I used to brush them away. Gossamer threads which, once entangled in the fine hairs on my face or hands, tickled and became annoying, so I would brush them away. Uninvited distractions to the pleasantness of my walk through the trees. I don’t now. Passing through the low-hanging spindly fingers of tree limbs that line the muddy “off the beaten track” trails of my forest walks, I feel them attach themselves to me and I just let them lie.
In my mind’s eye, and with each new step, I see myself being gently wrapped in the weave spun by so many night-owl, needle-limbed spiders until finally, all of me has been tightly draped. All that is left is a silvery cocoon suspended in the forest, glinting like a drop of water dangling precariously from one of autumn’s last leaves as the day’s final shards of sunlight pierce the canopy.
Invisible, bound by silk and bereft of all movement, I surrender to the rich cuddliness of nature’s bedding and sleep a deep sleep; not death, but neither fully alive. Light and shade come and go like ticks of a clock from another place. When I am sleeping there is no time, there is only before and that fades the longer I sleep. Everything I am, everything I have ever been, is here and now. I’m asleep and waiting to be born anew.
But what if there is no rebirth? What if there is no pupa of perfection, no new and improved self capable of scratching its way through its bindings, no Butterfly, not a cocoon but rather some ornate shroud, what then? Will it eventually fall to the mossy floor of the forest where the night needles will busily tether me to the earth allowing the demolition order granted at the moment of my conception, to be finally concluded?
Can I choose a cocoon over a shroud? If I could, I would choose Butterfly just for those few moments of perfection and harmony and light, held aloft in a woody sunbeam. I would. And if I can’t choose, what then? Am I just a dusty shadow of a Butterfly, a dull moth idiotically drawn to and bashing my head against all that is bright or shiny, imagining a silvery moon where there is only a dirty light bulb or a mindless flickering TV show? My existence is a thumb smudge away leaving nothing but a dry smear to signify my passing. I’d rather be nothing. I’d rather just be very still and very quiet and very unnoticeable until nature finds another use for me.
I can’t be a Butterfly. I don’t think I can choose anything other than what I have already chosen. Neither a cocoon nor a shroud, I have knit myself a straight jacket, the spiders will do the rest. But maybe an ember will. Escaping from an “almost-out” flame, engorged on the oxygen of new thinking, maybe one of these embers will become a fire that will warm and grow and illuminate everything. Wouldn’t that be something?
What are you up to Creasy? This is clickbait right?
Wrong!
But it must be! You can’t honestly be saying that you want the Conservatives to win the next general election….that’s….that’s….illegal
Turns out it’s not actually, but I can see why you might have thought so. So difficult to find anything on the real news that is positive about the Conservative Government in the UK. Even harder to find anything in the echo chambers of Twitter, Facebook or LBC (Labour Backed Chat – it’s a radio station here in the UK).
If I’m being honest, I kind of get why there is nothing positive being said about them. They are, after all completely fucking useless, having burned more political capital since the last General Election than a burny thing. Well, almost. It’s a bit like that Monty Python sketch in Life of Brian….
“What did the Tories ever do for us?”.
“I mean, they did get Brexit done (a self evident good unless you are an out and out global capitalist), at a time when we were on the verge of civil war.”
“Ok, but apart from that what have they done?”
“Well, that whole saving all our jobs by spending billions through the furlough scheme during the worst Pandemic since the Flu pandemic of 1918 was pretty useful, right?”
“OK, apart from averting a civil war and saving all our jobs, what have the Tories ever done for us, eh?”
“I suppose being first in the world to get everyone vaccinated against COVID (twice) wasn’t a bad effort, was it?”
“Alright, apart from averting a civil war, saving all our jobs and saving all our lives (twice), what have the Tories ever done for us?”
“Well there was that time….”
“Shaddapp we’ve gotta get rid of ’em ‘cos they are completely useless!!!”
Ok, but I have come across many many completely fucking useless people in my time and sometimes, ok a very few times (struggling to think of one specific example), through a combination of wise counsel, a good amount of introspection and a healthy dose of courage, they are capable of coming good when you least expect it. I think that may be true for the Tories, but only if they read this blog (I’m going to send it to Rishi so I’m sure they will).
But why would you want to save them Creasy? Why? Why?
Well, apart from the whole averting civil war, saving all our jobs and saving all our lives which I think earns them another go, it’s because the alternative is 5 years of Keir Starmer and his band of useless gits. Worse, it would be 5 more years of James O’Brian (Labour Backed Chat host), smugly preaching on and on about how Jacob Rees-Mogg almost lies down on the benches of Parliament and how Brexit was the downfall of the Tories which was all Jacob’s and Boris’ fault and how he told us Brexit would be a disaster but that everyone who voted Brexit were idiots for buying the Brexit campaign slogans instead of listening to him and how the Tories had messed up the COVID pandemic and how they were all corrupt for having a bev in the back garden of 10 Downing street when everyone else (except the millions that went out every weekend to have a bev and a dance) were all imprisoned at home and how the poor NHS is massively underfunded despite it being the highest spending department of all departments
(£189bn) and 151% higher than the next highest department and the highest it has ever been and how all the pay rises being asked for by Transport workers and NHS workers should be granted even though all that borrowing we did to pay for the furlough scheme during COVID to make sure that people didn’t lose their jobs still needs paying off because obviously Junior Doctors who will be earning a mint for the rest of their lives deserve 35% pay rises and those tube drivers who earn £65k a year to push a start/stop button all day but sometimes run over the odd “passenger” and that Mick Lynch is a great fella so they should definitely get their pay rise and didn’t we all go out and clap for the NHS workers during COVID so they should get theirs too and of course the useless NHS leadership should never be mentioned for flushing billions down the loo because it’s all the Tories fault expecially Boris…and Jacob Rees-Mogg… because they are complete twats and he hates them hates them hates them because they are a snooty public schoolboys (just like him and oh a billion other politicians) that have never ever done a proper days work in their lives (…..) and unlike every other politician there has ever been tell lies!
That is why we need to save the Tories readers, that is why. I just can’t stand the idea of listening to him whine and moan and bleat and groan and go on and on and on…I’m listening to him now and he’s been going on and on about some Nadine Dorries bird ‘cos she ain’t doing her MP job properly FOR 30 MINUTES STRAIGHT!!!! We have got to find a way to get him to shut the fuck up (now he’s going on about Brexit again FFS). Do you see the problem? Jim O’Brain is the problem, and the solution is to get the Tories elected again in the vain hope that the shock of that result will cause him to lose the power of speech. And yes, I have spelled his name wrong. I did it on purpose to piss him off because he’s bound to read this. And yes, I am aware that by talking about him I am, in some perverse way, promoting his shitshow of a daily party-political broadcast. So, I am writing all of this and saving the Tories (he’s going on about the Tory decline now) so that we can shut down this public schoolboy wannabe socialist git.
And while we are at it Jimmy, most people who voted Leave took about 10 seconds to make that decision. It wasn’t about immigration or rule Brittania or economic prosperity or Lbs vs kg or Pound vs Euro or Farage and his band of gits or Boris or Cameron or Rees-Mogg or the big bus commercial (apparently Dorries is a national disgrace now….groan…moan…woe is me…blah, blah, blah). No, it was different things for different people. For example, for me, it was ONLY about stopping Globalisation which I believe is the single biggest existential threat facing humanity today (way bigger than climate change). Not that I care a jot about humanity ‘cos I don’t generally like humans, but I really don’t like Globalisation. Only die-hard capitalists could support Globalisation and therefore the EU which is the single largest Globalisation movement in play today. That, my weak-minded chat show host, makes you a true-blue capitalist (he’s going on about cabals of corruption now and I’ll bet he starts promoting his book or his podcast in a minute. No, I was wrong, he’s going on about fat germans on a nudist beach).
Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I do see the problem Creasy, but what’s the solution? Surely there is no way to save the Tories from the most humiliating election defeat in history….or is there?
I think there might be but it’s not obvious nor is it guaranteed. It’s a new political strategy that has hitherto been ignored by the Tories, and indeed all political parties since the dawn of politics. I call it…
“The Grow a Pair of Bollocks Strategy”
Now, there are all sorts of policies and politicians that this strategy could and should be applied to, but I am going to pick just one policy because it is pissing me off so much. Let’s look at this blog as the Amuse Bouche for our erstwhile political leaders, so that they may gain enough understanding of having bollocks to be able to apply the same ballsy moves to other areas of policy, and by so doing, snatch victory from the jaws of inevitable defeat in the next General Election.
But which area will you choose Creasy because surely it must have enough gravitas to change something important to the people, and at the same time be so well thought out that O’Broon will not only be unable to moan about it, but will be forced to support?
You are correct of course and I can see you champing at the bit to know where I will break ground. I will dally no further and I tell you that Immigration is the policy that we must address.
IMMIGRATION!?!?! Don’t be ridiculous Creasy, nobody could fix the Immigration swamp that is the Tory policy on immigration. To suggest as much is just tish and nonsense!
I admire your skepticism and challenge my faithful padawan. It’s true, this is no mean feat, we have not seen such a balls-up of something since Bezos tried to compete with Musk in the space race. I mean the Tories have burned more political capital than you would have thought possible, but immigration is their on-fire Mona Lisa. Flights to Rwanda, smirking Frenchmen with false promises reaching into our pockets for mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money, and organised crime drowning people at sea. It’s proper fucked, and that’s what makes it the perfect Grow a Pair candidate. I intend to demonstrate, that by growing a pair of bollocks, not only can immigration be fixed, but it can be fixed to the satisfaction of all except a few racists who nobody gives a shit about.
Here we go. Stay with me as this is complex and there are twists and turns in this policy that must be carefully navigated if we are to be successful.
Ok.
Let them in!
Let them in.
Eh?
Let them in.
Let who all in?
Everyone who wants to come.
What everyone?
Yes, except for anyone with a criminal record or who has links to terrorism, we’ve got enough criminals as it is, mostly in Liverpool and Manchester but they have to stay because they’re British, but other than that let everyone in.
I don’t get it
I told you it was complex.
IT’S NOT COMPLEX THOUGH IS IT CREASY!! IT’S FACILE. YOU CAN’T JUST GO AROUND LETTING EVERYONE IN YOU MORON!
The EU did.
What?!
The EU did. Well, for anyone who was part of the EU club. People just wandered around in the EU like there were no borders. Except for criminals and such, they couldn’t just move around. ‘Specially if you were like a terrorist, ooh no, no entry for you my son. No, you can fuck right off. So we could just do that but like, bigger. In the words of the entrepreneur/lawyer/lecturer/writer Claude Bristol, “You have to think big to be big”
But everyone will come Creasy. It’s only a little island and there’s only so much money and so many jobs. It just won’t work.
Tosh, of course it will work, but we just have to have some simple rules to deal with some problem areas to do it properly. The problems I see arising from this scheme/policy are:
Migration Classification
State Benefit Entitlement
Health Care Entitlement
Education Entitlement
Housing Availability
Jobs Availability
Racism
Fundamentally, this concept depends on one single defining principle: Legal Immigration into the UK is a net benefit; culturally and economically and always has been.
So do we get to go and live/work in their countries then?
Don’t care. Nice if it happens but shouldn’t stop us from letting everyone come here. Again, if you believe that Immigration produces a net cultural and economic benefit to the country, then do it regardless of reciprocation. Don’t get hung up on that EU-type thinking.
So, let’s get at it.
Migration Classification
There will be only 3 classes of Migrant
Refugee
Economic Migrant
Student Migrant
Refugees are defined by the UN as “persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection“
An Economic Migrant is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a “person who travels from one country or area to another in order to improve their standard of living.”
Wikipedia defines Student migration as “the movement of students who study outside their country of birth or citizenship for a period of 12 months or more.”
Benefits available to each Migration Class
Some people care about whether folks from overseas are coming over to rip us off and live off our generous state handouts. Obviously, the vast majority of migrants are not, but some people worry about it because they are ignorant of the facts. Most people understand that migrants come to find work, that pays well and which will improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones, or they want to come here to find safety from harm. Smart people understand that both types are beneficial to our country culturally and economically and always have been.
I think we can address the benefits-scam worry and be fair to people coming to our country at the same time.
I have had a look at each migrant class below to address all the problems enumerated above except for racism which I will deal with separately.
Can I be a Ukrainian too?
Refugees
To become a Refugee seeking asylum in the UK, the process will be very simple. Go to your nearest UK Consulate, Embassy or UK port of arrival and declare that you are a Refugee. This can be anywhere in the world. For example, if you go to your Consulate or Embassy in Afghanistan, it’s the same as arriving in Dover. If you arrive in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, it’s the same as arriving at passport control at Heathrow.
Refugees need to be able to pay for and arrange a one-way ticket to Mainland UK from where they are, for themselves and any accompanying dependents. After all, we are not a travel agent.
You will not be allowed to enter the UK unless you identify your country of birth. You can only arrive in the UK by legal routes. If you arrive via illegal routes, then you will be incarcerated until such time as you identify your country of birth/citizenship. Once your country of birth/citizenship has been established, and once you have declared that you are a refugee, your asylum application will be processed in the normal way and you will have the same rights as a refugee applicant that arrived by legal means.
Upon physical arrival in Mainland UK, you will once again declare yourself to be a refugee and will be processed as a refugee in the normal way.
During the period that you are being processed as a refugee, you will be provided with suitable accommodation, primary and secondary education for any accompanying school-age children, healthcare and cost of subsistence (E.g. Food and Utilities) by the state.
You will be required and encouraged to seek employment (or establish your own business), during the period you are being processed as a refugee. As there are over 1 million unfilled positions in the UK, finding a job shouldn’t be very difficult, especially as UK citizens apparently don’t seem to want these jobs albeit they don’t want you to steal them either. We are particularly keen to hear from anyone who wants to become a nurse. This is so that the costs associated with your housing, education, healthcare and subsistence can be fully or partially mitigated as soon as possible. You will need to be able to show your efforts to secure employment.
If you do secure a position in the UK, you will be entitled to normal rates of pay including the national minimum wage. Any employer who attempts to pay you less than this will be classed as a racist (please see the section below on racism).
Your right to Refugee benefits ceases when any one of the following conditions are met:
You are found to have a criminal record or have links to one or more terrorist organisations. At this point, you will either be immediately returned to your country of birth/citizenship with no right of appeal, or prosecuted as a terrorist.
You find a job, have no criminal record, have no links to any terrorist organisation and have been employed for 6 months. Note that if your wages do not cover all costs associated with accommodation and subsistence, the state will subsidise your income until you can cover all costs yourself. Your status will remain “Refugee” until your application has been processed. If you lose your job while your application is being processed your right to the refugee benefits previously listed, will be re-established immediately.
Your application for asylum is denied and 6 months have passed since it was denied. At this point, you will be reclassified as an economic migrant and will have the rights available to economic migrants (See section below). You will not need to leave the UK.
Your application for asylum is granted, and 12 months have passed from the date it was granted. Because you effectively have nowhere to safely return to, you will also be granted full UK citizenship immediately after your application is granted, and will inherit all citizen rights.
I’ve done ever so well…
Economic Migrants
Any Migrant arriving in the UK, who does not immediately claim to be a refugee or who is not registered for a course of study in a UK educational establishment, will be classed as an economic migrant.
Arrival in the UK must be by LEGAL means and routes. An economic migrant and any accompanying dependent (husband/wife or children) must be in possession of a valid passport. Economic Migrants and any accompanying immediate dependents will have NO entitlement to state benefits EXCEPT for primary and secondary education for any accompanying school-aged children. Education will be viewed as an investment and be viewed as a self-evident benefit to the country.
All economic migrants and their accompanying dependents must have valid passports from their country of birth/citizenship. Any Economic Migrant and his/her dependents arriving in the UK without a valid passport will be incarcerated until such time as their country of birth/citizenship can be established. Once this has been established, the economic migrant plus any accompanying dependents will be immediately returned to that country. They will have no right of appeal.
Arrival in the UK by migrants who fail to declare themselves to be refugees, by ANY illegal means or route, or without having a valid passport, automatically disqualifies a migrant and any accompanying dependents from remaining in the UK or from ever returning to the UK as an economic migrant. These migrants will be incarcerated until such time as their country of birth/citizenship has been established, at which point they will be immediately returned to that country. They will have no right of appeal.
Economic Migrants and any accompanying dependents arriving in the UK must have a valid address they will be living at during their time in the UK. Migrants will be required to notify authorities of any change of address during their time in the UK prior to obtaining British Citizenship.
Economic Migrants and any accompanying dependents will NOT be able to use the NHS free of charge for any reason. Migration to the UK as an economic migrant is voluntary and it is unreasonable to assume that healthcare will be free when the migrant has not contributed economically to the country for a long period of time. Upon arrival in the UK, economic migrants must be able to show that they have a valid and current health insurance policy from a reputable insurer. Upon attending any NHS facility, an economic migrant MUST show their insurance policy when they are checking in. Where insurance policies have an excess, this excess must be paid in full at the point of care, before treatment is provided. If no insurance policy has been taken out, then treatment must be paid for in full and in advance of any treatment or consultation, at the point of care.
Economic Migrants will not be able to claim any state benefits prior to obtaining British citizenship if they lose their job or their business fails. In this circumstance, they must be able to self-fund or can choose to return to their country of birth/citizenship. Returning to their country of birth/citizenship does NOT preclude them from returning to the UK at some future date as an economic migrant.
If an economic migrant is convicted of a criminal offense at any time prior to obtaining British Citizenship, they and any accompanying dependents will be immediately deported to their country of birth/citizenship without any right of appeal (they will have the right to appeal their criminal conviction through the court system, but once these have been exhausted, no further right of appeal against deportation will exist).
If an economic migrant is found to have worked in the UK without paying Tax and National Insurance (Black Market=tax evasion which is a criminal offense), the economic migrant and any accompanying dependents will be immediately returned to their country of birth/citizenship without any right of appeal. In this circumstance, they CANNOT claim refugee status to avoid deportation, nor will they be able to ever re-enter the UK as an economic migrant or Refugee at any time in the future.
Once an economic Migrant is able to show 5 years’ worth of PAYE & National Insurance contributions, they and any accompanying dependents will be granted full British citizenship and will inherit all rights associated with British citizenship.
I reckon I will do ever so well….
Student Migrant
You have to pay for everything and are entitled to nothin’.
But you can come too.
Racism
Any person in the UK who racially abuses or discriminates (consciously or unconsciously), against migrants or any other person of colour (whether they be Refugees, Economic Migrants, Students, people on vacation etc.), will be relocated to Rwanda on the grounds that they are of no use to anyone.
Note that white immigrants and white people in general cannot claim racism or racial discrimination against them because, well, they are white and we all know that we don’t care if anyone calls us cracker or white devil or honky or gora or frankly anything else. Actually, we only really care when we are called Racist, which is ironic when you think about it.
To avoid unnecessary landing costs, racists will be asked to leave the aircraft (at gunpoint), as it passes over the Rwandan border. Parachutes will not be provided by the state so racists must provide their own…or not…we don’t care. This approach will have the added benefit of opening up space for more immigrants (who will be gifted the homes, jobs, businesses and credit balances of the racists’ bank accounts on a first come first serve basis).
Summary
So there we are then, an election-winning immigration policy that pleases everyone except racists, which the policy deals with efficiently (especially the ones who can’t afford a parachute). Even James “I’m a proper socialist” O’Brian and Keir “I have nothing to say” Starmer can have nothing but praise for this policy.
Apart from the obvious benefit of consigning Keir Starmer and the Labour Party (who nobody likes), to the file called “Useless set of gits”, this policy has the added benefit of consigning the nutter right-wing of the Conservative party (who nobody likes), to the file marked “Nutter right-Wing of the Conservative Party” both of which can then be set on fire.
The policy is fair, tough, welcoming AND respects the rule of law. It treats people with dignity. Most importantly it has bollocks because it sets out to do the right thing for EVERYONE even if some of those folks don’t know it’s the right thing for them (Middle England you know who I’m talking about).
Oh, and it’d be nice if someone competent in Government set out a clear and factual picture of how immigration benefits us all so that they can communicate properly when they introduce the policy.
Let’s remember that the primary role of Government is to Govern or, put another way, to lead. Nowhere is it written that Government has to please. Having the bollocks to do the right thing which is typically the hard thing, instead of doing the pleasing thing which is typically the domain of the intellectually lazy, will earn the Tories the grudging respect of the British people and, if applied widely to all policy areas, the next General Election. After all, what do they have to lose?
One final thought, it’s interesting to note that we could not implement such a policy if we were still members of the EU. That IS interesting isn’t it Jimbo? Yeah, that’s shut you up!
So, a flying saucer full of aliens comes down to earth in 1790, about 30 years after the start of the industrial revolution, to study our planet. They are pretty impressed.
“Wow Xanex, this place is off the chart!”
“I know Keanu, look at all this shit! Now this is what you call a rich biosphere right?”
“Totally X, there’s like millions of species of animals and forna, we could be here for yonks classifying it all. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve got an idea Keanu, why don’t we take a top-down approach and identify the species at the very top of the food chain and work our way down?”
And so they do. Keanu tells Xanex to do a quick search to try to find evidence of any intelligent civilisation on the planet. After about 10 alien minutes, Xanex is standing at his console scratching his head.
“Wassup X?”
Says, Keanu
“Erm, honestly? I’m a bit confused. I did my search and I found what looks like one single species, but I’m thinking they are actually two. I mean they are biologically exactly the same except for a few environmental adaptations like skin colour, facial features and what not, but in every other way they are completely different”
“I don’t get you X, how can they be two species if they are biologically exactly the same? That don’t make no sense at all bra'”
“Yeah I dig it Keanu, I wasn’t chosen for this mission because I’m a pretty face you know. I am actually the astro-biologist on this fecking mission”
“So what you flappin’ about then X?”
“Ok look, Let’s give the whole bunch a name so we know what we are talking about. I dunno, how about humanity?
So I’ve made a picture of the first kind of human. On the face of it, this geezer seems to be more technologically advanced than the other type (clothes, wigs, sail around in ships and making stuff in factories), but they seem to be spreading all over the planet from this bit of the planet here, taking over all the land but then fucking up everything they come across. Forests, killing all the wild animals for fur, killing all the whales for oil for their lamps and whatnot.
I mean, you can’t really blame ’em
They spend a lot of time killing each other, but they especially like killing this other type of human. It’s almost like a sport! They seem to want to own and kill everything they see. Except for dogs! They love their dogs. Just for the sake of argument, lets call these ones “Greedy Humanity” or “Avarus Humanitas” because us aliens love our Latin don’t we?
Then there’s this other lot. It’s almost like they don’t give a crap about technology. They have basic hunting tools like spears and blow pipes and bows and arrows, and a really weird wobbly stick that they throw at big hopping mice, but it’s quite clever really because it comes back if they miss so they don’t have to run and go pick it up before they can throw it again, and some basic tools for a bit of farming and such, but no machines you can really point at.
They don’t seem to want to own anything at all! In fact, they seem to be very determined to not use anything they don’t actually need. They only hunt what they actually eat and farm in a way that preserves the land. Classic hunter gatherer types. Pretty nomadic bunch following the seasons and allowing the land they just left to recover from their presence. Great wheel of life stuff really. They live in relative harmony with each other (odd scuffle but nothing to write home about), and they seem to show a lot of respect for the natural environment and well, everything really. So whilst they are technologically miles behind these tossers, it strikes me they have a much more sustainable and intelligent way of life; almost wise. In fact so wise that they seem to intuitively understand at a spiritual level that energy and matter are the same thing and that makes everything as valuable as everything else. They make no distinction between a pebble or a person. We could call them “Wise Humanity” to distinguish them from these greedy bastards. “Wise Man” for short or “Homo Sapien”.
“Some are smart but they are not wise”
Shoshone Proverb
So, whilst the greedy ones seem to have all the power, land and technology, I reckon these wise ones, intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, and environmentally are actually the top of the food chain, but from the looks of it, they are pretty much on their way out what with all the butchering and slaughtering these greedy ones are doing.”
If Keanu had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. After about a minute he speaks up
“So, we’d better kill all the greedy ones then init?”
“Eh? What all of ’em?”
Says Xanex.
“Yeah, we better kill ’em all. The greedy ones I mean. It’s logical and us aliens are known for our logic and that. Look, if we let ’em live then these wise ones are goners right? Also, if these greedy fuckers keep going the way they are, then I can see a time when they will fill the atmosphere with Carbon Dioxide from all these fossil fuel burning factories they are setting up, and we all know what happens when you pump the atmosphere up with CO2 right? Just a big mess and all of ’em, including the wise ones will become extinct along with lots of other species. So if you think about it we are duty bound to kill ’em really. Actually, it’s like we are doing them a favour really, because I’m sure that if they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t want to set off a global extinction event.”
Now X is thinking.
“Couldn’t we just show ’em how to do fusion and then they won’t use these fossil fuels?”
“You crack me up X, you really do.”
laughs Keanu
“You really think these nutters would use fusion properly? These dickheads would blow the planet up. No, we’re definitely gonna have to kill ’em. That is exactly, what we need to do”
He reaches over to a big red button on the console, winks at X and pushes the button.
“Kaboom motherfuckers!”
Ok, so I’ve sort of nicked the idea from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but I have modified it in two important ways: A) I didn’t want to kill off ALL of humanity and B) I didn’t pussy out at the last minute because John Cleese reckons we are all capable of changing our ways if only we were allowed to get to the point where everything was teetering on the brink of an abyss.
If the aliens had visited back in the 1790s, and had pushed the big red button (and they would’ve), wiping out Avarus Humanitas, the world would be a very different and better place today, because the ethical, philosophical and religious worldview of the remaining indigenous peoples is so fundamentally centred on the idea that
“Man belongs to earth, earth does not belong to man.”
Native American Proverb
Geographically, the remaining peoples of the earth would include Native Americans, South American indigenous tribes, Pacific Polynesian peoples, New Zealand’s Mauri peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples.
All these peoples shared a common understanding and acceptance of our place in the world and the need to live in a way that maintains Nature’s fine balance.
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle (Seathl)
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Isn’t it a bit insensitive to be talking about pushing a big red button that kills pretty much everyone, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means we are teetering on the brink of WW3 Creasy?”
I can see why you might think that mon brave, but A) I would retort that I have actually been thinking about writing this blog for about 6 months (way before comrade Putin and NATO bolloxed everything up) and 3) what better time is there to demonstrate that not only have we not changed since the industrial revolution, but that we never will and that pushing that big red button (not the one that sets off all the nukes, the other one the Aliens had), is really the only logical and ethical thing left for us to do.
We have lost our humanity, or rather, our technological evolution has stolen it from us. We have lost our spiritual connection to the Earth. Walking the dog in local woods with the sound of the M25 ringing in your ears doesn’t count. It really doesn’t.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot (1836-1890) warrior and peace-promoting head chief
Implicit in these words, is the notion of being still in the world and simply observing, and in that observing we learn truth and nothing could, or should, be more important. Instead of this simple but powerful truth, we, Avaratus Humanitas, have chosen to define and teach and reinforce a set of “moral” and “ethical” values based solely on the assumption that people are more valuable than everything else.
This is the fundamental difference between the world’s wise people and the rest of us. If a single human life is more valuable, more sacred, than everything else, then everything we do to preserve, enhance or worship that life becomes ethical. If human life is so sacred why wouldn’t we build temples of concrete and steel to worship it? Why wouldn’t we sacrifice everything that was there before to build those temples? Why wouldn’t we rape the earth over and over to grow the things we need to feed or decorate that abundant and most precious life? Everything else is secondary, everything else doesn’t matter. Only we matter, and we have enshrined that core value deeply into our collective psyches and our religious beliefs.
“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end.”
Catholic Catechism
Whether it is Christianity or Islam or Judaism, the basic premise that we are more special than everything except God is baked in. This is the most basic and flawed form of logic. All cats have three legs. Tom is a cat. Ergo, Tom has three legs. Logically flawless and absolutely wrong. Humans have value, trees are not human, therefore trees are not valuable. The initial premise for the function is wildly incorrect, so no matter how logical or flawless the rest, the final conclusion will always be wrong.
You have to start from a different place. A more correct premise. A place where a pebble has the same exact value as a new born human baby.
“From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred”
Peter Blue Cloud (1935-) Mohawk writer
You have to start from a place of simple need versus want. If our only purpose was to survive, using only that which the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would understand that our current rate of consumption of natural resources was not a problem to be solved later, but one which should occupy our every action and decision.
We would be watchful and careful in the way we shared this space and it would be entirely natural to preserve it so that our progeny could survive and know that everything had equal value too. Imagine the wisdom required to consider the impact of our every decision on the next 7 generations? We don’t even have the wisdom to think about the next one.
If we had this mindset, the decisions we would take would be very different. If nature produced a female that could not bear children, or a male that could not produce sperm with high motility, the decision wouldn’t be to conquer that natural selection with technology over and over again until the infertile couple actually produce another unnecessary child. Instead, adoption would be as normal and natural a way of “having” children, as actually giving birth to your own or having someone else do it for you as a surrogate. Sacred cow, right? Every man and woman have the right to have their own child whatever it takes, right? Why, because we are more valuable than the beasts of the field who naturally have the same condition, and anyway we have the tech to do it so what’s the problem?
The problem is that nature never gets a say. It tries to rebalance our numbers to levels it can sustain all the time, and we just keep giving it the finger. Disease? No problem. Famine? No problem. Floods? No problem. Infertility? No problem. Soil not producing enough human/livestock feed? Industrial Agro, no problem. Global warming? Bigger A/C units and houseboats, no problem. We think of everything as a problem to solve except us!
“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
– Australian Aboriginal – Tom Dystra
If our only purpose was to survive using only what the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would not allow our population to to burgeon. It simply wouldn’t make any sense for our survival, or the survival of the other species that share this world. Look at the fuss we made about a few people who died during the COVID pandemic. Yeah, I said it! As I write, 5.98 million people have died of COVID. That’s 0.07% of the world population (7.8Bn and rising), and the vast majority of those people were over the age of 75! Shit, it’s not even one city’s worth of people. A normal and sane thought process would say “ahh, poor Doris/Jim, but s/he did have a good innings”. Instead, we were beating our breasts and going on and on about how unsafe care homes were, when we should have been taking them on daily outings to Val Doonican concerts in the COVID wards!
Too soon? Put it in the comments section.
If we were sane, every school in the world should have at least half their teaching staff come from the indigenous peoples of the world. That would be the only qualification they needed. The other half should only be allowed to teach knitting (with sustainably sourced wool). I accept that there aren’t enough Native Americans, Mauri or Aboriginals etc. to go round because we killed most of them, but if for the sake of argument we could, they would teach our children that living wisely is consistent with the certain knowledge that no one thing in the universe has greater value than any other thing because everything in the universe is exactly the same as everything else. Everything is ultimately energy and it simply moves from store to store (matter). They would teach them that as sentient and spiritual beings, we carry more responsibility for recognising and respecting that value in everything, not less.
If we were sane, only indigenous people could stand for public office. If you live somewhere where you have already wiped out the indigenous people, then you would have to vote for one that lives somewhere else. As our leaders, they would ensure that every decision taken took into account the impact on our world.
Apart from the practical problem of most indigenous people being dead depriving us of the teachers and leaders we really need, we also have the lightbulb problem.
We can no sooner go back and start from a new set of values, than we can uninvent the light bulb. It’s like someone pointing at a yellow cup and saying “that cup is red”. Nothing will convince you that the cup is red when you can see it is yellow. Our value system and beliefs are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be unbelieved. They can only die out. We have set our avaricious foot on a trail that has a clear and unambiguous destination and all the tree hugging in the world will not stop us from getting there. We are collectively consumed with consumption, engorged by our bottomless appetites (ever been to an “All you can eat” buffet in the US?), and yet more individually isolated and lonely than ever before, as Globalisation lays waste small communities in favour of anonymous city life. At the same time, we’re all so badly trying to be woke about some things that we have forgotten that we are deeply and artificially asleep to the single central truth; everything has equal value to everything else. If we woke to that simple truth, then no other wokeness would be needed. Bias and prejudice and intolerance cannot stand up in water that deep.
“It’s impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.”
Navajo Proverb
I wrote a blog a while ago called Shouldn’t we Weaponise Babies? because I believed that the root cause to all of our problems today is the sheer number of humans that are consuming resources on our world. The basic concept behind that blog was to rapidly and radically reduce the world’s population to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth. I’d like to update that belief a little because it occurs to me that massive population reduction alone, albeit still very much needed, will not do the trick.
I seem to recall that I proposed a reduction from 7.8Bn people to say 500m people because at that level, provided that we never allow the global birth rate to grow above the replacement rate (2.1 kids per female), our level of consumption would be so low that the damage we have done could be healed naturally. I’d like to revise the reduction in population to 370m people, which just happens to be the total global population of all remaining indigenous peoples.
“That is a very spooky coincidence Creasy!”
Isn’t it?
Oh no….
I think I proposed that today’s children should be persuaded to not have children or to only allow 1 in 2 girls to have babies or something. So, I’ve changed my mind on that too. I don’t think that our selection of who can reproduce and who cannot should be random any more. We should limit reproduction to indigenous peoples only. What good is it to reduce the population if the people left teach those children the same values we carry around today. No, no, no, no, no! That won’t do at all. We have to scrape those values from the human consciousness like a burned lasagne from a baking dish that wasn’t stacked properly and therefore never made it into the dishwasher.
By only having indigenous people procreate, we can ensure that their children go to schools that only have indigenous children and indigenous teachers. To make sure that they don’t become infected by our values, we can create reservations in the cities for everyone else, where they can live out their lives. In 100 years they, and their values, will have all died out and the cities can be left to entropy to sort out. During that 100 years we should provide these people with every luxury their hearts may, and will, desire so they don’t feel like, well, like the indigenous people did when they were sent to a shithole reservation. Most importantly it might stop them from trying to escape or go to the countryside.
All other land should be returned to nature immediately and shared by the indigenous peoples of the world. We can’t give it back to them because their own system of values meant they never owned it in the first place.
Rewrite the 10 commandments as well, the one’s we have are pretty useless and nobody follows them, and they just keep going on and on about not committing adultery or not coveting they neighbours wife or not coveting they neighbours house which is fundamentally the same thing. If you ask me, the bloke who wrote the commandments is basically telling a crowd of sex starved other blokes, who have been wandering about for 40 years in a desert that takes a couple of weeks to walk across, not to shag his missus.
Our new commandments might look something like…
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next 7 generations (Iroquois Proverb)
Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your Mother and all things as your Brothers and Sisters (Native American Proverb)
Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself (Hawaiian Proverb)
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children (Native American Proverb)
Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it (Arapaho Proverb)
Pray to understand what man has forgotten (Lumbee Proverb)
The love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome (Santee (Dakota, Sioux) Proverb)
Only have 2 children. If one dies adopt another, or buy a dog….same thing. (Creasy)
Sit still on this high rock, look closely and you can see the pub from here (Aboriginal Proverb)
Don’t go near anything alive in Australia because it will bloody kill ya’ mate (Aboriginal Proverb)
These few simple measures, self evident and obvious, set the stage for a global renewal, not just of the land, but a healing of the collective mind. We have been poisoned but the poison is sweet and while the sweetness hides it’s fatal toxin, fatal it will be.
All but a few have forgotten the central truth of being, but it is still lying there in the pockets of those few, polished by soft hands and passed secretly from old pockets to new pockets, as they patiently wait for us to finish our feeding and move on like a great heard of bison, knowing that the wide trail of broken grass we leave behind will grow again as soon as we have gone.
If we want the best of humanity to go on, then the rest of us must “go quietly into the night”, so that the others can recommence their guardianship of this very special island in the cosmos.
“But how do 370m peacefully minded people force 7.4Bn people who don’t mind massacring all the peacefully minded people because it happens to be Tuesday and that’s when we do all our killin’ and butcherin’, to stay in the reservation Creasy?”
Ah! a crease in the Creasy solution. A crinkle in the Christmas wrapping paper of our Global gift. To a lesser man your observation might pose an insurmountable obstacle; a mountain range blocking our route to Nirvana (not the band). A chasm so deep and so wide that you could only fill it with the putrid dead corpses of Avarus Humanitas! And that, my little piranha, is why I have hatched PLAN B!
“I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious”
Albert Einstein
Now, I know what you’re thinking….
“Jeez Creasy, we don’t hear from you for like, a whole pandemic, and then you post twice in a few days. What the hell is going on?”
I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe I have all these pent up feelings that have been building up over the past few months; I have been a little emotional lately. Maybe I just need to vent a little. Maybe I just needed to talk to someone. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t understand why perfectly intelligent people can’t achieve something as simple as stacking a bloody dish. Yeah, maybe that’s it. Maybe that is exactly it!
I have this amazing daughter who I am increasingly convinced will solve Fusion and then go on, quite separately, to invent a fully functioning warp drive. Either that, or she will write the next series of best-selling great epic novels about short tubby people with big hairy feet and magic rings who, counter intuitively, battle tall, muscle-bound and horrid monsters successfully, but with tiny swords. Or, she could become the next Greta Garbo. All, totally within her grasp.
Then there is my incredible artist son who produces these beautiful light paintings using wands and silk and light, with digital cameras set to all kinds of funny digital settings that are really quite tricky and technical, and he does it flawlessly. He spends pretty much all his time ruining my lawn as he swirls and twirls like a bloody Ninja in front of his sodding camera. Totally expecting a call from the Vatican any day now for him to pop over and redo the Sistine Chapel.
@TiernanArt
J, joo are so locky
Last but certainly not least, I have this beautiful gem of a Best Friend / Life Traveller / Spiritual Guide who you could only describe as the ultimate multi-tasker, juggling a high powered career in Finance whilst being the ultimate Mum and role model to our kids and boss beautiful Wife to me. She should wear a cape with a big S on it. I am expecting her to come home one day and explain a new business idea that will revolutionise the world of Threading and make us rich as Sheiks. This time next year I will be writing my blog from the aft deck of our her Super Yacht whilst slurping down a frozen Daquiri. Totally going to happen , I know it.
“Creasy, you are truly blessed to be surrounded by so much intelligence, beauty and talent and to be so good looking, smart and charming yourself.”
Yes I am. That is totally true. I am blessed, and I fall to my knees and thank something, somewhere everyday for the enormous chunk of good luck that made me so very very blessed.
You can understand my problem though, right? Being so blessed and being surrounded, as I am, by all this intelligence, wit, talent and beauty, I think my expectation that these same geniuses be able to scrape their plates, stack plates with plates and bowls with bowls and to place their dirty knives and forks in the dish I have provided for just that purpose, should be considered entirely reasonable. It is reasonable isn’t it?
“Well, it’s not unreasonable Creasy”
See, that’s what I think too. I think it’s a reasonable expectation. So why won’t they? Why won’t they stack the plates with plates and the bowls with bowls? How can they be capable of all these world changing things and yet not stack a single dish. Are they doing it on purpose? Are they just doing it to mess with me or are they doing it to piss me off?
“I’m a goddamn marvel of modern science”
OMG! Are they trying to make me insane so that they can have me sectioned like that Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest? Is this how they avoid the cost of a good nursing home in a couple of years when I need to eat dinner through a straw? Is Nurse Ratched, and a big silent Native American who rips big sinks out of the floor all I have to look forward to?
Is that it?
Is that it?
IS THAT IT?
“Sheeit Creasy, calm down sunshine! Woosa……Wooooooooosaaaaaaa….How the hell are we supposed to know? Maybe they are just being a bit careless”
D’you think so? I suppose so. I mean I suppose it could be that, but really? Who is careless about stacking dishes properly? That’s not normal, and it’s a funny word that “Careless” isn’t it? Care Less. Couldn’t Care Less. Don’t Care. Don’t give a monkey’s. If I cared less it would be a crime.
It is a crime!
“Well, it’s not actually a crime Creasy”
It’s not?
I’m innocent y’onour
Well, it ought to be a real crime. I ought to be able to call someone and have them arrested and taken away and put in prison. Instead, one day I am going to lose my shit and go batshit crazy (maybe break some stuff), and someone is going to come and wrap me in a coat I can cuddle myself in, and take me away to the psyche ward where Nurse Ratched will be waiting for me with medical instruments she can probe me with.
“I think you’re being a tad paranoid Creasy. A smidge”
Am I? Am I though?
Ok look, let’s take a breath. Maybe you’re right Creasy fans. Maybe I am taking all of this a bit too seriously. All I’m saying is that normal people should be capable of this simple domestic procedure after each meal and in our house they’re not, so either they are not normal people or they are trying to make me crazy and I don’t know why.
People who love one another don’t try to make them, crazy do they? Of course they love me, who wouldn’t? So maybe I need to think again; not be so paranoid. What if it’s something else altogether that is preventing them from performing this simple task well?
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”
Sherlock Holmes
So maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I haven’t provided the leadership around this whole thing. Is the process too complicated to follow? Lets take a look.
No, no, that’s not it. The instructions couldn’t be more clear and the logic and options within the sequence are clearly defined. It’s taped up over the sink so that you can check each step as you go. And of course there’s the recorded tutorial that anyone can initiate with a simple spoken instruction
“Hey Google, how do I stack dishes?”
What problem are we trying to solve here people?
We did the whole 2 day internal training workshop thing last year, and a refresher course during the pandemic because the situation was just going from bad to worse. Then there was the sternly worded memo, which included another copy of the process, admonishing them to try harder so that Team Creasy would be the talk of the dish stacking Fraternity, but none of this has worked. It’s as if all my concerns have fallen on deaf ears.
We love what you’ve done here Creasy
I even wrote a song about it using Simon & Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence music so they could sing along as they stacked (Click here to hear a great version of that original song by Disturbed). After our “Learn the Lyrics” workshop, I can tell you that everyone knows the words and fully appreciated the sentiment. C’mon, you know the tune, sing along and perhaps you can improve your dish stacking skills as well…
dinga donga dinga donga ding
Hello Dishes my old friends
I've come to stack you once again
Because I love Creasy so com-pletely
And these dishes will be stacked neatly
And the forks that are dropped in the special dish
They smell like fish
before they have been cleaned
In restless dreams I walked alone
No dishes scraped something's gone wrong
I didn't do it after my dinner
I think that makes me such a huge sinner
And now they are smelling really strong
They really pong
I think I'll lose my dinner
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand dishes maybe more
Lined up all along the work surface
Did my kids do this on purpose?
It will take all day just to stack them properly
And all for free
I think I'll go and pee
Fool say I you do not know
Fungus like mushrooms will grow
Hear my words that I might teach you
Would you like to see these plates like new?
But my words like silent raindrops fell
That's a shocking smell
It really smells like poo
And the people stacked and scraped
With the scraper Creasy made
And the sign flashed out its warning
And the words that it was forming
And the sign said the food on the plates is stuck now for ever more
Are you sure?
They'll need a soak 'til 4:00
dinga donga dinga donga ding
And, riddle me this.
Too hard for me Creasy!
The recycling bin has been conveniently placed just inside the kitchen door so that as you walk into the kitchen with that empty tin, or when you have just emptied the cardboard cereal box, you can simply drop it in. Voila! Done! Why then is it that the work surface next to the sink is regularly piled high with recyclable detritus, when that work surface is precisely 18 inches away from the recycling bin. What’s that all about? Explain that to me. You can’t! There is no explanation.
Is this what housewives have been dealing with for, well the entire history of housewifery? Piles of unorganised, unstacked dirty dishes lying all over their kitchen like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie? No wonder they all wanted to go to work and do all that suffragetting! I mean, it’s not having that effect on me, but I can see how it would.
It’s like there’s a rat inside my skull scratching away trying to get out “eek-eek-eek, scratch-scratch-scratch, eek-eek-eek”. No single thing in and of itself sufficient to lose your shit over, but collectively adding up to an internal scream that lasts a week. I find myself sitting in corners facing the wall, giggling and babbling to myself incoherently….
“and that dirty fork was just sittin’ on the window sill, no plate just a dirty fork on its own…on a window sill…nowhere near the sink or dishwasher or anything. Hehehehehehehehhheeeeeeee”
or I will wake up in the middle of the night and find myself standing naked in the kitchen, in the dark, not knowing how I got there but stroking a whimpering and shivering Bobby’s head like Lenny from Of Mice and Men “George? Can I pet the rabbit? Can I George? Can I?”. The lines of unstacked dishes glinting eerily from from the black marble work surface…
“1,2,3,4 un-scraped bowls…haha, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 forks…why so many…hehehe, 1,2,3,4,5,6 pans and 8 lids hehe, 1,2,3 collanders…we didn’t have anything that needed straining though…HAAHHAHHAHAHAAAAHAA”
But that’s ok, I ain’t mad. Naw, I’m fine. No really, I am. Ain’t no thang. I’ll be a’ight. It’s all in my mind. Every day in every way I’m getting better and better. Better and better. Yes.
So each morning, I spend my entire life side-stacking the dishes properly; plates with plates, bowls with bowls, glasses and cups together, utensils in the special dish, before then stacking the dishwasher properly. Utensils first at the top, then glasses, cups and bowls in the centre and finally plates, pots and pans at the bottom. And when it is all done and the dishwasher is busily murmuring away, I feel comforted and relaxed and I think…
“Anything different is good”
“Maybe tomorrow will be different, and when dinner is finished I will look at the side-stack and it will all be perfect and neat and food free”
…but it never is. It’s like fecking Groundhog day.
“Ok Creasy, this is where you hit us with the punchline and the philosophy stuff and the genius life changing ideas that we all come here for because otherwise that would be twenty minutes of our lives we’ll never see again, right?”
Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seeking the builder of this house; and again and again, I faced the suffering of new birth. Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me. All your beams are broken, the ridgepole is shattered. The mind has become freed from conditioning: the end of craving has been reached.
Siddhārtha Gautama
Do you remember when you first took on the responsibility of owning a house? Do you remember how it felt when you signed those mortgage papers and someone handed you the keys and it was all yours? Not yet a home; somehow an empty walled echoey shell of a place, lacking furniture and warmth and connection, but great acoustics if you like to sing. So full of not-yet realised potential, so naked of everything else.
I remember feeling both exhilarated that I had reached such a “grown-up” milestone in my life, and at the same time horrified by the commitment and “end-of-youth” implications of settling down in this place. It wasn’t even a house. It was a third-floor, 3 three-bedroom flat in Hampstead, London. No garden, a kitchen you could just about swing a cat in (and I would have if one of those cold-hearted buggers had ever made it into the kitchen), and a living room with pitched ceilings and a wooden beam that managed to give the place a little touch of character.
“You oughta be an estate agent Creasy wiv all dem fancy descriptions of rooves and beams and whatnot!”
From that moment on, for most of us, the trajectory of our lives can be pretty accurately mapped.
“Bloody Hell Creasy, that’s a bit bleak and cynical isn’t it?”
Is it?
Is it though?
I don’t think so. Not really. Maybe a bit. I may be working out some personal issues here, but the reality is that every adult in the western world spends their days churning away at the same old shit like a lab rat on an exercise wheel, and why?
Another day another dollar….
“You want the truth?”
“I think I’m entitled to the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth! Son we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be paid for by people with jobs. Whose gonna do it, you? You, eight-year-old life-sucking kid? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for me having to work all the time and you curse the crappy presents you get at Christmas. You have the luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that my job while tragic, probably pays the mortgage; and my existence while grotesque, and incomprehensible, to you, pays the mortgage. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wheel, you need me on that wheel! We use words like hard work, long hours, absent parent. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent paying the mortgage, you use them as a punchline. I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself, to a child who rises and sleeps, under the blanket of the very house that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said ‘thank you’, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you get a job and help pay the mortgage. Either way, I don’t give a damn, what you think you are entitled to!”
A Few Good Men
“And that’s the truth, man! That’s the truth. Can you handle it? It’s just a question between friends, you know? Oh, and when they call you ‘shrimp,’ I’m the one who defends you!”
Jerry Maguire
Oh yeah baby!
Where was I? Oh yeah, houses. The greatest symbol of “success and security” there is barring a Sunseeker 131 or a G550 (look ’em up). Also, the best investment you’ll ever make over a 25 year period. The downside? You’ll be almost dead before you can realise and enjoy the fruits of your investment, but at least you can leave it to your kids so they can unwittingly take over your wheel by getting on the housing ladder.
“But it’s always been like that hasn’t it Creasy? Ever since Humans have been around?”
No, it hasn’t always been like that and in some places, it still isn’t. I was having a busy day watching YouTube the other day and came across a video on a channel called Fearless & Far called “Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions”.
I fuckin’ hate Baboons…
In this video, the commentator introduces a Tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Hadzabe in Tanzania. There are only 1500 Hadzabe people left and their numbers are declining. Their way of life may only survive a few more generations. When asked what the most important thing in life was, this wizened badass of a Hadzabe called Sokolo, thought for about three seconds and said, “Meat, Honey, Corn Porridge” and then he added “hunting Baboons, Antelopes and Zebra”. Personally, I thought this was a bit redundant given the whole Meat is the most important thing, but I’m probably nitpicking. At this point, one bright young chap interjected that Water was pretty important too. “Quite right” replied the badass (or words to that effect). I might have added shelter to that list but I think Sokolo was a bit of a foodie who really didn’t get on with Baboons.
Now whilst I can neither Hunt nor Gather or spear a Baboon to literally save my life, there was something compelling about Sokolo’s simple assessment of what is truly important in life. I also found myself reflecting on the fact that over the years I had often found myself trying to figure out what mattered, but unlike Sokolo, whose worldview is ultimately positive despite the carnage he wreaks in the Baboon community, I have always considered what matters in the context of worst-case scenarios. A series of “What-ifs” if you will, that ultimately end up with me being homeless and destitute. What would I do? How would I survive? Where would I live?
I’m quite fond of the idea of living under a bridge. It strikes me as the sort of place that homeless people might live under. Natural shelter from the elements but not so great in an earthquake. Not much going on. Easy to build a cozy cardboard shelter against one of the concrete stanchions and very convenient if for any reason I wanted to get to the other side of whatever it was the bridge was bridging. I think I would try to find a bridge in a sunny place.
“Don’t Trolls live under bridges Creasy?”
Only the one’s where Billy Goats called Gruff cross.
As to what I would do?
“You really thinking about quittin’?”
“The Life?
“Yeah”
“Mos’ definitely”
“Ah fuck. Wachu gonna do then”
“Well, That’s what I’ve been sitting here contemplating. First, I’m gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I’m gonna walk the earth.”
“Whachu you mean, walk the earth?”
“You know, like Caine in “KUNG FU.” Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.”
Pulp Fiction
Here, fishy fishy…
There’s nothing written that says I have to stay under the same bridge. When I live under a city bridge, I’d wander about looking for coins on the floor, or lie on the ground looking for coins under vending machines. Apparently, this strategy fed my son throughout his University days. If anyone came in he would exclaim “I just dropped a quid under here” to hide his shame. If I moved to a bridge that was more suburban or rural, I might try my hand at a bit of hunting and fishing in the fields and rivers (I have watched as much Bear Grylls as the next man).
When you take all this into account, I calculate that I could probably survive on £1 a day. £1 will buy you a loaf of bread and water is free (there are loads of places you can get fresh water for free if you think about it). This is reassuring. Not because I am worried that I might suddenly be skint and homeless, but because if I wanted to be skint and homeless, I know I don’t need all of the things that I have been conditioned to “need” to survive. More interesting, was my emotional response to the idea of living that way. It made me feel happy with a big dash of precognitive relief. Why relief though? Where does that come from? It’s in the letting go. Just the process of thinking about this simpler “being” creates a sense of being in that state already. Stress falls away like chainmail after the siege. The need to compete and win and show that I have won, a need no more.
“That’s just nutso Creasy! Who would want to be skint and homeless and living under a bridge?”
It depends on how you define “skint” and how you define “homeless”.
I fuckin’ hate Sokolo…
I suspect the Hadzabe, by our standards are proper skint, but money has no purpose or meaning in their society. Now dead Baboons? Well, it goes without saying that a man with 10 dead Baboons is way wealthier than a man with say, 9 dead Baboons? All joking aside (although Sokolo doesn’t strike me as a man who jokes about Baboons), their currency would be skillsets, which when used in co-operation enable a very simple, uncomplicated, unfettered and sustainable way of life within a small and very related community. If you can hunt, great! If you can collect berries, fantastic! If you can tell stories, well who doesn’t love a good story? An individual’s worth would be less than the collective’s but a function of how many berries you could gather, how many songs you could sing and how many Baboons you could hit with a brick.
As for being homeless, how many times have you heard the phrase “Home is where the heart is”. How do you find a home in such an anonymous and heartless society? Our homeless people are not homeless because they don’t have a house, but because they can’t find their individual worth in the kind of society we have built and because kin are far away.
“Creasy, surely you can see the good in our society too though? what about the homeless shelters or the soup kitchens or the many charities that help people in need?”
When did you last go and work in a soup kitchen? When did you last offer one of your spare rooms to a homeless person or refugee? When did I? Do you know anyone who has? Sure, we’ve all dropped a dime in a charity bucket or make a donation every month to our “favourite” charity, but when did you actually directly do something for someone who is not actually related to you?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising. Really I’m not. After all, rB > C, right?
“Wassat? Say what now? Hmm?”
C’mon, you know rB > C, right? Hamilton’s equation for the evolutionary development of an altruism gene, right?
Well, there you are then. No need to explain. It’s all there in rB > C.
“No, I like totally get it Creasy, but maybe you need to clarify a bit for the others?”
Ok fine. Here is a useful wee article by Jonah Lehrer that will get everyone up to speed.
By way of summarising the article, it wasn’t really Hamilton it was this bloke called Charles Darwin. Darwin had a problem. He had described Natural Selection, or Evolution, as a cruel mistress who ruthlessly removed the weakest links in an evolutionary chain. His whole theory depended on the notion that one specimen of a species will selfishly seek to propagate its genetic code to the detriment of all others. How could altruism, therefore, exist; a selfless act of generosity from one specimen to another? The fact of the matter was that altruism was observable everywhere in the natural world across a broad swathe of species. Didn’t that stick a dagger into the heart of Darwin’s theory?
To a lesser man, maybe. Darwin simply tagged this as a paradox and moved on. Evolutionary scientists spent the next century or so trying to figure out this paradox until a pissed up chap called J. B. S. Haldane (a biologist), who when asked in a pub how far he would go to save the life of another, replied
“I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one, or to save eight cousins but not seven”
William D Hamilton
Later, and because Haldane never tried to develop the proof of his drunken theory, another chap called William Hamilton, a young graduate student of UCL, spent years doing the mathematics and in 1964 came up with rB > C . Lehrer explains:
“In other words, genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the cost (C) to the individual once relatedness (r) was taken into account. The equation confirmed the truth of Haldane’s joke: once kinship was part of the calculation, altruism could be easily explained in genetic terms.
This basically says that if you are related to me by blood, the action I will take to save your life will be directly proportional to the amount of my genetic material you have. The closer the genetic tie, the more action you can expect. Indeed, by not acting to protect you, I would be working against my most primal need to propagate my genetic code to the next generation.
Raise your hands for the Museum trip
This proof has been widely accepted in the Evolutionary Science community (now that’s a club I want to join!), as the origin of altruism, not only in humans but in other species too. It’s not kindliness or generosity, it’s simply survival of the fittest in its purest form.
No wonder then that in small tribal communities typified by the Hadzabe, we see high levels of altruism within the tribe where many families are related by blood. Collective hunting and farming and gathering make complete sense in this context. Equally, no wonder that we did nothing to arrest the genocide in Rwanda. Biologically, we didn’t and don’t give a shit, especially as there were no economic benefits for us intervening. Put another way, my Dad didn’t fight in WWII to save the Jews from the holocaust, but to prevent Gerry from marching up Whitehall and threatening the life of uncle Bernie.
I’m a symbol of success now?
The more distant the genetic relationship, the less we care. It’s our nature. It doesn’t make us bad people. It’s biology. In our globalised society where families disperse to achieve economic improvement, we have built societal structures that provide no reason to be altruistic to one another, and every reason to not give a shit about, or even talk to, our next floor neighbour in London. Altruism in this context is basically Virtue Signalling. It’s the act or pretence of showing generosity, typically through the banking system, in order to promote our social standing. A social standing that is further enhanced by increasingly extravagant shows of wealth; houses, dogs, cars, boats and planes. A social standing intended to attract a mate rather than protect the tribe. A Peacock society.
Industrialisation destroyed our rural way of life and led to urbanisation. Urbanisation dismantled the village where altruism thrived in the extended family and replaced it with the nuclear family unit and very low levels of altruism. Personal wealth and competition have replaced community sustainability and cooperation. Philanthropy pretends to be altruism, but is the domain of the super-rich and therefore a platform upon which to display wealth no matter how good the underlying intention. Globalisation, is this societal shift to the 10th power.
Conclusion?
It cannot sustain. It cannot survive. Not because I say so, but because evolutionary science is not simply saying that it’s a surprise that the altruism gene exists, but that without the action the altruism gene enables toward closely related specimens, the mechanics of evolution will not work at all, and we all become the weakest link in the chain.
Oh, and if you are wondering why you can’t stop yourself from buying that pre-wrapped-in-plastic bunch of bananas to help save the world, it’s because biologically you, like me, don’t give a shit about either the bananas or the environment and it seems biology often wins out over intellectual reason. I too buy the wrapped bananas because the supermarket app I use as I shop can’t handle unwrapped produce. I could handle it when I go to checkout, but then I would be wasting three minutes of my time that I don’t use for anything else whatsoever, weighing and bagging my unwrapped produce. So whilst intellectually I understand that the plastic will either end up in a landfill for the next 1000 years or the ocean, where it will strangle a baby seal, biologically I don’t give a shit. If I thought for one second that the plastic bag would suffocate someone in my family (including Bob), I would stop. No matter how much I try to rationally link the macro effect on the environment back to my local micro context, my biology and my societal conditioning won’t let me and so every now and again, when I’m not using the app, I buy the loose bananas and the rest of the time I don’t.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness”
Martin Luther King Jr
Martin is of course spot on. Every man, woman and child must choose, and every day we do. Every day we choose the darkness of destructive selfishness. It’s not that we are all bad people, it’s that we are too many people. We’d like to think that we are more than the sum of our biology but the evidence says differently. When you create distance between members of a broad but genetically close family unit, altruism (acting for the benefit of others) is diluted and the inverse (acting for the benefit of oneself ) gains sway.
When there were only a couple of million of us wandering around hunting and gathering, our lack of give-a-shittedness didn’t matter because a) our way of life worked in harmony with our environment b) we were naturally culled by nature via climate, disease or predation and so c) there were too few of us to make a material difference on a global scale.
Other species don’t give a shit either, but they have not industrialised, urbanised or globalised. Where they are too many it’s because we have bred them to eat, and where they are too few it’s because we have destroyed their habitats. All species, in a natural setting will display altruism to protect their genetic progression. We don’t, because too many of us aren’t in our natural setting. Humans are tribal. The vast majority of our history on this planet (about 5 milliion years or 200,000 years of “modern” man) was spent living and working in small tribes. For the past 200 hundred years we have simply dispensed with that way of life in favour of a way of life that is purportedly better but which is evidently not. We have tried to mimick the concept of tribe in companies, markets, and societal structures and have failed miserably. We have encouraged individual security over tribal or genetic security and in so doing sacrificed all that is at the core of who we are.
And that’s why if we don’t let go of the way we have chosen to live, sell our houses, go live under a bridge and hunt Baboons, we are all going to die!
7th February 19mphmphmph. What a day; an auspicious day you might say. For on that wintry Wednesday morning in Halifax, after the disappointment of three daughters, all of my mother’s dreams came true and her little “fair pink and white” (which in hindsight, has certain racist overtones), was bestowed upon the world.
I was reminded of this the other day when the first birthday card arrived from the youngest daughter suggesting that a present would be coming, but she was having an awful time trying to work out what a good present might be for someone as special as me.
“DON’T DO IT SIS! THERE’S NO NEED! I NEITHER NEED NOR WANT ANY MORE STUFF!”
She won’t listen. They never do. Next time I see her, she’ll be like
What are you lookin’ at paedo
“Here Creasy, I got you a Porsche for your birthday. remember I said I would get you something”
I don’t even like Porsches. What am I going to do with a bloody Porsche except mince about trying to pick up some young totty like I’m having a mid-life crisis? She lives on a bloody rock in the middle of the Irish sea, so whaddya expect?
I was reminded again, when the middle daughter sent what appeared to be the ideal gift because, at first glance, it appeared to be a pre-loaded crack-pipe.
“Now that’s more like it!”
….I thought.
“Just what the doctor ordered to get through this Lockdown business.”
I thought…
But no, not a crack pipe at all. In fact, it turned out to be a salt pipe. No mind-bending intoxicating highs in there methinks; not a one. You can’t imagine. It’s impossible.
“A say whatnow Creasy??”
A salt pipe. Come on everyone knows what a salt pipe is. It’s like a regular pipe (or a crack pipe), except instead of lighting a bowlful of aromatic tobacco (or crack), and allowing the complex flavours of the burning bush (crack) to swirl around your mouth (brain), you stick this thing in your gob and sit there for 20 minutes sucking down salt crystals, like a COVID patient on a ventilator.
Too soon?
Anyhoo, this thing apparently has miraculous lung cleansing properties (apparently, people who work down salt mines are amazing breathers. Who knew!), and because I’m getting old and wizened and have mild asthma, what else would you get me?
YOU LIVE IN SCOTLAND LOVE – WHAT ABOUT THE BIGGEST BOTTLE OF SINGLE MALT WHISKEY YOU CAN FIND? WHAT ABOUT THAT? THAT ALSO HAS AMAZING CURATIVE PROPERTIES! WHEN HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ME SOBER? WHEN?
“You said three daughters Creasy, what about your eldest sister?”
The eldest Sister? Nary a peep. Not a sausage. She’s proper gangsta, and like a slab of granite that one. If she had a pocket full of fucks she wouldn’t give you one.
AND THAT’S EXACTLY HOW I LIKE IT BABY!
She gets it dude! She totally gets it bra’. And because she so gets it, I completely ignore her birthday in January too, because I know that’s exactly what she wants! Isn’t it sis? I say, hehe, isn’t it?
I mean what is this whole birthday crap all about anyway! Who came up with it. I’ll bet it was the owner of one of those “would you like to come in and buy some shite” shops that sell nothing of any use whatsoever, and we all went “Oooh, that’s a great idea I’m sure little Timmy would love another plastic beaker with the words “Best little birthday boy in the world” daubed across it“.
what’s so funny about dogs?
And oh the woe; the emotional upheaval caused if you buy the wrong thing! One year, as a joke, for the youngest sister’s birthday, we themed the whole thing on dogs. The card was all dogs, her gifts were all about dogs, we may have even dressed up as dogs, I can’t remember. if we didn’t, we should have, because that would have been the icing on the cake (don’t get me started on fucking birthday cakes)! In any case, the whole thing was hilarious and made more so by the fact that we didn’t even have a dog, and she didn’t even particularly like dogs. It was completely random and therefore hysterical. So was she. In fact, she didn’t appear to see the humour in any of it! What she tearfully took away from the whole thing, was that we thought she was a dog! You know, like fugly.
Wassat sis? Too soon? Wooosa……Woooooooossssaaa.
And my wife! Sheesh my wife. Oy vey!
“You’ve got to have something Creasy. Go on, what do you want? Shall I cook for you? I’ll cook for you. I can make a biriani. What about another electric toothbrush? You have to celebrate your birthday….YOU HAVE TO CELEBRATE YOUR BIRTHDAY CREASY! WHAT DO YOU FUCKING WANT? WHY ARE YOU BEING SO SELFISH? DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT YOU SHIT. YOU THINK IF I DON’T GET YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET ME THAT LOUIS VUITTON HANDBAG IN APRIL BUT YOU ARE SO WRONG FUCKER…..SO FUCKING WRONG”
Her sister is the same, but with food…
“You gonna have some Creasy? Go on have some”
“Nah, I’m ok Bri…not really hungry”
“Go on have some Creasy it’s delicious, look have some”
“Nah that’s alright Bri, really, I’m ok”
“Don’t you like it, Creasy? It’s delicious. Look it’s delicious. Just have a little bit”
HAVE SOME, HAVE SOME, HAVE SOME, HAVE SOME”
“Look Bri, I don’t want any and if you keep asking me I’m gonna hit you in the head with an automatic boot lid…”
Wassat Bri? Too Soon?
And then there’s Gonzalez whose birthday is precisely 8 days after mine. He was even born in the same year. Every year on the 7th though, the call comes in….
“Awreet you ould bastard! See you’re still here then”
Oooh I’m so mad!
And even though HE’S the younger one, he’s getting really grumpy the older he gets. You see, he hasn’t been able to pull off the same graceful, elegant glide towards an entropic state as me. Just keeps banging on about how BREXIT has fucked up his holidays and how Boris, uniquely among politicians, tells lies. Really big ones that make you a proper cross-patch! Wooosa Peter, Wooooooossssa. You’re going to give yourself a hernia!
Mind you, he always has a joke for me. There’s always one joke and it’s always a cracker, and well, that makes my day.
Here’s one of my favourites. Hope I can remember it.
There are two really old Northern blokes with Alzheimer’s who have gone for a walk in the park at the height of summer. Let’s call them John and Pete. It’s baking and they are ancient. They both have on buttoned-up cardigans, full trench coats and flat caps and sticks to help them walk. John says to Pete…
“Ooh it’s a bit bloody ‘ot init Pete?”
“Aye, T’is that”, says Pete
“D’you know what?”, says John
“What?”, says Pete
“I’d love an ice cream”
“Oooh, that’s a crackin’ idea”, says Pete. “Tell you what, tell me what flavour you want, and I’ll go and get us one each”
“Eh? yer jokin'”, says John. “You’ll never remember what I want and then I’ll be disappointed when you don’t come back wi’ the right thing”
“No it’ll be fine” says Pete “Trust me, I’ll remember”
“Awreet” says John “just get me a vanilla, yer can’t forget that”
“Fine”, says Pete “and ooh, d’yer fancy some rasburry wi’ it?”
“Look, just forget the whole thing”, says John “You’ll never remember two things and then it’s going to ruin my day when you come back wi’ sommat I don’t want”
“It’ll be fine”, says Pete “I’ll remember, I promise. So that’s a vanilla wi’ rasburry. How about some ‘undreds and thousands?”
“Bugger off will yer Pete”, says John “this is a joke. There’s no chance you will remember 3 things. I don’t want it now. Just forget it. I wish I never brought it up in the first place”
“No listen”, says Pete “Vanilla wi’ rasburry and ‘undreds and thousands. I’ve got it you see? Hey. Hey. What about mekkin it a 99? I bloody love 99s”
“Right that’s it”, shouts John “I’ve ‘ad enough. Yer just going to mess the whole thing up and I’m going to be spittin’ feathers when you come back wi’ nowt”
“Listen, I’m tellin yer”, says Pete “I’ll remember. so it’s a Vanilla, wi’ rasburry’ ‘undreds and thousands and a 99. Stay here, I’ll be back in 5 minutes”
Off Pete goes and John sits himself down on a nearby bench. Sure enough, 5 minutes later Pete reappears and hands John a meat and potato pie.
“Oh Fer fucks sake”, says John “Where’s me chips?”
Then Pete eats the meat and pertater pie.
It’s not that I don’t like birthdays (I don’t like birthdays), or even that I don’t want to celebrate other people’s birthdays (I don’t). No, it’s deeper than that (not really). Philosophically, I am predisposed to live in the moment. The past is, well passed. The future is unknown (duh). No, I’m more of a fly-by-the-seat of my pants kinda guy (what movie is that paraphrased from – answers in the comments please), and I just can’t see why people want to celebrate the passage of time so much.
Birthdays serve only to remind us that there a cosmic clock counting down to the inevitable moment when you realise that you have dribbled your last slice of birthday cake down your chin, opened your last present (scrabbled at the wrapping with hands too weak to tear the paper while thinking “which sadistic cunt wrapped this bastard”), with your family looking on grinning “Go on Granddad open it. Go on, you’re gonna love it if you can open it”, and sucked down your last salt crystal because your lung is so feeble (the other one gave up the ghost years ago), it can’t handle microscopic sodium particles “cleansing” around down there any more.
But maybe I’m missing something? Maybe I’m being too cynical? Maybe there’s more to it than that? Maybe it presents an opportunity to show the other person that you are thinking about them, and that their existence in this world is appreciated and that they are loved by someone somewhere.
Gawd bless you love…
Maybe I should be more grateful then. I really love all the nice socks and jumpers and toothbrushes and books and pipes, so why can’t I just say a simple thank you and be on my way. Ok here goes.
I would like to publicly thank my whole family and all my friend for thinking of me, every year, on this special date and for showing that they care.
Nah, that’s all bollocks, so unless someone can resurrect Marilyn to come and sing breathily at my birthday (and even then she’d be some ghoulish-zombie-shadow of her former self), I’m of the opinion that we should abolish birthdays altogether on the grounds that they are crappola.
I’ll let you stew on that one until next time. I’m off for another suck on me salt pipe.
And I mean EVERYTHING! You, me, a leaf on a tree, an octopus, a puff of wind, the moon and stars or Bob. Especially Bob. Unbelievable, but there it all is anyway. It’s crazy! Crae, crae! .
Isn’t it? Is it just me, or do you catch yourself strolling along in a bit of nature or an urban sprawl, along an empty beach or just gawping up at the majesty of the heavens on a clear winter’s night, and just think “WOW I’m actually here, and thinking about me being here and how all this other stuff is here, and I’m here actually looking at it all. It’s unbelievable!”.
And then, one day, there it is. Maybe you were eight years old or maybe fifteen, but probably not older than that, and a whisper of a question drifts into the back of your mind, uninvited like a little grey, innocent puff of cloud….
“Hmm, just how did all this stuff get here in the first place?”.
And right there in that moment, my inquisitive little padawan, you are royally buggered…..FOREVER!
Couldn’t just let it go, could you? Couldn’t just do the ole empty-headed “Oooh thas pretty init love?”. Now you have to deal with the fallout from that harmless-looking question for at least the rest of your life, but maybe FOR ALL ETERNITY!
And it’s not in fact harmless at all, is it? In fact, it’s the single most complex question that you have ever asked, and now we all have to be here to try and deal with it, and it’s just so exhausting!
Still, no use in bitching like Trump about it is there? So in the words of Hannibal Lecter as he is about to push the Commendatore Rinaldo Pazzi out of a very ornate window in Florence, spilling his intestines all over the street and tourists below, “Okey Dokey, here we go”.
We take very little at face value, do we? If someone tells us something, we like to understand whether that thing is true or just made up, don’t we? Surely we need that?
“How do you know?”
“Do you have any evidence to support that claim?”
“Did anyone else witness it?”
“Who told you that?”
“Did you just make that up?”
Our entire judicial system depends on not taking things at face value, albeit that might not have always been true.
Villager: “She’s a Witch!”
Judge: “Is she?”
Villager: “Yes, she’s a witch”
Judge: “BURN HER!!!!”
Ok, I’m exaggerating, even then we used to apply the stringent witch test of seeing if she floated. If she did then she was clearly a witch and sent to the stake whereas if she sank, she was innocent but dead from drowning.
Whilst today, our judicial system calls for very detailed evidence to prove the guilt or innocence of a witch the accused, the corroborating evidence needed in other aspects of our society to support any given postulate, doesn’t appear to be that great. Sometimes, huge swathes of support from great numbers of people for a particular view can be garnered despite there being a complete vacuum of evidence to support that view.
I give you the 2020 US Presidential election. The strength of belief in large portions of the Trump base, that the election was rigged or fraudulent, is so strong that these people felt the need to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washinton DC in an attempt to overturn the election. They were/are prepared to start another civil war! Four people gave their lives for that belief and one police officer gave his life defending the truth. The basis for this belief? Trump said so. He said so over and over again to anyone that would listen, via every outlet that would carry his insane claims. No matter that over 80 court cases brought alleging voter fraud were summarily dismissed by various State and Federal legislatures, including the Supreme Court. No matter that no evidence of any fraudulent activity has been uncovered by anyone during or since the election. Despite the complete absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, this very large cadre of people (some 33.8m or 45% of Republican voters supported the assault on the Capitol), have simply taken it on faith that Trump is telling the truth and that everyone else is lying to them. The go-to position of everyone else in the world appears to be…
“Dumb bastards”
and whilst this is an incredibly powerful argument in the example I have given, it’s also lazy and somewhat arrogant thinking. Not all Trump voters are white supremacist, misogynistic, hardcore racist, uneducated, conspiracy toting, baseball-cap-wearing, dumb-as-dirt rednecks; it just feels that way. Some Trump supporters are black, and beyond credulity, some are women! WTF! All of these people have seen fit to put their faith in this awful travesty of a human being and his fantasies, against all reason, logic or fact.
“Come on Creasy, everyone knows they are just a bunch of dumb shit-kickers”
Hmmm. In the words of a very famous bloke from Palestine 2,021 years ago
“Let he who has not sinned, cast the first stone.”
Good old JC, he had a quip for every situation, didn’t he? We’d all like to think that we aren’t like these Trump voters but actually, none of us is really any different. We might kneel at different altars, but we kneel nonetheless.
You are wrong Creasy! I don’t like to say it because you are such a clever bloke with amazing insights and very good looking, but you are wrong about this! I am nothing like those gob-shites”
Very well, I will prove it to you, and when I have, I want you to leave me an apology in the comments….and another compliment about how good looking I am.
There are currently 7.8bn people on the planet and you are indisputably one of them.Of these, according to sociologists Arieta Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera in 2017, there are only 450-500 million atheists and agnostics worldwide. That is only 6.4% of the world population; 93.6% of the world’s population believe in some sort of deity. Billions and billions of people affiliate themselves with structured religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism and many more.
Think about that for a moment. Not one single shred of credible evidence has ever been produced that proves there is a God, and yet the vast majority of us believe in some omnipotent being(s), that created everything. For many believers, their Faith is so strong that they would happily lay down their lives for their God. They even have a word for it; martyrdom! Many already have. Isn’t that unbelievable? Yet there it is, it’s a fact. Statistically, most of you reading this Blog believe in a God of some sort (yes, both of you!), and all three of you believe in something you can’t actually prove.
Let’s take a brief look at Faith in God. There is even less available credible evidence for the existence of God than there is for Trump’s claim that he won the US election, yet the vast majority of humans still believe God exists.
The accepted “evidence” for God, is written down in books like the Bible (Old and New Testaments), the Quran, the Torah or other sacred texts, and for huge portions of the population, these texts are compelling. For these believers, words and insights such as these could only come from God, and God used his prophets, or a Messiah and his disciples, to bring us his thoughts and his commandments via the written word. These written texts may be compelling, but are they enough to create and sustain such a large body of Faith in God on their own? I don’t think so, so there must be something else.
Let’s talk about “inherited” Faith as an evidentiary source for a mo’, because in my opinion, this may be the single biggest factor for Faith in God.
A child trusts nobody more than his or her parental unit. If they say Santa Claus exists, he does. If they say the tooth fairy will come to take the tooth and leave some money under your pillow he will, especially if the parental unit makes sure of that by removing the said tooth and depositing said money whilst the innocent, but somewhat naïve, little sausage is sleeping.
Which of us has not half-eaten Santa’s Milk and Cookies on Christmas Eve to convince our little angels that Santa came? It’s little surprise then, that our children believe in these things until such time as we tell them they aren’t real. Then, there is the painful realisation that a) magic isn’t real after all and there are no Unicorns, and that b) Mummy and Daddy are lying little shit-bags. My 12-year-old daughter has only recently discovered that a Haggis is not a trumpet nosed wee beasty living in the Scottish Highlands, because I didn’t disabuse her of that belief.
In like fashion, few parents tell their children God is not real and so, he stays real until such time as the child questions that belief. Many never do. For some reason, parents draw a distinction between Santa Claus and God. One is fun, the other a serious matter involving the eternal glorification or damnation of one’s soul. My own grandmother, a strong Catholic, would “hunt” down any of her grandchildren that hadn’t been baptised and baptise them herself. She was afraid that they might die and spend eternity in purgatory because they still carried Original Sin around with them (they get forgiven this sin when they are baptised). This distinction, and certainty that God is real and serious, probably derives from the fact that nobody said he wasn’t, and because people grow up in a world where sin is also very real; each one being marked down in their eternal ledgers.
Make a queue! Time to be Judged you ‘orrid bunch of sinners!
Fear of God’s judgement and eternal damnation in the afterlife becomes a real factor in how we choose to live our lives. Conveniently, the right way to live can be found written down in the aforementioned sacred texts, and our laws tend to be largely aligned with them (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife etc). This inherited tradition and the reinforcement provided by the rituals, mysticism and ceremony of the religion they are born into, combined with the fear of God’s judgement in the afterlife, becomes a powerful dogma that successfully confirms Faith in God but also provides a powerful disincentive for anarchy in this life.
The belief in an afterlife and a judgemental (but all-loving) God, gives many people a sense of purpose too. What greater purpose than to serve God, live in the way s/he has prescribed and avoid sinning. If you do sin, and the sin is not a very big one, ten Hail Mary’s, two Our Fathers and an act of contrition will sort you out, and eternal happiness will be yours. Our ability to reason forces us at some point in our lives to ask “Why am I here, what is my purpose?“. Pleasing God and being rewarded with eternal life in paradise, provides a pretty good answer to this question.
This isn’t true for everyone though, and it would be wrong to say it was. God as creator simply doesn’t work for some, and they search for answers in other quarters. Very few, including atheists and agnostics, sit back and decide not to believe in anything though!
Typically the Faith argument falls between the Believers and those that believe Science can answer how everything got here and where everything is going to. Science is a very compelling competitor to God, not least because it starts from a different place than religion. It starts by stating upfront, that every theory that has not been definitively and empirically proved could be wrong, no matter how elegant the theory is. It also starts out from the premise that the work of Science is to disprove theories raised, not to prove that they are correct. Believers make no such compromises or allowances.
“So what does Science say about the origins of Creation then Creasy?”
If you are going to ask questions like that you really need to be prepared for the consequences. Are you? Are you ready? Because if you aren’t I don’t want to go to all the hassle of writing it all down!
Ok then, you asked for it….
Science says that everything can be explained if only we could come up with a single unified theory of everything. This single theory would bring together all of the different branches of Science like Relativity, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics etc. to definitively show where everything came from, how the universe came into being, it’s history and how everything will turn out.
“And where are we with that Theory then?”
It’s a bit of a mixed bag to be honest.
On the one hand, Science is pretty good at history and predicting where the universe is heading. For example, Science can explain the history of everything in the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to right now.
Cosmic Microwave Background
In addition, Science does not only explain the theoretical history of the Universe, but it can also point to it in the sky and show us, so we can witness it by looking back in time with our own eyes at the light from the early Universe. In 1965, two chaps called Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias inadvertently stumbled upon the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), because it was interfering with the radio receiver they were building (they subsequently won the Nobel Prize for this discovery). They couldn’t figure out what was going on and at one point, they even got out some brushes and cleaned the receiver because they thought it might be bird poop that was causing the problem.
Bird Poop? Really?
BIG BADA BOOM !
When that didn’t work, they had to think of something else. They, and subsequent observers, noted that the radiation noise they were picking up was uniform across the entire sky, and in every direction. This discovery provided definitive proof that the Big Bang happened. Had there not been a Big Bang, the temperature of the sky would be different in different parts of the sky because it would not have been causally connected at some point in the past when the Universe was much smaller. General Relativity predicts how the universe should have evolved since 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang and guess what? It has, and to a ridiculous degree.
Winter is Coming….
First Photograph of a Black Hole clearly showing Hawking Radiation
Extrapolating from that history and continuing to follow the natural implications of General Relativity, Scientist can also predict pretty well where the Universe is heading, and you’re going to need a coat because it’s going to be cold. They call this the Big Freeze. We now know that the Universe will never shrink or contract, it will keep on expanding and everything in the Universe will continue to get farther away from everything else. As it expands, the Universe will “cool” and eventually, all matter in the Universe will be consumed by black holes. These will then evaporate, and as they do Hawking Radiation will be produced (a whole bunch of massless photons). Eventually, the back holes will go “Poof” and disappear too, and all that will be left are the photons in a cold, dark, very uniform Universe.
So, pretty much the whole of science agrees on the history of the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to now and have effectively proven this history by what we can actually see. Science is also agreed on the predicted evolution of the Universe to a cold empty sea of photons as I just described. It’s just that bit at the very “beginning” and the bit right at the very “end”, that is giving everyone the Ick.
“Well of course it is Creasy, but if they would just open their eyes they would see that God is the only thing that could have set it all in motion, and Judgement day will mark the end of everything”
Whoa, steady on there. Way too early to lay down those particular cards matey. I haven’t finished yet.
So, I’ll bet that most of you out there think the Universe started with the Big Bang right?
“NO IT DIDN’T !!!”
I bet you thought that the sequence of events was:
Singularity (a bit of a mystery where this came from – leaves a bit of a crack in the door for God)
Big Bang (Start of the Universe but we don’t know what made it go bang – door open a wee bit more)
Inflation (a period of rapid exponential expansion of the Universe just after the Big Bang)
Expansion (Long and much slower expansion of the universe just after Inflation ends)
Burn baby, Burn!
Well, that’s just wrong! Where on earth did you get that idea from. Honestly, I wonder where my tax quid goes sometimes. I might as well tip my tax in the back garden and set fire to it!
The right sequence is :
Inflation (Not originating from a singularity and it occurs before the Big Bang)
Big Bang
Expansion (as per #4 above)
So, no singularity then? Now it seems like a small thing, and perhaps you are thinking that this has changed just recently but no, it’s not a small thing and apparently it changed about 40 years ago and those scatter-brain scientists didn’t bother to tell us! Apparently, the sequence we were all taught at school had a few problems that were incompatible with inflation happening after the Bob Big Bang. Moving Inflation to before the Big Bang solves these issues precisely, and better explains the Universe we currently find ourselves deployed in (for a very easy read about this and the problems solved have a read of Ethan Siegel’s article entitled “What Came First: Inflation or The Big Bang” in Forbes here).
“So is there anything else you haven’t told us that we should know about before we declare God the winner Creasy, because you still haven’t explained the origin of the Universe yet”
Well, there is this one other thing. There’s this other chap called Sir Roger Penrose (Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford), who is also having a bit of a rethink on how everything “started”. Penrose worked with Stephen Hawking on black holes and he’s a Nobel prize winner, so that’s pretty good then.
His latest theory, called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC), postulates that our Universe is just one aeon in an endless succession of aeons/Universes. It’s an alternative theory to the Big Bang without throwing out Big Bang altogether. CCC is consistent with our current view of the History of our Universe in that it stipulates that Inflation happens before the Big Bang, but instead of thinking of the Big Bang as the beginning of everything, it is more useful to think of the Big Bang as marking the end of the previous aeon. The new aeon/universe then expands and evolves directly in line with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with all matter being consumed by black holes in the latter stages of the aeon. They then evaporate leaving only massless photons behind (Hawking Radiation).
All sounds familiar so far. You still with me?
“Yes Creasy! This is fascinating”
Ok, good! Let me know if you need a fag break…
Salvadore Dali
In this late stage aeon, where we only have an ocean of massless photons, the related concepts of time, distance, big and small will lose all meaning and to all intents and purposes, the Universe “loses track” of how big it is. Due to this lack of “awareness” of its size, Penrose states that Big and Small are effectively the same thing and therefore the conditions for a new Inflationary period exists (rapid expansion of the Universe) which will then be followed by a transition to the slower expansion of the new aeon/universe of the kind we are experiencing today. This transition point is what we recognise, in our classical history of the Universe, as the Big Bang.
Nope, don’t say it. We’re not finished yet!
The Energy required to bring this Inflation and Big Slow Expansion about (much better nomenclature), is provided by the ocean of photons left over from the evaporation of the Black Holes at the end of the previous aeon. Even though photons do not have a mass, they do have energy. Hold onto this thought because it’s important.
Energy doesn’t go anywhere. The law of Conservation of Energy states that in all cases, energy comes from one store and can only transfer to another. Energy cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. All the energy present at the Big Bang is therefore still present in our Universe today. If there was an aeon previous to our aeon as Penrose suggests, then all of the energy from that aeon would be present at the end of that aeon too.
The following excerpt is from a Cornell undergraduate Sara Slater, who went on to study at Harvard as a post-graduate student and who is now a researcher at the Kavli Institute, MIT. Sara sums up how matter arises naturally from energy during the early stage of the Universe.
“In the beginning, there was not yet any matter. However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle–for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.”
HOLY SHIT! There it is! At the end of one of Penrose’s aeons there are only photons, and at the beginning of ours what do we have? Only a whole bunch of photons that haven’t decayed into particle pairs yet, init-dough?
Coincidence? Je ne pense pas mon brave!
“Hang on Creasy, now it’s you who are jumping the gun isn’t it? Is there any evidence…at all…that any of this wish-wash from Penrose could actually be true? All seems a bit far fetched to me”
What, more far fetched than a Big Bang that nobody can explain where the energy to make that Big Bang happen came from unless it was an omnipotent being you mean?
The notion of a cyclic cosmos, with no beginning and no end, that appears to be fully compliant with all the laws of the Universe and that provides the perfect ingredient at the end of an aeon to seed and power the next, sounds pretty intuitive to me.
Of course, a little physical evidence would go a long way toward making me a firm believer though.
Fortunately, Penrose claims that we can actually observe the results of this process, by identifying what he calls Hawking Points in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). He defines a Hawking Point as the signature of the Hawking Radiation caused by the evaporation of Black Holes in the previous aeon. These would appear as very precisely sized circular temperature variations in an otherwise wholly uniform CMB. Penrose and his colleagues published a paper in 2018 which states that he and his colleagues have in fact made such observations of precisely the right size, in the Plank and WMAP satellite data, with a very high degree of confidence (+99.98%). So that’s pretty good then.
You had me at “Hello” Rog!
In the interests of full disclosure and objectivity, despite these observations, many people in the Scientific community have been pretty scornful and an itsy-bit rude about this theory from Penrose, but remember, Science starts out from the point where it tries to disprove a theory. This wouldn’t be the first theory that Scientists peed on, only to discover later it was right in the end. Until there is general acceptance that there is in fact irrefutable evidence to support CCC, then it remains just another theory.
“So it MUST be God then Creasy”
Well, I can see why you might think that. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. If all these bright scientists can’t agree and prove that it wasn’t, then why not God? I get it. I don’t believe it, but I get why this becomes an option.
For the life of me though, I just can’t fathom the purpose for an absent God. I don’t understand why he can’t just come to dinner and show us that he is God. I can think of a million things I could ask him/her to do that would help me believe that s/he is God.
“Go on then, walk on water”
“Sink under the water, and stay there for a day without any mechanical breathing apparatus”
“Fly”
“Grow wings and fly”
“Take me to heaven and let me have a look around”
“Let me meet my mum and dad in Heaven”
“Help me find my GoPro in the Red Sea by parting the waters right where I lost it”
“Make the Smyths sound good in my ears”
“Reduce the population to 500m”
I could go on all day
“Make Donald Trump a good person”
“Make Jeremy Corbyn useful”
“If Jenny has three bags of sweets with 12 sweets in each bag, and Bradley has a box of 4 chocolate eclairs, and Sue has a puppy with floppy ears, how many Km have I travelled if I have 23 postage stamps and a flask of coffee?”
“How many fingers am I holding up behind my back”
Any one of these things would constitute incontrovertible proof that God was real, but s/he’s not coming to dinner is s/he because for some reason, having Faith in God is way more important than having Knowledge of God? Because of that, I just don’t know what s/he is for, so instead of “Why not God” I end up with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
God can’t just turn up, shoot enough energy into a singularity to create the Universe and then naff off for the next 13.8bn years without a by your leave. And anyway in that theory of the Universe, creation only took less than 10-36 seconds because everything after that doesn’t need a God because science can fully explain everything as a natural process. What did s/he do before that? If Penrose is right, there is no “before that” because we are in an endless cycle of aeons that needed no kick start. If the Big Bangers are right, then what has God done after that? If we are saying that God’s useful purpose lasted between time mark 0 and 10-36 seconds to set everything in motion, then, really?
Don’t we end up with Occam’s Razor? This states that all things being equal the simplest solution is generally the right one. For me, the simplest solution is that we have not yet figured out what natural process took place, but we have a bloody good theory in Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and I believe, that in due course, we will find the evidence needed to convince the rest of science and everyone else that CCC is true.
But that evidence is a pretty important missing piece, isn’t it? Angry atheists, the real anti-Religion anti-Godders like Richard Dawkins or Ricky Gervais, tend to skip on by this “how did everything get kicked off” and simply adopt a more aggressive “people who believe in God are a bit stupid and so are their religions, because there is no proof for a God” argument, without stopping along the way to provide any scientific evidence for how existence came about. They forget that Science is in the middle of a massive cosmic game of Cluedo, and the only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Colonel Sanders in the library with a candlestick!
Placing one’s faith in science today, regardless of whether it is the classical view of creation or Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, is no more justifiable than placing one’s faith in God. It’s that simple. It’s also why you should never discuss religion at the dinner table.
Something else that is simple, is that regardless of whether there is a God or not, there is no getting away from the fact that humans are spiritual beings. The spiritual experiences we have throughout our lives tend to be cherished moments. It can be as simple as watching a drop of rain slowly run down the glossy slope of a leaf, or as momentous as lying sheltered in a shallow culvert on a mountain in the middle of a blizzard.
These moments are when I feel connected to something outside of me, to the natural world around me and to the impossibly elegant feats of natural engineering like a spiders weave, or the way trees sometimes lean in toward each other when they should all be leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind. Why do they do that? Are they aware of each other? Do they need the physical and spiritual connection of another just like us? I know that observing these connections between things, emotionally and spiritually connects me to them too. I can’t explain it. I can’t prove it. I only know it’s true.
It would be very easy for me to conclude, as someone who has placed his faith in science to ultimately explain everything, that life is a fortuitous accident and that there is no grand purpose or meaning; things are the way they are because that’s the way they are. However, I have been increasingly drawn to the notion that our purpose is finding the connection to everything in the Universe, starting with the pebble in my shoe.
The Lakota people call this Wakan Tanka which is often translated as Great Spirit, but also as Great Mystery. Wakan Tanka is the sacredness or power in everything. Every grain of sand, every cloud, every star, every river and every being whether that being is a person or a mouse, a flower or a tree. I, and everything else in existence, have borrowed energy from the Universe and that energy flows through everything and between everything. Energy and Mass are equivalent, so every “thing” in existence is ultimately energy. Today that thing exists as matter, and one day as a function of entropy (the state of any system tending towards randomness), the Universe is repaid as it decays and returns to energy. In this sense, we are truly eternal because the law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Today I exist as Matter. Sometime in the future, what was me will become energy again.
Maybe it is our intuitive understanding of this flux between energy and matter, that gives rise to concepts like the soul, reincarnation, eternal life and spirituality. We have a natural tendency to anthropomorphise: “It can’t be just the way it is, it has to be more like me“. Maybe this tendency pushes us to add personality and intelligence to the energy that flows through and around us, and we call that God?
“in a gentle way, you can shake the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
I have always maintained that there is no upside to atheism. Not much to look forward to really. Hope is what keeps us going, isn’t it? Isn’t it comforting and hopeful to believe that we are eternal and go on after our lives have finished? For me, the knowledge that everything I am, and everything I have ever been will persist, is comforting, but I choose to believe that persistence is not a soul in the religious sense but rather the conversion of the matter that makes up me, into the energy borrowed from the Universe. Everything I was, gets to be part of the future and one day in that future, some of the energy that was me might be lent to another Mozart or another Gandhi or another Georgy Best, on some distant planet in another galaxy, or even in the next aeon.
The worst of all lives is a life without hope. A life without belief in something leads to a life without hope. So, whether you believe in God, Science, the Great Spirit or the leprechaun at the bottom of your garden, nobody can prove you are wrong (but that last one is ridiculous because everyone knows leprechauns live at the end of Rainbowsto guard the gold). So I say ignore the sceptics and those who would ridicule your own particular brand of Faith because, in the end, these folks tend to be a bunch of smug pseudo-intellectual wankers when you get right down to it. So, give to other Faiths the same respect you would like from them. Keep an open mind. Keep hope alive and keep the Faith.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..
Charlie Chaplin – Final speech from The Great Dictator
Which brings me nicely to Golf Clubs.
I love Golf, always have. Me and my mate Pete (yes the same one that ate my pies in Shouldn’t We all be Northerners), used to spend entire days on our local Golf course, a gorgeous little nine-holer in Rishton Lancs. We would set off in the morning, and just keep going around and around until we were hitting the ball into the dusk. You wouldn’t so much see your ball land as intuit the flight of the ball from the feeling on the clubhead, and then you’d walk the resulting line of the shot to hopefully find your ball somewhere out there in the dark.
We played enough, that we were both members. Pete’s dad Joe, a Spaniard, was a full member and was a regular player. You could generally tell his whereabouts on the course from the clouds of pipe-smoke that he left in his wake like some 19th-century steam train forging its way through the Northern countryside. That man had the slowest backswing I have ever seen though. By the time he had completed his backswing, you could have polished off two bacon-buts and a brew. His shot was generally followed immediately by the words
“Ach ach ah Caramaba, ach, ach, Madre mia vaya con Dios”
or
“Ach, ach, ach…bluddy bal…ach ach, Sevé would, ach ach, never have hit a bluddy shot like that”
or he might break into song…
“Ach, ach….like a breedge under troubled waters….ach, ach…”
“Ach” was Joe’s all-purpose filler. It was used in the same way as a rest is used in music or a half-halt in riding. It slowed things down whilst he picked the exactly correct phrase to convey his meaning. It appeared many times in every sentence. You got used to it. It made you a better person. More patient.
When I was a very young man I worked for a period as an apprentice mechanic at Joe’s garage (he owned a garage in Great Harwood). Joe took apprenticeship and learning seriously. You couldn’t just come in and do your hours and then go home. Joe would give out homework. On one occasion the homework was to learn by heart how the internal combustion engine worked and what the major components were in this process.
About a week after he gave out this homework, I had a question for Joe about this process. When I got into work, myself and Mario (the oldest young man I ever met), went in to the office to ask Joe this question.
“What’s the torque you should apply when tightening spark plugs Joe?”
…and then we waited. While we waited, this happened.
Ach, ach, ach….ach, ach”
Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out his leather tobacco pouch, his old metallic “mechanichy” looking pipe with a knobbled wooden bowl, and a set of keys.
Ach, ach….ach,ach”
Using one of the keys, he painstakingly and precisely scraped inside the bowl of the pipe to loosen the charcoal from his last smoke. It was a practised unthinking motion, and it filled another minute while we waited for the answer.
“Ach, ach, ach….”
He stretched the arm holding the pipe away from him and squinted so he could examine the pipe, and then scraped one more time to clear out the last remnants of the scorched tobacco before depositing the keys back whence they came.
“Ach, ach, ach”
A good 5 minutes had passed by now and unconsciously, we had all leant in toward Joe like bamboo in the wind, hardly breathing, waiting for the answer. Between work-hardened thumb and forefinger, Joe extracted a knob of tobacco big enough to fill the bowl of the pipe and pushed it in. He then reached into his oil-shiny, blue overall pocket again, producing a yellow box of Swan Vesta matches, and removed one match. He pulled his chin tightly into his chest and looked down at the pipe. Gently, he packed the tobacco deeper into the bowl using the square end of the match and part of his middle finger.
This was surely the moment we had been waiting for. His eyes turned up toward the office ceiling as if the answer to our question was somehow invisibly inscribed there. He struck the match against the coarse side of the match-box. His pipe and the box of Swan Vestas in his left hand and the lit match in his right, Joe brought the pipe up to his lips and the burning match above the bowl of the pipe where, for what seemed an eternity, he inexplicably hovered.
The air was still. Nobody was breathing now. Every eye in the room was focused intently on the flame as it crept down the length of the match toward Joe’s fingers. If the flame touched Joe’s fingers, the moment would be over and the question would be lost in time. It must be burning his fingers now. So close. So, so close. As the flame began to burn his fingers, Joe shook the match, extinguishing the flame and said…
“Ach, ach…ach”
…before taking out and lighting another match. Our incredulous eyes followed the minutiae of every movement but this time, he hesitated for only a second before dipping the lit head of the match close to the tobacco whereupon he commenced a deep sucking on the pipe. He drew the combustible mixture of heat and oxygen down into the tobacco time and time again; each inward bellow-like breath encouraging the tobacco to take. He wasn’t lighting a pipe, he was performing a ceremony and we were hypnotised by it.
Joe’s head had disappeared. For every inward breath, there was a breath out and with each outward breath, a cloud of tobacco smoke would pour out of the side of his mouth until his head was literally invisible. The pipe was finally lit. The complex smell of pipe tobacco filled the little office and to this day, if I ever catch a whiff, I am back in that office again.
Joe took a pull on his pipe and inhaled the smoke. That doesn’t do justice to it; not at all. Joe sucked on his pipe as if it was the last breath of oxygen in a scuba tank, and he was one hundred and fifty meters down with an anchor chained to his ankle. Having pulled on the pipe, his inhale of its product was like a blue whale getting ready to dive. Then he held it. FOREVER!
We held our breath too. After the end of Time, but what was in reality only forty-five seconds, Joe exhaled. That doesn’t do justice to it either; it really doesn’t. Joe’s mouth opened and in one endless exhale, all the smoke from all the wars ever fought, and every Blackburn chimney that ever blackened the Northern skies, and all the dark clouds of retching smoke that were ever vomited from the sulfuric fires of Hades poured forth. It was never going to end. The look on our faces had turned from expectant frustration to awed horror. Maybe this was hell. Maybe that was what hell was; endless waiting for answers to questions that would never be answered!
If Joe had emerged from the smoke sporting horns, a pitchfork and a pointy tail, NONE of us would have been surprised! When the smoke finally did begin to clear, Joe blinked twice, and with tears streaming down his face, said…
“Ach, ach, ach……I dunno”
EH?
WASSAT?
Anyhoo, that’s by the by and a tiny tad off topic.
Rishton Golf Club was years ahead of the times. Even as a small child I can still remember that we had women members. Not only were they members, but they were allowed out on the course every now and then too! To play golf! They even had their own little room at the end of the Club House with a portable heater. Here, they would gather for a glass of sherry and a good gossip about Perry Como, while knitting golf pullovers for their enlightened husbands who at that moment were sinking pints and talking serious business in the cosy glow of the men’s bar next door.
If you think about it, it was a stroke of genius to let women be members. This way, the menfolk could retire to the 19th green (that’s what we golfers call the bar….hehe), and not have to worry about trying to get behind the steering wheel when he was drunk later in the evening. The little woman would be soberly waiting for her man to wobble out of the clubhouse so she could prop-him up and help him to the car. Once there she would pour him into the driver’s seat before climbing into the seatbelt-less passenger seat.
“Why didn’t the women just drive home Creasy? Surely that would have been safer?
Lol! hehe….hahahahahahah…
Oh God, I can’t breathe….hehe…hehe. That’s good, oh dear…hehe. You’ll be suggesting they should all go out and vote, or go to work next….hehe
hehe…hehe….ahem
No seriously, because it’s obviously a very serious matter. You can’t just go about letting women operate dangerous machinery. Why do you think there are no women drivers in F1? Well, for one thing, there is no central mirror in an F1 car so how would they do their makeup? Also, could you imagine trying to drive with a drunken lech in the passenger seat? No, much better, safer and prettier in the ole passenger seat.
Thank goodness all that has changed now! Only last year (2019) Muirfield’s (male) members all voted to allow women to become members. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that the R&A banned them from hosting the Open and them losing the hefty revenues therefrom, when the membership turned down women members in 2016. I’m telling you, the world’s a changed place.
I love golf. I do. It’s actually the best game on the planet. It is challenging (try a round at Southerness in winter if you don’t believe me), precise, rewarding and yet the most frustrating and heart attack inducing pastime of all time. It’s a game you can play on your own, or with a group of people, in amazing natural settings and is usually the prologue to a great day. I would recommend golf to everyone.
It’s the “members” who play the game I can’t stand. A more egotistical, mealy-mouthed, misogynistic, snobby-incompetent-middle-managerish, little Hitler group of Jaguar driving, bureaucratic, committee-sitting no-hopers you will never find.
And this brings me to the throbbing little nub of this story.
Remember the lockdown back in the Summer? Course you do. When everything closed down and everything went quiet? I think many of us will remember that time as a time of renewal, not just as a time when a killer pandemic raged across the world. It felt like the world was taking a break from us.
Well, during that time, one of my favourite things to do was to go out with my Wife, my Daughter and our dog Bob. Bob is the wee black smudge in the picture opposite darting off toward that little flat patch of grass below that amazing sunset. That’s the 12th green of our local golf course. I think I mentioned in Shouldn’t We Listen, that this golf course is just across the fields opposite our house and through a narrow, but beautiful strip of woods beyond the fields.
During the lockdown, the golf courses closed. A little at a time, some of us started poking our noses out beyond the woods and looking cautiously up and down the fairways of this golf course like the apes in 2001 approaching the monolith for the first time.
Gradually, as we realised the there was no threat present, we became more confident and stepped out from the woods into the rough (You have to imagine the theme music from 2001 about now “dah, dah…daaaahh……Tadahh! Dum, dum, dum, dum……dah, dah….daaaaaaah……….TADAAAAGH!”)
Before you know it we are striding up the middle of the fairways, laughing children scurrying about as if they have just landed in a strange new paradise, and yapping dogs with smiley faces chasing balls! It was a happy time! A time without worry or stress! A time of FREEDOM!
“Is that a golf club in your hand or are you just pleased to see me?”
My son TJ, made light paintings with my daughter Lu for his End of Year Show at Lancaster University. The one below was made on the rear side of a pretty nasty little sand trap.
It was never a crowd of people. Just a few people in the know who had found their way across the forbidden zone and happened across the natural, albeit perfectly mown wilderness, that lay beyond. There were a few plonkers, there always are. A few kids riding around on their bikes. A few teenagers down on the 9th having a few beers and a bit of a fumble on a summer evening, but nothing outrageous and no damage being done. No vandalism. I walked the length and breadth of that course during the Lockdown, and it was as pristine on the day the course opened again, as it had been on the day it closed.
The lockdown ended.
Soon, ageing tartan-clad hackers were once again hobbling up and down causing more damage in a single round of golf than any of the lockdown ramblers, dog walkers and glue sniffers had in four months. We all recognised that the good times were over and that we could no longer just wander around the golf course freely anymore. We confined ourselves to the edge of the treeline like trolls in the shadows.
I am very nonplussed!
One morning a couple of months later, I came to the field to walk Bob like normal and found myself confused, horrified and outraged all at the same time. Bob was nonplussed too!
The opening to our field was barred! The field we had been walking in for the last 12 years! Mine and Bobby’s field! Well he’s only two and a half but I had been walking there for 12 years. A silver gate had been erected with chains and padlocks. It was almost as if whoever put this gate up didn’t want people entering the field!
“Not a problem”
…says I. I’ll just walk down the path to the next gate and go in there.
“WTF?”
I exclaim at the next gate, which had now been adorned with a brand new heavy-duty padlock which is also clearly locked! No flies on me, I determine to follow this thread of clues to its ultimate end, because something was definitely going on here that was different to the day before.
Other equally confused ramblers from the community were stumbling about bumping into the gates wondering how to gain entrance to the field to walk their querulous hounds, who were now hopping about, yawning stressfully because they needed to take a dump in the farmer’s field.
“I know, I’ll bypass the gates by walking up the path through the woods that border the Golf Course, and I will be able to get into the field at the top”
Like the Fox.
I head down and walk into the woods, and find the path that runs the length of the wood alongside the golf course and the field. After about 100 yards the path cuts in toward the golf course. Bob is leaping and bounding through the undergrowth ahead of me. The squirrels are out. I smile. I love to see him gambling through the undergrowth like this.
Suddenly Bob stops. Like a statue, he is looking straight ahead with one paw curled under him, hanging in the air. A low growl is rumbling in his chest
“What is it Bobzu?”
I whisper. Sinking to one knee next to Bob, I lay a calming hand on his back and through squinted eyes I peer through the trees, silently trying to spot what he has seen. Maybe a deer? I’ve seen them down here before. A Rabbit? millions of ’em around here. It can’t be though. If it was a bunny or a deer Bob would have been off after them in a flash. He’s a lethal hunter after all.
As my breathing settles, I think I spy something in amongst the trees.
“What is that Bob?”
“Grrrrrr”
Whatever it is, he hasn’t seen before. Rising to a low crouch, I creep forward slowly with Bob at my side, low to the ground like he is stalking prey. Step by step we move together, like sha-A-dows amongst the trees until…
“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKIN’ KIDDIN’ ME!”
It can’t be. Really? REALLY? It has to be a joke of some kind. Who would do such a thing? But there it is. It’s as real as the nose on Bob’s face and as permanent as the pyramids.
There in front of us is the unimaginable; the unthinkable. So new it was still gleaming. British racing green so that it would camouflage with the trees, and because it gave it a military effect. A green, metallic, threatening monstrosity that cut through the forest like an axe. My heart sank and I fell to my knees in front of it and held my head in my hands. I’m not too proud to admit that a single tear made it’s way down my handsome face, getting stuck in the designer stubble on my square chin.
The Golf Club had only gone and erected a fence along the entirety of its western border. Not an ordinary fence either. This fence would not look out of place in Berlin or Palestine. I’d include the border between the US and Mexico but, honestly what a waste of time. That “non-fence” is way less impressive than this thing. If this thing was along the border of the US and Mexico, the Mexicans would take one look and say
“Oooooh….thees senor Trump must be a mighty and eeempressive hombre…I not heven gonna try to cross theees huge eerecshon”
No, Trumps erections are way, way….way, less impressive than this.
The top of the fence was jagged and sharp. Not one spike mind, three spikes per pole, two of which were bent at angles to inflict the greatest injury should a peasant member of the community attempt to climb over. This thing must have emptied the club coffers. I reckon there is a good £50,000 – £75,000 of fencing here.
But here’s the thing. The thing that gets in your craw and just chews away until you ain’t got no craw leyft Peggy-Sue.
Why had they built the fence?
“I dunno Creasy, why?”
It was rhetorical. You don’t have to try and answer every question I pose. I’ll tell you why they didn’t build this fence first though. They didn’t build it to keep us out. If they had, it was an exercise in futility.
Firstly, there are a hundred different ways to get on that course and the fence doesn’t even go all the way around the course, just through this lovely little copse. So, in fact, you just have to walk to the end of the fence and then walk around it to be on the golf course, Maginot line style…except the golf course is Nazi Germany and we are the allies going back around the Maginot line to beat the Germans…….reverse like?
Anyway secondly, there is a public pathway that goes through the golf course which means that they had no choice but to make a gate in the fence that is open 24 hours a day so that we, the peasants people, can ignore the fence entirely and walk across, and all over, the course. After 6:00 pm at night and before 7:00 am in the morning, I can tell you for a fact that there is nobody around, so you can have your Bobbies gamble all over the place without leads and without interruption until you see the first pensioner golfer wobbling from rough to rough toward you.
So why go to all the trouble of destroying this unspoiled little woods then?
Because, it’s a long, green, spiky and spiteful message and the message says…
“We spend five thousand quid a year to be able to exclusively walk about on this grass, tearing up the turf with entirely the wrong club for the shot, and if you think we are going to stand by and do nothing while you bloody plebs turn it into a ramblers club or a place for your bloody dogs to take a dump every morning, you’ve got another thing coming”
And the “other thing coming” was the spiteful fence. Designed only to ruin a good walk, ironically what golfers say about a round of golf. Well, Mr Captain, I’m here to tell you that a) the foxes and the badgers use the bathroom way earlier than us and b) Bobby wouldn’t lower himself to take a dump on your fairways (although I am trying to train him to take one on, and through, your fence).
Fences don’t last though. Everyone knows that. No matter how tall or how strong you build them, eventually they come tumbling down. Walking through the woods, I noticed that all the trees along both sides of the fence bend inward toward the fence. This is unusual as the trees would normally bend according to the prevailing wind. It’s as if they have already started their offensive against this gaping wound. Imagine our glee when we came across one large tree that had already fallen and crushed a section of the fence. Right next to it was another tree that was only inches from the top of the fence. One good puff during the winter and I reckon that will come down too, crushing the fence low enough for the combined, and by now rabid, ranks of ramblers and dog walkers to storm the course like the zombies in World War Z only stopping to call…
“Come along Bobby…Walkies…Poo poos”
….over their undead shoulders as they tear down this edifice to pride and middle class dumb-shitted-ness
This fence is a microcosmic metaphor for humanity’s world view. Everything is ours. Nature always comes second. Poorer is lesser. Wealthier always wins. Sharing doesn’t work. It’s time humanity woke up to the fact that we are temporal whilst nature is eternal.
Sharing that Golf Course during the lockdown, was an unwitting act of kindness to the community. Peaceful morning and evening walks through a tranquil green setting, was a source of comfort when everything else in the world was worrying or upsetting. The community gave it back in the same condition it found it and went back to walking in the nearby fields when the lockdown finished. In a single act of spiteful, petty-minded revenge and pride, the Golf club reminded us that actually nothing had changed. We could still expect and rely upon the dribbling colostomy bags who make up the membership of institutions like golf clubs, to convene their horrid little committees to consider how best to dole out their little portions of incivility and misery.
I curse their course. I hope a ninety foot sink hole opens up on their 18th green so it looks like a building site. I hope an army of Irish travellers take up residence on the 3rd fairway (then you’ll see what taking a dump on a fairway really means). I hope Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace organise a protest by thousands of tree-huggers to do a 4th fairway sit-in until the fence is taken down and the woods returned to their natural state.
Did you press the button? Go on press it. You know you want to. Press it. PRESS THE BUTTON!
Now, having pressed the button (did you?), I suppose you’re sitting there thinking,
“Well, that’s a bit of a cliché Creasy, not sure what all those Northern folk did to deserve that. Oughtn’t we be a little more woke than that?”
It might be. A cliché I mean. The fact that it’s a cliché invented by everyone who thinks it’s cool to use words like “cliché” (Translation for Northerners (TfN): “Cliché“: Sommat southern bastards come airt wi’), doesn’t make it any less true, or indeed a bad thing. No, I’m here to promote the flat cap, a ferret in your trousers, a frying pan full of black pudding and a pint of bitter t’neet and every neet (Translation for Southerners (TfS): “t’neet and every neet”: Every night), as the only moral alternative to the many ills of today’s society.
L S Lowry – Industrial Landscape
I grew up in a small Lancashire village called Rishton on the edge of the western Pennine moors, a few miles from Blackburn; an old mill town. The mills were long gone when I was a kid, albeit the tall chimneys remained like something out of a Lowry landscape. The major industries were farming, Steel Stock and making bombs at the local Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF).
My memories of growing up there are fond ones. We weren’t poor or anything. We lived in a nice house in a nice street and my best mate Pete, lived two doors down from me in a house called Casa Mia (Translation for Everyone (TfE): “Casa Mia”: My House). His dad, Joe, was Spanish and had come to England as a Franco refugee. He was from Bilbao in the northern Basque region of Spain, and little bits here and there suggested that his family might have been very sympathetic supporters of the Basque Nationalist Party, which later became ETA. Apparently, Pete’s Granddad used to hide their rifles under his floorboards.
Our street was quiet enough that me and Pete, with some other lads from the street, could have a kick about without any fear of being run over by a car. On our bikes, we could be in the countryside in five minutes or ‘Arrod in ten (TfS: “‘Arrod”: Great Harwood not Harrod’s).
At the age of 5 years, I was wandering around Rishton on my own or with Pete. Nipping down to the toffee shop (TfS: Confectionary retailer), down the backs (TfS: roughly cobbled road behind terraced houses with garages and whatnot), to get to the “wreck”. For my entire childhood, I could not work out why this big field with a footy pitch, swings and child-friendly, solid steel roundabouts was called the “wreck”. As far as we were concerned, it was in pretty good nick. It was only later in life when I moved to the South and heard the word “Recreation” in everyday parlance, that I finally put two and two together (TfN: Recreation: Sommat southern bastards come airt wi’).
We knew everyone and everyone knew us. Not just on our street, but pretty much the whole village. That “knowing” was the stringy glue that bound Rishtoner’s together as a community. Well, that and Nelly’s.
Nelly’s was the best chippy. It’s not there now; I think it became a Chinese takeaway, but back in my day it was the best chippy.
“Best chippy where Creasy?”
Everywhere. It couldn’t be matched. The only one that came close, was the chippy in Gretna Green we would stop at on our way to Scotland for our Easter and Summer holidays, but it wasn’t really close. Nelly’s was #1 and #2 was a very long way away. The food was great at Nelly’s, no question about it, but it was so much more than that.
First of all, there was the location. It was right across the road from the Walmsley Arms pub. Now the Walmsley was a proper Northern pub, and by that I mean the establishment itself had no redeeming features whatsoever. Southerner’s would call it a “shithole” (TfN Shithole:A pub that dun’t sell scampi or ‘ave a beer gerden wi’ slides an’ swings an’ that). The Walmsley makes the Rovers in Corrie look like an Alaine Ducasse bistro (TfN Alaine Ducasse: Southern bastard).
Upon entering the Walmsley, which was usually the same minute it opened, you were immediately presented with a key decision
“Right room or left room?”
This decision was made all the more difficult because there was essentially no difference at all between the right room, or the left. Both rooms were bare. Pictureless walls, laminate-top tables, basic chairs, against-the-wall leatherette padded benches and threadbare red carpets with a barely discernible pattern. Personally, I would recommend the left room because it had a window and there was more natural light during the daytime (UPDATE: I recently passed the Walmsley, and whilst the establishment is clearly still open, the window is now boarded upso both rooms will be equally bleak now).
Me and Pete did our apprenticeship just up the road from the Walmsley between the ages of ten and sixteen. Every few days, we would go to Nelly’s and order our usuals: “Meat an’ p’tator pie chips an’ gravy please Nelly” for me, and Pete, who due to his Spanish heritage had a much more adventurous palette than me, would order “Cheese an’ onion pie an’ chips please Nelly“.
We would retire to the doorstep of a little shop about 5 doors up from the Walmsley and settle down to our meal. Obviously, we ate the chips first. Pete would reach over and dip his chips in my gravy. We would eat in silence except for the occasional “Awreet mate” (TfS: Good Evening) thrown out to someone walking past with their own paper bundles of steaming Nelly goodness. Once the chips had been dealt with, you were full, but we would press on regardless. I would get started on my “Meat and p’tater pie” and Pete would dive into my “Meat and p’tator pie”.
“You mean his “Cheese an’ onion pie” don’t you Creasy”
Well spotted my eagle-eyed padawan, and no I don’t!
Pete would tuck into MY pie, and the last traces of the gravy, with only the odd “S’a fuckin’ good pie is that mate“. At first, I didn’t care. It’s what mates did. You shared your pie. And it wasn’t really the fact that he was eating my pie that bothered me. No, it was the unspoken question of the uneaten Cheese and Onion pie that really got under my skin, but I wasn’t going to ask, and for years we went through this ritual with that question hanging there between us like the aroma of my thick brown gravy. Each time though, it got just a little bit more irritating until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I bellowed
“WHY T’ FUCK D’YER NEVER EAT YER OWN FUCKIN’ PIE PETE?”
He looked at me like I was stupid and said
“I don’t like Cheese an’ onion pie”
and unfathomably, that’s where we left it.
Just for the record, he didn’t like Chicken Vindaloo either, but he would also order that every Friday night after we had had a skinful at the Vulcan in Blackburn.
“Oh, Ishmal! Oi Ishmal! Listen. Last week curry very good. This week, too fuckin’ ‘ot!”
I’m pretty sure the waiter’s name wasn’t “Ishmal”.
Nelly’s was much more than the village chippy; it was an epicentre. That thing around which, much of the village’s going’s on would go on. As much a source of cultural nourishment as physical. A vault of memories of a place where “community” wasn’t something you had to go out and start volunteer groups to create, but one where it was simply how you lived and required no thought.
“I’ll meet yer at Nelly’s then…”
“I’ll just ‘ave a quick ‘n at t’Walmsley and then ‘oer t’ Nelly’s fer tea”
“I’m off t’ Co-op next t’ Nelly’s”
“Where will I meet yer?” “I’ll be at t’ doorstep near Nelly’s”
Note to Southerners: I’m not translating all of that, you should be up to speed by now
“You’re being a bit nostalgic aren’t you Creasy?”
I suppose I am. I suppose thinking back to a time and a place where knowing the folk around you and them knowing you, and knowing that when the chips were down they would be standing right next to you tucking into your “Meat an’d p’tater pie”, is nostalgic. But it wasn’t really that long ago. Not really. And it’s not just that Northerners are better than Southerners. Even though that’s unarguably true, it’s more than that. It’s the location they live in too. Harsher, steeper, colder and closing people together in smaller, more spread out communities. Less rich. Less “automatic” and more manual. Less get a man in to do it and more “I’ll sortthat our fer yer“, knowing that sometime soon you might sort something out “fer ‘im“.
I miss the North and have a deep yearning for its way of life, it’s people and their values. I miss the easy thirty-second conversations about any old crap, the taking the piss and the humour that really doesn’t belong because people shouldn’t have such a great sense of humour when things are so much harder.
I try to hold on to my Northernness but every now and again, I hear myself say “Shall I get you some Sushi for lunch darling” to my twelve-year-old daughter, and I think…
“that’s sommat a Southern bastard would come airt wi’!”
“I tried to discover, in the rumour of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
Gustave Flaubert
I went out with Bob for a walk a while ago. We’re lucky, we have fields right across from the house that we can walk in for ages. I walked to my favourite spot, raised and where I can feel the sun on my face, and from where I can see right across the fields. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and listened. Only this time, the sounds I was unconsciously expecting to hear weren’t there.
I lived in London for 23 years before I managed to escape to, well just outside London actually. I’m outside the M25 though, and that’s like being on Mars to a Londoner, which I’m not but my wife is. I’m a Northerner who grew up in the foothills of the Pennines in Lancashire. I crave green and solitude and silence.
Actually, at first, I escaped to Oxfordshire, which is probably one of the most beautiful counties in England; all green rolling hills and stone cottages. The village I lived in was fifty miles from London, had 5 houses and a pub and felt like it was five hundred miles away from anywhere. There were fields right outside the door there too; with horses. The house was a 17th Century thatch-roof stone cottage and honestly, not much had changed in this hamlet since.
In the summer, the cottage was cool and we could open the front and back doors at the same time to create a low “tunnel” through the house to the back garden, where there was a wishing well and an apple orchard. In this configuration, the house would air-condition itself with cool breezes. The internal stone walls were about two feet thick, so in winter, the house also kept itself warm.
“C’mon Creasy, you’re shittin’ me!”
No, not really. It was picture perfect and could easily have been lifted from the pages of The Hobbit. Just to give this some credence, Tolkien based the Shire and Hobbiton, on the landscapes and villages of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire where he grew up.
Anyway, as I mentioned, my wife was a Londoner (I don’t think she can claim that status anymore), and whilst she gave it her best shot in Oxfordshire, we eventually had to move back closer to London because she was going nutso living out in the sticks. My only condition was that it had to be outside the M25 (mental barrier), and have a good-sized garden that the kids could have a kick-about in. Actually, I later banned all “kicking-about” because as the boys got bigger, and could kick the ball with greater and greater force, our hedges started to look like they had been at Trafalgar.
Our new place was just the ticket, big enough with a good-sized garden and about 5 miles outside the M25. Tick. Where do we sign? Sorted. On top of the base requirements, it had the additional benefit of having the large aforementioned fields in front of it, which then backed onto woods, which in turn backed onto a golf course, through which there ran a public pathway. Ok, I could do this. This would do nicely. Not as idyllic as where we were and probably not going to run into Gandalf anytime soon, but good enough. Nice. Suburban.
We even lived near the “Old Town”, an area, which as far as I can tell, serves no useful purpose whatsoever. There are more millinery, bridal, art, fancy kitchen and antique shops than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and restaurants. Lots of restaurants…..and gastro pubs. Not one butcher or baker or candlestick maker, but there is a clock shop.
There was one more thing that our new home had that the place in Oxfordshire didn’t: white noise. If you live or have ever lived in a city, you will know what I mean. No matter what time of the day or night, there is always background noise. Ever turning tyres on tarmac roads, engine whine, pub-chatter, sirens, the metal on metal sound of the tube and overground, approaching aircraft and pipping horns, all amalgamating and blending like cake dough, to create an ever-present hum that either your ears learn to tune out, or you leave behind and go live in the Shire. Our new home had this sound. Not as bad as London, but there. Mainly, it originates from the motorway a couple of miles away. This road connects our town to London and each morning, and every night, the traffic from our town amplifies the noise as rush-hour kicks in, and lines of cars head toward or return from London, carrying their bleary-eyed occupants.
On this day in late March 2020 though, standing in a field with my eyes closed and my face pointed toward the setting sun, that sound had stopped. The only sounds I could hear were the sounds of the field. The odd bird, the barley rustling or Bob snuffling about near the hedgerow looking for rabbits. All else was still. All else was silent. It was rush-hour.
The sense of relief was palpable and I felt giddy and calmed at the same time. The last time I had felt this silence was the last time I stood on a beach at my sister’s house in Scotland on a still day, yet here I was, twenty-five miles from London, and it was so quiet I could have been on the moon. Everywhere was like this. The noise had stopped everywhere!
My first thought was
“I hope it stays like this for always”
But right then, as soon as I’d had the thought, I knew it wouldn’t stay like this. This strange time we were living in, that had thrown families together or torn them apart was temporary, and it would end. We would make sure it did, and when it did, so too the silence. That realisation hit me, and for a moment I was sad. Just for a moment mind, because it was silent now, so I would cherish this time, despite the quiet turmoil going on everywhere.
My wife had to work from home. My 11-year-old daughter started virtual school. She walked out of proper school on Friday and started virtual school on Monday, and it was like she had been doing it all her life. The school had performed miracles to get the online teaching environment in place, and the students trained, in time.
My son came home from University for Easter two weeks early. It’s his final year and he won’t go back now. No end of year parties, tearful goodbyes or final emotional pub-crawls around Lancaster. He’s been studying Fine Art, and his End of Year show will be online now instead of his first real show. His graduation has been pushed back to December instead of the Summer, and his clothes and belongings are still up in his now empty digs. We’ll have to go up, empty his studio and collect everything when the noise starts.
I have phoned, texted, FaceTimed, Teamed, WhatsApped or emailed EVERYONE in my family. Many times! Sometimes for hours on end. This has been a time of re-connection for me, and I suspect for all of them too, both with me and with each other. It is so easy to lose that connection with the racing pace of our society where time, time, time is the elusive commodity. Will I lose that connection again when the quiet stops? I hope not. I have come to realise just how vital and important that connection is to me, and what an amazing family I am part of.
For a short time, I learned how to use Twitter. I still think it is the single worst application ever designed. It’s counter-intuitive and irritating, with conventions that make no sense whatsoever, and yet it has been a connection with “old-life”. Twitter is full of noise. It is quintessentially a meme for the modern world, capturing all the chaos, all the crazies, all the genius, the humour and all the now, now, now of our kind. I can only be there for a short while before I start feeling the need to rant at someone, so I usually stop then, but not always.
The more I use it, the worse a person I become. The more I use it the more I am re-engaged with the competition of ideas that gets in the way of individual reflection. Good, bad, genius, crazy or just plain dumb ideas. Noise. It’s deafening, and whilst ordinarily, I would just tune it out like I do the white noise, in this quiet, temporary time, I can’t. Now, because I know this time will be fleeting, it feels like an immense and extraordinary intrusion, unwelcome and unbidden. So, I’ve stopped using Twitter. I don’t want to be distracted from this time. I want to bathe in isolation and listen.
“Listen to what Creasy?”
I feel like there is an important harmonic in the world. It’s probably always been there but it hasn’t been able to get through all our static. If you stand still now though, in a field or a forest or on a quiet shore, close your eyes and tune in, I bet you can hear it. It’s just a whisper, but I bet you can feel it too. Surely it’s worth a try? Maybe the more of us listening, the louder it will be. Maybe our listening amplifies the harmonic until we are all in tune with it?
I think there is a simple but important message hidden there.
“stop. listen.”
I think this harmonic lives inside all of us. It’s internal, not external and of course, HAS always been there. The barely audible voice saying “no, not that”. The almost imperceptible vibration, deep down, that starts when we round a corner in the road and the unexpected majesty of nature takes our breath away, and the voice says “yes, this”. Then there are the moments when the vibration is not a tremor but a rumble that shakes us at our very core and the voice, not a whisper now, but a harmonic choir of loss or love or pain or joy that cannot be ignored, and that must be shared, lest it overwhelms us.
This time we are in could have been such a moment, but it won’t be. It’s already over. It passed and we missed it. We all felt it though, let’s not pretend we didn’t.
When we learned carbon emissions around the world had tumbled
“yes, this”.
When the dirt in the city air fell like a curtain and we could see them clearly
“yes, this”.
When we realised we hadn’t filled the car for 6 weeks
“yes. this”
When we collectively sent our light to the one’s who had lost the most, and when all they could hear was “please? not this”, even then
“yes, this”
When the trees stopped falling and the earth stopped screaming, and a quiet that few of us has ever known, descended on the world
“yes, this”
When our days were spent in the presence and proximity of our husbands, wives and children instead of the slow death of our desks or the factory floor
“yes, this”
“Yes, This”
“YES THIS”
It may not seem like it now, but we will yearn for this time again, but like the voice, we will push that yearning down, down and down until we can hardly feel it any more, but feel it we will. An insistent, irritating adjunct to “no. not this”. The practical will continue to dominate the ideal, realism the surreal or the abstract idea of being. But here’s the thing, we’ve seen it now. We saw it all stop impossibly quickly. Cars didn’t drive, trains didn’t run, aeroplanes didn’t fly and, for a short while, people were nicer to each other. We can’t unsee that any more than we can uninvent the light bulb or the telephone.
Now things are being “relaxed” and the noise has started again and it’s just so disappointing. “Relaxed”, so why does it feel like the opposite? Why does it feel like the static is back? Why do I feel “old-life” rushing back in like an urgent, unrelenting flood tide?
We did a good job of “stop”, not such a good job of “listen”. We will do a worse job of “remember”. We will need to be reminded again and again and again. I’d like to think though that having experienced it once, we will recognise it when it returns, as an old friend rediscovered after years apart, and we will listen properly and collectively hear “in the rumour of forests and waves”
