Author: Chris

See also.

An odd thing to admit for a fiction writer, but, though I love writing fiction more than ever, I’m increasingly reading non-fiction.  The book by Natascha Kampusch which I described before has certainly had a more profound effect on me, and made me think more, than any novel that I’ve read for a very long time.  What an extraordinary person, only 24, a year younger than my oldest daughter: so strong and clear-headed, so determined to live on her own terms.

She has a website here.  On it there are pictures of her in Sri Lanka, where she’s apparently been doing charitable work.  Here’s one of them.

How different it must feel for her than it would  for most of us, to be there under the sky, surrounded by other people, free to go wherever she wants.

In The Holy Machine I wrote:

There is one problem about being religious. You are taught that the supernatural exists – miracles, angels, the resurrection of the dead – but for some reason it always seems to happen off stage, either somewhere else or somewhen long ago. You actually have to live in exactly the same boringly unsupernatural world as do the unbelievers. It must be hard work believing in things which never actually happen.

So I don’t think it’s surprising that religious folk sometimes erupt in excitement over a statue that appears to weep, or a fish whose lateral markings spell out the Arabic letters for “God is great”, or an oil-stain on a garage forecourt that resembles the Virgin Mary …

This miraculous image of the Virgin Mary has recently appeared on a tree in New York.

Not very convincing, but the willingness to suspend disbelief, is a measure of the depth of longing behind it.  I read somewhere that at one of the great shrines of ancient Greece, pots and pans were tied to a tree, and the oracle heard the voice of the god in the way they clanked and banged in the wind. (If the gods are really gods, why can’t they just plain speak?!)

The tree has become quite a shrine it seems.  Someone has even adorned it, for some reason, with a full-sized Mexican flag.

(Source: nj.com)

(The latest installment in my attempt to understand economics).

My good friend Ian Pinchen, in response to my previous post on debt, said:

“the scale of what ‘we’ owe may not be what it seems – I read recently that, as a proportion of GDP, what we ‘owe’ now is less than what we owed during the first 20-30 years of the establishment of the welfare state. What has happened since the Thatcher years has been less a problem of growth and debt and more a problem of the transfer of wealth away from the population as a whole (including public spending) and towards large corporations and the already wealthy…”

It’s an interesting thought, the idea of wealth having been sucked out of, so to speak, the ordinary everyday sphere, and fits with many things that strike me about the way the world now works.

For instance, nowadays, many of the functions that were once performed by local councils, are now carried out by large corporations.  It’s said that the corporations are more efficient (i.e. better value for money) than the councils were.   I don’t know if that’s true (the corporate contractors seem to make a lot of crass mistakes, as we’ve seen recently with the security company, G4S), but even if it were true, the fact remains that money that would, in the past, have all been recycled in the local community, is now being sucked out of that community to pay shareholders’ dividends, and the salaries of senior executives (who, for some reason, require and are entitled to, gigantic salaries that would have been condemned as appallingly wasteful if they have been paid to local council managers).

The same with businesses too.   Coffee shops, restaurants, cinemas, are increasingly owned by national or even international chains (Starbucks, McDonalds), rather than being local businesses.  (A ‘leisure park’ round the corner from me has Nandos, Frankie and Benny’s, Vue… etc, and I’ve seen virtually the same combination in similar leisure parks in other towns: not a local business in sight).   More money channelled out of the community.

The very fact that giant corporations now have to be wooed by governments, like giant zeppelins of money floating above our heads that have to be coaxed and wheedled into alighting on our lands, is I suppose in a way a measure of the amount that they suck out.

Perhaps a day will come when we look back on their reign much as we look back on the era of medieval barons (who also insisted that their immense wealth and power was necessary, inevitable, just, and in some way beneficial to all).

I received some copies of Messias Maschine last week from the German publisher, Droemer.

I don’t speak German, and have never studied it, but if my mother is to be believed, there was once a time when I spoke as much German as I spoke English.  Both my parents worked when I was a small child (my mother was a GP) and they employed German au pairs to look after me, from whom I picked up German words and phrases.   My mother tells a story of me playing in my highchair, dropping something on the floor by mistake, and supposedly muttering, ‘Ach!  Gott!’

When a certain au pair – her name was Anke – finished her time in England and returned to Germany, my mother tells me I watched her from the window as she departed, and cried.

‘Anke said “ich leibe dich”,’ I’m supposed to have wailed, ‘but now she’s gone away!’*

This touching tale, frequently retold by my mother, was, however, dismissed by Anke herself when I met her a few years ago.

‘You were only 18 months old,’ she said.  ‘You couldn’t possibly have constructed a sentence of that complexity.’

(* I love you)

What crisis?  The whole business can seem a bit unreal if you are like me, and most of the people you know are on salaries, and are not in danger of losing their jobs.  But recently I had a carpenter come to fix some cupboard doors, and he told me that he was now only getting enough work for 2 days a week.  The following week, the chimney sweep told me that he was getting so little work that he wasn’t sure he could stay in business.   I suppose that getting your chimney swept is a pretty easy thing to defer when you’re short of cash.  I daresay the carpenter would give it a miss (if he had a chimney), and I daresay the chimney sweep would postpone getting the carpenter in (if that is what he had been planning to do).   Which I suppose is what recession is all about.

It’s all about ‘the debt’, isn’t it, about austerity being necessary to pay ‘the debt’.  ‘We’ collectively owe a lot of money, partly as a result of the government having to spend billions bailing out the banking system, which was itself too deeply in debt.   But who do ‘we’ owe the money to?  You’d think sometimes we owed it to aliens on the planet Zarg, who would come down with rayguns and destroy us if we failed to repay.  But in fact we owe the money to whoever chooses to buy government bonds, and that tends to be institutions like pension funds, very possibly yours or mine. Not aliens at all.  All very strange.

But whoever ‘we’ owe it to, how does it help ‘us’ to repay it, if the carpenter and the chimney sweep lose so much business that they pay little or no tax, and can’t afford to give business to other people?