I just accidentally read an article in the Daily Mirror about George Osborne failing to pull off a funny at the GQ awards last night. I was sitting in a cafe and it happened to be open next to me (that’s my excuse).
My first question was “how could he be awarded Politician of the Year?”
And then “why do I care about who gets the approval of a magazine?”
And then “why am I looking at the Daily Mirror?”
Politicians, glossy mags, tabloid newspapers – a whole ecosystem of irrelevance.
Do you understand what I’m doing at the moment? I mean, beyond the material thing that I’ve given up my flat and am on the road living and working with people as required, being useful and moving on.
No, neither do I.
Except it seems to have something to do with living differently, with experiencing other people’s lives and hearing their perspective on mine. It seems that this is something important for me to do, it’s not a choice I came to lightly, it took me a long time sitting in a flat in Fulham wondering why things didn’t work well and hankering for a way to be doing more, having a variety of experiences and meet with more diverse groups of people. It’s one of those things that I can’t say I chose to do, it feels much more like it chose me.
I woke up this morning with paranoia, the idea that everyone hates me and thinks I’m just being a dick, spongeing off the goodwill of my friends and occasionally writing pompous self-indulgent stuff on the internet. I know that the cure for this is writing about it, talking about it, getting it out of my head, because that’s the place it comes from. It isn’t based in any real evidence – I am making it up. In fact, since I poked my head above the parapet and wrote something yesterday I’ve had several very friendly and loving messages enquiring into my well-being. If anyone does think that stuff, they’re not letting me know.
What is different (I hesitate to say, “not working”) about this current journey is that I’m being challenged to involve others in my life. If the people I visit don’t feel involved then it does become a bit like spongeing, it all feels one way, but I’m still not sure how to do it. I’ve always found this involvement, openness, personal connection, difficult. I’ve found it hard enough to identify in the first place – I thought I was doing it, I think I’m doing what’s required, and yet from time to time I find myself having a conversation that shows me that the other person doesn’t feel involved, they feel shut out and cut off. I don’t really know what to do about this except talk it around some more and see what other people think. It feels like it’s in my blind spot. What does it look like? How would I know that I was involving you more in my life? If I’m always telling you what I’m up to, what I’m thinking, what I want to do, how does that differ from self-obsession?
I wrote this sitting in an upstairs room in a pub in Bude, Cornwall. I sat and reflected that I was watching a little part of the world slowly die. I was at the Bude Jazz Festival which annually celebrates the music as it was being born just about a hundred years ago in and around New Orleans. It’s not the music that’s dying. That will carry on. It is immortalised in thousands of recordings already and even though there may only now be a relatively small number of musicians interested in keeping it going we’ve learned that all sorts of genres are much more hardy than their original proponents.
No, what’s dying here in front of me is a generation of British people, the oldest of whom may just remember hearing Mr Chamberlain on the wireless telling the world that we were now at war with Germany. The youngest of them didn’t see anything of the war except it’s aftermath, growing up with bomb sites, cities being rebuilt, rationing and parents who were tired, fed up but stoically carrying on despite living through a horribly violent patch of our history. They are the lucky ones. They have had perhaps the best of the welfare state and social progress and reform that happened here in the second half of the twentieth century. They sit in rows hearing renditions of the songs and tunes that they danced to as teenagers. They’re alive, kept going by the National Health Service, most of them with small but bearable pensions. Many of them are here as venerable couples, they’ve been together now for forty years (or more). They’ve all amassed stuff, stuff and more stuff. I doubt that many of them have an empty attic or garage. They may have let their cars go as they became less able to keep driving but the majority will have made their way here with room for others on the back seat. They’re all likely to have inherited something from their parents, property, or cash or just belongings but they’re less likely to leave anything behind for the next generation except funeral expenses. If they hve wills they’ve probaly passed things on to their grandchildren rather than their own kids.
They remember a gentler time. Do they long for it? Do they wish things could just go back the way that they were? What do they really think? About anything. They look like Daily Mail readers to me, but that probably says more about my prejudices than about them. They won’t be here much longer. Or perhaps they will.
Postscript 1: When I got up from scribbling in my notebook, the people sitting behind me said “You were writing a lot, what are you writing?” Gulp. I said “I’m writing a lot about uncivilisation at the moment about how society is de-evolving” They didn’t ask any more questions. No I don’t understand where the words came from either.
Postscript 2: What if they’ve done their job, that generation? They were part of a pattern that created the free thinking and doing of the sixties. They helped create an antidote to capitalism and now they’re dying off, taking the remnants of the old system with them. Some of them kept a counter-culture alive that had been around since the industrial revolution and made it a little more mainstream, a little easier for the rest of us to do something different. I guess “thank you” is what I’m trying to say 🙂
I’m really pleased that one of the few bits of “proper” work I’m doing in the next couple of weeks is to MC the Community Day for my friends at Learning Pool next Wednesday (14th). I caught the tail end of a similar event last year and wished I’d been there for longer. I’m very lucky to get to dip into things like this and help people have conversations that they might not otherwise have – the Poolies really understand how to engage well with their customers and stakeholders in my experience.
There’s lots going on through the day, I love the idea of “hero” stories and I’m pleased to see people are being given a choice of seminars and support clinic sessions in the afternoon. I’m also sure there’ll be some serious fun to be had afterwards 🙂
And I hear that the lovely Dave Briggs and Paul Clarke will be there – hope there’s some time for some backstage nattering…
If it’s your kind of thing too sign up for a place here
I wrote this while attending Uncivilisation a couple of weeks ago. It became clear to me that uncivilisation is an ongoing process, rather than a state of being. It’s a process of unlearning, removing complications and reversing out of evolutionary dead-ends. It’s about unticking boxes. It’s a process that I’ve been going through for about 10 years now and it’s entwined with other changes that I’ve chosen to make.
Once upon a time, I had a wife, a house, a job with a pension. The idea was that i would live with my wife who would meet my emotional needs, we would live together in a house that met my physical need for safety and shelter and it would all be paid for with money from my job for now and in the future by my pension. This is “normal”, “civilised” life. It’s what most people do. It works for lots of people. It worked for me for some time, but then it began to unravel.
I didn’t have to think about what I was doing at the time – it was what everyone else around me was doing, it was what I’d always thought was the best thing to do. And I believed that if I kept doing these things and acquiring more stuff and maintaining this structure, then it would all make me happy. If I wasn’t actually happy at the moment then perhaps I needed a better wife or a better home with more stuff or a better job with more money now and in the future.
On the whole I was not happy. I had periods or moments of happiness derived from getting something that I wanted, but it never lasted for long. I had two beautiful, mostly healthy, intelligent children. Being with them gave me haappiness when I got out of the way and focused on giving them something, feeding them, taking them out, playing with them, watching them learn. I thought they brought me pain when they didn’t do what I wanted and when their needs encroached on my time and resources.
Now, I don’t have a wife, I have no home and I have no job. I guess I still have my pension, but I am no longer contributing to the fund in the way that was expected. When I reach “retirement age” it will not fully support my financial needs unless they are significantly fewer and lower than they have been for many years.
I am consistently more happy than I have ever been. I’m experiencing a new form of freedom that comes from moving around. I’m just starting a relationship with a woman that requires far more emotional honesty and intimacy than I’ve been capable of before. I’m working a lot but not necessarily in ways that look like work as I’ve previously defined it. I’ve become illegible to some people.
When I meet people I worked with about 10 years ago, their reaction (once they recognise me) is “What happened? What the fuck happened to you?”
This is a very interesting question. What the fuck *did* happen to me?
More clues: In 2001 I weighed about 20 stone (280 lbs) and was drinking alcohol most days. My health was not good. I felt ill every weekend, I had chronic headaches and I knew that my knees and back were suffering from being overworked. I’m now 14 stone and haven’t had a drink since early 2002.
It’s also interesting to me that I’m much more comfortable focusing on the externals here, much less on what has been going on internally for me, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Although I do believe that the stuff on the inside was what made it all happen. I think it might be an interesting task to try to write about that a bit more.
I’m in Bude, Cornwall and perhaps unlike much of the rest of the UK, it’s very much still summer here. When I poked my head out of the tent this morning, all I could see was mist and the sort of cloud that quickly gets burned off to reveal a glorious sun-shiney day. Hurrah! Pass the factor 57!
I’ve had a tremendous time down here for the annual New Orleans Jazz Festival. I had a jam with some friendly folk down by the canal this morning and when I’ve posted this, I’ll be busking in the High St – it’s all go and my ukulele fingers are a bit numb 🙂
So.
Next week!
I’m coming back to London tomorrow. I’ll be staying in Epsom with the kids tomorrow night but then I’ll be looking for somewhere to stay & something to do from Sunday night onwards. At the moment, I have nothing else in the book until 14th September when I’m MC-ing at Learning Pool’s Community Day. So get scheming folks and find me something useful to do for 10 days till then (earning some cash wouldn’t go amiss).
Primary need at the moment is somewhere to sleep in London on Sunday night (I’ve some stuff to do in town on Monday) but thereafter the sky (or perhaps the borders of the UK) are the limit! Think about it, come up with something that’ll knock my socks off!
Thank you 🙂
I overheard the following side of a conversation on a train journey recently. I’ve replaced the names with initials, though it’s highly unlikely that even with names intact the people in this situation would be directly recognisable.
Nonetheless, I can recognise the situation from my own experience and I imagine that anyone who’s spent anytime in a large-ish bureacracy will recognise it too.
These are the little conversations that we all have but which we treat as if they were unique to us. We don’t really talk about the fact that we working in bureaucracy gets us into these sorts of tangles. When I hear Thoreau’s quote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation“, this is the sort of experience I imagine.
I find it heartbreakingly ordinary.
“…as he was saying (he explained to me a little bit more) it’s.. for me… I went back to him because at half twelve it was like “Right this is what needs to go to C and this is a bit of background, yeah?” And so anyway, next thing I know, on Friday, when I’ve got to my mum’s, I logged on just to see what the situation was. And M, right, had already gone in, and listen, and e-mailed to C to say “Don’t worry C, I’ll pick this up with her” right? wait for this… so C, right (you can imagine my distress) went back and said “Thank you M, it’s good to see *somebody* taking a lead” (pause) I’m not joking… I was absolutely devastated. So then I think, right, “What do I do? I’ve done all this kind of…” So I went back on the back of that to K “It kind of” I didn’t say it pissed me off, “I feel really gutted” or whatever it was, that C might think that I haven’t spent time on this when actually I have (he didn’t respond to that) but, on the back of M’s note saying “Don’t worry C, I’ll pick this up with her”, err… he’s come back and said “oh you know, just be prepared, y’know, make sure you come across as being a leader and all of this, y’know in some ways quite patronising because in inverted commas he’s put because basically he’s saying “We need to watch her because she has much too, much too influence with C” So, you know when you just think, you’re in this bloody, this warzone or whatever you wanna call it and so and y’ so then, and so that had kicked off, and then D had said to me, y’know, she was ha… do a PDP to C “This is to show what I actually had done” Nobody else has had to do that! So I spent… so then I thought, like all of us, I’d kind of started my PDP but when I thought, “God, if this is going to go to C, I’d better do some work on it so I was like, on um, one of the nights she was um, when she needed it by, I was working till 2 o’clock in the morning trying to bloody, to do my PDP and I was completely, you know when you’re just devastated with this whole, what the fuck is happening, d’you know what I mean? Excuse my French. You know, you know and so I was just like, against this backdrop, you know not sleeping and everything, and then D was supposed to see E and he just didn’t turn up. Apparently, you know, she went looking for him and he’d gone to pick his wife up, which isn’t the problem, but he didn’t say to her, “oh by the way…”, you know when you just feel a little bit left in the, left in the whatever? And so, I don’t know, I think “Can things get much worse?” I was talking to D, she says, oh she’s had a conversation with E and, you know, on the, in the vein of what we’ve just said, you know, C expects me to step up and mmm… blah blah blah and I’m like “That’s fine E but you need to then tell me, y’know, how we’re going to cover all these other things that you know I’ve been kind of doin’ and you know,” and then. D, y’know, every, kind of everybody else, a-and she’s going on holiday. There’s complete devastation because it’s like he’s having to beg steal and borrow for people to cover for him, d’you know what I mean? and y’know it’s just not a good position to be in, y’know when, when we’re working so, y’know like, cut-throat, d’you know what I mean?”
“So. Anyway.”
“No! I’m glad you’ll be coming back… um… yeah, yeah go on. Oh right, OK then. OK honey, that’s alright, I understand, that’s alright, it’s alright I understand. Yeah. Ah don’t worry, things kind of, things, she obviously, it’s not, it wasn’t her choice to die was it? Without being sort of, y’know…. Yeah. Ah bless her. Ah bless her. No, don’t worry, don’t… y’know the thing is, that… as long as.. y’know… D seems to have been really OK with me this week, you know when you really need people to kind of be, y’know, and um… I… just… for me, it’s really all about, I understand that people know me, y’know like, it’s give and take and I just need E to be able to back me up with just y’know, if I kind of, ask… ask whatever of people, I need to, kinda, have his back up that we can kind of, underst… y’know that that’s understood and um… yeah…. yeah…. yeh…. yeah….yeah…yeah…no, ‘cos the thing is as well, I know it’s gonna take time, ‘cos what’s gone over to D is winging it’s way to me which is OK, but y’know he, it’s how does he, how much does he wanna be… y’know how D was full on wasn’t she with this item stuff, he was a bit, like, optional and I’m like worried, cos I’m like thinking “That’s fine” it’s not it’s like I can’t deal with it, because, y’know because it’s got, it’s not, I mean like S’s now muscling in as if she’s saying “Well she didn’t involve these IT people” that I’ve already involved that like G that we know is a cardboard cut-out. What does G add? D’y’know what I mean? And, and so I have to really manage where I really wanna say, y’know, “Stop tryin’ ta” she’s trying to support… y’know I don’t know I’m a bit, y’know, suspicious… well politics! I know! I know! and so that’s why, my brain is just zazzled and I k now it’s like a broken record and I’m just determined that I’m, I’m just trying to really hang in there, because honestly on Monday, I was absolutely, I was an absolute wreck. And, and cos, I, and I think D had come to see me and said I haven’t been able to speak to E, I’d had a really horrible kind of weekend trying to catch up on stuff and you think actually, you know, I don’t, I don’t want this y’know to be the norm, I don’t want to have to spend every night doing this, basically all weekend, I, I absolutely know that as part of my level I’m going to have to do “as required” but surely that can’t be as required for the last year and a half, that’s been what I’ve doing, I can’t sustain it any more and then to have, y’know, you even query my commitment or, or, d’y’know what I mean? Um… so, I don’t know.. so I think, I just think, “It can’t… please! it can’t get any worse” So I’m really trying to stay positive and think “Now…y’know I can, it can only…. no, I’m just saying, I just got to believe it can’t get any worse and I’ve gotta kind of now try to get, almost try to get, go back up a little bit, you know what I mean? cos I can’t physic… I can’t, I don’t want to be a victim. Y’know? I don’t want to be like… uh, I know… I know… I know…Oh bless you… Yeah, and d’you know what? Don’t ever be… you know I’m telling you because this is what I keep trying to tell myself, you know, at the end of the day, y’know, however daunting things are, at the end of the day, as long as, y’know, we can only do what we can do and as long as we’re pulling together and I’m trying to… and we can influence E as much as we can then that’s, that’s all we can do and cover our, cover ours.. cos y’know, cos, we just have to keep reminding each other… yeah…yeah yeah yeah, we are honey but listen you… yeah, bless you, but you listen, don’t you think about work now though and you do what you need to do Monday and I really… look forward to seeing you Tuesday. Oh don’t worry, don’t worry, oh bless you, no don’t you worry. OK hon, hopefully, I’ll speak to you, I’ll see you and speak to you Tuesday…OK then, yeah, take care… ah yeah, thank you, yeah bye. bye. bye.”
Our public conversations are of one kind mostly. We only know how to debate. The peoplle who hold the levers of power are those who are well-skilled in presenting a case, presenting an incontrovertable argument. They were the kids who succeeded in the debating society who learned to argue for or against something regardless of content or personal, moral positions. Many politicians come from the legal profession, the professionalisation of arguing. We elect mass debaters. This doesn’t serve us. It keeps us going round in circles, the people with truly innovative and creative ideas get sick of trying to connect with people who only want to pick holes in their “case”. When I bring you a solution, you won’t even look at it outside the paradigm of me making an argument for it – except in very rare cases.
When the riots started, news coverage and the public conversation devolved into either “this is a result of the policies pursued by (this) government” or else “this is sheer criminality, pure and simple”. No shades of grey were permissible all ambiguity was to be driven out and removed from view so that it could be a simple question “Who’s side are you on, boy? Who’s side are you on?”
In my view, conversation is the answer. We need to de-evolve a little, become a little less efficient in order to be a lot more effective. We need to install this in our personal interactions with children and in their educational settings. We need to add it to our political systems. We need to learn to recognise when we’re slipping into the old patterns and purposely practice non-confrontational non-argumentative forms of dialogue, not because we’re afraid of confrontation or argument or the emotions they bring up (although doubtless we often are) but because they don’t help us, any of us, (well perhaps only a very small minority of us) to get what we want for ourselves, our friends, our families, our world.
All this has been said before.
Bonus Link: Ray Nichols shared this with me on Facebook the other day, we were talking about it when I was kicking around New Orleans, just takes me a while to remember to blog some stuff…
It’s interesting to me how many times the same questions come up as I hobo my way around. I thought I’d do a series of posts answering some of them.
“So, when are you coming back?”
This one reveals an assumption about what I’m doing, that it’s a thing, it’s a project, it had a beginning and will have an end and then it will be over. And that the timescale is predetermined. Also that when I finish, I will return to London and perhaps pick up where I left off. It’s also tied in with an assumption that I’m avoiding London at other times. When I am in London, and I see people they say “Oh, you’re back!” I don’t see it like that, I always see myself as passing through.
I can’t say when I’m coming back, because I don’t know whether I am “coming back”. I don’t know what comes next, I don’t know how long I’ll be living like this. I will stop when I’m ready to do something else.
Some people find these answers alarming, some find them reassuring.
I’ve got a cold, or something after a weekend in the woods at the Dark Mountain Festival. This is highly unusual for me but I’m sure it’ll be gone after a day sleeping it off…
I need some help sorting out this week please.
I’m going to be in London all day on Tuesday. Then I’m heading to Bude for the annual Jazz Festival on Saturday. So I need something to do/somewhere to be from Tuesday night to Saturday morning inclusive, preferably in somewhere that makes sense between London & Cornwall.
I’ve been having quite a bit of slack time of late (and I’ve a week at the seaside next week) so some work would come in handy, but if you’ve no work, just a kipping place and a desire to have me around, that would be lovely too.
Let me know through the usual channels 🙂
Perfect Path 