So what are your solutions ?

Being in lock-down gives you lots of time to think. Time to read.

I love Michael Ventura. He is one of those not-so-well known writers who seem to speak for a generation, who just manage to tune in to the Zeitgeist and channel it. Paul Simon always had the knack of writing songs like this, songs that just spoke for the times.

I was thinking about people who had insoired me, who shaped the way I think, and remembered Michael Ventura. A long time ago I read and re-read and re-re-read his Letters at 3 a.m.: Reports on Endarkenment (1994) .

In that book, he offers his 'Solutions to all our problems'. He listed 30, and intrdiced them like this:

It’s happened once too often. Somebody says or writes to me, ‘You talk about what’s wrong, but you don’t offer solutions.’ And maybe they’re right. Maybe to merely detail one’s vision and let readers take it from there isn’t enough. Maybe there are solutions, and maybe I should know them. So I sat down and thought about things real hard, and here, numbered for your convenience, are my solutions to everything.

His last 'solution' was this:

Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You’re the solution. If you’re not, there is no solution.

And it struck me then, and again yesterday, that he was right. We have to find solutions for ourselves, solutions that work for us. Not just pragmatic solutions that help you get the lid off the paint without getting it all over your trousers (yes, I have been painting). Solutions to stuff that matters. So I was inspired to have a go at my own list - shorter than Michael's - and reading it again yesterday I only needed small tweaks to bring it up to date.

If these are no good, well, make your own. Of course. Here goes:

Solutions (after Michael Ventura)

 Try not to trade sunny days for money. Work doesn’t have to define your life, and the idea of regular attendance at a place of work is relatively recent. Work can shape and dominate your life, and you have to be determined not to let it.

Education should be more than just the process by which the state grooms future taxpayers for later exploitation. Children crawl, walk, talk and learn at their own pace and time. All the hurdles education puts in their way are artificial. Just try to stop children learning – it can’t be done. But schools almost manage it by squeezing out the spontaneity and joy in learning. And education schools children to squander sunny days.

Beware conformity. Conformity to values, habits, customs, other people’s expectations always round down. Conformity is about forcing round, triangular, hexagonal, spherical, 4 dimensional pegs into someone else’s square holes. No surprise that the fit isn’t comfortable. Ask yourself in any situation whether anything is gained by conforming, and whether anything is lost.

This is your life. You have just one. There is nothing after it. If you can’t make things better now, they never will get better. And nobody will make things better for you. You have to do it yourself.

Avoid organised religion and all its works. Building irrationality into your life is never a great idea. Building in someone else’s irrationality is just crazy. Think about the balance sheet for religion and what it has contributed; guilt, self-loathing, wars, repression, hierarchies, intolerance, narrow-minded legislation, social control. The good things religion has managed to do could be achieved without the trappings.

 Believe things. Believe in people. Believe in yourself.

 Be still. Make space and time to smell blossom, count grass, watch clouds, listen to the music of the world.

 Don’t trust politicians to make a positive difference or look after your world. They won’t see further than hanging onto power and won’t act in your interests. You have to make the differences yourself. Think global, act local was always the way to go.

Live simply. Thoreau said that a man was rich in proportion to what he could live without. Having is only an illusory substitute for being. Make things, and make them beautiful. Do things for yourself. Be as self-sufficent as possible.

Travel less and journey more. And never be a tourist. There is an unknown world right on your doorstep, and your adventures won’t be any more exotic because you had to fly or drive to them. Like sex, the best journeying is in your head.

Some things stay with you

This little book did not really look very promising when I first came across it, much longer ago than I'd care to let on.

But Robert Fulghum touches so many nerves. It's like sitting in a talk and thinking that the speaker has you personally in mind. A bit like 'Killing me softly with his song'. (If you don't know it, check it out. You wonlt be sorry.)

Some things stay with you, and Robert Fulghum eventually gets around to what he learned in Kindergarten. I guess our politicians never went to Kindergarten. Shame. See if you like it as much as I do.

These are the things I learned:

 

Share everything

Play fair

Don't hit people

Put things back where you found them

CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS

Don't take things that aren't yours

Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody

Wash your hands before you eat

Flush

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you

Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some

Take a nap every afternoon

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together

Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK

Because I have Aspergers something compels me to tell you that Styrofoam is polystyrene, even though you probably know that already. Sorry.

Flight risk

Heathrow arrivals 30 March 2020

New York is a virus hot-spot, right ? The most dangerous place in America with runaway infections. And the US is now the global epicentre of the disease.

So it would make sense to limit arrivals from New York (and maybe other American airports as well) ?

You would think so.

Looking at the schedule for Heathrow for yesterday, there are a lot of planes due in this week, and I guess every week.

The little plane symbols represent a lot of people travelling from JFK airport.

So it's obvious that while we are all subject to travel restrictions to prevent to spread of the virus, all arrivals would be tested or quarantined ?

You woud think so.

These passengers are neither quarantined nor tested. Listening to Michael Gove, it is clear that the government has insufficient tests avalable.

Well, then, surely the flights should be halted until testing is available ? Trump stopped al flights from Europe when Eurpoe was the epicentre.

You'd think halting the flights would be an obvious thing to do.

You'd think wrong.

This situation is nuts.

If this bothers you, write to your MP. Do it now. Make a fuss about it.

Social distancing

Is it the politics of resentment to notice that the Royals are hunkering down in their various separate palaces ?

Is it sour grapes to notice that while the man in the street is told to go home and stay there, Prince Charles has travelled to his Balmoral Estate, far away from his first home at Highgrove ?

Or that the Cambridges are safely tucked away on their country estate ?

This is serious social distancing.

The trouble is that this particular family is distanced from ordinary people by an unbridgeable chasm.

Having social distancing Mk I for the plebs, and social distancing MkII for the pampered elites only points up the need for more focused social justice.

The virus has little respect for boundaries of property, class, nation or religion. Perhaps we needed an equaliser like the virus to remind us that ordinary people matter. Without them, the elites might actually have to do some work.

Busy doing nothing

This comes from The Joy of Not Working by Ernie J Zelinski. (He also wrote How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free)

TJONW is a terrific book, and very reassuring. This illustration knocked me for six, however. It seems so obvious, but if it was obvious, there would not be so many people struggling to fill their time usefully.

Like me, you will know people who are lost without their job, the job that leaves them so little time for living happily. And when the job goes, not much else is left.

It's a puzzle that there are people hoping for life eternal who find it tricky to fill a rainy Sunday with useful activity.

Me ? Well, as you probably guessed already, I have never been busier than after retiring. The job always felt like one those huge tyres that slightly mad explorers drag behind them to train for the extremes of exertion, usually in temperatures that would make a penguin shiver. So shedding it was not exactly taxing, and I never regretted its loss, not even for the length of time it takes to eat a small yogurt.

At school, there was a barrow-load of irrelevant reading. But in Dickens I came across a sentence which resonated so much that I wrote ot down when I was 14. He had a smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

Not only was that written to describe me perfectly, but I recognised that at 14. It was true then, and it is, depressingly, still true to today. I am an inveterate messer-about. And it shows.

What made me think about TJONW today was the Great Virus Lock Down. While it is driving some friends up the pole, we have not got time to even think of shopping, as there is just so much interesting going on.

Sometimes, being an incurable and curious dilletante is a very handy thing to be. And I have my epitaph ready-made ... 

The blue lagoon

I have fond memories of Buxton.

When I was a kid, my parents often used to end up in Buxton on Sunday afternoon jaunts. I think there was a restaurant called Millers on the main street. Buxton had a kind of faded grandeur but was impressive. It reminded me of visiting the neat houses of maiden aunts where the loudest noise was the clock ticking. You could ignore the hairy chin and faint powdery smell because of the inexplicable kindness.

As an adult I worked in Buxton for a couple of happy years. I had an office in the Crescent, which at that time housed the Local Education Offices. The building was a bit tired, but the place was lovely and the people friendly.

Recently, Buxton has been working hard to revive its allure.

The spa town has been trying to get its mojo back.

The magnificent Crescent has been re-magnificented after a long period of dereliction and refurbishment.

Buxton is beginning to bloom again, even without its M & S.

One of Buxton's little local attractions is the Blue Lagoon at Harpur Hill. (No, its not a pub. Good guess though.)

At least, it was attractive until yesterday. Sure, the water is toxic and has the odd submerged wrecked car. But the Police decided that the lagoon was far too attractive. So attractive that people might be tempted to go see it, sit by it, view the water, relax. Pass on the virus. 

No problem. The Police had a brainwave, and it was a cracker. Here's what they said:

“Yesterday we received reports that people were congregating at the ‘Blue Lagoon’ in Harpur Hill, Buxton. No doubt this is due to the picturesque location and the lovely weather (for once!) in Buxton. However, the location is dangerous and this type of gathering is in contravention of the current instruction of the UK government. With this in mind, we have attended the location this morning and used water dye to make the water look less appealing.” 

Less appealing ? Sure, black dye would help with that.

Now it feels like a daily stroke of luck to live here in the Peak District. But I am nervous. What might be the next creative master-stroke to tame the siren delights of the countryside? Here are some brainwaves of my own:

• Dump rubbish on village greens. Fill lay-bys with old sofas and fridges.  (No. Old news.  Fly-tippers have been doing this for years.)
• Pour diesel on the roads to make them less attractive for speeding 
• Throw lorry-loads of supermarket trolleys into the rivers
• Have Police helicopters blast spiky music at high volume over every hill 
• Look into defoliation. There could be some old agent orange hanging around somewhere.

Poor old Buxton. Poor old Police. Poor old us.

If wrecking the attractions of the environment is the answer, what was the question again ?

Bus-slogan Boris

Boris Johnson makes it very hard for me to like him.

It isn't his air of entitlement, or even his perpetual clown act, his indolence or his insouciance. It isn't even his serial dishonesties or his utter lack of principal. Maybe it isn't the impossibility of taking him seriously.

Maybe it is all of the above. But what bites me at the moment is his inability to talk in anything other than sound-bites. Striking little phrases, devoid of much in the way of actual meaning, but catchy and resonant.

HIs Brexit bus ought to have been warning enough.

We send the EU £350 million a week
Let's fund our NHS instead
Vote Leave
Let's take back control

He kept on displaying this same slogan, even after it was roundly discredited. Why ? Because while it was untrue or misleading, it caught the voters' imagination. The actual truth of it was not an issue.

Now, he is spending £8.5 million on writing to 30 million households (what's wrong with texts and email which would be a lot cheaper ?). At the heart of his message, another bus-slogan: Save the NHS.

It doesn't seem mean to point out that the government has spent the last decade imposing austerity, a large part of the programme being the withdrawal of funding from public services in general and from the NHS in particular.

It doesn't seem too tough to ask whether our national resilience, and the NHS, might have have been more able to cope had the Tories focused on saving it a whole lot earlier. The constant reorganisation of the NHS, which led to staff losses and demoralisation were hardly a signal improvement.

No matter. Bus-slogan Boris will continue to fly the Save the NHS flag as long as it feels expedient.