MY OWN WALKING - September Journal 2026

I recently read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves To Death ( You'll find my review else where on this blog )  In it he takes Marshall McLuhan's aphorism that 'The Medium is the Message' and parses it as  'The Medium is the Metaphor'. Proposing that the medium through which we communicate or are communicated too through, has things that it is suited to and things that it is not. The medium through which that communication takes place, can become the dominant metaphor and hence the way we comprehend reality.

This has caused me to ponder on religions as both mediums and metaphors.  Now if the Medium is Buddhism, it communicates it's message largely through it's own particular concepts, words and imagery. Practices and ways of looking at reality, which are pointing you in that general direction, or are in some way considered a preparation for a state called Enlightenment.  Enlightenment is a metaphor for 'a turning in the seat of consciousness', that spawns a multiplicity of further metaphors.

I've been gently reflecting on the usefulness, or otherwise, of Enlightenment as a metaphorical term. Whether Enlightenment is conceptually too neutral, too removed from ordinary experience to function as a motivational ultimate goal. I've had a number of goes at trying to write something useful about this, but on previous attempts ( there have been a few) I was not happy with how they came out. They often ended up with me simply venting a series of personal gripes and long held frustrations. And whilst this was useful for me to know, this was not what quite I was aiming for. I'm hopeful that this time might get nearer to my imagined vision for it.

In the West we bandy the term Enlightenment around as if we understand what that means. As if Enlightenment exists somewhere out there as an entity that can be made knowable. It is literally only one word, that metaphorically stands for something that appears cannot be summed up in one single word. One of the difficulties for us, in using the word Enlightenment is that it shares, an etymological home, with the 18th Century Enlightenment movement. A rational and scientific approach to the search for human fulfilment, and discovering the way reality works. One that does not require a creator God, to explain it. We currently live in a world that is the living expression of that European Enlightenment world view.

Buddhist Enlightenment can, in the Western mind, become entangled and misinterpreted by this rational endeavour. Buddhist practices becoming the religious equivalent of scientific experiments, that if conducted correctly will automatically lead into you becoming Enlightened. This casual relationship obviously is not really how it happens, but I think each of us holds at least the residual concept of such an idea in our imaginative background. Some of the appeal of Buddhism to the Western mind can rest upon it's so called 'rationality'.

There is another question that Enlightenment raises. If Enlightenment is when you see reality as it really is, this is outside the normal everyday experience, so how could you ever adequately linguistically or visually represent that? Particularly to a person who is not yet Enlightened. Well, the truth is, you cannot. And the Buddha himself acknowledged that. There are phrases such as 'being nobody, going nowhere' that encapsulate one presentational approach to spiritual practice. A Zen saying that 'if you see a Buddha on the road, kill him' is another way of saying our ideas about Enlightenment and what an Enlightened being is like, are obstacles that need removing. Whilst Krishnamurti once said that ' becoming Enlightened is a horrible idea'. Thinking you understand what Enlightenment is literally, can be not just perceptually, but spiritually obscuring. In early Buddhism you did not even represent the Buddha. After his death, the Buddha was portrayed by things that represented his absence, like his footprints or an empty throne. His visual representation came much later, in carefully curated archetypal forms, when the need to have a devotional focus in some form, appeared to become overwhelming. Our visual ways of imagining what being Enlightened looks like, became then literally set in stone.

The state of Enlightenment cannot be given anything other than this metaphorical archetypal form. Fundamentally it's not knowable, ineffable to the unenlightened mind. And all the plethora of visual imagery and Rupa forms that Buddhism has developed over the millennia, either work for you as evocative representations of that, or they do not. But they do lead one into behaving as though they are ghostly representations of the Enlightened state. And all the God like devotional practices that these can associatively conjure. Human beings apparently need a visual focus for where they are headed. However, illusory or inaccurate those imaginative horizons might prove ultimately to be.

Judaism and Islam have both stuck to not portraying their God. It's a prohibition, but also a recognition that a true representation is impossible. Christianity and Daoism, like Buddhism, began by forswearing representations for very similar reasons. Though gradually accrued depictions, ofJesus on the cross, saints, sages or archetypal 'God like' figures over the centuries. And I cannot help but believe something rather important was lost at that point. Though this struggle to find potent visual metaphors to represent what is your ultimate aim, appears to be a universal one. Whether this helps or hinders depends upon how spiritually mature the eye of the beholder is. Paradoxically, the notion that ultimately any representation of the Enlightened state is a narcissistic hindrance, is another notion that can become a narcissistic hindrance. But simply sitting with that, like some koan that we need to find the key too, can just be to dispiriting. Graven images, are so inherently problematic.

But then you do have Dogen very clearly stated that even the images and metaphors we use, are as much a manifestation of Enlightenment as anything else in the universe is. Which seems a very pansychist way of looking at reality. Buddhism imagines ultimately that Enlightenment as neither 'out there' nor 'in here' it's not locatable like a hidden treasure chest.  Christian views of where God is, developed a similar dichotomy, for quite similar reasons. How you imagine and conceptualise your goal or divinity, can both aid and get in your way. 

I have to wonder then whether the term Enlightenment itself, is entirely fit for purpose.  Though there is always the background suggestion that nothing ever will be. Whatever terminology we choose to use can be misleading. As can where you place it in relation to you. Enlightenment, is to enlighten, it's like turning on a light in a darkened room. The Buddhist sutras tend to prefer the word Awakening, as though we are asleep to how the world really is, to which we are then awoken. I tend intuitively to lean towards the latter, that anything that places the focus 'in here' rather than 'out there' will prove nearer the truth.  Enlightenment places that truth 'out there', whilst Awakening places it 'in here'. But this is most likely my own prejudices manifesting, where something being 'out there' and remote from my experience, I tend to find unhelpful to me. But then as an unenlightened person, am I really the best judge for what really is helpful to me?  I can't, it appears, help myself from intuiting that Awakening, will start with developing a personal relationship with whatever it is. If there is an obscuration embedded in my current way of practicing it is that it's often far too bound up in the self regarding focus of an inward selfish love. To be it's opposite, which is other regarding, is to focus outwards, to become attracted to a selfless empathic love without any boundary.

Is Awakening just down to me, or is there something much more interactive and multifacted going on in such moments of transformative clarity?  Perhaps we slowly come into alignment, into a relationship with whatever the 'vivid soul of Awakening' is, and this is both within us and universally everywhere. We might see Awakening as this dormant part of us that needs to wake up, that maybe it has always been an active presence in every spiritual impulse we've ever had. Awakening, as a deepening of the human consciousness might easily be the entire purpose of the Universe. Awakening acts as a fortuitous magnetic attraction for faith. Faith being a form of love, a slow burning love affair with Awakening. Once we allow ourselves to surrender and fall deeper into the romantic pull of Awakening, then a fully realised conjugal reciprocal universal love opens out, infinitesimal and vast, with a scope that goes completely beyond all the limitations of our nit-picking small imaginings. We call it numinous, ineffable, an unknowable beyond, that were we to actually experience it, would shake awake our sleeping consciousness from its self fettered dreaming. To see the dawn of a new day as if for the very first time. An experience where terms like Enlightenment or God, don't remotely cover it.

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 3 - Breaking the Voice

During the years of being a chorister, my belief in God appeared to be solid, if not flourishing. I had a simple wooden crucifix on the top of my child sized writing desk, bookended by two tiny brass candlesticks, without candles. My parents had bought both my sister and I brand spanking new Bibles.  Frequently I imagined myself in the future becoming a Vicar. Such was my seeming devotion and youthfully naive aspiration. Meanwhile the chorister singing was proving ever more satisfying, as I was now one of the most experienced singers in the choir, and had begun to take solo parts in anthems. The choir master at Halifax Parish Church, recommended I attend a residential week for choristers, run under the auspices of the Royal School of Church Music at Rosall School, in Fleetwood, Lancashire.

My parents would certainly have struggled to afford this, but they did find the money, because singing was a talent my Mother understood and both my parents were prepared to support. Once I'd arrived at the school, I remember enjoying all the rehearsals and performances. The dormitories, the communal dining, the sheer number of people there, a lot of them quite posh, meant I felt very much a fish out of water. Being in the grounds of a public school, was a bit of a culture shock for a eleven year old boy from the terracec houses of Halifax, to take in. I had no friends with me there, I was really lonely. And I'd started to be picked on and bullied by some of the older boys. And I wrote a postcard to my parents. This was my first time living away from my parents, I felt homesick, and living in this strange place was freaking me out. And, in retrospect, I can see this was the beginning of a souring of my relationship with devotional singing.

As I progressed through my teenage years, people started preparing me for when my 'voice broke', as though this would prove to be of real significance. I'd never even thought of my boy soprano voice as having a use by date. This notion coincided with my new and burgeoning enthusiasm for glam and subsequently progressive rock music. Glam emerged after the late sixties hippie era, and was in part a reaction to the denim dressed idealistic worthiness that preceded it. Five years after gay relationships were permitted, being deliberately and ridiculously camp, suddenly made sense. In the midst of the 70's oil crisis, glam was light hearted frothy fun. And I fell in love with its sense of its own ridiculousness. Once I did become rather more earnestly into heavy rock, my having a sweet boy soprano voice, began to lose the kudos it might have once possessed for me.

About this time, I'd bought a copy of The Jesus Book, which was part of a late sixties phenomena The Jesus Movement in the US.  In response to the 'alternative' permissive culture of the era, this movement dressed Christianity up in some borrowed counter cultural garb and threw itself into the religious melting pot. And I'd thought  that this might be one way of, bringing both my music and Christian faith together. But I wasn't that impressed with it. For as my voice actually started to break, it began to dawn on me that my faith, such as it was, was rather strongly tied to my contribution to religious music. And I began to have doubts, whether my faith was based on anything more than just the love of singing. 

I was fourteen or fifteen I think, when I finally burnt my bridges with the Methodist faith of my parents.  Unconsciously, I was in the middle of some sort of crisis of confidence within Christianity. I booked myself on a Methodist residential study weekend, specifically aimed at teenagers. My parents must have paid for it, but my recollection was of it being at my instigation. I endured that weekend, like I have never endured anything before or since. I found myself reacting to the place, the leaders, other people, the way they dressed, the subject matter, the faux earnestness of it all, it really got right on my tits. My head got stuck in a groove of inner contention. At the time I was far too shy to voice a word of any of this, but internally I was a seething rebellion  It was going on that weekend which compelled me tear up my card carrying membership of Christianity. On my return, I told my parents I no longer wanted to attend chapel with them on Sundays. My investment in the Christian faith appeared spent. What faith I'd had, left on a long round trip to Vegas.

LISTENING TO - Half-Told Tales by Arab Strap

With fourteen tracks and a running time of fifty six minutes, this is a substantial slice of music to release onto an unsuspecting world. And in a first casual listen what strikes you is it's episodic character and changeable musical tone. Aidan Moffat's lyric writing is, if anything, conjuring poetic lines more magnificent and vivid here. With perhaps a stronger autobiographical leaning, often bemoaning the awareness of his bodily discomfort and increasing decrepitude. Prompting in Glamour Magic, a grissly foreboding story of a face lift that 'takes years off me' that ends up in a quite macabre way in the accompanying video.

Glamour Magic by Arab Strap

And it is this style of song that makes you realise the albums title Half-Told Tales is informing you why the album has this episodic nature. Each short song is like a briefly sketched vignette, of a personal memory, early romantic relationships, bizzare darkly gothic tales, ruminations on what it takes to be a man these days, the compromises involved in making and promoting your own music. The subject matter is as varied as the musical approaches it takes, sometimes they exist half way between being songs and a dry caustic monologue. Now some reviewers have found this album irritating in the extreme. Once I clocked what they were doing, I appreciated the album for what it is - a lyrical montage of comments and snap shot perceptions of modern life. Imbued as these are with Moffat's pet obsessions, bete noir's, the things that make him concerned, angry, melancholic, even sentimental over the pace and passage of time. Both musically and lyrically this album crackles with inventiveness and energy.

I Get Noise by Arab Strap

The album opens with huge propulsive intent with the track I Get Noise. This is very strongly drum led, the percussive sound and brassy quality is hard, with a pronounced flat thwack to it. And for a good deal of the album, its the drums that are central and to the fore in the defining of each tracks mood. I Get Noise is about the impossibility sometimes to escape other people's noise, Moffat ends up wanting - 

'to mute your stupid conversation, I get noise, I want to float above and fly away'. 

And the album does race out of the blocks at this unrelenting pace, with five punchy memorable songs galloping in one after the other. Then with Gape they slow down this hectic pace for a couple of tracks. These are quieter, more ruminative, reflective pieces. And whilst there continue to be rockier abrasive songs subsequently, the character of this middle section of the album displays how strongly lyric driven this album is, with words upfront in the mix. This album is Moffat at his most literary and expressive, positioned as a cranky oracle storyteller, the weaver of some odd old tales. From the track Ampersand onwards we return to the distinct straightforward style of the albums opening. 

Fragments by Arab Strap

The penultimate track Fragments does in its own a way explain the ethos for the entire album -

' death and life are in the power of the tongue, 

  but now everyone is leaving so young, 

  the plugs are pulled before the swan song is sung, 

  leaving fragments, sketches, half told tales.' 

Beats Per Minute by Arab Strap

The last track Beats Per Minute, is an elegaic momento to the impermanence of life, and leaves us with the choral lyric of -

'We only have this moment and it's already gone.'

This album is a mixture of tracks you like instantly, and slower growing revelations. I expect I'll keep finding little lyrical phrases and pockets of illumination, that suddenly have their impact upon me.  I suspect that given time and sufficient replays of my attention, I'll like this album a great deal more in a month's time than I do now. My current pick of its best lines are as follows :-

Under Offer by Arab Strap

From the track Under Offer, which is about returning to a house that was once your home but finding it greatly altered, ends on the criticism - 

' With respect it's like they've sanded away it's soul.'

My current top favourite lines are from the end of I Get Noise - 

'And tonight when you touch yourself 

Remember all the angels are watching

So put on a good show.'

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

 

LISTENING TO - Massive Champion by Getdown Services

Getdown Services presence in our music universe, appears to have a stronger public profile with every year. Their debut album Crisps, was a portfolio of whiplash wit and droll eccentric observations about the male way of being men in 2023. Featuring a wild mix of styles from dance to indie, drawing on 80'sand 90's tropes, and giving them a distinct twist that was all their own. Since then Joshua Law and Ben Sadler have been literally working their arses off performing in small local venues across the country, to some acclaim. They are, according to reviews, a two man communication of wonder and enthusiasm, and something to be sought out as an experience. Between Crisps and their second album Massive Champion, their have been an albums worth of tracks that didn't make the debut album and EP's galore. This output I'd say was of mixed value, some real gems, others variations on familiar Getdown Services themes. More does not necessarily mean better. I began to think they were putting out far too much.  One might be forgiven for thinking they released anything that moved, with little vetting for quality. So, Massive Champion arrives presenting challenges as most second albums do.

I Can't Die Like That - Getdown Services

It opens with a bit of an oddity. Poor Bannister, is a folk tinged song about watching an old woman asleep on a bus, while some random drunk guy pukes up on his trousers, but tries to pretend nothing is wrong. This is certainly an novel way to open an album. With the next song we are returned to rather more standard GS territory I Can't Die Like That, where they wonder about "Maybe my neck wont snap, if I fill it with snacks'  should he ' Kiss the floor like the Pope' and ' I wonder if I'll ever stop thinking about killing Baby Oleg, I hope not'. But like many tracks on Massive Champion, I Can't Die like That, has a more reflective and sombre feeling to it, about mortality and purpose. The whole album is flecked with regret. About childhood experiences, growing up, and why he is choosing to live his life in this way. Joshua Law, as the primary songwriter, has developed a vein of sadness and poignancy in his songwriting, alongside the strongly scabrous swearing, and sarky humour. Probiotic begins with a dialogue where he is asked why he won't eat probiotic food. The answer - 'because it's got bits in it'.

Cha Cha Slide - Getdown Services

Social anxiety appeared in their first album on the track 'I wish it didn't bother me', here it's 'Cha Cha Slide ' as a six year old Josh goes to his first party and feels a bit out of it and clueless, he wants to be like his friend Dennis, but finds I hard. This is a gently touching song, that channels the embarrassment and self consciousness of a young child's experience. Then we hit two really quintessential songs, which are the summation of what Getdown Services currently are. Radiator, probably needs no introduction. It paints a picture of two guys living in a room they can't turn the heating down in. The sweaty semi-squalor of a bachelor existence is painted so well. 

The Definitive Map

The Definitive Map that follows appears to be channelling mid 80's The Fall, in the way they collectively chant 'Trespass', it is by far the best of their rock numbers on the album. After this peak the album did feel to me to become more a meandering through moods, with its brief monologues and love songs. So far Getdown Services USP has been them being two unpretentious blokes who are best mates having a bit of a laugh together on stage. This album appears to be reaching for a bit more than that, but has not yet found a way of confidently standing in that world yet.

If you could sum up Massive Champion I'd say it is certainly more reflective than it's predecessor, the highpoints are when they are on their most well trodden ground. This album has been out for a while now, and though I've listened too it through quite a few times, it doesn't feel a must have purchased. Whilst it has definitely got highlights that show off their brilliance, their is something about it that feels under developed as the next stage in their career. It's not quite resolved enough, to know what they were aiming for here. Maybe the next album will nail this to the mast more securely. 

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

READING ALOUD - Wendell Berry - A Poem On Hope

A Poem On Hope by Wendell Berry

Subtitled Embracing Place and Possibility, this poem charts it's course through some very familiar themes in Wendell Berry's writing more generally. That hope is not something you can abstractly acquire. Hope arises from having had a strong sense of the place from which you have sprung, and it's future that you care for. It's a landscape that has to a large extent made you who you are. Without this we find ourselves adrift, anchorless, most likely these days alienated and imaginatively ungrounded. Where everything we might express about hope is an idea remote from lived experience. Wendell Berry's tone when he is reciting this, is even, breaking the lines of this poem where it will bring it greater import. Shifting the focus from person to place, meaning to emptiness, hope to despair, that cycle around to come back at you from a different angle. There is both clarity and mystery being woven here. Like his writing his reading aloud is strong on precision with an understated feeling tone.

A LEGIT OBIT - Wendell Berry (1934 - 2026 )

Wendell Berry when you saw him being interviewed had such a quiet unassuming manner, if you weren't paying that much attention to what he was actually saying. Because the ideas he talked about in his lectures, books and poetry were far from unassuming. They were trenchant and important reflections on the nature and consequences of modern industrialised agriculture. How our relationship with the land and cultivation, through becoming entangled with the agro chemical industry, had lost its sensitivity to the quality of soil, food and health. And what the consequences actually were upon us of how something is grown, upon the health benefits of what we eat and drink. Through the unbridled pursuit of increasing yields and profits, the balance and harmony of man's needs with natures fertility has got seriously out of wack. 

Wendell Berry, wasn't some folksy countryman, with a misty eyed nostalgia for the olden days, he was frequently hard hitting, a thoughtful man who examined motivations, saw their outcomes, and in detail would show you what result was meted out upon the health of the soil, the health of animals, the health of rural communities, of humanity and the planet we inhabit. And that breadth of perspective was what made him extraordinarily influential upon the wider organic food movement, ecological campaigners and agrarian movements.

He was certainly not a household name. I'd say most people who saw his death being announced would not have had a clue who he was. The written word was his choice of weapon, the range and style of things that he wrote about was impressive. Yes, he wrote about environmentalism and rural communities, but also novels, longer form non fiction, essays and evocative yet direct poetry. He has had as great, if not more influence as a poet than he has had as an environmental campaigner. As able in the delineation of the state of our inner world as he was in his statements about the outer. Wendell Berry was that very rare individual, who could expertly identify and go straight to the root of the problem, and write about this with such unshowy eloquence, yet heartfelt precision. 

For example. There is a video on You Tube where Wendell Berry gives a short lecture on the subject of the politics of gay marriage. His response was to say that what anyone chooses to do with their private life, how they wish to relate to each other as consenting adults, is entirely theirs to decide, and no one else's business. That this should not require sanction or seek approval from anyone, political or otherwise, outside of it. The problem, as he saw it, with treating private things such as marriage as public rights, is that this requires public political interventions into what is essentially a private decision between two people. That any right to marry that is dependent upon political approval, can just as easily be removed by political disapproval. The fundamental thing to defend is your liberty, your freedom to choose whatever you wish for you and your chosen partner, to be able to live your life together however you want, free from outside pressure, need to conform, or any requirement for external approval.

If you want to know a good place to start with his writing then there is an excellent compilation called The World- Ending Fire.

A LEGIT OBIT - Dolly Parton (1946 -2026)

Dolly Parton, became a torch bearer for everything that was positive, appreciative and playfully fun in the American way of life. Coming as she did from a poor Appalachian family, she appears to have never lost the common touch that could easily reach over boundaries of class, race or gender. Her superlative songwriting ability saw her accumulate many musical accolades. And with the wealth and the fame, she consistently found new ways of putting them to beneficial use. Whether that was distribution of free books or funding the development of life saving vaccines. She demonstrated how to put your good fortune to the benefit of the disadvantaged. Founding numerous trusts to support philanthropic causes that will continue helping beyond her own death. The honest good heartedness of this woman was truly exemplary.

Dolly's image, the way she chose to dress, became over the decades a deliberately self constructed parody. In this she exemplified the Quentin Crisp maxim that you should  do deliberately what you previously did by nature or accident, in order to get the joke onto your own terms. She saw Dolly Parton as this persona she adopted, that she could quite easily have become a drag queen. And she was more than willing to publicly send herself up, which was simultaneously endearing and disarming. Because no one could accuse Dolly of being performative, ingratiating or disingenuous, because she never hid who she was, the boobs, the plastic surgery, the ridiculousness of showbusiness fame. She made it all seem so natural and unaffectedly true to her life. She was one very impressive human, that everyone will mourn the loss of.

A LEGIT OBIT - Tim Curry (1946 -2026)

Anyone of my age, may well remember the first time they went to see the film  The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was in Hull on my Foundation Course, and we had an Arts Humanities teacher who dragged us all to see it at the nearby ABC Cinema. This landed as such a revelation to me I went to see it repeatedly more than a dozen times in as many days. I'd lived a sheltered life until that point, and had not really encountered high camp before. I instantly fell in love with it. Central to this infatuation wasTim Curry's performance. When Hubby and I rewatched the film recently to mark Curry's recent passing, I was once again struck by how full on his performance is. As the film was shot so cheaply and rapidly Curry's Frank n Furter comes pretty much straight from being honed to perfection over months in front of a theatre audience. So all the vocal inflections, pointed phrasings, mangling of vowel sounds and breaking of the fourth wall are timed to the minutest second to generate laughs. It is his show, and he is clearly very aware of the viewer out there, sat in a theatre, a cinema or in front of a TV screen. He makes the most of every single scene, and he is pretty much in all of them. One can only imagine how intimidating this must be over fifty years later for a new actor to take on this role. You look at Curry so on fire and try your hardest not to want to just copy everything he does. How would anyone make this role their own, and not end up disappointing?  Though there is no shortage of actors willing to give it a try.

And that ability to make a truly memorable performance that dominates the screen or stage was an ability he used, whatever the part he was playing. He could easily steal the show if he so wished. Using his vocal facilities to the hilt, that strong forceful singing voice, the larger than life stage presence, the expressive face, well this could be hard to contain. Any subsequent filmmaker would never choose him for a small subtle intimate ensemble piece. Curry at his absolute best was not subtle, but neither was he hammy. For when he was allowed to let rip he would produce, out of nowhere, a truly memorable bit of expertly finessed character acting. So there was his pirate turn on the Treasure Island Muppet Movie, playing a demon in the film Legend, and his very creepy version of Pennywise in the adaption of Stephen King's - It. He invariably ended up playing the baddy in films, because this was much more fun. As he did in Clue, and in a truly 'so awful it's good' film Congo. Nothing ever reached quite the cinematic must see pizzazz of Rocky Horror, though he always gave it a try. But then how do you follow Frank n Furter?  Not very easily is the answer. And most of the cast could never quite shake off being known for Rocky Horror, and in some cases, only that film. It defined their entire subsequent career. Curry was not alone in that. But he did have a go. Even after the physically debilitating heart attack, he continued to do a large range of voice overs. Because even unseen, he could still do larger than life, better than anyone. 

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 2 - The Performance & Dressing Up For God

Down hill from the family home in Dyson Road, a mere ten minute walk away, was St Augustine's Church of England Primary School. There I was presented with a daily assembly of hymns, prayers and readings. I don't remember this being particularly churchy or solemn, though perhaps a child never sees these things with such a jaundiced eye. St Augustine's had a monolithic Victorian stone built church, looming massively right next to it. In amongst the surviving momentos of my early education is a small exercise book. It has Scripture written in pencil on the front, in my infant handwriting. At some point in my early childhood, I wrote and illustrated this. And it contains  Christian religious instruction, a standard part of a C of E Primary School's curriculum, And this booklet definitely tilted more towards the Anglican, than the Non Conformist approach. Complex ideas of sin, original and actual, written out on a blackboard for me to copy in my rudimentary understanding of English spelling.  I learnt I was primarily a Child of God, though it's never explained what surrogate role my parents played in this.

I believe, because I was brought up Methodist, with chapels and services so plain and scarcely adorned, I had an appreciative response to Anglican, even Anglo Catholic, churches, rituals and ostentation, that was an eye opener to wonder and awe. After an upbringing starved with restrained aesthetic stimulation, you just blubber your face in the luxurious bubble bath of it's sensory stimulation. By comparison this felt life enhancing, conjuring up a response of being giddily thrilled. 

Whilst at Primary School, around the time I was eight, it was discovered that I had a passably good boy soprano voice. And the music teacher, Miss Gilliat, told my parents she thought I was good enough to be a chorister in Halifax Parish Church. Being good at singing, is something of a wasted talent in a Methodist Chapel. There was nothing more to offer a boy soprano than sitting up in the gallery singing along with the buxom ladies in the ad-hoc, who ever turns up sings, choir. Anyway, after a thorough audition by the Parish Church choirmaster, I was in. 

Being in a leading part of Church of England services, with it's candles and incense, felt rather exotic. It also gave me permission to dress up in a burgundy cassock, white ruff and surplus. There was an heightened sense of beauty, elevated through singing anthems, hymns, Festivals of nine lessons and carols, and on one occasion Bach's St Matthews Passion. All this was utterly exhilarating to a pre-pubescent choir boy, from a non-conformist background. From these experiences was born enduring lifelong loves - for church music and architecture, to name but two. The power of the human voice in song, to connect you, lays out a more transcendent relationship with divinity, however briefly experienced in the full flow of a performance.  Singing was the first thing I'd discovered that I was confident in knowing I was actually rather good at, 

And this flipping between austere almost minimalist aesthetic and the effusively baroque over the top coloured maximalism, remains a dynamic pull within me still. My Methodist upbringing, plus my art and design training, pull me towards the former, whilst my instinct, and the thing I adore most is the latter. Over the years, in my own artwork, I've learned to intuitively place more trust in the maximalist in me, and ignore any inculcated tendency to temper my expressiveness back to a more restrained, less emotionally indulgent form. You are taught at art school, that this is what serious artists do. The pursuit of beauty was an inherently distrusted motive, it was manipulative, even untruthful. And a similar dichotomy existed at times within my relationship with Buddhist practice. Either refined to the essentials, like a Zen monk, or the rich exuberance of Indian or Tibetan rituals. Restrain your engagement with emotionality, avoid cultivating intoxication or excessive indulgence. There was my habitual English upbringing in the Protestant moderation in all things, which became further reinforced by meeting a familiar friend in Buddhist restraint.

As a child, I had a passionate and exuberant side to my character, that I tended to suppress because I felt that it was unacceptable. But in my choices of music, my love of art, for performing, for OTT camp, and having made in later life friends from Latin American and Indian cultures, I discovered a way of being human, a joyful light hearted exuberance to be enjoyed in an uncomplicated way. I think if I'd been more self confident earlier in my life, this outgoing side of me might have found space in which to fully manifest. Instead I retreated into myself, and concealed this side. There has been times when I instinctually felt I had betrayed my personality. For within every closeted introvert, is an misdirected extrovert trying to find their way out of the cupboard.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must

From the perspective  of the 21st century, we have little remaining sense for just how ground breaking the upheaval of the British Industrial Revolution was. As the first Western country to become fully industrialised, people from other countries were flocking to visit Great Britain to observe for themselves, to learn of the latest innovations, see what was actually going on in its streets and market places.

Whenever you are the first to do anything, you are the one who makes the mistakes that others learn from. The ones you have to go back on later to correct. Things happen that you do not anticipate. It's you who encounters unexpected economic consequences. How do you respond to increased social tensions? What happens when your drive to modernise the economy, ignores the welfare of its own working class citizens? When riots or disease break out in the insanitary conditions of cheap urban slum housing? Britain was the first country that had to find answers to these questions. Essentially, how do you maintain social order in a rapidly developing technologically led economic boom? And the rule of the British Parliament at this time was definitely not fit for that purpose. It was basically a closed shop of privileged, extremely well off individuals, looking after their financial investments and property portfolios. Their responsibilities towards the social fabric and collective cohesion came very low down the list of its priorities.

Marx and Engels

Frederick Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, sent by his family to work in the family mill there. This move had been designed to extract him from the political radicalism he'd become actively involved in back in Germany. Though Engels spent his days dutifully working in the family firm, in the evening, with the help of Mary Burns who knew the city well, he ventured out to investigate for himself how working class factory workers lived and survived in these newly urbanised conditions. What eventually resulted from these nocturnal adventures was a highly influential pamphlet - The Conditions of the Working Class in England. One of Engels newer politically radical friends, Karl Marx, inspired by this document, came to stay with him. And together they began formulating a more radical socialist alternative to the rampant capitalism they saw ruining and debasing working people's lives in Manchester. This project eventually produced the Communist manifesto.

The Luddite Riots in the early years of the nineteenth century, were notable because they were the first real sign of the working class protesting their dissatisfaction with the conditions of their new urban life. The industrialised northern towns were becoming the magnet for a wide range of radical political, economic and social theories. Ordinary working people were politicised on the streets by reading pamphlets and broadsheets, and hearing public talks, about these ideas. They were increasingly more prone to noisily demanding better work conditions, pay, and the right to vote. Manchester, became a particularly intense hot bed for a broad range of these radical campaigning groups, and politically out of the box thinking. The sort of ideas being proposed by Engels and Marx, would eagerly feed into this.  A new economic reality demanded a new politics, and a truly representative people's democracy lay at the centre of that.

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1818, voting and electoral reform continued being campaigned for. They initially held out a hope for the Reform Act of 1832, but this failed to extend voting rights. It was also followed by The Poor Law of 1834 which robbed the poor of the most basic access to financial support, and made the workhouse their only option if they fell on hard times. So in 1838 a new and more politically astute voting reform group was formed, The Chartist Movement. This very quickly became a huge nationwide campaigning organisation. Initially focusing on staging large and impressive mass protests in Salford, Birmingham, Glasgow and London.  

Chartist meeting Kennington Common 1848

They presented a petition to Parliament asking for universal (male) sufferage, the abolition of the property qualification for candidates, regularised elections every four years, equal sized constituencies, yearly Parliaments, MP's to be paid a statutory salary. These may sound perfectly reasonable to us today. But from 1838 to 1848 the Chartists presented three such petitions to Parliament to no discernable response from government. The Houses of Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, was stuffed to the gills with nobility, landowners and businessmen. It was inherently corrupt and self serving. Getting this legislative assembly think in a visionary and democratic manner about its own electoral reform, was always going to be a tall order. 

Chartism's peaceful protest marches began to regularly get more out of hand. Frustrated fringe groups within it began to advocate taking more violent action. This appeared to play into the governments agenda to discredit Chartism and to ignore the eminently reasonable requests of its aims. After the 1848 petition failed to be adopted by Parliament for the third time, the whole Chartist Movement seemed to lose heart and slowly faded out of existence.

Manchester had always been the powerhouse stronghold of Chartism. Chartists there had successfully blocked some of the actions of the cities Tory dominated civic administration. Seen in retrospect, Chartism was in many ways the political precursor of the Labour Party. Many former Chartists did later become active socialists. Another legacy of Chartism was that it introduced and trained many ordinary working class people in how to be politically active and to campaign effectively for change. 

Though it did not appear to achieve it's stated aims within the ten or so years of its existence, all but one of its original proposals did eventually become law, the last being achieved in 1911. Parliament then and now, likes to think of itself as being the primary instigator of legislation, and does not wish to be seen being pushed or coerced into action by external protests or pressure from its own citizens. So once the Chartist Movement had dissolved, piecemeal legislation did begin to slowly appear, that were almost word for word what Chartism had demanded. Chartism's mass protests and strategy did succeed in changing the legislative mood within Parliament, leaving an abiding influence upon the future direction of electoral reform. It was the first modern movement to pioneer mass nationwide protests as a way to keep applying political pressure, for demanding social or political change, and this became the blueprint strategy for subsequent protest groups.

Next Episode - Fetter Not A Brother's Limbs

PLAYLIST 2026 - No 20 - Edge of Saturday Night by The Blessed Madonna & Kyle Minogue

Edge of Saturday Night by The Blessed Madonna & Kylie Minogue

Well, it seems The Blessed Madonna can call upon some pretty big names to bring their talents to the service of her dancefloor. Here it's Kylie,who is no stranger to this sort of electro woofer busting disco banger. Here she is slumming it with this very noticeably mock sleazy looking gay crowd, whilst Kylie is trying to look a bit more bedraggled, wrecked and edgy than is usual in her own videos. 

Goodness knows what this song is about, making everyday a Saturday and getting plastered perhaps.  I mean this woman is 58 and can't possibly do late night clubbing anymore, she needs her beauty sleep. Otherwise liposuction and the porcelain doll like tragedy of Madonna's pension years beckons. This has some very uplifting beats, providing a more than pleasing way to spend three minutes and thirty one seconds with this enduring legend.

FINISHED READING - John of John by Douglas Stuart

It is probably a universal experience of anyone who has gone away to college, that when they return to their parental home, they come back a subtly changed person. Everyone may treat you as though you are exactly the same person who left. Families feel like they know the truth of you, and are often reluctant to update their perceptions. The experience of leaving, and learning who you are whilst you were away from home, from parental supervision, and the framing context of your upbringing, adjust you and your outlook on your life, both past and present. The dynamics of relationships at home, may feel familiar, but not necessarily comforting. It can feel like you are returning to a way of being you no longer wish to inhabit. This disjuncture can be hard to live with. And the story, as told here by Douglas Stuart in John of John, captures that state of returning to a situation where you feel instantly trapped. Finding yourself rebelling in major or petty ways, against the reasserting of old constraints. Here, the desire to leave almost overwhelms it's central character Cal from the very moment they arrive back on the island of Harris.

For Cal, has been away to Art College to study fashion. He's attained his degree, but not his fully adult independence. He's been sofa hopping and living off the kindness of friends for months. His future career has yet to take off.  A lack of perceived inaction or ambition, hence makes Cal reluctant yet, to return to the island of Harris and to Falabay. He phones home every week to speak to his Father. They talk little about what he is actually doing. It's more like a Bible class, a religious instruction, in order that Cal does not stray from the straight and narrow of his Father John's faith. 

Cal is gay, but cannot even contemplate telling his father, because the consequences, well, they don't bear thinking of. For John, has a deep well of frustration and anger within him, which is horrible for everyone when it erupts. It's origins Cal frequently misdiagnoses. He has never understood why, when Cal was only ten, John seperated from Grace, Cal's Mother. Something went wrong in their relationship. Cal's Mother largely takes the blame, just because it was her that left. Though this is clearly not the whole story. There is hidden knowledge here, and it is not getting any better for being kept so secret. John indicates in one phone call to Cal, that his Grandmother Ella does not appear well to him, and this convinces Cal this is the time when he should return to the island and people of his birthplace.

Stuart describes island life, in evocative small details, the colours and sensory qualities of the landscape, the air, the sea, it's deceptive but cruel beauty. There are sensitively aesthetic descriptions of the process of choosing the mix of colours when weaving tweed cloth. Falabay appears to uphold ancient traditions and conventions, if judged by the externals alone. Though in a small intimate population where everyone knows everyone else's busines, keeping secrets you don't want other folk to know, means maintaining a stern stoney unknowable exterior. Island inhabitants always have something tucked away, they've never told anyone. The island economy runs on sheep farming, the weaving of tweed cloth and increasingly tourism. The latter is gradually changing the island and it's people, from a community into a commodity. The old traditions and beliefs of the islanders, though they are desperately clung onto, are teetering on the edge of becoming uneconomic to maintain. 

In the dwindling faithful of a church congregation, there is a clear demarcation between those who have taken Christ into their life, and those who have not.  Everyone knows which side of that line they are currently standing on. The Minister's gentle soft voice might seem benevolent in its intent, but his level of control over his congregation is coercive and invades the privacy of islanders inner lives. And beneath their subservience to the word of God, many of the island men inhabit conflicted and unfulfilled existences of disquieting loneliness. Some of them may indeed be gay, but no-one takes the risk of stepping outside the perceived shadow of shame and exile.

The feeling woven through this novel, is of an over hanging weight of despair and sadness. Of people struggling with unfulfilled lives, self betrayal and guilt. Of men trying, but often failing, to enforce a firm level of control over their inner lives, desires and impulses. And the sense is that so easily, and quite soon, the lid could blow off all these scrupulously maintained stand offs between what men say and don't say, what they feel they are, and what they actually publicly do. All of it buried under unchallenged moral expectations of them. 

The feeling that something personally tragic is being revealed to you here, makes this novel often a heartbreaking story to read. I found I had to space out my reading as I got nearer the end, just in case I couldn't bare where the story was heading. It is that good. Stuart slowly and almost imperceptibly feeds you snippets of information that lead or mislead you into thinking you know where the characters may be headed, and then it doesn't go there, but to somewhere else close by. Will exposing the truth, clear the air, or resolve anything here? Or is there bound to be a dark peaty clod of brutal tragedy discovered in some ditch or on the harbour foreshore, somewhere on this island? 

The Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain was like watching a slow motion car crash happen. His second novel, Young Mungo', felt a bit heavy handed and overly contrived in its evocation of grooming and abuse. John of John, takes you far away from Stuart's lived experience of working class life in Glasgow, to a much older geographically isolated rural culture on the Scottish islands. Its written with descriptive and emotional fluency, peppered with flashes of quite subtle perceptive brilliance. However reprehensibly some of these people may behave at times, you still appreciate, love and have some feeling of care for these people. So much is so gently inferred here, of truths understated, briefly mentioned casually in passing, rather than double underlined. It is a superb evocation of the nature of a people, landscape and the predicaments of an island existence. 

I was left hugely moved and often impressed with the depths this novel was prepared to go to. John of John, is Douglas Stuart's best novel yet. It haunted me, and held me in a state of tension, even whilst I was reading it, and lives on vividly in my mind still. It will be hard to find another novel published this year, to beat this one.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

FINISHED READING - Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

"What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience."*

Neil Postman, once a Professor of Communication Arts & Science at New York University, published this book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 ** It has the subtitle Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  It's a detailed, thoroughly engaging examination of how technologies, and specifically television, have altered the nature of our communication and culture. Turning it from one based on printed communication and the authoritative written word, to one, which through the medium of television, sacrificed intellectual depth to immediacy, with little need for context or comprehension, why this is being communicated, or what this might mean in terms of how we respond. What we must do as a consequence, is a question rarely posed. 

Postman's book paraphrases Marshall McLuhan's maxim, that ' the medium is the message', and turns it into ' the medium is the metaphor'. The prevailing metaphor of elevision programming is entertaining, and is primarily focused on retaining your attention through constant visual stimulation. Anything educational or informative that it says it's imparting is entirely coincidental, irrelevant as a justification for its existence. Television isn't about encouraging thinking at all, but emoting, and the necessity for everything you watch to be enjoyable.

"And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference."*

Imagery, how things look dominate our daily perceptions and political discourses. Television has made the conveying of information a subservient quality, it has turned us into passive receivers of insufficient information, that we can do little or nothing about. It has made us feel impotent. The expression of opinions has changed from a rational carefully worded statement into an irrational emotive sensationalism. That Postman's book is still in publication forty years later, demonstrates how his analysis has found a continuing relevance in describing the causes and effects of our internet social media age, which was presaged by television.

" If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided their performance consistently generates a sense of verisimilitude......For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying."*

It is to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, that Neil Postman looked to speak of the zeitgeist of our time, and the perils our civilisation is currently facing. In Huxley's imagined future people become addicted to technologies, that subtly and quietly take away their capacity to think, their ability to form a critique or retain any sense of history, and the perspective that can bring to the present. Now, doesn't all that sound rather discomfortingly familiar?

"Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heal by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas."*

Postman uses famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas as an example for what has changed. In 1858 they engaged in a series of public debates.  At there height Lincoln would talk for three to four hours on a topic, Douglas would talk for a further three to four hours, to be followed by a concluding response of indeterminate length. And these talks were extraordinarily popular events, that were well attended. Thousands of people would stay engaged and listen intently. You could spend an entire day at these debates. There were breaks for meals where folk went home to eat, and then came back for the next bit of the debate.

American literacy and access to written information at that time was probably the highest it's ever been, The broad general population was well informed, and more than capable of following such long complex debates. Wind forward to modern televised political debates, where speakers get five minutes tops to state their case. This demonstrates how immediacy and the need to keep things moving lest the TV audience get bored, has changed our relationship with how much information we are presented with, or can take in. Add to this that every ten to fifteen minutes their will be the incongruous interruption of an advertising break and you have no clearer example of how television as a medium has messed with, and infantilises, our attention spans.

"And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?"*

Neil Postman undoubtedly was a very skilled and succinct communicator. ( He died in 2003)  Abjuring complex jargon, silly acronyms, specialist academic terms. He uses language and imagery deftly to aid comprehensibility and deeper understanding. And he was able to do all that without you ever getting a sense of being talked down to, or the subject matter being over simplified or dumbed down. This was a simulating book of ideas and perceptions, that took you on a journey into the inner workings of our modern communication media. He repeats several times that he is not implying what is happening is the result of a conspiracy or deliberate malign intent, what is happening to Western culture is a consequence of the essential nature of television itself, as a technological medium.

" Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.....To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a programme for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make assumptions that technology is always a friend to culture, is at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. "*

I found reading this book both compelling and curiously reassuring, simply because it nails quite precisely how we have arrived where we are today. When Presidents of the world's largest democracy are drawn from the world of entertainment, from film or TV reality programmes. Where a lack of seriousness, of being clearly ill informed, of blatantly lying, have become acceptable as just part of the political landscape. Because so long as you keep the attention span moving on, by bombarding the viewer with the next outrageous statement or provocation, people become increasingly numbed to the outrage. Advancing quickly on to the next sensationalised event that's just been generated. This would be a person that clearly understands the nature of modern tele- visual media, and how to exploit it. Enabling them to get away with dismantling democracy, create the foundations for a totalitarian state, and ignore climate catastrophe, whilst amusing the rest of us until we are all dead.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

* All quotations taken from Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, Published by Methuen, 1987. 

** With gratitude to Jared Henderson and his You Tube channel, for first making me aware of this book.

PLAYLIST 2026 - No 19 - Mercy by The Blessed Madonna Ft Jacob Lusk

Mercy - The Blessed Madonna Ft Jaccob Lusk

In the seemingly long hiatus between the Gabriel's first album and its follow up, Jacob Lusk has been appearing to find time to do quite a bit of feature vocalist spots, mainly with Moby, but also here with the DJ The Blessed Madonna. This is a disco music at its most classic, and Lusk's voice gives it all the diva gloss you could hope for. I mean, if you had the opportunity to have that voice 'do your little ole song' you'd grab it with both hands wouldn't you. And The Blessed Madonna does not fail to fully embellish it with glitter..