'An egg on the kitchen floor'

Families without love are collections of human beings linked by a cold reproductive trail. Blood is thicker than water, they say, but they also remind us that you cannot choose your family.

Love is not an inevitable consequence of the genetic trail, though it may exist in the same way as friendship is possible between former strangers. Human beings are, in their general collective opinion, the final outcome of millions of years of evolution. Yet, in the main, their drivers are still the same as those of the entire living world and emotionally we remain prehistoric.

This simplicity and the fundamental nature of human drivers is often unpalatable to the human mind and is often rejected by those who claim intelligence. To survive, to be comfortable, to be safe, to be entertained and to provide these things for the next generation, these are the fundamentals.

Of course it is more complex than this, but even the complexity is not necessarily a reflection of intelligence or the consequence of higher brain functions, but results from the complex layers of intergenerational social interactions of multiple human beings.

Unconditional love is is not a natural consequence of parenthood, any more than love is. I'm in danger of asking that age old question, what is love? Relax, you will be pleased to know that I am not going to ask that or try to define it. The answer might be a consequence of my writing, if you can identify it.

'An egg on the kitchen floor' is a story of human frailty, self delusion, and egotism. It is the story of a family that never was and the clash between ideals and principles that could never share the same space.

Damn persistent cough!

 

It makes me cough just thinking about it. It’s always there, breaking my train of thought, stopping me from developing any coherent argument, waiting to jump back out after a fleeting moment of forgetfulness, then I remember and the thought comes ‘it’s gone’ and there is it back again. It’s a constant reminder that I have to breathe to live, I take a breath in, another out, then the tickle and there it is again! I can’t remember what it is like not to cough, how quickly my recollection of being cough free from the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years before has fled. It’s very quiet here, apart from my coughing.

Winter knows it’s a workday

 

A grey, wet and very blustery day has welcomed us back to reality after the Christmas and New Year break, and to be honest the sooner January 3rd 2012 comes to an end the better! Of course, being a ‘Home Worker’,  I am one of the lucky one’s - at least in terms of the usual impact the weather has on England’s overcrowded South Eastern road and rail networks. Apart from the usual delays at the shower and on the landing as I make my way to my office, the weather is unlikely to cause me any travel related delays today.

The global and technology based nature of the company I work for means that the weather in the UK has little impact on me, unless I lose my delicate access to the world provided by the pair of plastic coated copper wires being whipped against the branches of my oak tree. But the social and efficiency advantages provided by todays available technology are withheld from the majority of workers in the South East at least. The crazy ‘lemmingesque’ tidal wave of humanity that surges to and from London every weekday morning and evening continues unchecked.

Regardless of the available benefits brought by the increasingly wide channels provided for excited electrons to flow to and fro over incredible distances like micro commuters, uninterrupted by natures fury, the corporate masters continue to insist on physical presence as proof of labour. Late arrivals, early departures, discussion of the overcome challenges presented that day by the forces of nature, all add up to less time spent generating wealth for our masters. And commuters are fleeced by Government, road and rail providers.

Soon January 3rd 2012 will be over, will Winter know that its the second workday of the New Year tomorrow?

An interesting site, well worth a browse.

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/

The farce of the United Kingdom

 

A few months ago it was announced by the Open University that fees in England were to be DOUBLED as a result of Government cuts. It has been announced now that, apart from a modest inflation linked increase, fees in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland will REMAIN THE SAME AS LAST YEAR!!

Overseas fee's have yet to be announced but are also likely to stay the same as are European Community Member States fees! The English institution based in Milton Keynes and created by a (proper) Labour Government to help people who did not have the opportunity to attend University is in total disrepute!

How can this be allowed! This is supposed to be a UNITED KINGDOM, yet the 49 million residents of England are subsidising the minorities in the other parts of the 'United Kingdom' (circa 3 or 4 million each in Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland).

When is there going to be an English Parliament and an end to this so-called 'United Kingdom' farce? Isn't it time to 'give' Wales and Scotland AND ENGLAND Independence and create a United Ireland? Let the smaller 'UK' countries join Europe - but get England out of it!

What the moon means to me

 
To me the moon resets my perspective and positions me as a tiny part of a wider and much greater reality.

When I see the moon, I never fail to wonder at the magnificence of it all - it strengthens my belief that the tiny insignificant creature that is man is of no more significance than are ants frenetically and frantically scrabbling in the dirt to feed their greedy ruling class and their gluttonous swollen Queen!


Once I accepted the relentless march of time, the inevitability of decay and the fact that finding and understanding the 'meaning' in life was forever beyond the grasp of mere 'human ants', I came to understand that the commonality of aspects found in religions did, as is often claimed, come from a single truth, a single deity, a single god. But this 'god' has no sentience, has no reality outside the imaginings of the human brain.
God is an explanation that fills the void in our knowledge, answers the unanswerable but without the burden of explanation. We are told we must have faith, we must accept without question, or we will be punished when these frail shells in which our earth bonded sentience lives, briefly and tenuously like a candle flickering in an unpredictable and heartless breeze, are pulled inevitably apart.

But nothing remains the same, yesterday is inevitably different from today and time marches on, relentless, destructive, without any purpose visible to us apart from the inevitable dismantling of everything we build, everything we create, everything we are.

For me, our closest celestial neighbour, puts it all into perspective.

People – they gambled on your life!

 

I think that if there were a referendum on whether dishonourable behaviour should be legalised, a significant number of people in the UK would vote for it.

I am sick to the back teeth of hearing how pensions are ‘unsustainable’ in the current economic climate and that we are ‘living too long’.

When you sign up for a pension scheme, its a contract between you and the pension provider. They take your money and they promise a return – a pension at an agreed rate for when you retire.

How they do this should not be of any concern to us.

If they then decide they cant deliver, then like in any economic transaction, that is their problem not ours.

Is it our fault that they gambled that we won’t live long enough to benefit from the deal, that they have taken a risk and fallen foul of it? Is it our fault that they gambled on a return by investing in the biggest gambling house of them all, the stock exchange – and they lost? Is it our fault – as Customers – that they didn’t have an effective business plan to meet their commitments to us? Is it our fault they misjudged the risks, made extravagant forecasts that proved to be wrong?

Is it not true that we, as a tiny country with very little real production, are living beyond our means in many more ways than in meeting promised commitments to working people?

Is the monarchy realistically sustainable, is there really sufficient return on the cost? Can we sustain the level of support we give to foreign countries, in Europe and beyond? Should we pour money into India for her poor, for example, when the country has a space program?

Come on people, isn’t it time we broke away from divisive party lines and dogma and began fighting for what is right, what is just and what is honourable?

Rich media people and the press

Why are the same people always whining about the press? JK Rowling, frankly a very lucky but mediocre writer, is one of the most litigious 'celebs' and supported the McCans, the infamous child neglectors. Incredibly the odious pair come out of hiding to appear once again before a committee of our dubious democratic 'leaders'.

It's amazing and ironic that the McCanns whine about press intrusion when they courted the press, parading around in the limelight instead of searching for their 'lost' child, especially when the UK press have staunchly defended them and supported them despite the generally held public view that they at the minimum neglected their children.

Celebs can afford lawyers and often owe their income to press coverage, it is ordinary folk who need protection.

The boundary between celebs and the press is vague and indistinct as many celebs write for the media.

Freedom of expression should not be confused with press freedom, they are not the same. The media is owned by millionaires.