C.J. Stone's Blog, page 19

Prediction magazine: Elvis has left the haunted building

Prediction Magazine, October 2003

When people ask me about my belief system, I always say that I am a sceptic. By which I mean: I neither believe nor disbelieve, but rather choose to reserve my judgement on most things.

Take the subject of ghosts, for instance. I’ve never seen one myself, but other people say they have. So I can’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t disbelieve either. I guess it depends on who is telling you the story and what you think they might be getting out of it.

My friend Jude, who lives in Glastonbury, quite often has ghostly experiences. She told me that one day, walking along Chilkwell Street, she was greeted by an old lady on a doorstep.

“Hello,” the old lady said, brightly.

“Hello,” said Jude, and then walked on, not thinking any more about it. It was only later that she heard that the old lady had died the day before she met her.

It’s the sheer mundaneness of the encounter that makes this particular story at least plausible. There’s no histrionics here, no ghoulish ghastliness, just a little old lady hanging around in the world a little longer than is normally expected of dead people, saying hello to any passing person with the extra-sensory equipment to notice her.

You may wonder why she was hanging around. Who knows? Maybe it was a nice day, and she didn’t feel up to the journey just yet. Maybe she liked saying hello to people. (She was probably a nice person in life, why not in death too?) Maybe Charon was on strike, and the heavenly ferry hadn’t arrived. Maybe she was just whiling away the time of day, being far too interested in the local comings and goings to let a little thing like death distract her.

Anyway, she did her small bit of polite domestic haunting for a day or two, and was on her way, never to be seen again.

Continue reading here.

No Home, No Job, No Worries

WHEN HE LOST HIS FLAT, WRITER CJ STONE DECIDED TO GO ON THE ROAD. HOW WILL HE COPE WITH LIFE IN THE SLOW LANE?

Traveller

I’m not a New Age Traveller. For a start, I don’t have dreadlocks. I don’t have nose rings or a baggy jumper. I don’t even have a dog on a piece of string. But I do live in a van.

I can’t say that I made the decision consciously or deliberately. It wasn’t a political statement. I lost my flat at the same time that my car needed its MOT, at the same time that I discovered that I needed a new engine. It would have cost me the best part of a thousand pounds to get it back on the road. I needed a vehicle and somewhere to live. Then I saw the advert: “Converted Ambulance for sale, £1600.” It was just around the corner from my Mom and Dad’s house. I fell in love with it immediately. I bargained him down to £1300, and two days later I was the proud owner of a 2 Litre Ford Transit Disability Transport Vehicle converted into a camper van.

It has a bed and a table and a cooker and a sink and storage space and shelves and curtains and lights. My Mom made the curtains while my Dad fixed the lights. It even has a toilet: a nasty little chemical loo in a wooden cubby hole, which I only use on the rarest of occasions. I soon learned not to travel when there was anything in it. Half a nauseous day washing the stinking blue stains off the walls and floor and door of the toilet space after a ride down a particularly bumpy track was enough to score this lesson on my consciousness forever.

Continue reading here.

Muslim ban is Trump’s “shock event”

The scariest thing I read last week was a Facebook post by Heather Richardson, professor of History at Boston College.

I think it must have gone viral as I saw it a number of times on a number of different people’s timelines over a number of days.

What she said was that the Muslim ban imposed by the Trump administration last week was something she called a “shock event”.

The aim of a shock event isn’t to achieve the stated policy objective – in this case stopping people from Muslim countries from entering the USA – rather it’s purpose is to sow confusion, to create a distraction, allowing the administration to hide its real goal.

What the “real goal” might be she didn’t made clear.

The shock event also divides people along partisan lines. People who voted for Donald Trump will be cheering him on, while the liberal intelligentsia are roused to righteous anger.

As if banning Muslims from entering your country is somehow worse than bombing them in their own countries.

Not that we need any shock events to divide us these days. We seem to be achieving that without any intervention from the President of the United States.

It didn’t start with Brexit or the election of Trump. These things are merely the symptoms of a deep disease within the body politic.

The real sickness is inequality. That’s why people have been voting against the status quo in such large numbers.

Identity politics has failed us. So what if an openly gay man like Peter Mandelson can rise to power and prominence within the British establishment, if he continues to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

So what if we’ve had a black President of the United States, if he’s also bailing out the banks with public money and kowtowing to Wall Street?

People have divided along class lines. It’s overwhelmingly working class people who voted for Trump or for Brexit.

And they’ve voted that way not because they are sexist or racist or homophobic, but as a howl of protest at the ongoing insecurity that globalisation has forced into their lives.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 09 /02/2017

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Dylan’s voice of a generation turned dismissive and lazy

Early Dylan: like he was channelling some old time prophet through his poetry

The other extraordinary news of 2016 was Bob Dylan winning the Nobel prize for literature.

There were audible gasps from the audience when it was announced.

Leonard Cohen said it was “like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”.

Famously Dylan didn’t acknowledge his prize for several weeks, and didn’t attend the ceremony.

He sent Patti Smith instead, who sang “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” She was so nervous she forgot the words and had to stop halfway through.

It was a good choice of song. Dylan at his best, apocalyptic and wild.

In his autobiography Dylan described his writing as “always prolific but never exact.”

It’s obvious he wrote very fast. He was the opposite of Leonard Cohen, for whom writing was more like chiselling each word from hunks of granite.

Dylan’s greatest influence was Woody Guthrie, the man who wrote This Land Is Your Land. Guthrie was an authentic folk hero, a man who lived the life he sang.

Dylan, on the other hand, was a middle class boy from Minnesota, who was just playing at being a folk singer.

Nevertheless there was something extraordinary about him. It was like he was possessed in those early days, like he was channelling some old time prophet through his poetry.

His voice sounded like it had been dug up on an archaeological site: like some rough-hewn artefact from another era.

He hooked onto the radicalism of the folk-revival and became, temporarily, the man who voiced the spirit of those turbulent times.

It didn’t last. Later his words got more vague and his singing got more lazy. He stopped hitting the notes and started drawling around them. His tone took on a derisive snarl and his lyrics became dismissive and cruel.

Is he worthy of the Nobel prize? For his early work, possibly.

And some of his later work too, like Blood on the Tracks, has continued to echo down the years.

But, unlike Cohen, who remained vital to the end, Bob Dylan has long since succumbed to the lure of his wealth and these days seems only interested in making money.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 26 /01/2017

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The Triumph of Propaganda

Christmas celebrations in Aleppo after liberation

So, aside from the celebrity deaths, the big news last year was about fake news.

It was all over the place, in our newspapers, on the TV, on the radio, in the mouths of our politicians and media pundits: everywhere.

The principle claim came from a group calling itself PropOrNot (“propaganda or not”) which published a list of websites it said routinely relied on Russian propaganda.

The report was taken up and repeated by all of the main news outlets.

Unfortunately for them PropOrNot is itself a purveyor of fake news. Not Russian propaganda: American propaganda.

Included amongst the websites it listed as fake news sites were Wikileaks, Truthdig and Antiwar.com.

None of these are fake news sites. They are sites critical of US foreign policy, which is an entirely different thing.

It’s a measure of the triumph of propaganda when all opposition becomes labelled as propaganda.

And, let’s be clear: pretty well all news outlets these days, including those you would normally consider reliable, are infected by the fake news virus.

To take one example: as the Syrian Army was fighting its way into Aleppo in December last year, there was a news report about a massacre that had taken place.

I’m sure you remember it. The figure was very precise: 82 civilians shot. It was all over the media, in the left as well as the right wing press, on the BBC as well as CNN.

Here is an example of one of the headlines, from the Independent: “Pro-government forces slaughter at least 82 civilians while closing in on Syrian city, UN says”.

Trouble is, the UN didn’t say that. What the UN said was that it had received a report about a massacre.

Reporting the report of a report isn’t news, it’s Chinese whispers. It was uncorroborated at the time and, in fact, has never been corroborated.

It is a prime example of what, had it been reported on an opposition website, would have been described as “fake news”.

Instead, it was reported as real news at the time, and then quietly forgotten about when it turned out not to be true.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 19 /01/2017

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People who achieved so much in their short lives

[image error]So we’ve come to that part of the year again, when the Gregorian calendar clicks forward a notch and we say that another year has passed.

Many people died in 2016. About the same number as died the previous year, and who will die again this year no doubt.

Nevertheless it was an extraordinary year for celebrity deaths, starting with David Bowie and Alan Rickman in January, and ending with Debbie Reynolds, the day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher, in December.

Hardly a month has gone by without the announcement of yet another well-known person dying.

You could say that some of them died too young. Prince, who passed away in April, was 58 years old. George Michael and Caroline Aherne were only 53.

But who’s to say really? These people achieved more in their short lives than many of us can even dream of.

A number of friends also died this year, amongst them Richard Stainton, who campaigned for the peace bench in memory of Brian Haw. The bench will serve as a memorial to Richard too I feel.

Also Robert McDonald, who was a flat mate of mine for a while. Both will be remembered with undying affection by all of those whose paths they crossed.

So in the light of all this evidence of our mortality, and as a reminder that we are all only passing through this world, let me end with a few new year wishes.

May you find your heart’s calling in this complex web of life.

May your thoughts be ever searching and your actions always true.

May you find joy in the companionship of your friends and family, and may you be deserving of their respect.

May you be bold when boldness is called for, but cautious for the truth.

May you be astute enough to ask the right questions, and attentive enough to hear the answers when they are given.

And finally: may you find the love you are seeking, not only the love that is given to you, but the love that you can give.

A happy new year to all my readers.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 05 /01/2017

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Politics and Spirituality

“a young adult in the 70s”

Revolutionary times

So first of all I thought I’d tell you a little about myself:

I was born in 1953, in Birmingham in the UK, from a typical working class family. My Dad was an electrician, my Mum a hairdresser. Dad was in the Navy when I was born, so I saw very little of him in my early life, although we did go to Malta when I was about 3 or 4 years old, from which I retain certain vivid memories.

So I grew up in that post-war consensus, which saw living standards rise and continue to rise for three decades or more.

I was a child in the fifties, a teenager in the 60s, and a young adult in the 70s.

Read more here.

I believe in Father Christmas, not Santa Claus

[image error]Greg Lake, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, became the latest celebrity musician to die in 2016, joining such luminaries as David Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen.

Greg was probably most famous for his Christmas song, I Believe in Father Christmas. It’s one of the songs that gets reeled out every December as part of the Christmas play list.

Actually, as Christmas songs go, it’s not at all bad. There’s a bitter-sweet quality to it and a quiet note of protest at the rank commercialism of the modern Christmas experience. The final words are “Hallelujah, Noel, be it heaven or hell, the Christmas we get we deserve.”

“What we deserve” these past few years appears to be a dose of slick sickliness, in the form of the seasonal adverts from the transnational corporations.

Take that Coca Cola advert, for example. It has every Christmas cliché in succession: a snow-lit scene, a heavenly choir, sleigh bells ringing, and a little boy generously distributing bottles of Coke to a variety of hard working people, including, at the end, to Santa Claus himself.

Yeuch! God save us from a Coca-Cola Christmas. God save us from Santa Claus. We all know he’s really called Father Christmas, that he’s skinny, not fat, and that he doesn’t always wear red.

Christmas is actually a very ancient festival indeed. It pre-dates both Coca-Cola and Christianity by several thousand years. It is attached to the solstice, the shortest day, when the light is at its weakest, and the world is at its most inhospitable.

Both Stonehenge in Wiltshire and Newgrange in Ireland are oriented towards the Winter Solstice, and there is clear evidence of huge fires and feasts being held at this time of year.

It was celebrated by the Romans as the Saturnalia, and by the Vikings as Yule, and it represents that moment when the days are growing longer, and the light begins to return.

The Christian idea of a new born child who is the light of the world is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the ancient festival. The idea of fizzy drinks is not.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 22 /12/2016

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Is this really the way to run a railway?

Whitstable station: the ticket machine is left of centre

I went up to London last week to visit some friends.

I was planning to catch the 10.38 to London Victoria. Only when I got there, with ten minutes to spare, the ticket office had just closed.

Why would they close the ticket office ten minutes before a train was due to arrive? It’s a busy train, being one of the early off-peak services that retired people use.

What’s worse, the ticket machine outside was out of order. There was a queue, with a young woman in the front, trying to pick up tickets she had bought online.

She was stabbing at the screen with her finger and cursing under her breath.

Someone else left the queue and went to bang on the window of the office, trying to get their attention.

Just then a consignment of boxes arrived, and the couriers were trying to get into the office as well. They were knocking on the door as the customer was rapping on the window.

Eventually the office opened, with barely a minute to spare. More people had turned up hoping to catch the train, and a large queue formed instantly.

There was a general air of angry frustration in the waiting room. People were laughing just a little bit too loudly, as if they were about to break into hysterics.

Most people managed to get their tickets, fortunately, and those that didn’t would have bought their tickets on the train, so nobody got hurt.

Even so, is this really the way to run a railway?

It’s all to do with privatisation. The way to increase profits is to squeeze down on staff costs. Less people doing more work means more income for the shareholders.

The big con, of course, is that when the rail system was privatised, we were promised that rail subsidies would cease.

In fact the opposite has happened. The rail system now costs the tax payer much more than it ever did when it was publicly owned.

Such are the joys of neoliberal economics. Less pleasure, more profit, and an end to civilisation as we know it.

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From The Whitstable Gazette, 08/12 /2016

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The Native Oysters Band at the Whitstable Labour Club

The Native Oysters Band playing at the Labour Club 2nd Dec 2016

What a wonderful gig at the Labour Club last night, featuring the inimitable Nigel Hobbins, and the revelatory Native Oysters Band, in aid of the Oval Campaign.

Nigel was brilliant as always, doing a poignant rendition of his Garden of England song, amongst others. These lines seemed particularly apt given the cause this evening: “For this is the Garden of England and it’s worth fighting for.”

The Native Oysters Band are a kind of funked up Brass Band, playing an extraordinary mixture of New Orleans jazz, soul, funk and classics, with a great singer and trumpet player, two psychedelic sax players, a cool, laid back drummer, a keyboard player who stepped in at the last minute, and still managed to sound spot on, and the most wonderful tuba playing I’ve ever heard. Well I say “tuba” but I had to ask what it was. Actually it was a helicon, which is a type of tuba made for marching bands. You would normally associate the tuba with oompah pah music, but this was ultra groovy. It sounded more like some funky fretless bass on a jazz bender than anything you would hear in a German beer hall.

They looked great too, with their sailor’s caps with gold leaf designs on the peaks, with all the brass instruments, and with that great gleaming tuba in the background catching the light: it was like a golden glow lighting up the stage.

Lots of people got up to dance: except yours truly, who ran off into the bar when Julie Wassmer tried to get me onto the dance floor. You don’t want to see me dance Julie. It’s like Pinocchio on acid.

All of the musicians gave their time for free in order to aid the Oval Campaign, and Whitstable Society stalwart Graham Cox gave a great speech about the politics of the campaign.

This is not just a Whitstable issue: it’s a national issue. It’s about what a council can and can’t do with public land. If Canterbury City Council get away with selling off the Oval to the developers at a knock down price, then the same thing could happen in the rest of the country. This is a last stand for public land.

The Judicial Review takes place on the 13th, 14th and 15th of December and Whitstable people are encouraged to go along to show your support.

Funding for this vital case is still ongoing. If you wish to make a donation please go to: https://www.crowdjustice.org/case/judicial-review-october/