C.J. Stone's Blog, page 25

Death of a friend is reminder to value life

I’ve just heard that a close friend of mine, an ex-flatmate, has died.

It came as a complete shock. He was very young: not a lot older than 50 I would have thought.

I knew he was ill. We’d spoken on the phone about it. He told me he had stage four cancer and I asked what the prognosis was. He was due to go into hospital for an operation, he told me, and then they would commence with chemotherapy. His voice sounded serious but determined. He hoped he would be able to overcome the disease.

That was not much more than a month ago. Obviously things must have changed drastically in the meantime.

One of the customers on my round, a mutual friend, asked me if I’d heard the news? I said I had.

Now I think about it, the look on her face was telling me it was much more serious than I understood.

He must already have been in the hospice by then.

He lived with me for about two years. He’d been in the army and was the tidiest flatmate I have ever shared with. He had a cleaning business and would scour the kitchen and bathroom once a week in an intense burst of activity.

I never had to do any cleaning while he was sharing with me. I should have been paying him, rather than the other way round.

He was a genuinely kind person. He thought about you.

He was considerate, in more than just a polite way. He took time to really consider who you were.

He was around during the time my mum was dying, and was a great help and a supportive friend.

After he moved out he left some furniture and a cactus plant, and I moved into the room he had vacated. It’s almost as if I’m living in his room now.

What more can I say? I don’t intend to mourn. Every time another person dies I’m reminded how precious this life is.

Our duty to the dead is to go on living, with all the joy and fervency we can muster.

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Sick people being targeted by the law

John Ehrlichman, Watergate co-conspirator

So – remind me again – why is heroin illegal? Is it really the terrible drug it is made out to be?

Surprisingly, aside from its fearsome addictiveness, it is a relatively benign drug.

A heroin addict can live to a ripe old age, without any damage to their body whatsoever. You can’t say that about alcohol.

However, certain conditions have to be met for that to be true. Those conditions are: a clean and secure supply, clean needles, regulated strength.

What kills a heroin addict is its illegality. It is shared needles, adulterated product, uncertain strength.

It is allowing the drug to be sold and administered by criminal gangs whose only purpose is to amass vast profits on the backs of other people’s weaknesses.

There is a story in this month’s Harper’s Magazine, about John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, and close aide to Richard Nixon.

It was Richard Nixon who started the War on Drugs.

Ehrlichman said that the Nixon Whitehouse in 1968 had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.

He said, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

So there you go. The War on Drugs was a cynical conspiracy started by a criminal administration in order to block opposition to the Vietnam War, and it was based on lies.

With that kind of provenance it seems strange that the basic structures are still in place. Sick people being targeted by the law.

Heroin addiction should be seen as a medical disorder, not a criminal one. We should have compassion for those who are caught in its fierce grip.

They should be allowed to live in dignity, rather than criminalising them and risking their lives by handing them over to the exploitation of gangsters.

CJ Stone in the Independent

Mary and Eddy Stone at home in Birmingham

My first article in the Independent appeared in the Saturday Magazine, on Saturday 22nd March 1997.

It was the first of a series a columns collectively entitled “Going Home“, about my return to my home city, Birmingham, in early 1997.

The story is called “Back to Brummagem“, Brummagem being the local name for the city.

It’s not, as it sounds, just a nickname. The name “Brom” or “Brum” appears as a prefix for a number of places in the area: West Bromwich and Bromsgrove, to name but two. So Brummagem is probably the original name, and “Birmingham” the tarted up version.

People from Birmingham call themselves “Brummies.”

The reason I was going back there was that I was in need of a place to stay, having lost my council flat in Whitstable.

It was the Whitstable flat that was the setting for my previous collection of columns in the Guardian, Housing Benefit Hill.

After I was forced to move out of there, I lost both my home, and my source of income.

Housing Benefit Hill was a very successful and durable column, lasting from September 1993 to September 1996. That was followed by CJ Stone’s Britain, which I was still writing at this point, but it was nowhere near as popular or so enjoyable to write as Housing Benefit Hill. Quite soon it petered out, and that was the end of my relationship with the Guardian.

At the time of these columns, however, things were going very well for me. I had columns in the Big Issue, Mixmag and the Guardian, as well as in the Independent.

You can read all of my Independent columns here.

Poor paying for profligacy of the rich

It seems our MP voted against a House of Lords plan for an impact assessment into cuts to Employment and Support Allowance to the work related activity group.

To translate that into normal English: Julian Brazier has just voted to take £30 a week away from disabled people.

Yes, you heard that right. Some of the most vulnerable people in society are now being picked on by our government in order to cover up their mismanagement of the economy.

Employment and Support Allowance is money provided to disabled people on the recognition that their disability makes it harder for them to go about their daily business.

The government’s reasoning for the cut is that it will “incentivise” them to find work. That would be funny if it wasn’t also so tragic. It’s like saying that in order to incentivise homeless people to find a home we should take away their sleeping bags and put spikes into shop doorways.

As it happens this is actually happening. If there aren’t any homes, homeless people won’t find them. They’ll die on the street instead. If there aren’t jobs for disabled people, no amount of incentivisation will help. Employers prefer the able-bodied because they do more work for the dosh.

Baroness Campbell, a disabled Peer, said, “It is attitudinal and environmental discrimination that really prevents this group from accessing employment.” Meanwhile the disabled will be £30 a week worse off and the government aren’t even going to allow an impact assessment to see how this will affect them; presumably because they know it will affect them badly.

I would be interested to hear our MP’s reasoning for his decision. He voted against increasing the tax rate for people earning over £150,000 a year, while also voting against a banker’s bonus tax.

In other words he thinks powerful people with plenty of money should be allowed to keep a greater proportion of their income, while vulnerable people with less money should have to face increasing poverty.

Poor people paying the price for the profligacy of the rich. What an insane, cruel and stupid world we are moving into.

Contact Julian Brazier: http://www.julianbrazier.co.uk/contact

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Ian Pollock’s Illustrations for Housing Benefit Hill

Steven Andrews as drawn by Ian Pollock for the Housing Benefit Hill column Deeper and Down, October 7th 1995

Housing Benefit Hill was a series of columns which appeared in the Guardian Weekend between September 1993 and September 1996. Originally it featured a cartoon series by Steven Appleby, which were very funny, but not specifically intended as illustrations of the text. (Mind you, sometimes they could be accidentally appropriate). However in September 1995 the editors at the Guardian commissioned Ian Pollock to illustrate the stories, and the results are shown below.

They are remarkable drawings, not least because somehow or another Ian seemed to be able to capture not only the essence of the story, but the actual appearance of some of the characters. It was genuinely uncanny. I never met Ian, and, as far as I know, he never visited the people or places I was talking about, and yet, on the scantiest of information, he was able to do a portrait of that person of such accuracy it was as if they were sitting for him as a model.

You can see the illustrations here:

http://hubpages.com/art/Ian-Pollocks-Illustrations-for-Housing-Benefit-Hill

NHS not safe in the hands of private companies

You probably remember David Cameron telling us that the NHS was safe in his hands. In fact he’s used this expression on a number of occasions, most recently during the General Election campaign in 2015.

He said, “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.”

Well it’s sort of true. True in the sense that he hasn’t cut spending to the NHS.

In fact he has done something even more radical. He’s abolished it.

This took place in the form of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which removed the responsibility for the health of citizens from the Secretary of State for Health, while abolishing Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, and redirecting funds to “clinical commissioning groups”, whose task it is to buy in clinical services rather than providing them directly.

This is the means by which private health care companies are making inroads into the NHS.

Virgin, Circle, Bupa, Serco and United Health are just some of the companies vying for a piece of the NHS pie.

In 2015 nearly 40% of NHS deals went to private health companies, many of them donors to the Tory Party, who are cherry-picking the most profitable parts and leaving public service providers to cover the rest.

Virgin Care has recently taken over hospitals in Sheppey and Sittingbourne. According to the company’s own website, they now operate over 230 NHS and social care services, including walk-in centres, urgent care centres, out of hours care, community services and GP practices.

Don’t tell me they are doing this to perform a public service.

Richard Branson, while he nurtures the image of an amiable and slightly bumbling uncle, is, in fact, a ruthless financial operator. He wouldn’t be taking on these services if there weren’t significant profits to be made.

Noam Chomsky said, “The standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

Private profits will inevitably cut into services, thus making it appear that the NHS is failing, thus providing the pretext for its eventual sale – to the very companies who are draining it of funds.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/04/why-we-support-the-cross-party-nhs-bill

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Dental Costs are painful – even for NHS patients

The following story is an illustration of what private provision of health care in the NHS could look like.

For many years I went to the same dentist: Kelvin House on Nelson Road.

That ended just over three years ago, when staff told me that they could no longer treat me as an NHS patient. Either I was to go private with them, or I had to find a new dentist.

I chose the latter and signed on as a patient at The Whitstable Dental Centre on Oxford Street.

The provision there is perfectly good and affordable under NHS arrangements. I have no complaints. But the problem isn’t with my teeth: it’s with my gums.

Gum disease is a major cause of tooth loss and the only cure for the affliction is to have the teeth regularly descaled by a hygienist.

This work is unavailable under the NHS. You have to pay for it privately.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but for two things: firstly, the equipment at the Whitstable Dental Centre causes considerably more pain than that at Kelvin House; secondly, it is more expensive too.

It costs £42 to have your teeth cleaned in Oxford Street: £37 on Nelson Road.

Don’t ask me why. Maybe they think I’m a masochist willing to fork out an extra £5 for feeling like someone is scouring my teeth and gums with emery paper.

I tried going back to Kelvin House, only to find that the first obligatory consultation with the dentist would cost £70, thus bumping up the overall cost including the hygienist to £107.

Meanwhile, I am starting to lose my teeth.

This is exactly the situation that the NHS was set up to avoid. We are not supposed to have to consider cost in order to stay healthy.

Nye Bevan said: “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

Unfortunately the current government doesn’t appear to agree with this.

The wholesale privatisation of the NHS is already under way.

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The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
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More about Pixi in the Trials of Arthur.

Pixi looking happy

Not all the references to Pixi in the Trials of Arthur mention his name.

The following is an extract from Chapter 18: Camelot (Of Cabbages and Kings).

It describes life on a protest site, but actually refers to two incidents in which I observed Pixi, neither of which were on a protest site.

The first took place in a friend’s front room, when Pixi stood up to recite a poem, accompanied by a woman who mimed to his words. Pixi did what he often did when he was performing: he invoked the fire. He asked us to imagine a scene in the woods, with the fire burning in the hearth, at which point, he launched into his poem.

The second took place in the Red Lion in Avebury. People were playing the drums in the backroom, and Pixi joined in with them. But while the other drummers kept a steady rhythm, Pixi was playing across them, counterpointing them, playing an intense cross-rhythm which lifted the beat to another level of complexity. Pixi was talking with his drums. He was communicating with them. He was reciting poetry, quoting Shakespeare, using the drum like an amplifier to beat out the rhythm of his soul.

It was intense and beautiful and my writing was a poor attempt to recreate some of the rhythms I heard that afternoon.

Do you want to know what life on a protest site is like? It’s like this. The heart of any site is the fire, the hearth. Heart, hearth and earth, maybe there’s some connection? The hearth is the heart of the earth. The fire is dug into the earth and circled by stones, as guardians. The stones hold the fire in, protecting it. Most of the time there is a kettle boiling on it. So all the elements are there: earth, air, fire and water. Food is cooked upon it and then eaten around it. During the day visitors are welcomed to it, offered tea and conversation. At night they weave their tales around it, drink and carouse, engage in ceremony, sing songs, whisper endearments, smoke, make jokes, laugh, plan, squabble, come and go, feed it, nurture it, poke it with sticks, tap it to see the sparks rise, fall asleep beside it, wake up, blink, look about with wondering eyes, dodge the smoke, before finally deciding it’s time to go to bed.

The hearth is the focal point of all human exchange, the centre point for the ancient human economy.

And sometimes magic happens around it.

Spirits are drawn to it. The ancestors gather to be with the living. Ghosts of the night flit amid its fleeting shadows.

Things happen.

And then someone will stand and recite a poem, an epic tale of deeds and adventure, while another will stand beside him miming to the words as they rise and fall, declaiming and gesturing with mannered precision, and it’s as if a charm has come over the world, a sparkle, as if the night woods have become a theatre, the backdrop to that most ancient of plays, the human drama. And a feeling of hushed awe descends over the company as they welcome the spirits into their midst.

Because this fire has roots, not in the earth, but in time. And back, back, through the centuries, through the millennia, back through ages past, this fire, these people have been here, back to the beginning of the human story, when the world was new, when the people were shining beings, when the world glowed with its own internal light, this fire has played here in this hearth, the force that made us human. And in its embers we read our own story. In its warmth we feel our own warmth. In its light we see our own light. And the sparks that rise up into the night sky are like angels, and in its dark heart we see the writings of the Old Ones, hoary as the flames, whose language is time. And here we read our future, we read our past, we read our present, we read of all our days and all the things that make us human and alive, that make us want to sing, to love, to laugh, to recite poetry, to give birth, to dance, to grow, to become ever more and more fully human.

And then, maybe, someone will bring out a guitar, and the songs of the heart will be replayed, songs we have known, always, deep-rooted and as ancient as the trees, and the tribe draws in, ever closer, knowing they are one in their diversity, an organism, a life form, knowing that they belong, as we belong, as the Earth belongs to us. Property is a sin. It is a lie. It is a crime. It is the dispossession of humanity. It is our enemy. It takes away what we are. Because we are the Earth, and how can the Earth be owned or sold? It’s like selling off our souls.

And then the drums might start, that deep-heart Earth rhythm like a spiralling heartbeat, racing wildly, stirring the night’s depths with rhythmic insistence, a battering pulse, running in rivulets of strung-out deep bass Earth-notes and high notes, like the rattled chatter of baboons, all the tension of the stretched skins echoing about the dark woods and through the earth, a stream become a torrent, shattering and returning, circling, weaving, running rings around the trees, lighting up the darkness, joining all hearts as one. And don’t we all feel it? Can’t we all feel it? That pulse that always sways us, that sets our hearts drumming, that sets our hips spinning, that sets our minds swirling, that sets our feet skipping, that sets our legs dancing, that sets our arms waving, that reminds us of who we are: the rhythm of the Earth.

Pixi Morgan obituary

Photograph by Jez Emin: jez@jezemin.com

My friend Neill Morgan, known as Pixi, died just shy of his 50th birthday.

He was born on April 7th 1966, of Dee and Robert Morgan in Cardiff, South Wales. He leaves 7 children by a number of partners.

Read more here:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/17/pixi-morgan-obituary

In memory of Pixi Morgan

Pixi: real pixies in their original form were mischievous beings

It was during this visit to Cardiff that CJ had met Pixi for the first time. He stayed for a few days, and then, on the Saturday night Steve and CJ went to a party at the house where Pixi was staying.

He went by a variety of names in those days so you never knew what to call him. At one point he’d reverted to his given name, which was Neill, which he insisted was spelt with a double L. Later he declared that it was Reill, pronounced ‘real’ and even went so far to tattoo this on his arm. Then, after he met Arthur, he became Mordred, in honour of his role in the Warband. Not that Pixi was Arthur’s enemy as the character in the stories had been. They believed they had the right to interpret the stories in any way they wished, and in their version of it Mordred was on Arthur’s side. He challenged Arthur, because that was in his nature. Pixi challenged everyone. But the challenge made you stronger.

Later again he changed the name to Less Dread, because he had his dreadlocks cut off. But generally he was known as Pixi, a name that he loved and hated at the same time. The reason he hated it was that it had a kind of wishy-washy New Age ring to it. It was the sort of name that fluffy girls on peace camps might call themselves. But he knew too that real pixies in their original form were mischievous beings, not fluffy at all. Cosmic trouble-makers. Hence his spelling of the name, with two I’s. A bit sharp and a bit pointed. A bit angular. A bit spiky.

The party was in the back garden. They were sitting round a fire drinking cider. CJ and Pixi had never met before, but they felt that they already knew each other. They were like old friends. Pixi had heard Steve’s stories about him so many times, it was like he had been there, in spirit if not in body.

After a while Pixi began to sing. This was his natural place, with a guitar, by a fire, late at night, with the cider flowing. That’s when the currents of the Earth ran through him like a storm. It was like he was picking up energy from the Earth, like he’d planted electrodes deep into the mantle and was drinking in the magnetic field. There was an energy about him, an authenticity, a raw musicality, timeless and natural like the elements. It was as if he was giving voice to the spirits as they gathered about him, as if his audience wasn’t just a few people in the back garden of a house in Cardiff one late Saturday night in the 1990s, but the whole world, and everyone in it, for all time.

CJ felt that this fire was the same fire near which King Arthur had slept not so long ago, the one where the woman had accused him of being drunk. It could have been any fire anywhere in the world at any time in history. It was like the great stirring, humming electrical city all around them was fading into the background, and they had all been cast back, into another time: into a heroic age, in which the people were themselves again, no longer shackled by the constraints of industrial capitalism, no longer slaves to the profit motive, but free to explore their true status as legendary beings. It was like they had walked through a door and stepped into a myth.

CJ felt that this was what Camelot must have been like.

And that was the beginning of CJ’s involvement with King Arthur and the tribe and the Matter of Britain.

Read more here: http://hubpages.com/literature/Pixi