We had lots and lots of gin and beers and a few bottles of wine with a curry.
We talked of friends past and friends passed.
And we laughed.
We laughed a lot.
We’d already made plans to meet up next month and have a house booked in Warwick for a few days next month.
He got enormously pissed and was apparently making boop, boop noises in bed, after waking his wife up after he crashed to the floor in a heap.
It’s the drunkest he’s been for twenty five years apparently
I’m very proud.
And as I sort of mentioned a while ago, I’m making changes at work although I’m not telling them til January and I plan to spend a lot more time seeing friends next year.
I’ve been working at the same place for just over six years now and I’ve scrupulously avoided the most senior roles, mostly because politics bores me.
My boss resigned in July and I made it clear that I wouldn’t be applying for his job, work-life balance and a new international team that I’d created being the two main reasons.
The third and unwritten reason being that I didn’t want to deal with all the crap that comes with being in charge.
Still.
Along with one of my best friends in the whole world, I shared the role until a suitable successor could be found.
Said successor hasn’t been in post for a month yet and I have to say, he’s made some decisions really easy for me.
My little Milo developed a really bad cough that I’m hoping will just be a consequence of aging and asthma – the drugs that he’s been on since Thursday have worked actual wonders and he seems better than he’s been for ages.
I’m fortunate in that I don’t need money, my pension pot is good, I have a previous pension that’s paying out and would cover most monthly bills.
And
I have no mortgage or debts.
Which is a quantum leap from my early life.
My parents lived in one of those third floor flats for some of my childhood.
From Hackney to Shropshire isn’t far but it’s more than a lifetime away for me, I’ve been to places that I never dreamed, seen wonders and horrors and lived what seems like multiple lives.
So it’s been an interesting feeling over the past few days as I’ve looked at emails from the new boss and seen the reactions from my colleagues.
He’s a disaster waiting to happen.
We can’t stop anything, corporations don’t work like that.
But I can do something.
We have our first in-person leadership meeting next week.
I have a plan and many, many years of experience of working with people like this.
I’m going to have a little fun.
And.
By April, I’ll be doing something else.
Something that gives me some more time to do the things that actually matter.
When you’re very young, you don’t think about your own mortality, or if you do imagine your own death it’s probably tied in with some sort of romanticism, with a heroic ending.
That’s not the case for ninety nine point something of us, our time probably won’t be decided by us even if we’d like to think it will.
Just to make something clear here.
I’m not afraid to die.
At all.
I can say that from a position of having had my heart reset a number of times, the first time was a bit scary as you’re giving yourself over to the possibility of death and lying down to do it.
It was easier each time after that.
An internal flight from Edinburgh to Stansted was once so turbulent that the stewardesses were crying. I surprised myself by just relaxing and thinking that I’d had a good life if that was the end.
It wasn’t though. I’ve been all over the world since then, seen ancient wonders and glittering cities, played games with a Hindu God and dared the elements to take me while I stood in the sea off Thailand during a monsoon lightning storm.
I’ve also seen banal, low level Evil close up and tried to ensure that it didn’t win ( I think it was a draw).
In the past few years, I’ve adopted a couple of dogs and they’ve given me a more simplistic, live for today worldview and I try not to worry too much about the outside world.
But, fuck me, the outside world makes it difficult.
This week, the UK Government made assisted dying legal.
Or, they made assisted suicide and assisted killing legal.
This was something that had huge amounts of funding and support, along with ads showing a woman dancing for joy, more like an ad for feminine care products than actually killing yourself.
Our wonderful MPs had five hours of debate and passed this thing through.
Any concerns have been dismissed and anyone showing concern on social media has seen the same sort of attacks from seemingly coordinated low follower, almost dormant accounts that are designed to suppress dissent – as used during Covid.
This country has followed the same path as the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
‘But there’ll be safeguards’ say the people behind the bill.
Yeah right.
Unless you’re a proxy – the below is from the act as passed at second reading this week
So a proxy can be somebody who has power of attorney over a vulnerable person, is named in their will and can now legally FUCKING KILL THEM.
None of our social services systems are linked up and crimes can and will be left uninvestigated by a police force if the perpetrator doesn’t live in their area.
That’s if anybody investigates an assisted death at all. It’ll all be legal.
I’ve watched a couple of friends die recently, they wanted more time even though they were so frail and the system tried to give them that time.
What if the finances don’t stack up for that? How much pressure will be applied to the already broken down and vulnerable ‘terminal’ patients? How many people will sign something they don’t understand?
How many poor bastards are going to have a last moment of lucidity as somebody kills them?
It’s a problem though.
We all want to die with dignity, perhaps heroically or romantically- just not in a chair or bed covered in our own shit.
So I want to hang on as long as I can, maybe Musk’s Neuralink will help with some of the problems of aging and dementia so that our minds don’t go and the decision will be truly our own.
Maybe the science fiction of Altered Carbon will be realised in our lifetime and death will be a pause in between bodies.
What happens to our souls – if we have them is an issue for that time.
What I do know is that killing people for convenience or finance reasons will erode whatever souls the medical people who do this have, that they’ll be indistinguishable from concentration camp doctors.
So – what can you do?
Make sure you have a will and that it’s difficult to change should you fall into the hands of those parasitic scum who’d wish you harm or those of ‘Health Professionals’ – make it clear that you have a codeword or phrase captured elsewhere that must be correct before anything can happen.
For me, I hope that if and when I do choose to die, it’ll truly be my choice and that I’ll hold true to the things that I believe deep down.
That I’ll remember that I once believed this by Tecumseh to be the model for my own death.
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
That I’ll go with the question of ‘what’s next? on my lips and that I’ll be ready for whatever that is.
Genuinely, I’ve seen things in the past few weeks that make me question whether I’m locked up somehow and imagining my whole life.
But.
Before we go there, how do you feel about this country?
This England.
If you feel that it’s a hotbed of intolerance, racial hatred and the home of slavery, can I suggest that you fuck off somewhere else.
If you’re of recent immigrant stock, go back to wherever you or your recent ancestors escaped from.
If you’re white middle class, just fuck off.
Go somewhere else.
I don’t care where.
I worked and lived in India for almost a year and all cultures aren’t equal.
No running water in some major towns, people shitting in doorways, corruption that was so ingrained that almost nothing could be done without bribery.
For a large part of that year, I lived here:
It was built on the site of an old Dutch fort from 1720.
And the English took it by force, from small ships that had travelled thousands of miles.
We were awesome.
We brought language and a way of life that was far superior to what existed almost anywhere else in the world.
We stopped Napoleon dead.
Twice.
We held the line against the nazis when all others had crumbled or stayed neutral.
We ended slavery at huge cost.
And not a day goes by that I look at this county and think of what we could be, not what we’ve become.
Pro-terrorist filth fill our streets every weekend, almost every council in the country is near bankruptcy and our tax burden just went up again.
And for what?
So that the real cost of illegal immigration can be buried somewhere, that the costs on the balance sheet are listed as ‘social care’, that rape and murder are now so commonplace as to be almost not worth reporting.
And our government(s) piss in our faces and tell us that it’s all our fault.
£22Bn for ‘Co2 capture’ – the thing that trees do.
The trees that are chopped down to build solar farms that are effectively useless at this time of year.
£11Bn for climate support for other countries.
While our taxes go up.
Inheritance Tax on farms, the same farms that are on a knife edge year in, year out.
Because land somehow equals money, which equals tax that we have to increase because REDACTED.
Three little girls were murdered brutally in the summer by somebody who also downloaded an Islamist terrorist manual.
Oh yes, he also produced one of the most deadly toxins in the world.
And we were told this in the past week, while the same government who called normal people ‘far right thugs’ and imprisoned them for some hurty words knew all along and actively covered it up rather than treating the populace like adults.
And the American government murdered a squirrel and a raccoon.
We have to stem the tide of this shit, government overreach and coercive control of the populace isn’t a dystopian fantasy any more, it’s becoming the norm.
From now on:
I will not blindly comply, I will do the best that I can for my friends and neighbours, I will call out anybody trying to run my country down because they’re too fucking stupid to see how bad it’s becoming as a result of their words and actions.
It’s easy to think that everything is shit, there are so many things wrong with the country and the world that you could be forgiven for seeing that a bleak existence is all we have to look forward to.
But I just watched something live.
On the phone that I’m typing this.
The same phone that’s controlling streaming music that’s playing while I cook chilli, drink a raspberry vodka martini made from my own raspberries and look at the ancient hills beyond.
I just watched science fiction become real.
A booster rocket in America just docked with uncanny precision into a massive metal arm.
This was impossible when I was growing up.
But so many things were.
And now we take them for granted.
I don’t travel for work or go to an office unless I have to, I sit in my own office that’s around 30 metres from the house, with music playing over the same steaming system and I can do four or five things at once.
If I look backwards, my grandfather was a blacksmith and he made me a bookcase from what would have been an amazingly expensive wood for him at the time.
The mahogany that he made it from looks as new today as it did fifty years ago and he’s the only person from my past that I’d like to talk to.
He taught me about the balance needed in nature, about how to pick nettles with your bare fingers and how to look at the world with open eyes when you can.
He also made sharp things, the apple doesn’t fall that far.
I’d love to talk to him and show him the world that I live in, I’d love to tell him about all the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen.
I can’t.
But I can pause and think about it all though.
So….
What’s all that wonderment business about?
It’s a recurring phrase from a film called the Great Northfield Minnesota Raid as said by Cole Younger ( played by Cliff Robertson) –
‘Ain’t that a wonderment’
And here we are.
Growing up, I never imagined that I’d chat to people that I hadn’t met, send and receive photos and LEARN SO FUCKING MUCH EVERY DAY just by using a device didn’t exist until my 30s.
Or that an artificial intelligence could generate a picture like this within 10 seconds.
On the same phone
Or…..that I’d have a robot lawnmower that needs to be rescued when it’s icy.
Or that I’d be being watched by a dog that wants to go outside – and that at 16:33 on a Sunday afternoon, I can take a photo of her…
The drains were cleared twice a year, potholes were an occasional annoyance, councils employed their own staff and they mostly got the job done unless they were striking.
But our bins got emptied, the streets were clean and in the poorest areas of London where I grew up, the oldest people still cleaned their own doorsteps religiously and many of them had a key on a string so that the milkman or his son ( me) could put the milk inside.
Policemen were large gruff creatures and they walked a beat with cars in reserve, you fucked with them at your own cost.
The NHS had a huge number of community hospitals and you could get local treatment for minor illnesses.
Our army and navy, although diminished, could fight and win a war in South America and the RAF could send a message that was undeniable.
If you can remember this, you’re getting old.
Nothing has worked like that for a very long time.
Our councils are nearly bankrupt as they try to cope with the sheer amount of migrants being forced on them.
So care suffers, particularly for the mentally ill, because some fucking genius decided to let ‘the community’ care for them.
The old suffer, fewer buses and services, more hostile young men fighting in the streets outside their houses and flats while they stay quiet and hope that the problem of the day blows over.
A politicised police service colludes with community leaders’ as to how they will police the streets.
The UK government gives 11 billion pounds to other countries to fight climate change or some such horseshit – knowing that the money will be stolen and funnelled back into a banking system that’s the only winner.
Our electricity is the most expensive in the whole developed world and we’re constantly lectured about our co2 emissions by rich scum and elected filth who fly everywhere and travel first class.
Our brand new, shiny Prime Minister, who lectured the country for years in opposition now appears to be the creature of a billionaire.
But.
As of a few days time from now, you have to register with the government if you own one single fucking chicken.
That’s not a joke, I wish it were
Here’s the thing though.
One of my very few, actual friends disagrees with me about almost everything, particularly politics and regulations.
I was walking the doglets earlier today and asked her if she’s registered her flock ( she rescues chickens) – and I was a little surprised.
‘No. I suspect my anti-establishment mate Thunderdog may have some views, but I’m VERY NERVOUS about registering them. I am a personal small holder with a protected coop and I don’t let mine free range in winter or if there is a bird flu outbreak, to keep them safe. I am very wary of Defra.’
And then the kicker.
The thing that I’d personally been thinking about.
‘Although one of my neighbours is a cunt and will rat me out, no doubt.’
So.
Do you remember when we just lived without thinking about whether our neighbour would turn us in for being against the current thing?
I do.
I don’t know how we get back there but if we don’t, it’s going to get bloody.
I know what side I’m on and it’s not the fucking Chicken Stasi
It’s pouring out there as I type this. We’ve had over a day of constant rain and more is predicted tonight.
I still had to walk the dogs though, or, more accurately, ‘dog’ – Milo the Weather Dog only ventures out when he needs to. He’s a dog that knows his own mind and he’s not a fan of rain at all.
Cairo needs the exercise though, even though we’d both rather not, but she sets a pace that’s tough to keep up with, so I get a workout too.
It’s a commitment and a duty that I understood when I adopted her and it won’t stop until one or both of us are too infirm to do it.
It’s part of the code that makes my strange little psyche up.
Anyone who knows me in real life will know that I’m as far from a saint as it’s possible to be, I’ve led a life full of incident and I’ve caused some hurt along the way, the pain that I’ve given some people to own gives me regret and….I’d change some decisions if I could.
But I can’t.
So I try to balance my life where I can and help others when possible as a partial balance for my less admirable actions.
But I do have a code of sorts.
Like most people’s, it’s stolen from others but some of it is hardwired and some taken from long observation of others that I have considered to be admirable in my life.
Some of the stolen stuff is here, but stolen or not, I try to live by them after a fashion.
“It is said that the warrior’s way is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.”
“Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well.” “What laws?” Bond Rogers was dismayed. Yet she waited, evidently as curious as her son. “I will not be laid a hand on. I will not be wronged. I will not stand for an insult. I don’t do these things to others. I require the same from them.”
And when my time comes ( and I’ve had close enough calls to know that I’ll accept it ), I hope. It’s like this.
“When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.”
I’ve worked at a senior level for over twenty five years now and I’ve lived by a code that demands that I take nothing that’s offered by others.
If a supplier buys drinks, I buy one back, I don’t take free trips, hardware, gadgets or cash.
I’ve been offered outright bribes a few times and laughed in the faces of those offering them, if they were existing suppliers, I cancelled their contracts the next day.
I’m nobody’s creature and nobody will ever be able to call in a ‘favour’
And so, the news that a very rich man has basically bought a whole government has given me a whole new perspective on the politics of our little country.
Watching these elected filth make excuses for cash donations, private shoppers, free tickets, pool parties, use of penthouse apartments and a fucking ‘working birthday party for press and lobbyists’ has made me realise that we’re a banana republic and probably have been for a while.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better and it’ll never get better if we don’t hold them to account.
It’s been raining here for the last twenty hours, the roads are flooded again and Milo the Weather Dog waited until 4pm to go outside, he hates the rain and can seemingly wait forever.
Cairo isn’t as bothered though and she came for a four mile walk through huge puddles and running water before coming home to a warm shower and a robe, there may have been treats involved.
If you walk out of my house, turn left and walk half a mile through a private lane, you turn onto an unnamed road that leads all the way to the A41, it’s all hills here and the water runs fast down to the curve in the road; it can get really flooded there.
Some people would blame those floods on climate change or whatever, but in reality, there are drains that run to culverts, they get blocked up and the road floods.
On today’s walk, I could see that the most useful drain was becoming clogged.
So I walked back a hundred yards or so to where somebody has left a spade by a gate.
I used the spade to clear the drain and the road around it, the water flow speeded up and began to clear.
We then carried on with the walk and I put the spade back when we returned – for the next time that it’ll be needed.
And it will be needed.
It sits there patiently waiting for the time that it knows MUST come ( or it would if it were sentient).
It’s a crappy metaphor, but it’s the closest that I can come to for the state of the country right now.
A draconian crackdown on mostly ordinary people has resulted in a strange, muted mood, but the problems that they protested about are still there and getting worse.
At some point, we’ll all have to play our part in opening the path for the flood that’s coming, or risk being silenced for ever.
And on that cheery note, I’m going to go back to reading a book, listening to music and snuggling up with the dogs.
It’s grim out there right now. Both in the real world where the onslaught of horror never seems to let up and in the virtual world of X (Twitter for you oldsters), where the news is faster, unfiltered and very raw sometimes.
I’m quite fortunate in that my psychological makeup is:
A thing of possible horror
Stable enough for me to actually manage my emotions about 97% of the time.
I don’t take offence, I don’t worry about things, I don’t brood, nothing keeps me awake.
There’s a ton of churn at work, but I could legitimately quit tomorrow and never work again, so that gives me a platform to be the person who tells the truth, who tries to do the right thing, to protect his team from the predations of the morally vacant and stupid.
But I recognise that some things are insidious, you have to make the effort to avoid them sometimes.
And this is one of those times.
Our country is in deep trouble, but the problems aren’t going anywhere just yet.
Our ‘leaders’ are feckless scum who are pointing at an imaginary far-right threat because they’re sitting on some truths that will make the past few weeks look like practice.
The press are weak, vapid, paid for shills.
At least half the population are acting like congenital idiots.
And so.
We have to pace ourselves. Anger and hatred are corrosive, violence is a tool that should only be used sparingly and dispassionately.
We have to be better.
These two idiots don’t care about any of the things we do, they want ( in a random order), treats, walks, snuggles, a routine that they understand, food, water, love and the feeling that they’re safe.
So I focus a bit of time to ensure that I give them what they need.
I resist the urge, I resist the urge EVERY FUCKING DAY, to look Milo’s original owner up and return the pain that he meted out, with interest. I know everything about him.
But it won’t help Milo.
So….
Where am I going with this?
We need to be clear headed and disciplined if any of our problems can be fixed.
And we need a balance.
Take a few moments every day to appreciate the beauty that we can find almost anywhere in this country of ours. From mountains to sea, from flatlands to sheep farms on almost vertical hills, country churches and ancient woods – this is a blessed land.
Or take some time to read, I’ve been doing a lot of that in the past few days. Nothing as good as this from Shakespeare and ‘The Tempest’
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
And that’s where I’ll leave it.
Our little lives should have some time for waking dreams before the long sleep.
Call a friend. Tell an old lover that you’re sorry, go out and meet new people, read books, watch whatever films make you happy, take a long walk or go and swim in the seas and rivers.
I wanted to be a policeman as a kid, our local beat bobby was held in high regard even though it was a fairly tough area – he was respected. He walked everywhere, knew everybody’s name and was good at calming situations down.
I drifted into another career though and it was probably for the best. I’d probably have been good at it though.
But I’ve been happy with what I do and I’ve travelled to some fantastic places and seen some incredible things.
I’ve had a number of friends over the years who’ve been serving or retired police and they’ve all carried themselves with honour and dignity.
The man in the front seat here is my recently deceased friend.
Oh yeah. He nicked Barrymore.
He was apolitical and fair in all things.
Why am I typing this?
Because most of the policemen that I’ve met in my life have been fair-minded, brave and there to help the public.
I’ll gloss over the little uniformed sergeant in Southend who told me that I’d get a kicking in the cells but will always remember the giggles of the two monsters with him when I called his bluff and said that as long as he came into the cell first, I’d take the kicking after I finished with him.
Spoiler alert. I was sent home without charge or any sign of him again.
But why am I typing this?
Because something is rotten with our country.
We see evidence of terrorism support, antisemitism, rising numbers of rapes and assaults and a steady flow of stabbings, murder and mayhem.
And that’s without the actual terrorists.
And then we have the ‘communities’ – well actually the same one in different towns, the police admitting that they agree policing tactics with ‘leaders’.
And now, as a backlash against the drama following a mass-murder of little girls for unknown reasons, we’re seeing people arrested for words on a screen.
This can’t end well.
And I can’t imagine that the police staff who aren’t thugs or sociopaths can be enjoying this drip-feed of horror.
Anybody who thinks that the actual elected government is doing this isn’t paying attention.
They’re keeping the lid on the pressure cooker.
It isn’t sustainable
And it’s going to explode at some point.
I’ve never been gladder to live rurally and in a traditional area.
smallthunderdog 