All the stuff that makes no difference

Friday: I’m driving along, and for no particular reason my mind wanders onto the subject of the actress, Judy Davies. I follow the thought and find myself exploring her filmography all the way back to the movie of EM Forster’s novel “A passage to India.” I ponder this for a while. Good movie that. Edward Fox was in it too, and Alec Guinness. I’ve not read the novel, but I’m wondering if I should look it up.

My mind moves on, and I’m thinking of something else entirely when I pop the radio on and there’s a play on Radio 4: “A passage to India.”

This kind of low level, useless precognition is actually quite common and it can be easily explained away as coincidence. Admittedly, I’m less likely to do that than someone more scientistically inclined, but neither am I as shocked by it as I once was. At one time I would have been pondering it more deeply and most likely blogging today about the mysteries of time, space and being, but of late I recognise it makes no difference if there is or isn’t anything more to this sort of thing, and it’s best either dismissed or simply accepted as a mysterious part of life, but one we’ll never understand. I just wish it could be more helpful.

Anyway, Saturday, and I’ve picked up an ear worm: Aha’s “Take on Me” running on a continuous loop in my head – just the first couple of lines – and annoying as Hell. Then I call into a shop where they have muzak playing over the tannoy. I’ve not been there five minutes when they start playing “Take on me”. There we go again: that strange, useless precognition thing.

Then, on the way home this happens:

Okay, so I manage to avoid killing the cyclist, but not, I should add, because of any sixth sense. I’m just lucky, and actually a little warning would have been helpful, sparing me at least a near heart attack. Those bikes piled around the bend with breathtaking audacity, also, I presume, with a reckless disregard for third party insurance. The wobbling tail-end Charlie was unprepared for the bend and thus a victim for any vehicle coming the other way, in this case me.

If we’d collided, he would have gone off my bonnet, and either over or into the wall on my left. Over the wall is a thirty foot drop into a shallow river. He might have survived the wall but not the river.

He apologised in passing, called me “bud” and wobbled on – I’ve been called much worse by burly men in Lycra tights. Anyway, I drove home, then had a brew and a very long sit down. And I was thinking about how suddenly our lives can change for the worse, and how we never see it coming. We get word a close relative has been diagnosed with cancer, maybe we get the diagnosis ourselves. Something happens on the road – a Kamikaze cyclist skitters off your bonnet, kills himself and ruins your life – because whether it’s your fault or not, that’s a thing you’ll carry at the back of your mind for the rest of your life. You bumble along from day to day, thinking your life is humdrum, maybe even a little boring and then: bang.

On the other hand, the changes that bring about an improvement in our lives – barring a lottery win – tend to work more slowly. We sacrifice immediate pleasure for the thought of reaping larger benefits in the future. We invest in a pension so we can retire in comfort. We study so we can get a better job, afford a nicer house, buy our kids nice things. We bring our kids up as well as we can, then take pleasure in seeing them engage with the world. It all takes time, and it’s worth it.

But the good things in life tend to be incremental, introducing themselves so slowly we hardly notice. We become so entirely accepting we can find ourselves contemptuous, that even though life is actually, rather good, we barely notice, especially if we’re hooked on always chasing the next thing. Maybe we even grumble when those little things go wrong.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is it’s always a good idea to take stock now and then, because there’s something odd about life in that it never lets you see the bad things coming, only sometimes the stuff that makes no difference to anything.

 

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Just pipping my horn

Febrile: of or relating to fever, indicative of a malaise. Maybe that’s why the Jaguar pulled out of the side road in front of me this morning?

I’m not driving my own car at the moment – sold mine, but that’s another story. My current ride, a six year old Corsa has a leisurely way of doing most things, including an emergency stop. In fact it didn’t really stop. It just slowed sufficiently to allow the Jag get away with it. Pip my horn? Didn’t have time to think about it really.

But then it was the ubiquitous white van-man, weaving about at great speed on the motorway, undertaking, overtaking, ducking and diving across all three lanes, narrowly avoiding clipping my nearside front as he made a last second lurch for the off-slip – I think they call this manoeuvre ‘cutting up’. It caused another alarmed stamp on the brakes and a rise in heart-rate and blood pressure. But pip my horn? Didn’t really have time to think about it.

Then there was the BMW that pulled into my path as I was leaving the motorway, and with a Juggernaut full square in the view mirror, barely inches behind. I only half tested the brakes this time, sufficient to allow the BMW to get away in a cloud of tyre-smoke and stupidity, but not quite enough to have the Juggernaut ram me – just back off in a startled squeal of brakes and an alarming little wobble. He was as surprised as I was (a) at the sudden out of the blue manoeuvre of the BMW, and (b) that he’d managed not to ram me.

Pip my horn? Well, you know,…

And then, finally, there was the industrial estate, a sensible twenty mile an hour limit, and not difficult to manage, but a frequently vexing experience with aggressive vehicles glued to my bumper wanting to go much faster. This morning it was a brightly illuminated “Boss Class” Audi. As I slowed and filtered right to make my final turn of the morning, he vanished with an angry growl, a blared horn and a jabbed finger. “You slow coached, goody two shoes, penis,” he was saying, “take that: PAAARP!”.

It took a cup of tea and a good ten minutes to get my arms back in my sleeves after all of that, I’ll tell you. My commute is definitely getting harder.

There are a number of factors at play here. For one it’s the steady, year on year increase in the volume of traffic, which in turn increases the percentage of aggressive, or simply reckless personalities on the roads. Then there’s my age – one cannot react as quickly to a sudden stimulus at 57 as one did at 17, and too much erratic stimuli can leave one reeling when, at 17, it would be dealt with and dismissed merely as superfluous noise.

But there’s also something in the air, something fragile in the Zeitgeist and I feel endangered by it, glad to arrive safely in the mornings, now, and get home at night without mishap. And if it’s true we create our own reality, the universe is providing the white vans and the Jags and the BMW’s and the Audis to confirm my own sense of the febrile nature of things.

I therefore need to take steps,…

I’m not without my own faults of course. Slow, yes. A little overcautious,… and prone to the occasional muddle, at times> Yes, yes, all true, but also I’m prone to a certain cold eyed vindictiveness. Oh yes, really!

Since much of my commute is spent virtually motionless, sitting in heavy traffic, I have often had the opportunity to observe evidence persuasive of the maxim that money makes you mean. With the traffic control systems so regularly overloaded and spilling into commuter chaos, it falls to individuals to organise themselves and cooperate in allowing other drivers to filter in ahead of them, or no one would get anywhere. And I’ve noticed it’s older, cheaper cars, that are most likely to allow another to go ahead of them – the more expensive the car, the less likely. No, seriously! You can test this phenomenon for yourself the next time you’re creeping nose to tail with traffic filtering into the stream, from where it would otherwise not have right of way.

But I’m as guilty as anyone else here – at least in a topsey-turvey sense. If it’s an expensive car stuck for someone to let them in, I’ve noticed I’m less inclined to be courteous. I make an assumption regarding the kind of person driving that kind of vehicle. I assume they’re arrogant, over-brimming with a sense of their own entitlement, and in the main I feel justified in nurturing such prejudice on the basis such vehicles are also more likely to be reckless and aggressive when driving against me at speed.

So I suppose my personal challenge, and a possible way to defuse the Zeitgeist’s current febrile malaise, is, the next time I’m locked in traffic, to smile, wave, and allow that pumped up gas guzzling monster of a vehicle to filter in ahead of me. Indeed, let us all drive with greater courtesy to our fellow motorists, regardless of the car they drive. Let us defy the Zeitgeist, and be kinder to one another, generally. And even if you’re cut up, provided you survive to tell the tale, resist the urge to pip your horn in retaliation. After all if you’ve time to gather your senses and pip your horn, it wasn’t really that close anyway. Was it?

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Road rage

I had a near miss, this morning. I was coming up to a mini-roundabout, another vehicle approaching from the opposite direction, a big car, ostentatious, with its ultra-bright HID “F*$k You” headlights on, even though it was broad daylight. I thought he was going straight ahead, because I didn’t see the blinking amber of his indicator light. So it was a surprise when he cut across my bows, so to speak, and cut across them really fast. I was lucky, had time to react, stood the car on its nose. He had time to react as well, with an offensive finger.

It’s possible he indicated. I don’t know. I’m finding with these really bright headlights, they fuzz out my vision and I can’t see anything else, especially not a relatively puny blinking indicator lamp tucked in close to the epicentre of that laser like HID blast. And that’s in daylight. Meet one of these monsters at night on an unlit twisty road and you’re heading for the ditch. Or maybe I’m just getting too old to be on the road, too long staring at computer screens, eyesight too wasted now to discern the important details any more.

Nah, the optician says I’m fine.

Anyway, those long promised robot cars are coming, and they’ll avoid awkward situations like that. The well heeled finger jabber with the HID headlamps and I will be sitting back, flicking on our phones, while the cars are doing all the driving and the talking to one another. Each will know what other is doing, adjust speed so they manoeuvre smoothly around one another without so much as a dab on the brakes. Maybe those big cars for rich folks will even have superior algorithms capable of gaming the traffic flow to their advantage. I mean, otherwise what’s the point of paying a lot of money for a car if it isn’t going to steal a march on those less well off?

This morning was just a commute in my old Ford Focus, an A to B, and fair enough, they can be a bit of a drag. A robot car would save me time, allowing me to eat my porridge while the computer did the driving, and presumably took all the insults on my behalf. But is that really what we want?

This evening was different, I managed to avoid near misses – true the roads were quieter when I backed the Mazda, my other car, out of the garage. The Mazda is not a commuter mule – I keep her strictly for fun. It was about half an hour before sunset and the temperature had dropped to nine degrees. The vinyl top was too cold to risk folding back, so I made do with the other pleasures afforded by this little car, and I just went for a drive, windows down, feeling the air, tasting it, smelling it.

She’s laid up most of the working week especially over winter, so I like to get her out and give her some exercise of an evening whenever I can. Already I’m anthropomorphising. Cars don’t need exercise like humans do, but it’s as well to keep the battery topped up and the oil lining the cylinder walls, and the belts all moving. Still, I like to think of it as exercise, and she seems to enjoy it that way too.

I have this scenic little circuit that I do. It was a beautiful evening, clear sky, deep blue above, fading to azure at the horizon. And it’s a wide horizon out here in the West of Lancashire, but you’ll miss it if all you’re doing is flicking on your phone, and that would be a shame.

In this car you don’t need to be going fast to feel the thrill of movement – yes, movement! You can take the corners without any degree of body roll, thread your way through a series of left and right-handers, flicking up and down the box as the note of the engine tells you. And at some point, she’ll get into her stride, and you in hers, and you’ll press the gas and she’ll respond with a rush. This is no longer driving. This is dancing on air. No A to B, more a silver fox in an old MX5, dancing in the last light of an early Spring evening.

It won’t be the same with a robot. They’ll never be able to dance for a start. They’re dead things. Nothing human about them at all. Nothing human either in just wanting to get from A to B, yet that’s mostly what we do these days. And when the whole world is robotised and we’re all lobotomised, glued to our phones, flicking mindlessly at all that rubbish, and those times we drove simply for the pleasure of it are but a dim and distant memory,…

What then?

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And a cute little dog called Snowy

It’s been a curiously unsettling week. Twice my commute home was disrupted by serious accidents and motorway closures, turning a thirty five minute journey into an hour and a half marathon, where the normal free flow of things was choked off at every turn, blocked, impeded, restricted, stymied. On the last of these occasions, having finally made it home, exhausted, I left the car on the driveway and set off across the village on foot to get my hair cut, but the ginnel I normally use was blocked, the path being dug up, the way impeded, restricted,… the alternative, a long detour.

I returned home and did not move from the house again until I had slept long and deep.

And in my sleep I dreamed of road closures, of blockage, of the wreckage of trains and vehicles piled high into monuments of destruction. Thus in its own way the universe reflects my inner feelings, feelings of being stymied at every turn, at my lack of progress in terms of psychological and emotional development, my confusion – one path after another blocked, the wreckage of false hope and dreams piled high

The ego will make way at all costs, even if it ends up going only in circles.

And yes I’ve begun dreaming again, unbidden, and  vividly. I used to remember my dreams most nights and write them down in the mornings. It was a Jungian thing, interesting in the early days of my initiation into the way of the soul, but I was too much in earnest in my search for meaning, and those dreams, so lovingly recorded, remain to this day enigmatically opaque. Then for a long time I have not recalled any dreams at all – except suddenly this week I am dreaming vast landscapes, and vivid encounters with archetypal characters. Nor am I making any effort to recall them, yet they remain burned into memory, their feeling tones equally vivid and not a little disturbing.

Then there are the coincidences, trivial things yet astonishing in their persistence and their infuriating meaninglessness: I saw a dog on Instagram, a cute little fox terrier, and though I have never desired to keep a dog in my life, I was suddenly taken by the desire to keep one like that, and I would call him Snowy. Then within the hour I was watching a snippet from a banal TV game show, and the question was: what was the name of Tin Tin’s dog? Answer of course: Snowy.

Such things are only a coincidence if they happen once, but when they cluster they speak to me of other things, of something shifting, a curtain opening, the normal laws of time and space blurring at the edges. I am turning in of a night now expecting to dream next a mystical revelation. Except, I know from past experience this is not how it works. Stability will return, the old ways will open up again, the old grooves. I am left thinking I miss my turn each time, that I fail to grasp the symbolic significance of a motorway closure or even of a cute little dog called Snowy.

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An afternoon in A+E

I wonder how much we take our National Health Service for granted? Recently, I fell foul of a minor ear infection, so,.. phone call to my GP’s surgery, appointment that same evening, bottle of drops on prescription, infection gone in a few days. No work-days lost to feeling ill and with an ear the size of a balloon, like last time when I left it too late. Success? Well yes, absolutely, minor treatable ailments are dealt with efficiently and mostly for free, but things are far from rosy with the NHS.

I had another brush with it over the Easter weekend, this time not so positive, accompanying someone suffering from sudden and severe stomach pains to the A+E department. There being no GP cover over the weekend, I tried the national 111 service for advice, only to find it permanently engaged – not what you want when someone is writhing in agony beside you. I tried several times, concluded the service was useless. So I tried NHS online instead which took me through a question and answer of the symptoms and it said we should go to A+E, so off we went.

At A+E I discovered an overpressed and hopelessly outnumbered staff, holding at bay a waiting room of walking wounded – the limping, the swollen, the bleeding, the moaning, the coughing and the wheezing,… you can imagine.

Two hours of abdominal agony later, while buttock shuffling on bum numbing hard plastic chairs, an apologetic nurse explained the average waiting time was now six hours. This was not the wait for treatment, not the wait for my companion to be told he had a burst appendix, or reassured it was only trapped wind. This was the wait for assessment, for prioritisation, for triage. The wait for actual treatment could be another six hours. It was by then four pm and the system had collapsed. My companion’s face fell open in disbelief. How could he wait that long and in such pain? Well, we had no choice.

Upon hearing this news half the room cleared, suggesting many who use A+E departments don’t really need to be there, but that’s another story. My companion insisted he was in need of medical attention, and I didn’t blame him, so we held on. By now a softer seat had been vacated, allowing a more comfortable slump into semi-comatose agony. In the opposite corner sat a man who had been hit in the face with a three by two, literally quite a bruiser, beside him another with his arm in a make-shift sling after breaking up a separate bout of fisticuffs. They swapped stories with ribald humour. In the hallway stood a convict handcuffed to a Prison Officer.

Time passed. No names were called. I wondered if there’d been a terrible accident somewhere, a mass shooting, a massive motorway pile-up to bring on such a crisis. But it was just a regular Easter Saturday in A+E with no staff. A possible twelve hour wait? I wondered what state I would be in by six am tomorrow morning, let alone my ailing companion. Would his wait for an examination be shortened if he collapsed unconscious, rolled onto the floor? Dare I suggest it? Would anyone even notice?

He did not collapse. We waited another hour, then my companion began to feel a little better, well enough at least to walk slowly to the reception desk. There he withdrew his name and we went home, either to recover more comfortably in bed, he said, or die there in peace. I’m glad to report he was pretty much recovered by morning.

Most of us, fortunately, do not spend much time in hospitals and are therefore shielded from the current state of the A+E crisis. It’s plain they are cash starved, undermanned and struggling, being readied for privatisation. Given the overarching plutocratic trend in western politics, this seems inevitable, perhaps even overdue. Perhaps an Easter Saturday in A+E paints an exaggerated picture, but I am left with the indelible impression it may already be too late to do anything about it.

My children will leave university with £40,000 of debt, virtue of another crisis, and they will inherit a national healthcare system in such turmoil as to be useless to the point that even the evil of privatisation, of healthcare for profit, will seem the only viable solution to its ills. Our country is actually very wealthy, about 7.2 trillion according to the office for national statistics, and growing so it puzzles me the constant harking on about how much we have to cut pubic funding in order to save our skins, and how the vast majority of us are a lot worse off than we were. The middle classes are disappearing with the outsourcing of their traditional jobs, and the working class is losing its safety net while the moneyed minority pocket the nation’s wealth and drive about in motor cars worth more than my retirement pot. It gives one pause.

Driving to work this morning there was a car spun off the motorway, landing on its roof, an ordinary family saloon, glass everywhere. A little distance away was a bent Mercedes of the swanky company executive variety. A haze of blue lights surrounded them in a pouring rain that was streaked with snow – a bad morning for an accident. An ambulance made its way through traffic, doing its best against an ebbing tide. Pray God I thought, we never reach the stage were the paramedics want a swipe of your plastic first before they’ll touch you, and where the guy in the Mercedes gets priority because he has a gold health card in his wallet. Then I remembered the despair of an overwhelmed A+E on Saturday and hoped they were more fully staffed this morning. Rich or poor, when crisis hits, we all need the NHS.

So do be careful out there because the last thing you need in the current climate is to end up in A+E.

[Update May 2016 – the A+E department closed a few weeks after I wrote this. There is currently no indication when or if it will ever open again.]

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