A poem from the dark-side

Some poems dip toes into little pools of darkness. Others just dive in, to rivers of shit. As Jung memorably said- we do not grow by turning always into the light but by making the darkness visible. Though this is one of the darkest poems I've ever written, I hope you enjoy it. The image of relationships ending in acrimony and hatred or betrayal, that always comes to my mind, is of bloody and cruel trench warfare. Of slaughter. As family mediation is one of the strings on my bow of being, I am witness to a lot of this. I suppose, to continue the analogy, I'm one of the stretcher bearers running round gathering up the bits. I once had a powerful dream of separated parents as medieval knights jousting, using their children as lances-'splintering against their shields of hate.' Of course it's not always like that. Many people, probably most, end their relationships with quiet dignity even heroism. But that doesn't make for the best dark poetry!
And yes...For a while I was a soldier there myself-bewildered and trench-footed.
This is an inverted sonnet-that is, with octet and sestet changed round and without punctuation of any kind, apart from the bracketed (to us), and the paltry comma after 'you, and me' to create a sense of separation, topsy-turviness and confining loss.
This is from my nearly completed collection 'The Book of Three Rings.' For which I am currently seeking a publisher!


LIVING WOUNDS

Kindness is a language that is dead (to us)
A gag that swells within our strictured throats
We’ve laid the concrete over our green fields
And cut down all the trees and crucified
It all upon a cross of hate and pain
Hammered in with poisonous nails

Our insides spilled out in a bloody trench
Beneath the clouds of deadly gas-the stench
rises from the corpses of the family friends
Lying half-buried in the sodden mud
Beyond them by a blackly blasted tree
Lies something that once was you, and me
It lies now in a desecrated tomb
For we've been born again-as living wounds

From a 1994 Notebook

I felt a frozen thought fall from the book shelves. Morning light danced on the carpet as it crawled across the floor and wound its way upstairs and under the bedroom door.

Onions/Carrots/Potatoes/Celery/Cauliflower/Green-Red Pepper/1 small cooking apple/Tomatoes

...I am amazed that such an attractive woman should do such a job. We are in the lakes, somewhere, in some kind of park. She becomes cold and although I dearly want to fuck her, I go running round her. Run miles to find the car and bring it to her. Running like a little boy trying to please the headmistress when all I really want to do is come all over her. She is best described as willowy...reed-like...as if glimpsed through gauze.

Yet again of Sharon. She ends up sharing my bed with some other guy but I fuck her anyway. It's good.....................(water damage has removed words)...I am sure that she knows. In fact the radical fact is that she doesn't, but something profound had changed. Some atmosphere of trust has dissolved. But by God, it was good fucking her.

There was this awful time at the bedside. Holding that hand that the fucking demon arthritis had swollen then withered into a claw. I felt a surge of something deep in my body, something cold entered my heart and i knew with unshakeable certainty I was feeling death on me. I knew she was going to die. My head began to swim. A chair scraping on the floor sounded like a car crash. A toilet flushing sounded like a great river breaking its banks.
'Tell me' I demanded suddenly fiercely, urgently...'Do you love me?'

Flowers from her grave.

'Even the darkest night has an end. Even the brightest stars must ultimately be extinguished. Even the all-conquering mountains must collapse into their own bony entrails. There is no forever-that's just blind faith. There is only the knowledge of now and some unreasoning certainty about tomorrow.
More than that is too dreadful to contemplate. What the early Church did not realise is that one moment in hell is for all eternity. The experience of hell never leaves...never leaves.'
'You've put a foot in hell then?' smiled the newspaperman.
'I-have-been-there-yes...I should say that.' He spoke the words with such intensity that the smile drained from the newspaperman's face like air from a child's balloon.

Pancakes/Spinach/Ricotta1/4/ Gorgonzola 1/4/Parmesan1/4/Spring Onions/Mozzarella1/4/Double Cream/Butter/Milk

A contagious silence billowed and eddied around the house, peopling it with ghosts-stairs creaked, slithering hands rubbed wet windows in the rain. Floorboards groaned like restless sleepers and with the last ebb of the sun it became a dormitory of tiny noises.

TVP/Chunks and Mince/Turmeric/Mung beans

INTO THE BONES OF A POEM

I wrote recently that I would unpack a poem from my impending collection to indicate a bit about how it emerges from the chrysalis of thought into the form, meter and rhyme of a whole, complete poem.

Here's the original poem in all its uncut glory. When I wrote it I thought it was a finished thing; when I returned to it, it seemed so unfinished as to be hardly started.

FORCEPS DELIVERY-POET'S BLOCK

Contractions have ceased
for two weeks.
There has been silence.
No little kicks or movements.

But now I birth this
being back to life.
Push out this new sound.
It is a pub-delivery.

A message from the omnipotent stars?
Postcards from the Pleiades?
No-just these small words
Like tiny fists, opening and closing
in the gloaming.

Well,it's an experience just writing that out without interfering! The poem was about a fallow period in the middle of a creative frenzy of some nine months when most of 'The Book of Three Rings' was written. A period when I had given up work to concentrate on writing and other stuff-real work!

I experienced this period as some kind of pregnancy and that's what got me thinking about this metaphor. Poems were dropping like daily babies on the floor and the first word 'contractions' came in to my head.
But the rhythm in those first two lines is unhappy-making. A first line of four syllables and two stresses and a second line of three syllables with two stresses. Why not join the line up to make four clear stresses-tract/ceased/two/weeks?

Contractions have ceased for two whole weeks

It's certainly a lot clearer with a regular four beat line(tetrameter)though there's no getting away from the ugliness of 'contractions'-not a nice word! Maybe I should have put 'Contractions they have ceased for two whole weeks' but the 'they' seemed to contrive the line into pentameter in a very artificial way. It seemed to take away some truth, and all and everything,even the laws of prosody must bow their heads to truth. Non?

'There has been silence' seems a bit obvious and lacking the fear that went with the lack of creative juice-would it ever return? So it became:

An all pervading silence surrounds me.


This is much better with it's sense of that almost palpably oppressive type of silence and my comfort zone-the iambic pentameter. Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum Ti-Tum.

No little kicks or movements with its terribly clumsy beat becomes:


No swimming in the limpid sac-no kicks

Of course I'm in danger of doing my metaphors to death here but really there's no going back so the author just dives in with a clear and colloquial declaration:

So now I'll birth this bugger back to life:
PUB DELIVERY! THE FORCEPS OF PURE WILL!

This starting to be a bit of a piss-take with the capitals signifying a shouted line. We must not take ourselves too seriously hence:

(medicated with the sacred hop)

I decide to keep the next couplet pretty much as it is but change 'stars' to 'gods'.

A message from the omnipotent gods?
A one-off postcard from the pleiades?


The poet is confronted with his own hyperbole and confesses his sins pentametrically:

No way! Just fucking words and words and words.

But like a good poetic sneak just can't resist returning to his clever metaphor and giving the ending a gloss as if the closing door has had a makeover. In poetry this showiness is generally a fault. The poet is seduced by his ever more outlandish metaphors and similes. Like a drug-addicted lover who we just can't leave. Ah, that old seducing mind!

So we have:

Like tiny fists on waving stalks.
Like dumb mouths opening/closing, in their sleep.

So the re-written poem is:

POET'S BLOCK

Contractions have ceased for two whole weeks.
An all-pervading silence surrounds me.
No swimming in the limpid sac-no kicks.
So now I'll birth this bugger back to life:
PUB DELIVERY! THE FORCEPS OF PURE WILL!
(medicated with the sacred hop.)
A message from the omnipotent gods?
A one-off postcard from the pleiades?
No way! Just fucking words and words and words.
Like tiny little fists on waving stalks;
like dumb mouths opening/closing,in their sleep.


I think it's lots better but I hate to see my hubris so nakedly displayed!

Success to your work!

Jen Hadfield wins 2009 T S Eliot Prize!

Jen Hadfield is the youngest poet ever to win the T S Eliot Prize. She is prodigiously gifted as a poet, and has a voice that melts the legs and caused a mild palpation in this elderly gentleman's chest! Hear her read on the magnificent Poetry Archive-(Very well done indeed Andrew Motion). 'Nigh-No-Place,' her second collection reeks of the harbour-smells of Scottish islands-those God-droppings set in sapphire. There is a lilting thread that gently weaves a skein through all the poems. Language used like brushes of gentle light to articulate the moods of weather, the blashy-wadder, the inner moods. Here sheep and cats and dogs are characters. There is a refreshing sincerity in Jen's poems (when I went back to my own work I was appalled by my poetry's gravitas, its metropolitan disdain or pehaps the frown it wears as it looks around for victims...Ahem.) Jen's poems have none of that-they are indeed fresh, open and young. I wish her well in what promises to be a very fruitful career.
Buy the book and read it slowly rolling the words inside your skull as you would a good wine in your mouth. There's iodine from the seaweed gathering in your nostrils as you read this verse. Sit with it and carry the poems around for a few days. There's a waft of Lagavulin here. These poems take you back to what really matters-they mind you what your poetry's for.

Various Musings

Mmmm...Well two weeks ago I had Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction. This was my first experience of surgery and though a fairly routine operation, I was not looking forward to it-a full anaesthetic being required and me not being keen on such things for a variety of reasons, such as being much less tolerant of pain than normal folk!
One consequence is that I have six weeks to recover and have spent my first week stumbling round on crutches.

Something bad did happen in hospital and I want to write about it in the blog but I'm going to just sit a bit longer with it before I go fully into print. It is around nurse-vampyres chattering like gaggles of fruit bats and spearing we poor patients on the dripping, poisonous trivia of their meaningless gabble. God was I ever glad to get out of there!

My Book of Poetry-The Book of Three Rings which I have now been working on for seven years is nearly finished and I'm on the final draft. PARDON ME! WHAT'S THAT YOU SAID? IS IT ANY GOOD? GODDAMN YOU TO THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL YOU HAIR SCUTTLING BUG!! AHEM! OF COURSE IT'S GOOD!

Many of the poems featured in this blog are drawn from this collection. I'm really looking forward now to getting into a new project and already have some ideas. The Book of Three Rings is the story of a relationship cycle triaded into three rings-Despair/Spirit and Healing and finally Transformation. It sounds heavy as unrelenting debt and it is in parts but... I'm pleased to have honoured it with so much sweat and tears. The final story is that out of tragedy we can be moulded for greatness or smallness and it is the capacity to rise above the anger of broken-heartedness and to find forgiveness that allows us to grow, heal and move on...Obvious really!
I expect to be finished by end August and it just so happens I'm signed off work until then because of my knee!


In the next few days I'll publish some more poems from the collection, say a bit about how I write and organise my projects and show how poems transform and change under the re-write, with particular note to meter and form. (It may not sound interesting dude but in fact the meter and the form are the priming mechanisms for the poetic hit!)

Success to your work!

Freya Hoffmeister-Conqueror of New Zealand South Island!

Now this, my friends, is what heroes are made of. Freya is the first woman to solo kayak around New Zealand South Island-an incredible feat of skill and endurance. Congratulations and honour to you Freya.

Song of the Siren-A Poem!

Song of the Siren

Let me sing you a siren song,
a song that flows from the heart of me.
From the lush valleys
crazed with wild poppies
to the edge of the silvered sea.

Let me be the voice of the wind,
the soul-song of the mystery.
Let me be well carved
as from ebony
to the grain of infinity.

I saw a thousand serpents snaking.
I saw herds of great beasts grazing.
I saw hordes of armies feasting.
In the land of the lotus-eaters.

The dark ship-shapes made landfall there
in the harbour of the harpies.
The land where brave souls
are sold for gold,
the land of all that scares me.

Let me sing you a sea shanty,
a song of a ship on a wine dark sea.
A ship in full sail,
on course for true North.
Seeks Ygsdrassill the wisdom tree.

Are these the harbingers of doom?
The cold of the night; the dark of the dream?

Phosphorescence of burning stars
then the dark of the hunter’s moon.
Trust flows from the dark.
Trust is dammed too soon.
Trust in the rose that’s lost its bloom.

I felt the white sail billowing
like a white stallion whinnying.
A cold fear lingering;
in the land of the lotus-eaters.

I saw ten thousand women weeping
while away the men were creeping.
I heard the fiddle; saw the burning.
In the land of the lotus-eaters.

I COULD'VE BEEN BILL GATES!

It was many moons ago in the wrong half of the seventies and I was working as a programmer in the Department of Health and Social Security in Blackpool. We programmed in Cobol and I still get shivers when I think of those little binary digits. The department was made up of about twenty programmers and three systems analysts under the leadership of Geoff, a tall, thoughtful, lean man in his early fifties. Apart from having a strategically placed desk where I could glimpse the knickers of the sixth-form girls at the secondary school next door playing netball, the job had little to recommend it. The printers spewed out vast rolls of graphed paper which were checked endlessly. The computers were vast boxes with spinning tapes occupying football pitch-sized halls.
I decided, after several months, this was beyond a joke and determined to hitchhike around Europe with my guitar for a couple of years in the time-honoured manner of troubadours and poets over the centuries. This was, needless to say, viewed as a poor career option by my already-old geeky colleagues .
But you could have knocked me down with a wet fish when, upon hearing of my plans, our somewhat distant leader Geoff invited me out to a restaurant as he wished to put a serious proposal to me. I can’t remember what we ate, Chinese I think it was but I was intrigued and just a little suspicious that his designs might be of a sexual nature.
We bantered a bit and then Geoff leaned forward with a serious expression and said ‘ you know Tony, my wife and I have never had children, though we dearly wanted them.’
I nodded while hovering up some Chop Suey. That’s a shame’ I empathised.
‘Yes but what I really wanted Tony was a son. I wonder if you could be that son?’
I stopped eating and stared awkwardly at Geoff and then the table. There was a pathetic kind of pleading in his voice that made me resist my first impulse which was to laugh. It was if he had just told me he had fallen in love with me. In fact he had. He wanted to be my daddy…and frankly that position had been openly available for some time and was now one that I considered a tad redundant.
‘Er…Er…’ I took a deep swig of beer.
‘Well I don’t know what to say Geoff…I mean..’I trailed off.
‘You see’ he continued as if I’d said nothing and he appeared to be growing in excitement, his eyes began to twinkle.
‘Computers are the future Tony. Oh I know it’s hard to believe now but they will get smaller and smaller till one day they’ll be the size of a wristwatch with holographic projections, perhaps even beyond that. But you see, when they get the size of a television say, then people will buy them for their houses, and very soon there will be a computer in every home in the country. People will talk to each other with them, they’ll play games on them, put photos on them, write letters on them. There will even be small computers for carrying in a briefcase. In 20 years time it would be as strange not to have a computer as…well…a car!’
His voice had taken on a quivering quality as if he were truly aroused by the vision he had just painted.
‘And I intend to be there’ he continued…’All these computers will need programmes, will need software, they’ll need operating systems…Just happens to be my speciality, and I want you to be part of it. I want you to come into the business with me. I want you to take it over when I’ve…when I er…mmmm’ He trailed off, lost in a sea of primogeniturial complications and just looked at me expectantly.
In hindsight it is strange to admit that Geoff’s predictions seemed less mind-blowing and truly prescient than they did twenty years later when everything came to pass just as he said it would.
‘But I’m going hitch-hiking in Europe.’ I said somewhat lamely. Geoff’s eyes clouded with disappointment and possibly a hint of disbelief. He had offered me the riches of Croesus and I was going hitch-hiking? It made little sense.
I did go hitch-hiking round Europe and must have sung ‘Strawberry Fields’ a thousand times. I got back several months later and got a job in the Cleansing Department as a road-sweeper. One of my ‘roads’ was the one outside the Computer Department and my ex-colleagues would view my fallen status with a strange mix of compassion and outright glee.
Me? I thought-alright you bastards, you may be laughing now but I could’ve been Bill Gates! The richest man in the world!

John Gray is not God!

True but he has written a great book. I strongly advise you to read, study, ponder, and digest.

Oh the lives of the Idle Rich!

I want this boat. So what if I don't know how to sail? So what if sailing upon the deep I shall be superficial and shallow? I want it...NOW!!! NOW I SAY!!!

Black-eyed Blair

Tony Blair, the infamous war criminal, who is anything but in hiding, received a medal yesterday presented by his mate-the now quite dotty Lord Mandeltoon of LaLa Land. Blair sported a black eye. Perhaps received from an angry Iraqi mother? The medal was rumoured to be for services to India while PM but others say it is for the 200 thousandth Iraqi child death milestone recently passes in a drone attack. Very well done Tony. Congratulations on your...er...medal.

The Obama Fly-swatting Incident

The Iraqi and Afghan Metaphors are too obvious to be even interesting!

Unrolling Maps of 'The Real' at the feet of the Sleepwalkers

I was talking to a man about ‘truth’. He was a senior manager in a local government department. Incredibly straight, sensible, ambitious, a real eye for detail. A born bureaucrat. Always in a suit. Yet without a sense of humour or personal warmth, a real cold fish. A man with a great gaping hole in his belly. A man of our times. A management man. A meetings man.
It was early on in our working relationship and I was referring to the contents of a letter that had been sent out by another manager to a member of the public which contained information about me that was inaccurate. That I considered to be inaccurately critical of me. I had instituted a grievance against the author of this letter seeking the letter to be withdrawn and was discussing this in my supervision session.
‘So what do you want to get out of this?’ He asked me. I was puzzled by the question.
‘I don’t want to get anything out of it. I just want to be clear about what is true and what isn’t.’
He looked at me closely. I remember vividly his somewhat dull eyes scanning me for some clue as to what I meant. Finding none his expression changed to one of pity. I realised with a shock that this man whom I considered morally undeveloped actually pitied me.
‘Truth’ he explained ‘is relative, it depends on your perspective.’ I was confused.
‘But the letter was inaccurate and false. The things it said happened did not, in fact, happen, and the interpretations put upon those things that did not happen are necessarily false. Surely that makes it untrue?’
He shook his head sadly and stared at me as if I were a particularly dense child .
‘You have a lot to learn.’
I thought ‘this man lives in the World as if he is immortal. Yet one day the cold hand of his death will be upon him and nothing will be relative and even if it were it will not matter. All that will matter in that moment is what he has done with his life. One day he will understand this. One day you will understand it too and me and all of us. That question-WHAT HAVE YOU MADE WITH THE RAW MATERIAL OF YOUR LIFE? will be demanded. For now this poor fool has created a moral code that demands nothing of him and can legitimise any failure to live the moral life. These moral relativists have created a bland landscape for the soul. Anything is equal to anything else. As we concluded our discussion he called me a crusader, meaning, I presume, that I am carried away by my own outrage, that my emotions get out of proportion. Yet a part of me responds to this and senses the truth of it.
There is the story of the Comanche, the tribe of horse warriors pushed down from the great plains to the harsh deserts of South West America by the inexorable spread of the white people. The tribe would elect a chief whose role was to lead the men in time of war. In the heat of battle the war chief must go to the centre of the battlefield and thrust a spear into the ground. A cord is attached from the spear to the war chiefs ankle. There he must stay until the battle is won or he is dead. What a profound action that is when we meditate upon it.
It is a metaphor upon which I based my life. Be clear. Be honest. Stand up for something!
So I say YES to life! There is a position. If you tell a lie then you are wrong. It is simple. All that is required is courage. Courage mon Coeur! That shall be my motto and were I ever foolish enough to possess a coat of arms, that is what shall be written upon it, probably against a background of a hand making the two fingered gesture.
Boldness is required for such an active philosophy and wisdom comes in knowing when to bend with the wind. Humility too is needed in order to accept our mistakes as gifts. These are the tools of life. We are not here to be managed. We are not in this World to respond to market fluctuations. We are not given this life to accumulate more and more THINGS!
We are here to obey the rushing torrent of our Heart. We are here to listen to the song of our blood merging with the cosmic pulse of the Universe! Ah! There I go again getting carried away!
But then why not?
Of course there is risk. Where there is belief, commitment and faith to inform the lived life, there is always the risk of dogma, rigidity and prejudice towards the different. But Christ! Life is surely meant to be a great adventure and the dead hand of the corporate is upon us. I say-TO HELL WITH THEM!
I was relaying the story of the War Chief and the spear one night to a friend in a pub. He smiled at the story and said:
“Bloody hell, sometimes I’d want to pick up that spear and get the hell out of there!’ We both laughed and then the truth of what he had just said came crashing into my consciousness. Sometimes you have to pick the spear up and get the hell out of there. It offers flexibility and the ability to flow. It offers the possibility of forgiveness. Where there is the choice to stand firm there is always the option to run like hell. There must be. It is life.
I would have found it easy to die for something, it’s living for something that takes such effort. The alienation of men in Western society I feel is in no small part due to the absence of a war in our lifetimes. It is all so beautifully simple in a time of war-we are over here, they are over there..C’mon boys let’s kill the bastards! Deriving meaning in a time of peace and living a life of honour is not easy. Enemies are no longer identifiable. It is easier to demonise the opposition than to see ourselves in their monstrosities. Do you think the Serbs in Kosovo were aliens? What we watched on our TV sets with horrified fascination was the obverse side of compassionate masculinity. It is only when we own and take responsibility for the seeds of our own being in the actions of the ‘enemy’ that we become real. Only when we understand that the torturer breathes the same stardust as ourselves do we understand. The simple tenets of faith become too self evidently phony otherwise.
And yet...and yet there are examples of noble men to be found everywhere. Indeed I find myself at times surrounded by them. We all struggle with our masculinity in a world which would castrate us. Castrated men are easy to control. They work themselves to death willingly and fight when directed. They do as they are told. They are relieved of the madness of passion and ecstasy. But the warrior poets, the intellectual explorers surfing the edges of the current paradigms, the questing mystics-they are really dangerous assassins of the 'taken-for-granted'. They unroll maps of the real at the feet of the sleepwalkers.

From 'Letter to a Father Unknown'

The Mysterious Beauty of NOW!

AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL

Hewn from granite, I was inlaid with copper and silver and gold. Lapis Lazuli my eyes, and burnished well, till shining in the morning sun, I glowed and hummed. A mystery wind blowing through a conch shell. A sound like gathering or redemption. A sound more like ‘blown’ than ‘moan.’ Something running through. Something bidding life. Like the bloods headlong rush or the river folding itself to a conclusion after much slow, flowing thought. I’ve seen the Eden do this with my own eyes! The blowing heightened once or twice, as when I held my sons, naked and smeared with their mother’s blood shivering in the immensity of their new life. For a moment it seemed eternity pulled up her skirts and said:

‘Man, in this second you are alive for once! Feel the power of NOW! See through, over, into. See the truth of the child. Feel the miracle in your fingernails. Feel it brush against your skin!’ And then you...You took me to the deepest well and I cast a bucket for a crock of gold, and you said:

‘Look! Look how deep the heart goes! It is limitless really!’

And in the moment of falling; of letting go, I was gathered up. And in the moment of trusting; I was loved so much. And in the moment of saying:

‘Yes! I’ll take this life. This one! Its birth, its struggle, its countless breaths. Its footsteps. Its becoming and befriending. Its shrinking from the light. Its tears and weight, of so much fear. Its heartbreak and its love.’

In that moment of NOW, a life is stretched from these small boundaried cairns. Stretched against the canopy of infinity. It is made to see it is not one thing but the many brought to one. A radiant point of NOW that whispers:

‘THIS IS ALL! THIS IS IT! THIS IS EVERYTHING!

AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL!

The Bloggers Ball

The Bloggers Ball
My blog seems to be very slow in taking off. I know that numbers aren’t everything but 49 visitors in 4 weeks means if this was a dance I’d be a wallflower. I’d be sitting there in that morbid collective of boring bloggers. In fact not only boring but physically clumsy and ugly with ill-fitting cheap clothes, no money and to cap it all, a crushingly sensitive self-consciousness. We’d be staring out at the dance floor watching all the beautiful bloggers moving with a completely natural and easy sensuality and laughing into each others smiley open hideously successful faces. And we would want to knock their blindingly white teeth right out of their mouths. Spider -thoughts of herding these scumbags into Abhu Graib and causing them hideous sexual humiliation with dog leads and electrodes would crawl across our synapses while we outwardly smiled and took nervous sips from our rum punch.
This is how it always is. The internet has acquired the competitive tendency like a teenager acquires pimples. You must have followers. You must make money. You must have hits. You must acquire ‘marketing skills’. You must imbibe the writers discipline even if it be boiling oil hot from the nipples of Lucifer himself. And don’t forget you must make money. You must surf the limitless wave that is the next big thing in publishing. Oh and did I mention you must make money?
I have been a writer since I upped like the sassy little twat I was and wrote a poem about a deer being killed in the forest by a hunter. I must have been thirteen. I was at boarding school in Hampshire in the UK and it was just about the point I realised that everything, absolutely everything I had been told about the world, politics, history and especially religion was utter bum-twaddling, brain-mouldering, arsewipe. I was like the guy in those sci-fi movies who goes walking on the spacecraft and ends up having an anti-magnetic moment and spins off into the limitless vacancy of the Cosmos screaming soundlessly and tumbling like a gnat into the gaping maw of the Mandelbrot Dragon. Just writing these words I am also suddenly aware that it was also about this time I gave up on becoming an astronaut as an unrealistic career choice.
Anyway…My poem went down pretty well with the guys (all guys at my school) and I realised I was already what I wanted to be-A WRITER! A STORYTELLER! A WORD-ENCHANTER! A TEACHER!
My poem by the way was utterly crap. But I learned something about the power of the written word, for both good and ill.
In English class I started writing stories about satanists and rapists and death and people who did unpleasant things to horses, and writing I saw, could become an assault on the status quo. Words were weapons and the powers that be were fair game. One day I’ll post on how auto-erotic writing got me through puberty!
I wrote through my twenties, thirties, forties and now into my fifties. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful in publishing terms but I am in every fibre of my being , a writer. A word-onaut spacewalking out on the flight deck of story, awaiting my own anti-gravity moment!
I don’t need your internet publishing be –a- writer- in –thirty- days scams. I’d rather be a wallflower with a literary grenade held surreptitiously between my arse cheeks, waiting for the propitious moment.

Orgasm in 61 lines

UTTERING THE WORDS OF LIFE

Last night when I

licked the wet walls

of your mouth’s cave,

nibbled the sweet

shells of your ears,

palpated the soft creamy

down of you,

and slipped inside you

between your peaches…



I became a secret cannon.

A huge tube of steel!

Cunning symbols wrought thereon.



My swelling balls

the spherical wheels.



And I discharged from

the mountaintop to

the great all-encompassing

lake beneath.



Became the cannonball

then a pinball

rushing through tubes,

mazes and passageways.



Then with a great spurt

of red fire gushed

fire-workingly through your head

with a shout! Aieeee!

And you breathed:



‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’



Me, I hurtled through air

still rising!

Till, reaching the zenith

of my whirling arc;

I plunged,

fell with grace,

disappeared o’er

the crested ridge

and landed with a thud

in a field of disinterested cows.



The ball I was flattened

on the sweet earth,

its grey skin merged

into hands, eyes, legs.



On the faint breeze

wafting from the next valley

I heard your voice,

laden with urgency,

uttering the words of life:



‘I’M COMING! I’M COMING!’

Only in our moments of greatest challenge!

It is only in our moments of greatest challenge that we are ever truly free.

Write Work!

Unless you earn your living from writing it’s a sure bet you’ve got to have a job. That’s because you have to eat and pay the rent in order to write. Writers are therefore like spies. They go to work but only in order to do their real job-Writing! They are not who or what they appear to be. And this may well go unnoticed by colleagues and clients. The fact is we are only pretending to be teachers, bus drivers, social workers and judges. It’s all to fund our dark secretive habit as riders of the imagination, observers and recorders of the peculiar, surfers of paradigms and creators of characters inhabiting wider created worlds. As a writer is it wise to, as it were, ‘come-out’? Personally I think we need to be careful about this disclosure. Why? because if you are like me you work your nuts off to get a project finished before deadlines then you write in the time left. If my employers knew, they might consider me defrauding them despite my delivery of their project in a timely fashion, they might want more of me. This, I find is in the nature of employers- VE MUZT IMPROVE EFFICIENCIES! VEE MUZT INTOLERATE VASTE!

Karl Marx apparently always had food remains in his beard but he was right about those owners of the means of production. So the ancient rule atop the entrance to the chamber of the Illuminati might be embraced by we motley clan of scriveners-whether garreted and starved or struggling to feed our muse amid the panoply of corporations-TO KNOW TO WILL TO DARE AND TO KEEP SILENT.

And be careful what job you choose. It is nigh impossible to steal away to whittle a quick sonnet off while labouring for a piece-work brickie. And call me controversial but these builders will not honour and respect your muse though they may feed your imagination.

No, a desk in a privatish office, a laptop and access to the internet are a good start. A bookcase helps. Long stints as a kerouakian fire warden in a remote national park are ideal. Night security jobs can be useful as long as there is no risk of being shot or taken hostage. We do not want real dramas at work because that would interfere with our creative ones. And then of course there are the jobs that are really not suitable for sharing with one’s muse. I do not want my brain surgeon obsessing over his latest gore-fest script or my pilot catching up on his reading on the night flight. I want them pinned and wedded to perfection in their work, ever alert and super-responsible. And of course actors, dancers, musicians, artists are their work!

So the next time you notice that solitary shelf-stacker with a dreamy look in her eyes or the street sweeper, silently reciting some rhythmic line or the taxi driver with the worn legal pad on the seat beside him; that could just possibly be the greatest living writer on the planet. Be careful what you say! Or you could just kill them!

God Almighty Folks! What's going on in The UN Council?

MAY 29, 2009
UN PRAISES THE SRI LANKAN MASSACRE OF CIVILIANS

In the Times:

Sri Lanka claimed a propaganda victory last night after the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution praising its defeat of the Tamil Tigers and condemning the rebels for using civilians as human shields.

China, India, Egypt and Cuba were among the 29 developing countries that backed a Sri Lankan-proposed resolution describing the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”. The resolution also supported Colombo’s insistence on allowing aid group access to 270,000 civilians detained in camps only “as may be appropriate”.

The Sri Lanka Ambassador in Geneva said that European nations had failed with their “punitive and mean-spirited agenda” against his country. “This was a lesson that a handful of countries which depict themselves as the international community do not really constitute the majority,” Dayan Jayatilleka said. “The vast mass of humanity are in support of Sri Lanka.”

Western diplomats and human rights officials were shocked by the outcome at the end of an acrimonious two-day special session to examine the humanitarian and human rights situation in Sri Lanka after the blitzkrieg of the final military offensive that wiped out the Tiger force.

The vote is extremely disappointing and is a low point for the Human Rights Council. It abandons hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka to cynical political considerations,” Amnesty International said.

Sri Lanka, unable to stop the Human Rights Council taking up its case, rushed its own motion to the floor in time to beat a more censorious resolution tabled by Switzerland.

Don't go to Milnthorpe!

HALLOWEEN

The Spar shop is closed.
Drawbridge up-portcullis down.
An aproned granny smirks through the glass
as she labours the bolt into its round case.
A rifle bullet of finitude
condemning me to a
milkless, breadless existence.

I curse country life
under my breadless, milkless breath.

A youth observes me warily.
The grannie and I in rictus.
A frieze of unmet needs
in the dark hunching
of Milnthorpe Square.

Then, suddenly, Death walks past-
blood on his scythe.
As if on his way to a party-
he is clearly jaunty.

‘I’ve been looking for you’ I shout,
while wondering how to bundle him in
to the boot of the car.
Then four little witches
hubble bubble giggle and trouble past.
Lovely little witches.

And I feel sad for me.
No kids.
No pumpkins.
No vampire outfits.
Just me
and my dry and dusty books.
Writing down the bones

Photo by Matthew Emmott

Aung San Suu Kyi in Jail...Again

The 63 year old leader of the Burmese opposition is now being held in Insein (or should that be insane?) jail in Rangoon. It is said to be a rat-infested hell-hole and her health is fragile given that she has spent 11 out of the last 19 years in jail. Who are the scumbags who have turned this beautiful country into an Orwellian nightmare? General Than Shwe is the hardline leader of the Junta but maybe on his way out with stomach cancer but waiting in the wings is the truly monstrous Maung Aye, linked to drug lords and said to be an alcoholic. They hate Suu Kyi because she has a legitimacy as the leader of the National League for Democracy they can never have, and like the murdering bandits they are, they fear her.
The American who swam across the lake to her house, John Yettaw, may just have given the bandits the excuse they need to get Suu Kyi out of the way before they hold what are laughingly going to be called 'elections' later in the year.
Fact is that it is only an International Criminal Court that promises action and redress against these monsters that they will fear. Curses upon the strutting creeps. Blessings and honour to Ms Suu Kyi.

The X-Factor for Politicians? How about 'Britain's got Leaders'?

"The tyrants of the Golden City tremble
At the voices which are heard about the streets,
The ministers of fraud can scarce dissemble
The lies of their own heart;..."

The Revolt of Islam 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley

It's true what they say about literature and history-what goes around comes around. Politics in the gutter is no new thing then. But what results from this current national disenchantment with the pillars of the establishment? First the bankers and now the politicians. A golden opportunity is what. And also a great risk. They are the two sides of the same coin. Shall we have a workable and representative democracy? Essentially a pluralist fudge admittedly but, famously, the least worst of all the others. Or how about a bit of British fascism with all its attendant dressing up in sexually charged uniforms and marching and lots of bonfires and high jinks? Unfortunately this will also include beatings, torture, institutionalised racism and a sharp and enduring drop in serotonin levels across the nation but hey, it could be worse.
I suggest the X Factor for potential politicos. Or we could call it "Britain's got Leaders!" They can present their ideas before a panel of judges to include Joanna Lumley and Stephen Fry and David Attenborough. (Simon Cowell? You can fuck right off now! And don't get me on that despicable and repellent toad Piers!)
They will be given opportunities to present ideas and respond to a series of challenges and possibly spend some time in 'The House' for a continually televised residential experience along Big Brother lines. Many challenges will be of a DIY nature to encourage them to repair and decorate their own houses without cost to the tax payer. The country will cast a series of votes to diminish the field of candidates one by one. We could enlist Sir Alan to the cause too. "Gordon Brann you're useless and incompetent, you're fucking fired mate!" Ah, sweet music.

PERSEPOLIS (2007) And the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse

Watched Persepolis last night. What a great movie as well as a brilliant graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi who co-directed the film with Vincent Paronnaud. This just shows how animated films can educate as well as present great dramatic opportunities. And the story? The triumph of the bearded joy-killing imams and the devolution of Islam back to its medieval tribal roots. It is a triumph of illiteracy over education, of the tribe over the global commons, of women's oppression over women's liberation, of islands of dogma over the ocean of faith. When will we see that the etymology of the word religion is from the Latin religere-to bind? Religion is the curse that binds us to the horror of the past. The bearded imams are simply the other face of the child-abusing Irish priests identified in the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which reported this week that the Catholic Church in Ireland has left a legacy of neglect, fear and endemic sexual abuse in its institutions. Also that these same institutions have energetically sought to protect the abusers and cover up their crimes. And reader, there can be few worse crimes than the sexual abuse of children. It is the murder of childhood itself. These hypocrites are peddlers of hate and filth all. It has been our fate to watch them grow in strength since the seventies but you know, I really believe their time is coming to a close. There's something new in the wind, and it just might blow that tribe of God-worshipping, torturing, censoring, woman-hating, child-abusing lickspittles away with their beards and their black robes and their relentless bullshit. The breath of the new Aeon. It's a new dawn. It's a new day. It might just be on its way! Love and Will in Balance!

The Unloved

Last night I watched 'The Unloved' on Channel 4; a first film directed by the rather wonderful actress Samantha Morton about an eleven year old girl, played beautifully by Molly Windsor, living in a care home. It was heartbreaking to watch because it so accurately portrayed the emotional frost that seems an inevitable fact of life in a residential institution. That absence of love that leaves everything in black and white, a mere photocopy of reality. Love is the sunlight that grows children and unfortunately it seems, it cannot be manufactured outside the structure of the family.
In my late twenties I decided finally that it looked like my long term ambitions to be a freelancing astronaut would not bear fruit in this life and so I needed to decide on some sort of career. I wanted to do something that would not be routine and would be valuable so I decided to become a social worker in Children's Services.
I can honestly say I've never particularly regretted that decision but I can also say that most of my professional life has been spent fighting to protect children in the looked after system from the worst excesses of what is now called Corporate Parenting-an oxymoron if ever there was one!
I don't know what attracts the stony hearted, burnt out cases, and stupidly ambitious pole climbers into social work, I guess these people are in every profession. But I have a really simple-minded view of services for looked after children and it's this-Is this good enough for my kids? If so then it's good enough for looked after children. If not, then it bloody well isn't Mr Balls!

The Sunday Poem: Poetry of Domestic Violence

THE MADNESS


Last night the madness stole my soul.
Wove blood red mists before my eyes.
Drove me to the door axe-handed.
Thoughts garbled to the carrion crow.
Blood curdled in the pits.
Garotte for finger, stone for fist.
A knife and spear for hand and eye.

Till it seemed a child came, bathed in light
and held the space between with grace
till anger froze into shame.

To the parent of this rage: Blind grief .
We say: ‘Come in! Come in to the Heartspace!
Let us speak awhile to hear what
breeds your dark pain. Tell us tales
of sorrow long into the night. Let's
drive this demon from your door.’

Anything that makes reading easier! Introducing the Book Chair

Here's a little throne for the book in your life! I have two.

Italo Calvino Article in The Times!

What is it about Italo Calvino that makes him so compulsive a writer. I love him so much I named one of my sons after him! That would be Jack Anthony Italo Dougan-Quite a name.

THE WILD INVENTIONS OF ITALO CALVINO

Jeanette Winterson on Italo Calvino in the Times:

At the end of Italo Calvino's novella The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, who travels only from tree to tree and never comes down from the world that he prefers to the world that presses its claims, finds himself near death. A host of noisome courtiers and curious peasants swarm under the canopy of the forest, waiting for him to submit to gravity's insistence. At the final moment, when all seems done and he must fall, an air balloon flies over the forest, trailing a rope. Guido makes one last leap. He catches the rope and disappears.

Calvino was a writer who preferred to disappear. He did not enjoy talking about himself, finding that the facts of life were a kind of Medusa's stare, as he puts it in his essay Lightness, published in 1985.

He used his fiction to escape himself, and the weight of the world. This was not by any means escapism; it was his answer to the eternal question: What is reality?

Calvino began as a political writer and journalist. He was born in San Remo in 1923 and published his first novel in 1947. The Path to the Nest of Spiders is socio-realism - the one and only book of that kind that he wrote - and the only work of his that he regretted. When a writer regrets something that he or she has written, if it is fiction, it is always, paradoxically, because the piece of work feels untrue.

Did they fiddle while Rome burned? No, far worse; they fiddled us while Rome burned!

I can not be the only one who wants Joanna to lead us the promised land!  Bless her and the brave Gurkhas.  A curse upon the weasels who pollute our government.  Shame! Shame!

I don't think I can better the always excellent Andrew Rawnsley in today's Observer on the filching hypocrites who crawl around the corridors of our parliament. Do you remember? It's that one that's the Mother of Parliaments!
The Heart of the New Labour Party appears to be riddled with disease and corruption. Let us flail them with our whips as they run naked through the streets the greedy sponging bastards. Let us lash without restraint and...oh sorry got carried away there but really if anyone, anywhere was more deserving of er...correction. Ah thank you for joining us Miss Lumley, my word those thigh length boots are so becoming. Yes Gordo is about to be prodded down the street, let me get you your monogrammed cat o' nine tails, it shall be my pleasure. (Author hands bloodied whip while making indistinct slurping noises at back of throat!)
'Lash away Ms Lumley, lash away. do not spare the lash though it pains our hearts to see Gordie's so cruelly bloodied bottom'...etc...etc


Andrew Rawnsley
The Observer, Sunday 10 May 2009
Article history
Under John Major, it was cash for questions. Under Tony Blair, it was cash for coronets. Under Gordon Brown, we reach the suitably bathetic nadir of cash for cleaners. And cash for lavatories. And cash for carpets. And cash for saunas. And cash for swimming pools. And cash for gardeners. And cash for barbecues. And cash for dog food. And cash for cushions. Silk ones, naturally, 17 of them in all to ease the repose of Keith Vaz. In the case of a Conservative MP with a constituency in the shires, it is cash for horse manure. One MP wants cash for Kit Kats. A Scottish Labour MP confirms the stereotype of his race by claiming 5p for a carrier bag. Well, he probably needed somewhere to stuff all his receipts. A Lib Dem takes cash for cosmetics. One male MP claims cash for tampons.

I would truly like to hear how buying tampons is an expense wholly, necessarily and exclusively related to the parliamentary duties of a male MP. The explanation must be fiendishly ingenious.

Over 26 months, the taxpayer parted with £6,577 to pay for the char who cleaned up after Gordon Brown. I guess the prime minister must generate a lot of dirty laundry. His expenses are pine fresh compared with the way in which some of his colleagues have been dipping into the taxpayers' pockets. John Prescott, scourge of the bankers' bonuses, champion of the workin' man, sticks his hand into the public purse for three faux Tudor beams for his castle in Hull. He also claimed for two broken lavatory seats. It was two Jags, then it was two shags, now it is two bogs Prescott.

Shaun Woodward, who is probably wealthier than the rest of the cabinet put together, husband of a Sainsbury heiress, owner of seven properties, a man so loaded that he can afford to employ a butler, takes the taxpayer for almost £100,000 in mortgage interest. Hazel Blears, the minister responsible for housing, certainly knows her way around the property expenses game. Hazel is a little whizz at Commons Monopoly. She sped round the board, claiming on three different properties in a single year and each time passing Go. We bought Hazel two new TVs and two new beds in the space of just 12 months. It was only last week, in the pages of this paper, that Ms Blears was mocking Gordon Brown for his lamentable presentational skills with her witty line: "YouTube if you want to." When you are such an avid collector of television sets as Hazel, I suppose you fancy yourself an expert on the media.

While most of her colleagues have gone into hiding, Harriet Harman has been shoved before the cameras to try to defend the indefensible. She bleats that it was "all within the rules" as if the rules were not of Parliament's own invention, but had been handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. All her exposed colleagues have likewise protested that everything they did was "within the rules" as if they were powerless to resist an invisible hand that forced them to sign the claim forms. Not every MP felt compelled to scoff at the trough. Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson emerge as acmes of frugality who make modest and entirely reasonable claims for performing their duties. The unblemished MPs should be furious with the avarice of their grasping colleagues who have tarred the whole political class with a reputation for being seedy and greedy.

"It was all within the rules," they go on pleading. Oh no, Hattie, it wasn't. The rules were generous in their elasticity and even then MPs stretched them so far that they snapped. It is against the rules to claim money that you haven't actually spent. The prime minister accidentally submitted a £150 plumbing bill twice. Oh well, we know Mr Brown hasn't got much of a head for figures.

Jack Straw claimed for council tax he had never paid, luckily discovering his mistake and repaying the £1,500 only after the High Court ruled that all expenses claims had to be published. He accompanied a cheque for repayment with an oh-silly-me note pleading: "Accountancy does not appear to be my strongest suit." Thank goodness that the justice secretary is not in charge of a large government department responsible for many billions of the public's money. When he was angling to become chancellor, Mr Straw was keen for everyone to know that he was such a wizard at maths that he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Statisticians. At the very least they should strike him off.

I despair. One of the least edifying traits of Tony Blair's years was his toleration of sleaze and wilful refusal to see how it was poisoning the relationship between government and governed. I hoped for better under Gordon Brown. Despite the many sleaze eruptions, I have clung to the increasingly unfashionable view that most MPs are not venal graspers motivated entirely by the pursuit of their own interests. It is becoming harder to sustain that faith. If politicians do not arrive at the Commons corrupt, there is clearly a culture in Parliament that is corrupting. Disgraceful scams for milking the taxpayer have become encoded in the DNA of many parliamentarians. One reason is cowardice. MPs have long nursed a resentment about the monetary compensation for being in a high stress occupation with low job security. We discover Andy Burnham wheedling money from the Fees Office on the grounds that if they don't cough up: "I might be in line for a divorce!!"

MPs look enviously at consultants, lawyers, company executives, those they consider to be their peer group. They feel underpaid in comparison. I might have sympathised if they had ever had the guts to make the case for higher parliamentary salaries to the public. They instead exploited the slackly constructed and sloppily policed expenses regime and used it as a clandestine scheme for giving themselves tax-free top-ups to their salaries. Sheer greed then kicked in as the most opportunistic and rapacious of their number stretched the rules to the limit and sometimes well beyond it. The second home and additional costs allowances have been manipulated to the point where you need a very powerful microscope to distinguish some of the scams from fraud. The most outrageously lucrative racket has been to flip the address which they claim to be their "second home" from one location to another to fund the refurbishment of a succession of properties that can then be sold on at a tax-free profit.

No wonder Parliament put up such a protracted and bitter struggle to try to keep all this hidden from the voters. They should stop whingeing about the Daily Telegraph's drip feed of revelations from a leaked disc. MPs themselves created the black market in the information about their claims by trying to conceal what they had been doing for so long.

This will hurt the reputation of all politicians, but the damage is likeliest to be greatest to Labour at the next election. The government will be defending the most seats. Any incumbent MP with dodgy claims will be scourged by his or her challenger. It is a Labour government that failed to act in time to clean up this corrupted culture.

Politicians are further stripped of any moral authority to guide the country. How can they now talk about the disgraceful behaviour of bankers or demand sacrifices from voters to cope with the recession? We won't want to hear any more from John Prescott about the motes in the eyes of others when he has a Tudor beam sticking out of his own.

This week, I have learnt, Gordon Brown plans to convene a "political cabinet" when the civil servants will be sent out of the room so that ministers can talk privately about the mire into which the government has sunk. Several members of the cabinet are hoping to force the prime minister to let them debate the serial debacles which have engulfed Number 10 over the past month. These senior ministers grasp that there needs to be an urgent and comprehensive rethink about how Labour is conducting itself. There is certainly a lot to address: from the failure of the government to convey a strategic message to repeated bungling of the handling of day-to-day events. It will be in character if Gordon Brown tries to reassure his colleagues that the expenses furore is a passing froth, an essentially trivial story in the grand sweep of things. He will tell them that the next election will be decided on the big issues such as the economy. They like to think that the McBride Affair, the Gurkhas and parliamentary expenses don't really matter. They will be mere footnotes in the history books.

That may be correct. Yet sometimes it is the superficially trivial that conveys a significant truth about political decay. Full exposure of the expenses racket has illustrated the alarming extent to which so many politicians have lost touch with any ethical bearings, with any feel for what it is tolerable to the public, and even with any sense of self-preservation. The scams are bad enough. Worse is the total absence of any repentance. They have had weeks to consider how they would answer public revulsion when they were caught with their hands in the voters' pockets. What was required was a display of contrition. Yet the ­collective response has been to try to brazen it out.
Lord Mandelson, ever a man to think attack is the best form of defence, lashes out at the media, as if the disgrace was the exposé rather than that exposed. From most of the rest of the government there has been either skulking silence or a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that there has been any wrongdoing.

Caught in flagrante, they do not bow their heads in shame. Their answer to public disgust is to thrust two fingers at the voters. Everyone hates them; they don't care.

The MP who claimed for horse manure? Well, why not when so many other parliamentarians simply don't give a shit.

Breaking News 'The Kindly Ones' by Jonathan Littell

MAY 09, 2009

A SCANNER DARKLY

There are a lot of shocking things about Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, a novel about the destruction of the European Jews that is narrated by a matricidal SS officer named Max Aue, whose greatest joy is having anal sex with his twin sister; but the one that shocks deepest, and longest, is how easily the novel draws you in. I read the book in French (Littell was born in America in 1967, but grew up in France; he wrote The Kindly Ones in French) a couple of years ago and again this winter in Charlotte Mandell’s adroit English translation. Both times, I found myself looking forward to the moment when I was done with other business and could get back to reading about Max Aue and his grisly travels. I am not the only one: the book has sold well over a million copies in Europe, and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary prize. As I write this essay, it’s too soon to say if The Kindly Ones will be a big seller in the United States, but some omens are good. When the English translation was published in March of this year, Michael Korda wrote in the Daily Beast, “I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won’t be able to put it down for a moment—lay in snacks and drinks!” Yes, by all means, if you can keep them down. Reading The Kindly Ones isn’t a comfortable experience, or an ennobling one, but it’s certainly compelling, at least for some readers. The question I want to ask is, why?

more from The Believer here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:14 AM | Permalink

The Social Work Task Force

Yes it's here again-a long hard look at social work and all that it stands for and all that it means. Ed 'Talking' Balls and Alan Duncan announced this new body in January with the intention of revitalising the profession and remaking the poor burnt-out husks employed in local authoritiy social work teams into shiny bright energised uber social workers who, with one deft tap of their harry potter wands will transform the evil cancerous weight of the hideous lumpenproletariat into well adjusted worker drones with only minimal needs for pharmacological intervention.

And they will be happy! And we know that happy workers make New New Shiny New Labour very happy indeed!

Am I dripping with that lowest form of wit dear reader? Indeed, for I hear that Deirdre the agony aunt from 'The Sun' is to take her place on that hallowed and august body. Er yes...you heard that right. Here's a good response from the Fighting Monsters Website which I include in full.

1 May 2009 (4 days ago)
Dear Deirdre

from Fighting Monsters by cb
Dear Deirdre
I suppose you are making an effort with your survey on the Sun website asking readers to tell you all that is wrong with social work.
Personally though, I find it insulting that you were given a place on the Social Work Taskforce that is to report on changes and improvements to be made to Social Work. Although apparently more front line workers are being included, unfortunately, Deirdre remains. And no, justifying her position because of a Sun petition is not a defence, it is even more of an insult. Let’s put this simply - I say this for the following reasons:-
The Sun organised a campaign which included false reporting of social work – victimised individual social workers and questioned the mental health of a social worker. Now, they are claiming ‘victory’ in successfully causing the dismissal of a social worker and social work managers. Fine with the managers, but honestly if I live and work in a country where red top journalism and over-hyped dishonest media campaigns can lead to dismissal rather than incompetence in the workplace then it isn’t doing very much for morale – don’t you think?
What experience do you have of social work? Seriously. What knowledge beyond what your colleagues report? Where has there been any will to engage - I see you pulled out of the Community Care Live event? Can’t take the heat, eh, Deirdre?
Fine, if the taskforce wants a media representative – there are many worthy journalists from Community Care or The Guardian who have consistently shown a knowledge and appreciation of the wider issues within social work but AN AGONY AUNT FROM THE SUN??? Who on earth is going to take Social Work seriously if they think that newspaper agony columns offer some kind of expertise in social work?
I don’t want to be trialled and judged by media – I want to do my job well and effectively and be supported by professional organisations and relevant government departments – not held up to some kind of media trial that you seem to be creating by surveys.
If the task force was REALLY interested in views it would have made the meetings for social workers actually more accessible rather than bunching them in with a few days notice and filling up within hours. I desperately wanted to attend one of the feed back days but my only possibility in London was about a week after I found out that they existed because the other date filled up within a day. Hardly feasible for the front-line workers who, you know, have work to do..
Well, I’ve made my views clear but lets try and get to Deirdre’s ‘survey’ and give her some of the opinions she so obviously wants from Sun readers.
For the record, Deirdre, your first question on that survey, you know where you get one answer and have to say if you have ever had contact with a social worker or you are a social worker.. you know, sweets, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
I am a social worker. My foster child has a social worker, myself and my partner have a supervising social worker, my father who is, himself, elderly (sorry Dad, I know you are reading this!) has a social worker. So what on earth made you think that no social worker can possibly actually USE the services of social workers for your oh-so-helpful survey.
Bleh. Oh well, I guess it makes a change not to see the pressing issues of infidelities or what to do if you’ve impregnated your next door neighbour’s daughter on your problem page (although I suspect that’s only in the online edition).
gene hunt at Flickr
Go and fill it out though, guys, and let her know exactly what we think.
Oh and Deirdre, if you do ever find your way here, I’d love to hear your defence.
Wow, I sometimes have grumps but don’t often have a full-on rant. Sometimes it feels quite good.
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