I had not thought death had undone so many...

Ann Clwyd and the dehumanising tendency in neo-liberal NHS/UK Public Service Management

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/05/ann-clwyd-battery-hen-nhs-hospital-wales-_n_2242345.html?view=print

White towers slo-mo to ground zero. Mouthfuls of grey dust. Eyes blink: becoming accustomed to the dark.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

‘But its kinda fun here’, say the Eloi. ‘We are light; pure energy: we are Stardust. Don’t disturb our day, we’re miles away. And after all, we’re only sleeping.’

But old men die in hospitals, unnoticed, and the Eloi walk the wards. Dainty children huddle behind their monitors. ‘Careful. Ooh, my nails’. Pink and perfect. Safe behind their hi-tec, wrapped up nice and warm in scene of crime, forensic onesies.

Black and huge. Yahoo bands make noise and beds at night, while the soft white Eloi sleep.

'How the sick and old clutter our office with their tubes, phlegm, and crumpled pyjamas.'

War is over...

                                           Learning to sing the Song of Myself...






We've got to fight these f***ing people...

'We're living in extreme times and if you listened to modern rock music you wouldn't know that, ' says Gillespie. ' I just think it's odd there's no protest, resistance or critique of what's going down. It's like people are tranquilised. All the rights people had fought for - people like trade unionists, anarchists, artists - are being clawed back by extremists. These people [in charge] aren't rational thinkers. Someone like Boris Johnson hides behind that bumbling public schoolboy image but he's a sinister right-wing c*** trying to bring in anti-strike legislation....we've got to fight these f***ing people!'

Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream 'forthright frontman', talking to Tim Jonze in G2 15.03.13

People just get tired, Bobby...



 

 
 


'I once wrote these lines in a little poem (just went to look for it in a collection of yellowing papers - my writing scrapbook) - a long time ago when I taught in High School:

'Children's voices, 'Help me, help me!'/ Spirits, demons prowl my sleep/Dead men whisper dead words over/Hell hounds crying from the deep'.



'Blimey. Must have been going under then...'
'I am keen to swim in shallower waters these days. I decided some time ago:

                             
'I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/Am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two...''
Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. TS Eliot (1917)

'I remember during a long, jolly chat about British situation comedies, after a rather seriously political and philosophical research group meeting, Claire, a fellow student of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), leaned over, laughing, and confided, 'You know, Pete, you have hidden shallows...'

She's right, of course: I learnt to play the scholar, intellectual under-labourer, committed political activist, and even managed to convince myself I had become a 'man of gravitas'.

But I am very HAPPY now to splash around in the shallows...'

from an email I sent earlier this evening

I have heard the mermaids singing...

I grow old … I grow old …   I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Marina (Aqua Marina) I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from PRUFROCK and Other observations (1917)                                  from  http://www.fresh2o.org/   We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown   Till human voices wake us, and we drown.