Monday Morning Rant – From a Conversation with Joe

Tags

Benefits, finance, housing, policy, poverty

Why is Joe important to me?  Maybe because he’s one of the legions of people who live alone, who are not easily employable, and who, for one reason or another, rely upon the State to support them.

Joe is not ‘lazy’.  With his history of mental illness, I doubt he has a real concept of what the word means; nor is he a ‘scrounger’ in any comfortable sense.  Like almost all those the middle class try to cram into the freeloader mold, Joe doesn’t quite fit.   For a large part of his life he was institutionalized until the State in its wisdom decided he should be cared for ‘in the community’.  At some stage the same State decided he was well.  So the care bit stopped.  ‘Support’ took its place.

There are a small number of jobs for people like Joe.  Unfortunately, there are a very large number of Joes.

Joe is a council tenant.  He has a two-bedroomed house which the State now says is too large.  In the latter half of this year his housing allowance will be cut by fifty percent.  He has few other allowances – no child allowance, for example – so when the cut comes he will not have enough to live on.

The State has two answers:  either take on a paying tenant for the room to make up the difference, or move to smaller accommodation.    

Health and Safety now pieces itself into the argument:  before he accepts a tenant, Joe must satisfy fire regulations and install fire doors to his council let.  No, the council won’t do it; they’ll only prosecute if it is not done.  Joe does not have the four-figure sum this installation will cost; and everyone else involved is happy to ignore the speculative nature of such an investment.  After all, who can guarantee a tenancy?   Even then, incidentally, the council must approve his tenant – a process that, to go by most council procedures, could take months:  Joe’s budget just about gets him from week to week.

So, Joe must move into a single-bedroom unit.  Problem?  The councils and housing associations have no single bedroom units.  There is a massive waiting list for those that are already in place.

For years both legislative bodies and private house builders have concentrated upon the more versatile two- and three-bed units.  There are hundreds and thousands of those.  Even landlords in the private sector have predominantly larger units:  they attract more rent – they make economic sense.

Economic sense is the quality it seems our rulers conspicuously lack.  In a move that is intended to save money and drive those who for generations have lived off the State into work they are in danger of causing a housing crisis of epic proportions – a situation likely to cost five times as much as they save.   Not that this is unusual for British Government – they have enviable expertise in the area of profligacy and waste.  I just hope Joe does not have to count himself among the victims of this latest splurge.

Increasingly, the vox populi can be heard referring to ‘New Victorian Britain’.  If only it were so.  Yes, deprivation was extant in layers of Victorian society, and no, there was no welfare state; but in that dog-eat-dog world at least there was precious little regulation either.  You might install a tenant in your attic and another in your coal-house, and no-one would know or care.  Today we are regulated up to our eyeballs, pressured by commerce to the point where we no longer have control of our own minds and watched relentlessly by cameras on stalks, statistical monitoring and – shall we say – ‘zealous’ policing?   Poverty has a different complexion in the 21st Century, but it is no less real.

No, I am not a Socialist or a Communist or any other ‘ist’.  I hold no high expectations, whatever their political colour, of the loathsome gnomes who rule us but I wish – oh, yes, I wish.   I wish we might forfeit our pretensions on ‘The World Stage’ and accept we have no place in Middle-Eastern wars.  I wish we might cease supplying ‘foreign aid’ to plutocrats in the hope they will let us drill their oil, and I wish we might, just for once, begin to treat our own people with respect. 

Zen Dog

by Edward Monkton

Conception

Tags

characters, empty page, Plot, story

There have to be times when the tyranny of the blank page gets to the best of us, and I’m certainly no exception.   There are occasions when I cannot think of words, let alone sentences, and the river simply stops flowing.  So I thought I’d explain what I do when that happens, and compare notes with you. 

First of all, if I have already been working on something, I stop.  There’s no point in pursuing it if the inspiration which drives it is dry.

Then I start with the blank page.

I think of a place I know.  A street, a park, a piece of pavement.  Then I change it a little.  Give it a different name.  Maybe it would look better with a church, there, a large limousine parked there, or a bus at a bus stop nearby.

Now I put feet on the street.  Whose?  Male, female, young, old?  Usually I tie these things to someone I know, too.  But then I alter her a little – make her more attractive, or less:  give her a mannerism that adds substance – why does her hand twitch that way?  Why does she seem distracted – even anxious?

And I walk with her.  Yes, I do.  I try to view her life from the inside – see what she sees, do what she would do.  Or he – it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter yet, but it’s beginning to.  It starts to matter a lot more as she passes the big limousine and its door swings open, or a man leaps from the bus and begins running towards her, shouting………and I have a story.

The point is, I don’t plan it.  I don’t plan anything, I’m afraid.  I honestly had no idea where this was going five minutes ago, and I have no idea what will occur in the next five.  Will it be a short story or a book?  It might even be an article about road safety!

So, to those who insist I should plan my writing, I am a nightmare.  If I know where my story is going I cease to be engaged, and I simply won’t write it.  It will join the realms of the unfinished that march in legions across my hard drive.

This works for me.  What about you?  How do you meet the tyranny of the empty page?

Apparently Iranian god-guru and well known international raconteur

Tags

bigot, bigots, earthquake, Iran

Apparently Iranian god-guru and well known international raconteur I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket has discovered the root cause of all the earthquakes his country has been suffering of late – nothing to do with nuclear tests, no; its God’s punishment for the promiscuous behavior of women.   Of course!  Why didn’t somebody think of that before?

So if the female half of the human race all (go back to?) dressing in tents, surrender such lascivious pleasures as thinking for themselves and just stay home cooking or dusting, we men can be relied upon to take over the promiscuous bit.   Sounds like good sense to me!

Earthquakes are terrible tragedies, and I would by no means wish to belittle them, but has it occurred to I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket that maybe he and his pseudo-religious gang of bigots are the ones Mother Nature is really after?

Something Gnash and Incisive

So Liverpool footballer Luis Suarez became over-excited in a front-of-goal tussle and sank his teeth into the arm of a defender?   Come on, Football Association, if my dog did that on the street she’d have to wear a muzzle.  Need I say more?

Apart from lending further reinforcement to my opinion of football as a ‘sport’ this led me to wonder if there are not other situations which could be resolved by a similar form of retaliation?  Because when you come to think of it biting is a form of assault that has no easy response.  It doesn’t conform to any of the recognized rules of combat. 

None of that preliminary:  “Yeah, what?”

“So what?”

“What are you going to do about it then?”   Stuff.

Just teeth.  Straight in.  

And it doesn’t have the same result.  How do you feel if someone bites you?  Indignant?  Maybe, at first but not angry – no.  Not even mildly annoyed.  Instead, you spend the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of your life wondering….why?   Self-examination will necessarily follow, you will become a better person.  You may even adopt a new religion.

It is the thinking person’s response to injustice.  So maybe next time you are watching a play and the person in front of you persists in using his mobile ‘phone, or even coughs incessantly, you should avoid remonstrating with him and simply lean forward and…yes, clamp down on his neck!    On the ‘bus when the youth misbehaves, in the crowded metro when someone gropes.  Imagine the surprise, the satisfaction you will gain from that wounded look!

Thank you, Luis Suarez!  We have all learned something from you today!

This is hard to say.  It is hard because, as a writer, I am filled with self-doubt: a lack of confidence which will make me read and re-read this sentence because I am secretly afraid that what I say is nonsense.

Only if you as a reader appreciate the anguish of creative writing can you possibly know how much a good review means.  It lets the sun through the curtains, it brings warmth and it brings solace.  It lends reason to the madness.

So thank you.   Thank you to Carrie Rubin, to O.G. Tomes and others who have been kind enough to read and review my work.   

 

And I wish I could thank Elle L. for her great review of ‘I am Cara’ (which I only just picked up, incidentally, because it was given in the UK site for the book).

Now, back to the plot……

Tiny Tales

I keep writing short stories, and I keep asking myself why?   Is it because I was told many years ago – and have had it repeated incessantly since – that success with ‘shorts’ is a sort of proving ground for authorship?   A century or so ago, I guess, it might have been; Dickens began with his Boz sketches, didn’t he?  A century ago; not now.  

The technique for short story writing is quite different:  depth is positively discouraged; it’s all about outcome, with scant attention to the steps along the way.   The process for seeking publication is just plain frustrating, with turn-around tying up MSs for as much as three months at a time.  To some extent writing has to be a business:  short stories are not cost-effective.

So – all change!   Since my writing of ‘shorts’ is an indulgence, I’m simply putting them up on my website for anyone who wants.  They are still copyright, of course, and I would ask you not to reproduce them, but please come along, please stop by and read!   There are four to start with, there will be more as soon as I can get the time.   Personally, my favorite of this first batch is ‘Parfitt’s Island’ – but that’s just me.

Ding Dong

At four o’clock this morning the ‘royal’ bit of London rattled discreetly to the sound of sabres as the Household Cavalry gave Baroness Thatcher’s funeral a ‘dry run’ (with strict instructions, one assumes, to bring her back when they were finished).  The real deal comes up on Wednesday.

Margaret Thatcher wasn’t everyone’s idea of a Prime Minister – her passing has excited the indecent to demonstrate their loathing indecently.  The ‘Socialist Worker’ announced her passing with a one-word banner headline:  ‘Rejoice’.  Certain individuals loosely answering the description of ‘people’ were filmed stamping upon her photograph.  ‘Ding,Dong, the Witch is Dead’ from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ has reached number two in the charts.

Now personally I couldn’t applaud those things.  Respect for the dead, no matter what you privately think of them, is something I was taught: whether for or against her, I would prefer to think she was treated with dignity.  The trouble is, the dignity bit has rather gone overboard.  A funeral with military honours on the face of it would seem appropriate (at 11 years the longest-serving 20th Century Prime Minister, the leader at the time of the Falklands Expeditionary Force, etc.), were it not for the British obsession with pomp, which turns these solemn occasions into something of a tourist attraction.

Which also raises problems of security, folks, but it’s all right.  As a sign of dissent it’s OK to turn your back as the cortège passes, the police have announced.  You won’t get arrested for doing that.  Ah, the land of the free!  It makes me wonder what you could get arrested for – is it alright to buy ice creams, wear a Labour Party rosette, or sing ‘The Red Flag’?   I suppose we get the freedom the worst of us deserve, don’t we?

 

 

Correction of a House

Tags

closure, history, persecution, prison, UK

For those who missed it, Shepton Mallet prison closed last week.  

As a child of Somerset, I have distant memories of Shepton Mallet, and the prison (no, I wasn’t an inmate) is among those vague recollections, squatting in the midst of civilised town buildings like a somnolent slug.

High perimeter walls – 75ft is high – grey stone, tiny peeping windows with those tell-tale bars: I’d like to think that someone with vision would re-open it as a themed hotel, but I’m told they’re going to pull it down.

There won’t be many arguments, I imagine, in favour of its preservation.  No outraged National Trust junkies will barricade the doors or lie down in front of the bulldozers – no, this is the less desirable face of history; a side of society we would prefer to forget.

Built in 1610, it’s certainly a candidate for preservation. It offered accommodation to many famous ‘lifers’ not least among which were the brothers Kray.  And I believe the ghosts (I’m told there are several) would like to see their nameless memories preserved.  So many of them, victims of the almost continuous ravages of smallpox and the brutality that reigned within its walls, lie buried there; their graves unmarked by any stone.

How many were hanged at HMP Shepton Mallet? No-one really knows – in early years no records were kept.  In World War Two, however, it was a military prison. Sixteen American soldiers were hanged and two shot for crimes including rape and murder.

So no tears but those which the men, women and children who suffered the continuous torture of years within those cramped cells have shed, and still perhaps run bleeding among the stones.  And maybe in the other silences  the creak of the treadmill that once turned there might still be heard, when Shepton Mallet needs reminding of those darker hours.