September 2014 – Writer-insighter

NHS – a breach of trust

Contract by contract, one reorganisation at a time, the NHS is being rearranged so that it can’t really do anything that would warrant the word ‘national’ in the title. Where I work, in a mental health foundation, services are split not just between two counties but into different parts within the same county. The level of service is not the same.

A lot of the time services have to be outsourced to external organisations, ‘third sector’ charities using sometimes untrained staff on lower wages as well as the SERCO/G4S end of the commercial spectrum who can also spectacularly undercut NHS bids for contracts by using minimum wage staff on zero hours contracts. SERCO has an operating profit target of 6% instead of the NHS’s 20% to 25%. The NHS profit goes on training. SERCO get the trained staff free, inherited from the NHS until they leave.

Everything has to be tendered. If you want ambulances the NHS ambulance service has to bid for the work. If you want community services, or a drug and alcohol treatment service, that has to go out to tender as well. The fact that the services my hospital can offer have been pared to the minimum and each NHS Trust has to compete against other N HS Trusts makes it easy to pick off the contracts one by one, leading to more closures and cuts as there are fewer and fewer NHS patients to cater for. There are more patients, or service users as they’re supposed to be called, overall, but not for the NHS. SERCO et al got those. You don’t see this on the news for the same reason there will be no massive NHS Privatisation Act; it’s already being done, without fanfare and so far as I can see, without any media paying much attention at all. Or maybe they know all about it and think as it’s the government doing it then it must be a good thing.

I think of it as a breach of trust. The NHS was not set up to work like this, which is why it doesn’t work like this and this is being done deliberately, to “prove” it doesn’t work and justify the cheery picking break-up of services so that the NHS is left with the difficult and expensive things to do and everything else can be jobbed off to the cheapest bid.

The easy things, for example. But private contractors breach trust even with these. My hospital jobbed off its wages administration to a private contractor for the usual reasons: it was supposed to be done better and cheaper and more competitively, because everyone knows that private contractors work that way and nationalised industries don’t. It’s gospel, since 1979 and you won’t find many MPs in any party who say otherwise.

Quite why that means everybody at my hospital has to chase their wages almost every month isn’t clear. People only go to work for somebody else in the expectation they get paid. Otherwise they might as well work for themselves. So when wages aren’t paid on time, when you have to phone up to ask when you’ll get the money for the job you’ve done, when you’ve learned there’s never, ever any point in asking why your wages haven’t been paid because there’s never any reason that you’re going to be told other than ‘we felt like getting some more interest on the money in our account instead of paying it out to people like you,’ or ‘you know all that stuff about how we’re more effciient? That was just crap we said to get the business,” and you certainly won’t be told either of those things, at least one of which is true by definition at any given time, the privatisation work is petty much done. Hardly anybody wants to work there. Simple because it takes more to build trust than simply putting it in your name. Obviously the new chairman is looking into this as a matter of urgency. I wonder if he’s paid on time?

The complete Will Self DIY kit

Want to be rich and famous but you’re afraid of looking needy and greedy? Want to do that reassuring fireside chats thing, be cool and so smokiiiiin’ that your shorts burst into flame, all at the same time?

You too can be a famous Cuddly-Dissolute™ journalist/Have I Got News For You guest, go-to drugs authority/working journo me dear star. Just follow these ten golden rules and you too can get a little byline with a picture that looks as if it captures that nanosecond when you realise there was a wasp on that ice lolly you just bit into.

How To Write the Complete DIY Will Self Article:

1) Put a dateline in. It’s like journos used to do. Older means authoritative.

2) But you don’t want to seem too old, so put the mandatory drugs reference in the first paragraph. That makes you down widda kidz innit.

3) Do be careful with drugs. You don’t want people thinking you just wanted to get off your face like some loser in a council flat so make sure that drugs reference is an acronym of some kind. MDMA = good. Draw = I’m sorry, but you can’t put that in a respectable Will Self story.

4) Irony call – get this in early too, you don’t want people to think you actually LIKE the quite nice sounding place you’ve ended up reporting from, unless you can make it look as if you’re only liking it ironically. When you write, use words that sound as if your mouth is tight and turned down and that’ll be about right.

5) Synapses. They can fire, miss, implode, spurt, scream, anything you want them to do, but it is absolutely imperative to get them in there somehow, just to make sure people don’t think (3) or that you are or were some trash junky mess-up instead of a hip gunslinger way out there on the frontier, a sort of British Hunter Thompson, if Hunter Thompson had lived in Swindon, worked on the Wiltshire Times and hired a moped.

6) Key words and phrases to include: dickhead; capitalism’s blitzkrieg; millennium, moronic, at least one other highly specific drug reference, something about the 1980s, Comrade Stalin, hip, zeitgeist, unalloyed genius and at least one ‘high-culture’ icon, like Michaelangelo for example. Dante would do at a pinch.

7) Make sure if you do write ‘high-culture’ you put it in ironic inverted commas so that people know you know it is. Otherwise, no sorry, the thought alone is too hideous.

8) Get a pretendy swearword in towards the end, e.g. Hell. It keeps them reading. And you look hip as Hell. Also you’re obviously being ironic in using the word, so doubleplusgood.

9) Use doubleplusgood and/or Nadsat droogspeak if you can, but make sure they know you’re being ironic. Again.

10) The Faux-Humble Fake Letter From America. “And in the end” is a good way of rounding it off, especially as it’s got ‘in the end’ in, making it circular and oh look, ironic.

You’ll make a fortune. Just as soon as Will Self ironically shuffles off his mortal coil, comrade.

High on a hill

There is a green hill far away. We sang about it in Sunday school, but it’s more true now then when I first sang it, back where all the hills were green and not far away at all, just a cycle ride away.

I wrote this today about something over a year ago. I don’t know if it works or not. I thought it did when I wrote it.

This is the place I grew up, the place I'm from, this land of green hills far away. But somehow, very close to me all the time. — This is the place I grew up, the place I’m from, this land of green hills far away. But somehow very close to me all the time.

High On a Green Hill

I met her in a pub when we were younger

Half our lives away; I met her on Facebook when she was ill.

I gave her a book of mine to read, while she lay

Under a blanket in the chill of an Andalucian winter,

Thick patterned wool around her thin shoulders,

Cold tiles under her long feet. She had a plan

To start a marmalade factory but something happened

To the farmers collective or the orange crop,

I didn’t really know.

And then there was the husband

And then there was the son and it was complicated,

You know how it goes sometimes.

I thought of her all that winter, pale and cold

Her light burning lower.

You can die when you’re our age.

Or anytime, it’s just we know that now.

She had pneumonia, she had blood tests,

She thought she had something else and

We shared the great day when she could walk in the sun

Three clicks to the village and rest and back again

On her own, by email, the way people do now.

After the marmalada corporation somehow didn’t happen

We met face-to-face the second time in our lives;

A university reunion.

She was the only reason I wanted to go.

She didn’t drink any more.

I was about ten years too late for that plan

But I didn’t know that when I offered her a glass of wine

And as she said “if I drink I have no limits,”

As I tried so hard to catch the waiter’s eye

For a whole bottle her friend kicked my leg under the table,

Hard and then harder until she said

“And this time I’ll probably die, so no,

I won’t have a drink. Thanks.”

She drank fizzy water.

Apparently there are different tastes,

Just not the ones I thought she meant.

We ate while I tried to hide the tinted sin of my glass

And talked and went quite early to our separate rooms.

When someone doesn’t drink, what else do you do?

But in the morning, fresh, we walked through sacred damp Bath

To the café I’d found that I thought she might like.

And she did. And I did, when the waitress assumed

She was my wife. It felt like it could have gone that way,

In a different life. After breakfast we walked along the canal,

Early Spring and suddenly it’s May and maybe,

Just maybe everything would turn out ok and

After she told me where she’d been and I didn’t need

Or even want to top her stories and win,

Because just walking there with her,

It felt as if I had for once,

As if I’d already won,

Although what that was

I didn’t really know.

She played electric bass and me, I played

A bit of guitar and sax.

Our first gig was outside the city, later.

I thought I’d need to drink but somehow I didn’t.

In the shadow of a church up there on the hill,

In the mist outside the pub door.

I didn’t finish my drink, blowing warm

If not hot and maybe close to cool.

She was taking a taxi to the airport at four.

After we’d all judged the gig a total success

And packed away our rocknroll music stands,

Our funky bifocal reading glasses,

She zipped her Hofner into its flight case

As I said don’t call it, I’ll drive you there

And she said ok. We both knew

It wasn’t really the right direction

But part of her wanted to stay.

A little bit. Just a little bit.

We bought factory-made hummus

Second-hand in a Sunday supermarket,

Some grapes and bread on its sell-by date,

Flavoured water I’d never drunk,

Something with a hint of lime and ate

Parked on a grass verge in my car,

High on a green hill in the sluicing rain,

Next to a stone barn grey against the black sky,

The food unimportant until it was time

For her to catch her plane, nearly,

Or anyway drive her to the airport.

We parked again and haggled again

Over petrol money I didn’t want from her,

Paid the car park, carried her bags

Then watched her smoke a cigarette outside.

Before we hung around Departures

Until it really was time for her to go.

We’ll do it again some time.

All of us, maybe. Sooner than before

We’ll be high on a green hill again.

That is the way it is in the mountains

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

The best way to find out if you can trust anybody is to trust them.

All you have to do is write a true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

The first draft of anything is shit.

This isn’t my stuff, you know.

These are Hemingway quotes. And maybe like a lot of people, he’s been one of those writers you sort of know for so long that you can’t decide if he’s any good or not.

Fiesta

I read Fiesta when I was about twenty-four, only a bit younger than the character with the mysterious wound would probably have been, if it was set in the 1920s and he’d got shot wherever he’d got shot (Vimy Ridge, if you’ll pardon the expression?) in the Great War. Just to clarify, it was alternatively titled The Sun Also Rises, about a man who keeps coming across some English posh totty in Paris. Except he can’t seem to actually do that. And she isn’t sure she wants him to either, but she’s also not really sure she doesn’t and they sort of go on holiday with their friends except she’s not really with him you know, you do know that, I mean we had this talk, didn’t we? We said. And all the usual blah that anyone in their early twenties who drinks too much in a city can relate to. I loved that book.

At school I’d found a copy of something Hemingway did about a fish and an old man, and got through something he wrote about the Italian campaign in WWI, parts of which I recycled for O Level History which as nobody else even knew there was any fighting in Italy in WWI except probably Gino Petrillo and he was in a different class made me seem particularly knowledgeable.

I liked that whisky and guns and typewriters things, the more so because I was hugely into Hunter Thompson to the extent that I tracked him to his lair in Woody Creek. Depressingly, that’s actually true, but this isn’t the time for my Hunter Thompson and me party piece. Later.

I didn’t like the fact that like Richard Brautigan who lived in the same place, like Thompson who also once lived up on the California coast, all three of them shot themselves to death coincidentally or by design. In Thompson’s case, I’d suspect by design.

But that huge big gun big life thing, I didn’t really get off on that a lot. Nor did someone I used to know. She had to write about Hemingway at university and what with drinking and shagging and all the other things to do she couldn’t quite bring herself to read about a fat old man who hated himself, or anything he’d written. The day of the exam she skimmed through the covers of a few Hemingway titles and read no more than about twenty pages, at random. And blagged it. She’d got the gist of the plot and did much the same as I did in History O Level – stuck stuff in that was tangential and vaguely relevant. Whenever she got stuck she’d introduce a “Hemingway quote.”

The inverted commas are because she made it up. She couldn’t remember any real Hemingway quotes so she made up a bullshit, sparse, macho one instead. “That is the way it is in the mountains.” Sometimes with a comma, but more often not.

You bleed, writing about a bank manager taking a long time catching a fish on holiday. You write the truest thing you know about someone cadging doughnuts in a MidWest coffeeshop. OK. That’s probably why she got hugely good marks for her paper and something of a reputation of a Hemingway scholar for the rest of the term.

That is the way it is, in the mountains.

Guns, bombs and toilet bowls

A teacher in America was shot by her own gun when she went to the loo, according to the BBC. But the BBC isn’t what it used to be when Val and John and Bill & Ben ruled the airwaves. Right at the end of the tabloid story the BBC says basically, everything you just read was bullshit. We made it up. Yes, there was a teacher. Yes, she had a gun and went to the loo, or as she was American, the bayathrum. Yes, the gun went off when she didn’t mean it to. But it didn’t shoot her. It shot the toilet bowl. That’s what put her in hospital.

If that sounds unlikely, believe. And I know, because I was that soldier. Well, if not that soldier, certainly another toilet bowl victim.

And Scalextrix

It didn't have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad. — It didn’t have all that fancy digital stuff when I were a lad.

It was all a long time ago. I was living in London and had a job I hated and I’d been to some business exhibition down in Earls Court or somewhere. They were interchangeable. The only reason anyone went was because they had to and in those days they were full of free drinks. Maybe they still are.

Apart from alcohol one of the stalls had a Scalextrix track. If you don’t know it, it was plastic track with metal strips in that carried 12 volt current that worked electric racing cars, until they usually spun across the room on the corners because you’d been going too fast down the straight. Eeeh, we had proper toys in them days. Every male child was obliged by law to own a set, even though nobody really knew whether you pronounced the first X or not. The deal on the stall was simple. Win the race, win a bottle of champagne. With the cunning of the truly drunk I remembered the tortoise and the hare. Thinking that you’d lose more time retrieving the car and putting it back on the track if it spun off I just drove it sedately around the track. Which worked. Free champagne. Result. All I needed was someone negotiable to drink it with and there was one of those at home so I put the bottle in the big inside pocket of my covert coat and got the Tube.

Back then Finsbury Park overground had loos. It didn’t for a while after this episode, when the IRA blew it up. That stuff happened then, too. A friend walked past Liberty’s a few minutes before the windows blew out. I was close enough to hear the bang and see the smoke from somewhere in Fulham that was blown up. I thought the IRA blew up the loos anyway.

Pretty much like the Finsbury Park station Gents.

I was a bit tired. I was so tired I had to lean my head on the cool, welcoming wall tiles while I used the loo and without boasting or anything, they were quite a way away. I closed my eyes, because I was really, no I mean really tired. And the tiles were cool on my forehead even though I had to bend a bit to get my head on the wall and I wasn’t needing to find a bathroom really quite quickly anymore and I had free champagne and everything was really quite ok when the whole bathroom exploded.

There was a huge bang and I heard stuff pinging and ricochet off the walls just like on Saving Private Ryan and things hit me in the leg and my feet were wet with blood. Except when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see any blood and so far as I could make out the walls of the bathroom were still intact and there wasn’t any smoke and it wasn’t making any sense. Then I saw the champagne bottle in the stub of porcelain sticking out of the floor and suddenly it did. I didn’t mean for the bottle to fall out of my pocket and blow up the toilet bowl, but life is full of unintended things. Or it was then, anyway, but the bottle was intact so I went home and drank it.

Again according to the BBC another American professor shot himself in the foot when he was fiddling with his gun in his pocket while he was supposed to be talking to people. I had to flail desperately at my own trousers once when a Susy Lamplugh rape alarm went off in my pocket and I couldn’t turn it off while I was on the phone.

It was the ’80s. That’s what happened in offices. I’d been to a Lamplugh Trust event the night before and got one of the aerosol-powered alarms mainly because it was free but also because I liked stuff like that (wanna see my baton, baby?) and because I was a bit bored I was fiddling with the alarm in my pocket while I was talking to someone on the phone when it went off. Luckily it didn’t shoot a hole in my foot or explode a toilet bowl. That all came later. We all drank too much and had unprotected sex and bought flats we couldn’t afford with money we didn’t have for the price of a deposit on one now. It was brilliant. We had a BBC we could believe in, too. Mostly.

Selling England

There used to be a song called Selling England By The Pound. I think, although obviously I’m too young to know, that inter alia it was about devaluation, the scheme Harold Wilson came up with in the 1960s, artificially lowering the foreign exchange value of sterling to make exports cheaper in the countries they were supposed to be exported to. Since the great days of selling cheap Birmingham crap to natives in Africa, British overseas trade had depended on being cheap, the cheaper the better.

I don’t know whether it was because it was difficult to get investment money for new equipment, or the fact that if you mechanise first you’re stuck with the oldest machinery while everyone else is buying the newer stuff, a sense that if it’s not bust don’t fix it or as a country we’ve never, in my experience, valued real skills.

Sure, we had a couple of films about the man who invented the Spitfire. Anyone remember his name? Or his colostomy bag? The man who invented radar then? Or the hovercraft? Henry Hudson, the railway king? Any general other then Butcher Haig, or RAF officer other than Bomber Harris, or any naval officer after Nelson, really? Dyson. We know him. He moved his factory from Betjeman’s Malmesbury to China. Because it was cheaper, obviously.

Riding the rails

I knew a girl once whose great grandfather was a railway engineer. He designed steam engines, some of his in their time quite literally the fastest things on earth. I had another friend whose grandfather had driven the same engines. They never met. The first one, with her double-barrelled name and her genuine Hon. title put me right when I talked about the nobility of doing real jobs, of being covered in coal dust and sweat, understanding and cajoling these pulsing machines.

“No, he despised people like that,” she told me. Designing these things was a huge mental challenge. Rarely hard work. Just don’t ask him to bother about the grimy proles who had to work the things.

And then we had a war that got millions of grimy proles so fed-up with being asked to die for something they weren’t a part of that they voted Churchill, the nation’s saviour, into oblivion. Then we had Peter Sellers playing the archetypal trades unionist Fred Kite,

Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn't he? Geddit? — Fred Kite, the trades unionist. He looks like Hitler, doesn’t he? Geddit?

or we were told we did, and then a Prime Minister the swooning papers called SuperMac, as if we ever really needed reminding who was in charge when things were real. The Americans had JFK. We got the landed-gentry First World War officer with his massive shooting estate and TV sketch moustache, then the equally fatuous double act, Wilson and Benn.

So far as Benn was concerned it was never really the end of the peer show; he renounced the title to get into the Commons, but obviously kept the money that went with it. Equally obviously, his son is in Parliament now. As for Wilson, the man who famously sported a pipe when there were cameras about and a cigar when they weren’t, the man who was either so stupid or such a brazen liar that he couldn’t see anything wrong with going on TV one week to announce that devaluation would not affect “the pound in your pocket” and then the very next week, just before Simon Dee, going back on the telly to say actually, thinking about it, it would.

Unlike Simon Dee Harold Wilson wasn’t accompanied by a white E-type Jaguar and a mini-skirted dolly bird; he’d obviously had very, very bad PR advice about that. It would probably have been easier for people to hear the real message if it went along the lines of “I’ve pissed it all up the wall on fast cars and easy chicks, yes, me, personally,” instead of the truth: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.”

Is it relevant now? It’s nearly all sold, after all. Just a few bits of the NHS left and the rail network, but that’s so crap that the taxpayer has to pay for that so that modern rail barons aren’t burdened with any of the bad bits of privatisation, like social investment, or common responsibility. But the same song still sings out: The health service is safe with us. We must defend our interests, whatever they are, however often they change. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the House of Saud. Immigrants are bad. People on benefits crashed the economy. It was Labour’s fault.

As before the real message stays the same: “Either I’m stupid or I think you are.” And while people don’t vote it doesn’t really matter which one of those is true.

An old mystery

Items found clearing land. Nothing to do with me. At all. I mean, maroon? Please.

I used to travel a lot as part of my work in a succession of motoring embarassements from my proto-Yuppie red VW Golf , through Escorts and the one I thought summed up the company it was bought by most of all, the sleazy crappy exhaust falling off white XR3i I was given by a company that pretended to be oh-so-reputable before it organised Abu Ghraib. For once, the phrase Yuppie Scum was appropriate, attached to them.

The Golf. I loved that car. I nearly killed a French teenager in that, in Toulon when he rode his scooter into it but the fact that he was clearly going too fast and I think also, bluntly, he was a black kid and I wasn’t, I never heard anything more about it after he bounced off my windscreen. Someone who’s now an American horticulturalist lived in that car for a couple of days while she sorted out one of those things that are brilliantly funny stories a long time later at a dinner party and an impenetrable world of crap while you’re actually doing them. But that wasn’t the car’s fault.

I drove up to Cannock Chase one day in that Golf to do something in Birmingham I can’t remember now and didn’t care much about then. I liked those trips though. I’d get all the visits done by about four at the latest, then in those pre-satnav days, either go by map avoiding the motorways or just point the car in the direction of my house and make it up. I wanted to see the country I lived in.

I found totally forgotten Georgian market towns bypassed by the railway. Cities that had lost their people. Traffic jams in the middle of nowhere that once meant someone dead on a small motorcycle at the end of the queue, spires and trees and blue roads in the dusk.

And Cannock Chase. I stopped to get a local paper, another thing I did then to get an idea about different places. I wasn’t happy where I lived, long before I realised that follows you around until you deal with it and I kept thinking that like Horace Greeley, all I had to do was go West, or as I was brought up there, north, or maybe south, or east. Anywhere, really. Anywhere that looked nice and in order to see if it was I got the papers to see what happened there, whether places were the kind of place where the newspaper deals in armed sieges or lost dogs returned to their owners. It doesn’t always work, of course. A friend from uni – well, you know what I mean – ended up in Shewsbury thinking it was quiet and idyllic and found that as the only psychiatric social worker for twenty miles she more than once found herself hauled out of the pub by the police to go and help when someone had barricaded themselves in a Telford tower block with a 12-bore. They didn’t think it was funny when she asked if she could borrow one of their guns if they wanted her to go in there and get the person out.

There were two things I remember about the Cannock trip. One was getting the local paper and reading about a century old murder in the woods there, and the more disturbing news that someone had been found murdered with the same name there a century later. I’ve tried but I can’t remember what town it was, let alone what newspaper, or where their archives might be kept to follow that up. The other thing was urgently needing to find a bathroom and thinking I was going to be another murder suspect as a result.

I grew up in farming country. We have fields, and hedges and lanes and when you’re driving along and need to get rid of some well, obviously not beer, officer, orange juice perhaps, or tea, then you stop your car in a field gateway and go behind a hedge. It’s what you do. Well, it’s what we did, anyway and I still can’t personally see anything wrong with it so long as nobody can see you. This time I couldn’t find a real lane until suddenly I did, which was just as well as I could hardly walk by that time, English garages not generally having bathrooms, or certainly not then and not there anyway.

The lane became a gravel track but it was overlooked by a busy road up above it until it became a grass track shaded by trees. I got out there. It was a hot day with no-one around and just the distant noise of the busy road in the distance. As I was standing there I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Something moving, the same height as a person would be. I looked up quickly and saw it there and felt cold all over.

A white camisole set was hanging on a bush, complete, the wind raising the silk a little every now and then. Nobody there. Except there obviously had been. And I was only guessing they weren’t still there. I had a bad feeling about that place. For years I had episodes where I imagined I was sitting in a police interview room, having an endless conversation.

“So you say you never met this woman. Never even heard of her.” Distinctly un-Inspector Morse-like police officer stands up. “Except you did, son. You stabbed her about fifteen times, scraped some leaves over her then pissed on her body. Your DNA’s all over this poor tart you never met, according to you. So don’t keep messing me about ’cause I’m getting tired of it and me dinner’s on. Now, let’s go over this again.”