A Christmas tragedy.

Regents Park Christmas, not a mouse stirred
the fondue burned on the hob
setting alight the zoological caff
the meerkats were not doing their job...

No alarm was raised by any a beast
not gecko lion llama nor gnu
they all slept on contentedly
as an aardvark died in the zoo.

Yes an aardvark died in the zoo
an aardvark died in the zoo
while the keepers were listening to Flanders and Swann
an aardvark died in the zoo.

By the time the fire brigade got there
by an extremely circuitous route
the aardvark had met an untimely end
perfectly roasted en croute.

Now it's hungry work putting fires out
as any a fire crew will attest
so they fell upon that poor aardvark
in a mob of high visibility vests.

Yes an aardvark died in the zoo
an aardvark died in the zoo
it was not consumed by the ravaging fire
but by the ravenous Camden fire crew.

At the end of the meal, the aardvark all ate
they belatedly decided to thank it
so toasts were drunk and cheers went up
for that perfect pig in fire blanket.



Apologies to McGonagall.

The muse with a Borderline Personality Disorder.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

For the muse her secret life makes a mockery of both her public and private lives which are nothing more than a facade created in order to conceal the real person.

What follows is a sad tale of how mental health problems can cause profound misery to all who come into contact with one individual who is probably unaware of her illness.

Divorcing parents could lose children if they try to turn them against partner

Interesting article in the Guardian:

Divorcing parents could be denied contact with their children if they try to turn them against their former partner, under a “groundbreaking” process being trialled by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass).

The phenomenon where one parent poisons their child against the other is known as parental alienation, the ultimate aim of which is to persuade the child to permanently exclude that parent from their life.

Cafcass said it had recently realised parental alienation occured in significant numbers of the 125,000 cases it dealt with each year. 

Sarah Parsons, the assistant director of Cafcass, said: “We are increasingly recognising that parental alienation is a feature in many of our cases and have realised that it’s absolutely vital that we take the initiative. Our new approach is groundbreaking.”

The new approach will initially give parents the chance to change their behaviour with the help of intense therapy. Alienating parents who do not respond will not be allowed to have their children live with them. 

In addition, contact between the parent and child could be restricted or refused for a number of months. In the most extreme cases, the alienating parent will be permanently banned from any contact with their child.

Read on HERE

Amanda Palmer - Mother.

I've taken the following from Amanda Palmers Facebook. Worth a read:

i've need to share a thread that i just wrote on twitter. listen.
first of all, i’ve never seen a more overwhelmingly emotional & respectful high-five reaction & from my community for *anything* i’ve made. so thank you. but something is really freaking me out:

in my entire career, i’ve never heard such silence from the press. a few of my personal allies covered this video (thanks to Xeni Jardin at boing boing and Holly Cara Price at huffington post) but despite doing my usualpress-release to the US and UK the day this video came out, the non-response has been deafening. not one single major press outlet will cover it.

i’m like: is it me? am i old and irrelevant? is it the video too hard for people? are there really *no journalists* anymore, like some of my writer friends have been telling me? is it really possible to make a project so massive and not even get a mention from a single music blog? it’s so WEIRD.

and i find myself thinking: what if i didn’t have the patreon? i would be SO FUCKED. i have never believed more than NOW that my community is becoming the Media Itself and that i have to turn my fragile-ego-self away from the idea that the press is going to validate my hard work.

and how ironic, given my vide & all of trump’s hatred of the Fake News Media. but maybe it’s like the death of anything dear. maybe we have to collectively grieve the death of Old Media and celebrate whatever is taking its place, and make that thing work.

in closing: this platform you are reading right now is strangling my reach, the media won’t alert you, i’m not on a record label. so if you want to support me, there is only one channel left to assure i can still work and connect and survive, and it’s the patreon. please, join. the end.

it looks like i'm going to need you more than i thought.

and fuck it.

we can do this ourselves, it's always better that way anyway.

i'm pro-webcasting tonight from a super-sold-out show at london's union chapel, start time is 7:15 and i'll post here. come join me and the rest of the weirdos.

Obese children to be banned from 'Trick or treating' on Halloween.

It was announced today that obese children will be barred from the annual begging and gorging festival.

Extra police officers will be on duty on Saturday evening checking the BMI's of all suspect kids. Those who are seen to be overweight will be sent home with a stern warning to their parents.

It has been suggested by health experts that appetite suppressants such as cigarettes or amphetamines should be provided as an alternative to sweets.

Many parents are furious, especially those who have spent a fortune on 'Fat Donald Trump' costumes for their thin children. They fear that their children will be wrongly penalised and may turn to donuts as a means of relieving stress.

Boris Johnson failed to comment.




Disappointment at Halloween.

HOPE.

The bottom line is hope.

Without hope there is nothing; no ambition, no desire, nothing.

Hope is an horizon painted on a sheet of glass and seemingly forever out of reach; something to aim for, a goal...

Until you find yourself forced up against that sheet of glass.

There is nothing beyond it.

Living with COPD

Photo: David Petch.

This should really be titled: Dying with COPD.  I'm desperately trying to find humour in this situation but there is none.

When I was a child I would, when in the bath, cover my face with a wet flannel. For some reason I got pleasure from this until breathing became difficult. I now spend 24 hours a day sucking air through that wet flannel and I cannot remove it. I cannot fill my lungs. All I can do is reminisce.

My GP has given up. The regime of drugs no longer brings much relief. I have been told that I must call an ambulance should things worsen. I'm pretty much house bound except for wheezing struggles to the local supermarket or an occasional pint at the nearest pub.  I spend my days wondering if it is now time to call that ambulance.

I've been considering the blogs and what I should, or should not, delete. I have decided to delete all save Pre-Pentimento and the poetry blog which may be of interest to a child in time. The rest is going including the video's on youtube apart from one, for the same reason. I shall be adding video diaries while I can.

I am collating letters, emails, statements and photographs relating to the past 5 years prior to publication. This is being done in order that I might have a say in explaining the shitty mess that the past couple of years have been.

More later...

Nightmare.

There is an island, at least I think it is an island, it may well be a peninsula or a land locked continental state; I crossed no borders to get there, nor any sea that I can recall, one minute I was not there and then I was there and once there I thought of it as an island but one without any sea views or any boat to escape by not that I or any-one else on that island thought of escape for there was no-where to escape to that we knew of. We often inspected an unreliable bright place in the sky that constantly changed shape or position and sometimes vanished completely leaving us with little doubt that it offered no reliable refuge and what should happen if we arrived there on a day when it chose not to be there. How silly we would feel and how silly we should look to anyone who happened to be casually glancing that way at that time. And there was not a sea between us and that bright place upon which we could launch our hastily constructed balsa wood rafts necessary for an escape. And anyway none of us could swim and what should happen to us if some tsunami chanced our way and tossed us from our rafts and caused us to regret our foolish actions.

The island is a republic, or at least I imagine it is a republic for it has as absolute ruler a fraudulently elected despot of unimaginable cruelty and sublime poor taste. 

We live in crude dwellings while the Emperor lives in a palace constructed from the bones of our dead ancestors, the chandeliers that illuminate his grand rooms are formed from the delicate skeletons of stillborn children, we light our hovels with crude oil lamps that hardly light our hovels at all.

These oil lamps are each contained in a small pink cube manufactured from some strangely terrible material that reeks of fear and whimpers. Each cube, on one facet carries a cameo of the emperor in full regalia astride an unknown beast of his own design.

We have no beasts on this island, the emperors ate them long ago so we are resigned to imagining strange beasts, invariably forged in our nightmares.

We are each responsible for our own pink cube, we must tend the lamp and trim the wick. We must ensure the lamp never falls from it single strand of silk that rots in this tropical climate and must be replaced every hour on the hour, we have no clocks so must estimate the passing of each hour, we are natural comedians in that we have an innate sense of timing. We are not permitted to laugh under any circumstances. We take our comedy very seriously indeed!

The only law that we can rely on states that should one lamp go out or should one pink cube fall and smash on the packed earth floor below then the entire population of the island (save the Emperor) will be put to death. Put to death by whom we do not know but the threat alone is enough to keep us constantly tending our pink cubes (snatching cat-naps and meals (we have no sex lives to speak of) between re-stringing and wick-trimming) to ensure that they remain aloft and alight.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers. We are all going to die anyway, is it not better to die a free man and with dignity rather than tending the pink vanity of a bully and a tyrant.

LOWKEY - GHOSTS OF GRENFELL (ft. MAI KHALIL)

Grenfell Tower one month on. Notes on a vigil.

Lost for words.


Despite living for a while in the shadow of the tower and having witnessed the unbelievable made horrifically real I felt like an intruder.

A community glued in grief came together in silence. A deafening silence. A numbing silence.

The emotional exhaustion is palpable, one senses that it is collective adrenaline alone that is holding things together. In a sense the local authorities inability to deal with the tragedy and the need for the community to take control meant that many were too busy to fall apart in the immediate aftermath of the fire.

RBKC demonstrated that it is not fit for purpose when it comes to 'Local Authority'. It has no authority here now. The only valid authority is in the collective hands of the community.

The fire insulted every sense:  Smell, touch, taste, sight, hearing and fear as well as those arcane, primeval, intangible senses that cannot even be named. As the fire died, an ember, a spark, ignited another sense: A sense that has been smouldering for centuries... A sense of injustice and enough IS enough.

At the vigil I sensed an almighty presence,  a collective ghost. Not here to haunt but to demand justice and change.

Shhhhhh.  Give it time to think and work out a plan.

Lowkey, Grenfell Tower and Portobello Radio.

A rough cut of Lowkey's Grenfell thing first aired here on Portobello Radio. At 46.30 if you cannot be arsed to listen to the entire show. Gang of Four a little later.

Listen and weep and then rage.

https://www.mixcloud.com/Portobello_Radio/portobello-radio-radio-show-ep-111-with-piers-thompson-greg-weir-love-is-the-conqueror/

Shit was the jackals last thought.

There once was a jackal, a lazy, greedy jackal who wandered the forest taking what he could find in
way of sustenance; small mammals, unwary birds and especially eggs stolen from unattended nests. It was a living but rather too much like hard work for his liking.

One afternoon the jackal came upon a peacock preening beside a pool, comparing himself favourably to Narcissus and Brad Pitt.

'Hello'. Said the jackal. 'Ding dong the dinner bell rings'.

'Hold your horses'. Said the peacock. 'I'm all feathers and sinew, all gong and no dinner, you'd find more meat on a petit four.'

'But I'm hungry'. Said the jackal. 'And I am partial to a canapé .

I have a plan said the peacock. and he explained: Let us enter the forest and while I mesmerise the beasts and the birds with my fabulous feathered fan you shall have free range of their nests and their burrows and eat to your fill.

And that is what they did, the peacock preened and recited Pam Ayers and Shelley whilst the jackal gorged.The jackal promised to look after the peacock in return.

That night the Jackal lay down with the peacock and they entertained each other with congratulations and fabulous tales of cowardice and treachery.

They carried on their symbiotic relationship for some months until one day the creatures of the forrest went to the peacock to complain about the thefts from their nests and burrows. Unbeknown to the peacock the jackal was listening from behind a bush as the peacock firmly laid the blame on the jackal.

That night the peacock lay down with the jackal. The jackal ate the peacock... Sure enough all gristle and pomp,  before choking to death on the wishbone.

'Shit'. Was the cock wielding felon's last thought.

My 'post Grenfell' Utopian dream.

One result of the Grenfell disaster must be a complete change in attitude to social housing and the people living within it. Grenfell has opened a can of worms, the can is labelled Grenfell Tower but now opened we find the contents be, not the occupants but RBKC, successive governments and a privileged elite. For decades we have been miss sold the notion that poor people are the problem. It is time to turn that notion on its head.

A tower block is a village.

Villages traditionally grew organically in places that were not accidental or random but because of a natural resource or a social need: it may have been a river crossing, a water source, geological or agricultural resources, a major crossroad, a castle, a church, a need for a staging post for weary horses and travellers... The list is endless. As villages grew in size elements arrived to support the needs of the people...  The village pump or well, the pub, the baker, the village store, the village hall, the church, the village bobby. These services were provided by enterprising villagers or incomers who themselves became part of the community. Modern transport systems and the out of town superstore have put paid to much of the self sufficiency of small communities but much is still there, most importantly the village green which is sacred.

A tower block is a village.

Through careless planning, disregard for the inhabitants and thoughtlessness over the past 70 years or so these 'villages' have been erected throughout Britain. Villages intentionally created without the infrastructure that would allow soul or character to flourish. Multi story carcass parks.

My Utopian vision:

In my tower block there is:

A village green on the roof, planted with wild flowers, a children's garden, bee hives.

Within the building on a mid level floor that is open plan, a cafe and small kids play area by day then a peaceful meeting place in the evening, perhaps a gallery space too,  a place for  children birthday parties and the like. A social place, a village pump. This must not be stigmatised by the patronising title of 'community centre'. Multi purpose spaces can work, Westbank Gallery under the Westway is a good example.

A floor for teenagers with a pool table perhaps, a pinball machine, sounds,  a soundproofed practice room for the Joe Strummers of the future... Ask them what they want and, within reason, give it to them.

A shop or two.

A women only space, a refuge from men.This is not a modern concept, the W.I has existed for generations.

Four lifts, two stairwells, one built into a central concrete core to act as fire escape.

At ground level, a double height entrance lobby, lots of plate glass to break down the barrier that exists presently in such buildings with their steel doors and blank walls. A 24 hour concierge. A seating/meeting area (in an hotel this would be called the lobby lounge and would be considered essential).  Perhaps a small cafe  also catering for a seating area outside the building.  A lavatory/washroom.  I could go on.

My tower will not be clad. It will be painted on a 5 year cycle. The design/colour scheme will be decided by a competition open to all. It will be as dazzling as a honey coloured Cotswold village in its way.

The cost and practicalities. Where is the money going to come from?

Ring fence the council tax and rental income and plough it back into the building and its occupants. Put in place additional subsidies. Scrap Trident.

The services created within the building create jobs. Give those jobs to residents and provide them with training and support if needed.

Treat people with respect and they will invariable reciprocate. Treat people with respect and they will invariably respect their environment.

Regeneration should apply to the occupants as well as the real estate. This applies to all social housing schemes, not just high rise.

Trust me... I'm a dreamer.