… Emily was born.

Where did 20 years go?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Death came to the streets of Paris this week. We watched it all displayed for our collective horror on all those 24 hour spooling news channels. All that grainy footage from security cameras and interviews with the nearly-killed and those now left behind.

Desperate things have happened in Paris. People were relaxed, eating, listening to music, laughing with friends when in came death. In came the scythe of violence. In came religion.

The narrative around all these events is still too raw, the blood on the streets too fresh. Perhaps it should remain unexamined. The trauma is still ringing out like a broken bell.

Meanwhile however, politicians both sides of the Atlantic are lining up to declare war on the perpetrators of this violence. The Europeans are looking for someone to bomb. The Americans are recommending the ‘tracking’ of all Muslims in the USA, and the screening of Syrian refugees (fleeing violence) as if they were ‘rabid dogs’. Unless they can prove that they are Christians.

People are not equal- not even in death. Those hundreds of thousands who have died in the invasions of Iraq and the civil wars in places like Eritrea and Syria hardly register as worthy of mention- even when (as in Iraq) our governments have to be regarded as directly responsible.

I fear that in the wake of the terrible events in France, we will take a famillar path.

I have written before about how we might try to learn some lessons from history;

…Then there are the lessons of even recent history (let us not even mention the dreadful colonial legacy that has far more to do with the creation of terrorism than religion ever could have).

Although we have to start there in a way. At the end of Empire, Britain had lived with terrorism for at least 100 years. The transition from colonial territory to autonomous nation has rarely been peaceful; too many artificial borders imposed on disparate peoples, with a history of being on different sides of the many colonially sponsored conflicts. Britain learned the hard way that conventional warfare is never the long term solution to insurgency and terror. Or rather we had to re learn this again and again, treading a path that is remarkably familiar; concentration camps, secret police, propaganda campaigns that leave no room for dissidents, and along the way many a blood bath; Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ireland etc etc. Eventually we had to talk to people. We had to turn away from violence and try to make peace in the face of all sorts of provocations.

Ah- but these conflicts were largely about geography, not about ideology, I hear you cry; modern terrorism has no obvious negotiation point; we can not walk away, because it is coming to us- our homes, our streets. It arises internally from our own ethnic minority communities.

I would suggest that there are more similarities than would first appear, it is just that like all post modern movements, terror has globalised. It has worldwide franchises, but power and motivation are still generated in the conflict zones.

After the attack on the World Trade Centre, America declared a war of vengeance. They were quite open about it at the time. Someone had to pay. First Afghanistan was invaded, with a narrative about evil regimes, then on far shakier evidence (later almost entirely discredited) Iraq. Hundreds of thousands died. The bulging prison camps became training grounds for new terror movements. Surveillance and a suspension of the rule of law was seen as justifiable and expedient. To support the war effort successive governments incited fear in a wider public who, in general terms, had probably never been so safe. Has it worked? Can we really regard the world, even the USA as a safer place, a better place?

Perhaps we never learn. Violence has always to be met with more violence.

Perhaps too what our culture experiences is akin to that of a person going through an experience of post traumatic stress;

Violence breeds fear. Fear breeds the desire for safety/protection, even to the point of violence. The violence re-traumatises.

So perhaps it is indeed time to examine the narrative of fear and death that is being carried in the media at the moment- no matter how unpopular.

This ‘war on terror’- whom are we fighting? Where is the enemy and how much are they putting us all at risk?

There are indeed dangerous, violent people who live within our communities. Some of them are animated by a twisted religious conviction. However, all of these people are convinced of the injustice and evil that they and their kind have been subjected to by the West.

Surely the point of acts of terror is to create fear on a population wide level. Violence of this kind is intended to breed violence. People of violence are vindicated in turn by the violence that then results.  They are happy for us both to see through blinded eyes.

How then do we fight a war against this kind of violence?

Perhaps it is to seek peace. Sooner or later it will have to come.

To revisit my earlier post again, I said this;

As a nation we are vulnerable to many things in these changing and rootless times. Our chances of early death at the hands of an Islamic terrorist are absolutely tiny. Lots of other things that we live with every day will kill thousands of us; our lifestyles, our motor cars. There is a chance that our over consuming will be the end of our kind.

So let us pause, remember with respect those souls who passed and then try to make peace with ourselves and then with our neighbours.

For the sake of the sight of the next generation perhaps we should start by setting aside fear, and seeing it clearly with unblinded eyes for what it is; a traumatic smoke screen that stops us seeing the obvious, and tends to lead us into destructive delusion.

There is a man who ‘busks’ on the street near my office. He stands just inside the underpass holding his nylon strung guitar awkwardly, unstrapped. He plucks at one string over and over again.

duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh

He makes no pretense at melody. He utters not one word of song.

I walk past him regularly on my missions to meetings or for the odd sandwich. There he stands, motionless but for that monotone finger, staring zen-like at a point on the far wall, seemingly oblivious to the hand full of coins that some have dropped at his feet. Not by me, I hasten to add. I tend to shake my head in wonder. Surely he could just learn a chord for heavens sake?

However, the more I have observed him, the more I have come to think that there is something admirable, majestic even, in his stoical vigil. His total lack of artifice, of artistry, of concern for the judgement of others- it is remarkable. So much so that I find myself humming along to his droning string.

Hum hum hum hum hum hum hum hum hum hum

I have played guitar since I was 11 years old. But I could not have stood all those hours in that cold underpass and attempted to play for money. I would be too concerned about getting it right, about looking cool, about wanting people to be impressed by my art, by my skill. I would fuss over tuning and resonance. I would almost certainly fall short of my own expectations of myself.

So it is with many creative folk. To create we need to believe we have in us something worth creating. But self belief is a fleeting thing, often wafted away in the first breeze of public scrutiny.

Or at least that is how it often feels to me. It is almost as if each string I pluck makes nothing more than that same monotonous duh duh duh.

There he stands. And I walk by.

My son was wondering where they had all gone. He has heard of Mandela and Luther King and Ghandi- but he knows they are all dead and gone. The battles they fought belonged to other generations, not his (although perhaps the battles go on for ever in reality.) He wondered why there were no leaders like these around now. Where are the revolutionary heroes of 2015?

I was reminded of this song;

We thought about this, his mum and I. Perhaps heroes like this are only ever visible in hindsight- from the close perspective of history they are more nuanced and shadowed by compromise. Perhaps too the nature of our media twists and shapes the message so that it just becomes another piece of electronic background noise; at best something that flicks across your Facebook feed then fades back into ephemera.

Perhaps too the age of great ideological debates has been replaced by a homogeny of endless consumption; each and every thought and idea has value only because it generates hits on a server somewhere that also sells something.

Perhaps too that activism also has had to play by these rules. Movements like Occupy have eschewed ‘leadership’ in the traditional sense, moving instead for fluidity and protest modeled more on performance art- the sort of stuff that twitters well.

But sometimes you encounter someone to whom that rather cringeworthy word authentic can be applied to. Someone who is prepared to live in a different way. This is part of the dramatic appeal of Corbyn in British politics at present- for once, substance is elevated over style. Content is valued above communication.

For those of us who still long for flawed heroes, perhaps this will pierce the cynicism of these words. A real revolutionary hero.

Here you go son. He is not your generation- not even mine- but a hero none the less.

We went for a walk through the falling leaves yesterday.

This was the Aoradh (and friends) installation in Benmore gardens. We twinned the leaves with a poem- each one taken from this book, from the section called ‘Losing’.

Here is one of them;

Open hearts have to close sometimes

Rachel Edge

“Close the door, you’re letting all the warmth out.”

It’s autumn and the dying leaves are skittering over the porch, whistling over the concrete step.

The chilly gusts swoop and swirl round the doorframe, over my arms, making me shiver.

My heart aches like a cavitied tooth when it meets ice cream; cold right to the bone.

“But he might come back… I can’t close the door; what if he comes back?”

I look out on the bleakness, search for vacant signs of life.

They shake their heads, pitying me mutely.

“Close the door, love.”

I know. I know.

He’s gone

Some photos;

I listened to this speech. Every word made me frightened.

Not for the reasons that others are frightened- I have no fear of the radical left wing, in fact it is where I am most at home.

The fear I felt was related to something else- something to do with the fragility of hope. You see, just about everything that this man says makes my heart leap. AT LAST someone who has a loud voice is saying the things that I hold to be self-evident (even if he obtained this voice by accident and even if the assassins are hiding behind every corner he walks around.)

And as I hear him speak, I feel myself drawn in to the possibility that a real alternative to the suffocating me-first consumer-driven grubbyness that has overtaken life in the UK is possible. Perhaps we can start to care about the effects of poverty and inequality again. Perhaps we can raise our discourse above ‘the market knows best’ monotone. Perhaps we can once again be driven by principles that are based around humanity, respect, love even.

So why am I frightened?

Hope is a dangerous thing. Corbyn is not the Messiah, and even if he was, the Messiah that I believe in ended up crucified.

But nevertheless, how grateful I am that the Labour party (who have done much to destroy my hope in the last couple of decades) still have people like this man in their midst. He may well belong to an earlier age (the time of my political awakening in the 80s) when ideology was king, but he is a powerful reminder that politics based on pampering only those in power is a politics of despair.

Corbyn may never be elected as Prime Minister of this country, and I do not care. What we need from him right now is to hear a strong voice that challenges the status quo. A voice that reminds us of our duties to the poorest and weakest in society. A voice that points out that the fat old Emperor is stark bollock naked.

I am fearful that the very reasons why I like him (that honest naivety arising from pressure group politics, with its binary decisions about good/bad) might yet prove his undoing. His refusal to spin, to play the political game; it may yet mean that his voice can not be heard.

But in the meantime, still I dare to hope. Even on the basis of one speech, I dare to hope…

A 25th wedding anniversary poem for my lovely wife. 

September comes

September hangs a little lower;

Each branch still be strong, but

Wearied now by the pull of

The brown old ground beneath

And I fear for all that fruit

For it must surely fall.

Yet how these trees are kissed with gold

 In our late summer blooming

Every bird still joins our song

And all the earth is turning

Let the fruit fall as it will

How else shall seeds be sowing?

Let us sit down beneath these trees

And take some time for loving

In the corner of our lounge we have a gathering stack of leaf skeletons, made from copper, wood and wire.

These are intended to be blank canvasses for artists to make large leaf-art for this event. The leaves will be suspended to form an installation in Benmore Gardens.

We are looking for artistic collaborators- so if you are reasonably local and fancy taking a leaf to make your own contribution, please get in touch! You do not need to be an ‘Artist’ with a capital A- rather someone who has a story to tell on these empty leaves…

Here is a short piece of writing that hopefully gives some context and inspiration for the event;

We are all going to die.

There are no exceptions; no get-out clauses for the rich or the famous.

.

It is sometimes possible to live as though death is another country;

A place we know to exist but never plan to visit- Moldova perhaps, or Azerbaijan.

We come to believe that death happens elsewhere; in other houses, other families; to other people.

So it is that we hope to banish fear of the unknown

The terrible pain of separation.

.

But what if life itself is impossible without death?

What if a good life has to also embrace the inevitability its ending?

.

Like these leaves…

At first a dream in some distant DNA, secreted in the seed of some old spreading tree.

Budding in the harsh days of winter.

Unfurling shyly in the soft mist of the early spring, vulnerable to any late frost.

Spreading out into a canopy community, shouldering for space and light.

Frayed by the beaks of birds and the lash of summer storms.

Caught up in production, forgetting the play of the evening light.

And the singing sound of a warm breeze when it catches them all in concert.

Then comes the calling in of days; each one shorter than the next.

But rather than just let go, each clinging leaf becomes a blaze of colour.

For if the fall will surely come,

Let it be beautiful.

For though winter is dark

It can never put out the light

.

We humans live in a complex world defined above all by this one word;

Love.

.

May we learn to love most deeply in the dancing shadows cast

By falling leaves.

Alongside this event we will also have an evening of music an poetry in the lovely Benmore Gardens courtyard gallery. Music will be from Yvonne Lyon, whose new work is a collection of songs co-written by people reflecting on issues of hope and loss. It is sublime.

The poetry will be taken primarily from the section entitled ‘Losing’ from the Learning to Love book, and I hope to have some of the poets who contributed as part of the readings. Hope you can join us- tickets will be limited due to space being tight at the venue!

We are just back from a trip to Norway, a place I have long wanted to visit. In truth I was desperate for a holiday after a year of hard slog in my current job- something I rather hoped I had left behind. You know what I mean, that feeling of holding on in desperation for some kind of survival related break. Anyway, we spoke long and hard about where to go, and even considered one of those package tours but I simply could not face it. I have this dread of the thought of a package tour, even though I have never been on one.

As it happened, the planning of the trip to Norway made it clear to Michaela and I that having someone else organise your holiday for you might well have advantages!

Should you be thinking about a trip to Norway, here is what we did. The first thing that you should know is that it is an expensive place to go, so we decided to do it as cheaply as we could- we payed about £500 for air tickets (with extra baggage) and hired a car for 11 days or so (about £600) and then took tents and camping gear. We planned to spend between 70-100 quid a day and this already would mean this being the most expensive holiday we have ever taken. As it happens we spend more than this! Supermarkets (Rima 2000 being the cheapest) were about twice as expensive as here and meals out were two to three times more expensive (we only had one.)

We drove a lot of miles; down to the forests of the Swedish border, up to the high plateau between Oslo and Bergen then right round the southern coast back to were we started. The roads are stunning; Norwegians seem to have two national industries, one related to all things fish, the other tunneling through mountains. One tunnel corkscrewed down into a mountain for miles before emerging out of a cliff face onto a bridge over a fjord before the road entered another tunnel the other side.

Our favourite bits were the stunning high mountain passes, with all their snow patches and wildflowers. Bergen we were not so impressed with on the whole; to many cruise liners and ridiculous prices (we paid £16 for two ice creams!)

At the end of the day, we had a fantastic time and I would love to go back and explore the high latitudes. Need to save up though!

A few snaps;

Saw this today. What more would you ever need to help you think about the so called ‘migrant crisis’ in a different way?