Blah Blah Flowers

So I went to work today. This is partly due to the fact that I didn't realise exactly how much snow had been snowed during the night until I was committed to the whole 'going to work' thing and it was too late to turn around. In previous years, even if there's a good amount of snow making each step an adventure with Mr Compound Fracture by the time we reach the heat sink that is Inner London we've normally reached gondolas and water-wings time. But not today, I emerged with the fear of a white planet, and it was only as I stood on the New Kent Road that I found out all Inner London's buses weren't being allowed out to play today. However, as I was resigning myself on a dispiriting squelch to work a very nice van driver stopped, unprompted and offered me a lift, demanding no payment except his quiet satisfaction at a job well done. Noble knight of the road, I salute thee!

Of course, being the person at our branch that has to travel the furthest to work it was fitting that I was there as all the other members of staff called to say they couldn't make it in. Well, to be fair, it was completely understandable, one had two young children that weren't now going to school and had no bus for her journey to work, one had no overland trains and no two buses to get to work and the last would have come in but was only working for half the day anyway. She was owed time back and I suggested she take it. After finding someone further up the managerial structure than I who had come into work I closed the building I'd barely opened and squelched off to another library to work the day.

With just the three biggest libraries in the Borough open today we had an all hands to the pumps atmosphere, as most of the staff weren't as stupid committed as us there were five members of staff where normally there would be a dozen at least. Needs simplify in this situation, as we are all thinking "Hey, I struggled to get to work today through adverse weather conditions, when are you going to reward that dedication by closing the library and letting me go home?" I also expected the bad weather would drive all the vagrants into our halls to piss on our chairs but hey, no more so than any other day of the year.

Watching TfL anxiously to see if the 'severe delays' on my one route home turned to 'minor delays' or 'hah hah not a fucking chance, why not look in the Yellow Pages for a doss house in which to spend the night?'we were let out at 2:00, at which point the snow had a strange dagger-like texture which ripped at the skin and clogged the eyes making it difficult to see where I was going. But getting home wasn't too traumatic and I'm now burning off the North Sea reserves in an attempt to stay warm. I have a tin of soup for dinner this evening.

Tomorrow? Well, officially I was told I should come to work, unofficially I was told I should come to work, which is the last time I speak to him. Madly I was told "Geroff! I've lost my knees! Garglegarglegargle pomegranates!" and that's advice I intend to always keep close to my heart. Our council has a rather interesting approach to IT, having an intranet which all staff can access but which staff who actually deal with the public, like us, (as opposed to a department like Communications who, as far as I have been able to deduce, don't communicate with the public but exist only to inhibit communication between different council departments and between those departments and the public, this is no joke, they are soulless packets of yak excreta in suits) can't access without going to work. So, when I got to work I saw a posting on the intranet advising that staff who really didn't need to, shouldn't travel in to work today. Which leads me to a fun conversation I'm going to have with my staff next week, how do they suggest they make up the time they didn't work today?

At the moment I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. It's been snowing fairly constantly, at varying consistencies, all day, so there's not been much chance for snow to start thawing, so we shouldn't have extra-slippery pavements tomorrow. But it has been snowing all day, and probably will all night and in to tomorrow. If my tube line decides to give in to the weather then I can't get to work, the overland trains are down and the buses aren't running, bendy-buses can cause more damage as they skid uncontrollably round corners, who knew? But if the tube is still running, do I go into work tomorrow?

Meanwhile, a tube driver explains just why the London Underground always breaks down on the one day of snow each year.

In other news, I went to the Oxford Street branch of Zavvi last week, in order to gloat at how, having changed their name from the fairly sensible 'Virgin Megastore', they were now aground on the shoals of bankruptcy ((c) Eric Idle). Looking for bargains in the sale I reached for Labradford but it was only when I got home that I realised that I'd picked up La Casa Azul. So, with nothing better to do I decided to have a listen today, to decide how revolting it was before seeing if Zavvi are currently doing swapsies on the stuff they are trying to unload. But, much to my surprise, I quite liked it and it's now on my iPod. I have no idea what the songs are about but it sounds like an upbeat bleepy nonsense of a kind that doesn't normally appeal, sort of early Beach Boys steal a bunch of synths and video games and make Spanish pop while Brian eats all the cake. So that saves me a trip.

Mmmm, soup.

Labels: libraries, personal history, snow, weather

We also visited Tate Britain for their Millais exhibition. I don't know when the last time I mentioned this was, but those of you who are my crazy Internet stalkers probably have in your fact files the information that my Mum is disabled. She can walk, but the distance varies depending on how well she's feeling and the wheelchair goes on most journeys she makes now, whether it's in to town for some shopping, or on holiday. You don't appreciate how difficult it is to get round somewhere until you're pushing a wheelchair, sure, you might have one of those infant-humans that are so popular at the moment, but they'll grow up and start using their own legs, failing that you can drown them in the bath one evening when you should be washing their hair. If Mum decides to ride, that cuts a lot of places off to us.

It does have benefits though. When we go to Tate Britain Mum's ticket has to be paid for, Dad gets in for free as her helper. And this is more common than I realised, on our holiday on the Isle of Wight a month back I found English Heritage and the National Trust give free admission to mobility impaired people's carers and/or helpers. Dad's dropped his membership of those two organisations, Mum has her members card and he gets in free pushing her. People often still move out of the way for wheelchairs, though I find pushing Mum quite fast and shouting "Get out of the way unless you want a wheelchair of your own!" works quite well also.

Pushing Mum is also quite a good way to get good views at a Tate exhibition in a hurry. Due to the limitations of the venue the first room especially is always packed, things thin out as you move a couple of rooms into whatever you're looking at. But when you're pushing a wheelchair that does encourage people to move around you, so you get bona views of the pics (except for the prick who, after we positioned ourselves to his right, decided to step to his right to look at a painting, coming within centimetres of elbowing my Mum in the face). However, halfway through the exhibition Mum said she wasn't always able to see the pictures very well, the spotlights the gallery use to illuminate the portraits was bouncing off the glaze on some of them and into my Mum's eyes. I'm not sure what we can do there, they use the lights to show the pictures at their best, but I suspect that they didn't consider what the effect would be at someone looking from waist rather than head height. I'm looking for an address to write to, not to complain, but to bring it to their attention. When you're at a busy exhibition you don't have the option of stepping back and trying to look from a different angle, everyone else gets in the way then.

Labels: disability, personal history, Tate Modern/Britain

After my last post eulogising Escape Pod, they seemed to go, for me anyway, into a bit of a slump. We had several weeks of off-beat stories that really didn't do anything for me, leaving my short-term memory almost as soon as they arrived.

I did enjoy The Sundial Brigade by James Trimarco, in which humanity struggles for freedom when the Earth is run by alien museum curators rather than megacorps or fascistic politicians. It's one of those stories that I wish were longer so that some of the more interesting throwaway ideas could be more fully investigated, like the idea that bad behaviour by the humans is punished by their being given negative personality traits, like being made smokers or alcoholics. On the other hand, if these traits are investigated you get the novel length version of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, so maybe the short stories are best left alone.

On the train to work this morning I listened to Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane by Jonathon Sullivan. Set during WW2, the war of choice for a country so reluctant to take part in it at the time, it's one of those stories that mingles fact and fiction as it tells of the escape of Danish Jews, including Bohr, through the eyes of a young boy, torn between the competing demands of his rabbi Father and his desire to follow in Bohr's scientific footsteps. I can't really mention the fantasy element without blowing the whole story, but while it's true to say that it's fundamentally a traditional story, I think a number of the plot points won't be surprising anyone, it's notable for the strong relationship Sullivan evokes between father and son, so much so that I'm glad I was busy navigating around the London Underground towards the end of the story and so was occupied at the emotional high points of the story.

On a tangentially connected note, I only recently read Maus and was similarly moved by the relationship between author/artist Art Spiegelman and his father, Vladek, pumping him for the story of how he and his wife survived Hitler's Europe and the death-camps, while finding him so difficult to deal with in the present as he tries to survive in the modern-day USA. The relationship between children and parents seems to be a touchy one for me at the moment, probably the first stirrings of middle-aged angst .

While I'm currently single and don't want a relationship or kids, at the same time there's something buzzing at the back of my head to remind me that by my age my Dad was married with two young children and a mortgage. It's funny how part of me seems to want to measure myself against standards that I feel I've consciously rejected. But I wonder if that conflict is what, at the moment, makes me look for parent-child relationships in stories and resonates with them.

There are more stories at Escape Pod, for sci-fi, Pseudopod for horror and I'm also looking forward to their new show, Podcastle, which will be starting soon to spin off the more fantasy based stories.

Labels: books, personal history, podcasts, science fiction

I realised just now that it was about ten years and one week ago that I entered the realm of the gainfully employed and started my first job. Since then I've been continually employed to date, now in my third job in that time.

I graduated from university in the summer of 1997. Returning home with no clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life I lasted about a month before my parents forced me to go and sign on. When I did so the job centre had only one library-related job on it's books (or rather in it's database), librarian at a girl's school in Surrey. I went to the interview and, much to my surprise, got the job. I was signed up in my new job before I'd received my first dole check, and ended up being on the dole for all of about a fortnight. We already had the family holiday booked and, because I'd been interviewed at the start of August my new employers allowed me to start a week late. So we went on holiday, Princess Di snuffed it in the early hours of my twenty-first birthday and we came home on the day of her funeral. I had a flat, unfurnished and lacking central-heating, but wasn't able to move into it until after my first week of work, so I had a week of commuting in a massive slingshot, Maidstone to Victoria, then back out to Wallington.

Those years were pretty wretched, I managed to lose contact with all my friends from university and didn't really find any to replace them. Getting a job in North London three years later was a real turning point, but that's a story for 2010...

Labels: personal history

I'm back. Look busy.

I'm currently loading holiday snaps up at Flickr. You can have a look here, or take a look at all my photos here. Or maybe you want to go to Hell when you die?

Talking of which, Guardian Journalist, guess what DVD I got for my birthday?

Labels: Flickr, personal history

Maybe Patrick can't help being prejudiced against the overweight, it may be a malfunctioning immune response.

However, at least Patrick is not as bad as my mother, who feeds me lots of delicious food and then complains about how fat I am. Going to the wedding helped, as we met up with some of my cousins, one of whom is reaching James Galdofini proportions, while apparently having no links with the South London mafia.

Labels: fat, fatism, health, personal history

Diamond Geezer has visited the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway which appears to have changed little in the twenty odd years since I rode on it as we holidayed in this area each year.

Labels: personal history, trains and railways

A side-effect of having spent the last couple of months on sleeping tablets is that I was more and less teetotal. Now that I no longer have to take the tablets I've celebrated by opening a bottle of red wine I was given when I left my old job exactly two months ago.

< glug glug >

Damn that's good stuff.

Labels: personal history, wine

So off I go today to my new job, yes fear me for from today I'm a library MANAGER! I could have done without the insomnia last night that meant I only had about three hours sleep, but at least I'm no longer wishing I was back in my old job.

Eeeeeee!

Labels: personal history

My claim to fame: I was the librarian at the school where some or all of Cheetara went. They got in the Maker twice from what I recall, once as part of a 'Old Manics fans versus New Manics fans' article then sharing a page with another all-girl band that similarly failed to set the world alight. The biggest surprise from this article was learning that they actually stayed together long enough to put out a single.

Next time on personal reminiscences: When I met local TV news anchor Mike Debbin.

Labels: personal history

I really don't like snow and ice that much. I tend to like water in it's varied forms (hey, it's certainly the cutest sixty percent of my body mass) but I'm not too keen on it when it's solid because if there's one thing I like more than water it's notfreezingmyfuckingarseoff and the presence of snow tends to point towards the buttock-clenchingly chilly. After that "Squeeeeee! Snow!" moment you get on waking in the morning and looking out the window it's a vale of fucking tears my friend and let no-one tell you any different.

It's partly the fact that the United Kingdom is so shit at dealing with snow. All essential services grind to a halt as though the white stuff were some foreign concept. "'Snow' you say? Never heard of it. Sounds like some beastly trick of the European Union to make us abandon the pound. God save the Queen!" In fact, Londoner's learnt to live with the Blitz and Irish bombs so you would have thought we could have learnt to adapt to the snow. But no, first the train network breaks down because, being only a mere century or so old, they haven't had the time yet to R&D something to deal with the problem of snow on the line.

Roads generally don't have the same problems they did in the past. These days metropolitan areas have snow ploughs and gritters. In villages like the one where my parents live and I grew up (it's a fairly suburban village, it is surrounded by farms but the farmers are related only by marriage, not by birth as well) you are taking more chances when you go out driving. For many years we did have a big yellow bin at our end of the village on which was written 'SALT' but then we also had teenagers, so now when we have snow it's like Winter in Narnia. We did have Anne Widdicombe as our local MP but she never rode around on a sleigh or offered kids sweets.

Then there is the ritual of listening to local radio in the hopes it will be announced that your school was shut. This rarely happened to me as most of my schools were on main roads and I suspect the snow ploughs and gritters were in the pay of the headmaster. So instead we had the ritual of the mass snowball fights on the school fields. First break was always the best time as we ran out in to that snow that was as pure and virginal as the first form boys who would soon be covered in most of it. Mine was a school of traditions: prefects, the Combined Cadet Force and PE Teachers with drink problems and the belief that kids were given to them to help ease the frustrations of their unhappy marriages (Hel-lo Mr Diamond if you're out there!) and the tradition of the snow was that on the field race didn't matter, religion was unimportant, your father's conviction for embezzlement was forgotten, you were a band of brothers (I went to a single sex school, does it show?) with everyone in your year and your aim was simple: To find how fast snow had to travel to pierce the skin of someone younger than you. Once that was ascertained the next ritual was to sit shivering through lessons for the rest of the day because your clothes were all wetter than if they'd been put in the washing machine. You know that film Final Destination where the kids don't die in the plane crash and Death comes after them because he's pissed off with being cheated? We had buses with bad breaks and hills that tended not to be gritted. I cheated Death enough times going to school that I got invited to his sister's wedding and met his parents.

When you go out to work it's still the same. Will your business open and, if it does, will you get to go home early? For some reason, probably related to the way they automatically close for Christmas fortnight, most council departments decide not to bother opening when the white stuff is one the ground but libraries are expected to keep going regardless, as though people think they half-remember some old report about how the reading brain generates enough power to heat a small flat. We were due to stay open until 8:00 pm and had to wait until after lunch for the important decision from the management about whether we would shut and go home early. And it's one of those classic double binds, on the one hand we might get to finish early and go home, but on the other hand the library is better heated than my flat. Seeing as the management will go home early anyway it's never easy to guess how much they will care about the plight of their staff but in this case they let us close early. So I came home and had a warm bath.

I've wandered away from my point, whatever it was. Something to do with the sucking of snow and ice. But really, snow isn't that bad I suppose, it's when it melts and refreezes, that's the unpleasant time. I'm not looking forward to tomorrow, when the one mile gentle slope between my house and my place of work is transformed into a fiendish death-trap. I tend to end up having to take my chances walking in the road rather than on the sheet-ice pavements. Never mind these shoes for kids with wheels in the heels so as to allow the child to bend backwards, fall over and hilariously crack their skull on something sharp, the person who invents a successful shoe with a furnace underneath to allow us to burn holes in ice and so be guaranteed firm footing in snow will make a fortune.

Roll on the summer, I've already prepared my essay complaining about excessive heat and how ice cubes melt so quickly.

Labels: personal history, school, snow, weather

Have I said how much I've enjoyed this series here?



It's a comic about love, magic and Britpop. I'm not sure how this is selling any copies outside of the UK but maybe they just like the purrty pitchers or something. To someone like me who was as into Britpop as much as someone who never left their bedroom AND whose bedroom was in the wrong city (the only downside to Birmingham at the time was that the local Britpop band were cocking Ocean Colour Scene, talentless no-marks who were never shot through the lungs because no-one wanted to waste that many bullets) could be, this is equal parts bittersweet, a walk down memory lane and embarrassing.

Labels: Britpop, comics, music, personal history

Well that was a fun weekend.

On Friday I finished the working week hearing that I'd been succesful at my interview and was being offered a post as an Assistant Library Manager somewhere else. Now I'll be officially empowered to be nasty to other members of staff rather than doing it on a pro. tem. basis.

Saturday I went in to town, headed down to Tate Modern for the first time in ages. The queues for the slides were all too long and boring so I had a nose around the David Smith exhibition. I knew nothing about Smith, hadn't even heard of him before I saw the exhibition, but I did like his work.

After that I was off to The George on Borough High Street to meet C and S. We had to sit outside but the freezingness was mitigated by some tall freestanding storage heaters, though the table of drunk misogynist city-bores did try to steal them all to stand round their table. One of them started screaming into his mobile at his 'C*nt' of an ex-girlfriend and they melted away into the night.

We had something to eat at a Wagamama's and then saw S off on the train home, then C and I struggled to get up to Kentish Town. From Blackfriars it shouldn't be that difficult but the Sutton-Bedford trains were playing silly buggers and a fifteen minute train journey became a fifty minute journey with a thirty minute wait on the Kings Cross Thameslink platform for a train that wasn't going fast out of London.

While I don't know the specifics of where I will be working yet it will involve some level of commuting, so I will get to sample the pleasures of delays, cancellations and random BR and Tube related maliciousness.

We eventually made it to The Oxford, which I hadn't visited since it had changed it's name from the Jorene Celeste. I was commended on my new job and my tremendous hair and then I settled down to the prospect of trying to find some beer that I liked to drink. I had to give up on that very quickly and make do with Kronenberg and Carlsberg, donkey-piss brands both. We were assembling to cheer the brief visit of a friend of ours that had moved to Singapore several years ago. Beer was drunk, cigarette health warnings were ignored and it was declared that Fidel Castro was guilty of many crimes but surely the worst was to allow the Manic Street Preachers to play in Havana.

I headed home at midnight while most other people decided to buy more wine and drink at someone's flat nearby. I got a call around lunchtime from C who had woken up to find herself in Mr Singapore's hotel room with no memory of how she got there. We reconvened in Islington where we had delicious and cheap vegetarian Indian food (at the Indian Vegetarian Bhel Poori House IIRC) then we headed towards Kings Cross. I popped in to the British Library to have a look at their London: A Life in Maps exhibition. It was interesting to see both the development of the town (Tottenham Court Road was still bordered by fields in the 1700s) in to the city but also the increasing detail in the maps as it becomes more of a necessity for people to find their way around rather than the well-off to know which estate is which. However, whoever lays out this exhibitions really needs to be poked with spoons. I don't know if there are permanant walls down in that space that cause problems but starting the exhibition right slap bang at the bottom of the stairs into the room means that as soon as you have people coming in they are all crammed together trying to read the notices and see the first exhibits, roman maps of what would one day be 'Londinium'. Then, within the exhibition space there are several times when the path splits and the visitor is given no guidanec as to which way to go. These are little niggles though, the old maps are beautifully preserved (I remember some of them from what I think was a similar exhibition at the British Museum a few years back) and there's nothing more fun than scouring old maps looking for the road you live on or places you visit today.

After that I rejoined C in the Pizza Express across the road where we sat across from Vanessa Feltz. After the glacially slow service we walked up to Euston and caught the train back to my den of iniquity where we whiled away the rest of the day watching MASH repeats and looking for Captain Jack vids on YouTube.

Labels: British Library, exhibitions, London, personal history, restaurants, sculpture, Tate Modern/Britain

Apologies for the lack of my precious insights into your pitiful worlds, but I had a job interview yesterday morning and am currently waiting to hear whether I got it or not.

Labels: personal history

The Sun report that Saddam Hussein is dead with the gloating 'Iraq butcher sent to hell'. It wouldn't surprise me if NewsCorp actually have a foreign correspondent down there filing an exclusive report... In other 'unpleasant dictator' news, Fidel is looking rather peeky too.

The Independent and the Daily Mail both report on the New Years Honours, the day after Hussein was hung we find out that John Scarlett, who wrote the tissue of lies or 'dodgy dosier' with which Tony Blair made his fallacious case for invading Iraq, has been knighted. So who says crime doesn't pay?

There's an article in The Observer on diaries and those who keep them. I've kept a journal since September 1994, when I went to university, it's part of the reason I don't treat either this blog or my LJ as straight diaries either. This article does at least reassure me as to the mundanity of my recollections, as Samuel Pepys and Bart Simpson know, what seems normal today will baffle and amaze the people of the future, so presuming the Quiverfulls don't kill everyone first we may all have some fame after our deaths.

I received Michael Palin's first set of diaries for Christmas and am about halfway through. As he observes himself, there is next to nothing about Monty Python's early years in there, it only starts cropping up with any regularity when they've reached the third series, started to make the Monty Python films, touring the stage show, making the album and bickering about making the TV show until they aren't any more. It goes to show that we will never know what may be important down the line, I did realise the 11th of September 2001 was going to cause trouble for someone somewhere, although at the time I don't think I realised the scale of the ambitions of Bush and Blair for global change. A quick flick through the diary for 2005 doesn't reveal much of the depression that I remember as being the key thing about last year, someone who read it not knowing me might have been a bit surprised when I wrote in January this year that I was seeing a counsellor about it. Still, when I came round to compiling a list of things I'd done or experienced in 2006 that made me happy I came up with twenty things but it took me all day to remember them, and that was without looking at my diary, so who knows what's happened that never makes it in to the pages.

Labels: comedians, diaries, News International, personal history, The Sun, The War Against Terror

Pills and Potions
Originally uploaded by Loz Flowers.


Yes, this is my life now. Well, almost...

For some time now, I'm not sure how long, I've been having problems with my digestive system. I've been gradually giving up various different types of fruit and veg because I assumed they were what was giving me wind. But despite giving things up any relief was short-lived. My maternal grandmother and my Mum had or have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or thought they did, so I wondered if that was my problem too. Of course, I didn't do anything as dynamic as go to the doctors to ask about how one gets tested for IBS, if I dealt with my problems rather than worry about them what would I do when I'd sorted them out? What would I write about here?

During the summer my parents had been referred to a Natural Health Clinic over the other side of the town they live near. They'd been checked out and analysed and poked and prodded and now were on various regimen for various food allergies and gaps in their diet. Seeing as they are in their late fifties and their diets have been fairly consistent for around thirty years they did feel they were better after just three or four months on these pills. So, when they suggested it I decided to give it a try.

The Clinic uses the 'Bio Energetic Stress Test'. In lay-persons terms this basically means prodding your hand with a metal stick while you hold a metal rod in the other. This supposedly allows them to test your body for foods it is allergic or intolerent to along with the various vitamins and minerals your body is deficient in.

It was pretty painful really.

It ended up with me being told I didn't have IBS. However, I was intolerent to dairy products. Not all of them, but I was told to give up 'soft' dairy products, milk, yoghurts, ice creams. Ever since I was a child I was brought up to drink milk, even nowadays I probably drinked more milk than I did tea or water. It was also suggested that I give up any products with wheat in them, not permanently, but just for a fortnight. And what has my breakfast been for best part of this year? Weetabix, with milk. While I was sceptical about Alternative Therapies and the kind of treatments peddled by these places, the simple act of switching my milk use to non-dairy and my breakfast to a non-wheat cereal has relieved a lot of pressure in my stomach. I was told that I didn't need to give up cheese but I'm wondering whether the twinges I'm still getting are due to that. I'm thinking of giving that up for a few days as well and see if my problems go away.

I'm also on a number of supplements for dietary deficiencies. Supposedly my stomach isn't particularly good at digesting the food I eat (presumably because it can't handle the milk and yoghurts I've been consuming that buggers it up when it tries other foods) so they are there to encourage my stomach to start working more, if that works then I should feel more energetic and less tired. During the process the technician/clinician/poke-r asked me whether I had problems with depression. When I replied that I had it turned out the electrical wossname in my brain was low, which would result in me having low moods. She recommended I eat more oily fish and/or take omega 3, 6 and 9 supplements.

So, where are we now? Well, as I said above, cutting dairy and wheat (as best I can) out of my diet has made me feel better. I am intending to reintroduce wheat back into my diet after my fortnight quarentine is over, trying to go wheat-free is a pain, wheat-free bread is mainly dry and unappetising. However, looking at having less of it is a possibility and my mother and I are considering whether fresh bread from a bakery would be better for us than the pre-processed junk on the shelves in the supermarket. And I'll wait to see if the other stuff stops me feeling so tired, so low, or seeing the fairies that tell me to take a high-velocity rifle up to the roof of the town hall and let loose.

Labels: food, health, personal history

So, I've heard that today's some kind of anniversary yeah? Wait, don't tell me, let me guess... It's your birthday right? Hey, looking good, not a day over... not a birthday? Wedding anniversary? Between Tony Blair's face and George Bush's arse? Hmmm, five years, I believe that's wood... Not a wedding anniversary? But I'm getting close right?

So, yeah, September the 11th 2001, or 'niynellevun' as the USians would have it. Grief's a weird thing, I didn't feel anything when my Nan died, my sister was almost hysterical at the end of the service and a few years ago refused to hear any conversation that included the inevitability of our parent's eventual demise. I suspect it's part and parcel of being a moody bugger, I don't tend to go much lower when something genuinely bad happens.

Of course, there's other reasons to distrust public mournathons. The wailing and gnashing of teeth following the death of Princess Di wrongfooted me as much as it did the royal family, I didn't understand how anyone could devote so much of their time to following someone else so intently, 'were they crazy?' I thought, 'I wouldn't do something like that'. The fact that many many times the number of people who died in the Twin Towers on that September day in 2001 have died in the rest of the world since, both those against the American imperialists, those for, and those unfortunate to have been caught in between. The Independent's figures make grim reading.

When passion drives policy it's a bad thing. Thomas Sutcliffe wrote an insightful article in the Independent in March 2000 asking why the parents of Leah Betts or Stephen Lawrence should be allowed to influence policy. When a situation exists where you think the passion is manufactured to drive policy it's worse. The Sun fakes passion as a matter of course. The overwhelming feeling I felt on the 11th of September 2001 was a sinking one that Bush and the neocons around him were going to use these poor dead people as an excuse to kill a hell of a lot more, I couldn't believe they genuinely felt sorrow, but knew that they couldn't show their smiles publicly.

So, sure, let's remember those who died on this anniversary. But let's remember all of those who died, Americans, British, Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghans. Those that died in the Al Qaida attacks on this country, Spain, India and other parts of the world. Let us remember those who no longer walk upon this earth and those who do: Osama Bin Ladin; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Mullah Omar; Tony Blair; George W. Bush; Richard Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld.

Labels: 11/09/01, Afghanistan, Fox, freedom, George 'Shrubya' Bush, Iraq, News International, personal history, The Sun, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair, United States, Weapons of Mass Destruction

I used to be quite confident in my memory. Not so much that I remembered everything that ever happened to me or that I'd heard, but that it was black and white, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, I was confident that there were just things I knew I knew and things I knew I didn't know any more. But after going back to Catford in June and realising that the memory I had of where my Nan had lived was completely wrong I'm now starting to wonder about how reliable the rest of my memory is. I recently heard that someone I went to school with, Stuart, died several years ago when he came off his motorbike and smashed his head against a concrete bollard. He lived round the corner from me when we were growing up and went to the same schools as me until I was twelve. Then our paths seperated and I never really saw him again. But there were those weekends and summer evenings when all the kids in the street would play footie or ride on their bikes and we knew each other well enough that we'd go round each others houses. However I now find I cannot remember at all what he looked like when we used to play. Or any of his four brothers. And it's odd that he's gone, because I can remember the other kids who used to play with us and what they look like.

And that's the known unknowns. I wonder what the unknown unknowns are?

Labels: personal history