Carelessly Thrown together in The PRC - Or Giving The Expression Chinese Junk A Whole Nother Meaning.

As 2013 wheezes slowly to its end, presents opened, turkey consumed and Boxing Day Cornish pasties scoffed with bubble and squeak, thoughts turn to presents given and received.

All of mine given and received had one thing in common: none of them were Chinese tat. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not rich - not even comfortable; the Spanish State for which I work has seen to that. No, the point that I want to make is that we have all avoided the made in PRC label for one very good reason. We wanted to make sure that the gifts were still serviceable after New Year's Day. 

Notwithstanding most Euopean and American brands who maintain acceptable levels of quality in their Chinese subcontractors, any generic article emanating from the PRC tends to be, in a word, crap. And crappy crap of the crappiest crap kind.

Take the case of the two timer plugs that I bought this year. The first, an electromechanical affair, made in PRC, was purchased in summer. It lasted for about three weeks before getting thoroughly confused with our western imperialist electricity and rebelling. As such our immersion heater was switched on and off  with all the oriental inscrutability of an I-Ching reading. Peradventure the Feng Shui of the immersion heater was not propitious.

Two days ago I bought a (rather expensive) digital timer switch from an upmarket Spanish department store. It didn't even last an hour. When pressing the reset button, said button fell inside the device and so made it unuseable. I then looked at the maker's details. What a surprise! It was yet another fine article carelessly thrown together in the PRC. I should have known better. 

However, the real problem is the fact that retailers the world over seem to prefer the cheap and cheerless Chinese tat to (not much) more expensive articles made in the UK, EU or USA. We are being robbed of choice, subjected to a tyranny of tat while we see our own manufacturing jobs exported to the long-term benefit of no-one.

Instead of being condemned to endlessly replacing things that should last a lifetime, I would happily pay twice or more for an article that I know is not going to break or fall to pieces . In the case of the timer, I would prefer to pay the rapacious electricity companies more (at least electricity is produced fairly locally and employs people here) than line the pockets of billionaires living half a world away in an oppressive one-party regime with a human rights record that most third-world dictators would envy. 

And it would seem that most people are beginning to think the same. Many small Spanish shops have closed in recent years, driven out of business by the Chinese bazaar next door. Now we are beginning to see Chinese stores close down as consumers begin to realise that low prices and the lowest of abysmally low quality is not a real economic option.

So my wish for next Christmas is that our own business and political leaders realise that there is no real economic or social advantage in trade with the Middle Kingdom; just short-term gains and long-term losses. And please, Santa, bring me a serviceable timer switch, made in the UK, EU or USA! 

Update: Yesterday (18.01.14) I bought a different model of timer at the same store only to discover that the instructions included had absolutely nothing to do with the new model - they referred to the previously purchased piece of junk. Obviously this new timer was also chucked together in the same oriental sweatshop as the last. Wasn't it Einstein who said that madness was when one endlessly repeated the same action in the hope of a completely different result? Who is the lunatic, me for committing the same mistake twice in the same department store, or our society/economy for continuing to buy and peddle such low-quality crap from a corrupt rapacious, undemocratic country that oppresses its own people?

Note: Does PRC mean People's Republic of China - or, as I suspect, Produces Rivers of Crap?

A REVELATION

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

At the moment I am reading G.W.M. Reynolds’ Mysteries of London. Written in the 1830s, it is now considered by some as the first steampunk novel. I was pointed to the book by Asa Briggs through his masterly tome Victorian Cities. I have no idea of its the length – I have it on my Kindle. Suffice to say that I am now on chapter CXXV and am not yet 50% through the story.

The plot is no surprise to readers of Victorian improving literature: fallen women, honest journeymen and tradesmen ruined at the hands of dastardly noblemen, unscrupulous bankers and speculators; aristocrats who pay their debts of honour within a matter of hours while letting their tradesmen lose their livelihoods by refusing to pay them for months; a wronged hero and a cast of thousands, mostly of a disreputable nature. Add to this mixture a corrupt body politic, a callous judiciary who show nothing but contempt for the poor while indulging the high spirits of the aristocracy and what you have is a super-long novel that condemns the whole of British (English?) society. You can however, skip tens of pages at a time when the author starts spouting off about the one true saviour &.c &c. &c. To Reynolds’ credit, however, professional clerics and the Church of England in particular also come in for a good lashing.

The difference between Reynolds and Dickens is Reynolds’ total lack of sentimentalism. This is a documentary novel where occasionally the characters rather mysteriously have a grasp of the statistics regarding their particular calling over and above what they should reasonably know. They also have a tendency to regale their companions with the story of how they came to sink so low – a literary device that lets the reader see many aspects of how the poor were oppressed in so many different industries and callings. The novel, however, was not written just as an entertainment.  As mentioned before, this is rather an essay upon the plight of those members of the British population who have the misfortune not to belong to the aristocracy or to the highest class of capitalists – not that these latter are themselves completely safe from ruin and degradation.

Another great difference between Reynolds and Dickens is the fact that Reynolds does not only describe society; he examines it and the causes of its corruption and economic instability.

The most surprising elements of the book, however, is the fact that what Reynolds wrote 180 years ago is still true today: irresponsible banks and unscrupulous speculators (now called fund managers) who play with other people’s hard-earned money for their own enrichment while their victims find themselves on the street; the duality of the legal system where the aristos get fined (for them) meaningless sums (at least they do get fined – we all know about the infamous driving offences of the Saxe-Coburg, sorry, Windsor family that are never punished) for acts of high-spiritedness while the plebs who commit the same offences get jailed. The list is interminable.

For any of you, be you British, American, European or whatever, who think that you live in a free society where everyone is to some extent equal; I recommend that you read this book. You will find that, omitting the absolute misery and squalor in which people lived in the early 19^th century, we really haven’t progressed that much. Admittedly we are cleaner, healthier and materially better-off and better fed, but we are also more productive and more profitable for our masters.

As far as the economic gulf that separates us from our “betters”, it still remains the same – as does our reverence for such exalted beings, perhaps now both the gulf and our reverence are even greater.  

Read the book. You will be surprised by how contemporary the issues and social and economic abuses are. Even then, for example, Tower Hamlets had a reputation for being a sinkhole!

In Memoriam: Nelson Mandela

As the world mourns the death of Nelson Mandela – a truly great man – perhaps we should do so with a bit less open-eyed breathy wonderment and a bit more sensibly.

He was a mortal. He should have died months earlier, but his natural span was unnaturally and cruelly prolonged by the miracles of modern medicine. Had he been our father or grandfather[1], he might have been allowed to die with more dignity. However, the selfishness of the world, clinging to the wreckage of that once-great man, was unwilling to let him pass[2].

In my opinion, religion is an irrational security blanket that many need in order to face the uncertainties of life and death. Even though there are fortunately many others who have seen through the incense, smoke and mirrors of religion, some of them still feel the need for a secular idol – some greater being or ideal external to themselves. Some choose a pop star, some an actor; the most weak-minded choose a footballer or a fashion designer – perhaps even a shoe designer. Yet others, more intellectually and politically aware, chose Nelson Mandela.

Mandela was one of the greatest figures of the late 20^th century. He was a great man, a great statesman and a great father to post-apartheid South Africa. No-one could deny that his greatest achievement was that he showed the world how a single, dedicated man could change society. Yet at the same time what lay at the heart of his struggle was the belief that, in essence, we are all equal.

Bearing that in mind, perhaps the exaggerated reverence in which so many have held him for so long does in fact go against the grain of his philosophy and makes a mockery of his achievements. We will have to see if, without his presence, South Africa under the ANC will mire itself ever further in corruption and gradually return to being a one-party State, if it hasn’t already become one. 

Nelson Mandela was a man. No more, no less. Yes, a mere human being like you – like me – and as a man he surely had his faults just as the rest of us do. He might even, heaven forbid, have called his dog rude names when it did its number twos on the carpet.  He was not some sort of Christ-like figure as the first reports on BBC Radio 4 would have had us believe. I cringed as various journalists gushed on about his humility, his compassion; his capacity for forgiveness. I was half-waiting for news of his resurrection on the third day. At this moment in South Africa I am sure that, like the Roman soldiers around the cross played dice for Christ’s robes, a rather unseemly struggle is taking place to see who can make off with the great man’s mantle and political legacy. No doubt pretty soon the revisionist vultures, to their credit or shame[3], will also start to sink their talons into him and start to dig up the dirt.

Let us mourn then the man and his work and not the screen onto which so many politicians, artists and other trendy intellectuals, pseudo- or otherwise, have projected their own second-hand, lacklustre visions[4]. Rest in Peace Mr. Mandela, a peace that you have done so much to promote in your own country and continent. Let’s just hope that the example that you have set your land and countrymen will not, like your own remains, crumble into dust.

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[1] Although some people have deluded themselves into believing that he was indeed some sort of "universal" grandfather!

[2] Has anyone in the media said: “We shall not see his like again” yet?

[3] It all depends on your point of view.

[4] And no doubt made tidy sums on the royalites from their songs demanding or celebrating his release from prison – or indeed both.

Cutting Out The Middleman – You Know It Makes Sense

Last Sunday (17/11/13) I was unfortunate to wake up early enough to listen to BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship. That particular day it was from Headington Parish Church. Still, I thought that a bit of hymn singing never did anyone any harm so I continued to listen. What I had forgotten about was that there was a sermon to be got through and as last week was the 50^th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis, he was chosen as the subject under, erm, discussion?

The bacon butty. Always a small slice of heaven - and almost my premature passport to the Pearly  Gates. Image courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

But, heigh ho, I persevered, after all they do say that suffering is good for the soul – even though I had already sold mine a couple of years previously. However, what I heard almost made me choke on my crispy bacon butty.

Before going any further, let me quote the BBC website’s (badly punctuated[1]) disclaimer concerning the content of the Revd. Prof. Alister McGrath's sermon: "This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors ...changes may also be made at the last minute...".

Disclaimer nothwithstanding, this is indeed what the Reverend quoth from The Last Battle by CS Lewis:  [On seeing the new Narnia the Unicorn declared:] “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here”’. Then the lips of the Revd. Prof. dropped this pearl of wisdom (my bold): "For Lewis heaven is the "other country"  for which we were created in the first place.". Rather woolly thinking in my humble opinion.

OK, I know that greater, more capable commentators than I have written, spoken, chewed over and even been burnt at the stake for questioning the existence of god and his(?) designs for milennia. I know that the debate on free will has rumbled, and will continue to rumble, on for centuries, but I have to express my indignation at the above quotation. I find it so infantile, so silly, so... totally bollocks.

Quite simply, if we were all created for heaven in the first place, then why do we have to pass through this vale of tears? Come on, Rev., please! What kind of god dumps us here first? Why doesn't he just let us straight in instead of having us chance our spiritual arm? I'm sure that even the greatest monsters of the 20th century who caused so much anguish and suffering such as Mao, Hitler, Stalin and a whole host of smug TV presenters were once innocent children who helped little old ladies across the road.

Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian god himself is a cruel, vainglorious spiteful monster. He smites sinners[2]  razes whole cities and drowns innocent people and animals (which, of course, are amoral and do not have eternal souls that can be damned) because of the sins of a select few. Perhaps he more than most should not even be allowed to fill in the visa forms for the "other country".

The divine Ford Mustang Shelby. It would seem  that the celestial waiting list is even longer than  the now-defunct British Leyland’s was for its  magnificent Morris Marina. Image courtesy of amcarguide.com

Even his son wasn’t averse to saying the occasional porky to raise his audience ratings (my bold): "And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." (Luke 11:9-10) I've been askething for a Ford Mustang Shelby for decades and I still haven't receivethed.

What's more, I've been looking for a set of lost house keys for the last 3 months - to no avail. 
Luckily I have a spare set, so I don't have to knocketh. These days JC would be hauled up under the Trades Descriptions Act (and figuratively crucified on Radio 4's You and Yours?).

 So please god, if indeed you do exist, then cut out the middleman and let us all in now so we don't have to suffer illness, mortgages, German motorbikes that don't work, bad TV series, Coca Cola at room temperature, unwashed hippies, people with halitosis and yet others that fart in lifts. After all, according to the Revd. Prof. Alister Mcgrath's reading of CS Lewis, we were all created for heaven anyway.

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[1] There shouldn't be a comma before the and.

[2] For example he fulminated Onan for coitus interruptus, for spilling his seed instead of impregnating the widow of his dead brother whom his father had forced him to marry – hence the term Onanism. 

Why Britain Should Be Thankful to Spain

… and not for the cheap good-quality wines, the olive oil (cheaper than oil labelled Italian, probably produced in Spain and bottled in Italy), or the holidays, be they of the cultural or beach variety. And definitely not for the histrionic, over-rated pretentious pap peddled by film director Pedro Almodóvar and considered "Art" by many misguided souls.

No, Britain should be grateful to Spain for the amount of highly-qualified, highly-cultured engineers, doctors, nurses etc. who want to make a decent life for themselves in the UK.

My colleagues and I have just finished a long and gruelling round of language certification exams for the students of our august university, a university whose internal schizophrenia is reflected in the student body and the population of Seville itself. I am, of course speaking in general terms, but it would seem to me that the students could be classified into two main groups, the backward-looking parochial types and the ambitious, motivated ones with an international outlook. 

The Humanities seem to fall quite neatly into the antiquated, parochial pigeonhole[1] while the Sciences are definitely more forward-looking, more academically up-to-date and definitely more innovative. In fact, the Faculty of Medicine here is a true centre of excellence, something also true of Life Sciences and Engineering.

Anyhow, back to the main argument. In my last round of oral exams, I was truly gratified by the scintillating performance by over 80% of the candidates, young people with great ambition, high expectations and limitless drive. Not only was I impressed by their use of English, but by their intellect and depth of thought. These are just the sort of people a country needs to progress economically and socially. Unfortunately for Spain, most of them want to contribute to the progress of other countries, mainly Britain, the US and Germany.

Spain isn't working.  

And it's not the fault of the Spaniard in the street 

(sometimes literally).

 Image: elcorreo.com

Perhaps “want” is too strong a word, perhaps not. Would these bright people stay in Spain if Society as a whole offered its young people more opportunities? Perhaps most would, I cannot say. But I can speak from personal experience. My own son is an economic migrant, although within Spain. In Andalusia he had little chance of getting a stable job – or indeed training – in his own field of interest and specialisation: high-performance motorbike mechanics. In reality, he had little chance of finding any type of job at all. Now, after three years of training and practice, he and a colleague from his course have just opened their own workshop in Barcelona (Global Motos, Josep Tarradellas 55, Barcelona. Tel. +34 931 413 084).

By dint of hard work and application.

By dint of hard work and application they have found a financial backer and have also received support from an official motorbike dealership in the form of workshop equipment and advice. In Andalusia, such a thing would be well-nigh impossible – unless you had connections in high places, in which case some sort of subsidy might well be forthcoming.

As in Andalusia, as in Spain in general (Catalonia excepted). Spanish Universities are producing whole battalions of highly-educated young people and then consigning them to a life of dependency upon their parents. If they are “fortunate” they will sweat out their youth in a series of short-term Macjobs with no real future of betterment. If not, then the only alternative left to them is to master the finer points of the latest X-Box or Play Station.

This is why British Society should be grateful to Spain. Thanks to such gifted young people, the British economy will have a brighter future while Spain, after two decades of economic effervescence, will once again fall into the sclerotic economic torpor to which its usually inept and far too often venal, rulers (now with the connivance of the EU) have condemned it for much of the last five centuries[2].

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[1] Could you believe that the Journalistic component of its Master’s in Translation concentrated exclusively on the translation of reports of 1950s football matches and abstruse fashion articles into Spanish??? Well, believe it. Really contemporary, mainstream stuff.

[2] As an economic migrant myself, I benefited from an excellent British state education and migrated to Spain in the late 1980s. I have never paid income tax in the UK, but now find that my Spanish income tax is contributing to the education of such brilliant young people who will in turn go to Britain and pay their taxes there. The ironies of life!

REFLECTIONS ON, AND FROM, A BALDING PATE

Or: Turn on Your Shears Relax and Float Downstream.

Yesterday I was using the electric clippers – number one – on my Amazonian rainforest of hair (i.e. the total area covered is decreasing alarmingly, especially on the uplands). As I was doing great execution on the remaining vegetation I entered into a Proustian state of remembering. Here is the result of my musings:

First came to mind the comment of Victor, coiffeur of choice to Liverpool’s punk and new-wave, of cutting it “down to the wood”. Victor. A fifty-plus old-fashioned barber. He had his one-chair business in what I imagine had been in former times the porter’s lodge on the black and white marble-tiled mezzanine floor of a beautiful, 19^th-century run-down office building in Whitechapel, less than 100 yards away from the NEMS music shop. If you were really lucky, he would show you the spaces between his fingers, encrusted with the hairs of the faces he had shorn and give them a squeeze, resulting in a satisfying ooze of interdigital pus.

In my memory (albeit rather sketchy due to the fact that I spent great part of the late 70s and early 80s in a confused state of chemical enhancement) the shelves jostled with the accoutrements of his trade and while you sat in your creaky, boil-inducing, leather trousers on an old bus seat waiting for the chop, you might find yourself sitting next to Robbo the massive, muscled skinhead – a gentle giant reputed to be an eight-times-a-night man or a suited gent, sporting a Masonic tie clip, from one of the offices above (what did they do there?). Victor’s was a place where people of all classes and conditions met and interacted.

Image courtesy of
http://tonsorialist.wordpress.com/category/haircuts/

At that time, my cut of choice was a flat-top[1] now, unfortunately, impossible. If I let my hair grow to a length of 1in.-plus, it forms a rather hestitantly ridiculous Robbie Williams crest. I am contemned to suede-headedness for the rest of my life, unless I decided to go in for a comb-over. Hell will freeze over first. Less, in this case, can indeed be more.

As the clippers continued to graze over my dome, my mind wandered further back. To the days of Les’s the Barbers. Les was a consummate hacker when there were only three computers in the whole of GB. All the boys in my primary and middle school went there for our monthly short back and sides, our hair hacked at and chewed up by Les and his blunt scissors. His scissors may have been blunt, but his hatred of kids was extremely keen; he brought a whole new meaning to the term slaphead. If we moved our heads, we would be cuffed around the ears and invited to “fucking keep still, yer little git”. And this in front of our dads! Dads, of course, were treated with great deference and their haircuts usually ended with a murmured ”Something for the weekend, sir?” at which point certain “surgical supplies” or “prophylactics” would be slipped into the dad’s top pocket. Such discretion! Now the properties of the London Rubber Company’s finest products[2] are trumpeted proudly on TV.

Granddads, in their turn, would obtain something even more mystifying and well worth watching: they would have the tips of their hair singed (even their ear hair!) once the ordeal of hacking and mangling was over. Now what was that all about? I suppose that, returning to the Amazonian metaphor, we could call it a minor case of slash and burn. I later learnt that htis was one of those old beleifs that hair was hollow and when cut, exposed the inner part to invasion form all sorts of nasties. Hair is not hollow; only some of the heads that sport it - footballers, for example

But back to the man himself. We were given our haircut money, plus a sixpenny tip, when sent

Similar to Thornton's - not quite the same but you get the idea. 

Image from the Web - sorry but I've forgotten the site. 

to get our hair cut. Obviously the wilier victim would hold back the tip and buy choccy next door at Old Mr. Thornton’s[3] (no relation). But such petty crime had its desserts. Miffed at not having received his Manegeld, your next haircut would be even more vicious. Oh, what a lark! Les was such a card, the Bastard!

He was also an enigma. Everyone knew at least something about everyone else in the neighbourhood[4], except about Les. He seemed to have no existence outside his den of torture. No-one, for example, ever saw him enter or leave the premises. No-one knew why he had one leg a good couple of inches shorter than the other. Motorbike accident? War wound? Birth defect? Why didn’t he get an orthopaedic boot? No-one knew. Everybody knew, however, who had had their hair cut at Les’. The layers in the hackee’s hair would be stepped corresponding to when he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Of further, sociological, interest is the parade of shops itself. This formed the frontier between our neighbourhood of shabby genteel Victorian mansions and villas and the terraced housing, home to the rough boys who also went to my school – and Les’ Barbershop. I think all the kids on both sides enjoyed their first illicit encounters with alcohol (Bulmer’s cider) and ciggies (Woodbines) thanks to the rather liberal interpretation given to the law by Mr. Mackie, the owner and manager of the off-licence to be found at the end of the parade.

At the age of about thirteen I graduated to a Unisex salon, all chrome, black leather and smoky mirrors where, before it was cut, you would have your hair washed by rather attractive young damsels whose smocks always had the top two buttons undone. That is all I remember about that place – that and the large poster (changed monthly) of a naked lady stuck thoughtfully on the ceiling for the washee’s contemplation. Of little interest indeed compared with sadistic Les and, later, garrulous Victor whose décor and services (and in the case of Les, skills too) were basic, but whose ambience lingers still in the minds of all who went there for a haircut.

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[1]  A rather tenuously-related anecdote. In the Beatles’ “Come Together” Lennon begins with the lines: Here come old flat top/He come grooving up slowly. He later revealed in an interview that they were from a Chuck Berry song. Berry promptly sued for part of the royalties. And won (obviously).

[2] Including the famous Easy-on. Yet, if they are easy to put on, wouldn’t it be correspondingly easy for them to slip off during the act? I myself was conceived in such a manner when the easy-ons didn’t exist (in the days of, ahem, hard-on, easy off?) but the easy-offs most certainly did.

[3] Thornton’s general shop sold everything from ciggies, home-made ice cream and bags of broken biscuits to paraffin from a large tank at the end of the row of biscuit hoppers. Imagine a shop like the Local Shop in The League of Gentlemen. Old Mr. Thornton looked like an (even more) irascible Arthur Lowe with a Hitler moustache. When he died the “young” Mr. Thornton (60+ years old) took over until he succumbed to Parkinson’s.  

[4] Like Old Joey from the pub, who somehow already knew in the mid-60s that micro-electronic devices could be inserted into dental work and dentures so that “they” could keep tabs on us. His first order at the bar was a pint of bitter and a half of mild in a pint glass, this latter being where he would drop his dentures until chucking out time when he would retrieve his gnashers and drain the rather unappetising gargle. Or vice versa. In all fairness, he did work on the Polaris nuclear subs at Cammel Laird’s shipbuilders and perhaps knew, and talked about, stuff he shouldn’t.

HOW TO GO ON STRIKE WITHOUT REALLY STRIKING OR WITHOUT LOSING A DAY’S PAY.

This week is a week of strikes in Spanish education. Students will be striking for three days while teachers at all levels will be striking on Thursday, in some cases whether they want to or not.

But first, why the strike? The strike has been called to protest against the right-wing Spanish Government’s latest educational reforms. I will not bore you with the details, apart from saying that this one, like all such reforms, is a proverbial curate’s egg – good in parts and stinkingly rotten in others. Educational reform, promoted by whichever party in whichever country will always be divisive and will always (obviously) serve party dogma. Like hurricanes and other such phenomena, educational reform is cyclical. All that the long-suffering populace can do is simply batten down the hatches, mumble and grope around in the dark and endure stoically before emerging blinking into a new, strange panorama. They will then try to make a good fist of the wreckage until the next one hits.  

The “democratically elected”[1] powers that be of the august educational establishment for which I work are, obviously, against the government’s proposals, but to be fair on them, they have also opposed decisions taken by the previous left-wing government too. Basically, they are a bunch of grandstanding progressives. Indeed, so progressive are they that strikers lose no pay!!!

Surely the legitimacy of a strike lies in the fact that the workers sacrifice a day’s pay to voice their concerns? Where the reward for those whose conscience dictates that they  disagree with the call? Working or not, we will all get paid and thus the decision to strike or not loses all credibility. Evidently however, the figures will look good on the news. This Thursday I will be “striking” because the centre where I work will be closed down, not because I particularly want to.

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[1] Our glorious leaders are elected by vertical democracy. This was a wheeze used by the the Franco régime in order to give itself a veneer of democracy. It consists of different collectives, in this case, let’s say, teaching staff, unions, students, administrative staff, &c. electing various representatives who then elect the next tier of representatives &c., &c. &c. until we arrive at the Rector and his Cabal. The idea of a directly-elected team is somehow anathema – perhaps for the same reason that Franco and his mateys didn’t like direct elections: the result might not be the “correct” one. 

Plebgate; Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies? Or, My Own Tuppenceworth

Someone I know once voiced, rather sententiously, the none-too-original opinion that anyone who wants to join the police force shouldn’t be allowed to. Obviously, there are many selfless bobbies out there whose vocation is to serve the common weal and who, tragically, lose their lives so doing. There are also many who forget that it is not their person, but their office which demands the respect of the public. Thus it is in all public service. When a court rises as the judge enters, it is to honour the judiciary as a whole and not the individual in the robes and wig.

I AM THE LAW!

And so it should be with the police. Unfortunately, it would seem, many officers demand that the rest of us respect their office while they themselves do not, as the latest Jimmy Savile revelations would appear to demonstrate. The police seem to think that they can act with impunity or worse. they sometimes delude themselves into thinking that they are the Law, like the post-apocolyptic Judge Dredd from the excellent 2000AD comic, and not its servants.

I think that a lot of people are getting tired, even the Prime Minister David Cameron, with the illegitimate interference of the long-cossetted police and the Police Federation in the political life of our country.

The breathaking arrogance of the police is in the news yet again with the treatment of the three Police Federation officers who after a meeting with Andrew Mitchell MP gave a false account of the content of the meeting. Their  reprehensible behaviour has resulted in their being… erm, told they were naughty boys and not to do it again? Here is my own personal experience of certain officer believing that being a copper conferred upon him/her some sort of superiority over the rest of us mere mortals.

Last year, when surfing Twitterdom, I came across a private tweet written by a police officer at the Northampton Police Cells who tweeted about life there. The tweets were written during working hours and gave the impression that they were, at the very least, tweeted with the knowledge of superior officers.  Apparently this was not the case.

I eventually protested to the Northants Police when the tweeter boasted: “Called in to start work early. Bed to office in 25 mins! I impressed myself.” When I asked the officer if s/he had respected the speed limits and traffic lights I got no reply.

The officer also tweeted this picture:

A none-too agreeable mugshot

It looks extremely like a mug, and if so was probably produced in quite large numbers and sold to correspondingly large numbers of police officers. The background wording tells us this is a British, not US, police mug. Don’t you find the message in black arrogant and insulting? I do.

If we speculate that large numbers of this mug were produced and sold, what dear reader does this tell us about our police forces? Nothing good, I fear. 

As a result of my complaint, the officer was told to shut down the twitter account, @NorpolCustody. Apart from that I don’t know if, except for a good talking-to, the officer was in any way disciplined. No rubber hoses or falling down the stairs in this case! 

STRAWBERRY FIELDS, or Steak is Lentils

Probably one of John Lennon’s best and most iconic songs is the starting point of today’s post, a post in no small measure inspired by Silver Tiger’s recent blog, Out, Out, Damned Internet. 

Here is a link to a rather toe-curlingly embarrassing video of the Fab Four prancing and cavorting around pretentiously in what would now be classed as an early (excruciatingly wince-inducing) pop video of Strawberry Fields.  I wish I had never seen it.

And never have a song’s introductory lines been more topical. Here's a reminder (my italics):

“Let me take you down, ‘cos I’m going to Strawberry Fields,

Nothing is real.”

Although the song was released in the UK on February 13th 1967, the above lyrics reflect our contemporary society perfectly. Today we are living in a society where a large part of our daily lives is conducted with a virtual interface. Let me explain. If we buy a concrete article, or indeed a virtual service, we will probably pay with plastic, with our phones or with an electronic transfer. No real money changes hands. We can shop for real groceries in virtual supermarkets – we can even buy unreal books to download onto our e-books. This in fact is a rather nice circularity. The immaterial thoughts of an author, once exclusively recorded on physical media – paper – for transmission to the reader’s own mind can now be transmitted through virtual systems. A form of mediated telepathy, I would venture to call it.

Let me give a more personal example: mobile telephony. Here in Spain there is no such thing as a Movistar shop actually run by Movistar; they are all franchises, as I suppose is the case of all other mobile phone companies. I know someone who recently had her mobile stolen. Needless to say the SIM card was immediately cancelled, but to kill the phone she had to go to the police and report the theft. The police report was then sent by email to the phone company and the phone was duly killed. Most of the process was carried out remotely and at no point did she actually see any employee of the phone company face to face. And the phone? €400 down the drain. €400 that she neither saw in her hand nor in her pay packet as all of this money only ever existed virtually. It only existed because we are told and believe that it exists. All rather Buddhist I think. It is one of modern life’s great paradoxes that as we are all more interconnected, we all shrink more into our own little personal carapaces and pay less attention to the world around us, all rather Buddhist I think. 

And so to Buddhists. A question: have you ever seen a poor working class Buddhist? I haven’t. In my experience, Western Buddhists tend to be well-off middle-class people, usually retired, on some sort of pension or, as they used to say, with a private means of income. In other words people who in the past would have been flâneurs; people who have nothing better to do.

Those who do have things to do range from peddlers of their own type of Buddhism to peddlers of death-dealing weapons. I know one who teaches you (for a modest consideration) how to prepare for your physical death and transition to the next step in your existence by relating to a pebble sold to you at a rather extortionate price from the great collection with which Karma has blessed his rather large goat farm. He sells the goat’s milk. I never did find out what happened to the kids. Perhaps they were all loaded into a nice comfy cattle truck and taken to other, greener, pastures to live out their lives into a venerable old age in caprine contentment. More probably, they were shovelled, panic stricken, into an old van, trundled off to the abattoir and hung upside down to have their throats cut and bleed to death.

I know of yet another who spends half the year as an arms dealer and the other half eating lentils (no meat please, it involves the killing of sentient beings). Then again, as the ideologues of US National Rifle Association never tire of telling us guns don’t kill people; people kill people.  

And so to the subject of food. A Buddhist once told me that although the eating of dead flesh is a no-no, if that’s all there is to eat, you can eat it no problemo. How? Simple. You tell yourself that the mouth-wateringly delicious, juicy steak in front of you is in fact a bowl of lentils and hey

The biggest bag of lentils ever?
Photo from grammyshouse-susan.blogspot.com

presto!  Lentils it is. As everything is merely an hallucination that our perverse senses call into being, then logically if your upper consciousness tells your senses that steak is lentils, then steak is lentils. Pass the mustard, please. I wish it were a trick that worked in the other direction – good steak is hellishly expensive, or as they say here in Andalusia: mu, mu caro.

This rather surprising denial of reality has other benefits for Buddhists; they don’t really need to engage, for good or for ill, with what we poor benighted creatures call the real world. We do of course know that the Buddhist monks in Burma tend to make life more than a little uncomfortable for Burmese Moslems, yet as this is all a dream, does it really matter? Indeed, in the Buddhist mind, is this reality in Burma really real at all?

As reality does not exist, then neither do Buddhists have to help their fellow men. They prefer to help animals instead, animals that have survived for millions of years without the interference of Man – even dead ones. I have actually been witness to a dead pigeon (it was found expiring by a Buddhist of my acquaintance) being kept in the family freezer along with the peas, carrots veggie burgers &c. for months until it was finally laid to rest in a peaceful wood some miles outside Seville. Luckily it was a moribund pigeon she found and not and Alsatian as there would have been no room in the freezer. Unless it was chopped up.

"Instant Karma's gonna get you"
From Instant Karma, John Winston Lennon.

Karmic Brownie points can of course be accumulated by helping people. As long as it doesn’t cost too much money or effort. As the main aim of the Buddhist is to navel gaze and improve his or her own soul, little time is set aside for the improvement and well-being of those around them – unless of course there’s money to be made helping them along their route to Nirvana. Indeed, in the case of the arms dealer, maybe the unfortunate involved may not exactly wish to be helped out of this vale of tears, but hey ho.  Never in my life have I met such a smug, self-deluded bunch of people. Nice people in general, but very, very, very mistaken. They are definitely up there with the Moslems and Christians.

Finally, if there are any Buddhists reading this, don’t worry. It’s nothing more than a corrupt figment of your basest imaginings created by your oh-too fickle senses. After all, nothing is real. 

Footnote:
Since writing this, I have re-watched the Strawberry Fields video and have decided that although a bit naïf, it does in fact communicate the theme of mental disassociation that runs throughout the song. In other words it's rather confusing and confused

Eureka! Or: What Archimedes and Physics Teachers Never Told Us about Displacement

Image courtesy of mizantrop.co.il

We have all heard about Archimedes and his famous bathtime activities of splashing around, his wooden duck falling onto the bathroom floor with the overflow. This discovery helped us all understand why things float and why rubber ducks are better than wooden ones (fewer painful splinters and fewer cracked tiles). What we have never been told is why he was in the bath in the first place. For hygienic reasons, perhaps, but I reckon old Archie was there as a literal and figurative displacement activity.

Probably he should have been out shopping in the agora for that day’s dinner in Teskonotos or Asdakopoulos. But hey, it was a hot day, the streets were full of hoi polloi and Konon the barbarian slave was occupied clipping wifey’s toenails. Perhaps, even, he should have been drawing up plans for some new invention to help the contemporary Athenian’s life be that little bit more connected, more interactive, with easy-to-use eikons. Anyhow, to postpone the dreaded moment he decided to have a bath and pluck the hairs off his toes. He definitely was not worrying about the state of the Athenian Oeconomy and the overbearing demands of his Teutonic masters to reign in government spending. After all, the nothern barbarians were still running around naked and fighting Russel Crowe and his dog Wufus on the Danube.

Whatever. First he decided to have a nice, hot bath. No energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly showers for this lad. And in so doing he discovered displacement and - more importantly - the displacement activity.

I am a Master of Displacement. Sometimes, when not involved in displacement activities, I have the dubious honour of working for one of the, gulp, world’s top 500 universities. In fact, this post is a displacement activity in itself – and so far I have left it three times. I have convinced myself that it is imperative that I (wet) shave

I actually remember this type of washing
machine! Image courtesy of permaculture.co.uk

and on the way back from the bathroom look at the bed to remind myself that, eventually, I will have to make it. Finally I had the unavoidable urge to check that the washing machine is still going round. I love watching our washing machine (good pronunciation practice that bit, I’ll have to use it in a class!) but I love the old ones better. They used more water and you could see lots of little bubbles and the clothes sloshing about, displacing the grey water.

Where was I? Oh yes, displacement. This year my commute is slightly longer than before and involves a one-hour drive to work. I therefore need to commence the leaving process at least two to three hours before starting work. Why? First I have to have a shower, get dressed, have a mighty powerful hot drinking coffee and get to the car. This obviously involves all of the above, but also might include re-arranging the stuff in the bathroom cabinet while looking for the deodorant I bought last week but will not need until the other, full, can has been exhausted.  Then I might also look for the sachet of sugar that a colleague gave me to put that into my coffee instead of using the jar of sugar in the kitchen. There then ensues a lengthy round of checking up on emails, Facebook, etc. Finally I get into the car and drive off.

My Ford is the best car in the world. It isn’t new, but has enough technology to keep me happily occupied while driving. I set the fuel consumption display to show how many miles are left before I need to fill up. This means driving at various speeds to see how this figure rises and falls, the occasional overtaking and scanning of the skies for traffic helicopters &c. &c. &c. Therefore, the one-hour drive might take 45 minutes in Rammstein listening mode or it might take 1 hour 20 minutes if I’m in end-of-the-month fuel-saving mode. It all depends.

Once at work, I have time to check my emails (usually publicity or official university emails that I delete unopened), chat to the admin. staff, flirt, have a coffee, peruse our own lending library, enjoy some banter with colleagues, read a blog or two, start listening to Radio 4 and then realise class is about to start.

The classes themselves are a goldmine of displacement activities: I observe the idiosyncrasies of the students and mentally note them for use at a later date; I play with the computer (obviously after freezing the image on the projector) and, of course, reach the day’s teaching objectives while trying to keep the students interested and amused. Although I say so myself, I usually manage all three quite successfully.

I sometimes wonder if, in fact, work is my real displacement activity. Classes over for the day, the whole process begins in reverse. I –

Sorry, must go. There’s a crooked picture on the wall facing me and I absolutley must straighten it before going for a wander around the local supermarket to see how much Bombay Sapphire gin costs this week – it’s a great indicator of the pound-euro exchange rate. You could try something similar at yours, using a bottle of Sherry or Rioja.

PS. Bombay Sapphire is currently €21.95 in Mercadona. The pound is on the up.