A Murder in Merthyr

Frane always noticed that the air quality was better in Merthyr than in Cardiff, you got off the train and the sharpness, the coldness hit the back of your nose and throat straight away. Merthyr must be the only town with a shopping centre with the statues of two boxers at either entrance. Howard Winstone who trained in hob nailed boots, sliding over the paths and allowing him the swift movement and the lithesome poise and Johnny Owen, the Matchstick man, murdered in the mid-day sun out in Little Mexico, Los Angeles. You had to be tough to live and work in Merthyr. That’s why Des Phillips lived in Taff’s Well. He wasn’t tough. He was a cracked egg.    

They let the kids of Ysgol Pen y Dump out an hour earlier than the other schools. As 

a supply teacher Des Phillips drove away from there each afternoon and chuckled as 

he witnessed little fires being lit, a torchlight procession to see him home.

The danger of trying to educate in such extreme circumstances was that there 

would always be that one kid, a man child within the soporific ranks of Year 10 who could 

always threaten your life.  

Ken Frane took the call from Merthyr Police Station at 10.30am. Nigel Watkins, an old colleague from Docks Division 1980s style was on the other end of the line. His staccato delivery bringing back fond memories for Frane.

“Ken, Nigel Watkins, Merthyr, we’ve got a body, schoolteacher, supply. Kids found him this morning”

Frane & Heston, South Wales’ answer to Burke & Hare, Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey. Sometimes the pair were convinced that they were given jobs so that the team hiring them could have a laugh. They might have been a pair of throwbacks to the 1980s but nobody, nobody could wear cowboy boots like this pair. They had been known to put Line Dancing Nights out of business.

“Napoleon Bonaparte created what might be called the modern-day French Police Force and the reason that they are so effective is that the policemen and women are not from the local area. Merthyr coppers can’t solve a Merthyr crime. Everybody on the Gurnos shuts up shop. It’s a bit like Northern Ireland in that respect. They won’t rat on a rat. Napoleon had men from Lyon working Bordeaux. Very effective.”

“Absolutely shameful the way you treated that man, putting him in with the toughest classes in classrooms not suitable and not within easy reach of senior management help” Head of Geography Vivienne Pugh was letting it all hang out.

Buy me a coffee

The age of uncertainty

The Age of Uncertainty

Here's one for you, the reason that we're all feeling a little frayed around the edges is because we are being inundated with bad news. The Polar Ice Cap is melting, the Amazon Rainforest is burning, Trump is gonna open his goddam mouth again and declare war on Iran because he is King of Israel and Boris Johnson is going to lose his trousers as he tries to escape from another accident prone gaffe through Macron's French Windows. If it wasn't so serious it would be hysterically funny. This is a global farce that we are witnessing here. Alan Ayckbourn could not do justice to these atrocious events. Anybody who says "I like the news" must be mad. How can you watch that terror then go to bed with your cup of Horlicks and sleep in blissful denial? Either somebody is having a huge laugh at our expense or we really are fucked. We want our three score years and ten, we demand it as our right no matter how many deep fried mars bars we have consumed over a lifetime. What we don't want is someone to come along and threaten our mortality. We don't want to be told that our kids and our grand kids are going to fry in Armageddon but that is the subliminal message we are getting every day through the MSM. They are behaving like Religion of old. Behave yourselves or you are all going to be punished. No wonder we have turned into door mice startled at the next squeak. I am amazed that anything is getting done at all while this threat of civilization extinction hangs over us! People still believe that by putting faith in economies that this will pull us through. The more and more people who start to grind to a halt and just sit there like a rabbit in the headlights the more economies will crumble. People will be questioning their existence big time instead of continually going round and round on the hamsters wheel. I've got news for you folks, the hamster wants his wheel back and what distraction technique are you going to use then? Alcohol, Netflix or prescription drugs or will it be death by social media. If it wasn't for social media I wouldn't be able to reach you with this message in a bottle, with this cri de couer. In this age of uncertainty we are seriously going to have to consider retraining. Retraining the species to be kind and co-operative to each other and not to keep acting out of self interest. It is because of global self interest that we are in the mess we are in today. Imagine if we had had global Communism since the end of the Second World War instead of Capitalism. Nobody can say how much worse or better we would be off by now but the self made men and the strivers would tell you that we would all be in the Gulags under a Dictator. We are in a Gulag of our own making however and the Dictator is Climate Change. People are starting to panic in this age of uncertainty because they know that even though they would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and change their own behaviour for the good of the planet they couldn't trust their neighbour to do the same, so we still have mini versions of the Cold War going on in houses and streets throughout the land. "Whoever blinks first" The arch farce Meister was in his element last week when his think tank declared that every man, woman and child would have to work until they were 75 to keep giving in to the economy instead of taking out. The problem is that our standard of living is 'generally high' and we don't want any uncertainty to affect that and this is just something else that will. We don't want to be homeless like those unfortunates we see in tents and begging but if everybody was to start donning the Communist mindset instead of the Capitalist one then perhaps by the time we have reached 75 our standard of living will be less because we'll have learned as a community that it is possible and even desirable to do so. You don't have to get rid of incentives but instead of grafting for your own benefit you will be grafting for the greater good. Hey with an incentive like that you might just be able to tempt me back to work after 13 years of Unemployment. Threatening 'my benefits' with sanctions and tests and assessments isn't going to do that but promise me that my effort will contribute to benefiting the lot of all, then I'll be at the Job Centre doors on Monday Morning with my blue boiler suit on and a fetching red neckerchief.

https://www.widewalls.ch/10-propaganda-posters-from-soviet-union-for-international-workers-day/international-workers-day-go-where-is-work-2/

Further Reading
https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/08/its-not-rocket-science.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/10/economically-inactive.html

Punishment & Rehabilitation

The last tweet I sent into the ether last night was this one which even by my standards, I agree is a bit random.

Passing HMP Prison Northumberland on the bus and was surprised upon investigation afterwards that it is run by @SodexoGroup https://t.co/oavAmvTDwE
You have two hard court areas outside badly overgrown with weeds and vegetation. An ideal opportunity for a work party outside?

— David Williams (@davidredbutton) August 21, 2019

To give it some context, about three weeks ago, myself and my holy companion caught a double decker bus from the Henry Hotspuresque town of Alnwick in Northumberland to the slate grey town on the Tyne of Newcastle. The journey took 2 and a half hours all told but what struck me most about the journey was the pointless detour we took to the above named prison. There was a solitary rural bus stop outside but no escaped convicts got on the bus. It was a dead end which all prisons are. Two large hard court areas outside which I'm sure had witnessed games of five a side at the beginning of the 'Punishment & Rehabilitation' project were now full of tall weeds and vegetation. Yellow Rapeseed plants had pushed themselves up through the asphalt. Now if what was not going on outside was a reflection of what was going on inside then in the words of Shania Twain, 'that don't impress a me much'. Thinking about these things about a month later as you do, I googled the Prison and found out that it was a private 'profit making' concern. Now call me old fashioned but I don't think Education, Health Care or Punishment & Rehabilitation should be run on an 'on profit basis'. Our esteemed and glorious leader Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has huffed and puffed in his first few weeks in charge about longer prison sentences. As a boarder at Eton he is probably of the mind that incarceration, in with your chums, is a jolly good thing, but it isn't. From my limited experience of 4 months (114 days) in a tough Dutch Jail, the first month gave me a good idea about what crime and rehabilitation were all about. Even in the 'liberal oasis' of the Netherlands, they do jail time like they do in other countries namely 23 hours lock up, 1 hour walking around a so called recreation area. If you are a 'non-conforming' prisoner they have solitary confinement and all manner of carrot stick techniques at their disposal to make their charges conform. Because I had had the temerity to shout out the word 'Fascists' at the Prison Officers who had kept me banged up for 23 hours a day in my first week of 'orientation'. I was kept in my cell on solitary watch for 48 hours where I ended up singing Welsh hymns and graffitiing on the cork board in my cell. This blog post is not about me, it is about the men in Norhumberland Prison and in all the other Houses of Correction in the UK. It might sit well with the comfortable and complacent Daily Mail readers who appear to run this country but longer sentences is not the answer. One answer to the complicated conundrum of punishment and rehabilitation is 'farm gangs' and 'gardening gangs'. Instead of punishing people (because that is what they still are, regardless of their crimes) by keeping them banged up for 23 hours, rehabilitate them in the fresh air. Instead of an hour walking around a quad or playing football against another prison what about Fruit Picking in a No Deal Brexit Britain? The migrant foreign workers wont be here to pick the fruit so who is going to do it? Prisoners of Her Majesty's England that's who. Instead of looking in, look out and think about the benefits of hard physical work and fresh air. You wont be able to rehabilitate everybody but instead of punishing everybody and in many cases breaking them at least you will have a critical mass who upon release might look more favorably upon a system that at least tried to give them worthwhile activities in the fresh air and HMP Northumberland can start by clearing its hard courts with a work detail or with a privatized group of reluctant, paid staff. 

       

The Centipede from Pontyprid

This front page expose from today's Cambrian News has given me an idea for a piece of #badpoetry

"Dad, why dunt yew pronounce the dd at the end of Pontypridd?"

Cedric the centipede looked at his father

Sebastopol, the senior centipede had been dreading this day.

"Why can't you ask me about the birds and the bees instead of the double d in Pontypridd?"

"Cos I know all about em, I been watching them at it in the garden"

'Seb' to his butties raised his caterpillar eyebrows to the ceiling 

"Well you see son, yewer grandfather and his grandfather before that came by ere for work at the start of the Centripedal Revolution

and they were a bit too busy to fuss with the minutiae of pronunciation"

"They were lazy you mean?"

"Curse you, you little scamp, they worked damned hard down underground, their little legs doing the work of ten men"  

"But Dad, I didn't mean to offend but it's not hard is it? it just requires a little bit of effort,

a bit of recognition that the place that yew have come to live and work is made of different stuff to that from which yew have come"

"Bugger me Cedric, ave yew swallowed a dictionary again?"

"I told yew not to get down that library as a little learning is a dangerous thing"  

"So how come I can say Pontypridd and yew can't father?"

"Are yew trying to shame me?"

"Put yewer tongue between yewer front teeth and blow"

"Since when have Centipedes had teeth Cedric?"

"It's any excuse with yew"

"You can chat back to yewer father, 

yew wait until you go and stay with yewer Uncle Seilas in 

Machynlleth"

Further Reading
https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-moth-with-hobnailed-boots.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2015/12/on-possibility-of-planetarium-in-ponty.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-owl-wot-got-into-front-room-via.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/05/flash-savior-of-universe.html

On being mild in a bitter world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11602616/Why-dont-men-drink-mild-ale-any-more.html

This is not a blog post about drinking beer. It is a post about  mens' mental health. Are the two linked? Have men historically drank to forget? to become drunk? I know that I used to. 

They used to sell mild in the pub round the corner to me. Brains 'mild' at the Grange Public House and the urban myth was that the landlord would put the slops or the overflowed beer back into the mix for the next customer. This probably dates back to when beer was sold in jugs rather than out of pumps. I remember having the odd pint of the treacly tasting mixture but it wasn't the drink rather than the name that struck me 'mild'. Mild mannered men used to drink mild until they had become bitter men and then they drank bitter. Lager drinkers would become louts. 

Towards the end of my alcohol drinking days I realised how much by volume a pint actually was because in my early morning stupor most of it had been released on to the mattress via my bladder and penis apparatus. The number of Sundays I spent ironing the said mattress in a fugue of self hate and paranoia. I gave up alcohol and marijuana because I realised that these substances were in fact exacerbating my mental health condition. Well they tell you to write about what you know.  I knew that I wasn't right in the head, that I was prone to high and low moods and that I would use substances to ameliorate intrusive thoughts. Even now when questioned I cannot and will not go into the contents of these thoughts. If I did, with the correct therapist, then perhaps I would improve and recover but I have decided to struggle on. Put it this way, these thoughts that used to be on a loop and that used to bash me into submission with their potency are nowhere near as powerful without substances. Personally I do not subscribe to the 'chemical imbalance' in the brain argument for mental illness but I certainly can attest to how alcohol and cannabis can mess about with your mind. Talking about myself in such a way might help other men to navigate their own course. I follow OCD Recovery pages on Instagram and I have to say that I find them very helpful but I am not ready to follow exposure programmes to treat OCD. To that extent, considering that these intrusive, self defeating thoughts have been with me since the age of 13, I'm starting to think that I might be addicted to them. Without them, I might become a success, I might make something of my life and I don't want that because I consider my life to be a statement against competition against striving and against success. Somebody has to be a failure in the eyes of others and to that extent I am prepared to be the fall guy. 

Men and Women can live with mental illness. Indeed we are told by mental health charities that 1 in 4 at any one time are struggling. That lets the other 3 off the hook. We all have a brain, we all have a mind so we all have the potential to suffer at any time. We are not taught resilience in schools, we are taught how to cram information and pass or fail exams. You only need a bereavement, a loss of dignity and of face, a period of unemployment and then a lengthy period of low mood and 'depression' is inevitable but in this post industrial revolution era we are still treated as robots where work is considered to be the panacea to cure all ills. If you go back to work, you will forget the loss of your loved one because you will be too busy to mourn. You will be distracted and this is what the modern era is aimed at, to distract us from our own mortality. Enough X Factor, Come Dancing, Celebrity Big Brother in the Jungle with enough alcohol and snacks and you might forget for a fleeting few moments that like the loved one you've recently lost that you also are going to die.

We are not encouraged to dwell on our own mortality as this is considered an indulgence. It is better for the country and for the treasury if we are productive to pay the taxes to keep the country and the ruling elite going. The fact that they care not a fig whether we live or die should make us angry. They'll come after us if they can when we're dead if we have been productive enough with inheritance tax. The ruling elite suffer as well but not in such numbers as the austerity hit poor. It is us that are blocking up the A&E departments because they don't know what to do with us.

Whatever they teach the boys and men of Eton, they should be teaching it in State Schools so that resilience and mental health can be on the National Curriculum. 

I am obviously looking at this through the eyes of a jaundiced male. Women suffer high levels of emotional distress but it appears that they generally have emotional networks where they can talk things through. It is 'normal' for women to talk about emotions. It is not 'normal' for men. Keeping face, saving face, avoiding shame, self control mechanisms kick into place and very often these are dis-functional control mechanisms that end up in hurting, controlling or manipulating others in the fruitless attempt to hide the fact that we are vulnerable. The hunter gatherer is vulnerable and I'm sure that given the opportunity he would value the chance to talk with a non judgemental woman about how he is feeling before he can work on strategies on how he can talk about stuff with his mates but we have been conditioned into these stereotypical roles. Stags & Hens and never the twain shall meet.

Before this post degenerates into a ramble I would just like to ensure any younger men who might be reading, that things do get better the older you get. The things that worried you at 30 will not worry you at 50. In fact you will probably be able to laugh at them then. The important thing is, is that you get to 50. That you as an individual find a way to navigate through the hard faces and that you are able to maintain being a mild man in a bitter world.         

Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/07/frozen-faces.html  

  https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2012/01/booze.html    

Ramblo da Red Button: The Story so far

I could be dangerous

Hi, I’m Cara. I have bipolar disorder and anorexia. Never once have I considered a mass shooting.

These incidents we are seeing time and time again in America are not as a result of mental illness. They are a product of male entitlement and white supremacy. #IAmNotDangerous pic.twitter.com/NOON0oypUC

— Cara Lisette 🧜🏻‍♀️ (@CaraLisette) August 6, 2019

Hi, I'm David, I have bipolar disorder and Pure OCD (Intrusive Thoughts) so of course I have considered a mass shooting on occasion but I don't have access to a repeat action shotgun.

These incidents we are seeing time and time again in America are not the result of mental illness. They are a product of easy access to guns. #ICouldBeDangerous

There is a slight difference in the sentiments expressed by myself and Cara Lisette. I am white and I am a male. I don't feel entitled but probably am and I never think about being white. This must make me a supremacist.

It is all very well for the Grand Wizard of Looney Toons, Donald Trump to say that people who commit these mass shootings are seriously mentally ill but if they didn't have access to guns, whatever their motivation, hatred, ideology their actions would come to nothing because they would not have access to the tools required to kill so many people. They could use acid, knives, machetes but their range and scale would be limited. 

One thing that I will admit to unlike all these women posting is that #ICouldBeDangerous and that is not macho posturing, that is honesty but people do not want to hear honest opinions especially if they feel that it threatens their 'safe space'.

I have done Prison Time for using threatening language and being off my tits in a public space. I was in the maelstrom of a Drug Induced Psychosis but I was not aware of that fact. I did not have any weapons of mass destruction on my person, but I might have done. The Police Officer Tazering you is not to know that you are a 'nice enough bloke' when you are not off your tits.  

It is guns and not the mentally ill that have to be addressed in America. It has to be an insane society based on Capitalist Greed and Acquisition to have so much mental illness in the first place. Get Rid of the Guns Donald Trump or Get Rid of Yourself.

Further Reading

  

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/02/casineb-yn-ei-galon-dryll-yn-ei-law.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/10/thoughts-prayers.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2016/08/when-is-terrorist-not-terrorist.html

https://meddwl.org/myfyrdodau/dwin-ddig-mary-ellen-dwin-ddig/

Unholy Land

Lindisfarne 

Great Band, Great Songs 

But disappointing location at £9.00 a pop for The Castle and the Priory even though I had a voucher for 20% off. 

Ye Olde Aidan's Tea rooms, Bede's Brasserie were names I made up for the Hostelries that faced me. 

I've just walked across the water from Iona for this I felt like saying but then I am a congenital liar. 

Mea Culpa. 

Where in God's name can you get spiritual sustenance in UK today without having to pay for the pleasure of turning wine into water? 

Everybody wants your Tax Payer Assisted Benefit Money to pay for the upkeep of relics. 

But at 53 I am the old relic.

Saints preserve us, only NOT the ones at Holy Island, Lindisfarne. 

I shouldn't have gone with such a Holy Man. My pilgrimage companion was a lay preacher with the Presbyterian Church of Wales. He is a man of God as the son of a Minister and I am a 'Seeker' after my experiences of 2005. Read about them here. I have been seeking through mini pilgrimage but I should have known better. This is 3 years into a Brexit debacle. How do you expect to find spiritual solace in among that. Brexit feels very real in Wales. It felt the furthest thing from our minds whilst taking a sojourn in sunny Northumbria. I'm a man who likes his rough and ready areas and originality and we found that in Newcastle & Gateshead. I didn't find it when I went to the town of Glastonbury in Somerset a few years ago. You can read about that here. I didn't find it at Holy Island and Lindisfarne either so maybe I should give up seeking. "NOOOO" I hear you screech like harpees. "You must continue seeking, it is what makes your blog posts so interesting" "Why thank you" Perhaps I shouldn't go looking in the so called obvious places at the height of summer holiday in cagoule and shorts weather. Perhaps I shouldn't expect to find miracles of nature and answers to the meaning of humanity because humanity is all about escapism as far as I can see. Escaping into your car to visit somewhere a little intriguing, a little different, somewhere the kids can run around shrieking among strangers, somewhere that isn't too steep at the Pay and Display Car Park. We were under the impression that National Trust England had their act together and were a different mindset to our own heritage highway persons of Cadw and National Trust Waaaaleees. Not surprising perhaps because they were charging £9.00 to get into Lindisfarne Castle, the interesting looking outcrop that you can see from the mainland and they were also charging £9.00 to get into the ruins of the Priory which was next to the church of St Aidan's which was free so we went in. It was packed with people like us who wanted things for free. There was no escape from the madding crowd on Holy Island. Wherever you turned there was a Brit in cagoule and shorts which is like London but the person on your shoulder there is a foreign tourist. Not many foreigners on Lindisfarne. It is too far from London, the metropolis where the Lindisfarne Gospels are kept under lock and key and glass case in the British Library along with the Elgin Marbles. As a pair of 'hard line' Welsh Nationalists' we were very tempted to start up the Northumbrian Republican Army on Holy Island, march on London and demand the Gospels back but then we saw the Initials of our group N R A and realised that that might bring Donald Trump along the causeway so we abandoned our plans before any armaments were stockpiled.

Lindisfarne, Holy Island and Glastonbury may have been a disappointment but Newcastle United's St James' Park certainly was not. The second part of our trip saw us make for the Mecca of 'Wor Jackie' and 'Bobby Pop Robson' You'd have thought that the Toon Army would have been in despondent mood after the departure of Rafa Benitez, not a bit of it! They were out in force to see The Magpies host 'Les Verts' St Etienne near Lyon. The atmosphere was like that of a shrine, especially second half when local lad Matty Longstaff came on and scored within a minute. 16,000 but it felt more like 60,000.

What struck the pair of us before we went into the ground was the Newcastle United Foundation Team with their promotion of Be A Game Changer. Mental Health means a lot to Seeker & Holy Man because that is how we met, by sharing our mental health stories and journeys with each other and we continue to do so with podcast conversations which you will hear more about in due course.  After the game we had one more pilgrimage to make and that was out past Gateshead to pay our respects to the Angel of the North. This certainly was a pilgrimage worth making so to see the canny angel's outstretched wings not embracing the area in front of it but to my eyes protecting the area behind it. With the North East having the highest rates of suicide in England in 2017 the area and its people certainly needs protecting.

"In a 2011 interview in Time, Sting said that he was agnostic and that the certainties of religious faith were dangerous" Amen to that Sting say I.