Is it possible to stay angry and not stop living?

 life, politics, Portuguese coffee, professional politicos, summer holidays, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jul 302012
 

This happens to me every time I go on holiday.  I remember what it was like for me and my wife between 1999 and 2003.  We lived in Spain at the time.  Unemployed but working hard to become self-employed.  Bringing up our children in a beautiful city.  More or less, fairly enjoying every minute.

Every time I come back to this city, I remember how good life can be.  Is it selfish of me, then, to give in to the temptations of good food and sangria and proper coffee and sobaos and all those details of a life correctly lived?  Is it so very wrong for me to leave behind the horrors of Coalition Britain as I escape to a health-engendering climate?  Must I carry around with me wherever I go the terrors of injustice and miserable politics?

And if the answer is no to all these questions, at least whilst I find myself on holiday, what about when I return to my country of work?

What then?

How, in truth, and in the face of such horrible leaders, can I safely maintain my societal anger without forgetting how to fully live my life?

Yes.  There are many battles to be fought and I want to be involved in some of them.  But choosing which to fight and which to retire from seems almost impossible these days.  Our society is becoming evermore paranoid – everything is part of everything else.

Is that what defines a successful latterday politician?  He or she who is most capable of generating paranoia in their voters?

I don’t want to live a life where I must look over my shoulder.  Most people I meet aren’t like that either.  Why – then – can’t our public spaces mimic better our private experiences?  Why – in fact – can’t we learn to start living before we get angry?

Aren’t we simply giving in to the demands of these terrible politicos – as they define the tragedies that are our modern miserable perceptions?  For it is they who turn us into unhappy over-the-shoulder-glancing people.  It is they who turn us into the cattle which can be controlled with a simple whack of a stick.

We need to remain in touch with our anger and learn how to channel it assertively, that is true.  But not at the expense of loving our own right to be happy.

If all I need in order to feel at peace with my world is a week in Spain with real coffee and magdalenas, what right does society have to take this peace of mind away from me for the rest of a debilitating year?

What is this society we have constructed for ourselves?

What have we done to our right – to our ability – to simply be a human being?

Summertime means blog-free time (but not entirely)

 "Summertime", blogging, on a high, self-employment, summer holidays, teaching  No Responses »
Jul 202011
 

I’m off on my annual holiday to Spain. 

I was born half English and half Croatian.  I spent my early life in Chester.  I then spent sixteen years living, working, making mistakes and generally learning about the world in a country which has given me a wife and three beautiful children.  So how could I not revisit a place which has provided me with so much pleasure and friendship?

This summer I’ll have to spend a bit of my time working, though.  I’m looking to teach English and Spanish online in the autumn, as well as becoming more active in and recovering a practical engagement with publishing – something the Spanish are particularly good at and which I had much good fortune to learn from about a decade ago.  But writing is my very first love – so I’m sure once we get to Spain, those itchy itchy fingers will be looking to tap away at keyboards all over again.

A blog-free summer then, but not entirely.

Make the most of it whilst you can, dear readers.  There’s been a change in your profiles over the past couple of months.  The majority of you do still come from the US; but Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the Ukraine – as well as a smattering of interested souls from much farther afield – seem to be landing on these pages with increasing regularity.

I hope you find what you are looking for.  I find it gratifying that whilst I tend not to write for anyone in particular – that is to say, I break the rules of focus and niche which I suppose I really should not – even so there are people out there interested in reading what I say.

So I’d just like to put on the record, just so you know, that I’m very grateful for – and also kind of in awe of – your interest and support.  And I look forward to meeting up with you all again in about five to ten days’ time.

In the meantime, enjoy the music.  One of my favourite songs of summer …

Back in Blighty

 Blighty, consumer society, summer holidays, unclassifiable, vacations, work  No Responses »
Aug 222010
 

It’s a sunny morning.  A beautiful sunny morning in Chester.  The delights of snailband have been left behind and I’m currently accessing the Internet via broadband.  But other things, too, true delights at that, have also been left behind.

By birth, I am half Croatian, half English.  But I spent more than sixteen years of my life, formative years from a business perspective, living in Spain.  I don’t know if business in Britain is like business in Spain.  Most of my business in Britain has been on the receiving end of what people do to you as an employee of various large corporations.  I’ve been grateful for their sticking by me through thick and thin, but part of the thin was caused by how thick they quite often are.

So if I’m Croatian and English, I’m also Spanish.  Sixteen years – from the age of 26 to the age of a little over 42 – provided me with a language, a register and a set of ways of dealing with people that have not exactly prepared me for my return to old Blighty.

Every year I come back from our summer holidays it gets worse and worse.  Out there, it’s like I’m drunk all the time.  No.  I assure you it’s not because I am.  A glass here and there of sangría means little.  Most of the time it’s gaseosa and tónica I drink.

Rather, it’s the light, the sense of wellbeing, the city I walk through and know so well, the sense of liberty that comes from being on holiday.  As I discovered whilst online one day this summer, the word “vacation” apparently comes from the Italian and means “freedom”.  This is a particularly apposite truth, if – indeed – it is so.

That’s what makes me feel so light-headed, so easily happy and at peace with my surroundings.

Creative work, that kind of work which mirrors the sense of liberty snatched at so shortly in periods such as these, is our natural state as human beings.  Repetitive work, that kind of work which turns us into yet another part of this production line or that, is most certainly not.

On holiday, that is when we realise this.

Everything else – from the consumer society in general to the damned devices which occupy so much of our free time – is just there to distract us from such thoughts.

And such realisations.

Back to Blighty.

Now you may understand why being in Blighty, my country of birth, means what it means to me.  And perhaps, in that understanding, you can begin to excuse and pardon me for feeling as I do.

Welcome back.

Sum Tam, Ten Point Ten Euros And A Fuzzier Intelligence (Please Sir)

 A Very Public Sociologist, civilisation, fuzzy intelligence, Gramsci, identity cards, on a high, Spain, Sum Tam, summer holidays  No Responses »
Aug 162010
 

Sum Tam.  Well.  We know what they meant to say.  It’s like the Spanish word “footing”, which – for the Spanish – quite logically means “jogging”.  So logically that they often believe it’s actually an English word.

Rather than feeling bemused at such a curious case of linguistic invention, I would, in fact, prefer to raise a toast to a gloriously fuzzier intelligence.

We were up early this morning.  7 o’clock, which for a late summer holiday day reminds unhappily of workday alarm calls.  My wife had to renew her identity card.  It took just under twenty-five minutes from giving over the photos to getting the brand new card.  What’s more, it comes with a chip which allows one to acquire an online identity and purchase more securely.  So how much did it cost?  Just €10.10 – that is to say, at current exchange rates, somewhat under a tenner.

Why can’t we do that then?  Identity cards, well conceived, resolve so many practical issues: in an age where more and more of our utility bills are paperless and stored exclusively online, a reliable alternative to address and identity verification is sorely becoming needed.

A tenner is not a tax on citizenship.  New Labour’s proposals most certainly were.

So is Spain richer than Britain, better at some things we refuse to improve on?  I would say yes.  Richer in certain behaviours, even if not in a monetary sense.  Richer in accepting the moral and emotional right of human beings to exhibit themselves in public as such and in such terms.  And so I find myself asking for a fuzzier intelligence to control, guard and govern us: an intelligence which acts with humanity, not overbearing precision.  An intelligence which looks to budget for mistake rather than save every last penny.  An intelligence which is made in our own image rather than an intelligence which expects and even forces us to kowtow.

Kowtowing is not a natural state of mind for human beings.  Societies should not be built on the back of such expectations.

Having been outside the United Kingdom for four weeks now, I have slowly begun to reacquaint myself with what living in Spain used to mean for me. Many frustrations, yes.  Many inefficiencies, of course.  Much incompetence, naturally.  But, above all, above all these dissatisfactions that most Spanish people will recognise and accept as part and parcel of living in this often misunderstood country, there is the grand happiness that is the freely-given salutation on crossing the path of another; the emotionally expressed expletives on disagreeing furiously with a neighbour; the beauty of and widely-shared pride at winning well on the world stage; the honest and sincere sense of disgrace at winning poorly (for no Spaniard is satisfied to win at all costs); the incontrovertible prevalence of children in public spaces; and the right all people, whether big or small, have to be both seen and heard.

These are all examples of that fuzzier intelligence I mention earlier, an intelligence that I am more and more convinced we in the UK need to acquire ourselves.  For if there is one thing I understand now, well into middle age as I am, it is that the better a country functions, the sadder its people get.

Targets and objectives and performance management do not a happier population make, even as they allow countries on their development curve to show statistical improvements in key indicators which do – in some way – make for a better distribution of certain kinds of wealth.

What I do feel most fervently is that if we truly believe in the fullness of meaning that the word “civilisation” should represent, and at the same time find that we must in some way resign ourselves to forming part of a wealth-generating machine of some kind, then we must also attend to the emotional needs which arise around and out of our participation in such processes.

If we do not proceed thus in the future, everything else will be a lie of monumental proportions, designed entirely to confuse, deceive and deny.
____________________

Further reading: A Very Public Sociologist on Gramsci and the path to power

That hurly-burly of whirring distractions (or summer reflections on being a prisoner of my time)

 broadband, consumer society, political innovation, snailband, summer holidays, unclassifiable  1 Response »
Aug 032010
 

Every summer is the same.  I am awarded the time to retire to a previous life with people I love – and thus remember what is important.

It seems, therefore, that the intention and purpose of modern consumer societies is to create a hurly-burly of whirring distractions that serve only to make us forget that importance.

This is not a particularly new observation.  It is simply one I am obliged to re-encounter every year.  Summer holidays are where humankind can ease itself, if it so chooses those sorts of holidays which allow such a movement, towards a clearer understanding of itself and of its surroundings.

If the holidays in question do not involve a furious replication of the other eleven months of the year, then some self-knowledge will result.

If we choose to replicate, we can only gain in anxious pursuit of those distractions I mentioned earlier.

I read today in the Telegraph that digital Britain is falling vertiginously behind many of its competitors.  I can vouch for the appalling quality of my broadband connection – but, on the other hand, it is free.  Meanwhile, in my summer playground of truth, snailband is all that technology can offer me.  A snailband which costs €24 a month to contract.  A snailband which takes a week to get sorted, as call-centre operators show their ignorance of the difference between narrow- and broadband.  But then why should they know any better?  They’ve been trained to sell ADSL, not sort out customer problems.

But what am I doing, thinking of such subjects?  You might well fairly ask.  Am I not recovering a sense of sincerity and belief in the true things this existence offers us?  Is this not what I should focus my wayward attention on?

Well, indeed.

I am I suppose a prisoner of my time.

Although I like to think that summer gives me the opportunity to break free, in reality I am tied to my other work-plagued experiences by a rubber band that only ever threatens to break.

In the end, it does not break but, rather, instead, in a nasty namesake sort of way, cruelly brakes my desire to proceed.  In reality, it is not snailband I am suffering from but that rubber band I mention above; that rubber band which makes me believe for a short time that I can touch and feel what is real – only to shrewishly whisk away from me at the very last moment, in a sudden dervish-like rushing of impotence-forming omniscience, all continuing opportunity to do something truly different.

The real sadness of life is to be found in that suddenly unbound self-knowledge which – at the very same time and for so many reasons – cannot be applied.

If I were ever to believe in any political tract, it would be that which promised fulsomely to empower the ordinary man and woman in their ordinary revelations.

At my age, I realise I now want the common sense of political genteelness to rule my country.

Can you blame me?

The long and short of a Volkswagen Dormobile

 childhood, on a high, summer holidays, unclassifiable, Volkswagen Dormobile  2 Responses »
Mar 312010
 

One of the most positive memories I have of my childhood is waking up in the morning, feeling the condensation on the walls and smelling the smell of bacon grill on the mini gas cooker that normally sat, when not in use, neatly folded away under the front passenger seat.

I remember and hold this thought dearly.

I am, of course, talking about a Volkswagen Dormobile.  (I do so love that logo.)

When I was little, my mother and father spent most of their money on driving across Europe every other summer or so, for summer holidays we generally enjoyed in my mother’s homeland of Croatia.  In 1972 they bought this beautiful van, which – thirty-eight amazing years later – Stan, my brother, is most adroitly repairing.

I was reminded of this van as I stumbled across this Camperfest website today, advertising the aforesaid event to be held in Chester this Easter weekend.  Lovely reminder of a time that has gone all too quickly.

My dream?  To buy one of these.  Now that really would be something, wouldn’t it?  No air-cooled engine to nurse, mind you.  But a lovely piece of industrial art all the same.