a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway

1994

My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.

Posted by don quixote

Friday 8 May 2015

The politics of fear, division and self interest


Middle income England, the demographic that wins elections, don't give a shit.

They've sold their children's future for low taxes, increased house prices, gas guzzling cars, cleansing their neighbourhoods of the poor and young. Fuelled an economy that serves themselves with low paid insecure jobs for the bottom third, while they cling onto child benefits and gleefully cut welfare for others. Build up their pensions and private health insurance while cutting provision the less well off and having the effrontery to complain about how long it takes 'them' to see an NHS doctor. Enjoy the benefits given to them of free state higher education while stealing it from this, and future generations. Enjoyed the housing boom and the unearned accumulated wealth it gave 'them' but has refused to pay tax to build houses for those who can't afford buying or renting. Happy for an economy that no longer makes things but relies heavily on the financial sector, the very people who crashed all western economies and continue to steal our money.

They voted for the politics of self interest, of fear of the 'other', of division and inequality. They're not interested in securing a safe and healthy planet for their children to inherit. They're too busy partying into old age on house bubble wealth expecting the crumbling NHS to prolong their lives.

They voted for the Conservatives, it's in the name, preserve the status quo, conserve your wealth, your privilege and therefore, power.

'And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families' - Margeret Thatcher 1987