An end to navel -gazing

"He was black, so he might have pulled a knife out"

I see racism's on the increase. Reform - the party for the modern Daily Express reader - seems to have more batshit crazy councillors than Labour and the Conservatives combined.

And with batshit populism on the rise everywhere, it seems to have gifted the bigoted and the dim with a green light to air their prejudices, all in the name of Free Speech.

The other day a dog walker told me her daughter lives in Bristol, and her dog was attacked by a larger dog, but because the owner was black he may have pulled a knife on her so she just had to back away.

Obviously a large out of control dog is one thing. Like the dogs in question, the owners are often a 'type' .

We think of drug-dealing gangsters, but again these can be of any ethnicity. 

Why she felt the need to mention his skin colour when the majority of knife crime is black on black, to me is just racism.

It's like when you hear the phrase 'black bastard', as though the blackness of the person's skin had any bearing on his bastardness.

That's why the police mentioned that it was a white man who drove into a crowd of Liverpool football fans, as with social media had it been even mentioned that it was a brown person, the racist mob may have descended into violence, like last summer when a disturbed teenager who it was rumoured was Muslim but it turned out was not, stabbed some children to death in a nursery in Southport. 

These are scary times we live in. It feels like we're in a powder keg and one spark on social media is all it ever needs.

And it's all part of free speech. 

Which should of course come with responsibility.

The Beautiful Cathedral City of Wells...

Wells is a proper old Medieval town - and one of the smallest cities in England. It gets its city status purely by having its own cathedral.

There are plenty of stonemasons earning a living in these here parts, so I wanted to show some of the utterly shite repairs.

Someone has presumably ticked the 'okay' box and paid money for these.

This joker's used a stone repair mix instead of mortar, and it's already failed

Same again.

Obviously some left in his bucket.

Nothing like having pride in your job is there? Could have used a sponge.

Yes, that is a Grade 1 listed 850 year old cathedral behind. But who cares?

Wrong colour, too wet, and then they just leave it.

When you can do something to a certain level of proficiency and you have pride in your work, to see crap like this, you just think "What's the point?"

What is the point of me having dedicated all these years, thousands of hours, into a craft when shit like this earns people a living?

My family are musicians. My Dad still can't understand how people who could barely play could make so much money in pop music. 

Why do a good job when the people signing it off either haven't a clue what they're looking at or just couldn't care less?

And the thing is it's everywhere. For example, look at some of the new builds and see how poor some of the bricklaying is.

It's not as difficult as you'd think to make something look right, but it does take time and concentration.

I've seen some shocking work be praised by people who should know better. Even awarded with OBEs (Other Buggers' Efforts) and conservation awards. 

What is the point, indeed.

DMing the kids at Pilton

This was hard work. I'm still pretty kernackered 5 days later. 

One and a half days of prep, then 2 days of running the game with a large group of 6 kids - age range 12-16. 

That's a big range if you think back to when you were that old.

And then throw in a bag of neuro-diversity.

The youngest had quite a high level of ADHD and by the end of the 2nd day he was really getting on the edge of everyone's tolerance, but we got through it.

I had a massive tension headache, then took one ibuprofen and slept for 11 hours. 

Ah well. It's what I live for...

Dancing?? on a Saturday???

Ugh! You bastard.

I admit, it was me, in the White Hart, last Saturday. 

Boppin' about like a right Bertie. 

I think it was grab a granny night, as we used to call them.

Some joker called me a pirate on the Facebook post. 

I can see why.

As lovely old Dick van Dyke said: 

'Sing like no one's listening; dance like no one's watching.'

Gyles Brandreth in The Times, said: 

“Stop thinking about yourself. I find this one hard. We’ve all turned our lives into one big selfie. Breaking the mirror won’t give you seven years’ bad luck; it’ll add seven years to your life because happy people live seven to ten years longer.”

Good advice I think.

But what the hell am I going to do now??

T-shirt of the week

The Disclaimer T

The Culture of Work

Why aren’t these people dead yet?

Having lots of video playback in my head- situations I regret. One period that always plays back like a nightmare, is the first job I got in London when I returned in 1998, 27 years ago. 

Until I got FTD I’d barely thought about it. But in recent years it’s been gnawing away at me like some disease. This particular period of my life is primarily what causes me to randomly shout out expletives. 

I’d decided to check out what the world was like outside masonry so I quit my job and moved up to London, living on the floor of my mate's living room for a couple of weeks until I got sorted out.

I'd lived in Wells for 2 1/2 years and was bored out of my head as all my friends had left and I was in a dead-end job as I saw it, earning £200 net a week in a stonemasonry workshop. 

Nothing to do, and no one to do it with.

I'd really lost my confidence and at the time didn't realise that I was in the middle of a long depression.

I’d also just moved into a bedsit in Crouch End and was having a less than satisfactory social life. I thought I’d reconnect with my old London friends as it had only been 2 1/2 years since I’d lived there, but people had moved on to South London and in their social lives and I found myself rather isolated.

I got a job in a TV production company. I was quite excited as it was a company whose programmes I liked. So I got the job, met all the stars, and thinking I was in with them was pretty overfamiliar. 

One thing you don't do in these companies is get too pally with the 'talent.'

As a runner or dogsbody, it's your job to do everyone's bidding, essentially as a slave. People in the media industry proclaim their status by being as rude as possible to the runner, as you can't answer back and I was even earning less in London than I was as a mason in Somerset.

In retrospect I think this all points to a failure in my social behaviour which was always present - not knowing how to behave in certain situations - when to shut my gob and when to toe the line. 

As I've said before, I think my frontal lobe was pulled out of a skip when I was being assembled.

I made a few mistakes as a runner, said some inappropriate things to management and 'talent' and overall did myself no favours.

I had some bad luck too to be fair.

The flip side was the ugliness of the media industry - a public school bullying culture, where I was insulted to my face and spoken to as an idiot, which of course I'm not, even though maybe my behaviour had let me down at times.

It all started at the top with the CEO who was quite the tyrant. He didn't like me from the get-go. 

He was a classic public school bully.

And it makes sense, as the British public schools used the fagging system, whereby younger pupils went through a rights-of-passage as servants to the older boys and were often subject to beatings and bullying. 

These are largely schools which produced the kind of psychopaths who would have been sent out to brutalise the various peoples of the British Empire. With the Empire gone, where else would they go but The City and Television?

It got so that my mental health went from general lowness to rock-bottom. After a month or 2 I had to take deep breaths before going into the office building: I just couldn't do anything right for them. 

The abuse was relentless, and all the while I blamed myself for not coming up to par.

One evening I had a minor breakdown, and everyone was just either ignoring or laughing at me.

One person I did get on with there I confided in. She was a development manager and said she really didn't understand what had happened and that they'd got me completely wrong. She gave me a list of 12 people to contact in the industry and to mention her name. 

Within 2 weeks I had left for another much better job thanks to her kindness. 

Apparently they missed me when I'd gone.

Fuck 'em.

I still beat myself up about how pathetic I was in not standing up for myself and letting people treat me like shit. This is what happened and I've never told anyone any of this. I hope by writing it down this somehow acts as a catharsis and is the start of the end of these horrible memories that keep haunting me.

Because as you can tell I still feel ashamed.

I guess I just didn't have the backbone during that particular period. Especially when your opinion of your self has flat-lined.

Years later and everything seems to point to me having ADHD and some other neuro-divergent behaviours. 

Would they behave like that in this day and age? 

Probably. The media industry outside the corporations is largely unregulated.

Self-Employment

Since getting my diagnosis I now stand up for myself more than ever. Most people back down when you do that.

I guess I feel 'what have I got to lose?'

(I know - but this is relatively new to me... )

It took me until 36 to realise that I couldn't work for other people. 

I would be lost in a vortex where my life depended on trying to please.

I wouldn't stand up for myself either.

I lived, ate and breathed work. I could rarely get away from it. It pervaded my dreams and any waking thoughts, catching me unawares. And these were trivial low-paid jobs too.

In the case of some employers, I ended up exploding at them like a super-volcano of pent-up fury.

Other times if a few of us were unhappy about something I would be the one speaking up in a meeting, and turn to my brothers for support who would all be staring at their shoes.

Oh. it's like that is it?

Thanks. I know who you are.

Being self-employed was initially terrifying, but it was worth it. It means you can listen to your Spidey-Sense and not take on certain jobs. Also, you can call out a bad idea and it doesn't matter so much about the ego being bruised as they're not your boss.

You can tell a contractor to fuck off - or tell a client you're not interested in a job because they're a nutter.

I had a good guy working with me for a lot of the time. In the end he was doing about 75% of the work as my brain just couldn't get in gear.

There are more people who should be self-employed. I know who they are, even if they don't.

I miss my friend Mat

I used to enjoy my chats where Mat would rationalise the world, break down the chaos and let me see clearly what was going on. 

He'd do it really quickly too, which was great as we could have more time for drinking and laughter.

How many people do you have who you can really talk to, completely unhindered, uncensored? 3? 4?

People like Mat leave a big void. It's only when I look to the phone to reach out to a friend that I become all too conscious of that loss.

I think of Suzy, rolling up her sleeves and getting on with a director-level job, running the house, walking the dogs and taking the girls to all their sports meetings and social appointments!

And the girls getting on with their lives. 

How bloody senseless his death is. 

That's real loss, that's devastation. Much worse than dementia.