I was listening to Jonathon Millar on This Week, last week. Sadly his sister had died recently. He praised the NHS for giving her terminal care that would have cost his family a quarter of a million pounds in America. The other people in the studio were too Tory (Portillo and Neill) or too nice (D. Abbott) to do anything but make sympathetic noises.
I felt a great deal of sympathy too and rich brothers can easily have poor sisters but for the very rich (without redistributive taxation) such means tested charges would not be unreasonnable. They would of course insist on going private but that would make the whole private thing look v. expensive.
So then we could offer NHS surcharged services for the very rich.
Glad to hear that the Labour Party is still engaging in blue skys thinking and controversially so. I think the prospect of vigilante-ism recedes the more you give genuine power to local communities. With power comes a feeling of responsibility and the loss of htat feeling of irresponsibility that the Daily Mail and the Sun trade on.
I felt a great deal of sympathy too and rich brothers can easily have poor sisters but for the very rich (without redistributive taxation) such means tested charges would not be unreasonnable. They would of course insist on going private but that would make the whole private thing look v. expensive.
So then we could offer NHS surcharged services for the very rich.
Glad to hear that the Labour Party is still engaging in blue skys thinking and controversially so. I think the prospect of vigilante-ism recedes the more you give genuine power to local communities. With power comes a feeling of responsibility and the loss of htat feeling of irresponsibility that the Daily Mail and the Sun trade on.
posted by Big Mac the Red at 6:44 AM
1 Comments:
Hey, lighten up!
Easter.
Its Urbi et Orbi time.
Though this one's from me, an apostate Christan Prod. (Who must be the only 62 year old English all his life in domicile and tongue who didn't know until yesterday that chocolate eggs were a sign of rebirth. Blimey, I knocked out a Brit Art dead plucked chicken on a cross in contrition.)
I've become real too early. Some parts of me should still be imaginary but they're not. Living in my imagination is like living in a Dante purgatory. The exquisite trick is to emerge into reality exactly when the imagination has cleansed the soul.
Never mind, there are consolations.
I thrilled today to the thought of magick. And sad loser that I am I fear it was from a television programme the most popular one in England today.
I feel like a musician in 1963 who sits down at the piano to express his delight in a sound of genius that he had heard that very day in the aether surrounding us all. Then his painful realisation and recall bring his hands scintillating dance across the keys to a bitter crashing halt. He suddenly is aware that he was writing his paen in the very style of the genius he had found. So many McCartney - Lennon's writing Adam Faith songs on white pianos.
'Cheer up. There's nothing in Revolver that you won't find in Cathy's Clown'.
Even so I 'm watching my writing career disappear like a witch on sticks silhouetted against a siver moon.
I have always thrilled to magick. I even think Sapphire and Steel excellent. My first boyhood cowboy book had stories written in the simple past but told by a present day old Wyoming man to a boy. The old man would set a historical scene for each self contained tale. On some pages there were little sketches of a cowboy on a prancing horse or a wigwam or a waggon train. On one half page there was a detailed pencil sketch of a village like Sitting Bull's Little Big Horn camp. It was completely real but equally the man and the boy were standing next to it watching it as a table top tableau.
'I didn't mean to bring you here. Something terrible will happen here. Lets go as soon as we can!' the old man said.
I used to stand holding the book watching the real son and grandson looking at the real Indian village all of us life size, all whilst I was lying in bed anticipating sleep.
My mother asked me why I was always looking at the at the same picture when she came to turn out my light. I tried to explain it to here and then again a few days later when my dear sweet dad always doing his level best offered to build me a model village. I told them the picture was enough for me.
My delight found a metaphor in the small brass telescope I had as a boy. My looking at the drawing telescoped time and distance and size was re - ordered like its component barrels .
The old man told his son the village was one the 'long knives' would decimate. It was the first indication I had of the horror and terror my race brought to every other. I cried at the thought that they could kill the brave brown skinned dancing man who was wearing a fur hat with buffalo horns and a swan's white neck bone hollowed to make a piccolo pipe around his neck in the frontispiece page photograph.
I love magick but I have never read a Harry Potter book or seen a film. When I saw how real and immediate is the full screen face of Harry Potter in film clips I came to believe the children were missing the magick altogether. Just turning on to the images and the merchandising.
I had felt the same today about David Tennant and an exquisite Dr. Who episode. After all, children were supposed to hide behind the sofa at the sound of BBC Radiophonic vibrato.
I never change. I'm still the person who thought it was only me and a Times writer recognised Love me Do and Misery as the hallmark of genius. And I still find myself thinking I'm the only socialist in the whole global village.
So I alone would write of the scintillating joy of pure magick. How I would give up the whole world to see a white unicorn on a grassy chalk down in bright sunshine. He wouldn't even need to have a golden horn. It would take my mind off my failed Easter uprising. I'd promised myself Easter 2007 would be the year Guevara, Micheal Collins, Luxembourg and me would storm the Leicester post office.
But the childhood memory of timeless Sioux warriors came back and my fingers stopped in frozen perpetual hover above my keyboard.
I won't make the same mistakes again.
You know the exquisite colourful mosaic mottling on the outer under wing of the chalk hill blue and the extraordinary divine yellow dust on the outer wings of the green veined white, well,.............
...............Nice aren't they. And far more beautiful than any fantasy of mine I might have tried to hide in.
My conscience can wait. With an army that is clearly much happier to be captured than be on or off duty at home or abroad, it evidently won't have to wait long. Military bipolar disorder between fear and aggression is dead.
What a realist I've become.
Hey, I've just noticed! Its footie on the tele tonite! Pack 'em in terraces say I!
Well, fear and aggression military bipolar disorder does take a time fully to cure, y'know. Endless R and R is best. Or a proper job. And just like when Paula Radcliffe drops out of a marathon an African village will not go hungry tonight if that Ghanaian international scores.
Amen.
And even if you've had a bad week:
Its been a hell of a week!
Is it age I ask myself as I find I've spent most of Thursday preparing for a television programme that wasn't on.
Preparing you ask yourself? Yeah, well, its those Dimblebys. Always getting the people outside the box in the corner to chip in. So by 4 o'clock I've got six pithy txts (as we txters say) all ready. Me and Tony Benn both. Apparently when he's on a Dimbleby programme he spends all day working out replies to possible questions Whilst reading AJP Taylor on the interwar years and WW2 by the sound of the answers he gives. However. So there was:
Free and happy in Tehran. Back to fear and Deepcut - type brainwashing here.
and
Captive under Amedhnijad's regime in Iran = Alive!, Free on the streets of Basra at Blair's insistence = Dead!
and
America is the enemy. John Bolton is the Ugly American.
That last one? Well, he looks like he was in the Grateful Dead but talks as if he is recruiting us to them - for real. (Update edit: Anti - Vietnam had Kurt Vonnegut we get Bolton)
All this so I can fire off something at Question Time which prints a few out in a Ceefax 155 box at the bottom of the screen whilst the programme is on. Which it wasn't this last Thursday.
When I find out its on its Easter hols I think to myself
'Is this old age onset dementia? Forgeting what a Dimleby says at the end of his prog. is a pretty severe symptom I would guess.'
Only thinking Carole Vooderman would make a good carer runs it close.Then I remember the day I turned up tp school one Friday to find term had ended on the Thursday to avoid a Friday riot. And that was 50 years ago.
I know what you think. They just didn't tell me 'cos I'd been voted 'Pupil most likely to riot' Well OK.
But what about turning up in Bristol as a student on the Sunday to be early for the reception at Temple Meads on the Monday where everyone just wanted to tell me how to get to the digs I'd stayed in the night before. And keen they were. There were three trestle tables of helpers outside the station and no train due for an hour when I turned up. No one offering coffee and buns either.
So help me I'd arrived by train the day before walking past three 30 foot boards with Temple Meads written on them.
Then there was the exquisite half hour I spent talking to a BT Broadband call centre with the guy at the other end of the phone too nice to tell me straight out that I'd copied my own new BT Talk number from an email wrongly. And checked it twice as I said to him.
'Course that doesn't prove I'm not demented (is that what you say? I mean got dementia) because that was on Wednesday this week.
Oh dear, the needless self help health check seems compulsory. Did I used to lose my glases, keys and TV zapper way back when in those school days with an extra day of hols like I do now?
Well, yes. It's just that then it was always an exercise book I'd swear I had put in my satchel that just wasn't there. And some vital part of my sport kit - always suddenly missing as I'm rummaging through my bag in a sour smelling changing room half undressed.
Maybe I'm improving with time, like short sight is supposed to improve with age.(Believe it. Not.) But I don't think so.
At least I found Temple Meads twice then. (Well I got off the train at the right stop after all. Now I remember! Actually the train finished there. That's how I knew we were there, when it hadn't moved for 20 minutes. So there.)
But maybe.
Because at school I got lost every single time I went from my classroom to the third floor of the New Block. 4 times a week for 28 weeks. For an O level geography class.
Whereas Tuesday evening this week when I got lost jogging it was for the very first time though on a route I've run a thousand times. 'Course its all for the best in this best of all possible whorls 'cos it meant I went a much needed extra mile.
But what about typing hte for the and hten for then for both of which my spell check thinks hate is best. I seem to do it more and more often. And my own version of my BT Talk number was wrong by an o five instead of a five o. Left handers. Me and Bobby both. Me with the map in hand, my fellow leftie with the steering wheel in hers. I'd shout 'Left' she'd turn right. Those errors you notice a few minutes later. These days I'm oblivious to all htose typing errors.
Suddenly its a double bind. If I prove I've always been like this......If I've become like this ...
The health check makes me feel like a British marine back from Iran. Two different people per week.
Am I the relaxed there and then in Tehran young fella happy, rubbing noses with the other puppies?
In the halcyon days of my youth I used to think the odd lapse like saying 'Live' in 'Got Live if You Want It' to rhyme with 'Sieve' (a Rolling Stones EP, grandchildren) would all come out in the wash. A life of success before me which would wash me coherent like Christ's blood washes away the trivial mistakes of a sinner.
Or am I the uptight fear driven avatar back at some Deepcut who on hte telephone can plump for a sort of preposterous over precise pedantry in some travesty of a British officer in a German prisoner of war camp?
The British army does seem to offer its members just two modes. Anger and fear. Like the marines back here. Each feeling drives out the other. Miltiary consciousness is a bipolar disorder. In the army you overcome fear of the enemy with aggression and aggression toward your superiors is prevented by fear. I prefer our boys the way Iran treats them. I digress.
My poor old computer had got tireder and tireder throughout hte week
(I've decided to tell spell check to ignore my peccadillos. Htis is more me don't y' htink?
Anyway I don't do it every time y'know.)
Eventually on Thursday it refused like an old nag finally putting the horse before the milk cart and refusing to drag the bloody thing ever again. Anywhere..
So to the telehphone help desk. The first time so they can tell me my own number. I was Biggles on the intercom to Ginger. Trevor Howard in Hut 1, Stalag 14 in mufti with cut glass vowels his only deterent against his anhilation..
'Your number is..'
'My number is?'
'0567....'
'Zero Five Six Seven!'
'....2468..'
'Two four six eight!'
'...911.'
'911. I have an 11 figure number', the last word almost musical.
Silence.
'Please confirm' even more musically.
The second time, the compurer knackered, she appears to be Doctor Kildare. Her' surgeon; me, bag of intruments carrier; computer' patient.
'What kind of router do we have?'
'A 220 V BT voice router, Doctor'.
'Switch off router'
'Router off, Doctor'
'Unhook yellow cable from router'
'Cable disconnected'
'Switch off computor'
'Computer off'
'Unhook yellow cable from computer'.
I suddenly feel total fear. Is this BT's terrible revenge on me for emailing Radio 4 that we should take Blair hostage, it evidently has such a salutory effect on the savage mind, and hold him 'till Beckett gets us out of .. .well, everywhere from Iraq to the Pakistan borders, including the covert war in Iran. (Bush has one going according to ABC news. I bet the Brits have too. A little one. I digress. Again. This war must be on my mind).
So I'm staring at a blank screen in front of a dead computer holding a yellow cable in my hand the victim no doubt of a virus designed in Whitehall to destroy the computers of all dissidents.
'Now take your whole kit to the recycling plant. You are dead. Never criticise Blair again'. is what I'm expecting.
Hindus support Blair on this don't they? Even some Ghandi followers say this war is khosher and that Ghandi would have used force if he'd had the battalions.
Try to sound normal. Chatty even. She may let something slip and with a screw driver I can fix it myself.
'Cable disconnected, Doctor. Do you have medical soaps there? I feel safe in your hands y'know.'
'What soaps?' she asked.
'Like ER only nightly.'
'Oh, no, only ER weekly'
'What is the problem, Doctor? You can tell me.'
'Reconnect the yellow cable'
I am ecstatic.
'What both ends?'
'Yes'
'Switch everything on'
'Yes, Doctor, yes!!'
A pause.
'Its working, Doctor! A miracle! You are a genius!' Then to get myself down from cloud eight and a half (I have been happier once or twice), 'What was the problem?' (Repeat implied in rising cheerful melodic tone).
'Static'
I can't believe that. 'What, combs rubbed on cardigan sleeves and pith balls and stuff?' On the information superhighway?'
'Yes. It builds up and has to be released.'
Blimey 'Goodness. You make it sound like meditation to get rid of all the superfluous enegy.'
'It is. There's always some there. It has to be balanced or dispelled in excess.'
'You are wonderful. A guru.'
My perfect master gurgles with delight. Have I found a friend? At that very point she exits with a BT sign off script..
So cut the self obsession, I think, as I look gingerly at my computor cured by a modern Shavian woman and superwoman with the electronic equivalernt of an oily rag.
Avoid despair and paranoia.
So ...
What a week! A taste of ambrosia. Whenever I look up. As my old friend Mo points out in her version of mud and stars seen through prison bars.
'Look UP, Mac, do try,
So blue the sky!.
Trees so high!
Eyes dry!
DOWN is to cry!
DOWN is bad news
Makes you feel you'll lose.
The mud on your shoes
Give you the blues.
Its UP you should choose.
(It runs better to the tune I wrote for it).
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