Samina Malik

What is our country becoming?

On 8th November, Samina Malik was found guilty of terrorist offences, and placed under house arrest for a month pending further sentencing. Yet, she had done nothing except have an imaginary life, and obtain a few books or manuals. She gave no funds to terrorists, she committed no terrorist acts. To jail her for Thought Crime is pure Orwell. She's only 23 years old, barely out of adolescence. She's a nerd, a dreamer, perhaps a fool, but hardly a terrorist.

We are banning books, making the possession of information a crime as bad as committing a real offence. It's not just, it's not reasonable, it takes away the presumption of innocence.

When I and my cohort were at a similar age, it was not unusual to be in possession of revolutionary tracts - Mao Tze-Dong's (Mao Tse-Tung's) Little Red Book, or Che Guevara's "Guerilla Warfare". In fact, they're probably still on my bookshelves somewhere, unread for thirty years. We had weaponry: knives, the odd airgun. But just because we read and dreamed of revolution, of smashing the system that we are now part of, didn't mean that we would actually DO anything about it. And we didn't. And neither did Malik.

If we jail her, then we create a martyr, and formalize a new crime: dreaming.


:0(

Politics

It's time that I became interested in politics again. The present bunch are as bad as the last lot of our government, and the opposition is an Old Etonian club. God, they're a shower. There must be an alternative. The Lib-Dems? The Greens? Form my old party, based upon the cybernetic prescriptions of Stafford Beer? The Viable Systems Party?

What's the current situation in the UK ? We're losing our freedoms, we're losing manufacturing, we're dependent upon foreign energy sources, we're dependent upon the US for foreign policy, we're screwed but we don't know it.

Who can I work for? Who can I vote for? Who can I talk to?

I need answers but I don't know who or where to ask.

Grrrrr.

:o(

Le rêve

Not "Le Rêve"


Another dream.

"Le Rêve" is the title ( I think ) of a painting by Paul Delvaux, the Belgian surrealist. I remember seeing a reproduction of it many years ago, and the image haunted me ever since.
Now, however, I can't find an image of the picture anywhere. I've googled, used other search engines, trawled art shops and poster vendors. I've even looked at the Delvaux Museum website, but with no results.

Can you help?

:-]

I Shall Wear Purple

When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of
my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and
grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and a pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and
beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street.
And set a good example
for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read
the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple.

There's someone to live up to.

:0)

Athens

It's been more than thirty years since I was in Athens, so my memories of the city were hazy. What I noticed this time, more than anything, was the harsh grey concrete nature of the city. It's a dense amorphous urban mess, with hardly any green spaces except for the areas around the Acropolis. From the Areopagus the view is a concrete plain, surrounding the green of the ancient excavated sites. The valleys between the hills have been filled with ugly housing and roads, which are in turn filled with cars which park on pavements and into the roadway, impeding both pedestrians and other vehicles. You may gather that I didn't much like the city, this time.

Even the ancient forum areas were not as spectacular as I have seen elsewhere, but then I had a very limited time for tourism, so the Acropolis was closed when I was free. Two tourist hours in four days isn't enough.

On the other hand, an attempt was made to pick me up, which could be regarded as flattering. The last time I was there I was young and pretty with long fair hair. While waiting near the station for the next train towards London, an older guy (who was probably younger than I am now) made a concerted effort to get me drunk & chat me up. He succeeded in the former; I remember stumbling onto the train in a haze of ouzo, unsure of what the hell I was doing, but convinced I needed to get away.

This time, it was a guy who was younger than me, and an attempted street pick-up, but the lines were the same. Is it Greece, or is it me? I suppose I should be flattered.


:0)

To the Young Lady

.....who ran a bath for me this morning, and helped to test the temperature of the water.

While stark naked.
Thank you.

It's a shame you were just a dream, but what a pleasant vision to wake up with.
Please come back sometime.


:0)

Political confusion

I attended a conference last week, along with delegates from more than twenty countries. The socialising was terrific, with lots of chances for talk about work, the world and politics. The last was confusing, as understanding of specific terms varies so much.

To an American, being a socialist seems to have connotations of extreme communism, with shades of what we would call fascism. It's the opposite of the ideas that I subscribe to, which I guess are close to the Scandinavian model and the principle of all citizens working towards the common weal, instead of purely for themselves. That's why I don't mind paying taxes.

And to the French, being a "liberal" - which I regard as being a shade of socialism - appears to mean Anglo-Saxon free-market uber-Capitalism. So what am I? A libertarian, certainly. Do what you want, as long as it doesn't hurt or impinge too much upon your neighbours. And a collectivist, a believer in social cohesion. I support the state's duty to support its citizens, together with citizens' duty to support the state.

Liberty, equality and fraternity seems to sum it up. We're losing all of those in Britain at the moment. The loss of equality and the increasing gap between rich and poor worries me, as does the rapid erosion of our freedoms. I should take up politics again.


:0]

On the other hand......

.....with no offspring around the house, there are no damp patches around the loo where our son has "missed" , no hair monsters in the bath plug-hole, and the loo rolls seem to last for ages. Minor compensations, it's true, but it's nice to have some petty annoyances removed.

:0)

Empty Nest II

We rattled around this weekend; the first time that Moonface and I have spent a weekend completely without children. Our house felt empty. The weather didn't help, as after a week of blue skies and cool sunshine, we had rain all day on Sunday. Winter had arrived, and he wasn't welcome. Instead of going for a bracing walk, we huddled and whinged.

No matter. Life beckons. I will cook for ten next weekend, and hope to feed more. Work is fun, even though there is little of it, and there's not a pile of cash. We will retreat this winter into a warm core of rooms, and let the others freeze.

:o)

Uncertainty

I've had a couple of calls from head-hunters in the last day or so. Like a fool, I said "Yes, I may be interested," to them. I ought to be interested, as I'm working way in excess of the hours I'm contracted to for my present role, and I would like a full-time job and much more money.

But, I'm fairly happy in what I'm doing, and I do get enjoyment our of it. And, I hate the uncertainty of having job applications. It takes the bottom out of my world, it's selling oneself and setting oneself up for judgement. I feel uneasy and insecure again, and that's not pleasant. Then there's the extra work of titivating the CV, writing covering letters and being nicer to people. In some ways it's worse than looking for work when unemployed, as it's necessary to be more picky.

So I feel tetchy and irritable. Grrrrr. And then I wrote a letter I shouldn't have, which made me worse. Grrrr Grrrrr.


:-(

Loki

I've been to a couple of art exhibitions within the last month, but there's been very little that has grabbed my attention. The one outstanding piece of art that I remember from this summer (apart from cousin Jo's "Goddesses") is a small Viking carving, a thousand years old.

For the third time in a year or so, Moonface and I passed through Kirkby Stephen last month. In the dark red sandstone church, is a small grey stone with a bas-relief carving, worn with age. Only half a metre high, it shows a ram-headed man with chains binding his arms and legs. To the scholars, it shows the Norse god Loki, the embodiment of jokes, cunning and lies.

To me, it represents a man trussed for sacrifice: a real sacrificial lamb or scapegoat. When I first set eyes upon the stone, my blood chilled. It's vile. There are the traces of another figure beneath Loki's feet, a man on his back with bent knees and raised head. Another victim.

I guess that this statue is from a pre-christian temple on the same site, as the whole of this area was settled by the Vikings twelve hundred years ago. The other village names are so Nordic: Keld, Muker, Thwaite. The trussed man haunts me.

:(

Socially Mobile

Although I'm solidly middle-class in nature, petit-bourgoise with all its connotations, I think that I have always aspired to be an artisan, a skilled manual worker. Is "aspiring" the correct word in these circumstances? Yesterday I drove the van to Loughborough and back, as the car was in to be serviced but had not been returned by the previous evening. I think that I enjoy driving the van more than the car on long trips. It''s not so comfortable nor so quick, but there's a certain pleasure in its grinding tractor-like noise and steady progress, and of course the views are wonderful from being perched so high. And instead of a rep I'm a white van man, with all the prejudices which that entails.

For the first dozen years of my proper working life, following graduation, I wore a boiler-suit more than either a lab-coat or jacket-and-tie. I liked the feel of it as a uniform, imagining that it gave me an aura of competence and familiarity with the masculine worlds of machinery and tools. Indeed, my work at that time DID give me such skills and knowledge. Then, twenty years or so ago, I was a competent jack of all trades, able to tackle plumbing, electrics and mechanics as the need arose. I'd be pressed to do that now.

My ideas of industry were limited by experience, of course. Teesside was a centre for the heaviest sorts of manufacturing, bulk chemicals and steelmaking. Nights always had the glow from the flare-stacks of ICI, just a couple of miles away from home. With the wind in the wrong direction, we could see and smell the acrid nitric acid fumes as they drifted towards us rotting the clothes on the line. My walk into town was past the foundry wonderfully named Light Pipe Hall Road, where they cast iron pipes for the world. I knew, as well, that minerals needed to be mined from school and family trips around our area. There was coal to the north, iron to the south, salt and potash to the east, and lime and lead from the west. No wonder we were surrounded by industry.

And yet, there were aspects of manufacturing with which I was completely unfamiliar. My first contact with computing was for a company providing monitoring systems for discrete manufacturing, counting widgets being made. And as well as widgets, we looked after weavers. The country used to be full of them. In my patch, they varied from the silk ribbon makers near Crewkerne in Somerset to the Amxinster carpet weavers in Devon. I was unprepared, at first, for the dust and the clamour of those sheds: as a youth I had mentally dismissed this "soft" material manufacture as being of an inferior nature, when it was in truth an important industry upon which half the wealth of north-west England had been built. I know better, now, but the industry itself has gone the way of so much, exported to Asia.


:-]

Sunshine

I complained a few weeks ago about feeling old, becoming unable to undertake the physical activities that I used to with the same degree of speed, strength, stamina, etc. Today, in the strong low sunshine, everything went right. Riding the singlespeed through the quarry on the Downs and into the woods, I felt that I was cycling faster and better than I have done for some months. I cycled over logs that I wouldn't have attempted last week, I managed the tricky turns well, and the mud held no fears. It must be the sunshine. Now, four hours later, my forearms ache and my legs are tired; it's that comfortable satisfaction that comes with physical exhaustion.

After the ride I sat in the arbour at the bottom of the garden with a mug of tea, a bacon sandwich and a book. I trimmed back the lower overhanging tendrils of creeper to allow the November sun to reach me, so I could sit with the light on my face. Prompted by this rash act of gardening, I decided to mow the lawn. It's November! It's probably the latest ever in the year that I have mown the lawn; it's still growing in spite of the lack of direct light upon the shady areas, so the mix of moss and grass is all wrong beneath the southern wall.

It's been a good day. Despite the traumas of the early part of the month, the recent sun and lack of rain have made October better than July in many respects. Let's hope that November continues this way.


:-)