This morning two things were reported which ought to scare you senseless.
The Defence Minister whose idea of defence includes blowing people up in foreign countries any time he feels like it said he’s fine with that. The RAF launched a drone, a big explodey model airplane and controlled it from Lincolnshire.
It killed two British people in Syria. According to the Prime Minister they’d been going to threaten our way of life. Again. Before he collected himself the Prime Minister said they’d been going to kill the Queen. So far as I remember in the tabloids they were going to do that the other weekend as well. Then he used the magic word:
“Such actions are required to prevent a terrorist attack.”
He didn’t once use the phrase extra-judicial murder, which was odd. The plaintiff “We have to work extremely hard” just sounded a bit pathetic tagged on the end.
It’s terrorism though, you see? The Attorney General said it was ok and if he wants to keep his very nicely paid job and pension then as every previous one, he’d better. So it’s ok to fly an airplane somewhere and blow people up. You don’t need a trial or any of that old nonsense. You can just go and kill them. It’s fine. Because terrorism.
The final solution
As Michael Fallon said, there was ‘no other way’ to deal with people accused of terrorism. After all, we’ve tried all that arresting people and putting them on trial and witnesses and burden of proof and all that he said but she said and ah-yes-but-m’lud and frankly, where does it get you? Maybe Rebeka Brooks can tell David Cameron some time.
Seconds later on BBC Radio 4’s one o’clock news today we were told a 28 year-old policeman had been arrested along with several others for conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice. That’s serious. You can go to jail for life.
Just because his lapels are like that doesn’t make it not scary.
For reasons which were never made clear, as Hunter Thompson used to say, the Birmingham policeman had made-up a story. Which sadly isn’t totally unknown among police officers as any cursory viewing of the Sweeney will tell the impartial observer. But this story was different.
This story was that terrorists had been going to kidnap a police officer. Except there weren’t any terrorists. It was all made-up.
Do you see a problem yet? Maybe you should. Because now you don’t need proof to go and kill people any more. Just someone’s say so. For example, a lying policeman’s word on it.
If you’re ok with this kind of drone strike it’s probably best if you don’t even look at people the wrong way in future. The party of conservatism is taking us a long, long way from Dixon of Dock Green. Mind how you go.
In the Catholic church there are two kinds of sin. Sins of commission cover off the things you did and oughtn’t to have done. The sins of omission are briefly, everything else. Specifically, the things you ought to have done and didn’t. Which as a get-out-of-that clause is comprehensive to the extent that you have to wonder if insurance policies are the ultimate proof of a Divine plan.
Every bad thing is a sin. Even some good things are sins if you do them for bad reasons. Probably. I’m not too clear on this. But things you might think are good are almost certainly sins, or one kind or another. But it’s the ones of omission that are the real Gotchas. You don’t get away with saying ah yes, but I didn’t do it. Because that’s the whole point. No, says God. You didn’t, did you? Get out of that.
The biggest one I ever experienced was a lie. It happened in Israel, a long time ago. It altered the entire way I think about the place and the people who live there. The ones I knew told lies. They lied habitually, as a first response to anything. They lied about being able to borrow a car whenever you felt like it, which I was told would be happening before I even left England. They lied about the pigs they kept on the kibbutz. They kept the pigs on wooden pallets so their feet, or more specifically their cloven hooves didn’t walk upon the earth, to make it ok with God to eat bacon. Which we did more than once while I was there, but as the pigs were called turkeys it didn’t matter. The sad part is I’m not making any of this up. This happened, it was lied about and everyone seemed completely happy with the arrangement.
As they were the night we got machine-gunned. There were quite a few lies and sins of ommission that night, as well as some committed too, given we were all in our teens and early twenties and away from home and it was a warm night. I wasn’t committing any sins myself, you understand. Not that night anyway.
It was probably about 1am when those who were asleep were woken by a burst of automatic gunfire. I’d grown up near Warminster, the army officer training base in England, well within hearing distance of the gunnery ranges on Salisbury Plain. I shot every Thursday night at a local club. I knew what gunfire sounded like. And everybody who hadn’t had heard it on television anyway. Being young and stupid we all piled out of our beds and wandered outside to see what was going on, which looking back, isn’t the best response to a terrorist attack. We were lit up by bright lights floating down out of the sky; parachute flares shot off to spot the incoming invaders on kibbutz Revivim, which always saw itself as the front line, not least because it was one of the southernmost kibbutzim but also because it was Golda Mier’s kibbutz for a while. Some of us wondered if we were going to get shot. More of us just watched the girls in their underwear, softly lit in the pink and white glow of the descending lights.
After a couple of minutes of this an older man from the kibbutz turned up carrying an Uzi submachine gun. He got everyone out of their huts and marched us all off to the tennis court, where what we thought was a toolshed turned out to be the top of a set of stairs leading down to a brick-built shelter underground. So we sat there. Someone asked what was going on. Were we under attack?
No. Ok, so what’s going on?
Nothing was going on. It’s just a precaution.
Against what?
Nothing.
And that was final. Nothing was happening. Nothing had happened. Nobody had heard any gunfire. We must have imagined it. Nobody had shot off any parachute flares. We must have imagined those too. Whatever they were, which they weren’t, because nothing had happened. None of which explained why we were sitting in a bomb-shelter under the tennis court, which we didn’t even know existed yesterday evening.
It took about two weeks to worm the explanation out of several different people. Because it always thought of itself as a frontier kibbutz, they used to use fifteen year olds to guard it every night. They gave them all an Uzi and a bicycle. What could possibly go wrong?
There isn’t much happening on a kibbutz at night. Nothing that needs a submachine gun, anyway. So if you’re fifteen and standing under a palm tree you get bored. But they’ve given you this 9mm gun, just like your heroes. Just like in the movies. You could, I don’t know. Take the magazine out and put it in again. Unfold the stock then fold it up a couple of times. Slide the bolt back just enough to see if there’s a bullet shining in the chamber. Or .. I know! Check to see if the safety is on by pulling the trigger.
Not by looking at the indicator on the side. Not by feeling which way the lever’s pointing with your thumb. Not even by holding the gun without your hand on the grip, where there’s another safety which has to be depressed, so the gun won’t fire if you snag the trigger on a branch or something. No. By holding it cocked and pulling the trigger, like a bored fifteen year old who some idiot gave a submachine gun.
Different person, same gun. Exactly what a bored 15 year-old needs.
Which obviously never happened, because like the turkeys with curly tails, there was one version of the truth on kibbutz Revivim, and that was whatever the kibbutz council said it was. Anything else didn’t happen. And anyone who said it did was an enemy of the kibbutz, so they must be lying anyway. That’s what enemies do.
I lived like this for three months. I have no intention of ever going back.
Over twenty years after I’d banged the dust of Revivim off my boots someone invented Google Earth. I looked-up the kibbutz, just to see how it had changed. The map showed me the names of two Arab villages I’d never known were there for the simple reason that they weren’t. There was no trace on the ground that there had ever been people living in houses where the peach groves were now. It was called the nakba, and it’s something else that didn’t happen. The villages aren’t there on Google Earth any more. We’re not even allowed to see the names of them any more, as if they were never there at all. I emailed Google to ask why they were obliterating history, when they’d used the names in the first place. They emailed back to tell me my comments weren’t helpful. I’m glad they weren’t. I don’t want to help Google tell lies.
The nakba is where Palestinian refugees come from, the ones who were such a threat to Israel in the 1980s that it was fine to bomb them or drive a tank through their tents on the BBC News most nights without a single word of explanation about how or why or when all these refugees had suddenly materialised out of nowhere.
Except refugees don’t. They exist because of people’s deliberate actions. And pretending they’re just one of those things, or some kind of natural event, nobody’s to blame, nobody is responsible and hey, they’re economic migrants anyway, because nobody was trying to kill them except when they were, trying to blot them out of nice people’s history is a huge sin, whichever religion you believe in. Including none.
A couple of weeks ago a man flew an airplane at an airshow, which wasn’t unusual in itself. Sadly for the pilot and the eleven people dead so far, the plane crashed. A lot of people seem to think that’s quite unusual too, but it isn’t.
Airshow crashes happen quite a lot. Right back as far as 1911, just a few years after airplanes started flying, there was an airshow crash just like the Shoreham one. You can read the details on Wikipedia if you wish.
At Shoreham, the plane looped, then went into the ground. It happened in Suffolk too, at the little airfield just down the road from me. It was flown by a man called Lt. Otto Jenkins, known to his friends as Dittie. He was killed on 24th March 1945. I was told the story by a man who saw it happen, who’d seen the aircraft fly past at about 20 feet, saw it clip the tree and go straight into the field, where it exploded and burned. There was quite a crowd that day too. Lt Jenkins had told people to watch.
He’d just completed his last mission over Germany. He was going home. When he got back to Leiston airfield he said his last words on earth, over the radio. “I’ll show you flying you’ll never forget.”
He took his Mustang down to get the speed up then looped it, going up and over in a complete circle. Then he decided to go it again, straightaway. According to the mechanics watching, they could hear something wasn’t right. They said it was ‘mushing’ as it went round the second time, trying to press itself out of the loop, skidding downwards out of the circle. There just wasn’t enough speed to make it happen twice.
I met a woman whose aunt dated him, or said she did. He was married, according to the old pilot who told me about it. We went to look for the tree. It was smaller then, but it’s still there. Oak trees are tough stuff.
Lt Jenkins got through several aircraft in the few months he was flying. After the custom of the time he’d named them, first Floogie, then Floogie II, then Toolin’ Fool. then Toolin’ Fool’s Revenge. The pilot who inherited Floogie II. Lt Schlieker, was killed later. He crashed near Butley church, nearby. He was in formation when his flight of four aircraft climbed into the clouds. That was the last anyone ever saw of him. He was identified by a name tag on his shirt. Bad weather and accidents killed more pilots on that airfield than the Luftwaffe ever did.
A badger track leads across the field exactly where there used to be a path the pilots used, but there’s no plank over the ditch any more. The Officer’s Club he watched the show from isn’t there either, and where the Mustang screamed past the huts now it would be flying through a hedge and 70 years of brush that’s grown up since the airmen went home. Not Lt Jenkins. But maybe he was right, somehow. Not everyone’s forgotten his flying.
I had a health scare last week. There was nothing wrong with me. But there had been once, ten years ago this year. And frankly, I was scared.
I was also in pain. Intermittently. This was the main problem. The thing I had had sent waves of pain through me. Not just like shutting your hand in a door, although that’s painful enough. I’m not a notably small person and I’m talking about the kind of pain that drops you to your knees mid-stride, vomiting. It wasn’t a stomach thing. I guessed that was just part of an extreme fight:flight reflex. We’ve all advanced such a long way, haven’t we? Apparently not when the chips are down. Or coming back up again as in this case.
The thing is, when five minutes later apart from doubting your own sanity there’s nothing much wrong with you at all, it’s quite hard to get a doctor to take you seriously. Or at least, the doctor’s surgery I went to, the one where I was told “if you can cycle 20 miles there’s nothing much wrong with you.”
Actually, no.
Well, there was. That ‘advice’ very nearly killed me. The doctor was trying to avoid doing a blood test that would have cost about 80p. It has a reputation for providing false positives, which means that sometimes it will tell you that you have something when you don’t. The up side is that if the test says you don’t have the thing it’s testing for then you really, really don’t. And obviously, terms and conditions apply. Nothing is 100% accurate. Not even me.
It was DVT, or deep vein thrombosis back then. It happened when I was flying long-haul a lot and my blood clotted too much and blocked a vein. Which hurts if it’s a big vein, which it was. It isn’t the vein that’s painful but the things around it which hurt, I think. I don’t think there’s anything veins are made of that can feel anything much. I felt cold and slow and old and as if I was dying, which thanks to my doctor’s desire for an easy life and saving 80p, I was. It was no thanks to her that I didn’t. Instead I woke up one morning a decade ago with one leg nearly twice the size of the other and raspberry coloured, after three nights of terrifying dreams. Even my useless GP had to admit there was something wrong then, the way I’d been saying there was for three years. When I wasn’t dropped to my knees vomiting in pain.
Then a brilliant surgeon asked me if I’d like to be in his experiment, which having seen Marathon Man I wasn’t totally keen on. So he offered me a choice. Be part of my experiment. Or go on Warfarin anti-coagulant, so your blood flows more easily because it’s going to be made thinner. The snag being that it’s a cumulative drug, varying the dosage doesn’t work immediately and it’s easy to over or undershoot, so you’ll need a weekly blood-test. And after ten years you’ll probably haemorrhage spontaneously and that will be pretty much splashily that.
Pretty much like that, only smaller.
It wasn’t a difficult choice, really. I became the third person in the UK to have an iliac stent. If you remember Slinkies, think of one six inches long and just a few millimetres wide. Now think of it stuck inside your iliac vein. That’s the big one that gets the blood up out of your left leg, crosses over your spine and takes it to your lung. Which is why an iliac DVT is somewhat problematic.
If the blood clot breaks up and moves to your lung you’ll have a pulmonary embolism. Which can kill you. If it keeps moving it’ll go through your heart and probably block the artery on the way out, so your heart will literally explode as it keeps pumping blood into a blocked tube. Which can, obviously enough, kill you. Or it might keep going and lodge in your brain, when you’ll have a stroke and not be able to speak and have to learn how to eat again but with a spoon this time unless you’re already dead, which might be preferable. It wasn’t all that much fun, any of this. I think it was worth spending 80p on a blood test. My previous GP didn’t.
An hour of surgery under local anaesthetic. I watched the whole thing live on TV. That was stupid. Even the surgeon said so, afterwards. More nightmares, for two weeks. But in a thousand years when my grave is excavated on Time Team the only thing left will be the stent gleaming in the bottom of a pit. There is no way my iliac vein will be blocked there ever again unless I’m hit by a steamroller, in which case it will be an inconvenient day anyway.
Some people live with near-constant discomfort from stents, I was warned. My surgeon told me that might happen, or it might be only when I’m really tired. Which is what happened the day before yesterday but I didn’t know if it was that or the whole thing starting again.
So I went for a blood test at a new, different GP surgery. I don’t understand the talk about waiting lists. I phoned up and got an appointment ten minutes after the surgery was closed. The woman on Reception said it was ‘urgent.’ I drove over and gave a blood sample. Four and a bit hours later they called me on my mobile. Clear. I don’t have DVT.
I do need to sort my sleep out and I think a lot of that is simply bad sleeping habits. Like doing Facebook in bed, for example.
I’m lucky enough to live in a country where I can get health care like this. Most of my ancestors ended-up dead from DVT. OK, everyone ends-up dead sooner or later, but it’s not a quick or painless way to go. Luckier still, this kind of health-care is free. Still, after everything.
It doesn’t matter how rubbish you think politics is, or how much you want to pretend ‘they’re all the same’ or it doesn’t make any difference if you vote or not. Because it does. The National Health Service, free at the point of demand, is probably the greatest single achievement ever made in this country. It’s benefitted more people more fundamentally that anything else. And it came about precisely because politicians are not all the same. And because people didn’t try to justify their inaction with a self-fulfilling script about their own irrelevance.
I saw a Tweet today from a law firm, quite sensibly asking people if they didn’t have a will, what did they think was going to happen to their digital legacy when they died?
I don’t have any next of kin to leave things to but it set me wondering what kind of digital legacy they really meant. I invented some software once. Well, twice, to be honest. The first one got stymied by a “Top Six” firm of accountants, whose Watford branch was absolutely no help raising VC money AT ALL, for all their ‘we can get you a million’ hot air. Much like Tony Blair, the person in charge of the project didn’t really do email. And yes, that’s exactly what they said. To both things. As someone more sensible than me pointed out, the Top Six is a very, very different thing to the Top Five.
Then a tech crash and the dawning realisation that these provincial accountants had no more real access to that kind of money than I did and relied on going round asking people if they’d like to invest in something. Which I could have done myself. The other was a bit more successful, and would be today if the company who were buying it hadn’t been bought and then bought again and re-structured and moved and all the associated disruption that goes with that. Still. Don’t look back in anger and all that. And relax.
I made a Moodle website for Chalmers University in Sweden, the first one they had. Does that count?
What?
I don’t just sit here writing this stuff, you know. Although some days it feels like that. Maybe this is the kind of digital legacy they were talking about. I hope so. Because otherwise we’re going to have to consider who I bequeath my collection of Tweets about Kate Bush and New Labour to. My Facebook posts of videos of Wendy James.
I mean, really? Surely people could go and look at You Tube themselves. If not at Wendy James. I saw her down Portobello you know. She was sitting on a wooden pallet, I was selling Georgian tea caddies…. oh, you don’t need to know the rest, do you? Really?
If not Paris, we’ll always have, well, tea, old girl…
I always wanted one of these. Obviously that isn’t true. I wanted one since about oh, I don’t know. More than fifteen years. It’s a thing called a Kelly Kettle. You pull out the cork and pour water in. The bottom bit you put some old newspaper in, or pine cones, or driftwood, or anything you like, and light it. The flames go up the chimney in the middle because that’s all this is, really. A chimney, with the water held around it.
One part of the Saturday Financial Times is enough to boil about one and a half litres of water in less than five minutes, which is about the best use I can make of a Special Report on Khazakstan, however it’s spelled. I take the kettle to beach so I can sit and very Englishly drink fresh tea while I read a book in the sun. Is it a survivalist thing? Well, only if survivalists are quite well organised. Which I suppose they’d have to be or they wouldn’t. And only if they like tea, of course, so not Murican ones.
It’s not very glamorous. I used to have fantasies about taking one fly fishing, but given that yet again I haven’t done any this year as the nearest fly water is 200 miles away and I am definitely not fishing in a pond to torture fish by keeping on catching them and putting them back, it looks as if I probably won’t be doing any this year. But I can still drink tea.
It’s not the kind of behaviour you’d look for on a beach on the Riviera, except the Cornish one, but I’ve been to the real one before. But it fits where I live and part of me now. And I like this small part of me, quite a lot.
Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn’t understand why he lost.
Radio4 just told me that Gordon Brown is about to make a speech in London. There are several newsy things about this, not least that he hasn’t made a big speech for years. The other is that he’s going to say how awful Jeremy Corbyn is, presumably because Corbyn actually has some socialist principles while when Ed Milliband was accused of being a socialist by David Cameron he acted as if it actually was an insult and all but said ‘sorry.’
Given that Milliband spent most of the five years he was leader of Labour seemingly determined not to do anything that would in any way resemble contradicting the Tory Party’s policies then the title Leader of the Opposition was always misplaced. The full title was and is Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition; where it went wrong was that it was supposed to mean loyal to the Crown, not to the Prime Minister.
Yvette Cooper is another contender for the leadership of the Labour Party. She got her own little soundbite in the same piece on Radio4 too, explaining that Labour was out there listening to people and ‘trying to understand’ why they lost the General Election.
She also showed again why Labour lost the election and why they deserved to. Gordon Brown was probably the least charismatic figure any party could have chosen as a leader. It wasn’t just that his entire public persona as someone who was barely containing his inner fighty pub drunk wasn’t very attractive to the people who he wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t just that like Callaghan before him, he was supposed to be Prime Minister by inheriting the title and nobody outside the Labour Party thought this was credible. If they did, they hid the fact at election time. It wasn’t even that he got into probably the least edifying public competition with David Cameron ever, both of them doing all but digging-up the tiny corpse and screaming ‘my baby’s deader than your baby.’
How useless do you have to be exactly, to lose to him?
More, it was the fact that he was a workplace bully whose behaviour was tolerated and encouraged by a Party who claimed to oppose exactly that behaviour. It was the fact that in selling off gold at its lowest price for years he clearly believed his own nonsensical ‘no more boom and bust’ rhetoric. He did nothing to stop the slide towards privatising the NHS and nothing to stop the City of London rampaging out of control. His Freudian slip when he broadcast that he had ‘saved the world’ rather than bankers and their bonuses, primarily by giving money to banks without any stipulation they should do anything with it other than keep it and count it now and then spoke volumes about his belief in his importance in the scheme of things. And as the 2010 election showed, it was a belief few other people shared. Being unable to win an election against a collection of cartoon characters drawn from the Lord Snooty faction of the Beano illustrates that point better than anything I could write.
Cor Lumme, eh readers??
Gordon Brown was a joke. Like Bernard Manning, he appealed to some people but from here you can’t really see why. Milliband was too, but like Yvette Cooper, for a different reason. In trying to listen he shows he doesn’t have any principles or policies or passion. Aside from anything else he uses the wrong tools to listen, if that’s really what he wants to do.
Shortly after he became leader, Ed Milliband – or someone paid to pretend to be him – went on Twitter mourning the death of a ‘pollster’ (to use Ed’s own words) who had done sterling work for the Party. Except he hadn’t. He was dead, admittedly, but what his company had produced, recruited, interviewed and reported on were group discussions. Whatever else they’re for, groups are not a snapshot of what people are thinking. They’re done in a hurry and there aren’t enough people talked to that could give a representative idea of what other people think. If you’re interested, group discussions are a great way of generating ideas and discussing things to clarify your own thinking, but they aren’t in any way reliable for polling opinion. Because they aren’t opinion polls. Notwithstanding that a large body of UK market research thinks that two groups (ie about twelve people) can give the answer to anything, (a) they can’t and b) it might have been nice for the dead researcher to have what he did described correctly by the person who wanted to be seen to be paying tribute to him. Assuming he hadn’t described groups as polls himself, of course.
Because I worked in market research at the time I tried to talk to Ed on Twitter about it. He did what he always did in Parliament: stay silent. I thought then and now how pathetic that response was. I wasn’t abusive or rude in any way. I just said that polls are not group discussions and hence the deceased was not a pollster. I didn’t say that calling anyone a pollster is a fairly yucky faux-chuminess that isn’t the best epitaph anyone could wish for, especially as it was wrong anyway. But I might as well have done.
I tried to find the Tweet but it was years ago. I found another more recent one instead, from just before the election.
Ed probably thinks this is fighting talk. This is why he lost. Because like him, it doesn’t say anything that means anything. It’s a silly, irrelevant platitude that can mean anything you want it to mean. It doesn’t just suck up to the Tory line about ‘hard-working families.’ It says nothing about cutting child benefits at all. It says nothing about what if anything he intended to do to help families who aren’t working. It says nothing about creating an economy that creates jobs. Writing this – and let’s assume he did – Milliband could actually have CUT Child Benefit to families who weren’t working and stay true to his word. But first of course, he’d have to have some rubbish research done to see if a few people liked the idea.
Blair turned Labour into an Alice In Wonderland Party where words mean anything you want them to mean. But people outside Parliament don’t think like that. Most people mean what they say. They think about things and put together an idea of how they see the world and how they’d like it to be, then they do what they can to make it that way. What they don’t generally do is keep pestering everyone to find out what other people would like them to think. Because it’s creepy. About as creepy as gurning over a newspaper that despises you, pretending you’d even keep it in the bathroom in case the loo roll ran out.
When the truth is found
There used to be a band called Jefferson Airplane. Their break-through song, White Rabbit, was an acid-drenched soaring scream of wonder about leisure pharmaceuticals, drawing on Lewis Carrol’s Alice adventures. One of the most memorable exchanges in the book was between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Alice was puzzled about the way that according to Humpty and countless others, words could be made to mean anything you want them to mean. She found this odd and not the case; Humpty disagreed. I often wonder if it was just coincidence that on the very next track on a Jefferson album I have the very next track is “Somebody to Love.” It starts: ‘when the truth is found to be lies.’
One of the things about modern life is the belief that you can’t do anything. That other people are experts. That someone knows better than you do. And when they’ve trained to do that, it’s true. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer is that simply because he’s always been best mates with the Prime Minister from uni onwards, it patently isn’t true at all.
It’s the same with the things we use. I know I’m supposed to throw things away, but the thing is: I paid for them. I bought them in the expectation that they’d keep working and when they don’t I firstly get annoyed and then more usefully, try to repair them.
All you need for this project. Not including sticky-backed plastic and tea.
When my Macbook battery started to die, so much so that it even asked for help in a desperate little note on the screen, I know I’m supposed to have gone to a Mac repair place. They could have done a lot of sucking of air between teeth and the compulsory “can’t get the bolts, see, Fella?’ which enrages me more than almost anything else (being called that, even by policemen, who at my age should be calling me ‘sir,’ always preferable to ‘do you mind if I call you Carl?’ but let’s move on) as (a) I am not anyone’s fellow and (b) you could if you could be bothered, which was always true).
You say carbon-fibre spludger, I say chip fork.
Then I could have been embarrassed on the Mac shop person’s total failure to know how to repair anything at all without sending it to be somebody else’s problem and weeks later I would have got a bill for a couple of hundred pounds and it might or might not have worked. So forget that.
Instead, I bought a new battery on Ebay for £17 which arrived less than 48 hours later, looked online for how to do it and got my toolkit out. The first thing the web page listed was the three tools you need for the job. A tiny crosshead screwdriver, a triangular screwdriver and a bit of plastic called a spludger they wanted £2.49 plus post and packing for.
It’s just more pretend nonsense. A pair of wooden chip forks work just as well. They’re free and more to the point, are there in the car ashtray in case they come in handy for something. Which they did. And they’re recyclable too.
The black bit’s the battery. Recycling it around here is a 20-mile round trip.
First switch it all off and take the plug out. Obviously. Then you turn the Powerbook upside down and take the screws off the back of it. The only thing that can go wrong (apart from dropping the whole thing, or losing the screws, so that teacup she never even noticed, not least because I didn’t know she didn’t like tea when I bought it came in handy at last) is shorting the entire thing out with the static electricity in your body. You get rid of it by shorting yourself out to earth, which literally means that: take your shoes off and do the job with your feet on the brick tiles in the kitchen. If that’s not an effective earth I don’t really know what is.
A half hour screwing
The only iffy bit is getting the stupid triangular screws out, put there by some total arse who was trying to be clever in Cupertino, or maybe they just had a load of triangular screws they got cheap because nobody else wanted them, which seems likely. I have a few triangular screwdrivers but nothing that size. A tiny flathead screwdriver works just as well. Sort of.
Gently feel where it goes and press it just a bit. Come on guys, you should know how to do this.
Undo all the screws, flip the connector off the battery with the wooden chip forks (do check for vinegar and lumps of batter first; a good wipe down with your fingers works nicely, take the old one out, put the new one in, plug the connector, put all the old screws back and start it up. It altered the clock, but otherwise it’s fine and charging happily. And a lot faster than the old one.
I gave it all a good clean with a camelhair brush I had in a box of art supplies someone keeps forgetting to come and get out of my spare room however many times I say I’ll throw it all in the bin as she knows perfectly well I won’t.
No, I don’t know why most of my stuff is German, either.
And it all works. Because you can do this stuff. Anyone can. It’s just there’s a whole industry devoted to telling you that you need to give other people money instead of doing anything yourself. There was one slight problem – one of the screws holding the battery in didn’t want to bite. Given that the battery is held in place by the other ten screws holding the back cover on anyway I don’t really think it matters. It’s not as if it’s going anywhere nor as if the screw can fall out because it’s a long one. Maybe it’s like those parts on old British motorcycles, the metal thing you have leftover after any engine job, that has no noticeable effect on the engine running whatsoever.
We learned to be helpless. And you can learn not to be.
One of the good things about dead people is that they can’t sue you. You can say whatever you like about them. Quite a lot is being said about Cilla Black recently. Sadly, none of it quite like the revelations you might expect if she was anything like the character she played in Benidorm, which she obviously wasn’t.
Instead, we’re told that her life was altered by a ghost. Some of the papers half-heartedly tried to write it in inverted commas, but The Express and Daily Mail ran it as a real, true story. Cilla saw a ghost. That’s a fact. Kim Kardashian is talented for more than just having a huge arse. That’s another one. There’s a plot to blow up the Queen on Saturday and nobody’s been arrested. That’s another fact right there. All of them sounding as if they’ve been written by over-excited eight year-olds and given the fact that HuffPost and their ilk don’t pay anyone, maybe they have.
Something else in an otherwise predictable Sky “report” on ISIS was interesting but went uncommented completely: Peshmerga commanders have described how ISIS goes to great lengths to hide the identities of its fighters – including shooting dead bodies they are unable to remove from the battlefield repeatedly in the face until they are unrecognisable. Quite why was left unquestioned, let alone unanswered. What for? Why would they? Whatever name we’re supposed to call them this week?
But a lot of things routinely go unanswered these days. Such as why it’s ok for Turkey to buy oil from ISIS, which isn’t a rumour but something the US Treasury states. Or why Turkey bombs the Kurds who actually stand up to ISIS and fight back effectively against them. Or why ISIS has never fired a single shot against Israel that I’ve ever heard of, which is particularly odd if they’re really supposed to be rampaging through the Middle East and imposing a caliphate. Google ISIS attacks Israel and see what you come up with. It won’t take long. Or why the Isreali Prime Minister has been saying Iraq will have a nuclear weapon within two years for the past twenty-five years and nobody ever publicly says “but you said that last year. And the year before. And the year before that Mr Prime Minister.”
Or why BBC reporters claimed David Cameron publicly threatened to shut the BBC but they didn’t feel they ought to mention it until after the election. Think about that one for a moment. Or why the same newspapers who have space to print rubbish about a dead pop singer’s nights disturbed by apparitions somehow don’t have the column inches to print much about the Chancellor’s loss-making sell-off of RBS shares and still present his reign as an uninterrupted financial success story.
I think I saw a ghost once. I was in a very old-fashioned restaurant in a six hundred year-old manor house which had once been much bigger. We waited about 20 minutes before we could attract a waiter to our table and then waited longer to get anyone to take our drinks order. Eventually a man I presumed to be the owner came into the dining room. He stopped suddenly as if he was surprised anyone was there, then quickly left the room and turned down a corridor. I got up and followed him. He was wearing a white shirt and yellowish trousers, much the same kit I sometimes wear at weekends if I’m in that kind of mood. He was about ten years older than me. The only odd thing about him was that he looked so surprised and rushed off so quickly. That isn’t strictly true. The other odd thing about him was that the corridor I followed him into was a dead end with no doors and he wasn’t there. He would have had to have walked past me to go anywhere else. He simply wasn’t there.
H.A.F. You can work out the acronym yourself.
When the waiter came back he avoided the subject. It turned into a loud night. We assumed there was a stag party because of the noise that went on until the small hours. We talked to the waiter about it at breakfast the next day. He said we were the only guests and that staff didn’t stay on the premises overnight. He didn’t have any explanation for any of it.
Things that go bump
Did I see a ghost? I don’t know. Maybe and maybe not. I know it wasn’t in the least bit scary – I thought it was a real person I saw and as somebody once said to someone who said they’d never seen a ghost, in a room full of strangers or a busy street or train station, how exactly would you know? And it doesn’t matter. What does is that things like this are being pumped out to occupy people, while real, big questions go unasked, let alone answered. And it’s deliberate. And that’s much more scary than Cilla’s dead maid.
The ancestors. Simple folk. They couldn’t even fix an iPhone battery.
In the USA it means a place that needs some work. But for me it’s what I do. I fix things. I always have. I wasn’t much good at things like woodwork at school and I had no clue about how my Scalextrix cars worked other than that the electricity turns the motor that turns the wheels. Maybe there isn’t much else to know. It didn’t help me fix them, but maybe removing 3-in-1 oil and carpet fluff isn’t strictly electrical engineering. I’ve never looked at a syllabus.
I had motorcycles that didn’t and cars that sort of went and mainly because I had next to no money I had to fix them myself or they didn’t go. The one time I gave up and paid for a garage to fix my car they took about half a term’s grant (ah yes, dear reader, there was such a thing before Market Forces and your total indifference to doing anything about it) to fail to fix the kind of problem that is obvious when you start looking at it and begin to think. There was an intermittent electrical fault. The car would stop, then start, or miss a couple of beats, or slow down, or just stop for no reason anyone could see. In those days the sparks came out of a distributor which did that, spinning round and working a cam to put the spark into the right wire at the right time. To regulate things a pair of weights pulled a spring apart as they spun round at thousands of times a minute. The little pile of metal dust told me (and not the garage) eventually what was wrong. The spring had worn out after fourteen years or so and the weights were hitting the edge of the distributor, inside. So the electricity didn’t get to the spark plug when that happened, which wasn’t always.
I don’t know what happens under car bonnets now. You’re not supposed to. Like mobile phones and computers, you’re supposed to chuck them away and get another one when they start to go wrong.
Except that hardly squares with saving resources, whether they’re child labour in China or cadmium in batteries or just my money. So this week it’s time to fix the laptop as well as my iPhone. Both of them have the same problem – after three years of use you can only use them for about two hours at the outside. I know I’m letting the entire economy down but we’re hardly on speaking terms anyway.
Right now I’m waiting for them to arrive in the post, along with the special tools to hack the iPhone apart and the earthing strap to put on my wrist and my metal desk so the static in me doesn’t fritz the electrics. And you’re reading about someone who used to have blue flashes coming out of his fingers when he closed the car door on a Ford. Switching to a Mercedes cured that. It was what the seats and carpets were made of, natural fibres instead of static-generating synthetics. So wish me luck. I can still fix things. It’s what I do.
