nunoncastors

I have decided that I am not meant to live in a tidy and uncluttered room, each and every time I clear the floor – returning books to shelves, shoes to trees and clothes to hangars – something else appears to occupy the previously pristine space. Today it is a pile of ancient books, published by The Times, which detail the travails of the Great War, some interminable paperwork and my distinctly unpleasant and sweaty football kit.

I would remove them, place them in their allotted place, but I know that as soon as I do there will be replacements in the form of socks, posters, bike parts, yet more books and some magazines. I simply don’t have room for more accoutrements, so I’m leaving them be. Where these things come from, how they arrive on my floor or where they lived before adopting my room as their own, I don’t know, but appear they do to clutter my room and tangle my feet.

Either that or I’m really lazy.

Now that the stage where arresting politicians for doing their job has been reached, with ID cards on their way and the right to peaceful protest already curtailed, I thought it best that I ask a question of Parliament before such insolence sees me marched off for re-education.

I have watched, with increasing exacerbation, while politicians, our ‘elected representatives’ squander national resources and the public’s trust in equal measure. I am not a particularly well educated man, I am, perhaps, not the best suited to speak out, but I have to know why our Government, local and national, has ceased to represent the people in deed and word. Indeed, I find myself so used to the mouthing of empty platitudes by Government officials and elected members that often, to my shame; I do not even stop to question the venality of their words. It is as though, through sheer weight of repetition, they have come to carry a great soporific effect and engender a grim acceptance that there is nothing of worth behind the words.

I concede that, perhaps, many members are decent people with rational concerns, yet all I hear is empty speech, all I read are empty words and all I see are people who, against all reason, appear to have forgotten who they’re supposed to serve.

This letter, I suppose, is an empty gesture, a last hurrah of hope before the inevitable emigration to a saner nation, but at the same time it carries behind it a whole lifetime of hopes and expectations that have, in essence, been betrayed by people with whom I have nothing in common and little hope of reaching in any tangible sense.

The Britain in which I now live has little or no resemblance to the nation I grew up in, the unblinking eye of CCTV watches over us all like the Big Brother of Orwell’s nightmares, yet does little to assure our safety in the face of an ineffective police force, overflowing prisons, and a Crown Prosecution Service that would sooner release a habitual offender than spend money convicting and imprisoning them.

There are people who, quite inexplicably, have never worked a day in their life, yet are given money, housing and afforded innumerable benefits while others, toiling away in thankless jobs, have to scrape the very bottom of the barrel in order to make ends meet. Somehow, as a nation, we have spawned a generation that seems to believe handouts are theirs by right rather than a last resort in hard times. Yet still we coddle them, why?

Nationally, we are spoon-fed statistics and reports that endlessly extol the virtues of our failing government, that assure us our best interests are at the heart of all you do, that things aren’t as bad as they seem, yet money is squandered, powers are abused and, alarmingly, the buck is passed. It didn’t take long before RIPA was used to spy on people putting their bins out – the right to peaceful protest having already been curtailed – rather than pursue the perceived terrorist threat. What alarms most, beyond the pervasive surveillance, is that no one appears to have taken any meaningful steps to prevent the proliferation of such abuse because “it’s for our safety.”

We are asked to trust, yet it only appears to work one way, for most honourable members would, it seems, rather their expenses were kept secret, despite it being money from the collective coffers. Would a transparent parliament really be such a terrible thing, are we to do as you say, rather than as you do, is blind obedience the ultimate goal? You may roll your eyes, but it no longer seems as ridiculous and unlikely as it once did. Press photographers are already targeted by the MET’s Forward Intelligence Team for doing their jobs, reporters and activists apparently monitored ‘for our safety’, and yet it seems to me a crude hypocrisy that while we are to accept endless intrusion into our lives for our own supposed benefit, suggestions have been put forward to restrict access to MP’s home addresses, curtail the right of anyone to take photographs of, or identify, members of the police and armed forces, and, you know, generally do as we’re told.

Are we to blithely accept the inevitability of governmental databases replete with personal details, DNA samples, mobile phone and internet logs, yet raise no query as to why we can’t expect the same of our own representatives? To not want to know why, against prevailing public opinion, we’re being shifted towards a society with surveillance every bit as insidious as that of communist China?

But of course, I’m only one man, and this letter will no doubt receive the usual bland assurances without being thought on, considered, or addressed in any way. I’m no longer as upset about that as I should be; I’ve grown accustomed to my role as a resource to be mined, monitored and manipulated for the sake of convenience by those who know better, irrespective of what’s rational or right.

There are so many question that I want to ask, so many answers that I would love to have, such as why anyone in Parliament is even considering a Stasi-esque Civilian Security Force, but the sad truth is that I know no one is listening, that some lackey will read this letter, reply, and that that will be the end of it. The sheer frustration of knowing how futile the act of writing this is is indescribable, not that that’ll make any difference to you.

There was a time when I believed in the ability of our parliamentary democracy to represent the people, when I believed that our leaders were in some way accountable for their actions, noble or otherwise, but no longer, not since our nation became a laughing stock. There was once a trust between the people and their parliament, however misplaced, and now it is now gone, more or less, and I would like to know why none of you seem care.

That, I suppose, is my question.

Regards,

nunoncastors

They work for you, you know

Here’s an interesting fact for you, you don’t need a TV license to watch programmes on the BBC’s iPlayer, Channel 4’s equivalent or, indeed, any pre-recorded broadcast on the internet.

This may not interest many of you unless, like me, you don’t watch that much television and tend to download the programmes that you do. That is to say, if you link your TV up to a computer and only watch pre-recorded programmes via the internet, as opposed to live TV, you don’t have to shell out £139.50 a year so the BBC can continue to make shit TV. You can, in fact, tell them to take their ‘reality TV shows’ and fuck right off.

It is worth noting however, that you can’t have Sky or Cable, or even have your TV and VCR tuned in to the same frequency as any station because they’ll do you on a technicality, I’d certainly recommend against having an aerial connected. If, however, you’re content to just use your TV for watching DVDs and pre-recorded content on the internet, you’re laughing.

No one likes having to pay a crap TV tax, and now you don’t have to. ^_^

Credit goes to Times Online for this little eye-opener.

Depression is something of a leveller, not the great leveller, that’s Death, but certainly a leveller of sorts. Those of us who have had the dubious honour of encountering the Black Dog, to greater and lesser extents, learn valuable lessons about ourselves and about those around us; often they aren’t lessons that you wanted to learn, but that doesn’t make them any less salient.

My lesson, learnt at length, is that I am in fact a very lucky person, with wonderful friends, and every reason not to sit at home brooding endlessly over the multifarious horrors of the world, there is certainly no need for knives or other sharp objects. The trick, having learnt this lesson, is not to forget it.

Sadly, this is easier said than done when you occasionally wake up and wish you hadn’t, or when a piece of music triggers a less than pleasant memory and you find yourself running through the list of everything you’ve ever done that you wish you hadn’t*; I don’t know if you’ve ever been caught in the grip of self-loathing, but it can be quite difficult to worm your way free once you’re ensnared.

Knowing, of course, is half the battle and, once you’re aware of what’s going on, you’ve at least half a chance of pulling through and getting on with things without wasting too much time mourning over how utterly shit life is and how worthless you feel. Depression, to a certain extent, can be bludgeoned to death by a stubborn refusal to accept it. I realise that sounds rather glib, but I’ve found that a snarling resentment for being made to feel shit by your own brain can be turned in your favour and, unlikely as it sounds, it’s often that same sheer bloody-minded distaste for my own self-loathing that drags me out of bed in a morning – Christ knows work isn’t enough to do it.

So I find myself wondering, how many other people find themselves dealing with the hangover effects of depression, the intermittent visitations of bleak moods and listless apathy that signify all is not well in the mind, and I wonder how they cope, what their mechanism is, and if it’s any better than the stubborn anger I use to fuel my resistance.

In other words, fuck you, Brain; we’re off to Good-time City.

*This only really applies if, like me, you catalogue every occasion where you’ve done something wrong, no matter how trivial, and use it as a club to beat yourself.

My beliefs are in constant flux, whatever seems right at any given moment suffices for me in terms of spiritual needs; I realise that this is something of a contradiction, beliefs are beliefs, and for many people they are their defining feature, but that’s always seemed a little strange to me, a little too… immutable. One of the beauties of the human mind is that it can be changed, does change, ghost in the machine* that it is, I’d rather not waste the ability.

Inevitably, of course, there are beliefs that linger on while others are dispensed with, whether they are firmly held or not is yet to be tested in any meaningful sense. The idea that everyone is entitled to life, for example, persists despite the surety that, should it come down to a case of life and death, I would probably do my utmost to ensure I was the one to retain their grip on living and breathing. It’s nice to think that there’s an inherent nobility to people, that we’ve moved away from the more primal parts of our nature, but realistically, most would cling to life by whatever means necessary and worry about the moral implications later. It’s a strange dichotomy, but there it is.

So I try to keep an open mind, aware that nothing in this life is fixed beyond change, and despite the knowledge that, essentially, it makes me a hypocrite on more than one count. Words are great an’ all, but for all I try to keep an open mind, to be amenable to new beliefs and points of view, there are always going to be, hidden away in dark little corners, surprising reactions and contradictory ideals. You never really know until you’re tested.

* Dualism.