicians and journalists ) As towns go, Ipswich isn't the friendliest of places. It's often said that you have to live here 20 years before your neighbours will say hello, and it's true. The media described it as a city to begin with, but after being here a few days, changed their minds and now refer to it as a 'rural backwater', which is journalese for a dump. The local press are mightily annoyed at being outscooped by the national and international guys, and ran a story the other day about all the media in town, with more than a touch of pique.. As I write, three helicopters are buzzing around overhead - it's either the police again or, more likely, bloody Sky.
Mind you, it's good for business - the hotels are all packed to the rafters with bored hacks, and the taxi drivers are raking it in. One driver made 1200 quid last week. The plods are still assiduosly roaming the streets and stopping every car, but who knows if they've got the right guy yet or not? And time is running out...... Suffolk police haven't covered themselves in glory as far as their handling of the press is concerned, either. The phrase 'leaky sieve' wouldn't be far wrong. Now the fear is that they'll either have to release the suspects or bring chatges which might not stick

Live from Ipswich.......

Bloody hell. I hadn't even finished yesterday's blog when the first guy got arrested, and now another one picked up at 5am this morning. Who says Suffolk is slow? No-one thinks it was the first bloke, though - he sounds like one of those sad fuck wannabees enjoying the attention. The second one was arrested about 200 yards away from here - now that IS a bit scary. Funny though, that now arrests are being made, the tension seems to have lifted a bit.
Hot news - there is a police car parked outside my house.......

On and on.......

Well, unless anything significant happens, this is the last blog I'll do about the Ipswich murders for a while. It's still the main topic of conversation around here and everything else still seems slightly unreal, but lifes does move on. Anton went into town on Saturday, and noticed that people seem to be being more considerate of each other than might be considred normal for the week before Christmas, and that teenage girls seemed to be viewing him slightly more suspiciously than normal, but that might just have been his new hat. At the football on Saturday, the supporters too were being less hostile than usual.

more news from the scary place

Continuing the rather sick humour which has pervaded this town over the last couple of weeks...........these are just two of the jokes which are doing the rounds. I'm only posting them here as a matter of historical record, not because they're funny. As I've said elsewhere, jokes like this serve as a tension release mechanism, of the 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry' variety, and believe me, that's very necessary at the moment. As I write this, there's yet another news story about yet another missing girl, sales of rape alarms are soaring, and there's some serious technology ourside my house tracking car number-plates.

Five.

This is a strange town right now. There is only one topic of conversation. There are police and journalists everywhere. After the 4th and 5th bodies were found yesterday, the tension is all-pervading. People are nervous, but everyone's looking out for everyone else. Spirit of the Blitz all over again, just without Vera Lynn this time. There's a sense of compulsively switching the news on, because you just want to know, while at the same time just not wanting to know. Does that make sense? All the news reports keep talking about this part of town being 'eerily quiet'. Uh no, actually it's always like this. Apparently all the journo's are sitting in the hotels getting pissed, moaning about what a dump this is. Well, it's always been like that too. There are no tarts out on the streets, which is good - they're all giving interviews to Sky, and good luck to 'em - I hope they're getting paid for it.
And the sick jokes have started: (look away now if you are of a sensitive nature or indeed have any sense of decency at all)
Q - What's the difference between Ipswich and Mr Kipling?
A - Mr Kipling packs his tarts in boxes of six.
It's strange too how everything else seems to have faded into the background - terrorism, global warming, even Christmas - they seem so distant and unreal.

and now.........the circus

Yes, it's official - we're on the map. The media have arrived in town big style.You can't move out there for Sky reporters interviewing every tart in town. Between the police and the news cameras the prostitutes have never been safer. Ironic really, but this is how it works. The feeding frenzy has started, and the vuitures will hang around for a bit, hoping for a fresh kill, then when it doesn't happen (hopefully), they'll be off. I've heard all kinds of crap in the last 24 hours, one reporter describing this town as a city. the next as a rural backwater - well, make your minds up, guys. The news stories are getting ever more speculative, and every forensic psycholgist in the country is adding their two penn'orth. Sray tuned, folks......

one, two three, four.......how many more?

I live in a quiet, boring town in East Anglia with a crap football team and uninspiring shops. Nothing ever happens here. Correction, nothing has ever happened here. Now our town is getting national news coverage. Why? Not for any good reasons, that's for sure. Within a few hundred yards of my house two prostitutes have been murdered and a man in a night-club shot dead. One of the dead girls was my friends' daughter's half- sister, the other one was another friend's friend's sister's son's girlfriend, if you follow me. Not that that's very important, but this is a small town, y'know.
Wanna know why these three people died? Two were abducted and their bodies later found in a brook, the other one was shot at very close range. All were drug related. The girls were addicted to heroin, the bloke was a dealer up from London. As I'm writing this, the radio is telling me they've found the body of another prostitute. This is getting crazy. Leaving aside the obvious point that there's some nutter out there right now who will probably never be caught, there's something very wrong with a world where girls will continue risking their lives to sell their bodies to pay for their smack.
The issue here isn't the prostitution - men have been willing to pay for sex since the beginning of time, and women have been equally willing to provide it, but for God's sake, why can't it be legalised so that women can be safe? Superficially at least, these women were murdered because they were prostitutes, out on the streets late at night, but that's a very simplistic view. The truth of the matter is that these women died because they had no choice but to be out there to earn the money for their next fix. When are we going to learn that the war against drugs is unwinnable? Over half of all prison sentences are for drugs or drug-related crimes. It is still politically unacceptable for all drugs to be legalised, although it is probably inevitable in the long-term. However, there is an overwhelming case, if not for legalisation, then for the medicalisation of heroin and crack. Let the prostitutes, junkies and crack-heads have their drugs on prescription and not have to go out and commit crimes to get their gear. Cut organised crime at a stroke, and watch the prisons empty. Let the prostitutes be safe.
As I write this, yet another girl has gone missing, the fourth.The town is full of police, and people are feeling nervous,,,

National Hell Service

The NHS - where's it all gone wrong? Back in the golden post-war glow of 1945, we were promised a pill for every ill and care from the cradle to the grave. Now that probably was a bit optimistic, but hey, that's politicians for you - the best of intentions, but somewhat lacking in delivery. What they couldn't possibly foresee way back then though was that one day the drugs companies would do their damndest to provide a pill for every ill they could think of, and then some, and that the journey from the cradle to the grave would, thanks to all those pills, be longer than anyone ever could have imagined. The result has turned out to be the NHS we have today - a huge, lumbering monster of grotesque proportions, hopelessly tangled up in ever-increasingly costs, bureaucracy and expectations, with a demoralised workforce trying to cope with an ageing population suffering from still incurable conditions in hospitals which are bursting at the seams. You want an image of the NHS today? Here's one - a demented old lady lying in her own shit, slowly dying of malnutrition.

So how did it come to this? Well, if we go back 25 years to the glorious days of Thatcherism and maniacal privatisation, what was one of the first things put out to private tender? Hospital cleaning, of course. What a great idea that was. And what did it achieve? Dirty wards, MRSA, and the return of an attitude last seen in the days of Florence Nightingale, when people only went to hospital as the last resort. Scary. And you would have thought we could have relied on a Labour gvernment to do something about it, but what do we get? Private finance initiatives, that's what. And what else do we get? A government constantly cutting back on staff and services to make up for a 'debt' that is actually only 1% of annual expenditure, whilst simultaneously lashing out on a nice new Trident missile system, a bargain at £20 billion. Each time the powers that be 'reorganise' the health service, it costs a fortune in corporate rebranding, but no-one can tell the difference.

Lest you think that this is only a rant about the goverment, I haven't even started on the pharmaceutical companies yet. Drugs companies spend a fortune on 'drug lunches' advertising their drugs to overworked doctors, who prescribe them to trusting patients who, when they go back to their doctors suffering from the side-effects of said drugs,get prescribed yet more drugs, manufactured by. you've guessed it, the self-same drugs companies. Neat, huh? This happy truth is borne out by the fact that doctors rarely prescribe cheap generic drugs or sunshine and a healthy diet if an expensive drug will work just as well. It's not really the doctors' fault either. We the patients, are more than compliant in this. We really do expect a pill for every ill, an instant cure for every ailment. We have long ceased to take responsibility for our own health.

And then we come to the really tricky bit. How much does IVF treatment cost? A lot. Does not being able to conceive count as an illness? Evidently so. Does a woman have an inalienable right to have a child? How much should a cash-starved NHS be prepared to fork out for that inalienable right when balanced against the cost of, say, a new hip for an old lady? The further into the 21st century we go, the greater the dilemma between what is medically possible and what is financially possible. Everyone has their own axe to grind, their own corner to defend, and looks to the NHS for fulfilment of their desires. The hard truth is that we have the technology to make so much possible, and peoples' expectations are raised so high that in the end there will never be enough money to pay for it all, and so the rich will get the best care and the poor will get left with less. And was it ever thus.

bloggers block

Bloody bloggers block. Don't imagine for a moment that I'm the first person to suffer from it, or indeed the first to coin the phrase, although you never know. It goes like this - you start a blog. Then you write a bit of stuff. Then you publish it.Then you hassle your friends to read it. They do, because they are good, kind, generous people. They have to be, because they are your friends. They tell you that what you've written is OK, so you write a bit more. Then you start to get other people, people you don't know, reading it. And sometimes leaving nice comments, which is....nice. Then you start searching Google for pretty, witty pictures Then the trouble starts. You can't think of anything to write about. You start messing about with the fonts, the colours, the layout, anything you can think of. Then you realise you've buggered up the settings, so you leave it alone for a day or two, in the vain hope it'll sort itself out, which of course it won't, because it's only a bloody machine.Then you start reading other peoples' blogs in the hope that you'll be either inspired, 'cos they're so brilliant, or scornful, 'cos they're so crap. Then your friends start observing that you haven't written anything lately. Then you curse youself for being so lazy. Then you start obsessively tracking how many visitors your blog gets each day, and being childishly chuffed or insanely insecure, depending on the traffic. Then you remind yourself that the pleasure in blogging has to come from the doing of it, rather than the reaction it gets. Then you...........

five years on

I'm not much of a one for anniversaries, but this one's such a milestone I thought it was worth a moment. It's five years this week since my suicide. Obviously it wasn't successful, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this now, but it wasn't a failure either. I survived it, and it turns out it was the most important event of my life.
It seems such a long time ago now, and these five years have been the happiest of my life. I wouldn't necessarily recommend suicide as good way of cheering yourself up, but it worked for me.
I made the decision in August 2001, when my MS had taken enough of me that I was struggling to carry on looking after myself, and I couldn't bear the prospect of being looked after by carers. I didn't think I was depressed, but I hadn't been out of the house for three years, so I probably was. I planned it all very carefully, did lots of research, paid all my bills, everything. I was serious and I didn't intend to make any mistakes.
So I took the pills and went to sleep. I felt quite calm and ready - and then I woke up six hous later puking my guts up. Fuck. So they hauled me off to the hospital, and as we left the house, I remember thinking 'oh, this is nice, i'm going out'. The first 24 hours in the hospital weren't fun - I didn't expect to end up there, and I just wanted to get the hell out so I could get home and do it again. I was angry, dejected and completely without hope. I couldn't get any lower.
Then something started to happen within me. I started to look around at the other patients, who were mostly ancient demented women whose lives were clearly without meaning or purpose, and it dawned on me that my life was nowhere near as hopeless as I had thought. Simultaneously, I realised that I was interested in what was going on around me. There were some Filipino nurses on my ward, and I started chatting with them and getting them to teach me some of their language, Tagalog. It sounds really silly now, but I suddenly realised something I hadn't ever understood before - that life is beautiful.
As you know, I ain't the religious type, nor will I ever be, but I seemed to have reached some kind of a rebirth, an epiphany. As someone so eloquntly put it at the time, I'd jumped into the abyss, and the abyss had spat me out again. I had tried to go, and been sent back, because it wasn't my time yet. I had learnt that I wasn't afraid of dying, so now I could live. Does that make sense?
So here I am, five years on. My MS is still inexorably progressing, as it has to do, and sometimes it hurts, but it doesn't scare me. I enjoy every day. I've found love with a beautiful man. I have wonderful carers. I laugh a lot, and life is good. Suicide is still an option, when the time comes, but it's not here yet. (Note to self- must write euthanasia rant). It sounds like a cliche, especially from one as cynical as me, but life really is beautiful, and far too short to waste time with fear, misery or anger. It's as simple as that.

Bloody men.

Q. How many men does it take to wallpaper a room?
A. One, if you slice him thinly enough

That's my favourite man joke - funny thing is though, that most men don't laugh when I tell it. First things first - I don't intend this piece to be just taking the piss out of men, 'cos that would be too easy (if entertaining), but a look at how and why the genders are so different.

In the old days of black-and-white it was very simple - men were manly and went to work, whilst women were womanly and stayed at home baking babies and having cakes. Simple, if claustrophobic. Men were wise and strong, women were silly and adoring. (Some men, even today, think that's still the case, but they'll die out soon......) Then came the sexual revolution of the 60's, which men interpreted as meaning unrestricted shagging with no obligations, whereas women realised that it really meant the power not to get pregnant and the economic freedom to exercise that power. Men might have realised that too, if they'd just have stopped screwing around for a minute, but hey....

So what did we win in the great victory of feminism then, girls?. Well, we retained the right to menstruation, childbirth and the menopause (Note if men had periods, the right to menstruation leave would be enshrined in law, and tampons would NOT be taxed as a 'luxury item') And we gained the right to work a 40 hour week, then go home and feed the washing machine, feed the kids, walk the dog, do the ironing, go shopping, make the kids' packed lunches and, when we finally get to sit down for five minutes, massage his ego, and tell him how we couldn't manage without him . Call me cynical, but it's our own fault. We didn't have to let it turn out like that, but we just can't stop trying to have everything, can we?
So, the great battle for equality is largely over, women aren't treated like dolly-birds in the Benny Hill show any more, and it comes down to a never-ending series of individual skirmishes - the age old philosophical questions like why do men never put the toilet seat down? and why can't they talk about their emotions? and why do they always have to be in charge of the tv remote? (I know there must be things that men find endlessly infuriating about women, but as I'm a woman, I can't imagine what they might be.)
Don't get me wrong - I don't hate men - indeed some of my best friends are men (or were, until they read this), but as I get older I find myself regarding them with ever more fond indulgence and tolerance. Bless 'em, they can't help it.

The book says 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus', and like all the best cliches, it's true. Like the other one which says that men marry women thinking they'll stay the same, while women marry men thinking they will change. Equally true. We really are at cross purposes a lot of the time, but a lot of this confusion can be avoided if we just remember the things our mothers forgot to tell us:
Women understand men; men do NOT understand women, and that's how it should be.
Men, no matter how clever they are, never develop emotionally beyond the age of twelve.
Women, despite our best intentions, will never understand the psychological need men have for a shed/greenhouse/football team or other similaly female-free environment.
So, this is how it is. If you're a woman reading this, and you have a man, love him, cherish him, but don't expect more than he can give. If you don't have a man, don't worry about it, you really ain't missing that much. If you're a man reading this, you'll have noticed I haven't mentioned sex. Don't you EVER think about anything else?

Dozy cow!!

OK, I've got a confession to make - I've been really thick.....Do you remember that a few weeks ago I asked you for some feedback on this blog-in-progress? Well, I did, and nobody said anything, so I thought 'OK, fair enough, serves me right for being a) insecure, and b) fishing for compliments', so I just carried on blogging away, reminding myself that just writing it makes me happy, and that's enough. Shortly after I posted that plea, I was fiddling around with the blog settings ( I think I'd got bloggers block, and messing around with the form was easier than actually writing anything, but anyway.....) and I inadvertently disabled the comments facility. I only realised this yesterday, when I accidently undisabled the comments thing again, and found a whole load of really nice, helpful and encouraging comments from you all! So, thank you everybody - I really do appreciate it! And a special thank you to Anhua - your comments have made me grin like an idiot all day, and encouraged me more than you could know. Whenever I feel that I'm wasting my time, your generous words keep me going. Thank you.

did you see..........?

How much telly do you watch? I only ask because it's been brought to my attention that there are quite a lot of you out there who really watch quite a lot of the stuff. Now, far be it from me to be critical of our national viewing habits, but considering how much of it we all watch there ain't half a lot of crap on the box.According to a survey*, we each watch about 28 hours a week - that's 4 hours a day. Amazing really that we find the time, considering how we're all supposed to be busier than ever, and sooo time-poor. Mind you, there's watch and watch - the difference between being glued to it all the time, or having it on in the background, like moving wallpaper. Dunno which I find more annoying.
Anyway, I didn't really intend to whinge on about how much we all watch ( tho' I might come back to that later.....), as talk about some of the stuff I like and don't like: for me, good telly includes some soaps, some reality shows, and beautiful nature programmes, whilst bad telly is endless crime/detective stuff, unfunny comedies, and makeover shows. I know this is a very subjective little list, but hey, I'm only human.
Two of my favourite programmes are Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity.... and yes, I know it's a bit sad, and I'm not proud of it, but I find them both fascinating - BB because it's a houseful of complete fuckwits and wannabes playing outrageously to the cameras, and Celebrity 'cos its a jungleful of has-beens and might-have beens hoping desperately for another five minutes of fame. Both amusing in their own ways and psychologically interesting in a 'I can't believe what people'll do to get on the telly' kind of way.
Another category of shows I take a kind of sick pleasure in watching are those ones which are basically 'look, you're crap at feeding yourself, cleaning your house, managing your money and bringing up yoir children, so let us show you how to do it properly - in return for exposing yourself to public humiliation on national television, we'll make you healthy, clean, solvent, and a model parent'. Kind of nanny state fascism, really. I suppose its appeal lies in how smug and virtuous it makes us feel, whilst at the same time making us just the tiniest bit guilty 'cos we know we're not perfect either.
And finally, soaps. The glue that bonds us together and gives us a sense of community. What is it all about if not Peggy Mitchell screaming 'But it's FAAMILLY!'? Where else would we learn that a happy and stable society is built on a foundation of lies, deceit, confrontation, and the need for a launderette, leavened by the occasional murder, terminal illness and teenage pregnancy?
The point I'm trying to make here is, I think, that television has come to dominate our lives, not only in terms of time, but in how we think and behave. We get so much of our information about the world from it, that we're like lost souls without it, and that scares the hell out of me. When I was a kid, there was a programme on during the summer holidays called Why Don't You Turn Off Your Television Set and Go And Do Something More Interesting Instead? Good question.


* To see the survey, click on the tirle of this post.

the war rant

So George Bush loses political control of Congress, sacks the abysmally incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, and then asks if anyone's got any bright ideas about what to do about Iraq - oh for fuck's sake! We told you it wasn't a good idea, didn't we? Even way back in 2003 when you were lying to us about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, we told you it wasn't a good idea. Although at the time you probably thought you were telling the truth because, after all, you'd sold him the damn things in the first place. And its Rememberance Sunday this weekend, the day when we're supposed to bow our heads and remember all those who've laid down their lives for their country. Don't get me wrong, some wars are more justified than others, but this one? Don't make me laugh, cos it really ain't very funny.
Lets go back to the beginning, shall we? First there was 9/11, which did kill about 3,000 people and gave the US the biggest shock it'd had since Pearl Harbour - now obviously someone was gonna have to pay for that, and it wasn't going to be Saudi Arabia, where the bombers came from, cos it's a bit dangerous to drop bombs on oil-wells, innit? So where else then? Well, Afghanistan's good for the warm-up, give the boys some target practice, and no-ones gonna shed too many tears about theTaliban, but Afghanistan's a bit off the beaten track really, so how about one of those countries beginning with I?. Well, India's a bit too big, Iceland's a bit too cold, and Italy's got pizza....so it's down to Iran, Iraq or Israel. Well, it can't be Israel, cos they're the good guys (!), so Iran or Iraq? Well, it comes down to the Q - and Iraq's got one, just like Al Qaeda, so it's a done deal. And that Saddam, well, he is a bit of dictator, isn't he? Never mind the fact that he runs a secular state, nor the fact we've been selling him arms for years, he's an Arab with a crap human rights record and a big swirly moustache - he'll do.
So George drags Tony in on the act cos of our 'special relationship' (and the fact that no-one else is dumb enough to fall for it), and hey ho, off we go to war. Now, three years on, what have we got? Quite a high body count on our side (but at least we're counting), countless thousands dead over there, and a country that's being torn apart and radicalised by every fundamentalist Islamoterrorist in town.So what have we done? We've replaced one bloody dictatorship with another one even worse, condemned Iraq to God knows how many more years of pointless slaughter, inflamed a whole generation of Muslim youth, and he asks us if anyones got any ideas???

feedback........please?

Can I just take a moment here to ask what you think? I started writing the Russia piece and have realised that I could go on and on.....and on, but I really don't want to bore you rigid, so can I ask - shall I carry on with Russia, leave it a while and come back to it, or forget about it altogether? And while I'm at it, do you prefer the sarky pieces or the more serious ones?Obviously, I'm gonna write what I feel like writing, but I am sufficiently insecure and attention-seeking to want to know what you all think......either a comment on here or an email would be good. Thanks everyone!

Russia

Out of nowhere - a blast from the past - when I went to Russia (or, as it was then, the Soviet Union). I went twice, first time in 1985 for a month studying at the University of Leningrad, and second time in 1988 on some vaguely council-inspired trip to Sheffield's twin city, Donetsk in the Ukraine, as the translator for Swamp Circus, a vegan animal-free circus.

Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) is one of the most beautiful, if dilapidated, cities in the world . Just flicking through some photos has brought it all back to me, the architecture, the history, and the smell, a mixture of Russian cigarettes, damp, and cabbage.
When I was there it was still very Soviet and although Gorbachev had just come to power, there really was no hint of the changes that were about to unfold. There were huge billboards in the streets telling people to work hard for a glorious Soviet future, armed policemen on duty at the street crossings, and queues for everything, If people saw a queue outside a shop, it was generally considered a good idea to join it, even before you knew what it was for, because it would be for something in very short supply that you might not see again for years, like light-bulbs, or toothpaste. In many ways Russia in the 1980's seemed like I imagine the 1950's to have been - the rickety cars and buses, the potholes in the roads, the shabby clothes and string bags - everything had a musty, old-fashioned feel to it. I was there in the summer - hot and dusty, the pungent aroma of sweat, and the strangeness of the 'white nights' when it doesn't really get dark, just an hour or so of twilight around 2am, and then bright sunshine again. A magical city, full of atmospheric mystery and history - the very square where so much blood was spilt in 1917, the beauty of the Winter Palace, the squalor of the old apartment blocks unchanged since the days when Dostoevsky had his madman murder the old woman.
Then there was our hotel - the Druzhba (friendship) - a Soviet concrete box of cheap furniture, primitive plumbing, and uninspired food. Cabbage featured prominently on the menu, as did hard-boiled eggs and very black tea. Unfriendly, even hostile staff, whose favourite word seemed to be 'No' (as in 'Can I buy some stamps, please?' No.) , and ravenous mosquitos, whose blood we liberally squashed all over the walls of our room. St Petersburg was built on a swamp, so the air was damp and fetid, and the mozzies loved it.

The Russian people were, as people are everywhere, all different - some friendly, some not so. They were generally as curious about us as we were about them - many assumed we were American because we looked rich to them, plenty of young people wanted to buy our jeans, whilst older people tended to be bemusd or slightly hostile (it wasn't so many years before that even talking to a foreigner was dangerous)The most usual reason for people to talk to us was to see if we wanted to change money on the black market. In those times the official exchange rate was one rouble to one dollar, which was completely meaningless, because roubles were virtually worthless - Russians were always hungry for hard currency, because having dollars gave them access to highly desirable Western goods, like cigarettes, booze, etc, which were only available in the hard currency shops, which were only accessible to foreigners. Russians would go to great lengths to get hold of the precious dollars (symbol of the officially hated and scorned USA), and the black market rate was usually quoted at around ten to one. We didn't particularly want bundles of roubles either, but would often exchange some on the street because it was kind of exciting. Not really risky for us, but dangerous for them.

££££££ LOTTERY WIN!!! ££££££

Hah! Bet that title made you sit up and take notice, eh? Yes, it's true - Anton and I have won the lottery, and not just a skanky tenner either. But before you start sending pleading letters telling me how miserable your life is, and how a luxury mansion/fast car/new racehorse/cosmetic surgery might cheer you up a bit, I have to tell you that we've won the grand total of ..... seventy-four quid. But hey, not bad, is it?? Especially as Anton calls it our stupidity tax,and I make the pathetic excuse that it's a good way of giving to charity ( which it probably isn't, ) I did some research this morning trying to find out if winning the lottery - I mean winning big- makes you happy, and apparently, if you were a happy bunny before you you won, you'll still be a happy bunny when you're rich, but if you were a miserable git before, then you'll still be a miserable git afterwards, so all you new friends really will just love you for your dosh. Thought so.
And the lesson from today' sermon? Being poor might make you unhappy, but being rich won't neccesarily make you happier, although it will make your misery more comfortable

Islam

I was casting around for my next rant last night, and the subject of Islam was mentioned. Hmmm........tricky one, that. I don't feel as entitled to rant about it as I do about Christianity In fact, come to think about it, I'm not sure what I think about it at all.

There's a lot of anti-Muslim hysteria around at the moment, and I have absolutely no desire or intention to add to it. However, for what is worth, here are a few thoughts:
On the issue of Muslim women wearing the veil. I think it's a matter for them, and them alone. There seems to be a debate going on in the Muslim community at the moment, and it's really no-one's business but theirs. (Interestingly though, when Jack Straw started it by saying that he didn't feel comfortable talking to someone whose face he couldn't see, maybe he should have asked David Blunkett for his views on the subject)
As you know, I have no religious belief whatsoever - as far as I'm concerned, they're all wrong. However, I do think that everyone has the right to be wrong in their own way, as long as they accord that same right to everyone else. Now that's clearly not happening very much at the moment - the Muslim extremists shout about sharia law, suicide bombers are intent on wiping out as many innocent people as possible in Iraq, and xenophobic Brits make derogatory comments about 'ragheads'. So much for the brotherhood of man!
To my shame I don't know much about the history of the relationship between Islam and the West before the Iranian revolution of 1979, when the fundamentalists threw out the Shah and laid siege to the American Embassy in Teheran. That was when things started getting a bit tricky, and all sorts of people started getting in on the act. The Libyan embasst siege, the Lockerbie bombing, the war in Lebanon, a whole catalogue of internicine skirmishes, to say nothing of the endless Israel- Palestine saga. The politics got interwined with the religion so much, that now it's all a great big tangled mess of hate. When the history of these times gets written, I think it's certain that 9/11 will be seen as a crucial moment, the moment when everything changed and nothing would ever be the same again. Just for the record, I think it's important to remember that the 9/11 bombers were Saudi citizens, as was/is Osama bin Laden.

However, I don't want to get sidetracked onto the war here (I'll do that one another day). I simply want to make the point that the word 'Islam' doesn't neccesarily have to be followed by 'exremist', fundamentalist', or 'suicide bomber'. If you want to see what happens when religion gets politicised, look no further than Northern Ireland. So, spare a thought for your Muslim neighbours - they are no more to blame for the whole situation than you are - like you, and like me, they too are just ordinary people trying to live their lives. OK?

Bottoms up!

For my little chat today, children, I want to address the delicate subject of......ahem, bottoms, and what comes out of them - or not, as the case may be. I shall attempt to weave my way around the subject with my customary tact and diplomacy, but if you're VERY sensitive, I'd look away now......
Did you know that, according to statistics, some 3 million people a month suffer from constipation? God knows how they arrived at that figure, but I reckon thats a gross underestimate - more like half the population, most of the time, I'd say, But of course, we don't really know, 'cos we don't like to talk about it, do we? And because we don't like to mention it, bowel cancer tends to get diagnosed late. Talk about dying for a crap!
Anyway, I digress - as I was sitting on the loo this morning, I was thinking about how a good poo is essential to one's (OK, my)sense of well-being and happiness. Don't you agree? And it definitely gets harder as you get older (no pun intended!) I'm surprised that advertisers haven't cottoned on to this yet - other than vague claims to 'improve digestive comfort' - why not advertise healthy food with the line 'really gets you going!' Oh silly me, I forgot, it's only unhealthy food which gets heavily promoted, and that definitely DOESN'T get you going. 'Eat Big Macs - you'll be bunged up for a fortnight!' ain't gonna sell many burgers now, is it?
For what it's worth, here are my recommendations to ensure a smooth and swift toilet experience - dried fruit, especially figs, beans and pulses, especially lentils, spinach, and rhubarb. Much better for you than laxatives!

The C word........

No, not THAT C word! I mean the other one - the one which has started to creep into peoples' conversational landscape: a trickle whch will soon grow into a stream, then a fast-flowing river before finally swelling into an unstoppable flood, a deluge washing away everything in its path, reducing even the sanest amongst us to gibbering, quivering wrecks clinging to any sparkly, tinsel-wrapped Yule log within reach. Yep, you've guessed it now, haven't you? Christmas.
For the record, let me say here that there are some bits of Christmas I quite like - a few pressies, Chistmas dinner, even the Queen's speech as something to take the piss out of, but these simple pleasures are massively outweighed by all the stuff I seriously detest. And it starts here - today is October 25th, there are two months to go, and already every bit of junk mail that comes through the door is festooned with moronic little Santas, and every charity I've ever bought anything from or donated to is trying to flog me Christmas cards adorned with drunken reindeer.From here til the end of December it's downhill all the way.......
First of all, it's Hallow'een - now where did that spring from? When I was a kid, Halloween used to be when my mum tried, rather inexpertly, to hollow out a pumpkin, and then we wondered what the hell to do with all that nasty-looking stuff she'd excavated. Now trick-or-treating is a major industry foisted on us by those God-fearing Americans who'll celebrate anything, even a pagan festival, as long as there's a dollar in it. Jesus Christ, they'd have sold tickets to the Cruxificion if they'd been around. In Catholic countries November 1st is celebrated as All Souls Day, and everyone goes to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves. A bit more civilised.
Once Halloween is out of the way, then it seems that it's a downhill gallop to Xmas, certainly as far as the advertisers are concerned. Even now, expensive perfume ads are sneaking onto our screens, presumably to make women start dropping hints, which men will remain oblivious to until Christmas Eve, when those same perfume ads will reappear, and those same men will leg it into town.........
Christmas really is about advertising these days, and we, the gullible punters, fall for it every time - early in November all those ads promising a cosy Dickensian Christmas full of shining childish faces will appear to send a wave of nostalgia for something that never was through our hopeful hearts - maybe, this year it really will all be perfect, maybe..... - to be replaced a few weeks later by hard sell, three for the price of two, oh god what can we get mother this year ads, topped with snowflakes to get us in the mood, and accompanied by so many jingling bloody bells that you could cheerfully ram them down the throat of any passing ho-ho-hoing Santa.
And once we've all got thoroughly stressed about the presents, then they start with the food - not just turkey, but Marks and Spencer lovingly reared by rosy cheeked farmers in rustic country meadows until we slit their throats turkey. Go on, stuff yourselves stupid on all the stuff they tell you that you shouldn't eat the rest of the year (even though you do) until New Year, at which point Weightwatchers make you feel really guilty. Oh, what fun!
As far as I'm concerned, there are only two groups of people who have any claim to Christmas being special- the under eights, who still believe in Father Christmas, and good luck to them, they're gonna find out soon enough that the world really isn't that magical - and Christians. As a devout post-theist myself, (see my earlier blog What Really Pisses Me Off About God) I have a certain amount of sympathy mixed with scorn for them - their most important religious festival has been completely hi-jacked in the interests of gross commercial avarice, and they let it happen!!
It is estimated that each and every one of us spends an average of £750 on Christmas - and, aside from the fact that for many of us that's 750 quid we probably haven't got, let's pause for a minute and consider what we actually get from the whole festive experience - a lot of stress, a load of work, and more bottles of aromatherapy bath oil than we could ever use. And then there are the family tensions, the hangovers, and that flat feeling you get in the middle of January. Can't wait!

sniff sniff wheeze.......

I've got a cold!! This is tragic. I thought I didn't have to do colds (I'm in a wheelchair, you know). This is so unfair - no-one else who has ever had a cold is suffering as much as me. (Am I overdoing it a bit??) At least I'm not a bloke - then it'd be man-flu, obviously. Grrrr........ What to do today then? Going out and partying is probably not on the agenda, not that is was anyway. I can't say I'm surprised at this cold - I've been in contact with at least half a dozen snivelling souls this week, AND I've been to the hospital. Not nice places to go, hospitals, full of sick people and germs. Yuck. Funny, innit, that doctors can come up with successful treatments and cures for many horrible diseases, but present 'em with the commonn cold, and they're bolloxed. Aned will my devoted man be tending to my every whim today, picking up soggy tissues and mopping my fevered brow?? Will he hell - he's going to the stock-car racing. Don't worry about me - I'll survive.

History matters!

Below is a transcript of what I submitted to the History Matters mass blog

http://www.historymatters.org.uk


Well, I thought Tuesday 17th Oct 06 was going to be entirely unremarkable, but it didn't turn out like that at all........
I got up at 9a.m. when my carer arrived to begin our day (I'm severely disabled with MS, and am entirely dependant on my carers and friends for most things)I had some grapefruit, toast and marmelade and coffee for breakfast, then came back to bed and switched on my computer. I play backgammon online every day with people all over the world. I also checked my emails, and did some work on my blog. At around 11.30 I finally got around to getting up, so my carer gave me a shower and got me dressed, just in ttime for my mum to turn up. My mum and I always have lunch together on Tuesdays - it's a good opportunity for her to check I'm ok, and to have a natter about family stuff.My carer made lunch for us - a salad of prosciutto, fetta cheese, tomatoes and olives.. After lunch Mum and I settled down to watch the lunchtime news and Neighbours, our favourite soap opera. Just as it was ending my boyfriend turned up somewhat unexpectedly, having spent the morning at A&E. He's damaged his shoulder, and decided that going to casualty was the quickest way of getting some X-rays done, rather than going to his GP annd getting a referral, which could take weeks.
Just as he was leaving, my 2nd carer arrived for the afternoon shift and, completely out of the blue, handed in her notice! This was a bit of a shock, but her partner is moving away because of his job, and so she's going with him. So I immediately called the organisation which helps me with finding carers and sorting out the payroll, and arranged to put an ad in next weeks' paper for a new carer.
After all that, I felt in need of a rest, so I slept for an hour or so. When I woke up at about 5pm my best friend's daughter arrived to do her fortnightly cleaning of my flat, for which I am very grateful and consider myself very lucky! I pay her £25
The next person to arrive was her mum, my best friend, because we always have dinner together on Tuesdays. We've been friends since we were 18 (we're now both 45), and have been through a great deal together. Today was no exception. Her daughter was worried she was pregnant, so went off to the loo armed with a pregancy test and reappeared 5 minutes later, looking a bit shaken, to announce that she is indeed pregnant. Oh well. Mercifully thats not as catastrophic as it once would have been - she will have a termination in a few weeks, because at 21 she's not ready to become a mother.
We had dinner of jacket potatoes with tuna and homemade coleslaw, and then watched Eastenders.
By 9pm, my carers had finished work for the days, my friends went home, and my boyfriend turned up again, so we spent some quality time together, played backgammon (I won!), and he put me t bed and went home. Iswitched my light out at about 11.30 and drifted off to sleeep listening to Today in Parliament.

dreams

Aren't they strange? Lately I've been dreaming a lot, and incredibly vividly. I don't know if it's a getting older thing, or something to do with the drugs i take (I mean the legal ones, silly!) Either way, I'm not complaining - they are my very own, personalised, customised in-bed entertainment. And all for free! Bugger Sky! I don't subscribe to the theory that dreams are highly psychologically significant either. I think dreaming is just the subconscious part of the mind having a bit of a clear-out - a kind of cerebral crap, if you like.

Quoi?

"In 1995 the European Commission’s White Paper on Education and Training emphasized the importance of schoolchildren learning at least two foreign languages before upper secondary education. The Lisbon Summit of 2000 defined languages as one of the five key skills.
Despite the high rate of foreign language teaching in schools, the number of adults claiming to speak a foreign language is generally lower than might be expected. This is particularly true of native English speakers: in 2004 a British survey showed that only one in 10 UK workers could speak a foreign language. Less than 5% could count to 20 in a second language, for example. 80% said they could work abroad anyway, because "everyone speaks English". In 2001, a European Commission survey found that 65.9% of people in the UK spoke only their native tongue."

If you're British and reading this, you're probably thinking 'yeah, so what?' After all, English is the world's international language, so everyone's just got to learn English, and that's that. When we go on holiday to exotic countries, they always speak English, and if they don't, we just shout louder. Ignorant bloody foreigners. Once upon a time the British empire ruled the waves, and we might have lost all that, but at least our language still reigns supreme. Except it isn't really our language any more. What the world speaks now is Amercan English, and thats a rant I'll come back to another day when my anti-Americanism needs an outlet. What I really want to rant about here is why we are so crap at learning other languages, why those languages are so badly taught in our schools, and why we think it doesn't matter.

Right then, boys and girls. think back to your first term at secondary school, or high school. or whatever it was called then, and your first French lesson, or possibly German. But probably French. Why French? We hate the French nearly as much as they hate us. We've been hating each other quite happily for the best part of a thousand years, and making us learn their bloody ridiculous language full of frilly 'qu'est-ce que c'est...... ' qu'est qu'il y a' sure as hell ain't gonna make us love them any more. They have no time for us either, and when we do speak French to them, they just sneer and pretend they don't understand. Merde! So why is French the most common language to be taught at school? Well, in the old days French was considered to be the international language (which is where the phrase 'lingua franca' comes from), the language of diplomacy and law and, if you go back far enough, the language of the English monarchy. Thats such a good reason for teaching it now, isn't it? These days, French is spoken.....well, in France.

The most spoken languages in the world are, in order of numbers of speakers, Chinese, English, and Spanish.

Spanish! Now there's an idea - now, lets see, Spanish is widely spoken throughout the world, would be relevant to the millions of Brits who go on holiday there every year, and Spanish people are generally very friendly to people who try to speak a little of their language. It's also, compared to French, a relatively easy language to learn - its spelling is logical, and it's not hard to pronounce.

OK, so Spanish would be a better language to learn at school - kids would find it easier to learn, they'd see the point of it and, if it were better taught, they'd have more fun doing it. It's also important to start earlier - the best age to begin is about 8, when the brain is still porous enough to soak up information easily, and the vocal chords are still flexible enough to literally get your tongue around different sounds. Here probably isn't the place for me to give you a technical explanation of the different methods of language learning that exist, but take my word for it, it can be a helluva lot more fun than it ever was for us at school. I seem to remember some nonsense about a French goldfish called Zazou (!) - what the hell was that about? There are books, tapes, newspapers, magazines, games - all sorts of things that can make learning a language more fun. Oh, and good teachers. Don't get me wrong, learning a language does require a certain amount of effort - you have to be prepared to memorise lists of words, and put in a fair bit of practice and effort. Tough. Anything worth having does require something from you. Spare a thought for all the people who struggle to learn English - our language ain't easy, either.

(If you're still reading this, well done! I've nearly finished now, so hang on in there........)

So why bother to learn any language, even your own? Well, here's another quote -

"Research has shown that early exposure to a second language increases divergent thinking strategies, helping not only in language-related tasks, but also in areas such as math. Children early on have different ways of expressing themselves, such that they better understand there is more than one way to look at a problem and that there is more than one solution."

Basically, learning another laguage is good for your brain. It's also very good for helping you understand your own language better. On a less selfishly personal level, it also gives you a better understanding of all those people you come across in everyday life for whom English is not their first language, and a realisation of how hard they have worked in order to communicate with you in your language. Pretty nice of them really, considering you can't speak a word of theirs. Learning another language not only teaches you the words, but also gives you an insight into other cultures, and other ways of looking at the world. It might even help to make the world a better place. You never know.

a moment's pause

Well. here we are, ten posts in, and I think it's a good moment to pause and take stock.....(takes deep breath and prepares to sound pedantic) I'm really enjoying doing this blog, you know. It's sort of like keeping a diary, which I've done for years, but not, 'cos a diary is essentially private and not intended to be read by anyone else (unless you're a politician with half an eye on your future media profile), whereas this is public and can be read and commented on by anyone. And I love getting the comments and feedback, so thanks everyone for your remarks, and keep 'em coming...... The worst thing imaginable for an attention-seeker like me is the thought that no-one's listening....
But this isn't a diary, and whilst it's not exactly a book either, I flatter myself perhaps by regarding it as The Collected Thoughts of.....(A Pretentious Cow??). I'm trying to strike a balance between serious, and not so serious, stuff about me and my MS, and bilious ranting about the absurdity and idiocy of the world we live in. On the subject of which, stay tuned for future rants about....men, Christmas, and any other fuckwittedness that comes to my attention.
So, thanks for taking an interest, I love you all!

I'm in a wheelchair, you know

.....as I'm so fond of saying to get a laugh. And it generally does. Especially as when I say it, I'm usually lying on the bed and the person I'm talking to is sitting in the aforementioned seat. It's important not to take things too seriously, I find. Do you know the phrase which winds me up more than anything? ......'to end up in a wheelchair' That ain't the end, mate, it's the beginning. The beginning of a whole new way of looking at the world which brings as much amusement as it does grief. Well, it does to me, anyway. I could tell so many funny wheelchair stories that I could get boring. so I won't - well, not right now anyway.
When I got my first chair, one of those bog-standard heavy red NHS ones, it was a relief to be able to go out and be able to sit down, because my legs were getting so weak and wobbly. At that stage I could still stand OK, so getting in and out of the car or on and off the loo wasn't an issue. Not yet, anyway. When the point arrived when I couldn't stand on my own two feet any more, as it had to, things got a bit more interesting,but I found I was pretty nifty at swinging myself on and off. and was grateful that I'm quite small and light, and reasonably strong. Being an active wheelchair user is a bit like being an athlete - you have to wear the right clohes so that you don't get tangled up in the wheels.
I've been using a wheelchair for nine years now, and I can honestly say that I'm so used to it that I rarely even think 'Oh, God, I'm in a wheelchair', except very occasionally if I'm feeling a bit low, and I see someone walk across the room and feel a twinge of envy. The only other time it ever occurs to me is in my dreams, when I find myself walking or even, God forbid, running. And even then I'm sometimes aware that something, i.e my wheelchair, is missing. Very strange.
Now I'm at the stage where I'm a passive, rather than active, wheelchair user, and I'm even contemplating getting an electric one (which I will refer to, predictably enough, as my electric chair.....), but so it goes - everything is ever-changing and nothing stays the same forever.

but what about the kids?

Went to Toys R Us the other day, Anton and I. Scary!! Wouldn't want to go there the week before Christmas. We went there to buy some Lego for little Jack, aged 6. We found what we wanted easily enough, and I was amazed by the sheer volume and variety of stuff on offer. How are kids supposed to choose from all that? The point is, of course, that they're not required to choose, but just to want, want, want, which of course they do, not understanding the concept of self-restraint. And then their parents just spend, spend, spend, being equally deficient in the self-restaint department. Or feeling incredibly guilty when they have to say no. But they too just want, want, want, as their credit-card bills can bear witness to.
What are we doing to our children (and by 'we' I don't necessarily mean parents, I mean all of us, society as a whole) We spoil them rotten, then wonder why they grow up to be selfish. We pamper and over-protect them and wonder why they grow up to be completely at a loss when it comes to making their own decisions. We don't send them up chimneys any more, which is probably a good thing, but we don't let them climb trees either, which isn't so good.
In the old days, when the world was in black and white (and i don't only mean the telly), phrases like 'spare the rod and spoil the child' or 'children should be seen and not heard' had a certain currency, and whilst no-one woud want a return to that blinkered repressive world. I can't help thinking that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Why do we need programmes like 'Supernanny'? Because the post 1960's liberalism went too far is the simple answer. Or, to be more explicit, permeated further than it ought to have done. I can't quite believe that I'm going to say what I'm about to say, but......
......the hippy liberalism of the late '60's onwards was fine when employed by the muesli-munching middle-classes with little Jocasta and Sebastian, but has evolved into a far less attractive proposition when practised by Darrens and Sharons on sink estates up and down the land. Letting you child have the freedom to discover the world anew is fine when there are books in the house, and mobiles in the bedroom, but possibly not such a good idea when the only cultural stimuli are wall-to-wall Sky and Nintendo on demand.
The result of two generations of 'leave-'em-be' parenting has given us a generation of parents who have no idea of parenting, and a generation of children who have no idea how to be children.

reflections.....

Everyone gets born. Some people get to live a day, some people get to live a hundred years. Most of us get to live somewhere in between. That's as it should be. Life is largely a matter of luck. Live with it. Don't spend your life regretting the past, nor living in it. Don't spend your life worrying about the future. Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.I could go on - a list of truisms which are, like it or not, true.
When I was younger, I worried about everything, about how I would cope if this happened, or that. Ironically, as it turns out, I was always scared of getting ill. And then I did. I remember sitting on a bench outside the hospital in Tarragona, smoking a cigarette in the sunshine, trying to focus on what I'd just been told. It wasn't a shock - I was already fairly certain I had MS, and the confirmation of it was a relief in some ways. I remember thinking 'my life wiil never be the same again'. And it hasn't been.
If I could choose between not getting ill. and not learning what I have learnt, or the MS and all that I have learnt - about myself, the world, other people - I honestly have to say I'm glad things have turned out as they have. I've gained more than I've lost.

Monday morning....

......and it's raining. The weather has been strange this summer - June was nice enough, July was incredibly, horribly hot, August was the coldest annd wettest it's been in years, and September has been a beautifully balmy late summer month. There is no point any more in trying to work out whats normal for the time of year, 'cos whatever it is that's what it ain't.
There seems to be an implicit acceptance of this by the weather forecasters - they no longer tell us how unusual the weather is for the time of year,but just mutter something about how temperatures are a few degrees above the monthly average. If Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia) is right, and there's no reason to think he isn't, the balance of the scales has already tipped, and we've passed the point of no return. Doesn't atter how dutifully we recycle our rubbish, or how enthusiastically the multinationals start investing in biofuels, it's too bloody late. We will go down in what remains of history as the first species dumb enough to bring about our own extinction within a few short centuries. The planet will survive, but we won't. Serves us right for our arrogance in thinking we can conquer nature. We can't.

what a wonderful world.....

Two news stories yesterday, the juxtaposition of which was interesting. The first was a story about crisps, and the calculation that if you eat a packet of crisps every day for a year, then that's the equivalent of drinking 5 litres of cooking oil. ......cue photo of little girl necking great big bottle of oil, dribbling it down her chin, cut to interviews with kids who all say 'urgh...i'm never eating crisps again!'. The second story was from the refugee camps of Darfur, where a man was burying his two-year old daughter, who had probably died of malnutrition, but her father didn't know, because there is no medical service available, still less the medicines which could have saved her, to say nothing of food.
Half the world is killing itself through overeating. The other half is starving. I know thats a gross over-simplification, but its no less true for that.
So what's the solution? Well, let's be honest about this - the only answer would be for the rich half of the world to give up 75% of its wealth and luxury so that the rest of the world could achieve a basic levl of subsistence, and that's clearly not going to happen, is it?

grief

I'm having one of those days.......my body's giving me grief and its really pissing me off with the boringness of it all, so I've decided - fuck it, I'm taking the day off being positive and up-beat, and I'm gonna wallow in self-righteous self- pity all day and make the most of it! Look, I'm feeling better already........ ..well, maybe thats overstating it a bit, but who cares??

Thursday

It's getting to be a habit, this. Every morning, after my coffee and cigarettes, I come here and think 'OK, what to write about?' Shall it be picking up on a news story, retelling some anecdote about my life, ranting about MS or something similar or, if I'm feeling particularly lazy, just fiddling about with the setting and bunging a picture on? Today is one of those days. Can't get my mind to settle down to anything concrete, trying to resist the temptation to go and read what's going to happen next week in Neighbours, or play backgammon or scrabble, or even going pointlessly shopping. I know - I'll have a fag and rest my fingers a minute.....
Right then - smoking. There was an article in the Guardian this morning about how smoking will kill you. Well......duh!! It remind me of the comment Kurt Vonnegut made (A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America )about how, at the age of 83, he's been smoking for 70 years and is thinking of sueing the tobacco companies for breach of contract (Hey guys.....you promised!!). I couldn't agree more - having a chronic progressive neurological condition isn't enough these days, it seems, to ensure a swift departure from this world, so smoking is my death insurance - hopefully less awful than hanging around for decades unable to do anything more entertaining than grunt and pee (and thats only if I'm lucky). In the words of the great man - ho hum.

God

.

Do you know what pisses me off about God? apart from the fact that he doesn't exist, obviously. All the stupidity, hatred and pure evil that gets committed on his behalf, in his name.
When the world was young, and man an innocent, wandering around at the mercy of winds and weather and wild beasties, it made sense to pray and plead to the sun, the rain, anything handy, to leave him alone and not to hurt him. Fine.And when man grew up a little, and started to learn a few tricks, like fire, and throwing stones, and boiling up twigs and leaves, God was still handy to have around as a celestial back-up, an all-seeing, all-knowing trick up the sleeve who man could appeal to if all else failed. But then man grew to be a man, and came up with the idea of religion, and that was where it all started to go wrong. Men started to think that they, and they alone, knew what God wanted, and that they were the only ones wise enough to interpret His wishes. Only some men, not all of them. And thus began churches, and internicine strife, and the Crusades, and Northern Ireland, and The War Against Terror (or TWAT for short) and a list of barbarities as long as your arm......

Ethan

We had an experience yesterday, Anton and I. We went over to the park for some sunshine and a smoke, and were just sitting there pleasantly buzzing, when a little boy came bowling alog the path in his very shiny wheelchair. As he got close to us, I said 'I like your chair!' He grinned, and pulled up, by which time his mum had caught up with him. We were talking for ages, about chairs, and disability, and attitudes and all sorts of things. He's a nice kid, Ethan, seriously disabled (with cerebal palsy, I guess, not that the label matters), but with a lovely smile and a wicked sense of humour. His mum, Heidi, is pretty amazing too - a very ordinary woman who has become extraordinary in her determination to make life for her son as fulfilling and 'normal' as possible. Lives of quiet courage and determined dignity.
As we came away I said to Anton that I felt very lucky to have met them - they've given me something really valuable. I don't think that generally I feel too sorry for myself, and I count myself incredibly lucky that my disability didn't catch up with me and change my life until I was in my 30's. When I was a child, I could paddle in the sea. I can't now, but that doesn't matter - the point is that I could and did. Ethan can't.

........beginnings

well, they keep telling me I ought to write a book, and I keep telling them I don't want to, so maybe this is a reasonable compromise.....