WARNING BY PORTENT.

So, perhaps my unsuccessful mushrooming outing was portentious. On my return home I started to do some research on the Fly Agaric mushroom, so called because they used to add them to milk to keep the flies off apparently! I have never used Fly Agaric in the past, my mushroom experiences were always with the psilocybin variety, in this country called the Liberty Cap. Fly Agaric mushrooms do not contain any psilocybin and apparently the experience is nowhere near as good. There is also some evidence that the alkaloids in them can cause liver damage, this may well be propaganda to put people off using them, but would you want to risk it, especially for an inferior experience. The psilocybin shrooms are much harder to find and mostly on the high fells in exposed positions, there are a lot in Wales, where I always had more success in finding them than in the Lakes. Following “The Misuse of Drugs Act” in 1971 it has been illegal to possess psilocybin mushrooms, Fly Agaric is legal to possess but not supply. This is fairly typical of the UK drugs policies which seem to make legal and even prescribe dangerous drugs, while making all the harmless and beneficial ones illegal. Due to cannabis being illegal underground chemists came up with “spice” a so called legal high, it turned out to be so harmful that it has now been banned, but if there had been legal cannabis there would have been no spice in the first place. There are now massive problems with opioid painkillers when cbd (cannabis oil) has proved more successful in relieving pain for a lot of chronic pain sufferers, but there are no profits for big pharma in natural plants. When I had my operation, I woke to find myself hooked up to a morphine pump, press the button for a hit. When I told them I didn’t need it they offered me Tramadol from the drugs trolley; once was enough I felt like I had been poisoned, these things even look sinister. Eventually they were happy when I settled for paracetamol, and I had to inject myself daily with an anti-blood clotting agent for a month. Ironically, I wasn’t even in pain but I felt it would have been rude to refuse everything, especially as it was a free bar.

A lot of time has been wasted in not researching the potential benefits of what were considered recreational drugs, in particular cannabis and the psychedelics. This is partly because they were illegal and probably because big pharma wanted to keep it that way. However, they are now being found to have therapeutic qualities as well as self-discovery and in some cases pleasure giving qualities. We need to loosen the grip of big pharma and also look into our drugs policies logically. Even drug addiction should be treated as a medical problem rather than a criminal one, in fact legalising all drugs would take criminals out of the equation altogether. This has worked well in many other countries and we should be at the forefront not trailing along behind.

I am thinking that my next book will be a novel, it will be based on my experiences and have a bit of my own brand of propaganda thrown in. I have an idea for one that will be about an old hippie who re-starts his psychedelic journey and in the process gets involved with a coven of witches. Sounds a bit trite but it has potential; sex and drugs even if no rock and roll. 

THE SEASON OF MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS.

I quite like this time of year, although I prefer Spring, but this is the best time of year for those of us who do a bit of foraging and even better for those who do a lot of foraging. Time to get out the forager’s bible from the kitchen cupboard, I bought mine in the 1970’s, I don’t use it much I just keep it in case everything really goes tits up, and it becomes necessary to live on nuts and berries; remember Yogi bear? Most of my foraging is limited to Marsh Samphire, although I didn’t find any in the usual place this year; Sloes for Sloe Gin, although I have hardly touched the batch I made last year; Blackberries, I have a garden full and I thought I would wait to get this years crop before I cut them all back. All the ripe ones seem to disappear and judging by the purple plop everywhere the birds are getting them, I don’t begrudge them, their need is greater than mine; Gooseberries from a bush that just appeared in my garden, 2.5 kilos this year and taking up a lot of room in my freezer. Last, but not least, rhubarb from my garden, not foraging strictly speaking because I planted that; it keeps coming back and I have had three crops this year. This is also taking up room in my freezer and the family are getting sick of my rhubarb dessert with cold custard cream and crystallised ginger. There is also a variety of nuts; the squirrels get them and bury them in the lawn. Unfortunately, they are not that smart and forget where they buried them, so as soon as it starts to get cold they dig holes all over the lawn trying to find them. Just as well I am not bothered about a pristine lawn. Then we have the head food, aka shrooms, it has been many years since I partook. However, I have an idea for a novel and as part of my research I have decided to restart my psychedelic adventures. To that end I decided to have a walk up to High Dam near Newby Bridge, where at this time of year there are usually millions of Fly Agaric mushrooms, the fairy story red ones with the white spots. I have written about them before either in the blog or the book. As I drove up to High Dam, I think I experienced a portent; like many other phenomena I am ambivalent about portents. While I don’t believe in anything that I can’t prove, I don’t dismiss it either and on Tuesday there was a good example of a portent as a warning. As I got close to High Dam there were some roadworks and the road was closed with a barrier across. I know the area well, so I drove round and approached from the other direction. The road works were right at the bottom of the road up to the car park and that appeared to be blocked also, but I managed to get through. Walked all round High Dam only saw one mushroom and something had eaten half of that, maybe I am too early, had a nice walk though. Those who have read my book will perhaps remember I have some happy memories of the place. Please read my next post for the rest of the story. Bye for now fffffffffffffff

THE RISE OF THE ARSEHOLES NEW PICTURE.

I had great difficulty with the previous post finding an illustration that wasn’t too explicit and wouldn’t put you off your lunch. Then a couple of days after I published the post the perfect picture came along. So here it is. While I am on the subject ENW’s Head of Communications is coming tomorrow to discuss my proposal for the mast. I don’t want to tempt fate and we are not out of the woods yet, but it is looking much more promising for the mast to go in the woods. After all this time I will be almost disappointed now if I don’t get a chance to take all the actions I had intended for ENW.

THE RISE OF THE ARSEHOLES. WAS THE LATE SIXTIES THE PEAK OF OUR CIVILISATION? PROBABLY.

I am talking about the developed world here, the UK, the rest of Europe and to a lesser extent the US, where everything is much worse than Europe; but it probably applies to most places, and there was no ISIS then. OK, so not everything was better, but most things were. First and foremost, the population was less than half of what is now and that’s 50% less potential arseholes for a start. Our numbers then were starting to have an impact on the environment, but we had not yet gone into extinction mode. If, as I am postulating, we reached a peak then, by definition, it’s been downhill all the way subsequently, and now has become an uncontrollable slide. I thought a lot of places were overcrowded then, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see that everywhere was comparatively much less crowded than now and life was more pleasant. In particular, many popular events and tourist destinations were if not exactly crowd free, less crowded. Nowadays, most people don’t actually want to see things they just want a selfie taken there and then they can tick it off the list. It’s a pity there aren’t more like me; I don’t have a bucket list, I have a fuck it list, if I haven’t been there or done that by now I probably never will so fuck it. It is good that many of the must-see tourist destinations are actually quite disappointing and usually there are much more interesting things, often nearby, which you can enjoy without the hordes.

We had quite a few arseholes back then, but now they become the majority and that is not entirely unconnected with the shitty lives most people now have. I have to admit, my generation and the tail end of the one before, demanding more freedom didn’t help either. Most of us who fought for and won that freedom were able to handle it but unfortunately the majority were not able to grasp that there is an equally important concept called responsibility. It’s also a great pity that the majority have been dumbed down, whether by accident or design. I sometimes wonder if this dumbing down is a deliberate policy; as human intelligence is dropping like a stone, machine intelligence is increasing exponentially, it must be in someone’s interest that machines become smarter than most of us and the thin end of the wedge for A.I. perhaps? A lot of the very rich are heavily involved in that.

However, there is some justification for the people with shitty lives becoming arseholes. There is no such excuse for the middle classes, who, on the whole, have much better lives. Now it is almost universal that people are only concerned with their own convenience and to hell with everyone else and the environment. You only need to look at all the rubbish they leave behind. That’s the problem with democracy, most of the electorate are thick, we probably need to pay lip service to it, but we certainly don’t want to have the lumpen proletariat running things. They should be treated fairly and certainly given a bigger slice of the cake than they have now, but sometimes they need to be manipulated into making the right “democratic” decisions. “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”, and intelligent people are certainly more equal that thick ones and lets face it a lot of people are really, really thick.

But I don’t despise my country, I do despise what it has become. Everything now is mean and nasty, you have to be careful before you even open your mouth and nearly everyone all the time is just waiting to catch you out with a politically incorrect remark. They are not going to just disagree with you especially the so-called liberal lefties in our major cities, London in particular. Not only will they be aggressive if you disagree with their narrow point of view; you will be labelled as racist, homophobic or the latest one, transphobic. There is a very real chance of being ostracised, and people have even lost their jobs. Universities which should be at the forefront of cutting-edge debate have censored everything except the leftie liberal party line and no-platformed anyone who has an unpopular, with them, position, even prominent feminists and gays have been no platformed for not being right on enough about the LBGT+ community. Lecturers and professors are hounded and students demand their dismissal for perfectly innocuous remarks on websites and social media. The poor little snowflakes say their safe spaces are threatened by even just the existence of someone who they see as transphobic. God forbid that their point of view might be challenged they would need counselling if that happened. Let us hope that there is never a world war three where they have to go and fight hand to hand, compared to say the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans etc. we would be completely Donald Ducked. You mean I like have to go and fight and get shot at, there are no gender neutral loos and I can’t take my phone.

This aggressive attitude applies to everything not just what you say. God help you if you make the slightest mistake or hesitate when driving. Either of those or being ten milliseconds late taking off from the traffic lights will earn you a blast on the horn, not a polite toot but a loud aggressive PAAAAARRRRPPPP!!!!! For God’s sake, people have even been murdered in road rage incidents. Back in the day you could give the finger, or v-sign as it was then, to someone who cut you up, without them chasing you, forcing you off the road and stabbing you with a screwdriver. Not that long ago I returned to the UK after a week of tootling around in Minorca, picked up the car at Manchester airport and straight out onto the motorway at rush hour. It felt like everyone was mad and took me till Lancaster to re-acclimatise, of course the traffic was Ok by then. It’s always a relief when driving back up North to pass the tower at Forton services into relative sanity. I would hate to have commute in rush hour traffic every day. Of course, a lot of the time you are stationary; sat in traffic wasting your time is even worse than the moving madness. Shortly before Carol died she did some training sessions for the University of Cumbria, where she was an emeritus             professor. As they expected her to do an all-day session on her own and I drove her so she didn’t have a long drive at either end, then I would go off for the day. The venue was the Britannia Hotel at Daresbury and it is the arsehole of the universe. Once you got past Preston the traffic was horrendous and the first time, despite leaving what we thought was very early, we got there with minutes to spare. I would look around at all wage slaves sat in their cars stationary, which they presumably did every day, and think what a monumental waste of time and money, and as there was usually only one person in the car what an unnecessary impact on the environment. If most of them had been in buses there wouldn’t have been a jam in the first place. Before you think the obvious there was no alternative to Carol going by car. Incidentally, Daresbury was the birthplace of Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carol who wrote Alice in Wonderland, his father was the local vicar. He left to go to university and never went back, even though there was no traffic then.

When I started driving there was no national speed limit, mind you most normal cars then would struggle to reach 70 mph and if you managed it you would probably not live enough to regret it. I blew up the engine on my Standard 10 when I reached 70 going downhill with a following wind. The volume of traffic, or lack of, on the few motorways was hilarious compared to now, and you could park wherever you liked. Now there are hefty fines from private parking companies who buy your details from DVLC. What about the “Data Protection Act” that is always invoked by officialdom when you try to find out information yourself? They are always ready to bend the rules when they are making money. In fact, all those organisations that are supposed to protect the public bend over backwards to represent the interests of big companies, not the public who pay their wages, or are they just too scared to take them on? I have recent experience of this, and in my case it applies to Planning Depts, Highways Depts, all the Ombudsman organisations, so called Independent Regulators and even the Police. I have taken a company on and I am quietly confident that I have done so successfully. It was never a level playing field; a £2 billion company against one recently bereaved old guy; but the old guy was me, they never stood a chance. Giant killing has always been a hobby of mine.

Now employers are aggressive and never hesitate to remind you that there are thousands of people out there who would do your job for even less than they pay you. I am happy to say that I have not worked for an employer since 1996, I always stood up to them, and got away with it in my last job for a long time because they needed my skills; when the time came that they didn’t, my feet didn’t touch. Fortunately, I was expecting it, in fact I had been goading them to do it. That was all to do with the MOD privatising me and I am happy to say I managed to cost them £millions, the story is in my book. In my present struggle with Electricity North West over the mast it is just possible I might have cost them tens of millions, hundreds of millions if a Labour government get in and re-nationalise them, I will give the details in a future post, for the moment it seems like I might have got them to put the mast elsewhere.

Everything you buy online is a potential scam. If you claim on any of your insurances they will try everything they can to avoid paying out and you have to be meticulous about the information you put on proposal forms. Then there was the case of a woman who lives in a flat and was threatened by the council with a £100,000 fine for leaving a wooden pallet on the roadside for her builder to collect the next day, and yet privatised water companies pollute our rivers with impunity. I am drifting off piste again, but all these things were much better 50 years ago and if you didn’t like your job you could kick them into touch on Friday and walk into another one on Monday lunchtime. I have done it myself many times, but it was usually them who kicked me into touch, can’t say I blamed them.

Houses back then were affordable for nearly all working people and there were council houses for those who didn’t want to buy; they were well built, the rents reasonable and the tenure secure. On the downside, there was a process beginning of taking people out of “slums” and putting them in high rise blocks. Most of those affected had been far happier in the so-called “slums” than isolated in “new brutalist” towers, but it was still better than now, with many having to sleep on the streets, in B&B accommodation or in uninhabitable or minute, rented accommodation from private landlords. We have gone back to the slums again but much worse, you have to pay through the nose now for that crap; in the old slums a lot of people only paid a few shillings a week. However, the result was the destruction of community spirit and a steady increase in the numbers of arseholes, now unfettered by the cultural mores and standards of their former communities. It would have made more sense and certainly would have been cheaper to improve the “slum” houses, but the whole thing was being driven by corruption in local councils, as often Labour as Conservative it has to be said, climbing into bed with unscrupulous developers. It marked the beginning of greed and an overblown sense of entitlement, becoming almost universal. Previously, people were grateful that they were lucky enough to live in an advanced stable western society and their lot was not that bad. Then Margaret Thatcher came along and made the situation a whole lot worse by selling off council houses cheaply, in an attempt to create more Tory voters. Houses then became no longer just places to live but investments, however, I must confess to having been part of that myself and I have done very well out of it as have many of my generation. If the population was lower there would be plenty of houses to go around and house prices would fall.

 As if that was not enough much of our infrastructure was then sold off, also at cut prices to often foreign companies. So, some people were lucky to get good houses at a cut price and a very small number made a lot of money out of privatisation, but as usual the vast majority paid for it. One has to wonder where all that money from selling the family silver ended up, it certainly did not benefit thee and me. In those days most parking was free, hospital car parks always free, public loos free, sports and music events a fraction of the price they are now, students got grants not loans, and there were lots of reasonably well paid vacation jobs, public transport much cheaper, loans much cheaper and no Wongas charging thousands of percent interest, why on earth are they allowed to get away with that? Food containers were much larger and full not two thirds full. If we could afford it then why not now? when we are told everything is much more efficient, bollox. Thatcher and her cronies, it has to be said, were very clever and on her watch managed to reverse many of the social policy advances that had been won by the working class from the end of the second world war onwards. “When I were a lad”, all our infrastructure and important services were owned by us, not by companies to milk as cash cows, take out £billions in dividends, grossly overpay senior management, and underpay the workers. Back in the day those workers had decent wages, job security and could expect a reasonable pension when they retired. Privatisation has been a disaster for us all, everything is more expensive and less efficient. I have had time to reflect on this several times recently, when I have been sat at Lancaster station waiting for the last train which has been cancelled, the replacement bus service has been cancelled and the staff have been running around Lancaster hailing taxis to take people home. Privatised prison transport has lost prisoners, Capita the company brought in at great expense to use their “expertise” to boost army recruitment have failed spectacularly. The army is about 18,000 troops under strength, let us hope Putin, or China or even the US will not seize the opportunity to invade while we have our trousers down. The privatised Probation Service proved so useless it was re-nationalised, water companies pollute our rivers. I could go on but there is not enough room in this article even by my long-winded standards. Then we have Richard Branson, and American companies, hell bent on taking over the NHS. If we end up with a trade deal with the US it could easily lead to a back door privatisation of the NHS as well as other abominations. I can’t think of a single instance where privatisation has worked for the betterment of anyone other than the companies that took over.

By 1969 most things we have now had already been invented and we had men walking on the moon, supersonic airliners and the beginning of the microcircuits that were to become computers, mobile phones. Even a form of  the internet existed then but only for the use of the military. Nowadays all that happens is improvements to what we already have and very often they are not even improving anything just creating another useless mobile phone app, usually so that big companies and the government can spy on us even more efficiently. Popular music was at its zenith in the late sixties and the basic line up of three blokes with guitars and a drummer came from 50’s rock and roll and hasn’t changed much since. Regarding the music that has changed; as an example, we had calypso which arrived, along with marijuana, with the West Indian immigrants. Calypso was a witty, intelligent comment often on current affairs using allusion, mockery and satire to a tuneful rhythm. What do we have now?  nihilistic c/rap the weaving of the banal and misogynistic with the untuneful.

So, has anything improved? Cars definitely, they were quite frankly crap then compared to now, but we didn’t know any better so we weren’t unhappy about it. There were some very nice cars even then and petrol was cheap, 25p a GALLON, there were no speed cameras and you could park anywhere. Electronics have improved for sure, but you didn’t have people spending half their lives hooked up to electronic devices and you didn’t have to listen to people having banal conversations on public transport and in restaurants. Big tellys have led to the death of the cinema which in turn has led to most films being made by accountants. Universities are about bums on seats and generations getting into massive debt for a worthless piece of paper. Things are better for women now, but feminism has it’s roots in the 1960’s. The superior physical strength of the male is less relevant now that we have machines to do all the heavy work, so the superior intelligence of women is leading to them surpassing men in most fields. Men are hanging on by their fingernails but women still have to try harder, childbirth and rearing is also a big disadvantage for them.

The UK used to be at the forefront of societies that had fairly successfully blended capitalism and socialism to create a fairer society. We have since lost a lot of ground to other European and Scandinavian societies who have: better healthcare, better state pensions, better benefits, better education, better state owned transport and utilities, better school dinners, better prisons with less prisoners, better drugs policies, better crime statistics, better airports, again I could go on. Rampant capitalism has cost us a lot. Probably the worst thing to go has been optimism. When I was young, we thought we were going to make the world a better place. There are still quite a few idealistic young today but they are faced with a fight just to save the environment, never mind improve anything, which unfortunately will not happen until there is massive cull of the human population. I think nature will arrange that before very long, it will not be a pleasant process. There will be war and famine on a scale never before seen on our planet and it will affect us all. Brexit has been the last straw for the UK and has wasted a huge amount of time, effort and money that could have been better spent sorting out more important problems. It has also damaged our social cohesion, perhaps beyond repair. Three years on we are still no closer to a solution.

Fortunately, there are still mountains and wild unpopulated places where you can get away from the arseholes but I just worry how long it will be before there are phone masts on the top of them, and zip wires everywhere. On the more popular routes you now see people with mobile phones, and there are sometimes packs of Lycra louts on mountain bikes.

Therefore, speaking as someone who has lived in both times, I can assure you that in most ways it was much better then. I am not suggesting that we give up trying to improve things, but I think the only way forward now is to create alternatives away from the masses so that some of us can survive and thrive when it goes bad for everyone else. This has been a propaganda publication from whaleoilbeefoct.org but every word is true.