Some human societies seem to create bureaucracies in a similar way to that in which ants, termites wasps and bees make their swarm cities. Human bureaucracies can correspond with physical locations, but as Max Weber, who originally analysed them, pointed out, they are maps of social positions.
In their physical and pyscho-social forms they always entail niches, cul-de-sacs, temporarily blocked off short cuts, footbridges over railway Branch lines and back passage connections that are often too narrow for any passing police car to chase down.
Sometimes such locations are made to facilitate resistance to control. Accounts of Victorian London Slum rookeries tell of ceiling, loft and cellar walls knocked through between adjoining houses to create rat-runs for thieves.
But many of these odd bits of topology are not always so sinisterly and subversively made. Things can exist because of almost unintended consequences, because we always cut through the allotments here, or we put in another space, shed or street because there was some spare room here which could not be let left waste when money or some kind of accommodation could be made.
I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think that I know the name of the hospital or at least the name that most people round the area call it, if, say, they want to get a bus there.
However, you can never be too sure since at various stages of growth and/or contraction, bureaucracies may graft bits of themselves onto or into each other, like mistletoe onto oaks. So you could think that you’d been sitting in the General Ward of Central Teddington Hospital and you could be, but the chair and workstation that you use could be part of the Community Outreach Unit of South East Essex trust, or something.
You can never be quite sure where you are, what you are going to do, or what you are supposed to do, let alone why.
Further layers of medicinal and /or psychotropic confusion may be added then disorientation can easily result, I’m sitting writing in the corner of a ward of a big London suburban hospital where I am an inpatient. I think, and when I came out of sleep it took me quite along while to figure out that this was so. The walls are grey and featureless, the room is sectioned off into areas partitioned from each other by greyish pale plastic curtains which are probably washable and carry some sort of pink repeated design.
Each section contains an expensive mechanically adjustable bed with some chairs and tables placed closely by, so it is a holding institution of some kind, maybe? Most of the room’s occupants are male, but a woman enters wheeling a metal tripod trolley that carries electronic devices. She wheels it between curtains into one of the alcoves to stand over a supine male who is lying on one of the beds. One of her machines makes a loud metallic click.
“Three point seven.” She calls out.
“That’s low.” Someone else replies.
You can wake to dawns and wonder where you are.
“You” may be spark out, but your body monitor can be ticking over and maintaining your position, jerking your head back every time that it has slumped forwards. Practise this skill well enough and you could be able to sleep on your feet. Maybe if you swam like a whale you could sleep in the sea, (drifting off the Azores between squid hunts); but you ain't, so you can’t.
And then again holding the orientation of a semi-conscious body is about positioning a physically real object in physically real space and time; but we all also use mind-maps, dredging up the flimsiest associations between strange places where we are now and strange places where we might once have been.
You can wake believing that you are on a wide stone terrace, with beds laid out on interspersed stone buttresses, and creepers growing up and around the masonry. Everything is oriented to face the same way, which is contrary to some “badness” and for some “good” facing in the opposite direction.
You awake in the last echoes of a cry or chant that you feel that “nearly everyone else” (of who?) has been singing, as they were despatched somewhere, to ‘fight the good fight’. I in fact, you have no idea who “they” were or “where” they went or why. You only know that it was Very Good; they set off gleaming and courageous.
They may have been the “Few” and it could be that you have just missed “Our Finest Hour” and that this omission caps a career that has been devoted devotedly to inept and precisely timed inadequacy.
You can’t quite believe in yourself, you feel that you could have been preparing for this moment for all of your life. You ask someone who is standing there where you are.
“Where am I? I am totally disoriented.” You say.
“I am the sister in charge of the Intensive Care Ward of South Twyford Hospital. You are a patient on the ward, you were admitted yesterday.” She replies.
It all shrinks back, the creepers, the bastions, the battlements, the Mission have all gone. You are in an untidy ground floor grey formica building with plastic curtains with faint pink stripes on them.
Memories of last night return, you spent a sleepless night on a ward bed between two noisy old men who both repeatedly spoke words in languages unknown, (not phrases or sentences, just words and pairs of words). They bubbled their breath through the saliva that they are expectorating so that it accumulates in the curves of transparent plastic tubes, sometimes sounding as loud as boiling metal porridge pots.
You are a number in a med shed and you hope that you have a lot of waiting to do before you start singing the song of the sputum stew.
The Song Of The Sputum Stew.
Alone with two companions,
I must make
The passage that I can and must
Through small grey hours
Sat in a hospital ward
Next to an empty car park.
Under a red metallic sky
That echoes back miles of urban light,
Like an upturned frying pan
And there’s no sound to break the still of the night
Other than
The bubbling sound of human breath
Being percolated through the spittle
Collecting in the bottom of a curve
In the plastic tube
Doing and old man’s breathing
Through a breathing machine.
Detained by illness and poverty
I sit too
With Robert Burns and William Blake
Contained in slim volumes
Who now assist
me to make a fist
of coping with this long, long occasion.
“Mind forg’d manacles” William reminds
Are the strongest kind and the ones that keep me here.
But he doesn’t bring his Tyger
To melt the Hospital linoleum and
Warm my cold cracked feet.
Which do mean fear now
For into the carpark, I won’t go
To lie like a beast with nest overturned
By plough blade
I could be homeless
And lie shivering
Not sleeping like a policeman
Waiting to be taken in the warm at A&E.
Unless a zealous consultant came by
With his not quite chorus
Of not quite totally eager medical students
To whom he could expound
A homily on the virtues of thinness
over my lardy body
Proclaiming “yaY!”
“yaY, People “yaY!”
“Get Barry,
Get Barry
Get Barry
Atric today!
If you don’t do this
Then you will be as I portray
And get as obese as this
Fat bastard here
Who just sat on his couch
And digested himself
To cubby heaven or hell
Whilst we the thin live on
To fly like camels through needles’ eyes
Until we become
Tightly clenched hairs
Round a thin saviour’s bum.”
5 Flocks: Pigeons, Seagulls, Finches, Parakeets, Mallards
As Phillip Zimbardo, showed when he ran his famed simulated Prison experiment in California; it doesn’t take much in the way of social labelling and reinforcement to drive people stir crazy with instutionalisation.
I've seen five flocks over the wasteland and car park outside my ward window since, by seventh day in the general ward of this hospital and I’m starting to get the creeping Zimbardos.
One indication of this is the ornithological notes that I have written and append below.
Others are that I feel that I am detained here, under slightly false pretences and by slightly disingenuous means, (although I believe that I might be able to discharge myself against medical advice if push came to shove).One reason that I tell myself that I am staying is that some of my personal valuables are, apparently, irrevocably in the Hospital safe for the duration of this weekend, which makes it just too much hassle to do a runner and come back, especially if it could, as some events detailed below suggest, involve entanglement in the bureaucratic barbed wire trap of discharging and re-admitting myself.
I’m beginning to show analogies to zoo cage pacing bear behaviour and obsess about gowns and masculinity.
I go over to the lavatory to get some tissues in order to go back there and throw them away again; I repeatedly don and divest myself of my fleece jacket and waistcoat, moving different objects between different pockets so that I can lose them after I’ve found them.
And then there are the gowns. I am a fat man wearing two hospital gowns because one isn’t big enough for me. They hang loose from my gut down to half way up my ankles. At least the ones that I currently, wear, unlike a previous pair that I have some got onto my house, do not have the word ‘Hospital property’ emblazoned all over them, in a small blue font repetitively. They are merely spotted all over with a tiny repeated logo which makes the provenance of the garments very obvious.
According to currently dress conventions and parameters set by physical possibility, trousers can be super imposed over gowns or sub imposed under them. Or gowns can be worn without trousers or trousers without gowns.
Gowns may have been macho and a high social status in cold flag-floored Tudor palaces, to indicate to FatKing HenryWales which prelate or divine to decapitate next; but as Phil Zim grasped, they are now suitable twentieth or twenty-first century signifiers of masculinity for wear in suburban London Supermarkets.
When Zimbardo wished to dress the simulated prisoners in his experiment in a way which might speed the undermining of their pre imprisonment senses of themselves, he dressed men in gowns. When he wished to experiment with enhancing the macho authoritarian aspects of the guard role that he allocated to some in his experiment, he dressed his ‘guards’ in black and gave them shades to hide behind.
When it comes to the way in which humane, human rights respecting rules of a twenty-first century British general hospital are enabled and enacted by guards, who could have been coutured by Zimbardo himself, may attempt to prevent a patient trying to hide his gowns, (and the symbolic undermining of the feeble bastions of his masculinity), beneath his trousers; from shopping in a local Supermarket.
The whole exercise was justified by some spurious urban myth about drug dealers rushing to whack cannula wearing patients straight the veins via the cannulas taped and plugged into their hands and forearms instead of spending more than £40 worth of vouchers in the aisles.
So fulminating about the privatisation of public space and a tendency for, Supermarkets to impose crass and petty censorship of political expression in the verges and car parks that they now claimed to control it is possible to stare at birds through ward windows.
And see five flocks
1) The pigeons, (or to be pedantically accurate the feral rock doves), seemed to form a loose and shifting coalitions numbering maybe fifteen birds maximum. The mainly walk pigeononically, with sudden and frequent bouts of head-nodding and bobbing down to peck at something on the carpark tarmac. What can his be? Is someone leaving grain out for them in just the top north east quadrant of the car park? That’s where they mostly are and that’s where the mostly seem to head toward and walk towards. There’s no fence or organised pigeonherders around them, and they can move at will, (or to human eyes, seemingly at random), but this is their predominant pattern of movement. Sometimes there are only a few in the car park, maybe a half-dozen or so: others may fly over and then land to join them. perhaps due to a deep political flock fissure, a smaller sub flock can sometimes split off and fly away, but the flock as a whole seems to comprise a pecking coalition, always moving along the ground, always pecking pecking pecking, never reneging on the eventual triumph of international urban pigeondom.
2) Seagulls, probably urbanised herring gulls are the most beautiful flyers here. Some glide over from the south east maintaining a height of about fifteen feet, inclining aerodynamic bodies and knife-like wing tips and beaks so that individuals each pick up new and differing air currents that t sometimes turn back in the direction that the flock is coming from. This means that the flock interweaves round on itself quartering and re-scanning ground it has passed over, scouring for food. Nothing today, so no unseeingly screaming white fathered vortex forms pecking over the remains of a discarded take away. The flock silently flies on.
3) Finch flocking, (as I now nominate it), is strangest of all. I had no bins (binoculars), so could not see, what all the little birds might be, in their rapidly changing crowds moving like breeze-blown smoke. Probably a mixed bunch of seed eaters: long tailed tits, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, green finches, gold finches; whizzing at speed across suburban gardens, road verges and along canal edges. This time of year (late autumn, early winter) fifty finches in a flock can descend on berry bushes, feed quickly and move on, leaving stones skins and shit stains and uneaten fruit and no stragglers for any hawk to hunt. It may be an anthropometric explanation, but these guys aren’t top of any food chain; round here it’s gulls and crows fighting to be top flying dogs of overlapping food niches. And I wouldn’t say that finches live in fear but they don’t stop around long enough to fight or pray to be a hawk’s breakfast by day or an owl’s supper at night.
Their flocks whirl like smoke against pink London sunset and suddenly change direction like a sheet or a sail wrapped around a pole by a blast of high wind. Almost all of the finch flock seem to cotton on and follow instantly or maybe they all simultaneously all forge the same lead at once. In a new direction they can all swoop down to be birdstream inches above the rubbled surface of wasteland before rising high up again as though a living sail had been whistled to another boat and was hoisting itself up a new mast.
A man with a throwing net and some cages to sell songbirds in might cope, if he was fast and made some lucky throws. But any avian predator round here would be onto a bum steer. The chances of catching an individual finch from the rapidly twisting flock are zero minus. The whole flock would probably easily twist and turn away and the hawk, that wasn’t here any way, would survive unfed.
4: Parakeets: About twenty flew across the cat park from North West to southeast, straight line in a flock which could have been splitting with a wing of twelve leading I line and a bunch of twelve following, fast, straight and low, maybe to roosts in big tress in the parklands along the Thames valley.
5: Mallards: The fifth flock, about fifteen mallards making an s –shaped tracked flight about fifty feet above the car park from north west to the east, maybe broadly following the canal along towards Little Venice basin.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
HUTCHED
The airport workers are hutched in rows around the outskirts of Gatwick in southern England and some of these rows are arranged round big spiritual sheds, built large enough to house small airliners.
Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).
It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.
He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.
British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.
The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.
The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.
He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.
Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.
The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.
And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.
Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.
And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.
“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.
“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.
And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.
A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:
“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”
The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.
Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.
He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.
Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.
And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.
One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.
And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.
And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.
He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.
British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.
But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.
And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.
For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.
Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.
He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.
Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.
He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.
The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.
Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).
It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.
He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.
British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.
The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.
The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.
He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.
Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.
The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.
And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.
Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.
And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.
“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.
“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.
And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.
A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:
“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”
The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.
Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.
He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.
Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.
And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.
One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.
And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.
And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.
He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.
British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.
But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.
And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.
For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.
Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.
He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.
Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.
He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.
The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Three sightings
Three sightings of the devil are not things to be described in writing flippantly or frequently or in the “other interests” sections of a c.v. sent out cold to allegedly potential employers.
Pedro thought this last activity futile, since even employers who were recruiting during a recession, were unlikely to want to take on disabled men in their late fifties. Mention of encounters with symbolic manifestations of evil were unlikely to change this.
He could put them in one of his quasi political blogs, but the superstition would not be welcomed, even if the paranoia was, assuming anyone read it that is, but he ploughed on anyway
Chronologically the first devil sighting was aquatic. One summer off the tip of the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, Pedro saw an iron orca, which was a unsubmerged submarine, sliding up the Clyde silently. In the sunlight with the clear air and the bright water, it could have been a beautiful streamlined marine beast. It could have been beautiful unless one thought, as Pedro did, of what it could have been carrying. It might have been carrying nuclear missiles; sailing around a world that it could end.
Chronologically Pedro’s second sighting was on land, England’s green and peasant one, somewhere between the southern end of the Malvern Hills and Tewkesbury. In the another summer, in an early morning when Pedro was riding a touring bicycle through the back lanes. He turned a corner onto straight stretch of road with flat fields on either side, and about half a mile on, a farmhouse on the right. Pedro cycled on towards this building and saw what he thought was a big black dog sitting upright, mid road.
Pedro had feared dogs ever since a black tongued chow barked in his face when he was a toddler. Whatever deep seated fears might be involved, dogs running out of houses by country roads were a menace to cyclists. They might knock you off your bike or make you suddenly swerve out to avoid them. Pedro sometimes kept a heavy pump or D lock to hand. He kept meaning to get a pot of ground pepper or one of them ultrasonic things to keep in his handlebar bag. However he never deployed or used any of these deterrents.
When dogs came at him barking and snarling, he barked back, shouting and swearing at them or even, if they got close enough, kicking out. The last imperilled a cyclist’s stability and Pedro felt a right twat cycling along shouting, swearing and attempting to kick dogs.
That morning he just wasn’t in the mood for it, the sun was burning mist off the fields but the air was still cold enough to be refreshing. He was not resenting cars yet, since he had yet to see any that day and has blood sugar levels had not yet fallen enough to make him stroppy.
He stopped short of the farm, hoping that someone would come out of it and/or call the dog in. The dog sat immobile. It was black , featureless a silhouette. Pedro it was facing him and looking at him to he was too far off to descry its eyes.
Noises came from behind the farm and a large green tractor drove out onto the road from behind the farm. The dog ran off to the left across the fields, away from the building.
Pedro watched it run, its motion was not like a dog’s, more fluid, less rigid, As the beast ran it was possible to see its tail, which was as long as its body. The beast held its tail in a long curve behind it with the lowest point just above the furrows of the field but with the tip raised and pointing up in a sort of C or J shape.
At the time Pedro thought no more of it than that the dog had gone and that he could cycle on.
It was only about a week later that he replayed what he had seen in his memory and he could see the dog running in the clear air across the field away from the farmhouse, away from the building that any true dog would wish to guard. The long tails behind it with the tip curved up was an appendage that did not belong on any dog’s arse. The shug seen in the clear air was no true dog. Pedro concluded that a big black wild strange cat had crossed his trail.
Chronologically the third sighting was high in the sky. It came almost two decades later than the first. Pedro cycled no more. Arthritis had eaten the tendons inside his knees and no known number of Glucosamine tablets could put them back. Nostalgia and wishful thinking made him keep two bikes in his garage, where he also kept garden tools, a portable combined saw horse and vice, half a sawn up tricycle , four tarpaulins, a wooden dining table tripod, paints, rags and about thirty assorted chunks of timber and stone. Therefore the garage was cluttered. It was also dark and murky because of its corrugated asbestos roof. To let light on or to go out into the garden himself, Pedro had to pen a back door and to do that, he had to wheel out on of his bikes, usually the green painted Dawes Galaxy, and prop it up against the garden fence.
He did this one spring a few days after a volcano had erupted in Iceland. The ash from this volcano had drifted in a huge high invisible cloud over Britain. Fear of the ash cloud and the crashes that it might cause, made all airlines cancel their flights. Millions of profits were lost and as the skies emptied, the radio waves filled with the whingeing of airline entrepreneurs.
The day that Pedro wheeled the bike out was just when some authority had just judged the swifts’ road safe again. So after he had propped up the bike, he looked, to see if he could see the vapour trails again. There were a few beginning to weave a blue and white tartan across London skies again.
And above them all, crossing the sky diagonally, white doughnuts on a rope, a vapour trails higher than and unlike all the others, one that Pedro had only read about in obscure magazines devoted to obscure subjects like sightings of things that could be the evidence of secret aeroplanes. The main part of the strange thing that Pedro saw was a line in the sky like other vapour trails, but along it , at seemingly regular intervals were circular white clouds and in threaded through the middles of them. It was superficially pretty, looking like a child's necklace across the sky and maybe round the world. but what Pedro suspected about it made it seem less cute than it looked. He suspected , and his computer later confirmed this, as far as he was concerned, that it could be the trail of a pulse jet. This powered a plane, his computer told him the most powerful nation in the world could use to show it things which its space satellites were unable to detect. So why was it Flying over London? Was it only flying there today, or was it only visible today because there were fewer airliners than usual making vapour trails below it. Pedro shivered as his brain bathed him in paranoia.
However Pedro might have seen angel once in the form of wild European lynx beside a motorway near Gothenburg when he woke from sleep on the hard bed of that road’s hard shoulder.
Pedro thought this last activity futile, since even employers who were recruiting during a recession, were unlikely to want to take on disabled men in their late fifties. Mention of encounters with symbolic manifestations of evil were unlikely to change this.
He could put them in one of his quasi political blogs, but the superstition would not be welcomed, even if the paranoia was, assuming anyone read it that is, but he ploughed on anyway
Chronologically the first devil sighting was aquatic. One summer off the tip of the Isle of Bute, in Scotland, Pedro saw an iron orca, which was a unsubmerged submarine, sliding up the Clyde silently. In the sunlight with the clear air and the bright water, it could have been a beautiful streamlined marine beast. It could have been beautiful unless one thought, as Pedro did, of what it could have been carrying. It might have been carrying nuclear missiles; sailing around a world that it could end.
Chronologically Pedro’s second sighting was on land, England’s green and peasant one, somewhere between the southern end of the Malvern Hills and Tewkesbury. In the another summer, in an early morning when Pedro was riding a touring bicycle through the back lanes. He turned a corner onto straight stretch of road with flat fields on either side, and about half a mile on, a farmhouse on the right. Pedro cycled on towards this building and saw what he thought was a big black dog sitting upright, mid road.
Pedro had feared dogs ever since a black tongued chow barked in his face when he was a toddler. Whatever deep seated fears might be involved, dogs running out of houses by country roads were a menace to cyclists. They might knock you off your bike or make you suddenly swerve out to avoid them. Pedro sometimes kept a heavy pump or D lock to hand. He kept meaning to get a pot of ground pepper or one of them ultrasonic things to keep in his handlebar bag. However he never deployed or used any of these deterrents.
When dogs came at him barking and snarling, he barked back, shouting and swearing at them or even, if they got close enough, kicking out. The last imperilled a cyclist’s stability and Pedro felt a right twat cycling along shouting, swearing and attempting to kick dogs.
That morning he just wasn’t in the mood for it, the sun was burning mist off the fields but the air was still cold enough to be refreshing. He was not resenting cars yet, since he had yet to see any that day and has blood sugar levels had not yet fallen enough to make him stroppy.
He stopped short of the farm, hoping that someone would come out of it and/or call the dog in. The dog sat immobile. It was black , featureless a silhouette. Pedro it was facing him and looking at him to he was too far off to descry its eyes.
Noises came from behind the farm and a large green tractor drove out onto the road from behind the farm. The dog ran off to the left across the fields, away from the building.
Pedro watched it run, its motion was not like a dog’s, more fluid, less rigid, As the beast ran it was possible to see its tail, which was as long as its body. The beast held its tail in a long curve behind it with the lowest point just above the furrows of the field but with the tip raised and pointing up in a sort of C or J shape.
At the time Pedro thought no more of it than that the dog had gone and that he could cycle on.
It was only about a week later that he replayed what he had seen in his memory and he could see the dog running in the clear air across the field away from the farmhouse, away from the building that any true dog would wish to guard. The long tails behind it with the tip curved up was an appendage that did not belong on any dog’s arse. The shug seen in the clear air was no true dog. Pedro concluded that a big black wild strange cat had crossed his trail.
Chronologically the third sighting was high in the sky. It came almost two decades later than the first. Pedro cycled no more. Arthritis had eaten the tendons inside his knees and no known number of Glucosamine tablets could put them back. Nostalgia and wishful thinking made him keep two bikes in his garage, where he also kept garden tools, a portable combined saw horse and vice, half a sawn up tricycle , four tarpaulins, a wooden dining table tripod, paints, rags and about thirty assorted chunks of timber and stone. Therefore the garage was cluttered. It was also dark and murky because of its corrugated asbestos roof. To let light on or to go out into the garden himself, Pedro had to pen a back door and to do that, he had to wheel out on of his bikes, usually the green painted Dawes Galaxy, and prop it up against the garden fence.
He did this one spring a few days after a volcano had erupted in Iceland. The ash from this volcano had drifted in a huge high invisible cloud over Britain. Fear of the ash cloud and the crashes that it might cause, made all airlines cancel their flights. Millions of profits were lost and as the skies emptied, the radio waves filled with the whingeing of airline entrepreneurs.
The day that Pedro wheeled the bike out was just when some authority had just judged the swifts’ road safe again. So after he had propped up the bike, he looked, to see if he could see the vapour trails again. There were a few beginning to weave a blue and white tartan across London skies again.
And above them all, crossing the sky diagonally, white doughnuts on a rope, a vapour trails higher than and unlike all the others, one that Pedro had only read about in obscure magazines devoted to obscure subjects like sightings of things that could be the evidence of secret aeroplanes. The main part of the strange thing that Pedro saw was a line in the sky like other vapour trails, but along it , at seemingly regular intervals were circular white clouds and in threaded through the middles of them. It was superficially pretty, looking like a child's necklace across the sky and maybe round the world. but what Pedro suspected about it made it seem less cute than it looked. He suspected , and his computer later confirmed this, as far as he was concerned, that it could be the trail of a pulse jet. This powered a plane, his computer told him the most powerful nation in the world could use to show it things which its space satellites were unable to detect. So why was it Flying over London? Was it only flying there today, or was it only visible today because there were fewer airliners than usual making vapour trails below it. Pedro shivered as his brain bathed him in paranoia.
However Pedro might have seen angel once in the form of wild European lynx beside a motorway near Gothenburg when he woke from sleep on the hard bed of that road’s hard shoulder.
Friday, June 11, 2010
INVIGILATOR
INVIGILATOR
Enter an empty room,
put out all the papers
on the desks arranged in rows
write words on a whiteboard
and invite the exam candidates in
cheerily greet them by saying,
“Put your bags at the back,
And turn off your mobile phones.”
Start the exam
And stare And stare And stare
For three hours
I am the eye of authority
For a pittance
I have hired my gaze out
To enforce exam regulations
Exercising petty power
As bureaucratically stipulated
Only allowing one person at a time
To go to the lavatory
After they have put their hand
to request this privilege first
Thus bladders are subjected
To principles of academic freedom
And proper rigour.
And part of this important authority
Is the power to end the exam
Which I do promptly
And collect the papers,
Wipe the whiteboard
and leave the room
Empty again.
Enter an empty room,
put out all the papers
on the desks arranged in rows
write words on a whiteboard
and invite the exam candidates in
cheerily greet them by saying,
“Put your bags at the back,
And turn off your mobile phones.”
Start the exam
And stare And stare And stare
For three hours
I am the eye of authority
For a pittance
I have hired my gaze out
To enforce exam regulations
Exercising petty power
As bureaucratically stipulated
Only allowing one person at a time
To go to the lavatory
After they have put their hand
to request this privilege first
Thus bladders are subjected
To principles of academic freedom
And proper rigour.
And part of this important authority
Is the power to end the exam
Which I do promptly
And collect the papers,
Wipe the whiteboard
and leave the room
Empty again.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Mary the Mare and Billy the Beaver
Mary the Mare lived in a cottage with flowers round the door,
Or she did, until she ate all the flowers.
She asked her friend Billy the Beaver round for tea,
but she had no tea to give him.
So he ate the door
All the way from the ceiling to the floor.
Well he would wouldn’t he?
Because it was wood wasn’t it?
“I hope there’s not too much varnish.” Mary said.
“Nah” (chomp,chomp), said Billy
Then he spat out the hinges and the handles,
And went off leaving a trail of sawdust turds behind him,
Ready to be made into MDF kitchen units.
Mary stared at the world through the empty space where the door had been,
She didn’t even have half a door left to look over,
Thanks to that greedy beaver,
So she felt all unstable,
Suffered from a sudden loss of confidence
And fell over.
The moral of this story is
That we must all pull together and use good British commonsense
Because that’s all we’ll have left soon
Apart from sawdust turds.
Or she did, until she ate all the flowers.
She asked her friend Billy the Beaver round for tea,
but she had no tea to give him.
So he ate the door
All the way from the ceiling to the floor.
Well he would wouldn’t he?
Because it was wood wasn’t it?
“I hope there’s not too much varnish.” Mary said.
“Nah” (chomp,chomp), said Billy
Then he spat out the hinges and the handles,
And went off leaving a trail of sawdust turds behind him,
Ready to be made into MDF kitchen units.
Mary stared at the world through the empty space where the door had been,
She didn’t even have half a door left to look over,
Thanks to that greedy beaver,
So she felt all unstable,
Suffered from a sudden loss of confidence
And fell over.
The moral of this story is
That we must all pull together and use good British commonsense
Because that’s all we’ll have left soon
Apart from sawdust turds.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
A salad day of Fatty Rentamob
Life was like a salad now; once it had been meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, meat and two veg, fish on Fridays and roast on Sundays. A stodgy but nutritious routine of working 40 + hrs a week, 5 out of 7.
Reconsidering this gastronomic analogy, he thought his working years could be compared to the career of a farmed goose in south-western France. Initially he had felt relatively unconstrained. He had had quite a convincing illusion of freedom. He had been able to eat well and they even gave him holidays; but slowly the price that he paid in his labour and freedom for the sums of money regularly going into his bank account increased.
He became more and more discontented, but he had previously worked in shops, factories and on building sites, so he knew that relative to workers in those places, his conditions were good. Sometimes he could just about make himself believe, that as he taught Economics, or Psychology, or Politics: he could be contributing to a counter culture or even, if really deluded, that he was fostering some sort of revolutionary consciousness amongst his students,
When he taught word-processing or some of the gimcrack pro-capitalist garbage that went under the banner of “business studies”, or “world of work” or some other such bullshit name; it was then he knew that he was a wage slave in the wage slave training industry. Over the twenty years that he worked in the College, it was the latter type of work that grew whilst, the former shrank. So to return to the analogy of the French goose, he was still being stuffed with salary stodge, but he had now noticed the funnel down his throat and the fact that his feet were nailed to a board.
Like a force fed goose, he got ill, but unlike that of mature geese, mature human liver was not yet a saleable delicacy so he got ill health retirement instead of being pateed, preserved and tinned.
Since then he had ceased to have a routine. Sometimes bits and pieces of casual employment, or the need to travel, could induce him to pitchfork himself of bed early, even before dawn in the summer if need be. Sometimes electronic bleeping that he had programmed, or more often and urgent need to piss could get him up. He usually wished that he could resume the conversation that he had been having with a great crested grebe in the urinals of Buckingham Palace. Sometimes if the bleeper reached him whilst he has elvisly enthroned asleep on his not tropical hardwood toilet seat, he would open his eyes and his entire flat would seem to move through forty five degrees when realised that he was looking down at his feet which were not sticking out of the end of his bed.
Seizing the time and a tube of athlete’s foot cream from the window sill, he would anoint himself between the toes with this white fungicide. An operation which usually reminded him that human toes were a useless evolutionary dead-end, like the vestigial legs of slow worms. He wrestled with and swore at bits of attire as he donned them but seldom as much as he did when he took them off again in the evenings.
He seldom went anywhere without a bag ever, but recently his brand new ones had wheels on since his arthritic knees meant that he had to use the shopping trolley that he dragged behind him as a sort of walking stick. He packed this contraption with whatever he thought he might need that day, sometimes if hurried screaming “ Get in the fucking bag!” at recalcitrant objects.
He limped and lumped, down the stairs, the downloaded essential junk out the front door, over the step, down the cracked concrete drive past an urban foxturd. Out the front door turn left, turn right along uneven pavements to the bus stop. Sometimes he returned and made the journey again, if he remembered that he’d forgotten something, like the memorised memory stick that he’d once forgotten that he hadn’t got.
If it was early morning, cold or raining or all three, the people at the stop would often be morose, some almost asleep on their feet and /or conversing softly it languages that he could not understand. On anyone one of seven weekdays, the bus was likely to be full. London had a voracious and continuing appetite for servants to consumers, it sucked in waiters, house painters, cooks, shop assistants, security guards, clerks and all their line managers, like crabs, flatfish and strands of kelp into the blades of a tidal turbine.
Usually he only went has far as the maw of the nearest tube station, he might buy an unhealthy breakfast of biscuits and canned drink, to digest: he also was digested by a metal travelling worm to be cast back onto the surface into a demo, a meeting, a computer room, a library or some other assignation.
On a political day he might end up holding a placard or banner outside some ministry or multinational HQ, or even the Prime Minister’s official residence, often fenced in, by the police portable sections of metal fencing into a sort of political pig-pen. But the political activity he most enjoyed was the start of a big march.
Here he could behave like an extra in a sickening sentimental musical based on a sickening sentimental novel by Charles Dickens.
“Placards! Placards! PLACARDS!” he would shout.
“Git yore Placards, ‘ere! Green party Placards! No demonstration is complete wivaut a PLACARD! Heverey political hactivist needs a PLACARD!”
Sometimes he made up a little song to the tune of “My Way” as sung by Frank Sinatra. His lyrics were quite simple.
“Placards, Placards- Placards,
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh achards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards,Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh achards!”
In the course of all this singing and shouting, he handed placards to those passing by who were assembling for the demo occasionally, he attempted to foist them on bemused tourists. Sometimes people wanted to take them, Sometimes they didn’t. It seemed to go in phases and he could feel like a loud-mouthed angler standing on the bank of a fast flowing river, filled with migratory fish that would suddenly, and for no apparent reason, voraciously bite bait.
At some point either the placards or the people would run out and his shouting would cease. If the march was slow enough, (and nowadays it seldom was), he might go on it, but usually he took some kind of short cut to its end. This often turned out to be a paved square or an area of grass trampled into flat mud in a park where there would be speeches and pigeon shit.
Speeches at English political demos in the early twenty first century were, as far as he was concerned, empty rituals, usually as irrelevant as biblical psalms, but never as beautiful. Much as he purported to despise the prevalent media driven sound bite culture, he was incapable of listening attentively to even a two minute speech.
Demos were basically big social events, unless there were counter demos or sometimes unless a shadowy powerful person or committee deemed that some sort of symbolic threat to capitalism was being posed via the smashing of a bank’s plate glass windows or the scratching of expensive cars so that roboid cops in riot gear were deployed and push did come to shove. Usually during the speech, the listeners were rather than continuing to struggle, vowing not to give up the fight or keep marching until something or other, deciding which pub to go to and therefore also which ones not to go to.
If the demo was anywhere near central London, the pub was crowded the drink was expensive, the journey back to suburb or province cramped, so the sword went back to sleep in the shopping trolley, the clouds did not unfold and capitalism stayed to be smashed on another salad day.
Reconsidering this gastronomic analogy, he thought his working years could be compared to the career of a farmed goose in south-western France. Initially he had felt relatively unconstrained. He had had quite a convincing illusion of freedom. He had been able to eat well and they even gave him holidays; but slowly the price that he paid in his labour and freedom for the sums of money regularly going into his bank account increased.
He became more and more discontented, but he had previously worked in shops, factories and on building sites, so he knew that relative to workers in those places, his conditions were good. Sometimes he could just about make himself believe, that as he taught Economics, or Psychology, or Politics: he could be contributing to a counter culture or even, if really deluded, that he was fostering some sort of revolutionary consciousness amongst his students,
When he taught word-processing or some of the gimcrack pro-capitalist garbage that went under the banner of “business studies”, or “world of work” or some other such bullshit name; it was then he knew that he was a wage slave in the wage slave training industry. Over the twenty years that he worked in the College, it was the latter type of work that grew whilst, the former shrank. So to return to the analogy of the French goose, he was still being stuffed with salary stodge, but he had now noticed the funnel down his throat and the fact that his feet were nailed to a board.
Like a force fed goose, he got ill, but unlike that of mature geese, mature human liver was not yet a saleable delicacy so he got ill health retirement instead of being pateed, preserved and tinned.
Since then he had ceased to have a routine. Sometimes bits and pieces of casual employment, or the need to travel, could induce him to pitchfork himself of bed early, even before dawn in the summer if need be. Sometimes electronic bleeping that he had programmed, or more often and urgent need to piss could get him up. He usually wished that he could resume the conversation that he had been having with a great crested grebe in the urinals of Buckingham Palace. Sometimes if the bleeper reached him whilst he has elvisly enthroned asleep on his not tropical hardwood toilet seat, he would open his eyes and his entire flat would seem to move through forty five degrees when realised that he was looking down at his feet which were not sticking out of the end of his bed.
Seizing the time and a tube of athlete’s foot cream from the window sill, he would anoint himself between the toes with this white fungicide. An operation which usually reminded him that human toes were a useless evolutionary dead-end, like the vestigial legs of slow worms. He wrestled with and swore at bits of attire as he donned them but seldom as much as he did when he took them off again in the evenings.
He seldom went anywhere without a bag ever, but recently his brand new ones had wheels on since his arthritic knees meant that he had to use the shopping trolley that he dragged behind him as a sort of walking stick. He packed this contraption with whatever he thought he might need that day, sometimes if hurried screaming “ Get in the fucking bag!” at recalcitrant objects.
He limped and lumped, down the stairs, the downloaded essential junk out the front door, over the step, down the cracked concrete drive past an urban foxturd. Out the front door turn left, turn right along uneven pavements to the bus stop. Sometimes he returned and made the journey again, if he remembered that he’d forgotten something, like the memorised memory stick that he’d once forgotten that he hadn’t got.
If it was early morning, cold or raining or all three, the people at the stop would often be morose, some almost asleep on their feet and /or conversing softly it languages that he could not understand. On anyone one of seven weekdays, the bus was likely to be full. London had a voracious and continuing appetite for servants to consumers, it sucked in waiters, house painters, cooks, shop assistants, security guards, clerks and all their line managers, like crabs, flatfish and strands of kelp into the blades of a tidal turbine.
Usually he only went has far as the maw of the nearest tube station, he might buy an unhealthy breakfast of biscuits and canned drink, to digest: he also was digested by a metal travelling worm to be cast back onto the surface into a demo, a meeting, a computer room, a library or some other assignation.
On a political day he might end up holding a placard or banner outside some ministry or multinational HQ, or even the Prime Minister’s official residence, often fenced in, by the police portable sections of metal fencing into a sort of political pig-pen. But the political activity he most enjoyed was the start of a big march.
Here he could behave like an extra in a sickening sentimental musical based on a sickening sentimental novel by Charles Dickens.
“Placards! Placards! PLACARDS!” he would shout.
“Git yore Placards, ‘ere! Green party Placards! No demonstration is complete wivaut a PLACARD! Heverey political hactivist needs a PLACARD!”
Sometimes he made up a little song to the tune of “My Way” as sung by Frank Sinatra. His lyrics were quite simple.
“Placards, Placards- Placards,
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh achards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards,Placards
Puh luh uh-uh, uhhh uh-uh ackards
Placards, Placards- Placards
Puh luh uh-uh achards!”
In the course of all this singing and shouting, he handed placards to those passing by who were assembling for the demo occasionally, he attempted to foist them on bemused tourists. Sometimes people wanted to take them, Sometimes they didn’t. It seemed to go in phases and he could feel like a loud-mouthed angler standing on the bank of a fast flowing river, filled with migratory fish that would suddenly, and for no apparent reason, voraciously bite bait.
At some point either the placards or the people would run out and his shouting would cease. If the march was slow enough, (and nowadays it seldom was), he might go on it, but usually he took some kind of short cut to its end. This often turned out to be a paved square or an area of grass trampled into flat mud in a park where there would be speeches and pigeon shit.
Speeches at English political demos in the early twenty first century were, as far as he was concerned, empty rituals, usually as irrelevant as biblical psalms, but never as beautiful. Much as he purported to despise the prevalent media driven sound bite culture, he was incapable of listening attentively to even a two minute speech.
Demos were basically big social events, unless there were counter demos or sometimes unless a shadowy powerful person or committee deemed that some sort of symbolic threat to capitalism was being posed via the smashing of a bank’s plate glass windows or the scratching of expensive cars so that roboid cops in riot gear were deployed and push did come to shove. Usually during the speech, the listeners were rather than continuing to struggle, vowing not to give up the fight or keep marching until something or other, deciding which pub to go to and therefore also which ones not to go to.
If the demo was anywhere near central London, the pub was crowded the drink was expensive, the journey back to suburb or province cramped, so the sword went back to sleep in the shopping trolley, the clouds did not unfold and capitalism stayed to be smashed on another salad day.
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