Fifty F*****G Five

 

I usually write a shitty little poem to mark the event but this time I will go the whole hog Mogg and write a blog post for the delight and delectation of my loyal blog followers. January 2022 will be the 10th Anniversary of this Independent Boutique Blog and on Monday next, St David's Day I will be 55 years of age and I have just received an early birthday present from the Department of Work and Pensions.

Non Welsh speakers will be able to ascertain that they are looking to recoup the Universal Credit that they paid me between January 2019 and Christmas 2020. The case has gone to appeal and I am asking NOT to pay the amount back because my employer is the DWP which pays me £67.25 a week Carers' Allowance which they will have to recoup from that should they pursue this claim to the bitter end. I won't bore you with the details here but you can follow the case in the links in Further Reading.

I'm probably coming across a bit like Alex Salmond here. I feel very aggrieved at the Department of Work and Pensions course of action. I had exactly the same trouble with HMRC when they tried to recoup the Working Tax Credits they paid me. I had to ask the Cardiff South Mental Health team who had the misfortune to have me as one of their clients for a letter to tell them that I am severely mentally impaired (Bipolar Disorder)

My beef is with the system. "Don't pay people benefits if you are going to try and recoup them after two years. Find some poxy excuse to refuse the benefit payment rather than put the claimant/client through mental torture two years down the line."

I don't have the amount stated any more even though the DWP and their snoopers insist that I do. I will not be paying this 'alleged' debt and as somebody who has been to Prison before for their Mental Health I will go again to serve the time that equates to the amount stated.

I am a Full Time Carer for a 102 year old man and a 93 year old bed bound woman. My father and mother. I am an unpaid carer saving social services and the treasury a wee fortune. I made the claim for Universal Credit in January 2019 in GOOD FAITH having seen a carer from Gwent on BBC Wales state that he was receiving Carers' Allowance and Universal Credit.

The point I am making and will continue to make is that you cannot live on £67.25 a week even if you are in lock down and not going anywhere.

My mental health has been compromised by the DWP and HMRC but they don't care about that. The wee man in Belfast or Wolverhampton only cares about the bonus he is on should he be able to recoup Tax Payers' Money.

I'm not looking for your sympathy. I'm just putting it out there that unless Universal Basic Income is introduced into the UK then many like me will fall through the net of the Welfare State and be continuously subjected to this persecution.  

Happy St David's Day one and all.

Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2020/03/carers-pittance-universal-discredit.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2016/12/hmrcadvantisworkingtaxcredits.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/05/insult-to-injury.html

Soul Erosion

 

One reason I don’t want the lockdown lifted. I don’t want the tourists coming back to Wales. Call me a Welsh exceptionalist if you like but I feel that we are diminished as a nation by our Tourist Industry. That is a misnomer. It is a collection of small to medium sized business owners with B&B’s, Self Catering  Accommodation and Hotels. They might pay their subs to Visit Wales but they are ostensibly single operators out to make a profit out of visitors. What do visitors get out of Wales? A change of scenery, a holiday, activities, rubbing shoulders with the locals who are originally from the areas they have travelled from especially in Mid Wales. The reason that Ceredigion remained Covid Free for such a long time during the first lockdown and through the stop start summer was because of its geography in relation to the end of the M4 and the end of the A55. It would take another hour and a half to get here from those two compass points. Road & Rail Infrastructure bring the Tourists. Obviously I wouldn’t be writing this if I was a small business owner but I’m not but I think it is ‘anfoesol’ immoral to make a living off the backs of people who bring nothing to the area apart from their money. They don’t bring a refreshing manner, they don’t bring a love and respect for the Welsh Language. They arrive with the modern day version of the bucket and spade namely a smart phone and attitude.

I don’t actually think that some places actually want tourists. Porthcawl and Rhyl are used to them. Eryri is a magnet for them as witnessed by those who tried to make the pilgrimage there under lockdown. I ask the question "Are Beddgelert and Betws y Coed enhanced by tourists?" Do they improve the area? They improve the economy and there lies the rub where the National Motto appears to be “Diwedd y gan di’r geiniog”

Farmers make money from the land that perhaps they have inherited. They invest their time into the production of food. It is an essential service. I would argue that the Tourist Industry is not an essential service. Farmers have had to diversify into running caravan parks and offering accommodation to make ends meet. Fair enough. There is something holistic and regenerating about this kind of venture but just opening your hotel or Bed and Breakfast as a cash cow so that roads become clogged and holiday makers just bum around the town just doesn’t make sense to me.

Pre lockdown and I know that we are going to go back to it when the balloon is lifted, in Spring and Summer there was always the feeling of soul erosion going on in Wales. Areas like Pen Llyn, Ynys Môn and Ceredigion become shape shifting places to accommodate the ‘fisitors’. I wish I knew what we could do otherwise but we know what the Industrial Revolution did to the ‘soul’ of South Wales, The Tourist Industry is doing the very same to the ‘soul’ of North and West Wales.

Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2016/09/wales-free-wales.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2020/03/do-not-visit-wales.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2014/06/rhandiroeddreservation.html

Driftwood: The Movie

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/redbutton

The St Valentine's Day Bubble Bath

 

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR CORPORATE SPONSOR

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2013/02/half-price-love.html

Ruled by Robots

 

I want to be ruled by robots. I am fed up with human beings running the government. When you go grocery shopping and you get told off for putting your unidentified item in the bagging area, well that's how I want my star chamber cabal to behave. 

Instead of Liberal Shamocrats, Blairite Labour, Tory Fops and Paid Cymru party apparatchiks taking home a sweet £67,000 a year basic from Senedd coffers, what about computer chips, robots, cyborgs, robo dolls sitting in their chairs. We'd get more done. There'd be less bickering and more action. There would be no boozing on Assembly property under lockdown rules. The robots would be at home in their Cardiff Council allocated student accommodation, plugged into the electric getting recharged for the following day's government. 

You think I'm joking? I'm jolly well not. I'm old enough to have witnessed a lot of the shit show that passes for British Democracy over the last four decades. Before that I didn't really give a monkeys. Kindness was more important to me than anything as a young person. I always thought that Lord Jim Callaghan of Splott looked like a kind person. Margaret Thatcher did not. We know that the citizens of the so called 'British Isles' have been groomed into a kind of centre right group-think after forty years of dog eat dog, austerity loving, neo-liberal look after number oneism. It's very difficult to get out of this mindset seeing as pre-pandemic we were a collection of nations of shoppers and shopkeepers where the emphasis was most definitely on home ownership and material wealth. We've always had the rebels, the freedom loving, social justice left, there's just not enough of us to make a dent into the teflon Elon Musk like skin of modern day centre right politicians.

If we had AI in charge then they would not claim expenses. They would not travel under lockdown restrictions. They wouldn't have personal spin doctors who take spins to Barnard Castle to check their eyesight. When was the last time you saw a Robot with glasses? I don't care whether the Prime Minister has hair like Boris 'boorish' Johnson' as long as the algorithm inside his SIM card forced him to make the correct decision for 'the country'.

Human beings are fatally flawed, that's why they created AI. Surely an AI government would not have allowed 100,000 humans to die on their watch? Humans will allow anything to happen as long as they as an individual survive.  

Robots do not attend Eton. Robots do not recognise un-elected monarchy. The Queen would have to queue for the vaccine along with the rest of us. AI from the House of Common Robots would walk like Robots across to the House of Lord Robots and inform them in a voice like Davros to go and do something more useful like picking fruit in the post Brexit death camps dotted across the land. 

If a robot can run JD Wetherspoon then it can certainly run the devolved powers of the UK as well as the Computer Mainframe in Westminster.

Political Parties expect us to behave like robots every five years.

 "Oh goody a choice between Conservative and Labour which we all know is no choice at all but give me my stubby pencil because a wet behind the ears ambitious politico wants to get their grubby hands on the £77,000 pa starting salary."

I want to be ruled by robots.

         Further Reading

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2019/05/forty-years-of-disconnection.html

No Passengers

A joy for the monogamous is that nobody interrupts.

They have nailed their colours to the mast.

One for one, and both for each other, forever. 

I was never very good at boundary setting

A good listener, an appeaser, a yes man.

People would be flattered that I was willing to listen to their pish.

They would seek me out to talk at me.

Octogenarians are a danger.

Befriend an 80 something at your peril Beryl!

They are lonely for a reason. They can't shut up.

I admire the assertive boundary makers and markers

who know how and when to stay out of other peoples' way.

What makes some people so difficult to deal with?

I think back to those who could sense that I was trouble 

and left me to stew in my own bubble.

I was desperate to make friends in my late teens and early twenties.

Only to go to the effort of losing them all 20 years later.

John Donne wrote "No man is an island" 

but I am making a bloody good fist of it, believe you me!

My ambition is to be ultimately connection less

That means NO PASSENGERS

To travel duty free.

Miserabilist

 

home truths from a miserabilist
a poem over two days

Day 1

Family

School

Uni (if you are lucky)

Vocational Skills (if you are unlucky)

Work

Maybe Jail

Death is the great release.

Life is a slow suicide.

The Lockdown

The Leveller

We will all start again from scratch.

It is just that some peoples’ scratches are higher up the pecking order.

Booze, Bookies, Fags & Football

Climbing up the greasy poll until it is time to retire then die.

FOLKS! WE HAVE BEEN SOLD A LIE.

Life is one great big sigh!

My glass is not half empty, it is empty, there is no glass, the shop was shut, the owner had

diversified into glass for windows, that one sided shit that looks like a mirror 

so you can see yourself age.

 

Day 2

Your ‘other half’?

That presupposes that you were not whole when you met.

Some just want a sounding board, a cash cow, security.

Tell the Divorce Lawyer 4 U about how they complement your neurosis.

They know where the psychological bodies are buried

and they will take them when they leave.

My ambition is to have a heart as hard and heavy as stone upon death.

Build that wall against intimacy with the bricks that Trump left over.

He should be impeached for that alone, promising something he never delivered.

A day does not mellow an anti-poet. It condemns.

I am bricking it at the prospect of coming out of lockdown.

Going back to that abysmal normal with traffic jams and crowds.

I might wear a shroud and move through the fair.

Invisible to all but other miserabilists who will nod.  

“There he goes the King of old sods,

I thought I was bad but he takes the biscuit.

When it comes to introspection, he doesn’t half mix it.”

Two poems for the price of one

 Hi! How are you?

"Hi! How are you?" read the text out of the blue.

There was no name with the number so it could have been Goldfinger.

While you are here, you might as well hear what I have to say on the matter.

"How am I?"

I've given up on life.

"How are you?"

Same? Boo hoo.

Why contact me if I don't know who you are?

Did you think I was interested in more than a friendship?

or are you a bloke? a sick joke?

"Hi! How are you?"

"Fine, How are you?"

And we would carry on ad infinitum.

If you are really interested to know how I am at least have the depravity to put a kiss on the end before you press send.

Are you yet another condescending friend?

Who from my past could even be bothered to send a "Hi, how are you?"

I'm all over Social Media. You can contact me there.

Yet you chose the cold hard clinical stare.

I wish you'd asked "Why are you what you are?"

I would have replied

Because love has died inside

Because love has died inside.

Girl in a Green Duffle Coat

Don't look at me.

I'm old enough to be your father.

Don't pretend to be interested in my kindness sprinkled with humour.

Turn away and keep walking.

Your knight in shining armour awaits on the end of the pier.