Ten Day Challenge

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My last Ten Day Challenge involved no news at all for, well, ten days. I’ve decided to do another one. If truth could be told I put the name of this in italics with capitals because I imagine it must be a thing and if I searched online I would find all kind of Ten Day Challenges. I won’t look though because if I do and I find loads of people do these kind of things then instinctively I won’t want to do any ever again. I may even wish I hadn’t confessed to the world, or at least the three people who read this, that I partake in such things. I remember months ago at the beginning of lockdown I wrote a piece on running the 5K Challenge. I can’t say for sure I hadn’t heard about it beforehand and allowed it to slip from my conscious mind, but a week after writing about my ordeals running five kilometres, and after giving it the name 5K Challenge, everyone started talking about their times in the 5K Challenge. Either I’m a trend setter and an influencer, or most likely I’ve picked up the name from somewhere and not realised it. Either way when I discovered it was a thing I wished I hadn’t been so uncool, written about it and publicly acknowledged my participation in something. Next I’ll be pouring ice buckets over my head. So either I ignore the possibility that the world is already familiar with a multitude of Ten Day Challenges, that Instagram probably already did it to death years ago, that I’m actually far less cool than I want to be or I just remain in a ignorant bubble.

All that and I haven’t even told you what I’m doing. The longest and least interesting waffle of a build-up in history. Drum roll please…in an entirely original and never done before way, let’s forget Dry January or Sober October, I’m going to give up alcohol for the next ten days. It’s not as if I’ve become an alcoholic but at the beginning of lockdown I saw so many people embracing the beautiful weather and buying a lot of alcohol. I felt that even though I was working still I shouldn’t miss out on the pleasure of drinking at home. As if I too was on holiday, I joined the fun. Warm weather makes me want to drink, when I’m abroad I drink more during the day and over these last few months the weather in this usually cold and miserable country has inspired an increase in my alcohol consumption. It’s been a while, let’s be honest probably long before lockdown, that I went ten days without a drink but I’m about to finish day two of ten. Today was such a lovely warm and sunny day, it would have been perfect to quench my thirst with a nice cold beer but I stood firm, allowing only pure unrefined water to touch my lips. What a hero yet again. I’m glad I’m the only one ever to have managed such an achievement.

A TV Series’ Ungracefully Ageing

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It must be reasonably obvious to anyone who has ever watched television over an extended period that television shows have a point in which they reach their peak, are struggling to not just take it further but even maintain what they have and are staring down the steep slope of oblivion and cancellation. We all have examples of these. My favourite that never became one is Father Ted and it’s such a great example because as I said it never happened. Dermot Morgan, who played the titular character, sadly died of a heart attack before they filmed a fourth series and as a result Father Ted was immortalised, it never grew old and tired. The same could be said of Fawlty Towers which with only two series never got to the point in which it had refined and perfected the jokes and never had to push them too far in the process.

For there must be something in the idea; that once you’ve found the perfect recipe within a comedy you will kill your creation by not realising it’s limits. Just off the top of my head now I can think of Black Books, The Mighty Boosh, Spaced, to name but a few which were and still are incredible television series which knew when their time was up and didn’t destroy their long term reputation in the process. Without doing some research and actually speaking to those involved, we’ll probably never know who pushes a series too far and who stops it at the right time. If I was to make a guess I imagine the networks will want to rinse it dry and the writers, if they’re not driven primarily or solely by money, will want to protect the artistic integrity of their creation.

I’ve started watching the third series of The Young Offenders which is about two good hearted teenage neds in Cork Ireland, running around causing trouble, stealing bikes, getting their girlfriends pregnant and just being idiots. It’s quite a ridiculous program and in time honoured fashion is getting more ridiculous as the show has developed. There was something raw and utterly hilarious in the first series and while I’m still enjoying the third, it is possible they may struggle in the fourth if there is one. You can only up the ante so far until it becomes too much. I always suspected Father Ted perfected everything by the third series and that the fourth may have struggled, The Young Offenders may just do similar, not that they have either perfected everything or can even dream of being at the level of Father Ted but the point stands. And time will tell.

Anyway here’s an Irish cartoon which I’ve never watched but which Dermot Morgan does the voice of I assume a duck, as it flies south for winter, with loads of exciting stuff happening in between.

An Actual Pint

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I was going to talk about the football this evening but it was such an absolute shambles of a shit show of a result I would rather not. I’ve felt a bit hungover today and the players played as if they too went to the pub last night for the first time in five months. So I went to the pub for the first time in five months last night then. I didn’t get there until about ten o’clock after I finished work and it was already a little quieter. We sat outside in the beer garden although went inside to order a pint. Had we been earlier we would probably have had to sign in and give some details but by the time we got there it was too late and all the staff appeared shit faced enough not to care. That’s probably not very reassuring lets be honest. I’ll keep an eye on any coughs that develop.

After the first pint I started really enjoying being back in that environment. At first it felt like a slight anti-climax, but thankfully that passed. I had really wanted a pint at some point probably in May but that too passed and I didn’t really give a shit. The idea was to let the idiots all go back first and if everything appeared alright after a while, to cautiously venture in. I kind of did that, probably went back a little earlier than previously planned. In truth though I do enjoy a pub, the feel of a pint of freshly poured beer somehow always tastes better than drinking a can on the sofa. I imagine I’m not the only person out there who started to find that a little tedious.

And that’s that done now. One step closer to what we normally call normality. Maybe this is the new normal the politicians like to refer to. Such a disconcertingly ominous phrase for anyone who’s ever felt slightly paranoid about the potentially sadistic desires of their government. With this mob anything is possible, thankfully an implosion seems more likely but they’ll probably still try to ride out any wave that comes their way. So the new normal it is then. Suspect it’ll just be whatever I decide as usual. At least it was nice to get a pint in me on the way. I also made a barbecue on a wheel barrow today, I enjoyed that, I do enjoy making fire.

It’s Rather Chilli In Here

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Out of a fear of becoming as sensationalised as those I’ve chosen to self-righteously criticise in the past, I’m going to talk about my new chilli. She gave birth. I haven’t named her yet, or her new baby. Would you name a chilli, it would be like naming your chickens before wringing their neck, it just doesn’t feel quite right. Once you give them a name, you give them a character, which in turn adds if not full-on personhood, at least some elements of it. I don’t plan on eating the plant so she, and yes as a bringer of life it’s a she, can have a name but not her baby which I plan on devouring. Apparently it’ s a sweet redskin chilli which means that while my current solitary chilli is green it should not remain so forever. It’s quite big too so I wonder how hot it’ll be when I cook with it. Incidentally I’m this excited over it because I’m sure it was only two days ago, three max, that I last watered and looked at it. Either it grows really fast or I’m far less aware of my surroundings than I previously thought.

I remember when I was in Australia many years ago, after dropping off some friends in Byron Bay I continued my journey down to Melbourne and Tasmania. On the way I stopped in a little garden centre and bought a rainbow chilli plant.

It genuinely looked like that, although much smaller, and it took pride of place on the passenger seat of my car. I nursed it through an aphid infestation and it kept me company on the drive south, like a life force companion. If a pet can replace a human, then this gave a fair shot of doing similar. I don’t think I even ate many of the chilli’s, I certain didn’t eye it up ravenously like I have been the newborn redskin. I looked after it for the last two to three months I was in Australia and then I have no idea what I did with it. I suspect I either planted it, which I doubt, or gave it to a friend. I think the friend option is most likely, and I wonder how they’re both doing.

I’m not sure why I find myself drawn to chilli plants, I don’t feel the need to eat chilli’s especially often but I have had a disproportionate amount of chilli plants. Maybe it’s because they’re so easy to look after, or they don’t take up much space and what fruit they do produce carry’s a hit the equivalent tomato plant for example can’t produce. There was a woman in the next village giving away tomato plants during the lockdown and I still regret not picking on up. I have also got an aubergine plant so I’m really curious to see how she gets on. That will be an exciting and new experience. On a sad note though, my lavender seems to be dying and I can’t work out what has gone wrong. Maybe the solution will be another piece on here.

The Rabbit Hole

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It appears our police tried a George Floyd. After embracing the Yanks and rejecting Huawei we’ve gone all out and taken the knee. Unfortunately that’s no joke as it involved another man’s neck. To add further insult said man was black. I have experienced the British police, not on a regular basis, but I have, and certainly in no way people from poorer communities, be those black or white, have. They’ve been both friendly and truncheon friendly. I won’t defend them. Having been in foreign lands I’ve also experienced foreign police from numerous cultures and I will hold my hands up, the Brits are not the worst. They are not the best, whatever that is, but there are worse out there.

I’m not sure what I make of this kneeing incident. With everything going on this must be possibly the worst moment to do something like that. I wonder what he was thinking, was he conscious of the action or not. The man was handcuffed and restrained, only the policeman will really know whether he felt scared enough to feel it was warranted. And how often do police officers in this country feel it is a necessary action. I genuinely don’t know. How often do security guards or bouncers outside pubs do similar. What I don’t like about this, apart from the obvious, is how we now go about responding to it as a society.

Protests and riots in America were necessary after George Floyd. There was an outpouring of anger and grief. It was the only way anyone in power would listen and anything would happen. Long term let’s see if it all just get’s forgotten about but in the short it shook society to the core. I imagine there will be protests here, how big I don’t know. He didn’t die thankfully otherwise it would have kicked off already. Maybe it has. The police have already chosen their approach by seemingly condemning the act with the Deputy Met Police commissioner describing it as ‘disturbing’ while reiterating of course that it’s not standard police practice or part of training. There are a lot of things they do that aren’t trained, that doesn’t mean they don’t do them regularly.

But then there was a quote on the BBC by a witness; “I was worried he was going to get executed. That’s just how George Floyd got killed”. If the media could come up with a better quote it would win awards. He wasn’t being executed. Words like that are serious, people get executed by police every day around the world. This was not that and to throw something like that out is not only irresponsible, it’s sensationalist and stupid. It’s also how we appear to react to anything in this day and age of outrage. That’s not one spectrum or another, it’s seemingly everyone. I just hope this is debated seriously and we can have conversations which actually lead to something other than a carpet and a brush. I don’t trust the media not to go wild and sex it up for ratings but I just hope we can ignore that long enough to not use it as some kind of societal endorphin hit. I don’t know how much faith I have in this. We appear too far down the rabbit hole already.

Beef Strogayesplease

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I ate a whole beef stroganoff yesterday. I know that doesn’t mean anything. What is a whole version of something that could be any size. But I did. I made it myself too. I enjoy cooking so making that wasn’t an ordeal and although it was my first ever attempt, with a quick skim over a recipe I smashed it. Genuinely it was incredibly tasty. My friend had given me a huge chunk of unsliced sandwich meat a few months ago and I had stored it, along with a few other vital lifesaving things, at the back of my freezer in case of the coronapocalypse. Well that doesn’t look like it’s happening so in my belly it went. I used a whole tub of sour cream which I just checked contained sixty grams of fat and apparently my daily allowance is only seventy. Not that that would stop me repeating it all over again. I also added mushrooms because it wouldn’t be right without them and asparagus because I always like to fuck with recipes. I have a habit of cooking enough for two people every time and usually just eat it all myself. How I’m not a big fatty is beyond me. I wish now I had taken a photo of my delicious creation but I neither planned on writing about it nor am one for taking photos of my dinner. I’ll see what Google has to offer.

Beef stroganoff is something I rarely eat, it is surely some kind of 1970s throwback that has survived to modern times. It does though have an emotional connection in my mind, or heart, or even soul. When I was a young child I used to go with my Grandma to a department store in Edinburgh called Jenners. It is, or at least was to my young mind, quite a respectable and reasonably fancy place. It is massive and appealed, perhaps still does, to a slightly wealthier clientele, especially old women of that generation twenty-five years ago. I suddenly feel old. Where has my life gone. Twenty-five bloody years ago. Gasps for air. Anyway, one of my favourite parts of the day was lunch and it was in the upstairs restaurant that I discovered beef stroganoff for the first time. Red meat, mushrooms and cream. What wasn’t to like. There has forever been a connection and while I have probably had the dish ten times in my life at most, last night was my first attempt at making it myself. I have no idea what my grandma ate all those years ago, but had it been the stroganoff, I’m sure she would have approved of mine.

A Power Play

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There is one thing I enjoyed about not keeping an eye of the rolling news stories and it was that I got less caught up in the party political soap opera of Parliament. We live in a sensationalised world, not just the constant need to excite through 24/7 news channels but through the algorithms on social media that feed us constant anguish and thrills. They know what makes us tick and they’ve tapped into it. It’s so easy when writing this blog just to go onto a news website or see what Facebook has to say, and find enough material in one article on politicians and face masks for example to write something suitably scathing about dithering so called leaders bumbling their way to an end result we don’t notice because we couldn’t actually understand what they were saying. You see I’ve just done it there. It’s just too easy. They’re not inept, they’re incredibly good at what they’re doing, but it’s also obvious and therefore a treasure trove of things to write about.

At what point though do we stop listening and just get on with life. I’ve touched on all this before of course, it’s impossible not to bring up certain themes over again when writing every day. But when do we ignore the theatre of democracy, accept the demos are impotent and watch the shit show go on regardless. I feel powerless, these last five years politically have been incredibly trying and demoralising. Scotland voted no to independence from Britain, England voted yes to independence from the EU and England voted no to the first leader in generations who actually seemed to want to make positive changes to society for people. Instead we overwhelmingly got Boris. As you can see I think we are being dragged down by the English but I’m also wary of putting a single egg in a nationalist basket even if it is one promising liberation over subjugation. Politics has moved to the right and while there are signs of it’s coming back to, well, the centre-right, I am not filed with confidence.

Which means I am at the point of being defeated. Or maybe I already have, maybe that happened ten years ago when I naively thought myself an environmental activists and nothing changed. Of course I’m not defeated, I wouldn’t be writing this if I was, but this is no rallying call. I’m not all of a sudden going to build some ramparts and run up them. It is an acknowledgement though that there are people out there, people much smarter and with far more determination than me fighting for and enacting change. There’s a reason we don’t have a twelve hour work day and it’s not because of keyboard warriors like me. But then again everyone at all levels is important, even those blindly repeating lies and rhetoric in the cesspit at the bottom. If I believe in a holistic approach to the health of our bodies, why not believe it for the health of our societies. We are not just a series of strata within a hierarchy of power, that is not a healthy society. That is power, that is personal self-interest and that is exactly what we are hooked on with party politics. How can society nurture it’s people when it’s leader’s focus is ultimately themselves. While it is time to take the power back, it’s probably more the time to readdress our understanding and relationship with power generally. It is just a word and a concept after all, it’s down to us what we make of it.

A Few Things Today

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I’ve been having one of those ridiculous computer days in which nothing seems to work. I’ve held out from downloading Microsoft Office for a while now and stuck with LibreOffice which is open source and free to download. Unfortunately for the sake of work I can hold out no more. I bought Office 2019 from a website in which you just buy the key for the product, it’s about a fifth of the price on this website and I’ve used it before for the 2016 version. Anyway, for some reason I can’t download 2019 and am now stuck with 2016 and have no idea if I’m just using my old one which I thought was one use and is on my old computer or whether somehow something else has happened. I don’t even know if I go with the vague ‘something else’ because I’m completely lost and it all just seems beyond me today. This is probably one of the least interesting things I’ve ever had to share on here but I feel I need to calmly vent the last two hours struggles.

I’m also going to plug what I think appears to be something akin to an online chat discussion with the anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber and the editor of bi-monthly magazine The Idler, Tom Hodgkinson. I think I’ve mentioned this magazine before and how I felt it represented a world of southern English middle class success, despite being fundamentally based on an anti-capitalist understanding of the world, which I didn’t quite feel I connected with. It is a great magazine and I enjoyed it despite this, so I’m going to listen to them chatting with someone who is pretty renowned in the world of politics I like to feel a connection with. A drink with the Idler and David Graeber then, it’s free but you need to register for a ticket. This Thursday from 6pm – 7pm and it will be my first experience of Zoom which should be interesting. I really hope someone gets naked and does something shocking. I also hope the discussion is as interesting. Maybe I’ll see you there.

And finally in equally unrelated news, Wigan Athletic won 8-0 tonight against Hull City and are now eleven points clear of the relegation zone. Having gone into administration a few weeks ago in circumstances which are still not entirely clear but give off the impression of brown paper bags, corruption and a company being broken up for someones profit, they will be deducted twelve points at the end of the season. This punishment for going into administration would ordinarily relegate them but for the sake of integrity and morality them staying up despite the deduction will be like a big fuck you to all involved. A small northern working town giving the finger.

BR#9 – Accidental Death Of An Anarchist

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Another new playwright has crossed my path. Dario Fo wrote Accidental Death Of An Anarchist in response to the 1969 death of an anarchist in police custody Milan. He had been accused of the bombing of the Agricultural Bank which had resulted in the deaths of sixteen people. While in custody he, according to the official account at the time, committed suicide by jumping out of the window on the fourth floor of the police headquarters. Ten years later three fascists were convicted of the crime, some of whom were agents of the secret police, and in court proceedings it was determined that the major actors behind the bombing had been senior ministers and Generals who were condemned before being acquitted. The state once more protected it’s own while allowing those at the bottom who actually committed the act itself to go down for it. The play was written prior to this final outcome and was partly in response to a dearth of reporting from both sides of the political spectrum, the right-wing for obvious reasons and the Communists because they’re little more than power hungry political stooges themselves.

The play is set one week after the event and Fo uses the character titled Maniac to highlight the ridiculous nature of the police account of events, their incompetence and as a vehicle to get his political message across. I’m sure there’s a name for this type of character in a play but I forget what I learnt in school. While serious and dry approaches to storytelling always have their place, there is a particular way satire manages to express an idea and create an understanding in the audience. It is more accessible, despite it being on a serious topic comedy allows people to take it in without feeling they need to immediately react in a serious manner. Fo does this expertly and through his use of the Maniac manages to create a situation in which the police expose their own corruption and the left wing reporter her own hypocrisy.

To quote the Maniac in one of his more lucid moments;

“Why not ask yourself, Miss Feletti, what sort of democracy requires the services of dogs such as these? I’ll tell you. Bourgeois democracy which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class fail to silence ours demands, when they have put the population on the dole queue and squeezed the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises, and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them; well then they shed their skins and dump you, as they did in Chile*, and set their wildest dogs loose on us all”

*While events in Chile happened after the original was written, the text I read from was translated and adapted in the 1980s hence the reference.

Big Jack

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I know I’m about twenty-four hours late but it’s like that. Jack Charlton died yesterday, and while you take note of some of the ex-footballers who die over the years, Big Jack is one you not only remember but feel loss over. Some of my earliest footballing memories are in the first few years of the 1990s, my first being in the 1990 World Cup. During those early years he was in charge of the Irish, a country I’ve an affinity with through my Granddad. I have strong memories of that time and in particular of a man adored. I don’t remember much if any of the football but at that age you are only aware of personalities. He was certainly one of them. Even then very little of his personality has stuck in my mind, bar him fishing strangely enough, so you’re stuck with this idea that evolves into whatever it is I feel now.

He was born in Ashington. A northern working class town with a mining history that is about forty-five minutes from me and in which I deliver bread three times a week. I know this part of the world. There are lots of cliches about tough working men from the north but you can’t help feel this was a world he came from and epitomised. He said he couldn’t return to Ashington without succeeding in football, he would have been seen a failure. For all the ability, the drive must never be overlooked. You wonder if what appeared a fun, happy character below the hard enforcer he was, came from realising he had succeeded. There seems an appreciation.

Of course I’m very familiar with England’s 1966 World Cup triumph but being Scottish it’s hardly something I’ve looked on in celebration. Jack and his brother Bobby are probably the only two players I’ve much interest in, Bobby through his association with Manchester United, but Jack most likely through his association with my earliest footballing memories. He played for Leeds United who are one of Manchester United’s fiercest rivals. I quite like that he did, that he spent his whole career there during arguably their best ever period and that he was a part of that. This wasn’t just a character or a good manager, he was a bloody good player in his day.

This was Big Jack Charlton who died yesterday at the age of eighty-five. A genuine legend.