miscellania

Postscript

2009-06-28T17:31:00.003+01:00

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...

2008-11-24T11:38:00.006Z

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

2008-09-23T11:03:00.003+01:00

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

2008-09-11T11:02:00.008+01:00

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

2008-08-30T10:49:00.013+01:00

my poor toe

Anton looking for his car

Denis - a man no campsite should be without

happy campers

a bunch of roses

annefest 08

2008-04-17T10:56:00.008+01:00

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

2008-01-02T09:43:00.013Z

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

2007-11-11T12:23:00.000Z

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

2007-10-20T11:32:00.001+01:00

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

2007-10-11T17:51:00.000+01:00

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........

2007-09-24T10:38:00.000+01:00

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

annefest '07

2007-09-12T09:41:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-28T10:07:00.000+01:00

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!

2007-06-14T10:28:00.000+01:00

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......

2007-05-30T10:27:00.000+01:00

.....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

2007-05-17T17:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

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!

2007-04-23T10:24:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-13T10:24:00.000+01:00

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......

2007-04-09T11:58:00.000+01:00

....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

2007-03-11T13:27:00.000Z

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

2007-02-28T10:46:00.000Z

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

2007-02-21T10:36:00.000Z

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

2007-02-13T10:02:00.000Z

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.....

2007-02-10T10:31:00.000Z

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.