Thursday 7th February

Well apart from some gay couples who really want to get married I suppose.  It seems to me that the only ones who really care are that hard core of right wing Conservatives who feel they are fighting a rear-guard action against an ever-encroaching modern world.  A world that will have no place for right-thinking people like them who are simply trying to maintain standards, to keep up the moral backbone of the country – the very same people who voted down the ordination of women in the recent Church of England fiasco.

But who are these people?  They mostly live in the country; most city dwellers are so used to seeing openly gay people that they have accepted them as completely normal.  I came from the country too and had I stayed rather than run away to London at 17 I too would probably have the same attitude.  They are daily drip-fed their dose of venom by the Daily Mail and rarely see black or gay people or indeed anyone other than themselves.

And the great thing is that they are becoming less and less relevant as the decades go by.  In America the failure of the Republicans to win the Presidency was accompanied by many articles exposing their diminishing appeal to the majority of people.  And I believe the same thing is happening here.  Opinion polls put acceptance of Gay Marriage at about 56%, roughly the same proportion as MPs who voted for it, but only 18% opposed. The public are actually far more tolerant than their politicians.  Tony Blair was terrified about bringing in a smoking in public ban because he feared the public’s reaction; in fact it was overwhelmingly in favour, even smokers got it.

One interesting fact, which may of course have no long-term relevance, is that during the 13 years of Labour being in power the Tories could rarely muster opinion poll figures above the mid-thirties, which was all they got in the end in 2010.  Three years after a most humiliating defeat and with a leader who blatantly lacks charisma Labour have been on over 40% for about eighteen months.  Even Cameron’s sabre-rattling over Europe hasn’t dented this lead.

Could it be that as time goes on the Tories are more and more out of tune with the mood of the country; which may well be why Cameron tried to modernize them again with gay marriage.  Unfortunately for him more Tory MPs voted against than for, so the perception is again that they are out of touch.

Wednesday 6th February

I would like to ask a few questions about the Universe, there may not be any answers or the answers may be out there and no-one has yet discovered them, or more likely, articulated them.  Maybe they just haven’t been publicized, kept as some sort of secret for the cognoscenti of astro-phycisists; who knows, but they are questions I ponder.

Firstly, if for the sake of argument we accept the current model of the origins of the Universe; you know Big bang and all that, then what I want to know is this.  If there was some huge explosion or expansion of the Universe from almost nothing to what it is today, and as far as I understand the Universe is still expanding, we must be able to trace that expansion.  We must be able to follow the trajectory of all these Constellations and with the aid of computers trace back to the starting point.  Well, where exactly is it?  And if there was an expansion from one point then logically there should be a fairly big bit of nothing where everything hurtled away from.  Is anyone examining that bit of space?  Why there?  What was special about that place that caused the Big Bang?  Maybe we should start looking there?

Secondly I have never seen a model of the known Universe anywhere.  I understand it must be vast; I once saw a model in a TV studio of our own Solar System with the Sun the size of a small ball and poor old Pluto way out in the car park.   But with the aid of computer graphics we should be able to see a model of the Universe.  All the pictures we see are of swirls of white dots which the scientists tell us are stars and solar systems, but are so far away they appear as blurs of white light.  I want to see them as spheres, even better if they are on wires representing their orbits, and even if it is miles between one star and another a physical 3D representation would help us all to begin to understand what it is all about.

And as to THAT question, WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?  Why are we here?  Why does the Universe exist?  Well, the answer was here all along.

You put your left leg in, you take your left leg out.  You put your left leg in and shake it all about. You do the Hokey-Cokey and you turn around. THAT’S WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT.

Tuesday 5th February

That was the headline in the editor’s opinion column of City AM today.  I always try to read this very biased city-boy’s paper, as it good to know just what the opposition is thinking.  This paper, or propaganda sheet, is so right wing that it constantly criticizes the Tories for not cutting hard or deep or fast enough.  They worship the market, and metaphorically rub their hands with glee as weak companies go to the wall and thousands lose their jobs.

The headline ‘The Rich are getting Poorer’ was based on the spurious evidence that the top one per cent of income tax payers will account for a slightly smaller percentage of the total tax paid in this financial year than in last, and down 2% from the last year that Labour were in power.  I have no way of checking the numbers but I do question the extrapolation.

Almost all of these individuals will be in some control of their actual income, or at least in a position to negotiate how and when they are paid.   Most will have their own companies and can choose to pay themselves a certain amount in pay, and a balancing amount in dividends which are treated differently for tax and NI purposes.  So when George Osborne proudly announced almost a year ago that he was cutting the top rate of income tax by 5p in the pound, he did it a year early.  The cut comes into effect on 6^th April of this year, until then any income over the taxable amount of £150,000 will still be taxed at 50p.

Anyone with any sense and the ability to set or defer some of their pay will have decided it makes much more sense to pay oneself after 6^th April than before it.  So, of course the tax taken from these individuals has fallen during this last year of the 50p rate.  A nice little present to top Tory supporters, at the same time that the major cuts in housing benefit for the poorest will be kicking in.

And guess what will be the real icing on the cake.  George Osborne will use the fact that less money was raised during this last year from the top rate of tax as further justification of his decision to reduce it.   A nod and a wink is as good as a carrot to a blind Tory.

Monday 4th February

Many people have bewailed the death of the High Street, the awful unanimity of chains like Boots and Tesco Metro or mobile phone shops or estate agents squeezing out local bakers butchers and greengrocers.  Or out of town behemoths, the stultifying boredom of sheds like B. & Q, Carpetright and Halfords, and the massive messy Sainsbury’s and Asda, where you have to wade through aisle after aisle of homewares and bargain books to get to buy a pint of milk and a loaf of bread and then queue up for half an hour to pay, or face the nightmare of the self-service tills where ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ starts to drive you mad – ‘no there isn’t an unexpected item, it was the one I just scanned and which you have added to my bill already.’

So how do we rescue the old high street we all remember and love.  I think that local councils have to play their part, free parking, low business rates for independents, even putting pressure on landlords who would rather see empty boarded up shops than lower their sky-high rents.  Also a local community prepared to actually shop is essential, and if that means encouraging some high street winners like M. & S. or Wilkinson’s to modernize their shops then that is also part of solution too.

We have been to both Clacton and Frinton this weekend and both high streets are thriving; Clacton is admittedly a bit more downmarket, but it does have a Boots, a Wilkinson and a WH Smith and a small M. & S. where surprisingly with less choice you actually find something to buy. There are a few charity shops but no empty boarded up shops at all.  Frinton even has a real butcher and a fishmonger and two bakers, and a few independent quirky shops too.  So, there is demand out there, and despite their being a plethora of large supermarkets just out of town, it seems that people, at least in this corner of Essex like the ritual of walking down the high street and visiting all the shops and buying a loaf here, some sausages there and a second hand book all from different shops.

The High Street has to adapt and change to peoples needs, but it doesn’t have to die….at least not for a few years yet.

Sunday 3rd February

This morning (yesterday for you) I was at Walton.  It had rained in the night and as I looked out of the window in the morning it seemed to be brightening up a bit.  About eight I got the dogs leads on and out we ventured to the beach.  The sky was quite bright really and there wasn’t a touch of breeze in the air.  It is only a short walk to the beach, and yet by the time we had descended the twenty or so sea-washed concrete steps the mood had changed.  There was a dark cloud approaching rapidly from the North.  The sun comes out directly over the sea here and for a while it was startlingly beautiful.  The contrast between the bright shining sun out to the East and this dark menacing brooding mass of almost black cloud was amazing.  The pier was silhouetted black against the bright light and all the time this cloud of darkness was growing and spreading over us.

There were tendrils of cloud reaching to the sea and within minutes they were reaching down to us too.  A few drops of rain and then sleet and then big fluffy flakes of snow.  Within seconds it was like being inside a blizzard, no sign of the sun anywhere now at all.  We plodded on regardless, heads to the now quite blustery breeze, the dogs coats being streamlined in the snow.   We almost made it to the pier before I decided enough was enough.  I was getting colder and I could feel the snow through my shoes and my coat was getting soaked.  Luckily my faithful waterproof hat from the market in Duras was keeping my head dry, but my glasses were steaming up from my own breath.

We headed for home.  We had been out for only fifteen minutes and it felt as if night-time had descended.  Within minutes we were back in the warm, and as I took off my wet coat and shoes and looked out I saw that the snow had stopped, and was that a hint, a touch of blue sky over to the west.  Within five minutes the sun was out again and that monster of a black snow-cloud had moved right out to sea; and no-one waking then would ever have known that it had been snowing really heavily on the beach only a few minutes ago.

Saturday 2nd February Happiness, we all know what it means, don’t we.  And we can all recall times when we were happy, maybe a long time ago, possibly far more recently, incredible even now too. But I find that ‘Happiness’ or the state of being ‘Happy’ is the hardest to actually define.

I am mostly in a state of benign contentment, which may be bordering on complacency at times.  I certainly wouldn’t want to lose everything which contributes to my contentment and at times ‘Happiness’; my partner, my two (or depends which way you look at it, three) homes, the dogs, a reasonable but not great salary, a dependable job which while no longer exciting keeps the brain cells ticking over, and my faculties and my health.

I can look back and remember many occasions when I was happy, but is this with the rosy glow of hindsight, and was I actually happy at the time?  I look forward with ‘happy’ anticipation to events in the near future where I am sure I will be happy, I am just not sure if I will appreciate and enjoy it at the time.  Maybe ‘Happiness’ is one of those fleeting emotions which as soon as we realise it and become conscious of it we stop actually being ‘happy’.

Part of my problem is thinking.  I think all the time, or at least I think I think all the time, and am an absolute newshound, so I am constantly brought down to earth by what is happening in the world, and it is mostly bad.  Maybe ‘Happiness’ is achieved by blanking the rest of reality from one’s mind and just enjoying the moment.  Which does happen sometimes.   We all seek escape from reality, mine in books and music and to a certain extent in my own writing.  And then I am happy, but as soon as I become aware of being ‘happy’ I am also aware that that ‘happiness’ is an elusive beast.  And ‘Happiness’, like the words ‘Love’ and ‘Nice’ are really sloppy and used far too often.

But I am happy with this state of benign contentment, with occasional dips into morose moaning, because then when that bad mood fades, you realise that you are ‘happy’ again.

Friday 1st February

How many of your reading this will have any idea where the title for this piece comes from?  My pink half of the drainpipe – anyone?  Well it was actually a song title from the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band, who specialized in comedy or at least humourous songs.  Not at all popular nowadays and scarcely revered by anyone, but actually humour in music has a long tradition from Monty Python to Zappa.  But this is not a piece about humour – maybe another day.

This is about the sentiment expressed in the song.  My pink half of the drainpipe is about ownership and possession and dividing lines, in this case about a house and a disputed drainpipe.  And how parochial we all are about property. Disputes over fences and overhanging trees abound.  The neighbours putting out their bins so that they encroach even by a millimeter on our property sends us into stratospheric heights of righteous indignation (the strongest human emotion of all).

And as a nation we are just the same.  Parochial to an absurd degree.  Maybe because we have the sea as our natural boundary rather than a line on a map has something to do with it; we share no land borders with others unless you count Ireland, (though most of us do not really consider Northern Ireland as a part of us).

Maybe also home ownership and the concept that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ has something to do with it too, in most other countries home ownership is a far lower percentage.  This too is rapidly changing here as more and more young couples are forced to rent as house prices and deposits are still out of reach for many.

But what is home ownership really?  Very few of us live in the same house forever, so in a way you are only ever a temporary resident.  And owning a house is not like owning a CD or a book which can be disposed of easily, you always hand your house over to someone else.  In a way you are nothing more than a caretaker of the property, hopefully improving it, until someone else takes ‘ownership’ and becomes the new caretaker.   So why do we care so much about who owns the drainpipe and whether they have painted over our half?

Thursday 31st January

As a young teenager I read Agatha Christie books with relish, then one day I discovered a book by Georges Simenon in a second hand shop.  I had seen Maigret on the TV, and hadn’t been grabbed by it, but I didn’t realise that Maigret was books too.  I started reading them.  Voraciously.  I was drawn to the seedy side of Paris, the street names, the characters flaws and the whole Gallic smell of the books.  I had probably been reading Agatha Christie for that lost world of the thirties and forties, of country houses and rich people travelling on luxury trains.  I don’t think I ever really cared who killed who, or the processes of deduction employed by Poirot or Miss Marple.

Although reading widely over the years I have recently been seduced again by these series of crime novels.  Ian Rankin’s superb Rebus books got me hooked for a time, and again it was the slow deterioration of Rebus as a person that I was fascinated by not the crimes in themselves.  Over one book a clever author can establish great characters, but there is always a slight feeling of loss when you close the book for the last time.  With these crime novels you return time and time again to the familiarity of people you almost love.

I was bought the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a few years ago and loved it, and in quick succession read the other two.  This was a new take on the crime book, with a very Scandinavian twist.  The landscapes are bleak and cold, the living is hard, the crimes are unspeakable and the detectives are unconventional and yet quite ordinary too.  The best I have found so far is Wallander.  And I am drawn inexorably back to him.  I, struggling writer that I am, still cannot find what is so good about the writing.  He uses a lot of very short sentences, and is constantly drawing us back to how Wallander is feeling, which is usually miserable.

Well, whatever magic he possesses Henning Mankell, the author has found a secret lode of gold.  I love reading his Wallander books, immersing myself in a strange culture; the street and town names, the windswept flat landscape, the small town people, the quite ordinariness of it all, the routine of police work, the sense of frustration, the sadness of Wallander’s life.  And I am inexorably drawn back to him, time and time again.

Wednesday 30th January

Sometimes I carry an umbrella but more often than not do not bother, it is all too easy to lose them.  So yesterday, Monday night, I was umbrella-less and although having watched the weather the night before and was quite prepared for rain, I had no idea quite how wet it would be.

I have been soaked on a few occasions, mostly when I was younger.  In London you don’t really expect it to rain that badly, and there are tubes and buses everywhere, so surely you don’t need to get that wet.

The office I work in on a Monday is about half-way between Green Park and Bond Street stations, and as Green Park is one stop closer on the Jubilee Line to my eventual destination I never think about using Bond Street.  I started walking towards Piccadilly and the rain, light at first got heavier and heavier and I was quite wet when I reached the Underground.   As all too usual these days the carriage was packed and though I scanned the faces as we approached stations no-one got up.  I had almost forgotten the rain by the time I emerged above ground.  I had to pop into my doctor’s to pick up a referral letter, so beat my way across a wind and rain-swept piazza to the bus stop.  Almost the entire working population of Canary Wharf seemed to be waiting there and I tried in vain to shelter from the downpour.  The first two buses were full and after ten minutes I eventually ended up, again standing, on a D7.  Straight into the doctors and out into the rain again and another wait for a bus home.

I only had to walk a few hundred yards but the rain by this time was coming down horizontally, and an umbrella would have been useless anyway.

I was totally soaked and had nothing to lose by taking the dogs, restless for a pee, for their walk by the river.  I came back and my coat was dripping, my trousers below the knees completely sodden.  Changed and refreshed I sat with a cup of tea and marvelled at the power of the rain, and its ability to reduce the strongest of us to a damp squib.  Thank goodness I had had my trusty waterproof hat to at least offer some protection or I would have been a real drowned rat in all senses of the word.

Tuesday 29th January

Even the best of us, the most generous, the most kind-hearted – are selfish at heart.  Not that that is such a terrible crime, for those who live for others do receive thanks, even if only in the form of a smile, and that is what they live for, that moment when their efforts are recognized.  To feel good they have to feel good about themselves.  And that is true of most of us I think.  Along with our individual selfishness, our using people for our own ends – we still want to feel good about ourselves.

And I contend that we are all selfish in our own ways.  I plan my day so as to carve out little moments of selfishness; enjoying my almond croissant and latte while writing this blog; copying my daily dose of music from CD onto my laptop and i-player so that like the woman in the nursery rhyme – I shall music wherever I go.  A little selfishness which maybe hurts no-one else, but selfishness all the same.

We all have our own agenda, where our needs are satisfied, and if we live with others we are prepared to subsume our own selfishness for a while to satisfy someone else’s, and in that way we too feel good about ourselves.  Being a martyr is also a form of selfishness.

And all of this petty selfishness is okay.  It is only when we demand that others bow to our selfishness that things get out of hand.  And there are people out there like that.  Avoid them at all costs because no amount of martyrdom is enough for them.  Their selfishness is of a totally different degree and your giving in to them just feeds their megalomania.  I cannot think that they ever feel good about themselves, but maybe they do.  As they look around them at all these idiots scurrying around obeying their orders and doing their bidding.  Maybe mixed with the scorn is a feeling of great satisfaction.  Who knows?  For me, I have found my level of selfishness and do not want any more, because of course then I might not feel so good about myself, and no amount of selfishness is worth losing that.