Was just watching a talk by Sheena Iyengar form the TED conference regarding ‘the art of choosing’ http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html and was not giving It my full attention until she said that:

‘When offered to those not accustomed to it choice does not entail a liberation but a suffocation by meaningless minutia', which essentially gave voice to something I’ve been feeling for a long time. An example of the above statement is the experiences of those in eastern Europe who have undergone the transition from living in a communist state wherein product choice was confined to an affirmation or negation of the state brand of soap, chewing gum, beer etc (to which in east Germany many interestingly still retain their loyalty) to now, under democracy, being subject to an overwhelming deluge of seemingly identical possible brands, from which to operate an autonomous choice.

For those of us who have grown up as a part of this late capitalist paradigm we have been able to develop an acute ability to sift through the various possible manifestations of chewing gum or ‘soft drink’ with such fluency that forming brand allegiances and counterbalancing the market choices available becomes an almost instinctive activity that can be a source of pride. It is then however that we will find, when we believe ourselves to have carved a secure niche of brand preferences and loyalties out of the swarm of those commodities and products we could have chosen, and when we begin to derive a vivid impression of our own ‘consumer identity’ as it where, that we are most susceptible to undergoing a crisis of confidence.

The dissemination of the Anglo-American ideal of choice and the implications it has in forcing its citizens to compile a portfolio of freely chosen deals, contracts, brand’s and assorted paraphernalia can make those subjected to this tyranny of possibilities faint-headed. I increasingly feel absorbed by Sartre’s phantasmagorical ‘nausea’, on heading into town, as I start to feel winded by modernity’s unceasing reliance on my personal jurisdiction. To use a common example, any visit to a corporate, or indeed any other, coffee shop now consists of the customer being asked to dictate a carefully scrutinised prescription of how one would like one’s caffeine hit assembled. Surely I am not alone in feeling that this compliance and egalitarianism on the behalf of the coffee makers is enormously tedious? For imagine now how refreshing it would be to remove all the requests and democracy from the transaction and put your faith in the barista to process and comply with the words ‘can I have a coffee please’- what I would give to be dictated my order at a restaurant! On a trip into town I began to feel sweat trickle down my brow, and my consciousness teeming with neurosis as I calculate the price margins that delineate the different brands. A single trip into town will see the consumer sent hurtling from the void towards an onslaught of possible choices, negations and affirmations from which they are required by the late capitalist machine to perform countless exertions of what is actually quite high-level cognitive scrutiny. Only because from an increasingly young age we are initiated into this bizarre ritual, distinguishing our preferred cartoon enterprise, favoured manufactor of sweets etc, does it seem to us to be a natural one. However as Iyengar wittily points out in the video, choice is not an organic phenomenon which is a mainstay every culture, and hence the west is wrong to treat those cultures, such as her example regarding the green tea in japan, which do not bestow upon the consumer a vast array of options, as being aberrations that run counter to the notions of democracy and liberty.

The truth is that I believe many of the people who would triumphantly champion our ability in Britain to freely vote on who governs us as one of the most admirable facets of our culture would still, like me, relish a little bit of autocracy when buying a coffee. Because when absolute liberty infects the marketplace you begin to feel trapped and not freed. Supermarkets, far from being bastions of self-governance are its anathema; countless research having told us that when the range of options provided exceeds 10 we become lazy and disengage from the decision we are making. Multiply this disengagement by one trolley load and it becomes apparent that a reduction in the multiplicity of choice (in reality just homogenous variations on a theme) offered by the market would not leave the modern consumer disempowered and obedient, but would re-empower them by allowing them to redirect their cognitive energies away from shopping.

Was a bit apprehensive about posting this- but then bore in mind that i am essentially yelling into the void/muttering to myself here, such is the scarcity of those tuned in to hear me (which is actually a comforting and not a discouraging thought- more in touch with the idea of a blog as a 'log' kept whilst aboard a ship. Full of insidious bickering about the crew and hastily sketched recounts of the journey's progress/ self-indulgent moaning about the hardship of life at sea, all written in a sinuous scrawl due to the rockiness of the cabin desk ) Besides i think my three 'followers' may soon stop being the devotees the phrase implies, and justifiably take a detour from my inanities whilst i'm not looking etc etc

Anyway i wrote this in a frenzied burst- my eyelids artificially pronged up by caffeine stimulation on sunday early in the morning following a first shift at my new job-

Dissection of a Saturday night.

The residue of nights passed clings to everything here, a testament to punters liberally dousing every surface they pass with a variety of spirits, sugars and saliva like deranged catholic priests. I’m now acutely aware of this as I reach out to grip a table for balance whilst trying to weave in and amongst the horde of sweating, lurching drunks, emphatically bellowing innocuous lyrics in their friends faces. I glance at my palm in horror and with considerable effort succeed in wrenching it from its glucose web, a squelch audible as it is peeled away. Having completed this act of escapology I turn to face my true purpose for having stepped out from behind the relative safety of the bar.

Stopping to find my bearings I’m struck by the myopia of the club where a gaze is diverted by a hesitant glimmer of familiarity in the face over there, a distinct note to RSVP in a cute girls face or the unwitting intrusion of a passing elbow to the nave of my back. Then it’s the glance that in your daze your unaware to have held and the pulsing exposure of the strobe light etching phantom forms around you; it’s a scene from which sobriety reels and staggers to escape clutching its head like Chatterton. Its just then as I feel the rapid advance of blood from my feet to my head that I glimpse what I’d been sent to identify, over there, just behind the couple dispassionately gyrating against each other like two sticks being rubbed together by a boy scout hoping to prompt a spark. So I route cautiously through the crowd, side-on sneaking through the narrowest of human corridors, ducking beneath biceps tensed for photographs and intermittently issuing a barely audible ‘sorry’. Then with a final swivel past a middle-aged woman arcing her head around a seemingly oblivious partners neck and I’m by the crime scene, a freshly trampled carpet of glass.

Crouched down sweeping up the detritus I feel as though I’m a courtyard in a cloister of high heels and trainers. I’m reluctant to leave this clearing within the brooding forest of legs, hemmed in by the refractions of the lit mirrors that line the walls. Feet trace the floor and swing inches from my head whilst I sweep shattered beer glass from beneath them and I entertain the thought that months of feigning invisibility have paid off and I am now as translucent as the shards I’m collecting. For after all the role of the employee at the lowest rung of a business is to maintain a contrite efficiency and a perennial apology for their consumption of space and time. I see it in the shade of confusion and hostility that enters the delirious expressions I encounter on my way back to the bar. It’s the most transient of sensations for the drunk when inhibitions sneak back into their mind, and their own humility is reflected to them in the furrows of my brow. Once this peculiar apparition has dissolved from view however they can continue to exile any reservations and resume dancing.

As the clock hands meet and the proximity to other bodies lessens a greater flamboyancy enters the moves of those on the dance floor; what little etiquette was in place is all but savaged as grown men entertain guitar hero fantasies, lunging to the floor optimistically before despondently calling on their mates to haul them off the beer drenched floor. Blokes who habitually trust the authority of the Suns sages jut their starch-collared necks forward in time to American Idiot, and bark orders for ‘every body to enjoy the propaganda’ Women wield imaginary microphones aloft, eyes clenched, pirouetting their unoccupied hand in the air and yelling something resembling ‘if you want it/ you should’ve put a ring on it’, the final word stressed in a spirit of empowered solidarity.

letter sent to but not published by the independent

" There is a vindictive and unappealing current running through the british liberal presses response to their arch-nemesis Tony Blair’s announcement that he will donate the proceeds raised from his, no doubt rather censored, forthcoming account of his political career to the British legion. Now I am not issuing a defence of his actions and reserve a particular breed of loathing for someone who led Britain into what was probably the most destructive and fruitless exercise in US jingoism since Vietnam, however I don’t think this should cloud my judgement on what is a commendable action. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column in the independent was so drenched in vilification and bile that it could not give an impartial statement regarding Blair’s actions without tacking on a sentence clause further reinforcing that he is actually ‘as ever, phlegmatic and a trickster, flaunting his iron will and unassailable arrogance, and intimidating’ in case we’d forgotten. Or she is assuring us that whilst he might have seemed an enticing prospect in 1994 as Education Secretary “we know now that those eyes blaze with vanity and egotism, greed, ceaseless validation and money”

This is not confined to her particular column but permeates most political commentary, where journalists seem to salivate at the prospect even a slightest allusion to Blair’s name allows for unleashing a character assassination. Is this the way the free press in Britain conducts itself; to subject the news of a charitable donation (presumably of a sizable sum, given the books current sales) to an unrelenting torrent of bile, of which even right wing US hate-fanning pundits such as Glenn Beck and Bill’ O Reily would be proud? It has seemed since the Iraq war that to allow in a liberal paper that Blair had any redeeming features whatsoever is to condone the warmongering, kleptomania of his foreign policy. Meanwhile whilst this is going on, Cameron and Osborne are surreptitiously introducing the most deadly package of spending cuts to the Welfare State since its inception and the coverage they are granted is handled strictly with kids gloves. It has long been that serious leftist political commentary would rather laboriously tread over the same route of continual speculation about ‘were Labour went wrong’ instead of turn around to confront the current truth that we have a government out-Thatchering Thatcher to minimal opposition. So whilst she might reprimand herself for being duped by the charisma of the Blair spin machine during its formative years, it has been overlooked that the same is happening with Cameron and Clegg, particularly the latter whom most liberals believe will somehow forego his first cabinet position to ‘see the error of his ways’.

Instead of fixating on the litany of problems that admittedly lay within New Labour (the neglect of labour members opinions in favour of the vested interests of those in the deregulated city, the flattery of Washington’s Neo-cons and most catastrophically the oligarchic way that Blair sidestepped the cabinet) and to avoid sounding like a senile geriatric berating an old foe at a louder volume because he thinks hasn’t been heard,surely it is more profitable to focus on the reincarnation of the centre-left in the current leadership campaign. Acting as though what is evidently a stab at atonement (however awkwardly undertaken) from Blair is a ‘move both cynical and provocative’ is quiet frankly churlish. The action can be applauded without surrendering ones admonishment of his past conduct."

some kind of extract

His weeks drew on, months drew on, his life drew on, but not in any profound sketches or rococo splendour, no, they instead were the strokes accumulated on the pavement of the chalk artist. Playing with perspective, sure, eliciting a giggle or smile of recognition from a passer-by and habitually magnetizing a 50p piece to a hat, but never did these carefully weighed chunks of time halt someone in their tracks or tempt them to revaluate their own life. Well, he’d think, ‘tolerance of drudgery is simply further evidence of my increasing maturity. Look at how the prospect of a phone rant with the electricity provider constitutes an event in my parent’s weekly calendar!’ He’d watch the thinly veiled elation that the news of this approaching chance to bellow, condescend to and correct a faceless drone in a call-centre in Bengal provided for his mother with bemusement; but also with a wistful understanding that further growing-up would one day instil the same sensation in him. After all, the wisdom of the eleven year-old proudly cowering behind a barricade against the fairer sex, passing the time in the company of the Beano, now seemed just as mystifying. Indeed as he snoozed past 9 o clock on the 25^th of December that year, happily rolling his back to face away from the intrusive dawn rays, he could feel his younger self standing aghast at the door, foot tapping in impatient disapproval.

The grand life-plan was failing to materialize from amongst the routines, with every fresh pay packet enshrining what his parents had repeatedly assured him. That platitude, ‘lifes not all fun, you know’ so ubiquitous during childhood that he had become averse to its implications, now hung heavy over every day. It mocked him in his yawning reflection as he rode the bus to work and emanated from the white spaces of the note that the senior safety advisor had fastened next to the rota, which read:

“NOT SHUTTING FIRE DOORS MAY SEEM TRIVIAL TO YOU, BUT IN AN EMERGENCY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. REMAIN VIGILENT AT ALL TIMES THANKS, SIMON”

Then as he tried to exploit one of the few privileges he felt he was owed, of finding shapes amongst the clouds on the bus home, that same message smirked at his inability to determine the whale that the couple in front of him laughingly identified from a white blob.

Nonetheless he maintained an understanding that he had been given a weekly allowance of ‘moments’, which would enter his account conveniently at its point of exasperation, the zenith of tedium, and then just as quickly evaporate. This week it involved drowsily walking out into the garden behind his house, which oversaw the town built up in the valley, in the early hours of the morning for a smoke. From this point he felt consumed by the vapour in the air, and beneath his feet sensed the ground becoming dewy in preparation of the mornings activity. As the ash eat the length of the cigarette and the smoke spiralled around him, he came to think of it as a fuse that would detonate the day’s regularity. So he looked down across the valleys suburban streets, arranged in orderly formation like a rather harmless militaries parade, with cars in garages awaiting ignition and leaves creeping across immaculate lawns in the breeze. Watching, he then began to distinguish the steady advance of one vehicle along the lifeless avenue. With the ash nearing the butt he realised it was a milkman on his rounds, placing a bottle upon each doorstep with a nocturnal solemnity. The man didn’t take another puff on his cigarette, he wanted the moment to remain so, and with the cigarette symbolising what it did he could feel the heat of the impending discharge of boredom. So he watched and waited. Observing this spectre haunt the empty streets, glazed in artificial light, he was in rapture that he’d never consciously connected this poltergeists movement to the rows of glistening fresh bottles aligned each morning on the doorsteps he passed. Then with a tangible lurch, as though winded, he lost that feeling of elevation and, beginning to shudder, stubbed the cinders out beneath his heel and walked back shivering into the house.

Too many brains spoiling the broth

University application fear-mongering has predicatably spiraled into a frenzied maelstrom of dread, the impression i've harvested from the media coverage in the last week being that every decent university is founded on elitism, nepotism and an undue slavering reverence for the * .Meaning, of course, that in spite of record high-achievements vast swathes of intelligent state-school ‘yoof’ will be left coughing the dust from Angelica’s SUV trail into Oxbridge, as public school applicants dominate proceedings..

Instead of the donkey-jacketed nomenklatura (who now cite the fact that they had to read Beowulf as part of their English literature syllabus, given the benefit of hindsight, as being indicative of the intellectually stimulating and enriching education they were granted) having to concede that the ‘most examined generation ever’ are actually more adept at passing exams than them (n.b. not smarter than) They have instead resolved to degrade the qualifications now yielded by 98% of Britain [statistics vary according to the level of make-believe] as dramatically ‘dumbed down’ whilst at the same time surreptitiously accompanying each of these somber articles with a photo of 4 beaming, incidentally sexy, 18 year old girls thrusting their results sheets towards the camera.

So the introduction of the asterisk to the grade sheet at A level has further delineated the gulf between the have’s and the have’s lots. What struck me, was the way this was reported as though it was a major expose that Ox,Durham, Cambridge, St Andrews, Warwrick et al overwhelmingly have a social makeup similar to Notting Hill Waitrose or the Yachting club. Of course, given that I’m about to embark on a university application myself this morbid fascination of the papers has had what was presumably its desired effect, and I’m utterly terrified I’ll become like the poor chap used as the human interest column in the Daily Mail the other day ( “John Smith, recipient of 3A*’s, 4A’s and blessed with what his economics lecturer calls ‘economics virtuosity’, unable to achieve a place at university!” Shock! Abhorrence! Turn the page with trembling hands…) It’s undoubtedly a frightening time to be targeting the upper echelons of a system still disappointingly embroiled in class politics, but I will exile any such thoughts from my mind during my application and instead prepare with the diligence and perpetual fear of sodomy which seems to elicit such wonders from Rupert, Harry and co.

views on casual racism that prevails in cornwall

Bunch of decrepit, mumbling, miserable, bastards do they not have homes. They’ll frequent every bus stop between here and john o groats with their idle diatribes upon the lives of the drivers, and their caps that inform me that they’d rather be fishing. And their blue rinsed, coffee stained, mole ridden heads with the bumbling enunciation that trips over its self on its stealthy exit through the corner of their perennially glistening mouths. They feel the need to interminably inquire about information as though the signs and official documents, and testimonies of others are all one giant conspiracy that the whole fucking charade partakes in to deceive them. So they’ll stroll up to the drivers cabin ask him where’s going six times, demand an affirmation whilst tutting at his lack of courtesy upon providing the same answer for the sixth time and then they’ll walk away. Once the slab of bigoted farmer with white hair spiralling out of his ears like smoke from a burning house, gets down to the seat in front of me he shifts his titanic plaid-festooned load in pursuit of a comfort which will never be rewarded him from a seat patently so constrictive. Infuriated by the impunity of seat-designers in the 21^st century this man turns to his wife crammed into the window seat beside him in her pink cardigan, and begins to incoherently conspire into her similarly hairy ear whilst gesturing with his giant orange paw towards the women in the aisle ahead. I detect one word from the slobbering drivel that he pours in her ear (given the proximity I unfortunately hold to the couple) ‘…paki’, at the sound of which his wife contorts her rubbery features into a stern expression of agreement. Still shifting the plaid monolith begins to track glances at the girl with what his elephantine presence evidently deems to be refinement although its nothing of the kind, whilst his wife abandons any such tact to align her malevolent sneer permanently on the girl, who having detected the farmer and his wife’s attentions shuffles tighter in next to the window and adjusts her headphones.

By this point I’ve become inadvertently marooned within the feeble territory of the passive-aggressive British liberal predicament, too infuriated that two people could continue to harbour such intolerance having endured a lifetime of cultural integration initiatives to not intervene whilst aware that any intervention or accusation I will make will be misconstrued, caught in my throat, vigorously denied or cited as article one in the list of evidence to prove that I should mind my own fucking business. I look around; the man who’d rather be fishing adjusts his cap and plucks absent-mindedly at a brow that slopes forth like a wisteria adorned porch, the lady with the parted hair sits behind him engrossed in a paper by a Murdoch demagogue. Where’s my alibi? No else has noticed, perhaps once more I am joining arbitrary dots to while away time on a bus journey. After all perhaps I misinterpreted their slur as anything other than the ‘affectionate moniker’ that people of such esteem and impeccable upbringing as our own future monarch use (grandfathered, let it not be disavowed, by the best, the most chummily recognised and affirmed of our high-profile bigots!) I am prized from my meander through the outlandish and wittily phrased eye-openers I am imagining delivering to the couple by the announcement that I’ve almost reached my stop. Am I not colluding with them in a sense by instantly reaching the judgement that their gestures, points, mutters and grimaces where anything other than the entirely innocent responses of those who have lived more secular, guarded lives shielded from multiculturalism when confronted by somewhere of Pakistani origin? No of course not, I resolve, if people have fastidiously preserved the ‘no blacks, no dogs’ mantra of the 1940’s into the modern age whilst being all to willing to adapt their ever widening range of appliances, subscriptions and technologies then I can not exploit that loophole as a way of avoiding confrontation. Why not amend some of their archaic preconceptions about the world. Surveying them for an instance, I am once more caught by the demand that liberal righteous indignation has for them to do something more overt, to transparently expose their bigotry to the whole carriage, to vent out loud the words bellowed from their gestures, I become perturbed by how the very idea commands a strange excitement. Blighted once more by middle-class passivity and the perverse chokehold of manners I resist subjecting them to this auto de fé because I talk myself into taking proverbs about not teaching old dogs new tricks as sacrosanct when in reality its because I’m all too willing to recount my offence right now across this page but couldn’t muster the courage to reprimand someone for an insinuation. I left only shooting them a look of disapproval and the girl a look of camaraderie, which I instantly regretted, and spent the whole journey home dwelling on my course of action, where I now sat down and wrote up what I was sanctimonious enough to think but to cowardly to voice.

moving house

Cosmetically enhanced born anew,

The white casket from which a home grew,

Is opened and leases the birds from their cage.

As brushes erase the census gaps left by

The purge of cupboards, drawers and shelves,

In await of the incumbents approval.

By night, exiled to the attic,

Life folds to a foetal coil across a

Stripped double bed, two matt white tresses

And it stirs in a cavernous, emulsion, womb.

And carrying a bag through the rooms dust foliage

Scatters a legacy of doors, ajar.

Gulliver awakes hung-over, on a mattress sandwich

A prince locating a pea.

Sneezing violently as he recalibrates.

Anchored by lethargy, he

Tracks the sun’s cantilevering behind those chimneys,

In rapture with the light an, inauguration of the new

Illumination of brass tendons and

Crumbling plaster, cast aloft on a Georgian child’s

Jenga structure. Wolf (big and bad) approaching.