What if the next place is a surprise?

In the film Meet Joe Black (1998), Death (played by Brad Pitt) decides that he’d like to take a holiday (and be shown around by Anthony Hopkins).
The transition out of life is described at one point as moving on to “the next place”. That’s in a conversation between Brad Pitt’s character and an elderly hospital patient (played by — enough with the brackets!) played by Lois Kelly-Miller.
I enjoyed watching Meet Joe Black years ago, and the DVD’s on my shelf somewhere. Might watch it again.
[Aside: interesting where the pauses come in writing. I’ve just hovered between “my” shelf, “a” shelf, “my bookshelf” and “one of my bookshelves” when in fact I know that DVD’s on the shelf half-way up the stairs.]
But what was front-and-centre in my mind when --
[Sorry to interrupt; just gone and counted them — on one of the four shelves half-way up the stairs.]
— what was front-and-centre in my mind when I woke up this morning was the phrase “the next place”. I can’t tell you very much about the dream that put it there, but I lay --
[Had to check. Middle of the bottom shelf. Sorry!]
— I lay in bed thinking: wouldn’t it be a funny story if the next place wasn’t the one we were expecting?
[Only half-awake, and I’m already telling myself a story. I feel good about that. I did have to grab my phone because I couldn’t remember the name of that film with Brad Pitt — but that doesn’t mean anything.]
I wasn’t thinking “the next place” in --
[At my age, memory lapses are to be expected. I’m holding up five fingers as I type this and the president’s name is Ronald Reagan. I’m fine I tell you!]
I wasn’t thinking “the next place” in an Up or Down sense — no, that wouldn’t be funny — but what if the next place was actually Valhalla and not, I don’t know, one of those New Yorker cartoons in which two people stand on a cloud holding harps?
Or maybe there’s a ferryboat and I can either produce a coin to pay for my crossing or go back and haunt people?
Now, there’s a story.
What does the ghost want? The ghost wants your spare change.
Never mind the dream; I’m enjoying being awake.

These are desperate moves.

Rishi Sunak wants us to have oil, so he’s granting hundreds of new oil licences for the North Sea. He’s still on target to reach net zero, he tells us, by a target date set so far into the future that he can’t be proved wrong.

He’s on the side of motorists, he says, so he’s ordered a review of traffic-management schemes with a view to letting cars go faster through residential areas. Sorry – to limit councils’ ability to impose 20mph speed limits. Letting cars maintain their speed…

He’s taking control of immigration, which means targeting refugees desperate enough to risk crossing the Channel in small boats. He actually listed “small boats” as one of his priorities for 2023.

With a General Election coming up, he’s doing what he thinks we want. But who does he think we are?

Today's my day for coming back and posting on my dear old legacy blog. I write at medium.com now, but I do sometimes come back and revisit themes here.
    But - find me there.
    Medium.com has an easy GUI - it's a white sheet of 'paper' with a cursor and the words 'Tell your story' in a percentage of black. And there's an autosave that hasn't let me down so far.
    So here's another example of what you'll find if you look for me there.
    And here are some pictures of book covers.
    Because it seems silly not to, I've searched each title and put a link on each of the pictures.
    But that's just a formality, really - a nod to the e-world we live in.
    If you're interested in any of my books (thank you), you'll find them wherever you look for books.

Ignore the date on this post. You've found me at William Essex dot com, and here's a book cover to celebrate. Find Ten Steps to a Bedtime Story wherever you look for books. Scroll down for more.

What's it like, being kissed by a frog? Why can't little princesses do their own laundry?
     The essential guide to DIY bedtime storytelling answers all your questions and several you didn't ask about getting young children to sleep.

Sunday’s Facebook post.

“I'm beginning to think climate change might be a problem. After all, every media outlet I know has been banging on about it incessantly for as long as I can remember (given the state of my attention span), and the message is always the same: climate change is a problem. I think they might be trying to tell me something. But what to do about it? I know! Let's burn off some aviation fuel by flying the usual politicians to a city in Scotland and asking them to agree that climate change is a problem. That should fix it!”

Heard the news at 11am this morning. Apparently, there are long queues to get into COP26 for the first day’s business. Reminded me of Sibos back in the day: never plan anything for the first hour of the first day of a big conference.

Just ever so slightly interesting (to me, anyway) that Laura Kuennsberg was telling Woman’s Hour (actually, at 10.55-ish) that COP26 would be significant even if it failed, and that agreements already reached would not be invalidated by a failure at COP26. I had been wondering how they (the ministerial ‘they’, not the BBC ‘they’) would spin it as a success despite the absence of Russia and China – but hey, I’m not any more.
Here’s what I think will happen.

Today’s media-political complex will continue as before. We will save the world every few years, by making speeches at conferences and setting climate-change targets, and the weather will go on getting weirder. We will be lulled into a new normal incrementally, televised catastrophe by televised catastrophe, and behind the scenes, the lobbying will continue. Fossil-fuel burning will be banned, but there will be exemptions for influential countries that want to burn fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the world will change.

The pandemic will continue (we’ve been educated, entertained, trained to a story arc whereby it’s over, but it isn’t), birth rates will continue to fall, the ice caps will melt, cities will burn…

…and all of a sudden we’ll wake up to realise that the decision-makers are looking younger; they’re sounding more assertive; they don’t seem to take seriously the inertia-inducing processes, procedures and speech patterns of today’s – but suddenly, they’re of yesterday’s – politics.

Possibly the most pointless exchange in the history of modern broadcasting came last week, in a radio discussion of cuts to Universal Credit.
 
Interviewer: “Your cuts to Universal Credit are reducing people’s income by £20 per month.”
 
Minister: “We’ve already spent £6 billion on benefits.”
 
Curious how often the answer to “You’re cutting spending” is “We’ve already spent”. And come to think of it, curious how often the number is six billion.

We have a decision to make. To be optimistic or to be pessimistic about the Covid unlocking on Monday.

I know people who tell me that we'll all be fine because so many of us have been double-vaccinated. I even know one person who tells me Covid isn't a threat any more - the Delta variant ("Which Originated In India," as everybody adds) may be more contagious, but it just gives you a bad flu-equivalent.

And any future variants will just be plain-vanilla snuffles, she insists. Like that creaking upstairs in the haunted house is just air bubbles in the pipes. Or rats. The wind. Okay. No wind. So: heat on a still day, warping the window-frames. Something. Anything. Obviously.

I'm a pessimist. There's a lot of Covid around, and Covid mutates. The government's replacing "restrictions" with "guidelines", but that just makes it our fault if we disregard the "guidelines". [As in: the government's no longer taking responsibility for telling us what to do.]

Seems to me that the government has caved in to pressure from corporate lobbies - tourism, hospitality ("hospitality industry" reminds me of "military intelligence"; isn't it an oxymoron?), airlines - to open up. Future historians, if there are any, will add this detail to their histories of our static economy. [Static as in: all our legacy pre-covid industries are too big to fail and must be held up, even if they do block the new.]

It's a kind of almost pleasing irony that the NHS test and trace app is telling people to stay at home. We've built a piece of tech that has the legal clout to keep people safe. Less pleasing that employers are pushing for front-line most-vulnerable workers to be made exempt from mandatory self-isolation, but - yeah, right. What's a snuffle between co-workers, eh?

Optimism is dangerous. Optimists rush into crowded bars, restaurants, etc, and celebrate.

But pessimists - pessimists wonder how long it's going to take before all the tables are free.

Beatrix Potter followed Peter Rabbit with Squirrel Nutkin, Benjamin Bunny and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

My local cinema is following Peter Rabbit with Peter Rabbit 2.

Peter "wisecracks like Bugs Bunny," says a review in The NY Times. I think that's a comment on one of the films, not the original story.

Original. Now there's a word.

This is what the breakdown of law and order feels like.

Man attacks woman. Woman reports crime. System fails to do anything - but does want details of the woman's sexual history.

We legislate for equality; we have feminism; there's #MeToo among other lessons of history.

The breakdown of law and order isn't a sudden riot, any more than a global pandemic is suddenly zombies on the streets.

Seems to me that no matter what we do, we can't stop the system failing. The legal system isn't capable of handling rape cases effectively, even in today's climate of opinion. The overall system isn't saving us from anything.

Re: the pandemic. We've switched to the word "variant" from "mutation" because it's softer. We don't want to offend India, so it's the "Delta" variant we're facing now.

Re: climate change. "The G7 nations have agreed to step up action on climate change" (BBC News, 4 days ago), thereby adding an "agreement" to all the "targets" of - wait, how long ago?

Re: Rape. In two years, some courts in England and Wales will be allowed to switch on the evidence-recording equipment that all courts already have installed.

Oh, and courts will be encouraged to focus on the suspect's behaviour rather than the victim's. "Ah, but she was wearing a short skirt" will cease to be the issue; "He's been attacking women for years" will matter more. I can remember that being an issue a century ago.

What happens next? My guess is, more of the same but with added media releases to say that lessons have been learned. Then more of the same.

Then, eventually, not the collapse of the system but the decline into irrelevance of the system. They're all useless. We have to look after ourselves.

Any worthwhile social movement has to start from the understanding that people can't be led. Nor consistently inspired. Neither conviction nor idealism can be shared from one head to the next, let alone from one head to a crowd.

You can lead some of the people to the barricades, for some of their time. But you can't keep them there, nor direct where they go next. Leaders fall; regimes collapse; bills fall due; milk boils over; babies cry; dogs bark; caravans move on; all the while, ideals are eroded by the day-to-day pragmatism of living.

Abstract agreements are no basis for action. Yes, things "should" be different, and more importantly, could be different. But there is no automatic right to have them made different, nor to impose difference.

There is no mind so closed as a mind that believes itself open. And liberal. And benign.

Rejoice! Hooray!
 
Here are the first two paragraphs of the media release at
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-host-g7-summit-in-cornwall
announcing the G7 Summit in Cornwall this year.
 
[Spoiler: We are indulging my inner grumpy old so-and-so today. By reading this you agree to all manner of terms & conditions. In return, you have my permission to buy yourself a cookie or small bar of chocolate later and eat it in defiance of your diet.
 
Here goes.]
 
“Prime Ministers and Presidents from the world’s leading democracies will come together in Cornwall in June to address shared challenges, from beating coronavirus and tackling climate change, to ensuring that people everywhere can benefit from open trade, technological change and scientific discovery.”
 
Isn’t that great? Doesn’t that make you feel good? They’re coming to Cornwall to– Oh. Sorry. Here’s the second paragraph.
.
“The Prime Minister will use the first in-person G7 summit in almost two years to ask leaders to seize the opportunity to build back better from coronavirus, uniting to make the future fairer, greener and more prosperous.”
 
Won’t that be great? He’s going to stand up and ask them to seize the opportunity.

And they’re going to react like the idea had never occurred to them, reaching out with both hands – imagine them all pushing back from the conference table, raising their arms, swiping at the air as though they’ve been asked to do something real.

I like that bit from the first paragraph. They’re coming together “to address shared challenges, from beating coronavirus and tackling climate change…”

Such feelgood rhetoric. Unfair, really, to point out that they’re not coming together to beat coronavirus, nor indeed to tackle climate change.

But if “addressing” can do even a fraction of the good of “beating” or “tackling” – they’ll address. No problem.

Why am I reacting so strongly to a piece of flannel about an over-promoted talkfest of a photo-op between elderly politicians who - most of them - can’t organise a vaccine roll-out in a single market?

I don’t know, actually.

Because somehow it encapsulates the modern condition? Yes, perhaps that.

What is the modern condition? Oh, thank you for asking.

We talk so well because we don’t do. We talk so well because we know we don’t do. We shy away from the specific – tackling climate change – and console ourselves with the abstract – addressing the challenge. Faced with difficulty, or impossibility, we retreat into words.

We’ve honed the skill of talking to the point where it gives us the same feeling as if we’d taken action. We can almost convince ourselves that we’re tackling climate change when in fact what we’re doing – sorry, what we’re announcing, not doing, is that we’ve agreed to set targets for tackling climate change.

Which isn’t the same as doing anything. Of course. The action evaporates into the words. We cheer the target-setting and meet the failure to keep to those targets without surprise.
 
For another example. I pick up on this flower-arrangement of words from the opening paragraph: “...to ensuring that people everywhere can benefit...”
 
They’re coming to Cornwall to “ensure” that people “can”. Isn’t that state-of-the-art content-free speech?
 
They’re not “doing”; they’re “ensuring”. And they’re not ensuring that people “will” benefit; they’re ensuring that people “can” benefit.
 
I “can” benefit from a lot of things. Whether I “will” benefit from them depends on whether anybody gets their act together and does the work needed to provide them. No, wait. I “can” benefit. I’m already perfectly capable of benefiting. Oh, never mind.
 
At least the closing communique will tell us that they’ve all agreed to seize the opportunity. I’m hoping for at least a moment’s emotional boost from the rousing verbiage of the closing communique. I bet the main points of that have already been drafted. 
 
I’m also hoping for a photo-op on the beach, Boris and his chums in front of a sandcastle, ideally, a good, big sandcastle, as well as the whole inevitable salad of further-back advertising hoardings for the conference centre and the tourist board.
 
Ask not what the politicians have agreed.
 
Ask instead who built the sandcastle.
 
Or place your faith in the younger generation and go look for a child with a spade.

Struck me just now that "surveillance capitalism" operates by obsessing over the second-best answer to an obvious question.

"What do you people want?"

Imagine a restaurant which studied Big Data to work out what its customers wanted.

None of that old-fashioned inefficient handing out menus and taking down orders. These people are all meeting for lunch. They all drank coffee and 68% ate cornflakes last time they sat down to eat. Scrap the menu. Bring out coffee and cornflakes.

Recently, I bought a chair from a certain well-known online store. If I had bought every chair I've been offered, by email, since buying the chair I wanted - I would have enough now to fill an auditorium.

Surveillance capitalism fails at answering the obvious question. What do I want? I have a chair. It's a chair that I might use to sit down and eat.

What else do you think I might need in my dining space?

"I know! Another chair!" says the algorithm.

Shall I tell you about Umair Haque?

He’s a writer on Medium. If you [search-engine] his name, you’ll find that he’s a lot else besides. Go to his website, which is hosted on Medium, and read My Story. All of it – or more exactly, enough of it to understand why he uses the word “vampire” to describe himself. He’s interesting.

Umair Haque writes a lot of articles about a lot of issues, and he always puts a picture at the top before he publishes them. Lately, he’s got onto the subject of Britain (sic), and the picture he put at the top showed that young couple who gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey the other day.

Long-ish piece about Britain, but the title gives you the gist of it. How Britain Became the Dumbest Society in the World. And the sub-title. Britain is Becoming the World’s Newest Failed State.

Not Britain Made a Mistake or Britain Got It Wrong but how we dropped straight to the bottom of the list – we’re number 195 in the rankings for stupidity (or would be, if we could count that high). And we’re about to fail completely. There are 193 member-states of the United Nations; soon there will be 192.

[Palestine and the Holy See are non-member observer states, in case you’re not-British enough to have noticed the 195/193 discrepancy – and there are other states to mention, but this is complicated enough already.]

Anyway – Umair’s article (8-minute read, says Medium) paints a gloriously sunny picture of Britain ten-plus years ago – the best healthcare in the world, the finest public broadcaster, part of “the world’s most successful political union” (he means the EU), and overall, back then Britain “was a gentle, intelligent, warm, friendly, and wealthy society.”

Mr Haque, if you’re reading this, pick up a copy of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party. It describes the period you’re eulogising. Oh, and since you ruin the effect slightly by revealing that you got the “failed state” line from a newspaper report of a Gordon Brown soundbite – Rawnsley’s book also covers Gordon Brown’s time as Prime Minister.

Around 4 minutes into Umair’s article, well after the Gordon Brown bit, Umair asks and answers the question “What had gentle Europeans ever done to hurt Britain? Nothing at all.” Writing about Brexit at that point – taking a broadly Remain stance with the twist that we were being nasty to the “gentle Europeans” by blaming them for our problems.

Let’s not get into Brexit. I picked up on that “ever”. What had the Europeans “ever” done to nasty old Britain? Went to the comments, and sure enough, somebody had written a reply starting with “The Roman invasion…” right through to WW2. There were two replies to that reply. One said “Dream on, don’t wake up,” and the other, “You sound like a clown with your comments.”

Mr Haque, have you ever seen the 2006 film Idiocracy? Set mostly 500 years in the future, in about – pardon my maths – 2021.

I suppose if you’re going to get an audience these days you have to respond to the latest celebrity interview and take a side in whatever big-time culture war it represents.

And I suppose modern etiquette requires that I either condemn Umair Haque absolutely or praise him to the skies. How Umair Haque Became the Dumbest/Best Writer in the World, perhaps. But I can’t quite do that. He’s readable, interesting, and despite not knowing him, I kind of like the guy.

Umair Haque has moved his writing from his website as linked above, to Eudaimonia & Co., which you’ll also find on Medium. Here, in fact.

I suggest you go there now. After his non-quite-convincing Gordon Brown-based article about Britain becoming dumb, Umair Haque staged a dramatic return to form yesterday with How My People Became the World’s Greatest Idiots.

Not a celebrity nor a has-been politician in sight. And like the world – all the better for it.

Chilly morning after a run of Summer days come early. Buds on the roses, crocuses, but cold, definitely cold. The sun off to the right, describing a partial arc of the sky, from where I am facing East. Can't remember whether it's the sun, or the moon, or something else, but it's in Virgo according to the subject-line I read, which makes this a time of focus (okay, I opened the email).

Space-station Mir is in Virgo, perhaps. Now I'm remembering a conversation recently with a friend. "That was serendipity," I said, to whatever fortunate confluence of events had befallen her. "If I believed in all that, I'd agree with you," she replied, with a sigh that was audible even on Gmail.

So we had a conversation about the unimportance of belief. Does it matter whether it's chance, or the work of some benign Something? If it's chance - well, okay, we're just oddly evolved animals making a mess of life on a ball of rock, etc., hurtling through a void. If There Is Something reading this over my/your shoulder - they'd let us know if we're supposed to say thank-you.

Either way, I say: celebrate the serendipities, even if they are just chance. I think - and if you've come this far I'll assume you want to know what I think - that we're supposed to work with what we do/don't believe - because there's a self-assessment/self-nurture/self-reassurance process in there that matters.

There's nothing. Deal with it. There's something. Sit up straight. Some version of that is the monologue/dialogue you have with yourself.

The real question is - what does it tell you about yourself?

Spend some time looking at climate change. Charts, graphs, statistics, weather reports, news stories, icebergs breaking free, badly burned koala bears...

Then ask yourself, "What would Gaia do?"

What would the "earth organism", the combined total of everything living and life-supporting on the planet, close relative of Mother Nature, do about climate change?

Cull the invasive species? I wonder.

This virus could have been designed for us. It creeps up, never quite serious enough for us to recognise the threat, and first it takes out the older and more vulnerable. Leaving what a nature show would call a healthy breeding stock.

And/or install, somewhere deep in the primitive part of the brain, an instinct towards self-destruction? I wonder.

(1) We get a vaccine. Start vaccinating. Some weeks later, the scientists think to tell us - or the media finally get round to reporting their message - that after vaccination, we can still infect people.

(2) We get a vaccine. Two doses, to be given three weeks apart. We decide to give them eleven weeks apart. That way, we can give lots more first doses, and future supply can take care of the second doses. Roughly ten weeks into the first-dose phase, the company supplying the vaccine announces production delays.

Those delays, says a politician, are "unacceptable". Which is great, because those second doses have to be given within twelve weeks of the first dose. Or the vaccine expires. Becomes ineffective. Doesn't protect us.

I'm sorry to be such a pessimist, but I can't dislodge this uneasy feeling that we're going to leave behind for future generations a cleaner, greener, less crowded world.

It's not the fake news.

It's not the lies.

Nor is it that social-media thing whereby you exclude everybody who might disagree with you.

It's the self-belief.

The answer to

"Here is the incontrovertible evidence that proves you wrong."

is

"I know what I believe."

But that's understandable.

In our culture, the rebel always beats the empire.

We're disposed to take on causes.

The emperor doesn't have much of a dress sense, and the answer to the question "The 'empire' would do that, wouldn't they?" is not clear-cut.

Sooner or later, we all learn how to handle being mistaken. And occasionally just flat-out embarrassingly wrong.

We all experience that awful moment - you storm out, slam the door ... and realise that sooner or later, you're going to have to un-storm your way back in again.

Concede defeat, in other words. It's part of growing up.

The wisdom, at those moments, is to be found in the faces of the other people in the room, the parents let's say, who carry on as though nothing has happened, not looking at you, not reacting, letting the situation stabilise.

You gather up your toys and climb back into your pram. Life goes on.

In the 1984 film Red Dawn, Soviet paratroopers land on the football field of a high school in Colorado.

In the 2012 remake, they're North Koreans.

Either way, this local event represents a nationwide security failure: the baddies have invaded the US mainland. A crack team of high-school kids fades into the mountain country around the school to form The Resistance.

In time, the kids' immediate grasp of bomb-making and other sabotage techniques; their commitment to arguing face-to-face about their relationship issues; their adherence to American Values and clean laundry are so effective that the nasty Russians roll over to have their tummies tickled.

Or something like that. The 1984 Red Dawn runs for 114 minutes.

In the 2024 film Capitol, a group of middle-aged American citizens in fancy dress invade the seat of democracy in the USA. Shots are fired; there are deaths; the invaders describe their action as a "coup" and then split up either to go home or do some sight-seeing around Washington.

This is a security failure, etc., but they're rounded up very quickly by the FBI working from social-media and news footage. They go to jail.

It's a very short film.

The 1984 Red Dawn's actually okay. There are whole stretches (from memory) in which it's possible to suspend disbelief.

Capitol? Nah, ridiculous. In the real world they'd have a plan, at least. Wouldn't they?