Saturday 11th July

Yesterday, Friday was just another typical, untypical day.  It was cool first thing in the morning but the sun was blazing by ten.  The café was quite busy in the morning and as usual quiet after lunch.  Very few people walking around town as it got hotter and hotter.  I had the afternoon shift and a meeting with a lay preacher (don’t panic – I am not about to have a religious conversion) talking about the underused Protestant Temple, a few doors up from us, and the possibility of them running events some evenings in our Café.  Nothing really agreed, but quite nice people and they have to consult their hierarchy in the Church if England. A few customers and I closed up at five.

A quiet evening, we went to Bar Tortoni, where I had Calamari and Frites and my wife a salad, not forgetting a demi-litre of very good rose.  Most of our friends had agreed not to go to our usual Friday night at Le Pub Gambetta.  The musician was a French guy we had seen before.  And we were right.  We were only a few yards away and we could hear him clearly as he mauled ‘Bird on the wire’ by Leonard Cohen.  Hard to imagine anyone completely ruining the song but he managed it.  He sung a strange melody and put the emphasis on the wrong words, there was no phrasing, no sense of emotion in the flat baritone he monotonously bellowed out.  Third song was ‘Blowin in the Wind’ by Dylan and it was only by unpicking the words from the terrible melody that I worked out what he was singing.  We soon left and had another drink outside Café de Paris.  It was still hot at ten at night and we decided to call it a day.  Every day is different, every day is the same.  And even when you do nothing really it is quite lovely.

Friday 10th July

It is truly amazing just how in recent years there has been so much poltical cross-dressing.  We had Labour vying with the Tories to present policies to control immigration; all three parties love the NHS, Labour are concerned about the squeezed middle, the LibDems signing up to Tory cuts and so on.  And during the election campaign Labour were talking up the idea of a Living Wage but with no concrete proposals to make it a law.  Now George Osborne has proposed a legal National Living Wage which should raise the incomes of those at the bottom of the working pile.  The idea is that, combined with further reductions to Benefits this will force people to take jobs they might otherwise have rejected.

Well, that should have been a Labour policy, but with maybe a touch more carrot than stick.  We have to wait and see if any of it will work.  One thing is for certain, people on benefits, including the disabled will be poorer from now on.  I suspect, and knowing employers as I do, that they will increase prices to compensate for any higher wages they will have to pay.  Either that or they will lay off staff, or push them harder to produce more; in Restaurants that will mean one more table for each waiter to cover.  Another result may well be that differentials will come into play, at the moment with the Minimum wage at £6.50, quite a lot of shift leaders and supervisors are on £7.50 or £8.00 an hour.  If you raise the minimum to £9.00 then these people will insists on being paid in excess of £10.00 an hour.  And that will mean a hike in inflation.  Not that a bit of inflation is so bad, except for those on fixed pensions or indeed on reduced benefits, or savers of course.  But everyone knows that the base rate of 0.5% is not going to remain forever, and if inflation starts to take off the Bank of England may be forced to increase it, so hitting mortgage holders.

You see, whatever policy you adopt there are unforeseen consequences which may well result in the opposite of what you wanted.  So, I give a limited round of applause to Osborne for adopting a Labour policy.  I wish him good luck, but with his policy of reducing income tax I am not sure he will achieve his twin goals of paying down the deficit and getting more people into full-time work.

Thursday 9th July

It is getting busier and busier.  The summer is hare, the French schools are out and two weeks until the English are – and then we will have the onslaught, the avalanche, the craziness that is Eymet markets in Summer.  We were twice as busy today as last week, maybe also because the weather was a touch cooler too.  In fact between ten and one we didn’t have a moment’s rest.  As soon as one order was completed there was another one waiting.  To help me remember I line up the cups with the type of coffee (Arpeggio for those who want strong French, and Veluto for mild English), we have different cups for espresso, Americano, Cappucino, Latte and drinking chocolate.  At one time I must have had ten cups lined up, and even though our machine is not the very fastest, I made those ten coffees a hell of a lot faster than they do in Starbucks – and without asking the customer’s names.

Wednesday 8th July

Diary Entry – 20660228

“I was quite impressed, especially at first, by the little community living here, so deep in the bowels of Old London Town.  Right under the noses of the authorities too, who despite repeated government attempts at regionalisation, was still almost entirely congregated in G.L. (Greater London it used to be called in my youth, but now more and more we see it referred to by these initials; as if Americanising it could begin to disguise it’s ugly sprawl).  The city itself is now vast, and spreads almost from the channel right up to the Norfolk border and has swallowed up the old town of Swindon in the west.  It is as if the city has become a magnet and attracts not only millions of Europeans, especially after Turkey and Russia finally got into the EU, but has also depopulated most of Scotland and Wales.  Even the old cities of the North are being deserted as more and more young people seek their fortunes in the vast megopolis that G.L. has become.

The old concept of the UK had fallen apart soon after the Scots and then the Welsh voted for independence.  The usual story – a few years of flourishing success, cheap regional development loans and boom industries setting up, but when the Second Financial Crash came, investors flocked back to the safety of England, and G.L. just ballooned.  Now, even though the Scots and the Welsh eventually begged to be taken back, they are simply regions of England these days; and pretty squalid ones too.  What did ‘nationality’ really mean anyway?  Even England really only meant G.L., the rest was just a distribution area for the G.L. con-gloms.  But it was after everything really crashed in ’38 that the big migrations started.   G. L. now has a population of over a hundred million, small still compared to L. A. or NewNewYork but still pretty impressive.  There are rumours of even bigger cities in China, but no-one trusts anything they say any more – too many lies in the past.

All three of the con-gloms are based in G. L. anyway, and after the Super-Urbanways were constructed it made distribution so much easier.  Almost everything is made here now too.  That brief experiment of making stuff in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa has failed; the transport costs were just too high.  Now most things are made locally; the con-gloms factories are constantly updated and it easier to build duplicate factories in each of the world’s Mega-cities than make stuff in just one country and ship it about.  The con-gloms, although technically in competition with each other, are all owned by the same faceless rich bastards anyway, so all that International competition we were so obsessed by is meaningless now.  Cred has no boundaries; there are even rumours that everything, the whole caboodle, is actually owned by one Jewish-American family now.  Who knows anything for sure?  The more information you think you have the less you can trust.  The news media are all part of the same con-glom and even BSkyBC is in Mickey’s grubby little paws now.  Disnews rules the screens, the whole world is beamed to us through the eyes of a cartoon mouse.

England with its dependent old Celtic failures is still formally a part of the rump EU, which stumbles on but is a shadow of its former self.  They still grow most of the real food we eat there but their populations are much reduced and like here it is only the cities that thrive.  Now that much of the East is too cold, and the Med a bleak and damp rain-soaked turbulent place, that glamourous idea of Europe is fading fast.  Only Greater Germany with its vast population and Mega-cities is thriving, as it always has.  That old Teutonic dream of conquering Europe has become a reality, the French and Italians still cling to their culture, but have no real power, they are just pretty regions of the all-powerful Reich.  Angela Merkel the third is the real power in Europe, but even here they still kowtow to the Yanks.  And who America serves no-one knows.

I spent a few weeks with this small band of rebs deep in the old neglected tube station, but to be honest it wasn’t at all what I had expected.  They seemed so isolated and growing their own (pretty bland I must admit) manna food were more or less independent.  I had hoped they might be a part of a wider group, but despite Jonathan’s words they were more than content to simply survive.  If there was any contact with other groups I never saw it.  They were a strange bunch, mostly oldies like Jonathon but a couple of youngsters still in their forties.  Sometimes Jonathon would do a surface recce and bring in, like me, the occasional new recruit.  I tried to talk to one or two of them, but they were mostly uncrammed, from the lowest strata level and running from the Polis too.  But the group had no real idea what to do with themselves as a community except grow their manna and monitor things that were happening on the surface.  To be honest I found them and their whole set-up quite boring, they would spend hours reminiscing about life before the hypercoms or the second great crash when most of the emergency measures came into force.  I suspect that they were just trying to live out the fantasies of their youth rather than change anything.  Sitting around and talking, glasses of hooch in their hands, seemed to be the chief occupation of these ‘rebs’.  Refugees, more like.  Escapees from a world that had no place for them, they huddled together and reminisced about a time that was long gone and never to return.

I realised that I was more inquisitive than that.  I knew deep down that I could never really change anything either. It was too far gone for that, but I wanted to find out exactly how this world worked.  So much of our society was kept a secret from us, we had no real idea who owned anything, who was really making the decisions, or how it all fitted together.  There was a song I heard once by an old hippy from a century ago, that talked about knowing a man who knew a man who knew someone who knew what was going on.  But we are worse off than that because no matter how many men you might know, none of them has the foggiest idea of what is going on.  And I wanted to know, if for no other reason than to understand.  I had always been questioning, that was part of what was behind my re-building this ancient old lap-top.  I need to know how things work.

Only, in our highly strata-ed world no-one needs to know how things work anymore.  No-one needs to know anything, and worst of all nobody seems to care.  Better not to ask, just spend your cred while you still have it, and hope for a peaceful euthenasing at the end.  I don’t see anyone asking the questions that should be asked, let alone getting the answers.  They just accept it all, like dumb sheep, accepting syn-sex, accepting manna-food, accepting synthetic lives if you ask me.  That is at the root of my dissatisfaction; the fact that no-one questions anything anymore.  They have learnt it is better to keep their mouths shut, their eyes closed and their ears blocked up rather than discover any scrap of meaning to their lives.  Three little monkeys indeed.

Tuesday 7th July

Peter Gabriel left Genesis in the early Seventies, not sure exactly when.  He was the lead singer and the chief lyricist; soon afterwards Steve Hackett, guitarist extraordinaire, also left; Phil Collins took over and took the band in a more commercial but equally brilliant direction.  Apparently the splits were all amicable, and they are all still friends.  Peter released four albums in quick succession and all were brilliant; it was as if a dam had burst and this gush of creativity was released.  Brilliant songs tumbled out, one after the other, and his clear and expressive voice was given free rein above the instrumentation.

I bought each record as they came out, and these first four were all called simply Peter Gabriel, but it was the third one which really blew me away.  It is truly sinister.  It starts with a sharp drum beat, a grating noise and Peter’s voice almost whispering the words of “Intruder” – ‘I know something about opening windows and doors.’ Every song is about losing control or some sort of mental aberration.  “Family Snapshot” is about assassination, presumably of Kennedy.  But the words are matched by the brilliant new band he had, sharp brutal drums and equally harsh guitars softened by deep bass and soft keyboards. The whole thing smacks of paranoia and fear and anger.  It was almost a riposte to the punks who had declared that bands like Genesis were dinosaurs.  And then the album also has the anti-war song “Games Without Frontiers” with it’s jaunty melody and the haunting “Biko” which brings the album to a wonderful close.

Peter was really flying, and though he would go on to even more fame and fortune I think that this is undoubtedly his masterpiece.  Even if it is sinister, you can lose yourself in all that panic and ‘almost screaming at times’ vocals, and it still blows me away after forty years – nothing has ever sounded anything like it.

Monday 6th July

For several years now we have had selected and selective leaks a few days before a budget.  The reason is to take the sting out of controversial measures or to soften us up ahead of the big day, or sometimes just as window dressing.  The Conservatives won the last election, or rather fear of the SNP lost it for Labour, but anyway they are now no longer in a Coalition and can now bring in unrestrained Tory policies unhindered by those wretched LibDems.

So far, two measure have been trailed.  One was fairly well advertised during the election and one was not.  The first is raising the inheritance threshold to one million pounds.  In a way this seems perfectly reasonable; many people are now living in homes (especially in London) that are worth more than that.  But it is hardly a fair tax-cut, as the vast majority of people will see no change – it is only the fairly well-off who will benefit.

The other measure is far more sinister.  He is going to announce that people living in Social Housing who earn more than £30,000 (or £40,000 in London) will now have to pay the market rent, rather than as he insists, receiving a subsidy.  Now this is a really contentious issue.  Many people qualified for Social Housing, either Council or Housing Association, many years ago when they were not earning such ‘high’ salaries.  For whatever reason they have succeeded and are now earning more.  And yes, they might well have to pay a higher rent in the private sector.  So what?  That is because rapacious landlords are forcing private rents higher and higher.  These people are now being punished for ‘getting on’ and bettering themselves.  Many tenants of Social Housing have lived there for years, built up friends and neighbours and incidentally may well have improved their properties.  Why should they be punished by having their rents increased, or forced to move.  And the private sector rents keep rising, especially in London, so their rent will presumably keep rising now too.  The policy is supposed to force these people into the private sector so that more deserving people can be housed, which sounds laudable, but any extra rent will go to the Chancellor and not to councils so that they could provide more housing.  Now, this will cost many council tenants around £70 extra a week.  This is absolutely punitive, and it will be ordinary people who will have to pay this, in effect tax, simply because their income has risen.  And strangely enough this policy was NOT mentioned during the election at all.

And I bet there will be other even nastier rabbits in the Chancellor’s hat.  We will now begin to see what a Tory Government really means, one tax cut for the rich and another tax hike for the poor.

Sunday 5th July

We have had just over a week of pretty high temperatures here, mid thirties at the very least.  The mornings start off quite cool, though it is probably in the mid twenties still.  At least there appears to be a whisper of a breeze.  By ten it is warm though, breaking thirty, especially if there is no cloud cover.  The worst (you think) is about three, when everything you touch is hot.  We tend to stay indoors with the curtains closed and a fan on.  Then the temperature just seems to get hotter and hotter.  In the evening you wander out to a bar or restaurant but it is still hot.  Then at last the sun goes down around ten and you think – at last it will cool down.  No such luck, it actually feels hotter.  And as you go to bed you just cannot believe how hot it is.  What has happened is that all day long the roads and buildings have absorbed the sun’s rays and then at night they release this heat, so it feels no cooler.

Now, years ago, especially when I worked, I dreaded hot days.  That insufferable tube journey and hardly any offices were air-conditioned.  But now I am far more laid back.  The café is cool, and I don’t rush around.  If customers have to wait a few minutes that is just hard luck.  We are closing around two every day, as there is hardly anyone in town at that hour.  Hoping to grab a swim later today, then we are attending a friend’s street party at seven.  Lots of food and drink again.  And in this heat !!!  hahaha.

I imagine I will enjoy it.  And now I never complain.  I hear it was raining again in England…

Saturday 4th July

Another busy day here in Eymet.  To Bergerac to drop off my wife (Birthday Party in UK) and pick up a hire car for my sister.  After lunch we drove to the beautiful but somewhat sterile town of Monpazier.  It is the most picturesque and perfect of the Bastides but is somehow too perfect, too picture-postcard pretty.  Then to Monbahus, a tiny village tucked beneath a hill where in 1848 a folly was built.  A round turret with a statue of the Madonna on it.  It is perched on top of a perfectly round hill and you walk round and can see all different views over the surrounding countryside.  Today also (we have been here a couple of times before) you could go in and walk up some wooden step to the top of the turret.

This evening music in le Pub was Terry, Gerry and Suzie.  We have seen them a few times but they were never as good as this.  They sing quite beautifully despite being well into their sixties and are a little bit country, a little but corny, but never cheesy.  You know all the songs and we were all (as usual) singing along.  They started at 8.30 and stopped for half an hour at 9.30 then played again until 12 midnight.  And the songs just kept getting better and better.  They really could rock too, especially when Kenny got up and led us all through Honky Tonk Women.  They even played some Abba and Judy Garland.  Quite a few of us got up and danced and everyone had to agree it really was a wonderful, another wonderful, night in Eymet.

Friday 3rd July

-[ So that was how he did it.  Clever, I must admit.  The metal cupboard must have had some sort of lead lining to block out completely his com-unit, as we couldn’t detect it at all.  Mind you, this was deep underground too, I am not sure we were specifically looking beneath the surface at all.  And we had completely overlooked the Aldwych branch, and a few other disused bits of the tube system too.  The whole system has been in a constant state of expansion and upgrade for over a century and whole corridors were blocked off when stations were renovated, some simply tiled over and forgotten about.  Many plans had been lost or misfiled and most of the network is so deep that those lost bits of tunnel are simply undetectable.  Of course when Janek’s little diary came to light we made a clean sweep of the entire system, but apart from the Aldwych cell we never found any other rebs living down there.

I doubt they were quite as benign as Janek seems to have believed them to have been.  They were pretty well-organised actually, growing their own version of manna down there.  Of course they could never get hold of any cred so couldn’t buy anything in any real shops.  However it has long been suspected that amongst the lowest ungraded strata a degree of barter takes place.  It seems that criminality of this type is hard-wired into these people, that no matter how well we treat them, how many rewards we deem them fit to receive they are never satisfied.  We are attempting through a programme of intensive edu-crammer and revision of cred levels to rectify this aberrant behaviour, but with only limited success so far.

I am afraid that at some point a more permanent solution may have to be considered.  However that is for others to decide.  As I said before we are incredibly busy, and imperfect as some parts of our system are, we have other fish to fry.  (Though I hasten to add that this particularly unhealthy method of preparing farmed fish-protein has long since been consigned to history – still, it is a handy aphorism.)

So Janek has finally jumped ship, to use another popular figure of speech.  This caused quite a commotion I can tell you.  It wasn’t as if he was unimportant; his gift for detecting deceivers was highly appreciated, though as the nature of his work was so secret we never felt it wise to raise him to too high a strata.  Maybe we should have done so, and taken him into our confidence to a degree, although wiser minds than mine had decided otherwise.  Given his recent actions possibly they were right.  It is quite probable that the same quirk in his brain that enabled him to detect those irregularities we prized so highly was also responsible for his reb tendencies and they would have manifested themselves at some point anyway.  Who is to say?  Predicting the future has always been a precarious business.  The most any of us can do is to extrapolate current trends and try to take note of all possibilities.

Janek spent a few weeks underground, but eventually he surfaced.  Although it was many months before we tracked him again.  We had never forgotten him though.  As you know we do not forget anything.  However as time wore on, the level of importance we had at first placed on his disappearance was overtaken by other events.  It is amazing thinking back, what a chaotic time it was.  The fighting in the Middle East was getting quite serious and there was a danger that at last the Arabs might actually destroy Isreal.  It was imperative that, despite our written constitution, we would have to interfere in another region’s wars.  Restoring the somewhat precarious balance of power was the justification we came up with, but in the end the Arabs pulled back from the brink.  No-one is quite sure why, possibly without their old adversary their own identity, their ‘raison d’etre’ if you will, would simply vanish.  It was almost as if hating the Jews was what defined their ‘Arabness’, just as for the Jews, being surrounded by hostile forces somehow reinforced their idea of being the ‘chosen’ people.  Ridiculous, but there you are. But it was a good thing the Arabs stopped short of actually crossing the Nile and invading Isreal proper, as the Jews were just about to move into a nuke phase, and no-one had used those monsters since Kamchatka in twenty-eight.

We were also discovering that the Ambivalence was actually anything but, and what were reported to the general public as stable temperatures were in fact fluctuating wildly.  So much so in fact that we began to doubt both our own recording equipment and our whole predictive climate programming.  On top of all this the perfectly balanced financial system was showing signs of failing, or at least of needing a complete revision.  Rogue elements in the Russian con-gloms were secretly making vast profits and trying to buy Brazil.  In short 2066 was not turning out to be a good year.

So it is hardly surprising that this little matter of ‘a disappearing mid-strata special powers operative’ was slipping down the scale of importance.  But I for one felt some personal responsibility; Janek had been one of my protogees.  Not that we had ever met, of course, but I was technically speaking his superior, in fact I was responsible for the whole anti-deceiver programme at BettaBrit con-glom, amongst my many other responsibilities.  So, rare for me, I felt a sense of responsibility when one of my own, admittedly far beneath me, had absconded.  I should add that after the usual review I was completely exonerated of any personal responsibility but even so no-one likes to think they have failed, no matter how small the degree.]-

Thursday 2nd July

Pink Floyd have been a pretty moribund money-making entity for some years yet they still call themselves a group.  Roger Waters, who wrote most of the great songs left about twenty years ago and Rick Wright, the keyboard player is dead.  That leaves two, Dave Gilmour  the guitarist and the drummer Nick Mason .  They very rarely turn up as guest musicians, occasionally for Roger despite the rancor of their parting, or at events like Live 8.  But of course, the first genius of the band was Syd Barrett, who was kicked out in 1968 because of his mental health problems and he died in 2006.

The last album proper was the Division Bell in 1994 and that was seven years since the one before that.  To be honest I thought the last two albums without Roger were pretty ordinary affairs, no spark of anger, just a resigned and accomplished sound of a band no longer pushing the boundaries.  Mind you Roger had probably pushed them far too hard.  So it was with only a modicum of interest that I read that there was a new Pink Floyd album coming out – Endless River.  It is almost all old music with only a few overdubs and is supposed to be a tribute to Rick who died in 2008.  Are you asleep yet, or still reading?  I wasn’t going to buy it, figuring I might pick it up cheap one day on e-bay, but my daughter Laura got it for me for my birthday and I have been listening to it lately.

It is almost entirely instrumental and is okay, but it hardly adds to their body of work.  It is more an afterthought, or the sort of stuff you find on re-issues, where 30 year old half-finished tracks are tacked on to a classic album.  It is quite peaceful and there is some great guitar work from Dave, but it doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t take you on any sort of journey – so the title is very apt.  It is an Endless River of quite nice, flowing but utterly meaningless music.  Still I expect it has sold millions of copies and added to their already overflowing coffers.  I just wish they could be bothered to actually decide to write something new and of today and record (with session men if needed) and show the world just how brilliant they could be if they tried.   But I am pretty sure it won’t happen.