from Blogger 2

For some months now, I’ve been drawn to the ordinary. I can’t exactly explain why. Perhaps something has rubbed off from walking the streets in Babylon Town and in this narrow valley. I live not far from little river which sneaks behind factories, workshops and the common dwellings put up for workers in the glory days of Empire, when Victoria was a goddess worshipped in the East. It’s a humble stream, hidden behind boundary fences, sometimes scuttling through culverts under roads; always furtive, even when it rushes down a few rocks into the culvert with a roar of white noise, rather like an air conditioning outlet – an unmarked waterfall. You can reach by shifting a garage bin chained to a gate at the side of a small warehouse. Caught in the cascade are broken umbrellas, plastic bags, discarded For Sale signs—variable jetsam according to season. Lower down you can find ducks and moorhens, but there’s nowhere for mothers to take their toddlers with crusts to feed them: not till you get to the public park, known as the Rye; and that’s quite a different part of town.

This part has long thrived on making things that people need, such as chairs and brushes; attracting immigrants in the nineteen-fifties from far-flung corners of the Empire, like St Vincent and the Grenadines or Kashmir. They brought along their Pentecostal and Muslim modes of worship, but now it’s the Poles causing the Catholic churches to overflow. A single furniture factory remains, making hand-crafted items in small volumes for a well-off clientele who appreciate traditional designs and the beauty of hardwoods. Most of the business premises in our valley have been in continuous use since Victorian times. They might look Dickensian but I suspect they have bestowed on their workers more dignity than squalor. There’s one in my street (illustrated) making laminated doors, staffed mainly by apprentices, white boys, as it happens. I asked my ever-helpful neighbour Mohammed where to get sheets of ply cut to size. He took me into the factory and asked the boys on my behalf. They didn’t charge me anything: it’s a neighbourhood interdependence thing, like the parking, the water supply, the alleys for access to backyards, the traffic flow. We’re a close-knit community, not shutting the world out but deeply linked to it. Go down our shopping street and everywhere you’ll get international phone cards; and you can make Western Union money transfers to dependents overseas. I heard a slogan yesterday which expresses the new morality for a threatened world: “Think globally, act locally”. That’s what happens in this valley of ordinary people.

And what is the ordinary? – Simple: it’s the opposite of “special”. So what then “special”? The opposite of ordinary. Perhaps you will dismiss the ordinary as not worthy of attention, with the sarcastic question “What’s so special about the ordinary?” The logical answer of course is “nothing”.

The ordinary is almost universally disregarded. Thinkers are bored with it. The masses yearn to escape it, through success or celebrity: if not actually then in fantasy. Am I any different? No, I am of the masses too. Till I am dead, I shall always want something, if only to keep moving, to have more in my life than endlessly repeated rituals.

In the simple idyll of my ordinariness, I find a joy in washing dishes, in walking to the shops, in eating and drinking and laughing and solving problems and creating new things. It’s true I don’t like TV and all that it represents of manipulating ordinary people. But it’s better than being a slave in the plantations or a child in the mines or cotton factories. Or their equivalents today. I could wish the whole world as peaceful as my valley.

I’m at the internet cafe again. Perhaps I’ll get connected at home soon. So I am going to write something fast. I will try to express something before my time runs out! (I mean before the time I have paid for runs out, not my life, though that applies too.)

There have been some news items lately in the UK about research studies which predict that in the next 20 or 40 years half the population will be obese. The second of these studies explained that it is not our fault: evolution cannot help us adapt quickly enough to new living conditions – in which junk food is cheap and we don’t need to do a lot of physical work to survive; and children don’t walk to school and their parents are scared to let them out to play and they sit indoors playing on computers or video games.

It’s a familiar story and not one which usually inspires me to any reaction, but I saw that there was a new element: it was expected that government must do something to solve the problem on behalf of the people. There is a context to this: in the UK the Health Service is free and so the Government cannot afford the cost of obesity and its effects on health. Accordingly they add even more legislation, further reducing individual freedom and responsibility.

I’m not writing this as a conventional right-wing libertarian who believes government should not interfere with the individual. I revolt against such views for their lack of compassion. I don’t believe in “the law of the jungle” when it means that the rich can become powerful and the powerful can become rich. I always identify myself with the wretched of the earth.

But – this is the crux of my position – I have trust in the ordinary man and woman. I don’t think governments need to tell us what to eat, how to bring up our children and how to keep ourselves safe. Governments should not insist on the labelling of food but stop the manipulation of ideas which makes people eat disgusting things like processed foods, which no self-respecting savage from the jungle would touch.

But I shall continue to practise rather than preach. I want to demonstrate in the laboratory of my own life that it is possible to follow instinct and live healthy and sane and harmless.

The problem with being ordinary is to accept the given values of your community. The report into obesity concluded that the people who got fat were simply going along with the crowd, practising normal human behaviour, including being influenced by TV advertisements, doing what their neighbours do and enjoying the fruits of their affluence by riding in four-wheeled carriages instead of walking – just as a rich man would have done in past centuries.

I don’t argue with their findings. I just think it is terrible if there are more rules and if we get even further from instinct.

In me it is easy because I am practised in not following the crowd. K thinks I behave differently on purpose. It is true I question authority, I despise the crowd. But I greatly respect the ordinary man woman and child and their innate wisdom.

What we call civilisation is dangerously near collapse, on several fronts. Nature wants to straighten things out. Global warming is dangerous for civilisation but it would be good for nature if the oil runs out and we have to live locally on local resources and ditch much of our energy-dependent technology.

I just want to live simply in my neighbourhood.

This was an experiment in trying to express myself without premeditation in a few minutes. Bear with me. The time is running out!

Pic: dew on the washing-line.
If the inner life is the root of my existence, I consider writing to be the flower: I mean the expression, the flamboyance containing the immature seed. The flower’s gaudiness and scent is to attract bees who bring pollen from other flowers. Their visit is a sexual consummation. From that point, the seed swells and through one of a great collection of valid engineering solutions that nature has invented is sent to fresh soil away from the parent. This is my life as a plant: to be deep-rooted but yet to interact with the entire world. (NB As I wrote this I re-opened the blog to everybody.)

It was therefore a kind of trauma to find myself recently prevented from writing. To be transplanted is a crisis and if you see the plant wilt, don’t imagine it has given up. On the contrary, it’s making a supreme effort where keeping up appearances takes second place to survival.

It’s four weeks since I moved to this new house. I must find it a name. It’s 109 years old. An American would express himself more clearly, explaining that his new home is an old building. But in England we wouldn’t say that. You could speak of finding a new home for a cat or dog. You could send your aged relative to a “home” (a care home for the elderly). But we never say “home” to mean the bricks and mortar. Home is a concept, “chez moi”, “my place”. I imagine that in America it started as a marketing idea – to sell a home and not just a house. Here, though some marketers may have adopted the same term, we know it’s impossible to buy and sell homes.

The house we moved into a month ago had been a home, but that day we moved into an empty shell, an abandoned nest left stuck in a tree. It’s taken all this time and the depletion of energy reserves to a dangerous level to achieve the transformation. I’ve traversed a spectrum of emotions that seems to cover most of human experience and perhaps that of other mammals and even insects, who knows? There have been sharp catastrophes and bewildering miasmas, but none of them is worth the telling. I simply give thanks to have been through it and even more to have come out of it whole.

Out of my window the sun shines. (That was when I was composing this epistle: in this internet cafe there is no sunshine, only a draught from the back door and a mess of pistachio shells next to the keyboard left by an earlier customer.) The crab-apple tree stands in glory with leaves of orange and yellow and some still green and others falling, at the rate of one every few seconds now, as Autumn visits this latitude. Houses, each one a home to its denizens, cling to the southern slopes of The Pastures like sea-birds’ nests on a cliff serene and safe above the raging ocean.

I prefer “inner life” to “spirituality” for that word carries too much religious and philosophical baggage. I’ll stick to the metaphors which arise spontaneously, such as “roots” or if you will “sources”. For joy must come from somewhere. Not “Source” in the singular with a capital letter for that’s just a code word for God, sliding the baggage in again by the back door. No! Let the airline lose those bags, or send them to Shanghai for all I care. Leave me with the clothes I stand up in, and those roots from which I gratefully draw nourishment more precious than gold.