Category: Random thoughts and observations

Dans le vent

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Originally published on The Lady Shed 17/07/15

“The thing with you is that you are very slow with fashion. By the time you like something, it’s no longer dans le vent” said my Mum, many years ago. It was Summer time, long before I had big children of my own, she had not seen me for months so, as every Summer, we’d gone for my yearly treat: clothes shopping.

I miss those days. Not so much for the cheap ‘French’ clothes nobody else I knew back in England would be wearing, though that was nice, or being spoilt by my mother, though that was great; just the time spent together.

South of France in August, busy beaches way too hot, high streets boiling, we’d go and spend a couple of hours after lunch in the shopping centre in the middle of the local zone industrielle; more shopping extravaganza than industrie.

Conditioned air kept us cool, conditioned shoppers enjoyed buying, conditioned sales assistant rarely smiled. I never questioned then where my clothes might be made. Or by whom. Or why the smiles on the shop assistants were so rare. No idea. Too busy being young, working, and being on holiday with my family. And getting new clothes.

Because lots of bargains was normal.

Thing is, it’s not so much that I am slow, which I can be, it is more a case of not giving two hoots about fashion. Didn’t really then, and sure don’t now. Don’t try and tell me what I should wear. Simple. I don’t do fashion mags filled with skinny models that look nothing like this five foot something pear shaped reader. Clothes that are supposed to be in fashion today, out tomorrow, as opposed to beautiful classic clothes à la Audrey Hepburn?

Hell no.

I guess I see fashion a bit like uniforms. With more choice, ok, but it’s still let’s all wear what we’re told. Seasonal sensation. Of course I hate uniforms. For a start they make me think of the army. Well I didn’t have to wear a school uniform as a child you see, so I’m not conditioned to think it’s normal for a six year old to wear a uniform; let alone a tie.

From army uniform follows a sense of having to do what am told, almost blindly; obey. I came round for a while to the English view that uniforms, especially at school, makes us all the same, equal. Am no longer convinced. Kids can see through the uniform. If they want to bully or judge, they will.

They do.

Uniforms for children totally kick any kind of creativity or uniqueness in the teeth. What do you mean the child can’t wear different colour socks? For goodness’ sake. Get a life. But I do buy jeans. When the old ones are too knackered. And comfortable shoes, heels are so yesterday darling; and cotton tops. I do have a few shirts, you know, for special occasions. And a few dresses for Very Special Occasions. So in fact, I have a uniform. Practical, maybe, but the same trousers as millions of other people who don’t have to wear a suit.

Weird huh?

So what about the future of fashion big brands then? I asked a man who works in the fashion industry. He is an artistic director, his clients are big brands, he travels the world, so his point of view on the future of his industry interested me. His reply came as a surprise. I imagined the rag trade, considering it is neither new, nor known for being shy about making money at any cost would have had a cunning plan.

Big famous brands have mainly kept going by getting into new markets, like Japan or the big green eyed monster dragon with huge potential that is China. No Plan B if that fails. Sounds familiar, isn’t that the road supermarkets have been driving down? Expansion via forever new markets. And, are they not struggling with that plan?

Expansionism is all very well, but it is a recipe for success up to a point. As with everything else, on our finite planet, some call that a recipe for disaster. It all depends how we choose to look at a story. It will benefit some, at the cost of others. For fashion, supermarkets, or the economic model that rules our lives the current chapter is being written with no idea of what happens in the next page, let alone the next chapter.

Sophia writes about 50 shops in 50 days and £1 T-shirts which sounds bonkers but will appeal to many; Maddie tells us about clothes shopping in charity shops and her love for fashion. All very far from shoes with red soles or size 0 models. Far closer to reality. Whatever that is these days, in fashion as in everything else. From Rana Plaza to gold embroidered gowns worn once, it seems the world has not changed much when it comes to the rag trade. Only now, it’s properly international. And these days Brits know what’s going on in Bangladesh, if they want to.

And if you want to know which companies paid up to help the victims of Rana Plaza and who does not care one bit about the workers without whom we’d have no cheap clothes, and they’d have no company, have a little look at Clean Clothes Campaign, one of the many organisations trying to make a difference in our mad changing world.

One little or big step at a time.

Trying to improve the working conditions in the global garment industry seems a good idea. Non?

Right, that’s all very well, but I wonder.
Did my mother have a point about my being slow?
Or not being dans le vent?
Oh well, who cares.
.
.

"Dans le vent" (in vogue)

 

“Dans le vent”
(in vogue)

My mother the extremist 

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First published on The Lady Shed on 1/5/15
“Problem with you Mum, you’re an extremist”

That stopped me in my tracks. Driving along in my automobile, on a West Dorset lane, hedges ensuring I can only look ahead, no views of what’s happening in the fields around me. I didn’t slam on the brakes, but I sure was stunned into silence for a second.

“What do you mean I am an extremist?”

“You always go on about the Americans. That is extremist Mum”.

He was a bit angry with me. He loves America, the skateboarding, the rap music, the series on tv and all that stuff on YouTube. He doesn’t watch the news too much, that’s always the same old stuff of no interest to him whatsoever. Like so many adults who have given up on lis’ning.

And he sure has a way to get straight to the point, that boy of mine. And stop me in my tracks. He makes me think. He makes me readjust my ways. And I want to listen. Kids are not as blinded by economic beliefs that have been misinterpreted by a society on steroids along a motorway with hedges so high we can’t see any fields that may look different.

green fields

When so many teenagers I listen to see little hope of a bright future in this country, I wonder where we are heading. Just like the next person.

Starting from the system as we know it, our current base, the jungle out there, I can’t help but conclude that we will need dramatic changes in the long term if we are ever to live in that more balanced world philosophers have been writing about for centuries. For changes in the short and medium term, if we are to achieve any long term goals of rebalancing Society, maybe we do need to think about a few extremist ideas.

Yet I keep hearing that people don’t like change.

It makes me very angry when the Conservative Party’s manifesto states in the first paragraph “Labour’s Great Recession”. It worries me no end that the MP where I live has written a book entitled “How to privatise everything”. It astounds me that he writes policies with the help of seconded employees from KPMG and their like, even more so that our laws allow him -and many others- to do so. And then you have France riddled with endless strikes and equally filled with food banks. Economics and balance sheets are the only reality of life, it seems. “I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me” said a Scotsman from Inverclyde, a typical Labour constituency near Glasgow, interviewed by the World Tonight on Radio 4 on 29 April 2015.

Is he the only one thinking this?

Take calculator, add person A = £6,210 a year salary to person B = £1,865,999 a year, divide by two and you’ll get an average that means the country is doing great, thanks. It means bugger all, how does that deal with poverty? I’m useless at maths but if the top paid earn forever more and the low paid earns a tiny bit more thanks to tax cuts, then when you average their salaries the number will be bigger. Recovery we hear, but for who? Cuts to vulnerable people’s benefits have lead to deaths. In 2015, in Britain or France. How can this be?

More importantly, where do we go from here?

fragile

In our black and white world, it seems that if I speak up against ‘the Americans’ I must be Red Nat. I must be against Obama. If I go on about the danger of corporations acting as a monopoly I must be antibusiness. If I speak up about Israel, I must be antisemite. Therefore I must be racist. Therefore I must be derided, attacked, bullied, silenced. Which is pretty much how the media have been able to conduct their affairs up to now. And allowed to tell people who they should vote for. For goodness sake, why are these non-dom media barons allowed to get away with such blatant political bias?

Yes things are changing, people are engaging in politics when given half a chance, as the Scottish referendum has shown. People are turning to alternative media for news thanks to the internet. McDonalds are closing outlets, Tesco is struggling (on paper). What happens next? Will they pay their small suppliers even later? These dangers have been forecasted for years, by extremists on the left, yet they have mainly been ignored by Westminster Cabinet Inc. The old school media meanwhile is peddling the same old hatred to divide us to smithereens.

Benefit scroungers vs the rich, public sector workers vs private, countryside vs cities, good old days of the Empire vs ignoring the young, disabled vs the lucky ones, Eastern European vs proper British, hard working families vs lazy single parents (we can only assume). Oh and religions, obviously, nothing like a good old established subject of division and hatred. Always works that one. And that was before we even started the election.

Now we’re in overdrive. When a woman suddenly inspires not only Scotland but also English voters, all hands on deck. She’ll be working with that Welsh one as well. And heaven forbid the Aussie one with mad ideas. She and the other two must be taken down: if we are to be Great or British, we must remain a Union, we must therefore ensure those self-centered Scots stay back where they belong, north of the border. And The Sun happily backs the SNP North of the Border, and treat them like terrorist scum South of the border.

And I’m an extremist?

I have a beautiful roof over my head, I live in a stunning area and I’m angry. I’ve never been hungry, but I’m scared. When more and more ‘haves’ think that Conservatives have gone too far, won’t vote for somebody who won’t tell them where those damn £12bn cuts will come from; when they can see for themselves how this witch hunt of the have-nots-who-must-all-be-scroungers hits the old industrial areas like Cornwall; when the scroungers off the top have not gone anywhere near a judge, let alone a prison, and nowhere near enough the coffers of HMRC whilst the rest of us keep filling that big black hole to pay for:

  • the interest on our debt that goes straight into the bank balance of private banks with no renegotiation of the rate,
  • in-work benefit that goes disproportionally to the likes of Amazon and their non-tax paying international friends,
  • private landlords that make millions from rents on sub standard properties because there is no alternative social housing,

then please forgive me for worrying from my utopian cloud. I understood (wrongly) free market to mean something a bit more balanced, a bit less authoritarian from the corporations who want yet more power in Europe with TTIP so they can sue governments if their balance sheet gets hit by:

  • our not wanting fracking,
  • our wanting to know what we eat with proper labelling,
  • our asking for dangerous chemicals to be banned.

TTIP is being negotiated in secret, now, and the main parties are in favour of ‘business’. When was TTIP mentioned in the elections?

And I’m not even talking about climate change, a subject that has been as good as absent in these elections too.

If we cut benefits from the poorest yet more, won’t there be even more anger? Would we not likely have more riots like in the States, like in New Orleans, still not recovered from the devastating hurricane ten years ago, even before racism is taken into account?

Do we want to become more like the States and their Senate that blocks the President from moving in the direction he was elected to go towards because a small number of people can spend millions on political campaigns, anti-climate-change ‘scientific research’ aimed at the ‘left’s conspiracy theories’, the Fox News and Tea Party of this world…

That’s why my son calls me an extremist about Americans. He’s not the only one. And I understand what he means. Out of context, I sound like a communist. In our current world, I’m just worried that we are like a car on a West Dorset lane going way too fast, heading for a tractor that we cannot see but is firmly around the corner.

Then what?

I have a vision of blondie Boris and his water cannons, a couple of years from now, you know the ones, acquired cheap from Germany without permission from government. That gives me a vision of his type of leadership, apart from his jokey way of talking to people like they’re idiots, like he knows better and will do what it takes to get his way. If authority is what we’re after, he’ll do a great job. Authority scares me because when it does not listen, it becomes totalitarian.

It does not let me talk.

If I want to go and protest in London about fracking I might end up kettled for hours by some private company like G4S, end up at the wrong end of that water cannon, maybe sent to a Serco private jail that needs to make a profit, if I get injured it may be Virgin that looks after me and if I end up with a nervous breakdown due to massive stress because I find our society frighteningly out of hand but don’t want to just ignore it because it is my children’s future, well, who knows who will look after me?

At the moment in West Dorset, people with mental issues who end up at the top of a cliff out of despair are taken in a police car to Poole, an hour away. Because there’s no money to help them significantly, they’re ‘released’, they go back to the cliff, the police has to pick them up again, and again, hopefully as the alternative is at the bottom of the cliff, and yet police numbers are decreasing.

Where do we go from here?

There are many alternative roads from the established ways, if only we get a chance to look at them properly, analyse their proposals fairly, and work out a more balanced way forward. From Positive Banking that invests in small businesses, to enabling community Green Energy so we never rely on monopolies and foreign countries anymore, surely humans are clever enough to build a better society learning from the mistakes of the past?

In my search for a fairer world for my children away from finance capitalism, totalitarian communism or corporate socialism…

am I really an extremist?

Suis je Charlie?

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First posted on The Lady Shed 9/1/15

As fate would have it, for my turn on the Lady Shed this week I wanted to talk about satire, comedians and politics but in the light of the events in Paris, Russell Brand is out. My friends will know that I have been going on about my visceral fears of France’s fate in the last year, my country. Sleep has been difficult since 7/1.

We must beware to point the finger at one religion as most commentators have done, it is far more complicated than that, this attack did not happen in a vacuum, it happened within world events, it affects us all. To continue to simply point the finger at Islam extremism will only lead to more extremists, more hatred, more divides and ultimately, as we all fear, more blood.

We do not have freedom of speech nor do we have press freedom. France’s laws prevent its citizens from writing anything racist, xenophobe and, unlike this country anti-Semite. This is as it should be. It must be noted however that in France anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are seen as one, despite being two different things; they have become a single toxic subject that few will dare talk about for fear of misunderstanding, fear of offending and fear of reprisals. This is the most difficult post I have written, but France is my country, I cannot keep silent.

As the BBC has rules about not having any depiction of the Prophet for fear of offending, the French media does not discuss Anti-Zionism for fear of opening up old wounds that are deeply anchored in the French psyche; genocide a common guilt that Catholics have no idea how to deal with. We’re ill equipped for dealing with guilt when born in a Catholic society. Hell in the eternal life looms over our head to the point of silencing us in our short life on earth, as it has on many subjects over the centuries.

Zionism is not a religion, it is not a race, it is political. Sweeping difficult subjects under carpets does not mean they go away. Prohibition has consequences we have seen before. When France is not permitted to discuss Zionism yet discusses Islam extremism at length, this is not a balanced discussion of France’s other cultures within the republic. It is not about race or religion, it is about culture and the way we are brought up at home within a country where all are equal. We cannot have Fraternité nor Liberté without Egalité.

Anybody who is surprised about armed men taking the law into their own hands has not been following France’s events. French people are not surprised. Charlie Hebdo’s attack is in part due to the fact that very few newspapers and magazines will go where Charlie Hebdo went. I wanted to see newspapers around the world who said they were shocked about the events as it attacked freedom of press to publish some of the magazines’ cartoons on their front page. Not just the ones denouncing Islam extremists as many blogs have done adding fuel to the fire of misunderstanding what Charlie Hebdo stood for, but also the ones about Catholics, Jews, the Far Right, and the narrow minded white French man, Frenchie Joe Blogg. Oh and the English, my favourite subject, naturellement.

Who wants the English in Europe?

We need humour to survive. Humour is like anything else, what I like to eat is not what you like to eat. What I am allowed to eat is not the same as what other religions can eat. Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, I love it. No apology. Satire has long existed. Humour is part of our evolving civilisation. Court jesters were the only ones who could tell the all powerful King what the peasants thought and not be killed when he delivered the message; provided the King was fair and did not kill his subjects when he did not like what he heard, just because he could.

Satiric cartoons have long been able to depict in one single image an event, a mood, a wrong doing by the all powerful, kings, emperors, popes and again, even common people like me and you. We need this art more than ever. In our world where if this post goes over 800 words you won’t read it, we need images to wake us up to the realities that we keep shying away from. If art makes us smile or cringe but makes us think, it is needed. We want to get on with our lives, protect our children. We want to give our children a better world for tomorrow but are absolutely and totally hopeless at dealing with the bigger issues that are at the root of 7/1.

Since 9/11 the West has finally realised that a part of the world population hates us. Deep down we know why. We live in a world where a mainly Christian democracy thinks they have the right to tell the rest of the world what to do. Along with its allies, who are forever reminded that they were helped against the Nazis, and yes especially the cheese eating surrender monkey French, they (we) attack Muslim countries to prevent a war on terror and, because we are not infallible, we get it wrong. Are we helping? Are we attacking or are we defending? Are we defending ourselves against terrorists?

The largest democracy in the world uses drones against these countries whilst backing and funding a Jewish state that was given to Zionists by WWII winners. A war that started in Europe and took over the world once the Americans were attacked in Pearl Harbour gave its winners the right to draw a line in the sand in the Middle East, an appropriated land. Do we really wonder why the world is constantly at war? No we don’t. We know. But we are so deep in shit created by the past that we have no idea how to deal with the present to give our children a decent world in the future.

“Mummy, will we have a war” said my son when Ukraine kicked off.
Miss a heart beat.
We are already at war.
It is a world war.

Europeans and Americans helped start the Ukraine uprising, then pointed the finger at the Russians for their wrong doings because others’ wrong doings are always worse than ours. On 7/1 this international war came to the French capital with Russian AK47. Should we blame the Russians for selling arms?

It is all interlinked, we never really got out of the Cold War as the state of Europe today shows. When a French person says that a large majority of people in jail are Arabs, they’re called racist by news presenters who are petrified their show will turn into contentious subjects they’d rather not discuss at all. When we are labelled anti-Semite on one hand, racist on the other when we discuss the problems our country faces, with facts and figures, not emotion; when our police does not enter some parts of our cities where deprived disconnected French citizens feel they are not part of French society and rule a violent mini society within, where do we go next?

This is where we are. Are we Charlie? Charlie is the bloke in the pub that talks loudest, he is totally politically incorrect and many walk away from him. Charlie is not a fascist. He does not vote Le Pen or UKIP. He hates the Far Right and shouts it from the top of his voice to whoever will listen. And he doesn’t give a damn if you walk away offended. He speaks his mind. He takes the piss out of everybody, especially the Far Right voters who have forgotten than in the 1930’s, Germans never thought that Hitler would kill his own people if they were disabled, gay or stood up against his regime. Do we think we can’t go back to that? Did the Germans of 1930 think they would ever have to live what the ones who survived had to live?

In Dresden in 2015 some people think their problems are due to Islam, as more and more people do in many parts of Europe. Our problems are rooted in a history we cannot change and a diversity of population that keeps changing as it always has. The arms trade is doing fine. Yet for a minority of armed extremists there are billions of people who do not want war. Now more than ever we are able to stand together against more militarisation and against those newspapers and political parties that only bring more hate and division. We won’t solve the problems in one post, within one year or within one country. But together we can pressure our governments to lead us on the road of meaningful negotiations, and we can convince one person at a time that hate fuelling newspapers should not be shared so these media outlets who are dividing European citizens against each other within their own countries, let alone within Europe can lose readers, one by one. Non violent unarmed people are the majority.

If we lose hope and humour, we lose everything. Let’s have faith in human beings.

affiche-lepen

The cartoons on this post are by Charb one of twelve French citizens killed on 7 January 2015 by three French citizens armed with AK47.