It’s been some time since I’ve felt the ability to submit to my blog, but need to point out to anyone who may be interested that there is every chance I could upset individual sensitivities. That is not my intention, but is unavoidable as there is an issue…nay…phenomenon on which I must speak.
I will withhold names and direct references to places, although anybody with access to UK news organs will doubtless be aware of the case and the reaction to it which has spurred me to write.
Tuesday of this week, 16th December 08, saw the conviction of a number of people in a case of the murder of an 11 yr-old boy in a N.W. English city. The event took place in August of 2007.
The motive for the killing is still sketchy, with mistaken identity (of an 11 ye-old?) or one being caught in the cross-fire of some squalid gang turf-war being the likeliest explanations. Wrong-place, wrong-time is certain.
Tragic case. Pointless loss of life. All agreed.
Now living where I do, no longer in England, I am somewhat limited in my access to English language radio and choose not to avail myself of the press of my home country. I draw my news from the net and it serves me well. However, I had been deprived, until yesterday, of a poem written by the father of the murdered boy, which had been read out at his funeral (attended by 2,500), recited on the radio and printed in the press.
The poem would initially seem to be a valid tribute to the boy, and a cathartic exercise to help his relatives to deal with their private grief. However, by the third verse it becomes apparent that the poem is geared towards public consumption, with a suggestion that a god, from his heavenly position, personally selected the boy to be a striker in an all-star eleven of deceased footballers. You could read this as ‘arranged to have him shot in the back so he could make-up the numbers in some celestial soccer match‘….Mmmm???
Now I first read this poem after it had been submitted to an internet community, to which I belong, and being a secular humanist with atheism at my centre, I felt impelled to respond that I found the passage tasteless and for the normally rational reader to be expected to accept this as a valid explanation for such a pointless waste of life was an insult to humanity.
As expected, I was berated as heartless and insensitive, as though I was giving no quarter to the fact that the parents may be offended, should they ever chance to read my response. I responded with measure and held my position. I then stepped back and considered the seemingly national pastime of public outpouring of grief.
A few days shy of ten years prior to the murder of this boy, an event took place in a road tunnel in France which re-wrote the rules and raised the threshold of acceptability of public outpourings of grief, a threshold which has been steadily rising since.
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, former wife of the heir to the throne of the UK, saw all manner of tributes paid to a person who had done a great deal of good in the world, but who wasn’t as squeaky clean as the industry that grew around her death would have you believe. The trouble came when you attempted to wade through the pavement deep garage forecourt floral tributes which were placed near her Kensington home by countless people who had never met her and who were more interested in simply being seen to lay tribute, to state that this level of public grief was perhaps a little overkill and of questionable taste. One would be pilloried as cruel and heartless and not allowing the bereaved children of this woman to grieve in private. Like…err…all those flowers and platitude sentiments publicly spoken by otherwise unconnected individuals who claimed they needed to find a way to deal with ’their’ loss?
One conspiracy theory followed another, with a Monday not being a Monday without a Daily Express front page ‘Diana Scandal’. But things found a level, the sons grew up to be as rounded individuals as royal sons can be, the odd hospital wing was named in her honour…life went on. The public, however, hadn’t had enough, and needed more shots in the arm of self-satisfying public grief.
Since that time in the late 1990’s, there have been numerous, very high-profile cases where (usually) children have needlessly lost their lives. This has seemingly given a ‘green light’ to anyone who cares so-to-do to take public grief at bereavement far beyond what would be commonly acceptable were it the death of an old man from a suburb of an average town. A complete leave of reason is taken, usually with a hint that the death was all part of a god’s design, (why does this explanation trump all others at such times?). Knee-jerk reactions with pressure campaigns for new laws, angry mob-mentality aimed at the not-yet convicted becomes a valid reaction, and any throwaway sentiment is deemed as worthy to aid people in overcoming their individual grief. Sadly, and all too often, the families and loved-ones of the dead are swept along on this tide, usually pushed into the current by individuals with a personal bleeding-heart agenda.
Swim against this tide and state that this is too much and it has entered the realms of the perverted and tasteless, and you are nothing short of accused of complicity with a wrongdoer in that particular case…Why?
What is so wrong and criminal about holding reason and saying “This is too much. This is, on no level, an acceptable way to continue. It cheapens life and it cheapens the loss of it.”?
Let’s not make a national pageant out of an individual's personal grief. Let’s leave it to find it’s own level.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Seventeen Come Sunday (part one).
It’s mid-September ’88, and I’m sat there in quite indescribable agony. A few minutes earlier my friends had been all laughter and mirth, until they saw the blood. Despite the horrendous dull throb, I’d done the manly thing and attempted to climb the steps from the pool, only to collapse back when weight was concentrated on my right foot in the effort. Hoisted out by two burly life-guards, I was lowered gently to the tiled floor and informed that an ambulance was being summoned. It was at this point that I realised just exactly what had happened when my tomfool attempt at Olympian diving went horribly wrong, with the injury which I initially reckoned to be at worst a bad sprain to actually be my tibia and fibula protruding from my heel.
Oddly enough, in the emerging shock which seemingly saw every drop of my blood rush to my ankle, and which lent itself to that state which can only be described as gradually losing all senses, my words were of a more domestic duty persuasion, as I apologized for the pool and asked for a mop to cleanse the poolside.
So three weeks in hospital, which saw pins that remain to this day installed in my ankle, gave me the opportunity to reflect on the way my life-plan had had to be repeatedly adjusted over the past twelve months. It also gave me the resolve to make a decision which had a subtle importance which would actually make a huge change to my life.
It’s September ‘87, and this then 17 yr-old is convinced he’s going to be a journalist. Many darkness hours spent with World Service had told him that a radio-based foreign correspondent was his ticket, a sentiment shared by his languages and English teacher at comprehensive school. Not a particularly good school, but a few teaching gems who left an impression. However, it couldn’t offer me the next stepping-stone to where I was going, so it was college then university.
Normal morning. Up at 06:00; two consecutive paper-rounds followed by an hour behind the counter in the shop, then satchel and sandwiches and off to Oldham’s very own athenaeum. Normal, as in the same, but different as in not the same. My short trot from the newsagent’s to my house afforded me the sight of my father, whom I knew to have been on a 23:00hrs shift finish (rolling in at @ 02:00 following a drinks session somewhere), racing off down the road in his ‘Sweeney’ car (old Ford Granada), with mission in his eyes. Assuming another nuclear-powered argument with my mother had occurred, I just shrugged and walked through the front door at a little after 08:00. Mother was indeed there, and the tears and upset confirmed my suspicions. I could never have suspected the next line she came out with.
“Pack a few things! We’re being evicted.”
Oddly enough, in the emerging shock which seemingly saw every drop of my blood rush to my ankle, and which lent itself to that state which can only be described as gradually losing all senses, my words were of a more domestic duty persuasion, as I apologized for the pool and asked for a mop to cleanse the poolside.
So three weeks in hospital, which saw pins that remain to this day installed in my ankle, gave me the opportunity to reflect on the way my life-plan had had to be repeatedly adjusted over the past twelve months. It also gave me the resolve to make a decision which had a subtle importance which would actually make a huge change to my life.
It’s September ‘87, and this then 17 yr-old is convinced he’s going to be a journalist. Many darkness hours spent with World Service had told him that a radio-based foreign correspondent was his ticket, a sentiment shared by his languages and English teacher at comprehensive school. Not a particularly good school, but a few teaching gems who left an impression. However, it couldn’t offer me the next stepping-stone to where I was going, so it was college then university.
Normal morning. Up at 06:00; two consecutive paper-rounds followed by an hour behind the counter in the shop, then satchel and sandwiches and off to Oldham’s very own athenaeum. Normal, as in the same, but different as in not the same. My short trot from the newsagent’s to my house afforded me the sight of my father, whom I knew to have been on a 23:00hrs shift finish (rolling in at @ 02:00 following a drinks session somewhere), racing off down the road in his ‘Sweeney’ car (old Ford Granada), with mission in his eyes. Assuming another nuclear-powered argument with my mother had occurred, I just shrugged and walked through the front door at a little after 08:00. Mother was indeed there, and the tears and upset confirmed my suspicions. I could never have suspected the next line she came out with.
“Pack a few things! We’re being evicted.”
Saturday, November 1, 2008
These Foolish Things.
I thought I’d hit a wall, so early on in my self-published writing career. Talking like a late-Victorian wiseacre, convinced his voice spoke so much wisdom and his life story so interesting it needed telling, I floundered when I realised I’d not made full sense of it. This may sound like some faux-academia neurosis, but I really do need a reference, a counterpoint from which to work; and whilst I cannot claim that such a facility will guarantee a constant and easy to follow time-line of events, with randomly cobbled nuggets of information being the meat on the bones instead, I can promise that a beginning and an end will be present in each edition. I suppose that’s what the public platform phenomenon of ‘blog’ allows you to do. Be random, but make sense…of a kind.
So we’re fast-approaching this amateur writers’ block, when I happen to speak to one of my elder brothers. With a six-hundred mile gulf between us, Buzby is our main conduit of communication. Now whilst I cannot claim to have had a fulfilling relationship between one of my siblings and I (keep reading. It’ll be written at some point), a level of human peace has been made between ourselves, greatly aided by the distance.
Gossip and general talking hard-tack being the stuff of this not unique telephone chat, my elder happened to relate an incident relating to my father, with whom my relationship is good but progressively complex, (again, keep reading). That was the catalyst., and it’s telephone down and direct to the CD library.
Now everyone claims to have an earliest memory, which is supposed to signify the point at which consciousness kicked in. At three years-old, it’s conceivable that one can vividly recall time spent I the womb, but who’s to say? Memory develops and we log, or discard according to importance our psyche places upon them, particular experiences which are then carried through life. Some can allow the natural order of mental capacity to shunt certain data into the sidings, whilst some do what Google have been playing at for a few years. That is, particular parcels of data which are recalled on demand according to a few ‘alarm-bell’ words, but in this case sensory reactions. It could be a smell which reminds you of that holiday in Devon when you were 6, whilst a the image of a particular hue of purple reminds you of mixed caramel and fondant filled chocolates at Yule in your thirteenth year. As a part of my telephone conversation with my brother, a casual use of the word ‘foolish’ did it all for me, and Bryan Ferry’s debut solo album gets plucked from my CD library and then warp-speeds me back some 34 yrs and kicks that imaginary wall down. It's a stunning body of work, being masterful covers of an eclectic range of songs. Sadly, I listen to it for all the wrong reasons.
I can’t remember being within the age-bracket of 12-18 months, but I can certainly remember aspects of that time of my life. Clearer memories from those more developed at the time tell me I was taken daily, by my father, across Manchester to the newsagent’s shop which my aunt and uncle owned. Having been evicted from the public house of which he was licensee, a few months prior, my father took work with my mother’s sister and her husband in ‘71. The reason for my father taking me to his place of work have never been clarified to me, although my memories of being poked, prodded, and having my hair pulled out of my scalp by my elder cousins who knew no better have been galvanized on my mind.
Fast forward few years, and this is where ‘foolish’ becomes relevant.
Imagine, if you will, being a four year-old boy, waiting at the end of your street for your father to arrive home. Your mother has told you he should be home today, which is something she’s been saying and believing for three-or-four weeks. The only compensation for his absence has been the complete maternal devotion and attention of our mother, which has maintained the balance required in a rounded upbringing.
He’s not in prison and nor is he a man in service in some post-colonial outpost. He’s a radiographer for a construction company who build bulk storage containers. His current site is a cool 40-odd miles away in Ellesmere Port at a refinery called ‘Stanlow’ and for some repeated but unknown to me at the time reason simply cannot make it home to Manchester for the weekend when he clocks-off just after lunchtime on a Friday.
I did see him a few weeks back, when he met us on the train to North Wales for a short summer holiday. Nice time, but he got off halfway home.
Well this week is different, and my waiting has been worthwhile. He’s walking up the avenue and he’s got a bag. He’s got a few bags, more than he’d normally have.
He’s happy to see me, and he gives his youngest son the kind of hug which confirms security and gives a sense of togetherness , a sense of manhood in my tender years.
Even those tender years can not protect me from the immediate sense of friction which overcomes the household once he crosses the threshold. The time since he was last home means nothing to me, but to my mother it means 9 weeks of her scrimping on what she could earn whilst my father failed to send any money home. It means a long time for her sons to have no father around and for her to have an absence of the kind of companionship commensurate with married life. The little holiday was a break of a kind, but was there but for the grace of my mother finding the costs.
However, back then my father was as skilled at damage limitation as a Westminster spin-doctor is today. Satisfying himself that my mother still liked ‘Roxy Music’ he produces the vinyl platter of its’ front man and my mother asks my brothers and I to leave the room.
Playing it today, I can still hear the argument above the divine lounge-singer warbling of this son of Washington, and vividly recall that my mother never played the album herself. I did, however, hear it virtually every day for some time from then, as for some reason my father didn’t go away again.
So we’re fast-approaching this amateur writers’ block, when I happen to speak to one of my elder brothers. With a six-hundred mile gulf between us, Buzby is our main conduit of communication. Now whilst I cannot claim to have had a fulfilling relationship between one of my siblings and I (keep reading. It’ll be written at some point), a level of human peace has been made between ourselves, greatly aided by the distance.
Gossip and general talking hard-tack being the stuff of this not unique telephone chat, my elder happened to relate an incident relating to my father, with whom my relationship is good but progressively complex, (again, keep reading). That was the catalyst., and it’s telephone down and direct to the CD library.
Now everyone claims to have an earliest memory, which is supposed to signify the point at which consciousness kicked in. At three years-old, it’s conceivable that one can vividly recall time spent I the womb, but who’s to say? Memory develops and we log, or discard according to importance our psyche places upon them, particular experiences which are then carried through life. Some can allow the natural order of mental capacity to shunt certain data into the sidings, whilst some do what Google have been playing at for a few years. That is, particular parcels of data which are recalled on demand according to a few ‘alarm-bell’ words, but in this case sensory reactions. It could be a smell which reminds you of that holiday in Devon when you were 6, whilst a the image of a particular hue of purple reminds you of mixed caramel and fondant filled chocolates at Yule in your thirteenth year. As a part of my telephone conversation with my brother, a casual use of the word ‘foolish’ did it all for me, and Bryan Ferry’s debut solo album gets plucked from my CD library and then warp-speeds me back some 34 yrs and kicks that imaginary wall down. It's a stunning body of work, being masterful covers of an eclectic range of songs. Sadly, I listen to it for all the wrong reasons.
I can’t remember being within the age-bracket of 12-18 months, but I can certainly remember aspects of that time of my life. Clearer memories from those more developed at the time tell me I was taken daily, by my father, across Manchester to the newsagent’s shop which my aunt and uncle owned. Having been evicted from the public house of which he was licensee, a few months prior, my father took work with my mother’s sister and her husband in ‘71. The reason for my father taking me to his place of work have never been clarified to me, although my memories of being poked, prodded, and having my hair pulled out of my scalp by my elder cousins who knew no better have been galvanized on my mind.
Fast forward few years, and this is where ‘foolish’ becomes relevant.
Imagine, if you will, being a four year-old boy, waiting at the end of your street for your father to arrive home. Your mother has told you he should be home today, which is something she’s been saying and believing for three-or-four weeks. The only compensation for his absence has been the complete maternal devotion and attention of our mother, which has maintained the balance required in a rounded upbringing.
He’s not in prison and nor is he a man in service in some post-colonial outpost. He’s a radiographer for a construction company who build bulk storage containers. His current site is a cool 40-odd miles away in Ellesmere Port at a refinery called ‘Stanlow’ and for some repeated but unknown to me at the time reason simply cannot make it home to Manchester for the weekend when he clocks-off just after lunchtime on a Friday.
I did see him a few weeks back, when he met us on the train to North Wales for a short summer holiday. Nice time, but he got off halfway home.
Well this week is different, and my waiting has been worthwhile. He’s walking up the avenue and he’s got a bag. He’s got a few bags, more than he’d normally have.
He’s happy to see me, and he gives his youngest son the kind of hug which confirms security and gives a sense of togetherness , a sense of manhood in my tender years.
Even those tender years can not protect me from the immediate sense of friction which overcomes the household once he crosses the threshold. The time since he was last home means nothing to me, but to my mother it means 9 weeks of her scrimping on what she could earn whilst my father failed to send any money home. It means a long time for her sons to have no father around and for her to have an absence of the kind of companionship commensurate with married life. The little holiday was a break of a kind, but was there but for the grace of my mother finding the costs.
However, back then my father was as skilled at damage limitation as a Westminster spin-doctor is today. Satisfying himself that my mother still liked ‘Roxy Music’ he produces the vinyl platter of its’ front man and my mother asks my brothers and I to leave the room.
Playing it today, I can still hear the argument above the divine lounge-singer warbling of this son of Washington, and vividly recall that my mother never played the album herself. I did, however, hear it virtually every day for some time from then, as for some reason my father didn’t go away again.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
There’s little point in arguing this point; the facts are quite clear. To a man or woman, the enquiring mind observes all around and questions his/her part in the play being acted out in this great theatre which we call the world. It’s a by-product, benefit, symptom if you like, of the human condition enjoyed by the sentient amongst us.
Variant degrees of experience and the effect which they have on the individual are dictated by that individual’s particular, how shall I put it, roundedness and particular maturity of emotional responses. As alike and production-lined as we are as humans, there is a uniqueness to every one of us, which a simple cocktail of nature and nurture hones to create the one.
As an instance. Take an 11 year-old boy on a sink estate in a post-industrial northern English town. He’s about to sit the exam to earn an assisted place at the local grammar school, a place which his teachers from his earliest days of state education have been saying was his due. It has to be an assisted place, as his father pisses most of his income up the wall on a weekly basis, with his mother sacrificing herself by regularly getting the shit kicked out of her by the very shoplifters that her employer pays her to apprehend.
Same boy currently plays rugby for his school, town and county, and has just broken both of his wrists at the same time in a match, thus prohibiting him from taking the aforementioned written exam. Failure to sit the test means following his two elder brothers to a school which is a monument to educational failure, in a complex of buildings which were architecturally dated before the last brick was set and who’s every corridor is filled with the stale waft of underachievement.
The human spirit in this boy immediately sensed the culture here and using wisdom beyond his years recognized that some or most would simply have rolled like a puppy and accepted a situation which they didn’t even comprehend. Our boy started kicking. Not against a system or authority, per-se, but against a tide of predictability assumed of those around him. The kicking was not always effective, indeed it was often pointless in the face of the tremendous odds of fate which had a cruel knack of dealing unexpected hands.
His story is as unusual as it is usual…and it must be told.
Variant degrees of experience and the effect which they have on the individual are dictated by that individual’s particular, how shall I put it, roundedness and particular maturity of emotional responses. As alike and production-lined as we are as humans, there is a uniqueness to every one of us, which a simple cocktail of nature and nurture hones to create the one.
As an instance. Take an 11 year-old boy on a sink estate in a post-industrial northern English town. He’s about to sit the exam to earn an assisted place at the local grammar school, a place which his teachers from his earliest days of state education have been saying was his due. It has to be an assisted place, as his father pisses most of his income up the wall on a weekly basis, with his mother sacrificing herself by regularly getting the shit kicked out of her by the very shoplifters that her employer pays her to apprehend.
Same boy currently plays rugby for his school, town and county, and has just broken both of his wrists at the same time in a match, thus prohibiting him from taking the aforementioned written exam. Failure to sit the test means following his two elder brothers to a school which is a monument to educational failure, in a complex of buildings which were architecturally dated before the last brick was set and who’s every corridor is filled with the stale waft of underachievement.
The human spirit in this boy immediately sensed the culture here and using wisdom beyond his years recognized that some or most would simply have rolled like a puppy and accepted a situation which they didn’t even comprehend. Our boy started kicking. Not against a system or authority, per-se, but against a tide of predictability assumed of those around him. The kicking was not always effective, indeed it was often pointless in the face of the tremendous odds of fate which had a cruel knack of dealing unexpected hands.
His story is as unusual as it is usual…and it must be told.
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