A Nightmare in Newport

When Pope John Paul came to Cardiff in the early eighties he presented one of the rings of Rome to the people of Wales. It ended up in a pawn shop in Pillgwenlly 

It was grab a granny night at the Plotters and Ken Frane would rather be looking out at the Newport Transporter Bridge from his vantage point of Newport Cathedral on Stow Hill, but Terry Heston had insisted, and who was Frane to turn his old mate down after everything that he’d done for him. The smell from the mudbanks of the River Usk this night were overpowering. There was a game on at Rodney Parade, Newport County were winning again but Terry Heston like the overgrown caveman that he was, had his sights set on the female of the species. He would not listen to Frane when he told him that “they were more deadly than the male”.

"Baptism, the rite of becoming a Christian, is necessary for salvation — whether the Baptism occurs by water, blood, or desire."

But what the fuck does that mean Father Eammon? Baptism by desire?

A woman in a shimmering blue snakeskin dress is stood at the font and she loosens her top slowly to reveal first one and then the second huge breast.

She tickles her fingers in the holy water and then cups some and lets it trickle down one pink fleshy bosom to the teat where she flicks at it and looks up coquettishly and then the same with the other but slower and more lascivious this time.

Father Eammon crosses himself and then undoes his cassock. 

Letter to a Bully

Hello

I will begin in civilised terms because I presume that is how you started off but maybe you were born into a bullying household into a threatening and violent environment. We learn what we see around us of course and then off you trot to school to take out your learnt behaviour on others. That's where the problems begin because you are now affecting other people and you have no right to do that. Your bullying is reinforced at home by your parents who perhaps were bullies themselves but as responsible adults we will deny that we were ever bullies ourselves. Is imitation bullying? when you imitate somebodies face and mannerisms? I suppose it is well in that case, I was a bully because that was something I did.   
At your age it is very difficult for you to understand what you are doing, you do not have the emotional awareness and maturity of an adult. Adults bully because they feel fearful and threatened. Children bully for many reasons but the chief one being profound unhappiness and you want to share that unhappiness with others. Your life is a misery in some way and you want others to feel your pain and so the projection begins. Asking you to stop isn't going to stop you! Threatening you in some way will only make things worse but if you were to sit down with a crystal ball and look into the future through it and see how your actions will impact your victim way into the future, you might, you might just stop. Adults who suffer with mental illness were very often bullied at school and that school was unable to protect the children in its care. Bullying is pervasive and insidious and it hides in the cracks in the walls, it will shout your name and belittle you because you have lost your self worth through the actions of a stranger. The bullying is perpetuated by your own brain. Your own mind takes over from the physical bully of your childhood and you then become your own bully. 
Children tend to live in the present moment. Everything is immediate and the summer holidays are long. Perhaps you can escape your physical bully in these times but the term begins again and the creeping dread returns to your stomach and mind. You see the bully again and the bully knows the power they have over you. 
School Anti-Bullying Policies are not worth the paper that they are written on. The job of the school is to bully you into sitting and passing exams, they cannot possibly be expected to provide any pastoral care. You are on your own kid! Bullying is a choice. Perhaps you feel that it is some kind of addiction or compulsion because of your physical size or temperament, that when you see someone smaller or weaker you just have to go over and bully them. The law of the jungle, the concrete jungle? But you are not in the jungle, your victim goes home at the end of the day just like you but they don't sleep as soundly as you. You are smug and contented after your power trip but you have started a chain of anxiety and fear in another person that if not addressed can and will lead to mental health problems in later life. 

I repeat again 

"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO DO THIS"    

Please, unhappy human, please find another way to release your unhappiness and aggression. Start a Martial Art, Orienteering maybe or better still sit your parent down on the settee and ask them "Why are you a bully?"

  

Forty Years of Disconnection

The mental ill health and emotional sickness epidemic in the UK is directly linked to the above moment. Baby Boomers and Generation X who are the (Great) Grandparents and (Grand) Parents of the Millennials and Generation Z that are going down like nine pins with anxiety, depression, poor self image and eating disorders have carried forward in their DNA a trauma that was hot housed by Thatcher. There was a Post Second World War collective trauma in the UK where Macmillan told our ancestors that they had never had it so good. He was telling a generation of men predominantly who had returned from the killing fields of Europe. He was telling traumatised men of war that they had never had it so good. That was true purely because Attlee and Nye Bevan had introduced the Welfare State and the National Health Service  between 1945 and 51 and the Conservatives were taking credit for it in 1957.
The only purely Socialist administration that the UK has ever experienced and we need another one to cleanse us. 
We need a Corbyn and McDonnell led government to wave the sage and implement a revolutionary administration where the emphasis will be on community, collective living, pumping money into the Welfare State and National Health Service. Tax the High Earners and isolate the 'Pull yourself up by the bootstraps' brigade in their own gated communities so that they perish in their own disconnected grandiosity. 
Our collective 'Mental Health has been broken by a succession of Conservative and Right Wing Governments.
We have been oppressed, suppressed and repressed as a people. We are the direct descendants of the Victorians with their sexual hypocrisy and lunatic asylums. My God, they could build some tunnels and trains though. A metaphor for fucking us all up.

 This Be The Verse

 PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.   

From the Yuppies of the Kings Road to the Yachts of Sir Philip Green. From the media pariahs of Maxwell and Murdoch feeding off the miseries of the ordinary man and woman. Gated communities to Gas Guzzlers but their days are numbered. Extinction Rebellion have come to save us from the grips of the Right Wing Populists because right wing conservative thinking will always morph, chameleon like into something else as we saw with Tony Blair's New Labour Project. Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are the answer to our forty year disconnection. I could only look on with envy as the bridges and transport hubs of London were occupied as St Paul's Catherdal had been occupied previously in 2011 and 2012. Always the bridesmaid never the bride. At this rate I will be like 83 year old Phil Kingston before I see any protest action. What a great man, a former parole officer who realizes that the only way to stop the growth of the Capitalist Cancer Cell is to Protest and Survive.

That is the problem with the 'British'. We have been too compliant, too cowed by authority and ready to accept the status quo but at what cost to our mental health and most importantly our descendants' mental health.