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   Gambling

[ 8 minute read ]

I want to play too

This is about how constrained we are by our previous decisions and I use computer games, business and gambling (all highly addictive) as examples to explore opportunity cost, which can be seen as regret or a bar to something else.

When I started my business I did it because I wanted to play in the real world. My choice of computer games at the time had a business bent to them. Not for me, the single person shoot-up or online battles with a team. I was interested in how making decisions allowed greater freedom to make more decisions. In the real world this is a desire to accumulate as much money as possible. In my head that is greed. Greed when considered to be the only source for freedom is formulaic. As such, it might be considered to be a game with software written for it. In simple terms, IF this THEN this OR this. Logic decisions. I deliberately won't expand on that. You decide.

From playing business-type games and finding myself without a job (I quit) I decided to play a business game for real. And, that is exactly how I thought of it until things got serious, which is when I stopped playing and closed the business. The thing is, I was playing against 'players' who really had a vested interest in gathering wealth, and some who just needed to pay the bills. 

In shoot-em-ups, the player is initially given a weapon of some kind or perhaps, in modern games, some attributes or skills that would enable them to make weapons. These are plusses or positives. In business-related games the player initially also starts with an asset, money or a means to make money. The crucial difference between the two types of games (in both there is deadly competition) is that in money-biased games you can have debts. This is an incentive to 'speculate to accumulate'. In other words, you can guess or forecast a better future that will be so great that it pays for past debt. That is how most people go into business in the real world. They borrow money.

In order to borrow money from a bank you need a Business Plan which includes a revenue and profit forecast. I think there is always something missing from these Business Plans though, but the question can never be framed adequately: Is it a game to you? The upshot of this is in an underlying question: How constrained are you to sticking to a formula or can you afford to experiment and innovate? In a game, which should not affect real life (We will come to gambling), the player can pause and consider, quit, or make wild choices. After I have played a computer game many times I try wild choices to see what happens and it is then that I discover the constraints of the software. In real life, if a business owner has borrowed money, they cannot pause or quit without significant penalties that affect the rest of their lives in the real world (Opportunity Cost).

It seems then that someone who started playing a business 'game' for real has a significant advantage over someone who relies on their business to survive and is not playing 'the game'. I started my business from having experience in logistics (you can buy that but the cost is measured as opportunity cost). I used my own money which meant there were no stakeholders other than me. In business, the customers are stakeholders too but my customers were all ephemeral; the chances of them returning were practically nil, though it did happen. I could do as I liked including pause or quit. Against someone with debt I was the one who could afford to innovate. The key here is in understanding the constraints that someone in debt places on themselves. To me, making a mistake meant I learnt something; to someone in debt it means incurring a financial penalty that could cost them their home. 

I think this is why my marketing attitude to giving advice to my local shop-keepers is not taken seriously. They are way too far invested in their business activities to consider deviating from a stasis of do-nothingness or 'I have an idea how a shop works because I have been in shops so I will continue to run my shop as I have seen other shops being run' syndrome. To me, that is running a business using only peripheral knowledge. People too often do this with their lives.

'Game designer Will Wright was inspired to create a "virtual doll house" after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991 and subsequently rebuilding his life. Replacing his home and his other possessions made him think about adapting that life experience into a game.' 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims

I seem to remember The Sims game with only six motives for the little dolls but it looks like there were also eight: Hunger, Hygiene, Energy, Social, Comfort, Bladder, Fun, Room.

I never cared to find out about the creator or how the game was derived. I did however, go through a tough time and thought if I stick to fulfilling the same motives 'The Sims' dolls have then I should be okay. I still consider today whether I would be happier with a more comfortable chair or more friends.

In real life, if I have financial debt or am close to, or in, poverty I cannot speculate to accumulate. If my motivation to work is low it might be because I need better furniture or more friends or a better diet. However, if I skimp  on food this month in order to pay for dance lessons will the extra sociability and exercise pay dividends that exhibit in greater freedom by creating a larger financial revenue? Not directly from being able to dance, but again we are looking at 'opportunity costs'. 

Someone who relies on their daily business revenue to pay them a wage MUST work tomorrow. The opportunity for them to do something else is not available to them. So, doing their business has an opportunity cost as well as financial costs.

If I go to dance lessons I cannot do something else instead but my motivation in the wider field of my life might be enhanced and ultimately I might be able to afford a new armchair after all. Greater sociability and fitness can result in greater resilience and, importantly, a wider scope of opportunities. 

Gambling

Essentially, I am talking about gambling. The types of games I mentioned, 'shoot-em-ups' and 'money-related', or any competitive computer game, have an element of risk associated with them. They have to; it is what gives us a dopamine hit - anticipation and reward. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and hormone that triggers the 'pleasure' part of the brain. It reinforces behaviour, even if the behaviour is ultimately destructive. Simple gambling is deliberately incurring a loss that may result in a greater gain. Getting a loan for a business is direct gambling. Not eating as well as last week so I can go dancing is not gambling. Not eating at all for a week is gambling. So what is the difference? There is a presumption in the eating and dancing example because the premise has a time constraint of one week that more food is available or could be available after one week. If we don't eat for a whole week we are gambling that we will make correct decisions in a week's time based on a premise that food will be available and health will be restored. A gambler in a booking shop does the same with money. Perhaps the rent did not get paid for a week and the intent is to pay two weeks rent in one weeks time, which might turn out fine if food is still available in one weeks time. If not, the gambler needs to gamble again. The dancer on the other hand, has sacrificed a weeks good diet for a dopamine hit that may pay later dividends without incurring any more costs, or may not. However, exercise is guaranteed even if sociability is not when we dance.

Guarantees

We are looking for guarantees, right? Walk to the shops guarantees exercise and driving there guarantees incurring a financial cost. Many of us opt for the both the financial cost and a health cost. Why? Because we would rather do something else with our time. But what? In 'The Sims' we might need to empty our bladders, or relax, or continue to socialise at home, or sleep; but in the real world are we actually believing that we are Sims? Are we inadvertently playing a game but we are in someone else's game as Non-Playable Characters (NPC) in everyone else's game, but we are still afforded limited autonomy but not outside of the algorithms for health? 

Hunger

Hygiene

Energy

Social

Comfort

Bladder

Fun

Room

(The Sims)

This is why we must not be constrained by decisions we thought we had no choice to make. Crudely, in my mind, this comes down to whether we are playing or not.

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   Mental Health

[ 4 minute read ]

As we move towards The World Mental Health Day on the 10th October this year, I thought I might offer snippets on what shape mental ill health may take.

Sociopathy

'Sociopathy is a form of ASPD, characterized by a lack of empathy, disregard for others and persistent breaking of rules' - https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sociopath-personality-disorder

APSD is Anti-Social Personality Disorder. The most obvious symptom is 'having a consistent disregard for the rules and rights of others' (Cleveland Health Clinic). These people are not evil or mad or dangerous by default. I have a neighbour who has APSD. He rides his motorbike sensibly in built-up areas. Being young, he exhibits behaviour consistent with being young (such as he lacks experience in some things; he is trying new things; he is trying to find out where he fits in),  so being able to recognise that he has a mental illness is beyond almost everyone who is not a mental health clinician. My GP refers people who profess to having mental illness to a mental health team. She is not confident that she can diagnose someone as evil because they get in trouble with the law a lot. 

The Cleveland Health Clinic website goes on to say '“Sociopath” is an outdated, harmful term once used to describe someone who’s been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).'

They go on: '...nearly all signs of this condition involve significant, consistent and persistent disregard for other people.'

• Strong disregard for social norms, laws or rules at home, at work, in school and other public places
• Violating the rights of others
• Minimizing others’ feelings and how they affect other people
• Chronic manipulation, gaslighting, denial and deceit
• Difficulty forming healthy relationships
• Callousness and lack of remorse
• Acting impulsively without concern for consequences
• Attempting to gain power and control through aggression
• A tendency toward petty crime, physical violence or fighting
• Substance misuse

Like I said, a teenager who falls in with the wrong crowd.

Realistically though, the key thing to be aware of is, their behaviour must be 'significant, consistent and persistent'. Thankfully, even though I question reality, I do it from a position of trying to get a better understanding of reality. I also have a difficulty in forming healthy relationships. PTSD will make sure that the sufferer trusts no-one not to hurt them or to suddenly physically fall apart in instances of combat. 

A distinction can be made between PTSD as a result of domestic violence by a spouse, partner, sibling or parent, wherein the sufferer draws away from what may well be future beneficial relationships for them; and someone who due to having consistent disregard for others, acts impulsively, and is callous and remorseless, may have ASPD (Anti Social Personality Disorder). I think that someone with PTSD is the victim of someone who attempts to gain control and power through aggression, and is not the instigator of it. Indeed, there are many people who attempt to gain control with passive-aggression, as in 'I am right; You should think like me or you are wrong.' My brother would publicly ridicule my naivety to make a comparison to his three years more experience. Essentially, he got the support of a group to shore up his claims of superiority.

Let's face it; if you only have conversations within your own social group of people who only believe in the one and same thing, it is pretty easy to think everyone else is wrong. Thankfully, I only ever say what I think and never back it up with what someone else thinks. I don't overwhelm with numbers. 

When my neighbour with ASPD punched me in the face because I told him he nearly knocked me over on his moped, he didn't care. He acted impulsively and lashed out without thinking of the consequences. He was attempting to gain control using aggression. Another neighbour came along and told me that nobody likes me. I had only been living in my road for six weeks. What she was trying to do was gaslight me with passive-aggression, by trying to persuade me that because the majority have a singular opinion, then my perception of reality must be wrong. She showed a symptom of Anti-Social Personality Disorder. But, she doesn't consistently do this, or even persistently.

So, if I hear that someone has Anti-Social Personality Disorder I am first going to try to imagine what this person's goal is, and how do they shape their behaviour to get it. I am not going to think they are monsters of deception. The likelihood, if we apply only what we are told about people with ASPD is that anyone I meet with ASPD can't act in a consistent way to ever reach a goal anyway. That is plainly not true. While their behaviour and inclination to disrupt may inhibit their own progress we have to allow that every one of us exhibits something in the list above in greater and lesser degrees at different times of our lives, including before our first cup of coffee in the morning; after a divorce; or when we are stressed like immediately before an exam.

I suggest, that we be aware that pretty much all mental illness has crossovers in behaviour and attitude.

I invariably find that it is the person pointing the finger at someone else that is the most interesting person in the room. I find that they are trying to distract people from focusing on themselves. But Why? 

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

    Mental Health

[ 6 minute read ]

 

A Zoo of Chimeras of Thinking

Good Crikeyness! Everything is so monetised these days. I have a website still under construction but active and viewable (hegemo.co.uk) that I get nothing from. I get no money or reward or acclaim. It, I suppose, is an element of social responsibility, or a social enterprise if I want to feel that I am making a positive contribution to the world. I have to pay for stuff now that was free in May this same year (2025). There will be critics to the content, particularly from the mental health camp of supposedly trained and normal-thinking people. I am fairly well convinced, though, that they do not see themselves as negotiators in a hostage-taking scenario, when they should. I suspect, that the first thing critics to my approach will do is fail to recognise that the current content (22 September) comes from a single individual with a mind. A mind that is subject to its environment; the immediate world around the body in which it sits. While isolation, at certain times of our lives is favourable, it is not, I suggest, very helpful, when experienced for long periods, in an environment of increasing social interaction. 

However, someone used to long or extended periods of isolation is an alien to a planet of chit-chatting. The critics, I suspect, will not see it this way. If there is a planet somewhere in space that is almost identical to ours, but has different realities, a different past, future and present, most of us, I suggest, would be fascinated to learn all about it? While I would not suggest that any one of us humans on Earth with our own national histories is as fascinating as someone from an alternative planet, if anyone indigenous to Earth has a different historical pattern, I think I am safe in stating that each one of us is still uniquely interesting.

Unfortunately, out of eight billion of us on Earth only about one hundred and nine handfuls of us can actually use our languages and bodies sufficiently well to compel people to listen to us. Obviously, I have no idea of the real number of fascinating people with communication skills. They do, however, need to have both something to say and be able to say it well, don't they? I haven't met all of them yet, so..... 

'Nuff said, you get the point.

Confidence is something that grows in us while we are perceiving that others are finding us interesting. Personally, I have had the most anguished times in many conversations in which I have been outlining a position and 'spiralling in' to hone a point, when I get the feeling that the listening person is thinking their own thoughts around the multi-faceted subject, and reached a strong position that is far from the one I am trying to portray.

       'Oh, please stop thinking! Just listen until you have heard my conclusion.'

Too late! My conclusion will inevitably meet a different one. A fight will then occur between the two, and because the alternative conclusion is on home ground, it is likely to be cheered and encouraged, so it almost always wins.

When we meet another human, I suggest, we consider them to be the same as us. 'What is new?' we ask, albeit obliquely. 'How are you?' means 'Hello' politely. There is an expectation that the person we have just met cannot adequately convey anything interesting to us beyond, that is, what we are hard-wired to want. We crave knowing where good food is, and how we can attain it; procreation; and where danger is. It is only recently that we want to know about the Arctic or a desert located somewhere, where we might go one day, but that visit is highly improbable.

Right there in front of us, is someone with a past, living in the present environment, with a hope for the future. "Not interested. Don't care. Just entertain me somehow, because even though I can never remember that I have a past in the present environment with hopes for the future, I absolutely think I am different to you because I am healthy." It is a default position. Overweight, elderly, unfit, and silly, we ignore all of it while our brain seeks some kind of succour from the stuff that ails it; ourselves. 

It is not you that makes me feel rough; it is me. It is me because I forget that you are only putting on a play, an act that serves to protect you; an act that modern society demands from each of us because it is a hodge-podge of all of us that creates an hegemony of ideas and solutions. Today, I had a long conversation with someone who, at the end of it, made sure that I was aware that she would make notes for someone else to get a picture of what was said during our meeting. I told her that she will only promote a conversation between someone else and my avatar; an avatar created from her notes; an avatar that I shall be compelled to comply with. Far better that I make my own avatar and comply with that one, isn't it? 

You might, by now, have formed your own conclusions to my words. 'This idiot is trying to start a revolution! He wants to change the way we think.' Dangerous stuff, when it is spelt out like that, isn't it? But, you are not wrong. Like countless people before me, I cannot fathom a way to hold up a banner that says, 'It is okay to cry' without being hailed as a softie weirdo loser, a soufflé that can stand no knocks. It is true that I have been felled by a cruel axe that cut me deeply with every stroke. I was a young sapling and easily chopped. I grew back, but not as a tree with a single trunk, like every other tree in a forest. I am the tree that hikers, no, not hikers because that presupposes possession of some interest in an environment; I am the tree that passers-by look at and point out to the other passengers in the vehicle that whisks then speedily along. That isn't a car or a train, by the way; it is the way we live our lives and the pace of them.

The hikers, fleeting as they are, tilt their heads to one side and ponder for a short while before they think about where to find food, procreation, and what is dangerous. I mentioned, before, that I want to build a zoo of stories and mental positions for hikers to visit. None of us, it seems, want wild thoughts to be roaming around biting and clawing at the safe thoughts of where to find food, procreation, and what is dangerous, so it seems logical to shape those animals and recognise the shape of them, and then, even for a modicum of validation, show off our own chimeras. In effect, create avatars that individually belong to us and can be re-shaped over and over again, but only by the owner.

       'Look! Look! This one is really weird!' 

We are not allowed to do that! the Government won't let us. How can we ever be able to understand something if the 'something' is always shrouded in secrecy, and no-one can talk about it? I am not suggesting that we pillory people and laugh at their failing or incapacity to succeed, or conform to our idea or version of success. Far from it. I am suggesting that we recognise that it is beneficial to laugh at, be amused, disgusted by, or jealous of, other people's shaped and deliberately displayed chimeras of understanding and perception, as long as we do not do this to the persons themselves. Like pieces of art works like Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' we gawk and gape and try to reach deeper into it, and simultaneously ourselves, by attempting to understand how the image came to be. Many of us might simply glance at that painting and make an off-hand statement such as, 'That's how I feel' or 'That's how I feel when.....' Why do we do that? Why don't we spend some time shaping what we are thinking? I want to 'experience' more fascinating chimera's that can live in a zoo with 'The Scream' painting hanging on a wall.

Samaritans phone number 116 123 https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

I have decided that I have been neglecting my neighbours. I am usually not prepared to stop and chat with them as I whizz past on my bicycle. They wave from their cars and smile at me and I barely glance at them. Very recently though, I have come to realise that my stand-offish attitude is sub-standard for my village. I don't live in a cold and sterile environment bereft of human interaction. I live down a lane where people stop and pick blackberries next to a pasture. The birds sing, children laugh and dogs bark. My world is full of fun and happiness, of kindness and concern. It has people who care about other people, who help each other. I live in a village in which one neighbour cuts another's hedge. People here are not afraid of each other. We don't look away when a teenager is in trouble, or a dog is pining for its owners while they are at work. We don't selfishly pass by if a car battery has run down overnight and the car won't start on a winter morning. People talk to each other at the bus stop.

One of my shopkeepers spent a long time helping me to understand Buddhism to help me with a TMA, while the other helps me to understand the flavours of the Asian foods he sells, and he introduces me to new products. I make him tarts from the, to me, strange flavours, with my own twist on them. My village interacts in a fruitful way. I borrowed a neighbour's ladder and he borrowed my car to take his mum to hospital. Yet, still, I can do more. When I bought Art Supplies and left them outside my house for young mums, teenagers and the elderly to take, I carelessly thought I had done my bit. Now, I can remember that one of my neighbours said, when she stopped in her car to read my sign, "I must do that for my church." I am glad that I am inspirational but saddened that I did not immediately offer to help her implement it, or offer to give advice on Art.

I realise it is a cruel and selfish man who will find an excuse to never offer help. I realise now, that it is a broken man with a hard heart that will ignore another person; to have no will to engage, other than to make a conscious effort to undermine. I know when I see these types, because that is how I got part of my PTSD. My PTSD is a vicarious one. It was brought about by narcissism and psychopathy in one part, and by the direct effect of World War Two on one of my parents who suffered at the hands of an officer in the Sturmabteilung (S.A.) in another part. 

I vow never to be selfish or mean or jealous and critical of others, or feed off other people like a parasite, or piggy-back off their efforts. In fact, I have a reminder on my wall: 'Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales' - Byron J Langenfeld (World War One aviator). I will however, paint pictures of how I see things. I am not a writer and never will be. I am alive. My eyes are not stones and my ears are not closed.

I am pleased to discover that I am alive, that my PTSD does not shut me off from people as much as it could and once did. I was once entirely numb. I am not bitter. I forgive the people who hurt me. i am not jealous; I want people to succeed. I am pleased that I have grown and can find some peace where there was only isolation. I am pleased that my neighbours have admiration for me and the feeling is reciprocated. 

I am pleased that I have original ideas. I am pleased that I can invent shops and shopkeepers and streets and churches and people and cars and ladders and leaves as I please. I am glad that I do not have to.

One of the reasons I made money as an artist instead of a photographer is because I wanted to be able to add or subtract from a scene. I wanted to embellish or attenuate at will. I wanted to throw paint on a canvas and think that looks like a dolphin, I will go with that! I am pleased that I can make contrasts to act as a background to how I really feel. I am pleased I have an outlet. My world is not black with no light. It is not bleak with no hope of approbation. My world is colourful with no need for approbation. I am having fun.

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or search for 'martin cadwell' or 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. 

I am not on YouTube or social media

It is not you, It is me

[ 9 minute read ]

This is fiction in that I interviewed myself at home without a radio station and in private.

    mental health - PTSD

Yesterday, I rented a radio station studio and interviewed myself, live, on air. I decided that I would allow listeners to phone in with their questions, and I would answer them honestly.

       'Today, I have Martin Cadwell in the studio. Good Morning.'

       'Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here.'

       'First, Martin, let me start with a question that has always puzzled me. You are free with your words, both in public and as soliloquy. Why do you feel that you should impress your attitude on your surroundings?'

       'Well, you certainly pull no punches! Thank you. Why? Hmm! My attitude. I think our attitudes are born from our experiences. We very soon learn to take short cuts in our thinking at a very young age and if these short-cuts work in some situations, we store them as heuristics. Some people might just put it down to experience. I have experienced a lot of different people in different cultures of all ages in different countries. That doesn't make me a special person in any field of study, but it has given me an idea of how borrowing from one culture, age-group, or ideology and transplanting it into a set of circumstances I find myself in, could be a better solution to how things are actually, without intervention, playing out. I suppose I am seeking a righteous solution by speaking aloud.' 

       'You say that you are seeking a righteous solution by speaking aloud and intervention. Would you consider that you are trying to find a match to your thinking?'

       'Well, for a long time I thought that everyone was the same. Everyone has the same level of intelligence and everyone is at the same level of mental development. I was even convinced that everyone suffered in the same way from exactly the same maladies. For example, from having no experience of what a divorce feels like, I did not recognise that divorces are painful. So, in my mind, nobody suffered by divorcing their spouses. My approach had always been one in which everyone around me interpreted the world, and their immediate environment, just the same as I did. So by offering my opinion as advice, I suppose, yes, I was trying to find a match, and that match would then be the rallying point for a good solution to unfold. I felt that I was merely saying out loud what everyone else also thought but seemed to have temporarily overlooked.'

       'You speak now as though wherever you go there is conflict. Do you think you bring that conflict?'

       'Let me just finish my last answer. I was seeking a collective of similar thoughts that rally around a single banner to smother conflict.' In answer to your question, do I bring conflict: Yes, I am a very conflicted person. Something I did not realise, was that I was learning from everyone around me, soaking up my environment and trying to make sense of it. You probably know that I had some problems at a young age that made it difficult for me to experience emotions in the same way that other people do. Unfortunately, I was negatively impacted upon by the very same person's who were the people I was learning from. That is the same for all of us. Ideally, I suppose it would be good for children to spend some time away from their family and friends, in sterilised groups of people, to enable them to gain some perspective, but that simply wasn't available to me.'

       'I think they are called retreats, aren't they?'

       'Yes, retreats. So, as a child, like any child I was conflicted, but still modest enough to recognise that I am learning.'

       'And that was a fully formed thought then?'

       'Yes. And, I think it was this that set me apart from other kids. Where emotion should have been, I was filling the space with my childish logic. I knew that I had to learn from others. I didn't know who I should be learning from. So, lots of rubbish got mixed in, much like today's A.I.'

       'You are smiling. Do you empathise with machine learning?'

       'If you mean do I regard A.I. as a conflicted child with no emotion, yes, I think that is precisely what it is, and what I still am, in many ways. But, I don't think I am the only one that is like that. A.I. is supposed to emulate humans, and I think it is doing it very well. It makes, what we regard as mistakes, but if the same mistake was attributed to a human we would just say, to err is human, and look fondly at the comical blunderer, or in a court, try to discover how a fault occurred and seek redress.'

       'Do you think you should be punished for all the mistakes you have made, which in your book, you regard as vicarious mistakes? What do you mean by vicarious mistakes?'

       'If a child grows up in an environment where everyone throws their rubbish into a river that pollutes the next village downstream, it is, in my estimation, that the child will also throw rubbish into the river. This is not a mistake because, to the child, it is normal to do this. In discovering that the next village is polluted by rubbish in the river, and the child continues to throw rubbish into the river, it is a mistake to continue to throw rubbish into the river and claim that it is safe to do so. Realisation, however, is bifurcated here. It is safe to have polluting rubbish washed away from a village, and it is not safe to have polluting rubbish washed into a village. A vicarious mistake is a belief that stems from someone else's inability to reason properly. If the child believes that the polluting rubbish is washed clean by the time it gets to the next village he or she is making a vicarious mistake in not realising that the pollution is in the water, making it unsafe to drink for the people of the village downstream. So, it is a trickling down of mistakes that are absorbed by a learning entity in the formation of a supposedly reasonable decision-maker, in later years. As to being punished, I think we can only punish ourselves. It would do no good for me to punish you, and you to punish someone else. With, supposedly only six degrees of separation between all of us, the anguish I cause you by punishing you, and so on, would come back to me from hundreds, if not, thousands of people daily.'

       'We have Simon on the line in Kent. You have a question for Martin.'

       'Hello, thank you for having me on. Martin, I think you are up your own fundament. Why do you think you are so special? You have already told us you are damaged goods. Why should anyone listen to the rubbish that comes out of your mouth, when you know it pollutes us?' 

       'You shouldn't have to, should you? I understand why you are cross, why you consider me weaker than you, and why you feel sidelined.'

       'I didn't say that. I am trying to establish why you think your holier than thou attitude is useful to the everyday population of Britain.'

       'It isn't, Simon. I am not comfortable in my life, or with my life. I have, in talking to myself, told myself I wanted a divorce from myself. A complete separation. I spent many years sifting through my life trying to find episodes in which I was the instigator of conflict and lies. I have tried to forgive all the people who hurt me, failed to protect me, lied to me, and cheated me. I have not been able to do that in its entirety. I have not been able to do that because I find it difficult to forgive myself once I have forgiven everyone else. I am a product of my environment and I failed to recognise that until it was too late. Of course, Simon, I am not at fault for blindly acting as I did before I knew it was wrong. I made vicarious mistakes because I did not know differently. I cannot forgive myself for continuing to act badly, for allowing the vicarious mistakes to become my own mistakes. I did not spend any time trying to separate other people's mistakes from my own. So, Simon, I don't think I am better or worse than you, because I still use heuristics that are hard-wired into my make-up. A long time ago, someone said to me that he wished he did not know so much. He was troubled. It was obvious. Today, Simon, I am troubled. Yesterday I was troubled, and tomorrow I will be troubled. When I wrote my book, I had an idea that I would put a preface in it that read, 'If you want to know about me, observe yourself.'

       'Searing! Thank you for your call, Simon. I hope you feel that Martin has answered your question. Martin, you mentioned that you have tried to forgive everyone else but find it hard to forgive yourself. Could you go into a little more detail?'

       'Forgiveness is not something that is done on the spur of the moment. If someone stole my car, I could not simply and immediately forgive the thief. None of us can. I might just as well attribute no value to my car or any of my belongings. There would be no point in taking the keys out or locking the doors. I have PTSD. I have to make a conscious decision to forgive. I don't have the emotional connection to other people in the same way that most other people do; not all people, because everyone, I feel, think, is different and have a greater or lesser ability to empathise with other people. Most of me is made up of childish logic with amendments made by the adult-me who has experienced more than childish-me. The emotional detachment I experienced as a child left a vacuum for ruthlessness to thrive. It is that ruthlessness alongside emotional detachment, which by the way, I can to some extent, still switch on or off, that allows me to be objective about my past actions. I know I can be objective. In many ways, I live my life as an ascetic and place little value in assets. I recognise that optional and discretionary goods are luxuries, and many other people do not. I never seem to remember this though. It is this lack of enthusiasm in me to engage on a personal level with other people's perceived need for things; things that I regard as superfluous to a settled existence that I cannot forgive in myself. I know I can and should, but I don't want to because it is the last shred of who I am, or more precisely was and still am. It is a spoiled part of me which I cannot eradicate.'

       'Martin Cadwell, thank you. It has been a pleasure.'

       'Thank you. The pleasure was mine.'

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

    Mental Health

[ 6 minute read ]

I don't like music

(updated with an addendum  - 01:47 Monday 21 July 2025)

‘I don’t like music’ This was spoken by Mick Jagger in the 1970 film ‘Performance’ with James Fox. I can even today, in my mind, hear Mick Jagger say the words in his distinctive voice. I saw the film a long time ago, but not in the 1970’s.

It seemed incongruous to me that Mick Jagger, already well-known, in 1970, as the front-man for The Rolling Stones, should say something like that. I suspect that line was written specifically for him.

I used to like music until I was eleven. Then I didn’t. Recently, I found out that I don’t like music in the major scale; or perhaps it is more accurate to say, ‘I don’t care for pop music in the major scales’. That isn’t entirely true though, I think. A few days ago, I found a musician chap called David Bennett on YouTube. Odd, you might think. Why would someone who thinks that music is a nuisance distraction even be drifting towards any music based videos? I am curious, that's why.

One of the reasons I don’t like music is because the lyrics direct the listeners thinking, and then keep doing the same, every time it is heard. Like a smell can evoke a memory that takes us back to a past event, a song can take us back to a distinct point in time from our lives. We even make false memories that are tied to music. I wasn’t around in the 1960’s to hear the iconic 60’s music; The Four Tops; The Doors; Creedence Clearwater Revival; The Who; Janis Joplin; The Shirelles; and so on. Yet, I have a distinct nostalgic connection with that decade.

From the age of eleven, lyrics suddenly became just a melody of sounds to me; there was no story, no explanation, or lament of loss, or shout of joy, or expression of love; I was in a state of emotional catatonia, at least that is what I call it. I could not hear words in songs anymore. The lyrics to ‘Paint it Black’ written by Mick Jagger sum it up quite well (These days, I can hear a few lyrics, sometimes).

I have to admit music is a powerful force in our lives. Unfortunately, it pins memories and won’t allow itself to be heard anew and allow us to let go of the old memories. But even that is not how music affects me in its entirety. It is more widespread than that.

There was a really bad period in my life that lasted for many years. During that time pop songs were being played on the radio, and all my friends wanted to listen to their favourite music. I think most modern music uses the A major scale; Adele sung ‘Someone like you’ in the A Major scale. (I would never know that if I had not watched the YouTube video ‘Adele but in progressively weirder scales’ by David Bennett’).

While I can hear Adele is a great singer, I am not moved by the song. However, when the same song is transposed into different scales my ears prick up and I am doing what everyone else does when they listen to music; I am anticipating what comes next and then rewarding myself with dopamine when I get it right. Finally, I get it! Music IS fun.

On occasion, I write short stories. I can categorically tell you that there is NO MUSIC within earshot when my imagination is engaged. We are told to ‘show’, not ‘tell’ if we want to write a story. I have my own views on that, but I won’t be opening up on that. If I was to hear songs recorded in the major scales transposed into different scales, such as Minor, Lydian, Dorian, Byzantine, and Locrian, my imagination would be fertilised; directed but fertilised. One commentator to the video I mentioned, wrote this: 

‘The last three sound like: She’s gotten into the vodka. She’s driving drunk and swerving all over the road. She’s summoning a demon.’

I agree. Now THERE is a story that I cannot hear being told in the A Major scale. I suppose then, that the minor scale is ‘showing’ me something that Adele’s words are not able to in the major scale. Effectively, even with her wonderful voice she is merely ‘telling’ me the story in A major. Hearing Adele’s ‘Someone like you’ in other scales, except Locrian, really brought out the word ‘nothing’ in the first line.

‘Never mind I’ll find someone like you. I wish NOTHING but the best for you’. That spoke volumes to me. The feelings behind the words is the exact opposite to the common meaning of the phrase.

There is no doubt that I have missed out on a whole bunch of fun because I don’t understand music. But then, if all we get is the A major scale in pop songs, and I associate that scale with emptiness, then it is no surprise that fun didn’t, and doesn’t, come to me unbidden, simply by turning on the radio and tuning to a music station. 

Addendum since Darren Menachem Drapkin's comment at 20:14 Sunday July 2025:

Thank you Darren. You are right; I should make myself clearer. Sometimes, there is too much 'showing' and 'telling' is better. Music is a distraction to me. I will never just play music in the background. I only listen to music when I am searching for something to help me 'show' a story more effectively, such as in the marionette shows I created.

I think I need vinegar on my cake. I think Western music is not that interesting to me. I find that the songwriter has written a song that is good enough, but if the singer/songwriter just went that little bit further and changed the major scale to a minor scale, for example, we would have a better song. I am thinking that music in the major scales, 'tells' the story, and music in other scales 'shows' the story. In one of my puppet plays, a young woman marionette lays down in her bed and spirits dance around her while she dreams about a young man marionette. The young woman puppet has invisible strings and the spirits are two-dimensional cut-outs with visible strings, much as young children would make. The contrast is to show that it is a dream and not real for the sleeping, young woman puppet - a childish dream. I was inspired by music to make the scene. In fact the whole play grew from that one scene. I heard 'Până când nu te iubeam', sung by Storm Large with Pink Martini in Portland Oregon in 2010.

This is a Romanian love song, in A minor. 'Before I fell in love with you'

Până când nu te iubeam, sung by Storm Large with Pink Martini in Portland Oregon in 2010

(the better video from the choices, in my opinion).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zzvfUDMfHc&list=RD0zzvfUDMfHc&start_radio=1

Before I Fell in Love with You 

Before I fell in love with you

My love, my love,

I slept like a baby,

My love, my love.

Since I fell in love with you,

My love, my love,

I’ve been restless,

My love, my love.

I leave my house,

My love, my love,

And don't know what direction to head,

My love, my love

My poor heart,

My love, my love,

Do not break it,

My love, my love,

As far as I know it was originally recorded by Maria Tanase, a Romanian woman, it uses these chords: A Dm E Gm B. I think the same chords are used when Storm Large sings it.

https://chordu.com/chords-tabs-maria-tanase-pana-cand-nu-te-iubeam-id_wQhw0apE2p8

There seem to be other verses that other singers use:

I’m dying, this longing is tearing me apart,

My love, my love,

I’m helpless,

My love, my love.

I’m burning, I’m on fire,

My love, my love.

I can’t find some peace of mind,

My love, my love.

Oh, but don’t fight it!

My love, my love,

Please have mercy,

My love, my love.

Oh, but don’t fight it!

My love, my love,

Please have mercy,

My love, my love.

My sun is the same as your sun

 mental health

[ 8 minute read ]

National debate used to be great. It got people talking. Loud people in the pub were popular entertainers. This is about conversation.

I listen to phone-in radio. It used to be fun. In 2016 people phoned in to rant about Brexit. So funny; it got people talking.

Today though, the same radio station has callers that are convinced that the media has a lot to answer for.

     ‘YOU are making me miserable.’

My understanding is that these people are holding the news channels accountable for casting bad news into the homes of righteous people. What they actually mean, I think, is that by being aware of the news that media channels broadcast, people’s lives become more miserable. Hume, the philosopher, would be delighted to discover that the common man could independently come up with his strong idea that people are made happier by seeing people smiling and sadder by seeing people crying.

Apparently, there is a mental health crisis in the UK these days. Yet, I read that there has been a suggestion that ‘admittance’ to the Peak District should be allowed only by paying an entrance fee. (A lot of beautiful hills in the middle of England, near Manchester). Harry in the pub, it seems, so far hasn’t noticed that snippet. I have come across a lot of people who say that they don’t listen to, or watch the news anymore, because it makes them down-heartened.

Further to this, is that there is a suggestion that the NHS could save two hundred million pounds per year if they make the patient responsible for paying for notification of hospital appointments. We used to get these appointments through a letter box in our door – something that we all definitely have unless you don’t have a home; I once had letters delivered to my tent when I was homeless. While I am not against the NHS saving money, we should remember that it is not a private business. It is paid for by taxing the British population. I am not against raising income tax to pay for services that we all need; roads, policing and emergency services, doctors, nurses and hospitals.

Personally, I don’t carry a mobile phone and I don’t own a SmartPhone. I hear people speaking with awe in their voices as they, nowadays, briefly mention how much computing power we ‘all’ carry in our pockets. ‘We have access to all the world’s knowledge’. No, you don’t, you really don’t. We all have a digital portal to information that someone else doesn’t care if you know, or wants you to know. That includes news.

I ordered three things online last week. I received emails that related to all three being dispatched. Yeah, I paid so I expect them to be dispatched. Then I got emails saying two of your items are here, and now here, and ‘Oh, by the way, they are here now.’ There are only two places that I am concerned about: there, being somewhere where it is sent from; and here: where I live. In other words, does it exist? And do I have it? These two truths are separated by a time period known to be a few days; not next day or next month. Sending me emails to fuel my anticipation and cause me to produce addictive dopamine is setting me up for cognitive dissonance. It hasn’t arrived! I hate this world! Oh my God! How stupid are you people! Why can’t you just send it?

One of the items did not arrive when the email said it would. I had a tiny panic attack. Was I not in and the delivery person knocked? Has it been stolen? Did it get delivered to the wrong address? Did I waste my money? I would not be worried if I had not had to open emails that I did not need, that gave me false information. Let me go back a bit. Does it exist? Yes, here is some money. Do I have it? Well, if I need it badly I will definitely look to see if I have it. ‘Ah yes. Here it is’. So sending me emails just made me anxious. I had to open them, because in my world you only send an email to a customer to tell them something is wrong. As a trader, in the past, it was unheard of to constantly tell the same customer, ‘You can trust me, you can trust me, you can trust me,’ then, ‘Ooops sorry, I messed up.’ If we had done that we we not be trusted every time we said, you can trust me. Think about the boy who cried wolf.

I get my hospital appointments by post. I go for walks to chill out. Once or twice when things have gotten too much for me, I have taken a holiday. I don’t expect to live a life of luxury just because I am British. Goodness, if I thought that nationality was the determinant in who gets what, I would be racist.

     ‘Ah, you see! Those people are African, not British, so they shouldn’t have luxury’.

No, no, NO!

     ‘I am British and I blooming well deserve luxury. So those people, in Africa, who are not British, also deserve luxury.’

Is that better? 

Not being racist means believing that all humans have the same rights because there is no discrimination. I don’t, however, give money to charities to help people to buy optional, discretionary goods (luxuries). An optional, discretionary good is a television, a car, and a SmartPhone. Some people do need the latter two; I don’t. I need to know that I do not need to have money to get a hospital appointment. Yet, it seems that by using an App on a device it costs me money. Sure, we can receive texts and messages on a phone for six months without paying, but then we lose our right to have a phone number.

Mental ill-health, if it is personified, crouches, waiting to leap out, and possess anyone, (yes anyone) who finds it difficult to live with dwindling, inadequate or non-existent funds.

Here then, is my SmartPhone which I need for the future NHS app so I can get an appointment with a clinician for my mental ill health, which (SmartPhone) has access to all the media’s current fascination with reporting on poor social conditions across my home country. Of course, I cannot just buy a phone plan that lets me keep my number and only receive messages. Oh no, I, like everyone else, am encouraged to overspend my data download limit, because while I am waiting for the appointment, or I am in the waiting room, I need to distract myself from what ails me. I look on my SmartPhone for news because I enjoy reading about other people’s misfortune, starvation, exclusion, ostracisation, mental and physical anguish. I think not!

I think I will put my phone away now and go for a walk – except…..I can’t afford it. Because I can’t afford to go to the future Peak District I must make you, the nation, pay for my mental health appointments. Actually, I don’t have appointments for mental ill-health, because I have hand-written my own certification that says that I am entirely sane. I took a photo of it on my non-existent SmartPhone to prove it.

The real issue is that mental ill-health is not addressed as such. Government representatives and even Ministers will say something like,

     ‘We need to tackle mental health’.

No, we need to provide opportunities for good mental health to reduce mental ill-health. We shouldn’t be tackling mental health, we should be tackling mental ILL-health. I am amazed that the NHS does not have a chain of gyms and does not own the National Trust.

And there it is. Reduce the proliferation of things that make us feel bad so we can have time to feel good (in the Peak District). I know; reduce the cost that the NHS incurs by treating a rising incidence of mental ILL-health (mental health issues) by making them pay the entrance fee to the Peak District for the people who would otherwise be in the waiting room. Yes, I know, my argument (above) rests on the proliferation of, or absence of, bad news in the pub and by digital means.

      'Today, on the news...The flowers in Mrs Brown’s garden have provided plenty of pollen and nectar for the local insects. No-one in Britain got stung by a stinging nettle, and the price of an ice-cream has returned to an affordable price. Now, over to Hannah, our reporter in the street.’

     ‘Helloooo! So far five hundred and sixty-eight people have said good morning to me; twelve elderly men have raised their hats; seven hundred women have smiled to each other as they passed; and four children have hugged my legs. It’s going to be another wonderful day in Britain. Back to the studio.’

     ‘In more serious news. The NHS is working hard. The police are catching criminals; here is a picture my daughter drew of a criminal in a stripey jumper being caught, and your neighbour is not going to have a better holiday than you, because the sun that shines on them is the same one that shines on you.’

All my blogs:  https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

 

[12 minute read ]

Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian

A friend I have, knowing that I have a sympathetic ear, cornered me at a conference, with the following thinking as part of his belief system:

       ‘We all live in a rapidly changing world that somehow always manages to be one step ahead of us, at least technically. If you want evidence of this, you only have to look back to the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine.’

       ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

       ‘I had a model steam traction engine made by Mamod, when I was a child.’ he said.

       ‘Hmm. My brother had a steam roller.’

       ‘Given the right tools, I could build a rudimentary, but still viable, steam engine to power something that requires only a relatively small amount of power. I could even use a flywheel to maintain the power between piston strokes.’

Yeah, not difficult, I thought.

I am not an engineer; not in the strict sense of being someone who has formally studied engineering; electrical, mechanical, chemical, physics, or whatever. I am definitely not a scientist, such as we think mathematicians are and people who work out out how big our universe is. Yet, all of us can be in one or the other of these camps of thinking; I have mentioned this before when explaining a priori and posteriori. An engineering mind takes the facts that scientists have discovered and uses those facts to solve problems in the real world.

When we were at school, we worked in teams. Ostensibly, this was to make the brightest kids in the class take the role of assistant teacher; let’s face it, those brain-boxes had intelligence to spare anyway, and end of school results needed to look good. A communist might be happy with taxing the rich to give to the poor. Schools have done this for decades.

Quentin went on; I knew he would.

      ‘Of course, poor achievers in life have a right to think they should live in luxury. The nanny-state from 1948 to the present has consistently robbed the poor of opportunity, recently.’

Well, I didn’t expect to hear criticism of the Welfare Act 1948 today, but with Quentin, anything is possible.

      ‘When I say ‘poor’ I mean the one’s who received the most help in school from the richest or brightest person in the team. In 1765, James Watt came up with an improvement to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine. This ‘light-bulb’ or ‘Eureka’ moment could only have come to someone like Watt. People like him are the ones who brought improvement to modern poor people’s lives through the subjugation of their ancestors in weaving mills.’

Blah, blah, blah, I thought, Get to the point!

    ‘James Watt, in a modern school, would be the bright kid helping everyone else in his team to make the leap of discovery or realisation to understand how to come up with a solution to a problem set by a teacher or textbook. Schools then rely on pupils’ memories to be able to award level two and level three qualifications for students at, what is it, sixteen, eighteen years old? After that, Watt would go on to invent things to make himself rich and make utilisers of his inventions rich.’

I wasn’t averse to Quentin’s thinking, and he knew that. I didn’t always agree with him, but I had half-cooked ideas of my own, which left on the back-boiler, were always ready for a stir and some seasoning.

I moved my quite forgotten stew of juvenile thinking forward. In the 1980s, the UK Government decided that everybody should be allowed credit, pending credit checks of course. This meant that the class society was gradually taken from the UK populace. A communist would say ‘Good, Share the wealth and support the people.’

I chucked in Quentin’s mix, piece-meal, and tasted it. A class-less society means supporting people who falsely think they could have been a modern-day James Watt or Thomas Newcomen and are somehow equal to genius or successful risk-takers. ‘I know, I will get credit and be equal to the people next door’. Those people next door, they did not realise, have everything they need without credit. With no credit interest to pay, there is better utilisation of their available income. The ‘haves’ get richer, while the ‘credit-ridden’ get poorer; poorer because they somehow believe they have a right to luxury because the modern ‘James Watt’ helped them at school, and gave them a false sense of hope based on their end of school examinations which are a result of their achievements IN A TEAM with excellent thinkers in it. Take away the spark of initiative, and what do you have?

Quentin watched and waited. I nodded in a head-lolling way, raised my eyebrows, and grunted. He smiled.

Why did, Quentin, my friend, tell me this? It turns out that Quentin has a great deal of money, enjoys amateur dramatics, and has another friend, Alec, who went to the same private school as him, but has always been an under-achiever in the modern world. Alec had, Quentin told me, moved to the very same village I now live in, only two years ago. I had never knowingly met Alec.

Quentin told me that the last time Alec had won something without coming up with a formula to fleece bookmakers at horse races, was when he had bought a single raffle ticket and it was selected. Apparently, he wasn’t a popular sixteen year old in his home village and there was an array of prizes which the master of ceremonies had had to spend considerable time scanning to find the least valuable, or least useful, item. Eventually a sushi rolling mat was chosen against a bottle of wine, a small food hamper, a box of chocolates and about five other expensive things.

       ‘This is what matches your ticket number!’, Alec was supposedly told.

So, when Quentin, in sympathy for Alec’s life of inadequacy and disappointment, ear-holed me at that conference to ask for my help, I came up with an award for his ‘Alec’. Everybody has their ‘Alec’ and nobody likes a Smart-Alec. I congratulated myself on that one, despite it being a little mixed up in its relevance.

Quentin told me that, as a result of our combined efforts, Alec had been nominated for an award, sixty years  after his raffle win. Alec didn’t know what to expect. Of course, he now lives in a different village to his youth, and the locals, by dint of his age, automatically consider him to be greater than any unruly teenager. Of course, I had to meet him and he is, truly, still unbelievably dim. Yes, I am one of those bigots who classify people and thereafter use heuristics to keep them there in my mind. No-one can change their spots or class position. Once a teenager, always a teenager, as far as I am concerned.

The event was to be held in our village hall after the monthly screening of an obscure film by the local film club. After a couple of yawning hours, the crowd cheered up and some were woken by their immediate seated neighbours. At last, the moment that they had came for; the ‘Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’. No-one in our area had ever been lauded or praised so highly, quite simply because there never had been this award before.

       ‘And now the highest award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Change by a civilian’

      ‘The nominees are Anna Clarke for arranging Council funding for the local Brownies’ trip to Offa’s Dyke, last year; David Brown, our local farmer, for contributing to the new East/West railway with the donation of his farmhouse and re-development of it into a local train station; and Raymond White, for the clear instructions he gives for which side of a cyclist he will overtake on, while on a cycle path.’. That’s me! I realised.

The crowd sat up a little more.

       ‘And the winner is….Raymond White!’

      ‘Bravo’, called the crowd as they threw flowers at me, at ME!

      ‘No!’, I shouted above the din, ‘It should be Alec!’

For years, cyclists had been troubled and confused about which side the faster cyclist approaching them from behind was going to pass them on.

The UK Highway Code under: ‘Annex 1. You and your bicycle

Information and rules about you and your bicycle’, states that:

‘A bicycle should have a bell.’

It does not say must have a bell

Many pedestrians, particularly the older type, think that is law for a bicycle to have a bell. I have always liked to prove that a bell is no longer suitable in the modern world because people wear ear-buds and are listening to music that may include notes of the same frequency of a bicycle bell.

This is what I told Alec. Quentin’s plan was to use his wild bunch of amateur dramatics-loving friends to create a scenario that Alec would unknowingly interact with. I had told Alec to call out, ‘Passing on the right.’ each time he overtook another cyclist on a cycle-path. After a couple of weeks, actors would, unbeknownst to him, race to catch up with Alec from their hiding places along his route back home from work. As they approached him they were to call ‘Passing on your right’ just before overtaking him. The plan was to cause Alec to think that the local bike-riding population had recognised his efforts to be clear and safe, as being something they wanted to adopt themselves. Alec would then pat himself on the back. The award at the village hall was to cement his pride; after all false pride in someone so old as Alec wouldn’t be much of a problem for the young people of today.

I thought that Alec would think this was a sound idea because I already did something similar; to make sure that I was noticed when I approached pedestrians from behind I called out, ‘Bike’, with an expectation that the person in front would move to the side of any shared pavement for pedestrians and bicycles. When they do not hear me I then shout, ‘BIKE BEHIND’. A standard bicycle bell sound cannot be turned up, my voice, of course, can.

According to my diary of near accidents, I have saved over two hundred lives by shouting at pedestrians. But, the best part of shouting at pedestrians is when they stand still and shout back. That way I know they have heard me and I have saved a further one hundred and seventy eight lives because they will not be suddenly stepping to one side or the other.

On occasion, I have had to pick myself up off the floor with a sore face because the clumsy pedestrian, usually men, in turning has allowed one of their hands to fly out from their body at face level. I realised that these accidents could impact on the fomenting of good manners, so that is why I decided to also do what I had told Alec to do.

      ‘Passing on the right!’

Now, in my area, there is no sound of bicycle bells, only calls of intent. Many people are now safer.

According to my log of near accidents, scenarios I have witnessed which I keep at home; all told, I have vicariously saved one thousand, five hundred and five lives in my area by introducing good clear manners to young cycling people.

Alec was grinning ear-to ear.

A woman came over to me and introduced herself as a talent scout from the UK Highway Code legislators. She warmly shook my hand.

       ‘I am going to recommend that the UK Highway Code has an entry that states that cyclists should shout at pedestrians and pedestrians should stand stock still and control their children so bicycles can move smoothly on pavements, unimpeded and safely.’

     ‘This is a breakthrough in progress!’ gushed her companion.

The cheering crowd carried me out of the hall on their shoulders and right back to my house. The next day, I walked back to the village hall to collect my bicycle, and thanked all the cyclists shouting at me as they approached me from behind. A few of them held up a single middle finger to show their support for my first award. They seemed to think I was wearing two hats, at least that is what they were shouting, though running the words together.

The elderly cyclists held up two fingers in a victory sign, but most couldn’t seem to remember whether the palm should face the recipient or not. Perhaps they were showing their support for me to win a second award.

      ‘Thank you so much’, I gratefully called. 

I didn't realise that Quentin had set me up. It was just a joke; a joke on me. Most of the people in the village hall were actual residents in my village.

Quentin has never liked me.

All my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

  mental health

[ 18 minute read ]

I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home

Sometimes, a person on my doorstep, tries to sell me Broadband or something, and because I don't respond to marketing or sales techniques at all, rather than just poke them in the chest with a broom and shoo them away, I give them the time of day and allow them to practice their elevator-pitch (an opening spiel that is intended to open a door of curiousity). I ask questions and let them respond. Eventually, the conversation peters out and they quietly go, at least a little rejuvenated and not immediately shunned.

Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that 'omnipresent' means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that 'omniscient' means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future, like next Sunday, to cover a sin we are about to commit today, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink, so we just laugh instead.

I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at James' stupidity. This is just a story. I have taken a strong view as narrator to make a case for James.

Mind Chess

The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position, like unruly football fans at a match that hadn't started yet.

Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out and kept weeds down in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do; knowing this allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.

Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.

James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England; an unattended torpidity that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand, was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete. 

James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to hate everyone for their stupidity and and right to be a loner.

There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept James alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.

Initially, Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed, Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking, for Brian,  was almost entirely only mental exercise.

‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’

James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be a buttress to a non-existent scaffold that becomes the foundation for the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made all his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.

James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.

Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled and throttled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.

Brian’s unconscious source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’

He had, a long time ago, in younger years, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’

Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.

‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’

‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’

This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from his socially-conscious 1990s history, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.

Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.

Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.

‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.

In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.

It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.

Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’

‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.

Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.

‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’

Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.

Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.

However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.

‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained. ‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’

James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.

‘Shame on them’, he said again.

Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.

‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’

James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when an opportunistic jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing croakily called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.

Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.

James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.

The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it,  shook it, and laughed again at the jackdaw as it shamefacedly flew away.