A Yorkshireman displaced

Having nutured some sort of minor twitter addiction (hence the cause of my recent haitus), I’m on a mission to improve my attention span to the level required to maintain a full time blog. I apologise for alienating anyone through out this period. Sorry I appear to be metablogging.

Life at the moment appears to be a creative vacuum. I’m struggling against a creative block the size of the Berlin wall. I start new projects and never finish them. My hard drive is littered with the detritus of a thousand first pages to novels I will never, ever finish. My friends in comparison, zing . They have bright ideas and dreams. They build things and make things. What can be done?

Incidently, during the course of my blog haitus, I acquired a new residence. No longer am I forced to rely on the kindness of.. well friends actually. I have laminate flooring now. And throws on my sofa. Slowly, I become the sort of man who has sundried tomatoes in the cupboard and fresh pasta in the fridge. Is this a natural consequence of aging?

.

This week the Guardian published a letter from Stephen Fry addressed to his sixteen year old self. Since I have suffered writers block recently I thought it’s be a good way to get back in the groove so to speak. Permit me some indulgence

Hey,

I know how much like Holden Caulfield you feel right now. Truth be told, you are actually suffering from clinical depression and if you go and see you doctor now you might just do better on your A-Levels. You might save yourself a lot of trouble later on too. Depression is not hip, it’s not achingly cool and frankly JD Salinger did not have all the answers.

Also it’s good that you read books but try not to be so elitist about it. Just because someone prefers pubs to libraries does not mean they are shallow.

Oh and get contact lenses and get a haircut and play the guitar more often. By the way, in ten years you will be an amatuer DJ. Incidently you aren’t ugly, it’s just that girls think you’re weird. Stop letting mum buy all your clothes okay?

By the time you are twenty eight, you have a fantastic record collection and more friends than you could ever wish for. Music still matters to you.

Jobswise….. well there’s still time. You will never have a worse job than Hazelwoods. On the downside… you work at a low level job for a faceless corporation. Every single day of your adult existence you will think about fleeing. By 28 you will be trying to go into business for yourself. Somewhere in the back of your mind all those daydreams you’ve been having are still fermenting away. You can do it.

Chin up, cheer up

D

.

So I moved…

Even your professional nomad, your frustrated beatnik must settle eventually. I had been living in the twilight world of some friends’ bedroom and before that the box room of a liverpool terrace. Some months ago I finally secured tenancy on a flat (if you want to stalk me I live somewhere in the vicinity of Sefton Park in Liverpool)

I’m fermenting plans, I’m 28, If I did more exercise I’d cut a fine figure.

.

The silly game I suggest we play is the “Let’s Fisk* the Daily Mail game”

According to Harry Phibbs of the Daily Mail, Google Street view is categorically A BAD THING (as most Daily mail articles about modernity tend to be)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1162992/Google-Street-View-launches-25-cities-Britain-users-360-degree-close-live.html

I hate the daily mail with an absolute passion so I thought I’d tell you why Harry Phibbs and the Daily Mail are in fact wrong.

Fact number one.

If you have eyes then just walking around you local area will tell you more about your neighbours than Street View could.

Fact number two:

It’s not a real time feed. If you were a burglar you could case the joint yourself, if you were a stalker you’d have to be exceedingly lucky to catch your stalkee on camera in the first place and by the time you arrive they’d have had several months after the photo was taken to escape.

Fact number three:

It’s not sinister and Orwellian. 1984 was about the affect of an all intrusive totalitarian GOVERNMENT. Not a private corporation. Google are releasing the data into the public domain anyway so it’s not like anyone has more power through using this information than anyone else would have.

Fact number four:

The Daily Mail supported Fascism in the 1930’s so it’s not like they have a moral leg to stand on when complaining about surveillance culture.

Fact number five:

My friend is currently at a conference in San Fransico. Having never been to the city before he was able to visualise exactly where his hotel, the airport and the conference centre all lay in relation to each other. Something that was less easy with 2D maps, so yes it is a useful too damnit!

I think that’s enough vitriol for now, but I think it’s fair to say I can’t stand the mentality which states “everything was better in the good old days”. I guess when Google release the Rose Tinted Specs v1.0 application (see the world exactly as it was in the 1950s!) things might change.**

* For a defintion of fisking see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking  (and it’s not as rude as it sounds)

** For the record I’m not some sort of Google fanboy or in anyway affiliated with them. I just think that Street View represents another jump towards the science fiction future that I imagined as a child.

.

This is a strange story that happened to me in the park on Sunday afternoon. Whilst walking along on a deserted strip of pavement a man in an audi pulled up along side me and began to shout racist abuse at me, his precise words are not printable on a family oriented website such as this but they were along the lines of “Go back to Poland you polish ****” followed by yet more abuse. After my initial reaction of shock, I helpfully pointed out to him that I am in fact English (note that I’m not saying that misdirected racism is somehow okay). He rapidly departed in his car. Given there was no else around, he had to have been screaming at me.

I always assumed racism was born out of a misplaced and warped logic. A fear of the outsider that although vile was still framed inside a world view that could be pulled apart by logic. For example if you believe the recent Daily Express headline that boldly stated “All new jobs go immigrants!”, then it’s quite easy to pull apart by logic. I have a new job and I’m not an immigrant QED the headline is demonstrably false. I realise now after this incident in the park that logic just doesn’t work with bigots.

There are a few possibilities as to why the man might have believed that I’m Polish, none of them are at all logical. Maybe the man in the car has a misplaced idea (common in tabloid newspapers) that there is a platonic ideal of Englishness and if you look a bit too tall, a bit too dark, a bit too Slavic, you have a funny accent or funny hair, then you are not English. The problem with this argument is one of genetics. All of us are composite beings, the product of a particular sperm and particular egg. Genes that are recessive can suddenly flourish again if the right combination pair up. Biological systems are inherently in a state of flux. Even without migration, populations will change over time with every new throw of the genetic dice. This is the reason that I am much, much taller than my mother. The common parlance for this is evolution. It happens. Maybe the racist in the car needs a biology lesson but I don’t think that would cure him of his strange and otherworldly disease.

Another possibility is that the man in the car actually has some sort of mental illness. He could quite literally be a paranoiac. In which case I have nothing but sympathy. I don’t think rational discourse is capable of curing mental illness.

The third possibility is that maybe the bigot in question believed so sincerely the tabloid headlines about immigrants taken over that he assumed he was one of the last British people left around and that if he drove up to a stranger then he would be bound to encounter a foreigner. A sort of invasion- of-the-body-snatchers style scenario. If this scenario is true then I wonder how he functions from day to day. He would have to lie to himself about almost everyone he met outside his undoubtedly small circle of friends. This is almost indistinguishable from mental illness (the difference being that it is self induced). Imagine him in a pub, he would have to will himself to believe that all the people speaking English in local accents about local football were in fact foreigners pressing against him from all sides desperate to steal his job and his taxes. His position in life is completely untenable.

At the end of the day I can’t think of a single rational explanation to justify this man’s actions. I can’t think of a way of using rational thinking that could be used to combat the unlogic of bigotry. In a wider sense, how can faulty thinking be corrected when the fault in the thinking is logic itself? I would love to hear other peoples’ opinons on this.

.

 It’s impossible to walk in the city centre without small children careening into my kneecaps at high velocity. There is no snow, just a persistent rain blowing in from the Irish Sea. The British Genetic Queuing Instinct becomes crippled in these situations, we stand confused in shops like carrier pigeons that have been dragged off course by powerful magnetic fields. Sensible queries like ”Excuse me ma’am, are you in the queue?” garner baleful looks and possible hatred. My neck retreats further into the interface of my scarf and coat. I wish I could hibernate. I wish I was a big shaggy Kodiak bear.

I wish I could say something trite about how shopping in the cold and the wet taught me a life affirming message about the true meaning of Christmas. I wish I could say that I stopped to help a homeless person and my dark calloused heart was made clean by simple goodness. That’s a lot of wishing. I didn’t do those things. I purchased some presents, possibly ones that will sit in other peoples’ dark cupboards, forgotten, maybe wasted. I got cold. I drank tea and thought about going back to Yorkshire to see my family with all their combined quirks, neuroses and flaws. I wonder how they cope when this lanky son returns with money problems and ‘relaxed’ employment prospects.    

 The weather outside is frightful and I wish I was a kodiak bear.

.

I don’t generally approve of meme-spam but I don’t generally approve of X-Factor either. I do however approve of both Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen and the news that Simon Cowell is producing some soulless cover of Hallelujah makes me deeply sad.

There’s a facebook group called  Jeff Buckley for Xmas no 1.

Also if you feel so inclined you can buy the Jeff Buckley version from & digital or itunes or some such

I wouldn’t normally include commercial links in my blog but I’m making an exception just this once.

.

I’ve been living out off my friends’ spare room now since last august (due to circumstances beyond my control). All my possessions reside in large plastic crates or in piles. In twenty seven years on this planet I have acquired a lot of books, various assorted and ill paired socks and other garments and some musical equipment. In the event of an epic and uncontrolled conflagration, I’m not sure what I would rescue from this pile. Frankly I’m not even sure if any of it would be worth saving. Maybe this means I have achieved a zenlike state where possesions are meaningless and fleeting. Maybe this means I’m poor. I’m not even sure of the answer myself. 

 With any luck in the next few weeks I shall be moving into a nice new flat which features leather sofas and a jacuzzi bath. Needless to say, this will a step from the accidentally nomadic to the vaguely stable. Perhaps now I will decide that my life is not, nay CANNOT be complete without an Ikea rug, matching throws and crystalware. I hope that my desire for security doesn’t come at the cost of my soul.

I’m having beans on toast again for tea tonight.

.

Many words have been typed on internet forums, blogs and newfeeds about oil. It’s effect on the environment and economy. There is one thing that both green groups and rightwing think tanks always forget about in these discussions. How oil is created.

 I’ll spare you the geology 101 but most readers are probably aware that oil is created from super crushed organic material that has been compressed over millions of years*. That organic material was once alive.

 The stuff that currently resides in the petrol tank of your car or the bus you rode to work on was once a velociraptor or a giant fern in a cambrian forest or an early rodent or**…. well you get the picture. Oil seems a lot more precious when you realise you’ve been burning velociraptors to get to work doesn’t it?

* Unless you’re a creationist

** Okay it probably wasn’t actually a velociraptor or a T-Rex but I’m trying to be poetic.

.

and since I happen to like Sufjan Stevens, then I’m kindly providing you with a link to his rendition of my favourite carol: The Friendly Beasts

.