Montfort College Romsey: Going back to my old School

Picture by David Martin

Returning back to places from your past can be a bit like trying to squeeze into an old suit. Not only is it out of fashion but buttons fly off in all directions as you try and force that belly where it doesn't want to go. Innocent bystanders can be torn to pieces by button shrapnel. Memory itself can be shredded by reality-buttons. My own visit to my old school-a seminary run by the Montfort Fathers- was not the nostalgic event I anticipated. More like poking a stick into the long dead remains of some unspecified, possibly mythic beast from a twisted fairytale. I found Romsey ugly and tired, apart from its beautiful Abbey and was left wondering how my life became connected with this benighted place at the hoary old age of 11 years. The trip ended somehow appropriately with me esconced as the only solitary in my hotel's shabby dining room on Valentine's Evening, surrounded by couples, and being told I could only have the Valentine's menu of smoked salmon, sirloin steak and cheesecake. Fortunately there was no coupling actually in the restaurant and I survived by taking refuge behind an unread 'New York Review of Books'. I quickly consumed the fare between articles and stumbled off to my room to lie gasping on the bed like a heartbroken whale beached on some God-forsaken isle in the middle of mating season.
It was a place where I became educated in the ways of literature for sure, for it contained golden libraries replete with dusty books, but it taught me little in all.  Much that I learned was of the ways by which men become so easily hypocrites and of the brutality that results from cowardice towards originality and repression of the sexual instincts and the inherent stupidity of religion.  They were not the golden years of youth for me at least, and  I shall not return in this life.

I will continue to believe that the Roman Catholic Church is essentially, despite some magnificent heroes in its flock, a force for negativity in our world because at it's heart is a hatred of women, in fact a hatred not just of women but of the feminine.  And in this life too, I will have no more truck with it's nonsense.  Shame upon it and all it's works.
In Nomine Babalon!

The Torture Memo's

Unbelievable but true. I say it again-if Bush and Blair don't stand trial for their crimes then 'it makes me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.' 'Hurricane' by Dylan.

Walk to Work

A terrible thought occurs walking to work. My comment in an article that 'if the universe is a tree then poetry is the sound of the wind in its branches' suddenly strikes me as bollocks. Surely that sound would be the distant stutter of gunfire, or the precise bang of a firing squad or perhaps the rushing breath of a couple making love or the sound of hammering or eating or snoring? A child screaming? But not poetry. I wonder how much else I have written that is complete tosh and this leads me on to view my poetry as pretty bad anyway. I am a bad poet! A naughty poet. I wrest a sprig of pine needles from a passing tree and start to beat myself. 'The truth you dog! The truth!' I scream. Is it of any significance that all this occurs outside a house in which Victor Hugo used to live? Or that a copy of the Folio Society's limited edition of Les Miserables is hurtling towards me through the post. Victor Hugo resonances accumulate but aha...Here I am at the door of my office. I enter with a cheery greeting and sit at my desk. My moment of Hugoesque madness is over. I have survived again-these are the kind of adventures you too can have if you walk to work.

Ed Talking Balls and Gordon Beige and the bottom-feeders!

Just occasionally (more often than occasionally lately) you see them shed the outer shell to reveal their true hideous Selves beneath. On 'The Today Programme' Ed Talking-Balls must have said 'in all honesty' about several times which persuades me he was lying through his teeth. Gordon Beige and Tony Blur inherited the amoral political behaviour of Mrs Snatcher, the Dark Destroying Anti-Mother, (brilliant article by Germaine Gruur on her in Saturday's Guardian Review by the way. God what a chancer she was and I remembered that the only reason simple-minded Cecil Parkinson (Lord Hoodoo of Myarse) was in the cabinet was because she had the hots for him (...urgh it's too much!) -So the obscene siamese twins Blur/Beige are the true heirs of Snatcherism (hard pressed to call it a coherent system mate-too lacking in any kind of logical structure and well...instinctive you know: Daily Mail-ish? It's the dialectic Jim but not as we know it.) with their (now mutual) mate, Lady Mandeltoon of LaLa land. While Jacqui Smut, the home secretary no less, claims expenses for her husbands porn movies. The whole point becomes not getting caught with your pants down. It's all a parcel with the phone-ins and the fixed competitions, with Jonathan Toss and Muscle Rand. To these post-boomer moral relativists there is no truth-there is only what gets you where you want to go. Getting caught for these shite-hawks is simply the equivalent of the professional criminal doing some bird-it's an occupational hazard.
You just have to take one look at McBride, Whelan, Draper and Campbell and Co and you can see what tabloid-spawned, scum-sucking bottom-feeders they really are. Is this really the party of working men and women? Can these streaks of piss save our planet and liberate the children of Africa from starvation and corruption? Are these useless fuckwits going to seed the oceans with iron filings to raise reflective clouds to reduce the sun's radiation? Are these idiots going to create a fleet of sailing ships that shoot water droplets high into the atmosphere to create cloud formations in the areas of the world where we need them? Jesus Christ, these arseholes prefer tittle-tattle and nudgy sexual innuendoes about their political opponent's wives and husbands even if they may have recently lost a child. If we get the politicians we deserve then what complete tossers we must be. If we see ourselves reflected in our society then what a cracked mirror we have. If our leaders are the best of us, ye Gods, how utterly worthless we must be!

COMPETENCE AS A VALUE

A lot of my friends are initially surprised to know that one of my professional strands is as a Life and Productivity Coach. I don't know why. I guess it might be that my life appears fairly chaotic from the outside and ceratinly managing several channels of activity simulatneously including a young family is sometimes challenging. In fact I am obsessed with the arts of productivity and efficiency which for me means CREATIVITY!

I've always said that a guy with both feet on the floor is a guy who can't put his pants on but on the other hand a guy with no feet on the floor is either levitating or about to fall over. For me it's all about BALANCE. That also includes being out of balance because if you are in a permanent state of anything you're probably dead.

My productivity principle thinking today has centred around COMPETENCE. I think of that as a central value whether you drive a bus or run a large organisation. Even buying a newspaper from someone who treats you like shit can be a disheartening experience. And it is corrosive because the disenchantment of activity that leads to an uncaring dismissive service is contagious. So that's why, when I'm asked about performance and standards in any kind of organisation I always look first at the experience of the customer, of the service-user. Competence is defined in the OED as adequacy, being qualified. But I want a bit more than that frankly. In my own organisation Excellence is one of the permanent items on every monthly team meeting. I am constantly challenging my team to keep re-defining it in terms of their own performance, their ongoing self -appraisal. So if competence is the bottomline then excellence is the upper point and the constant tension between the two creates the momentum towards an ever-improving service. Do you ever get an organisation that is functionally excellent? Rarely in my experience but I have to say First Direct was one hell of an impressive bank when I used them a few years ago. I am no longer with them and use the Cooperative's smile.co.uk almost purely because of their rather unique ethical policy but although reasonable and certainly much much better than the utterly abysmal high street cousins they couldn't hold a candle to First Direct. What was the difference? Responsiveness/the clear delegation of authority to make decisions to first contact employees/Excellent first contact practices like quick uptake of telephone calls and timely responses to queries and questions. Excellence is not complicated-it's when something just works!

So competence is the first rung on the ladder but without some idea of service, that connection with the client, it can become heartless efficiency which is the plague that affllicts the modern workplace. If you want to see a kind of soulless efficiency at work visit your average state secondary school where you will see the mindless sausage factory of state education, with disillusioned teachers and unsatisfied pupils, a complete disconnection with what matters. W B Yeats said that education is about lighting a fire not filling a bucket but these days it seems to be about dousing any sparks of originality or creativity.

Competence is about getting things done and the productivity guru David Allen has developed a great system (known as GTD) for doing just that in his book of the same name. This forms the bedrock of my own working life where I am juggling several different activities as writer, social care executive, musician and performer and father with many projects running simultaneously. It can be done! The thing about competence is that doing something well makes you feel good while doing something badly makes you feel crap.

The woman in the Post Office blinked at me when I asked her what was the matter.
'It's only that you look like you've had some really bad news or have I done something to offend you? Please tell me if I have.'

Make it a practice that when treated with incompetence you draw attention to it politely but firmly. Maybe that way we can get rid of it. And it is kind of important. If the world's environmental crisis was a project, everyone involved with it would have been sacked long ago, but that's another story. The one about preserving the illusion of incompetence as a means of maintaining the status quo. Sometimes greed doesn't want anything to happen.