Ashton Boatman

          I'm not sure that friend is the right word but that line from Simon & Garfunkel seemed appropriate. When I was little we lived in an old stone cottage. In an alcove in the hallway stood a big solid austerity wardrobe where my mum kept her rarely worn posh going out clothes. It was dark in there and I hurried past it because I knew that behind the wardrobe was a tunnel where undefined monsters lived. They had only one aim, which was to get me. I didn't know what they would do to me but I knew it wouldn't be nice. I believed that my mum was trying to protect me, but my dad was in an alliance with them.

I once confided in my big brother about this, then immediately regretted it as he, unsurprisingly, scorned me for believing in bogeymen.

We moved from that house when I was 13. By then, of course, I no longer held that belief, but I still preferred not to linger in the hall.

Since then the bogey that has threatened my well being has had a name, Depression. It has grabbed me and dragged me into it's lair halfway through each decade. The last time it got me right inside the tunnel, so that I thought I would never get out, was the mid 1990s. That was 30 years ago. The bogey has grabbed me since, but I have learned ways of fighting it off. Writing about it is one of them.

I started to feel it's claws  in me last week. I started to feel increasingly gloomy . Yesterday I woke up and felt totally powerless. In my normal life I work hard to make changes for the good. My focus is on trying to use whatever skills I have to make the world a little bit better and a little bit more likely to survive for future generations. Some may think that silly selflessness, do gooderism, denying myself the enjoyment of the many things that are available to consume. in our brave new world. Some might think I would do well to jet off to Thailand or somewhere, at the expense of the next generation, and have a good time. In fact, I find what most people see as a good time just boring. I enjoy my life, except when the bogeys get me.

 When this feeling comes on me I feel like everything I do is a waste of time, but what else would I do? Everything is futile! Nobody understands. What's the point?

I start to go on about the curse of Cassandra. Cassandra's curse, in Greek mythology, was that she had the gift of true prophecy, but nobody would believe her. In 1973 I learned about the greenhouse effect and the Limits to Growth report. I decided to live more simply as a result. I sort of hoped that everyone else would catch on, but the promise of infinite happiness in the never never future through more and more consumer goodies was too powerful for most people. Many still attack viciously those who point out our real parlous situation, such as the brave young Greta Thunberg. 

50 years after learning about these things we are on the edge of global tipping points. If we go over them our planet will be plunged into an unliveable hothouse. The billionaires who are driving our suicidal economies are digging themselves survival bunkers in the Arctic.

My big dilemma has been, where do I go from here. My life's work has been saving a collection of wooden boats and trying to put them to work on jobs that are in some way good for the Earth and/or people's well being. Now I wonder if I should give that up and concentrate on trying to save the planet. There will be no use for old wooden boats, lovely as they are, if we collectively go over a tipping point. Perhaps I should get political and campaign to keep the oil fueled loonies of the Right out of power.

I'm not a natural campaigner, more of a digger and knocker together of bits of wood, so I'll probably carry on as I am, despairing of the stupidity that seems to be ruling the world at the moment.

I think a lot of people who feel as I do deal with it by consuming alcohol or drugs. I can see how tempting it must be to imbibe a substance that takes away the despair, even on a temporary basis. I'm lucky that I've never had that temptation get hold of me. I find it hard to spend time with addicts as they seem like people who have just given up on life. On the other hand, genuinely recovered addicts are often inspiring. However, I have used a little pill that helps to keep the bogeys away, St John's Wort. A herbal compound that helps to stave off depression.I now have a problem. A side effect of St Johns Wort is to thin the blood. Now I've had a stroke I'm prescribed blood thinning medication, so I can't take my worts lest my blood becomes too watery. 

I'm wondering if that's the reason for my current low mood.

Following the Green victory in the Denton and Gorton election my right wing friends seem to be concentrating on attacking the party for its rather liberal drugs policy. Let me preface my comments by pointing out that I do not have skin in this game. I am not dependent on mind altering chemicals legal or illegal. I do however live in a town where chemical abuse, including legal alcohol , is obvious and linked to health issues and petty crime. The war on drugs seems to have been lost here.

Let's scroll back to 1996. We kept most of our boats at the Boat and Butty yard in Runcorn. The Boat and Butty was set up by the wonderful Peter Shrubsall, Shrubbie, and his partner Marion. Unfortunately Shrubbie died in about 1985. Marion carried on the business but did little more than call in every month to collect mooring fees.

Our boats were occupied  by young people who kept them afloat and formed a loose community.   After "Forget me Not"s launch in 1994 I moved there and lived on "Raymond". There were other people living there on their own boats, including Ginger.

Nobody really disliked Ginger but he was shuffled away to the far end of the moorings because of his need to stick needles in himself. His partner, Linda, had a similar need to fill herself with alcohol. I remember seeing her getting into a taxi to go for rehab. I have actually seen healthier looking corpses.

Ginger needed to be in Runcorn because it gave him easy access to the drug dependency unit in Widnes. This supplied most of his needs. Because of the War On Drugs it was closed down. The only way that Ginger could get what he needed was to engage in the retail trade for illegal substances. A continual stream of sad shuffling people started to call at Ginger's boat. Unoccupied boats on the moorings were broken into.

 Retailers need wholesalers, who arrived in a black BMW.

Ignorant of what was actually going on I challenged these people. They claimed to be plain clothes police but could not prove it.  I said that in that case I'd call the real police. They said that if I did that they'd kill me. I don't give in to threats so I rang the police. I asked them to be discreet. 

The police were soon there, sirens blaring. They leaped out of their car, truncheons drawn, shouting my name. Discreet I said. The BMW had gone.

Usually when someone says they're going to kill you they don't mean it literally. It was pointed out to me that these people probably did mean it. Being stubborn I stayed on, spending each night in a different place. The nice friendly community evaporated. Most people kept their heads down. There had been several drug related murders in Liverpool recently. One person started a campaign of vandalism against me, damaging my possessions. I believe that he sank "Raymond" while I was away. I later learned that he had been told to make the place safe for the drug dealers with threats against his daughter as an incentive.

All hell was let loose. The criminals ruled the boatyard and the police seemed happy to let it go on as long as only hairy hippy boat dwellers were affected. All night cars and motorbikes were coming and going providing a delivery service. 

The man who was damaging my property was actually in touch with someone well known, who I can't name but some people will be able to guess, who put it around the canal grapevine that I was funding the boats by drug dealing. If this had been true we might have them all restored by now.

We started making plans for moving our boats out of Runcorn. Luckily we'd been invited to move them to Portland Basin.

Suddenly things calmed down. I read in the local paper that 3 men from Kirkby had been arrested in Widnes outside an industrial unit. Inside the warehouse was the biggest indoor skunk growing farm busted up to that point. The 3 men were in a black BMW.

Friends of Raymond took over that boat. Sometime later I delivered some of her fittings to one of their members at Braunston. He opened his front door and, when I announced who I was, he took a step back and looked scared. I hate to think what he'd been told about me. Canal gossipmongers can do a lot of harm.

All the above happened because of the WAR ON DRUGS. It was similar when they banned alcohol in the USA. More people died of alcoholic poisoning, crime increased and the only people to benefit were the Mafia.

In my view the only political party with a sensible and responsible drugs policy is the Green party.

The political world is in complete turmoil at the moment. The two parties that have had the field to themselves throughout my lifetime are both deeply unpopular but we still have an undemocratic 'first past the post' electoral system which makes it possible for a party to take full power even though the majority hate them. We also have most of the "free" press owned by right wing billionaires, who also own the social media platforms. Add to this the avalanche of hate stirring AI generated memes from Russia and it's hardly surprising that the public space is so discordant. Rational debate is replaced by name calling and point scoring. People aren't listening to each other but trying to undermine each other.

At various times I've been a member of both the Green Party and the Labour party, and I haven't liked either, though my political sympathies lie in that red/green axis. 

People support particular political factions for all kinds of reasons, not all of them rational. It may be that they find a particular candidate attractive, or they have a hatred for a particular social group. It is often that a party represents their short term interests, or pretends to.

To me, the obvious starting point is to ask what sort of a society would I like to live in. Since you ask. I'll tell you!

First of all it has to be sustainable, globally. There's no point in living a perfect life, whatever that is, if it's going to lead to a population crash through global famine caused by climate breakdown. Even if we don't expect it to happen in our lifetimes, most of us care about the next generation. "Well, it'll see  me out" is the most irresponsible phrase I hear, and I hear it often. Frequently from people who have children who they profess to love!

From the above follows the need for fairness. As things stand most of the worlds resources, be they land, money or industrial facilities, are owned by a relatively small proportion of the global population. Whether they are the 1%, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al, or just someone who owns agricultural land or a factory in Bangladesh, their income is derived passively from other people's efforts. The majority are trapped into working hard for somebody else in order to pay rent or a mortgage for somewhere to live and to buy food that they don't have time or space to grow for themselves.

Those who live by owning wealth have sometimes worked hard to attain that position, others have got there by lucky gambling but the vast majority have simply inherited wealth. Sometimes they've managed it well, sometimes not, but the fact remains that their comfortable lives rely on others having less comfortable lives.

Now, the status quo regarding wealth distribution may be alright if it was possible for everlasting economic growth to drag everyone out of poverty. The theory is that because the sum of wealth keeps inexorably increasing the eventually those who now work hard for a dollar a day or less will eventually drive SUVs and fly halfway round the planet for their holidays. By then, the owners of everything will be flying in private starships and enjoying their superyachts on the Martian canals. This is the theory of economic growth, but its pursuit has already run up against, or beyond, the capacity of our planet to sustain it. Most of the world's population still live in poverty.

In my view, we all need to live simply,so that others may simply live. That's not a message that most people want to hear. They have been trained to equate greater wealth with greater happiness, but it is not necessarily so.

In order for everyone to enjoy a comfortable life it will be necessary to redistribute the wealth, not just money but, in the words of the old Labour party, the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Clause 4 of the Labour party's constitution, so triumphantly expunged by Tony Blair and his pals, was often referred to as a nationalisation clause, but not necessarily so. There are many ways to skin a cat, if skinning cats is your thing. I am more of the Kropotkin/William Morris school of socialism rather than the Marxist/Leninist school. One of my more right wing friends insists on referring to me as his favourite communist. I know he means well, but it's highly inaccurate. Although the original Communist vision was one of liberation, I can think of little worse than the centralised bureaucratic nightmare that the Soviet Union became. Even worse is the unashamedly National Socialist surveilance state that the People's Republic of China has become.

In general, people of the left have a rosy view of human nature. Those on the right tend to believe that everyone is out for him/herself and continually in conflict with one another. Both are wrong, but often people feel the need to behave as though they are jungle dwellers because that belief is so widely promoted in our culture. In fact our species has only risen to prominence on our planet by its ability to co-operate and to devise rules to live by.

We all tend to assume that other people are pretty much like we are. In fact people vary widely. That's OK. If I need a brain surgeon I need someone with enormous specialised knowledge, very precise motor skills and a calm disposition. That's not me, but I can build them a very nice boat. Our different traits complement each other.

The difficulty comes with the 1% who lack compassion. This is to do with an undeveloped part of the brain. If treated well as children they often develop the ability to co-operate and find a suitable niche where they do good rather than harm. They often make good brain surgeons! If brought up in a dog eat dog culture they can become axe murderers, CEOs or dictators. Such people, commonly known as psychopaths, mostly lean to the right politically, but will actually adopt any ideology that they see as giving them a route to power. Mussolini began his political career as an anarchist.

Revolutions have a problem. Overthrowing the unjust system and replacing it with something better seems a good idea, but there is always resistance, often armed, from the status quo. To organise a fight the revolutionary group needs strong leadership. which is usually taken up by a psychopath, be it Napoleon, Lenin or Mao. These people develop a cult following that empowers their followers to behave without compassion and negate the original objectives of the revolution in order to keep the glorious leader in power. As the Chinese say, "he who fights the dragon becomes the dragon."

More peaceful transitions can also lose their way. Unfortunately the Labour party took their excellent clause 4 to mean Nationalisation, which is a very distant and indirect form of common ownership. In 1945 they had a once in a lifetime chance to change over to common ownership, but they blew it. Instead of giving core industries to the the workers they nationalised them, keeping the same boss/worker conflict and making them easy for the Tories to privatise again. I think the reason that the Labour party took the route of Nationalisation rather than worker ownership was that it retained well paid roles for powerful individuals and for trades unions, which would be redundant if the workers owned the company and elected the management.

My MP is Angela Rayner. She gets a lot of flak for everything she does. A lot of this is clearly mysoginistic or classist, relating to her humble beginnings. She's made  some mistakes regarding her slightly unconventional housing arrangements, but those who criticise her for this are actually experts at getting away with dodging tax. I like her, though I don't always agree with her.

Angela came up through the trades union movement which is, quite rightly, devoted to improving wages and conditions for workers. During her short period of access to the levers of power she got legal improvements to these things. These changes have been heavily criticised for making small businesses unviable. No mention is made of the fact that many small businesses are paying crippling rents to those who live by owning rather than by working. Often that rent money is being sent abroad and so is lost to our economy. The media never mentions the drag on our economy caused by high rents. Wages largely go back into the local economy.

Trades unions have been declining in influence throughout my lifetime. Essentially they are part of capitalism, a necessary voice for workers confronted by the immense power of capital. The problem is that capital is now global but unions are national. The bosses can say 'If you don't like it we can relocate to China". We need global trades unions to defeat global capital. The only one of these is the Wobblies  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World who are seen as a threat by most unions, who seek compromise with capital rather than overthrowing it. The Wobblies are still active, and actually growing in Britain. https://iww.org.uk/

I feel that the current Labour Party leadership, with Morgan McSweeney as puppetmaster, have worked a con trick on the British public. The biggest threat to democracy and the well being of ordinary people are the handful of people who own so much of our planet's resources that they are actually wealthier than many nations. Our allegedly socialist leaders have done secret deals with them in order to gain limited power. Don't get me wrong. The Labour government are slowly sorting out the mess left by the Tories and will do better for ordinary people than their predecessors, but, they're not interested in tackling the ownership of resources. They're happy that the rest of us pay rent to the owners of everything rather than taking back ownership. Did you know that the pipes delivering gas to your house are largely owned by a Chinese billionaire. We get the crumbs left over after the tax free rents have been paid.

One of the things that I have learned about recently is the exsistence of cults in politics. Like most people, I used to see cults as things like the Moonies, The Scientologists or the Branch Davidians. In fact there are many unrecognised cults that play a huge and unhelpful part in politics. MAGA is an obvious one but they exist on the left as well as the right. How do you define a cult. Perhaps a good definition would be 'a set of beliefs held tenaciously even to the extent of denying or refusing to consider evidence to the contrary'. If Trump tells his followers that prices are going down they believe it, even if eggs are costing more. Along with cults goes the idea of a magic man. Someone who is infallible and goes against conventional thinking because he's such a genius. Brexit was a cult and Farage it's magic man. Devotees still will not acknowledge what a disaster it's been or that Farage is no more than a conman. Through Reform UK Ltd he's now leading another cult based on the fallacy of white English superiority.

I could never wholheartedly get behind Jeremy Corbyn. Corbynism got too cult like for me. I recall a vicious attack on Facebook by some Corbyn devotees of a rather vulnerable lady who dared to suggest that the Blair government did some good things. It did, and overall it was better than the Tories, but, by using PFI for almost everything we ended up paying more rent to global financiers. Jeremy Corbyn was an unlikely cult leader but the left made him one because they wanted a magic man who would solve everything. In fact he did not have the management skills to lead a darts club, ran a clueless election campaign and walked straight into the antisemitism trap set for him. I disliked his support for dictatorships, just because they were left wing, and could never understand his apparent fondness for obvious psychopath Vladimir Putin.

Today is the day of the Denton and Gorton byelection. It's a first past the post contest and currently Labour, Green and the Nazis , call a spade a spade, are pretty much level pegging. I live in the next door constituency with similar demographics. If I had a vote I would use it to support whoever was most likely to defeat the Nazi. It's hard to know who that is because the polls put them all so close. The danger is that the Nazi will get in with 1/3 of the vote, while 2/3 of the voters can't stand him. That's first past the post for you! In 1933 63% of voters did not support the National Socialist party. They didn't get the chance to vote again.

I worry about what the makeup of Tameside council will be after the May elections, I expect Labour to do badly. There are already some independent councillors, about whom I have mixed feelings.  Perhaps we'll get some Greens but, in view of the amount of casual racism locally I fear we could get an influx of Fascists.

I don't know if anyone has noticed but I've been rather quiet so  far this year. The Happy New Year greetings had barely faded into the void when I was struck down by nasty flu virus. Emuna was determined not to catch it so I was banished to the spare bedroom. She  gingerly pushed food and drink through the door and carefully disinfected anything that I'd touched.

By 7th January I was beginning to feel better. I was declared no longer a biohazard on the 8th and allowed to get up and do the washing up. I thought I'd return to work on the boats on the following day.

At about 1pm I suddenly decided to leave the washing up and go through into the living room. I forget why. As I walked through the dining room my right leg suddenly gave way. I grabbed a dining chair with my left arm to avoid falling on the floor. I soon realised that my right arm was limp and useless. It began to dawn on me that I was having a stroke.

Emuna was upstairs so I called her. The sound that came out of my mouth was unfamiliar to me. She came downstairs and I explained in my distorted voice that my arm and leg weren't working. I realised, to my horror, that I was dribbling.

Em said "I think you might be having a stroke". "Corse I'm avin a bloody sthroke" I blurted, "Geranambulance". Emuna dialed 999. The operator said she'd make me top priority but we may have to wait 50 minutes.

I was still clinging to a dining chair so Em fetched her wheelchair. Between us we managed to manoeuvre me into it.

The ambulance arrived in 15 minutes, along with 2 cheerful and efficient ambulancemen. They carried out the necessary checks to ensure  that I would survive the journey, then wheeled me up the ramp into the ambulance, still on Em's wheelchair. She followed on with her stick and we were all strapped in.

I'd never thought much about strokes. I'd imagined that my risk was pretty low. Here are two things I didn't know about them. For an older person like me the risk of one quadruples after a bout of flu. When you've had one your emotions become amplified and sometimes uncontrollable.

Emuna is good at humour, we share a sense of it. She tried to cheer me up. Consequently, as the ambulance rushed through traffic, sirens blaring, I was laughing fit to burst.

They took us to Stepping Hill hospital at Stockport, the main stroke facility in our area. I was rapidly wheeled through corridors. When we entered the stroke unit the staff immediately went into action. It was like a well ordered military operation. I was fitted with a canula, checked over, taken to have my head scanned, about time some would say, then, when the doctors were satisfied that they understood my condition, thrombolised. This is when they pump a cocktail of drugs into you via the canula to break up the blood clot and prevent further damage. The sooner this is done after a stroke the less damage is likely to occur. I was lucky. I later  met someone who had been lying on the floor for 2 days and 2 nights before he was found.

We were taken to a side room to await a bed allocation. The staff were clearly busy. One nurse said it was the busiest  day she could remember. We wondered if it was linked to the flu that had been going round, from which some patients were clearly still suffering. I was thirsty, but every time  I asked for a drink I was told they had to check that I could swallow first. Another thing I didn't know was that strokes often take away one's swallowing reflex. Food or drink will go straight into the lungs.

Eventually a nurse found enough time to check my swallow reflex, then make me a cup of coffee.

I was moved to a ward and started to remember how congenitally uncomfortable hospital beds are. Em had an adventurous bus journey home in a blizzard, including tentatively descending a long,dark, deserted and icy flight of stone steps when changing buses in central Stockport. Later that night I was moved to another ward and settled down for a restless night. The natural discomfort of the bed made worse by the fact that my right arm and leg were just immovable dead lumps of meat.

As I blinked into wakefulness after a fitful night's sleep I started to realise how lightly I'd been let off. Several people had tubes feeding them through their noses. Some were confused and would pull out their tubes, bleating constantly for water, which they couldn't have. On the second night a man came in who was so connfused that he thought the nurses were attacking him. The little movement I had in my leg meant that I could walk with two people supporting me. 

A big moustached South Asian man came to scrub me to within an inch of my life, He looked like he would be more at home riding a white charger across a desert wielding an immense bejewelled sword. 

The doctors on their rounds were like the United Nations. The head doctor reminded me of Henry Kissinger, partly his looks but particularly his East European accent. Other doctors included a very tall young Sikh, a beautiful Muslim woman wearing a hijab and a colourful dress and a smart young African man. Thank God for immigration.

I've heard it said by my more right wing friends that nurses spend lots of time drinking tea and chatting. I've never seen that. On the stroke wards they are rarely still. Their shifts are 12 hours and they rarely get a break from the constant demands of patients.

Hospital food is not wonderful, though, to be fair, it's improved since last time I was in. Nevertheless, there was still too much refined starch and sugar to be healthy. Em visited every other day. A friend started bringing her. She brought wholemeal sandwiches with tasty and healthy fillings, bagels, fruit and sugar free cake. I got visits from therapists, speech, occupational and physio. I was given tongue twisters to practice. I was taken for a walk the length of the ward.

I'd been promised a transfer to Tameside, nearer for Em. The problem was finding a bed, then finding an ambulance to take me. Suddenly, one night, two young ambulancewomen appeared at my bed to whisk me away. As we travelled I enjoyed intelligent conversation about life, the universe and everything with the young Northern Irish woman who sat in the back with me while her colleague drove.

At Tameside it was a similar routine. The man opposite me was pretty much totally paralysed, though he could eat if spoon fed. Others were nil by mouth and some were deeply confused. The daily doctors round was similarly diverse, though less colourful. Three of the chief nurses were little Indian women, so similar that they could have been sisters.

Each day I looked forward to physiotherapy. Very soon I was able to walk to the gym with a quad stick. I was soon moved to a room of my own. After one night I was moved back because someone came in who needed to be isolated because of an infection. After a few more nights I went back to the single room. It seems the infected patient, who was nil by mouth, had been crawling out of bed and trying to drink from the sink. I enjoyed having my own space where I could practice moving about without well meaning nurses intervening.

It was lovely having visitors, with one proviso. Having a stroke makes you tire easily. Having visitors is tiring. One day I had thee visitors. I enjoyed seeing them all, but I was shattered by the end of the day. I felt sorry for some people who had hordes of family visiting all day. I know that sounds ungrateful, but that's. how it is. 6 weeks after the stroke, I still have to conserve my energy.

At last, after about a month, I was released. I'm waiting for some rails to be fitted by the stairs but my walking has got good enough that I can carefully move around the house. My arm is making less progress but I'm confident that I'll get it back eventually.

I wonder how much this would have cost in America!

I've just finished reading The Breaking Wave by Ian Marchant. Ian was, apart from being a very excellent fellow, patron of the Wooden Canal Boat Society. The book was his final novel, published just a few weeks before he died from cancer. He had been determined to get it finished.

                         I'm not a great reader of fiction, though I suppose this is more Faction as it's based around actual events and actual characters in Ian's life. A couple of the characters echo aspects of himself. It's central theme is the re-creation of a band that broke up acrimoniously in the 80s. It finds the different characters from that band, now all living very different lives, and includes a romantic element. It would actually make a really good film. In the last few pages there are links to actual recordings of the band that inspired it. 

I was puzzled about musical genres though. Music is something that I don't know much about. I like it, almost any of it that stems from a genuine creative impulse rather than just the desire for wealth and fame. I don't have strong views, though I suppose I feel more comfortable with some genres than with others. My dad put me off classical music and, particularly opera, by constantly telling me that it was superior to the rock and pop that I liked as a kid. A childish sort of my music is better than your music game, akin to the Beatles v Dave Clark Five arguments that flourished in junior school. I was of the Beatles camp (and history proved me right). Nowadays I'm even beginning to warm to opera. 

As I lived most of my teenage years in the sixties I have a particular affection for the music of the time. I ceased to follow musical fashions when glam rock came along.  In the mid 70s the whole hippie vibe that had made the previous decade so wonderful was overturned by a a new youth subculture that seemed to love harshness, discord and spitting a lot, ie  punk! I hated it and all the NO FUTURE negativity that seemed to go with it. 

I knew Ian as a writer and entertainer. The only music that I observed him performing were comic pisstakes, along with his friend Chas Ambler under the name Your Dad.  I knew that Ian used to be in bands, but for some reason I thought they were punk bands. I'm not sure now what gave me that Idea. Perhaps early ones were, but The Breaking Wave, certainly wasn't. Possibly it was something that Ian said that gave me that Idea. I knew our musical tastes differed. His tastes were very clear cut while I could listen to almost anything (though I can't stand modern manufactured pop). Perhaps it was our age difference. He was 5 years younger than me, a big difference in younger times. Ian would have been about 17 when punk reared its ugly snarling blaspheming head. 

Anyway, I've referred to Ian having a punk past a couple of times recently, and now it occurs to me that that might be wrong. Perhaps someone who knew him as a young man would like to comment. 

The book is good and should be the basis of a film. Something like Four Weddings and a Funeral springs to mind.  It combines exploration of characters with a band movie theme, romance, an underlying tragedy but it would be a sort of feelgood film. Any film directors reading this?  

Read the book (but don't buy it from Amazon as Jeff Bezos already has enough money)  Sorry the photos aren't very good. 

I wasn't sure what to call this piece. My first thought was The Curse of Cassandra, closely followed by What's the F*****g Point.  I settled on a derivation of the phrase The Elephant in the Room. That seemed most appropriate because it's dealing with a subject that is so big and scary and bound to change our lives fundamentally that most people prefer to ignore it, or claim that it doesn't exist.

I must admit that I have a tendency towards depression. Some people will use that last sentence to dismiss all that I say, but no, there's a lot of factors behind my occasional mood disorders, one of them being a tendency to face and try to work my way through problems rather than shy away from them. Despair and depression come from an inability to find a solution. Kitten videos just don't work for me.

I woke up this morning full of things that I was going to do today, perhaps too many things, but my mind was also working away at apparently unsolvable problems. Strangely the last straw was to find that we'd run out of toilet paper, a very unusual problem as Em usually stocks up for about 6 months ahead. I could simply have gone to the corner shop to get some, but instead I lay down in the spare room and wrapped a duvet over my head.

Back in 1973 I had a job driving a little van for TV hire company Multibroadcast. My friend Geoff Monaghan also drove for them. I'd already pretty much rejected the usual path through life, career, mortgage, marriage, 2.4 kids etc and had my concerns about what our species was doing to our planet. I came across 2 things that underlined my concerns. One was the Club of Rome. Limits to Growth report, one of the first major computer modelling exercises that concluded that, unless our species controlled growth in population, pollution, energy use, etc etc, sooner or later everything would screw up and we would suffer a population crash. The other was that our species was churning out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than the plants and oceans were absorbing it.

I told Geoff about this. He didn't believe me. I didn't know what the consequences would be but I could see that they wouldn't be good.

 The Limits to Growth  report was a warning. It should have been mailed to every person on the planet. Instead it was hardly mentioned in the media, dismissed, ridiculed and ignored. In the 50+ years since its publication the actual graphs of uncontrolled growth have closely followed the doompath projected by those old computers if we were to change nothing. 

Being aware of this, I've tried to live my life with a pretty low impact on our planet. Now, people may think this would make me miserable. I have admitted to a tendency to depression, but I believe that I would have that I would have that same tendency even if I lived in a mansion and travelled in a private jet. So many rich people I have met who live sad lives of tension and conflict in spite of, perhaps partly because of, their wealth. Happiness and contentment come from within, provided that you have the basic needs of life.

Some people may say that my efforts to live simply, so that others may simply live (Gandhi) were futile. Perhaps so, but at least I don't have being a big part of the problem on my conscience. 

Humans are good at solving problems. Remember the problem about fridges causing a depletion of the ozone layer that would cause us all to get skin cancer?  All the countries of the world got together to ban the offending refrigerants and replace them with something less harmful. The ozone hole is still there, but it's shrinking.

Remember acid rain killing Europe's forests? I recall being at a talk about acid rain. The lecturer pointed out that the first sign of acid rain damage was "a sudden outbreak of blindness among foresters", ie, they just didn't want to see it. That's an important observation. By international agreement coal fired power stations now have scrubbers to remove the offending chemicals from their chimneys. In Britain we no longer use coal for power generation anyway.

So, what's the big problem about tackling the climate crisis?   For most people it seems too big and its consequences too dire for them to dare to take their heads out of the sand. It also threatens their ambitions. Rich people want to get richer, poor people want to get rich and the destitute want, quite rightly, to stop being destitute. They're all in competition with each other and the fear is that, by stepping aside from that competition they'll slide back down to destitution again. This is particularly so in countries, even rich ones like the USA, with no viable support system for "losers" in the fight for wealth. 

Everyone is locked into a struggle for resources. As John Lennon put it, "There's room at the top they're telling you still, as long as you learn how to smile as you kill". Of course, for most people it's not as stark as that, but everyone knows that the people who 'get on in life' are often the ones who are good at networking and buttering up the boss. Yes, I know, working hard (or getting your staff to work hard) to get results helps too. The result of this is people wearing themselves out, mentally and/or physically to be cast aside when they can no longer perform.

The same thing happens between nations, trapping their citizens into a rat race and often fostering distrust and hatred of those living in other lands. I grew up during the Cold War. The Americans and the Russians were competing to build more nuclear warheads than the other, even though they could each end life on Earth several times over. During the Cuban missile crisis I was 8, and terrified of what was likely to happen. Happily, they pulled back from the brink and I've lived to be a septuagenarian. 

Some limited sanity in this area came along when Ronald Reagan watched a film called The Day After. This shows how getting out the true information rather than the propaganda can change things. Reagan's military top brass had been telling him that they could win a nuclear war, because their careers were boosted by him believing that. 

https://collider.com/the-day-after-ronald-reagan/

This conversion of Reagan led eventually to the SALT talks etc, scaling down each country's nuclear arsenal. However, a major factor in the Soviet Union agreeing to reductions was that it did not have the economic capacity to carry on competing militarily with the USA. Capitalism had shown itself to be capable of superior economic growth to the USSR's command economy (masquerading as socialism). 

Here's the big problem, which I don't have a solution for. Economic growth is bound to make our planet uninhabitable, but, our planet is divided into nations. If any nation eschews economic growth it will become less able to manufacture or purchase the latest weapons. Without the latest weapons that nation will become unable to deter and defend against aggressor nations. This is currently being demonstrated in Ukraine, where the greater resources of Russia has allowed it to gradually take over large parts of Ukraine, in spite of fierce and brave resistance. To many politicians, aware of the dog eat dog nature of international affairs, stopping economic growth would be suicidal, but so is carrying on with economic growth.

Strangely enough, Margaret Thatcher (who I despise) was one of the first major politicians to raise the issue.

Of course, then there's business. The rich want to keep on getting richer. They own the media and so control what information is shared with the rest of us. In the short term they can make more and more profits by selling us more and more stuff. They've got most people convinced that if they buy things that are bigger and better, if they fly away on holidays and cruises that are further and further away then they will become happy. Of course, to afford these things we'll have to work harder and harder (for them). In order to prevent change that may threaten their short term profits they pour vast amounts of funds into lobbying governments and promote online memes spreading disinformation about  what David Cameron famously referred to as "green crap". This has led to politicians consciously moving away from the very solutions that could save our collective bacon even though they clearly understand how vital a transition away from fossil fuels is.

I don't get it. Oil company bosses are not stupid, though they may be a bit crazy. They understand the science. They have children and grandchildren. Perhaps they think that somehow their wealth will protect them from mass extinction. Certainly it is rumoured that the world's richest person has a bunker in Alaska. Talking about crazy, he seems to live in a sort of Dan Dare version of reality where escape to Mars while the Earth boils is a possibility.

The climate crisis seems to have become the issue that dare not speak its name. Frustratingly it's become a political issue between left and right, with the right currently gaining traction.  I don't understand how atmospheric physics can possibly be a matter of political debate, any more than gravity or electrical conductivity can be. These are things established by scientific research and mathematical equations. I am clearly of the left, but like to maintain friendships among people of all political persuasions, as long as they're not actually promoting hatred. You may note that the two politicians that I have cited are right wing, but they accepted the evidence.

The most powerful person in the world claims to believe that climate change is a Chinese hoax, despite his own scientists having done much of the work on understanding it. It's a very personal thing. I have a friend who apparently understands the problem and lives a low impact life. He sometimes gets work on dairy farms and does not believe that bovine emissions are part of the problem, and yet the evidence is solid on this. Belief is a problem. I don't believe in belief. When someone says you just have to believe they mean that you should suspend all rational thought. I have friends who regularly fly, who drive everywhere, who go on cruises ( the absolute most polluting form of holiday) and yet I say nothing. Many of them understand the science but clearly think that somebody else should deal with the problem. How can I constantly be criticising my friends lifestyles. 

If I talk about climate change, particularly if I mention the need for immediate action, I'm seen as a Jeremiah, a spoilsport, a party pooper etc, and yet, how can I not talk about it when it hangs above us like a tidal wave about to break and wash away our secure and comfortable lives. The dinosaurs didn't know the meteorite was coming. We know what's happening, but choose to pretend otherwise.

I plant trees, partly to replace the ones I use, partly to absorb a bit of carbon. I wonder what the point is. Probably they'll die in a catastrophic drought or get burned in a forest fire, but I have to hope that my little bit will help.

I just found this article lurking in the deep crevices of my computer. I think I wrote it for Waterways World but i don't think it ever got published. At the time Forget me Not had no engine so Southam  was towing her as well as Lilith. 

I miss the recycling trips, I think a lot of people do. Unfortunately they had to stop because of covid and it's not been possible to re-start them. Nowadays we are having to turn donations away at the door of the charity shop sometimes. i think this is because so many similar shops have closed for lack of volunteers. 

“Southam”s fore end was now crammed with people. Someone had taken the
initiative to make tea for the masses. It was time to get people organised.
Sitting on “Southam”s roof I gave the obligatory safety talk, then selected
people to steer “Forget me Not” and “Lilith” (which were to be towed) and
work various lines as we set off. People moved to their action stations and I
went to “Southam”s engine room to fire up her huge old BMC Commodore.
I suddenly remembered the cat. Celebrity canal cat Captain Kit Crewbucket

had been following me around and trying to trip me up since I arrived. He
wanted his breakfast, but, had I fed him earlier he would have then gone to
sleep in one of the boats, only to wake up in a strange place, panic and
potentially disappear into the bushes. I picked out a sachet of catfood and
squeezed it out on to his dish, before giving last minute instructions to the
crews, untying “Southam” and putting her into forward gear.
The propeller stirred black mud and white carrier bags from the depths of the
arm as it pushed the boat forward then, as soon as she was into the main
canal, I engaged sterngear to avoid hitting the other bank. Moving the gear
lever to neutral position, I walked up the roof and used the shaft to swing the
bow to face in the right direction. “Southam” is very good at towing, having a
powerful engine, but, being a motorised butty, her manouverability is limited.
With the stern against “Forget me Not”s bow I take her line and shout “OK,
untie everything” to the boat crews before taking a turn on the T stud and,
with one hand holding the line and the other holding the tiller, I use my foot to
push the gear rod forward, a little grunt from the engine acknowledging that it
is properly engaged. As “Southam” moves forward I slip the towing line to
accellerate “Forget me Not” without a snatch. As she starts to move someone
walks back along her length with “Lilith”s line. As they hand it to the steerer I
move the gear rod to neutral and drift while they tie it on to the dollies. As the
steerer stands up and “Lilith”s line tautens I engage gear again and the boats
straighten into a line along the canal and past the new flats. The boats follow
dutifully as “Southam” swings round the first turn to enter the narrow confines
of Walk bridge.

It was busy at the boatyard. It's been quiet there for a while as Dave has to spend more time looking after his wife and Kim is sometimes away at his Spanish casa. I've been struggling to get the place sorted for ages, slowly but carefully getting stuff organised, weighed in or sold. Now Tony has got involved with this and I know he's frustrated by my careful sorting of everything. He's done a great job sorting out the non ferrous metals though. We just need the van back on the road so that we can weigh it all in. 

After a bit of a mix up about dates and times Geraldine and Helen showed up. I had planned to ask them to sort out nuts and bolts and screws but, as time had passed, they got on with cutting up all the brash from the foliage clearance and putting it into bulk bags. Dave has been repairing a stove and Kim was processing reclaimed wood for various jobs and painting Forget me Not's deck boards

There seems to be some progress on getting our mooring arranged with CRT at last. We seem to have a bit of a team working on it, including a civil engineer. The big problem has been that they just keep coming up with hoops that are very hard to jump through if you don't speak civil engineerese. 

MOT time for the charity's van is always a bit of a worry. Big vans are expensive even when they are quite old, but so are repairs. Repairs are getting particularly tricky as vehicles get increasingly complicated and full of electronics. Our Transit is 17 years old and it's little electronic brain had a nervous breakdown long before we got it. It has about 180,000 miles on the clock

We've had the van for 2 years, and it's due for its second MOT in our ownership. Last year I took it to a chap in deepest Lancashire who often does repairs for us. He doesn't rip us off and he does a good job. I asked him to get it MOT'd. It had a few minor issues which he dealt with, no problem!  

I thought I'd do the same this year. I drove it to the relevant place and left it in our mechanic friend's capable hands. Next day he phoned me with a long list of faults, lots of welding needed, there was an oil leak that would involve dismantling the engine to fit new oil seals and it had failed on emissions. Emissions is a big one. Worn old diesels get dirty and it's very difficult and costly to get them to run clean again.

I contacted our trustees to explain that we were going to have to spend a few thousand pounds on a replacement van, then got a bus to the little Lancashire town to pick up the vehicle. 

When I saw the fail sheet from the MOT station I began to wonder. The oil leak was an advisory, not a fail. It had actually had that leak as an advisory on the last two MOTs and it hadn't got any worse. I wondered if the engine had been properly warmed up. Cold engines are smoky and it pays to have a good drive round before an MOT.

Next day I called at a local MOT station that I've used before and explained my dilemma. They told me to come back in an hour and they'd do an emissions test. I drove about to get the engine warmed up and lo, the engine did pass.

My conclusion is that our mechanic friend in deepest Lancashire had simply driven the short distance to the MOT centre and had it tested with it's engine still fairly cold. He then bigged up the faults, I suspect because he didn't fancy doing the welding. I don't blame him. It's not a job I've ever done, or ever wanted to do. Grinding out rusty metal with bits falling on you, then welding in new metal in awkward corners, with hot bits falling on you, doesn't really appeal. I'd rather be pecking wood.

Of course, passing an unofficial emissions test doesn't get us an MOT. All the other faults need to be rectified, but, if we know it can pass on emissions then they're worth doing. 

I took the van to see Canis. Our new trustee rejoices in the handle of Canis Fortunatis, latin for Lucky Dog. He has long experience of vehicle repairs and seems to revel in rejuvenating rustbuckets. He had a look under the van at the faults noted on the MOT sheet and declared them perfectly repairable. Today I delivered the van to him loaded with likely bits of metal from the boatyard and a bottle of CO2/Argon mix for his mig welder. I backed the van on to his ramps then cycled home from Chadderton. Fingers crossed for a successful MOT test sometime soon.

The van is a vital tool for the WCBS. We use it most days for ferrying stuff between the boatyard and Portland Basin and it's essential for our charity shop, collecting and delivering furniture etc. We could do with more van driving volunteers, especially for shop deliveries and collections. Don't worry if you're unable to carry furniture. We have a couple of hefty lads to do the hard work, we just need drivers.

                                                        Any offers?

                                                                             Let me know.

Yesterday there was a terrorist attack on a synagogue in a suburb of Manchester. Two men, plus the perpetrator, died. Others are seriously injured in hospital. The media, quite rightly, are full of condemnation of the atrocity. They talk of an upsurge in antisemitism. I saw a video where a young Jewish man claimed that it was all Keir Starmer's fault for recognising Palestine, which he saw as an act of antisemitism in itself.

I must admit that I've been going off Keir Starmer, but he seems to be the current scapegoat for everything, including the failings of his predecessors.

I don't know how many civilians in Gaza died yesterday. The total since October 7th 2023 is over 66,000. Some put it higher. The average is about 91 per day. Lets say it was 91. 

Stalin once said "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic". Stalin was a psychopath. 

The three deaths in Manchester yesterday were tragedies. They left grieving friends and relatives. I very much doubt that the perpetrator will be met in Paradise by 72 fawning virgins. 

Are the 91 who died from hunger, bombs and bullets in Gaza yesterday merely statistics. I suppose if you polish off the whole family at least there's no-one left to grieve!

I imagine the man who carried out this attack was motivated by the genocide (call a spade a spade) in Gaza. How he came to imagine that killing some Mancunian Jews would change anything is beyond me. 

How did all this hatred between Jews and Palestinians start? Well, after the right wing genocide of Jews in Europe, survivors sought a Jewish homeland and, based on a vague declaration by Lord Balfour, they headed for their ancient homeland of Palestine. Their ancestors had been ejected from here by the Romans after a rebellion. Since then, Jews had lived in many lands and faced much persecution. The wish to set up their own state in their ancestral land, which was reluctantly administered by the British,was understandable. 

Just one problem! The land was already settled by people whose title deeds were granted by the Ottoman Empire, who ruled here pre- 1918. 

To be honest, no-one came out of the establishment of Israel in 1948 with a lot of moral credit. Jewish terrorists and militias had already been fighting the British, who basically gave up on refereeing the conflict.  To quote Leon Rosselson  (who is Jewish) "By theft and murder they took the land, now everywhere the walls spring up at their command".  750,000 Palestinians were ejected from their homes and land. They call it the Nakba, which translates as catastrophe. You can understand them being pissed off!

Over the years more wars have happened between Israel and the Palestinians, sometimes supported by surrounding Arab states. Israel has the apparently unlimited support of the world's greatest military power, the USA. The electoral make up of that country makes it almost impossible for a president to get elected without the Jewish vote.

After the war of 1967, Israel essentially had control of the whole area. Some parts were occupied but not officially annexed by Israel. Instead, they allowed settlers to illegally, according to international law, take land for themselves. The old Ottoman title deeds were seen as invalid. A friend of mine went and worked in one of these settlements in the 1980s. He told me that the life of a Palestinian was regarded as "not worth a light". 

Foolishly, in my view, Palestinians have tried to fight back with violence. Sometimes this is kids throwing stones at soldiers, and getting bullets in return. Suicide bombers, knife attackers, plane hijackers, home made rocket launches or, as on October 7th 2023, a large scale attack on civilians and taking of hostages. 

In order to have a war you need to dehumanise your enemy. You have to portray them as demons with no redeeming human characteristics. The man who wielded the knife at the Manchester Synagogue was not thinking he was killing people with friends and lovers and families. He was thinking he was ridding the world of vermin. The same dehumanisation takes place when Israeli fighters shell schools and hospitals.

The old testament lays down the rule of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". In other words, revenge should never be disproportionate. The attack of October 7th was awful and dastardly and wrong, even if it wasn't as extreme as the Israeli media machine has made out. The response has been far more than an eye for an eye. Jesus said turn the other cheek. Gandhi said "an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind".

It has to stop!  The Palestinians have to have their own land where they can live peacefully, but to do that they have to accept that the state of Israel is a reality that will not go away. Violence against it is futile as it is now a great military power (they have an 'iron dome' missile defence system that our islands lack). Israel has to accept that most of the world finds its behaviour towards Palestinians repugnant. Their genocide in Gaza has been the greatest spur to antisemitism in my lifetime. It has to withdraw to its 1967 borders, close down the illegal settlements and help to rebuild the massive infrastructure destruction that it has carried out in Gaza.

How this can come about I don't know. Recognising Palestine and condemning the genocide for what it is is a first step. Some in the Israeli government actually believe that God has promised them the whole of Judea and Samaria of old testament days. Israeli citizens and Jews around the world need to understand that the recent actions of Israel have made it a pariah state, rather like apartheid South Africa. 

I recall that the IRA started negotiating after their own supporters were horrified by the killing of two children in Warrington and the noble reaching out to them by the father of one of them. Perhaps, just perhaps, all this psychopathic killing will spur on both sides to come together and find a solution. Both sides are made up of human beings, even if their leaders seem to lack any kind of human decency.