Winter on the Hill – Thirty

Early March, and Coronavirus begins to infect both England and the work in progress:

Junction six, Walkden, M61 South. The Beast is purring down to the line from the off-slip. The grassed embankments on either side are awash here with a tide of rubbish. It’s where people wind their windows down while they wait for the lights to change, then toss out the waste packaging of Macmeals, miscellaneous wrappers, sachets, plastic bottles, beer-cans, and all those little nitrous oxide cartridges. This morning there are also nappies, tee-shirts, and a pair of trousers snagged in the bushes.

It’s places like this we void ourselves, sick up all the over-consumption, spoil any vestige of green. How can the natural world take this? Any other creature that fouls its own nest like we do lasts barely the blink of an eye. Why are we still here?

The guy in the white van beside me is wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves. He catches my fleeting double-take and responds with a finger. He’s either about to rob a bank or he’s paranoid about infection. This virus is beginning to spook everyone now. I’m not sure if it’s warranted or just scare-mongering in the press. Hard to tell. We’ve had years of one thing or another, and seem, as a people, permanently jittery, therefore easily suggestible, and vulnerable to tyranny.

So far as I can gather from my limited tolerance for current affairs these days, there are only a handful of cases in the UK as yet, though I suppose it’s a matter of time before that explodes. The challenge is to isolate against it, have it die out. Worst case it becomes endemic and circulates permanently in the population, scything through us in annual waves. It’s more deadly than flu, kills one percent they say. The government seems willing to tolerate an infection rate of 60%, thus allowing herd-immunity, but on that basis simple arithmetic suggests a quarter of a million of us are expected to die.

Can that be right?

For now share indices are plummeting, and the smart money is buying up bargains while prices are low. Astonishing, how a virus can mutate randomly into such a deadly coherence, and be half-way round the world in the blink of an eye. Yet with all our superior faculties, we cannot even protect our poor from cold and starvation.

Well, we can,… we just don’t.

I’m out this way on the edge of Greater Manchester’s conurbation, having come to see my old boss and mentor, Chester, who I find sitting now in the corner of the day room at the care-home, oxygen mask at the ready in case of breathlessness. Access was not the usual informality. I was interviewed briefly by Anita, the duty care-worker, who looks about twelve yeas old. She asked me if I had visited China or Italy recently, or did I feel unwell? Since I have not and do not, I was admitted. I took care to squirt my hands with the gel-stuff, as per habit, or rather I would have done, but the dispenser was empty, and Anita told me they had run out. There was no chance of resupply either, she added ruefully, and the country was running out of surgical masks, all of which has left me wondering if I am missing something.

If this bug gets into the homes, the old folk are done for.

Anyway, he was quite the thing in his day, old Ches – sat on committees that determined international standards, so engineers around the world could speak the same language – well, except for you Yanks who prefer still to talk in feet and inches which we Europeans find rather quaint.

Yes, I do still consider myself European.

He looks a little more sunken into himself than the last time I saw him, and his chest is wheezy, the fags catching up with him, but he’s eighty-five now and not had a bad run for someone of his questionable habits. It’s only in these last years when everything seems to have fallen apart for him: wife passed on suddenly, his knees gone to arthritis, hands curling up the same, the breath being squeezed out of him bit by bit, as if by a weight on his chest.

He has kids somewhere round the other side of the world. They come and sit and stare at him once a year, like he’s a stranger. In olden days and other ways of working, there would be ample opportunity for his kids to live and work closer to home, and the generations would co-habit, tend to each other more closely and with greater compassion than we do now. But he’s better off than me in that respect. I’ve no idea where my kids are now, or what they’re doing. I send cards out for birthdays, but I’m not even sure I have the right addresses for them any more – they move around so much with their work. And their emails have started bouncing back. It leaves me feeling empty, disconnected.

I’ve always looked at Chester as a way of gauging my own prospects, physically, I mean, at some point in the future, and lately these visits have begun to focus my thoughts on contingencies.

He was always what we used to call a middle of the road Tory, and worth debating intelligently, though of late he has caught the fever of racism to which, like flu, his generation seems particularly prone. He has discovered an especial dislike of Eastern Europeans, though seems not to have noticed most of the kids looking after him are from that part of the world. He has also matured, naturally enough, into an arch BREXITEER, still salivating for a no-deal, and presumably a return to wartime rationing too, which I cannot believe he remembers fondly. Given my own leanings in the opposite direction, we tend to avoid talk of such matters now, speak instead of technical stuff, as if we were still in the business of measuring things and that we matter in the world of work.

It’s an act then, yes, but he thrives on the illusion of it, lighting up as we converse.

Do you remember old so and so?…

But people are such liars, Rick. They lie to each other. All the time.

Yes Lottie, it’s true, we do.

Sometimes it’s the only way we can get by.

 

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Everything’s fine. Go shopping.

I was travelling the M61 south from Chorley in the predawn murk. I’m not sure if it qualifies as the worst stretch of motorway in the UK, but it’s certainly the worst I have to drive. The lane markings have almost gone and the cats eyes where they exist at all are dim, so these dark, misty, winter mornings have been terrible, with dangerously poor visibility.

What was particularly frightening this week is there was an incident on the hard shoulder and the highway men had shut the slow lane, pushing us all into the middle. Without that guiding line of the hard-shoulder, I felt I was hurtling into the unknown, unable to see further than the feeble cast of my headlights, and barely a whisper from disaster both left and right. Though I’ve been on the road for forty years, and I still drive that crumbling stretch of miserable tar most week-days, I was definitely afraid.

It’s perhaps the perfect metaphor for how I feel generally at the moment, that while I’m told half our citizens will be celebrating our leaving the EU on the 31st of January, it feels to me like we’ll be cheering our own headlong rush to slaughter. Some, of course, have every reason to be happy, like those who truly benefit from BREXIT. But let’s not go there. I’m weary of the argument and can barely raise a head of steam to repeat it.

I’ve moved on, I think, well beyond the crass jubilation, am now beginning to rough out a dystopian vision of mid twenty-first century England by extrapolating current trends to their inevitable conclusion. It’s not looking like a great place to be if you’ve no money, you’re old, or sick but I won’t bother describing it in any more detail than that. Indeed my advice to fellow remoaners is just to shut up and get on with it, and under no circumstances must we ever say we told you so. We live in a post-fact, post-truth world where the bad guy always wins, and where nothing means anything any more, except when it all goes wrong, and then it’s your fault.

Remainers voted to remain because they understood the EU. They knew what it was, had seen and experienced the benefits of membership, had worked with Continental colleagues, learned their languages, visited and admired their cities, the quality of their roads, their trains, their infrastructure. It wasn’t perfect – indeed far from it – but it was better being a little fish in a big shoal than a little fish on its own. I mean that’s why fish shoal up right?

Those who voted out, did so for many reasons, all of which perplex me. I can find no logic, no rationale to any of them, and it’s beyond insanity how even the claims of Brexiteer politicians and their Bond-villain backers – when revealed as pants-on-fire lies – can still be cheered on by the reliably demented wavers of the flag of Saint George.

Yes, it’s over and done now. But I won’t be celebrating.

You can always buy your EU citizenship back with one of those handy Maltese passports, as indeed many of those billionaires who championed BREXIT are now doing. I too have a route back, virtue of an Irish grandfather, which will at least save me having to queue up at the border with the rest of you with your patriotic blue passports, but that’s not going to benefit my children who now find themselves without a country. They’re not alone. There were riots in London on election night, not widely reported. What was trumpeted loud and clear though (and still is) is that the socialist, egalitarian evil of a Jeremy Corbyn led government was roundly thrashed. What’s been less explored though are the implications of being even more securely in the grip of those who sold us BREXIT in the first place. And they’re not saying anything.

It’s easy to lose heart when you witness the overwhelming power of lies and the ease with which people of bad character can tip us over into the void of tyranny. I’ve brought my children up to be decent, honourable young men, and must now witness their first steps in a world I don’t recognise, one I fear I have left them ill prepared to materially thrive in. Or maybe I should just relax, await the milk and honey we’ve all been so glibly promised, pretend everything’s fine.

And go shopping.

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2019,…and all that.

Well, I tried hard to come up with a pithy take on this pig’s ear of a year that was 2019, also the decade I suppose but found myself speechless in the end. Instead this thing popped up in my You Tube subscription from DDN, and I turned to fellow Brit and seriously honoured fellow Lancastrian, Tez Ilyas – in my humble opinion a truly brilliant, unifying voice who speaks as much for me as I hope for all of us.

These are staggeringly remarkable times, times when intellectuals are left dumbfounded, times when only a gifted comedian can make sense of what’s going on. Tez, my man, you’re so much younger than me, (say like 30 years at least?) you’re sharper, more clued in, cooler, and infinitely more handsome, but apart from all of that, and probably because of it,… I love you brother:

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In the absence of anything else

Photo by malcolm garret on Pexels.com

I found a purse, stuffed with cash, credit and debit cards, rail card, various membership cards – everything. You know how it feels to lose something like that? You panic, don’t you? you turn the house upside down, retrace your steps,… when did you last have it? Petrol station? Supermarket? Then you find it down the back of the settee, and breathe a sigh of relief. But there looked like being no such happy ending here, and I could imagine what was going through this person’s mind.

What do you do? Well, there was a name on the credit cards, but no other ID. I asked among friends and family but no one knew the name. What now? In the olden days you’d contact the local Bobby, and they’d hold onto it down the cop-shop. The owner would call in on the off-chance and be re-united with it. But now there is no cop-shop. No local Bobby either. Not much of anything really. Instead there’s a police Lost and Found Website with a million-choice tick-boxes to navigate, and as soon as you mention credit cards it boots you out.

Then there’s this non-emergency police help-line that takes half an hour to connect and, after twenty questions from an operator speaking from a distant city, in which your actual query seems irrelevant, you get a crime number, like that’s any good to you.

All right,… perhaps even thinking of the cops in this instance was naïve, a sort of bourgeois knee-jerk to calamity, but it served to highlight how much things have changed, how much has gone. If there’s been a murder, sure, call it in and the state will see to it. But if you just need a bit of help,… well,… services are somewhat overstretched at the moment, so just use your initiative.

Right now though my glutinous initiative is somewhat slow in taking shape. Finally I go out and Sellotape a note near to where I found the purse: Mrs Suchabody. Please ring,… etc. But that’s pathetic, surely? So I go home and fret. But an hour later I get the call. Purse and grateful owner are reunited, and all ends well.

I wonder if this denudation of local services, local help, local authority, will perhaps in the longer term serve up the grass-roots transformation we so desperately need. Indeed I’ve noticed recently how the despair of neglected communities up and down the UK, since the crash, is now transforming into a rejection of national politics and the “official” support mechanisms of the state because, well, they’re so chronically under-funded, they’re useless.

People are saying, you know, this place is a mess, and it’s been decades, and no one else is going to sort it, so let’s do it ourselves. It’s called social activism and it comes out of the community-centres, the church-groups, the Facebook-groups . It’s what the original socialist movement sprang from – despair and necessity.

So you find a purse on the path. What you do about that is between your own conscience and what’s realistically doable, in the same way as there’s that homeless guy sitting in a shop doorway night and day, and kids turning up to school so hungry they’re not fit for a day’s lessons any more. Do you think the state’s going to sort that out now? No,… it looks like it’s down to the community. What is the community? We are the community, us and the people we know, the people we trust.

“There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour. My meaning, [there is no such thing as society] clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations.”

Margaret Thatcher said that, as a prelude to winding back the state safety nets. And she was right in what she said, or at least there’s a sad inevitability about it,… in the absence of anything else.

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The Cappuccino Socialist

Even a casual observer of current affairs cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacular tragedy that was 2016. The year was a litany of violence, hatred and political upheaval, proudly presented across all media as infotainment – this in formerly stable, western democracies. Coupled with these calamitous events there is the growing realisation that even though Capitalism has been hanging on by its fingernails since 2008, it’s essentially dead. However, since no one has a clue what to replace it with, there’s a fear we’ll be suffering the stench of its rotting corpse for a long time.

Indeed the times do little to reassure me we’re tending towards a more peaceful and prosperous co-existence – quite the opposite. The impression is one of a world totally out of control, one in which destructive archetypal daemons have breached in force the liminal defences of reasonable thinking, and are now wreaking havoc on several fronts, ushering in a zeitgeist that wears a face permanently distorted by a snarling hatred of all things “other”.

The response from that more compassionate brand of politics, the politics of the progressive (i.e. old) left, seems muted, as if they’ve been so long in the shadows the daylight burns their skin. I’m more pessimistic now than I was in the Summer about their chances of making a difference. All the forces of evil, news-media, and even public opinion are arrayed against them, while the alt-right seeps unmolested into the cracks. The prospect therefore of passing the remains of this century tossed by an ever escalating reign of chaos does not sound implausible.

I have long wondered if I should take a more direct approach to this collective existential emergency, and become more politically active myself. The feeling came to a head recently, after giving the meat and potato pasty I’d just bought, and was rather looking forward to, to a homeless guy. I was embarrassed, didn’t quite know what the etiquette was, only that he wore the thousand yard stare of extreme misfortune, and everyone else was ignoring him like he was a drunk, or a dope-head, or it was somehow his fault he was sitting in the cold and the wet with a blanket around his shoulders. My companion even commented, somewhat cynically that he probably drives a jaguar and lives in a docklands penthouse. But anyway, I gave the poor guy the pasty, and he was grateful for it.

We’re used to seeing down and outs in our cities, and that’s troubling enough to someone visiting from the sticks, but this was a provincial market town in the North, my town, my North, so okay: I was going to get political. I was going to kick this spectre of eternal decline right in the balls. Boy, was this Cappuccino Socialist going to whip up a storm!

However,…

Instead, I tried to join the Labour Party. It’s currently revitalising its atrophied radical roots and I thought I’d fit right in with my newly radicalised self, but my enquiries thus far have not exactly been welcomed with open arms. Indeed my online applications are repeatedly lost in cyberspace. I don’t know why this is, and I’m not going to speculate beyond saying it’s probably more a case of administrative overload than I am suspected, by dint of an all blue post-code, of being a sneaking Tory saboteur. I admit the thought of the latter does amuse me.

So,… I’m taking this rejection by the Socialist brethren in good part, and in a more transcendentally meaningful sense, that is to say the Universe is obviously telling me my contribution to the cause of a global Shang-ri-La isn’t meant to be political. I’d be rubbish at it anyway. Take me away from the keyboard and I’m tongue-tied by a log-jam of incoherent thoughts. So I’m back to chronicling the times as I see them, sipping my Cappucino between repeated rewrites, the best I can do being to urge a positive frame of mind in spite of everything that’s telling us to be afraid and to restock our millennium cupboards.

I’m writing this on January 3rd, the worst day of the year, the first day back at work after a long festive break. It is my morning of a thousand emails, evidence enough of a world drowning in obfuscating bullshit. Like those emails it has mostly to be deleted before we can get at the real issues, the things that actually need doing. Nor does it help that my holiday reading consisted of Hans Fallada’s novel, Alone in Berlin, a chilling tale that in part describes the ways and means the barking mad alt-right of Nazi Germany infiltrated every institution of state, efficiently reducing the German people to a subservience based on a blend of patriotism and fear.

In Nazi Germany the penalties for dissent were extraordinarily harsh, as with all oppressive regimes, the slightest hint resulting in torture and death. It’s not something we hear much about, how the Nazis were as cruel to their own people as to the nations they invaded. It’s an important novel and, sadly, as relevant now as it was when it was written. If we think it cannot happen in a modern western democracy any more, it does not mean it cannot happen, only that we lack the power to imagine it, and have not learned the lesson of history.

Of course things are not so bad now as in Fallada’s wartime Berlin. I can still type freely online without undue fear of my IP address leading the tech-savvy Gestapo to my door. Sure Google knows where I live, but they just want to sell me stuff. The point is we should remain mindful of the freedoms we still have, freedoms we might yet lose, and the ease with which they can indeed be lost, once the goose-stepping alt-right shadow-monsters are manifested in the crowded rally, whipping us all to hysteria, making us do cruel and degrading things to others in the name of nationalism, and security.

Yet, it’s puzzling, the vast majority of people have good hearts. This is my experience. The natural state of the human being is compassion, a desire for mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. Cruelty and criminality – things that underpin the oppressive regime – are aberrations, and the rest of us must not be afraid to point them out, for our collective weakness is as ever the ease with which we can be led, either by the wiles of the charismatic populist, or in fear of the shouty man. That we so often allow ourselves to fall into the hands of vile impostors is testament enough, also a warning, for in their hands we might be condemned to languish, helpless, for generations.

But all is not lost. It’s not for everyone to stride boldly upon the world’s stage, to influence the masses with one’s wit and common sense back to a reasonable way of thinking. We cannot all write a novel like “Alone in Berlin”. We cannot all, apparently, join the Labour Party. For most of us the best we can do is sip our Cappuccinos thoughtfully, remember the difference between right and wrong and, in holding to that simplest of things, preserve our dignity. By doing so we hold a mirror to the shadow whipped crowd so it can see its own face, see how ugly it’s become of late, and maybe think twice before dragging us any further into peril.

Stay Safe, and be of good heart.

Oh, and a Happy New Year!

Graeme out.

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A collective psychosis

In observing the political and economic turmoil of the world, I feel I should be writing about it more, since if I’m not writing my life feels a bit like a rudderless vessel. And, politics, world affairs, these things are, after all, interesting subjects, subjects that determine the fate of nations, but I find it difficult to get at the facts of them, and without the facts one cannot help but be partisan.

The reason I struggle for the facts is I have laboured all my life under the misconception of a simplistic world view, a simplicity that’s comforting because the truth is more complex than most of us can make sense of. Indeed partisanship seems a necessary condition if we are to function at all, without the infinite ambiguity of the world rendering us permanently frozen in a state of catatonic schizophrenia. To be partisan, after all, halves the problem, since we can then dismiss the other person’s point of view and rest more comfortably in our own.

Of course, the advent of the world wide web has blown up a storm of imagery, revealing a world far more complex than we once thought, but this does not help because now the available information overloads us so we self-censor, pick the images that suit our narrow view, and block the ones that don’t. Yes, I can try to be non-partisan, but I’m working against myself, and I can be a devious fellow, but here goes.

Approaching now the end of our lost decade, we find American and Western European democracies polarising into entrenched positions to the left and right while the middle ground has fallen away. Unfortunately, the middle ground is where most people stand, and they’re finding no one represents their aspirations any more.

The economic system that has supported us since the Second World War – free market capitalism – is now impotent. It still generates wealth in sickly spurts, but fails to distribute it evenly. It is caught in a pathological malfunction that vastly enriches its captains while laying waste to the rest, both environmentally, and in terms of the life prospects of the majority of planet earth’s inhabitants. A mutiny, by the natural world, and the disenfranchised is an entirely plausible consequence, and some might say long overdue.

Politically, even the most cursory analysis reveals the West is not governed by democracies as we are led to believe, but by plutocracies. These are systems in which the democratic machinery exists and is indeed much vaunted, but its goals are more of an aspiration, rendered largely irrelevant by, and subservient to powerful moneyed interests. And plutocracies are resistant to change when change is due, since the beneficiaries, cosseted in wealth, do not feel the pain of the poor who are subservient to them, nor are they particularly aware of their existence.

As a consequence the global plutocratic vessel fetched itself up on the rocks for the last time in 2008, with political and economic efforts since then being devoted entirely to its salvage, at floating it off on an incoming tide of oft-touted market resurgence. But its back is broken, its cargo spilled and plundered. Persistence in this direction promises not a lost decade but a lost generation, or two. Yet this is exactly the course on which we’re bound.

There is a revival of left leaning, anti plutocratic politics, giving voice to complaint. Socialism, a term not mentioned above a whisper since the 1980’s, is spoken again, on both sides of the Atlantic, and without irony, but it remains to be seen if this will have any effect at ushering in a more egalitarian paradigm, since the forces arrayed against it, barricaded behind vast wealth, remain formidable.

But when consumer goods, things that have rendered populations docile, are beyond purchase, when the domestic budget forces a choice between food and renewing the contract on the iPhone, populations will become restless, prone to irrational frenzy. Thoughts will turn from the Playstation to activism. This is, after all, what the consumer society was invented for in the 1920s, as an opiate for the masses, and it cannot be allowed to fall away entirely or, whether such frenzies of want are tickled by charismatic, media savvy individuals, or by the phases of the moon, the half century to come will be an eventful one.

The Middle East is aflame, of course. The Syrian civil war has been raging for six years. Iraq and Afghanistan, theatres of western intervention, have been bloodletting for over a decade. Western Africa is benighted by an economic ruin largely ignored in Western Media. These regions have haemorrhaged their youth, set them on the terrifying migration routes to the heart of Europe, where their arrival arouses compassion and racist resentment in equal measure.

I do not know where this is going, only that it is a crisis terribly underplayed, and perhaps it is for this reason we seem immune to it still, ambivalent, by turns perplexed and apathetic, but generally believing things will still turn out well in the safe shires of the West, because they always have before. But this time they may not.

The world is not a dream, but in many respects the imagery coming out of it resembles the imagery of dreams. There is still the beauty of aspiration – the eye of the beholder – reminding us the human spirit can be stilled into appreciative contemplation by the simplest of things. Yet there is also the grotesque, the violent, the terrifying – all the stuff of nightmares, suggestive of the power of the unconscious bearing a dark fruit, sown by the seeds of things we have long suppressed.

This harvest is not a wholesome one, we shudder to touch it, but it must be gathered in all the same, dried out to harmlessness under the sun, and examined, not left to rot and fester in the fields, season after season, as we have always done before.

And as with dreams it helps to take each image in its turn, to ask ourselves what it is within us that gives rise to this picture. The dream, like the world, cannot be controlled directly. It simply is. And what it is is a consequence of our thinking, our desires, our prejudice, our imperfections, our inner most selves. We can only therefore each look to our selves and temper our hardness, temper the Ego’s will to power.

It is a retrograde step, and sad to see, the usual media popularising our leaders trading infantile insults live on TV. We have no need for warriors. Time more for all the great houses of power to temper their tone, for the Ego, that when shown its failings in the dream, even then persists in its will to power and the fantasy of its own superiority, gives rise to the most monstrous nightmares, to the apocalyptic imagery of the archetypal gods, on whose anvil all things are eventually broken.

Viewed in these terms, the world begins to make more sense. We are in the midst of a cataclysmic collective psychosis. Sadly, this suggests that what lies ahead of us is not a lost decade, nor even a lost generation, but perhaps a lost century.  And it’s only 2016.

Better to stay away from politics and world affairs – its study can make you maudlin.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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On my Bookshelf – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell

I was given this book in 1983, a time when British Socialism was on the wane and Thatcher’s blue revolution had already lit the touch paper to a firework of freemarket capitalism. It was odd then to be given a book of this nature, one that explains how and why Socialism came about, at a time when Socialism seemed to have burnt itself out in a muddle of lunacy.

The story is written in the decade preceding the first world war and concerns a group of painters and decorators in the employ of the unscrupulous firm of Rushton and Company. Day to day, they are at the mercy of the ruthless hire-em and fire-em foreman, Mr Hunter, or Old Misery as he is known behind his back. Jobs were scarce. Then, as now, it was strictly an employer’s market, the only difference being that then to lose one’s job was an infinitely more serious matter with bastards like Old Misery literally holding the power of life and death over you and your family.

Our hero Frank Owen is seemingly alone in his understanding of the causes of the deprivations and humiliations he and his colleagues suffer. His frequent brew-time lectures on the evils of unbridled Capitalism are met with derision. It seems to Owen that his workmates are blind, that even though they grumble and suffer terribly at the hands of their money-corrupted masters, they are at pains to maintain the status quo, to “know their place”, to even vote for the very system that perpetuates their oppression. Thus Tressel labels them the titular philanthropists, making do with rags and starvation, so their masters can thrive and grow fat.

Clearly a political book, Tressell’s work is a classic for all students of the history of British politics, left or right, and for anyone seeking a more visceral understanding of the origins of Socialism and the trades union movement:

A snippet:

Owen saw that in the world a small class of people were possessed of a great abundance and superfluity of the things that are produced by work. He saw also that a very great number – in fact the majority of people – lived on the verge of want; and that a smaller but still very large number lived lives of semi-starvation from the cradle to the grave; while a yet smaller but still very great number actually died of hunger, or, maddened by privation, killed themselves and their children in order to put a period to their misery. And strangest of all – in his opinion – he saw that people who enjoyed the abundance of the things that are made by work, were the people who did Nothing: and that the others who lived in want or died of hunger, were the people who worked. And seeing this, he thought that it was wrong,…

Re-reading the story now, it’s comforting to know the likes of poor Owen and his crew would be spared many of the indignities and premature deaths they suffered in those days, Socialism now having won the fight for access to free healthcare, welfare, paid holidays, a state pension, and strict health and safety legislation. Such things did not exist at the time of writing. But while much has changed, it’s striking how some things remain the same, such as the ease with which a country’s ills are apt to be blamed by certain factions of the press on all these “damned foreigners”. It’s also interesting to see how the principles of Capitalism, carried to their extremes ensure that a decent job of work never gets done, that it will always be scrimped, and bodged, the cracks papered over in pursuit of maximum profit. Tressel’s book also serves as a sober warning that the gains of Socialism over the last hundred years cannot be taken for granted, that they can be lost, and in this way the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists gives us a glimpse of a world to which we risk returning.

Socialism has enjoyed something of a reawakening, and for those perhaps confused by it all, are terrified by the word, or who are too young to have lived it the first time around, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an enlightening text, one that will explain much of what is going on today, the same as it did a hundred years ago. But this not a dour political treatise. It is a story, engagingly written, with a clear, concise prose and characters both sympathetic and repulsive. Nor is it without its moments of wry humour, all be it usually at the expense of the employers.

We have wonderfully blunt and descriptive names for characters such as Slyme and Crass, also Mr Oyley Sweater, Didlum, Grinder and the monstrous Sir Grabball (Bt). We are left in no doubt where Tressell is coming from, but it’s also sobering that he has no sympathy either for the working man, who, when presented with the means of awakening and doing something about his suffering, makes no effort to do so.

The Church, Private Rent Landlords, the drinks industry, corrupt councils, the tendency among the more affluent classes to dismiss the poor as shirkers and scroungers, all these things come under the microscope as social and cultural vultures which in some way demonise and prey upon the working man, and here too, the book has maintained its relevance today.

Owen is depicted as a bit more of an artisan than his fellow painters. For him are reserved the jobs that require more skill and an artist’s eye, not that these attributes are appreciated by his employers, at least not to Owen’s advantage, who is left as impoverished as his workmates. His employers value him only to the extent his skills can be exploited to undercut the work of other firms. Sickly and possibly even consumptive, Owen’s future looks bleak. What then of his wife? What of his young son? What future for any of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists when they are only a twist of old Misery’s bad temper away from being laid off, and no Welfare State between them and starvation? Tressell says we would be better dead than suffering this kind of life, and it’s hard not to disagree with him.

This book still arouses and inflames opinion. Whether you agree with it or not will obviously depend on your politics. If you are to the left you will find nothing here to disagree with, if you lean to the right, you might gain some insight into the reasoning and the suffering that underpins the passions currently arrayed against you. The problems of inequality and economic tyranny in society are not, as has been alleged recently, “yesterday’s problems”. They are cyclical, born of the natural swing of the political pendulum between the parties of the rich and of the poor. It remains to be seen if we are doomed to repeat the history of Tressel’s day, or if the forebears of Owen and his crew can redress the imbalance and prevent that pendulum from smashing us all in the face once more.

Get the text here (legally) for free.

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Joining the Dots

I chose Langcliffe for the start of the walk because the parking was free. Well, it was not exactly free; there is a donation box and I did donate, but the money I saved by not parking in Settle would pay for coffee later. This is austerity in personal terms, and rather petty I admit. Those truly struggling under austerity, and there are many now, would not have driven to the Dales in the first place because £20 worth of petrol goes a long way towards groceries.

It struck me recently we’ve been under the cosh of austerity since 2008. This tells me two things. One, it’s been a long time. And two, the ideology that’s driving it has either self evidently failed, or it’s driving us in another direction, that in fact it has not failed at all but succeeded in bringing about a state of political and social affairs that has basically reordered society into one that is less equal.

What this means in practical terms is penny pinching on a scale so grand our ears are filled daily with the sound of gears grinding as our machine runs down. There is a shrinking back to the Gradgrind-glory years of the Victorian era, an age when we sent little orphan boys up chimneys and down the mines to work the narrow seams, because they were cheap and expendable. We did not value life. We are being taught again only to value our own, that a person drowned in the Med is not a person, but something less than that.

Anyway, Langcliffe. This is a walk I’ve done before, many times: Catrigg force, the Attermire Scars and the Warrendale Knots. I wrote about it here. My return was on account of a free day and insufficient time to plan anything new. But with a familiar route, freed from the responsibility of navigation, the mind can turn to other things. The weather was promising, the morning peeling open after overnight rains to a mixture of sunshine and humidity.

Someone tried to get my email logins by phishing. I was sufficiently webwise not to succumb. Meanwhile the BBC tells me of a woman who was targeted by phone scammers, tricked into thinking her bank account was under attack and so sought to transfer funds to safety. She lost it all to the scammers. This leaves a sour taste.

This and Austerity. But are the two things not the same?

2008.

A long time.

Hitler was defeated in five.

This economic crisis is taking longer.

Unless it is not a crisis,

But a change of paradigm.

 

Some have grown fat from austerity, but most have grown lean. Then some have sought to join the ranks of the fat by foul and ingenious means, by preying on the poor and the lean and the hungry, because like in Victorian times the poor are once more cheap and expendable, and easily vilified into a thing less than human. Into perhaps a scrounger? Nobody cares about the poor.

But the beauty of the Yorkshire Dales managed to work a little of its magic on my soul. At Catrigg though, I felt unwell, my vision whiting out as I descended the shady sylvan dell, after strong sunshine on the open moor above. I don’t know what this was about but I didn’t panic. Were I to have expired alone at Catrigg, I can think of no finer setting.

He was at peace, they said.

As it was I sat only a while with a sandwich and fruit and quiet thoughts as the water roared through the narrow slit. Then, feeling better, I carried on.

It’s possible something has happened this summer. Many feel the way I do; fearful; alarmed by an ideology that seems unshakable in its grip, and which has razed the familiar ground, so there is no path now for my children to follow. Instead, they must follow the directions of the suited man with his slick coiffure and oily smile, and take their place in the minimum wage economy, regardless of whether they have a university educations or not.

It may fizzle out in a few weeks time, this thing, or it may lead on to a kind of rebellion. Not just here, but across the West and wherever the suited man sits fat. Men are appearing, dishevelled, articulate. Yesterday’s men, the suits tell us, but then they would. The dishevelled men fill assembly halls and football stadiums. They speak a language that is nostalgic to the old, yet new to the young. It will collapse of course, but not before it brings about a change in the other direction – I hope.

The walk is more up and down than I remember, more of a pull on the leg muscles, though I comfort myself this is probably on account of the stretching I did at Kung Fu the night before. In April you will find the early Purple Orchid sprouting in profusion along the base of the Attermire Scars. Today I found the delicate Hare bell, and other blooms so small one would need a glass to see them properly.

It was cold on the tops, a cold wind icifying the sweat on my back whenever I stopped, so I kept moving, munching a Kit-kat as I went. Dark chocolate and bright white limestone. The world could be going to hell in a handcart, quite possibly is so far as I can tell, but so long as I get my Kit-Kat of a morning, I can find it within me to remain magnanimous.

In the pastures by the Warrendale knots there were long haired cattle, reddish brown. Calves sat easy, nudged udders. One cow stood aside, silent and serene in expectation, as wide as she was tall, her calf still basking in the warm hinterland of the womb. A lone white bull moved among them. The path took me through the herd. I made delicate adjustments, startled none. A hundred tons of beef, but not aggressive. Had they the intelligence to be cognisant of their fate, would they have been so easy in my company? Had we been cognisant of ours in 2008, would we have been so easy too?

I return to Langcliffe, hill-achy and bone tingling tired. The church is having a sale of books and CD’s. I am searching for a copy of Belladonna. Stevie Nicks. 1981-ish. I could buy it online for about a fiver, but am holding off, thinking to discover it in a charity shop for £2.00. I have been searching for years.

Why so selective? I spend £20 on petrol for a walk in the Dales, but I won’t spend a fiver on an old CD that I tell myself I really want. Or is it that I resist the siren call of Stevie Nicks. Stevie is nostalgia.

My moods are mysterious.

I did not go into the church. I peeled my boots off, sat a while, let my feet cool, changed my shirt, then dropped the top and took the car across the moor to Malham.

There are moments of happiness. They come suddenly. Unexpected. It’s a rough old road to Malham from Lancliffe – quite a climb up the zigzags into a lonely wonderland of limestone country. The car’s done 80,000 now, still drives like new and with a punch on the climbs that delights and surprises. And then there are these moments, when we’re rattling along, I swear the tyres dissolve and we’re flying, and the land is not the land at all but clouds on which the scenery has been painted. Then the heart opens and I am smiling at the lightness of my being.

I stop for coffee at Malham, having joined some dots on the map. But it’s a strange country opening before us now. And 2008 is a very long time ago.

Anyway, let’s keep that drive

in mind.

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The Trip, Day 3 – Masham (Pronounced mass-am)

Grey, warmish, threatening rain all day but without following through. Managed to keep the top down. The driving from Leyburn is excellent on good roads, fast and curving. As usual the Mazda seems to take about 30 minutes to warm properly, then she purrs and revs sweetly, and with a sharper responsiveness. I enjoy a relaxed run to Richmond. It’s my first visit, and I rely on the ‘Droid to navigate me. This turns out not to be necessary. I park by the Cricket ground and make my way to the Market Square – seemingly ubiquitous to all rural Yorkshire towns. The whole of England was once like this. We have lost so much.

It’s £2.00 to park, £2.00 for coffee in a pretty little tearoom that used to be the bus company office and waiting room. The coffee itself is worth the trip. To the pretty lady at the till, I say the thank you I was not able to at the time, on account of the press of other customers. The day is gloomy-overcast, so I enjoy the castle walk, a pleasing overview of Richmond to be enjoyed for free. There is something about the town that reminds me of Knaresborough, another Yorkshire town I adore. I pass an hour here, then recover the Mazda, drop the top in determined fashion, and retrace my route back to Leyburn, then further south to Middleham. Parking is free at Middleham’s little market square, coffee also free courtesy of thermos and guest house kettle. There are some spots of rain on the run south from here to Masham but I keep the top down and teeth gritted as the car feels so much better when she’s driven al fresco. We avoid a soaking and arrive at Masham for 2:00 pm.

Sadly Masham is grey as the sky, and the hotel room is not ready. There are twelve rooms to be serviced by an overworked and overheated teenage lad, slaving on minimum wage. It seems my anosmia remission allows only the sweetness of sweaty bodies today.  And coffee. Still, I applaud the lad’s fevered and good natured industry.

The room is ready for about 3:00 pm. Room is not great. Grey, dour. It is also strangely corporate and lacking welcome. Courtesy coffee and tea are clearly rationed. Austerity “heavy”. I am by now a little tired, and feeling off-song. The room looks out over dour cobbled backs and buckled rooftops. I can still smell teen sweat.The windows are prevented from opening by more than a crack to admit air, lest I should instead wish to end my life by leaping from them. This smacks of corporate risk assessment. Not cheery. Almost laughable.

By 4:00 pm I am already looking forward to checking out. It is 60 miles to Scarborough tomorrow. For the promised free Wifi one must enquire at the desk. I cannot be bothered.

A 20 minute snooze improves things a little, but I am woken by man in the corridor asserting his displeasure to staff at lack coat hangers, soap, bath mat, and functioning bulbs in his room. I’m clearly more fortunate in that my bulbs work. I realise with a start I also lack bath mat and soapy things, but then remember I have brought my own. I decide to make do with a spit-wash. Hmm. Serious penny pinching here. As for coat hangers I shall manage without unpacking my case.

The Guardian runs with a picture of Kayne West (rapper) and Bob Dylan (legend) on the front page. Scientists have analysed their lyrics and a computer algorithm pronounces the somewhat obvious fact that rap makes greater use of vocabulary. In other parlance it is more wordy. But this equates to nothing; it is a statement of the obvious, and the article puzzles me. I cannot decide if newspapers deliberately make scientists out to be stupid by paraphrasing them, or if such things really are considered worthy of PhD study. Personally I prefer Dylan, but then I am of that generation, and not fond of rap.

The newspapers are also in a lather at the possible election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, some suggesting it is an appalling idea, others more sanguine. The thing that excites them is Corbyn is very left of centre and we have not heard a proper Socialist voice in a long time, or at least not one grossly caricatured in the largely right wing press as raving mad, which of course Corbyn will be if he begins to look like a serious contender. Yet anyone familiar with the Dao knows current times make his appearance more or less a certainty, and some might even say long overdue. Personally I would welcome it, though I am not the Shang-ri-la socialist I once was. Militant socialism is as stupid as swivel eyed conservatism, Corbyn seems more moderate. Left wingers also divide the Labour party, though it was founded on altruistic and inclusive Socialist principles, and a Corbyn ascendency would raise the possibility of a bifurcation into left and right flavoured Labour parties. I wonder what they will be called? It will certainly enliven political debate in the coming years. This is a fascinating turn of events and I am buoyed by it.

Anyway, dinner in the restaurant: Brewer’s Chicken, not bad, though a little “industrial”. The restaurant presents a better face than the hotel’s rooms, though I note the poor couple at the next table are unable to pick anything from the menu that the kitchen has remaining. The waiter keeps returning to them with apologies. They are good natured, though exasperated, and settle finally for what the kitchen has, rather than what they actually want.

I’m letting the story settle for today. I shall pick it up again in Scarborough. I feel a change of working title coming on – Mending Time, perhaps? There will be something about watch repair. The main protagonist, Finn, repairs worthless old watches as a hobby – reflecting my own recent interest in this field.

It’s late now. It’s difficult to focus on anything. The room is hot and there’s an irritating music beat vibrating up from the restaurant below. I hope it doesn’t go on all night!

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