Wednesday 13^th December

(This is NOT 2066 – reread the title of this piece please)

Ah, what a year it was and what an election.  The botched referendum campaign of four years ago had really torn the Tory party apart.  It was such a close run thing too with less than 30,000 votes eventually securing Cameron a feeble victory, but as Scotland and Wales voted overwhelmingly to stay in there was actually a small majority in England for leaving.  Teresa May resigned as Home Secretary and Cameron clung on but eventually left a year later, a broken man….every political career ends in defeat.

As you know it was Boris who, flying in on an offer of a new referendum in five years time, secured the Leadership of the Tory Party, but half the Cabinet resigned and wouldn’t serve under him and chaos ensued, the Tory Party almost splitting.  The Tories had earlier passed the Fixed Term Parliament Act so we had to wait until 2020 for an election.  By now the SNP had declared their own (technically illegal) second independence referendum and won it.  They had effectively declared UDI and Boris was helpless to stop it.  Labour had, as you know split in 2017 with over half their M.P.s forming a new REFORM party of the centre left but most of these lost their seats three years later.  The 2020 election was chaos, with the Tories winning just under 280 of the now reduced 600 seats, but so divided that they could barely agree on anything.  Old Labour (still under Jeremy Corbyn) won nearly 200 seats, the SNP won all 45 Scottish seats and a rejuvenated Lib-Dem party got nearly 30 seats.  A lot of Independent M.P.s were elected and the Tories formed a Minority Government which has slowly begun to undo many of the more contentious issues passed in the previous 10 years.  The Deficit is still nearly 100 billion a year and nobody even pretends it can ever be reduced completely.

We are in effect now running an unofficial Coalition whose membership shifts and changes as each new Measure comes before Parliament; a Government of Disunity if ever there was one.  And, as per Boris’s promise we are all set for yet another referendum in two years time which, according to the Opinion Polls, looks increasingly like Brexit.  And five years ago we all thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse….

Tuesday 12^th December

Whatever I was going to write about has been totally eclipsed (like the star he was) by the terrible news of the death of David Bowie.  I haven’t felt this way since John Lennon was shot.  David Bowie became the soundtrack to my life, especially during the turbulent Seventies when David amazed us all with his constant ch..ch..changes.  I had loved Space Oddity in 1969 and was surprised he didn’t have a follow-up single.  Then the Beatles broke up and it seemed as if an era was over.  But David re-emerged with Hunky Dory and the brilliant Ziggy Stardust.  And in many ways he took over the mantle of The Beatles themselves; he soaked up musical influences like a sponge, absorbed them into his own music and gave them back to us, enhanced and original and brilliant.  After three albums as Ziggy, David surprised us all by decamping to America and recording the soulful Young Americans and the more abrasive Station to Station (incidentally Fame and Across the Universe were recorded with John Lennon).  Then we were just as equally stunned by the Berlin Trilogy recorded with Brian Eno and full of weird instrumental tracks which I grew to love almost above all his records.  Then came a more familiar sound with Scary Monsters, a slight pause before the incredible collaboration with Nile Rodgers that was Let’s Dance.

At this point he was untouchable but the next few records were a bit direction-less.  He formed Tin Machine and again I wasn’t sure but grew to like them.  Of late he has embraced Dance Music, Drum and Bass and even made a Sci-Fi Murder Mystery Album.  He gave up touring a few years ago after a heart scare but re-emerged to everyone’s surprise a year ago with a new album The Next Day.

Of course it is all so obvious now; David knew he was dying and wanted to leave us with some of his best work.  His latest album Blackstar was recorded late last year and amazingly was only released on Friday 8^th January, his 69^th Birthday.  I have been watching it on you-tube, especially the songs Lazarus and Blackstar.  He has made videos for these two which are amazing.  In fact Lazarus begins with the lines “Look up here, I’m in Heaven.”  Just as almost everything which Bowie touched – it is brilliant, what other star could have ever conceived his own epitaph.

Monday 11^th December

I have never liked X-Factor, or Britain’s Got Talent, or in fact any TV talent shows, and there have been rather a lot of them over the years.  But, like X-Factor or not, it is sometimes hard to completely avoid it, and the few times I have seen the show has only confirmed my distaste for it.  It is nothing more than karaoke and the worst of it is that I don’t even know the songs the hopefuls are karaokeing to, but even worse than the songs are the nasty comments from the judges, especially Simon Cowell who seems to delight in ridiculing the contestants (although I suspect that this is a large part of the shows appeal for many people).

So a few years ago when the BBC announced that they were putting on a new talent show called ‘The Voice’ I was not filled with enthusiasm.  But I did catch one of the early shows and ‘surprise surprise’ I loved it.  Well, let’s qualify that, I really enjoyed the blind auditions where the judges can hear but not see the singers and press a button to turn their chair round; but quickly got bored as the show progressed and the judges “mentored” their teams and eventually a winner was chosen.  And the best thing about the show was the judges themselves; Will-i-am, Kylie, Ricky Wilson and of course the imperial Tom Jones.  They were always positive in their comments and kind and encouraging even when none of them turned round.  So I was devastated a couple of months ago when the news emerged that Tom had been dropped from the show; for me he was the star and I thought that was it, another stupid decision and the Beeb had blown it again.

But, a bit bored, I switched on this Saturday night to see how the replacements Paloma Faith and Boy George would fare.  And it was actually a success.  Paloma, who I barely knew, was intense and giggly at the same time and interesting to say the least, but Boy George was brilliant and witty and came out with some great lines, his best being “I’m not really a coach, more a camper van”   So – sorry to see Tom out of the show but George is really a great replacement.

Sunday 10^th December

Tony Blair has come in for a lot of criticism of late, not least from me; though that is mostly because of Iraq – but even here his defence was that it was really pragmatism rather than conviction that motivated him.  He argued that it was better for the U.K. to support America rather than to leave them isolated.  I am not sure on that one.  The U.K. was vilified in Europe and hated in the Middle East.  It is also impossible to prove but in my view highly probable that our joining the U.S.A. helped to create much of the terrorism of today and despite Blair’s arguments made us less safe.

And that judgment call between pragmatism, that is what works, and conviction, what you believe in – is a very difficult one.  For quite a few years we had a mix of conviction and pragmatism, exemplified by Harold Wilson (in retrospect one of our best Prime Ministers) whose instincts were left wing but learnt that sometimes being pragmatic was a better choice.  Thatcher was almost exclusively a conviction politician who believed in Private over Public every time.  She certainly changed Britain but many of her policies are coming home to roost, such as selling off our Utilities and Council Houses (49% of the population lived in council houses in 1979 and now only 8% do – most who do not own are private renters and at the mercy of the market).

Blair was mainly a pragmatist and in many ways continued the Tory policies, leavened maybe by Gordon Brown’s massive injection of cash into the NHS and the creation of the Minimum Wage and Family Tax Credits.

Cameron is an instinctive Tory, but he is prepared to be pragmatic when he needs to, pedalling back occasionally from disastrous ideas.  But his main fault I would say is that he is lazy; he allows his Ministers too much freedom to lead us down the conviction road.  Academies must be better than State-run schools – no question.  People must be forced to work even if they are sick – it stands to reason.  And he allows George Osborne to do almost what he wants in the name of Deficit Reduction, when it is really the reduction of the State and replacing it with Private firms that is his agenda.

And Labour are now led by Jeremy Corbyn, another conviction Politician.  He needs a bit of pragmatism to soften his convictions or he will never gain power.  It is at the end of the day a fine judgment call; a Politician needs to have convictions; ideas that can enthuse the public but must also have the ability to realise how sometimes those convictions will simply not work.  Someone once said that ‘Politics is the Art of the Possible’ and despite your convictions it is sometimes better to be pragmatic.

Saturday 9^th December

Bill Clinton appropriated that phrase and won an election with it possibly.  And now, even though the news is about murdered actresses or bad weather it is still the economy, stupid.  You may not have noticed but 2016 has seen major turbulence already, shares crashing in China and to a lesser degree over here, the price of oil slipping yet again, the pound also falling against the dollar.  But as usual what we hear is so much more about presentation rather than fact.

The Chancellor stood up only just over a month ago with a beaming face and declared that things were actually looking rosier than he thought and there was actually no need to cut Family Tax Credits after all (if you remember he was defeated over this in the house of Lords).  But actually things are really not rosy at all.  Unless there is a major turn-around from now until April he will have actually increased the deficit this year as he is running about 6 billion pounds behind last year already.  In fact far from paying down the debt, he has added almost one trillion to our National Debt in the last six years.  He came in promising to get rid of the deficit in five years (and suckering the Lib-Dems in with this promise too) but has gradually let that timetable slip until 2020.  Incidentally Labour in 2010 had said exactly that, that they would take ten years to wipe out the deficit but were laughed out of court by Osborne who said that was economic madness.   Anyway, just like other lies that it was Labour overspending that created the Financial Crash of 2008 the truth seems to matter little and the news media go along with his version of events.

But his recent optimism will surely be changed when he presents his budget in March.  We can expect even more cuts in spending and maybe more tax cuts for the already wealthy.  Because you see it is all political decisions.  The deficit is caused because spending (though reducing) still exceeds income, and Osborne has been happy to cut both spending and taxes.  And his real problem is that despite the economy growing a bit tax revenues are actually falling, and this after VAT went up in 2010 too.  And the country is deeper in debt than ever.  Personal debt (which many observers saw as the underlying cause of the 2008 crash) is also higher than before the crash as wages have fallen in real terms too.  We would have been in a much better situation by increasing taxes slightly six years ago and holding spending steady.  And interest rates are sure to start going up soon…

Expect more trouble ahead.

Friday 8^th December

I nearly wrote “The Journey Home”, but home is really France these days, though somehow I will always think of England as home too.  Up early for the market, though as we were well into our fifth day of perpetual rain (no, this is France not England) it was a pretty dismal market today (Thursday), only about half the stalls and these few were huddled under the arches out of the rain and wind.  A reasonable though not by any means really busy day in the Café and we finished as usual on a Thursday at 1.  We had to pick someone else up for the trip to Bergerac and he was returning after a house-hunting sortie.  In the queue at the check-in desk I bumped into one of our Eymet friends, Monica – small world. The usual parlaver at Security, but I seem to have a well-rehearsed routine and put all my loose change, credit cards and keys in a zip-up pocket of my fleece  and then don’t lose anything in the half-dozen or so boxes they distribute all your possessions into.

I was allocated a middle seat although I am usually lucky enough to get a window or aisle and felt a bit cramped on the flight back; no leg or elbow room.  I seem to go into some sort of dream state on the flight itself, drifting between boredom where the lines on my kindle don’t register and I keep re-reading them, and an exhausted and fitful few seconds of sleep.  At last the short flight was over and the long walk to passport control.  In front of me at least four people got rejected at the e-passport face recognition machines.  Incredible that Facebook can recognize me in a crowd and yet these state of the art machines cannot seem to match a passport photo and the real thing, however for once I sailed through.  I got my usual Costa coffee and muffin and down to the trains.  Just as I as buying my ticket I was distracted by Monica waving at me and calling my name, she was on the same train as me.  But I forgot to pick up my coffee and muffin….only on the train did I notice and it was just leaving, too late to retrieve them.  Oh well, I could do with missing the calories I suppose.

Soon in London and to the Restaurant to pick up paperwork then back to Liverpool Street and the long and tedious trek to Walton; if I am lucky I’ll be in time for fish and chips, which is one of the few things I miss about England.  At least the journey is over once more.

Thursday 7th January

Diary Entry – 20660607

“I woke up slowly, my head aching.  I was disoriented and was hardly aware of anything except a bright white light high up on the ceiling.  It was an old-fashioned light bulb, once so common before wireless led-lights, hanging from a plastic wire looped over a low-lying beam, and it was harsh and glaring and only gave out a small circle of light.  Everything further than a metre or so was just a thick blurry gloom.  I tried to lift my head but it was restrained, some sort of leather collar was tying me down.  What the fuck?  I thought.  I was face down and my face was tilted up and my chin seemed to be resting on a wooden board.  My hands were tied behind my back and my feet were in some sort of straps too, and I was stark naked.  It was quite chilly in the room, unlike the rest of the house, so I guessed I must have been in the cellar.

“Hello Janek, so nice of you to join us.”  I heard Peter Skinner’s quaky little voice speaking from the gloom.  I couldn’t really make him out, but there were several darker shapes and I knew he wasn’t alone. “Now are you going to be a good boy or do we have to administer some punishment?”

‘Punishment?’  I thought.  For fuck’s sake, they had me tied to a fucking piece of wood in a cellar or somewhere and were talking about punishment.  What was wrong with these fucking lunatics?

“I didn’t hear an answer Janek?  Just nod if you don’t want to be punished.  Now wouldn’t you rather just be a good boy?”

Almost involuntarily I nodded, and straightaway my head was pulled back by my hair and as my mouth dropped open a cock was thrust into my mouth, and I was being fucked in the mouth.  Hard.  I was choking and it was really hurting the back of my throat.  “Suck it, you piece of shit.” someone shouted, and before I could think my arse was being probed by a finger and then, as I felt the weight of someone on top of me, something worse.   The pain was searing, ripping through me, I thought I would split open.  I nearly passed out, as the shock of what was happening and the physical pain co-incided.  On and on they kept going at me, one after the other, sweating, breathing heavily and grunting as they came, spilling their filthy seed over my face, up my arse and in my mouth.  My abusers were all wearing masks, grotesque animal masks so I couldn’t see the faces, though I knew and would never forget the face of Peter Skinner, chief architect of my degradation.

I had no idea how long it went on for, and when the last of them had finished with me I lay there exhausted, sore and unable to even cry.  I now knew the meaning of abuse, of rape, of being taken against my will.  I had only ever known consensual sex; the very idea of rape and brutality was alien to me.  I couldn’t understand what they, the perpetrators got out of it, but now I knew.  It was the total control and raw power over another human being; the utter humiliation, the degradation, the reducing them to a piece of meat.  A piece of shit in fact, as one of them had continually called me.  I was less than a person, or even flesh, willing or unwilling.  I was far beneath that.  I was shit.  It was if they actually despised me for being the object of their perversity.  I was the one to blame for being so weak as to be their victim.  And so they hurt me, the more pain I was suffering the more worthless I became, the more despicable, the less of a human being.  But maybe here, in this circle of the truly privileged, the very idea of humanity, what it is to be a human being was simply beyond them.

I don’t even know if they were homosexual; it wasn’t as if it was even important what sex I was or which hole they were stuffing, it was my suffering they were enjoying, the look of fear and hopelessness in my eyes.  They fed on my fear, on my pain, on my suffering.  There was no consideration of me as a person at all; I was simply there to be used.  And this is what excited them, this was what they got off on; the fact that I was at their mercy, tied down, violated, vulnerable, hurt and scared.  These were the emotions that got them going.  Like hunters pursuing a wild animal, that mad adrenalin rush as the pack closed in for the kill.  And they kept jabbing at the beast until it, I, whimpered no more but lay there defeated and truly undeniably abused.

Then I felt the minor jab as a needle went into my buttock and I passed out again.

I woke up in Skinner’s small guest bedroom, as if nothing at all had happened.  The room was just the same, tidy, prettily decorated, the essence of normality.  I reached under the bed where I had hidden my laptop and recorded this.  Who knows now who will ever read this, this pathetic attempt at rationalising, at recording my life.  I knew one thing and one thing only.  I must escape.  At all costs I must escape.  It wasn’t the pain; after the Polis beating I could take the pain.  It was the humiliation, the dehumanising of me I couldn’t take.  What had it all been for, my journal, my escape, my travels; if not to try to discover what it was to be a person.  The way they had treated me, I was no longer a person, I was less than that.  I was shit.  I needed to become a person again.  I could not let them take me like that ever again.  I had to escape.

Wednesday 6th January

Now, long before playlists became the “thing”, long before i-players and mobile phones, I have had a playlist.  Indeed possibly from the first time I started buying records I have had a playlist of sorts.  But my system became established around the time I started taping all my vinyl albums onto cassettes; this was around ’76 or so.  And at the time I was constantly selling my old (taped) vinyl and buying new records with the proceeds and then taping those too, so how to get round to listen to everything?

Hence – the system; and now you must concentrate.  The first thing to remember is that it involves two revolving cycles, imagine two cog wheels of different sizes knitting together so that alternate teeth meet and at that point the album which is represented by one of the alternate teeth is played.  One cog wheel is my current collection, which is always alphabetical by Artists (and then by release date) and used to be all on cassette but is now CDs.  The other cogwheel is a smaller one of only eight new or recently purchased albums, and this is constantly being renewed as each new album is listened to nine times.  And the only real decision I have to make is which of the many new records to add to the playlist.  So, if the collection is represented by letters and the new stuff by numbers the sequence would be something like this…A 1 B 2 C 3 D 4 E 5 F 6 G 7 H 8 I 9(a new ‘new’ one) J 1 (now listened to 9 times and to be filed alphabetically and becomes part of the collection) K 2 L 3 M 4 N 5 O 6 P 7 Q 8 R 9 S 10 (another new one) T 2 (now filed) U 3 V 4 W 5 X 6 Y 7 Z 8 A 9….etc.  Well, if I have lost you now give up and read something else because it doesn’t stop here.

While I am here in France I listen to the collection bit on my laptop (burned from the CDs) but when at Walton the collection is old cassettes (again filed alphabetically) and throwing out any unplayable (remarkably few) and ones which are now on CD (remarkably many).  When I finish with the cassette collection I will revert to my CD single vault (don’t even go there, there are thousands) listening to three at a time.  Now as I am constantly adding (every ninth {or eighteenth to be accurate} play) to the collection it takes longer every cycle to go through my CDs from A to Z, but hey, as Magnus used to say, “I have started now so I will finish….”

Of course even me, super-brain, cannot possibly remember all of this and I have a spreadsheet (several in the past, as even these get filled up) of the current playlist.  Some of the more astute of you may be wondering exactly why I do this.  Well, it is a way of forcing me to really listen a few times to new stuff (which could otherwise be rejected after one or two listens) and also to constantly (if slowly) to re-listen to all my old favourites.  Occasionally, and far less often then you might think, I actually relegate one of the collection as un-listenable anymore and it is consigned to a box in the garage.  I feel that I am locked into my playlist and imagine that I will continue this system until a particularly grim reaper knocks at my door, but I have allowed myself one variation – on my flights back to UK I set the i-player to shuffle all songs which makes a change I suppose……If music be the food of love, play on….

Tuesday 5th January

The real story is often quite different than the one we are told about.  It is a bit like a doctor describing quite accurately the symptoms but not telling you the root cause of your illness, let alone hazarding a guess as to the possibility of you ever recovering.  And we have been here before; for decades after the Second World War we read of wars in Korea, in Vietnam and the evil of Cuba, when the real battle was of two seemingly opposing ideologies – Capitalism and Communism.  Or maybe in even simpler terms two Super-Powers who couldn’t even imagine the possibility of not achieving World Domination.  And then there was one…Russia imploded, or at least Communism in Russia collapsed, and America was suddenly the only Super-Power.  But even America soon discovered that being militarily and economically triumphant still would not guarantee that you would always win.  On paper both Afghanistan and Iraq must have looked shoo-ins.  I believe it was Prussian General von Clausewitz who said that “War is the continuation of Political Will by other means”.  He also said that an attacker should have three times the army of their opponent to be certain of victory.  America (with a smidgeon of help from us) had far more than that and yet has failed in both wars, just as they will fail in Syria/Iraq against ISIS.

And ISIS isn’t even the real story.  It is maybe just the most extreme exponent of a major battle of ideas in Islam.  Or maybe the real story is not the division between Shia and Sunni Muslims just as the Cold War was not really about Communism and Capitalism but about Russia and America.  The troubles in the Middle East, which extends from Libya right through to Yemen and possibly beyond is really a battle for Supremacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  And neither of them is particularly pleasant; both are regimes – one of a decadent “Royalty” and the other of a clerical hegemony which is secretive and almost impenetrable (though I am sure that the ordinary people in both those countries do not want War and aggression but simply want to lead peaceful lives with their families).  And maybe the real reason we are fighting ISIS is that Saudi Arabia is supposedly our ally and Iran is supposed to be the enemy.  And this struggle has been going on for decades too.  America once backed Saddam Hussein and encouraged Iraq (mostly Shia) to conduct a war against Iran (mostly Sunni).  That war lasted eight years and ended in a stalemate before Saddam became another enemy of the West.

But the real story may still be emerging, a struggle for Democracy in both of those countries may eventually end the regional discord.  Though look what happened in Egypt when they tried Democracy….

Monday 4th January

I can still remember learning to paint at infant’s school, teacher had Kilner jars full of powdered poster paints, bright blue and red and yellow, and she would mix them up with water and pour into glasses and let us paint.  And ever since with a paintbrush in my hand I am happy.  I used to paint quite a bit with both oils and Humbrol enamels, and keep promising myself that when I retire (hahaha) I will start painting again.  But actually I am almost as happy painting walls of ceilings or doors.  There is something magical about applying paint with a brush (I really dislike using a roller); the simple repetition of vertical strokes, trying to get an even finish and watching the wall of colour emerge.  And I like to listen to music at the same time too.  Somehow the concentration needed to paint evenly and the fact that it is repetitious allows your mind to wander a bit, and I find the music keeps me focused on the job in hand.

Maybe I have been wasting my time all these years working in offices, adding numbers up, creating spreadsheets, learning Accounts.  I should have been a painter all along.  And with the new house I am certainly going to be a happy man, as the paintbrush will rarely be out of my hands….hahaha