Be kind.
Achieve wisdom and exercise that skill.
The world has always been filled
With angry greedy people.
You cannot legislate them away,
Or hope that they will die out.
The world has always relied on people
Who are kind and wise,
To act as counterbalances to these others.
Unfortunately, the World supply of angry greedy people
Appears to be limitless,
So there will always be a need for kindness and wisdom.
You might just save the world.
One more of the poems from a notebook of about 25 years ago. Re-reading them, I am slightly surprised to find I rather like a lot of them, still. Although my style has altered considerably, my sentiments are still much the same. Which is as you would expect, I suppose.
But there are plenty that I certainly won’t be inflicting upon you!
As hard as ice and twice as cold,
The devil that is growing old;
Who taunts our bodies’ feeble frames,
And takes our minds – forgetting names.
As cold as ice and twice as hard,
The back that’s bent, the hand that’s scarred.
The face that’s worn and lined with sorrow,
The fear there may be no tomorrow.
The fear tomorrow may come yet,
And bring us more embarrassment,
But how we cling with greedy hands,
To these poor fragile, shallow, lands!
All good things come in threes, it is said. Unfortunately, so do these.
Bah, humbug!
God help you merry gentlemen,
If what you want is rest.
There’s not a chance of getting that,
For you’re off on a quest.
To fill your bags with goods galore
And booze to fuel the Fest.
So it’s tidings of Mammon and cash
Mammon and cash,
So it’s tidings of Mammon and cash.
Now in the town, you’ll find a store
Like none you’ve ever seen.
It’s filled with crap piled on the floor
Right up to the roof beam.
And you must buy a load of this
Or else we’ll think you’re mean.
So it’s tidings of Mammon and cash
Mammon and cash,
Yes, it’s tidings of Mammon and cash.
Another attempt at perverting rewriting a Christmas carol for 2017:
(Bob has a lot to answer for!)
Once in Royal Tunbridge Wells
Stood a lowly shopping mall.
Where a horde of frenzied shoppers
moved like locusts through it all.
Searching for their Christmas loot,
Trampling others underfoot.
Finding bargains at the poundshop,
Cheap old tat that falls to bits.
Plastic toys all made of poison,
Tiny parts to choke their kids.
And the Christmas Trip will be,
An ambulance to A & E.
Spending fortunes on their own folk,
Presents that could sink a ship.
One month’s food to last just two days
Enough booze to float that ship!
Heed the message of our song,
Selfish greed just can’t be wrong!
Everyone should go on a journey; a journey of discovery.
Even if they only do it once.
The journey will be different for everyone. No two journeys will be the same. But what they will have in common is that they will all be journeys where the traveller discovers something about themselves, as well as the environment where they have chosen to journey. The essence of the journey is that it gives the traveller both time and space to think; that on the journey they allow themselves to be open to new sights and thoughts and people.
For some, it will be a carefully curated tour to a country with a different culture to their own. Perhaps a Westerner travelling to Nepal or Cambodia, or an Indian visiting Spain or Iceland, with a carefully prepared itinerary designed to help them get the most out of their journey.
For some, it could be much the same, but as an independent traveller. They would have the flexibility to either keep to a strict itinerary, or to go off somewhere new as the whim takes them. Because everyone’s sense of adventure is different.
For some, it will be a long, long trek through difficult terrain, pushing themselves physically and mentally every step of the way.
For some, it might also be a long journey, but under easier conditions, where the aim is more one of contemplation, perhaps a pilgrimage of sorts.
For others, the difficult terrain might be that of their prejudices and fears – the terrain of the mind.
What starts as a pilgrimage might end up in your discovering that you do not believe in God; well, that is fine. Remember, it is perfectly possible to be a spiritual person without believing in any god.
Although what ‘spiritual’ actually means is not so easy to nail down. I think of it as pertaining to the spirit, rather than to material things. In that sense, I would associate altruism with the spiritual, and greed with the material. A sense of calm and peace with the spiritual, a rowdy hedonism with the material.
For some, the journey might be from their house to a town or village a few miles away, and the journey might take no longer than a day.
It is essential, though, that the journey is undertaken for the sake of the journey. The destination is, in some ways, unimportant. It is what happens on that journey that matters.
Many, perhaps, will journey without realising that they have done so, or arrive at their destination not realising that is what it is. They might only realise later.
Some will arrive at a totally unexpected destination, and perhaps that is the best destination of all.
Go on, then, off you go!
Well, Saturday already. Seems only yesterday it was Friday *sigh* I suppose I’d better get on with it.
I don’t think I’ll do ten of these after all, because I rather run the risk of listing books just because I like them, rather than because they have had a real and measurable influence on me. So today I present the final three.
1. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.
I read this book when I was in my mid twenties, and it really did open my eyes to what we as a species were doing to the planet. Up until that point, I had not really understood the impact that we were having on the environment. Shocked, I became interested in learning more, and then even more shocked as I learned what food and drink manufacturers put in their products for us to consume. At that time, one of them was the nasty compound dropped by the Americans on Vietnam during the Vietnamese War; a defoliant that was known to be carcinogenic.
It was used as orange food colouring.
I got hold of a list of all the ‘E’ numbers that were permitted additives, and which the industry certainly didn’t want us to know about. Certain ones were very nasty indeed. It was at this point that I became very keen on reading the labels on food and drink packaging.
I became involved with various pressure groups, such as Greenpeace.
That book changed my life.
2. The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham.
In some ways, this could lay claim to be the book that has had the greatest influence on my adult life, but in a different way to Silent Spring.
I’d always tried to be a reasonably decent human being, but reading this made me rethink the way that I wanted my life to be. It is the story of a man who returns from the first world war and begins to question his place in society. He finds the trappings of modern western life, and its values, empty and meaningless – its focus on making money, selfishness and greed. He then searches for something meaningful in his own life, through education, religion and travel, and explores his relationships to others.
The message in this book immediately resonated with me; that there is much more to life than the pursuit of money, essential though some of it it might be to my survival. Other people mattered. Helping others was important. What is called the spiritual life, whether or not you believe in a god or not, was an important part of us all.
5. The War of the Worlds by H G Wells.
Are you serious? you ask. How could this book be an influence on your life? One of the first science fiction books, and admirable for that, but an influence?
Well, it is easily told, and the answer will probably surprise you. This book provided the initial impetus for me to become a vegetarian.
Yes, a vegetarian. There is a passage in the book where the narrator recoils with disgust as the Martians take the blood from still-living humans for their nutrition, but then comments that it was probably the same reaction as an intelligent rabbit would feel observing our own eating habits. That made me consider whether it was necessary for me to eat meat, and I came to the conclusion that no, it was not.
I have sat on this one for a month or so, so that my emotions do not get the better of me.
But I am still furious.
I am lucky. I have always had a roof over my head.
I read an article in a broadsheet newspaper weekend supplement that self-righteously banged on about having to convert an entire house on a small budget of twenty thousand pounds, and how they had to live oh, such a frugal life, whilst they were doing this.
Not that there was anything wrong with the house before they converted it, but it wasn’t a style that they liked.
And the colour of that wall, isn’t it dreadful? How could anyone be expected to live in a house like that?
Have they ever had to wonder how they were going to buy food for their family because the bank refused to honour their cheques, because they were overdrawn without permission? No, but I bloody well have, and it really makes me furious.
And I am very aware that compared to the problems and dangers facing millions of people in the world today, mine was a comparatively minor problem. No one was shooting at me. I wasn’t forced to live on the streets. My children didn’t drown attempting to reach a country where they wouldn’t starve to death or be shot or bombed.
I am certain that many people here in the west today simply do not understand what ‘poverty’ means.
It does not mean that you cannot afford an exotic holiday this year.
It does not mean that you cannot afford to upgrade your car this year.
It does not mean that you have to buy the second best large flat-screen TV.
So many people condemn ‘economic migrants’ as if the very term means that they are simply greedy freeloaders.
As if hundreds of thousands of people are willing to risk their lives, and those of their families, just to get a little bit more. A few extra treats, or somesuch.
That they must be greedy, scrounging and good for nothing.
Foreign, of course.
It seems to matter little that they are fleeing war, terror, the destruction of their entire lives and livelihoods.
They are forced into overcrowded camps with hardly any facilities, which are then condemned for being squalid.
And newspapers and politicians encourage and disseminate this attitude for their own ends, telling us all that our own standards of living will decline if we let them in. Like the shameful lie that went around the UK a couple of years back that immigrants were being given cars by councils.
I am genuinely ashamed of belonging to this society.
It is not that there have been any new revelations on the migrant crisis, rather there is a paucity of news. Dozens of human beings drowning in a desperate attempt to reach safety no longer merits more than a passing mention.
Do we no longer care, or are we merely saturated with the horror of it?
Or do we just not, really, care what happens to people who live, or should live, far away?
No, it was just this one little article in one broadsheet supplement that made me furious this time. Next time, it will be something else.
Don’t tell me that if all the powerful and influential people of the world got together with genuine goodwill that they could not solve this crisis.
Where are the powerful of industry? There are one or two immensely rich industrial tycoons, such as Bill Gates, who have demonstrated that people like themselves can make a genuine difference to the world, and in a good way. Where are the others? I have always felt that the very rich have become very rich because they are callous, selfish, and do not care about anybody else.
I would be delighted if a few of them could now prove me wrong.
One month to go. The internet will shortly be deluged with Christmas blog posts of one sort or another, and so I thought I’d get mine in early.
Because that’s what you do with Christmas; you get in there early, and stoke it up.
I have been told so often that when it comes to Christmas, I am a curmudgeonly old misanthrope, that I could almost believe it.
But not quite.
I do not dislike Christmas.
Far from it.
What I do dislike, though, is the greed and consumerism that has been steadily growing up around it for more years than I care to remember.
The greed and consumerism that fuels the pressure to buy more and buy bigger; the pressure on parents from their children; the peer pressure over who gets the most, who gets the biggest.
The greed that encourages shops to put up decorations in August or September, and run Christmas adverts then in an attempt to promote and fuel this feeding frenzy.
It is not an exaggeration to say that families can virtually get bankrupted with the costs of presents and entertainment. There are many families who spend thousands of pounds on Christmas.
Is that really what it is supposed to be about?
Unless you take the trouble to go into a church, you could be excused for not knowing that Christmas is supposed to be the festival that celebrates the birth of Christ.
It would appear to celebrate greed, especially on every television channel and in every department store.
Until Victorian times, Christmas wasn’t much celebrated, Easter being the important festival in the Christian calendar. Much of its popularity came from Charles Dickens championing it in books such as ‘A Christmas Carol.’
Since then, though, there has always been an element of overindulgence, of booziness. But that is to be expected with a festival. Where Yule was celebrated, there was feasting and drinking, so there would always be some who indulged a little more than others.
And so I am ambivalent about it. On the one hand, there is this ghastly mass consumerism, which I find utterly nauseating.
On the other, it is, really, just another of those winter festivals that originated to give people hope that the bitter, hard season would eventually be left behind, and that spring would come. That is what I like.
Because in that, it is about hope, something that we could all do with more of, at the moment.
Mick Canning 