The Duvet Diaries

Here we are, once again!

2011-03-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

I was going to write something well informed, factually supported and scathing. I was going to try and write something neutral and unbiased but I can't, in fact no one can;no one is neutral or unbiased when it comes to existence. The great crash of the 1920's was a credit lead, consumption based catastrophy; monetarism and Reaganomics/Thatchersim was a return to those same dark days and the same thing happened again; 3 mile island and chernobyl warned us of the perils inherant to nuclear energy, and we have been warned about the dangers of a laissez faire attitude towards our planet and it's natural resources. We all know it, and that's the saddest thing of all.
I don't think I would be as concerned if this had never happened before and I wouldn't be so concerned if there weren't any genuine and realistic alternatives; but there are and we know about them too.
I'm going to put some links up so that you can see what I base my opinion on so you can read them and make up your own mind but my main reason for believing in realistic alternatives is more emotive.
Firstly, I do not accept that it is morally permissable to make people pay such a crippling price for what is ultimately the failures of our leaders, both political and commercial. Secondly, we would all do ourselves a service by trying to gain a better understanding of how governments perform the function of borrowing money and how we regulate the financial markets, I think you will be surprised how arbitrary these systems are;
withdrawing the investment in the public sector and the third sector, coupled with a lack of imagination and a will to reform the financial services industry, compounded by crippling our human capital with personal debts for higher education whilst looking at an ever decreasing and narrowing job market, are all contributing to a massive material debt in the future. And we all know this aswell in our heart of hearts.
Industry and manufacturing are the area's in which a long term and healthy economy can be built; it provides an employment, skill and knowledge based foundation on which the rest of the economy can be built. The environmental concerns, that we are now all painfully aware of, could be used to kickstart a resurgence in the "white heat of technology" that has served mankind so well in the past, but the main hurdle to jump is our own culture and attitudes towards ourselves, each other and the rest of the world.
Untill we, as a people, stop valuing our petty material desires over and above that which is truly important (or at least what should be) we are doomed in the truest sense. The way we idolise and aspire to the vain, venal and materialistic is truly a disgusting sight; it's not the money, cars, holidays, handbags, sex, houses and status symbols that are the problem; it's our attitude towards them that is problem. With all this in mind maybe you ask why I think anything can change and my answer is becasue the problems are not external, they are internal. If we change, everything else can change. I am convinced that if we can open up and free our minds, our arses will have no choice but to follow. Or are we really that stubborn?

http://www.neweconomics.org/
http://www.theworkfoundation.com/
http://www.jet.efda.org/

We Do It to Ourselves

2010-05-07T11:02:00.001-07:00

The electorate has struck! And have delivered us into the hands of a hung parliament for the first time since 1973. I would be lying if I said I was surprised and I would be lying if I said that I was pleased. London has remained predominantly Labour and is beset on all sides by a blue army, disgraceful. I know I am going to sound like a disgruntled left winger, but you would be wrong; I am disgruntled not with politicians but with people. The aspiring suburbanite's of our great nation have decided that change for change's sake is what we need. People hidden away from the troubles of the rest of society and who don't live at the thin end of the wedge of social and economic legislation, have blindly dragged us into what could quite easily be the most volatile political period for a generation and for what They can no longer afford a new car and two holidays a year.

The real reason for the economic and political climate that we live in nowadays is due to the selfish nature of the electorate and their incessant, childish greed. This is then pandered to by political parties because honesty and realism are something we are not prepared or willing to deal with. The banks were dolling out unsecured loans and 110% mortgages to anyone who asked for it, and doing so with gay abandon; and though it may be true to say that if Gordon Brown had acted sooner, it could have been curbed and the financial crisis avoided, the aspirations of the people would never have allowed it. If Gordon Brown had stopped people borrowing money that they could never afford to pay back and curbed the banks freedom to lend without a rigorous criteria for doing so, every greedy little eye in the land (with very few exceptions) would have been full of tears and every greedy little mouth would have been screaming blue murder, we do it to ourselves. As a people we are complicit in our own demise. What kind of idiot would lend a person 15 times their annual wage to purchase a house without a 10% deposit? And more to the point, what idiot would borrow it? What is a 110% mortgage anyway? It is securing a personal loan on a house that you don't own while borrowing the money to purchase said house at the same time, that's what it is. What is a bank that lends someone 110% of the value of the property? A greedy opportunist taking advantage of your stupidity and the government's naivety in financial legislation, that's what it is.

The nation has voted in favour of change despite the fact that given all of the governments shortcomings it was accepted around the world that Gordon Browns fiscal package to get us out of recession was on the right track, and like a petulant child we have put that all at risk because no one has a magic wand to make it all better over night. Well I hope you are all pleased with yourselves. Every new piece of legislation is now going to be held up by the endless bickering of MP's, and after eighteen months or so of getting absolutely nowhere we will have to go to the polls all over again. If you want change start with yourself; and if you want a real, lasting and positive change for this country then I suggest that we get involved in the political system at the local level, so that we may be better informed when we are required to make a decision. Dr, heal thy self!

Hiding Under Your Duvet

2010-04-22T16:01:00.001-07:00

I moved to east London at the end of the summer in 2008. It's a mix of students, upwardly mobile career people, artists and the working classes. If the Daily Mail is to be believed it is full of warring gangs who spend their time fighting each other or mugging and raping the locals, this is not true. East London has its fair share of trouble but unless you decide to ignore every alarm bell and warning sign and walk into an uninhabited, dimly lit danger zone at some un-godly hour, or walk up to a gang of surly looking youths and say to them "who do you think you're looking at?" you are probably in no more danger than if you were in any other dimly-lit, uninhabited danger zone in the country. Most of this fear, as far as I can tell, is brought about by the media and the fact that the east end is the definition of a cultural melting-pot which makes it very easy for newspapers to play on the irrational fears of middle England. The old tricks are always the best.

I was born in Hoxton in 1978 and lived there till I was eleven so it wasn't such a culture shock to move back to the east end. I have a lot of old friends that had moved back to London from Essex so I had a social safety net to fall back on and had no need to rely on making new friends. I didn't know what I was going to do for a living when I got here but a good friend of mine had always said to me "if you wait for the perfect set of circumstances to come along before you do anything, you find that you end up waiting a very long time for something that never happens" and "it's not such a bad thing to get out of your comfort zone and take a leap of faith...necessity can be the mother of invention" and as it turns out he was right.

A week after arriving in Mile End I had landed a job as an electrician which got me back on my feet but after a couple of months I decided to go back to bar work. Being a self employed electrician pays well but it is also quite stressful and I can't handle stress at the best of times. I had spent the past 18 months trying to calm my drinking down and now the slightest alarm or surprise brings on an anxiety attack, but it is a lot less pronounced now. I got myself a job in a nice little pub in Globe Town that was frequented mostly by students and creative types. They found me quite novel since I was one of the few cockneys that they got to converse with on a regular basis that didn't intimidate them or tell them to piss off back to where they came from, I'm not even a cockney really I just speak like one, something I inherited from my parents. There is a lot of resentment towards the new arrivals in the east end, a lot of people who have lived here for most of their lives feel that all it has done for the area is drive up house prices and divide the community. Public houses have suffered as well, the white community feel that the traditional Pub is on the decline and won't be around for much longer, and there is some truth in this.

The east end is also a geographical anomaly; you seem to be a maximum of twenty minutes from nearly everywhere, central London, Greenwich, Essex. You name it and it's only a short journey from where you are to where you want to be. When you arrive you may not necessarily want to be where you are but at least it's a short trip back home. I was invited out for a few drinks in Hoxton square which is one of the dull and grossly overrated hotspots around the east end. It is full of generically themed bars all of which are completely indistinguishable from each other and criminally overpriced. I would rather have been mugged by a hobo for the amount I spent that evening, I at least would have been able to say that there was nothing I could have done. Instead I was handing over an endless stream of twenty pound notes willingly to some belligerent po-faced fop in the full knowledge that I was being ripped off, but I only have to walk 100 yards and it looks like any other deprived area in London. These places are enclaves not parts of the community.

The regeneration of east London is also slightly oversold. The 2012 Olympics hasn't resulted in very many jobs for the local people. The young people in the area have limited facilities to keep them entertained and occupied and the facilities that they do have are rarely within their financial means. Most of the sink estates are still no go areas after 9pm and like so many places around the country there might well be jobs, but no careers. The apprentice schemes that people of 20 or more years ago could take advantage of are long gone and show no sign of returning and the jobs that are available are low paid, uninspiring and have no real future in them; but if you are an affluent student looking to get paralytic drunk and then eat in a fine dining establishment in-between downloading your coursework from the internet, then the east end is your oyster. This is not a blanket statement that I'm making but this a reality.

The real problem seems to be people's inability to integrate with each other; and when I say people I mean local government, residents' new and old, developers and business leaders. In east London you can look at any 100 square meters of it and find all races and creeds, private housing, public housing, million pound houses and bedsits all right on top of each other. It should be one of the easiest boroughs in which to create a sense of community and hope for the future. Instead we create enclaves for the exclusive use of one group of people or another. The best example I can think of that shows how easily people can get along without having to consciously making an effort is Brick Lane. You can't keep your head under the duvet in Brick Lane for very long; right next door to each other you have trendy bars, mobile phone shops, down-market Indian take-away and up-market Indian restaurants, Handbag stalls, second hand clothes shops and an American style bowling alley. The very people that you hate or fear, love or loathe are right next to you having a drink in the same old fashioned east end boozer and trendy bar as you, and if one of these people tries to socially interact and engages you in conversation I can assure you that you are in absolutely no danger if respond in kind.

There is a mosque two hundred yards or more from one the most famous bagel shops in London and no one has tried to blow it up yet. If the popular press is to be believed it shouldn't still be standing by now. The endless ranks of Muslim fanatics that are alleged to populate the area should have blown it up and Brick Lane should be covered with the charred remains of cream cheese and smoked salmon, but it hasn't happened because they don't exist. Not every Muslim is a potential fanatic and not every youth a violent criminal; much in the same way that not every football fan that you meet is going to kick your head in. I know so many people who won't step outside their front door unless they have a specific reason to do so due to some skewed media driven fear of what might happen to them or who they will meet. Most people that you encounter in the outside world are just like you and I, if you smile and say "Good afternoon" you invariably get a response in the affirmative whether you live in the suburbs or in the heart of London. As a people we rely far too much on what we see on the TV or read in the newspapers or on the internet that we have almost lost the ability to engage with each other on a human level. And it's not because we are all tired of human interaction it's because most people are scared thanks to people like Rupert Murdoch.

It is very easy for me to sit and write this and be all fluffy and touchy feely stuff because I have always been like that anyway, it's the way I was raised. I am the bloke that starts talking to you in the pub even though you are a complete stranger to me, I like people but so many of us a paralysed by fear. I would strongly advise that you to give people a chance; they don't bite very often and not very hard even when they do and I think you will find the risk is worth the reward. So don't sit in your bedroom hiding under your bed clothes down to some phobic, media induced perception of the outside world; don't get a taxi directly from your door to the trendy bar in Hoxton square so as to miss out all the gritty, allegedly dangerous bits in-between because of something you heard in the news. The press are only trying to sell papers at the end of the day, informing the public is the last thing on their mind. As for the lack of jobs and investment and the lost generation, well, that is a bigger problem than what I'm trying to talk about here, but I am quite sure if we all start introducing ourselves to each other and don't allow ourselves to be paralysed by fears that have no basis in fact we might come up with a solution to the bigger problems all by ourselves.

The Fellowship

2010-04-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

A lot of people think and, as strange as it may seem, even like to think that they are an alcoholic. The term alcoholic is a term that is used far too casually and far too much. I have been drinking quite a lot and regularly for a very long time now, and although I drink an unhealthy amount I found out recently that I am not an alcoholic, much to my surprise.

There are four different stages of alcoholism, each one being more detrimental to your health than the last. The first stage is where your social drinking ability has reached a level where you are amazed by how much you can consume without feeling too worse for wear, most of us have had reached this point at one time or another. It then progresses to the second stage where you start to experience blackouts and harbour feelings of guilt about drinking; this is sometimes described as "functional alcoholism" which means, outwardly they seem to be perfectly normal but still consume amounts of alcohol that will drastically affect their health as time goes on. Then there is the third stage which really is the last chance saloon (forgive the pun) before you reach the fourth stage which is chronic alcoholism. At this point it will be become an exceptionally difficult battle to overcome the disease. Yes, it really is a disease.

One of the difficulties in dealing with an alcohol addiction is the general attitude people have towards drinking. The world, especially Europeans, have a mild case of denial about the disease. You would never say to a heroin or cocaine user "fancy a quick needle lads?" or "I'm just popping up to the bathroom for a swift half a gram babe, care to join me?" but with drinking it is quite the opposite. Everybody boasts and laughs about their previous night's debauchery and everybody else laughs about it with you. For my own part I have fallen down concrete steps, abused the general public, soiled myself, forgot hours upon hours of my life. I have spent literally thousands of pounds that I do not have on booze and I have bored and entertained my friends in equal measure in the process and I had a great time doing it, most people do. The downside is that I have spent so much time enjoying drinking that nearly ten years have passed. I am now thirty-two years old with no job and no career sitting on my sofa tapping away at a keyboard in the vain hope of salvaging something from it all that might result in a career in journalism. Hope springs eternal.

The main difficulty in dealing with an alcohol problem is not just other people's acceptance of heavy drinking but also the abundance of alcohol in our society in general. Try to think of one social situation where alcohol is not readily available, it's quite difficult. If you are a recovering alcoholic it must be a nightmare. Can you imagine trying to stop smoking Crack only to find yourself at a bowling alley with beautiful young ladies walking around with a tray of rock's and a selection of pipe's, or walking into a restaurant and being able to order some foil, a Zippo lighter and a glass tube, then being given a list of drugs written in a posh font showing off a selection of Peckham's finest heroin. It would not be tolerated; in fact I think you will find that it isn't.

I first became acutely aware of true alcoholism when I went to an AA meeting with a very close friend of mine who suffers with chronic alcoholism. For anyone reading this who has either attended an AA meeting or is living with the disease, let me assure you I am not about to talk in detail about individuals experiences, nor am I trying to make light of the AA . The functional part of the name "alcoholics anonymous" is the "anonymous" what is said or heard in a meeting stays in a meeting and I am not a group therapy tourist like Edward Norton in the film Fight Club. I attended the meetings at the request of my friend to show support and this article is not an expose on AA. The first time I went to a meeting I was surprised and hugely impressed with the program and I have the upmost admiration and respect for those who are part of what is referred to by members as "The Fellowship".

The first thing that I learned after being in the meeting for half an hour is that I am not an alcoholic, I am just greedy and irresponsible. I would rather spend my time in a pub or at home drinking and talking about things that I should be doing, instead of getting my life in order. To make any comparison between the awful disease these people and their families are battling and my own laziness is an insult at best. The second thing to strike me was how upbeat and at times humorous the meetings can be. I am ashamed to say now that I was expecting, even if only subconsciously, to walk into a room full of sad individuals who wreaked of their own bodily functions whinging about problems that anyone could have but just aren't able to deal with. I could not have been more wrong.

The room was full of people from an amazingly wide spread of backgrounds with problems born mostly out their disease that were horrific to say the least. They were articulate, witty and the bravery they showed in sharing these problems with what is essentially a room full of strangers so that they might help themselves and others to deal with their affliction was inspiring and I left the meeting feeling uplifted which really did surprise me. After the meeting was over I walked outside with my friend to have a cigarette and we bumped into a mutual friend who was also in the program and as I drew my lighter to his face he smiled at me wryly. I must have been thinking very loudly because he said "You weren't expecting that was you?" "No, not at all" I replied. He then gave me a brief history of the AA and told how it had helped him and others that he had become close with through the meetings. We all had a coffee, in a pub of all places and I went home and gave myself a damn good talking to.

The AA is self funded via member's donations and has no affiliation with any other outside body or association so as not detract from the main goal of achieving sobriety or attract any controversy that might undermine their purpose. Drinking is only one of the many symptoms of alcoholism and to stop drinking once you have gone so far is a huge undertaking and some people don't make it. I am not trying to scare you off from drinking. I am quite sure that some of you who are reading might well be under the impression that you are an alcoholic and it would be wrong of me to try and diagnose the disease in this piece, but if you think you are or think you aren't if there are any concerns in your mind or of others around you who care for you do not underestimate the severity of how bad it can get. There plenty of great websites that can help you work out if you might have a problem and a trip to your local GP is never bad thing. And if the destructive ability of alcohol is not enough to treat it with respect then maybe this thought is. If you dismiss the power of serial boozing out of hand and wait until it's smashed your life to pieces you not only have a titanic battle to get what's left of your life back, but if you do get it back you will never, ever, ever be able to drink again. Cheers.