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.    

   

Camping

The reality and romance of camping have always intrigued me. Often the romance wins out and off you trot and then after a couple of nights of no sleep and basically roughing it you return to four walls and a solid roof in a foul temper. Camping like drugs isn't for everybody. I've done camping, from sleeping out in the small back garden in a canvas bell tent, blue on the inside and orange on the outside. You touched the fabric in the morning and you got soaked. You then gravitated to camping with the cub scouts in tents that had last been used in the Boar War, big fuck off turquoise affairs that housed about a hundred. Then as you got older you forgot how little sleep you got and you purchased the micro tents, the throw up tents, the ultra lightweight wild camping with go faster guy ropes and ultimately it was all futile. Camping just reminds me of being grumpy, permanently grumpy. More grumpy than when I am in a house which is really saying something because it seems to be a constant at the moment. Camping is an addiction because even now as a 53 year old grumpy middle aged male I still think of the kit I have up in the attic and yearn for a space where I can pitch my tent and just look at the stars or the roof of the tent listening to the noises outside. There is something about being in a tent that makes every noise into a bear or a psychopath. You cross your legs, not daring to go out for a pee just in case you bump into that psychopathic bear.  You want to make a fire but are scared of setting the forest on fire, you set up your little camping stove for a brew and the matches or the gas runs out. You eat beans out of a mess tin and then think why the fuck did I just do that? You wave and acknowledge other campers but don't get any further because you don't want them to know that you are an absolute incompetent. You pack up your stuff after two or three days, I've never gone longer than that and then you head home and think what the hell was that all about. Was it worth all the effort. The twinges in your back, the smell from not braving the communal shower block, the hunger, the lack of sleep. I hate camping, I love camping. When are we going again?  

Cheer up, it might never happen

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-48063982

The World is angry and stressed says this article on the BBC website. Well no shit Sherlock. After Christchurch and Sri Lanka the World is angry and stressed. Well you do surprise me.  I'm always a wee bit sceptical about these polls, they never seem to interview enough people. In this one the telling words are these

"Of some 150,000 people interviewed in over 140 countries, a third said they suffered stress, while at least one in five experienced sadness or anger."

Of some 150,000 people in over 140 countries. Doesn't sound too accurate does it? That's an average of 1,071 peeps in each country. 

The Top 5 Countries with Highest Positive Experiences are Spanish Speaking and in Latin America. The Top 5 Countries with Highest Negative Experiences have either been ravaged by War or Civil War. Did they interview people in Palestine or the Gaza Strip I wonder. Syria? I can't imagine that they would have many positive experiences.

Greece had the most stressed population in the world with 59% saying they experienced stress on the day before the poll. 

"The concept of a democratic society, such as the one our country enjoys today, began in the Greek capital some 8,000 years ago. The city of Athens is sometimes referred to as the cradle of Western civilization." from the New York Post which is interesting because around 55% of US adults said they were stressed.

I haven't downloaded the Gallup Report which you can do here  for two reasons. I don't want my information processed, transferred and possibly stored on servers that reside in the United States and I don't really care about other peoples' happiness. I only care about my own.

Eyes Down for a Full House Cont!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/47929266

One little duck

You don't give a fuck?

I'll give you two fat ladies

you sizeist git.

Unlucky for some anaye

eich bod wedi gwahardd y Gymraeg.

Empire?

You still think that Wales is part of the Empire?

What gave you that idea?

Oh the big fuck off Castell facing you

Oh I see where you get your vision from

but you do realise that within those walls

are guerrilla warriors who will speak Cymraeg

until their dying day, whatever you may say.

You don't want to see my legs 11

it won't be your lucky 7

No 85, we're staying alive

doesn't matter how ineffectual the law is.

Hang on there's a knock at the door

it rhymes with four

It's PC

Number 49

About time gentlemen please let's have your glasses. 

Further Reading & Listening

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2017/11/you-gorra-siarad-saesneg-if-you-wanna.html

https://davidredbutton.podbean.com/e/get-some-in/

https://davidredbutton.podbean.com/e/sports-direct-dot-com-store-language-policy/

Trouble in Tregaron

A Ken Frane Mystery

by

David Williams

Buy me a coffee

“That’s odd” remarked Frane to the Taxi Driver pointing to a candle in the window of the cottage. Dewi the Driver suddenly turned ashen.

“What’s the matter?” said Frane noticing the blood draining from his face,

“Corpse Candle Guv”

“Wossat en?” Frane had reverted to Valleys speak.

“That’ll be £17.50 from Lampeter”

Frane hands the Driver a £20.00 note and waves away the change.

Frane gets out with a suitcase that he confiscated from lost luggage many moons ago.

“So, what’s the corpse candle then?”

Dewi leans over and says “There are many country folks who still believe in the corpse candle as a forewarning of death; it appears in a house and lights the way to a place of burial”

Keeping the Grave Away

Keeping the grave away

by drinking gravy

how do we deal with mortality?

not very well I'll wager to say

do you think about death as much as me

or do you post positive affirmations for all to see?

I just can't get the images out of my mind

as they lower me into the hole

by a crane, cradling my behind.

head first, wicker basket, splosh

"let's away to tea

did he have much dosh?"

The eulogy read

in the pissing rain

said

"Unemployed for much of his life

a loony, a nutter, a bum

he was also quite partial to a tot 'bach' of rum

he claimed to be teetotal

but he was a wily old chum

given the right wind and a full tum

he would turn round and call the whole world 'scum' 

he thought he could write

no readers, no reviewers, no friends had he,

So I am surprised today

to see the whole cast of 'Glee' 

We've had to bus in security

and add an extra field

this is more like Glastonbury than a graveyard

was there more to him that met the eye, 

this awkward old card? 

He tried to be kind but

 it was interpreted that he'd lost his mind.

Being soft was a weakness

that got you not far

that's why so many of that sort

ended up propping up the bar.

When you finally realize what the world's all about

you're too old to give it another shout.

So we return his body to the earth

near to the sea

tune in next week

for 'Zombies that surf'

Further Reading 
https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-dont-go-to-funerals.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2014/01/sex-death-in-wales.html

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2018/08/winter-is-best-time-to-die.html