Facing Pride And Prejudice

Facing the repossession of our house, myself and the woman who lived there plus her ten-year old son initially sought to move to rent another house nearby, partially so that we did not have to have the chickens slaughtered and the boy could go to the same secondary school next year as he had intended to attend; the end of September being the deadline for applications to enter the competition for secondary schools. As I have noted before, in our town there are ten secondary schools, but five of them he could not apply for being either the wrong gender, the wrong religion or he had already been ruled out from attending on the grounds his teacher’s felt he would not pass the 11+ Examination. However, we soon found that because we had defaulted on paying our mortgage, we now have a black mark on our credit rating for the next six years, by which time I will be 50, so barring us from renting a house or in fact any other property, via a letting agency. We must now only rent property from a private landlord/lady who does not do a credit check.

With a seven-year waiting list for social housing in our town even for a woman with a primary school aged child, the options seemed to be living on the street or going to live with our families. Of our relatives only my parents and the woman’s sister live in this country. If my parents or her sister had managed to emigrate to Australia as they planned, then I would now be living in a tent illegally camped on common land and the woman and boy, I have no idea where. It is incredible how quickly in the UK you can go from having a house and a job, to having nothing and either being homeless or begging people for a bed. Hence the title of this posting. I have mentioned before how people now see the period of the British welfare state, of approximately 1948-82 as being anomalous. The ‘norm’ is what we are experiencing now. If you have work you may still need to ask for charity, just look at the number of people in employment getting food parcels from the Trussell Trust and other such charities. If you lose your job, depending on where you live, you may become homeless or be put up in a bed and breakfast room. There are apparently some council houses and flats left but personally I only know one couple who have managed to get one and they did that over a decade ago now.

Thus, people end up living with their families. The number of middle-aged people who, like me, with no other option, have gone to live with their parents once more is so much that it was warranted a feature in ‘The Guardian’. I have gone from being a renter and then an owner of a three-bedroomed house to living in a square room which is only 10cm longer along any wall than I am tall. Since the start of June alone, I have applied for 39 posts and have attended 13 interviews. I was offered a job which I accepted 8 weeks ago. Unfortunately I picked on someone to write a reference who went on holiday for 5 weeks so delaying the start date of my job which is still ten days away. I have been told that the work for me is piling up, but because of the precision required around references I am not able to start the job and begin reducing it. Apparently two of the three referees I had to provide have not been able to give the exact dates on which I started and left my employment, in one case going back to 2005; there is an issue about whether I started one job on the 1st or the 10th of a particular month. Due to this need for precision I am in this weird limbo of ‘having a job’ but not actually being employed. I guess people on zero-hour contract, i.e. with no assigned hours each week but required to be constantly available on call, can understand that previously anomalous, but now entirely acceptable position. I am still signing on unemployed while I wait for this situation to be resolved.

So I am living with my parents. Naturally I feel as if the last 26 years have been an utter failure. I am in fact worse off than when I left home to go to university at the age of 18. It is as if nothing that happened in the meantime ever amounted to anything. Mentally this is hard to deal with, but I am repeatedly told that I should not mention feeling down or confused, or any of the natural emotions losing your house and job throw up. The other thing I have stepped into a play of manners. The woman from my house is suffering it even more. When you are unemployed let alone when you are homeless, people feel that they are obliged to tell you how to live your life. Clearly everything you have ever decided to do, every decision or effort you made was wrong, it has been proven to be the case. This means that any opinion you hold is wrong and must not be expressed as it is illegitimate. Family members keep telling us how wrong we are. Any suggestions about improving our situations are dismissed as wrong or delusional and yet we are told that we are feckless, lazy, not applying ourselves. We are illegitimate and even if we accept that, it does not stop us being told many times per day that we are ‘wrong’. The criticism does not just stretch to work or economic issues but to everything. The woman from my house was questioned at length because she happened to kiss her former boyfriend when she met him, something her sister happened to witness. She was harangued when she mentioned in passing that she would like to buy a DVD of a particular series in the future. There is a sense that we should not even discuss or think about these things, these are not for the likes of us. 

As you see in dramatisations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels the family members seem to take delight in correcting us.  On one hand they feel a very heavy duty to correct us but also appear to get a pleasure or at least some contentment from doing it.  It is as if, because we failed to remain in work and keep our house, we must be doing things wrong right through our lives down to where we sit in the house, where we put glasses, how we communicate with other people and even how happy we are.  I am constantly being told off for looking 'too sad' as if given that after months of bullying and the collapse of the life I had I must be able to put all that behind me immediately and march boldly forwards without any feelings if something reminds me of better times, typically something I did with the woman and boy from my house.  Seeing 'Dr. Who' listed in the newspaper was painful as it was a programme that I would watch and discuss with the 10-year old and now I will never do that again.  It is not a bereavement or even a divorce but it feels incredibly close to those things and yet I have to keep on apologising for those feelings as they are 'inappropriate' in my current setting.

Since I lost my last job, I have increasingly felt as if I have become a species apart from other people. They can go into shops, they can think about a new car or a holiday even. I am not even allowed to discuss buying a DVD. Advertising now seems like something in an alien language. There is no point watching any of it, because even if there is something I can afford, if I bought it, it would be ‘wrong’. It is as if I have slipped through a membrane and whilst I slide through consumer society, I cannot touch or interact with it. Given my age, it is apparent that I will never likely touch it again. No house means no way to fund my care when I am elderly. For the first time I have begun to understand the rioters of last summer. You feel no qualms about damaging things from this other world that you are barred from. To think otherwise is equivalent to those who ran the Apollo space missions suddenly feeling guilty about damaging the Moon by landing men on it. It is that removed from my life now. This is why politicians fumble around for some explanation of what went on and simply blame whatever they want to criticise. If you can alienate a 44-year old, well-educated man from society, how are you going to hold on for those who had a lot less going for them and would envy the kind of life I have led up until now.

My father has not policed who I might kiss, but he has opinions on everything and seeks to put his nose into every corner. I was trying to speed up the references I was waiting for. My approach to writing an email to one of the referees actually worked out better than I had anticipated. However, it was not the way my father would have written it so I had to stand there why he shouted at me how much of an idiot I was and how naïve and foolish I was to think that was the right way to do things. My way succeeded, but because I am now categorised as being ‘wrong’ it still needed me to be abused. Talking to the Job Centre, he stands nearby tsking and criticising every response I give. I am caught between answering the demanding questions in a way that I think my father will approve of. I can never be ‘right’ even when my decisions are shown to be correct.

The fact that we are receiving charity means that every aspect of our behaviour can be policed. We have to be seen to be deserving of help. This is achieved by looking for jobs, not just any jobs, but the ones which our family feel we must get. If we do not get them, or in my case, not start them soon enough, then it is our fault. It is not because unemployment is too high or I am too old or too qualified or all the other excuses companies give me for not employing me. Whatever stops me and even more the woman from my house, in getting back into work is purely and simply our fault and we need to be lectured at length about it. We are incredibly grateful for the help we received knowing we would be on the streets otherwise, but the price demanded is impossible to pay, it is a thirst for indignation directed at us that can never be sated. It is not helped by the myths that these people believe in which I have highlighted before, the most common, ‘how come you cannot get council housing, all these immigrants turn up in Britain and get given a three-bedroomed house for nothing’. This is not true but they would rather believe the ‘Daily Mail’ than the actual responses you have got from councils and benefit bodies.

Another aspect is the house rules. I have mentioned before, the challenge of being a lodger. You will always fail unless you can precisely read the mind of the homeowner. The rules are immense, down to where you can put a glass, the amount of food you can eat, when even down to what demeanour you must have and what you can talk about in the house. Any violation leads to another round of haranguing, because if you have put a cup out of place then it shows once more how useless, feckless, lazy you are and you must be alerted to and lectured about that. It is exhausting but clearly satisfies some need in the charity-givers psyche. This has shown me why, as Francis Beckett highlighted in ‘Clem Attlee’ (1994), Attlee disliked charity and insisted that the state should dispassionately give assistance to those in need. The direct giving of charity, unmoderated by organisations, is acidic to the souls of both the giver and the receiver. Of course, this is something that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and those other writers who so effectively wrote about our times feature in their novels. The mid-20th century anomaly is over and I suppose as I find myself facing ‘Hard Times’ I guess tolerate a lack of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and simply cope with the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and pray that I can get a job and rent somewhere to be away from here.

Suddenly Acquiring A Teenaged 'Daughter'

Myself and the woman who lives in my house, given the fall in my income since becoming unemployed again, have looked at ways of increasing the household revenue, if not my income.  Like many towns and all cities in the UK, ours has a number of language schools which at this time of year in particular fill with students from across the world, notably other EU states (of which Italy and Spain seem to lead the way) and China.  They come to the UK to learn English and have a bit of a holiday from their parents.  Though increasingly language students are of all ages and business and retired people now come to such schools, their visits tend to be at different times of the year and the summer is dominated by the teenagers.  For many towns, especially run-down seaside resorts they bring in vital funds to the town and while their noise and crowds might be looked down upon disapprovingly by locals, they know that the money is very useful.  The government recently sought to choke off this revenue by effectively saying you could not come and study in the UK until you could speak a pretty high level of English anyway, a good grade at GCSE, a level that the majority of the British population does not have itself.  The industry employs 3000 people and brings £600 million per year to the UK. 

The ripple effects are far wider than that because of the need to accommodate these students.  Unlike, say, university students, most language students who come to the UK only for 2-4 weeks are billeted in private houses usually one at a time, sometimes a couple more.  This brings revenue to literally hundreds of households at any one time.  The going rate seems to be, in the South of England, about £400 per month per student.  Schools vary in size considerably, but having 200 students in one cohort does not seem excessive for the schools I have seen, so let us say each school would be putting £80,000 into the local economy each month.  I have lost count of how many language schools there are in my town, some small, some very large, but it seems apparent that by simply lodging their students in houses across the town they are providing hundreds of thousands of pounds of knock-on money into the economy.

Myself and the woman in my house realised that clearing out one room and providing it for a language student could tap us into these funds.  We had been inundated by offers from schools in vicinity and signed up with three to start with to ensure a constant flow of students.  Under UK regulations if you have language students below the age of 16 you have to undergo a CRB check like teachers and youth workers do, but if they are over 16 you can save the money and of course you get a student who should be responsible for their own welfare.  Thus, we went for this option.  We had our house inspected and were asked about what we could provide and then and sat back and waited for our first student.  We were to provide bed, breakfast and evening meal and a packed lunch when the student went on field trips on the weekend.  Out of the £100 per week this did not see a heavy expense.  Having travelled a lot in my youth as had the woman in my house, we were looking forward to having someone to talk to so she (as it turned out) could practice her English.

I have written before on this blog about avoiding the risk of inadvertently becoming a parent and the dire consequences of that happening.  However, wrapped up in this financial agreement and the business side of things I totally overlooked the pastoral consequences of having a 16-year old Spanish girl living with us for four weeks.  I had enough trouble dealing with a 7-year old and now literally overnight we have a teenager in our midst.  First she needs to be ferried from place to place in our car and the friends she is with too, so that is me breaking off what I am doing to go and collect her.  Her mobile is re-routed via Spain so any texts take hours to reach her so I am wandering round the town scanning groups of teenaged Europeans trying to seek the particular one when she is not at the place she was supposed to be collected from.  I was worried how sinister I must appear and was concerned I would be pulled in by the police.  Certainly the men lurking around there alarmed me and I immediately had nightmares of the student being butchered on her second evening in our town or at least and most likely, being mugged and having her mobile phone stolen.  The school set a 22.00 curfew, but in a house in which we struggle to stay awake passed 20.00, this is a challenge for us.  We gave up waiting up for her and were glad when the school issued her with her bus pass so I was no longer the free taxi service. 

The school she is with is far larger than the average one and has its own catering facilities open 12 hours per day and runs activities seven evenings per week.  This has meant, ironically, that we see our student as little as we presumably would a teenage daughter.  She does not stop for breakfast, just goes from her hour long chore of selecting her clothes and putting on make-up (one error we made at first was not to put a mirror in her bedroom meaning the bathroom was blocked for an hour each morning and before any major social event).  She will not take lunch and we are asleep before she returns.  I worry that in fact she is not eating enough.  After the first couple of nights she has had no meal with us and even eschews the proffered packed lunch at weekends.  Occasionally she remembers to text to tell us of her comings and goings but that is rare and the text usually turns up long after the event.  We have had none of the English conversation around the dining table and our computer has been adapted so that anything you hover over with the cursor comes up with a Spanish translation.

We are not the parents, we are not even in loco parentis, but when you have a young person in your house, especially one who is unfamiliar with your town and who does not seem to be eating enough and going to bed late every night, meaning she is now not rising in time for school, you do get concerned.  However, I suppose in this case we are no more than a bed & breakfast hotel for a guest who only wants the former.  She will soon be gone, but what it has alerted me to is that within 8 years, possibly less, the small boy who lives in my house will probably be just the same and that unless this household breaks up when the house is repossessed as it well might, I will be having to face up to the same sort of demands but permanently.  I suppose with a parent on hand discipline and curfew hours will be able to be enforced in a way we cannot with our guest.  I do feel rather though that I have spent some time with the 'Spirit of Summers Future' and seen all the unease and driving that those years will bring.

Are Children of Lone Parents Stronger?

I read a headline on a newspaper in a shop recently which blared that 1 in 4 parents in the UK is now a lone parent and the bulk of these are single mothers.  There is an easy assumption that this signals a decline in British morality that started sometime when the contraceptive pill came into common usage and as a result of 'free love' of the 1960s.  Of course, lone parent families are no new invention, just look at the records of 1919 and 1946 to see how many there were.  In the Victorian period when mortality was higher, the average working man dying at 45, there were often widows bringing up children alone.  People say, well, of course, it was different back them, people could draw on the wider family, forgetting that these days many grandparents, about 300,000 in the UK in 2009 are the prime child carers and that if you ever go to poor areas and I can draw on personal experiences from East London and Milton Keynes (which does have a poor ghetto area) then daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers often step in for childcare roles.  I remember standing behind a woman in a post office in Milton Keynes who said 'I was looking after my daughter's step-daughter's daughter...' as showing something of the nature of modern UK families; with longer life expectancy people across four generations can be involved.

You can argue that part of the problem is that people take on children as a pastime that they tire of.  It is certain that in our increasingly horribly sexualised society in which as Natasha Walton noted recently that the media in all forms encourages vigorously boys and men are to be macho and violent and girls and women submissive in a way that horrifies anyone who lived through the era of feminism.  It also means that men do not take responsibility for anything which is seen as 'feminine' and that includes looking after children.  Creating children, spreading your seed is macho, but dealing with the consequences is never seen as needing thought.  It is much the same with attacking men for looking at you in a pub or driving too fast, we have become a society which neglects thought of the consequence of any action, it is saving face that is the only thing that matters.  Thus, I am not arguing that access to contraception is causing lone parent families, in fact it is helping prevent it spreading so far.  The problem is that in the desire to move back to 'Victorian values' we have rapidly moved back to a society in which men of all social standing got women pregnant and left them to the workhouse or begging.  These days the workhouse is social welfare and so many people try to make single mothers feel guilty and grateful for the meagre income they receive.  No credit is given for trying to find work in a society in which child care is prohibitively expensive and no credit is given to those grandparents and female relatives who spare the state of its childcare responsibilities.

Thus, I would argue that we should move from this simple assumption that sees lone parent families as somehow a symptom of immorality, except on the basis of (men) not living up to the consequences of your actions, and again that seems to be something that is lauded in our media rather than condemned.  I also think that the condemnation of lone parent families on the basis that the children of them will be socially dysfunctional is also wrong.  It is far better for a child to be with a loving mother than having an abusive or neglectful father in tow.  I have noticed this many times before when speaking to children from lone parent families.  It is apparent that they are far better equipped for dealing with the world than children who grow up with two parents.  One of the most robust, innovative and well-travelled woman I ever met had had a father and uncle who had committed suicide when she was a girl.  I doubt she would have experienced all that she did unless that had happened in her life, she was a better person for it.

There is something about a child with a single parent that makes them more resilient and though I have long known this, it is has become more observable as my own household has changed.  As I have noted before, I have become de facto father on the eight year old son of the woman who lives in my house.  Now, however, whilst paying the mortgage on the house as an investment, I have moved away to find work and now live in a hotel.  Hence, the boy who has had this pseudo-father for five years, is now back, more consciously to being the child of a single parent.  Have I seen a change in his behaviour?  Immediately.  He has grown up incredibly in the three months since I left.  His literacy skills have leapt on but far more importantly he has shaken off silly, juvenile behaviour and now really contributes to the house, tidying his room, sorting out his laundry and washing up twice per week, all things he would never do when I was in the house.  He has a curiosity about vocabulary and certainly about finance that was also missing until I went.  Very rapidly he is gaining very useful skills that will stop him being one of these feckless teenagers you see trying and failing to live away from home at university and going back to live with their parents well into their 30s.

Why is there this difference?  I suppose because the child learns quickly that with one person if it cannot be done it will not be done.  There is no father to cover when the mother is sick.  There is no-one to mind the child when the shopping or the cleaning or the cooking is done, the child witnesses everything of everyday life which twin parents not really consciously generally shield their children from.  They also learn that if they do not do what they are asked, something is going to go wrong, there is no father to fetch the dishes or pick up the rubbish in their place.  If the child does not do it then it is simply another job for the mother.  In a single parent family there is none of the sleight of hand that occurs automatically in a dual parent family.  This tackles one of the key problems of contemporary UK society, that it is someone else's responsibility to do anything you dislike.  Shirking such responsibility is impossible in the single parent family.

The one drawback of the single parent family is money.  Since the late 1960s in the UK, certainly in southern England, but increasingly elsewehre, it has been impossible for one parent to earn enough to support a partner and two children in a middle class lifestyle, i.e. a car of less than 10 years old, a 3-bedroomed house, a foreign holiday once per year, a television that works, insuring household items and being able to replace things that break, eating out in a restaurant once per month, not a luxurious life but a 'comfortable' one.  Lone parents unless among the very rich cannot have a comfortable life.  Even with me paying into this single parent family neither they nor I can achieve such prosperity.  Some lone parents do get enough money from a partner who has gone but they are not the majority.  Given that the cost of so much, notably entering higher education, effectively precludes it to so many people, this is one drawback for the lone parent family, not helped by women earning 17% less than a man in the same role; women being in the large majority of lone parents.  However, given the efforts in the media to constantly discredit so many of the universities and degrees a large portion of the students whose families are new to higher education have been through, perhaps a more innovative, robust attitude to life that a child of a lone parent develops is going to help them when the Establishment has ensured that so many people's qualifications have been devalued.

Look around at the single parent families you know and you will find their children are more mature and are certainly aware of the consequences of their actions, even if the context they are living in limits their options for the future.  I am not advocating that men go round fathering children and abandoning them, on this blog I have always insisted people should handle the consequences of their actions.  What I am saying is that the media should not see single parent families as an easy target to say something about declining morality and rather see them as actually admirably equipping children for the challenges they are going to face.

Brothers At Arms

One person I will not be meeting with over this Christmas period is my brother.  My visit to my parents' house has been carefully scheduled to avoid his visit.  My girlfriend thinks this is an unpleasant situation especially as I have never met my baby nephew.  She only has sisters and I told her that in my experience compared to sisters, adult brothers generally do not communicate.  For some reason in the late 1960s/early 1970s it seemed very common to have two brothers born 2-3 years apart.  So many of my friends, like me, have this pattern.  Of all of them, only one pair now communicate and that was after years of not speaking at all.  In that case it was pretty extreme circumstances that brought about the reconciliation, the younger brother had married a very unpleasant woman who proceeded to move her Mexican lover into the house and then decamped to Switzerland to be with another lover, taking all the marriage documentation with her making it hard for her husband to get a divorce.  I use her as the archetypal example of woman brought up to insist that she has everything she wants, becoming petulant if she does not get it and having no moral considerations at all about what she is doing: her desires are supreme in her world.  Anyway, the elder brother has not gone around saying 'told you so', but his concerns have been proven to be correct and with the brother contrite and proving to be a useful tenant for a property the elder brother could not fill, they are back on good terms.

All other brothers I know, are not talking.  Usually the last time they see each other is when they get married and even then one friend of mine who I have known over twenty years did not invite his brother to his wedding because they were effectively strangers to each other after more than two decades of non-communication.  I did wonder why adult brothers do not communicate and, in fact, are often very hostile to each other.  A lot of it seems to stem from men thinking that their view of things is the 'right' one and the only possible view.  I know two brothers who are real posers, pretty pretentious and in fact very much like each other, successful in their careers and with women, but clearly on the details of what is the 'in' thing to do or own, they cannot agree.  In many ways they are too similar.  It does not have to be big things like religion or politics that keep brothers apart, in fact if these things are the basis of the difference they often have a grudging respect for the other.  What separates brothers is what separates families, the small day-to-day habits.  There is more friction in a house around taking off shoes when you enter, washing hands before a meal, putting the toilet seat up or down, saying grace before a meal, even how you make the tea, than there ever is around the big issues of the day.  This is something that you learn quickly from the age when you are permitted to go and play at friends' houses; you often end up with a whole different set of behaviours for when visiting.

Owing to this sense of men knowing what is 'right' (and this often extends to telling their parents what to do especially when they become elderly) one or both brothers can end up patronising the other.  Unlike the brothers I have detailed above, I had a good relationship with mine until last year.  We would visit each other's houses despite them being in different countries, a few times per year and would regularly email and exchange gifts.  We did have one large row back in 2002 and this stemmed from events 15 years earlier when we had been teenagers.  I have a bad temper and get violent with it, so we would often fight, something that went against my brother's pacifist tendencies.  He also felt (wrongly) that I did not respect him because whereas I had gone to university he had decided not to.  It was clear he still viewed me as if we were still 18 if not 15, and in fact in terms of the university thing, he would have been wrong back then.  To some degree it showed that whilst we got on well, we had not talked enough and in particular I should have communicated more clearly how proud I was of what he had achieved in web design and carving out a new life in a foreign country. 

Some of the patronising attitude has come out in the recent split (well, 11 months ago now).  He has travelled extensively in Africa including to very remote parts so he can adopt an attitude of me not knowing the 'real' world.  I accept, not least because of my various ailments that need constant medication, that I would not survive in remote parts of Morocco or Senegal for long.  However, that does not mean I am useless living in Milton Keynes or Oxford or even London, places I have thrived in, even in the poorest areas of Tower Hamlets.  Brothers seem to believe they must 'save' their brother, whether he is younger or older than them, from himself and the mistakes he is making.  Of course, generally he is not making any mistakes, just living a different kind of life.  I own a house and have work, I am not on drugs and I drink rarely, there is nothing I need saving from.  I want a better life for myself but I am a million kilometres from the kind of lifestyle that needs intervention.

A lot of tension between brothers stems from the other people in their lives, particularly the girlfriends and wives.  I have to confess that I found my brother's wife difficult to handle.  She was very forthright and especially when in continental Europe was very patronising assuming that the average British person would get utterly lost if they walked out of a house unaccompanied when in Belgium, whereas I had been cycling and driving across North-West Europe for many years.  However, I could see they were in love.  They have been together for over a decade now and have a child.  As time passed the woman relaxed and I actually have ended up with a better relationship with her, who has none of this emotional baggage my brother has, than with him.  She has changed and is not the woman she was when first with my brother.  Even then when I found her irritating I had the manners to accept that this was the woman my brother had chosen and not to try to convince him to chuck her out for someone else. 

I know it sounds mad, but I do believe in the precept put forward in the movie 'The Commitments' (1991) that you can learn a lot about life from the lyrics of songs, especially soul music.  Hence, I refer back to 'When A Man Loves A Woman' (1966) written (though others are credited) and sung by Percy Sledge and the lyrics: '[He'd] Turn his back on his best friend/If he put her down'.  That song has all you need to know about how you will witness men behaving when in lover. The one thing guaranteed to break any relationship between men is for one to criticise the significant woman in the other man's life and I knew any criticisms I made of my sister-in-law would fall on deaf ears.  Anyway, the criticisms were minor, there was nothing that she was doing that harmed my brother, I simply found her rather irritating, but even expressing that irritation as I did in 2002 when exhausted, cold and drunk, raised a strong reaction from my brother. 

This is why I was surprised when my brother started criticising my girlfriend last Christmas saying that I should get rid of her, despite all the happiness she had brought me.  He made assumptions that she was somehow draining money from me, whereas in fact she was contributing far more to our funds that would have been proportionate as she was earning three times less than me.  As is common, he portrayed me as naive about her and that I was not seeing what she was doing.  He was very critical of her going to the USA a place she had always wanted to visit and to see friends there, using money she had inherited.  I tried to temper his view, both face-to-face and via email, outlining all that she was doing for me, how hard she works and what a good mother she was to her son.  My brother would not listen to these words and so started sending hostile messages to my girlfriend directly (they had previously collaborated on a website) telling her she was draining money from me and should leave me.  You would not be surprised that in the face of being unable to get him to stop this barrage of criticisms (we blocked his email address coming into our inboxes) I had to break off relations with him.  Ironically, my girlfriend who has a big heart, wants me to try to rebuild contact with him, but I have received no apology and have no belief that his attitude towards her has changed.

My girlfriend finds it surprising that me and my brother have ended contact and have no view of ever restoring it.  This, I imagine is because she has only sisters and while they can argue and gripe they seem not to be so critical of each other to cause rifts that are very hard to heal.  This may be one of the largest differences between men and women.  I keep telling her, that in my experience no brothers I know are in contact with each other and that in fact up to 2008 my brother and I were an anomaly.  At this present moment out of all the brothers I know, only one pair is communicating and that is due to the exceptional circumstances.  So, I do not currently foresee me ever speaking to my brother again.  I guess we will grunt at each other at one of our parent's funerals and his son will look at this strange uncle who will, no doubt, be painted far blacker subsequently.  I have done nothing to harm my brother, I have not stolen from him or assaulted him, I just happened to go out with a woman he disapproved of, on the basis of false assumptions about her behaviour.  Even if she was taking me for every penny I have, then that would be a matter for me, not him.  To repeatedly try to break up the relationship and go after her when I had blocked his emails seems very unpleasant.  Consequently I am now beginning to walk alongside my friends who have not seen or heard from their brothers in decades, which, certainly in the UK seems to be the norm.

Surviving Christmas

I know that everyone's experience of Christmas is very different so it is impossible to give universal advice.  I have known people who set off for a Spanish or Tunisian hotel each December so are far away from the, poor weather, crowds and traffic chaos of the UK and I know people who go 'on tour' from relative to relative around the UK having a series of traditional Christmas meals to the extent that they must be sick of the sight of even the images of this food.  I know Pagans who get it all out of the way on the Solstice four days before Christmas Day so feel none of the pressures that the media seems to jack up.  I know one many who celebrates Saturnalia on the 25th complaining that the Christians stole his holiday.  He has no servants that he can serve on that day but child minds for Christians going to church.

I come from a small family so never had a huge number of relatives to visit.  However, I did live through the 1970s which these days seem to be perceived as the 'golden age' of Christmas.  There is regular reference to the fact that half the entire population of the UK watched 'The Morecambe and Wise Show' helped by the fact at the time there were only three channels.  In addition, Christmas tunes by Slade and Wizzard, hits in the 1970s are more common on our radios than many carols.  These days with television recording devices, the chance to 'see again' on multiple channels and your computer, plus computer and console games has taken away a lot of the tedious intensity of Christmas especially for the young.  It always seemed particularly cruel to given children toys they had waited for all year and then deny them the chance to play them and instead sit in Granny's overheated house listening to relatives arguing about which year in the 1920s someone joined a tennis club or when the zip had not simply been invented but introduced into common usage and sit through dull movies only to spend the time when all the good stuff was home being driven home in the dark.  Living in southern England as I do now, there was not even the consolation of snow, which generally fell more often at Easter than Christmas.  Coming from a Pagan family, once school broke up, I did not have to attend any more religious events and have no experience of standing in cold churches listening to people droning out the 'classics'.

This posting, then, is a random collection of thoughts on how to survive Christmas without feeling that you never want to see it again.  Please feel free to send me any other things you want to include that I may never have encountered or thought of. The umbrella warning I would give is:  Avoid Excess. Christmas is about excess in so many ways.  People have the heating on far too much which makes everyone dehydrated, feel fractious and thirsty; turn the heating down a notch for every person who enters your house.  Do not try and jam too many people into your house, it is a recipe for arguments.  Think about it, many UK families replicate the circumstances of the television series 'Lost', i.e. a strange assortment of people, many of whom do not want to be there, with people they might not particularly like and certainly have little in common with, in an overheated, cramped space not even as attractive as a desert island.  Excess continues with food.  At Christmas generally there is food from the moment you wake to when you are back in bed again.  There are sweets and nuts, cakes and biscuits then most people put on a meal many times larger than what they would eat on a normal day, except that, of course, you are not burning up a fraction of the energy you would be doing on a normal day and you have been eating lots of high energy food already.  The people who need the food at Christmas and the energy it provides are those that are outside like the homeless or working hard like emergency services, often actually get less rather more than usual.

Do not try and enforce jolity.  At Christmas people are often reflective, it is grey and they may feel down.  However, thrusting brash, noisy activity in their face is not going to make them feel magically happy, it simply throws what they are feeling into sharper relief.  Combined with over heated houses and excessive food and alcohol it can be far harder to cope with than something more low key.  Have decorations, yes, but not some huge installation that makes the place glitter in every corner.  True happiness comes from seeing what is important and being thankful for it.  You have a house when many people do not; you have food when many people do not; you have gifts when many people do not.  Do not put everyone on a guilt trip, but do see that actually you can be happy from having people you love around you and having a good (but not madly large meal).  If everything is too big and too brash then any real feeling is gone from it.  Never enforce jolity on people; do not compel participation.  Think about, after a large meal, lions lie around and doze they do not charge across the savannah, think the same with people.  If someone is not a gamesplayer all year round then do not guilt trip them into being one at Christmas, it will simply be twice as unpleasant for them.  Also avoid activities that provoke embarrassment; on this basis do not treat teenagers as if they were still eight years old, let them find their own level of interaction.  Keep it simple.  As a child I used to watch my parents and grandparents play serious card games at Christmas.  My Granny (my father's mother) seemed transformed into a different woman.  However, the card games were nothing flashy and nothing new, but it was clear that the players were enjoying the game because it was something they rarely had a chance for.  The same went for my Grandpa's (my mother's father) eclectic mix of piano tunes, generally more informed by Socialism than Christianity, but it was the only time he was tolerable.  These things work better than new elaborate games, especially if no-one is compelled to participate.

These days a lot of the problems of competiton to see various programmes has been eliminated and it has reduced a lot of tension in houses.  It does not really matter if you miss a programme or a movie, you can have preset your recording device before leaving home and the programme will no doubt be available on some channel or online or on DVD in the near future.  This contrasts with the past when large chunks of the assembled group would have to sit through something they found tedious knowing what they wanted to see was ticking away on another channel.

I do recommend a degree of exercise, if simply to counteract the stuffy-headedness of being inside for much of the day.  It also allows a reduction in the tension of having people piled up on top of each other, especially in the UK where houses are really too small for the number of people we jam into them.  The Royal Family has the right idea, though naturally their houses are huge.  They all go off to church and obviously for Christians this is one way to get some fresh air and exercise.  Of course, really Catholics time it badly.  Midnight Mass may have a magic to it, but if you want the family to survive Christmas, Midday Mass would be far more suitable.  For the more secular among us, walk the dog, go to some park, even look around the shops.  I favour going to some open space as even in these days of far longer opening hours, there is nothing more dreary than walking passed closed shops.  I can guarantee that a lot of the pressure of being around people at Christmas is reduced if a large portion of them get out.  We cannot entirely counteract the fact that we can only stomach our family for comparative short periods of time; often husbands and wives find it far more challenging to be together for an extended period than when each has the escape of work.  This is why there are so many divorces initiated in late December and early January.

The one thing that people neglect to give at Christmas is space.  Too many families organise every moment of everyone's day.  You rise early and you stay up late, prolonging the day, but rarely do you get time to take a break and sit back.  Let the teenager listen to their ipod, let adults not participate in games, let people watch something different up in the bedroom, let the elderly or the younger people sleep if they want to.  There is ample opportunity for coming together and you are going to get a lot more of it compared to usual over the period, so let people opt out for some of the time; do not try to have everyone involved all of the time, it wears down the reserves of patience and goodwill very quickly.  My one recommendation is to have a good non-fiction book on standby.  Do not have fiction because it can be frustrating leaving the story to go and eat or participate in an activity.  I always used to have the non-fiction samurai books by Stephen Turnbull for such use.  I think it explains why celebrity biographies are ideal at this time of year.  You want something that is interesting enough but that you can dip into and out of as need requires.  Let children have free rein on computer/console games, remember, for them Christmas, after the initial couple of minutes of delight, can be hours of protracted tedium, particularly for teenagers who would would rather be around their friends' houses than pressed together with little known relatives.

Overall, I know that people feel that Christmas is not Christmas unless everything is done to the maximum. My suggestion is that if you want to retain your sanity and good relations with your family, especially your spouse, is to step everything down a notch or two.  Do not provide excessive food; keep the house temperature down a bit; let people opt out of activities and you should be able to get through Christmas without dreading the same time next year.

Never Become A Father

Yesterday I read an open letter in the 'Family' section of 'The Guardian' from a mother of three children to them and also to their father who committed suicide ten years ago. Reading it reinforced my view that single-parent families are the only model that can adequately prepare children for life in the UK in the 21st century. Though all the children who are now 21, 17 and 16 have had the usual run-ins with some self-harm and contact with drugs, they are all now prospering and pursuing a range of interests and careers, they have not become homeless junkies. I imagine the same would have been much the same if their father had stayed alive. He would have been in no better position to stop them doing bad things to themselves than the mother has been. In fact especially for the two boys, the 21 and 16 year olds, antagonism with their father may have driven them to behave more hostilely and destructively than their brief flirtations with things have done. I think this is a classic example of a riposte to the group 'Familes Need Fathers', proof is stacking up that they do not at all.

Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.

In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.

Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.

I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.

There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.

P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.

The British and Bank Holidays

As I have noted on a number of occasions in the past the UK has 5 fewer bank holidays than any other country in the European Union. We get the following (typically they are given on the nearest Monday following the date itself): New Year's Day (1st January), Good Friday and Easter Monday (which move according to when the Easter holiday is), May Day (1st May), Spring Holiday (26th May this year, anyway the last Monday in May), Late Summer Holiday (a.k.a August Bank Holiday, 25th August this year, the last Monday in August), Christmas Day (25th December) and Boxing Day (26th December). Scotland (2nd January, 4th August) and Northern Ireland (17th March, 14th July) get an additional 2 bank holidays compared to England and Wales. Even the USA renowned for not having long holidays does better than the English and Welsh let alone our European neighbours. Those campaigning for us to have St. George's Day (24th April) as a bank holiday do not want an additional bank holiday they want it simply to replace May Day which they see as 'too Red'. Despite us having so few bank holidays you can guarantee that the news will have some employers' spokesman (and it is typically a man) complaining how many billions of pounds have been lost to the economy by workers having a day off. The British worker typically works longer than any other in the European Union in the average week anyway, surely these long hours more than make up for the bank holidays, but no, of course we must feel guilt that we are not working as hard as we can for the wealth of the company owners. The UK is exempt from the EU's working time directive which limits jobs to 48 hours per week and many people work a lot longer in the UK. Rules are tighter than they were in the 1990s but in the UK you can still work more than 48 hours per week if your average is less than 48 hours per week when seen over a 17-week period.

There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.

Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.

The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.

The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.

My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.