FILM REVIEW - Born Into This

This documentary Born Into This, tells Charles Bukowski's life story mostly via the filmed record of the great man speaking. Of all modern poets and novelists, Bukowski exploited the subject matter of his own life to the full. All his flaws and virtues are on show, and we are not spared his occasional unpalatable excess, his compulsive drink fueled behaviour. The violent, self-destructiveness and womanising, that was often misinterpreted as unrepentant misogyny, when it really was an expression of his sensitivity and sentimentality, to a feeling of being unloved or rejected. He didn't have to live up to his wild drinking and debauched image because that was how he often was. The discomfort of the almost daily childhood beatings from his Father,and his Mother's complicity in it, appears to have turned him into the archetypal non-conformist for the late sixties. Many of his fans live off this stance voyeuristically. He,however, lived an extraordinarily plain and ordinary working mans life, whilst continuing to write. He spent years working as a carrier for the Post Office, until his growing fame suddenly made it possible in mid-life to make a living from his prolific output.

There is a quality to his writing, sometimes swaggering, sometimes so frank about his own moral turpitude it is shocking, yet there is a huge warm human heart beating in broken voiced sympathy underneath it. He describes the effect of living on the low life edges of West Hollywood, its humiliations and the corrosiveness of this suffering on the human spirit. This is where Bukowski's writing frequently transcends the specifics of his own experience, and gives voice to something with more universal resonance. His poetry is never wilfully obscure or filled with literary references, a style best exemplified by Elliot, a fellow American, but someone who could not be further away from Bu//kowski. Elliot was part of the literary establishment, that was the cultural authority for the middle class intelligentsia. In Bukowski we hear the genuine voice of the American working underclass, simple, direct and unaffected.

FINISHED READING - Of Boys And Men by Richard V Reeves

"The iron rule of politics is that if there are real problems in society and responsible parties don't deal with them, the irresponsible parties will jump on them."

Daniel Schwammenhal

A former UK government strategist and Director of Demos, Richard Reeves now lives in the US and has become a prominent spokesperson on the current situation men now find themselves in. This book for two thirds of it is quite heavy on the statistics which demonstrate just how deep that crisis has become. In essence, policies have expanded women's opportunities and range of options in life, and there has been very little reciprocal political will to do the same for men. The traditional male role of being the main bread winner is all but dead in the water. And without a distinct alternative role and path being cogently portrayed and laid out, men are just floundering, and their frustration is now taking some of them into darker and more extreme reactionary places. By far the largest proportion of MAGA supporters are male. Trump, and the likes of Andrew Tate have been able to talk to this disenchanted generation of men, and co-opt their anger into their own perverting agenda. There is a sense of an existential ennui hanging over masculinity that mainstream politics is not addressing.

The problem is not due to women taking all the formerly male professions. it is that many of the traditionally male professions are in decline, contracting through environmental and technological developments, something which AI is only going to speed up. A lot of effort was successfully put into encouraging women to see themselves as being able to enter STEM professions, (science, technology, engineering and maths). A reciprocal push to make HEAL professions (health, education, administration and literacy) where opportunities are expanding, more appealing to men, just hasn't been given enough emphasis. The idea that men are privileged by their gender and therefore don't require help, is pernicious and fails to see the consequences of ignoring men's needs. That men doing well, as a benefit to everyone.

However, it is clear that men are not thriving in education and training either, women are outstripping them in both engagement and attainment. The sense is that young men do not see the point, have lost the drive and will to succeed, that women are fully grasping. If men do enter higher education they are quite likely to under attain, or drop out within a year. Male morale is low. Reeve points with particular loathing to the term 'toxic masculinity' which has become far too broadly and indiscriminately used, on literally anything men do that someone does not like. The despair that this creates, that there is nothing a man can do about it, that they cannot win. This is just really unhelpful. It's comparable to disparagingly refering to women as 'bimbos' all the time.

When it comes to solutions, Reeves lambasts both political left and right for the blinkered narrowness of their focus, The Right puts far too much emphasis on biology and implies a return to more traditional male norms, is the best solution to the 'male malaise'. The left refuses to consider that anything about gender behaviour might by biological in origin, and sees male roles in life as entirely culturally nurtured, so capable of change. Neither approach is either credible or in line with a fuller spectrum of the truth. There are professions which both men and women are less likely to do, not because of social prejudice or gender specific obstacles, but because they just do not appeal that much to them, period. So looking for ways to increase take up will fall short. The bias might be biological not systemic, and we have to be open to that as a possiblity. There is also the sense that feminists can view any initiative to help men, as diverting the focus away from women's needs. But as Reeves emphasizes this is false premise, it is perfectly possible to do both well, and they be complimentary. The emphasis here is not equality, but equity.

" True equality between groups that are different in any way can be attained only by providing for the differences."  Margaret Mead.

He concludes with a series of policy suggestions. That he thinks could help. Boys tend to mature at a slower rate, it could be helpful for them to delay by a year moving children to higher class. There need to be more male teachers generally, but specifically in primary education. Gender exemplification being important, particularly in early childhood. Encourage more men to go into HEAL professions, which is an expanding sector.  To bring, not just more attention, but more active policy to male education and employment needs, because simply ignoring them is not a secondary option anymore.

" In the U.S. a third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against, and among Republicans, the number is rising. This is false. While the problems of boys and men are real, they are the result of structural changes in the economy and broader culture, and the failings of our education system, rather than deliberate discrimination. But on the political Right as on the Left, attitudes on gender issues float free of the facts."

This is a thought provoking read. He backs up his opinions with a veritable barrage of facts and statistics. Though I found the constant statistical emphasis began to pall after a while. It became much more engaging once he began talking about solutions and ways forward. 

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

THE PAST IN RUINS - Blakeney Guildhall

English Heritage themselves seem unsure about this ruin. What exactly are the origins of it? They call it a 'guildhall', but does this create a mistaken impression that as a building it was much more important than is perhaps appropriate. This could easily be a simple undercroft of a merchants house or a monastic Cellarers Chequer of some kind? The history hasn't really give you an awful lot to go on. 

The Guildhall is sited to one side of Mariner's Hill. a large man made mound, which has served as both a look out and a beacon point for guiding ships into the harbour.  The mound itself is a bit of a local curio, with an unclear sense of when it was constructed. That the 'guildhall' cuts into the side of it might indicate that the hill predates it. And stylistically the building is 15th century. A few hundred yards further to the left is the entrance to the former site of a Carmelite Friary. 

For what was, and still is, a gaggle of small former fisherman's cottages around a narrow tidal port, the 'guildhall' is probably it's most significant surviving medieval construction after the parish church. Tucked behind one of the main streets in Blakeney. The English Heritage signpost directing you to it, was so rusted it's given up it's post. The building hasn't been open to the public on a daily basis since COVID. It is an overlooked and slightly dingy looking building from the outside. Though in 2026, it appears to be regularly accessible again.

You enter down some rough steps, relatively short but steep. You can see, once you are in, that though this is poorly lit, it is a quite impressively built crypt like building. This wasn't knocked up carelessly. It would have been relatively expensive to have constructed, beneath what must have been a substantial building above it. There are indicators in the walls of entrances, staircases and blocked up windows. The floor has been roughly paved with flint and brick cobbles, but a lot of it is compacted with dirt these days. The columns are very typical of the late medieval, octagonal in profile, branching out into simple, but elegant brick arches and transcepts. 

The question that really comes to mind is, did Blakeney really need a 'guidhall '?  You certainly see them in the much larger towns like Kings Lynn and Norwich. I know the North Norfolk coast was once a much more thriving sequence of competing shipping havens in medieval times. Cley just up the road, was by far the wealthier and busiest harbour on this length of coastline. They never had a 'guildhall', which makes the attribution of 'guildhall' to Blakeney somewhat questionable. 

It has traditionally been referred to as a 'guildhall', but that may be a local pretension, or for want of a better term. The strongesr suggestions are that this was originally built in the late 14th century simply as a wealthy local merchant's house. What is certain is that that house by the 15th century thebuilding had been adopted by a local group of Fish Merchants, not a 'guild' as such, but this might explain the 'guild' association. This undercroft was perhaps only ever used as a place for the storage of grain, fish and cloth. The living spaces up above, because they were not needed have not survived. That the undercroft has remained intact may be a testament to its continued usefulness as a place of storage over the past centuries. The building is an interesting anomaly none the less.

SCREEN SHOT - Living ( 2022 )

Living has a script written by Kazou Ishiguru, that is adapted from the Kurosawa 1952 film Ikiru. It has been re-set in an archetypal post war Britain, so this has a very similar period vibe and portrayal of constricted masculine self expression, as Ishiguru's Remains of the Day. Bill Nighy's style of buttoned up restrained acting is, in this sense, tailor made for the central character of Living - Mr Williams.  And he plays it with a consummate subtlety, understating the emotion whilst providing all the visual physicality that suggest a more disquieted and deeper unease beneath.

Mr Williams runs a department in the city council. Most of the time he is warding off or delaying work being approved, by referring it to other departments, who refer it to other departments, who refer it back to Mr Williams desk. At which point he'll place it in a tray saying, 'I think we'll hold that here for a while'. The whole departmental appears set up to bureaurcratically procrastinate, delay  prevent or cancel projects. Very little gets the thumbs up to proceed. It is a nightmare run entirely on stuffy minded prejudices of class and gender. Then Mr Williams is given a fatal health diagnosis, that he is suffering from a terminal cancer. This awakens him to what the reality of his life has been. He tells his family nothing about his imminent death. But his whole approach to life alarmingly changes, and the effectiveness of his department is consequently transformed for the better.

The opening credits evoke a Pathe News visual style and colour palette, Living is soaked in nostalgic sentiment and lovingly recreated period details. Mr Williams becomes a representative of an every man or every woman, who devotes their working life to doddling through a meaningless job, producing little of long lasting worth. It provides them with no satisfaction, or any feeling that they can achieve anything remotely good. This is something most of us will have some experienc of at some point in our life. The moral of the tale, does get over egged and a tad laboured by the end. It remains, however, a deeply affecting film, with a central superlative acting performance that single handedly brings real heart to it.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

POEM - The Tawdry Reaping

In a time requiring judgement

for it to end in profanity, 

is a defect of my soul-searching 

but these are the cracks 

in the crazed pavements 

we walk upon

this is a time that is deluded

about its own delusion

it is the smelly slime

from a pond, aggressive jack boots

have stamped in, dredged out, 

then renamed it clarity, 

I swear, I do swear, it is the swearing, 

that I do, in order to release the constraints 

upon my tongue, the nervousness of lips

out of a charitable need for my mind

to speak free of polity, off message,

frankly, I cry out fuuuuck, far too loudly,

too often, with a rage ignored

by the la la la of eardrums

so I doubt these caustic words, 

their construct and cognisance

their sentences, can they ever match the mood

or capture the collective geist 

of a succulent stupidity 

already presenting itself for crowning 

what is it, that we think we are doing

hunting down the scent of a putrid lure

across wild clawed countryside?

nothing as laudable 

as an altruistic urge exists here,

I am left smoldering in regret

for we will be so double crossed

by the mean spiritedness

of their tinfoil minds, 

dressed soberly in pastel blue suits

those arsonists who point

at the fires they've ignited

then shake their moralising heads 

at the descent of England

as though they themselves

had nothing to do with the inflammatory fury

that they are merely pointing at

all destruction prefaces a future creature

and I fear the beast now being let loose 

to ethnically poison then cleanse the soil

preparing this land for the tawdry reaping

of a mutant political harvest.

Written June 2026
by Stephen Lumb 

FINISHED READING - The Blue Room by George Simenon

Tony is having an affair with Andree. They meet regularly on a Thursday, and if Andree leaves a pink towel visible from the street, all is clear. Her husband is out. They hold their secret assignations in a hotel in the blue room. Just after they've had some very rough passionate sex, where Andree has bitten Tony and he is dealing with the aftermath at the sink. The sex they have, is becoming increasingly risky and harder to conceal the consequences of. Tony thinks he sees Nicholas, Andree's husband, walking back across the street, and escapes out the back of the hotel. Frightened that their affair has been discovered, Tony decides that it has to end. That he loves his family more, and takes them off on a two week vacation to get away from Andree. Then it becomes apparent that this incident is being recounted in the context of an interrogation by the local magistrate. And that Tony is under arrest, but it's unclear for what. And as the novel progresses it's clear that someone is not telling the truth here. It maybe that Andree has carefully created a false trail of evidence that implicates Tony in a crime. It's either that, or between them Tony and Andree have together carried it out exactly as planned.

The Blue Room, is one of Simenon's later crime novels that have a much more unpleasant darker undertow. They are not your standard crime detective tale, built around Simenon's Maigret character. Here he has chosen to write as Tony in the process of giving evidence in a series if interviews. This way you hear his internal dialogue, know his feelings, his sense of panic.Why is he lying about not seeing the letters, they know he has received? It very cleverly drip feeds you information, whilst still maintaining a silence about what he's actually accused of. And through out you are left unsure. Is he being set up by Andree as revenge for him abandoning her, or is he fully complicit in it?  It's a really brilliantly constructed piece of crime writing. 

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8 

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Peasant's Revolt

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it's The Peasant's Revolt.

1381 - THE PEASANT'S REBELLION

You would not want to have been born into the 14th century. A century where The Great Famine was followed by The Black Plague, and it's estimated half the population of Europe died. If you survived through all of that you were either extraordinarily lucky, a wealthy recluse, or both. The consequences of these disasters upon social cohesion, was devastating. The feudal traditions of deference, the economic contract and hierarchy between lord and peasant, neared the point of collapse. 

For those who survived there were certainly increased opportunities. The pool of skilled workers was much reduced, this meant those with a trade could name the price for employing them. People found they were able to improve their status in life, through their own efforts. The wool and weaving trade in England was in the middle of a huge boom, and a new bourgeois merchant middle class arose. The beginnings of what was to become The Renaissance started at this time. So on the surface at least, Europe and England were on the way to bouncing back better.

However, the aristocracy, monarchy and religious institutions, behaved as if these social changes were immoral, needing to be halted and reversed. They introduced a cap on wage rises, and brought in sumptuary laws to prevent people from lower classes, however rich they were, from buying certain types of goods. Rural workers began exercising their new found economic power by banding together and refusing to do work at their lords bidding. Riots broke out in Bury St Edmunds and Norwich, over the high handed and exploitative nature of the monasteries in their local economy. Hiking up the price of tithes, and land rents. Strips of land that peasants had once farmed, if the family had died out, were often embezzled by other landowners and enclosed into much larger field systems. Some peasants, now without a means to support themselves, were forced into vagrancy. Vagrancy was then criminalised. If you were poor, you really could not win. The cost of the Hundred Years War with France rattled on, and pressure from increasing taxes made the people resentful. Not to mention the cost of living itself constantly rising. England was a tinderbox primed to explode.

What triggered the revolt was high-handed tax collecting. The king had introduced a poll tax, and one man John Bampton was employed to collect unpaid arrears in Essex. A revolt broke out, quickly spreading throughout the south east of England. They burnt county records and set people free from prisons. Wat Tyler decided to lead a contingent of rebels, that gathered ever more people as they marched towards London. They had a number of clear requests - they wanted the taxes upon them reduced, the end of serfdom, and the removal of the King's senior officials and the law courts.

On reaching Blackheath, they were met by royal officials aiming to persuade them to return home. This failed. The protest progressed through the city, destroying palaces, law books, buildings in the Temple and killing any royal officials they by chance encountered. The next day, the fourteen year old King Richard met the rebels at Mile End agreeing to all their demands. This only momentarily placated the peasants, who continued on their path of wanton destruction, taking the Tower of London. So the kings agreement of the previous day, was definitely off. Two days later a militia captured Wat Tyler and other rebel leaders, killing them all. By then the revolt was spreading into East Anglia, the Midlands and North as far as York. What followed was a swift and brutal suppression across the entire country to extinguish any remaining fires of revolt.

On the surface The Peasant's Revolt, achieved none of its stated aims. But what it did do was exemplify to ordinary people the power of collective protest. Also, it gave them a sense for how near traditional economic and social hierarchies were to collapsing. Social class began to feel it was not so rigidly fixed as previously. Deference towards nobility could no longer be assumed. This was of deep concern to the institutions of the establishment. There were now consequences for taking the compliance of their citizens too much for granted. 

As is often the case when those in authority lose public credibility, they never capitulate fully, as this might look weak and set a dangerous precedence. So they do only the absolute minimum to save face. The whole idea of the poll tax was in effect unenforceable, so was quietly dropped. The unpopular expensive foreign war was scaled back momentarily. And whilst serfdom continued, it was actually already in decline, as a knock on consequence of severe famine and plague. By the 15th century serfdom had totally vanished.

For the ordinary folk of England, the Peasant's Revolt, in the future, became the role model for what power, agency and acting collectively in great numbers, looked like. And increasingly over the next century they would return to flexing their right to protest in this way. To actively campaign for things to either cease, be restored or changed. Heads could now roll.

 Next Episode - The Cade's and Cornish Rebellions

FINISHED READING - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Caroline Lucas mentioned this novel in her book Another England, as being part of the sort of cultural forces that can contribute to effect change in society. I have never read a book by Elizabeth Gaskell before. It is also sometime since I've read a Victorian novel, and I had actually forgotten how intensely they can write, with so much tiny heightened detail into inner worlds and dialogue. 

This took me a while to re-adjust to, and I realised that for the task of getting into the world of North and South, I would have to devote considerable chunks of time to it. Otherwise I'd be doing it a diservice. This was not the sort of reading that could easily be digested and entertained in short snippets before slumber descends.  And this was, in itself, revealing about the sentence structure of a lot of contemporary novel writing, which, generalising madly here, is more sparingly efficient in the journey getting to the nub of things. Though Victorian novelists often initially wrote for 'part-works' in magazines, brevity was never Gaskell's or the Victorian way of composition. 

So this is a longer form style of writing, with lots on minor, but notable incident that slowly builds up an idea for what motivates a character. The central character here is Margaret, who feels like a sypher for Gaskell's approach to life. Margaret is a young woman, aloof, strongly self-opinionated and motivated by a sense of injustice, and the need to care for all humanity, regardless of wealth or status. Her father, the once Reverend Hales has had a mid life crisis, and unexpectedly resigned his parish. This entails the whole family moving from the quaint rural idyll of Helstone in the South, to the smoky industrial urbanity of Milton, in the North. The culture shock on all of them is evident from the start. Margaret's mother is seriously unwell, she complains about the dirt, the smog, of having to rub shoulders and to be dependent upon the charitable disposition of tradespeople, like the mill owner Mr Thornton.

It is a different class of person who thrives in Milton, entrepreneurial, less concerned with the well being of those who work for them. Margaret and Thornton have long discussions/debates, where they trade blows over the ethics of modern industrialisd society, and whether the care of his workforce is his responsibility or not. The picture Gaskell paints of the life of workers in the mills are forced to lead, is sobering. And when the mill workers go on strike, violent confrontation is on the cards. Strikes are a new very urban phenomenon. They are treated as a moral affront to the rights of mill owners. That workers are getting above themselves in insisting they have a say in the matter of their pay and working conditions.

Interwoven into this telling portrayal of Victorian moral and social attitudes of the time, the Hale Family is in mid crisis. The mother is ill. Her father tries to earn enough money through teaching and Margaret attempts to keep the household running smoothly. She has a brother Federick, living in self imposed exile abroad, because he was involved in a notorious mutiny, for which he could well be hung were he ever to return home. 

Margaret, almost despite her hostility towards Mr Thornton, finds he frequently intrigues and occupies her thoughts. But when he declares his love for her, up go her affronted bridges - how dare he? And this resistance to love, where each of them pretends indifference, and plays far too hard not to be got, runs throughout the novel. There are secrets and lies at work, that neither of them is fully aware of. There are also plenty of tragic events, murder, suicides and destitution. 

The revolution of a newly urbanised society, had not really been portrayed to quite this level of realism before. Gaskell's attempt to convey local dialect, is not always effective. I couldn't detect quite what accent she was aiming for most of the time. But generally I'd say she portrays working class people with considerably more honesty, than Dickens, who does tend to resort to the loveable caricature, too easily ennobling or sentimentalising them. Yes, there are moments when the drama tips into the stagey melodramatic set piece. 

Mr Thornton is certainly this novels 'Mr Rochester', the blunt yet mysteriously unknowable man, you understand early on these two will be living happily together by the end. Margaret is more a spirited example of heroine than you normally find in Victorian novels. And Gaskell does bring her two central characters together at the end as equals. Though women's options, even here, can be are as limited as the wives of destitute mill workers are, without a husband or financial independent means, any agency would still be ring fenced by marriage. Margaret is herself misjudged for having seemingly strayed from the propriety of what is deemed acceptable behaviour for a woman. 

North and South is an interesting book, from both a historical and social perspective, in the portrayal of a society in flux. Disruptive changes, where views and expectations of class, gender and lifestyle were shifting, dependent upon where in the country you lived. The North South divide we talk of in Britain to this day, has its origins in this period of the Industrial Revolution.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

SCREEN SHOT - The Backrooms

I'm writing this review tonight, because I saw a matinee showing and I need to start putting words down before I lose all sense of the film. Not that there is any sense to be made of it. Because this film is deliberately perplexing and has no consistent logic or framework to make sense of it with. It's a bit of a psychological tease, dressed up as horror.

Clarke (Chitel Ejenfor ) runs a furniture business. His life is a bit of a mess. His wife threw him out of his own home, so he has ended up living in the back of his own showroom. He goes regularly to see his psychiatrist Mary, to make sense of what has happened and try to move on. One day, whilst trying to discover why his shop lighting is flickering and going on and off all the time at night, he discovers there is a part of a wall in his basement display area that is permeable. He can walk through it into a whole complex of backrooms, corridors and doorways. With random stacks of furniture, on many different levels. Aspects of his own furniture showroom appear but are backwards, or chopped off half trapped in walls. The whole backrooms are a vast space, but it makes no logical sense. He brings in two employees to help him document it on film, so he can show Mary. But this goes wrong and they end up being killed by a malevolent creature that lurks somewhere in its depths.

That's about as far as I'm willing to go with plot, to tell you more would spoil the film. To be honest providing more information will not make the film any more comprehensible. The film appears placed very confidently in the world that is created. There are moments of real shock and tension, but most of it is not in what you are being shown, but in the terrific sound design that impresses a huge feeling of foreboding upon you, very loudly. This is undoubtedly a cleverly constructed film.  Previously it was a series of short films on You Tube, that went viral. It's director Kane Parsons, does appear to know how to conjure nightmarish surrealism out of nothing. 

This the sort of film nerds of all ages will absolutely love and get off on. Spending endless amounts of time theorising about what its meaning might be and knowing references.  I think this will largely be a complete waste of time, but it will happen regardless of my view. You will not discover some great profundity hidden in these backrooms. It is fundamentally a film that constructs a realm out of human emotional memories and the psychology of recollection, how through remembering them, things often become more and more inaccurate with each repetition. That we all live with some area in our psyche that we never want to look into, lest we discover some demon in the dark corners of our past. These are the sorts of themes the film attempts to explore. 

It's in the nature of this type of film, that nothing is without significance here. The film one family is watching is A Never Ending Story. The psychology book Mary has written is called The Memory Within. This story, for what it is, presents itself as though based on someone's psychologically mangled memories, it's just not entirely clear whose. I dare say, given its success, a sequel will quickly follow. But I'll give that one a miss. Seeing or knowing more will be of no help here. I began to find The Backrooms tiresome by the time we reached it's last half hour.  It's certainly diverting entertainment, but only the once. It is, just one long tease, that I found in the end, exasperating. That said, the Backrooms will probably be the highest grossing film of the year, primarily because it was also one of the cheapest to make.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

MY OWN WALKING - June Journal 2026

In the history of my spiritual practice, my resistance to doing it, and my response to my resistance to doing it, have frequently been an area for patience, practice and experiment. In the first flush of enthusiasm and excitement of Beginners Mind, one rarely encounters much resistance. Only as things settle down into the more hum drum regularity of daily practice, does resistance start to raise its head. Because in those early days the sense of practice opening up new vistas on yourself and reality sustains you. It creates a tangible sense of you making real progress. However, deceptive that might actually be.

In my experience, this freshness rarely lasts. And whilst one is always being encouraged to keep hold of the openness and curiosity that Beginners Mind relies upon. In reality, this is pretty tricky to impossible to self consciously maintain. When anything that was once new becomes familiar, it loses its ability to rejuvenate because of its bright shine tarnishing.

What in essence resistance is, is tedium. Boredom with the same routine. Boredom with not appearing to make any progress. Boredom can even be a fundamental disappointment with oneself. And what one chooses to do in response to boredom rearing its apathetic head, has significance. What do you do when you are bored? Are you able to actually do anything?

I'll tell you what I've done, for good or ill. I look for something new that interests and fascinates me. Not necessarily in the practice. It might be another new unknown subject to explore and be excited about. A fresh way of looking at a the familiar object of one's practice, or at oneself. Yet this search for the shock and fizz of the new and novel, I'd say is a major tendency in the Western approach to spiritual practice. It turns spiritual practice into an adjunct to consumerism. The latest novelty practice, to move on from the moment anything becomes unrewarding or remotely boring.

Another response I've had to resistance, is the strong application of self discipline. Now I'll say right here, that this is very different from willpower,. Willpower requires you to be already 'willing' to do this practice. Self discipline recognises that to an extent you are not willing to do this practice regularly every day, unless you coerce yourself into doing so. One way or another you'll get your bum on that cushion. You make a commitment and you stick to it, regardless of your resistance. Self discipline also has a tendency to carry with it a tone in its approach that may not be kind.

This overriding of resistance, has it uses. In extremis it can be useful. But, if used too frequently, it does lead to not even acknowledging the presence of resistance. I found this to be extremely detrimental to my enthusiasm for spiritual practice in the long run. I wasn't taking the whole of me into practice, I attempted exclusion of the truculent non cooperative side of myself. As you can imagine this did not go down well with my psycho-physical being.

It is good to make commitments. But it's also good to recognise when the level of things you are committing yourself to carrying out. has become overwhelming or too burdensome to be consistently executed. It's important not to see dropping some of these commitments as a personal failing. It's just you finding that one way of approaching practice may have run its course, and the need to rethink and review this has arrived. Simply ease off the acceleration pedal you are pressing down too much on.

There was also a time whenever I met resistance or boredom, I simply stopped practicing altogether. This might be for a few days, weeks, months, even years.  I allowed resistance to rule over me, and hence ruined the quality of my engagement. These days, I'm experimenting with a gentler, more receptive approach to resistance. I recognise that my practice has different levels it goes through, on waves of enthusiasm and troughs of fatigue. And when I'm enthusiastic I can take on all sorts of things, try out additional practices, add this or subtract that. And if resistance re-emerges, I'll start pairing away elements of this practice, Perhaps stripping it back to a really basic level for a while. Ready to pick it up again when the fire for it appears to be rekindled again. This means I don't stop doing a daily spiritual practice of some sort, I merely readjust the quantity and intensity of it. To accommodate the indicator that resistance is, without completely capitulating to it. Believe me, this is what real progress looks like.

There is always the question to be asked of yourself. Is resistance a sign that you really don't believe in the efficacy of the practices you are doing?  You have to acknowledge this could be a possibility. Doubt, however, I've found is a pretty reliable test for faith being present. Doubt is just your faith wobbling a bit. It emerges when that faith feels ignored, threadbare or hungry. I'd be more worried if I was indifferent. Have you recharged your faith lately, and what do you do when that is required? What things do you do to put yourself in touch with your faith?  Whenever I am bored or resistant, I have usually become alienated from what I hold faith in. Practice can often become a bit too much of an idea, over idealised, be ego or head driven. Then I need to put greater effort into those more nebulous mystically orientated areas that ground me, point me in the general direction of faith - Imaginative. Poetic, Aesthetic, Mythic, Ritualistic, Raw, Rustic and Elemental Nature. It's like gathering around a freshly lit raging fire at night, with a cuppa tea, and gazing into the primaeval flames and communing with its spirit.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - The Magna Carta

My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it begins where else but with Magna Carta.

Imagine, you are the younger less handsome, less charismatic brother of the heroic crusader King Richard. You were his Regent. You kept the country running whilst Richard was off committing atrocities (with Papal sanction) in the Holy Land, chivalrously slaughtering Saracens. You can understand why John might have had a chip on his shoulder. 

Once he became King, did he feel unfairly maligned, undervalued, not respected or revered in quite the way his absentee brother had been? Richard was undoubtedly a hard act to follow. But, I mean, what had Richard actually done for his adopted country, except neglect it?  John, however, did appear to be cruel and brutal, with a perverse ability to make any bad situation worse, so his subjects actively feared and loathed him. The issues that really pissed off his barons, however, were very common ones in the history of English protest - war and taxation. 

Plantagenet Kings like Richard and John were not English, they were French. Who ruled at their peak half of France. For them England was an occupied territory, one that increasingly took time and energy away from their home country. Hence John found the need to fight wars in France to retain control of his home feifdom. But with each ensuing battle he was defeated in, he lost control of larger swathes of his territory. Wars were expensive to perpetrate, and royal coffers were emptying fast. So John had to raise finances through imposing taxation on the citizens of England. 

He was not the first king to find himself in this predicament. But in his case,John was losing a war quite shamefully, and would be further humiliated by having to pay his enemies compensation for it. Turning around and asking the citizens of England e.g his own barons, to stump up the cost. Well, this went down like a lead balloon. Had he won, perhaps they might have begrudgingly paid up. But there is nothing like abject failure in a war to foment dissent. The barons having had enough, rose up on mass and captured large areas of southern England, including London. King John was dragooned into signing the Magna Carta on the island of Runnymede. He may have been thinking of this purely as a tactical capitulation, to prevent the wider spread of civil unrest.

This was one hundred and forty nine years after the Norman Conquest. These plucky barons were two generations distant from being French migrants. So don't imagine they were Anglo Saxon Englishmen fighting for their ancestral rights. What they called 'their land' was stolen property, given to their families by William the Conqueror. But England was cash and land rich, that's why the Normans wanted it in the first place.

Charters similar to The Magna Carta were being signed all the time, in order to try establish in law firm legal precedence. The complete lack of a strong legislative making Parliament, made that virtually impossible in 13th century England. But let's be clear here, this charter was concocted entirely for the barons benefit and vested interests. Only by implication does this charter apply to every person in England. As it turned out. King John and the barons both reneged on it pretty quickly and conflict between the King and the barons erupted.

After John's death in 1216, Henry 3rd kept reissuing Magna Carta, using it to try and placate the baronial turbulence he'd inherited in 1216, 1217 and 1225. Under pressure he began to bequeath more power to Parliament. And his son Edward 1st reissued the charter again in 1297, but this time making sure it became Parliamentary statute law, with the intention of it forming the basic foundation for future national law. This was the point at which The Magna Carta began vaguely to resemble the proto-democratic document later generations would laud so highly.

As a piece of law making Magna Carta had a pretty shambolic progress towards enforcement. Only through historical retrospect, roughly from the 16th century onwards, through English Civil War Parliaments, to the Victorians desire to re-write English history with more noble people and principles actively present, has this document gained the significant reputation it now has.

Magna Carta demonstrates the morally compromised approach to law making in English history. Never start from establishing first principles, but give far too much consideration to the short term pressures and vested interests of an era, so end up doing only what could pragmatically be got away with?

However, given time, what this Protest established ( eventually) was the following, and because we once had an Empire these became established more widely in what were our former colonies.

No citizen is above the law, regardless of status.

Everyone has the right to a fair trial

No citizen should be arbitrarily stripped of their rights, without legal process.

No citizen should be taxed without prior Parliamentary agreement.

Judicial process should be impartial and not subject to bribery or corruption 

Any citizen can own and inherit property and not have it unjustly seized by another,

Religious institutions and practices should be free from royal or political interference.

To create the conditions for any change you first have to recognise the collective power that you possess. With Magna Carta the barons certainly grasped that. Over a hundred years later the peasantry of England were to learn what collective power they might have. And in the process encountered the duplicitous nature of the royal house of Plantagenet.

Next Episode - 1381 - The Peasants Revolt 

FINISHED READING - Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit

" The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be" - Virginia Woolf

Stubtitled - Untold Histories and Wild Possibilities, Solnit's book, was first published in 2005 in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War. There is a new foreward to this third edition published in 2016. This might appear to have little to give us hope in this Trumpian world, where we reverse into the future with a blindfold on. But what she has to say here about purpose and the results people can achieve if the have hope, still stand proud. Collective action still works, and the tech bros do fear that it might rear it's none co-operative head. Focusing on keeping us distracted, passively consuming the endless amounts of dreck on the internet.  When we look up from our start phones, then we might start to think. This book does stirs ones confidence, to grasp hope and fight for what you want. Nothing ever progresses or improves without cultivating the imagination to hope.

" Your opponents would love you to believe that it's all hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn't enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons."

I bought this book because I was finding in our contemporary zeitgeist, it was all too easy for me to fall into despairing, and I wanted to be more In touch with a more open hopeful demeanor. Though as a Budfhist I should already know, not everything we do produces the change we desire, that over desired desires are problematic. Solnit asks us to step back and look at things from a broader perspective, to perceived how change happens in the longer term. That perhaps one small campaign that appeared to fail or fall short in it's aims, might actively change the terms of a discussion and lead to a turn around in public opinion in later years. Hope is for the long run. If we expect revolutions and instant changes, then everything will undoubtedly fail to live up to the expectations we hold. It's so easy to get caught up in despair because what was achieved is only a compromised shadow of what we'd wished for. This may not be the perfect solution, but it is going in the right direction.

"Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough."

Naysaying, becomes a habit. Yes, this completely glorious thing had just happened, but the entity that achieved it had done something bad at another point in history. Yes, the anguish of this group was ended, but somewhere some other perhaps unrelated group are suffering hideously. It boiled down to: we can't talk about good things until there are no more bad things. Which, given that the supply of bad things is inexhaustible, and more bad things are always arising, means that we can't talk about the good things at all. Ever."

Solnit uses the example of the abolition of slavery, that the campaign took from first utterance to completion, around 250 years to reach abolition. Even then slave labour was often instantly indentured, which was another way of tying them to a particular landowner. Slave owners wanted compensation for the loss of their 'property', which they were duly paid. Though this could look like recognising that slaves could be personal property. All these things got the abolition bill eventually over the line and into law, imperfect though they were as mechanisms. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's was able to build further on that, by removing some of the lingering prejudicial circumstances that bedeviled black lives. And so on, through to # Black Lives Matter. None of this was a perfectly clean fast track trajectory, in the treatment of all humankind with dignity and respect, but it is being driven by the hope that it could be.

"We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voices and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless,or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. There are forces that prefer the giant remain asleep."

" One of the key recognitions is that the change that counts in a revolution takes place first in the imagination."

I found myself excitedly pencilling brackets around the clarity with which she expressed ideas in sentences and whole paragraphs sometimes. Particularly her criticisms that people on the political left get too self absorbed, and paradoxically like those on the far right, become all about what is wrong, not what it is you want to create. You oppose the comfy consensus by pointing out all its self evident flaws. As a result the left today, can be perceived as constantly in a negative state of mind, in relation to how the world operates, neglecting the need to offer hope and a positive vision for what a better world might look like.

" The despairing were deeply attached to their despair, so much so I came to refer to my project as stealing the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.  What did it give that particular sector of the left ? It got them off the hook, for one thing. If the world is totally doomed no matter what, little or nothing is demanded of you in response..... And those who were active were often hopeful, though it may be the other way around, some of those who are hopeful are active. Yet the range of the hopeful extends beyond that, and you can find hope in surprising corners."

The assumption by the authorities is that in a time of disaster, civil society will instantly crumble, and tight authoritarian controls will be required to prevent anarchy breaking out. When in fact the opposite is what occurs, people pull together and organise themselves and form alliances to help as many people as possible. During the San Fransisco earthquake in 1906, the city authorities literally impeded and got in the way of ordinary San Franciscan's organising soup kitchens and housing homeless families. 

Solnit champions nonviolent protests, and a growing use of none partisanship in solving problems or issues at a local level. The old left/right polarities were collapsing even in the noughties. You don't come in now with your preformed ideological solutions to solve issues anymore, it's more about finding where the common ground is, listening and being open to hear where the direction of ideas, and possible solutions maybe going. 

"Every act is an act of faith, because you don't know what will happen. You just hope and employ whatever wisdom and experience seems most likely to get you there."

This book is a welcome short shot in the arm. As she points out through examples again and again, those expectations of ours for what is possible, and how quickly it can be achieved, need careful monitoring. Otherwise despair will appear and apathy will get in the way.

" Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.'

All quotations taken from Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit, Published by Canongate Books, 2016.

2026 PLAYLIST - No 14 - Cursive by Mandy, Indiana

Cursive - Mandy,Indiana

Based in Manchester or Berlin, Mandy,Indiana have this stance that they appear to be coming from another world entirely. Their music is pretty uncatagorisable. There is definitely a debt of inheritance from the whole Manchester scenes of old. I'd say post punk more generally, in its melding of different genres into a cohesive whole. A commitment to pushing at boundaries that reminded me of early Faust, and it is that seventies German experimental rock/electro/Stockhausen/improv vibe I largely settle on. This performance of Cursive on Later...with Jools Holland, has the customary vocals in French from Valentine Caulfield. Not speaking French, I can't tell you what she's singing about, a lot of it sounds as if it might be nonsense lists of associative word play. But it moves along a great propulsive groove. That breaks at the end into guitar playing that sounds like he's scratching nails down a sheet if metal. Very Test Department like. I think I love them.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 140 - On The Ethics of Bird Feeding

The usual barometer of when Spring arrives is activity on the bird feeder in our back garden. The number and frequency of birds feeding upon it reaches a new peak, as enthusiastic broods of fledglings come to learn the ropes - Here is a bird feeder. Here is the meal worms suspended in fat  Here, is a lot easier than scrounging about for worms and insects in earth, I can tell you. You babes don't know you are born these days. So, pull in your bum fluff and get the hang of it boys and girls. I'm going to take a bath in the water jacuzzi with your dad. What's going on there? Well never you mind, just tuck in and look away.

Robins appear particularly stupid. They try and they flail. They flap wings madly, whilst simultaneously attempting to peck at the feeder. They make real hard work of what ought to be a simple enough task - Land on bird feeder, grip the wire with your feet, extend the head towards the food object, tuck in. Repeat. It's not rocket science. I thought birds and animals were genetically pre- programmed with such abilities. Weeks later does it dawn on Robins finally how you get the hang of it. 

This year has been noticeable different. The birds didn't really stop breeding over the Winter, because everything was 'so unseasonably mild', as the weathermen like to put it. This Spring there's been an increased volume of bigger birds trying and failing to make bird feeders work for them. Because, if truth be told, they are too f.....g big. Bird feeders were designed for petite birds, like sparrows, blue and great tits, reed warblers, coal tits, pied wag tails and robins, these have all come to use of our increasingly deluxe boutique bird feeding facilities.

The problem for larger birds is that they are large. And by large I mean more than medium large - blackbirds, jackdaws, magpies, thrushes and woodpeckers. We get mega large wicked looking crows and fat wood pigeons rolling in on their wobbly chassis. Flapping about manically, they get at most a peck or two and then go. It's exhausting just watching them struggle to snip even a small morsel between their beaks  Unless you are our local spotted woodpecker, who turns up early every morning, and gets stuck into a hanging half coconut of mealworm fat. This bugger will happily gorge itself till he explodes. I have, I admit, cultivated a disdain for woodpeckers, they are bloody greedy fuckers and are extraordinarily messy eaters, to boot. Throwing as much food left and right and onto the floor as what they eat. No one wants to watch a glutton eat. He keeps the wood pigeons happy though. With a wild scattering of crumbs on the ground beneath.

It got so bad recently, when half coconuts of mealworm in fat were being consumed at a rate of two a day. I mean, I'm not made of money. I just stopped putting them out for half a week. I've tried going to war with them, giving them a preliminary warning -  look just don't abuse my generosity guys and gals or I'll get really mean. Larger birds are the bullies of the bird world, they scare off anything small. My getting annoyed,however, is a waste of energy. There is no point in discriminating between small and large birds, no matter how vexing I find the greediness of a spotted woodpecker. They have, I expect, ravenous broods to feed like everyone else. I am penalising all birds if I do that. So I have tried to learn my lesson. Put up and shut up. Through heavily gritted teeth.

As we are buying a lot of fat sticks and half coconuts stuffed with mealworm lately, I have good cause to raise a concerning question. The birds who come into my garden and feed on the bird feeder, am I just training them to be lazy and creating a new obese generation of tits? If I put seed or peanuts or hard fat balls out, they are not remotely interested, far too difficult a digestive problem. My goodness, do fledglings have rubber beaks that can't chew or masticate. Because ours simply want to gorge on the softer mealworm fat. Now I know these are hungry fledglings learning to eat for themselves, but shouldn't I be encouraging them to eat wholesome stuff like insects, things they will consume as adults,? Am I merely storing up trouble for wild birds by making them dependent on me serving up the bird equivalent of a McDonald's Cheese Burger?

AI reaches new nadir
Yesterday, I was trying to type 'Papal sanction' into a blog I was writing.  AI apparently knew better what I was really trying to say, and automatically changed it to Pay Pal. It's becoming increasingly the case that as I write my blogs, half the time I am recorrecting the AI auto correct of what I originally wrote. This is the future we are going to be f.....d over by.

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