Barefoot Reporting: January 2010

As you might have guessed from the last post, I'm doing a bit of thinking about why I'm writing this blog, which began by accident in January 2009. This is how it started:

I joined the process described below about a week after it had begun, so my knowledge of the very first part is sketchy. What would be really great is if the fine people who got it going approached me so I could interview them and fill the gaps. I think it's important we get a better picture of how the (absolutely amazing) Red Brick Building campaign started. You guys were really, really great.

The South West Regional Development Agency tried a grubby little trick in order to demolish a building on the Morlands site - The Red Brick Building - which had been, firmly but indirectly, promised to the community. A few days before Christmas 2008, they put a fence around it. The Central Somerset Gazette ran an innocuous-sounding story - which I read - about SWRDA's plans. It was to come down on the 8th of January.

The timing seemed a bit off to me. It's a way of wriggling out of a promise to a community. It's done during a holiday period because there are large numbers of people who either have dysfunctional families driving them half mad, successful consumer-types busy as fuck with all the crap they're gonna buy, and happy families really only wanting one thing: to be together. Everyone - rich, poor, happy, miserable, from wherever, I mean everyone! - knows deep within themselves how important our families are. Who really wants to lose the time to be with them, because of a broken promise made by someone you don't know?

The only people who use a trick like that are politicians or apparatchiks whose sense of honour is about equal to that of a pickpocket.

[Aside: Yes, happy families do exist - Glastonbury is blessed with a large number where their happiness is obvious, because everything about them is just so naturally and easily beautiful. They're really great to have around.]

I've seen this sort of thing done before, in Copenhagen. A 12-acre area of high-quality disused factory buildings was levelled in 3 days while everyone was on summer holiday. The mayor called an extraordinary meeting, rammed the plan through in Thursday afternoon, the bulldozers moved in Monday and that was that. Those buildings were really damn good buildings and the project to restore and develop them would have totally revitalised that part of town. Everyone I knew was gutted. By the way: the cleanup took 6 months, but it only took them 3 days to smash them up.

The 'trigger' for me to get involved was when I learned that the SWRDA employee responsible was on holiday until - surprise! - the 8th of January. Sneaky buggers - that was no coincidence. But we saved The Red Brick Building! That name must really irritate some of the Nasty Party round here. (I almost wrote 'lol' at the end of that sentence, lol)

What SWRDA didn't know was that a group of fine young people had formed a relationship with it. About a dozen students from Strode College, and a few others, all about 15 to maybe 19 years old, had been using the space to get together for more than a year. They hadn't done much to it but they had tidied up and made a really good space, albeit cold and draughty in winter. That was because the roofs leaked and most of the windows were broken.

They squatted it in protest and I went to visit them. I was homeless, sleeping in a tent in a barn at the time, but I did have an office (which I shared with 'dynamic duo' Linda Hull and Caroline Lewis, both of Somerset Community Food) from which I did a bit of web design, pc maintenance, and programming. I didn't tell anyone I was homeless until the protest was over: I didn't want anyone to think I was just looking for a place to sleep, and I never stayed there overnight. I'm actually very good at being homeless. It's a real skill and teaches you a lot about yourself and the people around you. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for me it was tremendously cleansing.

From my office, I began to blog about the protest at the address makemorelandsbetter.blogspot.com. I did my best to help the protestors and ask questions of the politicians and others. I know for a fact that they were reading what I wrote, and it makes me very happy to have played a small part in helping our community. It's been a privilege.

After a while, I moved the blog to this address. When the protest was successful and the flow of news dried up, it became a personal project. You can read it all again here.

This, however, is the beginning of a very different story, one with a vision. It's a very personal story and all the facts are true. Some of it's about me, because it contains my thoughts and a bit of not altogether non-cathartic personal history. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't write and publish it.

I was born in 1959 as the youngest of seven children. My father had his 60th birthday four days after I was born, and my mother was about 42 or so. My father wasn't a good provider and my elder siblings, the eldest 17 years older than myself, grew up in post-war austerity in a poor area of south-east London which had seen a fair bit of bombing during the war because of a large army garrison and a munitions factory nearby.

My father wasn't very supportive of my mother. He saw women as possessions. He saw boys as competitors. In many ways he was an intelligent man who'd lived through hard times and didn't do that well. One thing that stands out to me now is that he had no friends, and no social life whatsoever, outside the 4-bedroomed ground floor pressure cooker of a flat all 9 of us lived in when I was born.

I bet you're thinking of the Monty Pythons 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch right now...but it wasn't like that. My early life wasn't really all that bad on a material level. We weren't rich but we didn't go hungry, I was kept clean, I went to school every day, I certainly didn't have nervous adults stopping me from climbing trees and taking risks and I had friends.

Emotionally, it was a different picture. I don't remember any events involving my mother, so this is patchy. She'd had a rough time. One of the reasons she moved in with my father was stark and simple: survival. She was in her 20s in the early years of WWII and was married to a man who was away from home in the military. When he came back, she had a young baby, and simple arithmetic convinced him he wasn't the father. He shunned her and in those times, to be a single woman with a child, for whatever reason, was to be despised and excluded.

She met my father, who was 20 years older, in the NAAFI at Blackheath where he was in the Home Guard on some sort of anti-aircraft duty. He took her in, but refused to let her bring her child with her. What kind of a man does that?

The reason I'm telling you this is to explain the stress my mother had to live with, and how it must have snapped what was undoubtedly a fragile, loving mind. I am now sure, in my own feelings and sense-memories, that she loved us as best she could, and on a good day, could be a lot of fun. She hurt many of her other children - my brothers and sisters. That's what very wounded people often do. She must have suffered terribly. She had stolen and been to prison for it, more than once, I believe.

She left the family 8 days before my first birthday and I have never seen her, not even in a photograph, since then. The pain, anger and fear of a small, frightened, unloved child has been at the core of my existence for 49 years, until recently. That sort of thing doesn't exactly make you a successful human being and the way I have dealt with the numerous challenges that have come my way has often cemented my false self-image and made me, and others, suffer.

The pain has now gone and my heart has opened. I've been trying for years to get over the top of that sad old hill and now I'm on the other side. For the first time in almost 50 years, I am happy, and able to give and receive love without feeling that old pain. Most of the time, I gave none and received none, because it hurt too much. That's gone, it's past, I can finally bring love to that memory and start healing.

There are many wonderful, loving people in this town, and I have received so much help from their caring attention. However, one in particular stands out, head and shoulders above the rest, and it is her love, inspiration and sheer beauty that has inspired me and healed me. I don't want to start analysing how she does what she does, but she's very easy to love. She has opened my heart to love and that is the greatest gift of all. I love her without reserve or limitation and her ability to wake and inspire the 'loving me' has enabled me to drop my own barriers to healing, which, unhealed, would have most certainly led me to destroy what promises to be a beautiful relationship. But, as she wisely says, 'it's still like an egg with a soft shell' so no more about that. Thank you - you know who you are - so much for being you. I love you.

No matter what happens, I will always feel her in my heart. 49 years is a long time.

Towards a Spiritual Politics

It has long been clear to me that, beyond a certain point, material goods do not make us happy. I believe that most people instinctively know this to be true. And yet we are living in a society where the vast majority of us are driven to acquire more, better, cheaper, and faster. Better is OK and cheaper is too - maybe - but the 'more' bit has reached a point where it's causing us all sorts of problems. Worst of all is the individualistic urge to acquire which has been shaped and exploited very cleverly to the point where most of us have chosen debt as a form of voluntary slavery.

Having said that, not all debt is bad. If I have the skill to fix a bicycle and take pleasure in the doing, and I can borrow my way to a workshop, I have gained employment and an income, my family's material needs are met, the community has reliable, cheap and healthy transport, and I am happier. The debt was a burden but wealth - economic and social, for the community and the individual - has been created. Paying the debt back releases those funds into the community again where they can be of benefit. If I need to learn a skill, a debt can also be self-cancelling, but more about that later.

We have four basic needs. These are, in order of priority, survival, security, independence and a fourth which some might call self-actualisation. It's no accident that some things are crop up in all societies and cultures at all times, and everywhere. One of them is music. The other is what we we might call Spirituality. I'm writing this with a capital S so you know I'm not using it as a general term and will expand upon that subject later.

Once our material needs are met, in such was that we can count on them being met in the future, and the cost does not involve any form of slavery or 'voluntary coercion,' it is my firm belief that our finest purpose as human beings is to live a spiritual life. I don't mean in a monastery or even involving organised religion, but as something we can both study and express as part of our everyday lives.

I will attempt to describe how we can realise this.

To Be Continued

Barefoot Reporting

Sunday, 31 January 2010

Who gives a toss? I do!

Monday, 25 January 2010

So who gives a toss?

Monday, 18 January 2010

Tesno, Newport Pagnell

Saturday, 16 January 2010

What a silly comment

The Trap - Adam Curtis documentary series

copyleft/copywrong stuff...