"Fast Change"

Although I reconcile myself to change in all its forms, when change happens in a geometric progression, an acceleration, it does leave me breathless. Today I leave my job at Apple Regent Street after a year and prepare for the changes ahead. I leave behind new friends, experiences and a rancid commute.

I keep coming back to the scene in "Lost in Translation" when Bill Murray's character is in the hotel bar and says to Scarlet Johansen: "I've got this idea: first we've got to get out of this bar, then this hotel, then the city and then the country. Are you in?"

It's going to be strange to leave the comfort of routine behind, but the uncertainty brings with it creativity and I feel ideas starting to stir.

I am eager to see what this new future holds.

What would you do for £100?

In these economically pressed times, what would you do for $202? 

Wal-Mart seems to be the epicentre of this herd mentality, that left one employee trampled to death. At another Wal-mart in Columbus, Ohio, Ms Nikki Nicely -- aged 19 -- was prepared to give and receive physical violence.

According to the The New York Times, Ms Nicely: "...jumped onto a man’s back and pounded his shoulders when he tried to take a 40-inch Samsung flat-screen television to which she had laid claim. “That’s my TV!” Ms. Nicely shouted. “That’s my TV!” A police officer and security guard intervened, but not before Ms. Nicely took an elbow in the face. In the end, she was the one with the $798 television, marked down from $1,000. “That’s right,” she cried as her adversary walked away. “This here is my TV!”"

What is our life for? What is it worth? 

About £100, it seems. 

Denying Reality: Financial Markets on the edge

It's not healthy to deny what is happening around you. Reality is more than just perception, it is what happens while you ignore it until some event forces you to reconsider that perception.

However, the financial markets are built on perception and that has given us the boom in property prices here in the UK and in the US, plus the dramatic "credit crunch" we are now experiencing. Northern Rock was the prelude, a little taster of what was to come. The real performance started this year on Wall Street: the collapse of Bear Sterns with its rescue with public money, the nationalisation ("Conservatorship") of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and perhaps the buyout of Merril Lynch.

All these institutions got in to their current predicaments by short term thinking, using massive bonus to reward investments with no long term viability. This was fuelled by irrational group psychology of the trading floors, which in turn is fuelled by testosterone. This clouds the perceptions of not only the dealers but the executives who control the organisations. As one investor has commented "Lehman tried to deny reality until the bitter end."

"Competition and growth" are the bywords of free market capitalism, not "co-operation and sustainability." Competition is a masculine mindset, the same testosterone fuelled psychology that bought us the zero-sum game.

Will it change? That depends on how cynical you are. Hope is normally lumped together with Idealism by those who prefer the status quo. But if the credit crunch tells us one thing, it is that if you live by the market; you die by the market.

When all we had was our labour-power to sell, we banded together to form labour unions. They worked so well that by the 1970s they were too powerful for the ruling elites. The pendulum has now swung back towards the property owners. Capital, the financial markets are all powerful and it seems there is no way we can change things. But we can: We own the means of consumption.

We can choose to borrow. We can choose what to spend our money on. We can even save it. If this financial crisis proves anything, it proves we can take control of the financial markets by withholding our participation within them. By choosing how and where we spend our money, we can starve the markets of what they need: financially ignorant players from whom they can fuel their cancer-like growth.

Change is in our hands. What will we do with it?

The morning commute

Five years ago my commute involved a bus and short train or ferry journey across Sydney harbour.

London is different. I live close to a tube station on the Piccadilly line, about 30 minutes from the centre of Town and the morning regimen goes something like this:

Get the tube before 8am or it looks like this:



People packed in so tight, face to face, clenched fists hang from rails and expressions universally devoid of emotion, too cowed to even show anger.

Most read free news papers, disposable entertainment and seething predigested anger, a proxy for their own disenchantment at their lives.

The train stops frequently and not just at stations. The "customers," as TFL management call this hot and sweaty cargo, sway and lurch. We arrive at Hammersmith.


Into the underground, as hot as hades, with companions that show few signs of life. No one talks. Not to themselves or to others. Both would be a sign of madness here. We are individuals, not a community. Everyone else here is to annoy "me," the identity constructed by advertising in The Metro.

By Earl's Court the carriage fills once more, the temporary relief of the quick-whitted jumping ship for the District line gone. There is nowhere to put your feet and arms are a cats-cradle reaching for a few inches of empty handhold.

Hyde park. A scramble for the doors. Space, room to breathe and perspire. Soon the scramble for the Bakerloo line. The urgent need for all the exiting passengers to be First through the doors causes a log jam. On the Bakerloo platform the train arrives promptly and once on board the competitors take up positions around the carriage door, ready for the running start for the escalators at the other end.

We swarm out of the train and jostle each other to be first on the escalators. Finally, outside in the morning air of London I can relax. Others reach for cigarettes and take needy gulps of smoke into their lungs to relieve their own tensions.

I savour the moments of space and relative peace, before turning my back on the London Underground experience and begin the working day.

Polly Toynbee and David Walker: an extract from their new book on the widening gap between rich and poor |

Polly Toynbee and David Walker: an extract from their new book on the widening gap between rich and poor |
Money |
The Guardian: "'We now live in a separate economy, we live on a separate level to the vast majority of people in the country. We don't send our kids to the same schools, we have more choice over schools, we have more choice over health, we have more choice over where we live, we have more choice over where we go on holiday and what we do for our jobs. And we live in a completely different world to the people we live next door to.'"

Youth crime: Greedy, rude adults 'fuelling teen violence'

"Sometimes as adults we don't model the behaviour we would want youngsters to follow. We live in a greedy culture, we are rude to each other in the street. Children follow that."

As we become more separated from others, as we become more dependent of material things to bring short-term gratification, we grow ever-more angry when we do not get the things we think we deserve.

Marketing sells us the idea that we deserve things, creating need from want. When that is not satisfied we become angry. Is it any wonder our children, who can only learn from example, begin to exhibit behaviour that we already possess.

Black Rain on the Thames

Umbrellas, hoods, designer jackets and shoddy rain macs. A steady
stream of amble past the Film cafe on the south bank. An woman stares
at me until I meet eye contact, the turns away. Blue, red, yellow,
white wheel held aloft to repel the rain that falls in steady circles
on the grey cobbles.

Summer in London. Crowds dispersed by elemental water. Peaceful as the
puddle on an abadonned table.

George Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty - and the ecosystem is gasping | Comment is free | The Guardian

George Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty - and the ecosystem is gasping | Comment is free | The Guardian: "ust as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world's marine ecosystems. No east Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can't afford to sail. The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won't be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish. The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen - who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species - warn that their industry could collapse within a year. Hurray to that too."

This is indeed excellent news. I come from an old fishing family and my father told me how the British fish stocks in the North Sea and English channel were on the verge of collapse in 1939. When WWII broke out, these sea areas were heavily mined and un-fish-able for nearly 8 years. This gave the stock time to recover and my mother tells me the size of fish caught in the late 1940s to the 1960s was amazing -- one filet of Plaice was like an entire fish now.

The best thing for the ecosystem would be a total ban on fishing. As that will never happen -- its not politically expedient -- the high price of oil is the next best thing.

The no's have it

Today's Britain is angry. We know that everyting is wrong. We
participate in the democratic process in negative: we vote against
everyting the government stands for, but what are we for? We don't
know, because to work that out requires original thought on our part.

We look to others to tell us what to think, under the guise of seeking
consensus with our point of view. Anything that challenges our
comfortable assumptions and received prejudices is other; alien and
threatening.

While in America, a movement grows around an idea of positive change,
something people with open minds can vote for, we have - what?

When there is a real chance of an African American becoming president,
it makes me wonder when we will have our first non-white prime
minister? 5 years? 10 years? 20?

Until Britain becomes comfortable with its own self-identity we will
not see a visible minority leader. This is the truth that remains
unspoken, tacit in every Daily Mail headline.

Until then we will remain against everything and for nothing except
personal gain.

The clock of the Long Now

On a recent trip to the London Science Museum, I made a pilgrimage to view the first prototype of the Clock of the Long Now. It sits in a quiet corner of the first floor hall where other items of the 20th Century gather dust. 

It was strange to see items from my life -- audio cassettes, a Sinclair ZX81, black & white TVs -- arrayed in sections and occasionally ogled at by passers by. 

As our lives accelerate further, how much more work-a-day ephemera will appear as history only after a few years?

Where did my Now Go?

When Google bought blogger they changed the security settings and I forgot my old ID and password. I tried to recover them but I had entered my email details wrong. For nearly 2.5 years I was locked out of this Blog, but if I am truthful with myself, I had nothing to write anyway.

So much has changed in my life and I have not always been living in the Now. I've found living a constant fight to and ignoring my awareness has helped me cope with the change.

I left Australia and returned to Britain. In the 4 years I had been away from the UK, either it had changed or I had. I suspect this country has always been hard to live in, it was I that has become aware and see it for its true self. There is little sense of community. People are isolated and materialistic. Londoners particularly are rude and passively angry.

I need to reopen my awareness. But that is so, so difficult when doing so leaves my sensitivity vulnerable to every thoughtless and petty selfish act on the street.

All I need do is capture my experiences here. The reconnection with this blog somehow gives me roots in a rootless, globalised world. When I regained control of this blog last night, I told my partner and burst into tears.

In some strange ways, picking this up again was like returning home.

I'm Back

I'm back.

After Blogger moved over to using Google Accounts, this blog was orphaned. Now, after many attempts at regain entry, I have finally regained access. I am once more able to contemplate The Long Now and share it with the rest of the internet.

So many years have passed. So much has changed. Much good, some bad. All experienced.

More soon.

I am back.