Don't look down.

Due to the nature of the universe there will be no strike today. There will be no more clemency for your foibles. Tomorrow will be something to regret, not to look forward to and a promise will remain just that: promise without realisation. You have passed reason. Unseen forces rule your life and if you have problems accepting *that* then my current suggestion is look to the law. The law of coincidences. It will exist if you believe in it enough. There is hope, hope in patience and patience through time. So I hope you have the time, because it is coming. Not just cataclysmically, not intruding on your meal at six with carbombs and crashes and mudslides and the death of children. No, not yet. It comes creeping in as fast as it dares, chipping away at your complacency and leaving you with a gnawing hint of dread, with disease in the farms and epidemics round the corner. With changes in the weather, with flood and wind and rain. But don't worry. Don't worry at all. You have the means to wash it all from your mind, the drug is in your hand, in the shops, in your breakfast cereal, on the couch with Anne and Nick, in banner adds and for sale at Amazon. It walks you to the shops and blazes from the sides of buses, takes you on holidays to Greece and opens Tapas bars for you to take loved ones too, so you can forget together. If it won't go, if you're getting sleepless and careworn, if you stop subscribing, well that's ok too. Because it's covered. We don't want you to do anything! Just come to our rock concert, watch on TV, drop a few coins in the tin, get a badge, get a bracelet, buy the t-shirt, buy the life. Recycle that life and turn the TV off standby, but keep the holiday and the car because hey, being free is important. Get high but don't look down guys, don't let anyone *bring* you down guys, those fuckers will kill you. Change the world? Sure you can! Support me and I'll change it *for you*! Keep living that life, keep consuming. You're a shark, you're a killer. If you stop moving, you're dead. It might look like I'm sneering at you, that's just a cold. I have it all worked out. Trust me. No, don't ask why. You won't like the answer.

Autumn comes with such surprising speed.

I love days like this.

I went down to the beach in town today and the whole bay was a seething mass of chaos and white foam. Massive waves driven in off the Pentland firth by a strong south easterly were just smashing into the shore with such force I could feel the rumble coming up through the bones in my legs.

The wind was thick with salt spray and disgruntled gulls who, having been ousted from their favourite spot on the wave-line had nothing better to do that mill around above the sea-wall like bored teenagers, squawking, squabbling and occasionally swooping down to pick at rubbish.

Some hardy people were being blown up and down the shore, but most sensible people stayed camped out in their cars. Summer tends to breed a kind of complacency in people about the weather and the forces of nature that Autumn comes to smash away, so a brisk wind and drop of a few degrees is christened "wild" weather by a couple of people in the bank. In just a few short weeks, as the world turns and the days darken, a day like this will be "warm and windy" and by April will be a sign that Summer is back on the way.

It's the wildness in the sky and sea that I love so much, the free power of it all as the world tumbles around itself. It is a time of change, a turbulent passage from one season to the next where everything is shuffled ready for the next hand, there is a charged excitement just in one short walk that reminds you how good it is to be alive, how beautiful every breath you take, every wind-blown leaf in the sky can be.

The air is sweet and fresh and clear, and full of thousands, no, millions of different noises, from high pitched rushing through trees to the gut-deep thrum as it forces itself past buildings, the clang and chime of the rigging on boast tapping against masts or the creak from the frames of old houses. the clank of a gate carelessly left ajar or the fading in and out of everyday noises as they are blown around in the storm.

The world is in chaos, every wave utterly different as it foams and crumbles up the shore but part of a larger pattern of advancing lines that are speeding towards the land. Leaves and rubbish are sucked in to spinning dances performed illicitly in the lees of walls, dragging any small debris in to the madly whirling tune while tress become shivering, rocking giants, moshing to their own exclusive beat, all slightly out of time with each other.

There is so much detail we miss just because we don't listen, or look.

So if it's windy and wild where you are now, I really recommend you wrap up warm and go for a walk.

If you're like me, you wont regret it.

Don't call me Scarface....

I’m an anarchist. A proto-socialist feminist pro-libertarian animal lover with leanings towards the anti-establishment and anarchical sympathies.

Or so I would have you believe. I could also say I was a Marxist neo-neo-socialist revolutionary fluffmonkey with massive identity problems. Or I could just say I was…..me.

I have a problem with these kind of labels. A huge problem.

I’m still of an age that I can remember my adolescence quite vividly, and at that age boxes and categories were a comfort. I was trying to make sense of the world and of all the confusing, conflicting information and people I was meeting. (how can people be pro-abortion but anti-death sentence? How can people say they hate inequality yet support a free market society that creates that very thing? How can you like football and rugby?) On the threshold between the simplicity of childhood and the utter chaos of adulthood meant that having some handle on all these conflicting concepts is irresistible - feminist, socialist, racist, communist, Libertarian, radical, punk, gay, all these wonderful tribal labels to stick on people so I didn’t have to think too much. Now I’m reaching a place in my life where I now want to take everything back out of the box into which it was carelessly shoved more than a decade ago and really understand it. I can now handle contradictions and I understand now that what people say, and what they really believe are often two very different things.

Now there are some things you just are. The accident of my birth made me Scottish, other people are Jewish, others Royal. These are not so much labels as descriptions, cultural or racial features that you cannot really choose to be, any more than I can decide to be a member of the royal family (god forbid). But describing myself as a Socialist is just an expression of opinion, a considered viewpoint that differs in many different ways from other "Socialists" and there is the rub.

You see when you take something you feel, for example "women are equal to men and should be treated as such" and slap a name on it, in this case feminism, you create a monster. It is immediately defined from one position so that some people are Feminists, while others are not, even if they had the same thought in the first place.

It works both ways too. You can masquerade under the banner of feminism, pay lip service to it's tenets, ponce about making dodgy statements, or in extreme cases porn, to "liberate" women. By exploiting them. Those that question just "don't get it".

Porn is a good example of what I'm talking about: as it becomes more mainstream we hear more and more people describe it as "empowering" for the women. They are the object of desire and this gives them this power, apparently. Erm, HELLO? They are the object of desire. Object.

You want to tell me that is good for women? Then I'll tell you what. Go make it regulated, only employ people who are screened to be psychologically capable of handling (even enjoying) having sex for public titilation, put no pressure on the performers to do anything they aren't into, there are strong storylines and the performers are not treated like exhibits of meat even when they are not working and above all else you make it equal, then I'll agree with you.

No more faceless men with Exocet missiles between their legs and ridiculous howling and yelping from moistened fuckpuppets. No more "gangbangz in da hood" and "Candy slut bangs the Detroit Dixies". Give them names, faces, motivations, emotion. Make them people. I digress.

It is a sad feature of our nature, regardless of society or standing, that we look at the differences first and to a certain extent define ourselves by them. The crazy thing is we are driven to conform too, peer pressure is the one largest influence on your whole life. You want to be cool and out there but also accepted and looked upon favourably. You want to be a player in the gang. Deep down you want to be "us" not "them", and where there isn't a "them" eventually you'll make one. Feminism might bring like-mided people together, but they will eventually divide up like bacteria into ever multiplying factions.

Philosopy sits inside belief inside Philosophy, like Russian dolls. You aren't just a feminist, you can be a traditional one or a neo-feminist one! Bra-burner! Ladette! My side! Your side! It isn't long before we have divided up a concept and totally lost sight of the original feeling under all the infighting and squabbling over the definition. Who has walked the true path? Who has "sold out"?

Who is coming up with all of this? Good lord! Since the beginning of society our species have been locked in this idiocy. I can just see stone age people gathered round the giant boulder they have all just dragged tens of kilometres, one set shouting "Shrine to the gods!" and the others shouting "Tomb for our ancestors!" and brandishing weapons. And of course when the shrine guys win, we all know they will just start arguing amongst themselves about which god the shrine is for, while in the confusion a smaller group of them quietly drag it further away and describe to the village this great idea they have had for a calendar.

True story.

Sunday walks and quiet talks

I don’t think I realised just how much I’ve taken the great things in my life for granted until now. Having a small person about just learning the ropes and getting excited about pine cones and beetles really swings you right back into focus. It’s like walking in gently rolling hills - you can only see the hill right in front of you so you give it your full attention, and see things you would miss otherwise.

An example of this is going for a Sunday walk. Back in the day we’d have jumped in the car, zipped to the forest, ambled round arguing about something and then back to the car, job done. If people asked what we had done that day it would be “Oh well, we took a walk out at Dunnet,” and that would be it. Unless we found a crashed space-ship or the Green Man smoking weed and getting down with his Dryads of course, which are not as common occurrences as they really should be.

Now the poor unfortunate soul who was foolish enough to ask that question would get far more. I’ll illustrate using this Sunday's walk.

Getting to the car. Not as simple as you might imagine, because The Boy wants to bring the peg basket with him. Also he wants to jump off the picnic table in the front garden a set number of times, a number defined only by caprice and the limited patience of his parents. We get to the car (with the peg basket but no pegs, I’ll worry about their current location later) and he’s not for sitting in his seat. No reason given, just “I not do it! Waaaaa!”

Ten deep breaths and several (forced) calm questions later we have established that he really does want to go to the forest, and he gets in the seat with the peg basket on his head, as he initially wanted.

We drive to the forest car park with the following questions cycling round and round:

“Rogue leader, this is Rogue 2. Rogue 2. Do you copy?”

“Yes I copy, Rogue 2, this is Rogue Leader.”

“Do you copy? This is Rogue 2.”

“It’s Echo Base.”

“You shoosh, Daddy! This is Rogue 2. Do you copy?”

“Yes I copy, Rogue 2.”

"Echo Base.”

“You not say that!! Rogue 2! Copy?”

And so on.

Getting out of the car is no problem, it’s what he wants to take with him. We get the peg basket back (Rogue 2 doesn’t wear his helmet on walks) but it is substituted for a 1m extendable lightsaber, in green, and he will not take his coat, even if it is re-labelled as a “Jedi cloak”. In the interests of actually going for a walk this century we capitulate on the lightsaber and carry the coat. All is peaceful and calm for about 2 minutes, Jedi Boy races off into the trees and we amble along, arm in arm like the old days (well, without the argument: there is no energy left for debating). The bird sing in the trees, we admire the lovely way the sunlight slants in golden rays through the trees and dapples the moss. We hear the soft rushing of the stream as we cross the small bridge and turn the corner to -

“FREEZE SUCKA!”

- be accosted by a wild-haired yob wielding his toy like a gun. He then belts off into the trees again, leaving two stunned parents to discuss how our son has become possessed by the spirit (and more importantly, vocabulary) of BA Baracus. The mystery is deeper given that we don’t have Sky or even a TV. Either it is catching in some way, like some crazed meme or psychological retrovirus, or he is copying older children who have seen the A-team. It is pointed out to me it could be genetic, and the raised eyebrows make the insinuation clear.

Anyway we get halfway round the forest in the same time it would take an octogenarian with a Zimmer frame as we have to stop wherever there is a seat, wait till he gets bored and then carry on. It becomes evident that there are either forces at work or people can hear us coming as the forest is pretty small, there were lots of cars in the car park and we’ve only seen people hurrying in the opposite direction.

When we finally do meet a small family with 16 trillion collie dogs the woman is very friendly and nice, explaining which of the multitude of dogs like children and so forth. Jedi Boy looks up and with feeling says “I’ll cut your arm off…” and brandishes his fully extended lightsaber. She leaves hurriedly while he looks up at us, grins wildly and says insistently “You run now! Go! Go!”

So we run. All the way back to the car. And he chases. Occasionally the shouts of “I cut your arm off sucka!” and “Run! Run! I get you!” punctuate the serene sounds of the forest.

And that is why you should never ask the parent of a toddler what they did at the weekend.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.