Autumn Thoughts

High Peak in Autumn

I've always liked autumn. In just the same way as the ancients saw it as a time for taking stock of the Harvest and preparing for the cold, hard winter ahead, I'm using the season to fend off ill-health, unemployment and encroaching mortality, not in a negative way, but with the glow of experience and the embers of the past hopefully lighting the way. 

John Keats saw the fall season as a period of bounteous fecundity, a time of 'mellow fruitfulness', while the more melancholy W.B. Yeats saw it as the onset of winter ... where the dying greenery is a metaphor for one's own ageing. 

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore....

(WB Yeats,"The Wild Swans at Coole" )

I see nothing inconsistent in celebrating both viewpoints - the waning of the light and the glow of the winter eventide. I know as I approach the autumn of my own life - hopefully - that it is a time for both taking stock of failures, successes, mistakes and rare flashes of inspiration and maybe even the odd glimpse of wisdom. It's a bittersweet taste, like alternating the taste of candied apples with a fresh, tart cider.

I spent most of the thirty years I've been working in steady jobs, until I was forced home from London by ill health and general ennui. Since then, I have been unable to find permanent work. Except this isn't quite true. At first, I regarded this ill wind rather nervously, and took the only job I could find .... working interim. It was my first experience of being self-employed, and I didn't expect to last five minutes in an environment where I was expected to pick up unfamiliar workloads quickly and deliver projects that had - for whatever reason - failed to get off the ground. On five days' notice, I expected to last .... well, five days. But I didn't; I made a reasonable fist of it and ended up staying eight months when I'd only expected three months work. The same has happened three times now, and I've actually started taking the initiative ending my own employment. It feels different when you actually define your own seasons, I've found. You actually cease thinking about the fallow winter, and start thinking about new, fecund springs.

Far from autumn becoming a moribund time where shorter days and the onset of winter drive one's life force into the floor, I've found the challenges of the season refreshing, life-affirming, and ready for the winter.

I hope your autumn brings you the same positive changes.

Listen to: Angelique

The Age of the Bucket List

I've recently reached a certain age (50, if you're wondering). It's odd how an accident of decimal arithmetic makes one take stock of life, the universe, and everything. One's perceptions of time are based on: how much of it you have experienced; whether you have less of it to come than has flown under the bridge; and if you damn well want any more of the stuff after the experiences that you have been exposed to as a result of having lived through so much of it already.

In my case, one usual reaction in the case of a fairly average First World WASP is to think about all the places I have never been, and whether, with the experience of age, I would, in fact, still like to go to these places with the full power of 20:20 hindsight. In most cases, I've retained enough enthusiasm about the world, to say a resounding "yes" to most of them.

My rather prosaic bucket list, in summary, runs something like:

• Greenland - what can I say, I like cold, remote places. 
• Kabale, Uganda - I wish I could say this was due to erudite reading, but I saw it on Top Gear
• Transylvannia - no fetish for Vampires, but Romania fascinates me
• The Atacama Desert - this time, not due to Top Gear, but due to the lure of the Andes
• The Andes - an end to end tour of the 4,300m mountain range taking in Chile, Ecuador and Peru
• China - particularly The Great Wall
• New Zealand - particularly the Remarkables and Lindis Pass
• Rome - I've never been, and it's relatively close to my home in the UK (obviously not by bus)
• Iceland - the weird and wacky result of effusive volcanism - and the Northern Lights
• The Himalayas - I read "Lost Horizon" as a 12 year old and have wanted to visit Tibet, Nepal and Mongolia ever since.
• More of the UK - I was born here and have never seen the Western Isles, the far north of Scotland, nor the Orkneys and Hebrides. Despite knowing North Wales quite well, I've never been to South Wales.

So far, so predictable. Except I then realised that my focus over the years has moved to people. There are people I would like to meet that I have befriended via this vast virtual desert we call the Internet (or Internets in plural if you're G.W. Bush / have an IQ of 64, whichever applies).

I won't embarrass the people I would like to meet, but I've encountered some fascinating characters over the years out here I'd like to meet in the flesh. But I know I probably never will in most cases, rather like the places above, many of which I know I won't ever visit. I suppose the nice thing is, I'm sadder about the former than the latter these days. Places are there for longer than this fragile and fleeting thing we call a lifetime.

About time I started compiling my bucket list in order of surname, I think.

Fred the Shred makes a useful scapegoat

Yesterday, it was the former Sir Fred Goodwin’s turn to get it in the neck.True, the unfortunate (now) Mr. Goodwin had run the Royal Bank of Scotland into the floor by sponsoring anything that moved and buying out larger banks, then scuttled off to retire on a huge pension, but he was far from alone in visiting ruination upon the banking sector.

Which is why the Establishment loves a scapegoat.

In truth, it is also the rules that are to blame. The United Kingdom has far too few financial regulations, poorly implemented, and although the dubious individuals who run big City institutions celebrate this fact as a positive incentive for the world’s great financial houses to set up shop in London, it’s bad news for the rest of us.

The domination of the financial sector in the United Kingdom has meant a relative lack of diversification in sectoral and regional growth for the past generation, with the Lion’s share of governments’ attention on London and its banks. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for 30% of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product. By 2011, manufacturing had fallen to less than 13% GDP, and along with this decline went jobs and the balance of payments -the difference between exports and imports.

To illustrate the difference, the Chinese and German manufacturing sectors, for example, account for 35% and 21% of their economies respectively. Watching Prime Minister David Cameron giving a lecture on economic competence to the Germans last week was amusing. This is the same Prime Minister that is happily setting about turfing police officers and local government workers out of their jobs at the very time they are needed most, and has watched British youth unemployment rise to over a million, with nothing but a word of condemnation for recent riots and ‘Occupy’ protests. The Devil finds work for idle hands, David. Who are you to dole out advice to others when so many of your own are drawing dole?

Not that one blames the Coalition Government entirely. Britain has no opposition, as anybody watching the arrogant, ineffectual clap-trap of Ed Miliband would surely know. Listening to his piss-poor criticism of a government that has largely continued to implement the policies of his preceding Labour parliament is an exercise in masochism: trusting what he says an exercise in stupidity.

Meanwhile the Liberal “Democrats” continue to criticise both Government policy, despite – curiously – being a part of the Government, and hurling opprobrium at all other sides of the House with their usual haphazard abandon. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. It is a failure in the political class that has allowed the world as a whole to crash into its current perilous state.

A corrupt and narrowing political elite has run away with this country’s politics: increasing numbers of Labour, Tory and Liberal politicians are from a privileged background, and no fewer than 23 of the 29 Cabinet Ministers are millionaires – several inherited from aristocratic wealth.

Capitalism has always been a brutal tool with which to feed the world, unfettered as it is by real social, environmental or political considerations. Yes, it is an efficient mechanism for allocating resources, but not the fairest, and requires strong and careful control if it is to work for the many, rather than the few who control it. Sadly, the politicians have been bought by the few, who have little to fear from either national, or international government.

Until politicians start caring more about their peoples than they do about the markets that supposedly serve them, the world will continue to be in thrall to the banks and other financial institutions that have so incompetently led us into recession. And Britain will remain in mothballs, with a downward spiral of people fearful of spending, and jobs, businesses and communities suffering as a result.

Meanwhile, scapegoats like Fred-the-Shred Goodwin will continue to be held up as an example of individual incompetence and misjudgement being responsible for our current problems rather than the deep systemic faults that run through many of our economic and political institutions.

The New Dark Ages

We live in an empty age. In fact, I'd go further than that. With humankind breeding out of control, natural resources being depleted faster than the Earth can replenish them, religious fundamentalism on the increase, the world in thrall - and hock - to faceless multinationals, owned by a small coterie of billionaires who call the shots, I can't help but think that we are either on the precipice, or in the throes of, a New Dark Age.

I’m not referring to the parlous state of the global economy, nor the shrinking rain forests, nor the plethora of ridiculous wars that we human beings visit upon one another. I’m thinking more of the Dark Age of the Mind.

We live in an age blessed — or perhaps cursed — with more sources of information and knowledge than at any other time in human history — printed media, mobile devices, ever-expanding universities and so forth, and yet these media seem increasingly obsessed with the trivial, banal and down right stupid.

So I’ve constructed something of a hermit’s cave, or mental gymnasium, right here in the belly of the beast – the Internet – that last wild, unconquered virtual wilderness, where would-be messiahs, lunatics and obsessives seem to spend their days proselytizing to we, the uninitiated (or uninterested).

It’s just a place to regain my sense of perspective, and my rusty writing skills that were once relatively well honed. It’s also a place I hope to generate a little bit of light of my own, for whatever reason.

It’s good to write. I stopped doing it for quite a few years, and I lost the most important part of myself in so doing. I’m back, and the point is not that somebody reads this, but that I wrote it in the first place.