Woke up. Got out of bed. Ran a comb across my head...Day in The Life by Lennon & McCartney. At my desk by six after completing my start of the winter’s day routines. Turn up the storage heater...on low during the night. Switch on the table lamp over by the bookcase. Start up the electric oil heater to put some fast warmth into the place. Water on for coffee. Get dressed...or not...quite a few weblogs are composed by dressing gown.
This routine is so automatic that often I have no recollection of what I did. The brain’s task...apart from the Aldous Huxley reducing valve function of keeping waking consciousness on full alert...seems to be to turn us into robots. Routine life gets organised away into delegated unconscious programmes...soft wiring. This is why it is interesting that whales can’t sleep and breathe at the same time. The hard wiring’s something else.
It had been another cold night. We have now had several in a row with frost on the ground every morning when dawn casts her weak light upon the affairs of men. Car windows have been frosted over which means ten minutes of scraping before setting off. But by midday the sun has done the job. No bill afterwards either.
My time in Llangolman is running out. My daughter is back next week. My coach heads east on Saturday week. And I leave for Purton at midday tomorrow returning on Sunday. Today is my last pressure-free homeday...so I feel the pressure to use it efficiently. I have been avoiding the Magpie Sagas. And I promised to take our Kergroaz-Vraz Institute Project out of the middle drawer before heading for home.
Today my four-weekly Working Tax Credit of £ 277 hits my Nationwide account. It can be quite a struggle for ownworkers to get into the state benefit system. It is geared up for jobs and mortgage people. But once in the system your money arrives with rarely a glitch. You can set your clock by the Queen’s Pence. It is a shame that means testing...and an obsession with fraud busting...spoils it. My housing benefit for instance gets turned on and off every time someone somewhere in the district council decides to recalculate my entitlements.
New means tests happen without warning...and the letter always gets sent to my boat instead of to my PO Box because the council’s computers can’t cope with a contact address as well as a residential address. ‘But we sent you a letter.’ ‘No. Your computer sent me a letter. And it sent it to the wrong address again. So I never got it.’ The conversation is scheduled for ten days time as January’s money never arrived. The main reason there are so many ‘No DSS’ signs on estate agents boards is because housing benefit can suddenly stop. The attitude of the landlord is ‘once bitten twice shy’. The Diary of A Scrounger will have more to say about this.
The latest moves on the Magpie Sagas went off recorded delivery from Cardigan Post Office in mid-afternoon. Returning home there was an e-mail from John Papworth. ‘What has moved people to make things better all through history, even if they have often taken a wrong road and succeeded only in making them worse, is the sweep of the power of some moral persuasion. Where is ours? This brings us back to the human condition. Our present arrangements and policies demean us. What do we need to aim for that might ennoble us? What arrangements can we project that will impel us to seek the best in ourselves rather than wallow in the worst?’
My first reaction was to agree but then I thought about it. We have seen explosions in population, technology, schooling and knowledge...and new money tricks like double Dutch book-keeping. 'Over the top!' ‘Up and at 'em!' and 'How terrible the world!' seem rather old hat...part of a vanished world of barricades, mass movements and grand revolutionary theories. Tomorrow’s reality is of disparate scales...and no theory of cause and effect.
So I wrote back and disagreed. For people on the social justice scene the moral case is given. What they want is some competence from the good guys and the impression that they have got the diagnosis and the prognosis right. They want to meet people who are on the right track. They want their own facts and experience of local realities to coalesce into a coherent analysis...something that actually rings true.
Most of all they want to believe there are some people acting together to organise for success...which means the demise of the War Party and the rise of the Peace Parties. Make Love not War. They want to find that what they do on their local action fronts fits in with the strategies being put in place on the global ideas front. Perhaps this is a little nerdy but the zeitgeist of the age just ‘is’ and doesn’t judge. Moral persuasions are part of the old ‘isms’. The disparate scales of 21st century reality call for a technical approach to political strategies.
Over in the Dark Continent South Africa’s ANC is scrapping its black empowerment programme ‘to boost foreign investment’ while Kenya’s former anti-corruption tsar John Githongo has claimed his first scalp. The close friend and political ally of President Mwai Kibaki, David Mwiraria, has quit his job as Finance Minister over the Anglo Leasing scandal. Just as well my daughter never applied for her Kenyan passport.