The BlackberryJuniper Philosophy of Birthdays

It’s my birthday soon.  I like birthdays.  None of this getting older, feeling miserable, what haven’t I achieved yet bollox for me.  Which is surprising I know, given my usual level of negativity!

But I think birthdays are brilliant.  You don’t have to have a party if you don’t want one – or any of the traditional trappings if you don’t like them.

No!  It’s International You Day.  For this one day (or any day close to it you can hold at least partially free for yourself if you have to work that day), you do things you like, for yourself.  With the company you would like, or none.

The idea is: it’s the one day a year that is entirely yours, entirely about you and how you would like it spent.  No one tells you how you’ll spend it, and if they do, you’ll calmly and quietly tell them you’ve already made plans if you don’t like their well-meaning idea.  (People often project onto others what they’d like for themselves, without realising; or else what you would have liked – but 5 or 10 years ago, your tastes having moved along now and them not having noticed.)  If they argue with you, they aren’t really respecting the International YOUness of the day.  They get to be bossy on their International THEM day, not yours.  See?

Obviously, you aren’t going to sabotage your own nice day with wishing things that can’t be so, like:

(a)   wanting to be with a partner, friend, or set of friends you don’t have any more

(b)   wanting it to be a replica of an occasion in the past: stupid and impossible and doomed to disappointment, sadly

(c)   wanting to do something you really truly can’t afford, or could – but only if you go into quite a bit of debt (e.g. I want to go shopping for the day in New York!  I want to go to Dublin and drink in a special pub I saw in a film/ read in a novel!  I want to go on the Orient Express!  Go to Russia to see the Bolshoi Ballet in situ!)

Etc etc etc.  Whoa there, horsey!  Calm down!

For the day to work nicely and feel satisfying, you have to balance something you’d like to do, the company (or not) to do it with, and a reasonable budget.  Some years I was not well off, and my treat, because I am fortunate enough to have a mid (proper) summer birthday, was to go and have a picnic in Hyde Park/ Kensington Gardens with aka Laughing Girl, Troubadour and Fry.  This was such a cool treat I ended up doing it about 4 years in a row.  Not too expensive: some food made, some bought.  And no expectation that each year would “be as good as last year”.  Just the same location because it was a nice sunny grassy warm place, good for people watching and not too noisy. 

Fry was young at this time, so each year was different for this reason alone – he was a totally different little person each time, and I could more readily see the development and differences because of being in the same place each year, for just this one occasion.  Likewise, my relationships with Troubadour and Laughing Girl changed and flowed, so the conversations were never the same twice.  Or the weather – one year we got rained off just as we had lovingly set out all the little dishes of bits and pieces to admire them; that was both funny and bloody annoying…)

This year I’m doing something more low key still, in tune with my more or less skintness and social isolation.

Nothing is happening on the actual birthday, which falls on a Wednesday (except I have to take Fluffhead to both the doctors and then a PTA thing at his soon to be nursery; so that isn’t my day at all).  But on the Saturday, Mum will visit and we are going out to a neighbouring town for a morning of charity shop perusal.  There are about 10 charity shops in the main street where we’re going – joy!  I never get a chance to go in them, ordinarily.  I also never really get a chance to hang out with mum, because when she visits it’s always to help me out with Fluffhead, these days.

So we will hang out, and spend a tiny amount of money buying stuffage in charity shops.  I’m a wicked good charity shop shopper.  I find excellent clothes and books and DVDs.

The secret is simple: you can go in there wanting a certain thing all you like, but don’t be too specific as it leads you to be blind to what is actually present – see what is there and if you need or like any of that…Only be terribly specific if its vital that you have a winter coat or something; in which case, be prepared that you may not get what you wanted because of your very specific requirements.

I just realised I have outlined a very good General Philosophy of Actual Real Life.  Huh.  Don’t be too caught up being specific with what you want or you’ll blindly and single mindedly miss what’s actually going on around you, which you might also have liked.  (It’s that ‘life is what happens while you’re busy making plans’ thing.  And the thing about the journey being important, not just the destination.  Doesn’t apply to all situations, but to quite a large number.)  Amazingly, considering I apply this with perfection to charity shop shopping – a naturally wilful, disorderly and stockwise unpredictable environment – JUST LIKE LIFE – I cannot seem to apply it to my Actual Real Life at all.  More huh.  You try!  Do better than me!

Anyway.  Then we’ll go to a local bakers and have a cappuccino and a bun or something.  And a chat.  Be together.

When we come back, mum’ll have Fluffhead for a bit and Stanley and I will go out for a nice walk or something, or to get ice cream and cookies.  (I’m on a diet, as usual for this time of year: hello Weight Watchers Online, your reliable summer income has returned once again! – but no diet this day.)

That’s it.  We’ve hardly any money, but I get to hang out with 2 really important people to me (no Fry this year, he’s working this day), and talk uninterrupted.  And I get a little unpredictable shopping (aka treasure hunting).

Its enough, it’s grand, it’s good.  It marks the day out as special and different, and it causes no financial stress or complicated logistical nightmare.  I’m pretty introverted, so it also appeals to my preference for one on ones, as opposed to Big Groupy (Confusing Headache Making) Things.

See?  And you should (yes: I boss you today, in the manner of opinionated bloggers worldwide!) do what you like with YOUR birthday too.

Go on wargames, go bird watching, go on a spa day, spend the day making muffins – or in bed, resting if you’re exhausted.  I am going to make some Sunshine Muffins I saw on a Ceebeebies prog, and have pro-pointed up to make all Weight Watcher friendly, just for the hell of it.  I like baking easy things; it’ll make me feel happy.

Do something All For You, that makes you feel happy, peaceful, buzzed.

Be quiet if you’re always subjected to noise.  Or vice versa (yikes).

Go out feeling pretty and glittery and glossy if you feel you are always frumpy, mumsy or worky (ok, I’m still channelling myself here).

Read, alone in the garden listening to birdsong, if you want no fuss from others.  But make a nice fuss for yourself.

Your birthday belongs to you.  In the present, now.  It’s not a symbol or reminder of anything in the past or pressures in the future.  (Special Circumstances: If something very bad happened near your birthday in the past – and I know one friend for whom this is so and it ruins her birthday every year – make like the Queen: declare a different date, and make it 5 months away.  Have your birthday when you’d like it to be, when you can enjoy it.  Why the hell not??  Take your day back.)

Your birthday is Out Of Time.  It’s like a Solstice: a marker of balance.  You are poised between last year and the year to come.  You can hope, dream and plan (or regret); but don’t let it rob you of the one day that is All Yours.

All Yours.  A present moment.

One day in the whole year.  You can spare one day, for you.

Do something that makes you Happy.

Two Sons, No Fire and the Freemasons

So!  Part 2!  You get two posts today, for being so kind as to wait for me for more than a week.  To continue the ramble of life…

The other birthday last week, was Son Number One.  He was 21.  He is an unusual person, in that he doesn’t really care at all for birthdays, and he doesn’t think it was at all lame to come and spend his birthday with me, his mum.  I kept what we were doing as a surprise.  I actually had some more money for this birthday.  Stanley had been astonishingly selfless in contributing money toward it at the expense of his own birthday.  (I’m not being sarky: I love birthdays, and Stanley thinks he doesn’t, but seems to really – he likes having a fuss made of him and going somewhere.)  We agreed it was an important birthday, and we should do something – even if it was only proving to Son Number One that birthdays aren’t all boring once you’re older than twelve.  (Where he picked up this singularly unfun idea I have no clue.)

So he came down on the Saturday and when we woke up on Sunday he was actually a bit excited and eventually, after feeding Fluffhead and leaving him with Stanley for the day, we set off to the secret and much fun venue.  I don’t think birthdays should be about grown up stuff, myself.  So I took him to the London Dungeons.  This was actually a complete misstep, as he had always said he enjoyed it at school, and would love to go back.  I enjoyed it once too and thought the same.  But he stood in front of it and did that thing only your own kids can get away with doing, of saying: ‘Is this it?  Is this the surprise?  Oh.’  Its all in the ‘oh’.  (I was a bit relieved to tell the truth, as I was still Womanflu-ing – I cannot get across to you how heroic I’ve been all week going out and doing stuff with my Dreadful Ailment dogging me every step of the way.  I was relieved to not have to be pleasantly frightened or have loud noises in my ear when I was feeling all dizzy and spacey anyway.)  It did leave a bit of a hole in the day though.  I hadn’t been sensible and accrued a Plan B. 

So we wandered up and down the river and South Bank for an hour and a half, building up a hearty appetite for something or other.  (Noticeable lack of Odd People down here in this area of wealth and prosperity, by the way.  Marked noticing of ruddy faced well-dressed people and happy looking tourists.)  Son Number One loves good old Pizza Express.  So we sat there and had a very extravagant meal (we spent the meal money plus the London Dungeon money; we had drinks and siders, and starters and desserts and every good thing.)  (Meanwhile Stanley texts and tells me he is finally exhibiting the cold and feeling ‘poorly’.  I have always liked this wan little word.  I text him that he needs tea – since he refuses most medicine of any description, which really offends my inner hypochondriac as I have LOTS of medicine to hand.  He accepts the suggestion of tea, and is not heard from for a further while.)

After the meal, Son Number One is suddenly full of beans and thinks the London Dungeon isn’t such a bad idea after all.  I then have to inform him we just ate any possibility of doing it.  To which he asks what else is in the surrounding area that is any good.  And I have a fit of nostalgia and tell him we aren’t far from the Museum of London.  This has always been my favourite museum over all others.  He loved it when small too.  We both have a near obsession with the Fire of London room.  Showing what an amazing person he can be sometimes he thinks the Museum would be a fine idea and we trot off to it after calling poorly Stanley for directions.  (I have no sense of direction, and Son can get back from anywhere having been there once, but we needed to get there for him to memorise the route.)

We have a great walk through the City getting there.  (I say to him that this will be the birthday he remembers as the Spectacular one, where I gave him Fresh Air and Exercise and Education, to go with the customary feed.  He looks both humourous and exasperated by this; I love a good incorrect spin as an irritant.)  On the way there, right near London Wall, there are suddenly Morris Dancers everywhere, who I hear first rather than see.  I hear the knee bells.  They go past hither and thither, no one direction only; different costumes and all happy looking.  Sadly, I have worn the wrong shoes today (I wasn’t expecting to have to do so much walking) so I don’t have the energy to chase them as I usually would to ask why they are so incongruously here, in the near deserted City back streets on a Sunday.  Their bells fade away after a while.  We pass a sign for the Museum of Banking.  I suggest we go there instead.  We both laugh heartily and settle for not vandalising it.  (See, I am not entirely without reasonable enlightenment despite the occasional strong view.)

Then around the corner, is what I think is a little horse.  Then another.  People are tending small brown horses – are they ponies? – and feeding them hay, by the side of vans.  I am very excited as only a Nature Loving Born Townie can be, at the idea of Sudden Unusual Strokeable Animals in London.  I do actually rush up to the first of these people and ask if I can touch their horse.  The woman smiles at me kindly and underlines my Towny Ignorance by informing me it’s a donkey.  Of course it is, now I look at it.  I am so ignorant of so many things, its annoying.  I’m sure I rode on donkeys at the seaside when I was little?  I just don’t quite remember.  The donkey is very friendly and utterly peaceful.  It looks up at me without ceasing to munch at all, and flicks its lovely brown ears.  I don’t think hay looks very good to eat, but the donkey seems most pleased.  Its name is Jezebel, which seems completely silly and therefore a very good name.  Son laughs at me for a while as I am so excited to stroke it, and then its friends that appear close by.  In my excitement, I completely neglect to ask these people why there are donkeys and Morris Dancers in London on a Sunday where there aren’t any people.  We forge on, and get to the Museum.

I forgot it had been refurbished.  It has not been as mangled as the Natural History Museum, which I remembered as a marvellously elegant building filled with tall soaring skeletons of the long gone beasts (and that excellent Human Biology section where the woman screams as she falls in the canal in the film that demonstrates heart rate and stress).  It’s now a loud, neon, completely overcrowded theme park for children.  Stanley and I vowed to not go there again, the disappointment in the change being too great.

I don’t know what it is about museums refurbishing not only what needs to be redone, but also what is perfectly fine, and has a cult following.  They ruined the Fire of London room.  It used to be a darkened room, separated from the rest of the museum by a heavy black curtain.  The lights would go down, and the wind sound effects would start.  A voice would say, ‘Its 3 in the morning, and all’s well….’, the town cryer, words to that effect.  It would tell of the Fire, beginning in that small house in Pudding Lane, and going on, progressively lighting up the brilliant model of London before it with tinny little orange lights, showing the progression of the fire.  The wind would howl, the voices of the narrator would tell of the attempts to outrun the fire and failing; how eventually they took to blowing up houses before the fire could get to them, which was the only thing that stopped it in some areas.  There would be sound effects of explosions, woody and old, and projections of orange and yellow flames would rise up all about the room.  It was slightly amateurish and completely mesmeric and wonderful.  I don’t know anybody who didn’t like it.  Now, it’s a semi lit room (no curtain).  They have kept the model and the rising flame effects, but only within the area of the model – so you aren’t involved in a surround way, anymore.  They have lost the narrator, and instead have several different voices telling you about the fire.  The annoying thing is – it’s more of less the same accounts, Pepys, Evelyn etc – but the atmosphere is completely lost.  No wind, no explosion; the model is barely lit up, only sections.  There are inane projections of some fire eating a manuscript and shadowy old houses from a documentary programme referenced at the end shown on the back wall of the room.  It’s all clinical, and informative…and has no feeling of time travel or ambience whatsoever.  (I really hope someone kept the original audio of that Fire Room, so that if something they will listen to complains and asks for the old one back it’s still possible to have it.  I hate that feeling – that something good is irretrievably lost.)

They did the same to the Victorian Walk downstairs.  There still is a good set of Victorian mocked up shops, showing the goods laid out.  But there used to be street sounds pumped through the whole section.  As you progressed through, you felt as though you were in a crowded Victorian street, hearing people calling their wares, hearing coaches clatter past, complete with snorts of horses…now there are only sounds for the pub room, and they are oddly muted.  I was sorry the Diseases section was gone.  How else will the world know about Glanders?  Such a scary Victorian disease.

We enjoyed the Museum in other ways.  We enjoyed playing the daft computer games there; we enjoyed the new Black Death room (oddly atmospheric in its bitty presentation).  We enjoyed the Roman section (though again, it had been rendered oddly slick and antiseptic by the renovation).

But all in all, even though he waited for his cake for a further day and a half, Son seems to have had a good birthday; or an ok birthday…which is better than the no birthday at all he would have done for himself if left to it.  He had such a good time he’s still here.  I just had him busy in the garden, while I’m doing this.

Then it was the time for Fluffhead to get back in the spotlight of Life.  Saint Mum came to take him to the park yesterday, and astonishingly, I was still snotty.  (Twelve days and counting.  Humpf.)  I watched some Buffy with Son, always good for a veg, and then decided to take my spacey self off for a Good Lie Down.  This was of course a doomed idea, as Saint Mum immediately reappeared with a bleeding headed Fluffhead.  Despite having stood up under a metal slide in the park (far away), and having created a great gouting wound, he was miraculously not turning into Tetchyhead.  It took Saint Mum an hour and a half to get back from the park on the bus, to ask me what to do about the wound.  (I told her in future to go straight to hospital and not come back for me.)  By then it was a bit all over the place and there were lots of bloody tissues here and there.  Fluffhead seemed completely unpeturbed, so I walked him round to the doctor which is 5 minutes away.  As they did last time he had a head bump, they helpfully refused to see him and insisted I go to the hospital.  (Because of this, and so I would be prepared in future, I had an emergency £50 for a taxi to get there in a hurry…the hospital is an hour and half away by bus, again, in rush hour.  I do love doctors, can you tell?)  Luckily, Son was still here and had his car.  He has a very slacker attitude to life in general and is very unimpressed with his brother altogether, but leapt to action and drove us there very quickly.  Saint Mum, who was still guilting (though he would just as easily have stood up under that slide with me as her, so just one of those things), was still fretting, so was very impressed with his speed and readiness in crisis.

Stanley had been diverted on the way home, and met us there with his excellent customary calm and togetherness.  I was actually too snotty to panic, which was a good thing as I do a really good panic when moved.   Fluffhead had fallen asleep in the car which led Saint Mum to further worries of possible concussion, but you know how lulling cars are for tinies.  As soon as we got to the Children’s Waiting Room, he caused havoc and tore up and down the room, and wanted to play with all the dirty old hospital toys, and the other wounded children.  I pursued him with antibacterial handwash; Stanley pursued him with our toys; my mother pursued him with her calculator, which did the trick, as he loves Grown Up Things He Shouldn’t Be Playing With.  We were seen amazingly quickly by the world’s perkiest nurse (in my experience NHS nurses are relatively surly; children’s wards are the definite exception).  She gained his eternal love with a clicky pen torch while she examined his head.  Apparently nowadays they glue children's damaged heads instead of stitching them.  We had a very fun time holding poor Fluffhead like a battering ram sideways while I rinsed his hair to get the blood out (what a sad little sight, all the blood running into the bowl; how clean his hair was after).  He complained and yelled and generally showed great good health, and continued as the perky nurse dried him and the perky doctor agreed the glue was ok and he wasn’t cut as deeply as it looked, scalp wounds bleed muchly etc etc.  He was finally pacified by the Freemasons.

Yes, the Freemasons.  Instead of conducting some shadowy international political intrigue involving costumes and blindfolding (and possibly Jack the Ripper and definitely Mozart), they were visiting the hospital and handing out teddy bears to sick children.  We got one with a red suit on.  The woman looked completely normal and not the slightest bit in a Secret Society famed the world over for…well, how many books have you read on it?  How many dodgy documentaries have you seen?  What do we really actually know?  We don’t really, do we, as its secret…(Did you click on the link?  Fascinating!  Are you convinced?!)

All I can tell you is, we left the hospital that evening, having named the teddy the Emperor Octavius Wolfgang, the Horned One.  (I named him, obviously.)  Fluffhead fell asleep, apparently unconcussed, in the car, on the way home, his hair drying in the breeze from the open window.  Clutching the small Freemason Teddy.

A post that wasn't meant to be about politics or my cold...

Well, here I am.  Back after a strange interval of life that felt very rushed, yet very slow.  I got a massive cold.  I’m the only female I know that does Womanflu.  I think its related to the fact that I think my sense of personality is almost entirely contingent on my sense of embodiment.  If my body feels wrong, all of me feels wrong.  If I’m very tired, for example, then life can feel very dark indeed.  (Since Fluffhead has been born; even since the last trimester of pregnancy where I ceased to be able to sleep comfortably in any position, I have been in a different state of consciousness to before.  A very changeable and more prone to downers/anxiety and general instability than before.  And I’ve never been that stable!)  Tiredness plus cold, tsk tsk…

So, womanflu isn’t a good thing.  I’m notoriously addicted to Sinex nasal spray (for over 20 years now), so my nose is a permanent mess of blocking and unblocking.  When I get a cold, its far far worse.  Then there's the head fogging and headache, the itchy throat that drives you crazy at night with the attempt to not start coughing, cos if you do you’ll be starting something that will carry on indefinitely and feed itself.   

I find it annoying that I catch most colds from people that wouldn’t just be responsible and take a sick day from work.  It seems to be the hallmark of Manliness and Productivity in some workplaces (and it applies to women too, to not look weak, and fit in) to come in when suffering a bad cold and continue, lamely, to attempt to work anyway.  Whilst busily infecting everyone else in the workplace, who take it home and infect their partners and small children.  I find that short-termist and stupid.  That day or two days when you could have just gone home and rested and not spluttered over the communal kettle might have saved some mother and child several nights of asthma and steaming the child in the bathroom all night; or antibiotics for a chest infection they got.  It’s selfish in fact, to stay at work when you’re ill.  Go home, rest, recuperate, and come back when you’re better: be doubly productive.  If you have a full time permanent job, this is what sick days were invented for.  It’s not a contest to see who won’t ever have one and therefore be more manly, and dedicated to international capitalism.  (This topic really vexes me.  As you can guess, Stanley brought home this cold from two plaguey colleagues at work; who also took it home and infected their wives and tiny babies.  It was ironic that Stanley Typhoid Mary-ed this cold, in that he was actually the last to get it properly: me first, then poor lil Fluffhead, then him.)

Anyway, during all this snotty fun, it was Stanley’s 45^th birthday.  We are a bit poor at the moment (I say that like we’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires; this is a bit hopeful of me – we are poor for the foreseeable future, I just have hope we might be a tiny bit less poor at some point).  So I didn’t really have any money much to do anything great.  Stanley always takes his birthday off work, so he did.  I tried really hard to not make the day all about me and how I had to go out with him even though I Am Ill (imagine what fun I am as a companion; then run away)…We went into the biggest nearest town (East Croydon), and wandered about the shopping centre and sat peacefully and ate ice cream, like old folk.  I always get quite excited at shopping centres.  Partly because I have never shaken off the marvellous marketing idea that if I buy something (whatever it is) I will feel better about life in general, a new me!  This is usually rubbish of course, but its very tempting rubbish, and I can count myself as intelligent-ish all I like; I still get sucked into the miasma of this silly concept sometimes.  But this day was different.   I don’t know if it was because we wandered round the post riot sites first, and it was sad seeing so many burnt buildings and boarded up buildings…which then got me to thinking I was seeing more odd looking people out than normal.  (You know the odd people:  they look like they have never had a job, they have a way of sitting about like they never ever did and never will have anywhere to go in particular.  Some of them look angry and scary; some look sad and talk to themselves.  Some just tic, or look very lost.)  I see them everywhere, wherever I go, and they have always wanted to talk to me, always.  I have had some very good conversations with some of them; none of which made sense in the Agreed Reality where we buy things, have a job, have dinner, watch TV, have hobbies, families etc.  That Life.  But they all made sense in other realities (ones where the streets were golden and had red gems in; and another where a man took a good 45 minutes for me to convince him I wasn’t the ghost of his dead ex-wife).

We sat there, in the Whitgift Shopping Centre, eating double scoops of ice-cream and chatting about the world, while watching the odd people, and the women with babies (the babies were either of the Exceedingly Cute or Very Big Headed type – since Fluffhead, I gravitate to other babies when I’m not with him; he was at home with Saint Mum, being babysat).  I realised that though being out with Stanley alone was rare and wonderful; and talking with him was also rare and wonderful, it was sad too, as I don’t seem to like shopping centres anymore.  All I could see was endless things I couldn’t afford, or actually want, at all.  All advertised desperately, with gaily painted signs, neon, screaming loud lettering.  I don’t want any of this stuff – there’s nothing I can’t wait for.  I wasn’t excited about the clothes; I’ve never been much into fashion.  I wear whatever I see that I like and that’s that.  I don’t do labels.  I take from whatever is in if I like any of it and add it to whatever I have.  I haven’t liked anything much that’s been in, for ages.  (I suddenly felt Old.)  I asked Stanley and he felt the same way (he’s a black jeans and band T-shirts man anyway; he’s the casual-est a old Goth can get and still have a passion for Industrial music…he would hate that set of labels I just put on him, so take them as mere indications of a much bigger picture, not a set in stone description). 

I wasn’t excited by the music we heard as we wandered through HMV, him pulling me along casually by my belt loops, as he does do when I linger and he wants to move on.  Him dragging me affectionately about through music shops is something of a tradition.    I realised I was sitting, walking, moaning about the place, worrying about the state of society and feeling it was all a bit off and not right, even at this cursory afternoon glance.  Instead of eating out our lunch – the Big Treat – we decided to change it to Take Away Pizza delivered at home, so Fluffhead could share the garlic-bread and not be left out.  It was very strange.  It was better to be back indoors.   It felt …not unsafe….but almost soulless, while out.  I was unsure how much to attribute this to my altered condition of feeling pretty crap and mucussy; and how much it was actually the world.  I still haven’t mentioned politics yet, and I won’t really just this instant.  I just will say that a lot of things don’t feel right anymore…some people’s attitudes seem to be shifting.   

For example: Its no longer thought wonderful and a great feat, that we created the Welfare State out of a debt ridden and beaten up country at the end of World War Two, so that we could look after everyone and ensure that something as basic as the right to try and live a healthy, non-destitute life was not just a hope.  To not go back to the scary arbitrary charity helping of the 1930s – where people still died rather than go to the doctor because they couldn’t afford it; people still did starve, in this country, when there was no work and they couldn’t get a job.  (I'm not saying the welfare state is perfect; its riddled with flaws in its execution....but its a damn sight better than what preceded it, in my opinion.)  There’s a horrible creeping voice I hear all over the place, from the mouths of otherwise reasonable people.  They say things that work out to this sentiment: ‘why are we paying for people who aren’t our own?  Why is it coming out of my pocket?  Why am I expected to be responsible for anyone other than Myself, and my family?  Let the weak die.  Let them suffer, it’s their fault they have no job/are sick’ etc etc etc.  It’s often dressed up as: ‘we can’t pay for them; we can barely pay for ourselves.’  It’s often lately joined with: ‘This is all the fault of Labour, this economic mess…’  It truly IS amazing how one political party can be responsible for the gambling immorality of the Entire World Banking System.  I truly am impressed that the hedge funders, bundlers of debt salesmen and futures speculators are all Labour members, apparently.  You learn something every day…

Yep.  Lots of things bother me, and that day…they really got to me.  Those riots in August very much unsettled me.  At first I did my usual self preservatory panic and hoarded food and found the key to the nursery, so I could lock myself and Fluffhead in there if necessary (see – I don’t overreact to stuff; dead practical, me), while calling for the army on Facebook.  Calm as anything, exemplary…Then I really did calm down, and it stopped (mighty relief).  And I read loads of articles about why it happened, and the one comment that got to me more than any other was one made by Philip Shallcrass (a Druid, and thinker).  He simply said (in a rambling Facebook thread) that until inequality was addressed in this country, things like this would continue to bubble and erupt here and there.  I won’t rant about all the many and linked probable causes.  I just thought that one summed up the root, and summed up the solution.  Inequality.  And I walked about that shopping centre and thought of all those people just sitting about.  (Inclusion/exclusion.)  And the other ones buying stuff they probably don’t need, on their lunch hours, to cheer themselves up.  (Aspiration/Envy.)  Its bright and light and airy in there…and tempting and soul destroying.  Our society IS sick, but its not in the way Cameron would have it, and its not his solutions that will work…

Next year – I shall not take Stanley to a shopping centre.  (Lets not even mention Dawn of the Dead, eh?)  I don’t care what stuff he might want, we can zip in and out if there’s stuff he would get the satisfaction of buying and unwrapping.  (He is a technogeek – there is always some musical or computer gizmo needed.)  But then I’ll take him somewhere proper, somewhere real, where you can see the sky, and hear the birds.

***

(Off you go – have a toilet break before I ramble Part 2 of this post.  Which will be happier and involve random donkeys munching hay.  Really, it will. )