On a scale of one to ten the exhaust pipe replacement project went from four to two...while the cost shot up from £72 to £125. My daughter’s Peugeot 106 has attitude. It was imported from Ludwigshaven three years ago. One of its more endearing features...at least in Germany...is having the steering wheel on the right and not the left. The English side in other words. To cut a long story short the car is a mongrel. The exhaust pipe fitted snugly enough at the engine end. But the old exhaust pipe had been modified at the other end. The new part did not fit. Out of time. My daughter is back tomorrow. A new exhaust box was rushed in.
I was at my desk a little after four this morning. My timing was excellent. I finished my two page piece on the Resurgence Group of Human Scale Instiutes just after eight, sent it on its way and arrived at the garage on the stroke of nine. More creative history. But we all need something to believe in. Besides I tell a good story.
I was at a loose end for much of the day waiting for car parts to arrive and exhausts to be fitted. I killed some of the time at the cinema watching The March of The Penguins. There must be a better way. Why does Nature make everything so hard? Here were these poor mal-nourished Emperor Penguins trudging seventy miles from feeding grounds to mating grounds. How about a moving pavement? Strange this earthly life of ours...and it applies to sheep and emperor penguins too. Nothingness stretching into eternity at either end and a brief flash of colour and conscious awareness in between. Could be a wind-up I suppose. Pity Jesus doesn’t laugh more.
The last people in the world to give much thought to such esoteric matters are the middle classes. They’ve been underrated by historians with their 'great men' and 'mass movement' theories of history. I lay some of the blame at Karl Marx door. He was always undermining them by his dismissive reference to the petit bourgeoisie. As a class they may well present a serious obstacle to the vanguard's onward and upwarding. But this works both ways. Once the ideas and values of the middle class shift then society as a whole moves. Today's heresies are tomorrows orthodoxies. And it’s the middle class who decide what is when. Women in particular can be regarded as the custodians of a society’s values.
Sociologically the lower class can be viewed as merely an aspiring (or failed) middle class who want their children to be middle class. And what the world thinks of as the upper class is really only upper middle class anyway...although few of those in it realise it and even less dare admit it. Democratic political parties like Thatcher's (and Cameron’s) Tories or Blair's New Labour base any electoral success on these assumptions. Besides from a purely practical point of view the only secure democratic source of funding is the middle class. The poor have no money. That is why they are poor. Causation or correlation? Chicken or egg?
This discussion came up in my conversation with Mexico City last week when I told Constanza that she was right to focus Pensart on the Mexican and Colombian middle class. And I explained that by this I meant ordinary people with aspirations and the divine spark to know that ‘this is not all there is’. There is something more. Outside the developed world the middle class is often self-taught. They follow their instincts and learn by discovery rather than by authority. As a teacher my aim was always to provoke students into thinking for themselves. A contradiction perhaps but notice that I was careful to avoid the word teach. However I often found it necessary to point out that thinking for yourself did not mean thinking by yourself.
My inbox was edging towards four hundred so I took advantage of the fast Cardigan Library computers to delete most of the messages and start dealing with what was left. The Radcon Planning Group got priority. Stella Grimes our Honorary Treasurer had some questions and Adam Crosland had been slaving away over the weekend on a poster. You can take a look at it over on the radcon weblog. Let me know what you think.
I’m not sure how it all started but Tom Greco and Toni Pinschof were mixed up in it somewhere. Anyway between the two of them they had come across a monograph entitled Usury & The Church of England by the Rev. Henry Swabey of 29 High Street, Maxey, Peterborough, England. This was just the kind of manuscript for the cesc website so I got drafted in to track it down and do whatever massaging was necessary before posting it onto the web. The only known copy was in Idaho with Michael Aldana. There is now another one on my hard drive awaiting the next time I do websites. That is ‘not yet’ so the project got parked. But Michael wants to see action. What to do? I’m thinking that weblogging is the way to go. Watch this space.
Over the weekend I resolved to get myself some commercial storage in Cambridge. I’m tired of having my stuff all over the place. The Big Green Box Company next to the Park and Ride out by the Cambridge Science Park is my first choice. So today I called them up for some prices. Ouch! One hundred pound a month...twelve hundred a year...for 10’ x 8’ x 8’ of secure self storage. Perhaps I should go for sponsorship? Or cut a window in the side and sleep there. Perhaps I can give the Big Green Box to the DSS as my address?
