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pádraig - LiveJournal.com
It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to leave a thing telling anyone who might be interested that I am going like a good'un over at http://www.purefinder.com
I still regularly check my friends' produce.
I've experimented with a few different ways to start this piece. I tried to start by suggesting that I'd had quite a week. I tried to start by suggesting that one can't prepare for that which is unexpected. I tried to start by saying that I was quite proud of mrs padraig and myself.
I suppose that I have, by creating the previous paragraph, done all of these and I can now start with the real beginning of the story of my week.
It starts on Thursday. The 'it' in question is my piece of writing - not the week.
Sometimes I tell people that I believe that our lives are an assemblage of experience and learning. I often actually mean it.
This week mrs padraig and I learned what it is like to sit in a conspicuously neutrally decorated room, watch an earnest non-smiling man enter and pass on the information that mrs padraig has breast cancer. It wasn't a completely unexpected announcement, the consultant didn't leap out from behind a bush as we walked down the street and thrust a diagnosis at us like a bailiff with a summons. We'd gone there to find out the results of examinations of biopsy samples taken from a recently discovered lump in mrs padraig's right breast and we had thus been aware that what he was telling us was one of the options. We hadn't prepared ourselves 'for the worst'. We had just been neutrally aware that this was one of the (two) possibilities.
We didn't get swallowed into a maelstrom of self-pity or uncertainty. We sat and listened as we were told of the projected treatment strategy - an operation to excise the cancer, a three week period for recuperation (during which a diagnostic meeting will be held to discuss that which has been removed), then, hopefully, five weeks of radiotherapy - five days each week.
We were then gently ushered into another room - this time with dried flowers and tissues, and left for a while when the nurse who will support us went to find 'information'. After a while, we joked that the room should have a 'sufficiently sunk in' bell to allow us to summon our nurse back.
We laughed again when we found that we were allowed to use a different exit to avoid disheartening those, further down the diagnostic processing line, in the waiting room. We joked, when we got back to the car park five-minutes before the end of the two hours that we had paid for, that at least we'd got out before we got clamped. Then we treated ourselves to a meal out and went to pick the children up.
We intend to cope with each individual hurdle. It would be overemphasising the choices available to us to say that we have 'decided' to cope; we don't have any other option.
There are times when Usenet is glorious. These are not the times when the peculiar troll people come to visit, or when a newcomer to a newsgroup, and to Usenet, fails to recognise the universal dynamics of online people who have talked together before and throws a few clique-busting grenades.
Usenet is at its best when a number of ingredients come together: people who have talked before, an interesting subject and a smattering of smouldering historical personal antipathies between participants.
This is the sort of thing that can result.
pádraig
I was, in the past, introduced to fluid mechanics. We did not become friends. I took little away from my exposure to the examination of how to describe the movement of fluids beyond a few vague concepts, a lingering antipathy for a lecturer who had, I believe, once had some vortices named after him, and an affection for the word 'tribology'.
Amongst the vague concepts I retained from those reluctant and doodling afternoons spent in a lecture theatre in Leeds, were the ability to recognise turbulent flow as I urinated and the memory of a few types of behaviour which had had nice names attached to them.
Thus, when there was a time when my trivial misery was of such a magnitude that it was difficult to contain, as I walked in the rain I described the tears that inevitably mingled with raindrops on my face as Venturi Tears - tears sucked from me by the flow of rain.
I cried less often when walking in fair weather.
My ability to enjoy interacting with the planet and its weather and its places, and my enjoyment of the inner dialogue these interactions produced, kept me living.
pádraig
I want to write about thoughts that I had last night, but, because of experiencing the... experience that produced the thoughts, I am probably a little too weary and intellectually impaired to manage to perform this task profitably. I'll have a bash anyway.
I went to a football (soccer) match, which is something I do frequently. I have a season ticket at Nottingham Forest, the team which I support, and watch the 23 matches they play at their home ground each year/season. Depending on the resources of time and money which are available to me, I sometimes/often travel to another team's stadium and watch Nottingham Forest play there.
Nottingham Forest, or Forest, as we succinct aficionados refer to them, have had a successful season. They performed well enough in enough of their 46 matches to allow them to take part in a play-off series involving the teams finishing in third, fourth, fifth and sixth place in their league division. The winner of the play-off series would be promoted, along with the teams finishing first and second, to the top echelon of English football - the Premier League.
There was a time, less than 25 years ago, when Nottingham Forest were the best team in the world - or at least they won, and subsequently retained, the most demanding club competition in the world, the European Champions Cup. Since that time they have declined to a much more mundane level - possibly appropriate for a small provincial English city.
The 'play-offs' allow teams, who are not good enough to distance themselves from their co-competitors, a chance to get promoted to a higher, or the highest, portion of the league. Progress up the league is... almost the entire point of a football team. The pyramidal structure of English football means that a team formed by a group of friends in a pub one evening can progress, gradually, up through the leagues to eventually play against the very best teams and players - Nottingham Forest were established by a group of friends in a pub one evening in 1865. Promotion to the top division is the ultimate realistic aspiration for many teams. It is hugely important. Hugely, hugely important.
This year Forest finished the season in sixth place and in a run of relatively substandard performances. In the play-offs they would face Sheffield United, who finished the season strongly and in third place, in a two-leg match - the winner of which would ultimately play against the winner of the other semi-final involving fourth and fifth placed teams with promotion the prize. The first leg of this play-off semi-final was played on Saturday and finished level at one goal each. The result of last night's game would thus decide Forest's immediate future.
It was probably the most important single game Forest have played for ten years.
Football crowds tend, collectively, towards ebullience, optimism and belief. Indeed, these qualities largely comprise their essential character. Last night traveling to the game we showed, in place of these doughty traits, fear, tension and dread. We talked to each other about our particular and individual experiences of the tension - our hyperventilation in our cars, our inability to focus, our inability to sleep. It occurred to me that my actual experience of the game, and whether it was actually enjoyable for me to watch it, could not be defined until the result of the game was known, that is, until after the experience was concluded. I felt I was likely to watch the game in a 'biological' state - awash with adrenaline and with a racing pulse.
This is part of what I enjoy about watching football, or more specifically, watching football involving a team to whom I have an emotional attachment. I think it is akin to a rollercoaster. I attach my emotions to a thing, over which I personally have no control, and experience condensed emotional diversity - hope, fear, happiness, anger, and sometimes elation and often rage. I suppose that the actual word to describe this thing is 'stimulation'.
Last night I experienced all the emotions listed above, but to such a hugely exaggerated extent that it wasn't much fun. We lost after a prolonged and agonisingly close game.
Last night the Sheffield United supporters experienced all the emotions above to the same hugely exaggerated extent, they won and their night was thus enjoyable.
I know that I've meandered a little here, but I think it is an interesting idea that we can experience the same events but our emotional attachment to one outcome can retrospectively change the way we define or describe our experience of the events.
Sports psychologists try to encourage athletes to analyse their performances by considering the 'process' rather than the 'outcome'. I imagine that it might not be possible for those who attach themselves to a team as supporters to achieve that detachment from the outcome. It is a shame - I might have been able to say that I enjoyed myself otherwise.
pádraig
My children are still very young - my son is almost six and my daughter was recently four. Though each are close enough to perfection for mrs pádraig and myself to constantly marvel at our good fortune, there have been times when their sleeping has been a problem.
It was enough of a problem for us to become a little obsessive and unbalanced.
I knew every creaking floorboard in our house. I experimented with, and eventually _knew_, the best combinations of amplitude and frequency for the swaying cradling that would produce sleep for my son. From the nuances of my daughter's cries I could divine excessive temperature, painful wind, full bowels, full nappies, imminent sleep or imminent barfing.
When we won each individual battle against inappropriate wakefulness, and indeed ultimately the war against inappropriate wakefulness, I would, and still do, gaze upon my sleeping children with abundant and ultimate love and know that there was a perfection about a loved child sleeping.
In one of those dark nights of weary parental bliss, I looked at one of my sleeping offspring, I think it was my son, and remembered that my parents, who had had a tough time with my youthful aspirations to stretch my days, would have entered the bedroom I shared with my brother and my sister's bedroom and gazed with equivalent love upon us - asleep. I also remembered that my parents, in addition to knowing the creaking floorboards, and the swaying, and all the rest of it, had to know where our shoes were and where our coats were and our clothes. Unfortunately, not merely to promote efficiency in the morning.
On many occasions my parents came into our rooms and looked at us as we slept and were compelled to lift their loved sleeping children from their beds. They carried, dragged or steered us, dozing, to our shoes and our coats and pulled us out into the darkened and quiet street outside our house, along which we and our neighbours and friends would scuttle, hoping to place enough distance between ourselves and a bomb to ensure, or at least enhance, our safety.
If the bomb existed and exploded, my strong father would carry us back home to prevent us standing on the glass icing the street. We would return to our beds and our sleep.
It is unarguably wrong for parents to have to lift children from their beds.
pádraig
The things that we collected as children are likely to have been a product of the place and time where our childhood was spent. My childhood was spent in a small village in Northern Ireland, close to the border and in the Troubles. Boys of a different generation may have wandered in the fields around their homes and collected delicate eggs from birds' nests. I wandered in the fields and gardens behind our village and collected fragments of twisted metal.
Our village was subject to a succession of bombs, mainly 'proxy car bombs' - to precisely describe these using the nomenclature which we formulated in those days. A 'proxy car bomb' required that those who sought to bomb should make their way to an isolated house and compel the man of the house to drive the bomb to a target of their choosing. Ordinarily, the co-operation of the driver was ensured by threats and guns - and also the appropriate and general fear engendered by living in a place where men with guns and masks and bombs appear at your door in the dark.
My father, his brothers, his friends and our neighbours joked that when these men with guns, masks and bombs came to the door they would readily accept their authority. When these men did come to the doors of an uncle and our neighbours they did do what they were told. Some of these men did not fully recover from the fear of being forced to leave their family with armed men and drive their cars, and the quarter ton of explosives, down dark and bumpy country lanes.
Eventually, the village became adept at dealing with bombs. A bomb would arrive and a warning would be telephoned to a responsible, and sober, local person who would be able to phone the police. We, the people of the village, would shift along each others houses until we were far enough away from the bomb to feel safe, and we would wait together until the lights dimmed and a fraction of a second later the huge noise and the blast roared past. In the immediate and inevitable silence that followed, the car that carried the bomb would return to the village - as thousands of pieces of terrible tortured confetti.
As we played our games of soldiers and Provos in the fields enclosing the village we would often come across these fragments. The smaller pieces, the size of a credit card, could travel up to a quarter of a mile, the larger pieces often had punctures and pock marks where the smaller faster pieces had impacted them in the horrific tumult of the explosion. Some of the pieces could be identified as belonging to a particular car by their colour, or because of manufacturer's marks. I was proud of being able to delve into the cardboard box, where my collection resided, and identify the car, and the bomb, that had produced each fragment. Relatives, visiting from their homes in Canada or England, would be horrified. In retrospect, I can see that their reaction was wholly appropriate.
The memories that we collect as children are a product of the place and time where our childhood is spent.
pádraig
I was born in Northern Ireland, a few days before Easter in 1966. My name, Pádraig, or at least my, moderate and respectable, parents' decision to call their new son, Pádraig, fifty years after Pádraig Pearse led the Easter Rising of 1916, speaks eloquently of the new self-assertiveness and consciousness of the Northern Ireland catholic community at that time. Two months after my birth, loyalist gunmen in Belfast shot, dead, John Patrick Scullion and Peter Ward - the first victims of this particular thirty years of savagery and madness.
Tensions and stakes grew as I was weaned, and as I walked for the first time, and as I spoke for the first time. By the time a mundane shopping expedition to Omagh became one of my first actual memories, the place I grew up in, and the people I grew up amongst, were descending into the tumultuous and malevolent maelstrom that would rage furiously until the lives of over thre and a half thousand people had been taken away.
That early memory of a day shopping in Omagh involved my father excusing himself, to one of his friends, from taking part in a passing Civil Rights march because he had a child in his arms - me. In the years that followed I can remember the first bomb in our village. I can remember waking to find that 40 IRA men had attacked a local army base from the street of our village and from our gardens and fields. I can remember more bombs - more frequently - ripping our village to pieces. I can remember the television news occasionally showing bodies lying on the roads and fields around our village. I can remember... I can actually remember a lot of things from those chaotic years and I think that I should probably try to write about these things.
pádraig
Today I got spam that said "arc responsibility ambiguity recruiter vacuum %RANDOM_WORD jack abuser insignia ditto".
I don't read all my spam, and in truth I don't actually get that much of it. I _am_ glad I read "arc responsibility ambiguity recruiter vacuum %RANDOM_WORD jack abuser insignia ditto".
As soon as I read it I thought of William Burroughs, which is not, when you think about it, surprising.
pádraig
Today, Tuesday 6th May 2003, the Guardian carries on its front page a story about the appointment of Barry Legg as the new chief executive of the Conservative Party and reminding us of his involvement in the disgusting abuses of power of the Conservative controlled Westminster council in the 1980s.
The council was most famously found to be guilty of selectively selling of social housing to engineer a demographic shift in marginal wards in which they hoped to increase the number of Conservative voters and displace low income familes, and homeless families, from the borough to other areas.
Today's Guardian says:
Mr Legg also bears direct responsibility for another Westminster council scandal putting more than 200 tenants in two high rise blocks, Hermes and Chantry Point, which were known to be full of asbestos, for seven years.
I was thirteen when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. As I grew up I watched their crass Northern Ireland policies inflame and prolong the conflict I lived in the midst of. Under their authority the [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<acronym="royal>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
Today, Tuesday 6th May 2003, the Guardian carries on its front page a story about the appointment of Barry Legg as the new chief executive of the Conservative Party and reminding us of his involvement in the disgusting abuses of power of the Conservative controlled Westminster council in the 1980s.
The council was most famously found to be guilty of selectively selling of social housing to engineer a demographic shift in marginal wards in which they hoped to increase the number of Conservative voters and displace low income familes, and homeless families, from the borough to other areas.
<a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,950126,00.html">Today's Guardian</a> says:
<blockquote title="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,950126,00.html">Mr Legg also bears direct responsibility for another Westminster council scandal putting more than 200 tenants in two high rise blocks, Hermes and Chantry Point, which were known to be full of asbestos, for seven years.</blockquote>
I was thirteen when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. As I grew up I watched their crass Northern Ireland policies inflame and prolong the conflict I lived in the midst of. Under their authority the <acronym="Royal Ulster Constabulary">RUC</acronym>, and other security forces, executed terrorists and terrorist suspects on the streets of Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. They tolerated the collusion of the RUC and security forces with loyalist paramilitaries, thus equipping themselves with an array of extra-judicial death squads to prey on the Catholic community, of which I was a part. They tolerated the collapse of industrial communities throughout Britain and provided little effective support for those who tried to find a new way of life amongst the economic desolation. They pursued a war of questionable necessity. They felt the 'promotion of homosexuality' to be such a problem that they introduced hugely controversial legislation hampering the ability of local bodies to provide information about HIV and AIDS - at a time when it was hugely important to educate people about the risks and the myths. They tried to introduce Poll Tax - the magnitude of the arrogance and crass stupidity necessary to imagine that this was a good thing to do matched by the utter vindictiveness of those who dreamt the folly up.
I could easily go on...
The Westminster asbestos scandal is, for me, the worst thing they did.
I think that it is reasonable to say that those of us who were sentient during the mid to late seventies and early eighties knew of the special dangers presented by exposure to asbestos. We watched the special reports from World in Action and Panorama showing those who had worked with asbestos, or lived with asbestos, facing the certainty of a painful and protracted end to their lives. Though I can remember an incident in the last few years when scores of plastic bags containing asbestos were deposited around the streets of Birmingham - in the hope that the normal refuse collection would solve some cretin's problem, I think it is utterly unbelievable that those in decision making positions on Westminster council hadn't come through the seventies and early eighties with the same horror and fear of the malignant effects of <a href="http://www.btinternet.com/~ibas/index.htm" title="International Ban Asbestos Secretariat">asbestos</a> as I did.
These people, the Guardian suggests that Barry Legg was amongst their number, sat down at meetings and decided that it was reasonable to house the homeless and the destitute and those who struggle with life in two blocks of flats they knew to <a href="http://www.lkaz.demon.co.uk/ban24.htm">contain asbestos</a> - and further to contain asbestos in a dangerous and disturbed condition.
A report into the affair written by John Barratt, an independent consultant and a former chief executive of Cambridgeshire County Council, said: <cite="Report of a documentary review into the use by Westminster City Council of Hermes and Chantry Points, Elgin Estate, Westminster for housing purposes, given the presence of asbestos materials, 1980-1991">"Despite the availability of the clearest advice and instructions to the contrary, those acting on behalf of a public body repeatedly took risks, for a variety of reasons, with the health of people who ought to have been entitled to assume that such risks were not being taken."</cite>
In June 2000 the World Health Organisation's Fifth Global Conference for Health Promotion considered a case study of the Elgin Estate, where the two tower blocks were located, and social health. The <a href="http://www.who.int/hpr/conference/products/Casestudies/wech.pdf" title="PDF file, Jonathan Rosenberg's case study.">case study</a>, written by Jonathan Rosenberg, included the paragraph:
<blockquote cite="Jonathan Rosenberg's case study">A 1985 study stated that Hermes and Chantry had the greatest potential for asbestos fibre release amongst residential blocks in the United Kingdom. The amosite, or sprayed asbestos, presented the most serious danger: it had been applied to the steel columns and beams and was extremely friable. Disturbed by air currents and vibrations, asbestos fibres became airborne and entered the flats via gaps and the fan assisted heating system. Once asbestos fibres are airborne there is a high risk that they will be inhaled by residents and become lodged in the lining of their lungs. It was estimated that solving all the problems in the tower blocks would cost Ł25 million.</blockquote>
I have always thought that the decision of Westminster council to put families into these unsafe tower blocks indicates just how much contempt the Conservative Party of the 1980s held for a large proportion of those who were subject to its nasty and often vindictive policies.
I watched William Hague, the former Conservative leader, on television last week and was struck by the undeniable fact that he was a pretty likeable and engaging chap. Remembering, and thrown into prominence by his apparent decency, his truly vile attempts, as leader, to achieve power by appealing to the basest prejudices of the British electorate reminded me that the Conservative Party are inherently indecent and essentially nasty.
The apparent willingness of the Conservative Party to tolerate the morally grubby Barry Legg as its chief executive simply disgusts me.
pádraig
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