graham stewart

Sisyphus with cash-flow problems

January 14, 2021 By graham stewart Leave a Comment

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 Leave a Comment

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 Leave a Comment

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 Leave a Comment

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.

I talked about my father, so now some words about my mother

January 10, 2021 By graham stewart Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading Vivian Gornick’s book on essay and memoir writing. The Situation and the Story is a smart and lovely little book, full of wisdom and insight into what makes for great writing in both essays and memoirs. The book’s subtitle is “The Art of Personal Narrative”.

I have just read a section in which she discusses the life and work of Loren Eiseley and, especially, the memoir he completed shortly before his death in 1977. Eiseley’s book is called All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life. Gornick makes the book sound unmissable and it is already on my shortlist for this month’s books to buy.

It is something Gornick picks out in the book that I want to talk about in this post. After my post yesterday about my father it is almost suspicious that it is Eiseley’s relationship with his mother that caught my eye this morning when reading.

Eiseley’s description of his mother as “paranoid, neurotic, and unstable” found me nodding my head in agreement. As I have grown older I have come increasingly to realise the depth of my mother’s mental health issues, how those affected her life, and, of course, affected me as a child.

There is a sort of stigma about criticising your parents too publicly. But whereas when I was younger I would happily criticise my mother and rail at her actions and beliefs, with age has come a certain compassion and it is hard, obviously, to blame her for the things she did because she was unwell. What puzzled me as a child — and later as an adult — was that my father seemed to see no warning signs in my mother’s behaviour. In contrast, past girlfriends — and my wife, most definitely — can attest to behaviour that was not normal by any stretch of the imagination.

In the five years since my mother’s death, my father continues to talk about her as if she was a paragon of common sense, kindness, and fun. She was none of those things, except rarely. My father talks of the strength of their mutual bond and their long years of marriage. I haven’t — and of course I won’t ever — tell him of the hours my mother would spend telling me of my father’s faults. Every day for more years than I want to remember, my mother would greet me as I came in from school and start with stories that showed my father in a poor light. This did nothing, as you can imagine, for my opinion of my father and is one of the root causes for a relationship with my father that has never been more than polite.

Of the three terms for his mother used by Eiseley, it was the “neurotic” and “unstable” that immediately conjured up memories of my own mother. She may also have been paranoid but I suspect that aspect of her was easily hidden beneath her neuroses and instability. And those were the character traits that most defined her, I think. And those were the traits that made her life so small and, in the end, such a bitter thing to live through each day. The strength of her bitterness sucked my father into that same life.

It is hard to escape the lessons of a lonely childhood lived in the shadow of such a woman. Even now, with a family around me that I love and in I which I feel loved, there are times when I must resist the call of a different response to comfort and happiness. It is like a seed of misery that has to be squashed before it sprouts. There have been times in the not-too distant past when I have allowed the seed grow – through a mixture of depression and wilfulness — and it has taken me hard lessons to recover.

Surviving Covid-19 at 91

January 9, 2021 By graham stewart Leave a Comment

That’s not a palindrome

I didn’t get to see my father this week. And I have tried calling him but his phone is switched off. So, I thought I would write this post about him instead.

My father is 91 years old. He is in a care home not far from where I live. He caught — and survived — Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic. That’s getting on for a year ago now, which is both strange and frightening to consider. The home called to say he had the virus but they weren’t going to tell him in case it worried him. He had a week of mild symptoms and then was fine again. When I visited him later he said he had not felt unwell at all and had no sense of being in danger. One of the lucky ones, obviously.

He enjoys the care home life. the best part is that he has everything done for him. My mother used to do everything for him, too. She died five years ago and for a year he found living a struggle. I suspected he would soon give up eating — apart from chocolate and biscuits — because he would tell me he was bored of even thinking of what to ask me to bring him from the shops. Arthritis in his hands had stopped him driving. He talked of wanting to go into a home. This, for him, was code for “I want to be looked after again.”

Our relationship has never been close and yet, as an only son, I felt it my duty to invite him to come live with us. My wife, not exactly a fan of the man, agreed that it was something we should do.

He stayed with us for two years and I don’t think any of us were happy. The happiest day of those two years for all of us was the day he left for the home.

I visit frequently for thirty minutes at a time. It is all that is allowed at the moment and it is long enough. We sit separated by a screen in a cabin in the grounds of the home. It is like visiting a prisoner but I’m not sure my father feels that the prisoner is him. My father remains, for the most part, cogent. He repeats the same questions from week to week. The best part of the slight memory loss is that he forgets how we argue about politics.

His days are spent reading the Daily Telegraph. Literally all day. He reads it more or less from cover to cover. A break for meals. The weirdest effect this generates is that he will raise an issue that is a result of Tory mismanagement, Tory policy, or the results of the years of pain and misery instigated by Thatcher and yet, when I point out the reasons for what he bemoans, he refuses to accept the root causes. His view seems to be that the world is a mess and the Tories are best placed to make it better.

You can imagine this makes conversation difficult. And this is not new. My father and I have been at loggerheads politically since I was a teenager. I think my father turned right-wing at an early age and has not deviated. He has not become more extreme but he has certainly not mellowed. He has a dry sense of humour and a notion of absurdity but his humour can turn to condescension when it comes to politics or economics. My father knows nothing of economics but thinks he is smart with money because he used to be a pensions manager for a large company. He is a perfect example of someone who accepts the right-wing myth that a national budget is the same as a household budget, with all the implications of balanced books and not spending what you don’t have. His acceptance of this ideological nonsense is the thing that most separates us.

We talk football and rugby and when we discuss Hearts or the Scotland team we are on safe ground. My father took me to my first game at Tynecastle a long, long time ago and I have followed Hearts ever since. For anyone who knows Hearts, this is a poisoned chalice that my father has given me. I forgive him for that.

There has been a new outbreak of Covid-19 at the home. The new strain, probably. They are starting to vaccinate the residents. My father has not been re-infected and it looks like the outbreak has been managed well. I received a message yesterday that the home was letting the residents mingle again and have meals together in the dining room. My father enjoys the chance to walk along the corridor to the dining room. I think it makes him feel like he’s in a hotel.

Tomorrow I will call the home and ask someone to remind him to turn his mobile back on. He worries about saving battery. I am the only person who calls him. Last time I saw him I said I had tried to call and asked him to remember to turn the phone back on. He said he would. He hasn’t.

Perhaps he’s happy not to talk to me.