it's good to burn bridges when they're built by bastards who occupy cozy offices in central london office blocks
it's good to burn bridges when they're built by agencies who occupy anything but spaces of self-reflection
and who are incapable of respecting the enemies we face to such an extent that they then see ... ... they always see themselves
as better than anyone else and thus will remain inferior forever to everyone out there far or near who ever you'll find out here at all
because british intelligence is anything but ... and british intelligence is stuck in that rut ... well it is ...
... of empire and suchlike and then it's the pleasant island and verdant and stuff and so well ... they say and oh they may
but actually not at all at all and so then again as eyesight dulled and vision quite blinded and sullied and hidden and quite blinkered and suffering
as if the tree of oak itself is rotting from the core and nothing more is to be done when all is sung and said
and just the well-read remain as saviours who actually can't any more anyways in a country where the rule of law is no longer treasured by the enforcers of the same
never mind the citizens they once said they served and so it's as if it's a stain on the country's disdain in respect of anything that might truly lead to life and its wily interventions
greater now it's true than the declensions of the idiots who run this country through influence not politics like the strata of medieval wastes grossly uncovered
as they make haste oh they do to run the lives of me and you as badly as one might wish to conceive
because they have no idea at all and they really have none worth talking of whilst instead of chasing the real criminality they prefer to focus on you and me
saying our desire for privacy makes us just as dangerous as those they let slip in cities of the north and others of balding and silly nick
and as they did so terribly that day and as they claimed to rue the horror anyhow and every way they let the bad they lost sight of at such cost
bomb to awful bits the innocents of terror whilst all this time they've feathered their own closets and offices into things quite truly grand and fine
as if the most important thing today in all our democracy of hey and wow is to show how good their taste in interior decoration
enables their decidedly stylish and cool creatively fabulous comforts of label rule over the safety of the ordinary citizens who find themselves utterly unable any more
dying hopelessly in the gutters as they are of the homeless and the buggered that end up left all to one side by the men of british intelligence
who knowing all they have all these years of strife actually and truly and forcefully and cruelly really really don't give a fuck
What MI5 assured us in 2020What the UK and US authorities now argue just this weekWhat I argued in 2023What I have experienced since 2002How they do itThe final outcome
does it have to do with what happened in the past?
or what happens in the future?
it’s to do with both
it’s a bit complex for everyone because it’s a human thing
well we are that’s true
i guess what you’re saying is we all need to show kindness and compassion to each other from now on
Mil Williams, 27th March 2024, Chester UK
… has come this poem:
the human loom
we're all bones at heart and blood in marrow and on the narrow and straight few of us are able to wait
because all of us worth anything are human as human can be and it's to sing out proud and loud the facts of all our frailties
and overwhelming loyalties to things we barely understand even when we're hand-in-hand and thinking we're close
as ever we've ever been where love is a rendition of all that we've seen and saw and more: and everything and everyone
then becomes this beautiful wondrous one where sat upon that mountain high we slowly allow ourselves to cry because it's true that you and me
is only a small part of the whole equation like the equators of reason and emotion's own avaricious longitudes and the earth of incessant latitudes
marking the x that tells us where our humanity actually lies and thus finds itself in turn at the crossroads and junctions
and intersections of all these truths which confuse us mightily and hurt us sometimes tragically as we attempt to duly understand
the people we have in front of us and next to us and inside our heads as if sometimes they're trying
and as if sometimes they're dying and occasionally as if it's ourselves who do the killing like the seeping of slow leak
out of deeply political mistakes because politics above all is what you and i and all of us do in family on each other
as we attempt to be faithful to the other and as we sometimes only wound the lover even as friendships are what counts all told and their courage (sometimes sold) leads us clearly
to embolden those we see all too dearly as we prefer to be seen without wearisome sighs but simply out of zero disguise:
a transparent good recovered as we should and leaving us cleansed and totally expunged
in newly wondrous sister- and brotherhoods where our humanity finally triumphs and wins over
the hardest of hearses and the maddest of curses into a much better place of more satisfactory race
as we decide once again after terrible times and pain to reach out each other's hands as bands of families
and good women and men choosing eventually to offer as gifts almost sacredly proffered being presented to the tribal heights
where the compassion of the mind and the kindness of the signs that once upon a time did break like shallow refrain
and now can only reencounter like meeting grand and mealtime fine and bread that's broken at eventides in joyful remembrance of all that's true
where you and me and me and you mean many more than just us two because after all and when grand they call
our lives do impact on all the rest and whilst sometimes it's death we wish to find if death i embrace thinking just for myself
the reality of life is that none is an island as another man said no human at all at all at all at all
and all our actions remain quite connected and all our fears are finally dissected and all our love is inevitably shared where in the end our family overcomes
instead of permitting that it might be overwhelmed forever and always lined and creased
like the ageing man i once did feel and the life even recently i wanted to be deceased because that's what it is
and that's what it's been as being or not became the mightiest question and dearest shakespeare was right as right in this so true and in other matters too ...
so all that's left for me to say is that compassion is a virtue and kindliness the best and whilst the words of forgiveness do wonders
what's the very best of all are the hugs that come naturally after decades of sadnesses and the embraces quite lost
to all of time's winds and to the bad and wilful foolishness of hatred's forces grossly mad where insistences on any part
just served to break finally the hearts of all our rivalries where they did only disperse like sounds of gears grinding in reverse
instead of all these years being voices of gorgeous seers able to come together and around tables of leisure and agreeable sounds
because exactly this is what i now give you and exactly this is what i would like for you and exactly this is where i'm now waiting and just this very thing
is where no hesitation remains to my mind and only love is what i now feel for everyone and all around
where everything is now unbound and life perhaps may finally resume as if a beautiful tapestry of light made by the sight of human loom
we prefer to close our eyes to dead babies blown into pieces by shrapnel our companies make, so we can have taxable events that lead to good roads and hospitals on the backs of such crimes, than actually consider that — as all of this is true — it might be much better not to be a part any more of this thing we used to call life.
mil williams, 2nd january 2024, stockholm sweden
the problem wasn’t hitler: it was the ordinary german-speaking citizens, business leaders, sports enthusiasts and professionals of the same, and other members of the german and supporting foreign political classes, both of the time and since, who gleefully enabled his rise to power. all in the service of money.
the problem isn’t putin: it is the ordinary russian citizens, business leaders, sports enthusiasts and professionals of the same, alongside so many other members of the british, european, and other political classes of other nations, who have, as a consequence of their action or inaction, wilfully enabled not only his rise to but also his permanence in power. all in the service of money.
the problem won’t be trump: it will be the ordinary citizens, business leaders, sports enthusiasts and professionals of the same, alongside other members of the global political classes of other nations, who will have, as a result of their action or inaction, wilfully and knowingly enabled his rise to and ongoing permanence in power. all in the service of money.
and so the problem isn’t them: it’s never been them. the problem is all of us who prefer to pay a mortgage and get to the end of the month rather than stop a war in its tracks. we prefer to fuck a partner every saturday than construct a civilisation made of good people. we prefer fireworks and instagrams to real works of charity. we prefer to close our eyes to dead babies blown into pieces by shrapnel our companies make, so we can have taxable events that lead to good roads and hospitals on the backs of such crimes, than actually consider that — as all of this is true — it might be much better not to be a part any more of this thing we used to call life. all in the service of money.
and when a terrorist organisation sets up a society where it is both military and health service in one, where it shields itself behind a longitudinal tech- and social network-driven gaslighting, and inevitably provokes a people, who have suffered unimaginably throughout world history, into acts of revenge no one could reasonably have expected them not to commit, is when we just don’t care. we actually just don’t care:
because we always ask our friends if they are ok when they are not. we never quite manage to do so when the opposite is to all intents and purposes how it appears.
and we always attend to violence when the bruises — whether mental or physical — are finally visible. we never do when they are still hidden.
and we only intervene when it’s necessary to protect our legal reputations, and never when it’s the ways of being and enjoying this thing we once rightly called life are imperilled.
that is, we only ever do shit when it’s to pick up the pieces. we never ever strategise — ever.
except that … some people do. the bad people. the hamas sort of types. the trumps. the putins and their hangers-on, whatever country their wealth delivers allegiances from. the hitlers and their chums.
and so this is NOT the world i can support. and i really do NOT go beyond today. not as your journeyman in superficiality at all. no sir. absolutely not.
yes, it’s true: you have been free to, meanwhile, and will continue to do so. and that may be good for your children and families who — when all is said and done, acting in blissful and self-righteous ignorance — SHALL get to the end of the month. but my end of the month is today. and i refuse now to go any place beyond in such a way, any more.
i have spent my life fighting for the good of all. whilst everyone else fights for the good of the small. and in this sense there is nothing to reproach. neither in your approach nor mine.
but you can’t ask me to continue to ignore what is manifestly true: ukraine is — and continues to be — our fault, because we are superficial in everything we do. nazi germany was our fault all along — even down to the social environments that predisposed the burning of books. trump is a direct consequence of the kind of big tech in facebook, cambridge analytica, and related, that we have not only consented to but deeply embraced — because of our inability to go beyond the next personal brand. and hamas happened under the very noses of technology corporations’ deepest total surveillance strategies, simply because we have all this time refused to reflect enough — and far prefer to interject shabbily and usually to facile end instead.
it’s not a good enough reason to die, though. i really have no intention of dying because you are too insanely weak to engage in this world in a way which would ennoble you, and protect babies from shrapnel, and lead to health services that were about health and not about the enrichment of surveillance corporations and cloud companies and ai organisations of the most broken.
it’s just not where it is, is it? it’s just really not where any of us should be.
but you are: you are directly to blame — in your inaction — for what has already happened to our democracies; and for what is happening right now; and for what is about to happen from this year onwards.
it’s not the billionaires who dream, in their effective accelerationism, of thousands of years of pain for the populace whilst they enrich their deep deep pockets.
no. they’re not to blame.
it’s we who agreed, for example, that search was cool all those years ago, as it gutted the business model of the very institutions and organisations of investigative journalism that would’ve prevented their brutal simplicity being imposed on our far more interesting minds all this time.
we could have argued the nature of their change actually wasn’t inevitable: we preferred, however, instead to satnav our brains into inabilities and easily monetisable dependencies that ensured we became less and less human as the years passed by.
so this is not my way.
i cannot live. i cannot die. i cannot survive. i cannot thrive. i cannot watch ukrainians being blown to pieces. i cannot bear the toxic and abusive ability hamas have demonstrated to twist the historical narrative so savagely. i cannot watch my own country destroy, in the name of extreme privilege, what was once a mother of something really worth treasuring.
i cannot watch this and do nothing. and i cannot watch this and do anything.
so this is now my request: can someone do the deed i need done on my behalf? i’d be happier, if at all possible, for it to be a convincing accident that randomly ended a life of no interest.
it would be much better, then, for those who were left and who clearly prefer instagram and interjection, and to believe the nature of change is inevitable.
so is that too much to ask?
i really think it no longer is …
oh.
and a happy new year 2024.
ps it’s not money that’s at the root of all evil. you did know this, right? it’s love of money … love.
that’s right.
love …
it’s not the billionaires who dream, in their effective accelerationism, of thousands of years of pain for the populace whilst they enrich their deep deep pockets.
no. they’re not to blame.
it’s we who agreed, for example, that search was cool all those years ago, as it gutted the business model of the very institutions and organisations of investigative journalism that would’ve prevented their brutal simplicity being imposed on our far more interesting minds.
There's things you can do and things you just don't because if you did you'd have to hide and once you hid you'd never have lied more than that day you found you'd hid at her door
And whilst I'm still unsure and the door in question remains half ajar I'd not tarry I don't think in the blink of an eye which caresses what it espies when looking forward to you
And so now my insecurity belies my other erstwhile uncertainty: I've lived my life without a wife as well as I could ever have done
That's all it's been and all I saw and then today I'm really happy and all up for a SAPPY review of you and me and me and you
And equally time to rhyme the end and equally lines we read between and equally things we just don't either except, that is, when yes we do
And then it's clearly me and you and then it's obvious: never true and then it's never less than us because it's time we began to trust ...
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life as eldest of my family being the glue that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be for every sibling and cousin i had the very best sounding-board they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects accepting all their holes of dark seeing as absolutely and utterly fair the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens of the dragons and monsters some of them have been to me and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen and what i have actually witnessed and suffered to the extent they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time i found it hard to do more than rhyme in order to survive the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me and imposed on me and painted on me as if into a corner around my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits and find in time the core i needed and just be me for me at all and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son and father and brother and lover and done nailed brutally and abusively to the cross of quite another
and so after all that it came to 2015 and all i could do was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought again he's going mad or maybe he's just bad and maybe that was it
when really what it was this thing i began to do was realise that their VACUOUS holes like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core of apple-like pleas ever forming contentedly so that all i knew how to do
all this time for 53 years of foolishness too was to impale myself like stake to a soul in such a way
that their very real madnesses appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day most would still find it easy to say that what they did to me in 2003 as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate as incarcerated foully by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty and how it did so
and how it was so neither good for them nor good for me as no one ever let me be neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004 then took me to her web of evil spidery claw and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly and without remission and did all those things to me with zero permissions
i am reminded also of the techie folk who in 2002 in virtual sense and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true as they played their games with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish who can't find it in themselves to ever care more than a minimum expression for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today and christmas 2023 does approach in its way and so now my son is adhd and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true and my younger relations both clearly that and good and even two others who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish for all their multiple decades and years ... and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for and one of utterly beastly yore as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis when if all the above had come fairly to light first of all then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family both sibling and parental and so wider and much more wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet drugged to the eyeballs by a country caring only to treat a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside like evil mischief far and wide because dear cousins
and siblings and children and wife and my life that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all as i tried desperately to be that thing you all needed me to be when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU who needed far more support than i ever would being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024 i realise with joy in no way a trickle that i need care for none of you any more at all because what was broken
and splintered and hurt was not my job you see to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time than you and yours and those you claimed were mine and i was far LESS incomplete and far less unseated
and far less nailed to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss and the cost of not talking to each other as we might've done and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed and never embracing what actually you all were in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity to treasure and measure against all other benchmarks where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now found myself at last with no right at all to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining to ever help out anyone insane enough to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe incapable of realising any of you in time that the very reasons you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why you should've protected me and precisely why no longer there's any point in my trying
to work with and for absolutely any of you in health and sickness or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame where being together could've been a worthy test of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun of chests of mysterious pieces of infinity where once upon a time
it was me that was seen to be the really crazed guy when it truth it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change because family for me now irreversibly wanes as we all become
as diverse as each other thus meaning right on i am finally released from ever being again your necessary brother
it's hard when you're younger than they think it sinks you to see when they wink amongst each other as bold as ass when racing to the bottom of the pile that's exactly when it's harder than you'll ever know
they see a body not a mind because that's the world they've had themselves constructed out of code and software constitutions designed to infect with viral obfuscations the truth of the matter in question where lies are absolute rejection
and it's harder still to be growing young instead of growing old as most because younger people like to think they're younger than almost all other folk when in fact it's not your age that makes you old but something else which involves not being bold
because when you lose your bravura is when you lose your cordura as the spanish would say wouldn't they yes they most certainly would and when you lose all that you might just as well be old hat for all i'd guess tbh myself
and so this matter of growing young instead of more conventionally growing old has me sorely vexed i hate to say it does because if it were their choice they'd have me as the henchman when all i ever wished was to be superman
and so whilst my brain gets that much better the people around me refuse to get it and all that's left for me to do is to attempt to grow young gracefully at that for old is NOT my thing and growing old NEVER my ring of dire necessity
let this be the lesson then of all that i say this morn: remember that some of us do grow old i know it has to be but equally others not so different from me actually do find the lessons of life utterly enthusing and not rehusing at all
all then that's left for me to say is that i'm just a small man who's growing smaller by the day and in this fact i find absolute joy because not for smaller do we become the universe's toy
one of my favourite writers of all time is the #prosepoet #raymondchandler. passages which describe dust-ridden orange groves intermingle with the blood of a dark and deep act.
you can’t imagine how i was transported to the best of such writing today, on beginning to read the below.
i’ve never read #ianfleming in my life. i stumbled across a #largeprint version of his book #thespywholovedme with a fabulous introduction by #nickstone earlier today in the quiet section of #storyhouse, #chester. i didn’t want to deprive someone who might really need it from the privilege if a standard-size version was available. it was. i wish now i had taken the large print. this #penguin edition is fab, of course. i don’t know if in every edition, but the page numbering in this particular one conserves the three digits of #jamesbond’s licence to kill. so page 1 is not page 1, but 001.
it’s a gentle and discreet touch and decision. it’s beautiful in its discretion.
meantime, the large-print version has much better artwork on the cover: really evocative of its time. this one here is nice, and reminds in its palette and visual tonality a lot of #chandler’s aforementioned orange groves (not wildly out of keeping with the locale, or at least the continent, tbh), but it’s much more prosaic.
and at least this #bond book is anything but prosaic. it’s riddled with a superhuman attention to details of all kinds. it’s a poetic prose at the highest of levels: #fscottfitzgerald wouldn’t have been ashamed of any of it. and so #chandler, neither …
but the most surprising thing about this book by #ianfleming is both twofold and interlinked: being precisely what #nickstone ensured we took away from his introduction to the large-print version. it’s not written in the third-person but the first, and it’s not written from the spy’s point of view but from the female hero’s gaze. cognitive about her prior life and surroundings to the max and metacognitive about what happens to her and how she reacts, it is an astonishing piece of writing.
you don’t feel this is a woman written by a man at all. and maybe this is because i am a man, and maybe a woman wouldn’t feel the same either. and maybe i am radically wrong. but to me this was the #fleming who took intuitive, calculated risks in wartime when they needed to be taken. and sometimes you hurt people. and sometimes you saved them. but always … intuitively calculating.
and as i delve further into the book and admire more honestly and deeply its achievements, i realise why writers — like #fleming and perhaps, to a much lesser degree, even myself — deserve to be actors on much broader stages. because a human being who writes daily, who writes well daily, who writes pleasingly daily, and who writes purposefully daily … well … we take a thousand or maybe more decisions rightfully daily … you really do, you know, when you put sentences and sentences together, one after the other; and if you’re a writer you’ll understand that when people say writing is not the same thing as doing, it’s only because no one who “prefers doing” ever duly sees the number of great decisions even just a good writer who writes every day is capable of taking because of their professional art and training: being transferable skills, all.
and #fleming is not only a good writer but actually one of the best. so when he sent humans to possible, sometimes certain, death on missions in world war ii, he did so with the very best of brains which might ever have been brought to bear on the challenges that nazi germany imposed at the time on us all.
and then after the war, with all those calculated risks done and taken and regretted or not, he proceeded to write an object of art such as this book i am reading now.
life is about doing things like this.
life is about calculating a #cognitivebeauty and completing it.
Chester was a place that gave a lot to me and took a lot from me.
It allowed me to grow into adulthood, with an epilepsy that struck me at ten years old, and was medicated with barbiturates until a better solution was duly found six years or so later.
In the 1970s it was a place of little attraction for young people, at least people like me … though now it has vibrant sociocultural institutions, and a small-town vibe that works for very many people.
But small-town vibe cuts both ways. It can lead to the beauty of the gentle and the unsuspected: of people who reach out to you and want to be reached out to, equally. Or it can lead to the embracing of criminal and mafia-like behaviours. Where who you know is much more important than what you describe and experience, even when you communicate it with absolute accuracy.
Today I saw in this very same town of Chester its very best side and its very worst. In its remembrance of the sacrifices of two world wars, and more before and since, it was exemplary and compassionate.
In its defence of mindsets I myself recall from my childhood — for example, things that happened at school to me and my classmates, which today would lead to criminal prosecutions — it also showed such evil people are still alive and literally kicking.
Earlier today, I was walking into the Tesco in the centre of town and a woman cut closely into my path with a suitcase trailing behind her. I had to stop. I bided my time. I then headed away from her into the shop itself, and lo and behold, she drove her suitcase, now in front of her, into the back of my left leg.
I turned round and she asked me if I was all right, with a beaming smile. I answered I was, and asked her pointedly if she was.
She said nothing. We went our separate ways. But the mindset she had didn’t. It planes over this city of two curious parts. One part, beautiful and scenic, in the physical, emotional and intellectual, and with the cultural organisation it never had in my childhood and now, obviously deservedly, manifests to the max for all who wish to value it properly:
But there’s another part, a quite different layer of society in Chester. It’s a layer which mainly chooses to defend its own very restricting, manipulative turf at the expense of the innovation and invention the first half not only treasures as it always attempted to, but is now capable of formulating wisely and assertively.
The layer which looks to defend its always-has-been looks to the past as a justification of all current behaviours: the woman with the suitcase and her mates videoing the scene are just a silly example of how the past can be (wrongly) used to justify a #gaslighting present.
The other layer, the one of cultural vision and fabulous statements where every human being has value, meantime, looks to Chester’s past not as a justification of the nowadays and the cruelties these others are continuing to deliver, but as a way of intelligently informing a collective future-present of the most wondrous: a world where all of us fit in, strive and eventually not just live but thrive.
This is Chester UK, then: the marvellously creative, wise, generous, gentle and compassionate on the one hand. And on the very beastly other, what I experienced in Tesco in the town centre not long ago: a group of people who have nothing better to do than track, using mobile phone tech and related, the simple movements of people, like myself, who will not stop telling inconvenient truths.
It’s Brexit Britain right down the line too, is the Chester I experienced today: so many good people who just want the best for the world, on the left of politics and in the decent centre both, whilst on the extreme right the monsters who, in truth, have become one-bit mobsters.
I spent most of my youth in Chester. I’m proud of the sociocultural environment its good people have managed to fight into being in the past few years from practically nothing previous.
Today’s incidents, on the back of other things I didn’t report on other days, because even sillier, have made up my mind, a mind that was unsure, for sure.
My decision after the Chester #gaslighters of this afternoon? I now intend to work here too, to join the better half.
Why?
After being unduly incarcerated back in 2003 by the outliers and institutions of this city, you’d maybe wonder why indeed. I’ll tell you, then. Now I shall. The good people who’ve stuck it out, and made this place so much better, deserve other good people to join the fight.
The bad, the one-bit mobsters I mean, don’t deserve anything any more. They certainly don’t deserve that the good abandon them to their victory.
In fact, they don’t even deserve our disapprobation.
Just to be ignored, is what they deserve. Just to be ignored.
I do join, then. The movement of the best. Not a city of #gaslighters. Not a city of beautiful #roman even.
No. Rather, a city which has begun to learn to fight a layered criminality with ALL the tools to hand. Something which in my childhood never seemed conceivable.
All the tools. Absolutely all. And even with the written word, I say.
mil's page 