Wage Slavery...

This week's flaneurial thoughts come from the relatively recently found dada (not capitalized) café in the town of Epping, which lays claim to have the highest High Road in the whole of Essex ( a dizzying 332 feet above sea level). The café is small but perfectly formed. Apart from a very exotic, if somewhat expensive, range of teas and some very strong coffee, they also serve a range of snacks and quiches, employing what seem to be former roof tiles instead of plates. If nothing else, it lends new meaning to the phrase 'put mine on the slate...'.
Reading the café’s copy of “The Times” I discover that the UK is apparently now a land of opportunity for the over 65s. Gone are the days when such folk found themselves 'forced' into retirement. Now more and more of them are 'benefiting' from the 'flexibility' of zero hours contracts. Most of these people are also employed at minimum wage level apparently, another wonderful plus for the UK economy.
In the world of spin, even the ugliest of facts can be made to sound pleasant. The reality, it seems, is that elderly people find themselves increasingly having to work whether they wish to or not. The already meagre allowances are being steadily chipped away by the powers that be whilst the state in the UK is increasingly unwilling to help even the most desperate of folk (unless, of course, the folk in question are the likes of Russian millionaires, Chinese property speculators or hugely wealthy non-doms who seem to somehow manage to maintain that status despite the fact that they have lived in the UK for up to 30 years).
It seems that it is not enough to have a society based on the wage slavery, but if at all possible, the desire from the upper echelons of government seems to be that the slavery continues until the moment the slave in question shuffles off their mortal coil.
The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, formerly known as the 'Oik of St. Paul's' and yet another member of the Bullingdon Club, has developed a fondness in recent times for preaching about the 'dignity of work'. Sometimes the dignity in question seems harder to witness in practice than to espouse in theory, the reality often involving, as it does, employees being forced to work long hours at the beck and call of fickle employers who currently enjoy the benefits of some very 'flexible' labour practices. These entail such things as the aforementioned zero hours contracts, compulsory and often unpaid overtime and a steady eroding away of even the most basic of decent working conditions. Mr. Osborne, it should perhaps be noted, has never had what used to be quaintly termed as a 'proper' job himself...

The American essayist, and very profound thinker, Henry David Thoreau pointed out the nature of the trap that we are all lured into. In his book 'Walden' he devotes the whole of the first chapter to 'Economy'. In it he shows how we are tempted and seduced by the desire to have so many 'things' we do not need and how being enslaved in such a way keeps us having to work long hours at jobs we often hate in order to acquire them. We are enticed, through the skilful machinations of the advertising industry, into greed, into the absurd belief that if we can only acquire enough things that this is somehow, almost magically, going to make us happy.

Thoreau demonstrates with incisive insight that excess possessions not only require excess labour in order to purchase them, but also often end up simply being a burden, something we need to concern ourselves with because they need cleaning, maintaining or even simply storing. People believe they need these things and this 'need' then forces them into devoting much of their waking time to working long hours in order to have these often completely useless items in their lives.

Advertising feeds into this 'need'. It persuades people that they are measured, or somehow validated, by their ownership of objects. It has them chasing after the acquisition of endless 'stuff'. On visiting people's homes, I am often struck by just how much 'stuff' they own. Things that are never used, that seemed a good idea at the time, that now lay neglected and unused in the 'spare' room or garage, or simply cluttering up every available space in the property. This seems to be the case as much with those of limited pecuniary means as for those fortunate enough to find themselves in better financial straits.
Happy, fruitful and fulfilled lives are not achieved by the endless acquisition of stuff, but by doing things that have meaning and value to the individual concerned. Whether that be through family, through relationship, through service, through the expression of talents and the doing of things that one loves, or simply by following the kind of life one wants to live.
Of course it is often necessary to have sources of income and the means to achieve these things, but often far, far less is needed than would be supposed to be the case.
Standing in the way of people's abilities to lead free and expressive lives is often the phenomenon of debt. The system is almost set up in such a way as to ensure that debt is taken on from a very early age (indeed, in the case of students, even before they are working) and piled on from that stage onwards through the acquisition of cars, houses, appliances, etc., so that most people, for the vast majority of their adult lives, are never out of debt.

It seems that very soon the average UK household debt level will top £10,000. This figure, quite amazingly, doesn't include mortgage debt. In excess of a quarter of all British adults of working age spend more than 40% of their income simply to service their debts. They are having to run faster and faster just to stay still.

Back in the Dada café, the lunchtime crowd have come and gone and the staff are busily washing the tiles, attempting to make a clean slate of things perhaps... My final thoughts are of Henry David Thoreau and his notion, when writing about economy, that the most precious thing we possess in life is time. For him, the idea of spending the days, weeks, months and years of our lives doing tasks we hate to obtain things we don't need seemed like an absurdity.
I, for one, would not disagree.

The Old Boys Club...

  “When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”
Lin Yutang

Early May in the UK, and I find myself enduring the fairly typical weather in these islands. It is generally cold, wet and windy, although happily it is about to improve, at least if the forecasters of the BBC are to be believed. The one day in the last week that was an exception to the ongoing gloom was Thursday, the day on which the general election was held. In the UK, the advent of decent weather for such a day was supposed to improve the turnout. It did … in Scotland at least. South of the border the turnout was much the same as usual, at around 65 %. As the winning party managed to poll 36.7%, this effectively meant that only about 1 person in every 4 actually voted for them. In the strangely undemocratic democratic system of the UK, this is enough to give the winning party a majority.
There was much frustration all around, perhaps none more poignant than than of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party). Personally, I have little sympathy with their views, but much empathy with their frustration. On the day they polled 12.6% of the vote, approximately a third of the Conservative party's 36.7%. The result? The Conservatives end up with 331 times the 1 seat that was given to UKIP in this bizarre system.

UKIP also managed to attract something like two and a half times the number of votes that the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) polled. Again, their 3,881,129 votes gave them just the one seat, whilst the SNP's 1,454,436 gave them 56. One wonders if this is an example of the kind of 'democracy' that the West has been so keen to impose on the rest of the planet in recent times. The 'first past the post' system employed in the UK seems to be a pretty random form of democracy at best.

In the end, the conservative with a 'small c' United Kingdom ended up with a Conservative with a 'big C' government, as is their usual wont in these islands. The only interruption in the last 36 years of Conservative rule came when the Labour Party essentially ditched any notion of being socialist and became instead a mirror image of the Conservatives. Basically, they out-toried the Tories. This seems to be just about the only way they have any chance of being elected in this somewhat insular country. Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps displaying a fair degree of insight when he made the observation some two hundred years ago: “L'Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”

One of the things I have not missed about the UK is the class warfare, although it seems to be a battle fought by just one side these days. The wealthy, and those many politicians who represent their interests, seem forever engaged in finding new ways to dis-empower the poor and make their plight ever more desperate. The poor, for their part, are just struggling to keep their heads above the ever rising tide. The word class is perhaps particularly apt in this context, given that many of our current crops of Tories, at least the influential ones, shared the same school, Eton. Some of these, notably Messrs. Cameron, Osborne and Johnson, went on to Oxford, joining the (in)famous Bullingdon Club and having a jolly spiffing time...

Oh well, as an old friend used to say, 'If things don't change, they will stay the same.' Or perhaps the Thai saying, 'same old, same old' is more applicable here.
Within a week or two, after the euphoria of victory, it will be back to the internecine in-fighting that the Tories specialise in. If things revert to the normal pattern that the Conservative Party loves to indulge in, there will be endless trench warfare within the party, factions within factions, particularly over the issue of Europe. One of the joys of travelling is leaving all this far behind.

Hopefully, within a week or two, I can set out once more for another part of the world and leave the rather dull, archaic and downright illogical machinations of the UK's political system to its own devices. There is some chance that I will be able to head off to Spain, perhaps Girona, Barcelona or Tarragona, in the very near future. If all goes well, I intend to spend at least a day or two in Madrid as well. Given the current state of the weather, and the current state of the politics here in the UK, the continuation of my travels cannot come too soon for this nomadic flaneur. 

Needing a little energy...

Much as it pains me to say, this week I find myself in tax dodging Starbucks, in its Epping incarnation, famed for its 'Swiss' coffee and creative accountancy. My excuse is that I needed a decent internet connection and also a little space away from friends, many of whom view the idea of contributing to Starbucks' coffers with some distaste.
After another week in the UK, I realise that my definition of a pleasant day seems to have changed quite drastically over the past couple of years. Gone are the days of finding 18 or 19 degrees centigrade comfortable; after spending weeks, or even months, in the mid thirties, such days now seem positively chilly. Odd too how one notices all the little aches and pains that a body is heir too in such weather as is prevalent here in the UK. In Southern China and, particularly, in Thailand, such things scarce came to my attention. Perhaps the last few years have rather spoilt me in this way, now the prospect of spending months of one's year in such a climate as here in the UK seems positively unpleasant.
One of the most positive aspects of my recent travels has been just how healthy, how energetic, I had been feeling. I am, hopefully, not quite over the hill yet, but certainly could be described as a tad long in the tooth. Yet during the past five months it has been noticeable just how well, how energetic, how downright healthy I have felt.
For much of this time I have become increasingly interested in Chinese health systems that relate to the idea of chi. For those who have never heard of such a notion, chi is defined as a universal energy that exists in all living things. To feel well, according to this paradigm, one has to find ways of increasing one's chi, or at least to having access to good quality chi. The latter, in the Chinese system, is considered a matter of clearing the body of stagnant and stale chi, and replacing it with fresh and flowing chi. The techniques evolved by the Chinese Taoists were originally known as qigong. As ever with Chinese, the sound of the words is a lot more exotic than its literal translation of 'energy work'.

Over the last few years, such esoteric health systems seem to have played a significant role in my life. At times, it almost feels as if these ideas have found me, rather than me them. My first exposure to the concept came about seven or eight years ago now. At the time I was severely incapacitated due to nerve damage from a previous climbing accident, the effects of which had dogged me for most of my adult life.
One day, whilst wandering along a local High Road, supported by a pair of walking sticks, I happened to notice an advert for acupuncture in the window of a shop that specialised in all things Chinese, and particularly Traditional Medicine. I tended to notice a lot of such things in those days. One of the benefits of finding one's normal walking pace to be as painfully slow as mine was at the time, is that one finds one has time to notice an awful lot more detail than was previously the case when I would blithely yet somewhat blindly wander the streets in good health. In my youth, I had often rushed around at a helter skelter rate as is the rather over-urgent norm of our present day society.
On enquiring how much such treatment would set me back, I was informed it would require a rather chunky £360 for 12 sessions. At other times, I might have been reluctant to spend such sums on what seemed to me to be a somewhat fanciful form of treatment, but as being confined to using a pair of walking sticks just to get about tends to restrict the things one wishes to spend money on, it seemed a reasonable idea to at least give acupuncture a chance.

I think my interest was also piqued as the year before I had spent much time in researching a book about the idea of a vital life force, and how this same idea seems to crop up again and again, being found in different guises in many cultures and spiritual systems around the World. I had managed to complete several chapters of the book covering such interesting notions as prana in yoga, huna in the Hawaiian spiritual system, odic force as explicated by Von Reichenbach in the 19th century, Henri Bergson's Elan Vital and even Wilhelm Reich's intensely sexual idea of a universal orgone energy.
Researching and writing about such things had been a pleasurable experience as I found many similarities in these various systems, and was fast confirming the idea that they were all essentially talking about the same thing, albeit using vastly different terminologies. All was going well with the book until I reached the chapter that was to deal with the Chinese Taoist idea of chi. Although it was clear that the concept was, in many ways at least, quite similar to the other examples, it seemed that the more I looked into it, the more complex and the more subtle the ideas became. In the end, it struck me as unfair that I should mislead any potential readers of the book by pretending I had sufficient knowledge of the concept of chi to warrant giving my opinions on the subject.
My first practical exposure to these ideas came with that first course of acupuncture. Many of a more scientific bent tend to want to decry the effects of this system and, it has to be admitted, there are many aspects that don't easily fit into Western ideas as to how the body works. Some of the critics tend to observe that any positive effects are probably down to placebo effects alone. My own expectations had been initially very low, but I did think that, given my parlous state at the time, it was worth trying at least.
Despite my low expectations, within a few weeks I was able to do away with one of the sticks. Within another month, I was walking unaided for the first time in quite a while. Whether I understood what was occurring or not, clearing something had changed. At the end of the treatment, I found myself walking relatively normally again and, quite pleasantly, out of real pain for the first time in years. There was a leftover numbness that stretched down the side of my right leg and into the foot, making moving the toes of that foot more or less impossible, but it seemed a small price to pay, generally preferring pleasantly numb to positively painful.
Such experiences made me quite open to the suggestion that I should indulge in a little qigong whilst I was in China. Again my expectations were relatively low, but even after a short while my flexibility began to improve. Also, my general sense of well-being, of joie-de-vivre even, had clearly taken a turn for the better.

After about three weeks I began to notice that feeling was returning to my toes and, lo and behold, for the first time in years I was actually beginning to move them again. At first the movements were slow, barely perceptible in fact. I even dismissed them originally as mere wish fulfilment. Over time though, little by little, strength began to return, and with that strength came an ability to balance on that foot once again.
My understanding of nerve damage had led me to believe that such results were nigh on impossible, but on the other hand, it is hard to deny one's own personal experiences even if they don't fit the paradigms one it given by Western medicine. In the couple of months since, the numbness has continued to subside but the old pain has not returned and, as an added bonus, the strength seems to be gradually returning to muscles that had been dormant for many a year.
Looking back on my time in China from a distance of some weeks, I have come to realise that much of what I valued and enjoyed in China were the remnants of the past, the gifts of a long and fascinating history. The philosophy, the spiritual systems, even the architecture of previous dynastys has left China with a deep and rich source of inspiration and guidance which, unfortunately, much of modern China seems to be busily ignoring in its headlong rush towards a supposed modernity, which expresses itself by way of aping the worst excesses of Western decadence and capitalism.
As I sit here, slightly shamefacedly enjoying the delights of a fairtrade coffee in Starbucks in Epping, I find myself once more yearning to go back and enjoy the best of what China has to offer, even if that emotion is mixed with a dread of the worst. Yangshuo, with its clear waters, beautiful peaks, wonderful vistas and clean air beckons just as much as the East Coast cities with their constant noise, teeming crowds and choking pollution repel.

China is forever an enigma, its history and culture being both fascinatingly deep and subtle whilst simultaneously its modern developments are ugly and depersonalising almost beyond believe. I find myself both loving and loathing the place in almost equal measure...