Ten Thousand Days

Semi-Skimmed Democracy

2011-10-31T09:46:00.000Z

Semi-Skimmed Democracy: Someone once said, “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” In the same way, referring dismissively to conspiracy theory doesn’t mean there is no conspiracy.

There are different levels of conspiracy, of course. There may not be any aliens in control of our planet - who knows? - but it is a fair bet that there are all sorts of reptilian characters up to no good. Sometimes they meet in rooms. This is, by definition, a conspiracy.

Useless Idiots: cuts, war crimes and quantitative easing

2011-09-27T11:22:00.000Z

Useless Idiots: cuts, war crimes and quantitative easing: While the banks are busy looting the world in what is effectively a financial protection racket, forcing the sell-off of public assets at rock bottom prices, the defence of those assets becomes a priority for all concerned citizens

Who Says We Are All In It Together?

2010-12-15T22:35:00.000Z

Who Says We Are All In It Together?: "Currently the top 1% of the population owns 23% of the wealth, while the lowest 50% of the population share 7% of the wealth between them. This is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth in this country and it shows how unjust our economic system really is."

Sandy Back: the true heart of Whitstable

2010-12-02T12:57:00.000Z

Sandy Back: the true heart of Whitstable: "I want to use this opportunity to say goodbye to my friend Sandie Back, who died recently after a long struggle with cancer."

An Optimist Considers 2012 and other stories

2010-11-25T21:41:00.000Z

An Optimist Considers 2012 and other stories: "An optimist is someone who believes thatthings will always turn out for the best. A pessimist is someone who believes that things will always turn out for the worst.

They are both right about half the time, and wrong about half the time. The difference is that the optimist has a far more enjoyable time while he’s at it."

Save Whitstable and Herne Bay Delivery Offices

2010-11-14T23:23:00.000Z

Save Whitstable and Herne Bay Delivery Offices: "The same technology which has cut into the letters business also allows customers to buy books and other large items over the internet. Ebay and Amazon have replaced utility bills and personal letters as the Royal Mail’s main business."

The Castle Grounds Whitstable: No Spirit of Place

2010-10-24T19:50:00.000Z

The Castle Grounds Whitstable: No Spirit of Place: "I miss the wooded area over by the road, which has been replaced by what appears to be a garden centre, and the weird bit of box hedging around the statue of the Milk Maid, which served no purpose whatsoever, but was quaintly eccentric in an old-fashioned, English sort of way."

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Gnosticism, The Roman Empire and the Myth of Christ

2010-10-20T18:59:00.000Z

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Gnosticism, The Roman Empire and the Myth of Christ: "The archons imprint their model on us, their dead world. That’s what we see through the eyes of the ego: a dead world. A world of objects, of things, bereft of life, hollow, empty, meaningless. A world ripe only for exploitation. A purely economic world. A world in which some humans have the power of life or death over others, a world where we can go to war for possession of a commodity. A world in which men and women, adults and children are slaughtered for the economic benefit of a few."

Landscape and Possession

2010-09-12T17:38:00.001Z

Landscape and Possession: "When a ghost enters a man we say he is possessed.

But what if he is already possessed and he no longer knows it?

What if the mind that he carries around in his head isn’t his real mind at all?

What if it isn’t just one man, but all of humanity that is possessed? Possessed by the demon of possession, in fact, by the mistaken belief that anyone can ever own anything."

The Trouble with HubPages

2010-09-12T17:37:00.000Z

The Trouble with HubPages: "The pressure is on for self-promotion. I’m sure you get people sitting up all night writing some generic comments on as many hubs as they can find in order to promote their own hubs. This must make for some very awkward relationships as on-line self-promoters promote themselves on other on-line self-promoters self-promoting hubs. Who’s promoting who here?"

We do the work. Someone else takes the wealth.

2010-08-21T06:09:00.000Z

Economics is easy to understand. Wealth comes from human beings. It’s as simple as that. It comes from human beings engaging with nature in an intelligent and productive way in order to make all of the things we want and need. It is work that makes wealth.

Read more here: http://hubpages.com/hub/We-do-the-work-Someone-else-takes-the-wealth

The End Of The World As We Know It

2008-11-09T20:04:00.000Z

You may have heard people talk about 2012. Some people say it is the year when the world will end.

By Steve Andrews & CJ Stone

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It

The Power of the Light

2008-11-09T10:19:00.004Z

CJ Stone tries an alternative therapy that is set to cleanse his soul and aura. The question is: is he evolved enough to step into the light...?

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Power-of-the-Light

Hair Pie

2008-11-09T10:18:00.002Z

Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang a song about it. In those days hair was a revolutionary statement. But what's its purpose? That's the question on CJ Stone's mind.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Hair-Pie

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You Can Write To King Arthur

2008-11-09T10:16:00.000Z

King Arthur is this ex-biker, ex-soldier, ex-builder (not necessarily in that order) who had a brainstorm back in the eighties and decided he was King Arthur, after which he donned a white frock and a circlet, and has been causing various kinds of trouble ever since.

I wrote a book with him once.

http://hubpages.com/hub/You-Can-Write-To-King-Arthur

LSD Refugees

2008-11-09T10:14:00.000Z

I've just taken LSD. For the first time in 25 years. That little brown drop of liquid, placed on the end of my finger and ingested some 30 minutes ago, is about to play havoc with my sense of self...

http://hubpages.com/hub/LSD-Refugees

Columns III: War and Asylum

2008-11-09T10:13:00.000Z

In the controversy surrounding the issue of asylum seekers, we tend to forget some of the very real human stories that lie behind it. It's too easy to see it as an "issue" and to forget that these people are human beings, with mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers who love them, with hopes and aspirations just like ours, who suffer just like us, who laugh just like us, who dream just like us, and who die just like us.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Whitstable-Times-Columns-II

Baghdad Girl

2008-11-09T10:08:00.001Z

She is fifteen years old and she has just finished her exams. She likes cats. She has a blog which consists almost entirely of pictures of cute little kittens rolling about on well-tended lawns, or relaxing, stretching and yawning, or playing with balls of wool. She is like most teenage girls the whole world over.

Her name is Raghda Zaid and she lives in the United Arab Emirates. She used to live in Baghdad.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Baghdad-Girl

Columns IV: Welcome to the Future

2008-11-09T10:06:00.000Z

These days we seem to be under the quaint illusion that the progress of civilisation is the same as technological innovation.

Every day there are hundreds of new products on the market; from mobile phones that take your picture, to palm-top computers the size of cigarette packets; from cars without pistons, to video streaming; from vacuum cleaners without dust bags, to "Blue Tooth" technology that allows you to use your computer in any location. All of this is seen as "progressive", as if the accumulation of more and more gadgets was really the measure of human worth.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Welcome-To-The-Future

Computer Troubles

2008-11-09T10:04:00.000Z

I’m very worried about my computer. It’s been doing some very odd things of late. I tell it to do one thing and it does something else. It’s like a recalcitrant teenager throwing a permanent paddy, stamping its foot and going off in a virtual sulk.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Computer-Troubles

Atlantis

2008-11-09T10:03:00.003Z

“...for these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable… Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others…”

With these words, from the dialogue of Timaeus, written in about 360 BC, the philosopher Plato would unwittingly launch a deluge of speculation, investigation, argument and counter-argument, that has lasted the better part of 2,500 years.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Atlantis

Samhain and Cider

2008-11-09T10:03:00.001Z

Samhain. Halloween. The season of darkness. Grim clouds scutter like thin grey rags under a sombre sky. This is the time of the ancestors, the time of the ancients, when spirits roam the land. The time of the dark awakening.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Samhain-and-Cider

Vlad the Impaler

2008-11-09T10:01:00.000Z

“Tepes” means “Impaler”. He got his name because impaling was his preferred method of execution. This is how it was done. The victim had his legs yanked apart, by horses attached to ropes, and then a sharpened stake about the size of a fist was inserted between the buttocks, up the anus. The stake was greased with pig-fat to allow ease of inserting, and to stop the body shock that might cause the victim to die too quickly....

http://hubpages.com/hub/Vlad-the-Impaler

Angels of New York

2008-11-09T10:00:00.001Z

We came in on the George Washington Bridge on the Interstate, but you could see the city long before that, from deep inside New Jersey somewhere, the jagged line of skyscrapers flashing between the hills and trees...

http://hubpages.com/hub/Angels-of-New-York-Part-I

Sweet Nothings

2008-09-07T09:34:00.001Z

They are just here, that’s all, in this place of borders, on the threshold of becoming. What do their faces tell us? Are they sisters? Are they friends? It’s not clear, even, when these photographs were taken. There is an archaic quality about them, as if the camera is a time machine and we’re looking through the lens to another time, another era, maybe a century ago.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Sweet-Nothings-The-Small-Schoolgirls-of-the-Borderlands-in-Eastern-Anatolia-by-Vanessa-Winship-A-Review

The Power of the Light

2008-09-07T01:40:00.001Z

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Power-of-the-Light

Reality Is What You Make It

2008-07-23T18:11:00.000Z

http://hubpages.com/hub/Reality-Is-What-You-Make-It

Bear Nation

2008-07-17T19:01:00.001Z

It was after this that I first heard a bear speak. It was Lydia. She was walking up and down by the fence making this noise. It is a unique and unmistakable sound, like a plaintive nasal cry, slightly wistful, slightly melancholic. The Latin name for bear is "Urs" and that is exactly the sound they make. "Ur?" It's a question. There's a questioning tone to it, like something you might ask of the mountains, of the wind. Something slightly sad. "Why have you left me, Ur? Where have you gone, Ur? Why do all us creatures have to die?" You can hear the peaks of the mountains in its voice. You can hear the breathing nearness of the wind. You can hear the echoes of the forest. You can hear the lonely miles of travel. You can hear mortality and loss.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Bear-Nation-Looking-For-Bear-in-Harghita-County--Transylvania---Part-1

I Don't Write For Money I Write For Love

2008-07-05T15:57:00.000Z

So, you have to ask, what is the difference between a professional writer and an amateur? The difference is that a professional writes for money, of course, and demands a proper rate of pay. This is reasonable enough you might say, and it's certainly true that I could do with being paid for some of the things I write. But the real truth is that most of these professional writers not writing for themselves. They write for an editor who works for a proprietor whose main purpose is to fill his paper with advertising. So in the end, most writers are writing for advertisers.

http://hubpages.com/hub/I-Dont-Write-For-Money--I-Write-For-Love

Riding With Lady Luck

2008-07-01T18:47:00.001Z

I'd driven through the night, through the darkness and through the rain, hearing the squeak of the windshield wipers rubbing back and forth sluicing diamonds from the glass, watching the lights from in front and from behind, mile after mile of road in this great arc across a continent, sweeping though invisible landscapes and the shadows of mountains, like dark, unseen presences, through Germany and through Austria, through unknown borders between sleeping nations, through dreams and night time stirrings, through the first flickers of light on the horizon, the rising dawn, to this place - not even a name on a map - a toilet-stop in Hungary.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Riding-With-Lady-Luck

Mothers Club in Erdington

2008-07-01T18:45:00.000Z

Mothers Club in Erdington, Birmingham, an early psychedelic music venue, opened on the 9th of August 1968 with a performance by Duke Sunny, and closed on the 3rd of January 1971, with a blockbusting three-band show by Quintessence, Stonehouse and Happy. The following is a personal record of that club, and that era....

http://hubpages.com/hub/Mothers-Club-In-Erdington

Down in the Dumps

2008-07-01T18:43:00.001Z

I was very, very nervous. Not so much at the prospect of any pain (I'd been assured it wasn't too painful) as at the humiliation of bending down to the scientific rigours of the medical establishment: being slapped on a table and pinned down like a specimen in a medical experiment, while they pumped alien substances into my back-passage, no doubt with the prime intention of blowing away the last vestiges of my human dignity.

As it happens, that's exactly what it was like.....

http://hubpages.com/hub/Down-In-The-Dumps

Strange Daze on Fantasy Island

2008-07-01T18:41:00.001Z

In a sense Steve looks at the human life-form in exactly the same way. It is weird and fascinating to him. It is a sign of Life - the Big Life - that weaves and patterns its way through the world in all it's peculiar, variegated splendour. But he's not at all caught up in human self-promotion, or in the out-of-kilter human belief that only human things matter.

In other words, Steve just hasn't got the slightest notion about politics.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Strange-days-on-Fantasy-Island

The Romance of Space

2008-07-01T18:37:00.001Z

There was a great movie on Channel 4 recently, called In The Shadow of the Moon, about the Moon landings.

It contains archive footage of the nine missions that went to the Moon between 1968 and 1972, plus interviews with some of the guys who took part.

There's something about those men. A quality. A presence. A sense of wonder. It's as if, having stepped upon the surface of the Moon, having felt its gravitational embrace, they have left something of themselves back there which still speaks to them through all that distance of time and space.......

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Economics-of-Space-Exploration

The Bard of Ely's Nature Conservation Site

2008-07-01T18:36:00.001Z

Once he dyed his hair turquoise. That must have been a very strange sight, a lurching, bespectacled, purple-headed giant with a green beard, looking like something that had just stepped out of a flying saucer, just popped down to Earth to do some shopping at the local supermarket.....

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Bard-of-Elys-Nature-Conservation-Site

How To Catch a Great Crested Newt

2008-07-01T18:34:00.000Z

I have nothing against Ringed Plovers. I'm sure the Ringer Plover is a very nice bird. The one I saw seemed perfectly decent to me, hopping along by the stagnant pool, pecking amongst the pebbles, looking for grubs. And I'm glad for all the Ringed Plover in the world that there ARE still places where they can grub about in, as it were, grubbing up the grubs to get their daily grub....

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Catch-a-Great-Crested-Newt

What to do at the end of the World

2008-07-01T18:33:00.001Z

One particular mystical-magical sect committed mass suicide. This seemed an illogical act to me. The end of the world means we're all going to die anyway, so why pre-empt it? Personally I'm glad I kept my options open and stayed alive.

http://hubpages.com/hub/What-To-Do-at-The-End-Of-The-World

The Khabs is in the Khu

2008-06-21T11:27:00.001Z

Actually there may be a partial truth in this. It is certainly true that by the use of repetition, incantation, slight of hand and magical gestures, anyone can weave a spell to cast an illusion over the whole world.
It's what Tony Blair and George Bush have been up to all the time. Abracadabra, hey presto. Look: they've conjured a "war on terrorism" out of thin air!

The Khabs is in the Khu

Transylvanian Journeys Brand New Post at HubPages

2008-06-14T14:15:00.004Z

http://hubpages.com/hub/Beyond-The-Forest-Journeys-to-the-Heart-of-Transylvania

This HubPage is the story of my journey to Transylvania and how it affected me.

In some ways, I think, it changed my life.

I've seen many things over the years, but nothing has ever touched me like that Transylvanian landscape.

I wrote the story in about two days nearly two years ago now. It is very intense.

It iss meant to be the first chapter of my book, Borderlands, about my time living in Romania, but unfortunately I was unable to find a publisher for it. I think it works by itself, however. Anyway, if people like this I will publish more of the book in the weeks to come.

It might be a little bit long for a HubPage, I don't know.

Let me know what you think of it by leaving a message at the bottom of the page.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Beyond-The-Forest-Journeys-to-the-Heart-of-Transylvania

We're Here Because We're Here

2008-06-12T14:40:00.003Z

This is the only known picture of Ivor Coles, who died in September 1915, most likely in the 2nd Battle Of Loos, which took place on the 25th of September that year.

In the picture Ivor is about 12 or 13 years old. He was 18 when he died.

After he died he "disappeared".

There were no records of his death. There was no grave to show where he was buried. There wasn't even an inscription on the Menim Gate, on which is carved the names of all of those whose bodies had been lost in the carnage of the First World War.

Ivor Coles became a non-person, not even a statistic in the records.

This is the story of Ivor Coles, how he got lost, and how, ninety years later, his family found him again.

It is a story of loss and redemption, told with poignancy and insight, with pictures and music, links and maps to go with it.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Were-Here-Because-Were-Here

Other stories by CJ Stone on HubPages:

Riding With Lady Luck: a journey across Europe in a Grand Cherokee Jeep

The Bard of Ely's Nature Conservation Site : A visit to Tenerife to see Steve "Bard of Ely" Andrews.

Down in the Dumps: how to survive a barium enema

Healing Hands

2008-06-05T06:31:00.007Z

I’ve been saying this for a few years now: therapeutic massage should be available on the National Health.

Everyone should be able to get a weekly massage from a qualified practitioner.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Biodynamic-Massage-in-Whitstable

Karl Marx Lives!

2008-05-29T20:28:00.005Z

The following is from a letter sent to me by my old good friend Dave, about a famous building (see above) in the great European city of Vienna where he lives. As he says:

"It's called Karl-Marx-Hof (Karl Marx Court), and is the longest residential building in the world. For its time incredibly advanced for council housing.

"Well, it was of course renamed under the fascists (from 34 to 45) and at the end of the war the American commander of that section of Vienna (like Berlin divided into British, French, Russian and American zones) was a little bit worried about the locals' plans to restore the original name.

"So he called on the expertise of an emigre Austrian, Joseph T Simon, who was then an officer in the US army. According to Simon's autobiography, he was asked, among other things, "Did you know this Karl Marx personally?" "Was he a member of the communist party?" "What was his position on the Soviet Union?"

"Simon, who had been a member of the revolutionary socialist (social-democratic)youth movement in the 30s replied that, no he didn't know Marx personally and since Marx died in 1883 he obviously wasn't in a position to know anything about the Soviet Union, but that he was highly appreciated by social democrats.

"The army commander then sent out an internal army mailing saying that Mr Simon was extremely well informed about Marx and that he credibly argued that Marx wasn't a communist at all, but was closer to the Viennese Social Democrats, so there was no reason to change the name of the building --- so it's still called the Karl Marx Hof to this day."

Thus Karl Marx lives in the name of public building in Vienna.

For my latest story please go to:

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Catch-a-Great-Crested-Newt

Poisoning the Atmosphere

2008-05-22T21:57:00.004Z

Have you looked at the sky recently? It´s like a motorway up there.

On one day last week in the space of less than ten minutes I counted at least seventeen aircraft. It was nearing sunset so all the lines of exhaust fumes were lit up like little streaks of phosphorescent pink candy scattered about across the sky. Later, as it began to get dark, I could make out the aircraft lights blinking on and off like secret messages in Morse code.

What strikes me is how we have diminished the power of the heavens. We look into the sky to see evidence only of ourselves. The stars have disappeared behind a barrier of light haze and air pollution and all that´s left is aeroplanes.

When I was in Transylvania last year I saw the Milky Way in a clear sky for the first time in years and it was breathtaking. There was no light pollution and the sky was utterly black. Looking up was like being cast adrift in an ocean of stars. Millions of stars like a tidal surge arcing across the infinite sky.

We´ve forgotten how awesome the Universe is. The Milky Way is the heart of the Galaxy in which our tiny sun dances and plays. It is one galaxy amongst millions. Each galaxy consists of billions of stars - billions of suns - each one of them a white-hot nuclear furnace of unimaginable power, unimaginable strength. To look up at the stars is to be reminded of this. To look up at the stars is to measure ourselves against the Universe and to know how insignificant we are.

It takes millions of years for the light from the furthest galaxies to reach us. Looking at the stars is like stepping into a time-machine. It´s like looking deep into the past to a time before our own fragile little planet was born.

Instead of which we look up and there´s some guy in a Cesna buzzing about catching the sunset, there´s a stray passenger plane from Gatwick flying to Lanzarote, and a few high-flying jets on some obscure military manoeuvres leaving plumes of smoke across the sky.

How much does it cost to send a military jet into the upper atmosphere, to catapult one man half way across the globe? How many gallons of aviation fuel does this use?

We´ve been taking this world of ours for granted. Now is the time to start asking questions. Whose purpose does any of this serve? Who gave the orders for these planes to take off? I don´t remember being consulted about it.

Have you noticed how the exhaust trails from those high-flying jets seem to hang around for a long time in the air? You look up into the sky and there´s not only live aircraft skimming the ionosphere, but evidence of previous ones left in long white streamers criss-crossing the whole expanse.

The official name for these streamers is contrails, and the official explanation is that they are the result of water vapour caused by engine exhaust. This doesn´t explain why they hang around for so long, however, nor why, as you watch them, they spread out and start to turn into something resembling a fine white mist.

The question is, what mess of chemicals are hidden in this mist? What effect is this having on our delicate atmosphere?

We can´t go on poisoning the world like this.

The Gorilla In The Room

2008-05-10T09:14:00.006Z

Things are not always what they seem.

For instance a credit crisis is not necessarily a crisis. For some people it's an opportunity rather than a crisis, a chance to buy up failing businesses at knock-down prices.

Meanwhile the war on terror is not really a war, and the front page of your newspaper does not generally give you the news.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Reality-Is-What-You-Make-It

Masochist TV

2008-05-05T09:08:00.002Z

I must be some kind of a masochist. After my last blog, in which I was complaining about the state of the telly these days, I’ve actually ended up with MORE telly.

I have subscribed to one of those on-line digital TV packages with 53 channels and the ability to record and pause live programmes.

This all sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. Who would want to pause or record most TV programmes anyway?

As for the 53 channels, anyone who has Freeview will already be familiar with them. They consist of the five terrestrial channels, news channels, kids’ channels, supplementary channels - such as ITV2 and Sky 3 (which mainly consist of repeats of 80s American TV shows) - lots of radio channels, plus – my favourite! – a whole heap of shopping channels for those of us who can’t even be bothered to get off the sofa while indulging our consumer habits.

Hand me the handset I want to buy something. How about some kitchen essentials, bed and bathroom furniture, filter products, watches, travel bags, electronic equipment, makeup, fashion accessories? I could get some new diamante bra straps and matching swimming caps to go with my latest beach wear.

There’s something glaring and hysterical about these programmes, something noisy and randomly garish, like being trapped within a glossy shopping catalogue-world with a psychopathic salesperson for company. The world finally gone insane.

I’m not quite sure how I ended up with this. I was after broadband, but somehow the salesperson on the end of the phone managed to persuade me that I needed all of these supplementary packages too.

So I’m a wired-up person. I am wired into the world-wide network. I mean that literally. I’ve just been counting the wires. I have a TV, a vision box, a CD Rom player, a radio, speakers, an external hard drive, a laptop, a wireless router, a telephone, a table lamp, all plugged into the same socket in the same room.

That’s ten electrical leads: plus one telephone cable, one TV aerial cable, speaker leads, scart cables, mouse cable, plus leads connecting all the electrical appliances to each other.

It’s amazing: all of this snake’s nest of advanced technology making it possible to record the latest repeats of Celebrity Come Dine With Me on More 4 + 1 while on-line shopping, listening to the latest top-ten downloads and looking up the TV viewing figures on the internet all at the same time.

Celebrity Come Dine With Me. This has to be the most inane celebrity TV concept programme ever devised: celebrities you’ve never of heard of cooking up food you’d never eat in rooms you would never visit with people you don’t like. People famous for not even being famous doing mundane things we all have to do anyway, like cooking food.

Whatever next? Celebrity Come Shop With Me? Top Ten Celebrity Nose-Picking Moments? I wouldn’t put it past them.

I’ve just looked up the viewing figures. On one night Celebrity Come Dine With Me netted 2.9 million viewers. Let’s say it’s a four part series. So that’s 11.6 million hours of people’s lives spent absorbing this drivel.

That’s 1,324 years – or nearly nineteen whole lifetimes - of people watching dreary people with personality disorders backstabbing each other while preparing and eating food on TV.

Welcome to the future.

It’s more frightening than you could ever have imagined.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

2008-04-20T12:02:00.006Z

With more than half of Europe's wild bears within its borders, the Romanian forest is the ideal place for some bear-stalking. By Chris Stone

http://hubpages.com/hub/Bear-Stalking-in-Romania

First published in Wizzit, Wizz Air In Flight magazine, February 2008.

http://www.wizzmagazine.com/features/2008/feb/follow-that-bear.html

TV Licence

2008-04-14T14:58:00.002Z

The world gets weirder by the day.

I went to buy a TV licence this week. Where do you go to get a TV licence? You go to the Post Office, surely.

Not any more, it seems. These days you buy your TV licence from Threshers.

Some of you may already know this. You probably think this is old news. Apparently the Post Office hasn’t sold TV licences for two years now. But for me it was just astounding.

I think my jaw actually dropped when the man behind the counter told me. I think I took a step back in astonishment. And then, when I asked where I should go, and he told me that the nearest pay-point was Threshers, I’m sure I did a sort of pirouette on the spot, looking round and raising my arms in a shrug of disbelief. I wanted to ask the people in the queue behind me if they had ever heard of such a thing?

TV licences from Threshers now. Whatever next? Greetings cards from the greengrocers? Suntan lotion from the butchers? Maybe the Job Centre could sell me bottle of ketchup to go with my bag of chips from Champs bakery.

Later, when I got to Threshers, I had another surge of incomprehension at what I was about to do.

I said, “excuse me, I can’t believe I’m asking for this, but is this place to buy a TV licence these days?”

“It is,” said the manager.

I turned around, and the man waiting behind me was clutching a TV licence top-up card.

I said, “look, he’s at it too.”

The man said, “it’s the easiest way,” handing his card to the Thresher’s manager to get it topped up.

So there I am, amidst all the bottles of wine and spirits, the cans of lager, the crisps and snacks, the half-price special offers, the Three-For-The-Price-Of-Two deals, buying myself a TV licence.

I felt that I must have entered a parallel universe. Andy Pandy in La-La Land. A place where nothing is as it seems.

Then again, maybe there’s a kind of twisted logic to all of this. The price of beer at the pub being so prohibitive these days, maybe they want us all just sat at home drinking on our own, in our own separate little boxes, watching the TV, while they fill us up with their drivel, pumping our heads so full of hysterical, screaming nonsense that we no longer notice that the whole world is being bought and sold from under us, that nothing actually matters any more.

Have you watched any telly lately? You have to be drunk to bear it.

So why are our Post Offices closing down? Why is the central Post Office in Canterbury now upstairs in WH Smiths, so that old people are made to clamber up the stairs while being bombarded with WH Smiths’ advertising from every angle? Why are local Post Offices all over the country disappearing?

You hear talk of market forces and the like. You hear talk of them being uneconomic. But then, you have to ask, who made them uneconomic, when the TV licence franchise is being handed over to Threshers?

What other services are being filtered off?

The term “market forces” is a euphemism.

It’s just another term for government economic policy.

Cheap Booze

2008-03-30T22:28:00.006Z

As I’m sure my British readers already know, alcohol prices went up by 6% above the rate inflation in the budget, supposedly to combat binge drinking.

That’s 4p on a pint of beer, 14p on a bottle of wine, and 55p on a bottle of spirits. So, now, I can already hear the binge drinkers thinking to themselves. “Fourteen pence on a bottle of Chardonnay. Clearly I will have to drink more responsibly from now on.”

http://hubpages.com/hub/Drug-problems-or-drug-solutions

Rooms

2008-03-22T21:50:00.006Z

I’ve been looking at flats.

I wonder how many readers have been in the same position in the last few years?

I was shocked at how expensive they have become, and how little you get for your money.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Cost-of-flats-in-Whitstable

Prince of Propaganda

2008-03-13T18:12:00.006Z

You will have seen the photographs. Prince Harry in a baseball cap. Prince Harry on a motorbike. Prince Harry kicking a football made of rolled up toilet paper. Prince Harry having a laugh with his mates. Prince Harry firing a machine gun into the empty desert.

Prince Harry fighting the good fight for justice and democracy in Afghanistan.

On a single day there were 56 pages of coverage in eight national newspapers, with booming headlines like "Harry the Brave" and "Harry the Secret Hero." The Sun included a glamorous poster of the prince out on patrol.

Meanwhile it’s been Afghanistan week on the TV news: a number of short films looking at army conditions in Helmand Province in the South of the country, where most of the British troops are stationed.

Well I‘m a cynic about these matters. Though Prince Harry’s presence in Afghanistan was a closely-guarded secret for a while, it was always a set-up for future propaganda purposes. How many of you actually believed those images? Do you really think that the British army would put him in a position where anyone would get a chance of firing live bullets at him?

As for the TV reports, I watched with increasing irritation as the week went by. How are we supposed to understand such a complex set of issues on the back of a few grainy bits of one-sided footage? The reporter was addressing us in a portentous tone while perched on top of a flat-roofed building in the middle of Kabul, a relatively safe city. These were his exact words, or something very close: “British troops, fighting and dying in Afghanistan to keep terrorism off our streets.”

Hang on now. These are Afghan tribesmen, not international terrorists. They are fierce, wily, savage mountain people fighting with home-made guns, essentially nationalistic peasants. They probably have no idea of where Britain is, and still less care. Their passions are inflamed at the sight of foreign troops on their soil. If there weren’t British troops in Helmand no one would be firing at them.

I must have been one of the last people of my generation to make it to Afghanistan. It's been off-limits for the last thrity years or more. Anybody younger than me - unless he was a reporter or in the army - couldn't possibly have seen it. At least I have some idea who these people are.

This was back in the 70s, when the famous hippie-trail to India passed through that mountainous, desert land of warring tribes, before the Russian invasion, but during the time of the communist government. Even then it was like the wild west. The Afghans are good at copying things and I was told that there were gun factories dotted about in secret locations. But then you’d see them riding into town on horseback, with a rifle slung across their shoulders, and it was a flint-lock not a machine gun.

It was the Americans who gave them Stinger missiles to fire at the Russian helicopter gun-ships. It was the Americans who trained them in modern warfare and who brought Osama bin Laden in to whip up their Islamic fervour.

Everybody knows by now that the war in Iraq was conducted for the venality and greed of the oil magnates in charge of the White House, so they are repackaging the Afghan war as somehow more “just.”

But Osama bin Laden left many years ago – left to escape while the US engaged in its plunder of Iraq.

Don’t you think its time we left the Afghan people to their own devices?

Van the Man Meets The Bard of Ely

2008-03-09T21:47:00.004Z

The following is a picture of my good friend Steve Andrews, also commonly known as The Bard of Ely, due to the fact that he writes poetry and that for many years lived in Ely, in Cardiff. The story that follows, about the time that Steve met Van Morrison, is a word-for-word transcript of a tape I made with Steve, which was later used as the basis of a Guardian column, and later again in my book The Last of the Hippies, in which Steve plays a major part. Apologies for the lack of new content on this site. I've been busy with a number of projects. Meanwhile, enjoy the sound of Steve's distinctly comic voice....

“And we’ll walk and talk in gardens wet with rain,

And I’ll never ever grow so old again.”

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks.

First of all I spoke to Van at Robin’s. I was working for Robin Williamson. This would have been about 1993. I was working at Robin’s as his secretary. And I had to answer the phone and everything, and I answered the phone one day and it was actually, it was Van the Man, and I’m saying, "who’s speaking please," and he’s saying, "Van Morrison." And I’m in total shock, awe, whatever, I’m like, "wow, this is Van Morrison," you know. And that was the first time I spoke to him, and that was a very unsuccessful conversation. I’m sort of gibbering, "oh, um, I’ve always been, well er, a great fan of yours." And he’s saying, "yeah, yeah?" And I’m saying, "yeah, yeah, really, what shall I…?" And he’s saying, " just tell Robin that I’m in the area and if I’m around I’ll give him a call again." I said, "oh yeah, right, right, I’ll do that." And - I remember what he said - he said, "all the best." And that was it. And I thought, "oh wow, wow, Van Morrison has said ‘all the best’ to me, this is brilliant, I’ve spoken to him." And that was the first time that I had any sort of connection with Van.

But then, I’d taken my son to his pottery class. And it was closed that day. And it was in the afternoon by now. Robin Williamson was doing the midsummer solstice concert at the Celtic folk museum in St Fagan’s, which I obviously knew about. I had an invite to be there. Because the pottery thing wasn’t happening, I said to my son, "well let’s go along and see Robin." So we went to the folk museum and it was an appalling day - it was one of these midsummer absolute piss-down days, it was absolute torrential rain going on - and we got there quite late anyway, and when we got there Robin’s gig was just about finished. And because of the terrible weather, they had to move the open air thing into one of the marquee tents. And Robin finished his set, and I could see a couple of people, one of whom was Van Morrison. And Robin went over and he was talking to them, and I thought, "wow, that’s Van Morrison again." And then I heard in the conversation, it came up that the other guy who was with Van was from Ely. And I thought, "wow, wow, Van Morrison is actually with someone who’s from Ely. This is my cue to go over and say something." And I went over and I said - the first thing I said was just utterly ridiculous - I said, "so you’re Van Morrison then?" And he said, "er yeah?" And I said, "oh yeah, I spoke to you once before, from Robin’s." And he said, "yeah." I said, "And I’ve always been a great fan of yours, I love your music." And he said, "yeah." And by this point I’m thinking, I’m not making much success here, I’m not having much success in having sparkling conversation with my hero here, all he ever says is "yeah."

At which point my son came over to me, and he’d just been outside the tent, and he came in the tent, like, we were at the edge of the tent, and Robin is stood one side, and Van’s stood here, and there’s this other guy from Ely stood there, and Isaac just comes in under the edge of the tent, and he says, "Dad?" And I says, "yes Isaac." And he says, "you see this rope?" pointing to the guide rope coming off the marquee tent. And I said, "yeah?" And I’m starting to sound a bit like Van Morrison, I’m saying, "yeah?" And he said, "well, can you put your head by it?" And I said, "yeah." And he said, "well go on then." So I’m moving my face down by the rope, very naively, in my usual way, and not expecting anything, and not being on my guard at all, I’m just putting my face down by this rope. At which point he grabbed the rope and twanged it, and all the water that had collected on the tent roof flew all over my face and down my neck and all over my clothes, and I just didn’t know what to do or say or anything, I’m just completely and utterly freaked out with utter embarrassment, cos this is right in front of Van Morrison. And I just muttered something, "er, oh, er, Isaac, um, we’ve got to, er, we’ve got to go and, um, come on," and sort of grabbed his hand and went. And I didn’t look back. I just sort of went out into the rain outside and headed for the exit as fast as possible. And that was it.

Bard of Ely at MySpace

Brave New World

2008-03-02T19:51:00.009Z

The following words are from the 1946 introduction to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I only offer them as particularly appropriate at this moment in history.

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

And again:

"Great is the truth, but greater still, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

Today there is a holocaust. The holocaust is upon us again. A people are being killed. A people are being targeted. A people are being subjugated. A restless army roams amongst a population, killing at random. Children are sliced down in their own homes. Their cries are echoing up to heaven, but no one hears. We are all silent. No one listens. No one hears. All is silence except the echoes of gunfire.

You ask, "Why do they hate us? Why do they target us? Why do they murder us at our business in our own towns?"

You ask this, but you do not ask, "Why do we hate them? Why do we target them? Why do we murder them at their business in their own towns?"

The child's cry echoes down an empty street. Why can we not hear it?

The Mother's cry falls on deaf ears, a dead baby in her arms.

Why can we not hear the pain?

You listen to the arguments. Listen, listen, listen, really listen. The argument is for a racially pure Israel, for racial purity, for a racial state. And within that state a separated ghetto with a racially distinct people inside, hidden behind fences, and subject to arbitrary attack.

Zionism was the original Nazism.

The Zionists worked with the Nazis.

They are one and the same.

Last week we heard that torture flights had passed through British territory. This sort of information has become so routine now that hardly anyone notices.

This week it was reported that Prince Harry had been in Afghanistan. Then we get pictures of him with his "mates" kicking a football made of rolled up toilet paper, rolled out for us, as it were, on demand, another item of ass-wipe news to wipe out the reality of what's happening around us. Routine propaganda.

Routine torture. Routine murder. Routine lies.

A routine war.

http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=7677967

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19447.htm

Codswallop

2008-02-24T18:31:00.003Z

I was listening to L. Ron Hubbard on tape with a friend of mine. L. Ron Hubbard (in case you don't know) was the Science Fiction writer turned spiritual guru who founded the Church of Scientology. My friend is an ex-member of the Church. He was guffawing all the way through. "I used to take this so seriously," he said.

The basic theory of the Church is that we are all re-incarnations of extra-terrestrial beings called Thetans. Members of the Church pay vast amounts of money to rise through the ranks. They start at OT-1, and progress upwards. "OT" stands for Operating Thetan.

On the tape Ron (as he's affectionately known) is sitting by the Ocean talking intimately to his followers. You can hear the lapping waves and the mournful cries of seagulls in the background. The tape was made sometime in the early '60s. He has a very warm, soothing voice, and he's chuckling to himself in a self-satisfied, nonchalant manner.

He was telling us about a near-death brush with some vast Truth. He referred to the Truth as The Wall of Fire. So awe-inspiring, so terrible, is this Truth that the mere mention of it would make you sick. Many people in history who have approached this Truth have died. Ron is the first man ever to have come through the ordeal. He did it so that others would be able to follow him. This Truth is only accessible to OT-3 levels. To reach OT-3 costs many thousands of pounds.

Then my friend told me what this "Truth" actually consists of. It concerns the origins of sexual perversion on this planet. Apparently it came from a Thetan dictator called Xemu several billion years ago. He ran a confederation of 75 planets, and brought certain of his subjects to Earth, where he tied them to a mountain and dropped nuclear bombs on them. He was experimenting on them, by implanting them with sexual perversion.

My friend said: "So Ron was right. It would make you sick. It would make you sick to have paid all that money just to hear such a load of old codswallop."

Freedom

2008-02-17T09:09:00.007Z

I was at a meeting the other day. The adjudicator asked us if we’d like to take a break. Only he didn’t use the word “break”, he used the word “breather” instead.

We said no, we’d rather just get on and finish the meeting.

It suddenly occurred to me what he meant. He was talking about a fag-break. The word “breather” was a euphemism.

This seemed quite funny to me, substituting the idea of breathing with that of smoking: as if taking a breath of nice clean fresh air was in anyway similar to sucking on a cancer stick and dragging those deadly fumes into your lungs.

It also struck me as a measure of the changes taking place in this country that no one wanted to take him up on his offer. In that room of maybe ten people, the only smoker was the adjudicator himself.

This time last year he wouldn’t have used a euphemism. He would have imposed the cigarette break and several people would have joined him.

Ten years ago it could easily have been the other way around: ten smokers to the one non-smoker. Almost everyone would have wanted that “breather”.

Twenty years ago and we’d all have been smoking in the room itself, and the non-smokers would just have had to put up with it. The air would have been thick with cigarette smoke and the floor dusty with ash.

Some changes are definitely for the better.

I watched an old TV drama the other night. What was shocking was the sight of people lighting up on the screen. You don’t see that any more. It seemed dirty somehow, rude, like seeing someone picking their nose in public.

Personally I like the new smoke-free pubs. I always laugh when the smokers go out. They look so guilty and furtive, shrugging their shoulders apologetically as they shuffle out for their fix.

There’s two smokers I see almost every day. I see them leaning either side of the door of their house, each with a fag in their hand, blowing the smoke out onto the street. Then they stub out their cigarettes and go back into the house. These days even the smokers don’t want to have to put up with the smell of their own smoke.

It’s been three years since I gave up. I never did a better thing. A few weeks ago I met my old friends John and Carol down the Labour Club. John gave up some years ago, but, he admitted, sometimes he still longs for a cigarette.

That never happens to me. It’s a matter of interpretation. I still get the odd twinge, but rather than interpret it to mean “I want a cigarette”, I think, “thank God I don’t have to do that anymore.”

The key lies in the term “giving up”.

When you give something up, it implies that it was enjoyable at one time. But smoking was never enjoyable, it was always only an addiction. The only pleasure you ever got was in the temporary relief from the cravings.

I spent about two months fighting my addiction. My moment of freedom came with one particular cigarette. I realised even as I was smoking it that I was already craving the next one. Each cigarette creates the addiction that requires the next cigarette to relieve it. In that moment I knew that all the cigarettes in all the world would never satisfy me, that all I had ahead of me if I didn't quit was a lifetime of craving. I knew that with every fibre of my being. The spell was finally broken.

I used the Allen Carr method.

You take one final cigarette, you smoke it, and you say goodbye to it. You smoke it knowing that it will be your last.

After that it becomes funny.

I was in a shopping queue about fifteen hours later in the midst of the withdrawal laughing at the absurdity of it. I wanted to say to the check-out girl, "hey, I'm withdrawing from nicotine and it doesn't hurt a bit."

Nicotine addiction is almost entirely psychological.

There's like a little tickle in your belly, but once you remove the psychological craving - the illusion that cigarettes are a pleasure - it's a cinch. You're high on an excess of oxygen. You haven't had this much oxygen in years. The whole world is suffused with colour. The air wafts with scents. Your senses are coming alive, and everything is hilarious.

I was in another shop buying lottery tickets and the Daily Mail for my Dad. I hate the Daily Mail, and I've never done the lottery.

A youngster came in, a girl, maybe 15 or 16, and bought a packet of ten cigarettes. I said, "you'll be addicted for the rest of your life you know."

I thought it was so funny. I could see the look on her face, a combination of surprise and disdain - surprise I'd said anything, disdainful of my aged opinion - and it was like reading my own mind at that age.

That was when my own addiction had been born. It had nestled in my cells and in my belly, a little tiny furtive thing niggling in my guts, hidden from view. It had pretended to be my friend, when it was really my greatest enemy. It had lingered inside me like a virus, sucking out my will. It had been a pose at the time, a way of appearing grown up, but it soon became a need.

After that the addiciton is associative. If you have a cigarette with a coffee, every time you have a coffee you are reminded of cigarettes. If you have a cigarette with a beer, the beer becomes a trigger. Everything becomes a trigger. Use the phone. Smoke. Have a meal. Smoke. Sit down. Smoke. Stand up. Smoke. Breathe. Smoke. A lifetime of breathlessness and obligation.

So no, I haven’t “given up” smoking.

I have been released from a terrible curse.

The Qi That Rides The Wind

2008-02-03T09:50:00.003Z

I’m what you might call deeply insensitive (as opposed to people who believe in spirits, who are usually referred to as “sensitives”). I couldn’t tell a spirit from a washing line. What I mean is that there was just something odd about the décor of the house.

It was purple for a start, various shades of purple, from light purple on the walls, to dark purple on the skirting board, with flimsy maroon scarves scattered all over the place, shrouding out light fittings and cast about seemingly casually over the backs of all the chairs. Also the room was full of crystals, table fountains and wind-chimes dangling in inconvenient places at the entrance to most of the rooms....

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Qi-That-Rides-The-Wind

The Boondoggle Economy

2008-01-31T13:37:00.001Z

I’ve just discovered a new word. It’s “boondoggle”.

Well it’s not a new word actually. The spell check on my word processor recognises it. But it’s new to me.

It comes from America. A boondoggle was a piece of braided leather which boy scouts used to hang their whistles on. It may have had a nautical purpose at one time. It’s basically a useless but decorative item.

Later on it appeared in a headline in the New York Times, on 4 April 1935. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play ... Boon Doggles Made”.

It was referring to one aspect of the New Deal programme during the depression when unemployed people were put to work doing useless jobs.

As a word it became famous overnight and came to represent government funded work with no intrinsic purpose used as a way of gaining political patronage.

I first came across the word in an article from Rolling Stone magazine called The Great Iraq Swindle.

In the article the writer is referring to the privatisation of services in the US armed forces. The American army no longer washes its own smalls. It gets a private company in to do that. The private company is on a cost-plus contract. This means that whatever it spends it earns, plus three percent.

It’s the way the American army has been run since the Balkans, which means that Blair must have been aware of it.

Stop and think about it for a second. Cost-plus. You get three percent on whatever you spend. It’s a recipe for spending as much money as you possibly can. Everything you spend earns you an extra three percent.

This is what they call “free enterprise”.

So American soldiers’ underwear is being washed on a cost-plus basis. So too are all their social needs being met. Cost-plus means that every soldier who uses the privatised R’n’R facilities gets charged to the American government, which encourages the people who estimate the numbers to exaggerate. The people who estimate the numbers are also the people who take home the profit.

Cost-plus is also the method being used to rebuild Iraq: that traumatised, wounded, war-torn, and shattered country. Cost-plus to build privatised hospitals. Cost-plus to build roads, police training academies, schools, to run airports, to build sewerage plants, to generate electricity, the lot.

It’s the reason why nothing in Iraq works very well, why they still have power cuts even to this day. They blame it on terrorists, but it’s mainly just substandard workmanship.

Profits go straight back home to America, to American private investors, leaving the poor Iraqis with nothing but wreckage to contend with. Even their services aren’t their own.

Everything that the Americans knock down in that grand on-going Turkey-shoot we call “The War on Terror” is being rebuilt at the American taxpayers expense by private companies on a cost-plus basis, making this the biggest public spending bonanza in World history.

This is called "Military Keynsianism". Keynsianism is the theory - first suggested by the British Economist John Maynard Keynes - that a capitalist economy needs a constant supply of public money to "prime the pump", as it were, to keep the economy rolling. In the post-war years in Europe public spending was - to a large extent - spent upon the public, on hospitals and schools. This was called "the welfare state". Military Keynsianism is another form of the welfare state: the welfare state for the rich, a way of funnelling public money into private hands via the Military-Industrial Complex.

So next time you hear about operations against al-Qaeda targets on the outskirts of Baghdad, remember who will do the rebuilding.

Remember, too, who made the bombs and who built the planes; who supplies the equipment; who made the uniforms and who rakes in the cash.

War: the biggest boondoggle of all time.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_5LcdqpgTho

Pistis Sophia

2008-01-25T13:26:00.001Z

The following is a column I submitted to an astrology magazine. Regular readers of this blog will recognise it as based on something I wrote in these pages about two years ago. Unfortunately the editors didn't feel it was suitable and it was rejected. This is only the second time a story of mine has been turned down by this particular publication. Interestingly enough, the first time it was a story about Christianity too: about Pro-Life Christians.

Here's a copy of the e-mail exchange between me and the editor just after it was rejected:

Chris: "What's the reasoning for this, just out of interest? No-go on Christianity?"

Editor: "Yeah bang on, we have to give religion a wide berth."

Which is odd, don't you think? Why would an astrology magazine feel that it has to give a wide berth to religious questions?

But as I pointed out to a Christian friend of mine these texts have been suppressed for nearly 2,000 years now, so it's not surprising that they should continue to be. I expect they would get a lot of noisy hate mail if they published. Christians just seem to find the idea of a feminine aspect to the divinity too difficult to contemplate it seems....

On my birthday I typed the words “The Hypostasis of the Archons” into my mobile phone and sent it as a text to my ex-wife, the mother of my son.

The funny thing is, of course, that using predictive text, my mobile phone did not recognise the words at all. Well it recognised some of the words, but not others. The others I had to spell out. Hypostasis. Archons. Letter by letter. Therefore my mobile phone now contains the title of an early Christian Gnostic text in its memory.

The Hypostasis of the Archons. It means, “The Reality of the Rulers”. It is one of the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. They are a collection of early Christian writings which had been buried in the desert to hide them from destruction by the Orthodox elites at the time. They date from between the first century to the fourth century AD and show what a very different force Christianity was in these early years.

When I found the text on the Internet is was like a thrill of instant electric recognition passing through my whole body.

I’d never read anything quite like this before, and yet is was oddly familiar. Christianity, and yet not-quite Christianity. Something else.

The reason I typed the title into my mobile phone to send to my ex was that she had asked me about Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code.

I’d said that Dan Brown was sort of onto a half-truth in his book. Not that Jesus ever married Mary Magdalene, but that the feminine has been systematically exorcised from Christianity over the centuries and that certain forgotten forms of the religion were much more sympathetic to the notion of a female side to the deity.

This is clear in The Hypostasis of the Archons, where the feminine part of the deity is given a name: Pistis Sophia.

“Sophia” means “Wisdom”, “Pistis” means “Faith”.

Her name therefore means “the Wisdom of Faith”, or, perhaps, “the Faith of the Wise”.

This is how she is described in the book:

“As incorruptibility looked down into the region of the waters, her image appeared in the waters; and the authorities of the darkness became enamoured of her. But they could not lay hold of that image, which had appeared to them in the waters, because of their weakness - since beings that merely possess a soul cannot lay hold of those that possess a spirit - for they were from below, while it was from above. This is the reason why ‘incorruptibility looked down into the region (etc.)’: so that, by the father's will, she might bring the entirety into union with the light.”

It was the image of the goddess reflected in the waters that caused a resonance in me. The goddess as “incorruptibility”. The idea of the “authorities of the darkness” becoming enamoured of her, but being unable to lay hold of her. They fail to lay hold of her firstly because they are looking in the wrong place. (What they are looking at is merely a reflection.) But secondly, because she is the image of incorruptibility and cannot, therefore be “laid hold of”. She is beyond objectification. She is beyond property. She is beyond measure.

As I read the words it conjured up an image in my mind.

This image sent a message to me about the true nature of our world, as a reflection of another world. Sometimes, even, I can sense that other world - not so far away - as a world of immense, intense almost unbearable beauty; as a world of true kindness; as a world of friends, not strangers; as a world where exploitation and violence have ceased to exist; as a world which glows with its own inner light, where the works of art and nature are forever intertwined in an elaborately playful dance of sheer delight. The naturalising of the human. The humanising of nature.

The rebirth of the goddess.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Hypostasis-of-the-Archons

Justice

2008-01-20T21:44:00.000Z

This is Sohail Qureshi, the dentist who was jailed for four and a half years last week on terrorism charges.

The picture is the one used in the Sun newspaper in its coverage of the trial on January the 9th.

In other pictures he appears without a beard, or with a small goatee.

Have you noticed how unreal that beard looks? It looks like it has been scribbled on the photograph with a felt tip pen. Look at it more closely and it appears to be the product of some cack-handed manipulations in Photoshop. The question is why? Why bother to put up a fake photograph when there are real photographs available? We can only wonder. Maybe the real photographs weren't intimidating enough.

Qureshi was arrested at Heathrow airport in 2006 as he was getting ready to board a flight to Pakistan.

He had several thousand pounds in cash taped about his person. In his baggage were night-vision lenses, sleeping bags and rucksacks, plus a removable hard-drive containing copies of US combat manuals.

According to security sources – as reported in the Sun - he was intending to go on to Afghanistan where he was planning to take part in actions against British and American troops.

You see this is what I find absurd. How seriously are we supposed to take this? The threat from jokers like Quereshi is about as real as that beard of his, and as effective as that Kalashnikov would be against an F16 fighter or a B1 bomber.

This is not to say that he didn’t intend harm, or that he shouldn’t be punished.

Who knows what was going on in his mind or what he intended? It's just that, on a relative scale this man is decidedly small-fry. A nothing. A nobody. A jumped-up idiot with delusions of grandeur.

The threat of terrorism is now a world-wide phenomenon. But the majority of victims of terrorism are not people in the relatively safe West; they are Muslims in the conflagration of fear and terror that is the Middle East.

Over a million people have died violently in Iraq as a direct consequence of the actions of the British and American governments. When violence happens in an occupied territory it is always the occupiers who are to blame.

It is no less a terrorist act to be killed by an American warplane armed with Mk 82 general purpose bombs in a raid against al-Qaeda positions in a civilian area on the outskirts of Baghdad, as it is to be killed by terrorist bombs in London or Madrid; the difference being the sheer frequency of the attacks.

Two attempts in the last five years in London.

One a week in Baghdad.

The trouble is, when I say something like that I can already feel people’s hackles rising.

Nothing justifies attacks on civilians.

Nothing.

And that goes as much in Iraq – where attacks on civilians are an everyday occurrence – as it does in London.

There is no such thing as “collateral damage”.

There are people dying, that’s all. And mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters grieving. And families and friends driven literally insane with grief.

And one grief does not compensate for another, it only adds to the store of grief.

This is a grieving, sad, hopeless, desperate world right now and I don’t know what the answer might be.

Grief on grief. Never ending grief.

But what I suspect - what I very strongly suspect - is that the routine response of enraged Muslims like Qureshi to these horrors is expected, and that the customary noise of newspapers like the Sun - their manufactured outrage - is merely a ploy, a front, a slight of hand in a game of masks and appearances covering far more devious plans.

The vultures are feeding on the blood of war.

It’s rich pickings amongst the carnage.

In the midst of a collapsing economy war is the one sure-fire way to increasing profits.

And just as I celebrate the capture and punishment of one would-be terrorist like Sohail Qureshi, so I would be even more pleased to see the real war criminals brought to justice; to see the likes of Bush and Blair hauled before a jury and tried in a properly constituted court of law.

You see, I believe in Justice.

Which is more than you can say for them.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle/print

Armageddon Factory

2008-01-16T22:02:00.000Z

Maybe I’m too cynical at times. I read the newspapers, or watch the TV news, and my first instinct is to wonder how I am being manipulated.

Take that story about the dentist-turned-terrorist Sohail Qureshi who was jailed for four and a half years last week. Most of the newspapers were suggesting that his sentence was too mild, adding that he was likely to be free in a year.

But what actual threat was he?

He was caught boarding a flight with several thousand pounds in cash strapped about his body, with optical night-vision lenses and police batons in his bag, along with two sleeping bags, two rucksacks, some medical supplies and a removable hard drive containing US army combat manuals.

He pleaded guilty to possessing articles for terrorist purposes and to possessing a record of information likely to be useful to terrorists.

So it’s obvious, by his own admission, that he was bent upon some violent act. No doubt he deserved to go to prison.

He had also been in contact with Samina Malik, the so-called “lyrical terrorist”.

Several of the news programmes referred to him as “an al-Qaida operative”. Apparently he had been on a training camp once. One newspaper described him as “a hate-filled fanatic”, while another said that he planned “to fight against British and American troops in Afghanistan”.

It was at this point that I spluttered into my tea.

He’s a dentist. What’s he going to do: pull their teeth out? Even assuming he has actually had some training, how, exactly, is he going to fight British and American troops using police batons, sleeping bags and rucksacks?

I’m trying to imagine what sort of action he might have been planning. I have a picture of him charging down a hill spinning a sleeping bag over his head while wielding his trusty baton. He would have been able to do this at night, of course, being equipped with the night-vision lenses.

OK. He had money. Maybe he was going to buy weapons. He could probably get one or two Kalashnikovs for that money, plus maybe some grenades and a pistol. Perhaps there was even a brigade of Taliban troops waiting to meet him somewhere on the Afghan border.

You have to ask, however: what use would a dentist from Forest Gate be to the Taliban, those battle-hardened mountain-men, many of whom have known nothing but war all their lives? He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

But it’s the comparison of resources that clarifies the real truth behind this story.

The day after Sohail Qureshi was sentenced the Americans were in action on the outskirts of Baghdad, attacking so-called al-Qaida targets.

They dropped 40,000 lbs of explosives in a forty minute blitz using F16 fighters and B1 bombers.

A B1 bomber costs $283.1 million. The US Air Force has 100 of them. Each 500lb bomb costs $283.50, making the cost of one forty minute operation, in ordinance alone, nearly $23,000.

There are currently 1,055,734 American soldiers on active duty around the world. US arms spending amounts to 48% of the world total. US soldiers are the best equipped in the world, each one having large quantities of deadly, sophisticated weaponry at their disposal….. probably including night sights and sleeping bags.

The idea that a crazed dentist from Forest Gate, an addled poetess from Southall and a few other nutters can be considered a threat to world peace compared to the Armageddon factory that is the United States is, of course, a fantasy.

Please click on the following link for a mind-boggling article from Rolling Stone magazine on the economic reasons behind the war in Iraq. Has the American state finally gone completely crazy? Here is the evidence...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle/print

Three Short Pieces: 1. Save the Fish!

2008-01-13T09:46:00.000Z

There's a line where righteous behaviour can spill over into self-righteousness. It's a very fine line. Everyone knows it: the point where a matter of principle can become a matter of absurdity. Take what happened to my friend John. He was on a weekend camping trip in mid-Wales with his five year old daughter. This was the first time John had seen Rhiannon for weeks. And he's crouching by a little silvery stream with a child's fishing net, chasing the trout around, the girl hanging onto his leg and chattering, both of them more intent upon their conversation than with catching a fish, when they're approached by a couple.

"What do you think you're doing?" the woman says. The man just stands in the background with his arms folded, looking displeased. She has long hair and a woolly jumper, and he has sandals and a beard. John looks at them bemused. "You're not allowed to catch fish in here, you know," she adds, indignantly.

John stands up. "Catch fish?" he says. "With this?" And he holds up the flimsy stick with its little plastic net.

"Well, you look Green," the woman says.

It took a second or two for that one to sink in. John thought she was referring to his fishing abilities. And then it struck him. She was referring to his politics. She considered herself a conservationist. She was trying to Save The Fish.

It's a common problem on the Righteous Left. People become so caught up in what they like to think is the Big Picture, that they stop noticing the details. The mind is so set in a righteous groove that it can longer distinguish a threat from a plaything. Of course the real threats to the future of the Planet - the international corporations, the military-industrial complex - are so unassailable and, at the same time, so ubiquitous, that it is beyond the scope of the average person to challenge them in any but the most peripheral of ways.

So what's a good Eco-activist to do? He has to do something. This is the point, maybe, where the sense of a personal mission can fall into pomposity - where righteous purpose becomes self-righteous posturing - and can end in the absurd spectacle of a couple of middle-class hippies defending these swift, muscular trout from a child's plastic toy.

Rhiannon said: "I think that Woman's mad!"

2. Angry Hair

2008-01-13T09:45:00.000Z

People have different ways of dealing with anger. Some people get drunk. Others kick a football about. Some people meditate. Raji drives.

He had this beautiful sport's car. And one day he was so angry he just jumped into it and put his foot down. He didn't tell me what he was angry about. So he was hurtling down the road at 60mph. There was an S-bend at the end of the road. He skidded round the first turn and then banked into the second. There were a couple of workmen nearby, digging up the road. He could see their faces. They were looking at him as if he was some kind of idiot. This made him even more angry. He just slammed his foot on the accelerator and...

Well you can guess the rest. His beautiful new sport car, slick and shiny and humming with power, wrapped around a lamp post: a write-off.

Anger makes you do stupid things. He was lucky he wasn't hurt. But he knew the workmen were still watching him. He leapt out of the door, slammed the door shut and, without looking back, went on his way. He was going to the hairdresser's.

Anger compounds anger. If he was pretty pissed off in the first place, he was quadrupley pissed-off now. The hairdresser had to calm him down. "Have you rung the AA?" the hairdresser asked. So Raji did. And with his car hissing and steaming around a lamp post, and this wild anger tearing at his nerves, he had his hair done.

Afterwards he went back to the car. The AA were already there, ready to tow the thing away. He gave them instructions on where to take it and got on with the rest of his day. He was due to at the airport in 4 hours. He didn't have time to think about what had happened till he sat down on the plane.

"And did you learn any lessons from it Raji?" someone asked.

"I learned not to drive when you're angry," he said.

"Why’s that?”

“You end up with a bad haircut.”

3. The Price of Food

2008-01-13T09:44:00.000Z

"What's the most expensive food you've ever eaten?" says Pete.

There are a number of them sitting at the bar, sipping on the various drinks ranged in front of them. The barman is polishing a glass nonchalantly. They all look at each other, mildly bemused.

"Dunno," one of them volunteers. "Lobster, maybe. That's expensive."

"I had Caviar once," another one says, "only it wasn't worth it. Tasted like salty axle grease to me."

"Me and the Missus went to an upmarket Indian Restaurant in London, and they put gold leaf on the food. I don't know if it was expensive or not, but it was certainly tasteless, in more ways than one."

Pete is, by his own admission, mad. He's pumped full of all those drugs they give to psychotic patients, which makes his eyes watery, and his walk stiff and awkward, like a puppet from a Gerry Anderson TV serial. He holds his arms clumsily at his sides, curling the fingers, as he wanders from pub to pub looking for company. He's also the victim of an unhappy divorce, and these days he's been looking even worse. His clothes seem more battered and stained, he always seems to have tears in his eyes, and sometimes he looks as if he's about to fall over. I asked him if he was all right.

"It's these new drugs," he told me, "they make me depressed."

"Don't you resent being made a specimen in a psychiatrist's drug-experiment?" I asked.

"I'd rather take the drugs than not," he said. "Not taking the drugs is much worse."

So anyway: back at the pub. Eventually they'd all run out of expensive foods to discuss. They'd been through all of the obvious examples, and anyway, it was beginning to seem like a pointless question. It wasn't as if he was asking them what meals they had enjoyed, which would have got a much better response. One of them turns to Pete.

"So what's the most expensive food you've ever eaten then Pete?"

It was what he'd been waiting for.

"Wedding Cake," he said, and walked out.

Gravity

2008-01-06T08:02:00.001Z

Personally I don’t like the idea of fate. When we talk of fate it makes it sound as if everything is predestined, predetermined, laid out like a train on its tracks, taking us on a journey from here to there without us having a say in the matter.

That’s the meaning of the word “destiny”. It means destination: the place where we are going.

Read more here

A Happy New Year

2008-01-01T09:45:00.000Z

A Happy New Year.

Or is it?

It depends on which calendar you are using. For instance, the 1st of January 2008 in the Gregorian calendar is actually the 23rd of Tevet 5768 in the Jewish calendar, and the new year is not due for another 273 days, on the 29th of Elul, which is the 29th of September.

According to the Southern Buddhists, New Year is the first three days of the full moon in April and the year is 2551.

According to Muslims, New Year is on the 10th of January, and the year is 1429.

According to the Chinese, the New Year is in February, and the year is the Year of the Rat.

According to the Julian calendar New Year is on the 14th of January. The Julian calendar was the calendar used in the West until 1582, when it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar. Some Eastern Orthodox churches still celebrate New Year on the 14th of January and some stubborn traditionalists still use the Julian calendar for all of their dates.

In fact it is possible to celebrate New Year in almost every month of the year. It depends on what part of the world you come from and which belief-system you ascribe to.

According to Robert Anton Wilson, the great anarchist humourist and writer, the year is now 6008, his personal count beginning with the birth of Hung Mung, a mythological ancient Chinese philosopher who supposedly answered all questions by shouting loudly, "I don't know! I don't know!"

Thus Robert Anton Wilson’s satirical version of a calendar system begins with an uncertainty.

Later he revised his views, saying that ALL calendar systems, including his own, were attempts to impose a single vision on a complex world, and he started using a variety of different systems at the same time. So a Robert Anton Wilson article might be dated in any one of about twenty different ways.

What most of these different calendar systems have in common is a starting date. That is, they are linear and progressive and whoever devised the system had to choose a day on which to start calculating the progression of days and months and years that lead us up to today‘s date.

Thus time is perceived as a straight line leading from somewhere to somewhere else. So it seems to go from the past to the future, from something that is fixed and known to something that is as yet unrealised, from young to old, from youth to maturity, from ignorance to wisdom.

And as it does so it degenerates: it goes from strength to weakness, from vigour to decrepitude, shifting from imagination into habit, from creativity into decay, in a process which can never be reversed.

But time might not be like this at all. It might not go in a line. It might go in circles.

One particular Celtic version of the New Year came in the form of a story. The young Oak King challenges the old Holly King for the love of the goddess, and kills him. This story is commemorated in a garbled form in the ancient carol, the Holly and the Ivy, and is repeated, in reverse order, in the summer, when the Holly King defeats the Oak King.

Thus the cycle of the year is seen as a story of death and rebirth, endlessly echoed through time.

Which, of course, is exactly what it is: death and decay giving way to growth and rebirth, and all of us spinning in a merry dance through the cycles of seasons.

And it is this notion of time which we celebrate in our modern version of the New Year. We celebrate the idea that the year can become new again. We celebrate the renewal and the rebirth of the year.

So a Happy New Year to you once more, whenever you think that might be.

Satan in the Supermarket

2007-12-21T21:13:00.003Z

"Better to shop in Hell, than serve in Heav'n."

I’m not sure you will catch sight of Satan wandering the aisles of Tesco, however, pushing a shopping trolley, forked tail draped loosely over one arm, while he picks out bottles of Christmas sherry from the shelves, two for the price of one.

You will, however, find Mammon there.

Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy in his Dictionnaire Infernal (1818) describes Mammon as “Hell’s Ambassador to England.” And you might add that Christmas is his time of year.

Read more here.

Matalan Family

2007-12-10T19:02:00.000Z

There’s nothing more irritating than to have some jolly pop-tune tinkling through your head when you’re feeling anything but jolly yourself.

That’s the trouble with Christmas: relentless jollity.

Right now the tune is “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” as featured in the Marks and Sparks advert on the telly, with Twiggy and a bunch of younger models gallivanting about in a pastiche of some 1950s Hollywood romantic comedy.

No it’s not. It’s the Most Annoying Time of the Year.

It’s particularly annoying when you have the same tune being played over and over again to remind you that you STILL haven’t got round to buying your presents yet.

I’ve been scouring the papers for bargains. Here’s one. Why not try a box of Opulence chocolates from Harrods? At £100 for 80 chocolates it would make an ideal present for that favourite aunt to enjoy after her lunch on Christmas day.

£100 for 80 chocolates works out at £1.25 a chocolate, so maybe it would be advisable to restrain the aunt from actually eating the chocolates. Maybe she could be encouraged to just take the occasional lick instead.

This also has the advantage that it can be turned into a parlour game for the rest of the family. Simply gather around and estimate the value of each lick.

This is cheap compared to a Tercenturian Hamper from Fortnum and Mason (pictured). A snip at £20,000. I suspect the only reason for buying this is to show off how rich you are.

Or how about a dinner suit from Matalan, costing £40?

This is a case of the sublime to the ridiculous, of course. For the price of one box of chocolates from Harrods you can get two dinner suits from Matalan, plus a spare trouser leg and zipper.

What a bargain. We were all round my Mum’s house when I read out the advert. I said, “come on: £40 for a dinner suit, it’s got to be crap,” and my sister said, “that’s how much it would cost to hire one, so you could buy a new one and just wear it one night.”

Meanwhile my other sister, mishearing, said, “some people wouldn’t mind laying out forty quid so that it matches the rest of the table.”

Pardon? So they make dinner suits in co-ordinating colours to match your table cloth and napkins now? How modern.

She thought we’d been talking about a £40 dinner service.

My whole family are great fans of Matalan whose original shop was situated in Tamworth in the Midlands, not more than forty miles from where we were brought up.

It’s where they are today, the whole lot of them, in the brand new Matalan store in the East Kent Retail Park near Broadstairs where they are doing all of their Christmas shopping for the next twenty years I suspect.

I do hope they buy me a dinner suit. I want a red one to go with my Father Christmas bow-tie and matching earmuffs.

I intend to look sophisticated at the dinner table this year.

Remembrance

2007-11-23T11:23:00.000Z

I went down to the remembrance service at the war memorial with my dad.

I’d bought my poppy a few days before from a lady poppy-seller outside the supermarket. She said, "I know your face. You write that column in the newspaper. Sometimes it makes me so angry I want to shout."

"Good," I thought. "Then I am doing my job."

I don’t normally go to the remembrance service. This is not because I don’t honour the sacrifices made by our service men and women in times of war. I am not a pacifist. I believe there are times when we have to fight to defend our values. It’s just that, as Will Self said that morning on the Andrew Marr programme, I don’t want to be party to a state-sponsored cult.

There are wars and there are wars. Some wars are just and some wars are not. The Second World War was a just war, being a struggle against fascism. We were on the right side.

Other wars are not so clear cut. Whose values, exactly, are we fighting to defend? In the case of the war in Iraq, more than a million Iraqis have died, and several thousand coalition troops, to defend the right of big American oil companies to steal the resources of that desperate, wounded nation.

In the case of the war in Iraq, in other words, we are on the wrong side.

The reason I went to the remembrance service this time was because my dad asked me to. This seemed like a great honour to me, to be able to stand next to my dad as the flags were lowered and he remembered his comrades.

It was a dull grey day but the sun came out right on cue just as the Last Post was sounding.

After the service we went to the British Legion for a drink, where I introduced him to Councillor Julia Seath. They began talking, and within a few minutes discovered that they had something in common. They had both been in Singapore, Julia as the daughter of a British Army officer, and my dad as a young rating in the British Navy.

They were chatting away happily about their memories of Singapore, recalling certain places, certain streets and certain landmarks, when their conversation suddenly became intense. They realised that they must have sailed over on the same ship. They were both on the same ship at the same time.

It was 1949 and the ship was the SS Orduna.

Julia said she remembered the seed cake they ate and that they used a special kind of soap to lather with as they had to wash in sea water.

This meeting wouldn’t have been possible without me. I’ve known Julia since I first came to this town and got involved with local politics.

It felt like a privilege to have been a witness to such a conversation.

Some things seem much more than just coincidence and I was glad I had accepted my father’s invitation.

Free Horoscope Reading

2007-11-15T19:45:00.001Z

I had my horoscope done over the internet the other week. The advert said: "Free Horoscope Readings". I filled in a form with all my details - my time and date and place of birth - and sent it off.

Some days later I got my reply. It came in the form of an e-mail which had a web link attached, with a security number. You logged on to the website, pasted in the security number, and got your "Free Personal Horoscope Reading."

"Dear Christopher," it said.

It was a very long text, mainly in blue, emblazoned with multiple capital letters, and with lots of words emphasised in bold contrasting colours.

"The other day," it continued, "when I was working on your Free Personal Horoscope Reading" – in bright red – "I had a SUDDEN BLINDING REVELATION about you."

"Oh dear," I thought, wondering what was coming next. Anyone who has to use capital letters and bright colours in such abundance is obviously on the make. It’s like they are shouting at you on the page, like someone suddenly leaping across a room and bellowing in your ear.

It said that there was going to be a very lucky turn of events in which I would become seriously, seriously rich and that all my dreams would come true. "This is an ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY," it said.

At some point the text said that it was IMPERITIVE that I continue reading to the end of the page.

Well you know me. I wasn’t believing a word of this. This wasn’t a horoscope reading, it was an advert. I was just waiting for the sting at the end. How much would I be expected to fork out for whatever service it was they were offering?

There were lots of free things on offer as part of the deal, like an ancient Egyptian Talisman, and a "Magnetised Photograph". This latter consisted of a photograph of the woman supposedly giving me all this personal attention, which she would specially "magnetise" for me so that when I rubbed it I would be in direct "psychic" contact with her.

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of being in direct psychic contact with anyone with a tendency to shout at you in clashing colours and capital letters. It was bad enough on the page. Imagine if it was in your head.

After this the text started to turn nasty.

It was going on and on about psychic-this and spiritual-that, promising me all sorts of wonderful things, when it suddenly said that I had a choice in all of this and that it was imperative that I made the right choice.

"I know you have been unhappy in your life," the text went on. "I know you have been lonely and frustrated. I know you have been hurt."

It then promised me that if I made the wrong choices my life would simply get worse.

I saw the psychology of that. Everyone has been unhappy at some time in their life. Everyone has been lonely and frustrated and hurt. My "personal letter" was clearly a mass produced effort with my name added by the mysteries of digital technology, but the psychology of it was to touch elements in my life that we all share.

Fear and loss and loneliness, hope for a better future, love – of course – and dreams of wealth and avarice, who hasn’t dreamed about these things or feared them?

The text was now adding a threat to its previous benign inanity. It was saying that my life could get worse. Indeed, it promised that it would unless I took a certain course of action.

This is where the sting came in.

She was even now working on my personal horoscope which would give me precise details on how to cash in on the great luck that was about to descend upon me, while telling me how to avoid all the pitfalls. She didn’t want to be so crass as to talk about money, she said, but in the light of the GREAT WEALTH that was even now gathering itself to pour down upon my head…. Etc. etc. etc.

You can guess the rest.

There was a Pay Pal link though which I could give my credit card details. After that I stopped bothering to read.

We’ve all see letters like this of course, and I couldn’t really complain, having elicited it in the first place by answering an advert on a website. But it struck me that it was tantamount to extortion by threats and there are certainly some vulnerable people out there who could be taken in and possibly damaged by this sort of thing.

Maybe I should sue for damages? That way I could get that fortune my horoscope promised me.

Parallel Worlds

2007-11-08T17:25:00.002Z

Imagine. Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away (as they say in the movies) there’s another you. This "other" you shares everything that you have. She has your past, your history, your family, your name, your body, your sense of identity, your dress-sense, your possessions, your sense of humour. She is identical to you in every way. She likes what you like. She not only thinks she is you, in a very real sense she is you.

She is sitting in exactly the same place as you are now, reading this blog, just as you are. She is wearing the same clothes. What’s the weather like outside? Well in her world the weather is exactly the same. If it’s sunny in your world, it’s sunny in hers. If it’s raining in your world, then it is raining in hers.

But at this point, maybe, things begin to change. You carry on reading this blog, intrigued, whereas the other you interrupts her reading after the first sentence and decides to go for a walk instead. Outside she meets someone she hasn’t seen in ages, who asks her out for a drink. A romance ensues. Later they marry and have children. The two worlds are beginning to diverge.

Small changes lead to greater and greater effects. So in your world you marry a completely different person, and have different children and sometime in the future, one of your children is responsible for a great breakthrough in medicine which saves large numbers of people from a major epidemic.

A war for resources that might have happened did not happen. People live who might not have lived. Some of these people are responsible for huge changes in how we go about our daily lives. And on and on like this, until the two worlds are utterly different from each other.

It is the "parallel worlds" scenario beloved of science fiction writers. You imagine a world quite like our own, but weirdly different in significant ways. So, for instance, in one episode of Doctor Who the protagonists believe themselves to be in London, only when they look up there are Zeppelins in the sky and the world is being ruled by a malevolent dictatorship. They realise they are in a parallel universe.

You think this is all just the stuff of fantasy? You are wrong. It is legitimate scientific theory. It is not only likely to be true, in all probability it is true.

The theory goes something like this: if space is infinite and matter is distributed evenly throughout then every possible scenario must be taking place in one part of the universe or another. So there’s not just one "you", there’s an infinite number of you, all diverging from the pattern at varying points along the way.

It’s like that trick you do with mirrors, reflecting a mirror in a mirror, till you get an infinite regression of mirrors disappearing off into the distance. An infinite number of Earths, going around infinite suns in solar systems exactly like ours. Infinite versions of the internet, with an infinite number of blogs by CJ Stone, all varying in an infinite number of ways.

Well I know it sounds far-fetched, but, according to the physicist Max Tegmark, in his theory of Parallel Universes it is the simplest possible explanation for how the universe actually works. Unless we imagine that the universe stops at some point and turns into something else - a kind of cosmic terminus-building with a big sign saying "Please Mind The Gap When Disembarking From The Universe"- then the best assumption is that it goes on forever; and if it goes on forever, then every possible story-line you can imagine is happening in some part of the universe or another.

As for that other you: she might have gone out for a drink tonight, but she missed reading a very interesting article instead.

And who knows how this might change the world?

Halloween

2007-10-28T16:58:00.000Z

It's that time of year again folks: the world-famous festival of fake blood and tackiness known as Halloween.

In my local pound shop, called George’s Mini-Market, you can buy vampire teeth, horror masks, wigs, face paint, skeleton costumes, glow-in-the-dark fingers and vampire's blood from anywhere between 10p to £2.

You can buy all the same things everywhere else too. The windows of all the shops are full up of the stuff.

Meanwhile in one of the posh craft shops in our town they have a proper witch's broomstick in the window, obviously hand made. They also have a witch's hat. My sister went in and asked how much the hat cost and they laughed. They got it from Woolworths, they said.

When I was on holiday in Romania last year I went to Bran castle in Transylvania, which is popularly known as "Dracula's Castle". They were selling all the same tat there too.

It's an international conspiracy. Why go to Transylvania when you can buy your Dracula gear from George’s Mini-Market?

Actually the only connection between Bran Castle and Dracula is the fact that the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula was filmed there.

The real historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, may have spent a night there once. "Dracula" was one of his titles. It means "Son of the Dragon".

Bram Stoker based his own Dracula's Castle upon one in Scotland which he also visited only once.

So Bram Stoker and Vlad the Impaler have one thing in common. They both only ever went to Dracula's Castle once.

A few years back Christians used to get very upset about Halloween. They would send scary letters to the newspapers accusing anyone taking part of "occult practices".

Fortunately this kind of superstitious scare-mongering seems to have died out in more recent times. Or maybe it’s that Christians don't want to be accused of being spoilsports any more, when secretly they still disapprove.

The first time I was ever published was in my local paper in a letter sent in reply to one of these letters, which I signed "Puck". It filled up almost half a page and the editor added a disclaimer to it. "The views expressed in this letter are not necessarily those of this newspaper." I was going through a pagan phase at the time.

In pagan circles Halloween is called Samhain, and is the Celtic New Year. It is a very ancient festival indeed, and involves a meal in which an extra place is laid out for the visiting dead.

It had mainly died out in England due to its replacement by Bonfire Night, but was revived recently as an American import after the popularity of Steven Spielberg's ET, which used Halloween night as a convenient plot-device.

These days the ET costume has become a part of the Halloween tradition. If ET was around now he wouldn't have to wear a sheet over his head. He could come as himself.

Sainsburys, meanwhile, is refusing to sell flour or eggs to under 16 year olds. Apparently this is to do with the practice of egging people's houses as part of Trick or Treat.

A friend of mine has the following notice on his door:

No Trick Or Treat

X-Ray Lasers

Mounted

On Roof.

It seems to work. Or so he claims.

Whitstable Harbour

2007-10-21T09:30:00.000Z

From The Whitstable Times 27/09/2007:

I’m from Birmingham originally. Not a DFL, a DFB. Down From Birmingham.

When I was a youngster we used to go out to a piece of woodland just outside the city called Chelmsley Wood. Later the area was developed and a large council estate put there (1).

At one point it was the largest council estate in Britain.

It looks like Lucerne Drive (2) but is almost as big as Canterbury, if you can imagine that. Lucerne Drive with Elephantitus.

It was designed and built in the 60s.

It has a town centre with shops and car parks, and a number of pubs. The pubs, of course, have no soul, being all the same, without history or atmosphere, and just being kind of plonked down anywhere as an afterthought.

As the years went by the pubs became increasingly decrepit and nasty. You wouldn’t want to go into a Chelmsley Wood pub without an armed guard. I think that Baghdad is probably safer than a Chelmsley Wood pub on a Saturday night.

The reason I am telling you all of this is that I’m looking at a drawing of a Chelmsley Wood pub right now on the internet. It’s called The Oyster Catcher and is Shepherd Neame’s proposed development plan for Whitstable Harbour (above).

OK, I’m probably exaggerating here. I’m sure that The Oyster Catcher will be sensitively designed and built to take into account the ambience of its surroundings. That is, like every new building in Whitstable these last few years, it will be slapped all over with Kent weatherboarding.

But the question still remains: who on earth thinks that Whitstable is in need of another pub? Whitstable has some of the best pubs in the world. Pubs with real character and real atmosphere, not crude mock-ups plastered with weatherboarding to give them that “authentic” Kent look.

I didn’t manage to get to see the development proposals for Whitstable Harbour when they were on display in the Horsebridge. Fortunately they are still available on the Canterbury City Council website.

So I’m looking at the various options now. Shepherd Neame’s attempt to recapture the spirit of a 60s council estate in the shape of a pub is actually the least objectionable of the proposals.

One of them looks like a spaceship, and another one looks like a circus (3).

I like these architectural drawings. They are exercises in creative fantasy. The design that looks like a spaceship also looks like it about to take off into the wild tumultuous skies.

However I’m puzzled as to why the council thinks the harbour needs developing. I don’t know about you, but I actually like the buildings that are already there.

Crude but functional, you might say, and entirely appropriate for the environment, this being a working harbour. Perhaps a larger version of the very successful market would be more in keeping?

That’s what attracted me to Whitstable in the first place. It is a real living town, not a theme-park parody of itself like Canterbury.

Let’s keep it that way!

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelmsley_Wood
2) http://www.lucernedrive.co.uk/
3) http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/buildpage.php?id=3416

Scary Times

2007-10-14T21:22:00.000Z

My aunt sent me a set of photos over the internet. They purported to show a little girl being punished for stealing in Iran. The photographs showed the little girl with her arm being forcibly held out while a car was running over it in order to break it.

The pictures were accompanied by some virulent anti-Iranian text.

I say “purported to show” and you already know what my attitude to these photographs is likely to be.

They may have been faked. They could have been mocked-up in Photoshop, or the result of a staged enactment.

Even assuming they were showing something real, there is nothing in the photographs to indicate where they may have been taken. It could have been Iran. It could have been Turkey. It could have been any one of a dozen different countries in the region.

For those of you sceptical of my scepticism, I would just like to remind you of the lies that got us into Iraq, and that German soldiers in the First World War were accused of bayoneting babies.

I think we all know by now that we are being set-up for a new war, this time against Iran.

If you think the war in Iraq was a disaster, just you wait. A war against Iran would be apocalyptic to say the least.

Unlike Iraq - which was a country already on its knees from years of sanctions, continual bombings and the bloody after-effects of the previous devastating war – Iran is a fully-functioning advanced radical state with a motivated and armed population. It would not be such a push-over.

Iran has always been the real enemy, having dumped the American-backed Shah in their Islamic revolution, and having backed some of the key anti-American/ anti-Israeli forces in the region, like Hamas and Hezbollah, for a number of years.

It is also almost certainly backing some of the Sh’ia based militias in Iraq, something that will no doubt provide the justification for any future attack. But - it has to be said - complaints about “interference” from an occupying power about a regional neighbour is patently absurd. It would be like Nazi Germany complaining about “interference” by Britain in the affairs of Vichy France during the Second World War.

The Americans have already built a small army base on the Iranian border, supposedly to stop incursions into Iraqi territory. This is a joke. You only have to look at the map to know this.

There are 200 American troops in that base. The idea that they can have any effect on cross-border incursions in a desert region along such an extensive border is laughable.

More likely they have been put there as an act of provocation.

There are also British troops on the southern border, so expect to see a re-enactment of the capture of British sailors earlier this year.

British troops are being used as bait in a nasty propaganda war, which will, almost certainly, turn into a real war in the end.

Scary times ahead.

Round and Round

2007-10-10T13:51:00.000Z

One of my favourite books is The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by PD Ouspensky. The central character is a failure who finds himself at a dead end in his life. Broke, bereft, emotionally and academically ruined, rejected by the woman he loves and contemplating suicide, he wishes he could live his life over again, but with hindsight this time, knowing everything that he knows now.

Then he meets a magician who offers him that chance. But first the magician gives him a warning. “Remember this moment,” he says.

After this the hero is catapulted back in time, to the exact moment when he believes he had made his first great mistake, and in his confusion, finding himself a fully developed older man in a child’s body, proceeds to make exactly the same mistake again.

Thereafter the book is a catalogue of continuing errors, in which the character does everything he did in his first life while slowly forgetting that he had ever made this return journey. In order to fit in, he reverts to his younger self, becoming, once more, a child in a child’s body. But he is plagued by a sense of repetition, of deja-vu, as if he has been here before.

There’s a terrible inevitability about the story, like the wheels of fate moving inexorably on, and a sense of echoes-in-time. There is also something unsettlingly familiar about tone of the story - a kind of resonance - as if you yourself know some of this already: as if you, the reader, also exists in a time-loop, as if you’ve been going round and round in time throughout all eternity. It’s just that you keep forgetting, that’s all.

Which is - maybe - not so far from the truth.

I had a weird little revelation the other day. I was thinking about reincarnation. I suddenly thought, “what if time is not sequential”: by which I meant that maybe time is like that loop in the PD Ouspensky story, or like the ever-repeating cycle of events in Groundhog Day. Not a straight line but a circle, going round and round and round.

I which case, I thought, when we die we don’t necessarily go on to the “next” life as such, but we can go back to any of our lives at any time in history. Each life is the same life, but with a different historical backdrop. This was my revelation. We have to keep on coming back and back until we get it right.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Maybe each time we come back we set ourselves a new riddle. That is how we develop. It’s not that there is some outside force judging us. We judge ourselves. One part of us is eternal - consisting of the whole of our experience throughout time - while the other part, the familiar little bit that we consider ourselves to be, that lives out our small dramas on this planet, is on an endless journey to find our selves.

There’s a great line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “Eternity is in Love with the Productions of Time.”

It’s a bit like a soap opera. If you already knew the outcome of the story then it wouldn’t be worth watching.

So it’s like the eternal “you” sets itself a puzzle - a plot-device, an interesting conundrum - which the mortal “you” then has to find the solution to, and that you have to keep on coming back and back till you’ve sorted it out. Then it’s on to the next sequence.

In the Ouspensky story the hero finds himself right back where he started, in exactly the same mess. Only this time he remembers that he has been here before. It is at this moment that he is able to move on. It is at this moment that he is finally free.

Anthony Peake links:
website
blog

Time Reversal and Reincarnation

2007-09-20T06:39:00.000Z

One of the things I most love are scientific papers which appear to prove the existence of supernatural powers.

One I read recently was called "Time-reversed human experience: Experimental evidence and implications" by Dean Radin of the Boundary Institute, Los Altos, California. It’s about precognition.

There are a number of experiments in there which make fascinating reading. My favourite is an experiment into so-called “presentiment”, that is precognition of a future feeling.

The experiment went like this. A computer generates random images. Some of these images are of a violent, sexual or emotionally charged nature. The participants in the experiment are wired up in such a way that the experimenters can tell when the person is affected by the pictures. Violent or sexually charged pictures cause a severe reaction in the measure of the so-called “autonomic nervous system”.

The non-charged pictures include pastoral scenes and pictures of household objects and cause no reaction.

The participants press a button, and after a six second delay the picture flashes up on the screen and remains there for another three seconds.

So this is the thing. During that six second delay, if the picture that is going to be flashed up is one that will cause a reaction, a higher than average percentage of the participants show a reaction in anticipation, before the picture comes on their screen.

In other words, this shows that people often know what’s coming before it comes. We quite naturally, as a matter of course it seems, can see into the future.

I love that. I love it when hard empirical evidence shows us that the universe is far more mysterious and strange than the one suggested by the theologians of materialist science who currently preside over the scientific establishment.

I read about the work of another scientist recently who has been looking into evidence of reincarnation. The scientist was Ian Stevenson, M.D. Professor of Research Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, who died in February this year.

Unfortunately, unlike the precognition experiment above, reincarnation cannot be tested in the laboratory. Dr. Stevenson was more of a detective than a normal scientist.

He would hear of a case where a young child - typically between the ages of two and seven - claimed to have had a previous life. After that he would interview the child, and then attempt to verify the child’s story.

Sometimes some of the children told remarkable tales about people and events which they couldn’t have got by any other means than by reincarnation.

His most famous book is Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, published in 1966.

In a typical case, a boy in Beirut claimed that he had been a mechanic in his previous life who had died in a car accident. Witnesses say the boy provided the name of the driver, the location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents, cousins and friends, all of which turned out to match the life of a man who had died some years before.

Of course, none of this constitutes proof, and Dr Stevenson was too cautious to claim that his investigations were any more than “suggestive” of reincarnation.

On the other hand, almost nothing in science is based upon absolute proof. For instance, there is no “proof” that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. There is, however, overwhelming statistical evidence that it does.

As to what conclusions you might draw from his work, Dr. Stevenson has his own views on the subject.

"I think a rational person, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence."

But there are a couple of questions which follow on from this: if it is true that we are indeed reincarnated beings why do we generally forget about it; and why it is that Dr. Stevenson’s cases were all young children? Aren’t older people capable of remembering their past lives?

I’m not sure what the answer to this might be.

Perhaps we are more psychically in tune when we are younger, and that’s why some children but not many adults can remember their previous lives.

As to why we forget: I think that’s obvious.

Forgetfulness might be a survival technique. After all, who wants to remember their own death?

The Mandate of Heaven

2007-09-16T18:30:00.002Z

My favourite book is the Book of Changes, the I-Ching.

Perhaps you have heard of it. It is one of the oldest books ever written. It is also unlike any other book on the planet.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Mandate-of-Heaven-myth-and-politics-in-the-I-Ching

Further links:
Yi Jing, Book of Sun and Moon
Calling Crane In The Shade
The Great Vessel
I-Ching on the net

Blessed By Luck

2007-09-11T09:40:00.001Z

It was my birthday. I was at the Shobab restaurant in Whitstable with my family: my Mum, my Dad, my two sisters and my brother-in-law, plus my niece Beatrix, who was two and a half years old at the time, and is one of the brightest little creatures on this planet.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Blessed-by-Luck

Words

2007-09-11T09:28:00.000Z

I’ve been having this debate with a friend of mine about the meaning of the word “facetious”.

To me it means jocularity at an inappropriate moment: trying to be funny when the conversation calls for something else. A facetious person is someone who thinks that they are funny, when they are not.

My friend says no: it simply means jocularity or humour. A facetious person, according to him, is a joking person, someone who is always making bantering remarks.

Actually, both definitions are true. In its original meaning, in French, facetiousness is simply wittiness or jocularity: a form of bantering humour. The fact that it has also come to mean something more negative is a consequence of the complexity of our language, a combination of Old German and Old French with a bit of Viking thrown in.

Once you have several words with the same meaning, each variation will tend to acquire more and more nuanced interpretations. Hence “facetious”. Originally just humour. Now humour at an inappropriate moment.

The point about language is that meaning is fluid, not fixed. Meaning is something that shifts over time. As I said to my friend, what does “fabulous” mean? What does “fantastic” mean? Both are words which have changed their meaning.

Or what about “gay”? This is a word which has changed it’s meaning not just once, but twice now.

It is also a measure of how people are constantly subverting “official” language.

To anyone born before the fifties, of course, it will have a range of associations around the ideas of brightness and happiness. Garlands of flowers are gay. People are gay when they dance and have fun. The blossom in early spring is gay.

In my younger days it became purloined by the rising Gay Liberation movement to mean homosexual, its current “official” definition. It is now the first definition in the dictionary. It was a radical move. By forcing the rest of us to redefine our terms it also asked us to think again about our own personal prejudices and, perhaps, to adjust them a little.

Most people these days, I imagine, are happy that the old stereotypes about homosexuality are gone and that people are free to choose their own path, as long as it doesn’t impinge upon others.

What people get up to in the bedroom is their own private business.

However, the irony is that the word has moved on again, with hardly anyone noticing. These days, amongst the young, “gay” tends to mean something like “fey” or “naff”: something slightly over-the-top and ridiculous, superficial or pretentious.

Elton John is gay in all senses of the word.

So “gay” has acquired an additional meaning as an implied insult, despite the language mafia’s attempt to control our use of words.

As for “facetious”: the reason my friend and I started this conversation is that I accused him of being facetious. I have since adjusted my description, calling his humour “tangentially facetious” instead.

He takes that as a compliment. At least I never called him gay.

The Camera Never Lies

2007-09-11T08:58:00.000Z

“The camera never lies,” they say. Well it does, and it does so with increasing frequency on your TV news these days.

There were a number of occasions when this became particularly clear to me. One was an image of a reporter on the front-line in Afghanistan during the invasion in 2002. He was ducked behind a line of troops in a trench. But there was something wrong with the set-up; the “troops” were Afghan – supposedly members of the Northern Alliance - but their uniforms were brand new.

Since when have you seen Afghan fighters wearing uniforms even, let along brand new ones?

It was so obviously a fake. It was clear from the looks on their faces and the general air of dishevelment and lack of discipline that these weren’t troops at all, but just a bunch of guys off the street dressed up to look like troops, straight from the prop department of the Pentagon.

I wish I had that bit of film to show to you. It was hilarious. There was the reporter with his serious face reeling out all this portentous nonsense, with his flak jacket and his helmet, clutching his microphone, making out that the Taliban were just over the other side, while behind him a bunch of scruffy Afghan peasants were lying in a ditch pretending to be troops, picking their noses and having a laugh.

Another was a shot of the “rebel” army in Haiti in 2004. They were overthrowing President Aristide, the democratically elected leader at the time.

But while the news reports were all making out that this was an internal matter – rebels vs government - it was so obvious from the look of them that this was no ordinary rebel army.

They were too well dressed and too well fed. They were toned and muscled, with tight tee-shirts showing off their abs, with back-to-front baseball caps, clutching the latest in US-made high tech weaponry.

They were so obviously Western-trained mercenaries in the pay of the US government, a point made clear when Aristide was later escorted from the country at gunpoint by the CIA.

This at a time when we were supposed to be promoting world-democracy.

The most famous example however is the one where they pulled down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.

It looked like a large crowd of ordinary Iraqis celebrating the end of the dictatorship. If you remember they made a great to-do about explaining the insult of people banging the statue’s face with a shoe. But any perspective would have told a different story.

The “crowd” consisted of 150 selected individuals, while the square itself was nearly empty. The shot was a set-up, as later independent photographs (above) made clear. Notice the presence of American tanks guarding the square and ask youself why this shot or one from a similar perspective was never shown on your National TV News.

So you have to beware. Nothing is quite what it seems. Most of the real news is being hidden from us, while, in it’s place, we have fakery and deception, smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand.

You have to watch the news very carefully these days; not to find out the truth: to find out the lies.

You Make Your Own Reality

2007-08-17T12:01:00.000Z

"Many people do not need to listen to my voice because they listen to the voices of the oak trees and the birds, and to the voices of their own being. I am a poor imitation of the voices of your own psyches to which you do not listen. I will be unneeded, and gladly so, when you realize that the vitality and reinforcement and joy are your own, and rise from the fountain of your own beings; when you realize that you do not need me for protection, for there is nothing you need protect yourself against....

"You were born into a state of grace. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot fall out of grace, nor can it be taken from you. You can ignore it. You can hold beliefs that blind you to its existence. You will still be graced but unable to perceive your own uniqueness and integrity, and blind also to other attributes with which you are automatically gifted....

"Now, each of you is a part of All That Is, highly individual and unique, like no other; and that like no-other-ness will never be taken from you. You will not melt into some great golden bliss in which your characteristics will disappear. You will not be gobbled by a super-god. On the other hand, you will continue to exist; you will continue to be responsible for the way in which you use energy; you will expand in ways now impossible for you to understand. You will learn to command energy of which you now do not know. You will realize that you are more than you realize you are now, but you will not lose the state of which you are now aware." Seth.

I’ve been reading the Seth material on the internet.

Seth, in case you’ve not heard of him before, is a disembodied being of indeterminate origin (is he a god, or a ghost or an angel?) who was “channelled” by the poetess Jane Roberts between 1963 and 1984, and whose regular sessions were recorded and then transcribed by her husband Robert Butts to make up a very large body of material: over twenty books altogether, along with video recordings and tapes.

I must admit there’s a strange kind of comfort in receiving the disembodied communications of an inter-dimensional being over the internet late at night. That’s what communicating on the internet feels like most of the time anyway - like communicating with disembodied beings - the difference being that Seth, according to his own testimony, never had a body in the first place.

When I first read the material I was annoyed. Seth struck me as a pompous know-it-all. Unfortunately he is almost impossible to argue with. I mean, who are you arguing with exactly? He’s from another dimension of reality. He may be a know-it-all, but he‘s an extra-dimensional know-it-all. How can you argue with someone who hasn’t ever been stuck in a traffic jam?

His fundamental philosophy is that you make your own reality.

Seth: "You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore you should examine these carefully. If you do not like some aspect of your world, then examine your own expectations."

That makes a certain amount of sense. You can wake up in the morning full of exuberance ready to take action and to enjoy your life upon this earth. Or you can wake up depressed, woeful, pessimistic and with low expectations, merely hoping to survive another day.

You can see your problems as challenges to be overcome, or you can see them as annoying obstacles getting in your way.

The approach you take to your life is obviously a part of your reality.

But Seth goes much further than this.

You make your own reality, including your physical reality. The very fabric of the universe is made up of your beliefs and expectations. There is no such thing as an accident. Nothing happens in your universe without your consent, and this applies equally to everyone.

So - say - I have an attack of piles. Do I make my own piles? According to Seth I do. I make my own reality, therefore I make my own piles. Everything in the universe has meaning. The problem then is trying to work out what, exactly, the meaning of piles might be.

You could go mad thinking like this.

Or again, more seriously: do the people of Africa make their own reality? Do they make their own poverty? Do they make their own hunger?

Isn’t there some sense in which in large parts of the world one set of people are having other people’s realities imposed upon them?

The trouble with this view is that while it makes a certain amount of sense to take responsibility for your own life, the same philosophy when applied to other people can also lead to an annoying form of self-satisfaction.

So you make your own reality. So if you are well-off, comfortable, with a nice home and a nice income, then it must be because you deserve it.

And by the same token, if you are starving, in a war zone, without shelter or clean water or clothes upon your back, then you deserve this too. It’s obviously due to some fault in your belief-system.

Personally - disembodied being or not - I simply will not accept this.

My solution is as follows. When it comes to aspects of my own life I accept that I have responsibility and hope to do my best to make the best of it. When it comes to another person’s life, however, no one has any right to judge.

It’s as simple as that.

http://www.spiritual-endeavors.org/seth/

Tread Softly Because You Tread on my Dreams

2007-08-17T06:07:00.003Z

http://hubpages.com/hub/On-Dreams

“Nothing happens unless first we dream.” Carl Sandburg.

My son is named Joseph.

The day after he was born I came to the hospital to see him and his mum. He was fast asleep and dreaming. There he was, this little frail pink body in a cot, his eyes rolling around in his sockets as if there was a war going on in his head. Maybe there was a war going on, who knows?

It was clearly something stupendous.

His tiny hands were clenching and unclenching as if he was climbing a ladder to the stars.

At the time I was reading a book by Laurens van der Post which referred to the biblical figure of Joseph, the perennial dreamer whose dreams came true. I knew immediately that this was my son’s name.

War For Oil

2007-07-12T21:40:00.001Z

"Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war, in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour, for patriotism is indeed a double edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch, and the blood boils with hate, and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need of seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
Julius Caesar

Have you noticed that members of the insurgency in Iraq are now almost universally referred to as “al-Qaeda” on your evening news? Also, almost any act of terrorism anywhere in the world is generally attributed to al-Qaeda, as in the following quote by Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.

Mr Brown told Andrew Marr on BBC One's Sunday AM it was "clear that we are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with al-Qaeda".

This is ironical for several reasons.

Firstly because al-Qaeda were never in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Secondly, because the insurgency there also contains large numbers of groups who are, and always were, opposed to al-Qaeda.

(In fact, the US administration can’t have it both ways: either the Iraq insurgency is being run by al-Qaeda, or it is being secretly funded by Iran - one or the other - because the regime in Iran and the leadership of al-Qaeda have always been enemies.)

Thirdly because al-Qaeda were a virtually moribund organisation before the so-called “war-on-terror” gave them all the justification they needed to continue their barbarous campaign of murder.

Fourthly because most of the time it’s simply not true. Al-Qaeda as we perceive them are as much a creation of the United States government and the media as they ever were of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri. Al-Qaeda needs an enemy, and so does the United States. It’s like a marriage of convenience, each giving the other justification for its actions.

Finally, and most ironical of all, as we heard in the recent National Intelligence Estimate, al-Qaeda are now better positioned to strike the West than it has been since September 11th 2001.

Al-Qaeda is “operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," we were told. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States…."

In other words, despite over six years of bombings and tactics designed to dismantle it; despite the war on terror and the attacks on our civil liberties; despite Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay; despite extraordinary rendition and the torture that goes with it; despite 655,000 dead* (most of them Muslims) in Iraq alone; despite all of this, al-Qaeda are stronger than ever.

Kind of makes you wonder what the last six years have been about doesn’t it?

We need to get a little perspective. On the same day the botched attack occurred in Glasgow - in which no one died - more than 100 Afghan civilians were killed in a three-hour bombing raid on a village in Helmund province. Real and effective bombs as opposed to improvised and useless ones.

No one knows how many people died in Iraq on that day. Or to put it another way: in order to protect us from a conspiracy that doesn’t exist, we kill civilians in other countries, thus creating more bloodshed and more mayhem, and more resentment leading, almost certainly, to more attacks.

This is not a war on terrorism, it is a war on decency and human values.

It’s all part of the game. You create chaos so no one knows what’s going on, and under cover of that you are free to pursue whatever agenda you choose.

In the case of Iraq, the agenda is oil. It always was.

Even now there is a bill before the Iraqi parliament, being forced through by the American government, which will effectively privatise Iraqi oil.

The joke here is – and I’ve just heard George Bush say it at his press conference – that the supposed aim of the bill is to “redistribute oil wealth”.

Yes, you heard it. You redistribute oil wealth by giving control of it to private companies. It’s a new interpretation of that old concept, redistribution of wealth: from the Iraqi people to the American oil companies.

So now you know.

Free enterprise: it really works.

*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html

Letter To A Christian

2007-07-11T11:07:00.001Z

God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men. (Gospel of Philip)

http://hubpages.com/hub/Letter-to-a-Christian

Al-Qaeda's New Tactics

2007-07-04T13:06:00.000Z

Tom Lehrer, that great American composer and humorist once wrote, "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize".

Tom Lehrer had no idea how far this would go. Political satire has now turned into international diplomacy. Tony Blair has landed the job as the Middle East Peace Envoy. Is this someone’s idea of a joke? George Galloway, of the anti-war Respect Party, said: "It's rather like appointing Count Dracula as the head of the Blood Transfusion Service." Which is as good a punch-line as any I suppose.

Of course, coming in the wake of last week’s terror-attack in Glasgow, and the attempted attacks in London, this may not appear so funny; except that I‘ve been screaming with laughter ever since. It wasn’t the attacks themselves, of course: it was the political commentary afterwards.

"Al Qaeda has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK," said Lord Stevens, a former London police chief and Gordon Brown's terrorism adviser.

Pardon?

Al Qaeda, remember, were the guys who hijacked four planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Centre, and one into the Pentagon, and only failed with the fourth because of the bravery of the passengers: at least if we are to believe the official story that is. So now they have changed their tactics it seems. No longer satisfied with ruthless efficiency, they've decided to try stupidity instead.

Let’s get this right. Two guys in a jeep full of Calor Gas bottles and petrol, one of them with a can of petrol and a lighter, charge at full pelt into the entrance doors of Glasgow airport while simultaneously trying to set light to themselves. In what way is this “importing the tactics of Baghdad and Bali to the streets of the UK”?

The people who made the bomb in Bali knew what they were doing. They made a bomb. It was a real bomb. It worked. You don't have to sympathise with the bombers to know the difference. A bomb is something that blows up, not something that just catches alight. Bombers in Baghdad regularly blow up US army convoys using a variety of sophisticated methods. Some of them are suicide bombers: that is they have explosives strapped to their body which they can detonate at will having positioned themselves next to their target. What they don’t do: they don’t douse themselves with petrol to act as a slow-burning fuse, setting light to themselves with a cigarette lighter, shouting “Allah! Allah!” while driving a jeep into a stationary building.

These people weren’t terrorists, they were idiots.

This is the kind of threat that can arise occasionally in any city or town across the world: the threat of rampant absurdity. People go crazy occasionally. They do crazy things. Sometimes they even set cars on fire.

These people did the kind of damage to Glasgow airport that you might see on a road when someone falls asleep at the wheel. Well no: nowhere near as bad. Glasgow airport, you see, wasn’t going anywhere. Glasgow airport couldn’t swerve across the road to hit the on-coming traffic. The jeep hit Glasgow airport and Glasgow airport stayed exactly where it was, albeit smouldering a bit.

Scary stuff.

But it gets worse.

The front page of the Guardian this morning (Wednesday 4th July) says this:

“Mastermind based abroad suspected of guiding plot.”

Mastermind?

MASTERMIND? As if Dr No and Ernst Stavro Blofeld had got together to launch this fiendish plot. It must have taken years in the planning, trying to work out just how to have the least physical impact with the most amount of trauma.

Maybe Osama bin Laden himself orchestrated it. I can see him right now, sat up there in his mountain fortress, surrounded by armed guards, thinking up ways to bring down the west. “We’ve tried ruthless precision. We’ve tried diabolical efficiency. We’ve tried flying planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Now let’s try stupidity as a tactic. They won’t be expecting that.”

The whole thing defies satire, it really does. A bunch of crazed idiots build a load of useless bombs and we are all supposed to be scared for our lives. Well they were clearly very angry people, willing to die for their cause: the only trouble is they had absolutely no idea how to go about it. The idea that there can possibly have been a link to Al Qaeda or that there was any training involved is just another one of those bad jokes.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Al Qaeda.

Al who?

Al-set-light-to-myself-while-driving-into-a-stationary-building-in-a-jeep-shouting-"Allah-Allah"!

OK, so it’s not a funny joke.

Try this one instead. Have you heard the one about the new Middle East Peace Envoy?

It’s Tony Blair!

Ha!

Now that is funny.

How Long Is A Piece Of String?

2007-07-04T06:59:00.002Z

It probably took over a thousand years to build, from its first to its last, and was in constant use for several thousand years after that. Indeed, you could say that it has never really gone out of use, if my visit to see the sunrise with Joe can be counted too. Who are we but the latest in a long line of visitors come to admire and wonder at this mysterious structure?

http://hubpages.com/hub/Stonehenge-and-Civilisation

Gordon is a Mullet

2007-06-30T20:46:00.000Z

Twice this week I’ve heard someone use a possessive pronoun in relation to the word “politics”.

First was Nick Dent of the anti-war Respect Party who I met in a pub in Whitstable, Kent. He said, “I’m glad people are beginning to understand my politics.”

“Pardon Nick, your politics, did you say? Since when did you acquire exclusive rights over politics?”

Next was a woman in a restaurant. She said, “Are you CJ Stone? I dislike your politics but I admire your writing.”

My politics. Your politics. It’s no wonder no one can ever agree on anything. Politics are seen as a possession, as something we own, rather than as the system by which we are regulated. The illusion is that any of us have any choice in the matter. The word “politics” here is really being used as a substitute for the word “opinion”.

This notion of politics is likely to be liberally applied over the next few weeks as the newspaper pundits begin to reflect upon the differences between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

There will be a great deal of talk about different styles of politics, as if politics was really just a hairdo. Snip-snip, roll, grip, spray, a quick session under the hairdryer and bob’s-yer-uncle: a brand new political hair style. Gordon Brown is a mullet, Tony Blair is a perm.

Just to be clear: the word derives from the Greek word “polis” meaning city-state, and is related to a number of similar words, such as “police”, “polite” and “policy”.

They are all words which refer to the regulations we apply to ourselves as human beings living in close proximity.

There are a number of different political systems. The great trick of our current world-system is that it pretends to be one thing when it is something else entirely.

It pretends to be a democracy when it is actually an oligarchy. Democracy means rule by the many. Oligarchy means rule by the few.

The world is being run by the international corporations backed by the power of the American military. Massive concentrated economic and military power is in the hands of the very few and is being utilised on a world scale for their exclusive ends, and to prevent the rise of any meaningful democracy. The appearance of democracy is used to undermine democracy.

You can’t get less democratic than a corporation. A corporation is a form of tyranny. Employees of the McDonalds corporation, for example, don’t have any right of say in the policies of the organisation that regulates their lives. There is no democracy in McDonalds.

This is not an opinion, it is a fact.

Someone once said that politics is the shadow cast over society by big business. I think it is more like a magic trick: smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, a grand illusion.

In other words, don’t expect any substantial changes now that Gordon Brown is in Number Ten.

He might change his hairstyle, he might change his dress-style, he might even change the cabinet around, but the politics will remain the same.

Court Refuses To Drop 6th Fairford Trial

2007-06-30T07:41:00.000Z

Milling and Jones

Prosecution Case Continues Tomorrow

THE STORY SO FAR

The re-trial began today of the 'Fairford Two' at Bristol Crown Court, making this series of trials the second longest the court has seen.

Jones, from Bristol, and Milling, from Cumbria disabled two articulated lorries, fifteen bomb-carrying trailers and three fuel trucks at the RAF base in Fairford, Gloucestershire, in 2003. They admit using hammers and boltcutters to disable the equipment on 13 March, just one week before the invasion of Iraq.

The pair, accused of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, have never denied damaging the vehicles, property of the US Air Force, but claim they were justified in doing so.

In Bristol Crown Court this morning lawyers for the two urged Judge Tom Crowther to dismiss the case on the grounds that the re-trial was 'oppressive', in view of acquittals in five previous related trials. The judge however, refused the application, and the trial began this morning with the prosecution's presentation of its case.

Jones and Milling said they wanted to stop US Air Force B-52 bombers taking off. They were trying to stop the “murder of innocent civilians” in Iraq.

Since the night of their arrest the defendants have claimed they were justified indisabling trailers used to transport bombs for US jets and fuel tankers in order to prevent war crimes being committed.

The two were the first defendants in an English crown court to use the defence of acting to prevent war crimes. They have been on bail for the past four years.

The linked cases of Milling and Jones, Pritchard and Olditch, and Josh Richards, were jointly the subject of a lengthy pre-trial appeal to the House of Lords, over what defence arguments the accused would be allowed to make in court. These appeals had to be completed before the separate trials could go ahead.

The law lords ruled that all five defendants could argue that they were trying to prevent war crimes - but not that the Iraq war was itself a crime.

The current trial is expected to continue until the end of the week.

CONTACTS: -

Robbie Manson (solicitor) - 01239 821 066 / Mob. 07812 681
Paul Milling - 01539 436 691 (H) / Mob.0776 583 6150
Margaret (Monica) Jones - 0117 946 6885

Latest News: 7/7/07

In spite of the best efforts of our excellent legal team, we had a jury who unanimously found us guilty after only three hours of deliberation.

This was especially frustrating given the previous track record of three hung juries in the orignial trials, and two acquittals for the re-trials prior to ours. Such is life.

Paul got a conditional discharge. I have to go to see the probation people prior to sentencing, and probably will end up doing community service. (The US Air Force should NOT expect any compensation whatever for their damaged vehicles, regardless of anything else !)

Paul and I agreed this afternoon that we both still feel profoundly content about what we tried to do back, in 2003. We still see it as morally right. If it's been adjudged legally wrong - so be it. Only sorry we couldn't pull off a hat trick for the peace movement. (It's STILL two victories to one defeat - and that will have to do.)

I just want to say THANK YOU to our excellent and deeply committed legal team - and also to our wonderful supporters, who really have sustained us for weeks and days now, in so many, many ways.

'Say not the struggle nought availeth ... .

'Stand up, stand up against oppression, for the tyrants fear your might ...

'Peace, love, solidarity -

Monica

Postal Workers Dispute

2007-06-29T20:51:00.000Z

Recently Amazon, the internet book store, shifted its bulk business from the Royal Mail to a rival company.

Rival companies include DX, TNT and UK Mail. You will have seen a variety of franks in the right hand corner of your letters, where the Queen’s head used to be, denoting a number of different companies.

Have you seen any DX, TNT or UK Mail postal workers on the street? What colour uniform to they wear?

The truth is, of course, that you’ve seen no such thing. The only people delivering mail are Royal Mail employees. Your postman and woman - the same person who has always delivered your letters, and who will, as likely as not, know you by name - is still the person who greets you at your door every morning with your mail. There are no rival companies to the Royal Mail in the delivery business.

What you have instead are companies allowed by the government to become parasites on the Royal Mail postal system. The process is called “down-stream access”. What this means is that a rival company can bid for a profitable section of Royal Mail’s trade, do all the easy work, drop it off at a Royal Mail delivery office and then demand that Royal Mail workers deliver it, at the rate of 13p per letter: less than half of what other customers pay.

Of all the companies in the postal business only Royal Mail has a universal delivery obligation.

In other words, what all this amounts to is privatisation by the back door. The trade from profitable city-to-city, bulk mail delivery and corporate sectors such as banks and utilities are sold off to the private companies, while the Royal Mail is expected to continue to deliver the rest: from Land’s End to John O’Groats, the rural, obscure and out-of-the-way post, the inner city areas where no other company would dare enter.

The current industrial action is not just about an under-inflation 2.5 % pay offer, it is also about diminishing conditions, lack of resources, and a contempt for quality of service. It is about whether we want a high-quality postal service in the future. It is about whether we want more junk mail through our post or less.

As part of the package on offer postal workers are being asked to deliver more items of junk through your post every day for the same pay. As if we aren't already chopping down enough trees to turn into adverts for hearing aids or double-glazing. Postal workers refer to this material as "landfill". It goes through the letter box and then straight into the bin.

Royal Mail have been bandying it about that postal workers can earn over £400 per week. I can speak from personal experience now and tell you that the average take-home pay is between £220-£250 per week.

I can also tell you that it is one of the most stressful jobs I have ever done, and that there were days when I worked nine hours without a single break: not even a sit down and a cup-of-tea.

In case you don’t know it, Royal Mail has a pet name for you: the ordinary, non-corporate householder sending post cards and letters and greetings cards the old fashioned way. They call you “Granny Smith”.

Granny Smith is every old lady on every estate who needs looking after and for whom the postal service is a life-line.

The Royal Mail management are on record as saying (I was at the meeting) that they no longer care about Granny Smith. Only the corporate business client matters now.

http://www.cwu.org/

FIVE 'B-52' TRIALS SO FAR - BUT NO CONVICTIONS

2007-06-29T12:40:00.000Z

PROSECUTION TRIES AGAIN WITH JONES & MILLING

-The 'FAIRFORD TWO'

CONTACTS: -

Robbie Manson (solicitor) - 01239 821 066 / Mob. 07812 681 083

Paul Milling - 01539 436 691 (H) / Mob.0776 583 6150

Margaret (Monica) Jones - 0117 946 6885

THE STORY SO FAR

Three out of five Iraq war activists who tried physical damage to stop B-52bombers taking off from RAF Fairford in March 2003 have been found NOT GUILTY at Bristol Crown Court. This leaves the 'Fairford Two' - Paul Milling and Margaret Jones - to face re-trial.

Jones and Milling, charged with damage to US military vehicles, had their first trial for conspiracy to commit criminal damage last year. A re-trial was ordered when the jury failed to reach a verdict.

Lawyers have now asked the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the case. But the prosecution is determined to press on. The trial starts at Bristol Crown on Monday.

Jones, from Bristol, and Milling, from Cumbria, disabled dozens of bomb-carryingtrailers and fuel trucks at the RAF base in Fairford, Gloucestershire, in 2003. They admit using hammers and boltcutters to disable the equipment on 13 March, just one week before the invasion of Iraq.

They said they wanted to stop US Air Force B?52 bombers taking off. They weretrying to stop the “murder of innocent civilians” in Iraq.Since the night of their arrest the defendants have claimed they were justified indisabling trailers used to transport bombs for US jets and fuel tankers in order toprevent war crimes being committed.

The defendants deny conspiracy to cause criminal damage, arguing they wereentitled to be acquitted because they were acting to prevent war crimes and thedestruction of property in Baghdad.The two, who were the first defendants in an English crown court to use thedefence of acting to prevent war crimes. They have been on bail for the past four years.

The linked cases of Milling and Jones, Pritchard and Olditch, and Josh Richards,were jointly the subject of a lengthy pre-trial appeal to the House of Lords, over what defence arguments the accused would be allowed to make in court. These appeals had to be completed before the separate trials could go ahead.

The law lords ruled that all five defendants could argue that they were trying toprevent war crimes - but not that the Iraq war was itself a crime.

EARLIER 'B-52' CASES AT BRISTOL CROWN COURT

(1) Josh RichardsAn activist from Bristol, Josh Richards was charged with trying to set fire to thewheel of a B-52 bomber. In the re-trial earlier this month the jury debated for over 9hours and failed to reach a verdict.. The judge then ruled the defendant not guilty.

(2) Pritchard & OlditchThe re-trial of Philip Pritchard and Toby Olditch in May ended in unanimous acquittal by a jury of 11 women and one man. The two were arrested while trying to reach and disable a B-52 bomber.

Tai Chi Twanky

2007-06-26T12:23:00.000Z

I’ve been practising Tai Chi.

Actually, when I say “practicing” I think that needs some clarification.

Dentists practice dentistry. Doctors practice medicine. Lawyers practice law. ‘Practice’ implies some sort of knowledge, some sort of expertise. But if doctors or dentists or lawyers did their practice the way I practice Tai Chi, then the world would be a very scary place indeed.

Actually, in the case of lawyers, this is probably already the case. Lawyers already practice law the way I practice Tai Chi.

I’m not very good.

Tai Chi is a bit like that trick you learn as a child, patting your head while rubbing your belly, only more complicated. It is more like patting your head while rubbing your belly, while hopping up and down on one leg, while cooking bacon, egg and chips while reading the newspaper all at the same time.

It’s funny, because when you see it on the TV – all those old folks in parks in Beijing, doing their eloquent, stately movements in graceful unison – it looks so easy and so natural. And, indeed, when our teacher does it, it looks easy and natural too, like some slow-motion ballet.

When I do it, on the other hand, it looks more like a schizophrenic sumo wrestler fighting an invisible orang-utan. Usually the orang-utan is winning. I have a tendency to fall over.

Where I do it they also do Kung Fu and Kick Boxing and all these other martial arts.

In fact Tai Chi is a form of martial art. It is martial arts for cowards. The point about Tai Chi is to weave and shimmy out of your assailant’s grasp, to unbalance him so you can run away as quickly as possible.

So the place is full of young people, lively and enthusiastic, swirling and kicking like demons, in one room - leaping and spinning and hurrahing and making all these explosive, guttural, shouting noises - while us older folk are in the other, wobbling about and falling over.

One day one of the young kick boxers came into our room to collect her shoes. I was doing my Tai Chi walking. This involves a complex set of delicate steps, raising one leg, stepping out, balancing on the other leg, while doing these slow-motion hand movements like semaphore. And you could see it on her face. Her eyes went round and huge like saucepan lids. I was so useless. She thought she was watching Widow Twanky in Aladdin. It was more like pantomime than sport. If I’d have been wearing a wig and false bosoms I couldn’t have looked more insane. It was all she could do to stop herself screaming with laughter. I could see she was dying to tell her friends what she had witnessed in the martial arts club that night.

Actually Tai Chi is more than just exercise. The aim is the achieve balance in your life, between the opposing but complimentary forces of yin and yang. Yin is the receptive force, yang is the creative force. You cannot have one without the other.

The ‘Chi’ of ‘Tai Chi’ is understood as a sort of universal creative energy which you can breath in and store in your belly. Tai Chi is best practiced out of doors, in parks, near trees and waterfalls, while watching the clouds drift by.

And despite my difficulties, learning Tai Chi is actually very good for me, gentle on the old soul. How come Chinese people can do it with such grace? Because they practice it every day. And maybe, with a little practice, one day I can become graceful too.

1984 and All That

2007-06-26T08:35:00.001Z

I’m very worried about my computer. It’s been doing some very odd things of late. I tell it to do one thing and it does something else. It’s like a recalcitrant teenager throwing a permanent paddy, stamping its foot and going off in a virtual sulk.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Welcome-To-The-Future

Cunning Folk

2007-06-26T08:30:00.000Z

There are some books which are influential without necessarily being credible. One of those books is The Witch Cult of Western Europe by Margaret Murray, first published in 1921.

The basic theory is that witchcraft is a modern survival of pre-Christian forms of worship, and that the persecution of the witches which took place throughout the middle ages was a Christian attempt to eradicate a rival religion.

The theory has since been discredited. But the reason the book has been so influential is that one person, at least, believed it, and set out to recreate what he imagined this religion to be.

That person was Gerald Gardiner, and the religion he founded was Wicca.

There is an irony here. Wicca is often referred to as “the Old Religion”, or “the Craft”, while making assertions about its link to an ancient tradition, and yet its one true claim to historical importance is that it is, in fact, a very successful new religion, born in the British Isles, which has since spread to many parts of the globe.

Where Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardiner might have been on to something is that, though there never was a religion which could be identified as witchcraft, there were certainly some odd magical practices which survived well into the last century, and which may have had their roots in some ancient belief system.

The people who practiced these beliefs were not usually called witches, however. Often they claimed to protect people from witches, who were understood to be people who used magic for evil ends. No: the general name they went under was “cunning-folk”.

I like that. Cunning-folk. Cunning-men and cunning-women. Folk who use cunning in the practice of the magical arts; which means that another word for “magic” might be “cunning”.

And looking the word up in my dictionary I can see that it is related to the Old Viking word kunna, to know, which is probably related to the Scottish word “canny”, meaning shrewd, astute or knowing, and to the English word “can”, as in “can do”, meaning the ability to do something. In other words, the cunning-folk are shrewd, clever or canny folk who know how to do things.

The activities of these mysterious people were made illegal under the same laws which banished witchcraft, in 1542, 1563 and 1604, and which outlawed "witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, to tell or declare in what place any treasure of gold or silver might be found…. or practice any sorcery, enchantment, charm or witchcraft to the intent to provoke any person to unlawful love."

Which is a startling concept. The first part would make metal detecting illegal, while the second seems to imply that there can be such a thing as “unlawful love”. How can love, in any form, ever be made unlawful?

The reason that cunning-folk were rarely prosecuted is that people depended on them too much, and that they were too respected in their communities for anyone to inform on them. Also, they kept themselves to themselves and stayed quiet.

Later, in 1736, the laws were amended. Witchcraft became a lesser crime. Later again, in 1951, all the laws were finally repealed. It was then that Gardiner set out to create his new religion based, as he claimed, upon an old one.

Meanwhile cunning-folk continued their mysterious practices, making love-charms and casting spells, predicting the future, driving away evil spirits, and making sure that all was well with the world, well into the 20th century.

And who knows, maybe they are doing it still?

How do you know, in fact, that I’m not a cunning-man?

http://www.karisgarden.com/cunningfolk/home.htm

Adam Smith

2007-06-26T08:27:00.000Z

I’m looking at one of the new £20 notes. It is very flashy. I mean that in the literal sense. There is a band of silver all down one side which flashes whenever it catches the light.

As you have no doubt already seen (unless you live outside the UK) there is a picture of Adam Smith on the reverse side, replacing the image of Elgar that used to be on the old notes. Also the words: “The division of labour in pin manufacturing (and the great increase in the quantity of work that results.”

Now what does that mean?

It is, of course, a quote from the great man himself, from his book, The Wealth of Nations, dated 1776.

Adam Smith is famous for having extolled the virtues of the free market. He is supposedly Gordon Brown’s favourite writer, hence – probably – his appearance on our English £20 note, despite the fact that he was Scottish.

There is also an institute named after him, an organisation which cheerfully promotes the privatisation of our public services. Margaret Thatcher was fond of quoting him.

Are we to read his presence on the back of one of our bank notes as a statement of policy then? Does this mean more free market economics under Gordon Brown?

As it happens, any actual reading of Adam Smith himself soon reveals the fact that he has been badly misrepresented.

He used the term “the free market” rather in the way that Ghandi referred to western civilisation, meaning he thought it would be a very good idea.

In fact Adam Smith showed that the free market didn’t exist. To quote:

“It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to.”

In other words, the so-called free market is based around the need of producers to accrue wealth, not the need of consumers to get a fair deal.

This is still the case. There is still no such thing as the free market. It is a system entirely rigged to serve the interests of certain groups with wealth enough to buy influence over government.

Or, to quote Adam Smith again: “The vile maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves and none for other people.” Perhaps they should put that on the back of the £20 note.

The process can be summed up in the phrase: “privatisation of profit, socialisation of cost.”

In other words, it is we, the public who are expected to pay to clean up the mess that private enterprise makes. It is we who are expected to build roads, to arm, to train, to police, and to do all of the millions of jobs on which private enterprise depends. It is only after all of this has been done and paid for that the merchants of private power can take their customary profits.

What a joke! Adam Smith would be turning in his grave.

The Last Post

2007-06-26T08:23:00.000Z

By the time you read this I will no longer be a Royal Mail employee. I will have handed in my uniform, my cap, my badge and my bicycle clips. They will have sounded the Last Post at the Whitstable Delivery Office for CJ Stone, APG, which I think means Associated Postal Grade. Something like that.

I feel like the archetypal detective in that classic movie being asked to hand over his badge and his gun. Only in my case it’s my badge and my delivery pouch.

Never to have to post a letter again! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m both sad and relieved at the same time.

The job served me well for a time. I was flat broke and in dire straights, several thousand pounds in debt, and with few prospects for my writing career. I was also very depressed.

Becoming a postman was helpful in more ways than one. It got me out of my financial hole, but it got me out of my mental hole too. There’s nothing like straight physical labour to brace the soul and lift the spirits, and there’s a certain joy in testing yourself against your own limits, to see what you can achieve.

I was never the best postman in the world, not even the best postman in Whitstable, by a long shot, but I was the best postman I could be, and there’s something very vital in that.

Also, having spent the last ten years working on my own, it was good to have people around me again, even if I couldn’t quite keep up with the banter most of the time.

I tell you, they’re quick those postmen. There are one or two down that office who could easily have their own TV series.

On the other hand, I’m a chronic insomniac, and I never could get used to those hours. There were days on end where I was walking into work having got less than an hour’s sleep.

Anyone who has ever gone without sleep for any length of time will know what it is like. It’s as if your nerves have been plugged into the National Grid. You feel on the verge of losing your temper all the time. Anyone breathing in your presence is in mortal danger.

“Excuse me, are those eyes you are looking at me with? Well put them away before I eat them.”

After nearly a year of that I was forced to go part time, two days a week. But then the two days of disruption turned into four - a day of anxiety in advance, and a day of recovery after – so that I almost might as well have been working full time again.

In the end I decided that enough was enough and to have a go at kick-starting my writing career again.

But I’m glad I did it and I will miss my work mates particularly.

Keep up the good work everyone.

Despite the proliferation of junk-mail, it is still honourable and valuable work you do.

E-Mail Trouble

2007-06-26T08:10:00.000Z

I seem to be having trouble with my e-mail. Every time I send a note to the my newspaper it comes bouncing back to me with a cryptic message attached.

“Host or domain name not found,” it says. “Name service error. Host name does not exist.”

How very peculiar.

It seems that there is no such place as the Whitstable or Herne Bay Times. Neither the Whitstable nor the Herne Bay Times exist. These newspapers are a figment of your imagination. You are not reading a newspaper column right now. You are merely having a very bad dream.

That, at least, is what my computer appears to be telling me.

Or, looking at it another way: if the Times’ offices no longer acknowledge my messages and their computer system refuses to respond to me, maybe it’s me who doesn’t exist. Whoever it is sitting on this chair in front of this computer must be an impostor. It’s not really me at all.

My last column was not delivered by e-mail. It was delivered by hand to the Times office in Whitstable, then delivered by courier to Canterbury, and then typed by hand into the computer terminal there: the old-fashioned way.

It’s amazing how fast this technology has developed.

When I first started writing for the newspapers - just over thirteen years ago now - I would write on an old Amstrad, print it off, and then send the printed copy by post a few days before the deadline.

Occasionally I would send a fax.

There may have been internet access at the time, but only a few computer nerds had it. The web did not even exist.

These days many of us spend large portions of our spare time “surfing the net“ and most correspondence is done by e-mail..

No one sends letters any more. As a postman I know how few genuine hand-written letters actually travel by post (or by snail-mail, as the computer buffs call it): no more than one in a hundred, I would guess, and most of those are pre-printed Christmas or Birthday cards, in which only a signature and a brief message is required.

Pretty soon we will have forgotten how to write.

This is a very worrying prospect, not least when you discover how dependent we have become on the technology, and how little control we have when things go wrong.

So this is in the nature of an appeal to all of you out there who can still remember how to use a pen and paper: keep doing it!

Those handwritten letters that pass through your postman’s hands are like items of treasure these days: small reminders of humanity in a mountain of pre-printed dross.

Computers have invaded every aspect of our lives. Even our language has changed. Once upon a time memory was something that human beings had, not machines, applications were for jobs, programmes appeared on TV, cursors used bad language, webs were what spiders wove, a virus meant a week in bed and a hard drive was eight hours behind the wheel.

As for your three inch floppy, that was something best kept to yourself.

Second Hand Linen

2007-06-26T07:20:00.000Z

If anyone wants to know how to get away without being searched by the bouncers at a nightclub: it's easy. Be over 50, have grey hair and wrinkles and such a dignified air of aloof superiority that no young whippersnapper would dare feel up and down the inside of your trouser leg.

Actually my friend, who was on the till at the time, had told the bouncers I'd be coming. She said, "look out for my good friend Chris."

"But how will we recognise him?" they asked.

"That's easy,” she said. “He'll be dressed like Man at Oxfam."

She's right. I buy all of my clothes second hand. The only exceptions are pants and socks, which my family buys for me at Christmas, and shoes, which I buy new for myself. For some reason I don’t like the idea of wearing anybody else’s shoes.

I guess you could call me mean. Or maybe careful. Or maybe I just like the sense of adventure, the uncertainty of trolling round charity shops looking through racks of unusual gear for exactly the right thing, instead of buying identikit products brand new off the shelf. How boring.

If people want to give their stuff away, then I might as well buy it. Why not? Anyway, I hate shopping. This particular evening I was wearing a linen jacket which cost 50p from a jumble sale. Go to any conventional outlet, and the same jacket would cost fifty quid or more. Admittedly mine is too big and rolled up at the sleeves. But it's still linen, still cool and stylish, still eminently practical for the summer.

I have a particular taste for loud, loose, expensive shirts made from cotton or silk, which I simply couldn’t afford to buy new. And it’s great going into a charity shop and discovering something quirky and surprising to add interest and colour to your wardrobe.

Anyway, let’s face it, my face isn’t exactly brand new either. I need clothes to match my personality, not the other way round. So it’s crumpled, bad-tempered, patched-up and dryly sceptical clothes I need to give full expression to my inner being.

One day, maybe, some bright young thing will teach me how to dress. I'll be wearing Nike cardigans, Armani socks and Gucci earmuffs, no doubt. I'll wear my Marks & Sparks vest inside out to show the label. I'll make sure my Y-fronts are multi-coloured and I will wear them above the waistband of my low-slung jeans.

That will be when I'm rich and famous. I'll be spending my time with top businessmen and Rock’n’Roll stars, all dressed in the same immaculate gear. I'll hang around in the Groucho Club and, when Mick Jagger walks in, I'll say: "Hey, you're wearing exactly the same trousers as I am." That's the sort of profound conversation we'll have, comparing notes for a more fashionable future.

Meanwhile I'll stick to my second hand linen jacket. At least it gets me into clubs without the bouncers wanting to search me.

How To Be Invisible

2007-03-30T17:38:00.002Z

He was famous because it was reputed that he knew a very secret spell called ‘How To be Invisible'. It was said that only the most powerful magicians knew this spell.

This story can now be found at:

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Be-Invisible

Diamorphine in the UK

2007-03-17T23:38:00.001Z

There is a shortage of diamorphine in the UK. Diamorphine is the world’s most powerful painkiller, used in the treatment of people dying of cancer and other dreadful diseases. The current shortage means that many people may be suffering undue pain and indignity in the final stages of their lives.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Drug-problems-or-drug-solutions

A Pint Of Bitter In A Jug

2007-03-11T08:38:00.000Z

The following stories are in memory of Geoff Squires from Coventry, long-standing resident of Whitstable in Kent, recently passed away.

Let's hope they serve a decent pint in the next life.

The problem with writing as a medium is that it is very difficult to portray the inflections in words. One word can be said in many different ways. In this case the word is "no". It can be said as "no-o", with a broken inflection. Or as "no-o" with a rising tone, or as "no-o" with a descending tone. Or just as "no", blandly, with no inflection whatsoever. Or in any one of perhaps a hundred different ways.

This story involves a trip to Southend. Geoff and his mate got off the coach and - of course - they wanted a pint. So they went into the nearest boozer. Geoff drinks bitter, and his friend drinks lager, but they both have one thing in common, that they prefer to drink out of a jug rather than a glass. Geoff went to the bar. "I'll have a pint of bitter in a jug, and a pint of lager in a jug, please," he said.

The barman didn't move. "No!" he said: like that, flatly.

"Oh," Geoff stuttered: "does this mean that you won't serve us?"

"No-o," the barman said (brokenly, with a rising tone).

"Oh," said Geoff again, bemused, "so you don't mind serving us?"

"No," (descending, with a shrug).

That’s when it struck Geoff what the problem was. He looked about the bar and there wasn’t a jug in sight.

"You won't serve our drinks in jugs?" he said.

"No," (indulgently).

"But you wouldn't mind serving us a pint of bitter and a pint of lager in glasses though?"

"No," (positively).

"All right then," Geoff said, much relieved, "I'll have a pint of bitter in a glass, and a pint of lager in a glass. OK?"

"OK." And the barman served them their pints, and Geoff was about to pick them up when something occurred to him. "Incidentally," he added, "why don't you serve drinks in jugs?"

"Because people tend to use them as clubs," the barman said, miming the action of bringing a jug down on someone's head.

"Good point," Geoff said as he carried the glasses over to his friend. And they drank up quickly, and left without another word.

Geoff is a diminutive Midlander with very thick glasses and wiry black hair like a brillo pad. He's very distinctive. This next story also involved a trip to Southend, although this time Geoff was on his own.

He went into a pub and ordered a drink. Now Geoff likes his pint filled to the top. No head. So when the barman handed him a pint with a quarter of an inch of head, Geoff handed it back.

"Can you fill it to the top please?"

The barman tutted, but did as he was asked.

After Geoff had finished that, he went for another. This time the barman gave him a pint with a half an inch of head. "This is taking the piss," said Geoff: "can you fill it to the top please." The barman was obviously having trouble with the pumps because the more he pumped, the more head he got. "Right," he said, "I'm the owner of this place. You're barred!"

Geoff shrugged his shoulders and headed off to another pub. But no sooner had he got through the door than the barman said: "you're barred."

"Barred? How can I be barred? I've never been in here in my life before."

"I've just had a phonecall from the owner," the barman told him.

"Oh well," thought Geoff, and wandered on again. He thought he might as well visit a club this time. He was on holiday, after all. So he looked around for a club, and when he'd found one, went in. He went to the bar, eager for a drink, but, once more, the barman told him he was barred.

"Don't tell me," said Geoff, "you had a phone call from the owner. Does he own every bloody pub and club in this place? I just want to know where I can get a drink."

"He owns two pubs and one club," the barman told him, "and you've just walked into each one in succession."

"Oh well," thought Geoff again, crestfallen, "at least I'm guaranteed a drink at the next pub." And he didn't care how much head that pint had on it this time.

Geoff has a friend, Big Ted, a tobacco smuggler by trade. Big Ted is about 6 foot something or other and the same about the midriff. A genuine man-mountain. You’ve already had a description of Geoff. He’s about 4'11", and wears milk-bottle bottom glasses. They call him "Double-Glazing" on account of the thickness of his glasses.

Big Ted has been in the smuggling game for years. He crosses over on the ferry once a week, returning with large quantities of continental tobacco, which he then sells around the pubs in his home town. There's a few like him in every town. Unfortunately, in the last few years he's begun to lose the use of his legs. Walks with a walking stick over short distances, but needs a wheel chair the rest of the time. Which kind of militates against the smuggling business somewhat. So he got Geoff in to help him. Which is when things started to go wrong.

Geoff does the pushing. So you've got mountainous Big Ted in his wheel chair, and little Geoff puffing away behind, eyes swimming like two jellyfish in gold fish bowls. To say that they're an obvious pair is to understate the case. They stand out like two conked-out Morris Minors in a Rolls Royce rally.

Geoff's got a croaky voice, a nervous disposition, and likes to do impressions of Reg Presley of the Troggs.

Which is fine on Karaoke night. It's not so fine when he's pushing a man-mountain through the Nothing To Declare section of the customs building, in a wheel chair loaded up with illegal tobacco.

"Wild Thing, you make my heart sing, you make everything groovy, Wild Thing….." echoing around the corridor, while Geoff boogies down to the rhythm.

"Shhhhh," says Big Ted, curtly.

And, of course, the obvious thing happened. All the customs men got to know them.

"Hello Ted, hello Geoff," they say as Ted and Geoff are embarking on the boat. And: "hello Ted, hello Geoff, what's that you've got tucked away in your wheel chair?" they say, as Ted and Geoff are passing through the customs hall on the way back.

These last three times they've been caught. Ted is thinking of taking early retirement.

The Battle of Orgreave

2007-03-10T09:03:00.000Z

History cannot be reduced to particular events. There are always complex forces at work. Nevertheless certain moments can seem to carry a resonance, representing a point of change in the life of the nation and defining, in a symbolic way, what went before and what came after.

One such “moment” occurred on June the 18th 1984.This was the so-called Battle of Orgreave, during the year-long Miner’s strike, a day when massed battalions of trained riot police were directed at the ranks of picketing Miners attempting to close down the British Steel coking plant in South Yorkshire. It is this moment that helps us to understand British history before and since.

Anyone above a certain age will remember it: will remember the sight of Arthur Scargill, his dignity severely compromised, clutching a baseball cap while being dragged away by the police; will remember the scenes of charging horses and stone-throwing rioters; will remember the incongruous picture of baton-wielding policemen, clutching shields, charging from behind protected lines, like medieval knights going into battle; will remember the war-cries and whoops and chanted slogans, the drumming, the jeering, the primitive clatter of wooden truncheons against riot shields, the surges and the counter-surges, the indelible impression of a nation at war with itself.

Which is exactly what it was, of course. The police were being withdrawn from their proper battleground - on the streets, fighting crime - and being redeployed, instead, in a war on Trade Unionism. It was the beginning of what has since become known as “globalisation”: the wholesale privatisation of public services and publicly-owned utilities that has continued ever since, and the attack upon anyone who stood - or who stands - in the way.

These are the events that a film by Mike Figgis seeks to commemorate, based around a re-enactment of the day, organised by artist Jeremy Deller. The film is available on a new website from Channel 4. http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs.

At first sight it is a strange conceit. The artist has called on the services of various re-enactment societies, more used to taking part in recreated battles from the English Civil War or the Roman invasion of Britain, than to play-acting an event in living memory. And yet it is not so strange. Police tactics on that day were exactly those used by the Romans, and revised again and again on the battlefields of history. The Miners represented a strand of tradition in British society that the government of the day had called “the Enemy Within” and openly declared war on.

Figgis uses the re-enactment as a sort of framework on which to build our perceptions. We are introduced to a variety of people, including ex-Miners along for the re-enactment, an NUM official, an ex-police officer, a former chair of Rotherham Miner’s Support Group; and Tony Benn, of course, that stalwart of traditional British values and historical good sense.

There are some very poignant moments. The ex-policeman, in particular, makes a number of very moving observations.

“People travel through Yorkshire or mining communities,” he says, “and all they see is slag-heaps and a bit of muck and grime. They don’t realise about the love and closeness that exists in mining communities....

“One of the reasons I joined the police,” he continues, “were I wanted to do some’at for the community I came from. And thanks to Margaret Thatcher I did. I helped to destroy it..."

The consequences of the destruction, not only of the NUM and the mining communities, but of a whole proud tradition of solidarity and mutual support in British Working Class life, is still with us: in poverty, unemployment, anti-social crime and drug addiction.

Margaret Thatcher called the process, euphemistically, “modernisation”. What she actually meant was a direct attack upon the networks of support devised by working people over the centuries to protect them from degradation and exploitation. “Modernisation” as a concept always serves those who have wealth and power against those who have most to lose.

It is one of Tony Blair’s favourite words.

I took a copy of the film to the Snowdown Welfare Club and Institute in Aylesham in Kent - once the social club for the Snowdown Colliery - to show it to some of the ex-Miners who still use the place. My thanks to Monty, Ian, Bridget and Graham for helping me to review the film, and to Bridget in particular for providing the TV and video.

The reaction was swift, and, I have to say, very intense. Despite the criticism that the re-enactment was unrealistic - there were thirty times more police in 1984, they said, and it was much more violent, much more frightening - it was clear that many memories were brought up. The sight of police snatch-squads, even fake ones, batons raised, cracking arms and heads in a riot of hate-filled reprisal, roused a deep, stirring anger. And they all agreed that the often repeated slogan of the time - “the Miners united shall never be defeated” - was wrong, echoing one of the sentiments of the film. It shouldn’t have been only the Miners, they said. It should have been "the Workers".

At one point a heated argument broke out, about who had been at Orgreave and who had not. Accusations were flying about all over the place and voices raised. At another point someone came over to me and abused me for forcing the film on them and reminding them of times best forgotten: “those days of anarchy“, as he described them.

“Don’t worry about him,” someone else said. “He doesn’t understand. He was never a miner.”

I was made to put the film on twice in a row.

“Every penny they had was to defeat the Working Class,” said Graham at the end, reflecting an anger at the way vast amounts of public money was so blatantly used for political ends, to attack people for merely defending their communities.

I suspect that this is precisely the reaction that Mike Figgis wants us to have.

The Battle of Orgreave was conceived by Jeremy Deller.

Commissioned and produced by Artangel in association with Channel 4 Television.

Directed by Mike Figgis.

Website:

http://www.historicalfilmservices.com/orgreave.htm

The film can be viewed online at:

http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/battle_of_orgreave.html

Original article appeared in The Big Issue June 2002.

Mutton Curry for Vegetarians

2007-03-06T19:47:00.000Z

Someone had scrawled graffiti on a post halfway across the golf-course. I used to pass it every day as I was walking my dog. "Meat means murder," it said. "All meat eaters are fascists."

I'm a fascist and a murderer, then. I eat meat.

It's an extreme statement. But is it justified? I think not. A fascist is someone who seeks to impose his will by force, and I don't care one way or the other whether another person wants to be a vegetarian or not. In fact - by that definition - whoever wrote that graffiti is a fascist, since they would have me eating only vegetables whether I like it or not. As for meat meaning murder, this is even more absurd. Murder implies malice, and there is no malice whatsoever in my desire to eat meat.

Time and time again I've been struck by the fact that extremist views in fact undermine the very aims they seek to impose. Death is a part of life. We all die in the end. When I die my body will feed the worms, no doubt. What we should be aiming for is the eradication of suffering. In other words: the humane and ethical treatment of animals while they are alive. This is a far more realistic aim, than that we should expect every human being on the planet to give up meat.

If animal rights activists were really sincere in their desire to help animals, then they would want to enlist the support of meat eaters too. No one wants to see animals boxed up in confined spaces for the whole of their lives, never seeing the sky, never skipping about in the fields. No one wants to see animals screaming in terror at the prospect of dying. No one wants to see animals clubbed to death, or left bleeding, half alive. No one wants to see animals force-fed on a diet of ground-up animal parts, turning naturally vegetarian animals into cannibals. There are many meat eaters who would happily see the end of veal crates, and the transport of live animals. And almost every meat eater who can afford it would be perfectly willing to pay more for their meat if they knew that the animal had had a happy life, and a dignified and painless death.

I was a vegetarian for a number of years. The reason I packed it in initially was that I got a job in a steelworks, and the canteen simply didn't serve vegetarian food. There's only so much manual labour you can do on a diet of mashed potatoes and cheese. And, the truth is, vegetarianism tends to be the preserve of the middle classes.

I went on the hippy trail to India. India, of course, has a fine tradition of delicious and varied vegetarian food. So no problem there. But those countries in between - Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan - are all almost exclusively meat-eating.

I'd already come to the conclusion that the insistence on a vegetarian diet, regardless of the circumstances, was both rude and impractical. There were vegetarian restaurants along the way, set up exclusively to cater for western tastes. But the normal Afghan fare - their equivalent of fish and chips - was pillau rice: a mound of rice fried in meat fat, with a scrawny lump of meat buried at the bottom. Poor man's food. Pillau rice was what the Afghans ate. And that - I decided - was what I would eat too.

In Pakistan I ate mutton curry. To this day I have a taste for cheap cuts of old meat - such as mutton or goat - mulled in spices over several hours, till the stringy flesh grows succulent and falls off the bone. It's a pity that such basic forms of meat are so difficult to find in this country. This is how most people in most parts of the world eat. In China they eat every part of the animal, even the feet. Nothing is wasted. It's only in the decadent west that we relish the tenderest parts of lamb and veal and other baby animals, and then throw the rest away. And it's only western travellers who will visit another country and then demand that they cater for our delicate tastes.

To be invited into someone's home, and then to put the host to so much trouble by insisting on the particularities of a certain diet, smacks of churlishness to me. To do the same in someone else's country seems rude in the extreme.

So let's unite to end barbaric factory-farming methods - shall we? - and leave out the insults.