JOHN PEEL

I will miss having someone like John Peel around. I actually didn't hear his show that often, but was always aware of how unusual he was in the media. A real music fan, and a hero of radio. As radio fades into the past, I can't imagine anyone being in a similar niche again. The thing was that he didn't follow received opinion or "believe the hype". He played the music he liked, and refused to be stale and predictable. So, as a "grumpy old man", he broke the mould.

As an unsigned musician, I am made painfully aware, again and again, of how no one gives your material half an ear; no one cares a great deal about what you've laboured over - it couldn't possibly be in the same league as someone sponsored by a corporation, so why bother?

We planned to send our new demo to John Peel because he really did make the time to listen - and all the tributes tonight are testament to that.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

I have just finished Notes from Underground, and I am genuinely puzzled by something. What did Dostoyevsky have in mind by going to such lengths to describe the main hero/anti-hero?

When the Underground man makes his "sympathetic" speech to Liza the prostitute, only what we know of him from the first part of the novel reminds us that he is not in earnest. I'm tempted, however, to think D was attempting to show the character groping towards redemption here. Is this naive of me? If the speech is supposed to be seen as entirely utterly mailicious and false, why does the Underground man give Liza his address? Only so that he can torture her more?

It is hard for me to imagine anyone so consumed by shame, bitterness and sadism that they could resist the final offer of love from Liza.

But my main question is about what D was trying to do in dedicating a whole novel to such a detailed portrait of someone so beyond redemption. Was he portraying this uniquely ruthless inconsistent character as a bleak comment on human nature in general or as a critical statement about the "Russian man"? i.e. it is a call to spiritual awakening. Only the latter seems to fit in with D's political conservatism, yet the relentlessly bleak tone would seem to suggest it's far from being a spiritual tract.

I read online that some critics have seen it as a dark reply to Rousseau's solitary walker.

OLD WORLD CITY/ SLOW TOURISM

Just walking along to the music cellar last night was as exciting as being in the place itself. Walking under an old clock, through dimly lit streets. Catching a thrill from the just-turned-Autumn air. Feeling very alert and prowly like a wild animal in new surroundings.

An unusually high number of people here seem to have deformities (rickets?) so it makes me conscious of how wonderful it is to be able to stride along. This is also because I got into some tortured thought process (because of a slightly sore back) at lunchtime that I might be going down with MS! No idea why. But for a few days afterwards, you feel differently about walking.

In the cellar, there is the kind of slightly shabby wooden decor that reminds me of an old cinema ad where people got holed up to dance the night away when there was a hurricane blowing ouside. I feel more at ease than I have for years in club-type environments, which I generally don’t enjoy that much. But it wasn't set in stone and maybe I'm a different person.

Maybe I was playing at being someone different when I was in the UK? I know that every time I open my mouth to launch an opinion, especially of the “generally, I don’t…” variety, I am forging an identity rather than describing anything. So much of our behaviour is just reacting to what others expect.

Now it's the weekend I should really be doing some more sightseeing. But why rush it? I love this slow tourism. It means that a metro station can be enjoyed as much as an art gallery, even more perhaps, because of the atmospherics.

DATAFACTORY

The Office for Statistical Management and Moderation has an awesome reputation for data manip and that’s why Crabdale was proud to join them after the last lot had pulled the wires from his chickenbone frame.

You can find it in one of the cratered back streets, a slightly scabby but not unattractive turn of the 20th Century building, with a courtyard open to the sky and enormous double doors like sentries. You can see by its magnificent pillars that it had originally been some elegant urban apartments, but you wouldn’t guess it has also been a base for the Purification of Youth movement; an interrogation centre in the dark years; and then a sound recording studio during the years of hope, where, tutored by long-suffering orchestrators of genius, a stream of untidy musicians converted their half-baked ideas into ephemeral jingles, used occasionally to promote gadgets but usually as soundtracks to poisonous adolescent vision quests.

This was all before it was purchased by DataFactory and thus entered its loftiest, though tattiest, period, in the service of Hibernia. Which is the greater good, arching above us all, in case you were wondering. (Don’t. There are more dark years ahead, more detention centres, and none of it must be hastened into existence by your unruly thoughts.)

DataFactory is a private consortium whose owners, whoever they are, do very well; not a credit from the public purse is intentionally lavished if it’s in any way possible to claw it back. The moderators all use reconstructed keyboards, grey with finger-grime and the data storage devices crash daily because of the amount of meaningless junk stuffed into their limited capacities. There are still typewriters on the go, the whirring and crashing of which can now be read by data-sticks as text. Ranks of drones are jammed into their individual stalls, often walled in, either racking their brains or dreaming uncontrollably, which occasionally results in an excited shudder. (It’s all right. No one is looking.)

They conduct interviews using beaten-up tape recorders held together by sellotape, and afterwards everyone strains so hard to separate the dialogue from the hiss that you would think there was something worth hearing. And, for relief, most drones go once or twice a day to the other stalls, which are tiny and stink like a farm.

The line manager is Lentil, a man in whose soul there isn't enough light material for any spark of humour to catch. He has protruding eyes and a wispy beard. He is thin and stalks round the office like a heron. No one knows exactly what he does. Crabdale, by contrast, scurries round trying to deal with the piles of paper on his desk and weights on his mind, both accumulating. He takes pills for today's hectic lifestyles and hopes they'll prevent the spreading of the dry patches on his palms.

Nothing is ever mended or brought to completion here. It is a continual striving for an improved state of affairs no fool would dare spell out in any detail. For he would be howled down, and after the howling was over, everyone would sit awake in the early hours and grip their sheets.

OLD WORLD CITY (2)

Beautiful, beautiful city and today is only the second cloudy one since I got here. And a warm (top floor), very central flat near the Parliament building and near work. So I've landed on my feet. The pay is, well, lamentable but a lot better than many professional Hungarians get. So, although I've had to tighten my belt, it's with a good grace. I may also be tightening it literally soon. Can't find all my usual ingredients, so I'm having to eat a bit less! So tempting to ditch my semi-veggie ways and have all the different sausages with the cheese and strange dark breads... it'd be easy peasy to eat that kind of Germanic breakfast every morning.

Things I'm looking forward to: "having a bath in a Cathedral" (the Gelert thermal baths) and playing chess in outdoor thermal baths on a cold winter day.

WAKING UP IN AN OLD WORLD CITY

When I lived in London, I'd been there so long I ceased to notice my surroundings anymore, and walking round the city was one long tuning out session. A day here in Budapest is different, a feast of impressions. I'm suddenly more awake to details and textures.

The first thing you notice is the decorated buildings in the centre. Carved on the facades of many of them are historical and mythological figures - the guide-book probably knows their identities; lions' heads and art nouveau motifs. The poster-covered pillars on the wide pavements and streetlamps suspended awkwardly between shabby buildings are distinctively European, and make it easy to imagine another era.

Taking the Metro is more fun too: it's a kind of looking-glass world where the different space and layouts of stations and all the indecipherable ads crowd out any sense of the familiar. (Plus it's cheap, clean and regular, so my frame of mind is altogether different.)

On a trip to Tesco's for marmite, I passed some Communist-era blocks of flats, the peeling walls of which, lit up by the Saturday morning sun, looked as bright and bleak as the surface of the moon.

TALKING ABOUT MINDS


We understand our own minds, and, by making analogies, those of others, through a process of interpreting mental events and symbols. This is akin to the process of understanding a novel.

Facts, on the other hand, must be falsifiable. On this view, we cannot make factual statements about the mind.

When we talk about thoughts, desires, motivations, emotions, ideas, what exactly are we referring to? Are these actually invisible entities, or are we merely making deductions based on people’s outward behaviour?

Behaviourists say the latter.

We can all agree that there are behavioural implications of statements about mental events. If we say, “George hates travelling by tube” and yet notice that he appears to be full of glee as he makes the descent on to the Northern Line, clearly the statement is false or something remains to be said. He might, for example, be feigning joy in order to impress a friend with his positive attitude.

But these kind of statements are not merely about behaviour.

“Listening to that music made me think of a vast expanse of water…”; “I realised that Nietzsche’s moral views were the most radical I’d ever heard”; “She couldn’t believe her ears”. It is stretching a point too far to try and explain these mental events solely in terms of people’s actions.

Something is going on internally. But where? We can search and we won’t find that vast expanse of water or the realisation about Nietzsche. What we find are obviously neurons and electrical signals. A die-hard materialist would say that each mental event maps exactly on to a physical configuration of the brain, and is nothing other than that. They are analogous with the operation of software within a computer; we can talk successfully about people’s minds just as we can make coherent statements and predictions about the internal workings of a computer. This does not require specialist knowledge of, respectively, neurology or programming.

And yet there is still a mystery: irreducible first-hand experience, “raw feels” as it is sometimes called. For states of consciousness, there is such a thing as what it is like to have them. (See Thomas Nagel’s What it is like to be a bat.) Most people would say that this does not apply to computers. This is surely the most characteristic feature of human consciousness, without which we would be utterly different beings.

The problem is this. Given the radically subjective nature of consciousness, how can anything we say about people’s minds be true, false or reliable in any way? And if we are, by implication, only talking nonsense, how is it that for years all the "ill-informed" gossip, speculation and literature about behaviour, dispositions and character have generally been so good at interpreting and making predictions about the world? What explains the success of psychology and the social sciences?

This is a mystery beyond science.

REPLY TO PUSKAS: THE BOUNDARIES OF LOGIC

Who on earth still believes that rigorous, scientific thinking can be applied to religion, psychology, morality and aesthetics in the same way as it can be used to, for instance, predict the flight path of a missile?

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein thought, rightly in my opinion, that our well-defined concepts were too limited to operate properly in the non-concrete world. Nevertheless, he grudgingly admired our efforts to break out of the linguistic “cage” and further understand the world. I agree with him, but I think the silence he advocated is for philosophy students only.

Our deepest motivations as individuals, and the madness of crowds, are driven by deeply irrational forces. We embark upon most of our actions literally before we know what we are doing, that is, before the area of the brain to do with conscious decision-making registers any electrical activity. The times when we pause, ponder and weigh up alternatives are the exceptions.

This is unconscious behaviour. How do we understand it? Through speculative thought; poetry and other literature; and yes, even “pseudo-science”.

To dismiss discourse about the unconscious out of hand as woolly thinking just because it is difficult to talk about with our recently evolved and limited logic is to miss out on sharing with others what are vast, and probably the most interesting, areas of human experience.

In reply to Puskas's comment on www.lovetosaydada.blogspot.com, I would say that Jung's speculation about a collective unconscious should be taken in the same spirit as anyone might talk about, for instance, a politician's underlying motivations or a friend's erratic behaviour. It is more akin to criticising a novel than doing a bit of neuroscience.

RELIGION & THE REBEL

Here’s a thought from Douglas Coupland in Life After God: “As long as there is a wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracts of territory lying dormant, craving exploration and providing sanctity.”

It’s clearly a spiritual thought, but God is absent or at best unnecessary.

Religion and spirituality are different, and this isn’t just splitting hairs. Take two polar opposites: Gandhi and the Rev Ian Paisley, both of whom are examples of people who follow/ed a religion. Gandhi is physically dead, but appears to have been spiritually very much alive. As for Ian, you can draw your own conclusions.

The etymology of the two words is different. Religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning respect for divine power. (Some authors, both ancient and modern, have even taken a more unsympathetic stance and traced the word to religare, to bind fast.) Even if we reject the latter contentious definition, religion has connotations of social control. It is something that happens when a group of people subscribe to a collective myth, and will almost certainly involve liturgies, rituals, and some kind of moral code. There will probably be such a thing as what it is to be a member of this belief system, or an outsider, and membership may involve some kind of initiation and/or vows. I cannot think of a religion which does not meet all of these criteria. So it’s a good enough working definition.

The modern sense of "recognition of, obedience to, and worship of a higher, unseen power" is from 1535, according to an online etymological dictionary. (my italics)

Spirituality on the other hand derives from the Latin spiritus "soul, courage, vigor, breath," related to spirare "to breathe." We have the related English words "spirited", “inspired” and also its near synonym “ehthused” from en-theos, full of god.

The key is that one concept is social and the other is something to do with solitude.

There is a concomitant difference in the locus of power. On the one hand, there is deference to some higher Authority “out there”; on the other, self-empowerment through attention – in the first place - to the most vital process in human life: breathing.

We can see in Jeanne d'Arc, for example, that there is often an overlap between the spiritual and religious aspects of someone's life but the sine qua non of spiritual experience is that something is going on internally and while some idea of God may be present, it need not intrude. The experience itself is more fundamental than the (necessarily public) linguistic concepts that may be used to frame it afterwards.

If we move on a little from the words, it’s clear how in any conceivable civilisation, religion, because of its tendency towards conformity, will have a very specific appeal to the worst sort of people, those whose success depends on controlling the belief-system of society. Hence the real-world manifestations: the Spanish Inquisition, the religious right in the US, and militant Islam. Among plenty of others.

Spirituality is more readily associated with mystics, poets, children and dreamers. Because the spiritually adept have found so much energy, and “inspiration” from this process, it’s no accident that they can end up as the founders of great religions, especially if they start talking about cosmology and/or morals. But I know plenty of spiritual atheists. It's not a contradiction in terms.

(The title of this blog comes from a Colin Wilson book which I haven't actually read, but I suspect it covers the same sort of ground.)

FEAR AND PARALYSIS

I recently decided to change my job, and horizons. Because there’s a 3-month notice period at my college, I had to leave here before I had started the majority of my applications. The reactions I got were so positive:

“I can’t believe you’re leaving a public sector job!”

“I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t like to be in that jungle.”

“It’s your funeral.”

And (this is a voice quaking with disbelief): “It’s MADNESS!”


Here’s the response of a very good friend of mine:

Always staying in your comfort zone

Giving up on developing yourself and moving forward for any reason

Believing that because you are good at one thing, and that will do

Fearing any kind of change

Being static and feeling that everything outside of your static circle is 'a jungle'

Huddling with other fearful people in the static circle

Giving up:

THIS IS THE TRUE MADNESS.


“If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl” Sa’di.

A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

Now – as always – it’s time for non-violence. You might think that all religions preached non-violence. Christ, for example, advocated it.

Yet his approach was a radical one, hence his rejection by his people as an irrelevant voice in their struggle to throw off the Roman yoke.

Listen to Yahweh: “Thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.” Deuteronomy 7.2

“slay man and woman, infant and suckling” 1 Samuel 15.3

Listen to the Prophet: “Smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them” Surah Muhammad 47.4

“If they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them” Surah al-Nisa 4.89

This desert god is a warrior god who defends his people against all comers. And the war goes on.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE DHARMA

I really want to be a Buddhist. I think I'll be able to slip into the Dharma naturally - it's going to be fun. It feels like coming home. The only thing is I don't know how on earth I'll be able to give up alcohol after all this time we've been together, but I'm going to set a date for this.

The fundamental ideas of Buddhism are the closest approximation to "the truth" that mankind is going to get; the first paradox here is that there is no static truth - at all. Scientific "laws" may be a candidate (I'm not qualified to say) but anyone who tries to give definitive judgements on human nature or how to live will be challenged (or even howled down) immediately by an army of exceptions.

Buddhism is a way to come to terms with - and get through - this Dionysian reality, rather than having to fortify oneself or even struggle against it. The whole Dharma (teaching, lifestyle) begins and ends with a recognition of constant change.

Seeing this for what it is, it becomes clear that we cannot be happy by trying to shore up our defences against change. This is the essence of non-attachment to things, money, people, ideas, none of which are constant.

I used to think that non-attachment was rather distancing, and that Buddhism was a cold-hearted, passionless approach to life. On the contrary. The fruit of mindfulness and non-attachment is a deep reservoir of compassion. This chimes with me, certainly as something to aspire to.

The best thing is to find that, although the ideas come with strange Pali labels attached, many of them are things I've suspected for half my life.

THE SUNSHINE PLAYROOM: IN PRAISE OF PSYCHEDELIA

Sunshine came softly through Donovan’s window; John Lennon lay in the back of a newspaper taxi with his head in the clouds and was gone; Syd Barrett tried to explain his cat; Ray Davies watched the world from his window.

I’ve never forgotten how these tracks made me sit up and listen when I first heard them. This kind of “fairytale psychedelia” is, for me, the unmatched pinnacle of all pop music, even though I was not alive when most of it came out. It’s incredible to think that these songs were all done within a few short years, between 1965 and 1971. (The Battle of Evermore on Led Zeppelin IV and Echoes on Pink Floyd’s Meddle surely belong in the same category, though you can sense the magic fading just a little.)

What makes psychedelia, and British psychedelia in particular, so good and so worth returning to with a good pair of headphones?

First off, it’s just amusing how a lot of – often, not always - working-class lads were inspired by the Beatles or LSD or whatever to cast off all the macho strutting they’d carefully learned in their teens and revisit their childhoods. On this inner journey, they created a distinctive kind of music-hall pop music devoid of the kind of self-conscious “attitude” that makes a lot of other music so derivative and dull. It’s as if they were playing to audiences from other planets; well, perhaps they were.

Britpop tried, and failed, to recreate this in the 90s, precisely because it was so full of ironic references to the 60s template. (Actually, I’m sure there’s some dance/ambient music in the 90s that has the same kind of experimental, joyous flavour. Screamadelica is one obvious example.)

The songs are full of surreal imagery - Lennon’s is effortlessly evocative; others just as strikingly inept: (“An elephant’s eye was staring at me from a bubblegum tree”… a different prescription, perhaps?) Into these landscapes come characters from all kinds of half-remembered storybook versions of England: Sgt Pepper, the Hurdy Gurdy Man, the Gnome, Mr Small The Watch Repairer, Mr Fantasy, etc.

“Across the stream with wooden shoes / Bells to tell the king the news / A thousand misty riders Climb / Higher once upon a time

Wondering and dreaming… the words had different meanings.”

It makes you wonder what it was in the LSD-fuelled experiences of British musicians that propelled them back to the nursery. Perhaps it was merely the influence from Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, or was it a sentimental grasping for security in the middle of an unpredictable psychedelic trip? Or disillusionment and a sense of powerlessness on the verge of an adulthood where all these exuberantly breaking dreams would surely be extinguished?

The records are so inventive in the way they play with sound. Like kids in a toyshop, the musicians and engineers pushed their meagre equipment to the absolute limits in search of newer and stranger sounds, proving that, in this case, less is more. The sonic palette on many of the late 60s albums is unrivalled to this day in terms of its glowing colour; use of the stereo spectrum and sound effects (which Pink Floyd developed further in the 70s); and the sheer capacity to surprise. On Flaming (Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd, 1967) a toy keyboard, acoustic guitar, bells and a few percussion instruments are used to create a startlingly magical effect, even though the arrangements are simple and the playing is almost clumsy. On the same album, listen to how the vocals come in from the left-field (literally) and are deepened by echoes and sudden bursts of harmony. The producer who created these soundscapes for Syd Barrett's songs was Norman Smith, who'd previously been the Beatles' engineer and is the unsung hero of British psychedelia. Both this album and Sgt Pepper were recorded using, as far as I know, a 4-track desk. 128-track is routine these days.

The sheer joy that the musicians had making this music is unmissable, and irresistable. It’s so clear that they were in control, giving free expression to their imaginations, and in league with the studio engineers, rather than being dictated to by them under pressure from the demands of record companies and markets.

That’s why the music is still being reissued and remastered, selling more copies today than when it was made. It’s not all good, of course, and beware: there are absolutely no undiscovered gems left at the bottom of the barrel.


Start with:
Matilda Mother and Flaming (Piper at the Gates of Dawn) – Pink Floyd, 1967
The rest of that album
Sgt Pepper & Magical Mystery Tour

The only compilation of psychedelic obscurities I can honestly recommend is Acid Drops, Space Dust & Flying Saucers – MOJO magazine

TOP TIP

Ha ha ha. "Look fab on the beach" says the banner on my mailbox. (And in magazines like Men's Health.) Er, bit late, isn't it? Hold your stomach in. Keep doing it and it'll look fab on the beach by 2005.

UNSIGNED, IMPERFECT, IRREPARABLE - YEAH!

Went to the studio yesterday to record No Comfort (song below, written at the time of the original Gulf War - when I could write good songs) and a couple of others. It's because I need an "unplugged" demo to try and play a gig before I leave this version of Babylon for another one.

Now, with unsigned musicians, especially this one, studio versions are never as good as live ones. I played and sang competently, but somehow the songs just didn't sound as good as a few weeks ago in the garden. This is because, instead of being relaxed, warmed up, and in the middle of an environment of dog-barks, sunshine and apple trees, you find yourself in a stuffy windowless cellar, head encased in large headphones, confronted by a state of the art mic that's going to reveal every breath or hastily sung note, and paying an hourly rate for the privilege that's a lot more than you'd charge for your own services. And then someone tells you "taping", and that's the starting gun.

And you're off! Don't mess up whatever you do don't mess up especially if you're near the end here comes that difficult note just made it here comes the bit I have to sing sensitively no no try to think of the meaning of the words not your singing style damn damn was that flat or not and i think i strangled that last word no no that was no good. "Can we do that again. John?" This repeats until finally you get a version you can live with. But somehow it lacks something you can't put your finger on...

For a signed musician, it's a different story. Except for the really exceptional talents, musicians who can really PLAY, the studio versions outshine live performances, technically at least. (If you don't believe me, check out almost any live album.) That's because, if someone else is footing the bill, you have time to edit out every breath, sing ten different versions than cut and paste so that every word is the best you've ever sung it, retune flat notes using a computer, and end up with something that's... well, literally faultless if a bit soul-less.

When some people complain that pop isn't as good as it used to be, it may ironically be the perfection that grates on them. If you're in that category, what could be better than hearing a warts-and-all unsigned musician, live? With dog-barks and apple trees.

NO COMFORT AT NIGHT - song lyrics

Tell me the times when we died in our minds for a slogan
Tell me the times when the spirit’s eclipsed by a cause
This is why there is no comfort at night
This is the reason why we fire
Tracer trails through the barbed wire
This is the reason for all of the wars…

Tell me the times when we lacked the conviction to move
Towards an adventure, afraid of what we had to lose
This is why there is no comfort at night
This is the reason why we fire
Tracer trails through the barbed wire
This is the reason for all of the wars

By the landlocked pools
Sailing little boats
Keeping the old captain afloat

Tell me the times we forgot to tie up loose ends
Let them fray and unravel a tale of inseparable friends
This is why there is no comfort at night
This is the reason why we fire
Tracer trails through the barbed wire
This is the reason for all of the wars

By the landlocked pools
Sailing little boats
Keeping the old captain afloat
By the landlocked pools
Sailing little boats
Keeping the old captain afloat

HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR HAPPINESS: WEAK OR STRONG?

Bertrand Russell in his History of Western philosophy interprets Epicureanism as a philosophy which was based on the avoidance of fear.

Because religion and death were seen as such great sources of fear, Epicurus denied Providence and immortality, and this became a “gospel of liberation”. Seen in this light, it’s in tune with modern humanism. Russell’s critique, however, portrays the philosophy as rather lacking in spirit, “a valetudinarian’s philosophy, designed to suit a world in which adventurous happiness had become scarcely possible.” (Epicurus suffered from ill health throughout his life.)

Back to square one then. (See 21-02-04 and understand how far the dementia has got!) Nietzsche says plunge in and accept life in all its pleasure and pain. Epicurus, by contrast, turns away and recommends a quiet life. The Buddha would question the whole enterprise of pursuing a worldly happiness that’s inevitably fleeting, and yet the foundations of the religion and its practices are based on the avoidance of suffering, and the "goal" - though Buddhists would never describe it as such - is a state of awakened calm and bliss.

I suspect that there’s nothing to choose between them! Whether people hunt down their happiness for years, paddle contentedly in the shallows or just forget about it is, ultimately, a choice that is deeply personal - and irrational.

ACCORDING TO EPICURUS...

My own small edition of the West's most famous research into happiness is in a friend's loft, where it has lain since 1997, along with most of my possessions. Every so often I do get a craving to surround myself again with all those wonderful books, but it quickly goes away.

So I've had make do with the web quotations below. From what I can remember, Epicurus advocated a life governed by calm reason, and talked a lot about tending his garden! There is much in common with Buddhism, that other great happiness-focused tradition, but without the total dissolution of the ego, so hard to attain without a severe asceticism, and so contrary to our culture-bound idea of ourselves as discrete individuals. So, although he lacks a wide readership today, perhaps studying his ideas may provide some insight into our modern condition.

As I've said before, it's EXPERIENCE, Stoopid:

"Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."

And lower expectations:

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you have now was once among the things you only hoped for."

And freedom:

"A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs and monarchs."

And friends:

"Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship."

Independence (basic financial security):

"The man least dependent on the morrow goes to greet the morrow more cheerfully."

This could also be read as advocating less attachment to the consequences of our actions, a commonplace Eastern teaching. Finally, there is independence of mind:

"I have never desired to please the rabble. what pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far from their understanding."

ALAIN DE BOTTON'S LIST

"Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realise what limit is set to acquisition and the growth of genuine pleasure." Lucretius, quoted in The Consolations of Philosophy.

"Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial." from The Consolations of Philosophy.

Alain de B's acquisition list begs the question (about acquisition), but only for an extreme Buddhist, so it's as good a place to start as any:

1. some form of shelter
2. friends
3. a garden, "to avoid superiors, patronisation, infighting and competition". Of course, it is mightily hard to obtain one in London, but per se, a plot of earth may be 'owned' in some sense, or occupied, or just there to surround you! Even here.
4. time to think/read/meditate
5. er, he finishes with a joking desire for a reincarnation of a Madonna by Bellini. He's gently suggesting that the desire for a soul-mate might remain in any romantic heart, and OK, he has a point. But he's bending the rules! (And how many of today's Bellini's Madonna lookalikes would be interested in Alain without his lucrative book deals?)

What does Buddha say? What would Puskas do? What about Jesus, Nietzsche, Proust and all the great names that have graced this little group of blogs? And what about you? This is my suggestion box. Drop in your lists. They've got to be practical, and honestly drawn from the peaks of your experience.

HOW CAN WE BE HAPPY?

In a book called The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook points out that despite our average quality of life having risen on a number of different indices, we are less happy than we once were. (By "we", I mean a very crudely sampled average person on an average salary in a developed country.)

Why is this? And why were people in Ghana, where I lived for a couple of years, generally happy and optimistic even though they had so little?

Is it the lack of God, time, generosity of spirit? A poor diet? Too many unfulfilled expectations? What is it that we lack? What do you think?

POINT OF DEPARTURE

Like a stained glass window in an explosion, my carefully pieced-together life has suddenly shattered and is reconfiguring. I'm so excited and I just can't hide it.

It's always a shot in the dark. I look for a "sign" but there never is one. So I just acted. And all is very, very well.

Mood: happy Music: Bob Dylan live in 1964

EARLY MORNING CALLS

I haven't had time to write (or read) blogs recently, having been gripped by yet another mid-life crisis. Happens all the time. My life must have several midpoints, so we're not talking Cartesian geometry.

It's always the same contrary pull, between security and an adventure.

Well, my romantic heart hasn't stopped beating yet - I've decided to leave my job and go overseas again. Despite everything, I still know that time and experience are more important than money. What's the Bob Dylan line about whoever's not busy being born is busy dying?

It sounds a bit Californian and embarrassing, but as long as you acknowledge what your heart says at 6a.m. and don't fight it too hard, you can make the best decisions. My friend reckons that I am a "solution-attracting organism". Good!

On Sunday morning, woke at 3.20am and went with K to a piece of woodland -Blean Wood, I think, by Rough Common in Canterbury - for international dawn chorus day. The woods were pristine, glorious, and bathed in mist. The sky was absolutely clear. And through it all the dots, loops and whistles - identified for once. Something quite magical. We laughed about having become middle-aged, which is obviously not the case, though everyone else was :-) . At the end we saw through the binoculars a nightingale, its little throat and body working with all its might to produce the calls; the sound was unique, like flutes.

SELF-REFERENTIAL

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CLIMATE CHANGE: HEARD IT ALL BEFORE?

EFL textbooks “do” climate change; I have to think of new ways in to prevent students rolling their eyes. I’ll always remember the girl who told me quite happily that it just didn’t interest her at all. And, OK, maybe it’s not immediately gripping when you're used to being entertained at speed, in colour and with a cast of celebs.

At the same time, it’s got to be more exciting than home make-over shows. Well, hasn’t it?

Number of victims in Twin Towers disaster: 2800
Number of victims in Madrid bombings: 200 +
Number of victims annually from consequences of climate change – malaria, dysentry and malnutrition: 160,000
(estimate by London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which excludes deaths caused by tropical cyclones and typhoons)

Warming over the past century: 0.6C
Warming this century predicted by the inter-governmental panel on climate change (3000 scientists): 1.4C – 5.8C
Possible figure taking into account decline in (cooling) smoke pollution: 7C -10C
Other factors that may yet further increase the temperature rise are the release of carbon from “die-back” in drought-stricken Amazonian forests and the release of methane from the oceans, triggered by warming.

At the end of the Permian Era, 251 million years ago, 95% of life species on earth were killed by a global temperature rise of just 6C.

And what’s the best “joined-up thinking” the US (and UK) can come up with? A war for strategic control over the remaining fossil fuel reserves in the Middle East and the Caspian Sea!

facts & figures from High Tide: News From A Warming World by Mark Lynas, reviewed in The Observer, 24.04.04

THE PROBLEM WITH IDIOMS

This is from a newspaper's obituary of Arthur Godman, a textbook writer who was taken prisoner by the Japanese army in WW2:

'Later, while he was working on the railway, Godman recalled how, after the discovery of illicit radio sets, a Japanese officer had summoned the officers in his camp to give them a dressing-down: "You British think we Japanese bloody fools," the man shrieked. "You think we do not know what you do. You think we do not know you are hiding radios. You think we know f*** nothing, but really we know f*** all." "We dared not laugh," Godman wrote, "as that would have been extremely foolish - and dangerous." '

(For this to work, you have to close your eyes and imagine the scene.)

TRANSPORTED BY BELLS

Tonight, as on every Monday evening, this lifeless suburb is transformed for an hour or longer by the pealing of bells. The sound tumbles down triumphantly from the top of Harrow hill and when I hear it, especially on a warm-scented Spring night, I’m transfixed. Now the roar of traffic is subdued and you can imagine it’s the sound of breakers on the shore - it's similar. When I lived out in Buckinghamshire, I used to hear the same sound across the fields on misty summer mornings. It makes me want to come alive in a Medieval village, reminds me of Dick Whittington and Lazy Sunday Afternoon.

It’s one of the things that has been untarnished by time. (Funny that, while enjoyment from music I used to love can pale until it's not there at all.) If I leave England, I won’t be able to hear bells without pangs of longing.

DE-STRESSING

Ha ha. Given the content of recent posts (Jesus, dreams, Crabdale, Radiohead) the banner ads for anxiety relief pills etc cracked me up. You got it right, Computer! Now, is anyone going to advertise something psychedelic to me?

THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Radiohead's OK Computer is reckoned by music journos to be one of the best albums of all time but I never thought so, mainly because it took me so long to get used to Thom Yorke's whining vocal style. After more (intermittent) plays, I've come to see it as a really wonderful evocation in music of a slightly futuristc dystopia (see Crabdale and previous blogs) where many people, despite having their material needs satisfied, are stretched to breaking point and feel utterly powerless.

I know this is a candidate for Pseud's Corner now, but I do think the album is a work of twisted genius. The title itself is about the nod of weary assent we unthinkingly give hundreds of times a day interfacing with the insanely complicated systems (computerised and otherwise) that regulate our lives. The songs are relentlessy nasty.

Karma Police, after an initial run-through of a comfortingly familiar-sounding chord sequence, lurches immediately into its sinister lyric about two misfits. Who they are and what side they are on is ambiguous but the malice of the assault against them ("arrest this man...he buzzes like a fridge; he's like a detuned radio") is clear. TY, in character as a weasly and paranoid collaborator/informer, asks the karma police to remove them from the scene. In the refrain, the sweet nursery piano scales contrast with the starkness of the words (of the Authorities?) and the dry rasp with which they tail off: “this is what you’ll get if you mess with us.” Best of all is the exuberant outro as the singer returns to his own path, now clear of undesirable elements; his hollow joy is emphasised by a fanfare of strangely cold voice-like sounds in the background, which evoke the soothing backing vocals you might expect at this point in songs from an earlier era. (These sounds are a good example of what one reviewer described as musical “hieroglyphs” which decorate every track.) The song ends jarringly.

Building towards the climax of the album (Lucky), No Surprises brings the theme to its logical conclusion: conform completely or get out. There is suicide by asphyxiation side by side with the pretty house and garden. What both solutions have in common is the quietly terrified plea for comfort: "no alarms and no surprises please."

It's amazing what a bunch of musical amateurs can do with a little technology and imagination. Go back and listen to it again.

MOLE REMEMBERS SOMETHING

The Mole had been working hard all the week, trying to improve his little life. First online, then from Estate Agents' leaflets; then scanning all those column inches, with furious intensity; till he he had poison in his throat, RSI in his fingertips (why had he never learned to type?) and an aching head. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little office with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder then, that he suddenly scattered all the paper on the floor, said "Fuck it!" and "Screw this!" and also "Bugger flats and mortgages!" and bolted out of the room without even waiting for the noisy computer to shut down properly. Something outside was calling him imperiously, so he wasted no time and ran into the garden with his guitar. Then he strummed and sang and crooned and hummed, and worked the fretboard for all he was worth. And he called his flatmate, who came running. The two tiny creatures put on loud music and danced in a frenzy and all the sun poured down in beneficent rays.

(Obviously there was no time for blogging!)

HOUSE TROUBLE

All week, since the key worker scheme offered me an equity loan and gave me four weeks to act, I've been worrying about property, about my future, about financial security... It all makes me feel unsettled and not in the least excited.

All the stress is an insidious effect of watching and listening to the news so much! There is a subtext in the media, not just in "aspirational programming", all about the need to shore up your defences in an uncertain, often terrifying world. I resent how it's crept into my head - my private "imaginal" space - and is making me into a "paranoid android". Having a long talk with a spiritually-minded friend this week helped me get things a bit more into perspective. What is really important in life? It's experience, stoopid! And that can be enjoyed to the full in a beach hut. Now there's a better idea...

DREAM TROUBLE

I dreamt this last night. I am on a tube train at 11pm heading into the city centre, even though I know I have work the next morning. I have two guitars and a suitcase with me - overloaded. I meet a colleague from work who has very interesting things to say, but I decide to cut my journey short and get off at the next stop. It's too much trouble and doesn't make much sense since I'm also very vague about the original reason for going.

Back home, in bed, I notice someone has left a sinister toy lying in my room. It's a demon-doll made of garish pink, green and yellow foam. It either says to me (or sends me the thought) "I'm going to get you." I reach over to pick it up. It's very unpleasant so I decide to get rid of it by scrunching it up; it becomes a ring with a little green skull mask on top, which I conceal in a drawer. Good riddance, I think.

I walk through to the living room, where my mother is having an anxiety attack about the political situation. The signal of the TV she's watching is erratic and a man is walking up and down the street outside selling gas masks. This is because things have deteriorated so badly that there is going to be a nuclear war. (I haven't had a nuclear war dream since Gorbachev, but I was reading about some Bomb scenarios in Douglas Coupland's Life After God at the weekend.) In another room, people are getting ready their last full English breakfast ever. I ask people how long we'll have to stay in the shelter -weeks or months probably. But we're only allowed to bring a small rucksack of supplies. I think about how smelly we're all going to be without enough clean underwear.

Back in the living room, Blair is making a speech trying to make the situation seem reasonable - but he knows it's out of control. You can tell he's scared; his voice is strained and he's being apologetic too. I shoo some plated armadillo-like prehistoric animals out of the room through patio doors where the windows should be.

None of this makes much sense to me, although it could be about abandoning a current plan, denying something nasty, and coping in the face of an imminent disaster.

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

My Dad spent several Christmases persuading me that Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a wise poem - and, yes, it is. But, to prevent my once plastic opinions becoming too hardened through contact with a stubbornly intransigent reality, I like to read and listen to people who are able to turn things upside down. Inverted, an apparently reliable old saw can be immensely revealing, not to mention hilarious. (I wish I could have some of Oscar Wilde's epigrams tattooed on my arm - impermanent, so I could get a different set once they'd faded.)

At a profound level, Zen Buddhism (and the lyrics to a Phish song I can't remember the title of) use paradoxical koans to drive home the point that reality is illusory and words are even less reliable. (One of my friends makes a habit of seeing truths in apparently contradictory propositions, especially when these purport to be guides to living.)

So I was delighted to rediscover after many years - through a quotation at the top of someone's blog - the magic of William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The poet speaks some of his own doctrines (his theme: "Energy is Eternal delight") through the Proverbs of Hell, collected from the denizens of that fiery realm:

"Everything possible to be believ'd is an image of truth."

"Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of genius."

"Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity."

"Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you."

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise"

"The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure."

CHAPTER 8 - POST-TRAUMATIC SHOCK

After hours of negotiating re-routed machines and blackcoat cordons, Crabdale arrived back in his street exhausted in the second watch of the night, the sky misty and orange. The trees with their amputated stumps where branches had been reminded him of the nuclear war scenes he'd once seen in a museum.

Thinking the house might be all winked out, he crept in, but all in vain. A light snapped on, a door flew open and Frothie scurried out.

“Oh, they were very pleased with the new pots and pans I got them,” she began immediately, not noticing his dishevelled state. “I’d originally gone thinking that they might have non-stick ones at the market because I’d vaguely thought I remembered seeing them somewhere, only maybe not there. They had these ones which were rather a nice shape and were half the price I’d expected, though, what I hadn’t expected at all, they had,” rising to a meaningless crescendo… “METAL HANDLES! Well of course, I might have gone to the other stall if I’d thought about it. But Esmie phoned. Actually, did she? No, I was about to phone Esmie, that’s it, because I knew I had to ask her about the pots in case she hadn’t wanted the ones I was thinking of, although she had mentioned them before when I went round to see her after her autonomic therapy session…”

Crabdale let her trundle on for another few minutes until she paused to freeze her face in a grotesque frozen mask to illustrate some stray point.

“There’s been another bomb. I just got out in time.”

Frothie looked genuinely alarmed. “Oh, how awful! I should’ve seen it on the news, only I didn’t get around to watching it. I’d vaguely wondered if I should watch it – no that’s wrong, I meant to watch it, only Esmie phoned and started asking about the little infant, because it turns out he's having trouble mewling and scrunting, which is quite common in first castes now, and before I knew it another hour had gone by."

“I’m pretty rattled, actually, pretty shaken,” Crabdale said, only just controlling a desire to yell, “I think I need some of that autonomic therapy myself.”

“So where was the bomb?” Frothie attempted to show an interest.

“In the city bowels, between the Refreshments and Retail in Stocks Green; I can’t say exactly as there were so many people rushing around and all the blackcoats were directing everybody out towards the feed route.”

“Cilla wants to go too, to the therapy sessions, by the way - to help her recover from the eating disorder that I thought might have been some kind of hangover from the last time she had sloth, or else because she’s waking up before her natural wake-up time. Speaking honestly, I think she and Esmie both need something to relieve the pressure, if you see what I mean. I meant to go myself – I was debating with myself whether to, because I had a vague feeling that it might have been on the evening I didn’t have to look after the infant…”

Crabdale crept away, with some comment intended to sound final and sleepy. Frothie’s words pursued him up the long spiral staircase to his room, her voice growing more and more plaintive in another desperate attempt to connect.

FOLK CODES Vs THE MONKEY DRIVE

I was reading an interesting blog the other day by James. (The title was "James" but I can't find it any more, so no link.) He’s got a section on his philosophy, where he says that our ideas about what we should do in life derive from how we see ourselves. He uses some neat arguments to dismiss the idea that we are souls, and concludes that we are essentially animals. (Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that this last point is correct. If you doubt it, you can find the point argued in depth by John Gray in Straw Dogs.) James thinks it follows from this that the good life is just one where you breed successfully and do what you can to ensure the health & prosperity of your kids. Family values, then? Not quite. What should your attitude be towards killing your enemies, and their kids?

Let’s call James's idea the monkey drive: spread your genes, increase your territory, look after your own (narrowly or broadly defined, but certainly not running to the whole species!) It’s the kind of theory that sits well with a neo-Darwinian “selfish gene” explanation of life. If philosophical background is needed, it could be aligned with many of the ideas of Nietzsche, especially in A Genealogy of Morals.

Nietzsche – and James – present a powerful challenge to the fragmentary, sometimes contradictory, but almost universally held codes of “folk morality”. We use these ideas to “teach our kids the difference between right and wrong”, criticise the selfish motives of a politician, or say what a great guy (or girl) a friend is. From these everyday examples, right up to the defining moral certainties about Auschwitz or the genocide in Rwanda, we draw from folk codes and implicitly criticise the monkey drive.

But are we on philosophically shaky ground?

Nietzsche’s challenge would go something like this. We are animals. We are at our happiest when following the monkey drive, which he called the Will To Power, i.e. rutting, being free from “status anxiety”, lording it over others, admiring our patch of ground after its latest makeover… (These are my interpretations: Nietzsche himself would have gone into an anti-bourgeois rage over home/garden makeover shows!) Folk morality derives from profoundly unnatural Judeo-Christian ideas, which arose as a historical accident as this culture attempted to assert itself over the worldly power of the Roman Empire. (He was aware of the irony of “altruism” being the banner of a whole people’s Will To Power.)

Anyway, these codes involve continually suppressing the monkey drive, resulting in feelings of alienation and guilt in their adherents. The most extreme examples, for example those found in the Sermon of the Mount – or, more recently, in Gandhi’s ideals – are sheer absurdities. Rather than teaching us how to live better lives in the world, they derive their authority from the groundless belief in a life to come, the great hereafter.

There have been valiant philosophical attempts, before and after Nietzsche, to answer this kind of challenge, usually by watering down the monkey drive so that it becomes a kind of enlightened self-interest (although it remains clear that the version in fact “works” in worldly terms is more a kind of concealed selfishness: cheat the system, make as much money as you can, rip people off, etc. Just don’t advertise the fact that you’re doing it.)

Without a more satisfactory answer, we have no recourse to the folk codes, “the difference between right and wrong” as conventionally thought of. What is your answer to Nietzsche?

EASTER - GO WITH THE ORIGINAL PLOT

I promised a student of mine that I'd go to see The Passion with her, despite the bad reviews, as she had only ever been to see one film in the UK before and is a devoted Christian. Just like when I was a boy, I found it hard not to cry; the suffering of Jesus remains moving - and, in Mel Gibson's version, disturbing - to watch. It has the same power as any of the great tragedies (e.g. Shakespeare, Hardy) where the odds are so heavily stacked against the characters.

Oh, except the ending. The story of the resurrection, typically Hollywood, has so clearly been added on by some saboteur who just couldn't confront tragedy for what it is. It's just like a book of fairy tales I once had where Goldilocks went back and made friends with the three bears and Hansel let the witch out of the oven when she promised to be good. In a well-intentioned but clumsy effort to make the stories more palatable, the modern author renders them largely pointless and, for children, a whole lot less fun.

Gibson's saccharine final scene underlines artlessness of the ending after what stands alone as a powerful and instructive myth. Jesus is the greatest martyr of all time. There is no more hard-hitting demonstration of the victory (in the world's terms) of cynical, institutional power over idealism, nor of the eternal justification of idealism in history, which might be called the "God's-eye" view, than the mythologised life of Jesus. So why ruin it with an ending that not only invalidates the terrible sacrifice but adds insult to injury by being downright incredible?

In any case, who today honestly believes that a man came back from the dead? That blood-sacrifice is the only way to expiate sin? That what consititutes sin is disobedience to the arbtrary commands of a Father God? That this God can forgive mankind not in spite of but because of the death, in such a horrible way, of His miraculously conceived Son? (He would otherwise be powerless to forgive, because He cannot contravene His own laws about the just punishment for sin....)

Enough! The ideas here are so tortured, so utterly arcane, that their survival into the 21st Century must rank among the best testaments to that voguish psychological state - "denial" - that I know.

People who recognise the true nature of Jesus' sacrifice - brave, idealistic, final - must see that the real story is preserved from second-rate writers of whatever era.

INTERNAL FLIGHTS

When I imagine myself in certain places, I catch a glimpse of a bliss so intense it's almost painful. While mystics aim to wake to Nirvana in the present moment, I prefer to conjure up an image of scenes that capture me then leave me momentarily racked with longing. I fantasise about these (usually sunlit) scenes nearly as often as I do about sex, only for seconds at a time, several times a day.

I was writing a card this morning when the intense blaze of scarlet on a tree pictured on the front (in woodland with a wooden house) transported me to one of the destinations – Autumn in New England. This is an idealised place with no cars, malls or deadlines. Probably in the time of the Pilgrims and charged with the thrill of playing in the woods of childhood. There is always a slight chill in the air and a deep blue sky to frame the bright leaves.

Music, most recently the shattered hazy guitar chord which follows Thom Yorke’s line “it’s going to be a glorious day” (Lucky, OK Computer) had a similar effect. Despite its occurring in the context of an ambiguous, slightly sinister lyric, the one chord took effect instantly - I was suddenly in my Long Summer Day in the mid-to-late 60s, perhaps seen from a London bus or in the “stoned immaculate” smile of a hippie girl in Golden Gate Park as she moves to the music…

On a rational level, I’m aware that a summer’s day is as good in 2004 and that a bus ride more often than not holds little excitement; it is because my destinations are by their very nature out of bounds that they are drenched with beauty.

Why is it that the most intense experiences are always bound up with the unattainable? Is this personal to me, widespread or universal?

CHAPTER 7 – GRINNINGSOUL

Black screen. Cut to blurred shot of ceremonial gas-lamp. Move out, pan round. Herr Grinningsoul centre-screen. Text: First Cardinal of Hibernia. Fade text as he starts to speak.

“Today we have all seen for ourselves the utter disregard for human life shown by the unrecanted. The kind of mentality that would perpetrate such crimes as these can scarcely be imagined, and our sympathies must go straight away to the families of the victims. Drone families will be granted an extra day’s compassionate leave from grind in recognition of their irreplaceable loss, while property-owners will be granted a one-month tax credit on rental income.

“I have today asked Parliament to support me in implementing a range of emergency measures, the detail of which will be made available through the usual caste networks and grind committees. I know that you will all understand the necessity of doing this, given the grave nature of the situation we are in.

“There has lately been some wagging of tongues, questioning Hibernia’s campaigns overseas. I say open your eyes and see that the time for this frothy talk is at an end. Root it out!

“Tongues have idly wagged on the subject of our precious caste system. The unrecanted are hoisting the banner of caste war in our streets. I say know yourselves, respect the castes, pull together in solidarity.

"It is not in vain that we toil for progress and stability. I say hold fast, return to your places of grind and continue to build what the unrecanted seek to destroy. Remember that my administration will stop at nothing to generate targets towards which you can grind with complete confidence.

“We shall not be cowed! Nor shall we stumble. We shall root out the unrecanted of all persuasions and silence the wagging tongues forever. The struggle for individual enrichment in the face of those who would destroy it shall never cease.

Good evening.”

Pan out, return to gas-lamp. Fade to black.

CHAPTER 6 - HISTORIC POISONINGS

In anticipation of two whole days free, Crabdale and some of the drones go to poison themselves. They leave the Department through the arch and scramble down the steel stairway to the edge of the trunk route to catch a machine. Legs wrapped round, clinging on, Crabdale enjoyed the buzz of the motor on his inner thighs. Such a privilege to have a two-day weekend, he reflected as the machine moved off into the traffic flow; so arbitrary, having two days off every twelve.

The tide of vehicles oozed slowly through the bowels of the city and finally deposited them on the edge of the refreshment zone. Wiping the grime from their faces, the bureaucrats made their way past the dull thud of tribal and warily eyed the group of young staggerers outside as they entered the Dog and Dreck

Hekate, haply evolved for life in bars, went to order for the group of them: three gutfuckers, a rusty nail and a Moulted Old Crow. She returned to the table, ran her fingers through her luxuriant jet-black hair and took immediate aim at the Head of the Department.

“I had to take some diktat from JC today,” she began, “and I was thinking - well, do you not think he looks really like round flubber man from the Flubberjacks? Remember the Flubberjacks? They used to show it after Carnivore Parade.”

Mad Alf closed his eyes and moved his jaw around for a few seconds, as if having a little fit. “The Flubberjacks – yes!” he grinned. “All the characters were played by the same person, weren’t they? But were any of them male? Were any of them straight?” Laughter. “I loved the Flubberjacks.” His slightly gap-tooth grin lent his face a look of total bliss until the moment he snapped it off and resumed staring at a point on the wall.

“That one was a bit after my time,” remarked Crabdale, but, keen to get into the babble about historic viewing, added, “I always watched Hang ‘Em High on the other channel.”

Alf jerked into life again. “A-ha! The execution show!” He made a frightening face. “That was so great, before they changed the format. Can you own that one now?” His eyes darted to Crabdale.

“Nah, I think most of them were deleted, but they re-run some clips on Dead Entertained if you stay up that late, ‘cept with different commentary.”

Hek eyed them all mischievously. “OK – when push comes to shove, JC or Hangman Judd from Hang 'Em High?” She knocked back some of her scarlet gutfucker.

Laughter. Lots of shouting.

“What about, what about…” Alf jabbered furiously, “Naughty Nicky or Slut?”

“Both! At the same time!”

“Alf Splitter or the Baby Jesus?”

“Yeah, Alf or the Baby Jesus? Which one? Which one? Good question!”

Crabdale let his eyes wander round the bar. He felt the characteristic sickening rush of the poison and watched as the rough contours of the stone walls began to reveal an inner structure of green and red veins. Alf looked skeletal, about to fall apart, jaw clenching and unclenching mechanically. Hek, feline and gorgeous, darted Crabdale a knowing look and nestled further into her recliner. Behind her, Crabdale could see the bar was starting to fill up with plasticked-up nubiles; he lusted silently as he watched the contours of their bodies shift gently. Restlessness filled him as he prepared for the onslaught of his thoughts. JC or Hangeman Judd? What an idea! Must shake that one off.

A violent crash from somewhere close by and a tinny loudspeaker spluttered to life.

“It’s them again,” Hek hissed to Crabdale. “We’re under attack. Let’s get out of here.”

“We’re supposed to wait for further instructions, aren’t we?”

The sound of falling masonry drowned out Hek's disbelieving reply.

IT JUST SO HAPPENED THAT...

Coincidences are always taken as evidence that, rather than utter randomness, there is a strange design behind events. On the other hand, the word itself, its definition and the very surprise with which people greet such happenings show that, deep down, coincidences are recognised as the results of chance. If they happened too often and were too seemingly prescient or uncanny, people would by now have learned to shrug them off as just another sign from God.

I've had a few happen to me, but not nearly as many as friends have had. I think perhaps it's all down to how fine the tuning is on your "strangeness antenna" i.e. some people, probably the more attentive ones, recognise as a signal what others tune out as noise. They may use a similar faculty that allows patterns in clouds, or indeed in constellations, to be discerned. Whether those patterns are actually there, let alone put there, is a moot point.

Anyway, this morning, I was taken aback by such a coincidence. At the top of this blog are banner ads which try (usually in vain) to target products at me, chosen by some more reasonably intelligent trawling software on the basis of what I write. (It makes some hilarious errors, though. For example, Crabdale's adventures in the kitchen were followed by a spate of ads for fitted kitchens, something I have very little use for as a single-room occupier.)

Yesterday, I was telling friend who is a former voluntary worker that, since my own time in Africa, I have always wanted to use my experience to train teachers to teach basic literacy to poor kids in developing countries. (I can't do this on a salaried basis without a Master's degree, pretty much beyond my means, even though I have all the skills needed.) I also mentioned in passing one inspiring English and literacy project I'd seen in Siem Reap in Cambodia.

The banner ad on my site today (one side only) was for a scheme called Room to Read, where volunteers are building libraries and supporting literacy in Cambodia. When I refreshed the site, it had gone and the kitchens were back. Weird, huh?

Please leave some other bizarre coincidences in the comments box.

HEART TO HEART

Theodore Zeldin took the opportunity of the centenary of the Entente Cordiale to restate his point about the value of intimacy. His book An Intimate History Of Humanity contends that all the most important changes in society happen in the forum of one-to-one conversations. In an effort to stimulate better dialogues, Zeldin has set up the Oxford Muse website, where people can “write self-portraits of two or three thousand words in which they set down what is most important to them”. This idea excited me immediately. I wondered what my friends would write, and what I would write.

Zeldin: “the world is still full of people who are too timid or polite to say what they think, or too conformist to think for themselves. We are schooled to be hypocrites and we all wear masks. The hidden thoughts in other people’s heads are the darkness that surrounds us.”

All of this is especially relevant now in London, where egomaniacs on both sides in the “war on terror”, by repeating slogans for public consumption, have brought us to the point where we are afraid of actually being blown apart.

How often, stung, do we adopt a rather hectoring tone as a kind of Devil’s advocate? Or, alternatively, prune the rough edges off some of our opinions to drift more easily with the general flow of the conversation? In these situations, nothing interesting results; far from being the kind of world-changing total communication Zeldin writes about, this hardly qualifies as a dialogue.

For that to happen, one thing is necessary: tolerance. Or, as someone said on the radio this morning, perhaps “acceptance” would be a better word, since tolerance implies suppressed annoyance. Dialogue cannot take place unless you recognise that, no matter how absurd a person’s beliefs may appear, given that the person is actually sane, there is a personal narrative which can explain how the beliefs were arrived at. (The same is true of the insane, though unearthing the narrative may require a specialist.)

Understanding this narrative may bring about a situation where beliefs can be quietly, effectively, challenged. And perhaps these will be your beliefs. No one walks away unchanged.

the Oxford Muse foundation

CHAPTER 5 - PAPER

Crabdale handed over his identification papers to the sallow-faced receptionist and looked at her wistfully as she checked his signature with her slender fingers.

“Drone?” she asked mockpleasantly.

“Second caste – look it says here.” Crabdale indicated the place where he had carefully inserted the distinguishing detail.

“Oh, yes. Sorry.” She eyed him thoughtfully, and then added, “you occupy your own room then, right?”

Crabdale looked down, a little embarrassed. “Yes, that’s right. It’s not that great, though. Just a small one. You must be on the ladder?”

“I’m going for my caste appraisal in eighteen months,” she made a little joking play of tense concentration, “already getting geared up for it all! Could you fill in the orange form with your name, room code and everything, then I’ll transfer it all to the entry permit for logging in. It only takes a few minutes.”

A quarter of an hour later, Crabdale was wandering the corridors of the Institute clutching his log-in receipt. He had to cross several wings of the building to get to the kitchen, but he didn’t mind; so much of his life had been spent in corridors that he felt immensely comfortable. It even gave him a peculiar sense of his own importance to be striding along empty-morningish, his echoing footsteps the only sign of life.

The head cook, Rosa Buckett, fixed him with her warm but piggy blue-jewelled eyes when he entered. (They looked so blue because of the ruddy pouches of her cheeks.)

“Hello, my darrlin’,” she bellowed “ it’s been an age and an ‘alf! We were just readyin’ the carcasses an’ I remembered you was comin’ so I saved you a few flaps and wraps.”

“Wonderful! Thank you.” Crabdale pretended an enthusiasm he did not feel.

The kitchens were cavernous; the air teemed with the sound of clattering cutlery and metallic scraping as trays were eased from gaping ovens. Vast clouds of steam erupted and dispersed below the vaulted ceiling, from where it dripped in spits on to the heads of the kitchen drones scurrying below. Even more impressive were the smells given off by rich treacly sauces, pungent roots and highly spiced carcass-cuts.

Crabdale took a moment to salivate and marvel at the vast space.

“Have the rest of my drones arrived?”

“Drones! They’re gentlefolk! One or two have started in the scullery and the second caster – I forget his name, sorry – is assessin’ the charnel.”

“I hope you’re storing the ribs separately from the entrails?”

Rosa produced from behind her back a wedge of forms, bespattered with fat. “I’ve been waitin’ for you to say that. All present and correct, Mr Crabdale, all scraped and scrotted!” she announced proudly. “I done the new returns just as you sed.”

Crabdale smiled but shuffled uneasily. “The thing is, Rosa… I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but those returns aren’t valid any more. The Department has changed the assessment protocols. You have to send the data direct to them, then they do an initial scan and pass them on to me. You can’t send those returns off as they won’t register on the new system. And we can't actually log today's work as a fully-fledged moderation.”

Rosa’s face dropped, for all she ever had wanted to do was prepare banquets.

“…in short, you need to do them all over again. I’ve brought you a summary of the new regs. But if you want to look on the glow rather than the glare, at least the hygiene and waste norms haven’t been changed – this time.” he smiled ruefully.

Rosa produced a huge handkerchief and plumped herself down on a tiny iron stool which almost buckled under her enormous bulk. “Oh, Mr Crabdale, I’m beside myself. I don’t know what to do, really I don’t! One day you’re tellin’ me this, then you goes and changes it, then we seem to be back where we started, and always so much paper.”

Crabdale put his hand on her shoulder rather awkwardly. “You and I both know that the paper is evidence of all your good work. Otherwise, how would the cardinals be able to keep tabs? Your kitchens are a shining example, you know. ”

Glumly, Rosa took the new documents and cursed. Crabdale, having failed to convince, went off to begin his part of the grind.

OUT OF THE CAGE

I think Jim Morrison said that kids got into the Doors because they needed something sacred. Rock music, in another era, did quite well in providing this, for teenagers at least, with impenetrable lyrics, quasi-religious iconography and spectacle all adding to the illusion.

In a certain type of person, including and perhaps especially young men (I was there), there is the hunger for a certain kind of spiritual stimulation. I mean this in the broadest sense, that is, experience that is out of the ordinary, charged with significance, potentially life-defining. These events occur in parts of you that mundane experience can't reach. They may be tranquil, but not necessarily.

So it makes me wonder when I hear that the papers have been asking "WHY?" in relation to the suspected bombers rounded up in the UK. Why would some Moslem teenagers have so much hate that they could plan death and destruction?

I always remember the "choose life" litany at the start of Trainspotting. There are so many things this society does not, cannot, offer to a young man in the first flush of his exuberance. Yes, you can have CDs, DVDs and any amount of plastic, but where has adventure gone? You can have casual sex, but what about the dreamed-of soul mate? You can have a successful career, but what about purpose? You can play sport, but what about heroism? You can go along to the church or mosque, but what about revelation? You can serve the community, but what about martyrdom?

And among the things that modern society must proscribe is the lip-smackin', finger-lickin', heart-racin' prospect of real violence.

EERIE

"Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship." George Wald

The mechanistic explanation of evolution, championed by Richard Dawkins, is almost universally accepted, and his models demonstrate how refinements and adaptations are cumulative, thus explaining the crazy leaps and bounds of development.

Despite this, I can't forget a flower I saw on the slopes of Mt Meru in Tanzania which was shaped exactly like a spindly red insect, so as to encourage others of that species to inadvertently pollinate it while, presumably, trying to mate - or else to have a conversation. (Spare a thought for the frustrated insect when he discovers his date is not all she was cracked up to be!)

I also recall an episode of In Our Time (Radio 4) last year, in which one scientist was saying that the octopus's eye and the human eye, despite having developed on totally unrelated evolutionary branches, are strikingly similar in their structure. He admitted, almost guiltily, that such recurring patternings were "eerie." Melvyn Bragg replied instantly, but in a matter-of-fact tone, "a lot of people will have picked up on your use of the word eerie."

It is not in the scientific lexicon. But can't be completely dismissed from mine.

ARC

Nothing to report, so I'll talk about the weather. Yesterday and today the sky was bright as June and I felt different about everything.

People rarely look up to see it, though they'd happily pay to go to the imax cinema or have a virtual reality headset on. Imagine all the people who were in galleries looking at Turner skies today, when the arc of infinity was there in all its glory above the chimney-pots.

Every time the sun shines, I am utterly transported. It's as if an oppressive weight has been lifted from me. Sometimes I think of Saturday afternoons as a child, free to wander the endless summer holidays. Or I imagine being alive in a different era under the same sun. Everything becomes imaginable.

When I used to live in Africa, the sun became quite ordinary and I longed for the cool and damp days. My heart sank when I saw the morning sky cloudless and thought of the heat of the day coming on. Seems hard to believe now!

A PERSUASIVE INTERPRETATION?

At Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, there's a Marxist called Heiko who holds forth every week and, if you weren't paying attention, you might take him for just one of the raving lunatics that populate the place. His defiance, however, is of a more thoughtful kind and what he says is very challenging. In fact, the idea of class struggle is a credible interpretation of what is happening in global politics today.

Everyone is rightly outraged at the terrorist bombings in Madrid, especially because they influenced the outcome of the election, yet not enough people have questioned the almost casual use of force on behalf of Western governments time and again to achieve precisely the same results.

Heiko draws a parallel between the Bush people and Al Qa'eda; both will stop at nothing to establish effective political control over what happens in the strategic Middle Eastern states of Iran, Iraq, Saudi.

He jokingly asked whether, if Bin Laden tows the American line for a while at some future date, as Gadaffy is apparently doing now, he will be brought back into the fold and rewarded in future years.

He also repeated the now familiar story that Bush had 24 members of the Bin Laden family flown out of the US to safety in Saudi the day after the 9/11 attacks. What's the truth behind that?

I'm not able to tie all these threads together effectively yet because I haven't done my research. It is clear, however, that the shots in the "war on terror", from both sides, are being called by rich elites whose interests are purely selfish i.e. maintaining and extending their economic power.

And isn't it these same forces that are the "drivers" behind many of the Government's policies? If only people weren't quite so keen to believe the official line, perhaps they would wake up one morning a reality quite different from the one they are used to.

Heiko's talks

CHAPTER 4 GRIND

In Shallow, the sky is nearly always Arctic grey – there is probably some chemical explanation, but no one cares enough to remember what it is. Everything is degraded.

Crabdale’s energies are elsewhere; he is almost consumed by his job as a moderating auditor for the Department of Public Attainment. His team of moderators have built up a fearsome reputation locally as they undertake their round of detailed checks on all aspects of public service provision, validating the initial grades of the in-house assessors. The final results of their enquiries are digested and passed straight to the office of Herr Grinningsoul, the Cardinal of Hibernia, who can thereby ensure that everything is running with just the right amount of versimilitude and perplex.

Today, the very greyest of the season of drizzle, Crabdale felt relieved to have an indoor assignment, a routine flash inspection of the kitchens at the Shallow Institute. He took the main road towards the Institute, which was lined on either side by gas lamps and the usual blackened buildings in various states of neglect or scrub, and from which, here and there, some tattered posters for last year’s visit of the Metaphysical Circus or any of the other thousand tawdry entertainments on offer flapped in the fumes.

NEW LABOUR: WEAK

"National governments appear increasingly impotent in the face of the giant corporations, who transcended national borders many years ago," writes Noreena Hertz in The Silent Takeover.

She claims that the welfare state is being undermined, arguing that New Labour have more or less reached the limit of what they can achieve, given the fact that no one would thank them if the monsternationals upped and left the country, as Ford seem to be doing in Dagenham.

No one can deny that Mr Brown is in favour of wealth redistribution; he has committed billions to education, childcare, the NHS and allieviating poverty. No one can deny that people both at the top and bottom of the social pyramid have been affected by his policies. I can't remember the exact figures, but I did hear from an independent source (on Newsnight, 2003) that the top 5% are 15% worse off while the bottom 5% are 15% better off - something within that range anyway.

The question is whether the Chancellor can do more, especially given the long-term environmental and pensions crises, let alone the money being wasted on the "war on terror".

If indeed, as I suspect, he is unable to act because of an electorate unwilling to vote for an income tax hike and corporations refusing to pay more corporation tax, how on earth will we be able to sustain anything like the current level of provision by the welfare state, especially when growth falters and the number of pensioners increases?

If the electorate is unwilling to vote for a sensible policy, on their head be it. That is how democracy works. But that predatory monsternationals should be able to lean on the government to prevent its acting in the cause of social justice is a disgrace.

Where is a more virile breed of politician?


The state of the world: read George Monbiot

CHAPTER 3 FROTHIE FAILS TO RETRIEVE

Open a new document and a blinking cursor demands your attention. Emerge blinking into a grey dawn and, half a minute behind you, “Auntie” Frothie will have pinned you down with one of her monologues that take over a room, smell of decaying rind and end up trailing off into nowhere. She has had no sleep and has spent the last hour devising a tale so inane and convoluted that it will leave you suffocated.

This is her domain and Crabdale has been trapped here for as long as he can remember. Every day begins in the same way and there is absolutely no respite.

The pattern of Frothie’s monologues was a chain of interlocking relative clauses, which took the unfortunate victim (I will not say “listener”) further and further from what might have been the original point. She would faithfully report each painful step of the interminable conversations-with-herself that filled her otherwise empty days. And each monologue was an impostor; being unsolicited, it announced itself as if it were a fragment of a real conversation.

“No, the interesting thing was…” she began at high volume, “I couldn’t remember which nostril she was referring to. She did say something about nostril-clearing, which I meant to write down and I should’ve written it down only I didn’t have a pencil and I had been debating with myself whether to bring one but," - here, the pitch rose to a higher intensity and each stressed syllable became a shriek - "Did I remember? Did I find one? Where is there a pencil anyway?"

The eyes stared madly out of the head.

“So I was sitting there racking my brains and she was explaining the breathing technique… I wish I could remember… it was supposed to be good for something or other; backaches, I think it was. Anyhow, she was explaining it and we were all trying to do it, if you see what I mean, and I did start to feel a certain dizziness, which made me think of Ellen because that’s exactly what she used to say when she was trying to learn the oboe…”

This was the cue for one of a fascinating range of silly voices.

“I really really wanted to learn the instrument but I wouldn't have done it if I'd known it was going to make me fall over!!!” – a peal of manic laughter and back, at once to a hushed, almost apologetic tone “…if you see what I mean.”

Crabdale avoided looking at the flat, yellow teeth and chewed harder on his carbon granules. Exit, exit, shut down, log off.

PREREQUISITES OF FREEDOM

People sing and write about freedom. Sometimes they take to the streets in protest, risk their lives and even die for it.

What is necessary for freedom? First, there is freedom from constraint; it must be true that our actions are not determined by external forces and are somehow a result of our choices.

Some philosophers have suggested that, since everything follows causal patterns and arises from pre-existing conditions, we are not "really" free. It follows from this that we should cease the almost universal practice of praise, blame, criticism, carping, admiration, condemnation, etc. This is hopelessly counter-intuitive for most people (even many Buddhist monks, for example, those who protested against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.)

A less extreme position, explained by Simon Blackburn in his book Think, is to accept that people do often go through a decision-making process, and that while the outcome of our decisions is often determined by our characters (incorporating our genetic inheritance, upbringing and experience of life), it is precisely this that is up for praise and blame, namely our characters, our "software", no matter how it was arrived at.

Second, and this is crucial, we need freedom of choice. Otherwise freedom is only freedom to dream, like the characters in The Matrix at the beginning of the first film, before they realise their world is illusory.

In the political sphere, we have freedom from constraint. This is why I can express my opinion without fear of being taken away in the night by the secret police. And I don't take this lightly.

However, this freedom has been rendered impotent, because there is no substantive freedom of choice. The often trumpeted idea of "change through the ballot box" no longer applies in this country. A couple of percentage points either way on tax and spending - that's it. All the parties are representing the interests of global capital (the movements of which are truly free from nearly all constraints). There is no alternative way which offers a sane environmental policy and justice for the world's poor.

What is to be done?

INSIDIOUS

"Like a bird on a wire, Like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." Leonard Cohen

Yes, I am grateful to be living in a country where I can express my opinions more or less freely to my friends, in songs and in this blog. I can go as far as to hand out leaflets and last year I even took to the streets. I am also free to take all the opportunities open to me, without fear of discrimination, as long as I can get the requisite amount of cash behind me. In a sense, I am free, and I want the government to continue to protect these freedoms.

Yet I feel a sense of unease at all this. What can it be? Somewhere along the line, what has happened to democracy? Can I and people like me really determine the direction of the society in which we live?

Since Mr Blair and Mr Howard both believe that it is Rupert Murdoch and The Sun that will win the next election, are they then going to let his views determine their policy on Europe? (This is a rhetorical question!)

Mr Howard woos Mr Murdoch

And isn't this just one instance of a more widespread cancer in the body politic, namely that corporate elites in the arms, oil and media industries, hand-in-glove with each other, have either bought politicians or otherwise constrained their freedom of action to such an extent that they have to follow only the policies that will benefit those industries? Isn't this clear for all to see?

Welcome to 1984, This Perfect Day, Brave New World... Choose your dystopia. The future has arrived and very few people have noticed. We the people are NOT in control. The only difference between the situation in the "democratic" countries and 1984 is that dissent is tolerated, even welcomed! The corporate elites have been so terrifyingly ingenious in their assumption of power that they can now allow dissenters to sound off as much as they like, safe in the knowledge that any amount of protest will be utterly insignificant.

CHAPTER 2 - VIA DOLOROSA

Crabdale trudged home through sub-district B11 of Shallow, preoccupied by the internal parade of images he played with to avoid looking at the grim skyline. At every shop doorway, he tuned his ears to the news of a distant war. He’d always loved current affairs! It gave him a thrill to think of himself as a tiny particle, the product of thousands of events, momentary.

Finally he ran the gauntlet of his own street, where high narrow gargoyled houses rose to block out the light. With relief, he turned the key to his own door. He’d got through another day! Virtually grey with exhaustion, he clambered over a heap of yesterday’s carpet shavings and plugged in the kettle. He watched it boil and restarted it every time it periodically sparked and switched itself off. He tried to make as little noise as possible, but it was no good.

From the bowels of the house, there were the unmistakable sounds of movement and eventually a strident squawk and a series of jarring chirrups as “Auntie” Frothie burst through the door, her tiny body taut as cables. As always, she had news that just had to be sung.

"Did you have FUN at work today?" she screeched and gave a manic grin.

Crabdale's heart sank and, grunting a response, he withdrew into his nether world.

AL QAEDA NEED NOT FEAR

A badly punctuated London Underground poster by the Metropolitan Police gives some cause for concern, but not to terrorists. If we notice a suspect package, it tells us:

"Don't touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or dial 999."

from the Independent letters page

FRONT-LINE GRIPES

Ha ha ha - I must have been daydreaming! Of course the government isn't going to fund a huge amount of public housing. For a moment it was like being in a socialist utopia (literally, no place.) They are only going to allow them to be built. Buyers-to-profiteer must be rubbing their hands with glee.

My tired brain got the wrong message on my 13-hour Wednesday. Arrive 8am; teach 9-12.15; teach 1-3; observe training course 5-6; observe teaching practice 6.45-9.15. Get home (to my single room) 9.30. Too tired to even catch the whole of Newsnight; crashed totally out before 11pm.

Every year, the work I and my colleagues do bring £1000s from abroad into our college; this goes ultimately towards supporting front line education, as well as - this goes without saying - a generous tier of management and administration.

I am an experienced front-line worker, yet to afford the meanest one-room studio above some noisy newsagent's in this London suburb, I'd have to multiply my salary by five.

GOOD OLD GORDON BROWN!

The best politician in Britain has just committed the Government to building 1000s of affordable homes. I have been working in education for 13 years and am about to become a teacher trainer, but am priced out of the market.

Even if my deposit was twice what it is, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. So I live just as I did when I was a student, in one room with my stereo and CDs. Most of the books I own have been in a friend's loft since 1997 as I have no room for them. Every day I go out to work - hard - for this. (In effect, for nothing, for I cannot move my life on to the next phase.) Many of my friends are in the same situation.

Why doesn't someone go the whole hog and make it ILLEGAL to own a second home merely in order to reap profit from have-nots?

THE MAGIC AIR

Was wakened at around 6 today by the first true dawn chorus of the year. (Either the birds notice the temperature rise, or I've slept through the others.) In my first job, one of my colleagues used to tell me how she'd always throw open the window to take it in and I do this sometimes as well when I can muster up the energy to stumble over to the window.

The deep blue morning is alive with bright chirrups and bleeps, and shrill "loops" that sound almost electronic; some short and insistent, others coded in a more involved way. I always try to track these longer messages; some are clearly variations on a theme, but with no exact repetitions.There's very little sense of space - it sounds as if all the little choristers are sitting on the window sill. Like a blind person might, I try to imagine the series of points where each little voice comes from.

MUSIC AGAINST THE GLOOM

Spring refuses to come, but never mind. My friend Steve came down this weekend and we challenged ourselves to see if we could write two songs in an afternoon. (This is because I've had musical writer's block for nearly two years.) Incredibly, we succeeded.

Both of us had bits of melody, a few fragmentary lyrics and chord sequences -musical junk - and then were pretty much swept along in the creative process for a few hours. First we wrote a throwaway calypso, which was OK as a start, and then a love song just came out from nowhere. Steve is able to take my rudimentary ideas and instantly transfer them to piano and develop them, and I can build on some of the things he comes up with.

Because I have no musical education at all and am a pretty rough player, it always hits me as one of the best things in the world to be able to produce passable songs.