Pills, Horses and Tories

As previously mentioned here, I suffer from clinical depression. Due to an unfortunate oversight involving moving doctors, my health has slipped since New Year, so my new doctor put me back on anti-depressants at the start of March. The longest period I was on pills before, from January 2007 to January 2008, I found myself unable to write at all, so I do as much as I can now to nip that in the bud. After all, I may need to spend much time on pills, when we find one that works for me, and them preventing the flow of words is as bad as a writer just waiting for the Muse to show up, I guess.

This is the fourth set of pills I've been on. Fluxotine I was on for that year. It held back all emotions, but didn't really help with the depression, and so was a double blow when my grandfather died in the middle of that year. Citalopram, which we tried in 2009, produced a one million to one reaction with me of making my asthma worse. And Trazodone was just weird.

So now, we are on Mirtazipine. Have been for a month. Sideaffects? A permanent headache which moves between annoying and preventing anything else happening. Prolonged periods of IBS. A tightening of the chest, involuntary muscle twitches, an overfast heart beat, and, as of this morning, prolonged bouts of vomiting. Worst of all, I was warned the pills may cause drowsiness. I take one at 11pm, it eventually KOs me, and I don't wake up till well into the next afternoon, at which point I am still knackered and unfunctioning till near enough time to take the next one. (Yes, this is being written at 10am. I am making the most of the special circumstances of being up most of the night sick, by indulging in the great writers pastime of whinging.)

I'm not sure I like these pills. But we shall see how the Doctor thinks of them, when we go to see him this week.

This did however lead to the shortest health related Job Centre meeting of all time. You get these every so many months automatically, the Job Centre like to just make sure you are ok. Well, they do with me, I know with other folk its a bureaucratic nightmare, but with me, they take one look at me and decide being nasty would be like kicking a three legged puppy, in a sling. The advisor took one look at me and decided I was nowhere near ready for work. The same advisor had pushed Mandy to apply for DLA on my behalf back in August, I was sceptical as to the success of that then, yet now we get a little bit extra, given Mandy has to double as her husband's carer for things he can't quite do.

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Before heavier stuff, a quick plug for Winterwind.

They have a site here, the first part of my acclaimed look into the supernatural is here, the interview with Duncan Lunan is here and the forum you can give feedback on all of this and much is here.


I remember watching Miklós Fehér die on live television. He was a Benfica substitute, and had just provided a crisp pass for Aguiar's goal against Guimaraes. Then, he leant forwards, before slumping backwards onto the pitch. He died soon after. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the same thing which saw off Leonard Rossiter, Mark Vivien Foe, and countless young athletes.

In recent times we saw the horrific incident at White Hart Lane when Fabrice Muamba collapsed. Thankfully, despite the situation looking dire, he seems to be on the mend, though like Clive Clarke I have doubts he will ever play football. But the sport is a mere triffle when a young life was at stake. Yesterday, during a Serie B match in Italy, Piermario Morisini collapsed on the pitch and died. It is not an uncommon phenomena. Even in the decade before Foe brought it crashing into peoples homes live at the Confederations Cup, over twenty young footballers died, either on the pitch or during training. Motherwell lost their captain, Phil O'Donnell. Spain lost two fine stars in Daniel Jarque and Antonio Puerta. 

What causes it? Looking back over the history of the horrid thing, you find examples dating back to the 1950s, and the fear is that it always has been, just now, with football more of a worldwide phenomena than it once was, all the cases are in the spotlight. There doesn't even seem to be a connection between over training or too many matches: Japan international Naoki Matsuda collapsed and died after a 15 minute warmup.

What can we do about it? Well, many of these deaths seem to occur from the hypertrophic C mentioned aboved. This effects 2 in 1000 people, so a number of sports people having it is not surprising. A routine medical, as is frequently carried out by sports teams, will catch 3% of these health issues on the spot. An echiocardiograph can detect over 80%. It wouldn't stop all tragedies, nothing is full proof, but it could stop the vast many. Whatever the (many valid) criticisms of the WWE's wrestling medical programme are, it detected irregular heart problems in one of their wrestlers, MVP, and managed to get it fixed. In Italy, there has been a substantial decrease in such deaths since regimented echiocardiographs were implimented for suspect athletes. It feels churlish to mention Italy so soon after tragedy, but it also shows how some will fall through the gaps. An 89% success rate leaves 11% for tragedies, nothing is fool proof. These medical tests are prohibitively expensive, but then, no medical cost is worth more than a life. If FIFA screens all participating footballers in their World Cup in this manner before a ball is kicked, then there is no excuse for extending it to all sports. Andy Murray recently called for regular heart screening in all sports. I heartily agree with him.

But with mention of the Rossiter example, I would hope that in the near future frequent checks could be as vital and as common as smear tests and cancer screenings. 

It's all about making sport safer. I saw a lot of people yelling at thin air earlier when the Grand National was on. It lead to the deaths of two horses, one of which was a name horse. Will that lead to a safer sport? I well remember the furore and tears when that wonderful horse Best Mate seized up and collapsed of heart failure during a race. I wouldn't hold my breath. Like motor racing before it, calls to improve the safety of the sport come in like trickles before a deluge, yet during the trickles Jackie Stewart was considered a coward by the sporting press for demanding safety changes. Jim Clark was regarded as the safest driver in Formula One, yet died due to unsafe conditions. The parallels between the sport of kings and sport of drivers may be a tenuous one, but the unsavoury side show of racing threatens to consume it as much as the fire and blood threatened to consume motor racing. 

I have no solutions on how to make all sports, involving animals or human, contact or simulated, safer. Inklings but no more. But I am just a humble writer on his laptop. It's not my position to make the games safer. The mantel is on the head of the various sporting bodies to act firmly and humanely.

It is in my cynical nature to believe they'd rather count their shillings.

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Over the years I have said many nice things about the SNP. Our friend, Shim, has reminded me of many stirring pro-independence speeches I made at university, when I was younger and my philosophies less thought out. Yet, with complimentary terms must come criticism, and the recent slide into petty party politics is one they need to watch. I am aware the Scottish Labour party do the same, but there is no need to slide to their standards. As Neil Kinnock might have said:

I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour opposition – a Labour opposition! – announcing its opposition to universal health care, all the while wondering why that sound of men turning is coming from graveyards in all the Red parts of the country.

I am aware I have a low opinion of Kinnock, but why not misquote him when you can. The trouble the SNP had was making trying to make political capital of Bradford West, and George "The Cat" Galloways return to parliament. The SNP know what it is like to have a person deemed non gratis becoming a troublesome independent. Lets hope the people of Bradford West dont suffer as much neglect as the people of Bethnal Green did for five years. 

It was special circumstances, though. Lets not chalk up Bradford West to the end of the Labour party. A popular demagogue stepped in. The SNP using that as a country wide issue is to, as Sunny Hundal aptly pointed out, make the same mistake Ken Livingstone has in London: to take a local issue and use it as a referendum on national. In London, it will cost Ken "Less Popular Than The Labour Party" Livingstone, a man seemingly still living in the 80s as much as the Thatcherites. As for Boris Johnson, a man whose polling is TWENTY ONE points above his own party, well, a loss to him is like a loss to George. Special circumstances.

And those special circumstances may come back to haunt the Tories: Boris has been spoken off as a potential Tory leader, so his popularity in London at the expense of the Cameron government may cause one or two heart tremors. 

In France, Francoise Holland may have the touch of humour, and his politics of hope may sweep away Sarkozy's chances of a second time. And how nice to see Melanchon threatening to overtake Le Pen. Even with the Left breaching as this. Will the Left never learn? Too often we are same page, wrong paragraph. Then we watch people in different books co-operate on the other side.

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In Memoriam

Norman St-John Stevas, Tory MP

Doug Furnas, pro-wrestler

Ralph McQuarrie, conceptual designer (Star Wars)

Leonard Cimino, actor.

Dave Charnley, boxer.

Robert B Sherman, songwriter

Philip Madoc, actor

Frank Rowland, Nobel Chemistry laureate 1995

Censu Tabone, President of Malta

Margaret Whitlam, activist, Australian first lady.

Jocky Wilson, darts player

Bert Sugar, boxing historian

Tony Newton, MP

Adrienne Rich, poet

John Arden, playwright.

Earl Scruggs, blues musician.

Phil Jenkinson, BBC presenter.

Robert Fuest, director.

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One aging BBC presenter isn't fond of immigrants or the EU. A pair of lovable TV icons helped blacklist ordinary workers for fear of Socialist uprising. One 60s TV star (in specific) was homophobic. I don't even name names, though it is out there, and some don't even shirk from their nature.

So what do we make of it? Is it possible to enjoy a show fronted by someone whose personal views are abhorrent to you? Well, in a word, certainly. 

Let's take a named example, often pilloried now he can't fight back, given that he is forty years dead. William Hartnell. Was he in actual fact a horrid old racist? I can't say. I learnt long ago never to trust anecdotal evidence. Most of it is tit for tat: for every element of unsavouryness, there is a corresponding tale to shoot it down, and vice versa. My suspicions are that he was a man of his time, but was able to put aside personal feelings for his job. (He can't have failed to notice the gay subtext to the character he played in This Sporting Life, yet plays it with aplomb. The rumours of his refusal to act alongside Max Adrian for homophobic reasons stems from Hainings Celebration: the two actors had performed together before, the scripts were not rewritten, and any tension on the set of The Myth Makers came from acting tensions other than nastier reasons, coupled with Hartnell's growing tetchiness due to recent family bereavement and the beginning effects of his horrible illness.) Even if he were a "horrid old racist", the role he was proudest of was of the great fighter for equality and injustice.

So same with the aging BBC presenter. His enthusiasm for his subject boils over, and makes him a national treasure in that regard. That he has personal views of a distasteful nature are neither here nor there. We must seperate the private man from the one on the box. Else, with more and more information coming out about the people we watch, and not all of it enjoyable, then when does it stop?

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Right or Left

It appears that yesterday my publicly stated views on events in England were misconstrued by nearly everyone who read them. Whilst yesterday that led to deep frustration, today I am forced to admit that if the writing doesn't convey the point well enough to the readers, then only one person is to blame, and that isn't the reader.

So we need to back track, before the debate over a person being left or right wing gets even more confusing, and we all feel like Colonel Renegade.

A riot doesn't spring up overnight, and nor does civil unrest. It is easy to see how distrust of the Met could spring up, certainly I have no love lost for them. At the time of the student protests, the Strathclyde Police were issuing statements apologizing for the actions of their Met counterparts at protests. There was weak leadership exposed by the hacking scandal, the issues of police brutality that never seem to go away (Ian Tomlinson just being the most famous recent case) and general ongoing problems with racism issues. Add to this that John Yates replacement as Asst. Commissioner of the Met - and the person now in charge of anti-terrorism in the capital city - is Cressida Dicks, the woman who made the headlines in 2005 for being in charge of the operation that led to the fatal death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Add to this Operation Trident, designed to smoke out black gun crime, but of whose forces only 5% are black officers only adds to the levels of distrust. It is important to mention Operation Trident, as it was officers working for it who were involved in the death of Mark Duggan, whose death was the spark for events in London.

So we have a police form, long time accused of racism, known for many examples of police brutality, known for it's attempts to cover up that brutality and having to pay up to £30k for being found guilty of that brutality. You can see why there would be lack of trust there.

Then we have our beloved Prime Minister, the man who looked ever so increasingly fragile during July, and who arguably was saved from an exit by the support of the 1922 Committee. His manner during the Andy Coulson debacle was humiliating to watch. Ignoring the fact that "nobody warned him about Coulson" (unless Ming Campbell asks him 5 minutes later) means either the PM lied at the dispatch box, or the editors of the Guardian and others are, the question he refused to answer roughly seventeen times (I don't think that it is too high an exaggeration) was: who vetted Andy Coulson to work in Number 10? News International sources, it turned out, so no wonder he didn't want to admit that in the House of Commons. The man gave the advantage to his opposition, a fellow seemingly destined as recently as six weeks ago to be the Labour partys version of Iain Duncan Smith, all the momentum. His biggest attempt to score a point on Ed Miliband's serve was to point out that Miliband's director of strategy, Tom Baldwin had also worked for Murdoch press. Even that failed, when the Labour leader, with a great relish to be in control of a situation for once, pointed out that Baldwin's line manager at the time was in fact... Michael Gove, the current Education Secretary!

Even without his faux pas at the despatch box, the Prime Minister could be forgiven if not forgotten if he had only led. That's why leaders are elected. To lead. Yet, through the worst moments of the phone hacking scandal, he is MIA. He threatened to be the same during the riots, but decided, out of the goodness of his heart, to cancel a holiday in the land of Berlusconi to come back and give out a few speeches about the violence. And reconvene Parliament. Well, at least he's starting to look go... (he also went against the advice of Sir Hugh Orde in order to score political points)...oh, well, forget that.

Let's not forget the Home Secretary, Theresa May.

Or the London Mayor, Boris Johnson.

So that's who we have in charge of the situation.

Now, onto the civil unrest/riots. Funny how we like to think of ourselves as freedom lovers, so that violent riots in far off countries are civil unrest, yet ones closer to home are riots. I said before, when the student protests were happening, and again during the problems with the Free HRC, that trouble makers and rent a mobs will attach themselves to any legitimate protest. And what we've seen stemmed from legitimate peaceful protest. Did the Met overstep their mark at that protest? Too early to say, and despite my noted bias against them, I remain careful before the facts, but they are allegations none the less.

So you have an angry crowd, angry against the police, the state, the bankers, everyone. Somewhere along the line a spark happened, and in the words of one ex-hooligan, "it all set off". The death of Mark Duggan was the spark for the protest, not the riot, and using it as a reason is both an unfair soundbyte and utterly unfair on the family, who regardless of the reputation of the dead man, whatever it may be, have lost a loved one tragically young.

But once you set something off, things can grow. Some of the usual suspects got involved, then brought in their mates. In the last three days many things have been brought to me by my sources: tales of London gangs getting involved in the rioting, of parents sending their children out with lists of things to loot, teachers and youth workers involved in it. It's not one sector of society, its a miasma of different people for different reasons. To claim it is social poverty, disenfranchisement, yob culture, education, gang problems, institutional racism, any one thing, is to belittle the cause and effect of what has been going on. A riot doesn't start over night, there is a slow build up rarely seen except from within.

And yet, the pivotal moment here is of crime and punishment. I've never had a problem with political protest, indeed I support the right for those to speak their mind, even those of odious natures. However, I also believe that one should accept the consequences for their action. If not paying the TV Licence is your stand against the BBC and State, then you have to accept the consequences if you get caught (ignoring the fact the licence is basically funded on trust, and the few caught out for evading the licence are those ignorant of the laws involved). If you want to chain yourself up to Parliament or throw a custard pie in the face of a billionaire, you have to accept the custodial sentence involved. After all, its part of the activism. Have you gone to jail for justice, etc.

Likewise, if you protest, even on legitimate reasons - especially even so - and you set fire to a persons house with intent to injure, then you must accept the consequences for that action. Likewise if you run over someone with a car in a hit and run, or mug a walking passerby.

VIOLENCE IS NEVER THE ANSWER. In that respect, I do remain as constant as the Northern Star. Those who resort to violence lose the higher ground, morally. Worse, they give excuses to those who would seek to mistreat them. The people who suffer the most from these events are the vulnerable. Their peaceful protests are ambushed, they are attacked by those who ambush the protests, and then the violence is used as an excuse for harsher measures on them. I cannot support people who will use mindless violence on innocents, be they in war or on the street. All it does it turn people. Yet it is fully possible to have the ability to accept the many layered reasons for an event happening, and still being able to say: "Those who burn houses down, and murder people, in the name of this action are wrong and must be punished!"

I will defend the rights of the innocent against those who use violence as a means to express their anger. I will also defend the rights of the vulnerable against those who will use this violence as means of cracking down on them, using excuses to bring forth their ideological madness.

Think of it like benefit fraud. It does exist. It should be punished. Yet, if one in ten people on benefits frauded the state, that leaves nine in ten who don't, and who desperately need the help it provides. Michael Foot once claimed he'd "rather see nine people fraud the state then the state leave one genuinely needy person to starve". We shouldn't allow the 1 in 10 to mean draconian laws for the 9 in 10. But that is what knee jerk reactions to this and similar situations leads to. That's what we have to be on guard about. After all, don't forget that our beloved PM won the Anti-Nobel Peace Prize recently for this. This is the level of opposition we are dealing with.


But the press works on soundbytes, so I guess the soundbyte here would be: They are all to blame. The Tories showed weak leadership and willingness to crack down on the vulnerable in society, claiming "We're all in this together!" The Met have form and history. The rioters succumbed to base instincts. The bloody weather. The councils, who path over play parks and seem disinterested in anything but profit. The Home Office who ignored all warning signs. An education system that has edged in favour of "profit over education".

When I was three, mum gave me the greatest gift in life I could ever have. A library card. We came from a poor area till I was 10, and the path that library card gave me - the ability to read, the thirst for knowledge, for experience - was the one thing that separated me from every other person in my class where, to the best of my knowledge, I was one of the only children to wind up at university. I remain as impotently raging as the rest at polices, racism, etc. The only difference between me and the looters, I guess, is that I fall back to the writing, because it's the only thing I've got. I feel for those who don't even have that, through no fault of their own.


So right wing or left wing? Couldn't tell you. I know that I stand on the side of the vulnerable against those who wish to exploit, harm, and victimize them. I know that knee jerk reactions and soundbytes wont solve a situation. I also know that violence never pays. We can only hope that the lessons stemming from this nightmare are greater tolerance, better education and less victimising of the innocent. Sadly, on previous form of all the leaders involved, the exact opposite can be expected.