Stoned Again at Stanton Drew

An inevitably wet UK bank holiday curtailed an expedition to take a look at the Maes Knoll hill and then the stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset earlier this week.  My fellow traveller and I only got to look at two out of the three circles, and missed the ‘Cove’ and the ‘Quoit’ entirely.  But hey, we’d already got soaked going up to the Knoll and we had to make a dash for the church porch to shelter from a further torrential downpour.  We hadn’t anticipated the need for total waterproofing.  Smartphone predictions let us down.  Another such expedition is called for, as and when.

So this is no neo-antiquarian well-informed write-up of serious research, nosirree.  This is a bit more personal.  I’m trying to figure out what it is that attracts me to these sites, these relics, these objects…  Am I doing it because that’s what people do?  People of certain types that is, whether Glasto-revering hippies old and young or strictly academic archaeological authorities or those who straddle the divide or just plain sightseers…  I can identify to some extent with any of them.  Am I romancing?  Am I looking for clues in the ever-elusive quest to figure out why us human beings do the things we do?  Is it some kind of compulsion to which I’ve succumbed over the years?

I guess it started for me with Stonehenge.  I still have, somewhere amongst my random archives, a 60s guide book or leaflet.  School trip or family outing, I don’t remember but - as in those days you could - I walked among those megaliths and felt something that stayed with me.  Awe?  Excitement? A sense of the mystery of pre-history – those stories that we can only speculate upon, based on fragmentary clues with multiple possible interpretations?  Some kind of link, in the presence of these objects, with ancestors who placed them in such locations?  A sense of the sheer sweat and blood involved, and the conceptual sophistication of their construction?  Not only that but the realisation that these things were built to last.  Planned obsolescence, the curse of modern times, was not part of their makers’ thinking (an observation I must accredit to my partner, by the way).

So there were values in operation here.  Were they values that I might share?  Who knows?  There are only these elusive clues.  Do they have anything in common with that which has been built within times of historical record in the way of locations for divine contemplation – cathedrals, monasteries, temples and the like?  It seems hard to deny this possibility.  Yet archaeologists joke amongst themselves that ‘ritual significance’ is a catch-all term for ‘we’re not quite sure’.

In my youth, enthralled by psychedelia, I was prepared to buy into the then current speculations about leys (or ‘ley-lines’ as I now gather we mistakenly called them) as energy channels, the earth’s meridians.  I can remember a visit to Avebury, some time in the 70s, and touching the stones there, ready to believe that something vaguely mystical would seep into my consciousness and bring me to enlightenment.  Didn’t work, I’m sorry to say.  Enlightenment requires a bit more effort than stone stroking.

With age, I read more, spoke with enthusiasts for whom a somewhat nuanced view became the norm.  And still I sought the stones.  The Rollrights, the burial chambers and megaliths and smaller circles that abound in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and – not so long ago – my first visit to Long Meg and her Daughters up near Penrith.  The folkloric tales that abound around these sites are always fun – people turned to stone for various misdemeanours or whatever, the devil hurling boulders from nearby hills.  They wind their way into my imagination and I daydream of these stones coming to life and animation when no one save the dreamer is looking.  I’m not sure Mike Parker Pearson would approve, but even he must have his more whimsical moments.

Up at the Long Meg site I tried to channel whatever it was that brought me there.  I wrote a poem that touched on some of the questions I’ve listed here.  It raised the concept that even the most solid of rock, when looked at in the longest of terms where tectonic plates cause continents to shift and reshape, is mutable.  As it will be too in about six billion years, when the sun becomes a ‘subgiant’, doubling in size.  In another couple of billion, it is estimated, our planet will melt into it.  In this light, there’s a poetic resonance I find to those tales of transformation.

No answers then, just fascination.  And the stones themselves – the sheer beauty in their shapes and surfaces.  At Stanton Drew, according to the useful write up on the stone-circles.org.uk website, the stones are a mix of limestone, sandstone and breccia – a sort of conglomerate.  They are intricately weathered, often pock-marked by erosion, and then – like any rock surface – coloured and patterned by lichens, mosses and other small growing things that lodge in cracks or on ledges.  My eye-to-brain channels are in love with the endless abstractions thus created.  Nature has been doing Jackson Pollock just about since the world began.

And a final thought.  If ever there was room for wilful misunderstandings, surely these are the places.  Archaeology constantly refines its comprehension with new equipment, new ideas and interpretations – but mostly, I think, acknowledges that there will never be enough information to give a definitive interpretation.  There will always be room for wedding guests or knight-errants turned to stone and for Satan lobbing his lumps of rock.

So maybe I’ve answered my question.  But as readers of this blog may have gathered by now, my place is permanently set amongst the bewildered, so I can never quite be sure…

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If you want to know more about the middle path approach of neo-antiquarianism, check out www.northernearth.co.uk/ and maybe take out a sub.  With regard to Stonehenge and the apparently
inadequate proposal to tunnel the A303 below it you might want to take a look at www.stonehengealliance.
org.uk where there's a petition you can sign if it's a concern of yours.

Comedy and Politics

I should think most of you have heard it by now, the little joke about what President Trump’s bodyguards would have to shout if he came under fire.  Yes, of course you have.  “Donald!  Duck!”  It’s actually one of those ones where, if you give it some thought, you realise they probably wouldn’t shout that at all.  It would be more like: “Lower yourself, Mr President!”  Or perhaps, given the reportedly regal nature of his audiences with the media of late, “Get down, your highness.”

But of course, Donald doesn’t duck.  He would not so much as consider lowering himself.  He’s so high he can’t get down.  And if he remains standing, bold and pugnacious, and there’s an accurate shot, perhaps his last words will be: “You’re fired!”

So there we are, at this point the joke backfires completely.

As probably - if some of the complaints I’ve heard from some comedians are to be accepted - do most jokes about the current incumbent.  “You can’t make it up,” they say.  “Reality outstrips you every time.”  Which feels about right – many of the darkest, funniest routines about Trump seem merely to involve straight description of the activities and pronouncements of the president and his cohorts.  A bit of canned laughter can be added to the soundtrack to keep us chuckling - if, at any point, we forget to think it’s funny.

I love a bit of satirical comedy as much as the next vaguely leftie old hippie, but here’s the thing.  Sometimes when I appreciate the commentary it’s making, I find myself thinking: ‘These men and women are so wise, thoughtful and observant.  They make their observations with insight, their deductions hold logic.  Why can’t they run the country instead of…?’ (conclude with an expletive of your own choice concerning politicians).  And it seems to me just about credible that they could do a better job.  And of course the media coverage would be lively and fun.  It would boost public interest no end.  In the UK we could have Jeremy Hardy and Alexi Sayle as the Corbyn and McDonnell of the labour party; Stephen Fry heading the lib dems and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown helming what’s left of UKIP into oblivion.  Though for some reason I find myself struggling to think who might do for the conservatives.  Jim Davidson?

In fact it probably wouldn’t work out.  I’ve been a great admirer of Eddie Izzard for many years (even if I don’t always get his space age approach to cross dressing) and have observed with some interest his efforts to get involved with political activism on behalf of the labour party and the ‘remain’ campaign during the run up to last year’s referendum.  But he doesn’t appear to have distinguished himself on this front or to have added a great deal of worth to the debate as yet.  Maybe the crossover requires a character with a bit more grit.  Mark Thomas springs to mind.  Or perhaps (and it has occurred to me that I’ve so far failed to include any female comedians) Josie Long.

I guess my conclusion is that it’s obviously one thing to diss the politicians, quite another to replace them.  It isn’t that difficult to take the piss or point out the flaws, especially if you ignore the fact that not all politicians are 100% venally motivated.  Pockets of integrity do crop up amongst them and sometimes even endure – providing they don’t get assassinated, as one of ours did last June.  The simple logic of my initial thought dissolves into the complexity of the world as we know it.

It helps to have a laugh, as one despairing friend of mine remarked after I’d re-posted a video clip of Mark Steele doing one of his affably scathing rants about Teresa May’s election u-turn on my Facebook page.  That inane joke around Trump’s first name with which I began this piece certainly made me laugh the first time I heard it.  And there’s not much that causes me to laugh about DT, or the power structure that now finds it advantageous to have him presiding.

Laughter does put it into a different perspective, presents another facet of reality in which foibles are made transparent.  I’m not talking about caricature so much here, which often slips too easily into insult alone.  It’s the observational comedy that works best for me, the stuff that points out the inconsistencies, contradictions, self-interest and deceits that lie behind the pompous facades.  Comedians can do that pretty well, even if they’d be no better at running human affairs than anyone else.

Of course, ‘Donald!  Duck!’ doesn’t fit into that category.  That’s just silly.

But then, I think there’s room for a bit of silliness as well.

Averse to verse? Then look elsewhere!

My Opposable Thumb

You ask what does my thumb oppose?

A set of fingers, I suppose.

It’s likely that I’d let things slip,

if I failed to get a grip.

If this digit was a critic,

would it tend to be arthritic?

If I took a strong position,

would it rise in opposition?

And should I need to offer thanks,

would it wag a stern phalanx?

Take me to task by hitching lifts,

instead of buying thank-you gifts?

Though there’s no reason why it ought

to be equipped with conscious thought,

it’s still my opposable thumb –

and I suspect it just plays dumb.

_____________

My Hand-Me-Down Phone

The things are everywhere.  On the streets people are talking into them.  On the train, they’re watching movies or tapping messages on finger sensing screens.  At any time of day they’re pulling them out of pockets, bags or those whaddyacallit slipcases they keep them in to see if there are any incoming messages.  If they lack information of any kind, they’re there for googling.  If they want to know the weather, the screen throws up cloud, sun and raindrop icons to guide them through the remaining hours of the day.  If they want to know where on earth they actually are, the things can tell them with seeming pinpoint accuracy.  If they want to know how something’s done, the things have videos to show them.

I’ve tried to keep up with technology.  I went from an Amstrad to a PC with all of a massive two gigabytes of hard drive memory, to the laptops I use today with their squidgywiggabytes and more.  But somewhere in the last decade or so I found I’d stopped being an up-to-date sort of guy.

At first I was up for resisting them altogether.  I didn’t need them.  Good grief, I’d lived for a full fifty years without them and I was still here to tell the tale.  Why should the future be any different?

The first crack in my defences was driving.  I have next to no idea what happens under the bonnet of my car and if it goes wrong, the job goes to a rescue service.  Some bugger or other pointed out to me that phone boxes are getting pretty thin on the ground these days, and if I had a phone with me in the car…

Damn!  I could not deny the logic.  I think my younger sister had something to do with that.  She’d ‘updated’ and had an old one I could have.  It was a clunky great thing compared to what’s around today and when you charged up the battery it would last up to a good… ooh… ten minutes or so.  But fine.  I could keep it in the car, switched off.  Just use it in dire need.  I didn’t want to go a step further.  I could just about handle it.

It got broken.  I forget how.  By then my sister had got her first smartphone and was cultivating a taste for it.  The road of temptation for her began with the inbuilt solitaire game.  Now she plays Scrabble on it with people from the USA.  And checks for messages, and the weather, and…  Yes.  She’s hooked.

So I got my next hand-me-down.  A Nokia something something something, I believe it’s called.  Somehow against my better judgement I was forced to learn to text message on it, which I still do clumsily and slowly with a lot of cursing.  By day, I use it to make phonecalls, because somewhere along the line I got on a ‘contract’ which I have no idea how to get out of, and my landline costs money if used before 7pm on weekdays.

But that’s it.  I’ve reached my limit.  I don’t want to tap screens with greasy fingermarks.  I don’t want to make things get bigger and smaller by sweeping with my fingertips.  I just…  I just don’t.

One thing haunts me.  What will I do when my Nokia something something something finally gives up the ghost?  Will my sister have one of those things ready and waiting for me, because she’s updated to a device on which she can play Hyper-Scrabble with creatures from Proxima Centauri?

Oh, good grief…  Will I finally have to crawl, protesting grouchily all the way, into the twenty first century?


Okay, behind all this 'grumpy old man' foolery there's a serious point to be made on this topic, which returned to my attention after reading a review in New Scientist magazine of a film shown at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London.  'Complicit', the film, documents the suffering of Chinese workers in the factories where smartphones are manufactured.  They are exposed to toxic chemicals on the production line, chiefly benzene and n-hexane, which give rise to leukemia, nerve damage and paralysis.  In addition, anyone making a protest is subject to often brutal repression.  Although Apple have, since 2014, banned benzene and n-hexane in final assembly manufacturing processes, these are by no means the only unethical aspects of most smartphone production.  Should I ever find myself having finally to 'update' to one of these devices I would go to a company known as Fairphone (https://shop.fairphone.com/en/) which appears to be bringing the principles of fair trade to smartphone production, along with considerations around re-use and repair issues.  So they probably deserve this plug.
                

Wilful Misunderstandings - One Year On

‘Wilful Misunderstandings’, my collection of short stories was published a year ago more or less to the day.  Regular readers of this blog will know that hard sell is something I find rather difficult to take on seriously, which may have proved to my detriment sales-wise.  Nevertheless on the whole I prefer to live with myself as I am, rather than aspire to any kind of slickness.  Sales, I tell myself, are not a reflection of quality, and it’s quality that jolly well counts.

Besides, ask any writer who isn’t in a position in which s/he doesn’t have to self promote, and you’re likely to hear a similar story.  We’re mainly into knocking the stuff up, not pushing it through people’s letterbox slots. Hence the fact that I generally prefer to fill this blog with anything that it crosses my mind to write about, rather than the book it was set up to promote.  However, now and again, bullets have to be bitten.

So here we go.

Accolades (not the kind you drink):

“Richard Foreman’s Wilful Misunderstandings comprises thirty four stories based around the twist or misunderstanding of an English word or phrase.  They are utterly beguiling and often unsettling, combining quirky humour and philosophical thoughts within slightly off-centre fictional worlds.  The stories veer between fantasy and surrealism yet somehow hold a balance of credibility that make them disturbing.  This variant Oulipo fiction with added humour is simply a tour de force of storytelling.”  David Caddy, editor Tears in the Fence magazine, issue 65, spring 2017.

“Within five minutes of picking the book up and reading it for the first time I was immediately entranced. These stories are a delight, and I have spent much of the ‘Festive Season’ proselytising about Foreman to anyone who would listen. I have found myself using the words ‘delight’ and ‘delightful’ far more often than I would have wanted to, but I truly cannot think of a better adjective. My life has been enriched for having read these stories. I cannot wait for the next volume.” Jonathan Downes, editor Gonzo Weekly magazine, issue 215/6, January 2017..

“Expect the unexpected while reading Wilful Misunderstandings.  The oddball characters and their quirky concerns will attract your attention. Richard Foreman demonstrates how deep his imagination is, and how the simplest of ideas can make interesting prose. He writes fluently, wittily, and his stories tend to approach the dark side in a humorous way.”  Michelle Stanley, Readers’ Favorite website.

And from Amazon reviews and some reader correspondence:

“Stories like dreams half remembered, tapping into a seam (or seeming) of the unconscious mind.”

“I love the feeling of shifting, malleable realities.  It is so much fun and encourages thinking in new ways about the world.”

“The book is bloody brilliant. I read it in nearly one sitting. It totally messed with my head.”

“This is a collection to reread, a book to tickle and amaze, to ruffle and amuse and sometimes to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.”

“Unafraid to tread off the beaten track into vivid, unsettling worlds where nothing can be taken for granted.  Where anything can happen.”

There, now that wasn’t too painful, I guess, being a simple copy and paste operation.  So you’re reading this and you still haven’t bought yourself a copy?  You can get it from online retailers and even order it through bookshops, but by far the best way is through Lepus books.  Just go to

http://lepusbooks.co.uk/wilful-misunderstandings/

skip the blurb because you’ll have already read most of it here, click on the relevant payment buttons and you’ll get a pristine copy, lovingly signed by me (ask if you want a message).  And I’ll get to use up some of the padded envelopes I bought in specially.  Win-win or what?

Neil Young's jeans.

It all started with my first glimpse of the back cover of Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush’ album.  Below the track titles and credits, the photo showed the arse of Neil’s denim jeans, resplendent with patches – paisley and otherwise patterned and textured.  To my eyes now, they look machine stitched, but at the time I assumed they were rather neatly hand stitched.  They get a credit on the cover – they were the work of Young’s then-wife Susan.  You get a shot of a youthful Neil on the inside gatefold.  He’s lounging on a leather sofa with a lot of guitars around him and he’s wearing the same jeans.  You can see more patching on the upper legs and knees.  He'd either been wearing them for some years until the material had worn to fraying holes, or Susan just figured the jeans would look good with all those patches.  It’s hard to tell how worn the jeans were from the cover shots.  He was doing quite well for himself by the time that record came out.  I guess he could have afforded a new pair of jeans if he’d wanted.  But at that time, patching your jeans was considered pretty cool.  Neil certainly looks that way in the gatefold – serious, thoughtful… and cool in his patched jeans.

So what started for me was the idea that it would be a really good thing to have my jeans covered in patches like Neil’s.  Back in 1970, feminism hadn’t really connected that properly for me, so my first thought was that I would have to find a woman who was willing to do the job for me.  I didn’t have any money to pay for the work, so they’d have to do it out of love for me – like Susan must have done for Neil, until she divorced him after two years of marriage.  Unsurprisingly, I didn’t manage to find a woman who was willing to patch my jeans for me out of love, so in the end I thought I’d better learn to do it myself.

Because I was a boy, I never got a chance to do needlework at school.  I had to do metalwork instead, and I don’t know why because metalwork has never been the slightest use to me in all the years I’ve lived since then.  And because I was a boy my mum didn’t think it would be appropriate to show me how to do needlework, because she probably thought that sooner or later I would marry a woman.  And then it would be her job to do any needlework I needed doing out of love for me.  So I got a woman who was a friend of mine to show me how to stitch on a patch, and I got a sewing needle, and some thread, and some random scraps of patterned coloured materials, and I started sewing my own patches on my own jeans.

It was easier to sew on patches by hand than I thought it would be, except where you had to sew through a seam and it was really hard to push the needle through all those tight layers of denim.  Mostly, I discovered that I quite enjoyed it.  The bit where you have to pin the patch on before you start sewing was kind of a drag, but once you had thread on your needle and you were pushing it through and pulling it out over and over again, that part was kind of soothing.  You could listen to music or watch TV even, and that repetitive action – in and out, pull it tight, in and out – just had its own pleasant flow.  And when you were done, got right the way round to the point where you started and tied the end in a knot so the thread didn’t start to work its way out of the material, well then you had a fine patch to show for all that time and energy.

And after a few years of wearing holes in my jeans and sewing on those multi coloured, patterned patches over those holes, I had one or two pairs of jeans that were starting to look just like Neil’s did on the cover of ‘After the Goldrush’.  Whenever I saw pictures of him or saw him on TV, I kept watching out for those jeans.  Had he got any more patches sewed on as more bits of the original denim carried on wearing away like they do?  But I never saw those jeans again.  In fact, after that I never saw Neil Young wearing patched jeans at all.  Not ever.  Maybe it was the trauma of being divorced by Susan after just two years of marriage, but he seemed to go right off wearing patched jeans altogether.

Actually, what it was really was something I hadn’t taken into account.  Fashion.  I thought that, once we’d got away from our parents and stopped wearing the kinds of clothes that they thought we ought to wear, we’d find the kind of clothes we decided we actually liked and carry on wearing them for the rest of our lives.  And when they started to get a bit worn, we’d repair them as best we could for as long as we could, and when they were really shabby we’d just wear them for doing messy jobs in ‘til they fell apart and we used them for rags.  How wrong I was!  I hadn’t taken fashion into account at all.

In fact, by the end of the 70s, people were actually buying new pairs of trousers that were ready ripped at the knees.  And they wouldn’t have even dreamed of putting patches over those rips, though sometimes I remember they did sort of join them together with safety pins.  I don’t think Neil Young ever did that, though.  Not even when he wrote that song that mentioned Johnny Rotten.

But fashion can get under your skin.  It can change your perception.  I hadn’t taken that into account either.  By about 1975, even I was starting to think my multicoloured patched jeans looked a bit silly.  Intrinsically, they probably didn’t at all, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling.  The trouble was, I still didn’t want to throw away a pair of jeans just because of a little bit of wear and tear.  I liked my jeans.  They were friends.  So I started doing my patches with just other pieces of blue denim, from even older pairs that had worn out or that I’d grown out of.  With all the different tones of blue and levels of fading, that looked kind of good - and it didn’t look silly at all to me.  It still doesn’t, and I still do it.  So it really doesn’t matter these days whether I see Neil Young wearing patched jeans or not.  Though I’m quite glad he still sometimes wears those kind of checked shirts he’s always worn.  That shows some sort of integrity.

As for me, when I go out wearing my patched jeans, I do sometimes feel a bit self-conscious.  It would help to see at least one or two other people doing the same.  But there we are.  I don’t intend to stop.  And if ever it does become fashionable again to patch your own jeans, I shall be so far ahead of the pack, I will be feted as a fashion icon.  Everything comes around.  All I have to do is to live that long.

Thoughts on 'I, Daniel Blake' pt2 - 'Two Days, One Night.'

Last time I wrote about my personal response to Ken Loach’s latest film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, welcoming the way it highlights in detail the pernicious modifications that have accumulated within the UK benefits system in recent years, but critical of its ‘tick box’ approach to storytelling.  

The film I’d like to describe now is one that, I felt, told a gripping story (managing to do so without resorting to car chases, explosions etc.) at the same time as it exposed the plight of low waged workers within the corporate system we have built around ourselves.  It was made in Belgium, released in 2014 and its English title is ‘Two Days, One Night’.

The story concerns a factory worker, Sandra, who returns to work after taking time off for depression, only to find that her bosses have decided that, in a period of austerity, they can get by with one less worker.  She is to be made redundant unless a majority of her co-workers vote to keep her on.  But if this is what they decide, they each have to sacrifice a 1,000 Euro bonus.

It’s a small factory, manufacturing solar panels, with a work force of 16 men and women.  A show of hands vote has gone against Sandra, but she persuades her employers that there has been a degree of intimidation on the part of a supervisor who is determined to get rid of her and secure the bonuses.  They agree to a secret ballot and she finds herself with a single weekend to persuade enough of her colleagues to support her, so the vote will go in her favour and enable her to retain her livelihood.

It’s a gruelling challenge, involving bus journeys, hours of foot slogging, searching for addresses, fruitless doorbell ringing, constant rehearsal/modification of the arguments she will use when she does get face to face with one of the 13 people she hopes to speak to.  Some of the confrontations are heartbreaking – they are all people for whom the 1,000 Euros could make a positive difference in their lives, or in some cases who are under family pressures to bring home that additional money.  Sandra herself understands all too well the difficult choice she is asking each of them to make.  And remember, her own mental balance is still frail.  The actress who plays the role, Marion Cotillard, is superb.  We are made to feel the strength of her determination; we are touched by her many moments of weariness and despair; we share her occasional moments of encouragement when someone agrees to vote in her favour.

The suspense builds as the weekend winds to a close, Monday morning and the secret ballot arrive.  It is not clear how the vote will go.  The story’s end can be found online, but I’m not going to put a spoiler here.  Suffice to say that a final twist presents Sandra herself with an acutely difficult moral choice.  That she makes it with clarity and compassion is a testament to the way in which her own strength of character has been developed by her efforts.

Okay, this film has a somewhat different brief to ‘I, Daniel Blake’.  But there are a good many parallels.  Both films highlight, as the gap continues to widen between rich and poor, the unnecessary and humiliating shit the latter have to face just in order to live.  Both focus on the harsh, soulless environments in which working class people now find themselves more often than not living.  Both tell of a possibly hopeless quest for some sort of justice in the face of a profoundly unjust system.  Where ‘Two Days, One Night’ scores is in making out of this kind of material a story that cannot fail to affect anyone of a reasonably sensitive disposition.  It’s a film that makes you ask questions and think, rather than to nod along numbly and say: ‘Oh yes, isn’t that terrible?’

It’s been said to me that in this particular slough of the twenty first century, the oppressed lack articulate voices to speak in their favour.  This may well be true and the likes of Ken Loach are to be treasured for speaking up and for going resolutely against the grain.  But in terms of doing this effectively, in a way that might just bring the situation home to those who prefer to think otherwise, I think Ken may have missed a trick.  One that the Dardenne brothers (directors and screenplay writers of TDON) managed to achieve compellingly.