I love these Catholic cathedrals. They are so ornate and lavish – they reinforce the doctrine of fear. Death’s coming – Hell awaits woooooaaaaahhh!
Crazy Zen Beat Hipsters – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
Rich said we were ‘crazy, Zen, Beat hipsters’ and we didn’t give a fuck. I wrote him a poem and Tim made it into a song. It sent chills down my back to hear my words put into a song.
It was a silly throwaway poem that I wrote in ten minutes – really nowt but doggerel. But I kind of like it. It’s fun.
Thanks Rich. Thanks Tim.
We’re all crazy Zen Beat hipsters, aren’t we?
But then we’re all pretty ordinary nobodies – Jack Kerouac, Roy Harper, Zoot Horn Rollo, Picasso, Captain Beefheart, William Burroughs, Attila the Hun, Gandhi, Hitler, and my Dad.
Maybe we just want to be noticed? We are ordinary guys. Maybe we want to make sense of what it was about? Maybe we want to make things better?
We invented wars and invasions; complete with genocides and so many atrocities we can’t even record them all. We created fashions and styles and tried to capture life and describe it. We have sometimes tried to right wrongs. But maybe we just wanted to be special and we were all fumbling about in the dark, playing with our demons and trying to make a world we could be happy living in.
So many of us just want to feel important, believe we are important, think we deserve so much more than anybody else. None of us do.
If only we had been loved and praised enough all our lives. We’re all so insecure.
3.11.01
Happiness is security and not having to worry.
3.11.01
The Punks come to visit – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
Happiness is security and not having to worry.
3.11.01
So the kids came round to my house, a great horde of them. There was a loud knock on my door early one evening. I opened it. There was a bunch of them all excited and boisterous. All the long hair and flares had gone. They now all had short hair, spiked up into points with brylcream. They had tight jeans. One of them had spray-painted his shoes with silver paint (He has since gone on to become a lawyer). There were a lot of razor-blades, rips and safety pins.
“Right you boring old fart!” one of them said, with a big grin, “we’ve come to play you some real music!”
I let them in. They had some a plastic bag of tinnies with them. We put the Hi-Fi on loud and I passed the deck over to them so I could sit back and listen. They played me Clash, Sex Pistols, Damned and Stranglers. I listened.
It was loud. It was fast. It was angry and violent. I didn’t know if I quite liked it on that first hearing. It felt raw and unsophisticated. It grew on me. I liked their passion and enthusiasm! I loved the way they had found a style that they could lay claim to. I loved the energy and anger of Punk!
The house rocked. They sprawled over the furniture. We drank beer and talked excitedly. They came out with their new phrases. Everything was boring! You could never trust an old hippie like me! This was the new world! This was anarchy! This was New Wave! I was now officially a boring old fart! But there was fun and a respect. I was now the old guard. They were taking over. I’m not sure that this was exactly the type of relationship that the school would be looking to foster, but it felt right to me.
It seemed that overnight I had become a dinosaur! These new kids were cutting a new path through the wilderness. I was the other side of the generation gap. But they came round to share it with me! That felt good.
At least I wasn’t considered to be completely lost and down with the likes of Max Bygraves, Val Doonican and Harry Secombe. They had some respect. I still had a little credibility! After all, I had introduced them to Roy Harper, Bod Dylan, Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and the Doors.
Later on, in the holidays, my wild Punks came round to help me decorate the house. There must have been a dozen of them. Liz went away with the kids and we cranked the music up and chucked the paint on, making short work of it and having a ball. The whole house was a party for three days.
They were very keen but not too proficient at painting. I found myself having to tidy up a lot of their sloppy work. You see, that’s what comes with age and maturity – you become fussier.
Us teachers have to set an example!
11.11.01
Gandhi and Martin Luther King both had a vision of a new world that wasn’t exclusive. It was for everyone. They both set about putting their energies into building that vision of a harmonious, multiracial world, despite the seeming futility involved in even attempting something so impossible. They both took on hugely enshrined establishments that were so set in concrete that it looked as if they could never crumble. Yet the British Raj and South African white supremacists were both defeated and shown up for the evils they were.
Mandela and Gandhi were extraordinary. They both refused to let their emotions lead them down a road of violence and revenge. They sought to oppose regimes that they believed were wrong, in ways that revealed their enemies for the monsters they were, without resorting to hate and division. They were threatened, beaten but never bowed. If ever men stood as examples of what it was to be a man, to be a human being, then it was epitomised in these two.
If ever a person needed a role model then they could not be bettered.
3.11.01
Happiness is hope.
3.11.01
Medgar Evers, Steven Biko, Ann Franck, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, plus countless others of all races and cultures, all genders, all colours, all religions, all creeds, they will live on as beacons, while the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots and countless other dictators, torturers and criminals should be reviled forever.
3.11.01
Happiness is building that better world.
3.11.01
More tests – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
We are the biggest disaster that has ever hit this planet! By the time we have run our course, we will have killed off a greater percentage of life here than any comet or natural disaster since the beginning of time.
Our priority is to ensure that we change and become less destructive; to ensure that my prophecy of our terrible effect on the rest of life does not come true; to ensure that the destruction we are wreaking is halted and we learn to live in harmony with each other and the world.
There’s nothing daft or soppy about that!
If we don’t learn how to do that we are, along with every other living thing, completely screwed!
11.11.01
The major problem is that we are too greedy. We are consuming too much of the world’s resources.
Try telling that to a meathead hell-bent on owning the world and consuming it all. “Hey, look how important I am, yah! I own a castle, twenty Rolls Royces and a fleet of Lear Jets!”
But then we are all guilty.
How many tellies do you have?
Crazy isn’t it?
11.11.01
Happiness is when your endorphins flood your brain and tingle all your synapses.
3.11.01
Right. Despite all my tests, I was not satisfied. I requested a further consultation with the consultant. It wasn’t lungs and it wasn’t stomach, but the pain was still there and getting worse. I had decided that it had to be the colon. A section of the large intestine came up under the ribcage and that had to be the problem. By my calculations, it could be polyps, irritable bowel syndrome, or bowel cancer. I think I had already decided that it was bowel cancer.
Thank heavens we did not have the internet back then. I might have had a long list of possible ailments and have convinced myself I had them all.
The consultant was very sceptical about my condition. He reassured me that it was psychosomatic and would go away of its own accord. He doubted that there was any physical aspect to my pain. I was not convinced and he could see I was not going to let it rest until I had explored every possibility. There was nothing else for it other than a barium enema.
They dressed me in that same stupid backless thingee that you have to wear in hospitals, probably designed to make you feel embarrassed and stupid, so it keeps you in your place as a patient. Then they put me on a medical couch and inserted a hosepipe up my anus.
The nurse hovered closely watching the procedure. It was embarrassing but at least it did not impinge on your breathing and produce panic. The tube was uncomfortable but I could hardly complain. I had requested it.
They then poured a gallon or two of white barium solution down the pipe. It filled your rectum. It was at least warm and not too unpleasant – though it made me feel as if I were suffering from the worst case of diarrhoea I had ever experienced.
I had to lay still while they pawed over their monitor screens and positioned me in exactly the position they required on the X-ray machine. I lay there trying not to produce the biggest wet fart of all time. The major thing that was on my mind was the desperate need to get to the toilet without making a spectacle of yourself.
Once again I was able to see the results on the screen and the doctor talked me through. There were no tumours, polyps or abnormalities.
“It’s alright,” he reassured me, “it is all normal.”
I knew that I had to come to terms with this. Most probably my symptoms were psychosomatic after all? But I still wasn’t totally convinced.
28.10.01
Happiness is when your mind is in balance and is not craving for anything.
3.11.01
The art of living is doing and being.
11.11,01
I went back for a further consultation. The doctor argued his case that he could see no physical reason for my condition but I remained adamant. He recapped through the procedures; they had now checked the lungs and been in from both ends to check my gut, I had had a physical examination of abdomen and liver but he could see that I was still unconvinced, the only thing that was left was to check my abdomen with an ultrasound.
Once again I found myself in a hospital ward wearing one of those strange backless thingees.
The ultrasound technician was a young doctor. She placed me on a surgical couch and immediately lifted up the front of my smock to expose my abdomen. I found myself once again wondering what was the point of having a smock that had no back? but I did not put it in words. She unceremoniously plonked a big dollop of cold gel on my abdomen, which made me jump, and proceeded to smear it around.
I had this strange feeling that I had become pregnant. It was just association, Liz had had it done exactly this when she was pregnant. She began searching around with the sensor. She showed me the images on the screen and I found myself looking for a foetus. Pulling myself back to reality I pointed out where the pain was and she began checked, pushing the sensor over the area, in and out, focussing on the organs and providing me with a commentary of the organs we were looking at. As a biologist I found it easy to identify them and asked all manner of questions. She was very diligent and persisted until I was satisfied. There was nothing to see. Normality, bloody normality!
By this time I was hoping for a nice round tumour. Something they could identify and say- “See! There! That was what was causing the problem!” I wanted something they could easily cut out and deal with.
I did not want a negative result.
She checked the kidneys and liver, even had a look at the spleen. I was sure that it had to be lurking there somewhere. Everywhere she looking it came back with normality. The gut checked out, gall bladder had no sign of stones.
We ran out of places to look.
I had to face the truth – I was healthy.
28.10.01
Happiness is when you are completely crazy and don’t know what the fuck is going on.
3.11.01
Teenage rebellion – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
My teens were a time of conflict. It was a time when I started becoming an individual. I was fast developing my own philosophy on life, thinking about the big issues and my place in the world, what I stood for and what I stood against. It was coupled with a strong urge to break free from the confines of my family.
I knew that my Mum and Dad loved me. There was never any doubt about that. They gave me unconditional love and care. They did not insist on great contributions to the housework or try to influence my views. I was very lazy. I had almost complete autonomy with my room. I lived in my own universe.
In 1965, inspired by the film ‘The Knack’ I painted my room white, including the mirror and all furniture. I put brackets on my walls so that I could display my albums. My parents weren’t particularly enamoured, particularly the mirror and furniture, but didn’t seem to mind too much. My mum even bought me a white bedspread to match. My life revolved around girls, friends, hair, clothes and music.
I had lots of freedom. At fifteen I was allowed to spend the summer hitchhiking around France with my sixteen year-old friend Foss. At sixteen they allowed me a motorbike, despite all their fears about me killing myself. At sixteen, I was allowed to go out to parties to the early morning and pubs to drink. My liberty was almost without limits.
While I was dabbling with morality and the wonders of the infinite, developing strong attitudes towards pacifism and animal welfare, they listened and didn’t argue too much. I was passionate and I think they were intrigued. They tolerated my girlfriends and turned a blind eye to the happenings in the privacy of my room. I was able to bring girls and friends in at will. The only frustration was my music, which I liked to play loud, was sometimes met with bellows of ‘Turn it down!!’ but even that was generally tolerated. My friends were made welcome and fed. My house became the focus for gatherings.
My conflict was with school and my appearance created a series of confrontations. I was constantly being sent home for infringements of the dress-code, hair and beard. It was a game I enjoyed playing.
My father saw education as the panacea to a perfect life. Education brought access to jobs. Jobs meant money. Money bought your life-style. Education was the answer. Education had been denied my father. He was bright but had been prevented from going to Grammar School because his family claimed that they could not afford the uniform and needed him to leave school and get a job.
Dad valued education and he wanted those opportunities for me. They sent me to a private primary school and scrimped and scraped to keep me there. The fact that they couldn’t afford a proper one and sent me to a Mickey Mouse establishment was by the way. They did what they thought was best.
So there I was, at the age of sixteen, with opportunities and freedom. Did I appreciate them? No. I enjoyed the social life, hanging round with friends and chatting up the girls. I was no trouble in class but only did the bare minimum to escape retribution. I was in conflict with the hierarchy at the school who viewed me as a rebellious nuisance. A view that was totally justified. I was standing up for my rights. For me Kerouac made more sense than any career.
My father took a more long-term view than me. My behaviour confounded him. As he saw it, I was actively damaging my future.
Having a good time was OK. He’d done his share of rebellion, smoking drinking and hanging out with the ladies. He could understand that. What he couldn’t understand was why I was growing my hair and wearing clothes that put me in conflict with school and ruined my education in the process. In his eyes I was busy burning the bridges that he’d have given anything to build. It did not make sense to him. He thought that my idealism was something I’d grow out of. The hair and clothes were fashion statements that would rapidly become redundant as next year’s business-manipulated whims created a new set of fashion. He did not see a cultural aspect to any of it. This wasn’t culture. This wasn’t philosophical. This was fashion. Fashion changed. We weren’t a new generation founding new values rejecting the ancient rat-race values he lived by. We were just doing what teenagers always did and pandering to current styles and attitudes.
In my mind I was not a young sixteen year-old kid, I was part of a unique new counter-culture. We rejected religion, politics and all the old world stood for. Nothing like this had ever happened before. We were forging new aesthetics, breaking away from the old traditions and attitudes. This was the modern world. We wanted rid of all that claustrophobic cultural baggage. A knife had come down and severed us from all the old ways. It wasn’t fashion. It was something much bigger than that. I was sixteen and I thought I knew it all.
I saw my Dad sitting there every evening, exhausted by his work, consumed by it, with no questioning of the system he was part of, and I knew I did not want to be part of that. I wanted to goof, and have fun, to discover every new way of looking at things. To him I was a crazy kid, sprouting hair from every orifice, looking like a rag-bag, doing crazy stuff and losing sight of the distant horizon – which was a good career. He knew that I was going to be working for forty years of my life and what I did now would determine what that career might be. I had the chance of an education. I was bright. I could go to university. I was blowing my future for things that ultimately did not matter.
For me, career was a dirty word.
“Get your hair cut!”
The fact that I was rejecting the life that he aspired to was an anathema to him. What did I think I was going to do with my life? I was accepted. They were proud of me. It was my behaviour that was being questioned.
But I was sixteen. I was an adult. I knew what I was doing. I knew where I was going. We were building a new world with new values. I was sure of it.
I wanted something simpler and more meaningful than the pursuit of wealth and comfort. This was probably because I had not experienced poverty, war and the drudgery of daily life with family responsibilities.
My Dad and I were from different sides of the spectrum. Life was simple for me and complicated for him. It was so obvious to him that I was deliberately messing up. He was certain that I would grow up to regret what I was doing.
Yet throughout it all, despite the arguments, I received their full backing. The house was beset with rows but my life-style remained untouched. I did what I wanted. There was a string of concerts and parties, the pub, girlfriends and friends. I don’t know if there was any way he could have insisted on anything else, short of throwing me out.
Despite myself, and my priorities, I scraped the necessary examination passes, and, although they weren’t good enough for the universities I’d assumed I would be going to, they were good enough to get to a polytechnic. I muddled through.
Once I’d left to go to college I was completely free. They had no jurisdiction over me. At eighteen years old, there was nothing to moderate or restrict me. The rows ceased. They accepted that I was going to do it my way – right or wrong. I had a home to come back to, they funded me and I got food parcels.
My relationship with my Dad became less fraught.
12.10.01
Happiness is freedom to do what you want!
3.11.01
Working at the bakery – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
After a year or two of working Friday nights at the bakery, I got moved onto forklift truck driving. This was great. The forklifts were electric and fairly zoomed about. My job was to pick up the bread pallets and load them on to the trucks. If you got it right you could swing a pallet on and brake so that it came off the prongs and came to rest in exactly the right place in the lorry. This was an art. I enjoyed that. You could spin those trucks on a sixpence.
One of my fellow forklift truck drivers was called Tiny. Tiny weighed about twenty stone and was not at all tiny. He was Scottish and he’d been a paratrooper and had fought in Korea. At tea break he would tell me about his exploits. On one occasion he had been part of a small patrol who had gone behind enemy lines on special operations. He showed me these huge scars on his legs. He explained that this was where he had got strafed with machine-gun fire on one of this particular ‘jaunt’. He’d been badly wounded in both legs and could not walk. One of his colleagues had incredibly carried him on his back for over twenty miles, over rough terrain, to get him back to his own lines. The alternative would have been to shoot him. Tiny was a huge man. That was almost a superhuman feat.
“We didn’t leave anyone behind alive to be captured,” he explained. “The North Koreans used to torture you, tie you up with barbed wire and leave you screaming for days. They wanted your mates to try to rescue you so that they could shoot them.”
So many people are traumatised by the horrors of war. Tiny was one of them.
Another guy I worked with was Henry. Henry was a huge Jamaican guy. He even made Tiny look small, but he was the gentlest man I have ever met. He spoke in a deep whisper and had this great rumble of a laugh. Because I was so little I think he felt very protective towards me.
One day I was doing a run up to one of the lorries and made a miscalculation. I accidentally put a prong through the side of the lorry. I went to find the driver to explain.
Now drivers are notorious for taking great care of their lorries. It was like a personal pride. The fact that I’d been careless, nay, malicious and stupid enough, to put a hole through the side of this guy’s lorry was inexcusable. The driver was a big guy. As soon as he saw what I had done to his lorry he became incandescent. He grabbed hold of me by the throat and was going to smack me right in the mouth. Just as I was grimacing in anticipation of seeing stars, a big black hand encompassed the driver’s fist as it hurtled towards my face and stopped it dead. Effortlessly the guy was spun him round to face Henry. It must have been quite a shock. Nonchalantly Henry picked him up with his other hand, by the scrunching up shirt and jacket and lifting this large man into the air. He then held him off the ground at arm’s length.
The guy was so shocked that at first, he didn’t even struggle. He could feel Henry’s enormous strength.
“Now what do you think you’re doing hitting my little friend?” Henry asked in a deep murmur.
I can to this day still see this guy being held off the floor with his feet dangling and hands clutching at this enormous arm. His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened and he tried to get loose – to no avail. Henry, as placid as a rock, held him tight. I don’t know if it is my memory playing tricks but I can see his legs kicking wildly in the air.
“Now calm yourself down,” Henry drawled.
Henry stood as firm as a rock and held that driver up there until he’d stopped struggling, then he gently put him down. The driver was in shock and quickly shuffled away muttering and casting wary eyes at Henry and me.
Another of my work colleagues was John a sixties freak like me. He had hair halfway down his back and the ambition to grow it down to his feet. To this end, he refused to brush or comb it. He reckoned that brushing or combing broke the ends off and so it took longer to grow.
John and I would spend the breaks discussing which albums we’d purchased, whether the Doors were better than Country Joe and the Fish, or Hendrix was as good as Cream. We’d talk about Middle Earth, UFO Club and Klooks Kleek, which club was best and who was on next.
John was really into acid and would take it regularly for his trips into the psychedelic cellars of London.
He was always telling me tales of coming out into the morning sun, still tripping, how one night the mounted police in Parliament Square all turned into centaurs, the trees breathed and pavement sweated. He even came into the bakery tripping and spent the evening saying ‘Wow’ and moving his hands slowly in front of his eyes to create slow motion trails. He said that the ovens glowed all colours of the rainbow, the bread was alive and throbbing, and the dough was luminous and pulsed as it was being plopped in the pans.
It freaked him out a bit to think that the bread was alive as it was going through the ovens.
All told, the bakery was an interesting place to work.
5.11.01
Some are obsessed with their physical shape and spend their lives counting calories, planning magic diets and refining exercise regimes in-between binge eating.
11.10.01
Tarting up the past – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
They are presently digging up parts of Britain, indeed the whole world. They are uncovering the past and restoring it. They are tarting it up so that it looks attractive. They put in roads to the sites and trim the grass. They construct paths and riddle the place with signposts. They produce brochures and put in historical information on plaques. The result is a tourist attraction.
People have got so much money and time that they can indulge themselves. They can go and see things that look interesting. This may be natural phenomena, such as hot springs, waterfalls and gorges or they may be old ruins. The idea is to make it accessible and attractive. It is no good leaving them as they were. They have to be manicured and resurrected into the artists’ impression of past glory. We worship the past.
We are becoming heritage Britain. We sell a sanitised version of the past to tourists. Battle scenes without the blood – we are fascinated. Stone circles without the sacrifices – we are intrigued. Castles without the rape and pillage – we are in awe. We are then invited to visualise these events.
Soon the whole planet will be a big plastic historical amusement park for the benefit of affluent tourism. It brings in the dollars. It is big business. You sell your merchandise on the back of the curiosity seekers.
I enjoy doing it myself – but, at the back of my mind, I know that what I am viewing is not necessarily real. It’s been tarted up to make it look more attractive and not more authentic.
8.11.01
Some seek out sexual partners and spend hours making themselves look attractive so that they can have lots of sex with different people.
11.10.01
We pretend we are ruled by our minds when in reality our noses and emotions tug us around. We do not even register that we are responding to each other’s chemistry. We do not know what makes us do the things we do.
We watch our dogs sniffing lampposts and other dogs and think we are superior. At least they most probably know what messages they receive. We respond without it even becoming conscious.
8.11.01
Death in the bakery – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
Our vision is only clear in two small pools, like headlights, in front of our sight. Our brain makes up the rest and pretends that it is sharp and clear. Most of us go through all our lives without even knowing this.
Most of the world we live in is made up by our brains.
We males vie with each other in some primordial ritual to establish a pecking order of status. Our position is set by the chemicals we exude from our armpits and groin. Unknowingly we respond to the chemicals exuded from others. Most of what we respond to, we are not even aware of.
Our subliminal responses reveal our disposition. Our status is based upon the respect we command via these chemicals and other subtle messages from our body language. The game never ceases as our position is always precarious. We are only as good as the messages we are sending out. In order to reinforce our status some people in power bully and arrogantly show off.
Females respond to the signals we transmit in different ways to us. They respond to status. Females also respond to the subliminal messages they are putting out. They have their own pecking order.
8.11.01
According to the rumour in the bakery, two people were horribly killed while I worked in there.
One was a mechanic who was fixing the ovens.
The ovens were long tunnels through which a conveyor belt took the baking trays. There were many of these ovens all lined up next to each other. The bread moved through the ovens in a constant flow. It was all automatic. A machine plopped a lump of dough into a bread-pan and a conveyor belt took the dough through the long tunnel of the oven. The journey took twenty minutes, which was the length of time necessary to cook the bread. It emerged at the other end as a standardised, fully-cooked loaf.
On this occasion, something had gone wrong inside one of the ovens and the only way of dealing with it was to get an engineer to crawl up inside the oven and fix it. Of course, they turned it off and let it cool down first. The trouble was that someone inadvertently turned it on. It wasn’t on long enough to cook the guy it seemed he got mangled up by mechanical arms inside the guts of the oven that were there to keep the bread-pans in line! At least that was the tale that was circulating.
The other tragedy was when a man was killed in the flour storage bins. These were huge storage bins, circular and tapering. They were about thirty foot high and twenty-foot across. When they were emptied someone had to go down into them with a broom on a long handle and dislodge any flour that was sticking to the sides of the hopper. It was a very dusty, unpleasant job.
While this guy was down in the hopper sweeping out, someone, not knowing he was in there, pressed a button and a load of flour was deposited into the hopper, tons and tons of the stuff. The guy was buried and completely suffocated in the fine powder.
5.11.01
One push of one button could be enough to finish everything. Easily done.
7.11.01
Working for the Council – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
Tribal. We are tribal. We are xenophobic and territorial. We are designed to function in small groups. We have to recognise and fight that if we ever hope to be civilised.
7.11.01
When I was eighteen I obtained a job working for the council as a road sweeper. I enjoyed it. The group of road-sweepers I worked with were a bunch of communists and revolutionaries. We met up for two-hour tea-breaks, discussing what was wrong with the country and how the whole social order should be overthrown. Then we went back to work.
Taking a two-hour break was OK as long as you knew the system.
I soon learnt that the foreman came round to check on me at exactly the same time every day. All I had to do was to be working hard for when he turned up.
I also sussed out that the public only saw you when you were working. If they did not see you they forgot you existed. I developed a strategy. I worked extremely hard when I was on the job. I did all manner of things over and above the call of duty. I weeded and cleared litter and leaves from hedges. Then I hid my barrow and headed off home or to the café. I only worked for half the time but whenever anyone saw me I was going at a feverish pace.
People were impressed. They’d never seen such an energetic road sweeper. Some actually phoned in to praise my industry and accomplishments, which was unprecedented. I was the sweeper who was clearing out under hedges and pulling up weeds. Nobody ever rang in to say I was only doing a three hour day and was sitting around drinking tea and gabbing most of the day. That’s because they never knew.
One weekend I wanted to take the Friday off to make a long weekend. There was a Rock festival on that I wanted to get to. I was in a dilemma because I could not afford to lose pay. I had a story sorted for the foreman for when he came on his rounds and I was not to be found. I had been caught short and I’d gone to the loo. I thought I could get away with it.
On the Thursday I worked for five hours and went overboard. I dragged stuff out from under hedges that had been there since Alfred had been worrying about the Danes. By the time I had finished I had left heaps of rubbish all the way along my route to demonstrate how hard I had been working.
On Monday the foreman came round early. He seemed cross. I was preparing myself to confess and take the consequences. I suspected he would dock my pay and give me a ticking off but there was a chance that I would be summarily sacked. Too late now to do anything about it. I was resigned to my fate.
“You realise the problems you’ve caused?” He started, glaring at me.
I hung my head, mulling over what I could possibly say in my defence.
“You collected so much rubbish on Friday that the men refused to pick it all up. We had to give two men three hours overtime to collect it!”
I couldn’t quite believe my ears. I looked up at him in astonishment.
“You’re only here for the summer,” he admonished. “You don’t have to kill yourself. Slow down a bit and take it easy!”
It was quite amusing – I was being bollocked for working too hard on the day I’d skived off.
5.11.01
Some people seek out friends in order to gossip about trivia concerning their everyday lives.
11.10.01
We humans are strange creatures.
We are obsessed with status and power.
We construct huge edifices to our glory. We swank around dripping with jewellery. We festoon our homes with priceless artwork. We fill our lives with labour-saving devices.
We are also incredibly inquisitive.
We use our skills to travel the web in search of knowledge and entertainment. We analyse atoms and explore the reaches of space. We build machines to explore the bottoms of the oceans, the edges of the stratosphere and the far limits of the solar system. We extend the limits of our senses with instruments and supersede the limits of our powers with machines.
We are ingenious.
We construct vast, complex civilisations with cities, commerce and philosophy. Our ideas exceed our capacity to understand them. Our tools are now so complex few of us now understand the principles upon which they are constructed.
Yet for all our intelligence and cunning we still behave like the most primitive of animals. We are violent, cruel, tribal and belligerent.
Are we ever going to grow up?
8.11.01
The vicious cruelty gene – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.
One day I will die and all my things will be divided up. Some will go to friends as mementoes. Some will be distributed to the family. Liz will keep some of them. My kids will have some. I will take pleasure in knowing that things will go to people that might get them out from time to time and think of me. I don’t know why that is? It will not matter to me. I shall be dead.
26.10.01
Perhaps it is necessary to wield the bomb and bullet and just eradicate all the evil bastards! Get rid of all the genes that breed fascists and torturers in one fell swoop!
It seems so easy!
But that’s frustration talking. Nothing is easy. It is likely that we all have the nasty genes. We all enjoy destruction, we all love cruelty. It is merely that most of us are better at suppressing it, or have never found ourselves in situations that are conducive to our nasty side becoming developed or expressed. But it is latent in us.
We have descended from the people that built Shakespeare’s Globe – but we also descended from the people who designed the pits for cockfighting, bear-baiting and bull-baiting that took place next door to the Globe. We are still the same as the people who organised the rules for blinding the bears, badgers and dogs and ripping their claws out to make the baiting more of a spectacle.
We designed the bullrings and flocked to them in our thousands, to bring the kids and have a family outing full of laughter and excitement, cheering as the animals were jabbed and speared and stabbed and teased or ripped apart before our eyes. The more bellows of pain and gore the better. What a day out for the family!
We are the descendants of those people. I do not think we have changed much in a few hundred years. The Taliban and Isis demonstrated that very clearly.
You can imagine the conversations around the family table a few hundred years ago. ‘Perhaps tomorrow we could go to the execution? I’ve heard they’ve got some new techniques. There are these wicked curved things they use to rip the entrails out and then they burn the guts while they are still attached and to the dirty criminals. I bet that makes the eyes water. More than merely crushing bollocks or pouring molten lead in ears. Then they have these great shire horses that they use to rip their legs and arms off. Bet that makes them scream?’
‘What fun!’
Perhaps we should just do the world a favour and do away with ourselves, slit our own throat, rip our own nails out, poke red hot pins in our own eyes?
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Sometimes, I think that there is something intrinsically wrong with the whole human race and that the world would be better off without us. Then a crisis comes along and there is always a multitude of kind people risking their own lives to help others or rescue an injured animal – every day a million acts of selfless kindness.
13.10.01
You can’t put your own aspirations on your kids. I think my Dad gave me a platform on which to build, but my life is nothing like his.
12.10.01
How many times have I let people down?
26.10.01
I’m guilty of playing the material game. I’ve surrounded myself with possessions, all of which seem important to me. After I am gone they will not be important at all.
Some of my things will be sold, some given to charity and some thrown in the bin where they belong.
26.10.01