Pick up thy bed and walk!

On Monday I accidentally deleted – like the twat I clearly am – approximately sixty thousand words of a novel I have been ‘working on’ for nearly two years. Bugger. I could blame somebody else of course, Bill Gates maybe, but it’s entirely my own fault and it was entirely avoidable; I was just stupid. I've been told it might be recoverable and I've had a go - no joy - but actually it’s not an issue.

Truth is I've been dragging my heels a bit because I had distractions and anyway, it got too involved and too ‘plotty’ to be able to leave for long periods and then get back into. If it was hard work for me, how much harder for a reader? All just excuses, really. So despite offers of help to recover the files, I've decided to start over. The plot is in my head, I know where it's going and I know the characters, so it’s just a matter of ditching a struggling project and adopting a new, streamlined routine with a view to meeting a deadline and getting to market.

See, for my one-man wording band the means of production are truly under the control of the worker and I can make the right decisions and live with the consequences of any shortfalls. Same with my household budget. In straitened circumstances I've cut my cloth to suit and managed to reduce my outgoings by the simple expediency of doing without. It’s hardly rocket surgery; you just have to pick up the pieces and get on with it.

What a shame that back in the dark days of the late seventies the entire country didn't have an inspirational leader with exactly those same values of thrift and balance and a sense of proportion.  Oh, wait... The irony of the poor, supposedly oppressed people of Goldthorpe dressing up and cavorting and recording their Thatcher hate day with their smart phones and posting the photographs online wouldn’t have passed the great lady by.

We have NOTHING! Look, we're burning it!

Whole countries have survived cataclysmic natural disasters killing thousands, have come through ethnic cleansing and have undergone economic revolutions in under a decade, yet a few thousand people in a mere dingy shithole like Goldthorpe can’t get off their collective fat arse and organise themselves into something better in an entire generation.

Instead they mourn a world most of them never knew. As David Tristram said on Twitter, you are allowed to have opinions about things that happened before you were born, but they won’t be your opinions. For thirty years all they've done up there is gripe and moan and wait for somebody else to tell them what to do; wait for somebody else to help them out. Their helplessness deserves none of your pity; it doesn't even deserve your scorn.

Margaret didn't invent selfishness. She didn't invent living within your means. She didn't invent the dole and she didn't invent market forces. Most of all she didn't invent class-driven strife and management and union corruption. Anybody believing she did could do worse than watch the 1959 film I’m All Right Jack. 

'Divisive'? Of course she was divisive. I'm divisive, you're divisive, everybody who isn't a doormat is divisive... and we don't even agree about that. Oh and why are ex-mining communities somehow more important than ex-fishing communities, or ex-shipbuilding communities, or anybody else? You have to wonder. I fully expect to generate a bit of hate myself for this - the downtrodden are remarkably quick with their fists and their brickbats - but the fact remains they are more victims of their own apathy and bigotry than anything else.

A society in which we all club together to help out others less fortunate is a lovely thing to belong to. So it's good that we already do. But ultimately the means of your salvation must lie in your own hands. How many more generations will pass before they grow up and realise the world doesn't owe a living to those who can help themselves? 

If anything it’s the other way round, Lazarus.


(PS: Goldthorpe Colliery wasn't even closed until 1994.)

She sold my brain!

How lucky I was to be born before Margaret Thatcher privatised all the intelligence. This week I was unfortunate to have watched Question Time, the Andrew Marr Show, Sunday Politics and The Big Questions, all of them on the BBC. I've also listened to the radio and watched television and there has only been one news item of significance. (I shudder to think what is going on behind the smokescreen.) 

On audience participation shows every quiet tribute to Mrs Thatcher was met with animal howls of unintelligent, unthinking, jingoistic rage. “Thatcher killed my father!” yelled one, “Thatcher ripped the heart out of my community!” chorused many and then the inevitable simple untruths; she did this, she did that, as if she was an omnipotent and omnipresent deity, individually conferring the curse as people slept in their beds.

Spoken with such certainty and repeated so often, often by mere children, such claims take on the mantle of truth, where no such truth exists. While the pro-Thatcher voices have been steady and measured, often with a balancing statement that the speaker didn’t necessarily agree with everything she did, the voices on the hating left all speak with one illogical, bitter tongue. 

Every Anti-Thatcher voice sounds like the chants of a brainwashing cult. It’s as if the Moonies invaded and took away their ability to think, to reason and more importantly their natural human ability to adapt and survive. For, while Mrs T may have prescribed the bitter medicine, the alternatives could have been so very much worse. What news of the turnip harvest, comrade? And a whole generation later (two in some communities) what's the point of blaming your life chances on events you can never change?

They say there are lies, damned lies and statistics. To that we should add Thatcher fantasies. For, much of the Left’s hatred of Margaret is based on falsehoods and those with most to gain from the useful idiots repeating the agitprop know this well. The best moment of my television viewing was watching the odious Neil Kinnock squirming in the Martin Durkin documentary when confronted with the simple truth that she left the country as a whole very much better off than when she found it. 

Kinnock may look stupid and sound stupid, but he’s made a lot of money by knowing exactly which master to serve. When he had the opportunity to redeem himself by admitting that undeniable fact he found he just couldn't bring himself to do it. In the face of logic and simple truth he had the physiognomy of a pug licking piss off a nettle. It was hilarious. 

Pre and post Thatcher era brain scans

And then the big battle line was drawn between two mediocre songs, neither of which meant what their supporters wanted them to mean. It’s like the country has collectively lost its ability to make up its own mind. I blame Thatcher; she sold off all the brains. Probably.

Sartre was right!

People on prescription drugs. People on illegal drugs. People on religion. People peddling so-called new-age claptrap. People peddling old-age claptrap. Believers in ghosts. Believers in spirits. Believers in some form of universal truth. Believers that all men are created equal? All deranged.

The young are helpless and naive and the old often appear gullible. Wisdom may come with age, but it also needs a bit of practice as well. Those who have relied on others throughout their lives are hardly likely to suddenly acquire oracle-like insight as their minds descend into the nightmare of dementia.

But, young or old, the continued existence of absurd beliefs in provable untruths is astonishing unless you also see human nature for what it really is. Opportunistic, simplistic and fundamentally selfish. Tribally we may form associations and alliances for life but our apparent altruism is often revealed to be based on self-interest or just blind instinct. So, much for the milk of human kindness.

There are many kind souls, yes, but their moderate voices get drowned out amidst the clamour for attention of the multitudes who refuse to display any sense of personal responsibility. And the rest of us are treading water, waiting for the day the floods recede... not any day soon it appears.

So, while we're all really busy - making money, taking money, being deluded, being feeble, being kind, being stupid - the idiot political classes engage in their own set of delusional behaviours. David Cameron is implicated in - gosh - party fund-raising, while the Labour lot feign apoplexy as if cash-for-questions never happened. The government increase taxation and decrease spending and the opposition attack that strategy before saying they would do the same. Meanwhile a lefty idiot tweets that she rejoiced on believing Margaret Thatcher had died and we righty idiots get all pompous about it. Yes, the country is in dire economic straits, by all accounts, but people still have plenty of time to spread dirt and gossip.

Despite all that you might want - or even need - to believe in, the truth is much more simple. There IS no big conspiracy. There IS no right way to govern. There IS no single set of magic measures to make it all better. But one thing's for certain, if you sit around waiting for somebody else to sort out your life you're gonna end up with one mighty sore arse.

You could save yourselves a bit of time with this: