Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

Jonathan Freedland at the Grauniad’s CiF on that election result.

My comment:

By the end of the 1970s it was obvious that (for want of a better description) left-wing economic notions were found to be incompatible with reality - they simply did not and could not work. This led Labour into the wilderness for decades as they learnt they had to ditch left-wing economic notions. Once they did that they got back into power.

Unfortunately Labour still retained left-wing notions of how society - apart from economics - worked. These too have now been found to be incompatible with reality. It is simply not possible to centrally control society and to social engineer it into a politically-correct shape. Thins like feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, welfareism and so forth have been found not to solve social problems, but to exacerbate them, destroying society rather than strengthening it.

So, Labour will have to spend however many year it takes in the wilderness until that learn to live without these other left-wing notions.

Sad really, because I used to be a believer too, all through those post-1979 years, desperately wanting a Labour government, even one with Blair, right up to the time we got one.

Unfolding

She knew, even before she touched it, what it would be. Once she opened the padded plain envelope and tipped out the small gift-wrapped box into her hand, she knew.

She knew it would be small, tasteful, discreet. Something subtle to wear on her ears or around her neck, perhaps even on her finger. But no, not a ring. He would have to know her size. He would not guess, and as far as she knew, he did not know the size of her fingers with any accuracy.

She put the small present down on the table next to the chair where she sat with her legs tucked up underneath her, she pulled her dressing gown down to cover her bare legs. Although it was spring, it was still sometimes chilly in the mornings, this morning in particular with touches of frost here and there on the lawn outside her window.

She turned away from looking out through the window and looked down at the padded envelope in her hands. She had not realised that she had been attempting to fold it, neaten it, tidy it up. Annoyed with herself she dropped the envelope onto the table next to her and picked up the small present, watching the envelope unfolding itself.

Typical, she thought, no matter how I try to straighten things out, tidy them up, everything always seems to unfold in front of me.

Doing The Right Thing

Then we go, like as though we understand. It is as if it all suddenly makes sense and we know what to do, where to go and what to say. But we do not know and the words never come to our lips. We know what ought to be said in such situations, but the right words seem wrong somehow, overused and worthless. Doing the right thing seems like going through the motions, somehow insincere. It is easy to be believable when it doesn’t matter, but so hard to be sincere when it is meant, the awkward hesitation and uncertainty, the tentative un-sureness of the felt seems false when compared to the glib assurance of indifference. The hand feels uncertain as it reaches out for the one like itself, as though learning how to touch for the first time, the fingers have to find a way of holding that doesn’t seem perfunctory.

Advertising Standards

Another day, another CiF article at the Grauniad site. This one an ‘open thread’ about ‘The most distasteful commercials of 2007’

My comment:

All adverts are offensive because of the insidious way they steal time from our lives.

Grub Street

Maybe it is not quite so apparent when you read an individual dead tree newspaper, but if you – as I do – visit the main broadsheet (as they used to be) newspaper websites on a daily basis you do tend to get a picture of the journalists – especially the columnists - as being all alike. This is despite the claimed, or assumed, political leanings of the papers they write for. So this comes as no surprise where:

the social exclusivity of journalism seems certain to become still more common. "Walk through our corridors," a lecturer at one university journalism school told me, "and you will hear that homogeneous public school accent." According to a sample analysis carried out for the Guardian, nearly half the postgraduate students in City University's journalism school, still one of the main gateways to Fleet Street and the BBC, come from just four universities: Oxford, Bristol, Leeds and Cambridge. All four are among the elite which recruit higher than average numbers of students from middle-class homes and fee-charging schools.

Nearly all the columnists for the broadsheets seem to live in the same London metropolitan area, be frightfully middle-class and to share the same outlook on the world that transcends their political posturing – whether of the nominal right or left – in their concerns. It seems to echo the same narrowness that we now get in the political parties with the rise of the professional politicians, people who have had no real experience of life outside the metropolitan middle-class enclaves they were born, brought-up and remain within.

*Grub Street

Monday Poem: Cat's Cradle

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Cat's Cradle

Follow the thread of history
back along these corridors,
contrived turnings,
so many corners.
We passed this way before.

We followed the thread back
to where all this once began.

But it only follows all our errors.
Each and every mistake we made
is embroidered between these walls.

A cat's cradle of our failings
tied up, parcelled, packaged.
Waiting here, still,
for history to return.

Living v Rock ‘n’ Roll

We do not go out looking for things to fill our lives. We just get on with living. The key is – I suppose – that it all lies in the routine ordinary days. It lies in all that stuff you try to escape from when you are young. All that stuff that is put down and derided in the song lyrics you learn off by heart in your teenage years. Rock ‘n’ roll is about escaping all that, or so it claims. But, if you are lucky, you realise that all that is the important stuff. All that is what connects people builds up communities.

The trivial unimportant day-to-day stuff, dismissed by all the media mouths is the important stuff. All the other stuff, the stuff that makes them look good as they strut their brief hour on the stage – that is the pointless, worthless stuff.