Blog 84 STUFF!

I have railed against materialism on this blog. I have satirised consumerism, I've written poems and performed comedy sketches on these topics. Therefore, it is with a blush and a huge guilt complex that I reflect on the last three days.

I was packing to move house.

A few months ago when the idea of a move took shape and then solidified, I naturally felt an increase in my ongoing urge to clear out. My children learnt a long time ago that if something hadn't been used or worn or given a glance in – say – six months, the chances were, it would find its way into the bin or recycle bag unless they nailed it to the floor.

It became a comfortable habit of mine not to purchase a significant item of clothing (albeit from the charity shop) without a quick pre-chuck-out. On occasion I have had to be careful not to re-purchase something I’d previously donated. Sometimes when a thing looked familiar – instead of my brain saying ‘you feel warmly towards that thing because you used to wear it’ my grey matter sends the ‘you feel warmly towards that thing because you want to buy it’ message instead.

Fortunately for my bank balance I have always viewed shopping as a task rather than a form of entertainment. Generally, being surrounded by STUFF drags me down.

There are no gadgets in my kitchen other than those that seem, even to me, to be essential. No microwave, no dishwasher, no George Forman grill (!) Anyway you get the picture.

But once I started to pack, the sheer amount of stuff, the number of things, the crap, overwhelmed me.

I began to suspect I may have cut it fine in terms of time allowed. But – I told myself – you've been handing over little parcels and boxes and bags of things to charity shops for a while. When my Edinburgh conveyancer finally got his finger out and we confirmed the date (and before it turned out he hadn't done something vital he should have done and I thought the whole thing would be off) I upped the clearing-out considerably. I decided to be ruthless, even with my books and they have been thinned out on a regular basis because they breed when I am not looking.

Items I’d hmm’d and ha’d about were cast aside without a second thought or regret. Things I really thought I could not live without were revealed as an obvious waste of space.

Lord, after a day and a half of packing, the task still seemed daunting. Even taking into consideration that some of the stuff belongs to the two daughters who have not lived at home year, and a lot more belongs to the one that does - there still seemed to be too much.

Maybe my aversion to 'things' is connected to upbringing. My grandmother is a psychotic shopper and my mum loves to get-a-gadget. I've been amazed at just how many gadgets there are for things you never knew you needed a gadget for…

My friends may chortle as they already think my sensitivity to clutter is verging on abnormal but there is going to be a whole new level of clear as I go from small house to even smaller flat.

Putting all that to one side – and suspecting that there may be more chucking out when the boxes are opened (which seems kind of mad) I think I am going to have a new rule. If I look around me and feel that it would take my children more than a few hours to clear up after me when I die – I’ve got too much stuff.

On a massive positive note – I am really excited to now be a resident of Edinburgh.

This week’s recommended blog from the archive is;

Blog 23. What is Love! (philosophy of Wil-e-coyote)

Blog 83. Hospital deaths were a NICE surprise!

I hope you are sitting down.

I wasn't sitting down when the announcement came on the radio and the shock was awful. I cannot afford for you to injure yourself and sue me when you read this blog so hold on to something.

NICE have announced findings that under-staffing in hospitals can be dangerous.

OK breathe.

Yes, NICE the National Institute for health and Care Excellence (what happened to ‘f’, ‘h’ and ‘a’?) have made an important announcement, after much consideration and looking at information and reports and statistics and especially figures for preventable deaths in hospitals. Apparently under-staffing can harmfully affect numbers of adverse incidents and patient mortality.

OMG

Let us only hope they do a parallel and more specific study into whether if you are tired and over worked you become more likely to make mistakes. I wait with bated breath for the outcome of that investigation.

Don’t confuse the NICE mentioned above with that other organisation with the same acronym, the National Institute for Could-have-worked-that-out-for-ourselves Easily.

All I can say, once I get my breath back is, thank god we have clever people getting paid lots of tax-payers’ money to tell us these things.

Being just an ordinary Jo (or Amanda) I can only hazard a guess at some of the mysteries of life and wonder about things like – would drinking tractor engine oil make you poorly?

To be honest there was rather a lot to take in this week in terms of confusing information. Evidently it’s not ok to legally (but immorally) avoid tax if you are a comedian but it is ok to illegally avoid tax if you are a singer and a mate of David Cameron. And it’s not ok to play a record with the ‘N’ word in it if you are an old DJ but it is ok to say the ‘N’ word (and be a misogynistic git) if you present programmes about cars and are a friend of David Cameron. How confusing is life?

So I suppose – if the things that should be straightforward are complicated then it makes a kind of twisted sense if things that are utterly obvious are then presented to us as if they are full of mystery and require stats and reports and serious public statements.

But back to the findings that surprised NICE.

The weird thing was that just a couple of days before this stunning announcement, a friend of mine  told me about her elderly mother who died in hospital after being given the wrong dose of one of her medications. The lady in question was old and poorly but the mis-medication possibly hastened her death and in an unpleasant way. While I felt huge sympathy for my friend and her family, I have to admit, my gut reaction was to also wonder at the plight of the nurse. How many elderly patients was she caring for? How qualified was she? How much support did she have? Was there a senior clinician available at the relevant time? Because one thing I do know from contacts in the medical field is that when these things blow up it is usually the person at the coal face who gets it in the neck. It is rarely the more senior medic, almost never the hospital manager and it is never EVER the politicians who landed the NHS with the targets and PFI contracts that led to much of the present misery and a funding crisis.

SO take a deep breath before you listen to the news or read tomorrow’s papers – they may announce that crossing the M25 without looking increases your risk of getting run over.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives is

No.32 NHS & the Condom of Common Sense.

Blog 82. Max Clifford, UKIP & ‘all our yesterdays’

Any hope of a sensible outcome (or even process) in the European elections was snuffed out when the first election leaflet flopped onto my doormat.

I am left still trying to comprehend (among other things) the appeal of UKIP – or should I say Farage. Yes he’s been shamelessly promoted and normalised by the media but over and above that, what is his draw? He’s a frog-faced racist hypocrite who seems to have galvanised the previously limp passions of (some) white men over 60 – like political Viagra. And who’d argue he wouldn’t look better with a condom over his head?

According to various opinion polls and commentators and worried Tory insiders, he appeals to those who feel their country is not what it was; those who crave the ‘better yesterday’. Presumably they want a yesterday when everyone was white and spoke perfect English which was – NEVER. There was no such thing as Standard English until well after Chaucer’s time and today most so-called indigenous people don’t speak it. The Royal Family are a Continental European import and blacks and Europeans have been resident on this island since Roman times. The fictional better yesterday seems to be some mythical time in the 60s, 70s or early 80s.

So I thought – couldn’t we put all the folk who want it to be yesterday together? They could go live on an island with Max Clifford. Maybe we could get some posters saying ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ to make them feel at home? The men could have compulsory comb-overs and the women would be forced to wear pale blue eye shadow.

On this island the only T.V. will be back episodes of Crossroads and Top of the Pops with Jimmy Saville. The food will consist of sandwiches made from packet Mother’s Pride bread filled with smash and condensed milk sprinkled with powdered coffee.

I do get why the main parties are such a turn-off. The Tories are shits. The Liberals justify their existence by claiming to be keeping the Tories from being as shit as they would otherwise be and Labour are whining from the sidelines that they will be a bit less shit than the others if we let them have a go (see spoof leaflet with this week’s cartoon).

Just last week the Tories proved yet again their disdain and utter contempt for the British public by approving the proposed take-over of Astra Zeneca by Pfizer (talking of Viagra). Apparently on the basis that P has given assurances they won’t decimate the AZ UK workforce. And we all know how reliable those kinds of business assurances are from the Royal Mail debacle.

The Liberals haven’t worked out that Clegg is as electable as chilled dog vomit.

Labour doesn’t get that;

Ed is unelectable

Blair is not completely exorcised

You can’t just keep saying you will manage the mess; you have to prove you’ll clear it up.

If the Tories want to out-UKIP UKIP they could pass a law stating that homosexuality is re-outlawed, we all have to paint our rooms brown and orange and all women must be trained as typists and not complain if their bosses grope them. And we could all go to hell in a handcart singing Rule Britannia.

Or...

... young people could wake up, smell the coffee, get themselves registered to vote and introduce euthanasia for racist, homophobic, misogynistic hypocrites.

Click on the orange Amanda Baker - top of the right hand column to view this week’s cross-cartoon

This week’s recommended blog from the archives is,

Blog 35 Eton Mess – pudding or state of the nation.

Blog 81. What happened to mud, fun & anticipation?

Clare Balding showed me why football is a rip off!

Explain modern football. Not the rules. Everyone knows the rules. The RULES are easy. Blokes kick balls into nets. If team a puts in three balls and team b puts in only one or two – then team a wins - duuuh.

This week I am writing on a subject about which I confess complete ignorance (as opposed to the partial ignorance I usually employ). I really need someone to explain the expensive end of football. What I desperately need to know – having spent two weeks trying to avoid hysterical news reporters going on and on about someone called Moyes, is what is it all about? I mean just WOT?

From a socio-political perspective I can about see a glimmer of light of an interesting idea. The modern game of football seems – from a distance – to perfectly reflect the rampant capitalism that is currently devastating this country and many others. I.e. a few people at the very top get disgustingly rich for doing not much at the expense of a whole load of other people who are exploited financially and who are too stupid to realise. So ‘fans’ (!) fork out ridiculous amounts of money for nylon T-shirts etc every time the season or the sponsor change or if the game is played at their home ground or not. Others pay to watch matches on the telly. The ‘fans’ may also pay to buy stuff that is promoted by the people who play the game – sometimes things that have nothing whatsoever to do with football from crisps to mobile phones.

The ‘fan’ is supposedly a tribal animal, fiercely loyal to a ‘team’ which takes the name of a town or city but usually doesn’t include anyone who actually comes from or lives in that town or city.

The ‘teams’ that get to the top are the ones with the biggest bank balances or richest owners. Owners also often have nothing to do with the locality of the ‘team’ or the ‘fans’.

I caught a news item a few months ago that confused me hugely. An interviewer was talking to someone regarding a ‘premier league’ club and its position of strength in relation to another club. It was a little while before I realised that the person being interviewed was not even talking about football prowess but the share values of the two clubs in question.

As a very young child I attended football matches with my dad. Leamington FC. My memories are vague as I had little interest in the game even then. I recall being cold, I recall drinking tea out of a white polystyrene cup that tasted of – well – polystyrene. I remember standing unless we were lucky enough to get a perch on a rickety wooden bench and I remember a certain atmosphere of fun and something I would possibly refer to now as camaraderie. I initially went because my brother and sister wouldn’t so it was a perfect opportunity to have my dad to myself. Ditto Cricket in the summer. At least at the cricket you could get nice tea and cake at the pavilion. But it was fun though hard to put your finger on why. Was it something to do with the smell of mud and expectation? Was it the sense of invisibility surrounded by grown-ups, mainly men, who were so completely absorbed on a single event? There was a peak of excitement and something to do with belonging even though I could almost never see what was going on because everyone else was man height and width.

Many years later I attended a match at Newcastle with a friend who insisted I needed to see at least one live match there. I could neither smell mud nor feel excitement. It was a sanitised and disconnected experience.

Thanks to Clare Balding and some history-of-sport thing I accidentally tuned into once – I know that the reason the rules of football were standardised was so that rich gentlemen could bet on the game played by the working class oiks – just like they bet on the gee gees. And though it’s too obvious to say it – I will anyway – that presumably is where the rot set in. Light years away from kicking a pig’s bladder round a field for fun we now have a game that is not just about money it is primarily about money – it is almost exclusively about money. It is about money to the point of seeming pointless to me.

Why not save everyone a lot of effort and just look at the bank balance of each club every month – or maybe which WAG has the most expensive handbag - and that club wins.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives is;

Blog 17 – How to make Monopoly more interesting

Blog 80. ‘The Sun Always Shines on TV’ – so why is it so depressing?

There is a potential Super Size Me situation here.

Five days exposure to television left me feeling like Morgan Spurlock after a few days with his food nemesis Macdonalds.

As regular BGOTR bleaders know, this sometimes ranty blogger has been sans T.V. since last century. Unlike ex-smokers or drinkers I don’t preach ‘no-telly’ I’m just content without it.

Also unlike those groups, I never crave T.V.

I admit to a little frustration with the standard question that has ambushed me on numerous occasions over the last decade and a half when people discover my television-less-ness,

“What do you DO (without a TV)?”

Sometimes I ‘DO’ nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sometimes I sit in my living room on my own and stare into space. It’s rare but wonderful. For the rest I would have to answer with a question - how do they find time to watch T.V.? But that makes people instantly defensive so I stopped. Another knee-jerk reaction when others find out I’m one of those weirdoes, is to say they hardly ever watch T.V. But these reactions tend to fall into the contingent who sees any divergence from how they live as an implied criticism.

But like a lot of other people, if I am in a room with a telly which is on, I find it almost impossible to look away for any length of time no matter what is on.

In the presence of the modern mega screen I am positively intimidated and sense overwhelming relieve if I escape its vortex pull or someone is brave / motivated enough to press the off button.

Last week I spent five days at my mum’s very much in the presence of T.V. By day three I was under the spell; flicking between channels and watching people cook, buy shit, garden and execute throw-away lines with straight or quirky faces in a myriad of sitcoms. And I watched bits of films that I couldn’t get into because of all the ad breaks.

I mean how can you maintain your fantasy involvement or sense of tension or suspend your disbelief if thrills are punctuated with cleaning products; epics are interrupted by women smiling at their gravy? Rom-coms (which are not a fave with me anyway) are side-swiped by people grinning into their mobiles because they just borrowed £1000 they’ll never be able to pay back.

Who would ever guess that mothers in Syria are boiling grass to feed their children?

The people eating crap, processed food are slim, blemish free and full of energy. The people buying rubbish they don’t appear not to be brow beaten by debt; they look ecstatically, manically happy. Shop workers interact and grin and wear remarkably bright smart clothes. The people in cars aren’t in traffic and don’t have slack arses. The people on TV watching TV all look bright eyed and perky not the way I felt – dull, sluggish, sofa-boated and a bit miserable.

Everything is sunny and sparkly and everyone, EVERYONE is smiling.

If you’re not careful a mild paranoia can creep in from the sides as the telly images prod you with your own inadequacy and less than sparkly attention to perfection in all things domestic.

Should my carpet be THAT clean, I mean do I need space age technology just to mop the floor? I feel ashamed of my old mop and bucket.

Something else I haven’t had in over 10 years is contents insurance – mainly because I just don’t have STUFF that breaks and gets nicked – like a ridiculously large expensive, living room obliterating T.V.!!! But apparently if you don’t have contents insurance all kinds of disasters can befall you not least the ceiling may fall in and smash your wide screen telly leaving the entire family staring at the floor unable to view any more insurance ads... YIKES!

I had no idea that you need specific machines to cook different foods. Old-fashioned nutter that I am I just use a hob oven and various pans. Where do people keep all this shit? Don’t get me started on cleaning equipment and unguents – do folk have vast underground bunkers just to store all the T.V. crap?

But I return to the bizzarrity (!) that amongst all this buying and cleaning and borrowing and consulting about sofas and cooking showcase food, everyone, just everyone is happy.

Surely there aint that much Prozac to go round?

One thing was for sure I needed something to pick me up after 5 days exposure.

But when I got home I knew what it was. Just as Mr. Spurlock returned to his Macdonalds-free home and vegan girlfriend, I returned to my clean but not surgically spotless, telly free house.

Recommended blog from the archive for this week

Blog 6. Please get a bigger T.V.

Blog 79. Piketty’s Stylish Statement of the Bleedin Obvious.

Cynics might be tempted to put Thomas Piketty’s celebrated tome Capital – ‘Capitalism doesn’t work’, on the shelf next to Obesity – ‘Over-eating makes you fat’.

It’s important to remember that accepting what is obvious isn’t necessarily easy. In particular, those with vested interests often need their blind incredulity smashed by a sledgehammer. For some it’s not enough to look around them at levels of personal and public debt, rising inequality, youth unemployment, social unrest, depression, addiction, friends applying for their own jobs repeatedly, zero hours contracts, reduced wages, creeping corruption, the rise of food banks, the increased numbers in work claiming benefits, ‘resource’ wars, starvation in a world of plenty, a rise in self-destruct illnesses and so on and so on – to conclude that Capitalism aint working.

C’est évidemment vrai.

Some people – politicians (?) – and maybe anyone else who has been living in a glass bubble for the last thirty years – may require 700 pages of facts and graphs, examples and statistics from a huge brain like French economist and big thinker  - Thomas Piketty.

Some folk need it written in blood – or French!

But some of us don’t.

You may recall that large swathes of the general public instinctively knew that invading Iraq was a shit idea. Others needed to wait for the body count and global terror inflation and the books that are coming out now from ex-serving soldiers to tell them in writing that it was a bloody, very bloody stupid idea.

So Piketty’s book is, by all accounts, being celebrated as both genius and earth shattering in the international corridors of power. If it takes a book for some rather than a little peer out of the window – I’m all for it – as long as the penny (or the dollar) finally drops – good.

Many ordinary men and women worked out that we are decimating the planet, long before the recent UN report (see blog77.) Others will only believe it when Birmingham is a bleached beach resort and cockroaches are running Wall Street - oh sorry – they already are – but you know what I mean.

So well done Mr Piketty. However, if I make it all the way through your book rather than just reading the copious articles and snippets and quotes and summaries, I’m still pretty sure I will still end up filing it next to those other ground-breaking, eye-opening volumes,

Fags – ‘Smoking Causes Cancer’

&

Planet – ‘The Earth is Round’

 

This week’s recommended blog from the archive is;

Blog 18. Elitism for All

Blog 78 Free Schools? Come to my FREE HOSPITAL!

What - I repeat - WHAT is all the fuss about?

Some folk just cannot be positive about anything. Snipe snipe snipe about how Free Schools and academies are just Westminster’s way of by-passing problems of neglect and underfunding in the state education system. Moan moan moan about the money being leeched from local authorities to fund the amateur education have-a-goes. People have even complained about corruption where school inspectors with links to Free Schools or academies have (apparently) connived to downgrade local state schools in order to discredit them and get a foothold.

I, on the other hand, think Free Schools are such a monumentally fantastically marvellous concept, I have decided to open a Free Hospital.

My Free Hospital will specialise in Maternity (on the basis that I have had three children) and gynaecology (on the basis that I have a fanny). What other qualifications does a person need? I’ll apply to the government for some of the funding they currently give to my local health authority and convert my leaky garden shed in to a birthing pool for those who think delivering a baby into a vat of floating body effluent is a great idea. I will have a couple of mattresses in my living room for women who want soap opera type births (you know the ones where the women sweat a little, groan quietly while the attractive hubby mops their brow and looks attractively anxious). There will be no mention of episiotomies or haemorrhages or retained placentas.

The idea that people have to be properly trained to do a job and maybe work with other people who are not only trained but experienced is the last word in archaic thinking. And they are only children for heaven’s sake. Pissing around with their future every time a new education minister wants to make his mark is bound to work. It’s particularly gratifying to know that children at many state schools are in overcrowded classrooms while funding is lavished on Free Schools and while the people making the policies either have their children at state schools in areas that aren’t struggling or at private schools.

A young friend of mine is doing her teacher training in a school where all the teachers wander round with little toolkits of equipment from scissors to colouring pens because the school can’t afford to provide them.  The teachers – who can’t deliver the curriculum without the basic equipment – have to provide their own. I worked in a school last year where there was a near Spanish Inquisition because I asked for the children I was working with to be provided with WRITING PAPER. A child was dispatched and the exact number of sheets I had requested was counted out of a cupboard while the secretary looked at me as if I had asked for the blood of a unicorn. In both cases I suspect the school budget had been squandered on non-essentials such as crumbling buildings and wages.

My new Free Hospital will be entrepreneurial, probably offering cards and flowers for sale in the hallway as a sideline and there will be a few benches by the clematis in the front for a waiting area.

OBVIOUYSLY I won’t undertake this venture on my own. I’ll employ a woman down the road on minimum wage. She’s had four kids so she’ll know a thing or two.

Once things are up and running I will branch out and maybe do something with bones because my middle daughter has broken a few.

I won’t bother with dentistry because I don’t like drills.

So – if you are not happy with your local hospital – don’t bother lobbying your local MP to bloody well do something about it – come to my house and be the first to experience my Free Hospital.

Or

I may set up a Free Air Travel company on the basis that I caught a plane to Bristol about ten years ago...

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By popular demand (about 6 people asked) I will back-reference archived blogs from now on. I haven’t room to lay out an index as requested, but each week I will recommend an older blog either as a contrast to the current posting or because there is an interesting link.

This week – I’ve chosen a blog with a link so why not check out,

Blog 10.My One Night Stand with the Ghost of Bill Farrell