28/12/14 [A snapshot]

I visited Guildford again, it was unpleasantly cold there, in a wintry way not an unwelcoming one.

The Shops are more fun today, I thought, as a I chanced upon a gentleman with a stand filled with booklets next to him. The printed cardboard sign above his stand bore the legend "What You Should Know About Mental Disorders" and a logo, the initials of the Jehovah's Witnesses dot org.

I was not rude, I was not loud, I don't think I drew a crowd as I questioned him on the appropriateness of using the emotive and very serious subject of mental health as a hook to attract attention to his worship club flyers. He was stumped but started to move the booklets that mentioned the subject on their covers to the top of the stand, nearest to the sign, and the ones that did not he moved down.

We spoke for some minutes. I was cheerfully nimble-minded and more learned than he expected. Eventually, when standing still in the cold had become tiresome for me, he could come up with no answer at all when asked the straight question, "What benefit is it to me or anyone else to be a member of your club?" and he was equally at a loss when then asked, "What ill will befall me or misfortune will I suffer if I don't join?".

With no apparent upside to membership and no downside to non-membership he appeared momentarily baffled as to why he was a member of the club himself, though I should commend him for conceding positively that the JWs are not an appropriate organisation to advise on any aspect of mental health.

I left the idiot pondering my assertion that every time he and those like him said to do something benign or worthwhile just because a particular book said so he and those like him were giving authority to anyone else's instruction to other people to do harmful things just because the same particular book said do them, too.

I tried on some shoes but they were too small and no larger the same were in stock at that or any other branch or their warehouse. I ate a sausage sandwich perhaps eight feet to the side from an ex-colleague from two jobs ago to whom I would have had nothing to say beyond acknowledging that we had been colleagues so said nothing.

I despise in passing the individual or committee that decided to put HP Sauce in small sachets which are impossible to open without getting some sauce on your fingers and those who dare distribute as napkins the flimsiest of paper sheets that adhere, tear and leave themselves attached to drying sauce instead of wiping one's digits clean. More wandering about ensued. I needed a cigarette.

I warmed up by queuing in Costa, before sitting outside in the cold to consume hot milk with coffee in it, to smoke and to watch the herds of pedestrians I had numbered amongst only moments earlier. As a seated observer of the hustle and bustle I was undistracted from reflection on the remarkable dexterity of the young barista whose work had had me mesmerised while awaiting my beverage.

I wondered whether there were any other jobs left in the modern world where the demonstrated attention to detailed and complex manual procedures performed at high speed had not been mechanised, whether such skills were transferable to a higher earnings bracket, as I am sure they were not being adequately rewarded where they were.

There is a lady who carries out similar tasks rather more slowly in the Liphook Sainsbury's Cafe, where I sometimes pause on shorter walks from home, who wields a J-cloth in the most disturbing fashion when attending to a steam-pipe dripping with just foamed milk. I do hope it is not just for my benefit.

I am having to remember I don't and won't have a bakery to stop at on the way to work now or a lunch-break to remind me to go to a café. My default daily calorie intake is down as a result by a sausage roll, a doughnut, some crisps and a bacon roll. It may have been a diet devoid of goodness but it was a diet of sorts.

Tomorrow I shall have a far healthier festive feast with my sister and her family and doubtless will feel uncomfortably full and suffer the wind of the sparsely-toothed for some while afterwards. I suppose that is what crimbo is all about.

Borders [2015]

Borders are just the boundaries of

Where sets of rules apply.

Where being different, for example,

You can live or you must die.

I don't want persecution

Of people like me

To wander free.

Neither do I want persecution of you.

______

Somewhere between

The far side of

The Middle East

And just over there

The rules change.

A transsexual stoned

In Seaside City

Is a

Recreational

Happenstance.

A transsexual stoned

In the Middle East

Is a

Public

Execution.

______

Especially,

I am wary of people

Who have been raised to

Believe it is their god's will to

Stone me.

Perhaps it

Is no surprise

I am wary of people

Who refuse to respect

Our bounded freedoms.

It is true,

You cannot see

Political boundaries

From the depth of space

But they are very real on earth,

This planet where we have to live.

______

Europe is an area of land.

It has hot bits and cold bits,

Flat bits and bumpy bits,

Bits that are dry and

Bits that are less so but,

It isn't the land that

Made Europe the magnet

For the disenfranchised

From elsewhere in the world.

______

Soil has no more or less problem than sand

With colour or gender or preference,

With who walks hand in hand

With whom or for why

They can't stand

Each other.

It's just

Land.

______

I am fifty-three, born

Only seventeen years

After World War Two.

When I was born a

European, peace was

barely old enough to

ride a motorcycle and

still too young to vote.

This year,

European Peace

Is seventy years old

And we take it for granted.

______

But it has taken people seventy years

Of tolerance, of understanding,

Education and co-operation

To get where we are,

To become where

Everyone else

Wants to

Be.

It didn't come for free.

______

We did not achieve this

Lasting peace in secret.

Our methods are in

The public domain.

______

Our methods are

The European public.

Our customs and practices,

Our rules and regulations,

Our laws and public behaviour

Are what makes Europe

And Europeans

Successful.

The peace

And calm,

The time

To think

Can no more

Be stormed

Or occupied

Than a pub's

Quiet ambience,

Its calm can be

Enjoyed

By anyone

If one

Pugnacious

Seeker

Of it destroys

The very thing

That drew them.

I heard a little girl sing a wartime song today [2014]

I heard a little girl sing a wartime song today, she sang
Words that resonate in me as a collective brave face,
As a desperate attempt at cheer in the face of death.

But that's not
How she sang it.

It was a song from the war after the one we remember
Having joined a hundred years ago today,
A song from the war fought by men whose fathers, uncles and
Elder brothers had fought the War To End All Wars,
Men who were under no illusions as to their likely fate.

But that's not
How she sang it.
______
______

The morning of Pride came to me slowly and slightly after noon.

An Eve of Pride Party had come to me hard and fast
Staying with me till some way after dawn.

It was fully light and already warm
When I fell to sleep beneath
The open window at the bed end
Of my just over bed-wide flat.

I slept soundly but only until the parade approached,
The crowd's enthusiasm rising and reaching its crescendo
As it passed along the road not seventy yards from where I lay.
______

My father, by now in generous old age,
Had been admitted to hospital a week before.

There an emergency tracheotomy had suddenly denied him
Both speech and the ability to feed except by tube for life.
______

I feel duty bound to experience the magical day
As proof of its existence and to have something to say

When I hospital visit my father, still twenty-four hours away.
______

I am hanging, a little stoned, it feels early and my mind is racing
At the finality of my father's situation and how desperately frustrating
And unsatisfying the remainder of his time will be, however long or short.

All the while I am making my way, against the flow of the crowd, toward the
Headspace I know I will find when I reach the sea and look out over what man
Has not since the dawn of time worked out how to colonise and fuck up like land.

It is my father's life that flashes through my mind while I dodge and weave through an
Oncoming shoal of unsubtly smuggled budgies and booty-shorts that shimmer in the sun.

I am not ashamed that I have tears on my cheeks at a carnival to celebrate the diversity of life.
______

I am head-wrestling my self.

It hurts as my emotions struggle
To take and hold my imagination,

Flitting as it always does between
Extremes of pleasure and of pain.

There is nothing more important in my world
Than my father lying uncomfortably in hospital.

I am today his eyes, his ears, his experience of
The world outside a sterile, single bedded room.

I cannot lie to him when I download as best I can my bedside head to his
So it is my bounden duty to make the truth of the day as entertaining as I can.
______

I have by now escaped the crowd and stand, battered sausage in hand, by the sea.

One pound and twenty pence invested in making a true story a little lighter to listen to.

My eyes are red with both tears and tiredness and the rings beneath are as puffy as puffy can be.

I am on my second convenience-store handy-pack of tissues as I now almost ignore the waves of

Sadness at projected imaginings of a time yet to be in a place or places unknown crashing against the rock

That is the reality of now, today, and all the days that have gone before to enable this one to be what it is.
______

I feel safe to lean against the railings above the beach
To look back at the land, to see how little has changed,
Then I think of the day and how much is very different.

I am hungry but can't face another battered sausage joke
So start walking back along the Promenade toward the pier.

I am thinking out now, looking around me, listening for detail
I can use to distract from my father's woes and maybe, just
Maybe, put a smile on his face when I see him tomorrow.

Three chrome-laden-Harley-boys rock up to the posing park,
Remove their helmets and as I pass by I hear them laughing,
About their bingo-wings billowing at speed on the motorway.

It’s the price of high bars and sleeveless vests and waistcoats
For all but the most Easy Rider scrawny of Peter Fonda wannabes.
______

Me, I like my arms.
They are not the finest, magazine grade
You might ever see
But you'd probably agree
They look right
With an all-over covering of skin
And that does it for me
______

I wear sleeves when I ride my bike
So as not to have to when I don't.
______

It's early evening and I am calm when I return to my one-bed wide flat.
My thoughts are still volatile but I have become used to cerebral bangs
And flashes of all the things I know not to write down in the moment.

I am not in the mood for an After-Pride Party but I will make the effort
Because that is what I have planned to do and I can't report back that I
Stayed in because I was miserable that one day soon my dad will die.

I shaved and showered, probably shat,
Making full use of all the facilities in the flat
I cooked myself something my father never would

Because he loved his son.

I never cared so much for me as did he.

I dressed and I walked the short road to the club
Where I drank and I smoked and danced to rub-a-dub dub.

It was long after dawn when I climbed into bed and
Set my alarm to leave just enough time to drive
Fifty miles into a summer Sunday afternoon.

To do my best at shutting out the shit
Of the whole sorry circumstance
And to ignore my yesterday
Insofar as I had mourned
The passing of much
Of what my
Father
Was

Yet
He was
Still there,
Albeit fragile.
______

I told my tale jokily
And raised a smile or two.

It was too soon to explain what I wanted,
That what I had witnessed the day before
With my own eyes, however blearily it was
And through however many tears of either
Sadness or of celebration, was proof positive
That he and his father had not lived in vain.

It isn't that they fought battles and won.
Instead, they demonstrated
How to do peace.
______
______

That is the key.

It's impossible to impose peace.

People have to notice how others achieve it.

If they amend their behaviour to match they achieve it, too.

It isn't about militarily suppressing revolt, anyone with firepower can do that.

Nor about scaring gullibles into brainwashed accord with outdated "divine" instruction manuals.

The best thing we can do to help those at war in far off lands is to keep doing exactly what we peacefully do.

Eventually they might notice, give it a go and discover how much easier peace is than war. If not it is their own loss.
______
______

It's not my job to save the world.
But if everyone behaved like me
There would be no religion or war.

Just saying.
_____

The song I heard the little girl sing was from my father's war.

It was his generation that wanted luck wished them
When their loved ones waved them goodbye.
______

My father was one of the very lucky ones,
He came home at the end of the war.
Having sung that song himself with
Friends and fellows who didn't,
A good few years before.

He will have sung it since in memory
Of those who were less lucky than he,
The chorus rising and rousing but empty
From those living in defiance for the dead.

But that's not
How she sang it.

The little girl sang the lyric with innocent enthusiasm,
With the broadest and happiest of smiles
She stripped it of all connotations,
She deleted its history files.
______

I wish my father had lived to hear it sung that way, too,
And that he had witnessed also Pride in Seaside City.
______

It is a hundred years since we entered the Great War
And nearly seventy since we emerged from the Second.
We have come a long way since Europe last fought.

A lot is said for the men, women and children who died.
Not enough is said for those who survived,
For those who made the changes
That enable us to enjoy
Our freedoms
Today,

That enable small children
To grow up here in peace
And in happiness
Without experience
Or knowledge of war.

Because that
Is how the little girl sang it
And because that
Made it special to hear.

© Po 2014

The System

My most recently FB-encountered proponent of dismantling the current "system", that which has evolved over many thousands of years and which has made life gradually easier for all those who engage with it than it would be for them to scratch a living from the earth with their bare hands, was a city-dwelling DJ, one who was pictured on their profile page living in a modest but softly furnished flat, fully clothed and smoking a suspiciously large, hand-rolled cigarette.

Were it not for the current "system" they would have no electricity, food, water, flat or furnishings, they would be naked and the only psycho-active substances available to them would be mushrooms and toadstools unlikely to be found growing nearby, and if they wanted to go anywhere else they would have to walk barefoot to get there.

They really haven't thought it through. Unless, of course, what they really want is for everyone else to continue to operate the current "system" and for themselves just to freeload.

We are all of us enlightened

Anyone who has discovered or re-interpreted something in such a way that it is their genuine belief that it is of unselfish benefit to humankind will have a link direct to the text of it from their FB page (if they have one) and not to a site charging upfront for downloadable copies of it.

A person who says they will make you feel better about yourself but who implies your guilt for the deeds of others or uses unpleasant or upsetting imagery as a tool in any part of their process is a manipulative git, not a guru.

And, of course, no sage worth their salt goes around quoting other people.

So, please, do not go looking for spiritual advice from anyone who either derives or intends to derive income [or elevated status] from giving it. 

The longer they can keep you from discovering that you already have what you seek, and that it is only the looking for it that is preventing you from finding it, the more they earn.

______

We are all of us enlightened

Unless we let some body

Convince us otherwise.

(© John Barrow (Po))

______

You have not been charged for reading this message

Three Little Piggies 2017

Three Little Piggies 2017

[Only the president's name has been changed]

_____

Across Europe houses are built of brick, stone, concrete and other durable materials.

Mediaeval houses had the stoutest of timber frames with solid infills. The timbers were connected with simple push fit joints and held in place with wooden pegs.

Even in the changing climate, at least for now, Europe does not suffer destructive typhoons and hurricanes.

Yet, in almost every photo of the aftermath of a seriously destructive storm in the USA I see a pile of wood, a bank, a pile of wood, maybe a hotel, a pile of wood, a gas station, a pile of wood etc..

I suspect even Donald Trump could be explained to that it isn’t just when big bad wolves huff and puff that houses of sticks and straw offer little protection.

Surely it is cheaper for the taxpayer to subsidise the building of strong houses that will last for generations, even in such vulnerable areas, than it is to deal with emergency evacuations and the constant rebuilding of homes just as fragile as those they must replace.

© John Barrow (Po) 2007 & 2017

7th Century Wiltshire Stand-Up

A traveller reaches a town and notices there are two people fastened at height to the outside wall of a Worship Clubhouse, one is dying and the other long dead. A grave is being dug in the Clubyard below. He asks a local standing nearby what has happened and is told:

“A month ago the dead man refused to pay to the Club his grain as tax and then just last week the dying man stole grain from the Club to feed his family.”

And the grave?

“The grave is for every man who pays his tax and who does not steal grain.”

[Raucous laughter erupts at the inn]

Anyway, ... The traveller is just about to continue on his way when the clouds burst and he and the local take shelter in the Worship Clubhouse.

After a few moments being dazzled by the blingtastic splendour of the building’s unexpectedly lavish interior, the traveller notices there is a dying man fastened at height to the inside wall of the Clubhouse, too.

As his eyes adjust to the glare he sees it is a statue of a man frozen in perpetual pain and quite intentionally denied death for all time. He asks the local what particular crime the poor fellow had committed that justified such savage and permanent reminding of it to all who enter the building.

“Him? He is the last guy who dissed the Club.”

[The inn was then raided by Heresy Squad officers and a number of arrests were made]

©2012 John Barrow (Po)

(I'm thinking not to write) Three Films. [2012]

The first is a fiction set in a Market Town at a remote intersection of trading routes across a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape, a town where merchants grow rich and pay their taxes to The Club, which in return keeps order, suppressing revolt among the underclass using collective threats so fantastic no one person dares test them for emptiness.

Officers of The Club make a point of demonstrating their violent capability on any member of the underclass who fails to achieve a safe distance as they pass. Random brutality, just common enough that everybody knows someone who has been a victim of it, is considered key to keeping the underclass afraid and obedient.

Most of the first reel is taken up by showing everyday life in the town, highlighting the relationships between the merchants, the underclass and The Club. Only at the beginning of the second reel do we meet the principal character, Steve, young and unmarried, a member of the majority underclass, who devises a plan to overthrow The Club.

Carefully and as quietly as possible, Steve begins recruiting members to his Rival Club. His manifesto promises an end to random brutality and a start to the sharing of the town's wealth more equally between its citizens such that all could be proud that no one in their town need starve or want for shelter. To the underclass this would be undreamed of luxury.

By the end of the second reel, though there are still only a handful of actual members of Rival Club, there is an uncustomary excitement among the underclass as word spreads of the hope being offered them for a brighter future.

The third reel is faster paced as news of Rival Club's existence and rapidly increasing popularity reaches The Club and its officers immediately carry out a spectacularly violent and unusually brutal, even by their own standards, demonstration of their continuing authority within the town, randomly selecting men to kill and women to rape as they set fire to houses in which children still hide.

The few who joined Rival Club stand, fight and are promptly despatched by officers of The Club. Hundreds of others are killed, too, many of them while helping their families to escape the town, leaping for their lives from its walls. Steve is nowhere to be seen.

Gradually those who have escaped gather together, just out of range of the arrows that every now and then still overfly the town walls. The camera pans across a dark sea of empty eyes and blank expressions, not one person yet able to comprehend what they have all witnessed, their fleeting dream having so suddenly become a reality more terrifying than their worst nightmare.

Orphaned infants wail, the luckiest in the arms of older siblings. The newly widowed hold tight to their children or grieve their loss alone. Few men have survived to follow their loved ones to freedom. Steve stands anonymously at the edge of the crowd, unharmed.

With the sky over the poorest quarter of the town glowing red with flame and with the air still filled with the screams of those unable to escape, one young mother recognises Steve near her. Her eyes lock to his and she asks him coldly, "Now what?" Steve says nothing, turns from the small crowd and walks slowly into the darkness of the Wiltshire night.

The survivors cannot return to the town. The wild landscape is vast and as poor townspeople who have never travelled they know nothing of its geography. As their adrenaline levels begin to fall they feel cold and resign themselves to having little choice but to all walk off into the darkness together, following the footsteps Steve left in the soft ground. Roll Credits.
______

The second fiction starts on the morning after the massacre, the sun rising slowly on a dishevelled band of cold, tired and hungry people, huddled together against the wind in silence. All are traumatised by what they have seen. None are yet able to speak of it.

The story is played out like a lightly comic road movie. Steve, no fleeter of foot than average, is patently unable to shake off his univited followers so he decides to organise them into a functional, self sufficient unit, making up rules for them as problems arise, often having to revise them later on when circumstance has changed.

It isn’t long before followers begin to realise Steve is just leading them round in circles and start openly questioning his wisdom. Each time a challenge to his authority arises, the camera follows Steve as he disappears off for a think before returning with a masterful piece of spin to keep his followers on side regardless of what has happened. As the challenges become greater, so Steve’s spin becomes more fantastic to counter them.

Steve’s masterplan is to grow his band of followers into an army with which to exact revenge upon The Club. Looking at those he has with him, it may take a while before they are ready.

Decades are skipped through with only significant events being shown. Battles are won and battles are lost. Many followers die in a single battle and Steve’s spin convinces only the few who remember the massacre in Market Town to remain loyal to him. For if they stop believing in his wisdom now they must accept they need not have believed it then and their loved ones need not have died.

Too few in number now to wage war on his behalf, Steve leads his handful of followers to the village of Other Market, only a few days travel from Market Town, hoping to settle into quiet obscurity.
______

The third and final fiction in the series begins in Other Market, where the quiet obscurity Steve by now craves is impossible to achieve. Other Market is a small village where no one goes unnoticed and through which many travellers pass en route to Market Town and Steve is soon identified and hauled before a public inquisition on the village green, the arrival of his reputation having preceded that of his physical being by a good many years.

In the eyes of the villagers, Steve’s attempt to settle anonymously in their midst is proof enough of his personal ambition alone being responsible for the massacre at the end of the first film and for all the deaths and woundings in battle his followers have suffered since.

Facing a lynching and already in the hands of the mob, Steve spins a speech to save his life and by the end of it has vowed his intent remains as ever it was and that he has not come to their village to hide but instead to raise and inspire a new army with which to drive The Club from Market Town.

After a few unsuccessful battles and some very creative spin to keep the momentum of his campaign up after each expensive loss, Steve does eventually raise an army of sufficient size and skill to carry out his original Rival Club manifesto promises, to liberate the underclass of Market Town and improve their lot.

While grateful at being liberated, there were many in Market Town who still carried scars from the last time they had placed their trust in Steve and they demanded an explanation as to why, if he believed in the infallibility of his mission as much as he had convinced everybody else to, he had run away at the first sign of trouble, as he had been witnessed by a number of survivors to have done. Steve has a very long think before spinning another speech to save his life again before a very uncertain crowd.

To those who don’t remember the massacre, Steve is their liberator, their rescuing hero. To those who do, rich or poor, Steve is a cowardly liar. Demographics have it that Steve becomes Mayor of Market Town and he immediately makes challenging his authority an offence punishable by death and demonstrates its enforceability.

Steve’s regime is no less brutal than that in any other town in England at the time but the brutality is less random in its delivery to members of the underclass than it was The Club. Now a law has to be broken and there is a punishment to fit each crime.

Steve’s laws are strict, and public punishment is always painful, often permanently damaging and sometimes fatal. When Steve is discovered to have failed to follow his own law he spins yet another speech to save his life, inventing new detail in the law as he goes to permit his own transgression to go unpunished and to enable any such future trangressions to go undiscovered. No one challenges his authority so to do.

It isn’t long before the law has been detailed as much as it needs to be for Steve and those close to him to enjoy freedoms denied to others under the same law and the practice of re-detailing law all but dies out.

The office of Mayor of Market Town and the associated absolute authority within the town walls is passed down through generations of Steve’s family until a period of unrest in the wider county brings the peaceful stability of Market Town under threat again from the latest incarnation of The Club.

On learning of the threat, the incumbent Mayor takes the town's cash and flees to the hills, promising to return with a mercenary army as soon as he can and leaving the town gates open so The Club won't need to break them down to get in.

Roll credits over images of decades passing with no sign of the promised rescue as poverty and oppression under The Club re-establish themselves with a vengeance in Market Town. Cut in shots of the missing Mayor growing old and dying in a comfortable, distant palace.
______

But I just know that many years from now, when my trilogy has all but faded from memory, when everybody knows the names of my films and considers them classics but everybody who ever saw them has died, someone will revive Steve’s legend, selectively amending it to suit their time and intent.

By gifting Steve with as many superpowers as the person revising my script considers their audience will have to swallow to cover the gaps created in its sense by their heavy handed approach to abbreviation, a new story will emerge, quite different from mine.

Of course, once SuperSteve has been given magic powers it will be implied that his descendents would naturally be similarly blessed and that it would therefore be perfectly possible that the missing Mayor, the cowardly liar who died behind the credits of my original film, could yet come back with his promised army of liberation.

Then the Market Town PR machine will kick into high gear and the gullible poor will give their hard earned money back to the rich for the privelege of waiting, exactly as instructed to in SuperSteve’s rewritten dialogue, for the missing Mayor to return to free them from poverty and oppression rather than challenge whichever Mayor it is who is keeping them poor and oppressed at the time.

For safety reasons, I remind you that my trilogy of fictions is set in a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape and that my principal character is called "Steve".

Hundreds of years will pass before the fourth film is made and the trouble really starts.

© 2012 John Barrow (Po)

Amongst other more profound one-line advices ...

Amongst other more profound one-line advices that had made me famous
When people passed them on in inns and hostelries across the land,
If I had suggested, a thousand years ago, that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel on horseback,
As, indeed, would I.

And as would be noticed,
By a hang-around scribe.
______

After my death,
To make a few quid
The hang-around scribe
Expands the few snippets
Of common sense I had used
To draw attention to flaws in the
System in to a first-hand biography.

His version of me picked up a good following
So others, too, wrote their expansions of my story.

But common sense is unexciting and soon assimilates into
Everyday life and the relevance of whence it came diminishes.
______

Turn the clock forward to just a hundred and fifty years ago. I am history.
______

Scribes are ten-a-penny now and one decides to make his own fortune by rewriting
The long forgotten story of me, updating it to make it relevant for a modern readership.
______
______

If I had suggested a hundred and fifty years ago that everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey

It is likely those who took my advice
Would travel by steam train
As, indeed, would I,
_____

The Victorian usurper of my reputation, however,
Wrote that everyone should travel only by
Steam train on the routes he was the
Owner of and made his fortune.

He died a very rich man,
As did his inheriting sons
Until
The age of steam died, too.
_____

It is century 21 now, according to local convention,
And my advice would be the same as it always has been,
That everyone should

Travel by the swiftest available means of transport
Rather than waste their lives on the journey.

It is likely those who took my advice today
Would ride bicycles and motorcycles,
Drive cars and lorries and ride
In buses and on trains
Of any kind, on
Aeroplanes,
In boats

As, indeed, would I

According to the
Journey I
Took.
______

So why would anyone now

Be limited to travel only by horse
Because it is what a scribe wrote
I had done a thousand years ago?

And why would anyone now

Be wrestling with their inner conscience
As to whether to only travel by train
To only travel by steam train
Or not to travel at all
Because the old
Routes have
Closed
Or,
Worse,
Moved into
Public ownership
For the benefit of all?

And why would anyone now

Be killing anyone in my name
Over a mode of transport
Or route they choose
To achieve their
Destination?
______

Where on earth
Would be the
Sense in that?

© Po 2014

Grenfell Tower and Others

As soon as it was reported which cladding product had been used on Grenfell Tower I read up on the stuff. For those who don't do that sort of thing and are currently mystified by the various reports following ongoing surveys of other clad blocks I clarify as follows.

Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) is just two sheets of aluminium bonded to a core of another material. What makes a panel suitable or not for a given application is what the core is made of.

Harley Facades, subcontracted to Rydon, are reported to have fitted products from Reynobond, who clearly state in their literature that their ACM panels come with either polyethylene (PE) or fire retardant (FR) cores and the provided illustrations show panels used primarily as fascias on shopping malls or low-rise office buildings.

If the reports are correct and Reynobond PE has been fitted to a block of dwellings with a roof in excess of 18 metres in height, the point at which the regulations relating to the control of the spread of fire across external walls changes, quite a number of people are directly responsible for a fire in a single flat having spread such that it had the disastrous consequences we are all aware of.

Without sight of all the contract documents and communications relating to the project neither I nor anyone else can say how far up the chain of command the awareness went of the panels being fitted not satisfying regulations.

I can say, however, that a legal precedent exists for everybody down to the team that fitted them to be accountable when failing to achieve fitness for purpose has health and safety implications, of which this fire was an extreme example.

Any competent cladding installer should know the building regulations pertaining to their trade and know that Reynobond PE panels are not appropriate for tower blocks like Grenfell and should refuse to install them.

Of course, before it gets to that stage, any competent specialist subcontractor should refuse to provide a price for works that contravene regulations and, anyway, no competent main contractor should ever request or accept one.

All those who can reasonably be expected to have known the material to be used was inappropriate have been negligent in failing to stop the works and prevent the installation of a life-threatening fire hazard. Any person not directly connected to the works but who had suitable knowledge or experience to notice the danger and did so in passing without subsequently insisting the works be stopped is included in this group.

Note it is enormously unlikely that a complete block of flats would be clad so quickly that the identifying marks on the reverse of every panel and on their packaging would have been hidden from view before any competent person engaged to inspect or oversee the ongoing works had had a chance to see them, recognise the unsuitability of the panels and stop those works.

Contrary to the impression given by many voicing their protest on social networks and in the streets, the members of the councils and associations who engage contractors to refurbish blocks of flats for which they are responsible are the least likely people to have the specialist knowledge to recognise a material as not fit for purpose on their projects, the least likely to have knowingly placed their tenants at risk.

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It is reported that emergency checks of the cladding on similar buildings throughout the country following the Grenfell Tower fire have found the same PE cored panels have been inappropriately fitted to other blocks by the same specialists under subcontract to the same main contractor engaged by different clients.

I expect there will be found at the end of an enormously long and expensive investigation a large number of people employed by both the specialist subcontractor and the main contractor were complicit in the willful and repeated carrying out of substandard works to blocks of high-rise social housing.

A lot of those people will claim that they were only following orders and they feared losing their jobs had they been obstructive. I don't care. If you want to yell and scream at someone, yell and scream at the people who actually installed the cladding. Nothing can justify participating in the turning of a tower block into a flaming torch. 

The Digital Despot

It has long been the case that any common-goal movement comprising humans will fractionate over time. In the olden days this would happen after the common goal had been achieved, when petty squabbles took the place of the new-found boredom. The principal effect of social media in particular is to accelerate the process such that the fractionation happens way before anything useful gets done.

Some of the problem arises from the plethora of available movements to digitally support. In the olden days you had to get off your arse and write letters, attend meetings, rallies and events to be part of something. Now people seem to think clicking "Like" on a Facebook page adds weight to anything. It plainly doesn't.

Imagine you are despot who feels the need for a Personal Guard of hand-picked and handsomely paid elite soldiers at your side to make you look 'ard. Imagine you oppress a million people and they start getting umpty. If every single one of them slagged you off on Facebook and Twitter you wouldn't be upset. But if just one in a hundred of them got off their arses, got together and turned up on your doorstep looking for you you would brick yourself.

So the digital despot simply diverts a few currency units from the Personal Guard budget across to the Social Network Unit. It is much more efficient and a lot safer to disrupt or distract discussions online than it is to stand up in an assembly hall full of militants waving a cat picture or suggesting that another cause is of greater worth than the one everyone just gave up their evening to support.

The few who can remain focussed on the big picture and who see but are not distracted by its intricate detail will still achieve change.

[2nd June 2014]

The Manifestos

An unexpected postal vote form arrived so I figured I had better mug up a bit sharpish on who is offering what and how much it is going to cost. To this end, I visited official websites and cheerily downloaded documents to read from the two main contenders for government. 

I was intrigued as to why the Labour Party chose to publish their balancing of the books separately from their Manifesto so, because it was unusual, very much shorter than the manifesto and bound to be full of numbers, Funding Britain's Future was the first of the three documents I read. I was impressed. It looked like a summary profit and loss account, showing itemized policy costs being totaled and balanced against the total of itemized policy savings or additional revenue, with a little extra put aside to cover for fluctuations.

I then looked for a similar table within the Conservative Manifesto to compare it with but there wasn't one. All of the Conservative cost and saving / revenue balances were included within the body text as each policy item was outlined so I ended up reading the whole thing.

In it the Conservatives set out their policy stall across a relatively concise 88 unillustrated pages and mention costs, savings and revenues and how things balance as items arise throughout the Manifesto document. I note the policies themselves are written with a confidence one might elsewhere associate with the statement of common sense, the kind that requires no argument for because anything else would clearly be silliness. End of.

My next read was the Labour Manifesto.

WTF is it with some political parties these days feeling they have to badmouth the competition to make themselves look good? Are not their policies supposed to stand confidently up on their own as being obviously the sensible thing? The Labour Party felt the need to make derisory and at times misleading mention of the Conservatives 68 times in its 123 page manifesto, which averages out as just over a jibe on every other page!

Anyway, aside from this peculiar "we are all victims together" tone in which they were presented alongside many brightly coloured photographs, Labour's policies included no surprises, unlike the policies in the Conservative Manifesto which were a lot closer to the political Centre than I had expected them to be.

The big surprise from reading the Labour Manifesto came from their apparent hoping that no one would ever think of comparing it with their separate Funding Britain's Future publication, you know, the one where the sums balance. Well...

It seems Labour's ruse for getting the books to balance is to include only the costs arising from just enough Manifesto proposals to absorb the few savings anticipated. There are many other proposals in the Manifesto that would incur significant additional costs that are not included in the calculation in the document "Funding Britain's Future" but there are no other proposals from which savings or revenue arise.

Policies aside, the Manifesto documents tell me:

Conservative - Vote for us. We propose to do this stuff and pay for it this way because it makes sense to us.

Labour - Vote for us. Our stuff must be much better because we are not horrid Conservatives.

Labour having published Funding Britain's Future alongside but separate from their Manifesto tells me they knew they couldn't get the books to balance if they took account of all the costs that would arise from their proposals so they avoided including any of them in the Manifesto itself.

Taking into account the proposals and the presented costings for them:

If these two Manifesto packages were tenders to design and build you a house I would have to advise you to go with the Conservative bid and end up reliably warm and dry, even if it isn't in the home of your dreams.

Labour's bid promises a very comfortable and well equipped residence but their price won't cover all of it. So, unless you were able to stump up a whole bunch of extra cash, the build would run out of money before the roof went on, leaving you cold, wet and broke after a relatively short period.

As to Labour's proposed £250bn investment fund:

The idea of a government funding vast infrastructure projects to boost an economy is an outdated one. The consultation and planning period is lengthy and has to be carried out by experienced people, only a handful of contractors have the experience to undertake the work when the planning is complete and the bulk of it is undertaken using huge machines, many of which are sourced from abroad.

Infrastructure projects are a great way for a government to spend lots of money in a hurry, thus bumping up GDP, but the money doesn't filter down in to as many pockets from where it can be spent to support the rest of the economy as it used to when there were a thousand men with shovels and families to support doing the work now undertaken by one or two drivers of large and complex machines.

The rail construction industry is not one that needs such a massive injection of funds. Were these funds to be injected into the sector in the hope the activity in it would increase significantly in a short period of time that hope would be promptly dashed. There simply wouldn't be enough appropriately trained, qualified and experienced people to make it happen. By the end of the first parliament, even if the rail projects were launched on day one, there would be a huge bill for design, consultation and legal fees but no material progress whatsoever.

I don't advocate making any commitment to borrowing billions of extra pounds to spend on anything until Brexit is settled, until trade rules are agreed and the country can work out what it will be able to afford to repay.  If, however, a government were hell-bent on borrowing hugely against an unknown future, I would strongly advise them to build houses not railways.

Spending any given sum on building houses would generate more, and more varied, employment than spending the same sum on building railways and the benefit of all these new builders having money to spend in the wider economy would be felt within months and the housing market would almost immediately begin the process of rebalancing, as it adjusts to the prospect of adequate supply.

If the same pressures were applied to buying up land for housing as would have to be applied to buying up land to run railway lines across, and if the same overall budget were to be made available, it is not beyond imagine that by the end of the first parliament there would be a thriving construction industry, reduced unemployment, no housing shortage and house prices would have fallen noticeably.

I still wouldn't recommend Britain borrowing against an unpredictable economic future, that of trading under as yet undefined post-Brexit rules, because it is daft not to defer any significant borrowing until enough is known to work out what Britain will be able to afford to repay. 

At least if a government invests in housebuilding and the sums are awry and the project has to be shelved half way through there would be still be more houses for people to live in than before, just not as many as they had promised. A half- built railway is no use to anyone.