When mediocrity speaks we all have to figure out what, if anything, was being said.

A close friend of mine recently posted this opening question for a new theme: “… when our bodies are at rest, when we are asleep, what happens to our consciousness, does it leave the realms of our body and travel out into the ‘thinking space’ that exists between us?”

Personally I have no idea, no idea whether we ever “travel” anywhere, though I know there are cultures to whom dreams are very important. I’m not even concerned only about dreams, but rather the whole question of what is the glue, the attraction, the linkage, the substance between us that connects us. I don’t know what words to use.

Obviously, you are one terminal and I am a separate terminal and we send messages and speech but it’s a lot more than that, isn’t it, because we mean something to one another and we connect in the silent imagination of each and of course in our dreams and fantasies and moments of emotion.

So we are also a great deal more to each other than mere terminals.

Perhaps the reason so many of you were moved by Saint Steve’s demise, for example, is that you actually felt strongly enough about him to feel connected, whereas to me he meant nothing at all. Perhaps it’s the strength of the interest, the love, the hatred, the affinity, the contempt, the emotion that is the medium through which we most connect in terms of out minute to minute experience.

I don’t know. I’m asking you to contribute your own thoughts, with no stupid videos and no quotes from great experts. Just you. All of you who think and know a little about life.
What is it that exists between us and actually connects us?

Next comes what we do with that information, another matter entirely, how much emphasis we place on which supposedly hard facts about life, which in truth are nothing of the sort because for everything that is known someone devised method of discovery and skewed the output. So that what we know to be true is actually just a form of more or less probable belief. The rest would be faith, as the religious would have it.

We are now familiar with the enterprise scenario in which thrusting people who don’t really belong in those angular clothes with those rapt expressions of passion are supposedly, in dynamic meetings, exercising their immense business and leadership skills to define, analyse, restructure, plan, implement and execute constant improvement towards a better bottom line. Whether this process can go on for ever is rarely discussed, but surely by now it is well enough advanced to wonder whether much more can be done through ruthlessly dragonish procedures, especially since everything has already been rationalised, synergised, outsourced, and Sygma-ed beyond recognition. No one sits around chewing the breeze any more, do they?

Now let me show you what rubbish this model is for the real world: please step into an acute care ward for respiratory patients. There are 18 of them in three bays and two private patients in rooms off. The nursing staff consists of at least one staff nurse and at least two other fully qualified nurses supported by at least three nursing assistants or auxiliaries. They are all working a 12 hour shift with lamentably short breaks. Also involved are one of two physios who serve this and other wards, a pharmacist ditto, the cleaning and catering team, occasional input from occupational therapy and various bods who come round doing tests, X-rays, assessments, whatever. Also on constant duty are at least two freshly qualified junior doctors working 3 day shifts as far as one can tell. And it’s visiting time so the ward is full of people, some of whom have dementia and are constantly acting up, some of whom are crying in pain and needing urgent help, some of whom need commodes and basic support and privacy, sooner rather than later. The nurses and their helpers are literally run off their feet, 12 hours a day.

The bays where the beds are were originally built for four beds but they have been adapted to cram in six, making access to powerpoints difficult at some stations and meaning that every single worker on duty is constantly cramped and harassed for space. This means that each nurse is now doing 50% more work than ten years ago with no extra pay or rights, in fact less in some cases. So you tell me how they’re yet going to save another £20 billion without cutting services…

Yet it all works and I’ll tell you how: the staff protest against the machine by speaking to the patients in their own local dialect; some of them absolutely refuse to compromise by speaking received English; they communicate with the sad old men as their wives and families would, altering their tone according to who is involved, rolling out their infinite kindness to the sickest and most demented, briskly encouraging those with hope, like me, prioritising their attention all day long, multitasking on several levels at once with rarely anything dropped.

They work by empathy; they manage all that information, all that technology, all that human drama; they managed it in an integrated way, not as separate channels like a manager might; they manage it like that because they are person centred. They do what works and they absolutely resist anything else. You cannot hurry them. You cannot panic them. You cannot distract them. You cannot disappoint them. Whatever comes up they cope with it, patiently, even if the same old man messes his sheets and needs changing ten times a day.

And even the ward sister, let’s call her Heather, gets stuck in when she can break from the damned stupid computer paperwork, finding time to comfort me when I am quietly crying because I fear that I will be a burden to Cora for the rest of my life. Heather is 69 years old and a law unto herself, as she deserves to be. And in any sensible world she would be Minster of Health. Heather doesn’t need any rat-faced little manager to tell her what to do and I doubt she’d listen if they tried.

The scenario now is that I will never get “better” in the sense of living a normal life because I don’t have a heart problem, after all, I have COPD and must rely on drugs and oxygen cylinders, disabled scooters and adapted cars in order to have a life. But it won’t deteriorate rapidly. I’ve been in a ward with asbestosis sufferers who are much worse off than me, in their seventies and still going almost 20 years after the illness took hold.

So I’ll still be around for a while. Cora and I are even quite excited about our plans for further adapting the house and garden and as my physical strength returns it will soon become possible for her to get back to “a normal life”. As a reward for living I’m getting a new superfast computer, a disabled scooter and a Skoda Yeti on the Motability scheme. Cora’s getting a greenhouse for her rare plant collection, my garden office and a husband with a brain the size of a planet and a perfectly fit heart.

Providing they solve my vascular problem and I get to keep my right leg I’ll be happy. It seems likely.

There will be much to say as a consequence of this new life and death experience.

Plenty of atmosphere, all of it nasty. Plenty of sharp dialogue without one single moment of human decency ever poking through the total gloom. Nice pointless plot in which all men are suspected of everything and not to be trusted. Possibly the most utterly objectionable film I have ever seen after Silence of the Lambs.

You must see it, as an education in pure, unadulterated prejudice masquerading as interesting psychological complexity. And Meg Ryan really got into it, as you can see from the Parkinson interview on YouTube, and Nicole Kidman co-produced it, so these babes think it really says something about sex, love and men – which is simply terrifying.

Because no mysoginist, no matter how bleak his world, no matter how many women had cruelly rejected him, could ever turn out an image of woman as utterly hating and completely negative as the men portrayed in this film.

What it tells us, that a bunch of rich, attractive, powerful and intelligent women in the most cosseted country on earth could make such a movie, what it tells us is that something is terribly wrong…

This voiceover enables Woody to illuminate the easy lives of a bunch of stupid American clichés, to mould them this way and that around a bunch of stupid romantic and life clichés, to foil them with a bunch of stupid cliché Spanish stuff - and yet to extract a dry laugh from a jaded and hostile viewer (me) at every single turn.

I have never liked the guy, never liked his arrogance, never liked his antics, never liked his strange family relationships and never liked the adulation he used to get from dunderheads starved of anything more meaningful. But if he had learned to step back sooner, as he does here, if he had broadened his field of vision like he does here, my God, he could have been almost half a contender.

For American humour, this film is brilliant, almost European in its almost sophistication. A very enjoyable romp, though the sex could have been more explicit and the Cruz identity almost spoils it by overacting to put  Scarlett in her place when actually the third woman, the incidental, woman, the Spanish artist and the voiceover are the real stars, especially the voiceover.

Choices:

1)          mesmerise yourself while passing dingy garage run by yobs offering a “free safety” check and recoil in panic when they discover worn shocks and offer to fit a reconditioned aircon something or other much cheaper than the main dealer; knowing nothing about cars you think it has to be done now and leave the car for three days; after hassling them on the phone twenty times, the final bill is about £700, less for cash; drive away and wonder if the aircon really is working or if they even changed the oil, let alone the front shocks

2)          opt for safety and book a luxury coffee break at the main dealer’s gorgeous showroom while a brittle woman plastered with make-up who knows nothing about cars but everything about billing patiently wears down the customer before you; glance at Daily Torygraph and National Geographic while trying not to admire the gleaming coupe next to your comfy leather armchair; speak to brittle woman for five minutes and depart in loan car for the day, desperate not to scratch it; return at teatime to see gleaming old car in parking lot and glimpse of beautiful workshop area where uniformed engineers are looking at computers; endure even longer wait for brittle woman’s assistant, hairstyle woman, who has a white Afro that surpasses description of any kind; drive away in immaculately valetted vehicle with £1, 287.67 plus VAT less in your bank account; this is fine if you have loads of money but the aircon still isn’t working like it used to

3)          learn something about cars and spend time tracking down the last real garage for miles, where Sid answers the phone after he’s crawled out from under an old Jag; book in for vague list of possible things that need doing and arrive early on appointed day to find Sid and Bill already on their bacon sandwiches after starting work at six; they don’t say much and they wave you away so you catch the bus home and hope for the best; at lunchtime Sid phones to explain something you don’t understand but it’s not that expensive so you say yes; when you turn up at closing time Sid and Bill are still at work on a treacherous Alfa, swearing at each other and obviously exhausted; your car is parked behind several others they must have done that day; you wait, wondering when they retire and why anyone would fancy Miss July 1983 for so many years; Bill arrives, because he is the communicator… explains that you are very lucky because they found a something that had worked loose from the aircon lying in the oil-pan where it could have fallen in the road and been lost, oh dear; he’s sorry but they had to change the brake pads and I didn’t answer when he rang me; apologetically hands over grimy scrawl bill culminating in the sum of £312 inc. VAT and tells you the shocks can wait another year; they don’t take credit cards but it’s OK to bring the rest of the cash tomorrow, when you can collect the MOT cert., OK?

This evening I witnessed what must be the death throws of that business model, at a depressing warehouse where flabby women waddle and spotty youth “manages” to be as completely unhelpful as possible, knowing zero about their own stock and not even trained to say “good evening” in response to polite customers who recognise them as human beings, which is a waste of time because they are not. From the financial pages I know that this chain of sheds is on the rocks and about to go bust, but have they learned anything about customer care in thirty years, have they used their huge sourcing muscle to bring quality goods to the public at reasonable prices? Have they fuck. The retail space consists of acres of crap bath and bed room layouts, all of them nasty but few of them cheap, followed by acres of own brand shite, all of it nasty but none of it cheap, followed by acres of garden furniture, most of it nasty and some of it cheap as well as nasty. The stuff you actually want, like a halogen bulb, a decent paint brush with proper bristles, some carpet tacks, whatever… it’s all carefully hidden away so you have to ask a confused assistant who waddles around for a while before saying she’ll ask the manager, who is busy with a queue of irate consumers returning trash and arguing about special offers that didn’t scan as such when they got to the checkout.
Finally you have your stuff and in a murderous mood you join a long line for the single open till that has broken down while fat waddlers and spotty managers whine at each other and look at their watches. They’re people, you tell yourself. Say good evening and engage in sympathetic banter about what a long day it’s been. Waste of time. The best you get is a grunt, blank incomprehension when you mention the lovely evening sunlight and the interesting breeze that is blowing the bags away, no thanks for keeping them in a job so they can buy some more junk food to exacerbate the spots and improve the waddle, not even a goodbye.
Personally, I’m sad that the excellent hardware store where I could have done this in five minutes for about the same price and had a jolly amusing chat with a friendly person about how well Arsenal are doing this season – has long since closed to be replaced by yet another fucking money-grabbing optician charging a 600% mark-up. But we asked for this when we were seduced by having the spending power of proudly rising house values and were able to improve our own homes meaning that decent workmen had nowhere to go and the world filled up with last minute cowboys who rip you off and the only way to get a plumber these days is to be insured.

Ugly, greedy, slimy-suited capitalism 5, ordinary people and consumers, 0. Quality of life index, minus 30%.

One day in 1742, when Diderot was passing time in a café, he was introduced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a young man coming from Geneva who had just arrived in town. Rousseau had moved to Paris to get rich. He had developed a complicated mathematical system that according to him could be useful for musical notation. He planned to sell it to some of the great musicians in Paris. However, nobody was interested in his ideas and Rousseau had to work in other ways for a living. He tried to do so by being a copyist of musical notation, before he became famous as a philosopher and writer.

Diderot and Rousseau liked each other. They were about the same age, around thirty. They shared several interests, for instance they both liked to play chess (although most of the games were won by Rousseau who was a much stronger player); they both loved music and mathematics. Later on Rousseau became one of the contributors to the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote a series of articles on music. The friendship lasted for fifteen years.

Gradually they drifted apart. Then Rousseau, suffering from paranoia, publicly broke off his bonds with Diderot.

The other fundamental friendship in Diderot’s life was with the German Friedrich Melchior Grimm who was ten years younger. Before Grimm arrived in Paris, coming from Regensburg, he had developed a keen interest in music and drama. He became the secretary to various aristocratic persons. Later he wrote a gazette for several royal courts in Europe. Diderot and Grimm stayed friends for many years and it is only three years before Diderot died that their relationship came to an end, because of a deep disappointment from Diderot’s side with regard to his friend’s political ambitions.   

We could say that Diderot has practised fully his ideas concerning friendship; we can see how his friendships sadly ended because of the habit forming part and when it came to interference with each other’s lives.

Apparently these are the touchy issues and not only three hundred years ago…