Soilman

Pausing briefly from my abyss-gazing to consider this glorious story about trade unionists’ reaction to Jeremy Clarkson on the One Show.

(Fear not, dear readers. This is not a pro- or anti- Clarkson rant. Your opinion of Clarkson is your own business. I shan’t be trying to reinforce or alter it.)

It’s not often that news stories depress me. I shout at some, laugh at others. Some prompt a short office debate, if anyone has the energy to raise their eyes from the mailbag sewing for more than a few seconds.

This one, though, achieved that special distinction by virtue of being so tragically absurd, so inanely and teeth-chatteringly preposterous and risible that it has threatened to ruin my habitual equanimity for the rest of the day.

Looming apocalypse

We are – as you may have noticed, and I have recently pointed out – living in dangerous times. There are people in our country – our first world, prosperous country – wondering how to put food on the table this evening. We face a decline in our living standards that threatens to extend into the early years of the next decade, with no prospect of definite recovery even then.

Tomorrow, or next week, people all over Europe may find themselves locked out of banks, their savings destroyed, their jobs gone, their national economies wrecked. The rest of the world wonders how it can possibly protect its own people from this looming apocalypse.

Yet here is a man seriously proposing, against that background, to use the valuable time of British courts to attempt a Crown prosecution of a man who chose to make a joke on the television.

You may deplore his joke. You may not find it funny. You may even hate the guy. All valid and defensible positions.

But here’s the thing: he was clearly not being serious. Not a soul who watched that show thought so. You could show that clip to 1 million mother tongue English speakers all over the world and not one would conclude that Clarkson was seriously calling for mass murder.

It’s called hyperbole, you ignorant motherfuckers.

Utterly arsefucked

Does it not disturb anyone else that apparently we now live in a country where making any kind of joke whose implicit politics other folk disapprove invites denouncement and the threat of criminal sanction? That highly paid people with bigger concerns (you would assume) are willing, at a time of national crisis, to go out of their way to encourage this? That our own prime minister is forced to comment on the situation?

Hey ho. The good news for anyone NOT disturbed by this is that you won’t have to wait long until I’m dead and buried. Quite a few folks who share my outlook and age will be gone with me.

So you can then fully enjoy your po-faced, hair-splitting, trivia-obsessed, big-pictureless, totalitarian, servile and utterly arsefucked society without our tedious interventions.

I hope you enjoy it. And that someone who disapproves of your humour or politics kills you in front of your family.

Have spent the last few weeks wondering if the world as I know it is about to end. The evidence is increasingly pointing in that direction. Some say it could happen this week. Most agree that without a German volte face, we’ll know the worst by the end of January.

What would be the effect of a disorderly Eurozone debt default? Pundits offer every scenario, from brief financial turmoil at the mild end of the scale to total economic collapse and world war at the other.

Me, I haven’t a clue. But being a natural pessimist, I’m not banking on good times around the corner.

I offer no predictions or prescient economic analysis. No can do. I have only these two mildly interesting observations:

• Economic/historical point: Isn’t it fascinating how Germans, themselves victims of rapacious Allied creditors demanding debt payback, austerity and reparations after WW1 – with all the baleful consequences of that policy – are now rerunning history in role reversal by forcing austerity on their ‘profligate’ neighbours… with depressingly predictable consequences? Like the Bourbons, it seems they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

• Psychological point: Isn’t it strange how full awareness of disaster-in-the-offing in no way helps – not the tiniest, teensiest bit – to mitigate the effects of imminent crisis? Truth is, when you’re looking at a partial or total collapse of economic and social order, there’s not a fucking thing you can do to prepare or insulate yourself from it. Except stock up on chocolate.

If those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, it seems those who learned them fully are destined to stand by and watch powerlessly while the others comprehensively fuck up the train set.

So, dear readers: Assuming the worst (and why wouldn’t I?), I wish you the best of luck, wherever and whoever you are. See you on the other side – if there is one.

The end of summer swings round again. Time for less gardening and more ranting. Hold on to your hats.

Today’s little tantrum centres on Positive Thinking. Reason: A relative has just grazed the edges of the Positive Thinking industry, and it reminded me of this wonderful book by Barbara Ehrenreich, which I enjoyed last year (there’s a great extract here).

Note to positive thinkers everywhere: you’re deluded, brainwashed victims of a plutocratic strategy to boost the wealth of a tiny few by reducing everyone else to serfdom. Your determined optimism is making others rich at your expense, and undermining everything you hold dear – your income, your social status, your family life and even your basic physical health (hey, just read the book).

Truth is better than blind positivity

I’m a born pessimist. Always saw the darker side from as far back as I can remember. If you’re an optimist you’ll not understand. You probably think I should just ‘snap out of it’ – as if my pessimism were any more of a choice than your natural optimism.

Weird, isn’t it, how pessimists can’t tell optimists to ‘snap out of it’? Consider that for a second. Its implications are profound. Anglo-saxon societies are infected with a powerful assumption that Optimism = good, natural, ‘normal’, right. Doubt and Pessimism = bad, evil, unnatural, unhealthy, wrong.

My pessimism, though inborn, was only deepened and further ingrained as I grew up. Contact with other human beings saw to that: ‘Homo homini lupus’.

More influential still was my growing suspicion, later confirmed by evidence, that other people’s well-meaning pleas to ‘look on the bright side’, or ‘count your blessings’ actually made things worse – for me.

Why? Because entreaties to see the best in Life are fundamentally dishonest. They are anti-truth. To ‘look on the bright side’ translates as: Cherry-pick the evidence in favour of goodness and fluffy bunnies and ignore everything else. It is as wrong-headed and stupid as insisting on seeing the worst even when all the evidence is positive.

As an empirical rationalist, I abhor this. Post-Enlightenment human beings enjoy the fruits of five centuries of breakthroughs in technology and medicine brought about by sceptical rationalism embodied in the scientific method. To doubt, to consider the evidence in the round… these are the bedrock of our prosperity.

Yet positive thinkers and optimists everywhere tend to live their own lives in direct denial of these principles, urging themselves and others to cling irrationally to a one-sided and facile world view that ignores oceans of useful, albeit unpleasant, evidential input. And it is this world view (encouraged and underpinned by the legacy, still powerful, of Judaeo-Christian teaching – “the poor shall inherit the earth”) that prevails.

The Cassandra Syndrome

It’s tragic for pessimists, because they’re doomed to live as strangers in society. Like dissidents under totalitarian regimes, pessimists dare not speak openly of their ‘faith’ or associate too freely with others for fear of denouncement and loss of social standing and/or employment.

You think I exaggerate? Think again. Anglo-saxon corporate life – especially in the USA, but also in Britain – is all about being ‘positive’, a ‘team player’, being ‘proactive’, playing up upsides, minimising downsides. A ‘negative attitude’ will get you fired quicker than shitting on the boss’ desk. Everyone knows it. To be doubtful, to produce counter-evidence, is to be condemned as ‘uncommitted’ and to be ‘Limogé’ – removed from the front line in disgrace, as French officers were at Verdun, for questioning the efficacy of frontal assaults across open ground against entrenched machine-gun positions.

When pessimists do speak out, they’re usually dismissed as pathetic losers, weird one-eyed ideologues determined to ruin the party – and like Cassandra, they go unheeded. It’s comic to hear our politicians desperately claiming that nobody foresaw the current economic catastrophe, and that it was ‘unpredictable’.

Bollocks. Many, many people predicted it, even non-experts. Be honest: Even as you saw your own house value shoot through the stratosphere in 2007, wasn’t there some part of your brain – even if you’re a committed, apostolic optimist – that said: “This is insane. Nothing goes up forever. There’s a horrible crash coming.”

Yet few said it, even to close friends. In public, hardly anyone said it… though millions were thinking it.

Cui bono?

To understand how this has become so entrenched in our society, you have to ask, as Ehrenreich does: Cui bono? In all of the rose-tinted froth about mental attitude shaping reality, in all those positive-thinking corporate away-day cheer-a-thons, in all the think-your-way-to-better-health bullshit of the medical optimism quacks… in all of this, who benefits? Who or what gains from you and I being optimistic, refusing to see a down side, trying to ‘turn negatives into positives’?

I’ll tell you: The Powers That Be, ie the State (it’s YOUR responsibility to make yourself a job/get healthy through positive thinking… not ours through rational economic planning and service provision), Business (it’s YOUR responsibility to turn your redundancy into a ‘good experience’ through the power of positive thinking… it’s not our fault for downsizing you if your life turns to impoverished dogshit) and even Doctors (YOU make yourself well through positive thinking. If the chemotherapy fails, it’s because YOU ‘lost the fight’ with cancer. Your fault, not medicine’s).

I could go on. Luckily for you – as I’m fond of saying – I won’t.

Just do me a favour. Next time you’re about to tell somebody to ‘look on the bright side’ or ‘cheer up, it may never happen’, or ‘don’t be so negative’… don’t. Trying asking yourself, instead:

“WHY am I being so fucking positive? Where’s the evidence that it’s justified? Where’s the evidence that it will really help?”

PS Here’s a useful and timely reminder of how useful pessimism SHOULD be… and how everyone ignores/minimises/scorns it nonetheless (here’s another one). The current Eurozone fuck-up really was predicted – to the letter, in graphic and prescient detail – by scores of eurosceptics. Who were of course all rabid, dogmatic ‘madmen’.

When I find the forces of idiotic positivity ranged against me, I try to remember that history’s greatest Englishman, Winston Churchill, was himself – despite the celebrated optimism quotation – a profound pessimist. All his politics, from opposition to Irish home rule to advocacy of the Gallipoli campaign, sprang from an in-built expectation of human failure, fear of British weakness and other nations’ evil motives. His was a lone voice in the unpopular campaign for rearmament between the wars. Nobody wanted to hear his pessimism about Hitler’s intentions… yet his pessimism was of course totally vindicated. People have now forgotten that many of his profound insights – and that majorly important one, in particular – came from a questioning, pessimistic, suspicious, rationalist mind. God bless him.

Came across this story about supermarket rooftop hydroponics. What a brilliant idea. I hope it does well for them, and eventually comes to the UK.

I stumble across these initiatives from time to time, but oh so rarely. Given that climate change and ecology are big issues in our time, it’s amazing how little is being done to change our behaviours.

• Everything I buy at the supermarket is still swathed in plastic packaging – needlessly.
• The fruit and veg they offer are still gorgeously uniform, flawless and perfectly scrubbed. Which means agri-chemicals, piles of rejects and endless waste, waste, waste.
• Supermarkets and shops still offer ‘disposable’ plastic bags (Jeez, even Americans – hardly the world’s foremost ecologists – stopped this nonsense YEARS AGO).
• Home-fit photovoltaics and wind turbines are still wildly expensive to fit and maintain. Subsidies are still derisory.
• Domestic recycling is a recent introduction to the UK. Recycling and anti-packaging regulations have been normal in Germany – to cite but one example – for many years.

I could go on… but luckily for you, I won’t. The list of things that shouldn’t be happening is endless. You might care to add some examples in the comments, if this bee also inhabits your bonnet.

By the way, I’m not a dreadlocked eco-warrior. I’m actually an anthropogenic climate change doubter.

But here’s the thing: even if human beings aren’t wrecking the climate, we ARE using up our planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. One day, they WILL run out – if we carry on like this. So for fuck’s sake, let’s stop.

Sorry for another non-gardening post, folks, but I had to mention this.

I have the in-laws staying at the moment, so I’ve been doing the traditional London tourism shit. It’s been a very long time since I did this, so I was unprepared for the experience.

From a British citizen’s and Londoner’s point of view, then, here are my reflections upon London tourism:

• Jesus Christ, but it’s SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE. The biggest rip-off I ever saw. Seriously disgraceful. A family pass to Madame Tussaud’s – a two-hour entertainment, at most – is £99. That’s after you’ve queued for THREE HOURS to get in. Everything else is as bad – Buck House, the London Eye. For a family ticket, none of them give you much change from £100, if any. Stay in London for a week and see everything and I reckon you’re looking at something like £700 per adult without bed and board.
• The queues, the queues (see above). Westminster Abbey is just about acceptable at ‘only’ 20 mins waiting. Everywhere else sucks. Madame Tussaud’s broke my heart: Expensive and shit. Why anybody wants to see the damn place so much is utterly baffling.
• The restrictions. I haven’t been to Parliament Square for a while, so I was shocked to see the permanent railings (see pic) keeping people out. I understand why – the riots etc. But that the central, eponymous historic public space at the heart of our democracy should deny access to its own citizens is appalling.
• The profanity of charging £50 for three adults and a child at St Paul’s cathedral. Six years ago, when I last went, it was free. How dare they suddenly start charging? I thought St Paul’s (unlike Westminster Abbey, which stopped being a ‘real’ church years ago) was a place of proper worship?
• The websites. As if the foregoing weren’t irritating enough, London’s various ‘attractions’ have created a new Hell in their booking systems. In this dungeon of impenetrable jargon (‘Fasticket’, ‘Freedom pass’, ‘Fastrack’), you quickly become disorientated by the conflicting price information, the combined ‘multi-attraction’ offers, the early/late savers, the ‘priority’ no-queue options and the two-for-one ‘specials’ that turn out to be pricier than certain individual tickets. It’s almost as if – perish the thought – it was all created specifically to confuse.

Anything good to mention? Well, Brits are as polite and orderly as ever – no queue jumping, and smiles all round. Plus every guide and usher is a comedian; a perennial pleasure of living in the UK.

But on the whole, the experience is depressing. I’m saddened by the overpriced and crummy commercial ‘attractions’ that our capital has to offer the world. To think that people fly thousands of miles to queue on Euston Road for three hours, then pay so much money to see something so fucking tawdry…

Well I just wish it weren’t so. That’s all I’m saying.

PS: Want ideas for things to do in London? Some of these might appeal, if you like the unusual. And many of these are must-dos: unusual, interesting and great value for money. If you’re a history nut, walking the Thames path is 100% free and the best way, bar none, to see the sights of London.

If you know any unusual, cheap and interesting things to do in London, do please add them in the comments. May help some luckless, itinerant American who is even now pacing the streets of our capital, utterly broke, and cursing these islands for their disgraceful contempt for visitors.

I know I shouldn’t, but I really do have to comment on Hugh Grant’s interventions into the phone-hacking scandal.

Hugh’s a splendid chap and I have huge respect for what he’s trying to do. The cynic in me fears he’s motivated less by selfless concern for the public good than by revenge (it was News International papers that cheerled the story of his embarrassing roadside blowjob), but I’m willing to suspend my cynicism. Hey, right thing even for wrong reason etc etc.

My worry about Hugh and his enthusiastic cheerleaders is that they risk exemplifying the dangerous adage that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

I don’t disagree for a second with his analysis that “there has been a grotesque power over our lawmakers.” Spot on. That’s how Murdoch (and, for ages, Conrad Black at the Telegraph) kept scandal at bay. Nobody in public office (or in a private position of power) wants to offend the media – obviously. It’s dangerous.

And yes, it IS grotesque. It affords the media, as I’ve said before, a disproportionate and shocking power. Which they will abuse. That’s human beings for you.

But here’s the thing: The alternative – politicians wielding grotesque power over the media – is far worse. If, like me, you deplore the vices of a free media uncontrolled by government, wait until you see the behaviour of a ‘free’ government unrestrained by media.

Speaking for myself, I’m forever amazed by what our lords and masters get up to even when they know the eyes of the press are upon them (parliamentary expenses, anyone?).

Believe me, you do NOT want to live in a country where the media lives in fear of politicians. On the contrary. We want our lawmakers and powerbrokers to fear the press. We need them to.

The downside, as ever, is that this has a price. Freedom – of the media, of the individual, of society – always does.

Example: You want to be free to own a firearm? Fine. But you’ll have to put up with an increased risk of being shot, or seeing your children shot. Americans, on the whole, understand this freedom dilemma better than Europeans, and I admire them for it. This side of the Atlantic, we’re all for minimising risk – all risk – at the expense of a wide range of freedoms.

When it comes to press freedom, it is exceptionally dangerous to tinker – no matter how noble or desirable the goal. I’m all for preventing a repeat of the phone hacking, and all the rest of it (I have an even greater interest in stopping it than a non-journalist), but every ‘solution’ proposed, so far, scares the shit out of me.

It should scare the shit out of you too. We must get this right – which means cool, unemotional deliberation and great, great care.

We do not need excitable luvvies running around talking about grotesque press power and demanding that politicians ‘control’ the media.

And so the glut begins. Thought I was going to get no cauliflowers at all during the dry patch. Now that it’s been pissing with rain for three weeks, they’re going nuts. I cut all of these this evening, and there are more on the way.

I’d normally be triumphant – boringly, nauseatingly triumphant. But I can’t bring myself to gloat tonight. The News of the World scandal is profoundly depressing me.

It’s not the evil, amoral wankers who hacked that poor, dead girl’s phone – although they sicken me. It’s not even the risible, farcical denials from NOTW upper management that they knew nothing about what was going on.

No, what really bugs me is that several hundred decent journalists (most entirely unconnected with the scandal, and hired long afterwards) are now going to lose their jobs so that everyone in upper management can keep theirs.

There truly is something wickedly immoral at the heart of this whole revolting story. The stench that hovers around the Murdoch name and the Murdoch empire is suffocating – and I speak as a journalist and a NOTW admirer (easy to forget, but they used to do – and have done – some great journalism as well as the end-of-pier kiss ‘n’ tells).

It matters for Americans, too

To my American readers, to whom this may all seem arcane and irrelevant: It matters to you guys, too. The Murdoch family, through News Corp, owns vast media interests in the USA, and is bidding for more.

Americans who care about and have any say in good corporate governance need to have a long, hard look at how News International has been behaving on this side of the pond. Do you really think these behaviours have been confined to Britain? What on earth has been going on elsewhere?

Are these people you want running anything important, significant or influential in your country?

Thought not.

It’s the time of year when everything’s a-bloomin’ and a-fruitin’. Some nice raspberries, and the early spuds are at last producing.

Sadly, so are the weeds. But that’s life.

In other news, Mrs S has determined that for our holidays this year we’re going… nowhere. Instead, we’re having a ‘staycation’ and remaining firmly at home.

I could kiss her (and will, actually). Jaded as I am by the traditional Soilman holiday, I was getting very antsy at the prospect of an aeroplane trip – any aeroplane trip.

Knowing I don’t have to do it fills me with exquisite relief. No puce-faced child. No screaming blue murder in my ear. No ill-fitting nappies (diapers) leaking their contents on to my trouser leg. No need to spend half my salary at the osteopath on return.

Instead I’ll have a fortnight on the allotment – weather permitting. And how bloody marvellous will that be?

The Planning Dept (aka Mrs Soilman) is slowly turning its attention towards the summer holidays, and I’m worried.

I used to look forward to holidays. That was before I’d taken many.

From a 42-year-old perspective, the 20-year-old’s optimism seems deranged. After climbing into your car, going on holiday is the biggest risk you ever take with your health and sanity.

I’m not even going to mention air travel (the folly of volunteering to cramp yourself into Stephen Hawking’s chair while a small, puce-faced child vomits and screams blue murder into your left ear – for 14 hours – defies rational explanation).

No, my principal beef is that places I can afford to visit (I definitely include my own nation’s offerings in this general judgement) are a bit shit.

Brief diarrhoea

Only in the lives of the super rich are the cabs plentiful and empty, the prices reasonable, the hotel rooms clean and well appointed, the dividing walls soundproofed, the satellite pornography peopled by cheerful and attractive actors, the sunblock effective, the lavatories pristine and unblocked, the maps accurate, the peace of night time uninterrupted by yelling drunks from Morecambe, the wi-fi dependable, the sewers invisible and odourless, the beaches unpolluted by dog shit and engine oil, the flash floods insufficiently violent to wash you off a mountain into the Dead Sea, the transgender prostitutes discreet and inoffensive, the pickpockets clumsy, the child beggars winsome and grateful, the waiters loquacious and amusing, the foreigners unexcitable and anglophone, the tourists indistinguishable from the natives, the local pack animals well fed and kindly treated, the swimming pools uncontaminated by Giardia, the food delicious and hygienically prepared by people who wash their fucking hands, the food poisoning confined to one lavish vomit followed by miraculous recovery, the diarrhoea brief and barely noticeable, the sandflies hypoallergenic, the mosquitoes vegetarian, the sea urchins and lethally poisonous Stonefish confined to the bay used by the other hotel, the hire cars well maintained with working brakes, the roads clearly signposted by somebody who actually wants to help you orientate, the service polite and attentive, the ‘attractions’ cheap and uncrowded, the lie-ins uninterrupted, the only-on-holiday marital sex agreeable to both parties.

In my world, at least half of the above will never be true – wherever we opt to go.

I realise, of course, that I should count myself fortunate to be able to take any kind of holiday. And – with reservations – I do.

But that doesn’t stop the gnawing tension creeping into my consciousness about this time of year.

Having Fun can be so fucking ghastly.

Talking of freedom of speech (see below), we are living in significant times.

You’re probably aware of the current superinjunction fiasco – ie folks on Twitter ‘outing’ celebrities who’ve taken out injunctions to prevent the media identifying them or writing about their marital affairs.

What you may have missed, unless you work in the media, is today’s story about Max Mosley at the European Court of Human Rights. In a nutshell: Max (who won £60k in damages from a UK tabloid for violating his privacy when it wrote about his S&M orgy with prostitutes) tried to get the ECHR to force UK newspapers to notify, in advance, anybody about whose ‘private life’ they propose to write.

Luckily, he failed – for now.

There is something rotten at the heart of both these situations. I don’t mean the UK’s Human Rights Act (the well-meaning, but flawed legislation that governs litigation in both), but something more profoundly mistaken: the principle (enshrined in judges’ recent interpretations of that Act) that a person’s sex life – no matter who and what it involves – is private. In particular, the now established legal assumption that marital affairs are a private matter.

Guess what? They’re not.

Marriage is a public, legal contract. One of its provisions is a contract of fidelity (unless both parties specifically and publicly contract out of that). If you breach that condition, you are breaching the terms of a public contract.

If you’re found out (or if your lover wants to tell the world), you can’t cover it up as ‘private’. Sure, discovery will cause damage – to your marriage (presumably), to your children, to your reputation and your wider family.

But here’s the thing: it’s public, because you breached a public declaration of commitment to another person. You have no right to privacy. Cheating spouses, once exposed, will be discussed and will be publicly disapproved. Quite right, too: the whole point of a public contract is to invite the public to hold you to its terms by the implicit threat of gossip and disapproval if you breach them.

In short, you blew it – and the damage caused is entirely your fault. Not the media’s, not your family’s, not the law’s. You have no right to shut that particular stable door once the horse has bolted.

There was ever, is now and always will be only one way to avoid alienating your spouse, hurting your children and destroying your family: Keep it in your fucking trousers.

If you can’t, and get caught, take it like a man and stop snivelling about your right to privacy. You forfeited that right when you got your knob out.