“Did ya hear the one about the dragon who goes to a tattooist?”

He looked up at the speaker, a thin, wiry individual, and shook his head. He dreaded what he knew was coming next but no-one else was talking to him in this place.

“The dragon says ‘Will ya take this woman offa me. She’s driving me feckin’ mad!’”

Donald smiled weakly.

“That’s a good’un, ain’t it?” The man held out his hand, “The name’s Seamus.”

‘Of course it is’ thought Donald and shook the proffered mitt – a strong calloused one it seemed. “Mine’s Donald” he said.

“That’s a good Scots name,” declared his new companion, “do ya have connections to the place?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Names travel all over these days. Like the people, I suppose. Well Donald, if you’d buy me a drink, I’ll tell ya a real story.”

‘I should have seen that coming.’ thought the Englishman.

“Guinness is it?”

“No, but a pint of bitter would go down well … and, if you’re feeling generous, maybe a small Bushmills?”

Donald finished his drink and headed for the bar. He figured he was paying for some entertainment and just hoped it wasn’t going to be too expensive. But he’d been here before and reckoned he could get out if the situation became too weird.

1. Going too far out
When his father went to buy icecreams, Ali picked up the airbed and headed for the water.

“Don’t go too far!” called out his mā.

“OK.”

Ali knew why she was nervous. So many people from their country had gone to sea in rubber boats and died. But this was the first time he’d been to the seaside and he wanted to experience it as much as he could.

The sand was warm and soft where they’d been sitting but then became hard and flat where the sea had run over it. He stepped in the water with more confidence than the first time an hour or so ago. The cold had surprised him then and covered his body with gooseflesh, but that had passed as he got deeper and submerged his whole body. The waves were small and it hadn’t been too difficult to swim amongst them. He’d learned to swim at the local pool at home and he could manage a passable breast stroke. Still, when the next wave hit his belly, the shock stopped him briefly.

As soon as he was about waist deep, Ali put the airbed on the water and lay face down on it. Then he started paddling with his hands till he was out beyond where the waves were breaking. This is what surfers did, who he’d watched on Internet videos. When he thought he was clear of the surf, he rolled carefully onto his back and looked up at the sky. It was a light blue screen with only wisps of clouds high up, that didn’t seem to be moving at all. The sea rose and fell gently and the sunlight was a warm blanket over his whole body. Ali closed his eyes and enjoyed these lovely feelings. He knew his father would be angry and he’d not get his icecream unless he went back soon but this was too good to miss.

Their family hadn’t come across the sea in a rubber boat but in an airplane. He’d been too young to remember it and this country was the only one Ali knew. But he also knew that there was a war now in the country where he’d been born and lots of people were trying to get away from it but many of them had drowned in the sea. That made him sad but not afraid of the water like his father was. His father was a scientist and had brought them all to England so he could work at the university. That was before the war and now they couldn’t go back. Ali knew that his parents worried a lot about other relations who were stuck there and whether they were some of those who had died trying to get away. That was why Ali had waited till his father had gone off for icecreams before taking the airbed on the water. He knew he’d get told off but this was worth it.

Ali’s eyes were closed, his skin was warm, the airbed rocked on the swell. Time seemed to disappear. He had no idea how long he’d been there, nor how far out he was now. He’d heard about tides but didn’t know it had been going out since he entered the water. Nor did he know that there was a strong current along that coast that was now taking him even further away from the beach, where his parents stood frantically scanning the sea for a sign of their son. They shouted his name but he was too far away to hear them.

Suddenly the airbed stopped rising and falling on the sea but rose even higher with a rush of water and bubbling air. Ali sat up with a start and looked around him. He nearly fell off the airbed with shock. The land was just a dark line in the distance, while he was now surrounded by a yellow disk of some kind, shining with the water draining off it. Ali’s mind raced. Was it an island? Was it some kind of whale? How could he get back to his mum and dad? He was shivering with fear when there was a loud clang behind him. His head span round in time to see a head appear out of a hole in the yellow circle. It was covered all over, it seemed, with reddish curly hair and the face looked as astonished as he felt.

“What are you doing on my boat?” the head demanded. The boy sat and said nothing. His mouth wouldn’t work. The head looked around and then back at him. After some seconds it came to a decision and the man the head was attached to climbed out of the hole and came over to where Ali sat frozen with fear and confusion.

“You’re a long way from home” said the man, “I suppose you’d better come in.”

He helped Ali to his feel and guided him to the hole in the yellow circle and onto the ladder leading down inside. Then he picked up the airbed, saying, “We don’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

Some people are physically unable,
sometimes the sound roots you to the spot,
for whatever reason, you put your cards down on the table
and recognise the music is too hot.

This doesn’t mean at all that you’ve stopped dancing,
it’s all just happening out of sight –
your mind is flying with the high notes
and crawling on the floor when basses bite.

It’s a wonderful sensation
to be able to travel through the stars
or wander on the bottom of the ocean
or burn rubber in the fastest cars, ..

.. to make love right there out in the open
with your lover or one you wished was yours,
to dance like a gymnast or a dope then
slide down walls and hammer on the doors.

There’s nothing in your imagination
music can’t release and energise –
it can unify each and every nation,
get the lame to walk and the dead to rise.

So don’t worry if you find yourself immobile
while others still are moving to the beat,
enjoy that engagement all the while
the rhythms are still coming through your feet.

Wishing a Merry Midwinter to all my readers!

Santa on the cross*

An image to horrify, amaze –
such a mixing up of concepts
we’ve grown up with for so long
but, after all, not necessarily so wrong.

Old stories, myths and fairy tales,
have been distorted every way,
taken from the memories
of former tribes and families.

For a century and more
they’ve served to sell another line,
to hang our dreams out on display
and, to satisfy our hunger, make us pay.

In the North in winter we need light
to get us through the darkness of that night
and so we celebrate, as best we may
with fire and food and drink, the shortest day.

But the pushers who control the world
use every kind of trick they know
to ensure that we consume their junk
and spend all of our dough.

So it is not that strange at all
that in one shopping mall
the management mistakenly
hung Santa on an Easter tree.

rs 19.12.17

[* It was outside a store in Japan and told by an Icelandic story-teller on BBC Radio 4]

Money or “Who says I’m better off?”

by  on  in intemperants

(a beginner’s guide to why you’re not rich)

I woke up this morning thinking about money and what it is. I don’t know why but I seemed to be coming out of a dream phase. Anyway I was thinking about inflation – how a pound is now worth about 10p compared to fifty years ago. On the other hand, my income is probably ten times larger than it was then, so that cancels out and economists will tell me that, ‘in real terms’, I’m in fact better off. In some ways that might seem true but it’s worth looking at more closely.

The musings that follow aren’t new, even for me, but have been spiced up somewhat by listening to a radio programme called ‘Promises, Promises, A History of Debt’ written and presented by David Graeber, a well known anthropologist.

What is money?
The standard answer is ‘a medium of exchange’, that is something, whose value can be agreed on, given in return for goods or services. That value, however, is clearly somewhat variable, as inflation shows. But what about the thing itself? Let’s start with the paper kind.

The title of Dr Graeber’s programme seems to refer to a lovely little phrase that the Bank of England’s notes still carry, ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of … pounds’. Did you ever wonder what that meant? If you had, you’d have been told that bank notes were originally promissory notes which could be exchanged for the real thing – metal money, ie coins. We were told that this ended when the UK ‘came off the gold standard’, but gold was never the main metal used for money, that was silver. In fact what that promise on our bank notes meant was the Bank of England owed you so many pounds in weight of sterling silver. Sterling is a fixed standard of purity for silver – 92.5%. Whether a Bank of England £1 note ever got you that, I don’t know, but that was the theory. Currently 1lb sterling silver is worth a little over £250 – that’s inflation. Best of luck getting them to cough up at that rate.

But how did metal become a means of exchange? There have been other things used, like beads and shells, but the main feature seems to be their scarcity value rather than their usefulness. Gold and silver were chosen because they were shiny and gold, at least, didn’t tarnish. Other metals are used as well and we still talk about ‘coppers’ and, in some parts of the country, ‘brass’ and ‘tin’. These are very useful materials, so it isn’t difficult to imagine a time when not everyone knew how to mine and refine them from rocks in the ground, even if you had access to those ores. It would have seemed a magical thing, or at least it did to me when I was a kid. Thus a little lump of copper or tin, that could be worked into beautiful jewellery or a tool or a weapon, would be worth having in exchange for whatever you had to offer at an agreed rate.

Whether or not that scenario ever happened, it would have come under the heading of ‘barter’ and the only advantage metal had over other items was that it took up less room than, say corn, and so was easier to carry. This was for many years the standard history of the beginnings of metal money. However Graeber points out that the actual history is different and, for centuries, people traded almost exclusively on credit. Coinage only came into use as a means to pay soldiers and, in particular, mercenaries. So money and war have a common origin. How surprising is that?

Money hasn’t stopped being magical. If paper notes could stand in for real coins, then the next move was that we could write our own notes – cheques. This worked when a bank was holding our money and would transfer some of it to another person when they received that piece of paper. Magic. Then some smart-arse invented the credit card, which did away with the dreary task of writing out a cheque. But that didn’t mean someone would carry a bag of coins, or even paper, from your bank to the other person’s – it was just the numbers that changed in the ledgers and the banks agreed between themselves who had what. Then came computers and the whole process speeded up exponentially and money became even more abstract and mythical, but it was still just numbers flying around on wires and fibres in the form of electrical pulses. So where was the real money?

Banks and exchanges
We’re told that banks were invented in Italy in the 14th century but the business was around a lot longer than that. All you needed was a large or regular supply of cash* and a customer. The people with the money supply were generally big merchants while, as Graeber told us, the customers were usually rulers who had a war on their hands or in their plans. [* the word cash originally meant ‘box’, like the ones money was kept in, then it transferred to the money itself]

Apart from money-lenders, the other kind of dealers were the money-changers – you may have heard of Jesus chasing them out of the temple in Jerusalem. These exchanged gentile Greek and Roman coins for ones that were acceptable to the priests. Presumably they made a profit on the trade. Elsewhere it seems that no-one bothered much where the coins came from so long as you knew what they were worth compared to your local currency. At least that was the case until nation states became more protectionist about whose money was circulating in their territory. That’s when the exchange, the cambio bank, made its appearance.

Karl Marx defined capitalism as the trade in ‘money as a commodity’. Capitalism isn’t private industry, it’s the trade in money itself. As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the few things Marx got right. Multinational corporations may be richer than all but the strongest countries on the planet, but the real power lies in banking and currency markets. That’s why there was so much resistance to the UK changing from pounds to euros – one less currency for the gamblers to play with.

Credit & Debt
As far as I can see the difference between them depends on class. If you’re working class, what you owe is a debt. If you’re middle class, what you owe is your credit. If you’re ruling class, you don’t care either way – someone else will pay.

Generally it doesn’t matter how much you owe as long as you’re able to keep up the repayments. It was the banks, mortgage companies and currency traders pushing that logic to its extreme that caused the crash of 2008. And who paid for that? The poor of course. All those huge numbers flitting around the memories of computers across the world may have seemed like fairy dust to those pushing the buttons, but the reality came down to who and what it all was based on – real people making and needing real things, like food, jobs, housing. Wealth means having, or controlling, a lot of those real things by whatever means.

So the real source of wealth is people and all that money – cash, credit, debt – means is ‘how much are you worth?’ The answer to that depends on the person asking the question. In other words, ‘how useful are you to me?’ The answer to that is ‘do you have something I need?’ Well, do you? What do you do, find, produce, transport, package or deliver, that I need? If you tell me that there is something and I believe you, then you’re in credit. If I get it, I owe you and I’m in debt to you. I’m promising to give you something in return. Money was invented as just one way to sort out that agreement but it went on before that for as long as humans have been around.

Is there another possible system? A friend of mine used to talk about the ‘cosmic supply company’. What he meant was, if you give somebody something – a cigarette, a cup of tea, a meal, a lift, some of your time – then there was a good chance that somebody else would give you what you needed another time. Sounds fantastical, but how often has that happened to you? Could we run a world on that system? Who knows? We haven’t tried it for a while.

RA 24-29.8.16

“I believe in being tolerant …”

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

The 16 November was the UN’s International Day for Tolerance. Sounds highly desirable but then I think it also sounds arrogant. It’s like that old tag-line for the 1960s – ‘the Permissive Society’. Who has the right to tolerate or permit another’s existence or behaviour? According to my dictionary, tolerate comes from the Latin word ‘tollere’, meaning to lift up. That’s fine if someone asks to be lifted up but more often they’re demanding not to be held down.

Whether it’s race, religion, caste, class, income, gender or sexuality, our world is riven by divisions with those on top consciously or unconsciously bearing down on those lower in the hierarchy than themselves. Asking them to ‘tolerate’ their poorer or weaker neighbour is not what’s needed. Nor should those lower in the pile tolerate their supposed superiors. They have a right to their intolerance but not by categorising all those who seem to oppress them as enemies. Sometimes education and understanding (or ‘overstanding’ for the Rastas) are enough. Sometimes, however, a fight is necessary.

RA 4.11.17

Taxation and off-shore money +

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

Taxation and off-shore money

The so-called ‘Paradise Papers’ have made this front page news but it’s nothing new. Up to 30 years ago my main mode of long-distance travel was by hitch-hiking and it’s common knowledge that this situation tends to make people a lot more open in what they say than they would otherwise be. So, over that time, I had some interesting conversations. One of them was with the boss of a fairly large and well-known company who talked about the amount of taxes that the government lost from corporations which had large off-shore holdings – he mentioned BP and ICI as two of the biggest. He reckoned that, if the government would offer a deal, some of that taxable income could be brought back home. They never did, preferring to demonise poor people on welfare instead. The scale then of lost taxes versus estimated benefit fraud was 10 to 1. It’s got to be a lot bigger now since George Osborne made it even easier for companies to legally base themselves here, in what a former tax inspector on Radio 4’s ‘Money Box’ called ‘brass plate’ status (ie in name only), while their income was safely stashed away elsewhere. When the government conspires to keep their friends rich at the expense of the rest of the population the best description of the UK is a ‘banana republic’, monarchy or not.

Baccy and guns

Another couple of those highway revelations are worth mentioning here. One was over 40 years ago when I was picked up by the Chief Marketing Manager for British-American tobacco. I asked him if he was at all worried by the anti-tobacco lobby, which was beginning to make itself noticed. He wasn’t bothered at all, pointing out that, even if it was totally banned here, they now had their first factory in China and the market there would dwarf anything in the rest of the world.

The other was the cop who took me one night from Warminster to Bristol. Whether the beret and combat jacket I was wearing fooled him into thinking I was a squaddie, I don’t know but he was quite forthcoming. We got onto the subject of when police carried firearms and he said blithely that it happened a lot more often than the public was aware of. As he was obviously CID, I figured he knew what he was talking about.

Goes to show just how much is hidden from the general view, not in secret, but in plain sight.

RA 11.11.17

For God, King and Country

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

This obscenity is found on war memorials, often in Latin: ‘Pro Deo, Rege et Patria’. I call it an obscenity because the majority of those servicemen and women did not die for those fictions but either because they had no choice in the matter or to save their comrades. Lying on the battlefied with his legs blown off, a soldier was more likely to be calling for a medic or his mother than any so-called deity, even if he believed in one. Still less for his monarch – it was centuries since any king had been anywhere near a battle, let alone the front line. On the other hand a fair few of those ‘fallen’ may have fought to defend their country, however they envisioned that, from invasion and destruction by the enemy. So we’re talking about patriotism. This term is touted as the ‘decent’ form of nationalism, in that it should not imply any superiority over other nations. But a cursory glance at the history of war, imperialism and sport shows the lie in that. It has to be endlessly invoked because it’s a relatively new phenomenon – the idea of nation states is barely five hundred years old and much less in most parts of the world. Most people’s loyalty is to groups much nearer to them – their family, their tribe, their work mates, their football team, their community, if there is one, their co-religionists. Their traditional enemies are likewise mainly closer to them. So, at times of war and other international conflicts, patriotism/nationalism has to be revived and reinforced and the enemy dehumanised – ‘The only good Indian/German/ Jap/etc is a dead one’. The problem for the rulers is that these false emotions are hard to control when they’re trying to be on good terms with the Indians/ Germans/Japs/etc. Then ‘patriotism’ becomes extreme nationalism, which the right wing make a show of deploring, while using it to their advantage wherever possible. As someone said long ago, “What’s moderate racism?” So what’s moderate nationalism? Another set of blinkers to stop us seeing clearly.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other lies

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

On the 16th November 1917, Lenin is reported as stating at the Congress of Peasant Assemblies (Soviets) that anyone who attacked the soviets was a counter-revolutionary. He wasn’t lying, he was a counter-revolutionary and it only took 2 years until, under Trotsky’s direction, the Bolsheviks took over all the soviets, put the army and navy under the command of officers, often previously Tsarist ones, and the trade unions under military control in the guise of necessary measures to win the civil war. The soviets never regained their autonomy, the armed forces and unions stayed under Party control. It took only another 9 years until the peasants lost ownership of their lands under forced collectivisation. Whether Lenin would have agreed with this is debatable … for what that’s worth.

As for socialist, it’s another word, like Christian, that’s been tortured out of any resemblance to its founders’ teachings. “Are you, or have you ever been, a Communist?” – every Christian should answer “Yes!” if they understood the meaning of either word. If we invent new words, they’ll get twisted too. Give up attacking labels and go for those people who misuse them to hurt other people.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

Another lie – it means the dictatorship of the Party. The Bolsheviks broke the first rule of revolutionaries – not to substitute yourself for the class. Marx called for ‘self activity’. This happened in Russia in March 1917, was crushed by the Party and all memory erased by Stalin. No wonder they’re in the shit now.

What’s in a name?

More lies:-
Democratic = Stalinist or a quasi-monarchy as in North Korea
People’s = ‘Communist’ Party, aka Stalinist
Freedom = Fascist
Christian* = Fascist or at least extreme conservative [* substitute a religion of your choice]

RA 20-21.10.17

The women as usual …

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

This title is part of a quote from an account in a local newspaper of the Exeter Bread Riot of 1854, it goes on, ’The women as usual were the beginning of the disturbance.’ (Western Times, 14th January 1854) I love that because it reveals a truth that, as managers of the domestic economy, generally, women are the ones who know when the situation is no longer supportable. Whether it’s about hunger, as in the bread riots, demanding safer working conditions, as the fishermen’s wives and widows from Hull in the 1960s, or against murder and disappearances, as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo a decade later, women are often the first into battle. They then force the men into action, sometimes by leading them. The storming of the Bastille may have signalled the beginning of the French Revolution, but it was the march of women to Versailles that sealed Louis XVI’s fate. Likewise, it’s not well known that it was the women who started the Russian Revolution in March 1917, appropriately enough on International Women’s Day*, when female workers in a clothes factory in St Petersburg went on strike and called out the men in other works to join them. The Bolsheviks weren’t consulted, Lenin was still in Switzerland, the Winter Palace was unstormed. Shame that Eisenstein didn’t make a film about that.

Of course I’m talking about poor women, not the ones who become professional politicians, business leaders or academic writers. So, while Theresa May desperately tries to get the Tories to back-pedal and take on some of Labour’s policies, we can only wait and hope for the crunch to come.

[* started by a Jewish garment worker and socialist who was an immigrant from Russia to the USA. Come on chickens … time to roost!]

RA 4-6.10.17