‘You pretentious git’, said Dave. He had just read the first line of my last posting:
Once upon a time I was a poet. Quite a good one.
I had to agree it read like I am pretentious git but the reality is more complicated. I get embarrassed when people praise me too much. I usually utter a quick “F*** off”, look away, put my head down with my right palm covering my eyes. I don’t make eye contact. I’ve just rehearsed it with Ezekielto check.
In this picture I was given the instruction “Go right over there, Geoffrey, and bounce a ball”. That was a metaphor for my place in the school classroom. Not really fitting in. Can you spot me?
As a child, I wasn’t an outcast but I didn’t fit in well with the rest of the kids. I used to blame it on the fact that I lived in a bungalow the other side of a big hill away from the friendly terraced streets near the school. But it was probably more down to my personality – a sort-of loner. Later I learnt to be more gregarious but it didn’t come naturally. To be an Angry Amateur it is necessary to have some distance from the rest and be separate from the group think of the crowd. Actually it’s even less definite than group-think more like a subliminal group-smell as in that Guardian piece, Can you smell the perfect partner?
I wrote this months ago but held off posting it after a discussion with an advisor as to whether referencing Wikipedia was good enough. I have disputes with Wikipedia but I still rely on it – after exercising my own judgement . That is what I do when I read peer reviewed stuff – use my judgement. So does Eziekiel the Alien.
Leon Festinger and the Aliens
Drifting to sleep last night listening to the radio, a mention of one of my heroes woke me with a start.
In 1950, Leon Festinger had showed that people tend to befriend their neighbours. It was a brilliant piece of work which I read when I was a Research Fellow at Leeds School of Architecture. I must have read it in 1971 or 1972 because, it guided us in choosing a house to live in: We moved into a co-operative housing development in 1972. Using Festinger’s book we chose the house positioned to make it easier to know our neighbours. It was a good choice.
Once upon a time I was a poet. Quite a good one. You can read some of my stuff on Auntie Jayne Solves Your Poem, unless you are in Morrisons Supermarket, where it is banned. Morrisons allows the Racing Post but not Oddschecker (reason=GAMBLING ). Most of my other websites are banned too but the reason fields are blank. Pity. Morrison’s customers are a refreshing change from the pretentious middle classes who shop at Waitrose – F&H, M&J and a few others are obviously excepted from this slur. (Note for US readers: In the UK the “middle class” are considered a step up the social scale from the “working class” but it’s complicated.)
Some of my friends think I’m rather self-obsessed. It is a fairly consistent response so there may be some truth in it. Introspection tells me their view is too simple. However, in the case of the 1970s proposal for a York Inner Ring Road, I’m not even going to pretend to be humble. If anyone stopped it, it was me. I did it.
Que moi? Yes me!
The proposed ring road crosses The Mount
In 1972 I gave evidence to the York Inner Ring Road Inquiry as an individual, having broken from the main protest group York 2000. I felt too many of them just wanted to stop their houses being knocked down.
On the other hand, my motivation was to see traffic kept away from York City Centre, allowing out-of-town development for the motoring classes to use. (Now we know the devastating toll motor cars have on the climate, my views on this have modified somewhat.)
Countless thousands of Britons have become addicted to pills that have been prescribed by their doctors for pain, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression.
Tranquillisers such as benzodiazepines (also used as muscle relaxants for pain) are highly addictive, yet many medics continue to hand them out for longer than they should.
actionagainsttranquiliseres.org.uk (2003-2016)
The article in the Daily Mail prompts me to re-post an item from an old website, actionagainsttranquiliseres.org.uk started in 2003 -but the problem is rather older: The Independent reported in 2010 in Drugs linked to brain damage 30 years ago. Now that’s 37 years ago.
Anyway, here is something from 2003. It’s a submission that a voluntary organisation made to government when there was even less public awareness of the benzo issue. The document was written as background information which in the late ’90s/early 2000s was still very scarce. It was one of several compiled by grassroots organisations intended to inform Government. A Hidden Epidemic was submitted to Home Office Minister Caroline Flint in 2003.
Since then nothing much has changed for people suffering harm from drugs they have been prescribed – particularly, the benzodiazepines. A Hidden Epidemic noted that consumption of benzodiazepines was rising and misuse was widespread. Short term benzodiazepines could be useful but long term effects are horrible:
Dependence
“It is more difficult to withdraw someone from benzodiazepines than it is heroin” “the withdrawal symptoms are so intolerable that people have a great deal of problem coming off”. Lader M.1999
Cognitive impairment
“Most benzodiazepines impair and compromise a wide range of basic skills which are absolutely necessary for coping with the intellectual and psychological demands of everyday living.” Hindmarch I. 1999
Agoraphobia
Cognitive and other coping mechanisms are vital for negotiating busy streets etc. With these abilities impaired by BZs, many long-term users find themselves increasingly housebound with agoraphobic-type symptoms.
Co-ordination
the benzodiazepine tranquillizers and hypnotics, more than double the risk of injurious accidents/ the use of the most frequently prescribed impairing medication, the benzodiazepine tranquillizers and hypnotics, more than double the risk of injurious accidents 32 De Gier 1998/9.
Benzodiazepine misuse
– Increased drug-related deaths
– Risks to the unborn child
– Crime and criminal behaviour
Next time I get a chance, I will ask Caroline Flint whether A Hidden Epidemic got through the departmental filter and she got a chance to read it.
After 37 years it’s good to see the Daily Mail on the case. The problem hasn’t disappeared.
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the [lung cancer] epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales…
As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established.
Unflattering visual images of prefabs too often fuel misleading prejudices. The prejudice against prefabs may have blinded planners and academics to their success. As PrefabsAreForPeople put it more crudely:
This is a minor rewording of a submission to Tom Watson’s Commission on the future of work. It introduces an extra element to discussions about the robot revolution: Climate change.
Scene from Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots
In Robot wars – Automation and the Labour Market, Adam Corlett asks, ‘Should we be concerned that robots will ‘take all the jobs’?’ He contrdicts Frey and Osborne who, in The Future of Employment, claim that, ‘as many as 47 per cent of jobs in the US are susceptible to automation over the next two decades’. Corlett points to OECD research, which suggests, ‘in the US only 9 per cent of jobs are threatened over the next 20 years’.
I don’t always read my copy of Prospect Magazine – the writing in it is top quality but it seems firmly inside one of those bubbles my social betters inhabit – but, on New Year’s Eve, I had an hour to kill in the pub and I had just collected the January edition with my post from my previous address.
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