opposites to consider

The bunker - world wide network of friends

Nuclear tourism - running a beautiful river

Trolling - practical and spirited encouragement

Envy of the wealthy - understanding the moment

Correcting others - getting benefit from a drone's eye view of human foibles

micro-capitalism

My use of this term means the human and small scale and fun side of trading, buying, making and selling without a bureaucratic superstructure designed to suck the life-force out of you.

Any company- which means ANY big company using subscriptions as a revenue generator- which makes it hard to change or leave is using bureaucracy as a weapon against the human race! Companies that create layers of complication to diddle us are immoral. So it is no surprise that once you've been duffed up by such a company you hate the whole thing. And because the word 'capitalism' is bandied about with about as much care as the word 'democracy' you end up wondering what label you want to take a breather under.

Reject bureaucratic capitalism- by which I mean cease working for such entities unless you have an escape plan- and embrace micro-capitalism. 

modern life is boring

Boredom is not a subject that has been studied very successfully. There are thousands of books on power and violence and sexual problems and depression and anxiety but hardly any on boredom. Philosophers have given it a cold shoulder. Foucoult never wrote Boredom and Civilisation, Heidegger didn’t pen Boredom and Time and Sartre may have written Nausea but he didn’t write ‘Bored shitless’. 

Yet as a dad you know one thing is going to come, sooner rather than later: “I’M BORED.” What is the thing you get to hear from teenagers during a TV voxpop on any town, city or village: “It’s fucking boring here.” As a child my sister had a French exchange and her new pal knew no English. But she had a dictionary. One of the first things she did was to rustle through it and point to a word: BORED. Which she pronounced Bore-red. After a few days she had learned to say “I am bor-red. I am the very bor-red.” 

Boredom is when the world lets you down. Depression is when you let the world down. Philip Larkin so truthfully wrote: first boredom, then fear. Many commentators, like former laureate Andrew Motion, misunderstand this notion of boredom- surely you’re frightened of life first and then it gets boring? But this is normal, regular, healthy boredom not the deep existential boredom that Larkin knows, that kids, whether in a delightful home counties village or an innercity housing estate know. Existential boredom is the great killer, the destroyer of decades of young life. It is the corrosive poison of our times and has nothing to do with being ‘a bit bored with that now’ as we speak of a lack of interest in Miles Davis or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Normal boredom happens when you are no longer challenged, the job is too easy. Existential boredom happens when the whole wold ceases to engage you. The cogs are slipping and quite obviously it is the prelude to depression- or anxiety- as Larkin wrote.

My sisters used to say towards the end of the summer holidays that they were bored and looking forwards to school. Being a contrarian I set myself against every commonly held view. I knew from encounters at school and through TV that kids were ‘supposed’ to find ordinary life boring so I was determined never to be bored. It was decision rather than anything based on observation or experience. And yet once I had made it (I also made a decision never to say ‘I’m tired’ even if I was) I found I never was bored- even at school, where watching the clock was the norm, I never associated this with boredom. I set my problem solving mind to solving the problem of what to do next and inadvertently created the space need for natural interest to take over.

You see we’ve got it all wrong. Life is fundamentally replete with things that are very very interesting. We don’t need to DO anything. Just make a big enough empty space to let those interests speak to us. But once we assume life is fundamentally boring then we never give ourselves that kind of space. We think as parents we have to do stuff, fill the screaming void of our children’s lives with activities and fun stuff and when that fails TV and video games because we pessimistically assume (in our actions if not our words) that life is intrinsically boring and must be jazzed up. One wealthy friend who had kids before I did, remarked wryly that his old sock and an empty cigarette pack were his son’s favourite toys- not the hundreds of pounds worth of plastic gimcrackery given by friends and family. The child knew.

When you covertly or overtly think life is basically boring and only by a constant effort at entertainment can you avoid being engulfed, your kids pick it up. But the killer thing is: they’re right.

I, and the other unbored contrarians, working hard to never be bored were wrong in the way that the alienated and disgruntled always are. In some senses the majority are always right- what I mean is- modern life isboring. But that does not mean every form of living is. The ‘normal person’ is both wedded to modern life but is fundamentally trapped by the idea that this life is the only way of life possible. Usually it is fear backed- they imagine that prehistoric man lived a life nasty brutish and short. (Which widespread research into hunter gatherer and pre-industrial tribes proves completely false.) But even so, just a look at other people around the globe who use some modern medicine and conveniences but don’t live as we do in the industrialised developed world. Using modern tools doesn’t preclude a different way of living, a different set of values to the forty hour week hump and die formula that the lousy modern world boils down to.

Modern life is boring. Face that one first.

be an average dad

Be perfect? Forget that. Be average. One of the most useful and also enjoyable things I’ve ever done is go on two theatrical improvisation courses taught by the genius Keith Johnston. Keith originated much of the impro games used in theatre around the world. He’s an innovator and an impro director who is the best teacher I have ever had the good fortune to study under. Sadly Keith is over eighty now and has stopped teaching but youtube and his two books offer some insight into his talents. Anyway, the first thing you learn with Keith when you go on stage is that ‘trying’ is a waste of time. You’ve been trying your hardest, doing your best all your life and where has that got you? Instead of wishing actors luck or suggesting they do their best Keith tells you, “Be Average.”  

I tried for years to be a perfect dad. Tried and failed and felt bad about it. Then one day I realised it was OK to be an average dad. Failing to be perfect did not make me a bad dad, just average, or, less than average. Because the very act of trying to be perfect and failing (which you always will) actually stimulates a worse performance then aiming to be average. The perfect dad mindset is the problem. It puts the child first, at the centre of the family. But no child wants that- whatever the squawking and squealing that suggests the contrary. All children want to be part of the ordered environment that is a happy family. Like the dog that wants to be master but is flummoxed and snappy when he is allowed to be, children may seek to be the centre of attention but they don’t know what to do when they are- except play up and annoy you.

The first and most revolutionary thing an average dad has done is realise that dadding is a skill, and not a very advanced one. But it has to be done right and in the lousy modern world there are all kinds of popular ideas that get in the way of this. But by calling oneself average you take the first step to leaving behind the vicious uselessness of a child centred world. You have moved towards a world where the child has to fit in with your life, not the other way round. Does that sound extreme? Good.

teaching your own kids

Teaching your child to become an adult seems like something you’d need qualifications for, and in truth, the happiest children in this troubled age (troubled with regard to parenting that is) that I have observed have been the children of teachers or people who work with children. These ‘professional parents’ aren’t operating on a long ago memory of what theirparents said and did. They don’t idolise childhood. It’s a job, they know how to get it done. Both my parents were teachers (before changing to other work) and they knew what to do.

Be consistent. Be a team. Show a united front. Decide on the kind of home you want to live in, and make it everyone’s responsibility to keep it that way. Set chores and police them. You can watch an episode or two of Supernanny and get the idea quite quickly. But sticking to it…

We hardly know what it is ‘to teach’. Does it mean telling someone off? Always correcting them? Setting a silent example (dedicated dad who drives you everywhere, doormat mum who clears up after everyone?) or does it mean letting them ‘find their own way’? We have such negative experiences of school we tend to lose sight of how we really learn. And even when we know we assume that others will just ‘pick it up’. Well some do, like those with a natural talent at sport, just watching it done is enough for them. One child I know learnt how to do perfect cartwheels and flips from simply watching an animated character in a video game. But others need remedial help, they need help in removing the blocks that are stopping them from seeing what is really going on. They need help in getting into ‘the learning zone’. 

The learning zone is when we are open and transparent and eager to absorb anything that looks like it might help, might get us closer to mastering something. It is the holy grail of all teachers to try and inspire this- but in an unruly class of thirty kids where being cool is a higher priority than anything else, the task is not easy. We encourage our kids in their sports and hobbies hoping they will pick up this crucial meta-skill, know how to learn, how to teach themselves something. And somehow, as an average dad this is one thing my children have managed to acquire. Genetic? Taught? All I can say is that I over encouraged the slightest interest they showed in anything I approved of to the point that they would give it up very quickly. It seemed I had failed again. But then, as they edged into being teens, they began to surprise me. And the places where they did show persistence and a desire to learn were all areas I didn’t really value. With Dill it was her endless and meticulous copying and drawing. With Al it was his obsession with street football tricks. It is almost despitemy efforts, or so it seems.

Over eager, over keen, wanting it NOW I had forgotten that beinginterestedis a normal part of being human. It doesn’t need encouragement or discouragement such much as time and space. And this is one thing the lousy modern world is very good at taking away. It is the era par excellence in which there is never enough of either. 

And don’t think sending your kids to an expensive school will solve all your problems. The pressure to fill every minute is perhaps even greater at a school with high ambitions and higher fees. Instead our children need long days of non-toxic time and acres of free space.

Serfs

Four years of wandering fields and making cycle rides gradually getting further from home but never making an expedition. Camping in back gardens or at a campsite but never going hiking, backpacking, carrying all your gear and heading out into the wilderness. Now I was in the scouts the twelve mile hike was a requirement and for me one of the best things about being a scout. Trinder and Dorn were to be my companions. Trinder was the only boy in our troop who went to private school- he was a ‘Royce’s boy’ as the local Independent school was known- and though he had a slight superiority of manner he was liked and accepted by everyone. He told me his ambition was to become a skin doctor so that he could cure his father of the skin disease he had. He said this with a certain fervour which impressed me and yet at the same time I knew there something hopeless about such dreams. Life did not work out like that. Dorn was from the opposite end of the social scale. He was an oik alright, a real local, a boy who could catch snakes and tickle trout; he spoke in short inarticulate observations but he was sharp. His kind of lad I knew from my own comp and it was very unusual for them to become something as lower middleclass and naff seeming as a boyscout but I suspect that Dorn’s dad had been a scout and like mine had passed on a love for that organisation. Dorn showed me a gruff tolerance; that I went to a similar kind of school to him meant I could not be a snob. With Trinder it might be different. Behind his back references to Royce’s poofs were made constantly. Despite the large size and manly bearing of the Independent school’s Rugby team, all privately educated boys were considered effete and quite probably homosexual. The generalisation always stands despite individual cases that proved the opposite.

So Trinder led the way and me and Dorn followed though it was Dorn who got us water from one farmer and even some milk for our porridge from another. We walked four miles one evening along the Ridgeway and eight miles the next morning to Goring Gap where Trinder’s dad picked us up.

And so it seemed most extraordinary that Trinder should eventually be beaten up by Dorn among others for putting a safety pin in his ear and telling everyone he had taken acid when we had it on good authority that he had been palmed off with an aspirin and his trip has been nothing more than stumbling around in the rain for four hours in soaking jeans and a tee shirt. Trinder turned up seemingly stoned to a scout meeting when he was fifteen though we all suspected he was putting it on. Then the older scouts and patrol leaders of which I was one by then lured him to a hut while on a winter camp and beat the shit out of him. I would have been there but for some reason I missed that camp and often think what I would have done if the group had decided to pick on Trinder who I still quite liked and even if I didn’t the obvious cowardly nature of the attack appalled me. What had Trinder done to deserve such rejection? I think it was simply some kind of cumulative resentment against his privileged background, which was made much worse, brought into focus by his embracing of punk culture. Punk music at my very ordinary comp was for middle class kids, arty types. Hard kids, people who came from council estates and caravan parks, liked northern soul or nothing at all. Was it the fact of Trinder pretending to be ‘out of it’ and therefore trying too hard to be cool? Was it Trinder’s attempt to gain acceptance in a duplicitous manner and double the perceived already injustice of him having higher social status owing to being a Royce’s boy? I think that was it. The messing with the natural system, the age old feudal hierarchy of serfs and gentlemen and I think it was Dorn who got him to come to the hut where they were all waiting for ‘the meeting’ that resulted in his beating. Dorn- the only genuine serf among us if by that I mean someone with the same knowledge of the land as someone from a thousand or more years before. Trinder never returned to the scout group after that.

Exploring

The job of an explorer, a real explorer is to go into a country where the locals only have silly long names or stupid to the point words like ‘river’ for river and ‘sea’ for sea and give them lovely nostalgia inducing names usually those of old world places or names of their relatives or their kings and benefactors back in smokey old London or other places of where dreams and teeming desires are brought to the boil by sheer pressure of population numbers, impacting on the city, compressing the ideas of everyone into something that becomes real and solid on another continent half a world away.

When I was six we moved to the country to a wonderful house with an orchard and stream running down one side and willow trees that had once been pollarded but had now long shot their crown with great high fat fingers of branch stems reaching skyward and swaying in the wind. (The symbol of pollarding may be something important as oddly enough my father had lived his teenage years in a house in Croydon on Pollard’s hill.) These willows had been pollarded for basket making perhaps fifty years earlier, anyway that orchard was a great place and beyond it were fields of wheat and some barley that stretched away for miles. There was track you could follow along a stream that lead to a sewage farm and a pond with a beach we played on but we never got to the end of the track for years it seemed as it was too long then one day, on a holiday I decided to ‘go on an expedition’ and see what was at the end of the track and beyond. I had by then- I was maybe eight- learned how to read an ordnance survey map- kind of- and using my dad’s map and taking my notebook and magnifying glass all in the army surplus gas mask case that I treasured I set off to on my first expedition.

I went across the fields when I came back and my shins were all scratched from the cut stalks of corn in the fields. But going out I stuck at first to the track which was a dry rutted tractor track that lead past the sewage farm that mostly entirely unmanned. It had a chainlink fence we sometimes climbed and once I got one of the ‘shit stones’ from the bed being watered by the sprinklers but then I threw it away. I went on along the empty track past the empty sewage farm and empty fields of just cut corn. The fields had been burned only a few days before and they were black and burned but the stalks still stood up. When they burned the leftover straw in the fields it was very exciting and the roiling black smoke and encroaching lines of fire made us scared but also pleased that we were in the midst of real farming and understood it. 

The fields were empty and there were empty drums of pesticide and fertiliser at every gate entrance. The streams were all dead and you never saw even a stickleback or a newt or frogspawn. I didn’t see a frog until I visited my cousins who lived in surburbia, far from any farm. One stream was called the ‘polio stream’ because people still remembered the polio outbreak in the 1950s and how it could be spread by bad water. The polio stream had slow muddy water in lazy shit coloured swirls that hardly moved and made it hard to tell what was water and what was the bottom of the stream. We were careful to stay out of the water and only fell in a few times.

I was going along the track and checking the OS one inch map that I used all the time, or looked at all the time and though I knew the signs for Church and train station and other such things easily learnt from the key at the side I was not good at guessing how far I had come from looking at the map and I was also almost unable to orient myself in a landscape using the map. But still I loved and cherished the OS map with its beautiful colouration, contour lines as fine as banknote illustration and precise coded secrets of the landscape. I also loved my compass which was a small brass compass about the size of a watch and good for little except finding out where north was.

I realise now that the game of exploration, the game of travel started then, along that track and then further past the huge abandoned quarry which I just stumbled upon (the faint markings on the map I had missed altogether, did not realise I had come that far till I got home and used a thread to measure my distance gone- almost the best bit of any walk). A couple of seagulls wheeled above the quarry and it felt as if I had come a huge way, perhaps near to the sea even though we lived about as far from the sea as you can get in England. The promise of seeing the sea over the next hill was one the most powerful feelings generated by any holiday we went on. The sea, the sea- more than simply a place to play with boats and floats it was the way wilderness could enter our unexciting lives. Apart from the imagined wilderness and pockets of overlooked undergrowth between fields and marked out woodland this was the only wilderness I knew then.

By acting as if I was an explorer, making notes in my small notebook with a wire spiral so I had to be careful not to detach the pages, I became an explorer. Following the instinct of children I gave my own names to places. Past a wood of wheeling birds and discarded 12 bore cartridges I named it Pigeon Poacher’s wood. The old quarry was simply that, the word quarry was charged enough. At the end of my wanderings that day, when the track frittered away to nothing but  large field scored with the arrowed prints of tractor tyres, I clambered under a barbed wire strand and jumped a ditch to find myself on an island about 100 square metres with a single willow tree low enough to sit on an outstretched branch. The island was formed by two streams, diverted with ditches going off but leaving a central half wooded wild patch of land. Big enough to stand or sit upon or light a fire. I called this place Compass Island.

The naming of places I had no doubt assimilated from Arthur Ransome, who makes it an explicit part of his books. Dick and Dorothea are somewhat reluctantly accepted by the Swallows and the Amazons because of willingness to invent names that weren’t too bad. Dick was the silent egghead professor figure of the later books and I idolised him, especially when, despite the handicap of specks and wimpy physique (compared to the literally Amazonian Nancy and the butch maturity of John) he performed some heroic act of endurance. Early on, owing to an inability to run more than a few yards without getting wheezy, I switched my attentions to acts of toughness and survival rather than athletic prowess.

Returning over the fields as the sun was setting I had been out for hours. In long corduroy shorts my shins scratched from the stalks of corn I strode through I looked forward to the ritual of checking the distance walked with a piece of cotton thread, drawing my own map in my notebook, writing up my ‘notes’. The act of walking and looking for strange islands locked in the farmed and regulated world. And then naming them with my own lexicon of names the ones that just came to me, there was no thinking about it. The right name always appears when you need it.