The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 50,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
A wee late Christmas present to myself this…
There is a cricket series going on down in Australia at the moment between England and Australia. These two sides have history, and encounters between them are always to be savoured. In my case this means ridiculously late nights, although at present England are being hammered into the ground.
William and I (who both play as much cricket as weather and family allow) often discuss what it must be like to face up to one of the fast bowlers, tearing in and trying (literally) to knock your head off. Anyone who thinks of cricket as a sedate gentlemanly sport should think again- even at club cricket level there are many bowlers far too fast for me and I have the bruises to prove it.
Fast bowling is about intimidation. Facing up to someone who has the ability to put the ball either at your feet or bouncing into your ribs at real pace is a test for anyone. Good batsmen always seem to have much more time- no idea where they get it from of course, as the ball will take about half a second to get to you from leaving the bowlers hand.
Abrasive motor-gob Piers Morgan, fresh from his spell as a news anchor on CNN (taking on the American gun lobby) fancies himself as something of a batsman. In fact, he has been slanging off the ‘pathetic’ England team for their apparent cowardice in the face of the Aussie quicks, suggesting that they should just ‘grow a pair’. He reckoned that he could manage just fine, so challenged the very quick former Australian fast bowler Brett Lee to send down a few at him.
Here he was on twitter beforehand;
I’ve only got a few teeth to lose, you’ve got a whole reputation that’s going to be shattered.
It did not go well;
He tweeted: “Full injury list post @BrettLee_58 showdown – cracked wrist, bruised rib, and massive egg on back of head from…the throw-down guy.”
He added: “For the record, I didn’t actually see a single one of @BrettLee_58 ‘s deliveries. But I felt 4 of them crashing into my flesh.”
Lee replied: “@piersmorgan that’s what happens when you talk it up.”
On reflection, perhaps I will leave facing fast bowling to my son.
We have had a lovely Christmas day. Just the 4 of us and a slow day listening to music, laughing a lot, eating too much and watching cheesy films. I had some lovely gifts (thanks everyone!) and enjoyed helping Will put together his new bike. Emily has been in great form too, making us all laugh like drains- mostly with her, occasionally at her.
There is only one potter in our family- and this is Michaela. However, she lets me play around with clay from time to time. Usually she gets a bit fidgety whilst looking over my shoulder but that is fine with me.
I enjoy mixing up ceramics with metal and wood to make things that speak of the sea. The glazes we use are mostly sea colours- you never quite know what magic will happen in the kiln though. I have also been using some shapes to impress into the wet clay to make celtic crosses and the like. What better way to spend Boxing day?
Here are a few of the things I have been making;
And what a sermon. Here it is in full.
It was given by Frank Schaefer (no, not that one– different spelling) who was defrocked by the United Methodist Church last week for officiating at his son’s marriage to another man.
Whatever your theological stance on this issue (it will not surprise you that I am with Frank) you have to admire this man’s courage.
Frank said this;
Being a United Methodist minister is the only way I know how to minister. All of my children have been baptised in the United Methodist Church. It was our church. This is our church.
I knew that I had to confess what in my heart I knew to be true, and I had to stand against the church – not the entire church – but the institution of the United Methodist organisation to say “I believe that this rule is discriminatory and wrong”, and I knew I had to tell my lawyers that.
And so when I sat in the stand, and it came to that moment to share about my true faith, and to stand against the church. I was sick to my stomach. And I was thinking, “can I actually get those words out”? And as I was in that moment, I looked out into the room, and I saw my family. Behind my family there were people sitting. Some of the people were from this church, wearing rainbow stoles. And all of a sudden it was like I could feel their prayers, and I heard myself say to the jury: “I will put on this stole, this rainbow colored stole, as a sign that I will from now on stand in advocacy of the LGBT community of our church”.
And I heard myself say, “I want you to know, that if I am going to be a United Methodist minister tomorrow, I will not refuse ministry to anyone based on their sexual orientation.”
And I heard myself say:
I can no longer be a silent supporter. I will always be an advocate and I will tell the church that these laws are discriminatory. And that we treat our LGBT brothers and sisters as second-class Christians, and that the hate, the hate speech of the church has to stop.
Regular readers will be aware of this stone on Dunoon’s foreshore, close to my house. You will also be aware that I have tried to engage in debate locally about it’s origins, given that it carries two markers that have clear racist associations- it is decorated with familiar ‘Blackface‘ markings, and is labelled ‘Jim Crow Stone’.
This debate continues to be a rather difficult one as the rock divides people fiercely. Those who tend to object to the rock are more typically ‘incomers’ who are not thought by locals to have a right to comment. For their part, they grew up with the stone, as an innocent backdrop to playing on the shore. For them it was a crow, not a racist statement.
I wrote a letter to the local paper a couple of weeks ago, in the wake of the death of Nelson Mandela, suggesting a information board, where we might discuss the different opinions about the rock, and talk about the slave connection through Clyde trade, as well as the Blackface minstrel shows that happened in this area. To be honest, I did this with some trepidation as I expected to get a bit of a kicking from outraged locals.
However, this has not happened. Most conversations I have had with people have been broadly supportive of the idea. There was only one letter in the paper in opposition- and this one concerned itself with the history of the rock. The correspondent insisted that the rock could NOT be racist as it’s name pre-dated the ‘Jim Crow Laws’ in the USA.
There does appear to be some evidence of the name ‘Jim Crow Stane’ on early charts- as if it was used as a navigational marker, as early as the 1700’s.
However to suggest that this closes the argument, that the markings on the rock then become innocent, is clearly (in my view) nonsense. Folklore gets changed and adopted according to the mores of the times. The name of the rock, and the use of the term ‘Jim Crow’ as a pejorative label may (or may not) come from an era before the decoration, but the association with racist images and ideas does not. T
I wrote a reply for the local paper- again I do not know if they will publish it. Here it is though;
Dear Editor
Thanks very much to John A Stirling for his thoughtful reply to my previous letter suggesting an information board next to Jim Crow rock. John appears to believe that the historical points he makes close the argument about the origins of the decorations on the rock. I am afraid they simply do not. History is rarely value free and in this instance, far more complex than what John would have us believe.
John suggests that the rock cannot have racist connotations as its name pre-exists the Jim Crow laws in America. However this ignores the fact that these laws were grouped under the name ‘Jim Crow’ precisely because this was a pre-existing pejorative name that had been in common usage for Black people since at least the beginning of the 19th C. The song ‘Jump Jim Crow’ (written in 1828) perhaps popularised this stereotype but it is more likely to predate the song considerably.
The words ‘Jim Crow’ fell out of common usage possibly because they became increasingly associated with racist laws adopted by most States, and which were gradually removed from American statute over a period of 50 years of protest by brave people, some of whom lost their lives in the process. Previously ‘Jim Crow’ would have been used in the same way as the word ‘nigger’. Are we really happy to give unexamined space on our shores to such words?
Even if John is right, and the name of the rock pre-dates racist associations, the ‘blackface’ image that is painted on it now remains one that Black people recognise immediately as a racist stereotype. Again- do not take my word for it, ask the Jim Crow Museum (who have expressed horror at our rock) or the Racial Equality Unit.
Whatever the debate around this rock, at present it stands as a potentially offensive historical oddity. It will continue to divide us into people who are troubled by what it represents and others who fiercely defend it as an innocent local folklore.
Once again however, if we were to put up a display making clear the nature of this debate, perhaps we might yet transform the rock into something that both John and I can take mutual pride in. We can keep the rock in place, celebrate it even- whilst also owning the darker parts of our history.
Here I am, aged about 8 or 9, on the back row of my class picture from Croft Primary school. Someone posted this picture on Facebook and it all came flooding back. I am the one in the strange yellow t-shirt and the odd pudding bowl haircut.
My sister and I were part of a one parent family, existing entirely on welfare benefits. We lived in a reasonably comfortable house- a suburban semi detached that my mother had bought before she married my father. It was a difficult short marriage and she was left holding the babies, bitter and isolated.
Growing up a child of the welfare state in the 1970’s was possibly the best time to do so. Family credit, child benefit, free school meals, clothing vouchers, even help to pay for some school trips that otherwise we could never have been part of. Don’t get me wrong- we had very little, but my mother was very good at scraping together every last penny. But the chronic shortage of money dominated every waking hour- leaving lights on or wasting food was a sin punishable by violence. I lost a coat once and did not dare go home- hiding in the fields for hours.
There was food in the house- in the early days my mother fed the babies rather than herself, but as time went on, she began to stockpile dented tins and dried lentils. She is in her 70s now and still does- her kitchen cupboards are full of foodstuffs well past their sell by date but she can not begin to throw out. When you have been hungry and have had nothing, the fear of this returning cuts deep.
I mention all this because when I was a child, benefits were worth considerably more in real terms than they are now, even before the axe that our current government has taken to the welfare benefits system.
If I had been born 35 years later, it seems almost certain that I would have been one of the 500,000 people that would have needed to visit a food bank in order to eat.
Today the Christian charity who run many food banks spoke out in condemnation of the Work and Pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. They have been trying to meet with him to discuss how they might work together to help families better. IDS refused. In fact, he did not even stay till the end of a commons debate on the issue this week.
The government agenda is clear. The problem is not poverty, as anyone who is poor should either get themselves a job or manage the benefits they get better. Neither is the problem benefits cuts- these are proportionate with the need manage national debt, and everyone has to do their part. IDS suggested that charities like the Trussell Trust are just scaremongering, following a lefty political agenda. The problem is that some people are scroungers, wasters, layabouts- addicted to hand-outs from the state. Wanting to sponge off the taxes of hard working people.
This agenda has been so well peddled by the government and the right wing media that even people on benefits (perhaps particularly them) come to believe it of themselves. Escaping from this kind of sense of failure is incredibly difficult. It also plugs into a certain kind of base me-first middle class mentality. Do you remember the study that I quoted here?
Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.
Any discussion about welfare is always ideologically loaded. The facts, such as they are, tell a rather different, more complex story. Check out this article that seeks to tackle some of the myths.
When confronted by an ideology/political view/power statement that scapegoats marginalised and dis-empowered people it is time to sit up and take note. It is time to ask searching questions of those in power. Above all it is time to listen to the voices of those who are being scapegoated. Everything within me says that this is what followers of Jesus should be doing right now- listening, challenging, engaging.
Anyone who has ever spent time with people whom life has broken and pushed to the ragged edge will know that survival is the goal- forget recovery, forget healthy environments for children to thrive within. The margins, slim though they were, that I grew up within are now simply gone.
A radio interview with some people visiting a food bank today heard how people were not able to take food that needed to be cooked, as they simply could not afford the energy to cook with.
Most of us instinctively think of people who use food banks as ‘other’; ‘not one of us’. Despite my rather different circumstances in 2013 from 1973, I can not say that. The people at the food banks- they are just like me.
We are being treated to a series of storms up here in the north- It seems that we are having another one every second day. It has been quite a nature-show.
We all start to wonder about the over used phrase ‘global warming’. Is this the cause of the apparent increase in volatility of our Atlantic weather systems? Or is it just a variation within normal?
Whatever, the storms we complain about in the UK (even here on the Wild West) are nothing compared to the weather systems that kill thousands in places like the Philippines. Is there evidence that the increase in super storms might also be down to climate change?
There is some interesting discussion about all this on Climate Radio– reflecting on the Warsaw Climate Talks back in November.
The science is ever more categorical about the fact of climate change, but also about the potential for positive action;
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in October showed us that in the absence of an effective international agreement we are on a high-emissions scenario racing towards an inhospitable 5 degree world of escalating extreme weather. It also showed us that if we switch rapidly to a low-carbon pathway it is still technically possible to limit warming to two degrees centigrade.
The responsibility still lies primarily with us in the rich West. For example, the US are responsible for around a third of the worlds carbon emissions, despite the shift of much ‘dirty’ industry towards the East.
We might lose the odd fence, the odd roof tile. There is a lot more at stake.
Last night we had our first proper Christmas celebration- a lovely evening with friends from our old ‘house group’- reading, praying, sharing gifts (a secret santa kind of thing) and even singing the odd carol. Michaela had planned a ritual involving listening to U2’s song ‘Peace on Earth’ (uncharacteristically dark and mournful for her!) and also re-lending some money our group had invested with Kiva.
Earlier we put up Christmas decorations. To prove it, here are some (slightly cheesy) photos!
Some ideas are so central to our world view that everyone just assumes them to be fact. The domination of so called free market economics have forced quite a few of these kind of ideas into our thinking- one of them is the absolute necessity of competition.
Without competition we become flabbily inefficient, like some kind of state run farm in the old Soviet Union. Without competition we will never become the best that we can be, either as individuals or as countries. Without competition, we are told, all human endevour atrophies. All science is still born, all education is weak and pointless.
A what is more, without competition, there is no fun, no sport, no football no (Lord save us) cricket.
Be honest, at an economic level, do you think this is a closed argument? It might surprise you then to hear that there the value of competition in economics can be regarded as something of a mixed bag. Sure, it might drive down prices, but it might also drive down quality. It will ensure too that devices will lack interoperatability- each new produce will lead to the need for a new device- leading to huge waste and cost.
It might also deliver more choice for consumers (choice being another one of those current cultural holy cows) but this often leads to huge complexity, confusion and again much more waste.
What about competition pushing technology forward? We appear to be seeing unprecedented advances in computing at present. People are upgrading and renewing computers faster than ever before. Rather than buying a machine and using it for 8 years, people are renewing every 3 years, often due to the lower build quality, and cheaper parts end up breaking sooner. Again this is leading to huge wastage, not to mention the environmental impact of all those rare earth metals– which seem to be increasingly dumped in poor countries. There is now huge pressure to buy a new computer at the slightest problem, rather than fix the old one- they are cheap enough and new formats (netbooks, tablets, wrist) are made to look like essential accessories.
Competition might also be regarded as aiming to destroy the opposition. So a powerful company (say IBM) might ensure that their computer platform overcomes other ones. They are removed from the marketplace, even if the technological solutions they contained were better, more useful. The story is often told of computers that used to boot up in seconds but the company that won the competition went a different route.
Am I suggesting that competition is bad then? It would be possible to make a strong case; what is the root cause for war if not competition? Does it not create far more losers than winners? Might competition not be dragging us headlong towards the end of our civilisation because of the damage being done to our environment? But this would be every bit as simplistic and one sided as the competition-is-always-good hegemony. What I would argue for however is the urgent need to look at the holy myth of competition and expose it to a measure of healthy doubt.
Clearly competition delivers huge benefits, but at what costs? I have mentioned potential environmental costs, but there are other more human ones too. The dream of success stalks us all- our huge need for measurable, quantifiable, objective evidence of our place in the human race. But in order for some to win, many must fail. And so we will do what we can to be one of the winners, not losers. However it has never been a level playing field; some will always be able to control the game on behalf of themselves and their families/friends. At present, by almost every measure, the world is providing less chances for those who have little than previously. We are discarding countless Einsteins, Beethovens, Marie Curies every day.
You could argue that even the costs of failure (our current banking crisis) has been outsourced. Those suffering from all the adversity programmes slashing our welfare, health and education budgets were certainly not the cause of the problem- in fact they were not even in the competition.
As someone who tries to follow after Jesus, it seems rather obvious that he did not seem to regard the winning of competitions as any kind of priority. In fact he seemed to favour the opposite; turning the other cheek, the first becoming the last, the lion lying down with the lamb. I know that neo-liberal economists do not tend to use Jesus as their major source material, but nevertheless it is strange how these ideas co-exist within so called Christian cultures. Perhaps the Jesus way of doing things is not really a good way for our children to get ahead?
Which brings me to my final point- the education of our children. When I was a kid back in the increasingly distant 1970’s, competition was bad. Enlightened parents and teachers tried to emphasise non-competitive games, encouraging co-operation and the shared experience. To be honest it was a bit shambolic, not much fun and the urge to compete was so strong in most of we kids that it was pointless anyway. Since then the whole attempt to imbue education with egalitarian principles has been totally abandoned in the UK. Competition is most certainly good- the more the better it seems, particularly under our current government.
The fear we live with as parents is that we do not skew the scales as far towards our own kids as we possibly can. The pressure is on to equip them for success in each and every exam, so that they can succeed in life. There is some evidence for the truth of this. Expensive private education hot-houses kids to exam success, and privately educated kids crowd the top professions in this country, particularly the political class.
Here is the rub though- as we start to look back on lives (rather than imagine forward into the lives of our kids) what successes do we most appreciate? What gives us most pleasure, satisfaction? Which of them might be regarded as having been worthwhile- not just for ourselves but for the world we were part of? If you are like me, this has little to do with money or exam results or career. It is much more to do with family, friends, community, creativity, love, kindness. Is it possible that competition mitigates against some of this? Is it not at least a distraction, or perhaps given too much weighting in the choices we make for both ourselves and our kids?
Competition is saving us. Competition is killing us. Both are true, and neither.
Competition is overvalued, and needs to be subordinate to grace.
I have spent much of my adult life looking upwards towards mountains, longing to be lost in the shape of them. This started out in the crowded landscape of the Peak District, chewed and nibbled by quarries and industry, leaving only the millstone edges and the heavy dark peak with their wet peat wrapping of dead forest. It progressed to the cosy mountains of the Lake District– bare crags and scree spitting like broken teeth from the bare grasslands. Nowadays I have the high places of Scotland, path-less and unforgiving, untidy with scrub, alive with deer and ticks.
What I am just coming to realise is that these beautiful landscapes are anything but wild. Sure, it was more obvious with the first two of my places of adventure, but it is even true of Scotland. George Monbiot (rapidly becoming a real hero/prophet to lefties like me) is about to publish a book on Re-wilding and the impact of farming practices on our ecology. Once you look at the British landscape through these eyes, you will never quite look at it the same way again.
Could it be that those rolling hills and high mountains that have beckoned me all my life are actually barren wastelands created by the depletion of almost every indigenous ecosystem? A wasteland created and sustained above all by our agricultural practices and supported by vast amounts of public money in the form of subsidies?
Monbiot suggests that we do not see this because of the myths that we have adopted as fact about our landscape- myths that are so powerful that they have achieved some kind of stranglehold on politicians, ecologists and members of the public alike. Here is Monbiot in an interview with Steve Wheeler on the Dark Mountain blog;
Yes, that’s right, and in fact shifting baseline syndrome – the idea that what you experienced in your youth is the normal state of the ecosystem, and so conservation becomes an attempt to recreate the ecosystems that existed in your youth, oblivious to the fact that those ecosystems were themselves highly depleted – it’s that syndrome that is responsible for the dire state of conservation in this country. In some other parts of the world, too, but Britain is a particularly extreme case. There’s no other place on earth where conservationists are quite so frightened of nature, and where they try to such an extent to manage and suppress natural processes. There’s nowhere else where conservation so closely resembles a slightly modified form of farming, and that’s because conservationists, like everyone else, appear to be profoundly ignorant of what was here before farming, and what could be here without farming, so they focus on the species that have happened to survive 6,000 years of farming – which happen to be tough, weedy, rapidly reproducing, ‘R-selected’ rather than ‘K-selected’ in the jargon of ecologists, rather than the species that did live here and could live here again.
SW: It struck me, to be fair to some of these conservationists, that there’s a strong psychological reason when they talk about the dangers of undergrazing and so forth: there is a fairly messy phase that the ecology would need to go through before it became a rich, old growth forest, and that looks like stinging nettles or bracken, which to a lot of people elicits a reaction of: ‘Oh look, these weeds are coming here, this is a less beautiful landscape, this is less useful for the needs we wanted it for’. There’s a lack of faith and trust in the succession of species – that one stage needs to happen first and then the next colonisers will come and the next.
GM: Almost every stage is a stage of increasing richness over what was there before. Some of the upland sites are so impoverished, have so little life, that any recovery in terms of scrub, bracken, brambles, would actually mean an increase in biodiversity. It’s fascinating how almost every aspect of the discussion about what we’re trying to conserve and why has been completely distorted by our perceptions of the present overwhelming the past and the future.
For instance, conservationists will, with a straight face, assert that their grazed open grasslands are more biodiverse than woodland. You say ‘What do you mean?’ and they say ‘They’re more biodiverse’. And you ask which taxa they’re talking about and the answer is ‘flowers and butterflies’ – it’s always flowers and butterflies! So you say, ‘Yes, strange to relate, grasslands are more diverse in non-woodland species than woodlands are’. But they don’t see it, and they genuinely believe that more flowers and butterflies equals greater biodiversity in total, and ignore all the other taxa, whether they’re beetles, moths, spiders, mammals, birds, fungi… trees! – whatever they happen to be. All of those are ignored, because they only happen to see biodiversity in two groups.
Does it matter then? Are these places not still beautiful, vibrant, compelling? To stand high on the Cuillin ridge with clouds lapping your feet on one side, an clear air the other (as above) is still transcendent. The reality Monbiot wants to wake us up to however is that we have stopped looking at what we are losing. We have become transfixed by the ‘conservation’ of certain totemic species which we have preserved, even re-introduced; sea eagles, otters, beavers, salmon. At the same time the diversity of the wider eco-system is in terrible decline;
SW: You’ve been at pains to point out that you want to rewild the uplands but leave the lowlands for agricultural practice – albeit perhaps not as currently practiced, but generally. Do you think that kind of agriculture is sustainable?
GM: Well, it depends what you mean by sustainable, which is a term that has become almost meaningless. Can it be sustained? Probably, yes, if the phosphate doesn’t run out, which is probably a couple of hundred years off. But at great cost to the natural world, and already we see that cost in terms of the extraordinary losses of wildlife in almost every nation on earth, including our own. A remarkably rapid loss, such that even since my youth – which admittedly was quite a long time ago – there have been profound changes.
I remember when the riverbeds were so thick with eels migrating to the sea in the the autumn that they looked almost black, and now the european eel is a highly endangered species, there are very few of them left – it would have been inconceivable to me if someone has said that that would be the case. For some 10,000 years following the ice age there was this massive migration, and now it’s come to an end, just about. I remember on summer nights, the moths would pack the windows, so that you could scarcely see out, of all sort of colours and shapes and sizes, which was a wonderful adventure for a boy like me, just to log the species stuck to the window, trying to get in. Fields used to be covered in white mushrooms, all gone now, and that’s just in my lifetime.
And as I say, that was already a highly depleted ecosystem; but it’s been so radically depleted in that short amount of time, and largely by agriculture, so it’s plainly unsustainable in terms of maintaining even the barest scrapings of life. It might be sustainable in terms of preserving food production, but it depends where you are, we’re now seeing in the interior of the United States large areas rapidly becoming unsuitable for agriculture through a combination of climate change, aquifer depletion, and overuse of the soil.
If Monbiot is right- then what should we do about it? His radical suggestion is that we change the subsidy system away from supporting upland grazing towards re-wilding; simply put, we get out of nature’s way. Switch the subsidies towards permaculture, with proximal zones where we do nothing.
Farmers will not be pleased- many of them anyway. Some are living in marginal subsistence situations already. Others are reaping vast profits from the subsidy system.
How about people like me for whom our ‘wild’ places are a poetic adventure play ground? We might need to get used to far less tidy landscapes- I can tell you that it is MUCH easier to walk and climb in the Lake District than it is in Scotland- mostly because the former is much less ecologically diverse (even though Scotland is heading in the same direction.) A walk up Cat Bells with the crowds in their creaky new Gore Tex will convince you of this if anything will;
It is not that we did not enjoy the stiff climb, the uninterrupted views out over Derwent Water, the sound footing on constructed paths. However, we did not consider the bare slopes, accommodating of our exercise as they were, to be anything other than normal- which perhaps is exactly what they were.
Wilderness.
What does it mean to us? Is it worth fighting to preserve? Do we think that our current economic systems can ever be trusted to do this?
