Never mind the Queen. God save our COUNTRY.

Every day - every hour - people in my Facebook timeline post things that if I really wanted to, I could be offended by. Things about politics, sexuality, race, religion and pop culture. But I figure everyone is entitled to their own opinion and to express it, so I don't immediately engage in trying to argue with them about those sorts of things. I love the variety of views my friends hold.

So when I posted a picture of the Union Jack with the words "Never mind the Queen - God save our country!" on it, I was a bit taken aback to have been attacked for doing so. I mistakenly posted the picture as "Public" - something I will literally never do again. I posted the picture because I thought it was ironic, gritty, realistic. I didn't do it deliberately to provoke or offend. Just so you know. If I wanted to deliberately provoke or offend people, I would do so far more thoroughly and efficiently, so there'd be no uncertainty.

I have seen this country's flag used as a motif on everything from key-rings to toilet seats, car flags to dog beds, tea cosies to rubber ducks, flip-flops to doormats to hand bags. Don't tell me what I posted was defacing and therefore disrespectful to the flag.

It was suggested that I pay better attention to who can and cannot see my posts, but surely it would make sense for individuals to moderate their own behaviour, rather than have me censor their opinions individually? How am I supposed to know the particulars of everyone's thoughts and feelings? I have over 400 FB friends. If what I say or write offends, one can always express the contrary opinion on one's own wall. Gah. Maybe I am being naive. I simply should not have made the post public. Especially as it opened the door for people I did not even know to join in the discussion.

So you wanna know what I think of the Jubilee? Well, I'm not best placed to comment on the festivities, because I deliberately did not watch any of them until it got to the concert. My children were watching that.

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert was a fine illustration of so many British traits - the stiff-upper-lip insistence that there's nothing really wrong, that our history is glorious and chock-full of (pop) heroes, that we should pay unquestioning homage to people that have done nothing to deserve it other than be historically the ones we DO revere, or who have appeared recently on the television. I only started watching when Annie Lennox came on and I thought she was trying a little bit too hard, as if she was just a little bit uncertain; Tom Jones was thankfully restrained; Robbie Williams was given very much the wrong song to sing and I think was being deliberately sabotaged by Gary Barlow. He sounded and looked like a fool. Stevie Wonder seemed to think it was the Queen's birthday or something. Elton John was just cringeworthy.

Paul McCartney has not been able to sing properly for the last decade, at least, and really should retire gracefully. Rolf Harris was disgracefully booted off stage in the middle of his impromptu performance because of scheduling (read: 'financial') considerations. I felt sorry for Lenny Henry, who'd been doing OK till then. Madness and the animation projected on the walls of the Palace were absolutely wonderful, even if the saxophonist lost his reed in the middle of his solo in "It Must Be Love."

Seriously - if you didn't see it, WATCH THIS: ON FULL SCREEN.



But on the whole, and after considerable reflection, I feel the whole things was insensitive. It smacked to me of "We're all right, Jack", or the kind of Circus Maximus entertainments the Roman Emperors used to throw whenever the masses were unhappy because of lack of employment or food.

Never mind you don't have a job, or the one you have has been down-graded, that your benefits have been stopped or your day centre closed ... never mind dear. Here's Cliff Richard instead.

How insulting. And what difference has it made? Will it bring more tourists to London - next year? Will it persuade wealthy multi-national companies to relocate their operations to the UK and provide employment for us? What lasting legacy has it left? How has it  .. helped? Just by cheering people up for a couple of hours. OK I grant you that has some value .. but do you know that UK taxpayers will be paying over £1 million for the Jubilee celebrations (and please note, at the time of writing no one actually has a definitive figure for the cost yet.)

Can we afford that? We're all gonna have to work that much harder to make up the £1.2 billion lost to the economy through having an extra Bank Holiday. So I'd better stop writing this and get on with something that'll earn me some money I guess.

More details of Jubilee expenditure, here.

I'm going to have to moderate comments on this post I'm afraid - not because I like censorship but because this is MY blog, my opinion, and I am not especially interested in reading attempts to try and change my opinion. Arguments just upset me. I am not trying to change anyone's ideas by posting any of this, so please show me the same respect.

Being a Writer

I'm struggling here, trying to take on board the idea that I am not a real writer.

See, almost since I could ever hold a pencil, or certainly since my fingers were strong enough to depress the keys on my Marxwriter Deluxe, I have written. Like, every day. It's a bit like ingesting food - at a push I am sure I could go several days without eating, but I really would rather not.

Published writers sometimes appear to me - and I stress at this point that this is entirely MY perception, and not necessarily through their projection - to think that their writing carries more kudos than mine, because it has passed through the rite of passage of having been scrutinised and considered by a third party, and deemed worthy of being paid for.

Here's a typical conversation with a (published) writer.

Writer: "What do you do?"

Me: "Oh, amongst other things, I'm a writer like you!"

Writer: "Oh wow, great! Fabulous. What have you had published?"

Me: "I haven't been published. See, I - "

Writer: "I must get to the buffet table, sorry. They're about to run out of smoked salmon mousse."

Or perhaps, if I am lucky, they will spend a little while telling me why it is so imperative that I do everything in my power to get published and get paid - even a paltry few quid - for what I do. But why? As if my new-found 'success' will somehow reflect upon them, perhaps? I dunno.

Because I don't get paid for what I write, my writing carries less weight, it would seem. My writing doesn't have the battle trophies pinned to the legion's standard, or the ragged scars that ache when the weather changes, that prove it's worthiness.



Oh, don't get me wrong: I can see how my suggestion that I might be a writer could be confusing and irritating to someone who makes their living from the same activity, just as I can see that a "Fully Qualified, Board-Certified Music Therapist!" would perhaps feel discomfited by the fact that I do a job almost exactly the same way as they do, but without having jumped through all the professional, educational and certification hoops of flame that they have had to. That's why they have succeeded in making it illegal for me to call myself a music therapist, in spite of the fact that it is the description that most closely fits what I do.

(For years and years and years I did not even THINK to call myself a musician. I cannot read a note of music and therefore, I do not have what it takes to call myself a "musician". The best I could hope to call myself was an 'enthusiastic amateur'. Those days are behind me now.)

And then I read things like that pretentious, self-serving twaddle that journalist Joe Jackson had published (and was paid for!) in the Irish Independent magazine last week, and I think .. er, no. I don't think so. If that is what paid writing is about, then forget it.

I'm not saying that I sometimes feel my writing is worthless. I'm just saying that I'm occasionally talking to people and I feel like my writing is worth less.

Energetic Ranting. Plug me in!

Gosh. If someone at the Physics Department of Imperial College, London could only develop a way to harness the power of The Rant, the entire energy/global warming crisis would go away instantly.

The other day I was listening, in desperation because there was nothing else, to Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio Four's "In Our Time." Bragg has been working hard on celebrating the history of the Royal Society, which - for the benefit of those of you who've not heard of it before - is a British institution founded after our Civil War for the advancement of science and the betterment of human existence.

Uh-huuuuuh.

Well, get this. As part of the episode that was talking about what the Royal Society is up to today, there was an interview with a bright young student at some science fair thing they were running at Carlton House Terrace in London. Bragg described it as a sort of "Farmer's Market" for new scientific ideas but I found myself wondering if it was more like a car boot sale: For, as well as a smattering of NEW science ideas, there was also an unhealthy representation of OLD ideas about natural resources, and especially about who is entitled to reap (rape?) the natural resources in the African subcontinent.

An enthusiastic young go-getter was heard extolling the virtues of their wonderful new photovoltaic cell, which is something like twenty percent more efficient that the cell being commonly used around the world. Excellent, I hear you say. Superb. Yes. Give me three dozen. Have them gift-wrapped and sent to my apartment.

The student explained how these cells, which work by making use of ALL of the available light in the spectrum, and not just a small percentage of it, could be put in the Sahara Desert and then the power thus generated could be fed via high-voltage cables straight back to Europe.

Oh, I thought. Oh! OK. So .. because the Europeans have been able to pay for the development of these wonderful new power cells, then it is obviously they who should get all the benefits of the power that is generated, is that it?

So. Instead of feeding that power into the process of developing (especially) sub-Saharan Africa; powering its hospitals, its schools, its water pumps, its cooking stoves, its computer servers and its mobile phone networks, we should instead send that power directly back to Europe so we can use it to play on our Nintendo Wiis? Or leave our downstairs lights on all night for the dog to see where its water bowl is? Or to power our garage-mounted security lights that we are too stupid to programme to not come in during the day, triggered when a cat strolls over to the flower bed to have a dump? Or to power our ridiculous displays of Christmas lights every year - getting bigger and bigger in a pointless show of defiance against the moron over the road who has gone out to B&Q and bought YET ANOTHER string to go over the loft conversion?

Oh, I'm quite sure that the young person from the physics department at University College London was just nervous, was just all of a wibble at being interviewed for the radio, and as such can be forgiven for making a common error-of-speech; that OF COURSE the energy would also be made available to the poor Africans! I mean, after all - they wouldn't need awfully much of it would they .. just enough for a single low-voltage bulb to light the interior of their mud and straw hovel, isn't that it? Yes, I am sure we could spare them a bit.

Why don't people THINK before they open their gobs? No, don't answer that till you've really considered it.

The Imagery of Depression.

I read a lot about depression, in an effort to try and understand it better. The different analogies that people use in order to describe it fascinate me endlessly. Depression is something that has troubled me since at least my teens, which is when I started to keep a diary about it.

I read a lot about Gabriel Byrne because I like his acting. People can take the piss out of me for this on occasion, which I also find depressing, until I remind myself that they do it on order to compensate for something lacking in their lives, by trying to belittle something good in mine.

This I stumbled across the other day, and it speaks volumes to me.

Excerpted from here: http://tinyurl.com/pbtu3e - An interview in the Irish Sunday Independent "Life Magazine." Interview by Barry Egan.

Emboldenment is mine. Those are the bits where I thought, "Blimey! He's inside my head. He's reading from the script I have written there..."

Of course, Gabriel Byrne has talked about his long, dark nights of the soul, recently describing his depression as being “about trying to not let other people know all you want to do is lie in a corner and have nothing to do with anyone”.

“I don’t think anyone is immune from...” he says, breaking off, when I raise the subject.

“First of all, I would dispel the notion that depression is some form of self-indulgence and some kind of desire to hide away from the world. It is not as simple as that.”

He says he believes “the roots of depression are as much physiological as psychological and emotional; they are a combination of many things”.

The award-winning and internationally acclaimed actor continues that he thinks “some people are more prone to depression than other people. There are some who are just born naturally optimistic. I envy those people. They are born with the happy gene. I don’t think I ever had that.”

He says that he doesn’t “quite buy people who say that they are permanently and totally and utterly happy. I don’t think you can live in this world and not experience the ...” he breaks off again.

“To be fully human would, in my opinion, embrace the notion of fighting against nihilism. You have to battle that. I have battled with depression. The only reason I [talked about depression publicly] was not because I wanted to be another of these people saying, ‘I have depression’ and then people saying, ‘What has he got to be depressed about?’”

That is, he says, a very easy assumption to make. Depression, like many other things in life, is no respecter of class or wealth, or success or lack of success, he adds. “It is something that can be exacerbated by the absence or the surfeit of any one of those things,” Gabriel believes. And he has good reason to believe this.

“Nobody actually really understands where it comes from; why it comes; how long it lasts and why it actually goes. They have theories about serotonin levels in the brain, but nobody truly understands the genesis of depression. But there are things that you can do to offset it. There are a lot of people, for example, who drink to get away from it, but that leads into a vicious cycle,” he says, adding that trying to maintain a positive outlook in life is something that he does daily.

“And there are some days I fall down. But most days I keep standing up. That’s just the way it is. You know, I have accepted it, and I acknowledge it. I don’t try to hide it any more. The only reason I spoke about it was not to do a kind of misery memoir, but so that other people would see it, too.

“People who really know me know that I have a tremendously light and humorous side to me,” he says. “If you spoke to anyone on the set of In Treatment, they would tell you that I am the one who is light-hearted.”

I could vouch for Gabriel’s whoopee-cushion funny side, too — having myself and Liam Neeson in knots of laughter with his anecdotes in a New York bar in 2003; him playing the piano in his red socks with holes in them in Yoko Ono’s apartment in Manhattan in 2001. He uses humour a lot.

“I do, don’t I?” he asks rhetorically. “I think for a lot of people who battle that particular demon, humour is something that they work with. A lot of comedians tend to veer towards that [depression] and humour is some kid of a weapon that they use to defend themselves. Humour is very important to me in my life. I try to keep a light spirit and I try to keep looking outward and forward. I wasn’t somebody who was going around in a black cloud all the time. I mean, most of the time I was in very good humour. These inexplicable attacks would come every so often. I have learnt how to deal with them now.”

Asked to explain how he deals with these inexplicable attacks of darkness, Gabriel says the first thing he has to do is acknowledge it — by acknowledging it, he says: “I mean, by saying: ‘Here it is.’”

And what is it?

“It is like a black serpent in the garden. It is a beautiful sunny day, you are lying under a tree and you know that in the garden somewhere there’s a serpent. Sometimes it can be asleep. Sometimes it can be roused. Sometimes you can step on it by accident. That’s kind of the way I feel about it. I look at it and I say: ‘There you go again.’”

Gabriel tries to do things for himself that are, he says, positive. Keep active. Read. Keep engaged with people. Don’t isolate. Remember that it will pass. It is not the reality of life. And so forth and so on.

“Why today does the world seem dark — whereas yesterday it was bright?” he muses.

“Try to talk to somebody else about it,” Gabriel adds. He says that one of the most difficult things you can do when you are depressed is to reach out and to talk to another human being.

Reaching out can be life saving and it can also be desperately difficult because, he says: “with depression goes a sense of shame and a sense of isolation and so forth. But I would hate to think that my life is defined by it. I think that life presents us all with challenges that we have to overcome and we have to battle.

“Some of us are better at fighting than others. You know,” he continues. “If I didn’t have that, I would have to say I would have a pretty happy life and a pretty contented life; even with the knowledge that [depression] is something that’s there now and again.” There is a final pause before he continues.

“So most of the time — 90% of the time — my life is pretty contented and pretty happy. I don’t want people to go around [thinking I'm] crippled by depression. That’s not true."

Death by Cynicism.

Last night's review of "In Treatment" on the Radio Four programme 'Front Row' spoiled my dinner. In the end, I switched the radio off before the woman had even finished her ignorant and scathing tirade. I had begun to suspect that she was simply looking to be sensationalist. Some people are incapable of making a big enough impression on other people, and so they have to be deliberately objectionable in order to create some kind of reaction. Any kind of reaction.

The whole experience once again reminded me starkly of many of the reasons why I hate living in the United Kingdom. The ingrained cynicism. The unwillingness to embrace - or even to grasp - new ideas, new thinking, new ways of doing things. The harping on about the good old days. The sneering. The continual subtext, in so much of what is said, that the British are in some way superior to the Americans (amongst others.)

No wonder some of this country's greatest creative minds - people like Jony Ive, have upped sticks and fled this cold and sterile environment for the warmth - in more ways than just the weather - of California.

Spittle and Vaseline.

I've been thinking a lot in the last week or so about a story I heard of a little boy who left Dublin when he was about eleven years old and travelled to London to join a seminary and train as a Catholic priest.

He was the oldest of six children and his decision to follow this vocation was probably a source of great pride to his parents and his siblings.

But when he was there, he found himself subjected to blatant violence in the form of beatings (not in the least unusual in any school in London in the mid-Sixties, it has to be said) but also to less blatant - indeed, thoroughly covered-up - sexual abuse. He and countless others learnt the facts of life whilst being physically penetrated "with spittle and Vaseline."

Now, many years later, the man is grown up. He never became a priest. He has lost touch with his god. He has managed to make his life a good one, a successful one, in spite of a slow start. His early adulthood was blighted by indecision and lack of confidence, and he was marked as a restless spirit. But now he is internationally recognised for what he does, and he tries to make the best use of his position.

So, he began to talk about what happened to him. "When you speak out about something, then the disease of silence begins to lose its power." Which is how I heard his story.

People were incensed, they were outraged, they were horrified. They begin to say things like: "The Catholic Church owes him an apology!"

But suppose - just suppose - that some fairly high-up member of the church hierarchy were to telephone this 60 year old man at his home in New York to effect some kind of apology. Yes, that would be a wonderful start.

But a start to what?

See, if you apologise to one person, then it stands to reason that you should take the process further. My question is not where the apologies should begin, but where would they end?

Who will apologise to the millions of Jews exterminated like vermin during the Second World War whilst the Pope stood idly by? Literally, stood idly by. (I'm thinking of what happened when the Nazi's rounded up the Sephardic Jews from their ghetto in Rome.)

Who will apologise for the women who have died giving birth to their tenth, eleventh, twelfth child, or whose lives continue to be little better than that of indentured slaves as a result of the church's failure to embrace modern birth control?

How about the countless hundreds of thousands of lives blighted in Africa by AIDS? The church could easily have simply accepted people's true nature where sexual activity is concerned, and promoted the use of condoms instead of continually banging on and on about the pipe-dream of marital fidelity.

Will the souls of all those women burnt at the stake as 'witches' in the Dark Ages ever be apologised to, or handed an official pardon? I doubt it, somehow. Who will express regret to the memories of those millions of women throughout history who have been branded as harlots and ostracised for the 'sin' of bearing a child out of wedlock?

What about all the Muslims killed during the Crusades? And I do not just mean the Crusades in the Eleventh Century. How about the ones going on right now?

And why should it stop with the Catholic Church? Who is going to say sorry to lesbians and homosexuals denied opportunities to live openly and to express their true natures by the Church of England, or the Evangelicals in the United States of America? Who is going to bow their heads in sorrow at the plight of the Palestinians routed from their homes on the West Bank to make room for illegal Jewish settlers? What about the countless numbers of Hindu women who were expected to immolate themselves on their husband's funeral pyres? Or who are murdered or mutilated by their fathers and brothers for the crime of falling in love with the 'wrong' man? Or the girls in Afghanistan denied the right to an education that might gove them a chance to make something out of their lives? Or the woman in the Sudan faced with the prospect of being whipped like an animal for the 'sin' of wearing trousers?

I suppose that, if someone were to telephone the middle-aged man in Brooklyn and apologise for the Catholic Church's utter failure to protect him when he was an impressionable and sensitive twelve year old boy, that would be a start. Of sorts. Maybe that is where the whole process has to begin - not with grandiose damage-limitation gestures engineered by public relations executives, but simply with one human being speaking quietly to another and expressing genuine regret.

Plane Sailing to New York City

I actually sent this letter, with the top and tail of it changed appropriately, and of course I received no reply. That was sad, but not altogether surprising. I simply felt saddened that such a well-known and respected local company was behaving in the same faceless couldn't-care-less manner as their bigger rivals like Thompson or Thomas Cook.


Dear Relatively Small, Family-Owned Travel Agency based in Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset,

I understand that, legally, we are liable for the deposit money that we paid to your for our trip to New York City. Details of how we would have to forfeit that money are printed clearly, if in rather small type, in your Terms And Conditions. There is plenty of precedence for this kind of penalty charge across the whole of your industry. We can appreciate your legal standpoint on this matter, but are having a much bigger problem with your MORAL standpoint.

You say in your letter that "We look forward to being of assistance to you again in the future," and I just wanted to take a moment to explore this concept with you. See, I would never again even vaguely consider the possibility of coming to you again for holiday advice. From my perspective, you are the type of company who charge customers over £400 for having made two phone calls and written one letter on our behalf. I cannot believe that your company was at all inconvenienced - and certainly not to the tune of £400 - by our cancelling our family trip to NYC some thirty eight weeks before we were even due to depart.

It's a shame really. As a family we are committed to trying to support local businesses like yours as much as possible, especially in these stringent economic times. But this kind of behaviour is very off-putting, and is strongly reminiscent of the big faceless corporate travel agents who are your main competitors.

If you cannot show yourselves to be any better than they are, then why should you expect to get repeat business from anyone?

Yours sincerely,

A Pissed Off Person who is still trying to deal with the very real disappointment of having to cancel the trip in the first place, never mind losing 400 f****** quid over it.