Paul Malpas

Anne Harris, the Editor of the Irish Sunday Independent calls them the “coping class” and the Irish Times calls them “the squeezed middle”.  They are the ordinary working people of the country who go to work, pay their taxes and vastly increased taxes they are, after the bankers, developers and successive governments have flagrantly ruined the financial basis of our country.  These people are bringing up their families on an ever decreasing income but on the whole behave themselves and just get on with life as best they can.  These are the people any government would expect to bring them out of a crisis.  They do not rebel, they might moan but generally they just get on with it.

Recently however this vast majority, this huge uncomplaining mass of people, have been starting to think and to wonder why it always is, when trouble abounds, they are the first people to get their arses kicked.  The answer is of course that like the family dog, their arses are kicked because they are there and the government and establishment hope they will remain there.  But there are signs, faint signs possibly as yet,  but signs that this tolerant behaviour is being cast aside and the average thinker wonders whether it is because the plutocracy’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Various things have been happening in this big wide world of ours recently  to suggest that the wealthy, the bourgeoisie, the establishment who never suffer in the hardtimes, have had their day after their various antics have come to light and no longer will the coping class just cope, they will rebel with disasterous effect on those who choose to govern.  Even the big prop of our capitalist classes has had its strength eroded mightily.  The Christian Church, that harbinger of decent life and a definite ally of the system so far, has blotted its copybook and dampened its trousers in its headlong pursuit of hedonistic values and can no longer be relied on to capture the imagination of people.

It is well known that the press have had a very powerful grip on the minds of most for a long time and the government and establishment have been using this grip to their advantage.  The popular press have been feeding garbage and titillation to the people for a long time and helping to keep the public’s eye off the bigger picture which is the rape of the many by the few.

However the Tory inspired Leveson Inquiry into media culture and ethics, and its relationship with the police and politicians, is bringing more unexpected worms out of the woodwork than Mr Cameron really wanted when he set it up in the wake of the phone hacking scandal that brought down that superb merchant of trash, twaddle and sleaze, The News Of The World.  An interesting thing here, and it shows the rubbish that this weekly newspaper set out, was when the Murdoch’s, in their zeal to regain lost ground, closed the newspaper down.  Their customers of trite did not switch to another paper but just stopped buying an alternative.  It shows what that group of people wanted with their Sunday breakfast.

One of the above worms mentioned by that most unlikely of witnesses called by the inquiry, Mr Paul Staines or his alter ego Guido Fawkes, the archblogger, was in his condemnation of the British press.  He told the story of photographs of Mr Christopher Myers, one time aide to William Hague the Foreign Minister, who had been sharing a room with his boss whilst out on the hustings, which had come into Mr Staines possession and placed Mr Myers in a compromising situation.  Now I am not interested in the ins and outs of Mr Hague and his friends because all that has been mulled over in the press for years, but these photographs are interesting.  Mr Staines sold these photographs to the News of the World for £20,000.  At that time Andy Coulson, one time editor of the paper who had resigned because of pressure from the phone hacking furore and was now David Cameron’s press advisor seems to have used his influence to persuade the paper to spike any story that could come out of the photographs.  The photographs were never published and Mr Hague gave out a press statement about his happy marriage and all the papers covered it, but again the News of the World fought shy.

What also came out of last weeks press runs was the bravery of Richard Ingrams, who has been pushing boundaries for over 50 years, first with Private Eye and now for the last 20 years with his monthly magazine The Oldie.  He tells the story of another man long encumbered by innuendo and gossip about his perverted sex life but who always managed, being a pillar of the establishment, to keep his story out of the newspapers.  Jimmy Savile, that doyen of Tory Party ministers, who told everybody he came into contact with on these matters that if he went down he would bring the upper echelons with him.  The Oldie ran the story of the BBC scoop that never was.  The story of Jimmy Savile and pubescent girls from a remand home in Essex, whom he used to invite into the BBC studios and abuse them during breaks in his television rehersals, was withdrawn at the last minute by BBC senior management because it implicated both the BBC and two living celebrities.  Now everybody needs to be concerned at this facet of his libido because Savile’s whole persona, created from 25 years at the BBC, was in his handling and dealing with children and if this story is true, and I think it is, his whole image would need to be removed from public life. Rumours of this man’s mores have been circulating for years.  Even I ran a story on 23 April 2010 on this topic and Jimmy Savile’s contribution which was backed up for me by a restaurateur in the New Forest who often used to cook for Ted Heath, when Jimmy brought a new batch of boys down for Ted to savour.

The real problem with all this news is that it is getting to close for comfort for those at the top of the tree, those who have been, by doubtful means, controlling your every breath.  Take for example that thorn in the side of the Scottish legal system, Mr Robert Green and his campaign for justice for Hollie Greig, a young Scottish Downs Syndrome girl who was horribly abused for many years by a large ring of top of the range paedophiles in Aberdeen, which included judges, police officers, social workers and teachers. He was recently found guilty of breach of the peace at Stonehaven Sheriff’s Court after undergoing something like 20 court appearances, costing well over £500,000 in public money and involving 64 prosecution witnesses and engaged the services of most of the top brass of the Scottish Justice Department.  All this for a breach of the peace hearing.  The only top dog who did not appear was the former Procurator Fiscal of Scotland, Elish Angiolini, whom Robert wanted to call as a witness but was not allowed by Sheriff Principal Edward Bowen, who at the trial did not declare his relationship with Angiolini.  This was the same Elish Angiolini who resigned in mysterious circumstances last May when supposedly at the height of her powers as Procurator Fiscal.

Robert however has now managed to pin down Miss Angiolini and has had a file opened on her and been granted a crime number by Lothian Police.  Now where does Angiolini live but in Dunblane, scene of terrible circumstances 16 years ago, when a lone gun man, Robert Hamilton, shot and killed 16 children and a teacher.  Hamilton was a suspected paedophile who was implicated with George Robertson, or to give him his full title, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, one time Labour Defence Secretary and Nato Secretary General, who disappeared off the radar very quickly in 2004.  George also lives in Dunblane, along with, it seems, some very important people.  Not bad for a town of 8,000 inhabitants.  I wrote a blog posting about this particular coven entitled Paedophilia, The Hollie Greig Scandal, The Dunblane Massacre And The Scottish Cabal on 4 April 2010 which proved to be the most popular piece I have ever written.  It is still there in the top 3 most widely read blogs of mine after two years and so are all these people we have spoken about, but there time will come.  Their chickens will eventually come home to roost especially when the coping classes rise up.

On 19th January 2010 I wrote a piece called The Reality of Retirement the intrepid reader should hunt it out and read it, it is awfully good and amazingly short for me at 850 words but each word and idea is a gem.  I was reminded of this posting only the other day, thinking I must have written it a few months back and in fact it was two years since I started to realise the beauties of being unwaged.  If time flies that quickly in this nirvanic state I find myself in, they will soon be carrying me out the door feet first.

Yes I was reminded of this literary gem the other evening, when a chap called by at 7.00pm on his way home, frazzled from a long hard day at work.  He related the events of his stressful day and then asked what I had got up to.  It made me think, “do you know Jack” I said “I don’t think I’ve done anything and I have not been bored but enjoyed every minute of my day”.  On uttering those words I knew I had already reached the liberating state that the world’s population strives for.

In saying I had done nothing, I was obviously telling little porkies, because I had showered and dressed myself, had a leisurely breakfast, sauntered through my e-mails and written 1100 words on the ridiculous Irish Government custom of buying communion dresses for little girls.  I followed this up with an equally leisurely and fashionably late lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon reading a very interesting novel cum biography of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.  The book called The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, I can recommend to anybody, it tells of their life in Paris and the gifted people who filled this place  after the Great War and during the liberated 1920s.  People like James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, all megastars of the 20th century.  I did all all this at my own pace and enjoyed myself so much it felt as though I had done nothing.

The beauty of this senile exisatence is that since last February, the Queen of England, her glorious majesty, has given me a few hundred drinking vouchers every week, I get free medical care courtesy of my medical card, costs of which in Ireland, which does not have a National Health Service, can be worth an arm and a leg,  perhaps that is why the government here can give out free communion dresses.  On top of all this from next week I am entitled to a free travel card which allows me to travel anywhere in the British Isles for nix on public transport which includes trains, boats and buses.  I am, as they say, on the pigs back.

In my previous posting on this subject I stressed the need for peace of mind being the epitomy of the retired state and how on retirement you should relax in the beginning and slowly find your way to this peacefulness.  Well I reached it by throwing off the man made psychological shackles that the Catholic Church had bound me in all my working and married life and in my freethinking state exposed the bunkum and downright lies that the Church had told in their bid to keep a lid on the clerical abuse scandal that has shattered most of the western world’s religious ideologies and which is only now coming home to roost in England and Wales.  I really enjoyed jousting with the nincompoops of Safeguarding Commissions that the Church in their fat, mindless state had left in charge of this most important of roles.  As these obsequious and obfuscating hurdles, put in place by the Church, were blown away, the younger and more energetic I became.  I was like a youth again, scared of nothing, roaming the internet, like Spartacus in revolt.

When you are mindful of nobody, peace of mind comes easy and your relaxed state takes care of the boundaries you could easily tip yourself over.  So to come down from this buzz, a well written book, a few hours watching test match cricket and a glass of Malbec act as balm on a totally fulfilled life.  I recommend it to everybody who has been round long enough.

I retired at the relatively early age of 59 on the eve of my 60th birthday.  I retired because I did not like what work had become but I had assiduously applied myself to the task and had a modicum of success and vowed my next few years were for Helen and myself.  I was reasonably young and had most of my faculties intact but I was obviously needing something to do and I naturally knew what it was.  I wanted to write, not rubbish, but something with a little quality attached either in phrasing or ideas or both.

So after a period of thought and preparation I set about writing the memoir of my life, not a great life but one with some interest even to the casual reader, let alone my children for whom the tome was originally prescribed.  I started it in the winter of 2006 and quickly found out that I could write more easily at night time when it was quiet and there was no distraction.  So with a little planning and preparation I set to.  I was amazed; the words tumbled out of my mind onto the page almost quicker than I could write.  In those days and even today with some scripts, I had to put pen to paper first before transferring them onto the typed page.

So as England was trounced by Australia in five Ashes test matches over that deep dark winter, I crafted 130,000 words of my own to describe myself and my forebears.  I wrote it in about four weeks and then asked Helen, my devoted wife of 39 years, to type it out, because her earlier training, before she started on me, was in that direction.  She knocked out about 60 pages in quick time before she tired of the task, or possibly of me, who stood at her shoulder and glowed as she committed my words to the screen and she told me that I would have to finish the job myself.

For me the size of the imposition was gargantuan, never having used a keyboard previously but in true surveyor’s style, I split the work into sections and vowed to complete 20 pages per day, in double line spacing, about 6000 words per session.  I had it done in a little over three weeks and I was a proud man until I started reading and editing which then took me the best part of the next three years before I was happy enough to let others read it.  It was received well by some and not by others.  I could not help being critical of some stages and some characters in my life.  I was brutal but probably factual in parts but I knew I was not quite there yet.

Sometime between 2009 and 2011 my painfully typed memoir disappeared off my computer screen, why or how, I do not know but into the ether it went.  I had made a typed copy but for tinkering purposes I missed it.  I was always adding words or subtracting sentences and it was lovely to play with it.  I am no expert in computers and it probably is in there somewhere that the intrepid expert will  easily extricate.  One day I might give the task to some familial great in the field to find but I have kind of resigned myself to retyping and not without a little pleasure at the thought, because in retrospect some sections need revisiting and rewriting from a different angle.  However that is a promised duty for when I run out of steam and not now when I am so busy with other ideas.

So come the winter of 2009 I was in a writing desert, wanting to write but trying to find a medium, finding a way for others to read my thoughts.  The urge to write is an amazing need in one so struck.  You are impelled by some intangible force to get words on paper, not particularly to earn money, though that would be nice, but that others could benefit from or be critical of your fine turn of phrase and laugh or at least smirk at the humour of your thoughts.

It was then I was struck by an idea mooted by my son-in-law, although he was referring to it in a business sense.  Blogging and how it could help people in business.  I signed myself up as a non-paying customer of a symposium he was about to give on the subject and after 10 hours of education, I realised this idea was for me.  It also taught me a few insider tricks in how to make the blog more available to others.

Within a couple of days my daughter and husband had set me up with a vehicle to put my words on and after a very shy and tentative start I was into my stride very quickly, helped by the antics of the Catholic Church and the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse in Dublin, which gave me an ocean to trawl through for ideas from the very start.

I realised  quickly the subjects to steer clear of.  My scrapbook was full of poison pen letters and anonymous phone calls and threats of all descriptions, including three from the local rag here in Boyle, who were considering suing me for defamation.  Funnily enough I also received a threat from a bumbling priest in Manchester who was going to sue me for “deformation”.  My mind has boggled ever since.  Certainly the parish pump is a no go area if you want a quiet life, especially in small town Ireland.  There are still people seething from stuff I wrote regarding the local scene two years ago, it does not matter that it was the truth but for them to be confronted with it, was not quite on.

So my mind and blogging moved to the international arena and away from the small minds stadium.  I wrote about anything and everything, little ideas wormed their way into my head as I lay, a supine insomniac, in my bed at night and the next day these thoughts displayed themselves onto my screen as I nodded off for want of sleep.

What cheered me and what drove me on was the choice of subjects, especially the Catholic church and its works and pomps for which I had a particular dislike, but the real driver was the feedback.  Over the last 27 months I have met thousands of people through this medium with readers from all over the world e-mailing me and posting comments on the site.  So far people from over 150 countries have contacted me to give me their point of view on a particular subject.  That is the real power of the blog, the fact that there are no boundaries, the whole world is your stage.  Once you have written your piece it is there forever, like an over-abundant fruit tree with a never ending crop waiting to be picked off 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by anybody who chances along.  In that time of 27 months, I have written 177 blog postings containing about 300,000 words with hundreds of thousands of people reading what I have to say.  A tool called Google Analytics tells you exactly how many people read my printed words and how much of it they actually read.  Really useful when you are looking for popular topics to write about, not that that bothers me because I write about things that jar my mind and if others agree or even disagree that is where my pleasure lies.

In all that time two people stand out as really influencing my thought process and making me think seriously about my topics but at the same time distracting me in the nicest possible way from my task of delivering words, having to construct and answer a daily crop of e-mails to them.  However their thoughts, ideas, cajolements and humour have turned me into a far better person.

One of this duo contacted me first out of a need to share his experiences with me after a piece I had written.  This single contact turned into an avalanche of daily e-mails, full of wit, innuendo and downright truth about the revelations coming out of the Catholic Church which certainly attracted the main butt of our humour at that time.  His constant hammering on my computer screen made our main construct into a viable cause and hopefully we will be friends for ever, even after this rash of clerical crap is over.

The main problem with my writing is my lack of subtlety.  My scripts are a blunt force, which makes the point to easily.  I needed  assuagement, like a car engine needs lubricating oil.  My problem was that I did not understand the power of the blog.  I did not realise that you could not just tell it as it was but as the blog became popular I knew that this bluntness could not last because I might be over-stepping that thin, hazy, grey line they call legality.

I was eager to learn because my wealth, however small it might be, was destined for Arthur Guinness’ pockets and not some sidewinding litigant hoping to line his breeches with my hard earned.  A person made herself available, a person with more than a little knowledge of the legal code, a person, who at first, had me cowed with the fineness of her mind, she volunteered to turn my rough Longsight ideas and words into things of beauty and awe.  Her deftness of phrasing was a pleasure to read, her subject easily wrought but it was her humour I craved.  In the midst of all this horror and talk of what legal bods could do to you if you only slightly overstepped this indeterminable line, there was a humour so unlike anything from her ilk, that I had to listen to and take in everything she said.

Eventually her tuition turned me into a far better man and a far more circumspect writer and hopefully I taught her a little of the northern spirit she claimed she had in her genes ( her family having moved from a semi-detached mud hut in Jarrow to a twee bijou residence close to Buck House in the 14th century).  So,  having been edited and tutored to distraction, I write now with ease, splaying silken sentences onto a sensuous screen.  I am no longer the man I was but I thank both my amanuenses for turning me from the guttersnipe I obviously was to a person you could take anywhere.

Life in Ireland is no different to life in England except really in two different ways.  The casual immigrant, as I class myself as being, one who never did his homework before coming here, one who classed Ireland as his or her’s spiritual home and had to get here come what may, all of a sudden runs up against matters that do not seem to make sense.  Take for example the Health Service here.  If you step outside your door intent on a visit to the doctors, the euros start to clock up.  If the doctor is at his surgery and you nod in his direction he charges you €40 if you are lucky, then there is another €20 for a blood test and when you go to the chemists with a prescription you can be charged anything.  I remember being asked for €193 for some pills for my wife.  There is also 50 cent government  levy on each type of medication you walk away with.  I did not of course pay the €193 but handed same back to the pharmacist explaining how my wife has decided to take the old fashioned remedy and chosen to ignore her complaint because in most cases complaints fade away unless they are very serious and then the doctor or pharmacist cannot really help.  All pharmaceutical products and doctors work on the fear factor to cower you in to partaking.  Why cannot they set up a National Health Service here.  A think tank of doctors and health professional spent a year recently looking into this ideal and came to the conclusion that the transition could be done smoothly and at no real cost if the motivation was there but it isn’t and the consultants and medical practitoners continue to make hay without any real discipline as they have always done so.

So with these kind of costs clicking up like a till register in a superstore, the potential patient has to be quick on his feet to avoid bankruptcy and like most problems Irish there is of course a way round the problem but you need to take a combined 3rd level course in computers and psychology to prevail.  Either that or take a lesson off the simple man in the street who at all times and in every country has found out a way round every barrier known to man.  So within weeks after taking some very intense lessons on life and how to live it, stood at the various bars around town, I passed my examination with flying colours and now the mazuma stays in my pocket and does not grace the doctors.  This medium is not the place to relate the secrets in which I matriculated but if you, like me, will stand at the bar or better still sit on a high stool at your favourite watering hole and invest in copious quantities of Arthur’s finest cordials, your investment will be well rewarded.

Another happening yesterday made me stop and ponder on the conundrums of Irish life as opposed to the puritan English.  Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein TD and Deputy Leader of her party, and champion of all that is foolish about her party, stood up in the Dail and roundly criticized the Coalition’s minister for Social Services, Joan Burton, for once again attacking the very poor in this country.  The reason for this broadside was the fact that under the present rigourous belt tightening that the Fine Gael/Labour Coalition Government is imposing on the inhabitants of this fair isle, Joan was looking seriously at the social service payments paid to thousands of parents throughout the country for Communion and Confirmation dresses hopefully intended for their little cherubic daughters to go lightly tripping up the aisle of their parish church on those two annual sacramental days ordained by Holy Mother the Church.

Now I do not know how the lads fare out in this fashion parade and I hope they are not left with their arse hanging out of a scraggy pair of trousers they have worn every day for the last two years, but yesterday in the Dail only Communion dresses were mentioned.  It might be a case of the Government giving early lessons in cross-dressing which would ease their financial problems no end with the thought of the word gender being thrown out of the window and the lack of need for distinguishing the sexes.

However the thought that these little Catholic children of Christ are getting free party dresses while the poor Church of Ireland, Methodist, Presbyterian and all the other myriad of religious and non-religious parents do not get even a sock fills me with distaste.  Is it a fact and so I was told since being knee high to a grasshopper, that the Catholic religion is God’s chosen course and that all the rest of them and now me included, are damned or is the Catholic Church in Ireland after years and years of abusing these little children getting more than its fair share of the financial cake?

Now it is obvious to the casual observer that because of this clerical abuse of the little children of Christ and their abuse of so many things, in so many walks of life, that the attendances at mass are dwindling and that the congregations at Catholic churches now seem to be limited to people over 70 years old who stopped thinking about their redemption 40 years ago.  So why should it be that the thrusting and vital young parents of today, who only see the inside of a church at Baptisms, Communions, weddings and funerals find the need to equip their loved ones in the finest couture the government can buy.  The answer is obvious, because it is there.  Once you see an apple on a tree it is nature’s course to want to pluck it.  The communion dress serves a variety of purposes and if the mother is wise she will design the dress that it fits the child for every social occasion for the next seven years and after puberty is passed, can be cut down by the able and made into very decent curtains for the back bedroom.

Last year the average payout per child was €242 and Joan said yesterday, whilst under constant attack from that party who value family life above everthing else, she might have to limit the payment to €120.  Tell me why in this day of total financial insecurity, where handicapped children are being denied their basic rights, where every government penny is counted, is it even thinking of giving parents, who never dream of going to church, unless there is a party afterwards, €120 towards a new frock.  I am not annoyed, I am slightly shocked but I am also completely dumfounded.