Some questions (not exactly Keats).

Widowmakers, are you pleased at what you’ve done?
Are you celebrating, having fun?
Mission accomplished.
Many hundreds dead.
Many lives extinguished.
The fires of hate well-fed.
Your war you can’t ever expect to win, defeat is all you are,
Nous sommes ensemble dans la lumière, pour brûler le noir.

Orphanmakers, what drives you to such hate?
Some deep-seated fear, fear of your fate?
Murdering innocents.
For your made up god.
Do you think that’s what he wants?
Is he really such a sod?
We’ll beat back every one of your attacks; beat back all you are.
Nous sommes ensemble dans la lumière, pour brûler le noir.

Beautykillers, how do you think this will end?
Our death? Your death? The death of all we defend?
You want to make us afraid?
We already were.
Did that ever stop us?
Not bloody likely, sir.
Just a modern day inquisition; that is all you are.
Nous sommes ensemble dans la lumière, pour brûler le noir.

Motherfuckers, what right have you to do this?
Is it still because cartoonists took the piss?
You do not have the right.
No-one has the right.
The hundreds you have killed:
They did not start this fight.
Cunts like you try to drown us in terror, but you only light the spark.
We stand together in the light, to burn away the dark.

Dear Nestlé.

Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you. Fuck your opinion on water and your utter contempt for the lives of people everywhere. Fuck you for declaring, without a shred of decency, that we should pay you for water. Fuck you for stealing water from places where it is becoming increasingly precious. Here's hoping the lawsuit succeeds. Fuck you for not giving a thought for the people who would have no choice but to die if your ambition of making clean, drinkable water, the thing that every living thing on this planet needs to stay alive, a commodity that people would have to buy from you. Fuck your posters that you’ve put up around my town declaring you are building healthy families over pictures of smiling families or of children drinking from a plastic bottle of your water. The poster that was vandalised to make the bottle look like a big cock was disturbing, but let’s face it, that’s kind of what you want to do to all of us. Fuck you for being among the most shamelessly hypocritical companies this world has ever seen. Fucking die in a fucking fire you fucking fucks.

Adventures in beards.

I’ve been clean-shaven for the last 36 years. I’ve never really felt the need to leave my face to grow hair, but recently there has been an increase in noise from spouse, colleagues and children to let the face fuzz off the leash. So I did.

For the first few weeks it itched like buggery, but after sticking with it for a little longer the nasty prickly feeling subsided and things became a bit softer. There was much positive feedback; Rach liked it, the kids started calling me ‘fluffy daddy’ and treating my head pretty much like a cat. Even my mum liked it. The intention is (always was, really) to keep growing for the meantime. I mean, what’s the point of growing a beard if you don’t grow a big bushy one? For some reason, this seems to be less popular.

Rach has talked about secret trimmings while I’m asleep, and mum is somewhat less enthused than she was. The kids love the idea still. I am intending to persevere. While I had Tormund Giantsbane in mind, so far comparisons my friends have made include some wrestler, Ed bloody Sheeran and…Prince Harry. If you can believe it two thirds of them were meant as compliments. Fuck sake.

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.

Social media, soaps and me.

So, previously, my laptop broke, and I had to endure pretty shite customer service to get it fixed. Not the worst ever; that would be a certain well-known music retailer, but still pretty bad. I wrote about it here. The other month I managed to drop my laptop. I am a butterfingered fool. Luckily, I was forking out for some pretty comprehensive cover, and was able to, after an attempt to fix it, get some money to put towards a replacement. While the service was pretty slow, it was, on the whole, much better.

A consequence of this enforced laptop drought was that I had to work a little harder for access to social media – either borrow my wife’s phone (I don’t have a fancy phone myself - you remember how much I love phone shopping) or frequent the local libraries. I love our libraries, as well you know, but for books, not for spending my time pissing about of the Book of Face. So, I took pretty much 6 weeks out.

The e-mail build up was truly horrendous – most of it shite. Amazon recommended some stuff I’d never watch in a million years because of something I watched, and there were many, many e-mails from Facebook frantically telling me of everything I’d been missing and all the wonderful people I could be friends with (let’s not dwell on the fact that some of them were people I had been friends with but had unfriended me previously), and Twitter wanted me to know all the interesting things people were tweeting every day that I was missing.

I logged on and…it was just as if I’d been on the day before. It was like watching Eastenders for years and then missing it for a few months. Coming back to it you find that after 5 minutes you’ve already caught up. Coming back to Facebook and Twitter after 6 weeks was exactly like that.

I am a fan generally of social media – it’s useful, it is a fantastic way to connect with people all over the world that you have more in common with than many of the people you know in reality, and it is a useful way to keep in touch with, well, whatever you want really. But, it’s worth not connecting for extended periods at times so you remind yourself that it isn’t essential and that life trundles on pretty much as it always did, even without you seeing what some dude had for breakfast one day.

Anyway, gotta go. I need to check to see if there are any new cat videos.

It’s like they knew somehow.

A few of the books I’ve read fairly recently have a few unsettling things in common. First off, not too long ago, I read George Orwell’s 1984. Published in 1949, it tells of a rigidly controlled society where to even think outside the accepted lines is to invite horrifying conditioning until your mind thinks the proper way. The population are told what to think, and the structure of society ensures the population think it, even when it flies in the face of all observable facts. Recorded history changes overnight and yet to call attention to this, to question what those with authority tell you is truth is simply not conceivable. It’s hard not to find echoes of Orwell’s totalitarian vision in the way newspapers will publish blatant untruths again and again because it backs their ideology, driven to recent ludicrous highs in the lead up to the election.

(Loosely related tangent: Russell Brand is a cock; we all know this. There is, however, no denying that the cock has become a bit of a figurehead for the disillusioned non-voting masses. So, appearing on Brand’s web show The Trews as Ed Miliband did, in an effort, however half-arsed, to at least try to engage with these people is surely worthy is it not? It seems not. The official Government line is that Brand, and therefore by extension, the large percentage of the population he is speaking for, is a joke. Way to show contempt for the people whose lives you’re supposed to be working to improve. The papers declared it to be the desperate move of a lunatic. Why is it such a terrible idea to try to talk to the apathetic non voters? I agree that they should vote, but apathy doesn’t justify the contempt the press has shown them, lumping them together as some kind of bad smell it’s impolite to even acknowledge. Of course, judging by the recent election results, the silent majority might well consist of mostly UKIP voters, so now here I am, quite out of character for me, kind of hoping they go back to being silent.)

Anyway, back to the point; prescient novels. It seems Orwell’s future is one increasingly within the realm of possibility with every passing year. I’ve mentioned before how one of my favourite films growing up was the 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine, but I hadn’t, until recently, read H. G. Wells’ original novel. Rach picked it up for me from one of our local libraries (I get a delicious thrill every time I remember I’m lucky enough to live in a place where ‘local library’ is plural, and now that where I live has gone blue for the first time in over a decade, I’m concerned that may not be the case for much longer). Published in 1895 and set in Victorian times, it follows a scientist, known in the narrative only as ‘The Time Traveller’ to the year 802,701 to discover what has become of Earth and humanity in the far future. It turns out the divide between the rich and poor in our society continued to grow and grow and grow. It’s incredible that even pre-1900 there was concern in society about the widening gap between the classes, and that over 100 years later, we’re still having trouble with that issue. Did I say incredible? I meant incredibly depressing. But hey, I suppose I’d better get used to things being incredibly depressing for a while.

Having conquered the need to struggle for anything, the upper classes have evolved into the Eloi; mindless children, spending the days frolicking, eating, fucking and, well, not much else. Certainly not thinking. Their language is hugely simplified and their attention span is practically non-existent. The Time Traveller contends that this shows that struggling and fighting for a better world is what has driven us to achieve so much throughout the years, and when we finally got what we had struggled for for so long, our drive, our intelligence, our will to improve and our creativity withered and died, no longer needed. Meanwhile, the working classes have retreated underground and evolved into pasty, light-fearing Morlocks, living in dark holes full of machinery and manufacturing. The relationship between those above ground and those below is no longer economic, for there is no longer the need for an economy. Nor is it master and slave. The Morlocks continue to manufacture clothes and shoes for the Eloi, but it is not to serve them, nor is it because they are still some beaten down underclass. For the Morlocks have become cattle farmers, and the Eloi their unthinking food source. The gap between rich and poor, between upper and working class, has been widening for some time and is already pretty sickening. Inexplicably, we seem happy for it to get worse. The 19th Century concerns expressed in The Time Machine seem more timely now than ever.

And then, I came to High Rise. I’d read some J. G. Ballard before; The Drowned World, The Wind From Nowhere, The Terminal Beach & The Drought were my first experiences of the British writer, which I picked up after raiding my father-in-law’s book shelf. When news broke that Ben Wheatley was adapting it and that it is widely known as Ballard’s best novel, I reached out to my local libraries again and picked up a copy. High Rise was published in 1975 and is set almost entirely within the concrete walls of a recently opened self-contained living apartment. 1000 apartments on 40 storeys, the building includes shopping malls, swimming pools, schools and anything else the occupants might need. The only reason to leave is to work.

It doesn’t take long for things to start going awry; able to shut themselves off from society completely, those living in the high-rise begin to alter their self-contained society into something more primal – physical class distinctions evolve, literally lower, middle and upper class, reflected in the floors they occupy – and, freed from the restrictions placed upon them by a civilised society, a different rule takes precedence, that of hunter/gatherer, of predator and prey.

The really uncomfortable thing about High Rise is the fact that the inhabitants of the building actually welcome this degeneration, like a long-tamed beast finally throwing off its shackles. There is a sensation of the people actually pushing things further and further deliberately, out of a need just to see how far it can actually go; they embrace the darkness eagerly. The thing about High Rise is that it is so disturbingly plausible, that while the apartment building offered the ideal environment for the events described, sometime it feels there is every possibility of pockets of civilisation going this way as a prelude to the whole of our society plunging purposefully and giddily down this path of de-evolution. The intent of our new Government to re-legalise foxhunting and stop Britain being subject to the Human Rights Act, maybe even to withdraw from Europe altogether, make it feel like our entire country is becoming a self-contained high rise of its own, and the feeling of the balance tipping, gently at first, then quicker and quicker towards oblivion that many of us currently have is evoked so strongly in the early chapters of Ballard’s novel it is dizzying, and not a little disconcerting.

Of course, things on the whole aren’t quite as depressing as all that. While it is really quite depressing that in the decades since these novels were written and published, it seems we’ve failed to progress at all, there is hope in that we don’t yet appear to have slipped any closer to the hellish visions dreamed up in them. We might yet find our way to a future civilisation more positive than those described in 1984, The Time Machine and High Rise. More like The Commonwealth described by Peter F. Hamilton. More Star Trek, less Mad Max. Here’s hoping.

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?