Apologia Absurdum

A brief apology and explanation to regular readers....

This blog, if I am honest, started as something to do because I missed the buzz of writing for print journals but was in no position to do much about that. This year, for various reasons, I started looking again and, coincidentally, also started getting more requests.

The upshot is I now have regular spots in two more publications, as well as the column in the bi-monthly which originally gave this blog a name and some sort of focus. I am also likely to add to that by next year. Seems it isn't just you nice folk who share my odd obsession for knowing what the religious lunatic fringe and other puritans get up to outside of London or Texas.

I will be continuing here, but it might be restricted to, say, a short weekly comment as things pick up. Hope that meets with your approval, and thanks for encouraging me to keep cranking stuff out in lean times.

Happy holiday

I’ve just wasted an entire afternoon of my precious holidays, in which all I learnt was that my daughter can pull side-splittingly funny faces at the drop of a hat.

The serious intent was to get an ‘informal’ photo of me in my workaday suit. This at the behest of some marketing consultants who decided that, in order to emphasise we work for a ‘people company’, my fellow employees and I should provide mug shots for the corporate website. Naturally, we had to arrange these in our own time, with our own resources, because the ‘creatives’ who thought the whole imbecilic scheme up had other worries - getting dressed in the morning without professional help, for example.

In addition, said ‘creatives’ also provided a shopping list of ‘wants’, from format to maximum file size, resolution, etc. etc., from which I suspect they also can’t use a camera and definitely can’t use Photoshop, which might also explain why they haven’t arranged to take the piccies themselves. Alternatively, it might just be that being such clueless numpties they never thought of it.

As I don’t own a digital camera, I decided the safest bet was to ask the nearest acquaintance with the most expensive digital camera apparatus. Bish, Bash, Bosh. Done in about two minutes, e-mail to my office, change back into a human being and head off for an ice-cream with the light of my life – or so I thought.

 It quickly became obvious that the reason those with more money than sense buy expensive designer techno toys for art ‘projects’ is that they cannot use the cheap and cheerful stuff with which amateurs (who know and love what they do) create art that brightens up your life if they give you it (rather than wondering how quickly you can bung it in a dustbin without upsetting the creator).

A few minutes in and I was already a nervous wreck, which was when I had the bright idea of asking my girl to pull faces behind the photographer, so I’d smile to order instead of steaming at the ears. It worked a treat, shot after wasted shot after shot as we fell about laughing until we had one to provide the required impression of a suited chimp on Prozac the management and their pet airheads ordered.

At which point it was time to fire up the equally expensive computer gizmos on which the mug shot would be processed and e-mailed to me. It then became obvious that we could have produced it with a pinhole camera, developed it and sent it by pony faster than just finding the right file type and folder to save the first shot to computer –never mind the tricky stuff.

To cut a long story short, the results took hours and are not useable, so tomorrow we try again. This time at my wife’s lower-tec workplace, where they may have no branding team but have offered to snap me with any cheap camera handy, transfer it to a computer and e-mail it to me all within a tea-break.

The drag is I have to don the straitjacket again and waste more time when my daughter and I should just be enjoying our respective holidays from duller places. The brighter side is a whole new audience gets to see her amazing and spontaneous face-pulling, as do my wife and I.

And if, by chance, she ever runs out of new and startling faces, I can always get the required smile imagining an entire marketing team falling under a bus instead.

Clocking on

On August 6th, just before being dragged away reluctantly to warmer, more vibrant places for a while, I wrote that: “The optimist in me hopes I'll come back a chilled, kinder, less irritable person determined to spread only positive vibes…..”
It wasn’t just that the balance between the precious benefits of the quieter pace of life over here and the inescapable price (having to work in a sick industry which offers the only local employment) was getting out of kilter.
It wasn’t just the knowledge that (as the Manx education system is as riddled with small town prejudice and superstition as anything else) working parents with no link to the richest, thickest inbreeds need to take on the real education of our children, and treat ‘school’ as little more than a child-minding service where the kids try not to go to sleep while we’re away at work
It was also the reality kicking in that family responsibilities to relatives whose health is fast failing mean yet less time from now on for activities that actually interest me.
And the further knowledge that, even while away and theoretically on holiday, we’d probably be drawn into the lives of others whose problems dwarf our own.
Like the calm, unassuming folk who the drunk or loony always sits next to on the bus, me and the Mrs just seem to be magnets for anyone who can’t or won’t open up to ‘normal’ people or ‘proper’ family. Usually we don’t mind - and sometimes we even tap into something richer we would otherwise never have experienced - but even Nobel Peace Prize winners need a day off.
Well, I’m back on the Rock. Have been for a few days, actually, but still couldn’t bring myself round to blogging again.
Why?
Well, probably because (having studiously avoided the internet whilst away) I found nothing had moved on when finally checking back in here last week.
And I do mean nothing! Do the Toytown windbags who dominate the local media really think anything they have to say is of importance to anyone with more than a double figure IQ?
Really?
Seriously?
And probably because I have not even looked at a computer in almost three weeks yet the sky has not caved in. This brought home to me that, while 99% of anything on the Isle of Man is nonsense I didn’t miss, 99.999% of anything on the internet in general is mind-rotting twaddle exchanged between losers who seriously need to get a life instead.
And probably because the optimist in me did triumph over the blue meanies which dwell on the bad stuff, and though the problems of others did eat into time I’d rather have spent lounging under a tree reading a funny book it didn’t matter. Because the folk with problems were folk I love and want to see happier, and because I only had room for one funny book in my hand luggage anyway.
So..... chilled, kinder, less irritable, determined to spread only positive vibes?
Yes, I think so.
Mind you, I only actually go back to work tomorrow, so better give it until the weekend to be sure!

Faith, Hope and (maybe) some Clarity

Some days you start to think Ireland may finally be over Dark Age superstitions.
And other days you read garbage like http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/david-quinn-why-there-were-no-atheists-in-the-mine-2380534.html in what is, supposedly, the shiny modern end of the Irish media.
And Irish people complain because the world jokes about their intellect!
Of course, the biggest joke is that if Chilean Catholicism’s favourite son, Pinochet, had still been alive and in charge he’d have demonstrated his ‘faith’ by shutting the mine, engineering a media blackout (not that the current media frenzy in reality amounts to objective journalism), leaving it for God to sort out & opening another bottle of shampoo with whichever cardinal he was collaborating with to move local money out of the country and into a Swiss bank account.
Then again, Ireland doesn’t have a mining industry, so what would this pillock know about mining communities and their legendary ability to pull together against adversity and injustice? As a far more on the ball Liverpool fan put it the other day, for instance, can you imagine Thatcher’s rage knowing the only news stories in town on her 85th birthday involved miners and Scousers?
Because the UK also had a mining industry – once, before Thatcher – and UK mining communities also know all about the tragedy of underground disasters, the bravery of work colleagues and solidarity of families, friends and neighbours. Especially in the face of government neglect, or government spin merchants trying to steer the media away from the mismanagement of nationalised industries, a total disinterest in safety measures or the destruction of whole communities.
And I also suspect that, if only anyone in the media can see past the spin, there’ll be more stories like http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9785/ , which gives a far better picture of the true relationship between mineworkers and ‘management experts’, and a far warmer picture of the true nature of workplace solidarity. Very similar, in fact, to many of the tales I heard from those in the mining and steelworking community where I grew up.
And interestingly, I can also recall a far more positive image of a mines safety engineer, and how his faith shaped his work, his relationships with the local community and in particular his determination to do his best for other miners.
This engineer was a man called Jack Smith – an almost cartoonish stereotype of a miner. Face streaked with coal dust, rode everywhere on an old Raleigh bike and wore a donkey jacket every day of the week except Sunday, when he wore his Salvation Army uniform and played in the band with my Dad and Granddad.
You’d never have guessed from Jack’s broad Derbyshire accent, modest dress and house, or the lack of a car, that he had a B.Sc. and was one of the key safety advisors in the local mine. He got his degree the hard way, mostly through night school, only studied because it was the best way he knew how to look after his fellow miners, never left the same street as his former shiftmates. He was the man who persuaded my Dad (who’d left grammar school at 15 because his teacher said kids from council estates didn’t go to uni) and also me (same story but 16 in my case) that being ‘educated’ didn’t mean being middle class, didn’t mean walking away from your community. In fact, if you were determined enough, it could mean you could contribute more to it.
Jack had some disappointment later in his life. Joyce, his daughter, threw away a good education to marry some drunken waster of a Scouse actor. A total chancer whose family, even after this loser supposedly divorced her, managed to keep Jack’s daughter, and later his grand-daughter, away from Jack’s positive influence.
Thankfully, Jack was long gone by the time his grand-daughter, another bright girl, had married a similar chancer (this time a former public schoolboy) who went into politics. In fact, if Jack ever knew how Tony and Cherie Blair went on to betray absolutely every value he held dear, even Jack might have lost his faith.
That’s right. Despite Cherie Booth/Blair’s famous commitment to Catholicism, her real intellect and drive came from a side of the family and a tradition that has been edited out of history. A Derbyshire miner, a Salvationist, a pillar of his community and lifelong Labour supporter of the sort Thatcher crippled when she shut the mines, and New Labour finally killed off.
Jack would have understood the solidarity and faith of the Chilean miners, would have been first down the mine to help them out if necessary, but (it is far more likely) would have fought tooth and nail to ensure they were never exposed in the first place to such criminal working conditions and destruction of community. Crimes which the Chilean government, burying all analysis of the true nature of mining community solidarity with all those fairy tales about religious faith, is trying hard to ensure we never hear about.