Disclaimer: Full-time Dreamers

This piece of writing is a work that is still in progress, though it is already complete in itself. There is much here that may be subject to revision, or expanded.

 

FULL-TIME DREAMERS

 

Confessions Of A Government Artist

 

 

When I graduated in 1981, it was reckoned that there were 500 graduates to one job. Thatcher had been following her monetarist policies since being elected and the result, as someone who understood economics better than I did explained to me, was this unprecedented figure of 3 million unemployed.

 

Until then, graduate unemployment had been unheard of. Now, it was not qualifications that mattered but experience, the catch-22 being that you could not get a job without it, but it was only through getting a job that you could get it. And being highly-qualified could disqualify you from many, less demanding  jobs.

 

I had read accounts about individuals who had caved into total despair in the face of endless days of mind-numbing anomie once faced with the prospect of signing on, but I did not understand why that should be the case. Surely, it ought to be possible to find some purpose to life without being so dependent on external structures, I wondered. After all, I have my  art......

 

So I was prepared to be challenged in finding ways to use my vast abundance of free time productively at the prospect of having to sign on, but what I was completely unprepared for was the social disapproval and hostility I encountered, once I started signing on. I stayed with my parents briefly before moving on, but they had chosen to settle in a village, an enclave of well-off families who seemed very much moulded by the repressive and conformist 50’s and therefore felt the need to keep the subversion and chaos of the big bad city at bay, with its immigrants, vandals, layabouts and drug addicts.

 

From the 50's Twilight Zone enclave, therefore, there was either that cloying pity, which I found no less easy to stomach than the veiled or open antagonism that I all-too often, also encountered, because of my being unemployed.

 

The hostile attitude, often championed by gossip-columnists refanning the embers of staunch Calvinist values and whipped up into a shrill frenzy by various right-wing tabloids, or semi-tabloids, went more like this:

 

'Anyone can get a job if they really try,' or: 'The unemployed are lazy scroungers who don't want to work.' 'The newspapers are full of jobs that nobody wants to apply for.' 'If you have been unemployed for any length of time, then there must be something wrong with you.'

 

 

Late on, I got to hear of the importance of the Protestant Work Ethic and Calvinism, the idea that working automatically made you a Good Person, that mind-numbing drudgery was good for you and even meant salvation of the soul. Idle people, conversely, were sinful and morally lax. They needed to be punished, on order to keep them on the Straight and Narrow. At the appendix I have attached to this piece, I have included a link to Wikipedia’s notes on Max Weber, who wrote a long critique on this work ethic and the way it helped enslave people into a twilight world of drudgery as he saw it, rather than living more creatively.

 

At the time, however, I was naïve about how Calvinism had shaped the view of so many people.

 

I remember a brief encounter with a young man who decided to turn our date into the kind of interrogation, not much more competently surpassed by some of the more zealous Claimant Advisors I came across after Lord Young launched his restart scheme after the mid eighties (I did not see much of this date afterwards, though he did apologise afterwards):

 

'Soooooo....how many jobs did you apply for this week?'

'And last week?'

'And have you been to any interviews recently?'

'Have you tried applying for many jobs further afield?'

'What about this place, that place....too far for you are they? Too much trouble, to commute  a little? Don't like getting up early, is that it?'

 

More often, fortunately, the response to the question was an embarrassed 'sorry I asked.' These individuals more often belonged to the cloying pity camp.

 

Even the nasturtium lady, Vanessa, who was supportive as a friend, gave words of warning. Like the cricket to Pinocchio. This came from her prior experiences as an employee with the-then DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security).

 

'You might be called in,' she told me, 'And asked why you have not been applying for more jobs. Or, you may be made to apply for jobs you might not like.'

 

‘Better make sure you have a stock of rejection letters to prove to them you have been looking – just in case.’

 

After my less-than propitious graduation in 1981, however, I spent the next few years dedicating myself to gainful unemployment - with varying levels of success  - to Art, Personal Development and Radical Community Activity.

 

Throughout this piece, I shall be looking not just at what it meant to try to live as full-as possible a life without paid employment, but also at various experiences with different subcultures, creative, politically radical or spiritual, who were also trying to explore alternative ways of living from ‘mainstream’ society.

 

Past Perfect

 

 

My generation missed the affluence of the preceding baby Boomers. I was born in 1959, which makes me part of 'Generation Jones:' not young enough to be part of the infamously-dispossessed Generation X, either. We are called 'Generation Jones' apparently, because we want to keep up with the ever-more elusive Joneses - of an ever-vanishing affluence. I think, however, that the Jones appellation might just correspond more accurately to children of the mid-60's Generation X-ers again.

 

At least, 1958 and 1959 produced an impressive array of musicians - Madonna, Kate Bush, Robert Smith, along with other goth stalwarts Siouxie Sioux, Wayne Hussey and Andrew  Eldritch.

 

My parents were born in 1933, so they had grown up during times of Depression, then war, then more years of rationing, but then coming into their own during the industrious, but conformist 50's. There might not have been the terror years of Stalinism that a landlady of mine lived through in Hungary, but there was certainly a fear of reds under the bed. Before parting the nest for undergraduate life, for example, I had been warned about falling into the clutches of 'Red Sue,' and her brainwashing cohorts. In the event, however, I doubt that Red Sue would in fact, have been particularly interested in enlisting in someone as sheltered and geeky as me. 

 

Anyway in the 60's, there was that sustained boom time where lucky little boys and girls such as myself had never had it so good, as I remember repeatedly being told by teachers at school as well as at home, where at Christmas it was sometimes emphasised that here was an embarrassment of presents.

 

So already, it did seem that I was part of a generation of undeserving brats, enjoying the thankless fruits of long-suffering labouring generations long gone. The preceding generation had found its niche of grown-up solidity. There had been no lack of Career Opportunities in the 50's-onwards and my family was now quite prosperous, enjoying a good life in a dormitory satellite, where we moved from Southampton when I was 10.

 

Here, life among the middle-aged home-owners was ordered and thoroughly civilised. Here, nobody ever freaked out or had a fit of the vapours, life with its vicissitudes and disappointments to be borne according to fine, upstanding true-blue precepts and stiff-upper lip fortitude.

 

Often then, it did all seem so repressive as to be unreal, as though the Fifties had gone on for ever in a Twilight-Zone caricature of ordered, though somewhat unforgiving, Conservative banality.

 

Only whilst still a full-time student did I find out that not everyone in this part of darkest Warwickshire was as conformist as all that. I had at one point got to know an amateur astrologer in this village before graduating (astrology is a long-standing interest of mine, albeit involving a somewhat complicated relationship) with whom to astrologise, and also became friendly with an 'alternative' family who had come up from London. The alternative parents meditated and had a guru and once gave me nasturtium flowers from their garden to eat with their salads, when I first came to visit.

 

As they pointed out to me, my interests would not have made me stand out as odd in any way in somewhere like London, although the Nasturtium Lady was at pains to point out that she did believe it was important to blend in and conform wherever you were, however straight and provincial the locals might be.

 

'I cannot be as outspoken here as I would be in London,' she told me once. 'Here, you have to be circumspect. You have to conform a little if you want to be accepted.'

 

Later on, after moving to Wales, this might also include taking part in local Christian groups, though she remained a fairly uncompromising vegetarian.

 

The Nasturtium Lady may have been a Londoner, but she had slow, deliberate ways that somehow made her seem suited to rural life, and there were numerous walks in the countryside around the village, as we talked about things.

 

Her then husband was interested in setting up alternative channels of education and seems to have been something of a New Age economist, though my father, apparently, had heard of him and warned me that he was a ‘bullshitter.’ The husband, meanwhile, boasted to me that his New Vision was designed to bring about the downfall of capitalist dinosaurs such as my father.

 

In the meantime, there were diversions to be had after graduating and signing on, as this couple had a music studio in the back garden and on one occasion, got enlisted with several others to sing on a Eurovision song entry. So, there was a sense that Things could be Happening Here.

 

The astrology lady had made me feel 'got' and therefore accepted - something I had not until this point reccognised to be so very hungry for, when she laughed at my witticisms for example - in an environment where I had never felt all that understood, though sadly this did not last (Neither did the sense of being especially understood by astrologers. On later encounters, I was to find that all too often, it tends to be applied according to very prescriptive and inflexible tenets for 'typing' people). Various unexpressed annoyances began to build up, though my relationship with the nasturtium lady, though sometimes a little prickly, did last.

 

Immediately after graduating, I had just felt a huge relief to know that campus life was over. I had spoken to other graduates - in one cases, one with a PHD - before this time, however, who had told me about how impossible it was to find a job.

 

Any confidence to rise to the occasion as a doggedly conscientious job-seeker was not helped by the fact that there had been one or two dark hints about the suitability of my personality for corporate life and my deficits in getting on with other people. Always I had had it emphasised that I had 'a good brain,' but there, that any gifts of mine might be outweighed by various unnamed, obscure personal deficits.

 

In that respect, I do wish now that there had been more of an opportunity to face these fears head-on, earlier in life, rather than later. Unemployment did give me the opportunity to develop my artistic skills, albeit with one or two false starts and some misunderstandings over what my art was about, and to be involved in a world very different from the mainstream one of full-time work and conformist multinational life, as I shall explore here later on. However, one way in which unemployment was particularly undermining for me is that it did not allow me to take the bull by the horns as far as confronting either any real or imagined deficits in character or learning style.

 

After more than a decade's experience as a fully-freelance teacher, concerns such as these are now - no pun intended - redundant. School years, however had left me with very mixed messages about my real capabilities. On the one hand, I had been told that I was gifted, especially in verbal/linguistic skills, whilst hopeless at maths, worse at science, and otherwise being dreamy and hopelessly lacking in common-sense.

 

This in practice could mean being castigated as somewhat inattentive and geeky, if not a bit slow to catch on the one hand, whilst having very high expectations placed on me on the other hand because of the unfair advantage of all these great gifts.

 

The brighter children tended to get 'pushed' at the secondary school I attended, which was proud of its record of rivalling grammar schools in the children it sent to University. Afterwards, I did meet more than one of these early academic stars turning against further learning in later life, because of this kind of pressure. Otherwise, however, it was a rough rural school with a rough, rural culture, and one that had little tolerance for much in the way of eccentricity, or unusual interests, or for that matter of any intellectual leanings.

 

At school, I had started to get interested in the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything, and after not finding the Answers to these great Imponderables in the Christian Unions and get-togethers at the school, had turned to Jung, Existentialism and Self-Discovery movements, through looking at Astrology, symbols and dreams. Much like the dreamer Dorothea of George Eliot’s tribute to this area, Middlemarch, these left-field preoccupations did not always seem to lead to any increased sense of kinship amongst peers within the strongholds of the sturdy provincial Warwickshire world of common-sense and conformity.       

 

I could have gone to Italy to work, but after an unpleasant four-month stint there, which culminated in my losing a wallet with a lot of money lent me to tide me over, the idea of returning there did not appeal, either. 'Work' there had included getting to be exploited by a rich mother who did not tell me in the beginning that my (unpaid) teaching duties also included being a bodyguard against possible kidnappers (other families did give her a bad time for that when word got out there, though), babysitting another student whom I now recognise was almost certainly suffering from a bi-polar condition, moving away from a not-very well disposed student who was supposed, as my exchange student to have been my 'buddy' after the landlady decided to evict us without any warning and then living with a depressive student and her depressive pro-Mussolini landlady, who used to shout at any couples she ever saw snogging outside her balcony.

The depressives were demoralising, according to them, as a foreigner everyone was out to trick or con me. My new room mate, who proved to be gravely depressed judging by the letters she sent me after I'd returned to the UK where ‘everything was black’ and she wanted to commit suicide, whilst normally and basically warm-hearted (Aries-Sag, with a Cancer Moon, she was into astrology), she was happy to let me know more details about how the not-very well-disposed exchange student had been bad-mouthing me.

 

In any case, the exchange student did her bad mouthing to my face as well.

 

'I don't want to be friends with you,' she had told me. 'You English are like the Germans. You are cold and detached.'

 

I suppose I could be grateful that she did not attack either my nationality or personality in other ways. I had not been briefed about the sense of disorientation that may come with the experience of culture shock, only coming across that this was a well-known experience of reality more than a decade later.

 

After returning to the UK, it did seem to me that dealing with English culture was enough of a challenge for me, without having to deal with prejudices against my nationality, too. In any case, I never really felt I could get on with the predatory approach to women in Italy, especially not towards fair, foreign women, who were even more considered  to be 'fair game.'

 

To begin with anyway, I had just felt huge relief to be away from campus life, which had had its own special stressors, in the form of various post-adolescent existential crises. I had been reading a lot of books about astrology that had been taking a more or less 'esoteric' line, which treated astrology not as a form of divination, but as a spiritual path towards gnosis, that is, special spiritual insight - through discovering the holy grail of the divine Self.

 

However, then it had seemed that in order to evolve as these writers prescribed - in this case most especially, one of the most venerable of these writers, Dane Rudhyar - I was supposed to kill off my 'false' ego - there was supposed to be just this clear, pure Self on high, totally freed and divorced from the sublunar world of messy feelings and emotions. (The original Gnostics may or may not have been matter and flesh-denying, but it is my conviction now that there is an unhealthily Manichaean streak underlying a good deal of New Age philosophy, as I shall explore a little more here later on, and have done elsewhere.) At this time though, there had been an intense relationship with another student who had been happy enough to play on these angsts.

 

My mother did ask at one point if I had been getting mixed up with more notorious cults such as Moonies - interestingly enough I did encounter some behaviours from some of these esoteric dabblers that did seem rather cultish, as experience was to prove yet again, later on. Whether truly cultish or not, I did keep coming across sentiments among 'esotericists' - following on from the channelled writings of Alice Bailey - that family ties were tribal, atavistic things that could hold you back spiritually and were supposed to be transcended.

 

When I graduated in 1981 at 22 then, confidence had not really then been at an all-time high, knowledge of a deep recession prior to completing finals had not been an especially edifying prospect to look forward to. But to begin with in 1981, it was good simply to get back in touch with 'normal' life, as I actually started being able to sleep properly again and not feel so physically unwell: at this point of time, I was still unwise to the ideas that there might be an intolerance to grains, particularly wheat.

 

From that point of view, unemployment in graduating had been a life-saver, as it had allowed me to ‘recover’ from all this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Career Of Signing On

 

 

So to begin with, life on the dole seemed like a grand holiday, as one or two people had initially observed with some envy, as I started to look around for things in which to get involved.

 

There was a radical community centre in Leamington Spa I often visited, although that did not really prove to be the most satisfactory area of involvement for me at the time: the Community Worker did seem to want to involve everyone who came but really, it seemed to function best as a free drop-in centre and crèche for single young mothers whose hands were too full with their offspring for much attention to be spared beyond that.

 

Many of the women attending the frequent meetings did not seem to have a lot of tolerance or patience with those who wanted to get involved with the community activities. At one meeting, apologies were read out for one member, who had given her reasons for not attending as 'not being sure how welcome she really was.'

 

'So what does she want?' exclaimed one recently-divorced wife, now turned Radical Lesbian. 'A gilded invitation card? For us to hold her hand?'

 

Or, words to that effect. 

 

The militancy of a lot of Far Left groups frequently advocated political gayness, though I never really got on with that. I certainly believed that women should have equal opportunities, be free to decide what to do with their bodies, be free to 'reclaim the night' and generally live life free of any sexual harassment. It seem to me, however, that changing your sexuality as a political act did seem a rather strained and less-than honest choice to make, if it did not truly come from within. Neither did it feel possible to really have that much in common with the self-sacrificing mothers.  

 

One of the women however, did show an interest in encouraging me in my creative activities, in her desire to be supportive towards the beleaguered workless. She certainly seemed to possess some talent and inclination for mentoring. She was 'just a housewife' herself, but as a post-graduate in anthropology, clearly seemed ambitious for more.

 

She was very correct in lifestyle in liberal, Leftist policies, tastes and lifestyle, as well as being married to a Black husband. She was a kind and understanding listener, whenever I poured out my troubles, on one occasion active in standing up for me when there was trouble with another woman in a project in which I was involved. At other times, however, I did occasionally suspect that maybe she enjoyed being the strong one in the face of any neediness in those people whom she knew to be economically disadvantaged.

 

At other times, conversely, she could be hard. Flak from fellow campaigners - and later on, bookshop co-ordinators - whether or not unfair on lesser egos, was, it seems, to be heroically borne within the travails of the greater cause of liberating the Oppressed. Many years later, after we had fallen out, I saw her eavesdropping on an unproductive interview I attended with an Open Studies employer at my old University, refined Schadenfreude masked by what struck me as being a Mother Superior inscrutability.

 

With that precious resource, Time, on my hands, it was also, certainly important for me to be able to continue at something else that had become very important to me - my artistic path, such as it then was. As the government generously allowed the 3 million unemployed to study part-time as long as it was for under 21 hours, I eventually took up life drawing and crafts classes at the college there, later on following a 2-year diploma in painting with a timetable that luckily fell well within the 21-hour limit  (my family disapproved of the life drawing, with the models' willingness to pose naked, showing their 'thing').

 

As well as the life-drawing classes, there had been one or two arts and crafts courses on offer, thus opportunities to work in artistic media other than pen and ink with crayons. A sense at times that these activities were perceived as occupational therapy for some was probably unavoidable and it was rare to met other people my age: it was often a question of mixing with retired men and women, or thirty-something housewives, alongside 16-year-old foundation students, though I did not really mix with the latter.

 

The exception a little later on was an Essex girl, whose lifestyle had seemed enviably ‘cool’ to me in her socially active world of bedsit land, but who sadly proved to be a little too fond of cannabis and violent boyfriends. She too was unemployed, but here it seems that she was not using the dole as a grant to finance Greater Things, as one of the tutors had boasted to us he had done before it had become a little more usual, but to continue in what appeared to be a downward spiral in her life. I don’t remember now if she actually finished the course. I certainly remember that after helping her by lending her a library book of mine when she had been late with an assignment, she did not return the book when I asked and the library staff had a merry time chasing me up.

 

There were sometimes trips to London, to look at the exhibitions of well-regarded contemporary artists, such as Francis Bacon.

 

I studied a little sociology too and regret now not having taken a more in-depth course, alongside other extra-mural courses in anthropology, but again, the 21-hour rule meant that these had to remain strictly on a part-time ‘hobby’ basis, so there were neither the opportunities nor the money around to take these further, to modules, for example that might in time have led to a second degree. The feeling I was starting to get now was that unemployment did seem designed to keep those signing on strait-jacketed in a Mickey-mouse world where nothing could be taken as far as I would have liked. At least though, at this point in time you were left alone, unlike later on when the unemployed were regularly called in and pressurised, or intimidated to take on equally Mickey-mouse and frequently time-wasting training schemes.

 

For now, however, the experience was more like being under a glass ceiling where a certain amount of part-time study or voluntary activity was permitted - but not if this got in the way of being able to find a 'real' job – or, you were deemed not to be eligible for benefits. So this meant that all these activities had to be seen as 'hobbies' or worse, 'occupational therapy.'

 

A habit I had continued as an undergraduate was always to have a small folder with me to take work around with me whilst on the move, so here a thick folio of small artworks soon accumulated. Some of these I occasionally (and by now, guiltily) sold for small sums of money, though in finding places to show the work, response was frequently less-well received.

 

‘Well, what about the presentation of these things?,’ I was told at one ‘alternative’ venue in Leamington. ‘We don’t take any old stuff here.’

 

I did exhibit in one or two local libraries, though again could see that this kind of ‘community activity’ was a far cry from dreams of Great Metropolitan Galleries and glowing reviews free of any condescension. A tutor at Coventry University had kindly obliged by writing the blurb to go with an exhibition opening of mine, but referred to my work as ‘charming and decorative.’

 

There was also, always the potential for getting into trouble with my creative activities. I spent a good deal of my time drawing, experimenting with abstract compositions in shape and colour, and for a brief period in the early 80's, was fond of making designs for arty badges.

 

There were not yet the numerous internet websites like Red Bubble or Etsy, for example, where I might have been able to experiment a whole lot more with creating prints, designs or t-shirts intended for such pursuits, without either facing formidable printing expenses, or Compromising my Artistic Integrity.

 

At this time, however, the Mickey-mouse rule worked this way: if you were unemployed, you were not legally supposed to make more than four pounds in any fortnight in any kind of an enterprise or part-time work. At one social event I once attended, someone asked me a good many searching questions about these badges. However, I had heard that this particular worked for the DHSS, so I kept mum - there had never been much to report there, anyway, which might or might not have disappointed this budding DHSS sleuth.

 

Later on, Georgina, an older woman who had always seemed well-disposed and somehow less critical towards me than most of the feminist community in Leamington, allowed me to use a badge machine that belonged to the Labour Party. Georgina was later arrested several times for taking part in 'actions' against the police at Greenham Common,  Later, however, this went to someone else for safe-keeping, but who was also amenable. I may have paid a subsidised amount for using this machine - until a 'friend' reported to me that this guy was now unwilling to let me use it.

 

'They are saying that you want to set up a private enterprise,' he reported, not without some smugness - the accusation may or may not have been his. He was a rapidly-becoming ex, whose displays of paranoid jealousy had made me realise, amongst other things, that this was not the right match for me.

This (the issues with the badge machine, that is) is the kind of pettiness in ideology and rules that can completely stranglehold any real sense of autonomy from developing in anyone who ever gets caught up in the unemployment trap, in my humble opinion.

 

As time went on, there were certainly other experiences that did rub in the fact that any experience of mine did feel pretty well surplus to requirements. The 'holiday' feeling immediately after graduating, where it had been remarked that I'd appeared to be really enjoying this period of freedom from honest blood, sweat and toil, was starting to be replaced by more complex and bitter experiences and feelings of exclusion.

 

Not all voluntary work was like this, but there were always those times when being asked to make paper chains chafed - or turning up for an arranged group activity, only to find out that the paid worker had decided to take her group off on an outing and  clearly could not be bothered to tell me. At the Community Centre, most people were certainly too busy to talk for long to discuss any viable community activities, whilst an element amongst some members of the women's groups did seem a little cliquey, an impression that was further confirmed when my minute-taking at one their meetings was heavily criticised. But then in Community Centre politics, I was most certainly a bit wet behind the ears: no doubt, it showed.

 

A lot of the activities I was involved in were set against a background either of the moral opprobrium already described, but then there could be the cloying pity, as already remarked.

 

One of these occasions had involved being stopped by a pair of middle-aged market researchers, who were organising a small trade fair on kettles. The first woman told me she would include me anyway, though she seemed distressed when I told her I didn't have a job. On proceeding further, the second woman then blurted out that they could not 'use' me for some strange reason in their market research study and that they were 'very upset.' The kettles stood in a row on the tables behind, their silly upturned spouts reminding somehow of the middle-aged ladies, one who now continued to blurt 'But how one earth do you manage to live?'

 

I was offered a chocolate bar in compensation for my time, but declined this small kindness. It could be, I should have dissembled a little more for the purposes of this survey by lying that I was a full-time student, but I did not see why I should have had to.

 

Actually, I don’t ever remember living as badly as all that, it was certainly not poverty in any Dickensian sense, no matter what depths of destitution these worthy ladies had in mind, in their most lurid imaginings. There was never any question of going hungry and my dole was enough to buy and prepare perfectly tasty and pleasant dishes to eat. It was not, however, possible to splash out much on books or CD’S and trips to restaurants were out of the question, whilst the occasional take-home pizza was manageable.

 

It proved later on to be much more difficult to find good accommodation, often because landlords and landladies were unwilling to take on DHSS tenants perhaps because then, the income accrued from them had to be declared, or perhaps because of a dislike of claimants. Those private landlords that did, I found, could often prove to be there because of the opportunities for creating scams, of one kind or another.

 

Eventually, I did accept a so-called ‘Community Programme’ job with the County Council. Supposedly in place to help me take my place in the Real World of Work as a Worthy Citizen, though there were a lot of Mickey-Mouse elements to it to begin with as was true of other such schemes I later felt pressurised to join. One of the activities, for example, involved painting masks.

 

‘Just like Juniors!’ I had overheard someone exclaim in disgusted terms, on seeing my glorious handiwork.

 

As remarked before, the trouble with many arts projects is that they might be seen to overlap with what looks a lot more like ‘occupational therapy’ rather than any form of pure modernist or post-modernist self-expression. I believe now that in the UK, there are now any number of tenures and projects for artists to get involved in, though I do not know if these are genuine positions, or connected to New Deal schemes and the like.

 

 Eventually, I did get to paint a number of Community-Arts display boards, in what would have been at one time, old-fashioned sign-writing.

 

Old-fashioned, as in a skill that may be pretty well obsolete.

 

Later on, I was asked to fill in a questionnaire 'designed' to set me a course especially tailor-made to my needs. As a graduate in English, I was asked to decide if a sentence comes at the beginning, middle, or the end of a sentence.

 

However, the Claimant Advisor who had told me about a course there that might be suitable for my needs, however, followed me up, asking me why I had not taken up the course she had recommended there. This was a scheme designed to help claimants set up small businesses. The trainer had a strong Birmingham accent and whilst constantly reminding us that we were supposed to be ‘volunteers,’ obviously believed and foresaw a time when such courses might not be. He was happy to make personal criticisms too, no doubt in the interests of promoting sound Character Development.

 

‘Slow up,’ he told me. ‘Don’t be so impatient.’

 

The scheme later proved to be more to do with keeping tabs on the participants: after complaining to the management when told that we were to be monitored and checked up on every two weeks in ways that seemed punitive to me, I read from their handbook that the aim seemed less to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit amongst the participants, but to ‘control’ their movements. The heavy-handed approach to rehabilitation showed in the way a ‘review officer’ checked our appearance to make sure, no doubt, that we had not forgotten to wash behind our ears.

 

I felt under pressure to get results with the ‘entrepreneurism,’ but at one of the few outlets I had found for some cards I had designed, it proved to be all-too easy to alienate people whilst under this kind of pressure: the situation was making me feel more and more trapped.

 

In some respects, I now believe that certain workfare measures might be preferable to these kinds of Mickey-mouse schemes, if they actually, genuinely do provide quality training for paid work or some viable kind of self-employment, as the Tesol course I eventually undertook, finally did. Such measures might involve a whole lot more dignity too for the individuals undertaking them, if they really do provide quality training.

 

Such measures might be more valuable still, if this could involve training for work of the claimant’s own choosing, even if there are clear conditions from the outset that certain levels of benefit might be more conditional than any survival Basic Income. If these were to involve something other than the kind of half-baked time-wasting schemes that all-too often seemed to do more for the bureaucrats or charitable bodies that run them, rather than for those people who are most supposed to benefit from them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attitudes, Workless Utopias and Solutions

 

 

This cloying pity towards the unemployed, as opposed to the hostility, was most often given expression by Socialist sympathisers such as Jeremy Seabrook or more liberally-minded papers such as  the Guardian, where being deprived of paid work inevitably meant an entropic descent into a pointless limbo of subsistence without the saving structure that only Work could provide as anomie, depression and suicide inevitably ensued.

 

As if everyone automatically caved in, unable to flex their creativity and muscles of the imagination without the tyranny of work structure, I thought. Surely, more people ought to be able to survive without needing an externally-imposed work structure, timetable, or work ethos to guide them.

 

Paid work, however, according to Labour was the only thing that could give any kind of life dignity or meaning - it was not called the 'Labour' party for nothing. And whilst it did not see unemployment as the fault of those signing on, it did not seem to question the Calvinist values of the Protestant work ethic, either. At the beginning of the 80's there was a 30's-style March for Jobs, which did come our way, so that I (and others) could meet the marchers and talk to them.

 

The attitude of the marchers did not deviate much from good, solid, dour Socialist party line. Only Work mattered: all other concerns, such as being an artist, looking for any kind of spiritual meaning to life beyond Work, were never given much in the way of merit.

 

Either way, it seemed that only paid employment could bestow the golden seal of approval upon your worthy brow. Once again, being inherently acceptable as a human being became something that was purely Conditional, such as having good marks at school. And that had been a pressure that had not always been wholly appreciated.

 

Other viewpoints I have encountered point to a common need to find suitable scapegoats for all the ills of society - again, the more left-biased or liberal commentators have long-observed that in the UK, single mothers as well as the unemployed, tend to take on the unenviable mantle of 'folk devil.' In Hungary it tends most often to be gypsies who are the folk devils, and when I have asked why they are hated so much, a common response is that 'they do not want to work.' (Now in Hungary, whereas in the UK I was one of millions being supported by tax payers, now I am one of a purported 22.5% of tax payers, supporting Hungary.)

 

This underlying attitude of assumed guilt, or blame, could create some very strange psychological dynamics - one which, I might add, where constant iinterviews and monitoring by Claimant Advisors could become totally counterproductive - where not just simply just experienced as intolerable harassment (enter the long-term sick claimant at this point, rather than the long-term unemployed claimant). As I remarked earlier on, in all probability most people do not care to be made to feel like a passive piece of meat to be processed and ‘fixed.’ There can be more of a sense of autonomy to be gained or possessing any control over their lives through rebelling against being put through hoops, being pressurised or forced to attend courses or any interviews without being offered any choice on what is best for them, it being assumed that they are in no position to be able to think for themselves. Most people may well be cunning enough to see the sense of being able to ‘play the game’ with an authority that has the power to withdraw any means to survive in a worst-case scenario, but may still not be willing to go along with the rules of the game in every respect. The DHSS could then become enemies to be outwitted by the wily claimants in a passive/aggressive war of nerves - or attrition: one, where the payoff on the part of the great and shifty Unwashed was not to triumphantly find salvation through getting that holy of holies - a Job, but to outwit the authorities by not  getting caught up in the clutches of Work. Or slavery.

 

Certainly, I did encounter other viewpoints on offer on how much of a social evil unemployment actually needed to be, and why the need to stigmatise those without work was so great, if the work ethic itself had become a redundant concept.

 

Unemployment was neither a personal tragedy, nor any kind of badge of shame or stigma! The unemployed were neither lazy nor suffering from 'personality problems,' as someone close to home had loudly declared must surely be the case if you were unemployed: no, not at all, according to pundits of new wisdom such as Jeremy Seabrook and Guy Dauncey, with varying levels of optimism, at the prospect of a workless future: no, work itself was redundant. In the future, labour would be taken over by computers and robots and the challenge for all able-bodied humans was to discover within themselves the imagination to use their leisure time creatively rather than depend on any  external structure of timetables and routines to spoon-feed all that for you.

 

Guy Dauncey had published a booklet on how to turn unemployment to your advantage and even to make of it a positive experience. He believed that alternatives to paid employment might in time become more valid options: job sharing, part-time unpaid community work (why should paid employment be the only officially-sanctioned, meaningful activity? What about housework, what about creative/artistic activities?), or self-employment?

 

He also championed the proposal for a Basic Income scheme, or a Citizen's Income. No need for the dole, or Jobseeker's Allowance - there would, in effect, be a dole, a safety net for everybody. It would consist of an inalienable and non-conditional right to a subsistence level of income available to all citizens of any given nation.

 

I believe the proposal of an unconditional Citizen’s Income is still actively proposed by the Green party. Certainly, there was more talk about its being a possible option before the ideological climate seemed to change in Britain after the mid 80’s and the Restart scheme, involving increasing monitoring of claimants and pressure to undergo ‘training’ courses was introduced in the UK.

 

The Citizen’s Income would operate in the way Child Benefit now operates and would remove at a stroke the resentment low-paid workers might feel towards the unemployed, if every citizen had the inalienable right towards this basic safety net, though it would, of course, be difficult to run, and, more to the point, very expensive. At this point of time (2008), I believe that just the one state of the USA, has anything like this scheme, in Alaska - though maybe, this is a state that is in a position to be able, at least, to do this.

According to Wikipedia, there is now in the US, called an Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income tax-payers, whilst the city of Dauphin, Manitoba, took part in an experimental basic income programme called ’Minicome’ between 1974 and 1979. Most recently in 2008, a pilot project of this kind was also started in the Namibian village of Otjivero by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition. activities.’ In this last cases, the actual benefits are seemingly real, rather than just Utopian: apparently, there has been less child malnutrition  and more school attendance, and more significantly less poverty. This is because, quoting from Wikipedia ‘It was also found to increase the community's income significantly above the actual amount from the grants as it allowed citizens to partake in more productive economic activities.’

Such a proposition does seem all the more appealing now, where the insecurity and subsequent inability to plan long term or to save mean that part-timing and freelancing are scarcely enviable positions to be in, where compulsory workfare may now define the current meaning of 'voluntary' work, for example, the last of which could be criticised most as any viable alternative to paid employment. Slave labour indeed. And judging from comments from one or two people in parts of the world as far-flung as Australia - in 2008 - the reality of 'voluntary' worrk is that those carrying this out are frequently treated with about as much respect for their labour as, well, a slave.

 

No doubt, the idea of a Citizen's Income still seems a pretty Utopian proposal these days, where if anything, life has become even more cut-throat, work even more of a drudge with its 'flexible working hours' than it was at the beginning of the 80's. Now, it seems to be not the Far Left in the UK that now questions the merit of jobs where employees can work well in excess of 40 hours a week, but rather more conservative women's magazines whose target readers tend to be 50-plus. There is, after all, the ever-present competitive threat of the Far East with their surplus of labour, their 7-day weeks and the saturation of European markets with their cheaper products. And whilst Japan may yet still be the first to produce a viable humanoid robot, even with limited skills, the idea of a Leisured World of creative dreamers now seems a lot more remote than it did.

 

Ideas such as these were also explored by Norman Jope in two pamphlets he wrote later on in the early 90's called 'Floating Leaves and False Economies' and 'Finding Time,'    both critical of 'the tyranny of work.' There articles were written in response to the government’s withdrawal of any subsistence payment to anyone deemed to be ‘voluntarily unemployed’ – which could include leaving a job voluntarily, not matter how unpleasant the working conditions, or refusing to participate in any kind of government training scheme ‘designed’ to make you more employable: the velvet gloves, as the 90’s progressed, were coming off. More recently at the time of writing at the end of 2008, I believe that a book has been published from the USA by Shipley, demonstrating that whilst the American Dream may promise reward to Hard Work, that in fact, most infrastructures, by the way they are set up, tend not to reward Hard Work at all.

 

But to return to the more Utopian dreams of the early 80's, as one of Thatcher's newly-graduated 3 million: again, to give a dog a bad name at being made to feel suspect and potentially and existentially guilty before even getting my first giro in the post amongst many: I 'd bought all this!

 

I would like to state at this point that my view now is, that unemployment is an invidious state to be in, for anybody. It is not possible to have any real control or say over your life, to be dependent on the State, where any State benefit is totally conditional – where survival is dependent on being able to ‘play the game’, no matter how creatively or productively you may spend your time. 'Unemployment' may be an artificial status devised by bureaucratic minds, which could become meaningless. were there a citizen's income or if individually, it is possible in rare circumstances to subsist through ‘independent means.’ However, as it stands, to be unemployed still means being forced into that passive state, where the pauper is expected to sing for their supper. The claimant, if ultimately there isn't the freedom to extricate themselves from this position, because basically there just aren't enough jobs, can all-too often find themselves being treated like a child or a patient, needing things being 'done' to them, because they may be incapable of deciding for themselves what is 'best' for them. Difficult at any time to take but perhaps most of all, perhaps for a young person at that time when their adulthood has scarcely been tried or put to the test.

 

Unemployment, in the end was 'bigger' than any ability of mine to understand what was happening to me at the time, in many ways. Furthermore, the attitude towards the scale of the problem at the time, was so apocalyptic. It genuinely did seem to be believed that full employment was never likely to be seen again and that work itself was becoming redundant. At the time, there were certainly few who predicted the reality that had taken shape in the mid-90’s, where there was less in the way of secure paid jobs with fixed hours, but plenty of part-time insecure work and jobs involving ‘flexible working hours’, which in practice could all-too often involve the long working weeks so deplored by the normally-very conservative UK women’s magazines, as already mentioned.

 

I understand that one of the main fears behind implementing any kind of citizen’s income, in addition to its being expensive to run, is that it may act as a disincentive for many people to work – or, at least, feel pressurised to take on any work that may be less than ideal.

 

Possibly, that might depend on how it is implemented. A subsistence baked-beans-and toast income (leaving aside, at least in the UK, the question of housing benefits), if totally unconditional, might on the contrary allow a more entrepreneurial spirit to flourish, should such a recipient occasionally desire a little more than baked beans and toast for their main meal each and every day. There is no reason why more conditional benefits, reaching a higher level, might not be made available to those who are interested in undergoing training to allow them to acquire more marketable skills, or who are willing to do more hoops in order to demonstrate their willingness to work.

 

From my point of view and in retrospect, a Citizen’s Income might have been ideal way for me to develop my professional skills without feeling harassed right from the start as, even though the badge-making project was scarcely the stuff of entrepreneurial spirit gone rampant. At the time, there had been an Enterprise Allowance scheme, which paid budding entrepreneurs an allowance for a year, but the criteria for joining it seemed to be strict. Later on, I was to find out that once there is a definite means to make a living, then there really is no need for elaborate business plans – it is just a question of diving in. But that point was a long way off.

 

Meanwhile, fears about being not just being caught up in economic forces bigger than myself, but about being maybe fundamentally unemployable anyway, sharpened during the second recession in the early 90's. Then, it was just starting to become fashionable to start labelling people not by their neuroses, but by our neurology. Now Asperger’s, which to my mind is the new schizophrenia insofar as it can be used to scapegoat those people who do not live up to certain expectations either socially or otherwise, was being bandied about to help explain why I had not fitted into either socially acceptable role of getting decently married off, or being gainfully employed. Someone in my family had once vociferously opined that the reason why the husband of one of her neighbours had been without work for over two years must be because of ‘personality problems.’ This, when I had first graduate with so much unemployment around had left me feeling particularly undermined as well as discredited, although I have since learnt that one of the said neighbour’s husband, was, in fact, suffering from schizophrenia (this, I have had occasion to see in one or two cases, is a destructive illness indeed). Anyway, I hated the way doubts about my personality seemed to be continually raised by close ones because of the situation I was in, rather that it ever being possible to explain that I had only been trying to look for creative solutions to a difficult life situation.

 

To begin with, I am sure my mother had thought I must be insane in the early 80's as my family once confronted me over Sunday lunch, for not communicating and being inexplicably moody. I was told that I had food allergies and this must be why I still didn't have a job.

 

'If only you'd shell your beans, you'd vote Conservative,' a relative cynically suggested to me, when I recounted this tale.

 

Actually, things were not going well in the place where I was living, but as there was already so much disapproval of my lifestyle, my family would have been the last people I would have confided in over this. There are plenty of ways I may have hurt my family by seemingly turning my back on them, but the disapproval and intolerance I felt from them for what I was about, along with the insistence that conforming above all else was the only thing that mattered. Also, what always seemed like a fundamental lack of faith in me and my capabilities, never made them seem much like 'friends' to me, where either all my 'wrong' choices or decisions were seen to be due to being crazy or lazy, or mad or bad. Of course, until this point in time, there had never been the phenomenon of any kind of graduate unemployment within the equation: what equation there had been prior to the early 80’s was that a degree equalled a guaranteed job.

 

At this point in time at least, my family was actually, mostly careful not to hassle me too much over the work issue, but the underlying disapproval always seemed to be there in the background lying, unspoken, in the air whenever I saw my parents.

 

By the start of 1992, I had also encountered the resident bully amongst the claimant advisors (the job of the Claimant Advisors, as the Nasturtium Lady had once warned me, was to 'counsel,' or intimidate or pressurise the unemployed into any job or scheme going, however unsuitable; even with good intentions, at best, it could only be policing) of the Coventry Job Centre.

 

Despite the fact that I had recently landed my first part-time teaching post, she went in on the attack: she was my worst dreams come true.

 

'So you haven't applied for any other jobs outside this sector at all,' she accused me in measured, tight tones, designed to intimidate.

 

My own reaction, in bellowing at the top of my voice at her, may not have been noble, but by now, the whole situation had been making me feel more and more trapped. By 1991, I would already have been happy to get the chance to do the Tesol course and leave the UK but Coventry, unlike London, where I had spoken to people who had got to do it without any strings attached at all, was slapping on other conditions in order to do it: one day's attendance on 'office work for idiots,' that kind of a thing.

 

When I complained to the dole and went to my MP about her approach to me, the dole listened to me and actually apologised - I gather, she had already been getting a reputation. I knew it was only a matter of time before job 'motivation' courses and even workfare would become de rigour in the UK, however, so did feel that whilst in this case, I had won a battle, there was much less chance I would be winning much in the way of a war here.

 

Meanwhile now in Hungary, where the future looks grim indeed again, I hear students of mine tell me about their classmates, who after writing hundreds of applications for jobs, in most cases never even get an acknowledgement for their efforts. It is understandable to me why motivation might wane under these circumstances. It is still unclear to me why such individuals might be judged to need still more external 'motivation' in the form of still more harassing measures and government sanctions designed to be punitive rather than enabling.

 

At the very beginning of the 90's I had been hoping that various entrepreneurial activities close to my heart would take off enough for me to be able to sign off for good: there had been teaching courses, success at psychic fairs, artworks sold. The new recession starting in 1991, however, put paid to that - it became obvious that everyone  was now holding onto their money, yet the restart interviews in the dole offices were becoming more inquisitorial. Now, I was simply beginning  to feel more and more trapped  in a hopeless situation, as still more and more doors slammed shut.

 

As the mid-90’s approached, validation for an astrology course I had been teaching at the local university was withdrawn, because a sceptic higher up had started to object to the fact that undergraduates were choosing my course as one of their modules towards their degrees, no less. I found out through devious means that my course proposal I had been asked to supply had been sent to one H J Eysenck).

 

So in addition to this and an accumulation of other losses, both in terms of part-time work, and attempts to become self-employed that took place from 1991-1994, this brought morale down even lower. I became more and more afraid of being coerced into something that was not essentially a free choice, and whilst this might not have bothered many people who have been unemployed, it certainly bothered me. Also, the dark hints from closer to home about my personality had got to me: I had began to want to be more sure that I was not actually unemployable, rather than being a dissident, which would also have involved choice rather than any lack of free will.

 

After finally getting the chance to study for and attain the Tesol qualification, there was no desire any more to get caught in the machinery of social security and poverty traps again. I believe that workfare schemes are certainly the norm in Hungary, where I live now, and in the UK, under the tough and brave new world first set in motion by the Blair government, now proposed by the Conservatives. Interestingly enough, it was predicted to me well before Blair was even the leader of the Opposition, that it would be Labour who would be most likely to introduce compulsory workfare schemes in the UK, under what was later to be called ‘New Deal.’

 

It might also be worth pointing out that in the UK, declaring any kind of part-time work, which was not of sufficient duration, nor sufficient to cover all benefits, proved to be more trouble than it was worth, on more than one occasion: part-time teaching, especially, proved to be a fool-proof way to accrue many months of rent arrears.

 

It is maybe ironic that I had already encountered the social evil of unemployment before, but on a purely academic level.

 

I can remember 'O'- level history lessons at school, where our rather jaded teacher, a dapperly-bearded Welshman called Mr Jones, had told us of the early 1800's and the Poor Law benefit provisions then that had been set up to prevent want, where the Speenhamland system also created poverty traps that could only have created a disincentive to work, where low-paid work could leave a benefit claimant no better off, or even worse of, if accepting a job. Once again too, the new provisions and amendments set up to prevent poverty traps were punitive beyond measure  - the workhouses, run in the style of concentration camps, without actually killing the inmates.

 

By the millennium, it was as though the issues of what role work should play anyway in most people's lives had been forgotten about, along with the spectre of unemployment: as has already been observed, it now all just seemed to be unilaterally a case of having to, and wanting to, work, work, work and work. Concepts of 'work/life balance were only belatedly, and often, only cosmetically introduced and applied in the workplace, in order to keep their burnt-out workforce in place a little longer. Only in France was there any exception to the rule, though that may have been overturned now, where a strict adherence to a 35-hour week was imposed.

 

So I wonder how the world will deal with any coming new 30's-style Depression, in which mass unemployment may become a reality again.

Trots and New Agers

 

 

Many of the endeavours that involved any level of politics or activism, for me frequently involved sharp and sometimes painful and disillusioning learning curves in getting to know more about the divisions of opinion and attitudes of other people.

 

One of the main polarities I encountered in the 80's involved the split between those who felt change could only come about through political activism and that any kind of 'mystic crap' was redundant (my nickname for these is 'Trots'), or self-proclaimed New Agers, who believed that a peaceful society could only come about through changing the self.

 

I should perhaps emphasise at this point that in using the word 'Trot' my intention is not to denigrate every kind of activist! Neither, conversely, do I wish to automatically denigrate any socially-idealistic spiritual seeker as a 'New Ager.' What I felt critical of then - and now - is a kind of a narrowness, or pettiness in the approach to such matters taken, in anecdotes I shall describe later on. At the beginning of the 80's, there was only, in any case, traditional materialist socialism: there were as yet no Greens, nor any Green party, for example. Apparently, there had been in existence since the 70's an 'Ecology Party' but the ideologies for this movement had not yet really found a major voice in British politics.

 

The fear of imminent global mass destruction had to be in part due to the jitters many people were feeling with the intensifying Cold War - something that certainly struck a strong chord with me, after having been exposed to Too Much Science Fiction as a teen - in this case, post-Apocalyptic tales of a future world ruined by poisoned wastelands and genetic mutation from John Wyndham, or tales about the last days of sleepy Australian communities before the total wipe-out of humanity, from Nevil Shute, in On the Beach (I had read this at 17, having bad dreams for many a month after so doing.)

 

Bands like Killing Joke were helping to stoke up this jitteriness, that lay in knowing that we could all blow up the planet to kingdom come any minute, so that threat of the mushroom cloud hanging over us was ever-present. The news on TV showed the size of the bombs that each bloc had in graphic detail - made it all like a great game and in fact there was a board game you could buy and play, called 'nuclear war' - not sure exactly who got to be the winner, but the first part of it involved playing for World Domination, much like Monopoly. Ultimately, of course, once world destruction was 'achieved,' there were no real winners.  I remember there was a satirical TV series too called 'Whoops Apocalypse,' where an illicit nuclear bomb is smuggled across borders, disguised as a graphically-sculpted phallus – the opening scenes of apocalyptic nuclear holocaust were nightmare-inducing enough to make the humour as black as need be (Not long ago, I recently also saw rival powers India and Pakistan parade their equally phallic-looking nuclear bombs in military parades).

 

One powerful dream I experienced at about 23 in particular, helped set me on this particular path of self-discovery.

 

I dreamt I had been catapulted into a Britain of the distant future, in an alternative community in Scotland called ‘Findhorn.’ England was now an uninhabitable, burnt crisp for the most part – and even here in Scotland, the whole countryside and terrain were a desolation of dead land. I saw a community form the future meditating, hands clasped, around a lake of dead water.  Suddenly, I saw that there was a film of oil on the surface and tried to explain to the others that the problem was not due to radiation, but merely  oil. However, I then found that the brains of these future inhabitants had mutated, and they no longer used speech. I joined the others meditating non-verbally, and painstakingly, we managed to make a small, green plant grow.

 

Strangely enough, the dream came partly true, at a peace camp I later visited with a woman called Joan, with whom I hitched all over the country to different camps, with her then 2-year-old daughter. I had decided to try ingesting a hash cake whilst sitting outside the gates of military base – and quietly panicked whilst the others were meditating, because the chemicals had started to make me fear that I had lost the ability to speak and verbalise. I became afraid of being locked forever in a dumb world, though luckily the effect did not last long – though it put me off experimenting to any great excess with such things, afterwards.

I used to visit peace-camp bases like Greenham Common and join CND marches, whilst kith and kin ducked behind their Daily Mails, which voiced the complaints of neighbours, who hated all these nasty women in league with communists and fouling up a respectable neighbourhood. My involvement with the peace camp at Greenham Common, however, was not as active as it could have been. I believed that women should be treated as equals to men and not be discriminated against, but the truth was, I did not always feel all that comfortable in the company of my fellow sisters - it was often not easy to know where I stood with other women, whose parameters for inclusion seemed to depend on political interminables that often seemed petty to me.

 

Still, I was there to support actions with Apache war cries, as women created human walls at the gates of the military compounds where the Americans wanted their cruise missiles, spiderwebs and other artworks and slogans adorning the barbed-wire fences.

 

My family lived next door to a traitor at the time - that is someone, who had spent time in prison for having sold secrets to the Russians - which further raised the temperature of Sunday-afternoon lunch fights over politics. This was David Bingham, later known as David Brough, who, if the papers are to believed, was hen-pecked by his wife into a bit of espionage in order to keep her in the life to which she was accustomed. I had met Brough at a meeting for volunteers working for the Probation office – here, he was simply a Probation Officer, proud of his work in the community, keeping potentially Bad Boys on the straight and narrow.

 

My family were not happy about having Brough as a next-door neighbour, however. It was all rather hilarious at times in a M.A.D sort of way, though. My father used to conspicuously smoke Churchill-size cigarettes in the garden and I occasionally got carrots and other phallic-shaped objects thrown at me for my own traitorous activities, in supporting the women campers at Greenham Common.

 

There were certainly rumours that the Russians were visiting the Greenham-Common women at their camp sites, though I don't remember ever encountering any. I do remember once meeting a German single mother, who was portrayed with outrage by the Daily Mail, as one of those  disgraceful scroungers: she was claiming dole during the sojourn at the camps.

 

Meanwhile at home, I was sometimes confronted over whether or not these CND marchers 'had jobs' and reminded by irate siblings that all the young men in the world wars had given up their lives 'for England.' Hitler aside, it had always seemed to my traitorous mind that England, along with all the other Jingoistic imperialistic powers of the beginning of the 20th Century, had had their fine young men slaughtered for very little real reason.

 

There was at least some levity to proceedings when on another fine Sunday morning, my father once rang me at where I was then living and asked me if I would like to 'come home for lunch for my weekly punch-up.'

 

At this point in time, 'home' for a while consisted of a not-very private flat in Leamington Spa above a radical/alternative bookshop. The bookshop in the end proved to be more an experience of the 'steep learning curve' variety; suffice to say that one individual in particular had made the running of the venture her special empire and well......in the end, maybe I might as well have had done with it and had the experience of being a bona-fide paid and down-trodden Bob Cratchett of an employee, rather than supposedly working voluntarily for a brave and free anarchically-run collective.

 

I had visited the shop as a student, where I had  been able to find 'alternative' literature  of every radical kind, or hard-to-find publications of other kinds. At the time, I had been most interested in astrological texts and esoterica, mostly of the theosophical/Alice Bailey persuasion. There were also volunteers who could talk about Jung and alternative forms of mysticism.

 

Most of the books were firmly polarised along the mystic/Marxist divide, but there were one or two exceptions. If there had been Weber's critique on the work ethic and how pleasure-denying Calvinism fed the machine of capitalism, robbing humanity of any birthright as joyfully creative 'Homo Ludens' then I did not encounter it, and those books that were either hard-core anti opium-of-the-people materialist Leninist/Maoist texts etc put me off as much as hard-core ego-denying mystic tracts, whether or not New Age, or Hindu/Buddhist, etc.

 

I enjoyed coming across those writers who did seem to be able to cross the divide - and, incidentally, I bought these books too: there was Theodore Roszak, who advocated, amongst other things, a thoroughly Green sensitivity to his non-violent activism, as opposed to just buying into the whole paradigm of perceiving Mother Nature as something to be controlled and exploited; a 'right-livelihood' approach to work and being true to the creative dictates of your Soul, whilst also bringing a virtually Dominican critical rigour to bear on some of the more indulgent Manichaean excesses to be seen on the Aquarian Frontier. There were Marilyn Ferguson and Frithjof Capra too, also advocating new and more inclusive paradigms that did imply throughout that a Peaceful Revolution and Better World could only take place in the context of some kind of new and accelerated route to greater, collective spiritual awareness. The only problem there to my mind might be, what kind  of spiritual awareness.

 

Also recently published and eagerly awaited because of the more apparently ‘feminist’ practice of allowing their women to play an active role in their church, had also come Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels. Interestingly, Pagel’s reservations against the Gnostics echoed more contemporary criticisms of some aspects of the New Age – that as a solitary path, this was potentially, always somewhat self-absorbed and could always become somewhat depersonalising in its quest for an overriding divine Self beyond and apart from our mere and feeble mortal envelopes. An intolerable and thoroughly unedifying Geminian split in the psyche, was how it always struck me.

 

As an undergraduate, I had attended some workshops by a loosely-run group of Jungians in London, also adept at alchemy and astrology – here, it was supposed to be all about respecting each polarity equally, within the mystic reunification of opposites.

 

The leaders of this group were, however, condescending towards me, when I questioned them. I was told by one of the woman speakers that as a mere woman of feelings and intuition and not much education my intellect, or animus, was probably not integrated or evolved enough to understand the magnificent intellectual sweep of ideas that informed the Great Mission. I was also told me that ‘going back to Nature’ was a purely regressive step. There was also a great deal of emphasis on the supremity of the great, pure Self detached from any polluting, regressive emotions and feelings so beloved again of Dane Rudhyar.

 

Even without the anti-intellectual stance of working-class heroes, there tended not to be much in the way of any desire to talk in depth of such matters amongst a lot of people I then know, though I had found a friend through an astrologer's group who was willing to discuss such matters. He had once worked as a librarian who, whilst not actually signing on, did not seem to be working either. For a long time, I supposed he could not be interested in me, as he had a girlfriend - with whom I had met, though later on I was to discover that this was not the case.

 

In the meantime, he always seemed pleased enough to meet up with me, to discuss paradigm shifts and astrology.

 

The shop also stocked a pro-Sinn Fein newspaper (which did make me uneasy, because of the advocacy of violence), books on how to make hash cakes (which did not make me so uneasy, though in fact, hash never really made me feel that mellow.) The shop management was certainly uneasy, as under the vigilant, ever-seeing management at the back, I nervously tried to give a straight answer to visiting inquirers about the availability of literature on substances: apparently, I was supposed not to know too much about that, but at the same time, was not supposed to discourage genuine inquiries, either.

 

Complaints, meanwhile, about my performance were never just discreetly discussed with me in private, for example, but written down for all to see in neon lights – or so it then felt to me - in the Day Book: 'Lynda forgot to do this; Lynda failed to do that; Lynda was rude to a customer.' And so on.

 

I began to feel that nothing I ever did would ever be right, but criticisms from other unpaid staff could be shot down in stern and righteous flames and protective fury. It was suggested that 'perhaps.....we who were not women/Black/Mothers just do not taking orders....'

 

I did not yet have the skills of self-assertion to challenge what seemed to be the case of an oppressed person using guilt to oppress other people in turn. Later on, in Coventry, I got to witness someone who was far more adept than me at nipping any  attempt by Oppressed Minorities – or disabled, or differently-gendered - to ride roughshod over other people in certain situations (in this case, meetings): that is, using the defense 'I am Black/female/Christian/Moslem or whatever to prevent having any bullying behaviour of their own called into question. Two wrongs don't make a right.

 

For a supposedly anarchist venture, there was a surprisingly strong desire to seem 'respectable' and not put the shop at too much risk from the wrath of the authorities).

 

Radical-left tomes therefore stood in uneasy compliance with books on Eastern religions and divination.

 

Signs were up to warn the 'thieving mystics' not to nick the Tarot packs, as it seems that many Tarot novices took the old wisdom, that prices for these were not to be quibbled with, rather too literally.

 

Radical therapy groups found a venue upstairs, working with techniques such as co-counselling, where, the personal being political, the idea was to work on the Self, in order to redeem the larger social reality. This to begin with, had involved essentially non-confrontational pairwork, where each pair took turns to counsel each other: very egalitarian, though the skills accrued in doing this, depended on the quality of training given by the leader, initially.

 

This involved co-counselling, which involved some basic training with a leader, and afterwards individuals meeting in pairs, in order to take turns in counselling each other.

It was designed to be non-confrontational, but by it nature, very egalitarian.

 

The leader, Persh, was a woman very much involved in the New Age movement, and was also involved in rebirthing workshops (which would have been way beyond my slender means to investigate, even if I had wanted to).

 

An out-of-work actor called Roland had first introduced me to the technique, though in the fist meeting, I had considerable doubts about whether not I was going to get on with Persh. When she saw me take out some drawing to work on, she loudly and roundly told me off for not paying attention.

 

‘I’m not a little schoolgirl!’ I hissed at her, ready to scratch and claw.

 

Persh backed down and explored her own ‘stuff’ about seeming like a bossy and domineering schoolteacher in her own session.

 

I did not join this group because I felt as messed-up as all that, although I did hope to become more able to make the right kinds of friendships and links with other people. I was, in fact, more intrigued by the Euspsychian promise in finding freedom from our cultural conditioning, allowing us to become freer in our responses to the adventure of Life. This was not necessarily incompatible with more political ideas: ‘the personal is political.’ At least, that was the ideal. I had joined such ventures in the hope of being able to improve my ability to make friends and to be more outgoing.

 

One of the more interesting people to join the group was a psychology lecturer from the University of Warwick, whose adverts for ESP tests I had seen whilst still studying there full-time. These had declared ‘ESP can can in very useful at exam time.’

 

He was right – somehow, more than once, I had got through exams with virtually no revising, except through idly happening on one or two key quotes or passages. These often were the ones to come up in the exam.

 

Obviously, that interested him – he called this particular talent ‘question spotting.’

 

Later on, the gentler co-counselling approach  began to turn a more Est-style, confrontational turn. 'We all create our own reality,’ Persh lectured me. ‘You have to take responsibility for everything that happens to you.'

 

I see. The rhetoric was starting to become familiar. Graduating at a time when there were 500 graduates to one job - that was once again, All My Fault. Similarly, when I visited an acupuncturist in Leamington, I was told that on some level, maybe I had  'wanted' to be ill, when trying to be healed of a stubborn inflammation that would not go away. Did they tell those with more serious ailments such as cancer this? - I wondered, the short answer being that yes, they did, a topic extensively covered by Monica Sjöö, in her critique of New Agers.

 

I was beginning to suspect that New Ageism, with its magical tendency to blame all forms of poverty, disease and want onto either victim mentality or bad collective karma might not ultimately be something I wanted to take on whole-heartedly as a set of guiding principles by which to run my life. However, I could get on with a lot of the Extreme Leftists I met either, with their opposition to interests I held dear, such as astrology.

 

It often felt that I was simply, congenitally unable to truly fit in anywhere.

 

During this period of my life, in fact, I had met someone who had appeared to have one foot on each side of the mystic/Marxist divide. I went out briefly with a self-proclaimed Communist, who was also interested in Jung and who had also written down channelled material about the nature of the universe, etc. There were long, earnest conversations about such matters in the small hours of the morning.

 

He was a scruffy, scarecrow of a man nearing 30, darkly intense, whom I knew my parents would disapprove of on sight, as someone who 'was not making anything of himself.'

 

He really was a dreamer, however. At one point, this involved trying to make the Good Time as a musician, incorporating my weak and wobbly vocals in a cover of 'The Night they Drove old Dixie Down.'

 

Well, Vanessa (the nasturtium lady) had a husband at this time who also had dreams of making records. When she met this guy, however, Vanessa articulated concerns - the sense that there was something wrong - that I had supposed might have been my parents' rather than actually my own.

 

'He still does not really know what he wants to do, 'she warned me. 'He has no real focus. Such men can get very bitter...'

 

So, this was already an 'angry young man' in his adherence to Communism, playing me 'Working-class hero' whenever in one of these moods.

 

He had a way of trying to shoot down my beliefs, too. Especially of my interest in astrology, calling it petty personalising of a more grandly impersonal universe of stars.

 

On another occasion, however, a more personal truth came out, where he admitted that he too had been 'badly psyched' by Alice Bailey's Books and those of Dane Rudhyar, and he was particularly critical of what he saw as the Nietschean fascism of the latter.

 

Alas, this was not a relationship where either of us really prospered - he hated what he called my 'Crowleyesque' desire to remain a law unto myself, remaining jealous of my personal space and free time, whilst also growing to feel more contempt for his misogyny and neediness, and later on, and more disturbingly, his paranoia.

On one such evening, for example, an Othello-type scene emerged because of where I had, or had not, placed my crash helmet (not handkerchief).

 

At the time, I was not able to truly empathise with the truly corrosive shame he must have felt over his madness, which did seem real and serious enough. Yet there seemed to be an indulgence, along with a certain amount of misogyny that manifested in showing disrespect for most of my opinions and reasoning power, that had grown more and more difficult to respect.

 

From the point of view of the Revolution, however, most hard-core Leftists, however, made it quite clear that anything that smacked of the opiate of the people, was to be unilaterally condemned.

 

One such individual, whom I had allowed to stay with me, later made it clear to me that in order to gain his unadulterated approval as someone truly politically 'sound,' I was to embrace violence in the good cause of Violent Bloody Revolution, along with condoning a willingness to kill in the name of Creating a Better World. He also had a disturbing tendency to boast of a willingness to undertake contract killings.

 

What was strange with all this was that in the way he promoted his atheist creed, the more he came across to me as a Jesuit or a zealous and vengeful patriarch, where male minds better than mine, were quoted again and again as possessing unimpeachable authority. Yet, he had made out to me initially that he was a feminist.

 

If 'nice', Middle-class bourgeois neighbourhoods where I had grown up were so willing to metaphorically burn the unemployed at the stake, then here were still more unwelcome revelations of a world still more devoid of peace and love for all humanity. For some strange reason, I had become besotted  with this individual, who had managed to play on my sentiments to an extraordinary degree prior to discarding me, even as I had a brief stay in hospital for some minor surgery. Apparently, he had used many other women before me, whenever needing somewhere to live. By now, I was coming to realise that 'bourgeois' concerns about whether or not a potential partner was 'making something of his life' or not may not necessarily be about 'keeping up appearances' but rather about common-sense and possibly too, self-preservation.

 

Most Far Leftists I met were usually - fortunately - less either mad, bad or both than this particular individual, or simply possessed a little more in the way of certain, basic humane standards and conscience, but it often seemed to me that in order to be part of their 'club,' it was necessary not just to read (or sell) the right (but not 'Right') newspapers, but also to adopt the right kinds of clothes, lifestyle, accents (often a pseudo-Northern  one) and tastes.

 

One activist whom I met later on in Coventry and who now has a career as a councillor there in the area where I used to live, an earnest young advocate for the rights of the Disadvantaged, seemed to write me off as hopelessly  bourgeois, when he discovered that I kept cold tea in the fridge.

 

At least the CND movements and others against the Bomb were a little less prescriptive in this respect.

 

In addition to visiting Greenham Common, in the 80's I also got involved with some New-Age camps of self-discovery, set in the countryside.

 

Maybe in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher's much-hated Peace Convoy, houses were to eschewed in favour of tents and tepees and a movement wishing, on the surface at least, to return to a less alienated existence started to grow a little more in momentum. 

 

The first of these involved an astrology camp, the very first of its kind and this was a truly enjoyable experience. The main organiser of these camps was one Palden Jenkins, who always reminded me of a still-enthusiastic but now rather over-worked and harassed Boy Scout leader.

 

Here, then, is a topic that usually meets with either derisive scepticism or religious condemnation, if any interest in the topic is admitted to - then, there are the divisions of belief, approach and attitude within it, and the question of what to make of literature, where it can be very difficult to find the dividing line between genuine spiritual (or for that matter, empirical) insight, or bigoted kookiness.

 

Here, the atmosphere was friendly and open - here, it could be possible to discuss the intricacy of your birthchart, without being considered an oddball.

 

I met an esotericist who was friendly enough, even though he talked a little too much about 'lower selves' for my liking. Then there were traditionalists, as opposed to the modernists, who use the chart as a map for inner self-discovery: a horary practitioner, a Draconic astrologer, a speaker on  the newly-discovered planetoid Chiron and how to delineate and interpret its position in your own horoscope.

 

One more apparently Feminist astrologer gave a workshop on looking at moon phases and the mysteries of menstruation, though my closer questioning about how she understood her spirituality, rather disappointingly suggested to me that she belonged far more to the 'White Light'  - that is, New Age school of thought than with what one or two astrologers in more recent critiques of astrological thought in Garry Phillipson's 'Astrology in the Year Zero' rather disparagingly called 'Earth Mother' die-hards, or as one individual on an internet forum I came across recently, christened ‘passive fundamentalism.’

 

By the following year in the life of the Rainbow/Oak Dragon camps, however, rain clouds were making themselves apparent.

 

I had become involved with a loose group of esoterically-minded affiliates in London, where the idea was to meet up at most auspicious full moons, in order to bring Peace, Love and Understanding to the world. Yet, the atmosphere was becoming less free and open. Power struggles between members were starting to develop, ideas about the planets and the horoscope and what was a valid form of self-expression and what manifestations of 'conditioning and reflexes' more rigidly prescribed. It began to seem that now, theosophical tenets about who we were as people were to be slavishly applied, with transgressions in belief and outlook to be admonished and corrected, rather than there being the open and free exchange of ideas and insights that had so agreeably impressed me at that first astrological camp. Self-appointed gurus began to emerge, whose job it seemed was to wise all his disciples to the tricks and triggers of 'the inner child.'

 

Charts were being scrutinised in order to clarify to the Unenlightened precisely where the Seeker was supposed to identify themselves, according to the unvarying dictates of the birthchart, in order to discern and discover the One and Only way to Selfhood, and the Inner Child – astrologers may or may not be surprised to know this meant the moon sign - was being increasingly defined as the thing to be overcome within this progress.

 

The promise of radical transformation of self and society there might indeed be, but all too often, this noble impulse all too often does seem to get roadblocked by pettier abuses of power. That, along with a kind of a black-and-white extremism towards 'modern' astrology did seem to be way too much in evidence, along with a zero tolerance for any alternative viewpoints.

 

Strangely, more recently I have seen a similar phenomenon more recently on one astrological internet forum in particular, along with the same curious tendency to over-polarise and for some individuals to band together and join forces against any perceived heresy.  

 

I rather gather that a sadder and wiser Palden Jenkins has wondered about what happens in situations where self-discovery is promoted in ‘alternative’ communities too, if my impressions from what he has written on his website are correct. The Noble Savage, once free of his/her cultural conditioning, does not seem to emerge as full of good will and Love ad Light as might have been hoped: what often does emerge is a lot of power struggles, along with all the vying for top-dog position and the subsequent plotting and scheming and betrayals in attaining this.

 

What this approach to the horoscope and interpretation of sun, moon and stars reminds me of now, in retrospect, is of something I encountered as an undergraduate, when two members of a Moonie-type community started wooing me to join their commune - some kind of a rural smallholding not far from the University.

 

Their women all wore long skirts and headwear, the men all had beards. There was music, partying, food, and the heady sense of being part of something greater, expansive friendliness, combined with criticisms and attacks on lifestyle and outlook on life in the case of outsiders who were being wooed by this group, to join.

 

The heady sense of being part of being something greater than the more narrow worlds of family and commerce is, bye the bye, something that has always been seductive to me – maybe not so much a case of any inner child in this case, but inner groupie. It does seem, however, that where there is the opportunity to satisfy this need, then such an individual is blessed indeed, it seems they even live longer. More recently, I got to teach a family in Budapest who belonged to a Christian group – and in many ways, I envied the solidarity and sense of being something greater that they seemed to enjoy. Yet I felt, without really feeling able to explain to them, that I could never have got on with their fundamentalism. It certainly beats the motivation called here ‘interest’ I have often encountered here, where friends and contacts only seem to be made outside ‘family’ or work, if there is something substantial to be gained personally from nurturing this contact.

 

The trouble is, the desire of a group or ‘something greater’ is something that can be exploited, and there is often a great deal of pressure to conform in these cases - to some kind of 'group think.' This is something that must surely make itself felt in the great, corporate world of multinationals - certainly it does with the imposition of dress codes, for example, an issue I have occasionally had cause to encounter, in my latter career as a sub-contractee teacher whenever visiting some of these establishments.

 

In the former instance, I knew there was no way I could ever have adopted the commune's fundamentalism, nor the highly conformist clothes and mien prescribed for the women there - nor would I ever give in to the heavy-duty manipulation of the group, to get me to join them body and soul: I despised both the sexual conformity and the manipulative Moonie tactics, which also involved, hugs, love-bombing, deep and prolonged eye-contact into the Soul and many searching statements about the state of my heart.

 

This, however, was about a philosophy to I was deeply attached - but here, too, my way of being was not acceptable. In the end, some of these people were after my soul too, if not my body - but all again, all by their standards and definitions, not mine. To me now, all this was, was  a loose-knit variation of fundamentalism, only now it was a question of converting me to their way of looking for the God Within - and being defined purely by these strict criteria. The very part of me that had been so drawn to all these fair visions of a Brave New Age was merely the Inner Child, and that had to go.

 

By the second astrology camp, then, feuds and factions between members were beginning to make themselves felt between the enthusiastically - followed experiential sessions. One of my more disturbing experiences of this particular camp, however, involved the antics of a self-styled Kabbalist, who clearly thought that the one way to the True Self of another had to involve a combination of heavy-duty attempts at seduction along with the guru-tripping already beginning to emerge amongst the bringers of Peace and Love, where love would rule the stars.

 

After some of these experiences, I did wonder whether certain negative experiences at school, where I was the kid that was never really socially accepted, might have had something to do with my continuing with a group of people that seemed all too happy to continue to abuse my poor, simple trust. Either that, or I had read somewhere that the ability to withstand attempts to tread on your corns or push your buttons was all good, sturdy training for the spiritual athlete – either way, this kind of practice was starting very much not to appeal.

 

When verbal attacks started being made on me in relation to my ‘true’ astrological self in order, no doubt to expose my ‘triggers’ on one of my last of these trips to London, it did seem well more than time for me to move on. The conclusion I made after this is that astrology, whilst still absorbing and fascinating to me for some strange reason, will never, truly be really a ‘friend’ - at least, not whenever being used as an ersatz neo-Gnostic religious path.

 

In any case, even without all the angst here about 'inner child' and 'Self,' a more shrill and cynical inner voice – in this case, maybe an inner sceptic or Tory, though I should add that there is no danger now I will ever become a Tory - was certainly starting to make itself felt. This was along the lines that all this navel-gazing surely wasn't a little indulgent, even pathetic? Maybe in the end, all this preoccupation with 'Self' was nothing more than a rather destructive form of 'selfishness' with a small 's' and ultimately, nothing more than a narcissistic escape from the world? (More recently, the post-Jungian Hillman, also seems to be critical of the tendency to want to subordinate the richness of the soul in its diverse elements to an overriding Self on high, also calling this depersonalising and highly reductionist. He definitely did, also seem to feel that too much of an adherence to ‘spirit’ at the expense of soul – including links and connections to the world of community and relatedness, definitely to involve a good deal of self-centred narcissism.).

 

The year afterwards, rather than attending yet another astrology camp where in any case the planets, stars and their meanings by now seemed pretty well done to death anyway, I decided to seek paid work as an Arts and Crafts instructor instead - and initially was, in fact, offered a contract, with a wage, for that one week, with what initially sounded like, well, Real Work.

 

The contract was, however, withdrawn: it was decided  that there were not the funds to support such a venture and in any case, unpaid work might be better for our karma and possibly, their bank balances.

 

Not actually having much to lose, I attended anyway.

 

I got to meet an astrologer who had co-written a book more or less advocating a more ‘feminist’ type of astrology, though to me it only scratched the surface, and Monica Sjöö, an artist who was championing contemporary relevance of the Mother Goddess. Sjöö was infamous for one painting in particular, that she had titled 'God Giving Birth,' 'God' in this respect being very much a strong and androgynous woman.

 

She was a large, statuesque woman with a somewhat deliberate manner, who could no doubt be formidable in most circumstances; she kept her Swedish braids long.

 

Her ideas had first caught my attention whilst I was still a full-time student, where she appeared to be the only person going against the grain of a lot of the esoteric literature I had been coming across, inspired mainly by Alice Bailey's Channelled writings. In the latter case, as it was with the group in London, the full moon was always 'celebrated, too' but this was certainly not in order to celebrate any immanent Divine Feminine, but in fact to move beyond that to the great solar logos on high.

 

This was to be explored further by Monica Sjöö in a critique on New Age thinking I came across years later, though, after having come across some of her pamphlets earlier on, I was already wondering what she was doing at a New Age camp.

 

Monica Sjöö had only recently undergone the much-publicised tragedy of the untimely loss of two of her sons, though over and above that, she did somehow seem spiritually troubled.

 

She gave a talk and demonstration of her artwork and I bought her book of the Goddess, that set out the fruit of hers and Barbara Mor's research, with their thoughts on the matter.

 

A great meeting of minds, however, this was not to be: when I showed her the artwork of a set of Tarot cards I had designed, I was criticised for depicting some figures as being stereotypically blond and blue-eyed, without enough Black characters. In fact, I had included several Black figures throughout among my full 78-deck of cards.

 

I knew that I had really lost her, however, after producing my pride and joy at the time (in 1987), which consisted of my pocket computer. Apparently, she was at one with Michael Shallis there, whom I had also once seen lecture at an astrological conference at Warwick University I happened upon in 1980, as he was heckled by Roger Elliot, the Russell Grant of the time. Apparently, Shallis believed that all computers were 'Ahrimanic' and therefore, somehow Satanic, because their electrical energies fed into negative brainwaves and emotions of the individuals using  them.

 

More recently, I met someone in Budapest who had known Monica better than I did, who told me how 'privileged' he had felt in being able to see her artwork and in being part of her mission to 'Save the Earth.' He was, however, not blind to her more intolerant sides, and told me he could 'hear her voice' when I told him of her objections to my computer and my Tarot cards.'

 

'She was a monster,' he told me.

 

The privilege of genius.

 

This reaction was profoundly dispiriting at the time, not least because of having contracted food poisoning at the camp. I had encountered so much of that rather polarised mindset when still in Leamington Spa, it could be so easy to get blackballed for not fitting in completely on either side of the great Marxist/Mystic divide. And that, only if it was clear that I followed the correctly-prescribed lifestyle, made all the right noises, as prescribed in all faithful details.

 

Possibly, quite a few others had been feeling the effects of the food poisoning too  - the mood there did not seem to be good. The morning camp meetings - or pow-wows - seemed to drag on interminably, with little ever conclusively decided. Jenny, a dark-haired and bespectacled woman, agreed with me that there did seem to be a certain 'hardness' in the attitude towards many things.

 

At least, I had not actually been told my sickness at the camp was my fault and down to negativity, but I certainly remember how angry my travelling companion had become when she was confronted at the gate by Persh, the leader of the co-counselling groups I had attended in Leamington Spa, for not having bought her ticket in advance and for living fecklessly. 

 

‘Are you on the dole?’ my travelling companion was asked. ‘Well then, you certainly could have used your giro to get a ticket before coming here.’

 

Then, as the camp was drawing  to an end, I watched the bespectacled woman get verbally and physically beaten up and her glasses smashed.

 

I read later that apparently the trouble between this woman and certain others at the camp had already been brewing up for some time; on one of the last days I watched her flounce into the eating marquee. I saw her in heated discussion with several others, then I saw her being shouted at, pushed and given a hefty kick, at which point one of the restaurant staff threatened to call the police.

 

Apparently she had been involved in some decision-making with a radical therapy called the Atlanteans, whom I heard singing songs about 'victims' and how these should be dealt with, as some kind of a spiritual parasite. The fact that this woman wore glasses apparently just went to 'show' that she was a victim who deserved all she got. Apparently, she also felt that she had been attacked because if her Jewishness (She could have been right to be concerned at this. A lot of the channelled esotericism referred to most at the time did seem pretty well unapologetically anti-Semitic, if the dark blue books I had seen in the radical/alternative Bookshop were anything to go by.)

 

Whatever the case, I did later on see Persh, as well as several others, huddled in various quarters of the fields and concluded that surely, all this must be involving plenty of constructive negotiation.

 

What I later found out, however, was that the woman who had been attacked then went on to claim in open letters on the internet, and elsewhere, that she was in fact being invited to perceive what had happened to her as her  fault, the result of the negativity and fear she had brought to the camp. It was her inability to 'respect the space' of those who had attacked her and who seemed ready to do so again, as after all we all create our own reality and should therefore claim responsibility for anything bad that happened to us.

 

Along, no doubt, with every other cancer sufferer, internee of ethnic cleansing camp, or anyone ever caught up in a major recession, I daresay.

 

These were the criticisms levied at most New Agers by Monica Sjöö in her book, as her terminally-ill son was seduced by the philosophy of Rebirthers, who claim that most human beings are by right, both rich and immortal. Yet, Monica Sjöö also reminded me of the many 'trots' I had encountered through the 'alternative' bookshop in Leamington Spa, where a big-brother political correctness was already starting to make itself felt. I got to hear of the occasion for example, where one attendee there was castigated by the management  for being in a 'black' mood, because this was racist.

 

By the end of the 80's I certainly felt disabused of any notions that a Better World could be discovered any time soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Hillfields Artists Against The World"

 

 

By the end of the 80's, it was time for a change of scene, and I moved to Coventry. This rather run-down city did not have any of the cosy new-age community of Leamington Spa, though by now I did not regret that one bit.

 

Coventry is a city that frequently goes through boom/bust periods, relying as it does on vulnerable industries, such as the motor car. So the recession had bit hard here, in the late 80’s, with one in five citizens purportedly being clinically depressed; the unemployment figure undoubtedly not far behind this figure.

 

Faults in hasty town planning after the war are now cited as being responsible for also creating alienation and anomie in the city centre environs and beyond: hence, the notorious 80's no1 hit song about Coventry by the Specials' 'Ghost Town.'

 

But I had had enough what had seemed like both the incestuousness and the narrowness of rural/small-town life, though Coventry was scarcely a metropolis. However, there was more the sense that here, most people were not judged quite so much by the criteria of whether or not they were in paid work, and that this was not really the business of other people either.

 

I had looked around for work possibilities in most of the manpower agency shops, but was told that there was ‘virtually nothing’ for my skills and qualifications in Coventry, with the sense that my questions about these things were rather silly questions.

 

Unfortunately, the now newly-christened Employment Service had other ideas, and now I was summoned for my first visit with a Claimant Advisor. This was part of the new restart initiative, though a welfare-rights advice group I visited to ask about this had not as yet even heard of it. They suggested that maybe I had been shopped for doing a little part-time work, which at the time I was. Often, it has since seemed to me that so much time wasting and angst can happen due to getting advice or information that is actively wrong.

 

In addition to a little more part-time work washing up in a kitchen, I had also undertaken chef duties on a shared rota in a peace centre set under the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. The scheme had been set up as part of an initiative between the UK and Germany, as a gesture towards creating a better atmosphere of peace after WW2.

 

Here, it was easier just to get on with things. Making vegetable curries or pastas did not need involve endless meetings or pow-wows that were all show, with the real power struggles going on behind the scenes or in the pub with the Inner Circles afterwards, nor were there quite so many unspoken agendas in the air.

 

It was an anarchic mix of characters, and each year, a new male volunteer from Germany would come to help run this, rather than serve conscription time in the Army.

 

Visitors also included a refugee from Dresden whose jokes maybe (classified as 3-year or 5-year depending on how offensive they were to the authorities) had had him flee to Coventry, where he had championed his own cause against being deported.

 

Later on, I did wonder if it was not his obnoxious character as well as his jokes that helped get him into trouble. Now, I wonder if he ever went back to Germany.

 

Once, when talking about my fears of getting conscripted onto workfare schemes with the advent of the Restart programme, there was a wild and woolly character who gave me some special advice, in the event of being enlisted in a dead-end job by the Restart posse of claimant advisors.

 

‘Feign madness!’ he told me. Your benefit will go up and you will no longer have to sign on,’ surreptitiously handing me some pills on order to achieve the desired effect.

 

 I did not, however, avail myself of them. I had seen enough, by now, of how destructive a process madness can be.

 

The Dresden refugee might have made a beeline for me but for the determined efforts of an ex-welfare worker who just wanted to be my 'friend' though in fact he didn't. He wanted more, although he continued being ‘just good friends' for a significant time afterwards, though in fact I as already involved in a somewhat on-and-off relationship at the time.

 

The Dresden refugee was to meet me one morning in order to arrange some shopping for an event or activity I cannot now remember, but the ex-welfare worker made a very determined point of arriving first unexpectedly, before I had even got up properly. On seeing this, the Dresden refugee then shouted at me, telling me that I could do all the work myself, obviously reading more into the intervention than there was. Hereafter, he was always rude and cutting towards me, even at my own parties where I had invited him. Clearly, not one for giving the benefit of the doubt.

 

The welfare-worker befriender who wanted more had a much younger mate, a Coventry-born Irish would-be poet whom the Claimant Advisors would have loved, as he brazenly announced to us that he had no intention of getting a job. He was on the chef rota, too.

 

Anarchic humour could and did abound in what was called by the German volunteers a 'soup kitchen' - and later got closed down, for having this role only. But whilst it remained open, it was fun.

 

For example, there were mornings when I arrived at the Centre only to find that the statue of the Devil on the new cathedral, which stood next to the ruins of the old - bound at the feet of the victorious St Michael, had had a condom fitted on its rather generous endowment.

 

I did wonder how the perpetrators had managed to climb onto the figure in order to do that.

 

Trips to Birmingham were also pretty frequent, as someone I was seeing regularly at the time had found out about a Green collective called the New University. They had bought a house there and were holding meetings to discuss how to create a more peace-loving, and eco-friendly world.

 

The leader of this group wore rugged short trousers at all times of the year, and most of the people in the house made do without many, more decadent luxuries. Other members included a Pagan woman who once admitted  to me that she too had been put off and alienated  from the astrological scene by the heavily-prescriptive way in which her chart had been interpreted by the Experts. Then, there was another ascetically inclined young man who nevertheless was a quarter-millionaire, but still somewhat ascetically-inclined who I was later told, had written myself and my partner off as fun-loving dilettantes. Later on, he was allegedly spotted in a suit, working for IBM. There was also a radically earnest Anarchist, and who later burnt his record collection, as a gesture against being ‘bought’ by the ‘system.’ Sometimes, it seemed to me that in England, the old conflict between the puritanical Roundheads and decadent Royalist cavaliers was still being played out in the mindset of much of the countercultural scene I encountered.

 

Regular meetings and discussion evenings were held in order to discuss the new policies of the emerging Green movement, so naturally, there was room for ideas such as the concept of the Citizen's Income, though finding ways to scale down and green the inner cities was another hot topic.

 

So, the atmosphere in the earlier days was very congenial though as ever, it seems a more fanatical edge was creeping in.

 

Apparently, other people complained at this venture that if they chose to consume cow's milk with their coffee instead of the more correct Soya milk, for example, then they could encounter some pretty heavy-duty censuring.

 

Many of the people in the house were Quakers and were genuinely idealistic in looking to create a Better World.

 

Eventually, some Anarchist hard-liners moved in and took over. The meetings and lively discussions abated, in favour of endless meetings over the running of an organic café that had been set up in a working-class part of the town. I gather, however, that many of the working class failed to patronise it.

 

In parallel to the New University Project, here were also Pagan meetings afoot to investigate, both in Birmingham and in Coventry. To begin with, the group in Coventry had consisted of a small group where the leader had maybe wanted to set up a Wiccan commune, though other members seemed to be more cerebral in approach: here, at least in the early days, meetings tended to get bogged down in what kinds of orthodoxies to approach.

 

The idea of making an alter to Brigid, or of pathworking with Greek gods felt stubbornly alien to me – however, there was still a sense of enchantment – real magic, that did truly appeal.

 

‘Look at the Moon!’ the Pagan leader once remarked to us, on the occasion of seeing heavily full over the horizon, one balmy Summer evening: ‘Isn’t she beautiful!’

 

So there was less of an emphasis on painstakingly trying to wrench out from the bowels of our ignoble unconscious complexes and compulsions a God, or even, Goddess Within, but rather in perceiving the Divine in the world outside ourselves – this made a nice change. Later on, a second Pagan group formed, of individuals who had a clearer idea of what they wanted to achieve than the earlier group. Some of the earlier meetings were interesting enough, though possibly my background made it difficult for me to wholeheartedly embrace goddesses such as Brigid, that were neither Christian nor neo-Gnostic in any shape for form. There was the opportunity to put on the occasional tarot workshop, as one of the members kindly allowed me work amongst her medley of cats and alters at her home, though there was another who was roundly critical of some of the fairs I occasionally frequented, because of the fact that readings did involve the crossing of the palm with silver.

 

I tried to explain to him that probably many of the psychic readers at these fairs might simply have been hoping eventually to be able to make an honest living out of these services, but he was adamant.

 

‘It is wrong to charge for gifts of the spirit.’

 

I remember that Monica Sjöö was likewise critical of many New Age workers and gurus who charge far more imaginative fees for their healing, life coaching and what-have you than were charged at the psychic fairs I attended but the fact is, my experience of the psychic fairs is that the work, whilst sometimes very rewarding, could only ever have contributed to a modest life indeed.

 

Meanwhile, however, in Birmingham, the main talk of the town was a dark-haired woman who had grown up in a Jehovah’s Witnesses family, and who now seemed to be set on making up for lost opportunities for scandalous notoriety and for some strange reason, other Pagans had turned against her, as somehow brining the Pagan scene into disrepute. The main arbiters of this being, apparently, a self-styled (and male) Council of Elders.

 

Uh-oh, I thought to myself on heating this. Power struggles as usual.

 

Disappointingly too, most Pagan events appeared to be excuses for drinking copious amounts of beer or cider, coupled with an aversion to discussing any really interesting ideas in depth, whilst the notorious lady had accused me of being too donnish at one such event.

 

Meanwhile in Coventry, meetings had started to figure in my life again - long and tedious, with the definite sense that the 'real' decisions were being made behind closed doors. They were, however, attended by the main members of a local artist's group that I also wanted to join.

 

Dave and Adrian came to visit me in my new flat in Douglas House after the meeting in the community centre, in order to view my artworks for themselves.

 

In retrospect, I daresay that my work, though prolific in some ways, was still not as yet that impressive.

 

My creative activities had begun in my first year as an undergraduate, but in literature, not in any fine arts. It consisted of a glorified doodling, covering every square inch of a piece of A4-size paper, with highly intricate pattern-making. There was never any desire to direct the work and I was told that this kind of artistic activity involved a kind of 'psychic automatism.'

 

Whilst it all seemed very deep and meaningful to me, to others the feedback I got from the tutors of a part-time course I attended in the mid-80's was that there was no real validity or merit to what I was doing. My work was called 'decorative' and I was instructed to work from any kind of starting point in the 'real' world.

 

So when Dave and Adrian, the main driving force of the Hillfields Artist's Group, came to see me, there would have been a lot of still pretty well amateurish experiments intermixed with what I now call my 'soul-work,' my more 'decorative' work.

 

Some of these pieces, as a kind of a soul work, seemed to involve an almost Shamanistic process, for want of a better word, though on one occasion, the process once nearly got me into a lot of trouble.

 

Whilst still living in Leamington, I returned home feeling 'stuck,' very depressed, but there was a canvas still there to be worked on, in the corner.

 

I started hurling, grinding and tearing layers of tissues and wallpaper with masses of rich and bloodily red paint, then set the edges of the paper layers alight.....the fire nearly got out of control. But I did not feel stuck or depressed any more. Later on, the flatmates cheered when it was taken away by Jenni, whom I first got to know whilst in Hillfields, but this piece is still very much with Jenni.

 

Later on, I got to work with crystalline glass fragments from busted car windows, wreckage remains from burnt-down cars.

 

I had only recently moved into Hillfields, after being rehoused by the Council, after one of their interviewers had come to see my in my damp bedsit in Earlsdon, Coventry. Who had seemed relatively unsurprised by Dickensian tales of mushrooms growing out of the carpet of the tenant's next-door flat (the subsidence, or whatever it was, along with the rigged electric heaters so smugly denied by what was maybe Coventry's answer to Nicolas Von Hoogstraten, was not apparent when I had first viewed what had appeared to be a far more attractive dwelling than the one I had wanted to get away from whilst still in Leamington Spa. Along with the schemes and scams my landlady had wanted to implicate me in there).

 

The flat was one of a series of brutalist high-rise flats on the edge of the city centre and was then a notorious inner-city estate of decay and vice.

 

In fact, Hillfields was known as a 'frontline' area, where local Rastafarians were determined to make their own stand against the evil empire of Babylon. Helicopters could on occasion later on be seen to be hovering above the flats, in occasional search for miscreants or occasional rioters.

 

My father was 'appalled' when I gave him the news of my pending move there, telling me there was Aids and the threat of rape and even of getting murdered in my bed, my mother disapproving and angry. Although in part there was maybe a little perversity in my decision to take it, that was not all it was about.

 

I had always been fascinated by the way the flats loomed over the city edge anyway, the wing-like contraptions on top of them always looking like some kind of Wellsian Promethean vision of Utopia - though in this case, according to the hype, taken over by the Morlocks, only stuck 'up there,' as a local councillor called it, rather than trapped in any subterranean setting.

 

I regret now that I never photographed the flats at the time, nor depicted them in other ways, when I had had the chance.

 

Actually, what I had associated Hillfields most with, as an undergraduate a few years ago anyway, was a place you went to when you looking for advice; as an undergraduate, I had come across a community centre based there, ready to serve the beleaguered people in the heart of the inner city.

 

All these ministrations were in the interests of building Community, where there was never the question  of ever having to be 'deserving' - it was enough simply to be a human being.

 

But that was then. What I saw now was the flat of my dreams, that I knew would look really good once I could tidy it up and decorate it. I did get a little help from the Council in tidying it up because the last tenant had left it in a bit of a state, and once decorated, it did apparently look good enough to generate a good deal of envy – from the girlfriend of the paradigm-shift focussed male whom I had known in Leamington and who had, apparently, been holding more of a candle to me that I had realised.

 

The quality of light in the flat was superb, there was room in the hall for my artworks, there was constant hot water as opposed to immersion heaters or cheaply-installed showers, and no horrible flatmates or crooked landlords to have to deal with. Later on, I was also given a cat by someone from Walsall involved in the Pagan scene, a small black-and-white part-Burmese, with a kink in the top end of her tail. She was a post-traumatised inner-city cat: she had been rescued after having been thrown down a rubbish chute in a box along with her kittens, by her former owners.

 

And then there were the artists.

 

I had visited the attempt to build Community and Community  Spirit in the midst of besieged Front-line Hillfields the year before, in their answer to London's Notting Hill Carnival - the Hillfields Happening. In the tent, there were artworks of various kinds, along with some highly-accomplished, Dali-esque surrealist paintings, signed by one Dave Patchett. 

 

And now, here he was, along with his ever-faithful side-kick, Adrian Knight.

 

At an earlier meeting, I had seen Dave eyeing me with a sardonic glint, though Adrian, whilst somewhat voluble, did not seem to have quite so much in the way of an edge. Afterwards, when I disclosed an interest in Tarot and Astrology, Dave tutted in what sounded like what could be standard trot exasperation to me.

 

'Ah, so you're a mystic. I knew you were too sensible.'

 

Dave's questions were designed to show me more of an edge, if I were to be allowed to get my hands on any grant money intended for genuinely talented, but impecunious Hillfields Artists.

 

'Have you got any habits?' he asked me.

 

Habits....I sifted through the contents of my blameless soul, looking for possible, untold vices to confess...but could not really find much in the way to confess to. Well, there had been some of my experimenting with psychedelics at various festivals, licit and otherwise, at Glastonbury at Greenham Common, this being edifying on some occasions, scary enough to deter me from making a lifestyle out of it. But now.....

 

True, I enjoyed a good glass of wine too, especially in congenial wine bars with congenial company, but no......as I confessed to Dave and Adrian, I did not much in the way of vices or habits and my life was now pretty boring, really.

 

'You have one vice though,' said Dave, in an accent that belied origins not Coventrian, but rather south of Watford, 'You're a mystic.'

 

Nevertheless, I was now In.

 

Actually, Dave was right to interrogate me in this way - one of our newer Hillfields Artist members who had joined the same Crafts Materials course at the local University I attended, went on to develop a serious problem first with weed and then in the course of time, graduated to be a junkie, whilst what Dave had first described as huge artistic 'ambition' was forgotten about.

 

She lived on the 6th floor of the flat facing the main road, and the quality of light in hers made mine seem like a dungeon in comparison. She chose the block because she had liked the idealism of the name 'Unity House,' whilst acknowledging to we more cynical oldies that she might still have a lot of youthful naivete.

 

Another 'artist' who had received some spending money from the Arts Council grant once came shopping with us in Birmingham, but then made his excuses to return to Coventry before making any purchases. Dave then explained that he had later spotted him making purchases with a local drugs dealer, not far from his block.

 

Later on, there was Ian, who had actually graduated with an arts degree; his work was intricately figurative, like Dave's. It depicted futuristic mechanoid dystopias, and in which he also immortalised me, as an android.

 

A German volunteer at Coventry Cathedral once called most of the people he knew in Coventry socially as 'full-time dreamers.' Dave, however, made me realise that I had been, if not a bit of a full-time dreamer, then certainly a dabbler, as far as my pretensions to being at all creative went.

 

He invited me to join himself and Adrian in his flat some evenings, in order to paint, promising by the bye 'not to make a pass at me, as he already had his dream woman.'

 

And he was as good as his word. Probably, he enjoyed being a bit of a mentor too, as he showed me how to prepare and frame boards for painting, one or two painting techniques, as well as making me an easel for use in my own flat.

 

He used to set himself timesheets and full 8-hour working days, as his satirically intricate fantasies came to life. I had never before encountered anyone displaying that amount of self-discipline and dedication.

 

He had once worked, along with Adrian, as a dustman and as far as the trot label went, he had certainly been a card-carrying member of the Socialist Worker's Party for many years: Lenin was avowedly his hero, though by now, along with Adrian, he had mellowed. He was on the dole.

 

Adrian, when I first met him, however, was still working as a dustman. His artwork was more delicate than Dave's and made more use of patterning - in this respect, his work was closer to mine in style, but his painting could also make good use of light.

 

Dave warned me not to let him distract me too much with his talking, which someone later described as some kind of a 'nervous thing.'

 

He was the kind of person whom I suppose could be described as 'the salt of the earth' - he was the one who tended to be in charge of any record-taking, or being the treasurer, along with other such responsibilities. He was a likeable person to know, but exasperating too - because of that talking.

 

At the time, I do remember speculating from an astrological point of view that maybe he had a 1st House Mercury (conjunct what can be the a notorious blind - but still sensitive point in the sky, the South Node, in fact) as I had known once before a compulsive chatterer, who did have this.

 

Whatever the case, perhaps it is a pity now that more people did not confront him a little more about his inability to communicate two-way a little more, but then it is always easy to look back on past omissions in retrospect.

 

Anyway, his talk when we met in Dave's flat - which was on the 15th Floor in Pioneer House, the tallest block - could occasionally be distracting, but he did once snap that maybe I was critical of his excessive talking.

 

He also confided a little in me - like me, he had had his adventures with 'alternative' living and trying out psychedelic drugs. 'But I had to stop,' he then told me. 'I got a bit depressed. Got into a bit of a state.'

 

I did not repeat this to Dave, as I thought that if they had known each other for 20 years, there could not be that many secrets between them. I did sometimes think that out of the Three Musketeers of the Hillfields group, Adrian was the most vulnerable of us. With Dave, any hassles from the dole would be like water of a duck’s back, I would not be nearly as tough but would fight back anyway, but Adrian.…would simply cave in.

 

Adrian shared a house with the keeper of the main museum of Coventry, a man endowed with a spectacular beard and a house full of Hindu exotica, though later on, he took a flat in what now houses Asylum refugees - Thomas King House.

 

Thomas King House still remains, along with the block, Douglas House, where I used to live, and Dave's block, Pioneer House. The rest however, 7 in all, were demolished, against the wishes of many local residents, to make way for a new site for the City college - designed to usher in a brave new world of Prosperity and gainful employment to the area. The remaining flats have been renovated, though the future of Thomas King House may still be in question and recently, I got to visit someone who had campaigned to stop the demolitions from going ahead - strangely now living on the same floor as Dave.

 

I now live in a block of flats very similar to the one I lived in Coventry. Here, there is no drug-dealing in the lobbies, no rioting – sadly though, no artist community either, though the quality of the light is just as good and the ergonomics and infrastructures of the area better-planned. Hillfields - at least judging by a recent visit - now seems very bleak, the new grey painting-over of the remaining flats emphasising what seemed to me a thoroughly English dampness, even in Summer.

 

Other artists who joined us in exhibitions in Coventry Cathedral and later on, in the Herbert Museum showcase and in environs beyond, included Andrew, who also doodled but unlike me was truly Working Class. Then there was Yvette, who lived in one of the now-defunct blocks, Selina Dix House, though her speciality was choreography.

 

This period was one of the happier times of my life, even though there was always the fear that conscription into punitive Workfare schemes could soon be round the corner. Until the early 90's recession deepened, however, I had been more confident that my entrepreneurial activities and part-time teaching might eventually get me off the dole, on my own terms.

 

A lot of publicity was generated in the local paper for our exhibitions, as well as for my own creative activities, and for the courses I was putting on at Coventry University and at Warwick University.

 

The more upbeat feelings were in part down to the sense of being part of a creative community, and my artistic style was maturing a little more, in comparison to what it had been. The inspiration fed on itself: I occasionally had intensely mystical dreams after taking certain photos, trying out new colour/pattern combinations. In one such, I was given a beautiful Persian white cat, called MoonRay, or something like that, had transmorphed into an unearthly pearlescent and white light of unimaginable beauty, in another, I got caught in a strange storm of pouring fish. One such slid down my neck and then all manner of untranslatable insights flooded my mind.

 

One of the highlights of the beginning of the 90’s and also included a trip to New York, with the friend-who-had-wanted more. Here, I was assured that for artists, it was not a question of the schools you attended, nor ‘who you know,’ but purely the quality of the work itself that mattered. The land of Equality and Liberty.

 

Securing the part-time teaching at the local university was a real fillip, as were the occasionally-more substantial sales of my artworks – some pieces to textile agencies, who regularly visited both New York and Italy, others as simple works of fine art. I realised, though, that textiles were not really what I wanted to do – here, designs had to follow the predicted fashions and follow certain mathematical rules, when I felt that my work came from some kind of deep and more spiritual place from Within (Right from the beginning, I had always felt irritated by those well-meaning people who would look at my work and then declare ‘why don’t you try to use these as scarf designs etc?’) All the same, the money was welcome, though afterwards the agent to whom I was introduced became very unhelpful with my queries, afterwards.

 

Whilst I had decided to keep away from astrological happenings and the manipulatively-cultish people it seemed to attract, I did find that I enjoyed giving astrological and Tarot readings at psychic fairs.

 

That is something that really took off at the beginning of the 90’s. The 10-week astrology courses were proving to be popular, which even meant even signing off for some periods, although this could frequently prove to be more trouble than it was worth. The fairs meant a different venue to work from every weekend, even on some occasions as far-flung as Inverness. I enjoyed the theatre of the work, working on a stall with Tarot cards and pocket computer, with books and forms for setting up charts. The advertising for the punters has already been done by the fair – all the readers have to do is sit back and smile, although there was always the enormous pressure of being ‘spiritual’ whilst covering the costs of the stall, travel expenses and guest house – and it was always possible to make a loss, if the fair organisers did not advertise enough.

 

It is work I might in the right conditions, turn to again. My main problem at the time was that the nebulousness of this kind of work means that the expectations of the customers can be very skewed, and this case its own special difficulties. Most of the punters were not interested in the kind of navel-gazing and introspection so characteristic of ‘modern’ astrology – they wanted to know their future, though I was to find that many clients came as they were experiencing either difficult Saturn transits (meaning Troubles) or outer-planet transits (meaning Traumas). Many were also expecting to find a medium in touch with the Dead, not helped maybe, by the fact that I was working with Tarot too. Certainly, the thing that most people wanted to see was Clairvoyance, which was apparently a whole lot sexier than boring old ‘scientific’ astrology.

 

Later on, as the recession bit, telephone work became more popular, but for some reason this never appealed.

 

At the beginning of 1991, however, there was talk once more of recession. A palmist sent to me to be vetted, told me that I had to stop dreaming and dabbling, forget about Art and make money instead, or I would commit suicide. I was already beginning to fear that I might now be trapped by the situation in the UK, which was getting to be a scary feeling. Therefore, this woman really did succeed in demoralising me. I have since wondered if she had been working as a Claimant Advisor as part of her day job, or maybe she had discovered that an effective way of keeping her punters was by scaring them into paying her more for her services.

 

All I can say to her kind predictions is that I never did give up with my artistic activities, with or without the income question.

 

But to return to the mixed art exhibitions, there was an assortment of different artistic styles, ranging from conventional landscape pictures, which sold, statements about peculiarly female dilemmas to do with fertility and wombs, from Dave's girlfriend which also sold, and my pieces, which did occasionally sell until the new recession came along in 1991, and then didn't. 

 

The star of the show, however, was always Dave, he was the one whose hard work got the breaks, all of which was smugly appreciated, although he also reminded me with all bitterness that whilst sending literally hundreds of applications to galleries, very little emerged there in the form of Breaks.

 

There were few breaks in Coventry either, or interest from any prestigious galleries within the Midlands. It may or may not have been because Dave wanted our Hillfields collective to be a 'working-class' venture. None of us apart from Ian had been to a an art school, it was true. However, it seems that we were all-too easily written off as being either 'illustrative' in the case of Dave, Adrian or Ian were not 'merely decorative' in my case.

 

Dave told me that he had been grilled by a Claimant Advisor and sent to a compulsory workshop designed to 'fix him up' on retraining, which he accepted with more equanimity than I would have done. However, once he showed the workshop leader his paintings, the leader was impressed enough to lay off the pressure - which apparently did not happen a decade or so later, once Blair was in power. Then, he was finally offered a non-negotiable post as hotel porter or guard through the auspices of New Deal, though again, he accepted he post with equanimity, until reaching retirement age.

 

At this point in time, though, there did seem to be something of a Custer's Last Stand mentality in the face of a deteriorating ideological climate, especially when Thatcher got voted in a third time in the beginning of the 90's.

 

Adrian, meanwhile, had left his job as dustman. It is possible that there had been stresses amongst colleagues that we did not know about, but he had hoped to be able to dedicated more time to his Art.

 

The dole, however, had other ideas. Hitherto, the ‘21-hour’ rule, where the unemployed could undertake part-time study, and which I had certainly exploited a great deal, was suddenly withdrawn – and so was Adrian’s benefit claim. Adrian tried to keep cheerful about this new setback, but it was clear that it had rattled him badly.

 

'Hillfields artists against the world,' Dave told me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Mickey Mouse Schemes and the Quest for Breaks

 

 

As full-time dreamers, most of us certainly dreamt of having some kind of a Break, where our work would be catapulted into Fame and Recognition – more modestly, just a few sales. Dave certainly had one, when the frontman of a ‘doom metal’ band, Cathedral, spotted his work and asked Dave to do the artwork for his CD covers. My work, however, just kept on being ignored.

 

There then appeared, however, to be breaks not just for Dave but for myself and others too, when a new gallery owner in Stratford expressed an interest in our group. She was certainly as sweet and nice as pie when I also visited and showed her my work.

 

Could it be we were finally on the map? When I rang her later, though, she was offhand and indifferent.

 

As time went on and little emerged from the promises I kept hearing from Dave about how she intended to feature our work in her gallery, I began to voice warnings to Dave about her plans: 'I think she is too good to be true.'

 

Dave then told me that he had given her all his sales money for his paintings towards this lady's gallery 'as a romantic  gesture.'

 

A few months later, it seems that when he asked for some of the money back, he was told that none of the money was available 'as she had spent it all.' There could be no redress, as being on the dole, Dave was not supposed to be in possession of that amount of money, anyway, although it could maybe have been argued that the expense and labour of producing the work would not have returned much in the way of a profit here.

 

After that Dave changed and, as another friend of the group observed, he 'became nasty.'

 

Our creative matrix of full-time artists, dreamers and performers did attract other kinds of hangers-on, who whilst not being out-and-out opportunists or crooks, could and did certainly promise the moon.

 

There was a lady from Rugby, who had been involved in some kind of mysterious set of occult power struggles whilst also, once living in Leamington. She was, however, genuinely prepared to bring business to the group, also attending the theatre group events. She became a patron of Dave’s work, but even condescended to buy one of my pieces. She was an old goth, just as I was becoming one, who enjoyed visiting cemeteries, and once we visited Highgate Cemetery together. She loved looking at the coffins in the mausoleums.

 

She was a psychiatrist and attended my vampire course – one or two staff at the university seemingly relieved that pastoral help might be at hand for my students, in case my course might prove to be too much for the, in unleashing any Demons from within the dreaded Id. The staff concerned might have been less happy had they known, however, that this good psychiatrist had been organising trips to London with myself and a few others, to a venue of S/M techno nights and revelry, called The Torture Garden.

 

Another was a friend of mine who after finishing the Yoga best-seller using my artwork, had grand-scale plans for the rest of us, where she would act as some  kind of an agent for us. She was devastated, however, when her ideas were picked to pieces by an aggressive  Black ex-community worker from Brixton.

 

Here, it was Dave who raised the red flag.

 

'She is too sensitive,' he warned me. ‘She’ll never do all the things she says she’s going to do.’

 

In fact, she was self-confessedly bi-polar and became too manic to stay on course for anything. Similarly, Ian had found what seemed to be a 'patron' who promised to buy and keep displayed several of his paintings -but that was when he was in an 'up' mood.

 

It was in that mood that I got invited to one of the biggest and most lavish birthday parties I had ever seen, at the beginning of one August. He was a man in his 70’s who behaved as a gracious King in his Camelot, and there did seem to be something almost god-like in his demeanour.

 

I tried to return the favour by inviting him to a party of mine, but he curtly declined: 'Out of the question,' he told me.

 

Ian then told me that the good  gentleman was bi-polar too, and once in a depressive phase, bunged all his precious artworks into a damp cellar, where they all irrevocably warped.

 

Not long after moving into Hillfields, I had also taken up a job, on something then called 'Community Programme,' the second such of its kind, though a friend begged me not to.

 

This new Community Programme scheme, however, had sounded promising. There was the chance that a real enterprise could be developed from the project, in designing educational punch-and-Judy toys for inner-city schools.

 

To begin with, the woman whose brainchild it was, also thought that my work, with what she glowingly called my emerging, distinctive style, could be just what this project required.

 

The friend was right to try to warn me off it, however. The money was little better than what I had been getting on the dole and for this, I was to be cooped up in cold, dark workshop-style premises all day - furthermore, ideas were being copied from books with no regard to copyright whatsoever. For all the dreams of True Enterprise, Mickey Mouse still emerged anew, writ large.

 

I was asked to make the designs for a story-book, so laboured over monochrome line illustrations - only then to be told that I had made a tactical error by mentioning it to another Council employee, meaning that now approval for publication would now have to be sought from everyone of the project, were it ever to see the light of day.

 

After that, I just found the whole thing insufferable - especially, having to deal with other people day after day, ever-amongst other people, whether or not in either office, staff room or workshop premises. The woman whose idea it was got impatient with me, though there had always seemed to me to be a condescending streak to her makeup. Earlier on, for example, she had told me that ‘all you had to do was work hard to get free of silly schemes – though that had not been my experience to date. Too much of what I poured my energy seemed simply to fall onto stony ground. Or so it often felt to me.

 

I left before the contract expired and had my dole docked by half for 3 months, but I just lived on cheap packets of instant pasta in that time.

 

At this time, another volunteer at the International  Centre also asked me to illustrate her own best-seller for children, but after giving her the illustrations, she never contacted me about her book again. Not so much a question of not working hard but being a fool in negotiation I realised. Later, she did tell me that she worked with groups of unemployed who had been forced to attend her restart workshops.

 

Later on in Brighton, I was to hear of similar laments, where the 'job-plan' workshops, mandatory after one year of signing on, were often run by arts workers sympathetic to struggling artists; however, they too, often proved to be big wasters of time.

 

As time went on in Hillfields, other community activities receiving grants sprang up, including a theatre group, in time to be managed by another individual living in the flats and Yvette, the choreographer. We were joined by a professional actor, Alan Wales, and now, my concern lay not with illustrating some of the scripts to go with this, but with writing them.

 

And with acting.

 

As it took up all my evenings and more of my own capacity for rampant ego emerged along with that of others, my taste for this diminished. By this time, the idyllic sense of solidarity I had enjoyed with Dave had gone - now, he more often tended to carp and draw attention to various weaknesses of mine: obviously, the fiasco with the Stratford lady still rankled, but then there were other, easier targets for this misplaced venom closer to hand.

 

A choreographic play on unemployment was the first fruit to emerge from this particular venture, directed by the ever-energetic Yvette, then there were evenings arranged with an assortment of comic skits.

 

The one thing that really did make my day there was being able to get fangs fitted by a dentist in order to play a vampire part - in fact, in addition to teaching an accredited astrology course for one university, I also got to teach a vampire course for the other, at Sidney Stringer school - no need for the City college then, which is now proudly standing where the old flats used to be.

 

We were joined by a lively 30-something lady who seemed determined to have a little 'fun' in what was maybe a certain amount of midlife angst.

 

From the point of view of inventing clever skits full of double entendres and outrageous performances, creativity was again on a roll.

 

The ‘fun,’ however, included this new member having affairs with almost every male in the group, though there was an innocence about it that did not leave me inclined to condemn the woman – in fact, I had liked her and had found her pleasant company. She did not have the edge of a trouble-maker, out to deliberately set members against each other, for example. It seemed that she had had troubles with bouts of depression, though she was down-to-earth and amusing to talk to.

 

It did occur to me that this kind of 'fun' could eventually create a good deal of jealousy and divisions amongst members –and indirectly, over time, it did, particularly in one case, between father and son.

 

It could be easy to say in hindsight that these things - that is our creative community - are unstable by nature and never 'meant' to last. I had often felt restless, but would never have wanted things to move on in quite the way they did.

 

Adrian had succumbed to a deep depression. Facts had come to light about loved ones, and it seems that these truths were beyond his means to accept. He was stoical about it all when he handed me all his responsibilities, including all the treasury funds, and I remember that this bequeathing did raise at least a yellow flag, because a few days later, he jumped off a train. 

 

There is always a tendency to speculate afterwards about the outcome would have been different, had this been said, that done. At the time I thought that maybe just mentioning the Samaritans might have put the idea in his head, to exit in this way.

 

Ian, however, was convinced that it was the way his benefit had been withdrawn after it was known that he had undertaken part-time study, as so many others had done before him without any comeback, that had ‘helped kill him.’

 

Perhaps, everyone I knew at this time in Hillfields had been a full-time dreamer in one way or another, and the trouble with having dreams is that they can lead to a good deal of disillusionment when things don’t quite deliver as originally hoped.

 

Dave left his flat to try his luck in France with his then-new partner from the now-defunct theatre group, Ian had taken a teaching post in Botswana, later to settle in South Korea.

 

Dave then returned to the UK to settle in Brighton and meanwhile the crack dealers had been allowed to have their day in Hillfields, along with some Chav neighbours who had decided that my gothic face did not fit any more. Almost all my friends had now moved on and I had lost my astrology course after the panel had conveniently discovered it was not quorate, by the time they were finally ready to see me.

 

I decided to move to Brighton and Dave's now ex-partner, Jenni, became my flatmate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Beach

 

 

I had repeatedly dreamt of finding myself walking along a beach whilst still living in the Midlands, but in practice, in all the 2 years I was there was in Brighton, I scarcely ever ventured there. The beaches at Brighton are stony. And once ensconced there, as opposed to being on holiday, the expanse of the sea looked more and more like a tantalising view to be glimpsed through the bars of a window in jail.

 

Jenni became a long-term friend, but the problem of sharing a flat after having had one to myself for so long still, frequently made me regret my decision to give up my home in Douglas House so quickly. Toilet rolls were used up as quickly as they were provided and not replaced, the bathroom involved antiquated heating systems and showers again and was all too-often occupied, whilst feuds from less-than friendly flatmates were expressed by piles of washing-up evicted from the sink I had left in, to ‘soak.’

 

What attracted me to begin with, anyway, was still the sea, and that every kind of self-expressively eccentric 'character' could be found on the streets here when in Coventry, such self-expression could just result in a knifing. (Neither were the villages of Warwickshire entirely violence-free, I might add – most small villages and towns had it share of local yokels and Hells-Angels wannabees).

 

It seemed a wonderfully open permissive sort of a place to begin with, a real London-by-the-sea - with two old friends from Hillfields there on the one hand, an old friend now based in Worthing who knew astrology and whose Tarot workshops I had attended in London on the other: best of both worlds. I had Been warned, however, that Brighton could also be highly 'competitive:' it did not take long to find that out. On one occasion, for example, I had advertised a Tarot workshop, only soon to find another advert for the same thing, at the same time and date, was now smugly sitting right next to it.

 

It was lovely to still have my old friends from the Hillfields group around and to be making interesting new friends too, but I had hoped that this would be that much more of a career move, where I would be able to sell the occasional artwork and get to find a corner in which to do psychic work. After four months, from that point of view, I had realised that from that point of view, I had made a huge mistake: if anything, the doors here seemed to be closed even tighter than in Coventry. And by now, because of the inquisitions of Restart with its increasing powers to send claimants on courses on a compulsory basis along the loss of what could have become piecemeal self-employment in Coventry, I now hated being on the dole. I was desperate to get off it.

 

Perhaps, the problems started because Brighton was that much more expensive – with landlords and landladies able to charge ‘unfair’ rents that exceeded even generous Housing Benefit scales and cut further into the pockets of those who were lucky enough to have a home: on every street corner, there was someone aggressively trying to sell Big Issue, the magazine sold by homeless vendors.

 

Everybody, it seemed, wanted to be an artiste, or just talked about it even more than did the full-time dreamers of Coventry, seduced maybe by a laid-back 'hasta-manyana' approach to life engendered, perhaps, by mellow sun and sea, if not sangria, of the beach.

 

The psychic shops, where I had been so confident of finding a spot, proved either to go very quickly by first impressions, or could be very protective of their turf. The resident astrologer of one big shop, for example, blackballed me on the strength of my chart and no doubt, also on the strength of my telling her that I considered white-light esotericism anathema: apparently, she told the management that with my horrendous afflictions  and my lower self having full sway, I would bring ruin and infamy reigning down upon the place.

 

Perversely, her character assassination made my day.

 

Way before moving to Brighton, I had become fatally drawn to all things gothic, and had decided to whole-heartedly adopt both music and cultural style.

 

A promising new avenue of outlets had also opened up, as I started contributing articles and book/music reviews to a fanzine originally given the possibly cheesy title 'Bats and Red Velvet' - its name was later changed to BRV. Even after I had started teaching in Budapest from September 1996, books and CD's  were still regularly appearing in the post for me, like so many Christmas presents, for me to review.

 

I also got the chance to interview authors and bands. The authors I got to interview included Brian Lumley, Storm Constantine and Brian Stableford, the latter of whom I met personally, in his home. He had recently written a superb SF novel that had also crossed over seamlessly with vampires and female gothic - Young Blood. A sort of a gothic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I got the interview published and he also gave another novel of his to take away and read. Kudos to me than, as well as having the opportunity to meet these people, making it all just like Christmas yet again.

 

I wrote for another zine too, Lowlife, which was more discerning than BRV, but the editor sadly died in an accidental OD before this could truly flower. BRV, sadly, fell victim to a computer virus before some of their less well-advised commentary finally moved their hidden enemies into action. They were finally shopped to the taxman for being an undeclared private enterprise, rather than just being 'a hobby.'

 

It seems, however, that I had chosen my subculture with better discernment than I had imagined. One critique on the whole goth zine made the comment that here, shadowy inversion of all kinds was a way of life and applauded the ‘evasiveness’ of the true gothic spirit, where it was not really possible to pin the soul down in the way the astrologers seemed to want to do. The hunter could just as easily become the hunted, the vampire slayer a vampire in turn. Here, there was no crass assumption of an overruling essence under the crud of roles and simulation - gothic, it was declared, at least by the suitably-pretentiously named Richard Davenport Hines, had no time for vacuous hippy preoccupations with either Inner Child or Real Self. Everything was a simulation, a burlesque of reflected masks and roles. Nobody should presume to know the soul of another.

 

All this was now music to my ears. In fact, most goths really weren’t interested in knowing about birthcharts or star signs, though some could certainly be happy to receive a Tarot reading in some instances.

 

Apart from anything else, I wanted to have a little more fun, without any of the 'heaviness' or the power-mongering I had so often encountered amongst either the New Age or Trot circles.

 

As far as other activities and interests went, there was an art gallery with whom I exhibited, I put my work in various cafés, but there were no sales. The gallery owner castigated me for being, as she saw it, overly-concerned with 'money' - but then, she herself was not actually signing on.

 

With Dave, we also half-succeeded in getting a new theatre group together and might have done, but for the destructive behaviour of one new member, who had our director sacked.

 

Bad blood was in the air over treasury policies, afterwards letters of recrimination were sent by the destructive ex-member to Dave, where an intense friendship had briefly flowered. He signed himself 'Jesus,' although afterwards he apparently said that this had only been intended as a joke.

 

As for 'making trouble,' I had joined a campaign against new measures against the unemployed at an unemployed centre.

 

One middle-aged American character at this venue told me he had never worked and promised me a poster with the words from the concentration camps inscribed on his placard : 'Work sets you free.'

 

Ultimately, though, it was disheartening to see how many people were happy to attend the compulsory courses, as opposed to making a stand against them.

 

I had refused to go to one of these compulsory workshops, when asked. I had my benefit docked for two weeks, which did not bother me so much, but had several weeks of rigorous questioning on several occasions when signing on, which did.

 

On one occasion I nearly walked straight into the path of a car going at full throttle, when leaving.

 

The people I first worked with at the Unemployment Centre had seemed fine to me to begin with, one a recent graduate, the other a veteran in campaigns, until meetings started being attended more and more by coldly-bland staring individuals who did not seem to be satisfied with what they saw.

 

As if I didn't already know the type by now.

 

When it was obvious that for this new group of trots, the only way to get brownie points for the noble cause of liberation for the lumpen proletariat was by getting arrested at marches rather than refusing to go on the compulsory government schemes, I lost interest. One member of the group who had constantly twitched at meetings I had attended, went in full on the attack in condemning me at a later meeting for not getting arrested at a demo which, if my memory is accurate, was not even connected to the campaign against the measures of the Jobseeker’s Allowance.

 

By now I was beginning to feel either hopeless apathy in a situation that not only left me feeling totally trapped in a punitive 'move-directly-to-jail' set of moves, or murderous rage fuelled by listening to New Model Army's anthem ,which had as a chorus, 'I believe in getting the b........ds.'

 

To me, the lyrics sounded more as though it was 'killing,' not 'getting' the b.........ds.' Whilst the lunatic ravings of 'violent bloody revolution had been off-putting to say the least from one or two of my earlier encounters from my joyless stint with the radical/alternative bookshop in Leamington Spa: now violent, bloody Che Guevara-type fantasies were becoming more and more intrusive as day-dreams. The trouble was, apart from the new hard-core clique of Trots that had descended upon and more or less taken over, my overwhelming impression was, that these were Different Times indeed from the militant, gory days of the 80's: most people on the street seemed either complacent or irritated with my zeal to promote the cause.

 

'But you can't fight Pluto,' I was cautioned by one such fluffy, astrologically-minded individual.

 

My response was probably better -thought out than my more frustratedly vitriolic ones, where rolling eyes might be among the more charitable responses.

 

'You have Pluto somewhere in your chart,' 'I told him. You have a certain amount of power too.'

 

The guy was probably right, though. Public opinion, with or without Pluto or collective power does seem to be very powerful and manipulation of it a very special skill, perhaps not mine. I did not think that just getting arrested just to make a point or show class solidarity was the right approach and certainly not be instrumental in changing the way most people though about work and leisure. It just seemed clear that most people were unconcerned about the possibility  of compulsory workfare for those claimants unlucky enough not to have a way out of that trap altogether. And by now, I wanted to be out of that trap, and preferably for good.

 

My 'career' as a government artist finally saw the end in sight after I finally managed to successfully complete a certificate in Tesol in 1996, when I accepted my very first post as a ‘proper’ employee at a State school in Budapest, Hungary.

 

In 1999, I returned there, after finding out that there was still very little in the way of paid work for me, with my level of experience and skills, in the UK. A rift developed between myself and my family, perhaps as a result of unvoiced criticism from the past, now vociferously made, though it had never been my intention to look back, however it may have seemed at the time.

 

I became fully, though continuously precariously, officially self-employed at the end of 2000 and then, my main foe amongst the Gnostic Archons, as someone close to me also dubs this more intrusive kind of red tape, was with the Immigration authorities, rather than with the dole. The EU accession in 2004, luckily, changed this to some degree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterward

 

 

Currently, some of my day-job work involves teaching Hungarian doctors and dentists the linguistic skills they need in order to get out of Hungary. The wheels of fortune are forever turning. A while back, I almost landed work from a tender where I might have ended up teaching unemployed people English, on a drop-in basis. I wonder how happy the people I might have ended up being sent might have reacted to me on that basis, had this tender gone ahead.

 

I still do not know what solutions are most likely to work regarding the great question of Work, as far as creating a world where there are more opportunities for enabling saner work/life balances for most people. Neither do I really feel much closer to being able to answer that perennial question, 'what comes first' in creating a Fairer and More Just World:' is it a question of changing the individual first, or society. Possibly, a rhetorical question.

 

For my part, I am glad I did have the opportunity to be able to engage in personal art projects I certainly would not have the stamina to undertake now on top of a demanding day job with anti-social hours, such as the Tarot deck and accompanying booklet I designed. I also wish that less time had been wasted in dead-end projects and false trails and that it had been possible to either have become self-employed or decisively moved on a whole lot sooner than I did. Before getting really ‘burnt’ by it all.

 

It would be nice to think that in time, a system such as Citizen’s Income might be introduced, however limited, that might remove the sting of stigma from signing on. Other times, I do feel that maybe, most people will always need someone to blame for poverty of any kind, and the unemployed do make such a convenient target for the this kind of scapegoating (I believe that Jung called this the projection of the Shadow), when economies and infrastructures go wrong, a depressing need always to go for short-term solutions at the expense of possible, better long-term ones and to be more comfortable in infrastructures apparently designed to limit and curtail freedom – and free time – rather than to enable or to make free. To say nothing of allowing any individual, should at any time they find themselves at some point in their lives in the position of being a claimant, the dignity of being able to make choices of their own free will, rather than being coerced or threatened into something that may be even less of a choice than becoming unemployed in the first place.

 

Once again, should there be another major, global economic crisis, I do wonder how the question of unemployment will be tackled this time round.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labour Of Love: Appendices

 

Challenging The Work Ethic

 

 

Here is a link to Wikipedia’s notes on Max Weber, on his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

 

 

 

Creating A Better World

 

 

This is what Guy Dauncey is up to currently. I do not know if he still makes the proposals for Basic Income I first encountered in the 80’s, however:

http://www.earthfuture.com/publications/default.asp

 

This is Wikipedia’s link to Theodore Rozsak:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roszak_(scholar)

 

And Frithjof Capra, whom I also mentioned in relation to his theories for a closer connection to future vision both ecological and holistic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra

 

Palden Jenkins. His New Ageism makes me cringe now. I thought he did sound a little sadder and wiser after the 80’s, however. Here, you can judge for yourself:

http://www.earthfuture.com/publications/default.asp

 

This site is a tribute to the creative work of Monica Sjöö:

http://www.monicasjoo.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Basic Income

According to Wikipedia, one of the main proposers of the Basic Income Scheme is the French economist and philosopher, André Gorz. Here, here is quoted on the subject, by Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact...

From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work...

Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: 'the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and work-based society is thrown into crisis (Andre Gorz, Critique of economic Reason, Gallile, 1989).

World wide, supporters of a basic income have united in the Basic Income Earth Network. BIEN recognises numerous national advocacy groups, describing one of the benefits of a basic income as having a lower overall cost than that of the current means-tested social welfare benefits. Viable proposals are still being looked into, though it certainly does seem in Namibia that the scheme can be empowering: as noted earlier on in this piece, it seems to have reduced malnutrition, child truancy at school and empowered self-employment.

There are further quotes and arguments in favour of a citizen’s income on the same Wikipedia page, including a list of some of its main supporters worldwide.

Two other writers proposing such ideas include James Meade in his book ’Full Employment Regained? He believes that a return to full employment ’might only be achieved if workers offer their services at a low enough price that the required wage for unskilled labour would be too low to generate a socially desirable distribution of income that the required wage for unskilled labour would be too low and that therefore a citizen's income would be necessary.

Meanwhile in his Robotic Nation essays, Marshall Brain argues that the growing amount of automation in the workplace will eventually displace a large percentage of workers, and that in order to be able to maintain the economy, an annual stipend will be needed. A similar argument was made by Jeremy Ritkin in his book The End of Work.’

 

This is the website for BIEN, the world-wide organisation advocating Basic Income:

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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