Liz Truss is a belter.

The formless nought. That was my thinking when I heard Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng mentioning ‘the people,’ ‘the people’ he talked to, ‘the people’ he listened to, ‘the people’—

Not my people. Not me.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, friend of Queen Victoria,  leader of the Conservative Party and twice Prime Minister but also a writer. Sybil (1845), for example, brought the two nations argument into dining rooms. The working class, of course, did not need to read about it in novels they couldn’t afford to buy, we lived it.

‘Two nations: between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.

You speak of… the rich and the poor.’

 PM Liz Truss and her chancellor no longer are going to implement a 45p tax rate for top earners, equivalent to Thatcher’s hated poll tax, but worse, because that possibility remains.

Liz Truss puts her faith in trickle-down economics. Also called supply-side economics, or monetarism as opposed to Keynesism. Thatcherism. Reaganomics. Trumpism. Lowering taxes and cutting regulation will promote economic growth.  A coded form of letting the rich grow rich. 

Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Party leader but not yet Prime Minister in a speech given in early1975, to The Institute of Socioeconomic studies in New York, outlined her philosophy in her ‘Let the Poppies Grow Tall speech’. ‘I would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so’.

Greed is good. Money trickles down the economy and everyone wins. But some more than others. There’s not much trickle down from King Charles III’s conservatively valued £10 billion of art work. But he gets to put his mugshot on our notes and coins. Its value goes on rising as the economy goes into triple-dip recession. He’s looking down on us. Sterling tanks, allied to the economic folly of Brexit which knocks around five-percent off Gross Domestic Product. The price of money goes up. Mortgages go up, the value of our homes fall, for the first time since the financial crisis, but not too far. There’s a safety net for investment. Demand for housing outstrips supply. The oldest, most costly and least energy-efficient housing in Europe (50% built before 1965, most of it council stock, 20% built before the end of the first world war, housing for heroes). Price, in theory, will find a new equilibrium under Alfred Marshall’s original supply and demand diagram. The free market will have done its job of allocating scarce resources.

The Tory government refused to let the Office for Budget Responsibility audit these tax cuts. But According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, only taxpayers whose earnings are £155 000 or more would have paid less tax in the government’s mini-budget. Millionaires would, nominally, become £40 000 per annum better off. Spending and welfare payments to be cut, and not to rise with inflation, which is another way of penalising the poor.  Austerity the answer for one of the two nations. Withdrawing free child care for three-to-four-year-olds marked down as a saving. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, 800 000 children living in England are missing out on free-school meals and going hungry.  Ten-to-fifteen percent, the amount house prices are likely to fall next year according to analysts. Eight million households struggling to pay telecom bills, according to Offcom, a record.

Fredrich Heyek (1944) The Road to Serfdom argument that a central bureaucracy will lead to militarism and fascism. Council houses equals fascism. British Rail equals fascism. Public control of water companies equals fascism. Health Care and the NHS equals fascism.

Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, the class enemy of Thatcher’s government. 85 000 coal miners and then there were none.  His mantra that not a seam of coal would be left in the ground has much the same ring as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Right Honourable Jacob Rees-Moggs’s claim that no untapped gas should be left in the North Sea. No great surprise that deniers of manmade climate change and deregulation have the same office and same ideology.

BP, which used to be owned by the taxpayer, who like other energy companies have had a good war in Ukraine, and enjoyed massive windfall profits with sky-high oil prices, chief executive, Bernard Looney was paid £4.46 million in 2021. Like his colleagues in Shell and British Centrica, top ups range from around £75 000 to just over £550 000. More is on the way for less.

The Rand Corporation in the United States shows decades of tax cut and deregulation of labour markets have taken around $50 trillion in wage growth from the bottom 90% of earners and given it to the top 1%.

We talk about subsidising Putin’s war by buying Russia’s oil and gas. We are familiar with sanctions against Russian oligarchs who have supported the Conservative Party. But we remain wilfully blind to who helped the moron’s moron get Trump elected in the United States in 2016, supported Nigel Farage and engineered Brexit. We’re talking Moscow.

  But as James Meek argues in Private Island, the free marketeers in selling off public assets at knockdown prices effectively subsidised other nation’s public sector, privatised and taken back into state control. The French state energy company EDF is a good example. The company we hoped would build new reactors for us with Chinese partners. Our government ditched the Chinese for political reasons. EDF ditched our government for financial reasons. There wasn’t enough cash in it for their private monopoly. Win-win for them.

Meek tells the reader what we already know about privatisation.

‘The Spanish economist Germa Bel traces the origins of the word to the German Reprivatiserung, first used in English in 1936 by the Berlin correspondent of The Economist, writing about the Nazi economic policy in 1943.

‘The Nazi Party facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires through “privatisation” and other measures thereby intensifying centralisation of economic affairs in an increasingly narrow group.’

Ironically, Karl Marx’s dictum that all value comes from the surplus value of labour shows best how deregulation worked in concentration camps that benefited the national socialist elite and their eugenic philosophy. Heinrich Himmler, a leading architect of the holocaust, had a sign over the entry to Auschwitz: ‘Work makes you free’. He benefited from the unit cost of labour. Worker’s wages were driven down. Uniforms, housing, and food were provided by the SS. They acted as a modern employment agency where workers were replaceable parts. The commodity price of labour fell to the bare bones with sick days limited and near to zero. A right-wing paradise and the trains ran on time. Even Amazon or Uber would find it difficult to beat such benefits.

Surplus value. The gap between the price the worker can sell his or her labour for and the price of the commodity on the free market widens. Win-win for efficiency and the capitalist mode of production. The hidden cost of labour is taken out of the equation. Low cost labour labelled workshy or lazy by the right-wing media or lacking the prerequisite skills, until we’re told to clap them as they worked throughout the pandemic. Now those same workers are labelled greedy and unreasonable for not agreeing to inflationary pay cuts.     

 Thatcher did not have a patent on privatisation.  The Common Lands used for the good of communities was made uncommon. Those that owned the land owned the people on the land.

Unchained Britannica, the cabal of free marketeers who seized power committed themselves to the same path as Cameron and Osborne’s austerity budgets or Johnson’s levelling-up agenda. Taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich (the reverse-Robin Hood, I’ve been saying that for ten years or more). But they talked about it in the wrong language. They scared Tory voters. And they scared the markets they claimed to understand better than anyone else. George Soros bought sterling and sold sterling. Black Wednesday, 16^th September 1992, wasn’t black for him. He made billions of dollars. Sterling’s weakness  was regarded as a snapshot of the economy by trading markets. Hedge funds are similarly piling into the pound, borrowing to bet it will fall to parity with the dollar. Money for nothing. Who works for it?

Chrystia Freeland (2013) in the introduction to Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich noted the super-rich, or the one-percent, didn’t like being called rich. They prefer the term affluent. Winners and losers. We’re all in it together rhetoric of David Cameron. Bumps in the economy ahead. A 2011 experiment conducted by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School with behavioural economist Dan Early, Duke University showed people the wealth distribution of the United States (top 20% own 84% of wealth) and compared it to Sweden’s (top 20% own 36% of wealth), and asked them where they would like to live.

The predictable answer is Sweden wins, even as it is becoming more right-wing, insular and moving towards the American model. Ironically, the Swedish model of wealth distribution was similar to the American model and indeed the British model of the 1950s.

What happened?

‘The skew towards the very top (accelerated after the moron’s moron, Trump took office in 2016) is so pronounced that you cannot understand economic growth figures without taking it into account.’

Trussonomics and the Tory Party, and the magic money tree, follow this model of deception based on nominal economic growth. After the 2008, $700 billion banking bailout in which unregulated (which they termed self-regulation) money men were given public money, which was mirrored in Britain and around the world at no cost to the rich. Boom and bust for some. Greed is indeed good. All the gains, none of the losses. America’s economic recovery in 2009-10 of 2.3% of GDP could be considered impressive out with China and Asian economies.

Economist Emmanuel Saez had a closer look at these growth figures. ‘99% of American’s incomes increased by 0.2%. Incomes for the top 1% rose by 11.6%.’

Tweets, President Joe Biden: ‘I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics. It has never worked. We’re building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.’

Thomas Piketty (2014) The New York Times Bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century was based on fifteen years of research. He acknowledges the empirical data provided by Simon Kutznet and compared him to Karl Marx. Kutznet’s theory could be summarised in a single sentence spouted by President Reagan, ad-libbed by numerous politicians, the latest being Prime Minister Liz Truss.

‘Growth is a rising tide that lifts all ships.’

Kutznev, like Piketty, was measuring income distribution. Who gets what, without providing the why as Marx did.

‘He (Kutznev) noted a sharp reduction in income inequality in the United States between 1913 and 1948.’

America was becoming a more equal society. Income equality would follow the path of the Kutznet Bell Curve. Inequality was shrinking as Americans and the world became more middle-class.

Freeland compares Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction to Kutznet’s, which sounds very like a justification for the modernity of colonialism and the white man’s burden. He was writing in the early years of the industrial revolution, when the wealth and status of landowners was being undermined by industrialists who poured labour into the coal mines, shipyards and sugar plantations (that’s not to claim that many industrialists weren’t also aristocratic, the two aren’t mutually exclusive) and took out vast sums of money or capital.

‘If one looks closely at the world since the beginning of society, it is easy to see that equality is only prevalent in the historical poles of civilisation. Savages are equal because they are equally weak and ignorant. Very civilised men can all become equal because they all have at their disposal similar mean of attaining comfort and happiness. Between these two extremes is found inequality of condition, wealth, knowledge—the power of the few, the poverty, ignorance and weakness of the rest.’

Piketty worked with other economists to analyse, like Kutznet, wealth distribution and inequality in around twenty nations using historical and contemporary data such as income tax returns. His findings are clear. Hayek believed we were on the The Road to Serfdom. Much the same road as Marx envisaged in his theory of infinite accumulation. Wealth increasingly flows from the poor the rich, who use their resources to deregulate and create an environment in which inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, like global warming, reaches increasingly new highs, which become the new norms to further pauperise society and call for more tax cuts for ‘the people’. We lost the propaganda war. Fox News is no news. Plutocrats might not like to be called rich or super-rich. No bell-shaped Kutznet curve, but the hockey stick of man-made global warming shooting up year on year, running in tandem with the wealth of the super-rich and growing inequality. In our new gilded age, the must have is a bolt-hole away from common humanity and the coming apocalypse. Liz Truss could play her part as being the useful idiot that builds a fence to keep out the poor. Inside the gilded escape pod, the problem of labour returns in a familiar form. How do we keep the servants servile? How do we keep labour labouring? Discuss, Liz Truss.         

Van Badham (2021) Quanon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults.

‘We elected a meme.’

Conspiracy beliefs eat you from the inside. I know this having been brought up a Roman Catholic. Guardian journalist Van Badham tells the reader her book is about two things, i) the internet, ii) belief. It was personal for her.

‘My interest in the internet’s extremist underworld resulted from my experience of its attacks…I found myself on the very public online radar of misogynists, racists, homophobes and outright fascists. I was the subject of attack videos and hateful memes and subject to constant trolling. In the wake of online attacks came offline too. Parcels of anonymous materials began to appear on my doorstep; my Twitter account was hacked; I was stalked, harassed and attacked in the street. International Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer published a hit piece with my photograph and a written incitement to run me over in a car.’

I naively believed that at the soon to be President Trump’s rallies the cries of ‘Lock her up! Lock her up!’ was regarding the Democratic Party’s servers being tapped by the Russian state (FSB) and information about her email accounts being passed to followers of the moron’s moron. She’d acted illegally in not securing them, which was a potentially criminal act (but we all know rich people don’t get prosecuted).  Hillary Clinton publicly apologised. But Trump’s followers wanted her locked up for what I thought was a minor misdemeanour. What I didn’t realise was when she ordered pizza, it was a code word for children to be delivered to her and her paedophilic followers, who would rape and eat them. They would also milk them for a substance, a by-product of fear that would give them eternal life. #PizzaGate wasn’t about pizzas. Badham shows that any relationship with badly scripted B-movies and The Matrix is intentional and unintentional.

The $4 million damages awarded against Alex Jones— his defence costs running at $49 million— were the standout tag for public and political theatre. The right-wing profiteer who said the Sandy Hook school shootings were a hoax, and helped propagate the lie using his site InfoWars as an internet megaphone amplifying lie after lie for personal gain was forced to recant.

Jones’s highly priced attorneys made school-boy errors. They released two years’ worth of text messages from his phone to his legal adversaries and then failed to claim client privilege. A counterpoint to Stop the Steal.

Infowars website was making $800 000 a day from merchandising was one of the facts revealed. His net worth $279 million revealed to the parents of a family of a six-year old boy shot and killed and targeted as liars by Jones’s trolling followers.

Alex Jones, like Trump with ‘Stop the Steal’, ran on paranoia and promoted self-serving lies, all the way to the bank, and beyond the Presidency. The show is still running.

Alex Jones was quick to apologise to the bereaved parents of Sandyhook children. He was willing to admit ‘the attack was ‘one hundred percent real’.

Jones also admitted #PizzaGate was a lie. The Ping Pong restaurant run by James Alefantis in Washington, DC, did not have dungeons and basements which ran underground and fed the voracious appetites of Hillary Clinton and her cabal for very young children, who they liked to torture before eating. #PizzaGate: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.

His YouTube messages to his tens of thousands of followers that he was going down there to investigate was also a lie. He’d no intention of visiting. Online activists, digital soldiers, kept the churn going, until Edgar Madison Welch from Salisbury, North Carolina did visit with rifle in hand. He sent a text message to his girlfriend and children. He was ‘Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt regime that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.’ In other words, Madison Welch was being heroic.

Jones was also forced to apologise for perpetuating lies that a yogurt factory was also a centre for supporting child rapists and the spread of tuberculosis.    

19^th August 2020, Joe Biden was announced as the Democratic candidate that would run against Donald J. Trump in the forthcoming election—which he, of course, stole, if you believe the 45^th President of the United States and his dim-witted followers.

In the White House, the moron’s moron was asked at a press conference what he thought about QAnon and its followers on social media (and indeed in the White House itself when they invaded it in an attempt to shut down Congress and lynch the Vice President of the disUnited States, Mike Pence).

‘They are people who love their country,’ was the moron’s moron’s reply. Meme speech follows familiar patterns.

When the call came Ashli Babbet and Rosanne Boyland came to Washington, DC, like Maddison Walsh because they saw themselves as heroic. They were willing to die. And they did. Yet they were disowned by QAnon as false-flags. Later to be lionised.

Who or what is QAnon? Van Badham suggests it may have been Steve Bannon. The government insider who played Deepthroat in the deep web of 4chan and 8chan. Or it might have been someone from Breitbart or Cambridge Analytica. Certainly, they had help from Russian FSB. Lieutenant General Flynn is put in the frame. Both received pardons from the then President Trump. Or it may have been lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani. Or it might have been all of them. It didn’t really matter. QAnon went silent after Trump. It helped create a meme as President.

Silicon Valley pioneered computer software to get you clicking on cute cats doing silly things. You became the product. You are part of Big Data sets and A/B testing on server farms.

Amazon, for example, identified me as part of the tens of millions who bought and read Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch. Ninety percent of us finished it.

Amazon knows I’m a sucker for books. I’m also part of the millions of buyers who bought Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty shot down the idea of a trickle-down economics being a shell game using offshore companies to hide profits and help create an ideology that was based on lies. But we lost the propaganda war, by us I mean the poor people that are reliant on wages as their sole source of income and who get to retire when they reach between sixty and sixty-eight (if we’re not dead first). The French economist urged governments to tax the rich. The two leading candidates of the Tory Party vie with each other to go in the other direction. Taxing the poor has always been popular in certain elite groups that don’t eat children.

But Amazon also knows I’m the exception to the rule. Only three percent of those who started Piketty’s book, finished it. I’m glossing over that I forget more than I remember and in an examination I’d fail, but Amazon doesn’t know this. It just quantifies pages turned. And I’m a page turner.

But I’m also part of the growing minority that believes we are living in the end of times. Unchecked global warming will end civilisation in the next fifty years. A YouGov pole at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic found that almost a third of those questioned anticipated a life-changing disaster in their lifetime.

A 2019 survey found that almost half of those polled in US, UK, France and Italy belief that civilisation will collapse in the years to come.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/06/change-is-coming-meet-the-englishman-prepping-for-climate-apocalypse-in-an-old-german-barracks

Conspiracy theories thrive in such an environment of fear. It’s not what you think, but what you feel. Van Badham’s prescient book came out before Alex Jones’s trial. In a way it vindicates her work, but nobody is listening to things they don’t want to hear is the real message of this book. QAnon metamorphoses into something more right-wing and hateful and will go on and on destroying lives. Jones shows were the money and political influence lies. It’s not surprising his phone records have been subpoenaed by Congress investigating the role the 45^th President had in insurrection and civil disobedience in Washington, DC.   

The Tender Bar (2021) Amazon, screenplay by William Monahan based on a memoir by J.H.Moehringer (J.R.Moehringer) and directed by George Clooney.

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0LKB4TVGOKF41EW4RDDQFCHTNB

A lot of big hitters in this movie. I wasn’t sure about it, but I gave it five minutes and watched to the end. It jumps between 1973 and 1986. Daniel Raneri (with very long eyelashes) plays J.R. Maguire, a kid returning to his grandad’s house in Long Island. Tye Sheridan plays an older J.R.

His mum, Dorothy Maguire (Lily Rabe) has a mattress attached to the roof of their car and all her worldly belongings. She’s going home, but carries with her a sense of failure. Her marriage to ‘The Voice’ (Max Martini) has broken down and he refuses to pay child support. Grandad (Christopher Lloyd) is grumpy and put out, his house is already filled to overflowing with his children and grandchildren. J.R’s mum is upset, but the young J.R. admits to love living in grandad’s house. It’s full of fun, mostly, in the figure of his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck).

Uncle Charlie Maguire gives him the sit-down talk most fathers baulk at. He tells him he should always have a car and a job and a girlfriend—and you never hit a woman—and a stash in your wallet where you put a little something away in case of emergencies. Uncle Charlie knows about these things, he runs a bar, The Dickens. Anyone that has watched Cheers will know that kind of bar, filled with interesting characters that offer monosyllabic advice that you could take or leave and where everybody is your friend.

Uncle Charlie also tells J.R. he’s been watching him, and he’ll never be much good at baseball or sport, in general. Perhaps he should think of being something else when he grows up. He asks if he has any ideas. At that age, my ideal job was being a bin man or playing for Celtic. People were always telling me I was shit at sport, but I never listened. I tried to prove them wrong until my knees got arthritic. J.R. has a singular vision. He wants to be a writer.

J.R. begins straight away. Uncle Charlie has a look at his work and tells him he has got talent. But he needs to read. Uncle Charlie has a cupboard filled with a stash of books for him to dig into. J.R. also needs to get lucky.  Not the kind of geek luck that got him into college at Harvard, or even the job at The New York Times. Writers are supernatural being.

There’s a story-book romance with Sidney (Brianna Middleton). She continually dumps him. And there’s a kind of in-joke that fiction sells, but there’s a market for memoirs. And here we all are with J.R.Moehringer becoming an international bestselling author, with a film being made of his words.

For those of us that write (millions of book published, ironically, on Amazon every year) it would be nice to bask in this nostalgic afterglow of God-given success. Hopefully, my next novel, Beast, sells more than ten copies. Enough to buy a can of Coke. I’m a fan of fellow American writer, John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and he tells us two truths that make more sense to any aspiring writer:

 ‘You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.’

Most importantly of all:

‘The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.’

I watched the film. Now I’m going to do things in the wrong order (it should always be book first) and read the book, The Tender Bar (2005). Read on.

Aidan Martin (2020) Euphoric Recall

‘My name is Aidan and I am an addict.’

So what, you might say. You probably know the trajectory that follows.

You’ve got Damian Barr, who grew up near Ravenscraig steelworks, a solid working-class town. Him being gay wasn’t his fault—or even a fault—but being a fucking Tory, Maggie & Me, was just a step too far.

Deborah Orr, Motherwell: A Girlhood, which just about sums it up.

You’ve got Kerry Hudson’s whimsical, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (fiction) and Lowborn (factual) that deals with what it means to be working-class poor.

Meg Henderson’s wonderful Finding Peggy, but a bit before Hudson’s time.  

Darren McGarvey, with his Poverty Safari.

Janice Galloway’s autobiographies This is Not About Me and All Made Up are my clear favourites.

She mentored Graeme Armstrong and The Young Team, the story of Azzy and Airdrie, if you’re fucking asking, and it’s told in dialect.  

Scottish actor and comedian, Jane Godley, described as Nicola Sturgeon’s alter-ego (before she fucked up and went a bit too far and behaved like a politician—grabbing the money). Handstands in the Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival, which told a tale of incest and marrying into a gangster’s family in the East End of Glasgow was, to my thinking, underrated before clicking on to Amazon to find over 2000 five-star ratings, which shows I was deluding myself, but not as much as Sturgeon.

We can even fling in Alan Bisset, Boyracers, which tries to do the impossible and make Falkirk cool.

And if we’re stretching it, Maggie O’Farrell  I Am I Am I Am, seven brushes with death. She’s from Northern Ireland, but kinda Scottish.

The real daddy of fictionalised memoir, Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart and Shuggie Bain. A gay boy growing up in Glasgow’s housing estates and watching his mother slide under the couch with drink, while drowning, but claiming to be simply waving and doing her hair.

What does Aidan Martin add to this amorphous list, or, in other words, what kind of story can a guy in his late twenties tell us that we’ve not already heard?  In terms of markets, what’s his Unique Selling Point?

Livingston isn’t very cool, which is a good starting point.

First chapter, ‘Groomed’. He’s standing outside McDonalds. ‘Heart racing.’ I don’t like heart racing, because it’s clichéd city.  But we know what he’s talking about. He’s not there to have a Big Mac and chips. It’s in the chapter title. He’s fifteen and meeting an older man, with a North English accent, who calls himself Derek.

White-van man is a world of disappointment, but he’s organised. He’s got a room in a hotel booked and a cover story. He’s brought a bottle of Buckfast for Aidan, because that’s what you do. Fantasy is never reality.

‘Escapism,’ Sexual addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction.    

 ‘You’re fuckin’ dead, after class…

‘Truth be told I wasn’t as violent as the lads I was always fighting. Some of them seemed at ease taking it to the next level. But the idea of jumping on someone’s head or stabbing them felt sickening to me. Survival was day to day.’

Plotting of beginning, middle and end is quite straight forward. Aidan is suicidal, but the reader knows that if he’s written a book he can’t be much good at killing himself. The writer’s job isn’t to make things simpler, but more complex.  

Grandpa dead. Grandma deteriorating fast with depression and diagnosed as bipolar. His wee brother, ‘DJ was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma one of the rarest soft tissue cancers in the world’.   

Bargaining with yourself. ‘Money was getting tight, so we started on the cheaper drugs too. Back on the eccies, speed and valies. We had a few attempts at crystal meth, and I found myself smoking an unknown stuff from foil.’

Aidan had yet to hit his rock bottom, in Alcohol and Drug Anon language. But he’d a Higher Power looking out for him. This is shown in graphic form.

 ‘I self-harmed with knives…some otherworldly force flung the knives out of my hand.

All I can say is I know it truly happened.’

The reader knows Aidan is going to make it. But he’s honest about it. His relapses were to do with a lack of humility. I’ve heard the same story in so many forms. My brother, for example, telling me he was just going to have a few pints. Aye, we knew, what that meant. Deep down, so did he.

We’re in the world of repetition. Even the language becomes boring and clichéd. Recovery is slow. Aidan at 25 is at West Lothian College. He will have relapses. He will find himself. The reader knows that. God help us, if I start quoting Rumi and Leonard Cohen, We’re all broken. There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

I’m a reading addict. The pleasure of recognition lies not in revelation—although that has its place—but in resonance.  

‘I am grateful to be clean.’

Hallelujah has nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with a clean heart that cries out. Read on.

but, yes to writing in 2021.

Don’t wait for God to put his hand on your shoulder—unless you’re the Virgin Mary—that’s not going to happen any time soon. Start writing now. All you need is you.

Yes, I procrastinate, which sounds like masturbate, or maybe only to my sick mind.

Do something you enjoy with yourself without the need for paper hankies. Having a sick mind is an advantage, because you’re going to have to tell lots of lies. That’s what fiction is, without having to be elected American President. But the nearer the truth your lies are, the greater virtue you create for your characters. Believable characters must roam the land like prehistoric dinosaurs, leaving behind a trail of disruption.

Conflict is where your characters live. If someone else mentions that you must kill your darlings I’m going to hunt them down and treat them to one of my readings. Sincerity is what you find in yourself when you’ve nothing else left. Buried treasure unearthed and you’ve been forced to share again and again until it becomes boring.

Worthless treasure isn’t treasure. Fool’s gold is easy to find. It’s on the page in that first draft. Your eyes glitter. You open the swag bag, ready to pile in the awards.

Forgive and forget yourself. Write like a dog running after sticks. Slabber if you like. Nobody cares. Don’t let your smooth baby brain slowly harden into a border guard.  You just need to get that stick to mix metaphors with it and beat back your inner critic. You need to get words on a page pronto.

Don’t interrupt yourself with somebody else. When you’re having an affair of the heart, the worst thing you can do is pick up your phone. Listening to the siren calls. That’s like saying ‘I do’ at your wedding, then sloping off to fuck the entire front row, and some of the back row too. We don’t want to seem too picky. We want to be nice.  Yeh, we’ve all done it. Social media owns us, but not completely—yet.

You only live once, but in writing you can live as many lives as you like. You can do what you want, you can be what you want. Being believable is Sir Gawain setting out to find the Holy Grail. It will always be over that next hill. You’ll make mistakes. Go the wrong way. Other knights will challenge you to duels. Chancers will spring up and tell you they know the way, the true path, all you have to do is follow them.

Imagine being like Ted McMinn (the Tin Man), the Rangers’ winger, who wrong-footed himself and wrong-footed defenders by not knowing himself what he was going to do with the ball next. It doesn’t matter. I played football for over forty years and was rotten. But write as if every game matters, because it does at the time—I’ve not got the medals to prove it—and it might be your last. You need to turn up, with your three quid dues in your hand.

My characters aren’t rich or famous. I’m not going to be rich and famous either. And I wouldn’t know what to do with it, but I might feel less guilty about leaving the bathroom light on overnight and wasting electricity. I’d still be guilty of causing global warming and deforestation in the Amazon, before Amazon owned the world.

Take responsibility. You know your work is finished when you can’t bear to look at it one more time. You’d rather spit it in someone’s face and apologise for how terrible it is. Given half a chance you’d be quite willing to sell out to a huckster with a shivering monkey on his shoulder turning the handle for an organ grinder offering peanuts, and then by sleight of hand taking them away.

Humility and humanity don’t rhyme except in the heart. There’s nothing wrong with you when you listen and see. When you don’t listen, you don’t see. Buddha is just a jade statue of a fat guy sitting about doing no work, while you’re banging away on the keyboards ready to produce The International New York Times bestseller that everyone really needs to appreciate now.

Pour yourself into who you are and your writing, not what others think you should be. Writing is meant to be fun, but I played football mainly in the rain and freezing conditions and on gravel parks that took away the skin of my legs and scarred me. I’m not going to say I loved it, but when I think about it now, it makes me smile. I am going to say I loved it, because I can change my mind.  I can therefore claim maturity, even wisdom.

Writing gives you a sense of achievement. For a somebody that’s nothing much. We’ve all heard it before, the media figure that lists their achievement then at the end adds, blithely, I just thought I’d write a book.

We all know about Alexander the Great visiting Diogenes with inked parchments of his International New York Times bestseller tucked under his arms. And Diogenes asking him to stand out of his sun.

Yes, us writers own the sun, moon and are but fragments of stars. Get your parchment, pens or keyboard out and make great use of them.  Do it now.

The world doesn’t need another post-script—but here it is.  

You’ll be a lot better prepared for existential questions like when a neighbour, Frances, was complaining that her grandkids got too much, and that children in Africa haven’t got any toys, or even enough to eat:

Alfie (aged seven) said, ‘Doesn’t Santa go to Africa gran? You said he goes everywhere’.

It’s your job, as a writer, to make sure Santa gets to Africa. Write on.   

Celeste Ng (2017) Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was published in 2017 to critical acclaim and is still a number one bestseller in Amazon in 2020. It terms of book sales, the author has produced the literary equivalent of Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell. Being a writer that never writes much now, I thought I’d take a look. It’s a page turner — the end begins at the beginning. I liked it. The review should end here with recognition of that neat trick.

 One I’ve used myself, but as George Bernard Shaw famously said, (adlibbed) writers that can’t write, teach, and teachers that can’t teach, write review.

People that can’t write often ask people that read, what was the book about? The answers pretty simple. Rich man/Poor man, or, in this case, women. I might as well talk about themes.  Class and race. These are biggies in American politics. These are biggies in any politics. Here we have the affluent, white,  Elena Richardson, she’s a local reporter and her husband is a lawyer that works in nearby New York. He comes home to Shaker Heights, where his wife and four beautiful children reside.

Talking Heads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHatn3_UxEU

Shaker Heights is somewhere we all know, a place where a former Vice President in the late nineteen century moved to get away from the stench of the urban poor. Houses are solid and well maintained and everything runs on rails. Elena Richardson is a third generation Shaker Heighter. They have not one house, but also two units. She admits she doesn’t really need the money, but likes to rent them out the right kind of people. Not charity, exactly. But Mr Yang, whom she rents to in Winslow Road (Down) is suitably grateful.

Here’s the hook to draw readers in:

‘Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer, how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough—or depending which side you were on, May Ling Chow—and now, at last, there was something new and emotional to discuss.’

Interrogate the text is a standard cry of creative-writing teachers. Interrogate The American Dream with the subtext Sidonie-Gabrielle Collete’s Gigi, ‘The bustling lives of people with nothing to do’. And remember how the rich are always telling us how incredibly busy they are. The reader is here left with a question, whodunnit, but the answer is in the text: Isabelle. In a book over 300 pages long in which Isabelle or Izzy doesn’t appear until about page 50, the reader suspects something more is going on.

In successful novels, one book becomes many books. George Bernard Shaw’s famous play ‘An Inspector Calls’ has an Inspector visiting a family after a tragic accident, or suicide that might have been murder.   Here we have Mia Warren, an artist and photographer with her daughter Pearl, arriving in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle and renting half a house in Shaker Falls from Elena Richardson. Shaw’s dictum ‘That those that can’t change their mind, can’t change anything,’ is the kind of mantra, Mrs. Richardson lives by.

If you play by the rules, you’ll get your just reward is her firm belief, but she is a bit miffed that Mia isn’t properly grateful for the chance she’s been given for a better life. And she’s offended, although she doesn’t show it, that Mia won’t sell her one of her photographs because Mrs Richardson wants to help and she’s a struggling artist. She does shitty jobs to get by, her art is her life. Mrs Richardson can’t imagine what a shitty job feels like, but she wants to do the right thing and gives her a job as housekeeper in her home.

Mia is the ying to Mrs Richarson’s yang. Mia doesn’t play safe. She and her daughter’s possessions can fit snugly in the Beetle and when the time is right to move on, they do, pulled by the necessity of creating something new and rich. Mia’s life is her art, a living embodiment of Shaw’s fellow Irishman’s dictum: Art for Art sake.

There’s lots of doubling in Little Fires Everywhere. When you start making connections they burn through you. Mia and Elena. But also Pearl and Izzy. Moody (look at the name, remember what that means to be fifteen and in love) falls for Pearl (listen to her name, she’s lustrous). He’s lustrous too, but a virgin. They both are, he falls for her hard. Up close teenage life is always Romeo and Juliet. They’re best buddies and that gives Pearl entry into a kind of life she could only imagine, the kind of life she could get used to as she becomes a part of the Richardson household, part of the Richardson family. Pearl is doubled by Izzy, the black sheep of the family that moves in the other direction, helping Mia with her photography, idolising her and imagining what it would be like to have Mia and not Elena as her mother. She’d be the cuckoo in Mia’s nest. Pearl the cuckoo in the Richardson nest. But being like a daughter is not the same as being a daughter.

‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,’ as Mia said.

‘You look nice,’ said Trip to Pearl when they’re hanging out in the living room.

Trip is brainless but beautiful, girls in Shaker Heights—and pretty much everywhere they go—fall all over him, admitted Mrs Richardson to herself. She could imagine Pearl falling for Trip, but not the other way about.

‘She always looks nice,’ snapped Moody.

Lexie, the eldest of the Richardson children is eighteen and about to graduate and go to Yale. She’s queen bee at school. A bit like her brother. But she has a steady black boyfriend. You know what’s going to happen and it does, in the high-school, coming-of-age drama. Then we have the doubling of Lexie with Pearl, wearing her clothes and feel more Lexie and Lexie wearing Pearl’s grungy T-shirt and feeling more loved by Pia.

Most novice writers are asked a simple question to determine point of view. Whose story is this? An omniscient point of view is used here in the stories of many lives. For example, even Mr Yang, who lives below Mia and Pearl as a bystander also gets to tell his backstory. This shouldn’t work, but an artist putting a collage together can make one vison of many pictures. Some of the writing is great, which pushes Little Fires into the literary genre.   

For example, Moody’s first vision of Pearl, taken from his point of view, when he parks his bike and looks across at the new tenants moving in.

‘He saw a slender girl in a long crinkly skirt and a long loose T-shirt, with a message he couldn’t quite read. Her hair was long and curly and hung in a thick braid down her neck and gave the impression of straining to burst free. She had laid the headboard down flat near the flowerbeds that bordered the house, with the side rails below it and the slats to either side in neat rows, like ribs. It was as if the bed had drawn in a deep breath and then gracefully flattened itself into the grass.’

The last line, in particular, raises Ng’s writing to poetic realms of resonance. On the rare occasions she falls into cliché it can be overlooked. Backstories add to plot. Pia, for example, doubles with a fellow worker May Ling Chow in having a baby that has no real father. Pia’s backstory of acting as a surrogate mother for a rich couple is more akin to Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White, with Pia a doppelganger double for a New York matron unable to conceive. This in turn doubles with Mrs Richardson’s best friend, Linda McCullough (class of ’71) also having miscarriage after miscarriage and remaining childless until finally she’s given a baby to adopt, one that’s been found on the doorstep of a fire station. It’s a Chinese baby, it’s May Ling Chow’s baby, and she wants it back. But as an immigrant worker with no money and no connections she has little rights.

Race rather than class rears its head. But they’re not mutually exclusive. Race and class double up against each other and reveals hidden motives as characters confront their hidden prejudices. Little Fires interrogates what it means to be poor white, poor Chinese and what happens when choices need to be made. The Wisdom of Solomon is invoked. Often that’s not enough for a good story in our crazy world. You end up is T.S Eliot territory:

‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

Read on.   

Book Week Scotland, Karen Campbell (2019) The Sounds of the Hours, presented in Parkhall library.

Long story. I was in Dalmuir library yesterday. For some reason I wanted to check out Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Diaries.

As you know Gramsci was leader of the Italian Communist Party.  Gramsci writes about how capitalism mutates and appropriates art and literature to establish a cultural hegemony. If that sounds pretty long-winded it’s probably because I don’t understand it either. Gramsci did. And it’s increasingly relevant today. The working class (that includes me) lost the propaganda war. What’s normal, just seems so.

Gramsci was imprisoned when Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts marched on Rome, which is the kind of lie Gramsci would recognise as myth making. Mussolini who wore a bowler hat and spats when taking flying lessons and petted a lion club in his lap, while his driver chauffeured him around the streets of Rome is a leader who sounds vaguely familiar. His switch from supporting the Communist Party to supporting Fascism also resonates with leaders whose only ideology is self-glorification.

Fascism shorn of its spats and bowler hats and lassez-faire disguise sounds to me just capitalism with added imperialism. Making Italy great again, by invading Ethiopia.   Making Germany great again by Anschluss and Lebensraum and seizing the lands of the lesser nations to give the German people breathing space.

Volksfuhrer, Adolf Hitler, demanded Jews and Communists be kept apart and concentrated in camps, caged as Trump cages refugees and immigrant children.

Business leaders’ demands of the fascist leaders were deregulation and a cutting of red tape.  Deregulation = no regulation.

Work makes you free. Himmler’s SS were paid a fixed fee by employers such as Volkswagon for them to provide labour. The SS provided food and accommodation and took a fee, in much the same way Sports Direct Workers or Amazon workers are not employed directly be the company. Zero-hour contracts, mandatory.

Short story. The Prison Diaries wasn’t in Dalmuir library.  Library staff said they’d purchase a copy, even though it’s been long out of print. There’s something beautiful in that.

I noticed there was a leaflet for an author, sponsored by Book Scotland, who was selling her book The Sound of the Hours in Parkhall library.

I couldn’t be arsed going and it was cold outside. But I’d been there. I’d did a gig 2016, Book Scotland, Dalmuir Library, when I was a writer, trying to sell my book Lily Poole (West Dunbartonshire library book of the week).  I decided to go to Parkhall and show solidarity with my fellow worker.

Karen Campbell was great. She talked about her journey as a writer. The Sound of the Hours was her seventh book, but her first historical novel. There were things I can relate to, her setting was often Glasgow, and her having been an ex-cop, but admittedly, not a very good one–write what you know –  she’d wrote detective novels. She also wrote about immigrants and the homeless.

The Sound of the Hours was a harder sell. It was set during the Second World War in Italy, but the Glaswegian part of Italy. Barga. You’ve probably spotted the contradiction. She told me things I was vaguely familiar with, how immigrants from the poorer Southern regions had come here to work, mainly to sell ice-cream and chips to the Scottish working class. A niche market and culture.

They were immigrants like my Da from Ireland, standing outside shipyard gates waiting for that call.

My hand was first up when she asked if we’d any questions. I said, ‘My Da, when he was drunk would always shout about the Gothic Line. That we should get on the blower to Paki.’ Paki I explained, was an Italian and was called Paki because he had black hair. I guess we could say those were more innocent times, but I’d be lying.

‘Was the place she was writing about anywhere near the Gothic Line?’ I asked her ‘Because that’s were my dad served in the army and watched his pals die’.

‘Aye.’

Barga was the Gothic line. Italy is mountainous. The Germans when they’d freed Mussolini from his hilltop prison split Italy like the Brexit vote. She said she’d thought about having the word Gothic line in her title. I was a step ahead of her here. That would have put her in the wrong camp, with Dracula and co.

We don’t judge a book by its cover. She admitted her cover was of the Friday night coup d’état from Bloomsbury order. I’m reminded of Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy in Truth & Beauty: A Friendship discussing how a bad cover can kill your book. And many of my readers reminded me the best part of my book was the cover. So I’m up to speed on the cover issue and she admitted on the foreground it’s got hanging branches with lemons. That fruit doesn’t grow anywhere near Barga, or Italy, generally.  A bland, blue-greenish cover is a bitter lemon for any author to swallow.

Luckily, I was already hooked. I bought a copy…Having read the first few chapters…well, that’s another story. Let’s just say I wouldn’t have, usually, have picked this type of book. Read on.     

63 UP, ITV, directed by Michael Apted.

https://www.itv.com/hub/7-63-up-uk/2a1866a0001

‘Give me a child and I will show you the man.’

That old Jesuit or ancient Greek aphorism is alive and well. I’m at 56 and UPward myself and one of my classmates, George Devine’s funeral, was on Wednesday. Arthritis creeps around my bones, but I’m still gloriously alive. When I went to school Mrs Boyle taught us that 9 x 7 = 63 (UP). My life has been in eight instalments, but I’ve followed the nine episodes of this soap opera and read into it things I already know. Class is alive and flourishing in Britain as it was in 1964; a half-hour documentary made by Granada, a World in Action, looked at the state of the nation through children’s eyes.

The villains of the series, as in life, have always been to me the upper classes. I’m like that old priest in Father Ted that when drink is mentioned his eyes glaze and he jumps out of his chair. With me it’s Tories. Fucking, Tory scum.

The first series (7UP) shows us three boys representative of that class, aged 7, Andrew, Charles and John.  They are shown singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin.  In their posh English accents they also boast about what newspapers they read. The Financial Times and Guardian. And tell the viewer exactly what prep school. public school and universities they will attend. And this all comes to pass with Biblical accuracy.  A world away from North Kensington, Grenfell Tower, the same rich South Kensington, London borough, where these boys hailed from.

The exception to the rule was Charles. We see him in 21 UP, long hair, hipster, telling the viewer how glad he didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge and attended Durham University instead. And he was glad of that because it gave him a different view of the world. Ho-hom. He does not appear in the subsequent programmes. Being educated at the right schools and having the right connections, of course, he went on to become something big in Channel 4,  something big in film and theatre and  threatened to sue his fellow documentary maker Michael Apted for using his image. This shows no class at all. Apted being one of those national treasures, like David Attenborough. Imagine, for example, a beluga whale suing Attenborough for impinging on his right’s images and all because of a bit of plastic.

Andrew went on to become a partner in his solicitor’s firm at 31, by that time he’d married outside his class to a good Yorkshire lass, plain Jane and they had two sons, Alexander and Timothy. His firm was taken over by a larger corporation and he regretted spending so much time at work, but in his modest way, admitted those were the choices he made. I quite liked Andrew.

I detested his and my namesake John. Of all the upper-class twats that little Tony wanted to punch, he would have been my prime candidate. I hated everything about him. The way he looked and sounded. His pronouncements that (Luton) car workers with their fabulous wages could afford to send their children to public schools. His life went exactly to the book, his pronouncements, aged 7 UP, realised. He became a Queen’s Council and gained his silk robe. He married the daughter of a former ambassador to Bulgaria and admitted his great grandfather, Todor Burmov, had fought against the Turks to gain independence and had been Prime Minister. No surprise, the gone, gone, gone girl, Teresa May, who attended the same Oxbridge institution, and helped create the hostile environment for immigrants didn’t exactly rush to deport him. John had the wrong accent, the right register of the Queen’s English, fabulous social connections and the pasty-white colour of skin favoured by immigrant officials. Two of his friends were Ministers in the Government.  Even Nigel Farage, the ex-Etonian, would have complained if John had suddenly been napped and put on a flight to Sofia, but then a strange thing happened. I didn’t mind John so much, and actually admired him.

He was one of the few that didn’t tell the viewer whether he had family or not. The reason he kept appearing in subsequent programmes was to promote a charity that helped disabled and disadvantage citizens in Bulgaria. He admitted modestly that he’d worked hard. While that usually would have me thinking nobody had worked harder than coal miners who’d powered the Industrial Revolution and paid in silicosis and black death, or Jimmy Savile who prided himself on being a Bevin boy and working (hard) down the pits and incredibly hard with his charity work and had other interests. John mentioned his mother had needed to work to send him to public school, in the same way that tens of millions of mothers have to work to put food on the table. John gained a scholarship to attend Oxford University, with the inference he was poor. I’m not sure if his mother was a Luton car worker, but I’m sure she didn’t work as a cleaner in a tower block in South Kensington. I didn’t exactly like John, but I understood him better, which is the beginning of knowledge.

I guess like many other viewers I identified with Tony, this tiny kid from the East End of London, his dad a card-shark crook and he looked to be going the same way. Larger than life Tony from 7 UP was a working-class cliché. He was never going to make anything of school. Left at 15 and he tells you early he yearned to be a jockey. He was helping out at the stables and got a job there. I know how he feels. I wanted to play for Celtic and trained with the boy’s club at 15. Trained with Davie Moyes, Charlie Nicholas on the next red gravel training pitch. Clutching my boots in a plastic bag I wasn’t even good enough to be molested by Frank Cairns, although he did give me a passing, playful, punch in the stomach. I guess he was aiming lower down and the lower league. Tony in a later UP series told us he’d ridden in a race against Lester Piggot. He wasn’t good enough, and is big enough to admit it.

Tony with his outdated attitude to women. The four Fs. Fuck them, forget them and I can’t remember the other two. Debbie sorted that out. She gave him three kids and now he’s got three grandkids. Tony admitted he’d had an affair. Tony, plucky London cabbie, having done The Knowledge, as did his wife and son. A spell in Spain trying to work out as a property broker. I guess, I should have guessed. Tony admitted he’d voted Tory all his days and now he wasn’t sure. More of a Farage man. Fuck off Tony.

Tony got a bit heated when he thought Apted had accused him of being a racist. ‘I’m a people’s man,’ he said. ‘You know me.’

Then he talks about the Arabs, in the same way you’d talk about poofs and Paki shops. The Arabs were the only ones that were helping him make money. It wasn’t Uber, that was ripping him off, but Labour that were taking everything and giving nothing back. Fuck off Tony, read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and find out what part of Mugsborough you’ve moved to. Yet, there were his daughter, something that had gone wrong. Sometimes we’ve got to realise that although we circle the wagons, as Tony claimed, only a community can save us.

The old lies are made new again.

Let’s look at the girls from the same social background as Tony. My kind of people. Straight as a die, Lynn, attended the same primary school as Jackie and Sue. Married for 40 years. Two daughter and two granddaughters, Riley, only two-and-a-half ounces at birth. God bless the NHS. Lynn whose first job was in a mobile library. Lynn, who loved kids and loved helping kids to read. Then she worked in Bethnal Green in the library. Under the Tories, of course, we don’t need libraries; we don’t need women like Lynn. Her job was redundant. She was redundant. RIP.

Jackie was always the mouthy one in the triumvirate of girls pictured together. She  told Apted he wasn’t asking her the right kind of questions and patronising them – which he was, a product of his own class. Jackie, first married of the group. First divorced. Said she didn’t want children, but had three boys and ended up  in a council estate in Scotland, but separated from the father of the two of them, but still in love and in touch with him. Jackie, who had rheumatoid arthritis and told the camera, and David Cameron, if he thought she was fit for work then he should show her what kind of job. Disabled, she was classified as not disabled enough and fit for work. Tory scum. Here it is in person. Public policy without humanity and based on a lie. No great surprise the suicide rate on those deprived of benefits has rocketed. I wonder what Farage, who has never worked and continues to draw a hefty stipend from rich fools and from the European Parliament he wants to destroy thinks about that. We know what he thinks. He thinks what rich people tell him. Jackie can speak for herself. Speak for us.

Sue can think for herself too. She got married to have children and had two kids, but divorced their father because she didn’t love him. Karaoke singer, she met Glen and they’ve been engaged for twenty years or more. She works as head administrator in the law faculty of Queen Mary, University of London. She’s thinking about retirement and does a bit of acting and singing. A working class life, made good. But she worries that the world we’re passing on to her children and our children isn’t as good. Doesn’t have the same level of opportunity and social mobility. She’s right to be worried.

Bruce, representative of the middle class,  who when he was 7 UP claimed to have a girlfriend in Africa that he probably wouldn’t see again and wanted to be a missionary, always had that look on his face as if he’d missed something. His father, perhaps, in Southern Rhodesia.  Bruce was beaten at public school. He freely admits it and agonised whether Christianity was an outdated doctrine and whether it was liveable. I wonder about that too. I see the façade and under the façade more façade. The devil seems to me more real than any god and Jesus whose only weapon was love. Yeh, I like Bruce. For a start, although he was public school and went to Oxford to study Maths, he was never a Tory. He taught maths to children in Sylhet, Bangladesh and in the East End of London (Tony’s old school, if I remember correctly). Late in life he married and had two sons.

Peter, who went to the same school in Liverpool as Neil, was also representative of a different strand of the middle class. Both boys claimed they wanted be astronauts, but Neil hedged his bets and claimed he would be as equally happy being a bus driver. Peter went to university, got a degree and took up teaching. The greatest moment of his life was, he claimed, the 1977 Tommy Smith goal for Liverpool in the European Cup Final in Rome. No mention of his marriage or his teaching career. He dropped out of the 7 UP series after being targeted by the Daily Hate Mail and other right-wing publications for criticising Thatcherism. He later re-appeared, in 56 UP, having remarried and hoping to promote his burgeoning musical career. He claimed to be happy working in the Civil Service. Good rate of pay, good pension. He must be ecstatic now that Mo Salah and Liverpool have given him another greatest moment of his life in Bilbao. Anyone that sees through Thatcherism has walked in my shoes and I love my team, Celtic in the same way he loves Liverpool.

Neil never became an astronaut or bus driver. He did go to study in Aberdeen University, but dropped out in the first year and at 21 UP was living in a squat in London and working as casual labour on building sites. Neil makes for good television. Contrast the bright, beautiful and confidant seven-year-old boy with what he’d become, a shifty-eyed loner, with obvious what we’d term now, mental health problems, or as he admitted depression or problems with his nerves, madness. At 28 UP he was living in a caravan in Scotland. Then he was living in Orkney.  Neil never fulfilled his boyhood potential. But I guess that’s true of us all. Then somehow, in that long curve on life he seemed to be making a comeback. 42 UP he’s living with Bruce and later becomes a Liberal Democrat councillor in Hackney. 56 UP he’s moved again to middle England as well as being a councillor is a lay preacher in the Eden district of Cumbria. Able to administer all the rites of the Church of England, apart from communion. 63 UP he’s living in northern France, a house in the countryside he’s bought with money inherited from his parent’s estate. Neil has become a squire. Like me he hoped to have written something people would want to read.

Nick, educated in a one room school house in the tiny village of Arncliffe, in the Yorkshire Dales, a farmer’s son, who went to Oxford and gained a doctorate in nuclear physics, is a story of meritocracy and upward mobility. He didn’t want to run the farm, he said, perhaps his brother that was deaf, could inherit the farm. Nick wanted to change the world. A fellow student at Oxford commented that he didn’t associate Neil’s Northern accent with intelligence.  He was right, of course, intelligence has nothing to do with accent, and upward mobility has nothing to do with meritocracy. Nick’s comments that Teresa May would never have become Prime Minister if she’s gone to an obscure polytechnic would have at one time seemed inflammatory. But Nick lives and teaches in Wisconsin-Madison. Before Trump, and the moron’s moron continual twittering, nothing has ever been the same again. Nick had a son with his first wife and later remarried Cryss. But in 63 UP he admits to having throat cancer. He’s intelligent enough to know what that mean.

In 56 UP, Nick admitted having long conversations with Suzy, who had appeared in eight of the nine episodes, but not in 63 UP. Suzy when asked about the series when she was a chain-smoking, twenty-one-year old, thought the series pointless and silly. By that time her father had died, she’d dropped out of school and been to Paris to learn secretarial skills. Her upper-class background true to form meant she was a pretty enough catch. She duly married Rupert, a solicitor and prospered as a housewife and mother of two girls and a boy. After 28 UP she glowed with good health.

Symon and Paul were the bottom of the heap in the first series of 7 UP in 1964. Symon was the only mixed race kid in the programme. His mother was white. He missed her when he was in the home. She just couldn’t cope with him, but later they became close.

Symon went to work in Wall’s freezer room. He had five kids and was married by 28 UP. He wanted to be film star. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. At 35 he was divorced and remarried. He remarried a childhood sweetheart. They met in the laundrette. She had a kid and they had a son. They fostered hundreds of kids over the years. If you take away the money Symon has been the biggest success story and has given the most.

Symon and Paul kept in touch and they reunited in 63 UP in Australia where Paul lived. He emigrated, following his father down under. Paul worked in the building trade. He was always one of the shy ones in the programme. He went walkabouts with his wife Susan, who thought him handsome and that he had a nice bum. They had a couple of kids and stacks of grandkids. Their daughter went to university. The first of their family to enter an institution of higher learning. Paul and his wife work together in a retirement home.

The 7 UP series tells us about ourselves. When it began the Cuban Missile Crisis had been played out the threat of nuclear annihilation had passed. Or so we thought. With global warming and tens of millions of migrants on the move, the threat of nuclear annihilation is more likely, but for a different reason, because countries divert rivers and tributaries and claim them as their own.

The jobs that each one did will be redundant. Self-driving cars mean taxing will be for the birds. Amazon are already delivering by drone. Any kind of administration is child’s play for artificial intelligence. The bastion of law and medicine is based on pattern recognition. We can expect the new Google to run our health service, or what’s left of it. Nick, the nuclear engineer, might not have much of a future. The future is green, totally green. Those Arab states that rely on the mono-crop of oil will become bankrupt almost overnight, like a Middle-Eastern Venezuela. Russia has long been bankrupt, but without oil it implodes. Let’s hope it doesn’t take the rest of us with it. Money flows from the poor to the rich at an increasing. rate, like an ever-growing, speeded up, Pacman creating new wealth and eating it up more quickly. We are left with dysfunctional politics, tyranny and chaos. The centre cannot hold. Our homes will be battery powered. Plants and trees are already solar powered. They shall become our new cathedrals. Scotland should be green by then.  That’s something a celticman appreciates.

 

Storyville: The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets – the Cleaners, directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003f2f/storyville-the-internets-dirtiest-secrets-the-cleaners

I’m a big fan of Storyville and BBC 4, in general. That tells you a lot about the type of person I am. Big data companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter (Amazon and Apple) mine data points for personal information the same way Archimedes used mathematics and mechanics (Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world) not only to tell us who we are, but what we are, or think we are. This is the shit end of the spoon, or fulcrum.

Whenever one of these tech gods deigns to appear before some select committee in Washington or London— Mark Zuckerberg refusing to appear before Members of Parliament for a third time at the end of March 2018—then they or their minions offer up a salve, they’re doing everything they can to clear up the internet, they’re not publishers, but providers. They take no responsibility, but because they’re good guys they’re going to help us create a brave new world by wiping clean the slates we leave behind.

Here’s the mechanics of it, our digital trace. Zero or One, remove or retain. Epsilon is the lowest caste in Brave New World and they live in Manila. Facebook, Twitter and Google, don’t employ them directly. Alpha tech in California hands that job to Betas, who delegate to Gammas and Deltas, all who take a cut and the poorest paid are those that labour in booths, looking at screens in our digital age. These are our smoking beagles forced to test the safest of cigarettes, that don’t really give you lung cancer.

For every worldwide scandal on the net the number of Epsilons increase, a knee-jerk reaction, until we look the other way. Forget about them. We don’t count them, or look at the ways tech companies like to hide their dirty washing.  They clean the internet for us in the same way the untouchables in India clean away the shit of the highest caste.

What do they do?

They look at porn. Child porn. A six year old girl sucking a man’s dick in a cubicle.  Remove or retain? Yes or No. Twenty-five thousand images a day on average. Maybe more. Do less and it’s the door. Hi-tech knows how to milk the flesh of our eyeballs.

Beheadings. Suicides. Animal cruelty.  Murder. Genocide.

Porn. Porn. Porn.

Hate speech.

Self-harming.

Classify terrorism according to the latest diktats from corporate heads, based on cash.

‘Algorithms can’t do what we do,’ a cleaner explains. Three strikes and the cleaner is out, sacked, offscreen.

Beagles don’t really get lung cancer and cleaners don’t really get post-traumatic-stress disorder and kill themselves. It’s just a job. Somebody’s got to do it.  Poor people don’t count.

Shaun Bythell (2017) The Diary of a Bookseller.

Remember them, booksellers before Amazon? On 1^st Septmeber 1962, 250 000 Glaswegians gathered in the driving rain to pay homage to the last run of the tram cars. Who will honour our booksellers?

Shaun Bythwell likes being his own boss. He is the owner of The Bookstore in Wigtown, which he bought in November 2001. His employees like him too, which makes him one of the good guys. Amazingly I’ve heard of the Wigtown Book Festival. His bookstore is the second biggest independent in Scotland and his diary dates from 2014 when the nation had a vote on Independence. We lost, but maybe next time. Shaun is still there.

George Orwell also had a job selling books. His ‘Bookshop Memories’ acts as a counterweight to Bythwell’s diary musings. Here in February 2015, for example, Orwell writes of his experience during the nineteen thirties:

The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long – I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy hour week, apart from constant expeditions to buy books – and it is an unhealthy life.

Selling books is one of those jobs I could imagine doing. The thrill of the chase, the knowing and not knowing what you will find in the next book haul which Bythell experiences. But the long hours and the bad back hauling books. 172 000 miles on clock of his old van. 100 000 books in the shop. Nah, doesn’t sound that great. What is harder to imagine is how Bythell makes a living.

Amazon, of course, are like the orcs invading Middle Earth. ‘Cut-throat and barbaric’ notes Bythell in November 2014. An earlier entry 9^th September states Amazon sells books cheaper, ‘for less than the cover price’. No book store can compete with that. No publisher can resist Amazon’s advance. No writer, with the exception of James Patterson, who campaigns against them, can fall out with Amazon. Amazon’s unique selling point is we’re cheap, but at what cost?

An analogy here is with Blythwell and his (ex-) wife Anna arguing against windfarms on Wigton Bay in a place dependent, almost totally, on tourism. Thursday, 22^nd January:

At 4.30 p.m. a friend [who] lives right in the middle of the proposed site and estimates that if it goes ahead it will reduce the value of his house to almost nothing.

Scotland’s future, I believe, the future of an independent Scotland lies not in the black, black oil of the North Sea or the fossil fuels, but in renewable energy, wind and wave, but the land is owned by a handful of people with the murky past of the aristocracy. Here we have one of the smaller breeds of orcs, the developer of the proposed wind farm.

19^th Janury…began by telling me, ‘I’m not here to try and change your mind’, then spent the next three hours trying to change my mind. Anna was very impressive dealing with him, asking how much he was going to get paid for allowing them to build on his land (over three times what the rest of community will receive each year) and whether he would be able to see them from any of the properties on his estate. He looked at the floor and sheepishly admitted that he would not be visible from any of the numerous properties he owns.

Standard bookish and Amazon fare, one guy gets paid more than the entire community, moves his money offshore, pays no taxes, but moans about it being too much and asks for a block discount, and doesn’t have to live with the monstrosity that he benefits from. Aye, right.

The leaven in the books is provided not by the customers, but mainly by Nicky, an employee who seems more like a member of Bythell’s extended family.

Friday 28^th November: Nicky decided to stay the night so we could drink beer and gossip. Predictably we both drank too much. I offered her a bottle of Corncrake’s Ale and told me she doesn’t like any beer that has a bird’s name in it. This is the kind of logic that she applies to all her decision making.

Till total £62.50

5 customers.

I was surprised to read in the epilogue that Nicky had left The Bookstore for a job with Keystore ‘closer to her hovel’. Shaun Bythell split up with Anna, but they remain friends and The Bookstore goes from strength to strength. Ahh, a happy ending. Read on.