October 2014 – Writer-insighter

Das Boot

In the film the sailors were down deep in their submarine

Hunted hunters or hunting, it was hard to tell

Under the water and oil and blood and fire

If not honour. The destroyer was closing in fast

Dropping depth charges, the twin screws churning

The water above the submariners’ heads,

Cavitation whining, foreheads furrowed,

Woollies on, tense glances while they had to keep silent

Or they’d never hear the ping on the hydrophones

That would tell them who was where.

It was just a film

But it made me think of you and I and how

When we met we were both quiet,

Talking almost in whispers

One voice loud enough for both of us to share

When the pings of our sonar echoed back to each other faster

And faster as we got closer until nobody could really hear

Any difference in the two beats, the ping meeting the echo

In one long high sound that almost hurt to listen to it.

It never lasts long, that sound.

They dived deep to get away from the ship hunting them;

Only one option in the face of the evident danger.

The ludicrous flaw in this whole arrangement

The deeper you go the longer it takes for the depth charges

To reach you but because of the pressure all around,

Going deep, running silent, when they find you

The bolts shear more easily and the red lightbulbs smash

With the concussion, the rivets groaning as you look at each other

And wonder looking, each knock -Is this it? Is this the end?

Is that the tap on the hull that’s going to crush this all around us?

This blast of smashing cold that’s going to take our breath away?

And somehow it never is. It’s just that now the hunt’s over

And there’s so much time between each ping, each echo of you,

The air getting stale somehow, the signal fading

And so hard to even get a clear fix on your direction

These days, these nights, I miss the sound of that one long joining

Of that separated out again to two different pulses,

Longer now between each one. And longer still each time.

The sounds the ships make sinking, on the screen,

Their bulkheads blowing as they make the last voyage to the bottom.

It sounds like a scream. As if they had real feelings.

Then the longer silences now and just the echo of you fading too,

Contact broken, skipper. I think she’s gone,

However much I listen, my fingers twisting the dials,

Still here in the quiet, searching, headphones on.

Keep it down in the engine room. They can hear us miles away

On a night like this. But I can’t really hear your echo at all.

We can come up to the surface now. I think we’re in the clear again.

Every time I try to write this story it spins away from me. It started off simply enough. An old man in a pub was having an argument with a fat British skinhead and I heard the words ‘Nazi’ and ‘Hitler Youth’ and thought the old man was attacking the younger one for using the words. I was only half right. It’s happened before. He was, but only insofar as the old man resented being called a Nazi. He’d been in the Hitler Youth, like every other German boy of his age, because they were all conscripted on their thirteenth birthday. And it was great, he said. He really enjoyed it. They went on camps, they had big flags to fly and songs to sing and they lived in the golden summer in the open air and it was a dream come true in a time when most of the dreams had starved to death.

The elderly language teacher in Mr Norris Changes

I was fourteen when I saw these for sale in a shop in Carmarthen. I think they were £12. I didn't have £12. — I was fourteen when I saw these for sale in a shop in Carmarthen. I think they were £12. I didn’t have £12.

Trains wasn’t skeletal because he was on a diet. But these boys had food and campfires and singing and hope and even better, if you’re thirteen, pistols to shoot and grenades to throw. They even got a special knife, the blade inscribed with Blut und Ehre, blood and honour. Free.

On the last day of his war the SS came to his village and marched all of the Hitler Jungend up to a field where they scrubbed around in the grass until they found a hatchway that nobody in the village knew was there, opening up a bunker that held brand new machine guns and more grenades and steel helmets. They issued the boys all of this gleaming kit and told them to defend the village, the fatherland and their honour while they, the SS, had some urgent business to attend to in the opposite direction to the one the Americans were arriving from. In about an hour.

The SS left, the boys grabbed as many guns as they could and their schoolmaster, when he saw them, as the leader of their Hitler Youth troop beat them up, made them throw all the guns in the ditch and sent them home crying.

Every time I try to write it it gets jumbled up with other stories I’ve heard first hand from the same time, the stories that are spinning away now, with so few left to tell them.

I heard from an American pilot who at the same time, April 1945 had to walk back from a dance, 22 miles, because he’d missed his transport, out shagging in Ipswich and a mission to fly to Czechoslovakia the next day, eight hours there and back five miles high. I heard at second hand of a Wermacht surgeon who the same month decided enough was enough, and walked home to Bremen from Czechoslovakia to surrender to the British, who once they’d emptied his pockets told him as he lived literally around the corner to piss off home.

Except they didn’t empty his pockets completely. I’ve held in my own hands the field surgery kit that lived in his pocket for five years, the green cloth roll holding the small forceps, the massively thick suture needles thicker than the ones sail makers use, the curved and the straight scalpel, the little sharpening stone. They let him keep them. Or maybe he went home first and emptied his pockets there, before he went out to surrender. I’ll never know the answer to that now because of time.

It was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994. I remember the Battle of Britain Flight Lancaster flying over my house. I remember a curious dream where I could see an armada of ships stretched out to England and the horizon as the dawn broke grey across the water and knowing more and more ships would come and I would die.

I drank a lot back then. Maybe that’s why this picture fascinates me. I found it on the web by accident, yet another cat picture, but for me it’s more than that.

It’s England. It’s summer, with friends and food and wine and a funny cat off doing the things that cats do while we laugh and talk to each other and drink and we’re not going to have to go and fight in any wars, ever, and the green hills hold us close while behind us, ignored and always there, there’s the war, waiting. The England of Kate Bush’s Lionheart. My England and yours, where it’s been such a beautiful day and everything’s fine and yes, I will have another glass of wine, thank-you, and maybe some cheese. This red, sorry, what were you saying?

The triangular things the cat jumps between are dragon’s teeth. That’s what they were called back then. They stop tanks. They’re too big to drive over and too solid to blow up quickly, which is why they’re still there.

I don’t know who these happily drunk girls were that afternoon nearly twenty years ago. I think that’s when it was because of the colours of the picture. Because this is my history too. I don’t know what happened to them or whether they’re still happy now. But I know the stop lines across England were peppered with these concrete blocks and pillboxes from East Anglia to Wales, to hold the German advance when the invasion came. They were in the fields where the rivers meet at Tellisford, where I used to fish when I was a boy. The past is a different country and besides so many wenches are dead now and the young men too who should have met them. But at the same time the past is still here, just behind your shoulder, the thing your cat’s jumping off. And while we have their stories, so are they.

Lesser known facts

I’m trying to find out some things that have been forgotten, to help me with a story I’m trying to write. The address of a bakery in Bremen in 1945. The date the city was captured. I think that was May 5th, 1945, but I wasn’t there. The day a man in Czechoslovakia decided enough was enough and he was walking home, 700 kilometres, knowing at each step that if the Gestapo found him and checked his papers they wouldn’t bother with a blindfold and a last cigarette.

How do you make that decision? How do you decide that’s it, I’m gone? I’ve never been good at that and luckily my life hasn’t involved decisions as big as that. But I’d still like to find some of these things out. The web doesn’t always help, although it’s easier than it was before that was around. Some of the things you read there simply aren’t true, and some people seem to leave their brains off when they write things.

Were Germans in Hamburg in 1943 evacuated to America?

Where do you even start with that? Why do people hijack airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Centre? It’s the same sort of question. Just totally stupid and self-referential. Y’all’d sure have been all talkin’ Nazi iffen it hadn’t been fer us. And some of it’s just plain wrong.

The first shot of World War II in Europe was fired 20 years, 9 months, 19 days and 18 hours after the last shot of World War I was fired. It was fired from the 13,000 ton German gunnery training battleship Schleswig Holstein.

Well, no. No it was not. I know this for a fact. The first shot of World War II in Europe was fired from a Webley & Scott revolver, in a Mayfair townhouse bedroom, before a ball, when a young British officer was shot. I know. Because he told me.

In one of my lives I’ve had a house in Stow on the Wold, exactly where and just at the end of the time when you might expect to find a still active officer-class survivor of World War II living there, even if he did only just survive. He lived next door to my old house next door to the huge old pub at the bottom of the square. I wish I’d kept it, but the past is another country and besides, the wench who used to call round occasionally may or may not be dead. It was quite a long time ago.

The Major, as he was when I knew him, was just a young subaltern in 1939 but his parents were stonking rich, certainly rich enough to have their own town house in Mayfair. They threw a ball specifically to celebrate their only son’s commission and he decided to celebrate by going with his chum to a decent tailor to collect their brand new dress uniforms for the ball. On their way home they collected the new pistols they were still allowed to buy for themselves in those days, as officers still did and being eighteen or so and there being no television, went to see a cowboy film before they went home to change. Dress uniforms in proper bags from the tailors and brand new heavy black pistols on their belts they went to see their film and got back to Mayfair in

A bullet nearly half an in ch across really messes-up a new dress uniform.

plenty of time to bath and change and lace Brilliantine through their hair, chummed up together in the same bedroom in the innocent manner of the times. Both of them unloaded their identical pistols and tossed the bullets onto the eiderdown while they practised their quick draw in front of the mirror, in the style of Tom Mix and Jimmy Cagney.

My neighbour was the first to get bored. War had been declared and these weren’t toys after all and there was a ball to go to and the little band was warming up downstairs and despite all of this, they were both nominally on active service, so in case the Germans invaded Mayfair that night he re-loaded his revolver and laid it on the bed before he finished dressing in his new uniform and slipped his Sam Brown belt and shiny holster on.

As his chum did, as well, but being not very old, his chum decided to have one last try at clearing leather, as if the armed might of the Wermacht would be stopped in its tracks by a teenager with a pistol who was quick on the draw.

As if in a car crash, as if in a dream, my neighbour told me how although he could see what was happening he couldn’t say anything as his chum picked up the pistol he himself had just loaded, identical to his own except for the then-unfamiliar weight of the six bullets, aimed it at him and pulled the trigger. For fun. Because it was empty.

Except as happens with guns, it wasn’t. After the enormous noise had rolled around the room and the smoke started to clear he walked downstairs, down the huge main staircase, into the room they had been going to use as the ballroom and said “I believe I’ve been shot.”

He never took part in active service, or not outside England, anyway. And that was a true story. I wish I could remember his name but really, it doesn’t matter. What does is that the history books tell just a fraction of the story.

And sometimes, talking only about the very big things instead of the small ones, they’re not true at all.

Obsession

December 24, 2012 7:50 pm

This is a bit of a long-shot, but would you happen to be the Wendy Hales who was married in Bradford-on-Avon in 1995, who was Wendy Buckingham before that?

Happy Christmas in any case, but if you are Wendy it would be superb to get in touch. For me, anyway!

February 12, 2013 9:50 pm

Hello, you may be totally the wrong person, but I’m very curious! Sorry to bother you, but if this is you in the picture (a) that’s not me and (b) hope you’re well and happy.

I’ve often wondered about Wendy Buckingham over the years. She was married in 1995 to someone called John Hales and there is no trace I can find in the UK. Someone suggested I looked on Facebook and there was/is only one Wendy Hales there. With other friends called Buckingham and a friend from the town where she was married. I only found that out last week. I’m really not a creepy stalker, honestly!

Wendy inspired me to write a book. I used an old photo for the cover. If you actually are Wendy I will use a different photo if you prefer, but she was really rather lovely. I hope that shows in the book. I think it does.

Rather rambling. Sorry. Just not sure if I’m talking to the right person or not. Happy New Year, anyway. I still think of her, wherever she is.

June 17, 2013 6:42 pm

Hello, I’ve tried to message you on Facebook. I wrote a few days ago. If you’re Wendy Buckingham, or used to be, I mean, I’m just trying to say how are you, hope you’re well, I hope the years have been kind. I rang at the weekend, but I don’t know if it was you or wrong number – I’ve only just worked out you got married – not the world’s quickest detective! Seriously, hope you’re doing brilliantly. It would be great to say hi. Friend me on Facebook or something!

September 24, 2013 3:15 am

Ok. I’m in your ‘others’ folder. Obviously it’s late. Obviously drink has been taken. I just wanted to say hi. That’s really all. I hope you’re well and happy. You obsessed me for years. In some ways you always will, as an idea, as an ideal. I don’t know if that’s love, probably it’s not, but I never meant any harm. If you remember me at all you know that. You were a magical vision of perfect world, TV world. It’s only now that I realise you were in free fall, only after I wrote the book. I had to write it to see how things were. I don’t think I’m very sensitive. I wasn’t back then, the time it was about. I just looked at you as if you were something upon an altar. I wish I had looked on you as if you were a real girl then. I might have been more sensitive. I understand now how painful that period must have been for you, not as an expression, but as a real thing. I wish I had known. I wish I had not been so crass. My only excuse was I was 17 or 18. I am sorry. You took my heart away. I never really got it back. I wish I had really cared, I wish I had really loved, I wish I had really known. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

I would love to talk to you. I really do understand why you might want to cut off from anything from that time. But I wasn’t your enemy. I was too young, too stupid, too overawed by you to do anything but worship without doing anything at all sensible or helpful if that was even possible back then, being the person I was. I found a diary from that time the other day, about the time your mother loaned me her car for the evening, for reasons that are still not clear to me, other than she knew I was ok with you.

Wend, it would be so good to talk to you. I don’t even know if people still call you that. I don’t know if you’ve read the book. If I definitely knew where to find you I’d post one. It’s on Amazon. It’s not a pornographic fantasy. It’s about a young man who cannot cope. Who was too much in love to actually love. About a feeling that would never leave someone, for reasons that they would only know decades later, that weren’t the reasons they thought they were. I want you to contact me for me. To do my heart good. To tell me that I didn’t do anything bad. I want to hear that your life has been good, or at least ok. That things worked out, or they might do. Just to hear you say ‘hi’ again. That’s all. It really is.

I know. Sad. Pathetic. Late at night. But sometimes late at night is the only real time things can be said. Be safe. Be happy. Say hello sometime. But above all, be you.

Me.

Getting like a ghost town

"Then Sammy said if your Majesty hadn't spoken I'd have thought it was the horse! Top hole, what, Mary? Oh I say, I didn't mean, er.." — “Then Sammy said if your Majesty hadn’t spoken I’d have thought it was the horse! Top hole, what, Mary? Oh I say, I didn’t mean, er..”

According to the BBC the number of High Street shops is falling. Again. Which is odd, because a few years ago the very earnest brand spanking new Prime Minister, David Cameron, thought he’d solved all of that by getting the rising media star Mary Portas to go and write a report on how to save if not the universe, then at least the heart of places like Trowbridge and Ipswich.

As someone who grew up in Trowbridge could have told you, what’s wrong with Trowbridge is easy to see. People don’t live in the centre, so at 5:30 its dead. The police force has been cut and what police there are drive around in cars, so after 5:30 you’re pretty much on your own. Not that the police there were ever much good in the first place. When I lived in the town there was a spate of garden gnome thefts. Miraculously almost all of the gnomes were found by the police but only because they were lined up on the police station wall one morning. And the pubs were crap. The Lamb wasn’t, because it had the Village Pump music gigs on Mondays (yes, as in the Village Pump folk festival, which wasn’t quite as big in those days, being mostly in the old stables out the back of the Lamb) and the Rose & Crown wasn’t, because it was walking distance from school and the landlord, back in those dear dead days, didn’t mind anyone drinking in there so long as they at least pretended to be a grown-up. Everybody knew about it. Nobody threw up or got stabbed or any other nonsense.

And there’s nowhere to park. Actually, there was a huge big carpark where the cattle and sheep market used to be, which was easier to use once the council got rid of the rusted brown metal pens that people sometimes drove into and wished they hadn’t. Something which can stand up to three or four tons of bullocks pushing against it for a hundred years didn’t have too many problems with a Ford Anglia. But the town got full, the carpark was replaced with a multi-storey and that got full as well and the shops that survived got bigger as the small shops shut their doors.

The supermarkets shut them. Something the Portas Report somehow didn’t feel it should mention. Bizzarely for a business report, it spent a lot of time saying what Mary Portas wanted, as if that was in some way relevant. Big squiggly signature. Big intro. Loads and loads of I think, I believe, I say. My challenge. My struggle.

My camp, Mary could almost have written if she’d been male, because when she wasn’t gurning on TV as a retail consultant looking straight to camera like Anne Robinson after an experimental trip to the hairdresser she was spending most of her time telling everyone who would listen how she’d just come out and still got on with her husband uber super-woman stylee, although presumably not on him.

Read it here, if you like. It’s crap.

“My review has shown me…” Wow, well thanks Mary. I somehow had the idea that all that public money you got for doing it was to show ME, but that shows how little I know what things are about.

“An increasing number of shops are falling by the wayside as they fail to meet the expectations of today’s increasingly experienced time-poor, experience-rich consumer.”

Well I never. I won’t say that the wayside metaphor is probably the most stupid cliche I’ve seen if you’re writing about a High Street, because it just is anyway. But what does the rest of it even mean? What kind of experience are we talking about? Silk ropes on the bedstead? And why two ‘experience’s in the same sentence? How were people fifty years ago poorer in their experiences? Because they didn’t have a TV show, a packet of ginger hair dye and a producer? Apart from the fact it’s vacuous inane borderline-illiterate regurgitated irrelevant crap in the first place?

“We’ve seen the closure of brands.”

Have we Mary? How do you close a brand, exactly? “There’s a wealth of knowledge which describes them.” Is there? Is that what knowledge does? “Much of what we do know is stored in professional silos.” At least I’ve seen one of those. It’s over near Wickham Market, in the grounds of the old school that the big farm took over to store their machinery. About sixty feet tall and bright silver. I think they store grain in it or something like that. As well as old copies of the Portas Report, presumably. They probably need something for the rats to nest in.

Mary Portas spent her entire non-TV career making the High Street the way it is. That could be why her report spent its first few pages saying it wasn’t about blame and we are where we are and it wasn’t really anyone’s fault if the High Street was all big crappy shops selling all the same stuff, except maybe the small shops who couldn’t afford to be there, the losers, given she’d made quite a lot of money turning it into that.

So what was Mary’s solution? £100,000, to be given to six “Portas towns.” Each, obviously. Wouldn’t want to give the impression that this was in any way a token amount that wouldn’t change anything. Why, for that sort of money you could probably get what, six, maybe even ten extra carpark spaces, provided you didn’t have to buy any land to put them on and you could just move some curbstones and paint some lines. And stick a meter in, obviously. Oh and a big sign about it all.

“What really worries me is that the big supermarkets
don’t just sell food anymore, but all manner of things
that people used to buy on the high street.” Portas Review p11 col 2.

Excuse me. Just what exactly is this crap? Why is it of even the most passing interest to me, or the government, what worries Mary Portas? Did she just get someone to type up her diary or something? “All manner of things? And there’s a capital H on High and a capital S on Street, while I’m here.

But basically, so what? Who cares? Lord Sainsbury doesn’t. There isn’t a Lord Tesco yet and if they don’t reach a bit deeper there won’t be, either. Most of the people who go to the shops don’t, so long as they think someone else should pay for their convenience, whether that’s Tesco building a big car park or Apple using child labour tucked up out of sight in China.

It’s a gimmick. The answers are obvious and nobody cares. Or rather, they say they do but if it comes to the choice of piling factory food in the back of the car or walking to the shop every day then they don’t, at all. And we can all go on pretending that car insurance and parking and congestion and pollution and children with asthma and road deaths and local council rates and every single road having yellow lines on it and places like Ipswich where if the council had any sense, given what they’re offering they’d pay you to park there, not the other way around, all of that’s convenience shopping.

There you go, Mary. Maybe you’ll be back on TV soon, to tell us all how your report’s doing. We really care what you think about things. Almost as much as you did in the Portas Review.

Let’s see anyone bothered by that. Until then, there’s probably something on TV about it. Oddly, after that stellar performance it’s not by Mary Portas this season.

Dawn patrol

In a further development, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Isil had been able to fly three Russian fighter jets captured from the regime. Though they have not been used in operations, the Observatory said the MiG jets were being flown with the help of defected Iraqi air force officers.

Just before dawn the three chums wandered out to the sheds where the fitters had been labouring through the night. Mohammed reached into the unfamiliar pocket of his flight suit, rummaging through the invisible folds of his traditional robes forgetting that he no longer wore them as they got really flappy in the cockpit at 700 knots.

“Smoke?” He held out the packet of Players to Mohammed and Mohammed.

“Actually old man, best not. Mohammed, you know.”

“Drat this,” Mohammed ejaculated tensely.

“Steady on, old man,’ Mohammed interjected judiciously. “If the CO hears you carry on like that he’ll think you’ve got a case of blue funk.”

Mohammed held his gaze steadily, his brown eyes hardening.

“Blue funk. We have three 40 year old MiG fighters, based on a design that’s 60 years old or I’m a Chinaman. Three.”

“Mohammed old man….” Mohammed exclaimed. “Not in front of the chaps!” He nodded his head towards the fitters still labouring in the sheds. One of them started to whistle a popular tune before his comrades told him to stop promoting decadent Western imperialism. Sheepishly the overalled figure assayed a few bars of “Like A Virgin,” but his attempt at reconciliation fell on stony ground.

“Do you know what each one cost? Well do you?” Fl.Lt Mohammed spat furiously. “$185,000. I went online and saw the advert.”

“Allah is merciful, Mohammed old man,” Squadron Leader Mohammed reassured Mohammed.

“Allah might be, but the Allied Re-Engagement Strike Enhancement Force (Air Recon) Command Exercise…”

“A.R.S.E.F.A.R.C.E., old man. Acronyms. Don’t want the chaps hearing things. Need to know,’ rumbled the squadron leader.

“A.R.S.E.F.A.R.C.E. then – isn’t. Our three MiGs go up against fifty brand new Mach 2 fighters guided straight to us by their AWACS and the entire Mediterranean U.S. littoral support capability the second we pull the stick back. If we ever flew against them seriously we’d be coming down Harry Prangers before we’d even got the wheels up. And that’s just the bally advance force in the area.”

“Flight Lieutenant Mohammed! That is enough!” The squadron leader’s tone was icy. “Chaps in the ISIS air force don’t come out with that kind of tommy rot.”

“Fl. Lt. Mohammed didn’t mean it sir,” Wing Commander Mohammed interceded. “It was just banter. He’s flown too many missions lately.”

“He’s flown no more than every other pilot in the ISIL airforce. Either of us,” growled the squadron leader. “It’s like the Battle of Britain. If a chap hasn’t the stomach for it we’ll soon see who has.”

The lieutenant steeled himself. “It’s not though sir, is it?” He rushed on, before his nerve finally failed him. “It’s not like the Battle of Britain. Or even the Battle of Baghdad.”

“No popsies, for a start. No piling ten chaps into a Lagonda and singing “We’ll walk together down a Syrian lane” on the way to the Red Lion. No Red Lion. It’s haram. And not with only three of us in the airforce. No cheeking the unarmed local bobby about closing time, because there’s never opening time. No fourteen pints and get rid of the hangover by snorting pure oxygen from your high altitude mask, because there’s no such thing as fourteen pints, or even one. Just the overwhelming odds. It’s nothing like a Biggles book. Nothing, I tell you. Except for the lemonade W.E. Johns had to put in the books instead of the whisky in the original stories he wrote just after the First War he served in, when Hamlyn started selling them to children in the 1930s. Sir,” he added lamely.

The lieutenant stood disconsolately, his resolution fading as his lip trembled before the Wing Co’s growing fury. Somehow he steeled himself for one last supreme effort.

“Even the only beheading we had around here was when Leading Aircraftman Mohammed pulled that ejector seat handle in the hanger without checking the safety pin was in place.”

A heavy silence hung over the entire ISIS airforce as the three men stood freshly bearded on the tarmac, not smoking, entirely un-hungover, limbs not loosened in a post-coital glow as they didn’t remember the two WAAFS and Flossie the barmaid from the Bunch of Grapes in Carshalton. Each man’s ears twitched for the sound of the Allied cruise missiles screaming across the field. It was going to be a short air war.

It’s what I feel

I think I’m not going to listen to Radio4 any more. Not news or current affairs, anyway. Saturday morning and I’m eating half a pink grapefruit while I wait for the mushroom & parmesan omelette to transform itself magically from stuff in a pan to yum and there’s a piece on living standards. Someone else has written a report about the British economy, such as it is. The report says it’s basically shagged, that consumers, in the new parlance ‘people at the bottom’ have seen their wages decline in real terms, meaning that they might have had a pay rise but things cost more so they’ve actually got less.

Even before the substance of the report you notice how the discussion has changed. Ordinary people who buy things in shops are now called ‘people at the bottom.’ Which obviously implies there are people at the top. So what do they buy? Do they go to Waitrose instead of Asda? Maybe. They probably send someone to do it for them though. Do they buy two jars of marmalade instead of one? No, but they probably don’t get the Asda value one for 49p. When they want a new pair of shoes, do they buy four hundred pairs instead of one, given that they earn four hundred times as much? Er, well, actually…..

Obviously, even the most infantile trickle down supporter wouldn’t claim this is what happened, even though that’s the basis of the entire post 1980’s economy – if the rich get more they’ll give it to other people, because it’s a well-known economic fact that rich people got rich by spending lots of money.

Except it isn’t but never mind. We don’t do facts anymore, as the two experts on Radio Four proved. Why is all this happening? It’s yer immigrants, innit, said one.

It would have been nicer if that’s what he actually said, but he used a voice like mine and we don’t speak or sound like that. We speak clearly and authoritatively and quite often people listen to what we say, because what we say sounds like the truth. The snag is it’s just our voices. That’s what they’re like. Sometimes they make people believe things that just aren’t true and do things they don’t want to do, because they think they have to. But it’s just our voices. That’s how it works. Ask any Springer spaniel.

The other expert politely told him that what he was saying was bollocks, but she made a basic error in bothering to be polite instead of simply telling him not to talk shit. She asked him for any evidence that what he said was true, that the massively growing inequality between ‘people at the top’ and everyone else was down to immigrants.

Which was where she lost, as she should have known she would because we don’t do facts any more. He didn’t have any evidence, he said. But he felt that was true. Game over.

Exactly like Blair and Iraq, exactly like Brown and any statistics, exactly like Ian Duncan Smith and his ideas about the feckless, fraudulent, workshy poor, or ‘anybody on benefits’ to use the current shorthand, we don’t do facts any more. We do feelings. Apparently all you have to do now is feel something is true and because we’re all so sensitive and perceptive and mindful these days, it’s sacrilege to contradict them. Feelings are sacred. If anyone even attempts to say your feelings are in total contradiction of facts they simply aren’t going to be invited back on the programme. Like the Greens. Who needs them and their facts on the radio every morning?

Rude, you see. Very, very rude. Don’t know how to behave in public. Lunatic fringe. If they want to behave like that then there’s Speakers Corner every Sunday. Real people, the kind we want telling us all what to do, they feel things. And that’s much more important than knowing anything real. I blame the immigrants, meself.

The Bird In Hand & The Green Dragon

I don’t know why dragons are green, although the fact that they’re named green suggests that there must be other colours too, such as the red one and the black dragon that are supposed to have had a fight on the border of Essex and Suffolk, long ago. Assuming there are dragons.

Whether or not there are or were, a policeman used to ask my grandmother for a green dragon, back when she used to run a pub in rural Somerset. The Bird in Hand was in Nailsea, on the edge of the moors and when she was a girl, before the moors were drained, it was about as remote in winter when the sea came in as it had been in King Arthur’s time, or when Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. Every few months a policeman on a motorcycle used to turn up, usually when the pub was closed and this was a time when pubs shut in the afternoon and at eleven o’clock at night, on the dot, if you didn’t want to lose your licence to sell alcohol.

A Mr Polly world, where the pub was central to the community, or at least the section of the community that had two pints a night every day on their way back from work, the men who worked with their hands in the village, the kind who got thirsty of a night. There were other reasons to drink in pubs in those days too, other than just liking beer. Beer at least made sure you wouldn’t be poisoned by the water you drank out of the pump, and a lot of houses big and small still had pumped water then. It also gave you an excuse to be out of the house, at a time when contraception was a joke or a dirty secret. My grandmother was one of eight children. She had nine. Maybe she should have gone out a bit more herself.

She never knew what it was the motorcycle policeman wanted. He visited for years. I have an idea but it seems unlikely. There never was a beer called Green Dragon. The wood floored beer smelling long bar of the Bird In Hand, where my grandmother’s favourite customer service toolkit included a bull’s penis stuffed with lead shot, applied behind the ear to gobby customers when they turned away, didn’t lend itself easily to anyone’s idea of a cocktail bar, either.

But absinthe …. maybe that’s what the policeman was after. It was illegal. I remember when it stopped being illegal, probably, and an advertising agency party where the bottle was considered almost as illicit as the coke someone lined up on the cheeseboard. Absinthe that Toulouse Luatrec liked, a little taste of la vie en rose wafted in to deepest Somerset. It hardly seems more likely, somehow, that anyone would go looking for it in Nailsea, never notably a hotbed of artistic bohemian endeavour.

The pub shut long ago. The forge was demolished and my grandmother dead more than twenty years back, so I’ll never know what she thought the policeman wanted. I have my own idea exactly what it was.

Starting late

I did a thing people have told me to do for years. I went to the doctor and asked to be referred for and that’s the problem.

I don’t know what. You walk in. You don’t know where to start or what to say. I’ve got, I’ve been told, a warm, nice, calm voice. The kind of voice girls like. I speak clearly. I used to have the most awful Sloane bray and if I can’t hear and I’ve been drinking, I still do, but the doctor’s surgery was quiet and and I haven’t had a drink today. I’m going to when I’ve finished writing this.

I sat down. I watched the doctor getting impatient. I could see her face clouding. So I told her I’d been abused as a child. She thought I meant sexually, but I don’t think I was. Physically and mentally. As Meatloaf used to sing, out of three ain’t bad, doc. Two out of three ain’t bad.

My father was a bigamist. Probably. He was definitely a professional liar. He pretended he’d been born in Australia, but he wasn’t. I found out by going to get a copy of his birth certificate. He’d removed it and mine and my sister’s and my other sister’s and every other piece of official paper in the house when he finally left, but for most of my childhood he was hardly ever there, just two or three times a week as I remember it. We went on holiday a couple of times, and he had to do bizarre things on his own, like going to visit a church to see the special window dedicated to the RAF, which he claimed he was in as well. He never, ever went near a church in all the time I knew him, so I’m presuming this story, like every other story he came up with was pure horseshit. He was probably phoning his other family, the one he ran at the same time.

Trashing the NHS

The nurses are on strike today. In the usual way that people speak to very small children the government has told them they can have a 1% pay rise or something else but not both because Mummy and Daddy can’t afford it.

So far as I’ve seen, nobody in government, the press or officially, the health unions has stood up and called this the utter horseshit that it is, that if a government can increase ‘the deficit’ and call it reducing it and at the same time commit to an endless war against abstract nouns when it doesn’t even know who’s on which side, assuming there even are any sides, then clearly it can afford anything it wants to.

But that’s unsayable. As Goering pointed out at his inevitably-decided trial at Nuremburg, the kind we should have had in 1997 except we didn’t know then we’d just voted in the same thing but with more hand-movements and a smile, it’s easy to get people on side with the idea of a war they don’t want. You just call them traitors if they say anything against it and tell them the enemy (anybody, it’s never really mattered, take your pick) wants to rape their dog and take away their iPad so they can’t watch X-Factor. Or the contemporary equivalent. And it always works, because it takes a bit of an effort to find out the truth and dogs and iPads don’t pay for themselves and there’s stuff to do.

Another truth that is a bit hard to find out because the media themselves are a bit too busy to mention it is that there will never be an NHS privatisation bill. There doesn’t need to be. It’s already been done.

For the last six months I’ve been working for the NHS, at a mental health Foundation Trust. It was supposed to provide services to two large rural counties to help people in fragile and damaging states of mind. Effectively now, it can’t, by design.

The first project I worked on was to provide a drug and alcohol service for around one and a half million people. We calculated what it was going to cost to provide it, working on the NHS overhead figures which usually come in between 20% and 25%. It pays for things like training, pensions, and all the expenses you can’t get rid of, such as the maintenance of buildings that have had to be shut almost as soon as they were opened, because there isn’t the money to run them. I can show you two, boarded up and unused as one of them has been since the last brick was laid. The maintenance building is closed now as well, so anything that needs doing won’t be done by the NHS and will have to go out to tender.

We thought somebody like SERCO would bid for the Drug & Alcohol work, along with other NHS Trusts from other areas. We thought SERCO would put in a bid at about 70% of our own NHS bid, because SERCO can afford to do that, operating on an overhead margin of 6%. Of course, SERCO don’t have to pay for training, or full-time staff and quite often deliberately underbid to get the work, as they did when they provided GP cover in Cornwall, where SERCO felt one GP was enough to cover the entire county some nights, and if that wasn’t really quite enough they’d falsify the records to make it unhappen anyway. Which is why SERCO is facing multiple different counts of criminal fraud. Which is not why SERCO is barred from pitching for any further NHS work, because it isn’t. This behaviour is entirely acceptable and in no way will or even can count against any further bids SERCO put in. Because that’s the system you voted for, especially if you didn’t vote.

None of it mattered anyway, because when we got the official budget from the county council which has the statutory duty to provide these services and can’t, so they contract them out to the NHS or anyone else who fancies a go, the money available was just over half the amount the NHS thought would be needed to do the job. So the NHS didn’t bid, because it couldn’t do the job for that money. Someone who thinks they can will be doing it instead. The NHS budget Cameron was talking about wasn’t even relevant. Any journalist could have found that out, if they’d wanted to. They just didn’t want to. This was County Council money. This is how it works.

Obviously, whoever gets the contract won’t be providing training or pensions or standard terms of employment or company cars or even minibusses to get staff from one end of a poorly served hump of land jutting out into the North Sea with hardly any trains and busses about as rare as a Labour voter around here. Because the NHS is safe in the Conservatives hands. They’ll take good care of it. So that when the last service the NHS currently does is put out to tender, when more staff have left, when the last bid can’t even be pitched for because it simply can’t be done for the money the local authority thinks is a perfectly reasonable amount, all that lovely prime development land on the edge of the town can be sold, mature trees, bus stop and all mains services connected.

Buyers are advised to carry out their own surveys and advertised services may not actually work, obviously. But that’s not really the point, is it? Nobody’s interested in how the NHS operates or what works and what doesn’t. You shouldn’t even be asking questions about it. Can’t you see the enemy are making you think that way? What are you, some kind of ISIS apologist?

Month: October 2014

Das Boot

Das Boot

A history

Lesser known facts

Obsession

Getting like a ghost town

Dawn patrol

It’s what I feel

The Bird In Hand & The Green Dragon

Starting late

Trashing the NHS