G.A. Milnthorpe's Blog

I’ve been thinking about goodness and, more specifically, whether I have ever done anything truly good?

Do I increase the sum total of happiness in the world? Do I improve the world by being in it? I have certainly done a lot of things which are not harmful, or which are relatively inoffensive – and I’ve done plenty of things that are good for me. But does that count as goodness?

I heard the CEO of a bike company on the radio the other day. He was saying that his company exists to make the world a better place by getting people out on their bikes and keeping them fit and healthy. That does sound good. But to put it another way, his company exists to sell bikes and make money.

I suppose you can make anything sound “good” if you put enough spin on it.

Take my job…I work in the public sector, which you would think would be a good thing, but some people don’t seem to think so. The Council provides services for the general public – be it waste collection, libraries or care homes – and I contribute to that in some small way. But sometimes that care is bad, and the waste goes to landfill and the libraries are outsourced – so where’s the good in that? And, ultimately, I do get paid and that’s probably the main reason I get out of bed.

What about my writing…a comedian I once met said that he views each joke as being a small contribution to the joy wafting around the world. So, ff you read my novel and smirk at page 43, have I done a good thing? Or perhaps art can only truly be good if it changes the world – a bit like Dickens and his effect on the poor houses. As Heather Wolf said: “Use your voice for Good in this world. There are many who tear down, but it's those who build up that truly touch hearts & transform lives.”

But wait…I’ve got it. The other day, at the age of 38, I helped an old lady cross the road. She was trying to cross a busy street, cars whizzing by, with her Zimmer frame and shopping bag. I stepped out into the road and held up traffic as she worked her way, at a snail’s pace, from one pavement to another.

Maybe that’s all goodness is…and maybe that’s all we need in these divided times.

“You feel the fragrance of goodness not only in the mere physical presence of a person, but also in the words he uses and the acts he performs. It all leaves you more perfumed.”
― Rabb Jyot, The Freedom of Being Human

“I wonder if there is anyone in the world quicker than Usain Bolt,” I said.

“Of course there isn’t…he’s the fastest man in the world,” he said.

“That we know of,” I said, being a bit smug.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, there could be a bus driver in Basingstoke who could run the 100m in 8 seconds, but we’ll never know because he never had the chance to join an athletics club.”

“But there isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if he was, he’d be at the Olympics.”

“Not if he never had the opportunity…or the inclination….or the encouragement. I mean, there could be a woman out there who could throw a javelin further than Fatima Whitbread ever could, but actually she prefers dancing…or smoking pot…or reading…or maybe her parents wanted her to be an accountant so she’s doing that now. Or maybe she did always want to throw a javelin but the local athletics club had been closed down, or was forty minutes away by bus and she didn’t have the fare.”

“Rubbish. If she was that good, she would have been discovered. The cream always rises to the top.”

“Not if it’s already been made into butter or yoghurt or condensed milk.”

“You’re talking nonsense now. This has got nothing to do with dairy products. Talent always finds a way. And it will knock down any obstacles put in its way.”

“Hmmm, tell me, do you vote Conservative…?”

For many years, this is what politics was like.

"We believe in education so we're definitely going to prioritise that."

"So do we and so are we."

"And we think national infrastructure is really important so we're going to get some super efficient people to run them."

"Yes, we were planning to do that too."

"And that NHS - we love that, so we'll really invest in that."

"Yes, us too, us too."

Everyone wanted the same thing and to deliver it in largely the same way; outsourcing, public-private initiatives, commercialism -private sector nous for public sector problems.

No wonder people were bored...disenfranchised. If you voted for New Labour you got Academy Trusts, cuts to public services aand the incremental privatisation of the NHS. And if you voted Conservative you got...well the same really.

So I'm grateful for Jeremy Corbyn because at least he represents choice.

You can have your rail fanchises and your private ownership of the water industry, or you can have renationalisation.

You can have Academy Trusts and the Business of Education, or you can have Local Education Authorities again.

You can have a commercialised NHS and an increased defence budget or...you get the idea.

So regardless of what you think of J.C. as a man or a leader or a politician, I think the IDEA of J.C. is worthwhile.

It's just a shame about his position on Brexit.

Interesting article in the East Anglian Daily Times this week, by a journalist called James Marston. It’s an article entitled “Corbyn's refusal to take tea with Trump shows why he can never be Prime Minister” and seems to be a case of James’ “I-don’t-like-Corbyn” agenda overriding his logic.

Whilst I understand the central point…that dialogue is essential to resolving conflict (James references the Good Friday agreement) there were one or two little points that I felt might require some challenge.

The articles states (emphasis mine):

“If Jeremy Corbyn comes round mine for tea I wouldn't boycott him. I'd want to hear what he has to say, if the opportunity arose that is. I don't know about you but I don't think much to his latest protest of snubbing the state banquet IN HONOUR of the US president.”

There does seem to me to be quite a big difference between (1) sitting down with someone for a constructive chat over a cup of tea and (2) attending a banquet in their honour. I suppose I might, conceivably, have a sit down with Tommy Robinson and try to convince him that his informal reporting of criminal trials does more harm than good…but that’s quite different to attending his birthday bash down at the Rose & Crown on the off chance that we might get to have a chat in the toilets.

It also states:

“Mr Corbyn seems not to know this basic fact of human and political relationships. Where would we be if we didn't deal or talk to the oil sheikhs or China or the European Union? How can we raise our concerns or get our point across if we haven't got the decency to sit down and talk?”

(This little paragraph could also be entitled “Money talks.”) But yes indeed, where would we be if we didn’t do deals with oppressive regimes or sell arms to dictators or appease those countries who abuse their own citizens…? (We’d be poorer probably but that’s the way the world works.) And the idea that anyone would stand up at a state banquet, ting their champagne glass with a spoon, and say, “Mr President, I wonder if you would just say a few words about that pussy grabbing business…and then perhaps I could reconsider…”

And lastly:

“Mr Corbyn seems to be relying on what other people say about Mr Trump while eschewing the opportunity to meet him and come to his own conclusion.”

Imagine a 1940s version of James Marston, receiving a posh invitation from Goebbels: “…we’re having a little bash in honour of Adolf and we’d love you to be there.” “Oooo,” thinks James, “people don’t seem to be saying very nice things about this fellow…but I better pop along and see for myself…”

OK, that last bit might be a bit of a stretch…but these aren’t…genuine Trump quotes.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people.”

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.”

“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything….Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

I have been thinking a lot about that recent Michael Jackson documentary. Blimey, it was bleak and dark and the allegations, if true, are absolutely horrendous. How could anyone do those things to kids?

I see that the Simpsons have withdrawn the episode featuring M.J. from their back catalogue and a number of radio stations have removed his songs from their playlists. I’m not sure how I feel about that. One of the people in the documentary said something like this, “as a musician, he was a genius; as a man he was a monster.”

The question is….to what degree can you separate the art and the artist? Can we enjoy the genius without validating the monster? It seems…not.

There are some high profile recent examples of the modern-day approach of disassociation….can you ever imagine singing a Gary Glitter song at a karaoke bar or saying, “I know Jimmy Saville had his problems, but he was good on Top of the Pops”? No. What they did is so terrible that it’s almost better to wipe them from history.

But, how far does it go? Did you know, for example, that:

• J. D. Salinger, the writer of The Catcher in the Rye, supposedly had a relationship with a 14 year old girl when he was 40. David Bowie purportedly had a relationship with a 14 year old girl when he was in his 30s. Even the King, Elvis himself, got into a relationship with a 14 year old girl, Priscilla, when he was 24. He went on to marry her but still…

• Caravaggio, the renaissance painter, murdered someone.

• Miles Davis, the famous jazz trumpeter, used to hit his wife (apparently). As did John Lennon (his first wife, not Yoko) (allegedly) and even wrote a couple of songs about it.

• JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, were reputed to have an unhealthy obsession with children.

And what about the tax dodgers? Or those that play gigs for dictators? Or those that are anti-Semitic or racist or misogynistic?

Is there a line? Where is it? Does it keep on moving? Can we condemn those that we don’t like and forgive / forget those we do?

Take cycling…Lance Armstrong has been wiped from the history books. Marco Pantani, another confirmed drugs cheat, is feted as a hero. Why?

There is no child in the world who wants to grow up to be a sprinter like Oscar Pistorius…but there is a generation of youngsters who might want to be Mike Tyson.

I'll leave you with a quote by Jackson Pollock: "Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."

“Dad, where are the plasters?” asked my son.

“We haven’t got any,” I said.

“What about a bandage?”

“No, none of those either.”

“Why?”

“I felt your mother was spending too much money per annum on medical supplies…so I’ve outsourced it to Barry across the road.”

My son looked a bit confused, which I put down to him not having a sufficient grasp of the essential tenets of capitalism. Or it may be because he’s 10 years old and his hand was bleeding. I thought I better explain….

“Your mother was spending an average of £34 per year on medical supplies. I thought this was too high so I put it out to the rest of the cul-de-sac for competitive tender. Barry came in with the lowest bid. £17 for the whole year.”

“Is he a doctor?” asked my naïve little fella.

“Of course he’s not a doctor,” I said as I ruffled his poor little dim-witted head. “You can’t have doctors dealing with medical supplies. That’s ludicrous. Barry is a businessman. He used to sell hanging baskets door-to-door in Droitwich. Therefore, he knows about buying stuff, he knows about logistics, he knows about economies of scale.”

“Can I just have a plaster?”

“Of course. If you just log your needs on this easy to use app and Barry will drop one round within 4-6 hours. There will a small additional charge for delivery but Barry assures me that this will still be cheaper than our previous arrangement with your mother.”

“I’ll be dead in 4-6 hours,” said my boy, who does have a tendency to exaggerate.

“June, in the corner house, had offered a 1-2 hour response time but that was quite expensive. And besides, she used to be a nurse so I don’t think she would have the necessary commercial nous to keep driving costs down and standards up. Too entrenched in that public sector ethos if you know what I mean. You’ll just have to wait.”

“You’re going to have to take me to the hospital,” he said as he glanced out of the window. “Where’s the car?”

“Ah, have you ever heard of the word “franchise”….?”

Someone asked me that the other day, having found out about my coffee drinking habits. They seemed to think it was odd enough to justify my inclusion in a mental asylum for the criminally insane. Homicidal maniacs do tend to have their funny little ways, so I’m told.

I have three methods of making coffee at home:
1. Cafetière
2. Coffee machine
3. Instant coffee

I like all three, so how am I supposed to decide between them?

Well, here’s what I do…(and I should probably add that I have 5 coffees a day and I try to have them as close to 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 7pm as possible)…as I walk into the kitchen to make a coffee I will glance at the digital clock on the cooker. If the last number (the minute number) is 1, 4 or 7, I’ll have a cafetière. If it’s 2, 5 or 8 I’ll have a cup of instant. If it’s 3, 6 or 9 I’ll use the coffee machine.

So, if I walk into the kitchen at 7:04 in the morning, I’ll be starting the day with a cafetière. Perfectly normal.

You’re probably wondering, what about “0”? Easy, I just move one digit to the left. So I might not get chance to have my lunchtime cup until 13.20; in which case I’m having a cup of instant.

You might even be thinking, “but what if G.A. Milnthorpe is in a rush? Surely he doesn’t have time for a cafetière bearing in mind that he probably sets a timer to make sure he brews the coffee for the exact time it says on the packet?” Again, don’t worry about me, I’m not crazy. All I do in that situation is apply an exemption whereby I swap the time-consuming cafetière for a rather quicker machinated cappuccino. Later in the day, when a 3, 6 or 9 pops up I would then have a cafetière, mindful of the earlier exemption and therefore restoring order to the Universe.

Most of this I can do in the quietness of my own mind….although it does get difficult when I go to other people’s houses…

So there you go, perfectly normal.

The people of Suffolk are safe...at least for now.

But if you do happen to think this is odd…just wait until I tell you how I choose cups, shirts, CDs, jumpers, toothbrush head attachments, reading material, films, running routes….I think that’s it…no hang on, shoes, pants, glasses, breakfast cereal, which weights to do, TV programmes, food from a menu, hats….and maybe a few more.

When writing a novel, the biggest sin in respect of characterisation is to be inconsistent.

A character must be consistent at all costs, it must follow the rules, it must stay within the confines the author has already built. To do otherwise is unrealistic.

And yet, in life, people are entirely inconsistent. They are contradictory. They are rebellious and irrational and needlessly petty. They are selfish one minute, generous the next. Grumpy and happy, almost in the same breath. Sullen and gregarious, often at the same party. They turn on a knife edge. And when I say “they” I probably mean “me.”

How would I fare as a character in a book?

My wife would say that I have a remarkable memory, but that I’m also forgetful. “I don’t care what the capital city of Bhutan is…you forgot to put the bins out. Again!”

I can be perceptive and well-meaning, but entirely clueless and insensitive in the same sentence. “So, do you miss your boyfriend since he ran off with your sister?”

Someone once described me as being highbrow, perhaps because I like going to the theatre and reading books, but he didn’t know that I still find the word “boobies” absolutely hilarious.

Take this recent interaction with my daughter’s friend, aged 7.

“And what does your daddy do?”

“He mainly just plays with mummy’s boobies.”

After I had stopped snickering I said, “my response to that sentence has just highlighted the difference between my projected self and my actual self. You see, my projected self, the image that I try to present to the world, is intellectual and bright but also caring and concerned. It rises above the petty and the mundane, the vulgar and the smutty. But my actual self, the one that I try to keep covered up is infantile and childish, self-important and selfish. Perhaps that’s the secret of my recurring inconsistency…”

But the little girl wasn’t listening anymore, she was trying to finish her word search.

A friend of mine, also a novelist, once said to me: “just because something happened, it doesn’t mean it’s realistic.”

How true. Or is it?

I went to Bridlington last week and said to my wife, “You know what…I think I’ve been here before. I think I might have been on holiday here. In fact, I think my Dad might have had a girlfriend here…”

It was more of a vague impression than a memory and I wasn’t even sure it was accurate, particularly as the words “my Dad” and “girlfriend” would not usually exist in the same sentence. But my brother confirmed it. My Dad did indeed have a Bridlingtonian girlfriend and we’d been there on holiday a number of times.

But I couldn’t remember a thing about Bridlington itself – not the coastline or the pier or the beach. I couldn’t remember the girlfriend or her house or even her name. The only thing I could remember about Bridlington with any degree of certainty was that there was a spider plant above the kitchen door.

How odd – to condense a whole period of my life into a pot-plant. What was hidden within those spidery leaves?

It made me wonder about all those other seemingly random memories that I have in my mind – what exactly was subsumed within each of them?

Like the time the local pub landlord left a bottle of lemonade for my Granny on our front step. On the side of the bottle he’d written – “maybe try this next time Renee.” Or what about the time my brother tried to force me onto the back of a Shetland pony. Or the time I was woken by someone in the dead of night and sent to sleep at my friend’s house down the road?

What have I hidden within these little vignettes of recollection?

And what about the things I’m convinced I remember – but couldn’t possibly…? I am sure I saw a killer whale – a real one, an Orca – on a daytrip to the seaside town of Rhyl in North Wales. Am totally sure of it. But I couldn’t have – so what does it mean?

They say you don’t really remember things – you don’t conjure up an exact recollection of what actually happened. It’s not like playing a video recording – it’s not necessarily reliable or chronological. It seems more likely that you imagine what it would have been like, constructed mainly from what other people have told you.

The only person who might be able to embellish that memory isn’t here anymore – my Dad.

I wish I could ask him about that spider plant although I’m pretty sure I know what he’d say: “what the bloody hell are you talking about? Get me a beer.”

Here are some wise words from Zadie Smith…

“Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds.

Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.

Things change. I don’t need the state now as I once did; and the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.”

…they could almost be my own, except for the NHS baby and the University grant (I had a loan). But if I had somehow got myself pregnant at the age of 33, I’m sure the NHS would have delivered it without any quibbles.

And my brother actually was knocked over by a transit van, aged about 10 or something, and the NHS managed to get almost all of his brain back into his head.

But the state did educate me and clothe me and check my eyes. It let me borrow books and jump off swings. It fed me and transported me and gave me an opportunity. It didn’t matter that the clothes generated such static electricity that you would nearly kill yourself every time you touched something metal. And it didn’t matter that the glasses were hand-me-downs from Ronnie Corbett or that the school custard had a skin on it that would make me gag.

The point is: the state did it.