On the pursuit of wealth.

The best things in life may be free, but everything else, up to and including the second best things in life, costs a bloody fortune. And if it doesn’t, you can bet that some bugger somewhere is trying to figure out a way to make it. It’s going to be hard to make it sound like I’m not just coming from a place of jealousy, but I really don’t mind that people and companies make ludicrous sums of money. Good luck to ‘em, if it makes them happy.

I do mind when the deliberate actions they take impact directly on people who are not rich just to protect their already-ridiculous-and-still-increasing profit margins. Governments inflicting austerity measures on people, with the loss of amenities all across the country while resolutely failing to try to collect masses and masses of unpaid corporation tax, while also trying to convince people you should manage a country’s economy the same way you manage a household budget. A press that relentlessly bullshits its readers and focuses on stirring anger and hate against others who have the fucking cheek to, wait for it, be born or have parents that were born on the other side of a line on a fucking map, because it sells more papers. Companies that aggressively market milk formula in a third world country as an alternative to breastfeeding, leading to the deaths of a significant number of babies due to the unclean water the formula is made up with and other issues (hi Nestlé! Fuck you Nestlé!). Businessmen who will bully and cheat smaller businesses out of money owed just because they can (an example of such a person being the fucktard who is the current Republican Presidential candidate). We’ve got to the point now that the effects of climate change are beginning to be unavoidable, and yet there is still a huge push to deny it is even happening (I’m actually impressed Brian Cox didn’t deck this fucking prick) amongst our elected leaders everywhere, and even the ones who admit it’s happening seem pretty powerless to do a damn thing about it. The opportunities and the progress we’re going to lose over the coming decades because of this deliberate cuntery is heart breaking.

All because being really ridiculously rich or turning over stupidly high profits isn’t enough. They’ve got to be even richer, make even more, pushing our species and our planet’s ability to support us to the brink in the process. I don’t regret having children, but I regret the desolate future I’ve brought them in to. The so-called 'American Dream' is no longer a romantic ideal (if it ever was). It is simply economic wealth at the expense of everything else, and it is poisonous, and has infected many developed and developing countries all over the world, to the detriment of all.

How can this be changed? What can be done? This is the kicker. Everyone thinks you need money, and it is reinforced everywhere. And because that’s what everyone thinks, it means you kind of do need the money. You need money to make headway against it. Even if you’re content, like me, to do the best you can on a smaller scale and live by your own set of values ("Do the good you see in front of you" to once again quote Pratchett), you still need it. Even two working people on, for the area, not terrible salaries, can’t afford a place to live. You could see the confusion in the face of the mortgage advisor when we explained we’re not interested in a Shared Ownership on a newly built shoebox in the middle of a number of other identical shoeboxes, with the intention of climbing the property ladder, but we just want to find a place to settle, comfy enough to set up a home and not move on every few years. We can afford it – over a decade without a single missed rent payment is proof of that, but saving a monster deposit? That we cannot do. So we’re stuck, with a choice between staying put and continuing to rent or moving into the Shared Ownership shoebox. Renting it is, then.

Who decided that living life this way was a good idea? Because it smells like bullshit to me.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Hives – Without the Money: “Without the money, there’s nothing you can do.”

The city is alive.

I recently had the good fortune to spend a night in London. Living in the Midlands, London is distant enough to me to feel like it may as well be another country. I know it’s down there, and I know as far as most of the world is concerned, it’s the only part of this country that counts. Sometimes I feel like I’m the equivalent of an inbred farmer in the sticks, considering himself almost a different species to these fancy city folk. The sensible part of me knows that cities are full of people not that different to me; the difference being that there are more of them; something you’d think would put me off, but for some reason doesn’t.

We got there by train – first to London Euston, then Underground, then another short train journey into Croydon. The thing that strikes me about London, is the sheer numbers of people, all different and no doubt complex, yet all specks besides the city as a whole, like stars in a galaxy. We got to our platform in the Underground, only to find our train was jam-packed. As I was preparing to force myself into this mass of bodies, my travelling companion, with the benefit of more experience in this, placed a hand on my shoulder and motioned me to wait and let the train go. I then learned that there was another train coming along in a mere 90 seconds. And another 2 minutes after that. On and on, day and night. The number of people constantly moving in, out, through and under the city is mind boggling. The roads are almost never free of buses – usually there are 2 or 3. To use a car to get around London seems ludicrously inefficient.

Endless movement, endless offices, endless new buildings going up, endless restaurants, apartments, banks and hotels, endless people. It adds up to something that while made up of these separate parts, feels somehow beautifully alive in its own right, and I love that about it.

It makes me want to tour cities everywhere, to see how each melting pot of humanity feels, to see if they are different. It’s why I’m drawn to fiction where a city becomes a character in its own right, like Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, or New Crobuzon in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Cities are alive, and, while certainly bad for the environment, the wealth of positive inspiration I get from them manages to quiet the concerned ecologist in me.

A blog post that ends in a completely different place to the place it started, because that’s apparently how my mind works. Or doesn’t.

So I wrote once about how I used to be a gamer – Atari 2600, and a Sega nerd, until I stopped. Then I gave in and bought an Xbox 360. I love it, and have loved catching up with some of the biggest gaming franchises of the last decade. What I was unaware of back then, but know all too well now, is the trap to ensnare the anal mind; achievements. I’m never going to get them all, but I’m never going to be able to stop trying.

On top of that, now there is the new generation. Many of the folks I gamed with are moving on to a place I can’t yet afford to follow. But dammit, how long is not being able to afford an Xbox One going to stop me getting one? Souped up GTA V? The Witcher 3? The new Gears of War? The new Mass Effect? I recently had to be convinced to fork out £90ish for 4 seasons of Game of Thrones on Blu Ray, so I’ll be with the old 360 for a while, I think. Unless you want to buy me a One? No? Fine.

Rach and I often find ourselves asking how people can seem to afford to splash out so much on houses, cars, clothes and gadgets, because we genuinely have no clue. For the area we live in, our combined income is over the average, and yet we cannot find a way to ‘live within our means’ as the saying goes. Wages are spent before they are earned, and anything we manage to save is saved just in time for the car to blow up or something equally well timed. We have holidays (not expensive ones), we have an Internet connection and we have books, music and a TV. A lack of any one of these would label our family deprived, which makes you wonder what families that have to exist without any of this are? I suppose that depends on who you’re asking; Katie Hopkins, who has recently overtaken Clarkson as the UK’s number 1 reason to bring back hanging, might consider them cockroaches, but nobody should try to legitimise that talking bag of stale sweat-scum from Danny Devito’s unwashed scrotum by pretending her opinion is good for anything other than taking a huge shit on.

Anyway, I find myself stuck between a wish to moan about not ever seeming to have enough while other folks have seemingly bottomless pockets and a consciousness that reminds me that there are a great many people who have much less than we’ve got and maybe I should be a bit more grateful, and I call myself unpleasant names. And then I remember the wheels that turn constantly to keep this distressing status quo in place and the lethargy that it engenders in people too focused on the wrong things to make any kind of positive change. I remember the system that masquerades as democracy run in the financial interests of corporate entities with more rights than poor people, entities that will gladly send us running, screaming, fighting, warring, abusing and unseeing into endless catastrophe just to keep profits growing. And then I feel fury at the injustice that is perpetrated everywhere, and helplessness at the obvious impotence of that fury; unable to change things, unable to bring justice, unable to do anything but acknowledge it is pointless even to try. But then I remember something else.

I remember what my life really is – a collection of moments, lived in series; a collection of memories made and memories yet to be made. I am extremely lucky in that the vast majority of those moments are worth remembering and bring joy. An increasing collection of them are perfect moments, and to quote the late Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time; “Against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain”.

Finally, after this endlessly repeating dance of petulance, annoyance, guilt, fury, helplessness and gratefulness, I come at last to the end and feel always the same thing: contentment. Let the world continue to turn, let the rich and powerful continue in their greed, let the hateful continue to spit bile. Let them not go unchallenged, and let us remember to spit in their eye should we get the opportunity. But above all, let us be happy for the things that bring us happiness because, and I know this works, you make others happy in turn. If you can do that, even briefly, how can it be anything other than worth it?

The value in repetition.

I’m a repeater. My favourite records are played again and again until they wear out and must be bought again (Definitely Maybe, Parklife, Grace, Is This It?, Different Class, Songs for the Deaf and Appetite for Destruction amongst dozens of others, if you care). Throughout my childhood I re-watched my favourite films to death (The Time Machine (1960), War of the Worlds (1953), Goonies, Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones) and that hasn’t changed much since I’ve got older apart from the addition of a few others – Pulp Fiction, Lord of the Rings, and Fight Club along with many more. The hours I sunk into playing through Sonic the Hedgehog, James Pond, Alex Kidd, Road Rash, Flashback and Street Fighter II and more over and over again in my teens I have no doubt would be terrifying were they ever to be added up, and more recently, I’ve been through the Gears of War campaign more than once and can see myself playing though GTA V again before too long.

There are, I don’t doubt, many people who have quite the opposite point of view; when you’ve seen a film once, you’ve seen it, so what’s the point of seeing it again? But if I love it, why would I not want to see it again? Those records, those films and those games became a support system for me while negotiating the difficulties of adolescence. They were friends, they were retreats – they were my happy place. They still are, in a way.

Books also had their place. I’d like to be able to tell you that I loved books above all those other things; that I used to spend hours, days even, lost in them. Alas, I wasn’t that bright. I did like books – I would read Roald Dahl, comics and adaptations of my favourite films. As with films, music and games, I would re-read my favourites – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvellous Medicine and a junior version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – that would all become dog-eared and well thumbed, and later To Kill a Mockingbird would become my favourite. This recent article about books written for children kicked off this whole train of thought. It makes a good point about the validity of children’s books, as they have to be written with repetition in mind. They have to be robust enough to stand up to kids reading and re-reading them over and over again. While as adults we certainly do re-read our favourites, they are never tested to the extremes kid’s books are – I particularly like the Neil Gaiman quote in the article about how while he can’t justify every word of American Gods, he can of Coraline. Does that mean he thinks Coraline is a better book? I doubt it, but it does sound as though he takes special care over his children’s books compared to his adult books, and it’s probably because of the retellings the children’s books are subjected to.

But I didn’t really get into reading until I got into my teens, when I found Robert Jordan, Professor Tolkien and Terry’s Brooks and Pratchett. I am in fact re-reading Pratchett’s Discworld series at the moment. I wrote this this ages ago about how you generally have differing points of view when coming back to something like a book series or TV show later in life, and a similar thing has happened with Discworld. My favourite hasn’t changed – previously it was Small Gods and so it proves to be the case still – the conceit that gods are only as real as they are believed to be and their power diminishes with their belief, leaving them to essentially die along with their last believer is such a stroke of inspired genius that I doubt Pratchett will ever top it (although he’s come close a few times). Taking the series in more general terms, however, my favoured stories were always the ones that involved the wizards of Unseen University, or Death. While they are certainly the funniest ones still, I’m much happier this time round in the company of Watch Commander Sam Vimes and witch Granny Weatherwax. I could be well off the mark here, but they feel somehow truer, as if their righteous fury at the injustices of the world is closer to Pratchett’s true view of the world and echo the points he’s really trying make under the funny. This piece written by Neil Gaiman about Pratchett and his anger being the ‘engine that powered Good Omens’ might suggest I’m not that far off the mark, after all.

As usual, I don’t really have much of a point, but I suppose what I’m getting at is you should spend time in the company of the things you love.