January

The month is finally coming to a close - such a long month it always seems, even though this one began so well.  Tonight I am celebrating because it's just after 5.00 and it isn't fully dark.  Nearly time for Candlemas/Imbolc - the next turn of the year - I like this time of year when it begins to get lighter - and my birthday approaches.

I have been in bed with the stinking cold all day, but I have finished reading this month's Book Group choice - details of which can be seen here, http://katehamlyn.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-of-month.html, if you're interested. 

I need to get up and cook now.  There will be seven of us at dinner tonight - the two Chinese boys are delightful - last night I cooked a Chinese meal - pork sweet and sour, stir fried veg with rice noodles and yellow bean sauce, and rice - followed by coconut and pineapple upside down cake... they loved it.   Tonight a more sensible dish - roast pork and veg, plus apple crumble - which Ned is longing for, as we haven't had a crumble for ages.

I am wondering about retiring from Facebook - I don't spend a long time there, it's nice to keep in touch with people - but I really hate the "surveillance" aspect of it, the targetted advertising and the rather totalitarian wish for us all to present ourselves in a uniform way.  I once tried to put in the languages I knew - it wouldn't let me do it, because it has set combinations and mine (probably) exceeded that number - I happen to be very proud of having once learned enough Turkish to get by - and I want that there.   It will make me feel less guilty about not knowing Mandarin.  It is the only non Indo-European language I have ever tackled.  Now I wonder if I could learn a new language - especially a non I-E one - Arabic perhaps, but Chinese would obviously be more useful - although, according to our students they all learn English from age 4 - all of them?  Or only in the elite schools?

Night Thoughts

Traditionally, these are things one worries about, so I am a bit perplexed by this morning's offering from the unconscious: I have irresistible thoughts about a woman a friend has married.  I dislike her - and I cannot understand what he sees in her, but apparently she has turned his life around... which is great... but she is just so foul, and actually I am basing a character on my novel on her. 

I don't know why she's coming up - even when my mind is at rest, on another topic, she's seeping in in an almost telepathic way... grrr.  I wish she'd push off.  I really need to adjust my attitude to her, but I can't help feeling that she dislikes me even more than I dislike her, so it is quite hard to do. 

A cure for woe!

Get a really nasty head cold - then you can sit there quietly listening to the economic news and not feel a thing... because your head cold has filtered all the horror out of the situation.   Of course you have a head ache, and in this case, bouts of sneezing and a sore throat, but that is minimal in comparison.

I feel this is a bit too soon after the last viral ailment - but that was more or less over by December, so I guess I've had two months without virus. 

Festival Club last night - a film about Ramsgate in the 60's... quite good fun - Ramsgate Arts has suddenly got back on the agenda, but it feels more manageable now.  I have stopped feeling anxiety about things going on here - don't feel I have to meet everyone and network - I can relax... I hear about a group of 40 professionals etc. who meet to network and don't feel - "how can I get to know them?"

I have no aspiration to "get to know" anyone in particular around here - that sounds snobbish, but I like who I like - and I have a clear pattern of liking leftish people who read and are amusing... but also liking sincere, earnest people who are "trying hard" - and vaguely decent people... people who understand the need for kindness... I have faith that friends will develop - as they have - over the years, and that it will be all right.  One has affinities... I have also found that some of the apparently "desirable" people to know are stronger on style than content... and, from the point of view of what I'm interested in, dull!

My own problem is that I fear I am getting a bit dull and shallow myself  - not reading enough good books, making enough connections.  I feel very intellectually lazy - concentration not what it was.  However, a head cold is hardly the best time to start reading hard books - all the sense would be filtered out through the mucus I expect (oh, yuck!).   Back to bed for a bit - to away my lunch tray (ha - a grudgingly made sandwich I expect, with a drink if I'm lucky!). 

January is the cruellest month...

There are all sorts of marketing stories about January - the famous one being that the 3rd Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year... created by travel company in the attempt to sell holidays.

So far this January hasn't been too gloomy.  We have been busy, preparing the spare room for our Colombian student, and getting on with the re-write of TRF... but now Rafael has arrived, and the weather is unpleasant and cold and wet and grey... and the economic news is getting worse, and some of the news items are getting more depressing.  So today I have felt that giving up Citalopram, which I had begun to do by cutting my dose in half, is perhaps not such a good idea. 

The government is proposing to put a cap on benefits - which I find rather unjust, I cannot see why cutting help to the poor is justified.   The government thinks cuts in benefit will force people to get work - er, hello?  There are 3m unemployed out there... all they will do is make unemployment less "comfortable".   It is such a sophisticated problem that it can of course easily be resolved by a simplistic approach.    What I find so upsetting is all the people who are applauding this - benefits have actually shrunk in real terms in relation to the average working wage in the last 30 years, there's no way that the unemployed could be said to have shared in the country's wealth.  But the self-righteousness of it: "why should taxpayers pay for this?"  What else do they want to do with the money?  We aren't going to get to keep it,  impoverishing the poor even further isn't going to help anyone.   Less money in the economy keeping small shops and businesses going... good thinking Ian Duncan Smith!

In the Middle of the Night....

It's been ages since I woke up at 3.00am but now I have; I got up to distract myself - play Mahjong Titans... listen to the World Service.  Usually it's very stimulating and interesting - but tonight there's a programme about Sri Lankan music - and the most appalling dirges - actual mourning songs - really wretched, being sung by bereaved women.  I was dying for it to stop. 

I had been lying awake worrying about getting the furniture into the new bedroom - now I am feeling guilty because that seems so trivial compared with the losses these women have suffered.  Perhaps the misery was hearing such heartfelt music.  It isn't the kind of thing that's going to lull me back to sleep.

I must blame drink I think - we went to a Quiz last night - good fun, and we were invited out to dinner on 14th Feb - a Valentine's dinner... sometimes, when you find the right sort of middle-aged people, you can have fun...although I did drink too fast.   Still, it was the first time we'd been out for fun since Christmas.

Racial Stereotypes

Oh dear, we can't help it, we all do it.   And today's stereotype is:  Italians.... Having lived in Italy a bit, and having spent more of my holidays there than anywhere else, I do know a fair bit about Italians - and I know that they don't really conform to the traditional "laughing carefree peasants" stereotype promulgated in the 19thC.  But one of the longest stories about them has been about cowardice... jokes about Italian tanks having 5 reverse gears etc.  I don't know why - maybe because they aren't a great fighting race, and have often hired mercenaries to fight their wars, rather than fighting themselves. 

Anyway, I don't especially credit the cowardice stereotype - but the behaviour of the Italian captain has rather confirmed it, and then one hears that he was sailing close to the harbour in order to show off to his mate.  The showy-off thing is something more remarkable in Italian men than in say, Belgian men.  There was a remarkable recording of his discussion with the coastguard who was berating him for his behaviour.  The contempt and sarcasm were marvellous  "Oh, so it was dark?  And you were afraid?"  It was marvellously entertaining - one listened with horror, how could he be so completely lacking in dignity and diligence... now it is said that he "tripped over and fell into a lifeboat".    Really almost as accident prone as Berlusconi - perhaps that could be added to the racial stereotype: creators of implausible excuses...

Maritime Disasters provide light relief

Monday morning - listening to the news - it occurs to me that the news of the awful cruiser sinking in Italy (almost on the centenary of the Titanic) is a brief respite from the horrors of economic news.  The downgrading of the credit ratings of several Euro countries isn't great news, but I don't find it personally horrific.  I suspect this is all part of a longer term "re-adjustment" to the Western world's economic status.  Even Germany is shuddering a little and the UK is clearly still in recession...  the only "good" news on the economic horizon is that London may become a major centre for trading the Chinese currency.  This is a very clear indication of the way the wind is blowing - but I wonder whether this will really come to pass.  I expect a series of announcements that New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan etc. will also be about to become major centres for trading the renimbi - or whatever it is called.

Saturday night!

I suppose it's a condition of middle age that we don't go out on Saturday night.  It's money chiefly, but this Saturday seems especially grim (middle of January and all that of course) - and I managed to make a really terrible lasagne - using a frozen block of bolognese sauce which when it defrosted didn't seem to taste very nice - I added herbs and tomato passata, but it wasn't enough... the boys gave up on it, I didn't like it - and turned to cheese and nuts and red wine instead.   Where would be without red wine?  Fortunately we still have a bit of a backlog from Christmas, but think I need to conserve this too.  Well, we always conserve the good stuff to give ourselves nice surprises - but I think we'll have to convserve the plonk too.   Wonder when we'll next get a pay cheque? 

:And of course, I start having mild paranoia - suppose putative agent doesn't like the re-working of TRF?  Suppose she thinks it's hopeless...never mind, retire to watch Ken Russell...and drink coffee and eat chocolate - which should guarantee a good night's sleep...

Privacy

Had a lovely evening with A last night - she's always good fun - although she burbles away (the only person  know who makes me look silent) sometimes frivolously, within her proclamations there are often extraordinarily percipient and wise things.  We were talking about internet privacy - lack of.  She reminded me that anything I put up here would be here for ever - which I know, but occasionally need to be reminded of.  She was also pointing out that you may think you know who's looking at your FB stuff, but in fact a lot of people just trot around, lurking, watching what their friends and acquaintances are saying but never commenting.  

I Ching replies

In a disturbance I always go to the I Ching - crazy, but I find the answers soothing - and usually they say something to me, some scrap of sense/wisdom that relates to the situation.  Tonight I go No 2 - Earth - this is all about the constancy of the mare, finding a master when necessary - persistence, having somewhere to go and not being diverted... good stuff, after supper I had another go, No 36 Brightness Hidden/Wounded - this is the one about the nobleman who feigned drunkeness and madness to survive difficult times, and remained true to his lights even though they were rejected.   Both stress constancy and staying true to one's vision - so I shouldn't get deviated - interestingly both had no changing lines, so these are longer standing answers.  Good.  un peu du calme enfin!

A slight shiver in the equanimity

This post has been taken down for reasons of personal privacy - sorry.

High Speed Railway

Oh dear, oh dear.  Yes, it's a wonderful thing - but that part of the countryside is so lovely, it's almost miraculous.  Every time we go over there I am surprised as how close it is to London and how relatively unspoiled it is.  I presume more housing will be built in the area as it will be an even easier commute.  

I suppose this is inevitable, I suppose we can do nothing about it, and a railway is better than many other things...

However I am not thinking about things at present, because I am working on TRF and this is taking up all my mental energy - and the other blog, Only Writing, is becoming dominant in my thoughts.

The Good News!

I wrote about this in the Only Writing blog - but just want to say that the most stupendous thing has happened.  On Tuesday (?) I was rung by an agent who wants to work with me to create a new and better version of The Romantic Feminist.  This is ludicrously exciting - when I saw her last year I decided she might be "the One" - but I didn't approach her until just before Christmas.  Anyway, she's very enthusiastic and is making lots of positive suggestions and I'm busy creating a new synopsis.   It means putting Conscience on hold and working flat out on TRF - but I think it will be worth it.  It means that I have got what I really wanted, a supportive agent who can give me some help and guide my work towards what's going to sell.   I think I really need someone to bounce ideas off - and to give me some guidance.  I know I can write - and tell a story, but, as with my journalism, the stories I want to tell are not always completely mainstream... so this is the answer.   And she is the agent of a very successful contemporary woman writer too - so she must know what she's talking about!

The great clear out!

Have spent the day amidst clouds of dust... my little office is being converted into an extra bedroom to house a student.  I am going to be working in my bedroom - so we moved the big desk into the bedroom - I sorted out all the drawers, got rid of stuff etc.  It was great.   I now have a better working area in the bedroom - not ideal I know, but essential at present.  I am only going to have 3 trays: financial, domestic and editorial.  Everything else will just have to go. 

There is still a lot to do upstairs: not quite sure how we can stow all the box files etc.  We couldn't get any boxes from Waitrose except tiny little ones.  They are quite useful though for certain items. 

What is astonishing is how much stationery we have.  I will be very surprised if I need to buy any more envelopes or lined pads in the next 10 years.  And pens, and pencils!  Ludicrous.  I am sending some old stuff to a charity in the Gambia.  Anything to clear up the house a bit.   I must try and throw away more stuff.

Tomorrow I am going to have to deal with the contents of the bookshelves and the Victorian cupboard.  Everything is going in the spare room at present, but this is not ideal.  Especially as we will need it for a week for 2 chinese students on 28th January.   I don't think I have bitten off more than I can chew..., but...I also have to submit the synopsis for the new version of the novel - and get cracking with that.  

Actually, I am so happy about that that everything seems possible.  I know the new version of TRF is going to be much better.  I always wanted it to have proper lurve and sex in it - and only sensitivity to Mark prevented that.  Now I can write Bill out of the book - and change the first husband to an unrecognisable character - and there will be no more mention of it being "autobiographical"... and it won't be either.

Religion and Cosmology: The Catholic Church and Stephen Hawkin

Sorry, these topics are not linked, but are two topics I am thinking about separately partly because of two items on the radio today.

I was brought up as a Catholic - became an agnostic - married the first time in a Catholic church, and have always felt "culturally" Catholic.   In the last 15 years or so, when all the scandals about the Church have come to light, I have often found myself defending the Church against the somewhat simplistic criticisms of all the people who have piled in to denounce the Church (and why am I writing Church, not church?)

I have no theological loyalty to the church - but when I go to RC church services I often find myself wishing I was still a member.  I think there are many very good things about the church - its world wide reach, its social/economic teaching - its compassion and work for the poor.  So what's not to like?  I guess for me, the reason I wanted to leave was the authoritarian nature of the church - it's not immediately apparent when you are surrounded by smiling, guitar strumming nuns, and dignified, thoughtful clergy with liberal ideas (a vignette of my childhood experience), but when you grow up and discover that you are expected to believe certain things because the church tells you to, and are not allowed to defer to your own conscience, well, of course, you leave.   Broadly that is my objection to the church.

Today I was listening to a piece about Irish soldiers who fought in WW2 for the British - if they died their children were "taken into care" i.e. put into really cruel factory schools and given especially bad treatment because their fathers had "deserted" the Irish army.  This was a particularly Fianna Fail policy - opposed by Labour and Fine Gael - all part of DeValera's sneaking wish for the Germans to win the war, such was the hatred of the English.   As I listened (again) to the horrors inflicted on children in these places I was again wondering how nuns and "brothers" could do this to children, how nothing they might have read in the Gospels had come to mind and stopped them doing this.  But it must be the case that authoritarians hang together - the Church's innate authoritarianism meeting the punitive desires of the Irish state and being happy to administer punishment.   "We are right" must be the unofficial motto of the Church - but we all believe "we are right" yet most of us don't have the chance to administer our views of what is right to our fellow citizens.    How can an organisation that is meant to be driven by the Gospel be so utterly wrong?  The answer of course is that the RC Church is not driven by the Gospels, it is driven by its own structure of ethics, which have "surpassed" the Gospels long ago, probably since the time they became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and suppressed anything pluralistic and found that siding with temporal power was the way forward.   So chumming up to injustice has gone on ever since, side by side with all the good, kind, saintly people within the church. 

Stephen Hawking was another topic today.  It was the kind of things people said about him that were interesting.... he is clearly the equivalent of the Dalai Lama to some of his admirers.  It is connnected with the strange way cosmology is becoming an alternative religion: there is no God but Cosmology, and SH is its prophet.  One woman said "it is extraordinary to meet this man and to be in the presence of someone you know that people will still be talking about in 1,000 years."

I wonder if people felt like that about Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas?  I suspect that 21st century cosmology will have been so wildly surpassed by other ideas that in 1,000 years time, if any human civilisation survives, SH will turn out to have been a by-way.  Mind that is because apart from the famous book, I am not clear what he is famous for - is it black holes?  I mean, what has his unique contribution to the mystic science been exactly?  Black holes are all very well, but they have led on to all the other stuff, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy... and the theory of multiverses (which sounds perfectly reasonable in its way - originally predicted by CS Lewis in The Magician's Nephew of course!)

Perhaps I should have another crack at A Brief History of Time but at the moment I have so much else to read.  Anyway, I think there is just as much that is unbelievable in cosmology as there is in Christianity.  The other day Brian Cox was advertising one of his programmes on TV - saying how was it possible to believe that a particle could be in different places at the same time?   I felt, smugly, that this was not an intellectual problem for those of us who believed in God - since we had committed ourselves to believe in that long ago, and to believe in paradoxes such as the existence of a being, Jesus, who was simultaneously fully human and fully divine.   I am not sure that most people will understand the science behind this particle behaviour (if they have worked it out yet) and will take it on trust, as a matter of faith, just as religious believers do.

OK - that's enough religion.

Comeuppances, continued.

I forgot another of the major comeuppances last year, there were MPs and Lords who were imprisoned because of fraud, in the 2010 parliamentary expenses scandal, but the over-arching thing in the UK was the decline (if not fall) of Rupert Murdoch.  He was so influential, so seldom criticised in public, leading politicians were chumming up with his kids, he was in and out of Downing Street and he seemed untouchable.  Having arrived with the intention of undermining the Establishment in the 1960s he became part of the establishment, while at the same time sniping from the sidelines at traditional organisations that he had not wormed his way into.  At the same time he was producing "lively" newspapers which seemed to focus on undermining the lives and families of anyone who "stepped out of line" or in anyway did anything worthy of criticism.

After the News of the World phone hacking debacle, suddennly everyone felt free to criticise him, and they did!   It was rather wonderful to see someone one has really disliked and disapproved of for decades, suddennly recognised as a scumbag by everyone else.

Economic future: very grim outlook.  People saying a decade of standstill like Japan's would now be a good outcome and we would be lucky to have it.  I still feel that M and I are going to buck the trend, we will get richer during this period, but of course I may be wrong.

Where will next year's comeuppances come from?   I also forgot Berlusconi, clearly the most unbelieveable politician, who finally had to stand down, not because of all the corruption and sexual scandal, but due to simple economic incompetence and the need to find someone who really can run the Italian economy.    I believe one of Berlusconi's fans was Vladimir Putin (wonder what it was that he admired exactly?) - and I am beginning to think that people in Russia have begun to see that Putin isn't offering the solutions they need, and this maybe the year his regime comes to an end.

Why don't I warm to Putin?  To be honest I am rather ignorant about Russian politics, but I understand there is a great deal of corruption, lawlessness and powerlessness amongst ordinary people, and Putin's regime has done little to improve their lot.  Life seems fine for "new Russians", but one doesn't hear a great deal about the other 90% of the population.  I also find Putin's vanity, and the endless "heroic" pictures of him rather suspect.   In one way they could be seen as almost endearing - a continuation of the "heroic leader" pictures of socialist realist art.  And perhaps a lot of Russians feel comfortable with that.  But Putin - however well toned his body - seems to me to be a KGB official who got very lucky - and rode the wave of robbery that occurred when the oligarchs stole the national industries from the Russian people, and made off with the loot.  Putin was there to keep everyone under control and let them get away with it.   I may be wrong, but I haven't heard anything about him that has changed my opinion.  Maybe he wasn't as bad as the alternative.

2011-2012

There have been any number of media discussions about last year - mostly believing that it was one of the most eventful, era-changing years, comparable with 1968 and 1989, so full of events that Osama bin Laden's assassination was a tiny news story.

In the UK there has been growing unrest with the banks etc., but here in the semi-rural, tiny, under-educated Isle of Thanet we have been immune from riots, occupations etc.  Our concerns tend to be parochial - inevitably.

What I felt most about last year was the sense of things finally coming home to roost.  Often in a distressing way, people getting their comeuppance - Gadaffi, bin Laden, Mubarak, the Tunisian guy, and the continuing efforts in Syria to get rid of their leader  Bashar al ? whose name for the moment escapes me.   In Europe the long-predicted difficulties of the euro came to a head.  Everyone said that having such diverse economies sharing a currency would lead to a disaster in the end, and it has.   In our personal case, we finally gave up the fight with our debts - that was a definite comeuppance.   There are trends that have long been predicted, growing teenage violence, lawlessness, gang culture, which seem to have finally become close to getting out of hand. Anxiety about the nucelear industry would have been more fully vindicated if the Japanese earthquake/tsunami scenario hadn't just been one of many horrors this year. 

Of course there seem to have been certain groups that haven't got their comeuppance - the bankers for example, heavily criticised, much disliked, but still taking home vast salaries and bonuses.  But I don't think these trends will somehow stop with the change of the year - there is a seething mess out there, who knows what will emerge next?  Of course, this is the year the world ends, according to the Mayan calendar.  They apparently prophesied that this time humanity would wipe itself out - last time humanity disappeared - in their view, 5,000 years ago, it was with flood interestingly...didn't realise that the flood story/myth/memory went beyond the European/Mediterranean culture.

I just rather hope we don't end up quoting Phyrrus "Another [year] like that and we're done for!"