graham stewart

Just show up

January 16, 2021 By graham stewart

Time does the rest, if you let it

This is purely aspirational, you understand — Photo by Benn McGuinness on Unsplash

I’ve carried the thought that I would like to try yoga for at least twenty years. And, like many of the things I know that I think would be good for me, I have never carried the thought forward into action.

I’m not really one for resolutions — experience has taught me that they are both a waste of time and serve only to make me feel disappointed in myself — but this year I am finally determined to make some changes. One of those changes is to recapture some flexibility, balance, tone, and self-respect. Yoga may or may not offer all that but I suspect it does, so I decided that I would start on January 1st using one of Yoga with Adriene’s monthly journeys.

I signed up at the end of December and on January 1st I showed up. And continued to show up.

It is now the 16th and I’m mightily pleased with myself that I have showed up every day and done the ‘class’ to the best of my ability. And I don’t mean I’ve sat and watched the video and wiggled my toes from time to time. I have given what I could. And I am rewarded.

Showing up is more than simply being there. It has to include a certain commitment to take part. Don’t be the churlish date that tags along to a party and grunts and moans and lets everyone know you’re counting the time until you can head home. The same goes for writing and the same goes for yoga. Be there in heart, mind, and spirit, or don’t bother at all.

This has coincided with me picking up and starting Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott again. She understands showing up.

“All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for almost everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way….” p8

And that’s how it works. Trick resistance into taking your weaker self out for a coffee and sneak to the desk — or the mat — and just start.

And I have become superstitious about it, too. I know that habits are usually supposed to take about thirty days to get baked in but I think if you combine new habits there is a reinforcing element at play. So I’ve done sixteen days in a row on a book. I’ve done sixteen days in row writing posts on Medium. And I’ve done sixteen days of yoga practice. If I miss one now I’m scared I’ll miss the other parts of the triumvirate that is championing my self-esteem at the moment.

There’s a theory that by talking about this I will jinx it and tomorrow all my resolution — and resolutions — will crumble and I’ll be sitting watching TV instead of showing up. There’s another theory that by making yourself accountable any lapse in the process brings shame — or at least embarrassment. I’m going with the second option.

Come the end of January, I’ll commit to an honest appraisal of how I got on for the second half of the month. I’ll even talk word count on the book.

Britain’s Labour party responds to the looming financial crisis

January 15, 2021 By graham stewart

…..by proposing the same old tired neoliberal sh*t

So there you have it. The Labour Party under Sir Keir (the Strimmer) Starmer has finally found its financial policy. It’s going to threaten the Tories with a plan to become economically competent. This radical policy — of basically following the traditional neoliberal playbook of balanced budgets and austerity — was announced by Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds in the annual Mais Lecture on January 13th.

Now follows a rant.

This is a return to playing by right-wing economic rules. It’s a commitment to drain useful money from the economy and ensure it filters upwards. Balanced budgets — or treating the national economy like a household budget where spending should match income — is simply a guarantee of stunted growth, low wages, poor services, inadequate housing, and ever-increasing inequality.

Labour, by returning to this failed notion — this economic illiteracy — is simply showing that they are no longer the party of the working majority of this country. Fiscal responsibility is code for asset stripping. True economic competence would be about ensuring that money is spent where it is needed most. Housing, health, jobs. We have a fiat currency, which means we cannot go broke. There is no direct relationship between tax and spending. Tax is a tool to combat inflation and to manage levels of employment. To pretend otherwise is to commit to increasing the wealth of the plunderers of the national treasury and to lead us further down the road to a right-wing authoritarian nightmare.

It is both depressing and furthering that our main party of opposition has no expert in economics who can guide our shadow chancellor away from making the usual errors of judgment and bowing to the Daily Mail’s view of how an economy works. Couldn’t Labour perhaps think outside the box for once and try to hire someone like Stephanie Kelton?

That it fails to do so sentences the majority of us to a future of greater need, little protection against the climate crisis, and the threat of fascism as the anger of the deprived is used by those benefiting from the growth in inequality. Instead of blaming ignorance of economics, of course, the wealthy will have us blame someone or something ‘other’. Immigrants, the ‘undeserving’ poor, benefit ‘scroungers’, the disabled, ethnic minorities, the plain old unemployed. These all become categories to be despised and targeted. Instead of treating the nation as a community, the right want us to see only competitors for scant resources.

And the irony, of course, is that there is no practical limit on the money to spend on public services. On housing. On transport. On health. It is always an ideological choice how money is spent and how it always seems to be spent upwards.

Sisyphus with cash-flow problems

January 14, 2021 By graham stewart

When the writing life is like eternally rolling a boulder up a hill

I wish I’d thought of the phrase in my headline. It’s Anne Lamott’s description of many a writer’s life. The phrase comes to towards the end of her introduction to Bird by Bird, where she talks about having no regrets for choosing the career she followed.

“I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.” page xxvi

I picked up my copy of Bird by Bird in 1995 in the Kinokuniya bookshop on Orchard Road in Singapore. It was the first book on writing I think I had ever read. I had always been of the “you can’t teach creative writing” school. What I probably meant was I was too pig-headed and arrogant to believe anyone could teach me anything. Understandably, I had written very little by 1995.

Lamott’s voice was warm and encouraging and compassionate. And funny. I’m not sure what the book taught me about the technicalities of writing but it certainly made me feel that doubts and fears and all the things that kept me from the page were perfectly normal.

I’ve had the book on my shelf since then. But it was only as I reached the suggestions for further reading at the end of Vivian Gornick’s book on memoir and essays (The Situation and the Story) that I was inspired to pick it up to read again. Gornick only lists seven books and Bird by Bird is one of them. I had forgotten the long introduction is really a memoir. It tells the story of how her father influenced her, her struggles at school, and then the practicalities of turning up day after day to face the blank page. Hence the Sisyphus reference.

Sisyphus refers to a character from a Greek myth who is damned by Zeus to eternally roll a large boulder up a steep slope — in Hades, of course — and never quite reach the top. The boulder always rolls back to the bottom and Sisyphus has to start again. He was probably on minimum wage, too, but that’s not made clear in the original stories.

Sisyphus never makes it to the top. But writes sometimes finish something — get the boulder over the crest of the hill and watch it hurtle down the slope on the other side. But then what? Back to the bottom of the original slope to look for a new boulder. Writers tend to condemn themselves to the eternal punishment. There’s no blaming Zeus for that.

Shock, horror, as private company screws over those in need

January 13, 2021 By graham stewart

Privatisation is still the best answer, says nobody

From the time that the first photo was posted on Twitter yesterday, a storm has erupted across much of the media — both social and mainstream — about the miserly portions sent in a food parcel as part of the free school meals programme. The picture was, indeed, shocking and confirmation was soon pouring in from other households that this was what was being sent out by the private — of course — company handling the distribution of the food. In a great irony, some of this confirmation came from furloughed staff of the company who had received one of the parcels.

The response from the usual suspects on the right to this appalling example of something that combined both greed and heartlessness in a particularly British way was informative. The extreme free-market ideologues saw the company behind the outrage — after exhausting all avenues trying to prove it was poor administration rather than deliberate and planned graft — fell back to the usual position when privatisation of any sort shows its true face. In other words, this was an unfortunate case of one bad apple — or, as many of the recipients of the parcels commented, just two bad apples — and was a rare example of poor oversight. It was, in short, a mistake.

Those on the left, of course, were less inclined to accept that this was something rare, unexpected, or accidental. These inadequate food parcels — and I assume this is not some undeclared war by the Tories on childhood obesity — illustrate what happens when the private sector performs public service. It is almost too perfect an example, with all the right players and the right callous ideological motives. And wonderful visuals and with children as the victims. If anything could put a dent in the mantra that private is best, this could be it. But don’t hold your breath.

It was a simple enough problem to solve. It was decided — no doubt by someone who has never had to feed children for a week on such a sum — that £30 was the amount to be given to parents. The easiest way to deliver this would be to send a voucher, which could be used only for a range of goods. But no, apparently vouchers were open to abuse. Drugs and alcohol — and no doubt porn and televisions and football season tickets — would be sought and acquired by these nefarious poor people. Putting money straight into bank accounts would be even worse. Let’s face it, you can’t trust someone earning less than a living wage to make sure their children have enough to eat.

So, with the recipients properly demonised, neoliberal ideology came to the rescue. Privatisation was the answer. Let’s take the £500 million — say — we have set aside for this programme and, instead of spending it all on getting food to those in need, we’ll spend the same amount and make sure some of our friends running private companies can get some of the action. Who shall we pick? What about someone who has been a loyal donor to the Tory party for a long time.

This is how privatisation works. Nothing is made more efficient. Nothing is about better value for money. It is about ensuring that money targeted for the rest of us is diluted, siphoned off, and used to fill the cash reservoirs of those already rich enough.

The company running this little food delivery scam were no doubt paid their £30 per parcel and told to take their profits out of that. (This, after all, is how companies rejecting benefits claims make their money.) There might have been some talk of savings through bulk buying, for instance, but everyone involved in that deal — both on the government side and on the Tory donors side — knew that this was code for skimming off the top. That the result was so brazen, so indifferent to the suffering of those in receipt of their joke bags of food, says a lot about Britain, the companies that fleece us on a daily basis, and the Tories and their ideology that takes us all for fools and treats us as either fools or accomplices.

Will there be much comeback on this for either the company or the corrupt team that chose them? I doubt it. Not enough, that’s for sure. The parent company of the shit-show running this insult to those struggling to survive after a decade of Tory austerity is a global catering brand. In the latest post on their site, Compass Group’s CEO talks about how proud they are to support HRH The Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative. This is something called the Terra Carta Charter. The CEO writes:

Our strategy to reduce environmental impact focuses on minimising food waste

I suspect that the charter focus on food waste is not really about providing minimum food in the first place.

The post just before this on the Compass Group blog — do you really want to visit? Oh, well, here you go — is about Chartwells, the very company at the heart of this national rage. And what is the post about? Well, the headline probably tells you all you need to know: Chartwells supports children across the UK during Christmas

Apparently, “Chartwells, the leading provider of catering and support services to schools in the UK, delivered 11,500 nutritious food hampers to children across the UK this Christmas.”

I wonder who defined ‘nutritious’ for them.

And so privatisation will remain the route to socialism for the rich, where transnational corporations continue to loot the treasuries of the nations in which they operate. To each according to their greed, from each nothing in return.

A commute with a difference

January 12, 2021 By graham stewart

Taking the bus home in Crete

I have just finished Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and, as I was reading the short Conclusion section, an image of a bus journey from many years ago flashed into my head. So I’m going to share that.

I was living on Crete. My girlfriend and I had both taken courses back in the UK to give us the certificates needed to teach English. It was my girlfriend who landed the job in Crete and we travelled by Magic Bus to Athens and then on to Crete by overnight boat from Piraeus.

The woman who ran the language school in Heraklion had a friend with a school in a village in the hills near the Lasithi Plateau. It was decided I would visit there once a week and teach the children in her school.

It was a bus journey of well over an hour to Arkalochori. The road started to climb not far outside Heraklion and then the bus groaned and strained its way round bends and up ever more steeper inclines. This was over thirty years ago and the buses were old even then. I was usually one of only a few passengers on the trip into the hills.

The return trip at the end of day was very different.

It was often recently dark when the bus stopped on its way down from even further south and I climbed aboard. Often, some of the children from the school would walk me to the stop outside one of the village tavernas.

On the more sedate morning climb there was a silence in the bus. By evening, the driver was determined to turn the trip into a party. He played Greek music loudly and let the bus hurtle down the steep roads. The party never happened because his passengers tended to be black-clad women wearing scowls in silence. They were often accompanied by chickens in wicker cages or even the odd, strangely docile goat. I had to fight past this menagerie guarded by indifferent women to take a seat at the back of the bus. I knew from experience that I would be the only passenger going all the way back into Heraklion.

I said the bus hurtled down the hill. It careened. But only for short bursts at a time because at every village — and often at vague and unmarked spots between — one black clad woman would descend from the bus or another black clad woman would hail the bus, climb aboard, and add her own animals to the collection. The music continued all the way, the volume high and the song apparently interminable.

I had been teaching at the school for most of an academic year and the start of summer was near. it was my last trip down from the hills in a bus that always seemed to be the same. Only the drivers changed from one week to the next. They all played the same music, though.

I had, for that year, found teaching at the school both stressful and unrewarding but I loved this journey down to the coast. I loved everything that was different to bus journeys at home in Britain. I loved the music and the way the warm air filtered through the windows of the bus, carrying the scent of wild flowers and herbs. I loved everything that was alien to me on that bus and, at the same time, loved the fact that it was now so familiar. This has always been the deepest joy of traveling and living in places that are not my home. Staying long enough for the disconcerting to become almost comfortable. To embrace the unfamiliar and to be able to remember places and food and people and bus journeys that are simply not possible to replicate elsewhere.

On that final trip down from Arkalochori, I felt relieved that I would not be teaching at the small school in Arkalochori again but a high sadness that I would have no reason to take this noisy, animal-filled, rattling, harum-scarum trip on an ageing spluttering bus again. When the bus pulled into the small bus terminus at Heraklion, I knew that I would soon be taking the ferry back across the Aegean to Athens and then making my way back to London.

It was time, therefore, to plan a new adventure.

The Buddhist way to wash dishes without resentment

January 11, 2021 By graham stewart

Coming to realise that all time is your time

Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story about one of the lay helpers at Plum Village. (Plum Village is the Buddhist centre in France that Nhat Hanh set up in 1982 after he left Vietnam for enforced exile in 1975.) The story concerns time — and I’m being vague as far as reference goes because I can’t find the actual story in the books on my shelf. I came to this post certain I knew in which book I could find the story and roughly where in the book it was. I failed to find the correct book. Even worse, I failed to find any notes about it, either. Sorry.)

For a moment I even doubted that I had read the story. But only for a moment.

Back to the story. In a conversation with this layman at Plum Village, Nhat Hanh senses the man is frustrated. He is. The man tells Nhat Hanh that, what with the many tasks he is assigned during the day and the time he spends with his young son, he finds no time for himself. He is resentful.

I knew where the resentful layman was coming from. For much of my adult life — and, dare I say it, even now when I fall back into less mature modes of thinking — this was how I looked at the demands of others. That he was resentful even of spending time with his young son had an echo in my feelings towards my children when they were young. Not something I’m proud of.

Nhat Hanh breaks the man’s pattern of thinking by asking him whether he leaves himself behind when he does his tasks or spends time with his son. The man is puzzled at first and gives the obvious answer. He is unable to leave himself behind, of course.

Then he starts to see what Nhat Hanh is getting at. Whatever we do, wherever we are, the time we spend is our time. There is no other time to squirrel away, just “for ourselves”. To be present in any moment makes that moment ours, regardless of what we may be doing. (I spent many years refusing to countenance time spent doing things I didn’t want to do by punishing myself — refusing to allow myself to be present. Using alcohol, mainly, to avoid the now.)

Whatever we do, wherever we are, the time we spend is our time. There is no other time to squirrel away, just “for ourselves”.

Whether the man mastered the art of being present as quickly as he would have liked, at least knowing that he could ‘enjoy’ washing the dishes by being fully engaged in the act would have dissolved many of the resentments he was carrying and which would have led him down all sorts of dark and deadly paths in the not too distant future.

That story was one of the first things I read by Thich Nhat Hahn and the way is resonated with my own experiences was enough to convince me to read quite a bit more. It also helps me feel less resentful about doing the dishes, which I seem to do quite often.

I just need to keep better notes.