We'll (not) meet again

As a non-religious person, I am aware of the near certainty that I will never again meet those who have died.

And I have no need to persuade myself that there may, after all, be some form of celestial dictator, a supernatural creator, who has designed things to ensure that we all meet again in the kingdom (and being religious it would have to be a kingdom and not a queendom) of Heaven.

That’s a bit of a shame really because I would like to have another chance to thank my mother for bringing me up single-handed.

I'd also seek out my father to learn a bit more about him.

With my father living in Canada for much of my life, our contact was mainly by airmail letter.  For years, we did not have a telephone in the house and those pale blue fold over envelopes represented our only meaningful contact.

I knew my mother well enough.

She was a simple woman, not a stupid person I hasten to add, who had few interests beyond going to work, bringing me up and then going to bed.

When she found re-marriage, she became a hermit, rarely leaving the new marital home but for a time she was happy.  She died in 1999 after an horrendous later life of illness and pain, all caused, incidentally, by cigarette smoking.

I was obviously greatly saddened when she died but there was little I didn’t know about her.  There were no secrets, nothing hidden in the closet.

With one parent remaining (I also had a stepfather who lived his final miserable years in a care home, his life gradually taken away by the ravages of Parkinsons) I now know I should have taken more of an interest in my father.

Anthony Johansen’s was a long life well lived.

When he died, I had made my peace with him.

Not that there was any rancour or bitterness – certainly not from him: he was always blissfully, frustratingly consistent! – but I knew him far better in his twilight years.

Prior to 2004 (about which more in a moment), he visited England to see his family and we were part of that visit and that family.

I loved him being there but in so many ways I didn’t really understand our relationship.

I had missed the son and dad life, although I did not realise until much later in life, thanks in large part to my mother, I didn’t miss it at the time.

When he re-appeared from time to time, I knew who he was and yet I didn’t. 

He was my father but to me that was only a name.

In 2004, I made my second ever visit to Canada, my first was in 1975.  It was for his 75^th birthday party.

By now, he had met the true love of his life, Joy Phillips.  He never told me this – it wasn’t the sort of thing he would tell me – but I just knew from a very early stage.

I still felt a long distance visitor but I now felt more like a son because he introduced me to people as such.

Five years later and I was back in Canada for his 80^th birthday, a truly wonderful time in my life. 

As ever, we quarrelled and disagreed about things but I now knew for sure that the bond was as close as it would ever get.  For his 80^th birthday I took him to see John Fogerty in concert.

I left Canada much happier with our relationship.  There would be other times we would spend together.  Maybe I would see him for his 85^th?

In late 2010 he fell ill and on 28 February 2011 he left us for good.

Days later, I made my fourth visit to Canada but this time in the worst of all circumstances.

It passed in a blur.

Tears here, there and everywhere before and on the flight.

My brothers Noel and Vaughan and I spoke at a celebration of our father’s life and before I knew it, normality was resumed.

It’s the what might have been that I can’t quite come to terms with.

It’s patently absurd to think that, in the very unlikely event I end up in Heaven (in the even more unlikely event that it exists at all!) that I’d find anyone I knew anyway.  And how old would they be anyway?  The age they died?

I knew my father quite well when he died but I didn’t know him well enough.

I’ll never know him any better than I do now and that’s the worst bit.

Shanks

Something terrible has happened to my golf.  I have somehow forgotten how to hit the ball straight.

When I say I have forgotten how to hit the ball straight, it doesn’t mean the ball always went straight before, but now it never does and I have developed what is known the world of golf as a shank.

Essentially, what happens is this: I line up the ball as usual and then slice it wildly off to the right.

How did it happen?

Just a week ago, I carded a lifetime equalling best 59 on the Thornbury Par 3, playing some of the best golf of my life.  This week I have run up two 80+ scores and a 91.  It has been soul-destroying.

The harder I worked to correct the defect – and I had no idea what the defect was – the worse it got.  I even paid £7.50 at the Hambrook Driving range where I managed to shank the best part of 100 balls.

I think I may need help from the man who got me playing in the first place.

In the meantime, I have been ploughing through endless videos on You Tube and I have a very good idea of what’s happened.

Whether I can put it right without referring myself to a good coach remains to be seen.

I have not hit a green once in 54 holes which shows the gravity, in golf terms, of the mess I am in at the moment.

Rich, poor: does it make any difference to a depressive?

I have recently had some interesting debates with people on social networks, and in real life, about mental health, with particular regard to how it affects people from different social settings.

It’s a subject that is, for many, still taboo.

As a lifelong mentally ill person, I have very much welcomed the recent coming out of various sports and media people.

When you have a mental illness, not only can you feel there is no hope, you can also believe you are all alone.  That’s certainly how I feel during episodes.

The likes of the cricketer Marcus Trescothick and the multi-talented Stephen Fry have put their illnesses out there for people to see.

To me, it’s a simple thing: depression and its friends do not draw a distinction in wealth.  The grey dog doesn’t care who he – and I am guessing it’s a he – infects.

Social networks, like twitter and Facebook, are probably not the best places to debate complex issues and I really should try not to but I have. 

I think it is easier for the rich and famous to deal with mental illness.

It is because of their wealth and fame but more what that money can buy.

Now look at me, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that.

I’ve had my fair share, far more than my fair share, of mental health counselling, therapy and drugs over a period of 40-odd years but it’s not much really.

It’s helped, for sure, but once it’s over, it’s over.  The NHS has so much it can do for you and once you reach a certain point, that’s it, short of being sectioned and not all of us have quite reached that stage, well not yet anyway.

My last therapy ended last year and there’s nothing left unless I go private.

I did look at that, seeing a mental health practitioner from the profit sector, but when I saw the costs, I took a step back.  I’d have needed to go into debt to afford more treatment which I suspect I’d have found stressful and possibly a little depressing.  D’oh.

The more affluent can buy additional treatment which may not cure all of them but will in many instances have a positive effect.  They can even take time off their chosen occupation and hardly suffer financially at all.  Those of us at the basement of the earnings league have no such luxury.

So I don’t decry the rich and famous when they reveal their mental illnesses: I welcome them to this miserable place and hope they escape it.

But the truth is that mental illness is not taken seriously in this country, resources are minimal and sometimes non existent and many people struggle on – or not – with no help at all.

The story of my life

I have decided to write my memoirs.

In making such an announcement, I am very aware that it will be of very limited public interest.  In fact, it will probably be of no interest at all to the wider public

So, why do I want to write it?

It is fair to say that both academically and in the world of employment, I have not exactly ripped up trees.

I left school with the qualifications my scholastic career richly deserved, which is to say not a lot.

I took the first job that came my way in order to put food on the table and proceeded to stay there for the best part of the next 40 years.

Not exactly an inspiring story, is it?

But then, as with the most famous movie star or the most successful sports person, there is a story to tell, even if it doesn’t feature anything remotely like an Academy Award or a World Cup winner’s medal.

Therefore, the autobiography of someone who didn’t achieve a great deal is soon to be set before an apathetic world.

Trains and boats and planes

There is a journey I want to make.

I remember little of my childhood.

Obviously there are some things that I remember, some vividly.  Other things I remember vaguely and I have realised, as middle age becomes a memory, never mind my youth, that some things I thought I remembered I actually don't.  They were things that were recorded on film, black and white film.

Every summer, my mother took me to the Netherlands; specifically Rotterdam.

I do not recall how old I was when we started going but it must have been when I was very young because one year I came back and Dutch was my first language.  Actually, it was my only language and I had to relearn English, so my mother told me.

We didn't just go for a week or so.  We went for the summer.

It was how we went that I would like to do again.

Parts of the journey I don't recall.  Getting from our house to Bristol Temple Meads and indeed the train ride from Bristol to London Paddington.  Nothing.

I do remember, however, arriving at Paddington and usually getting a taxi - a taxi!!! - across London to Liverpool Street Station.  A big black cab in the big city. 

Liverpool Street station was the place from which the journey would begin to take us to Holland on 'the boat train'.

I close my eyes and I can feel what that train journey was like, but I couldn't describe it at all.  It was nothing special either, except that the terminus, the end of the line, was Harwich-Parkeston Quay.

I don't remember what happened after we arrived but the next thing I remember was boarding a big ship, named after a Dutch queen.

We shared a cabin with bunk beds.  

We didn't tour the ship, we went to our cabin and stayed there until the morning.

Then the memories do kick in.

You knew you were arriving when the noise from the ship's engines died down.  I woke up and looked out of the port hole and there was land.

I was captivated by it. The sun was rising and in the distance was the Hook of Holland where the trip would end.

As we got nearer to the shore I could see the railway line and better still there were trains waiting there, probably for us.

I have never forgotten that early morning 'feel' as we arrived in the mother land (well, the mother's land in my case)  the sun peering through jagged white clouds, people going about their business at a time when we really should be sleeping.

My memory deleted the boring bits, such as disembarking, clearing customs and all that.  The next thing I remember was getting on the train.  And the next thing after that arriving at Rotterdam Centraal Station.

This was how you travelled in those days.

Air travel was for the middle and upper classes - as it remains today - and everyone else took a day to travel to the Netherlands.

But there was a sense of travelling.  

I'd love to be more eloquent and write even more about it but sadly I can't.

But I want to do it again one day.

Not just travel to the Netherlands by plane but to make a real journey out of it.

My mum always did it and it was god enough for her.

The winter of 2014

It is fair to say I am not in the first flush of youth.  I'm not exactly in the final flush of it either.  In fact, middle age is a bit of a misnomer as I near my bus pass, assuming Cameron doesn't scrap them before I get there, at a rapid rate of knots.

I vaguely recall the winter of 1963, or maybe I don't remember it but I think I do because I have photos of me in the back garden, posing with a large snowman who stood there for two months (so I am told).

I have seen the occasional extremes of weather.  

The long hot summer of 1976, the storm of 1987 and now the never ending wet winter of 2014.

This year is, by far, the most depressing and dispiriting of the lot.

I am a great believer in science, not that I understand much of it.

I listen to Professors Dawkins and Cox because they know what they are talking about.  That evolution is a fact and what happened in the Big Bang.  Science tells it like it is, unless someone can come up with a better theory.

The science this year tells us not that this awful winter is because of climate change, but that we are likely to suffer more regular events like this because of climate change.  There has to be something in it.

The sights and sounds from Somerset and increasingly elsewhere make my heart ache.

Ordinary, decent people seeing their lives ruined by the forces of nature, altered by mankind or not: for now it doesn't matter, or maybe this is not the right time to dwell on the likelihood that it is.

In all the distress, and my god there has been enough of it, there are signs of heroism, of community, of courage, of generosity.  The human spirit, though drenched, has not drowned.

And suddenly we have the economics of Keynes, with Cameron's right wing government (correctly) throwing money at this catastrophe as a good socialist would.  Because, and lest we forget, the market, upon which the Conservatives base all their principles, doesn't work in disasters.  

No.  Their much-hated public sector, which for four years has been attacked more than by any other government, even Thatcher's, is all that stands between the people and crushing defeat to the elements.

Suddenly, the heroes helping the citizens are soldiers, firefighters, environment staff, doctors and nurses, police officers, council staff and so on.  No fast buck to made here.

And yet.

The first step this government took in 2010 was to announce austerity and the Department of Environment took the biggest financial hit of all, the biggest cuts of all the departmental budgets.

And what are the big budget items in DofE?  Why it's only flood defences.  The budgets were cut by almost £100m a year.

The Environment Secretary doesn't really believe in climate change either so he slashed by 40% his department's spend on developing the UK's adaptation to the effects of global warming.  You know, like strengthening flood defences, protecting rail links, that sort of thing.

And now the politicians are at it.  

Cameron, at last, arriving for photo opportunities, Eric Pickles slagging off the Environment Agency which is, er, funded by the government.  (If the Tories hated it so much, why didn't they abolish it, or bring it back into full public control?  Because it's easier to blame something semi-autonomous rather than accept blame themselves when something goes tits up.)

I doubt that the people who have seen their lives ruined by water are pleased to see the posing and posturing, although I suspect they have other things to worry about.

The government's reaction to all this was so slow it beggars belief.  But then, why should it?

The government - and usually governments of all colours - have ministers, and indeed Prime Ministers, with skills no greater than us.  Cameron, for example, was a TV executive.

They seem to have been following the unfolding tragedy like the rest of us, by watching on telly.  And now, whilst Somerset drowns and other areas join them, they have twigged something must be done.

Well it bloody should.

Just a few weeks ago, the government confirmed it would be sacking around 1000 Environment Agency staff as part of the government's cuts.  These are not all bean counters in non jobs.  Many are those in the front line, trying to make people's lives better, or at least trying to stop them getting even worse.

I've never seen anything like it.

A great politician - a Blair or a Thatcher, I dread saying - would have risen to the occasion and shown real leadership, but this lot cower in fear of the opinion polls and allow events to unfold before their eyes instead of shaping them.  They will pay a heavy price for this.

Away from the shysters of politics, we must never forget the people paying such a terrible price.

Ordinary people with ordinary lives whose lives are drowning in the floods of 2014.

The public mood is changing because, it seems, very little is being done to help the worst hit.

It's very, very sad to see but the reality appears to be that we cannot afford to be climate change deniers anymore, unless we want more of these disasters which could well be man made.

I think we would do well to assume climate change is for real just to be on the safe side.

Union news

There now follows an essay about the decline in my union, the PCS.  Feel free to fall asleep as you read.

The threat to trade unions by the government’s decision to end the check-off facility for collecting subscriptions is very real and is likely, particularly in the case of PCS, to be extremely damaging, if not fatal.

No one can be in any doubt of the political motivation behind this decision but we need to be very clear that it will have little effect on ordinary PCS members who already find themselves being represented, if that’s the word, by a rag tag and bobtail collection of Toytown revolutionaries who have already taken the union to the brink of destruction.

While it is undoubtedly true that in many, often unseen, areas the union carries out much good work for members but on the national stage it is almost an irrelevance.

Campaign after campaign has faltered and died, only to be resurrected during the annual AGM and election season before being allowed to falter and die, again.

After last year’s hopeless campaign, which appeared to start with pensions and pay but ended with a ‘stop the cuts’ slogan, there was a ‘consultation’ period which passed many of us by but concluded, astonishingly, with the revelation that members still fancy a scrap with the government.

Whilst there is undoubtedly disillusionment and even despair among the ranks, I do not detect the will for a fight, whatever that means.

PCS is inextricably linked with the ultra left in general and the Socialist Party (Militant to us old codgers) in particular and we have, in the view of this tired old hack, reached the end of the road.

The ultra left controls virtually every aspect of the union from full time paid officers, its branches, it’s national committees and it’s annual delegate conference where, despite the fact that hardly any members participate in the ‘democratic’ process (ha ha), the union’s policies are made.

With huge cuts for union time off in the last year, you just know that the only ones who will carry on fighting for the revolution will be the diehards, the Moonies of the ultra left. 

I hear people saying that ordinary punters should stand for election against the Trots but I will argue we’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.  Since 1984, those who reject Trotskyism have tried with decreasing levels of success to turn the union round.  And now it’s all too late.

I hear the voices of those who say that there should be a list of sensible candidates –a slate - to run against the incumbent ultra left but those who say that have no democratic structure behind them and no policies (other than ‘we are not Trots’).

I have agreed with the arguments that there is no point in running a slate to oppose the ultra left.  It’s too big a mountain to climb.  Any fight back would need to start at the bottom up, not the top down, and I see few people who want to enter the fray.  Because if they – whoever they might be – did decide to fight the Trots, they’d need to go in with their eyes wide open.  It would be a long fight, a very ugly and exhausting fight and, without huge resources of people and, dare I say it, money, an ultimately unsuccessful fight.

The current structure of the union sees a huge amount of work carried out by ‘lay’ officials.  With huge cuts to paid union time off, this becomes more difficult by the day.

So what to do?

Like all unions, PCS runs an annual delegate conference where over a thousand representatives get together and support Socialist Party ‘policies’ and turn them into union policies.  Conference costs a fortune, yet only a tiny minority of members participate in the democratic processes, or have the first idea of what goes on.  Nor do they give a toss.

My first decision as the union’s new Tsar would be to abolish conference.  With some of the money saved, I would appoint local organisers to represent existing members and recruit news ones.  They would get a basic (fair) salary but they would get commission if they were successful.

I’d carry out a root and branch survey of the entire union structure and scrap entirely the branch set up. Instead of lots of Bristol branches in different departments, I’d set up one Bristol branch, serviced by a full time paid official.

I would reduce the huge area structures to a bare minimum, as well as the departmental committees, regardless of cries from the far left of impacting on ‘democracy’ as they call their control of the union.

Instead of having ‘editorial boards’ of lay officials for union publications, I would appoint a professional journalist to oversee union publications and literature.

I would cut delegations to affiliates, I would scrap donations to organisations no matter how worthy they appear to be; in short, the union would exist purely to support ordinary members.

I’d abolish all annual elections and make them at least bi-annually, if not every three years.   More frequent elections don’t mean more democracy.

And so it goes.

I’d even seek a meeting with the PM despite everything that has happened, even to the point of offering a ‘no strike’ deal in exchange for better pay and conditions and agreements to avoid compulsory redundancies and transfers.

Surely it would be better than what’s happening now, where PCS heads to oblivion, lions led by donkeys who have far greater ambitions than giving a shit about humble poorly paid civil servants?