Friday, March 13, 2009

[freaky friday] comments please

[them] out of the closet


Two emails arrived in the past week, one from Anon, he of the long, linked comments in the comments sections and another from a blogfriend of mine, asking who ‘Them’ is and what they do. The email subject line was ‘Conspiracy Theory’ which pretty well set the tone for any ensuing ‘discussion’.

This blog suggests that there is no conspiracy.

I don’t believe there are people working for their own ends, except in the context of working for a higher boss. Them, [third person plural], are simply sheep themselves, as we all are.

The last Bond film raises some good questions in a fictional setting. Who was behind Le Chiffre? Mr. White. Who was behind Mr. White? People like Dominic Greene. Who was behind Greene? Mathieu Amalric. Who was behind him? The film doesn’t say because it’s getting closer to the great houses and the franchise can’t afford to step on the real toes.

Who’s behind the great houses?

To me, conspiracy suggests some sort of joint action for their own goals. I suggest that these people, the Sutherlands and Mandelsons of the world, are just as much sheep in the hands of a different shepherd. So yes, they collude, just as Common Purpose graduates collude … but for a higher purpose.

People who suggest there is no collusion going on in the world make me smile. If there was no collusion, then what were the Roosevelt anti-trust acts? What is insider trading legislation for?

‘Them’ themselves, if they could be bothered with me at all, might be intrigued what explanation I could give to the sceptical reader as to who They are. Even usage of the third person plural pronoun, They know full well, is a bit of subterfuge.

I’d like to put an analogy here.

If you look at the situation in Darfur, you might be led to believe that there was evil going on there – babies’ eyes gouged out, people tied back to back and burned, villages razed and so on. If you look at Gary Brecher’s article on Algeria, you might be forgiven for thinking that some sort of evil was riding unchecked there.

Playing devil’s advocate, I could say no, it’s just classic psy-ops. After all, Machiavelli wrote, in 1513:

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

John Arbuthnot Fisher, around 1902, wrote:
The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.

Apologists for violence abound. Ian Hay wrote, in 1915:

War is hell and all that but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peacetime.

Yep, like providing a comfortable lifestyle for your family and yourself, not having your home broken into, family members tied back to back, burned and babies’ eyes gouged out. Real nuisances, those.

What’s to recommend war? Profit, of course plus one other rarely defined and obnoxious element present in its implementers.

The government in Sudan maintains that the villagers were rebels and therefore fair game. The average Brit would look at this and Mugabe’s atrocities and really wonder about the overkill. If you had to raze whole villages for psy-ops, then why not just shoot the villagers and be done? Scorch the earth, yes but why the fiendish little embellishments? From where do they spring?

Similarly, if you have to have land clearances to rid your land of the pesky Scot, then why not just clear the land, why indulge in atrocities?

George Kennan touched on it in his first memoirs [1967], writing that he was:

… never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. In his memoirs, Kennan argued that containment did not demand a militarized U.S. foreign policy. Instead, "counterforce" implied the political and economic defense of Western Europe against the disruptive effect of the war on European society. Exhausted by war, the Soviet Union was no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the beginning of the Cold War but rather a strong ideological and political rival.

Militarization was no strategic necessity but there were those, from Oppenheimer to Dulles [a known advocate of ascendant man] to the hawks of today who allude to patriotism and make a great show of it in visits to the troops, dropping into the earthy rhetoric and simplistic political analysis which is light years from the truth, to achieve the real goal, the goal of Them.

We come down to the same old argument we always have – is it the evil in men’s hearts at work or is there an actual evil, utilizing the evil in men’s hearts? When man is left unchecked – see Golding’s Lord of the Flies – he descends to evil, not the other way round.

Ephesians 6:12 is a good start as to who Them is.

The worldwide legion of corrupt people are not bound in any conspiracy – they’re just the front few lines of people lost to the seven deadly sins but their bosses are something a bit worse.

‘Business is business’ is a wonderful cover for the world’s atrocities.

Girls from the Ukraine and other eastern European nations are prostituted for your delectation, kept in slavery and fear for their lives and that’s just business, isn’t it? Hey, many of them want the chance to get out, you might say. People with nothing will do anything.

I suggest that this is no more nor less than the bestialization of both the victim and the punter. Men and women, unbound by any code except ‘do as thou will’ and ‘business is business’, as indifferent to the plight of the pensioner and common man as any RBS, Northern Rock or Freddie and Fanny big wig, are acting in the interests of evil, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Buchan [The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915] touched on it but didn’t go far enough:
Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it, the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake.

I suggest that Buchan was wrong. When we get down to who the people behind the Morgans are, even behind the ‘rat faced men’, then we’re getting into a shaky area where many ideas abound.

Let me ask you a question.

During the rise and age of usury, enormous profits were made and then they just disappeared. Where to? Into the monarch’s coffers? Then why were the monarchs always near-impecunious? It doesn’t take that much research and almost no speculation to come up with the answer.

Let me change the topic completely.

How did the great houses get to be great in the first place, providing the ongoing leadership of Europe and the New World and the captains of industry? Who lent them the dosh in the first place and on what terms?

Leaving them aside and speaking completely hypothetically – if you wanted to be so filthy rich that you made Bill Gates look like a pauper, what would be the most lucrative areas? Surely land rentals, the war industry, prostitution, pornography [and by the way, which are the two most viewed categories of freely available internet porn?] drugs, oil, gas and the car industry, water and food monopolies and the hijacking of the green movement.

That’s whence it’s derived.

Now, if you’re a johnny-come-lately to these money spinners, how do you buy in? You don’t. The people with their hands on the wheel are not going to lightly relinquish that unless you come in with a lot of firepower, work for Them or pay your dues.

But how could you buy in, if you felt compelled to?

Well, you’d need a duplicitous, powerful person, used to funding both sides in a conflict, to provide you with sufficient resources to destabilize the powers that be. Why would he do this? Because he believes that only through constant conflict [Orwell’s 1984], by passing through the fire, will you achieve a higher consciousness. It’s the supremacy of the strong [Nietzsche, 1883]:

I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed.

From the Tower of Babel until the present, this perverse philosophy has ruled in the corridors of power. Look at the currently disabled Particle Collider or go back to Oppenheimer’s 1945:

I am the destroyer of worlds.

Who is Them? It’s too dangerous to name, even for people like myself who couldn’t care less any more. But the manifestations of Them, the visible arms, can be spoken of, e.g. by Woodrow Wilson [The New Freedom, 1913]:

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

Wilson again [1916]:
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

He should know. Lieutenants Warburg and House stood awfully close to the President throughout those dark years.

Churchill was referring specifically to communism and in reading his whole text, the following must be taken in context and yet the words are still powerful in a general sense [1920]:

From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg, and Emma Goldman, this world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played a definitely recognizable role in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

I suggest that the people behind all major movements are many and varied but they’re bound by a common boss whom many of them don’t even recognize.

My personal interest has been in the area of mind-control and this plays a role in the plot of my three books. It is amusing in a way that the existence of MK Ultra, now mainstream knowledge, was both denied by the CIA and seen as fantasy by the general populace when they did get to hear parts of it.

I’ve known of it for years, as you only need to do the most cursory research to come up with DID and SRA. Occasionally, the real roots of this hell on earth surface briefly and only the perceptive will see them before they sink back below the surface again. Do a bit of research on Michael Aquino, heavily involved in this business in a minor role for the U.S. military and look at his night time business – the Temple of Set.

Here are some descriptions of Them:

… organized, secretive, and extremely wealthy at its upper levels. They are not stupid … … These are NOT nice people and they use and manipulate others viciously. They cut their eye teeth on status, power, and money ... … these are the most cautionary people on earth. They try to leave absolutely NO tracks … … They have infiltrated our government, and the governments of every country in the world, and well as the judicial and legal systems, the media and our financial institutions. They are ruthless, ambitious, and will not stop at killing those they oppose ... … They are arrogant, and this could be their downfall. They view the common man as "sheep" with no intelligence. They are full of pride, believe they are invulnerable and that any press about them is the equivalent of a gnat to be swatted. Arrogant people make mistakes, and they are becoming more blatant and open in recent years ... … Stopping pornography and child prostitution and drug smuggling and gun running would take a huge chunk out of their profits …

Let’s throw in Jenner’s comment [Feb. 23, 1954]:

The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening, to make a breach for a collectivist one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government without our suspecting the change is underway. This secret revolutionary corps understands well the power to influence the people by an elegant form of brainwashing.

That was 1954. Now look at the state of Brown’s Britain today. ’Nuff said.

How do they succeed? George Kennan wrote [George Urban, "From Containment to Self-Containment: A conversation with George Kennan," Encounter, September 1976, p17], that:

The source of the problem is the force of public opinion, a force that is inevitably unstable, unserious, subjective, emotional, and simplistic. As a result, the U.S. public [and we can include Britain in Kennan’s analysis] can only be united behind a foreign policy goal on the "primitive level of slogans and jingoistic ideological inspiration."

People just do not analyse or look for the ulterior motive, preferring simplistic explanations reinforced by the so-called rational sceptics. The average person, beset by his own worries, induced by Them in the first place, manipulates him something awful.

How many people think there’ll be a revolution and anarchy in the streets, where pollies, pakis and the MCB are all summarily executed? How many people would welcome Brown and company being tried and executed for what they’ve done to Britain?

‘Them’ want nothing better. Then they can remove the final freedoms and create the martial state, the whole idea all along. The martyrdom of Brown will have served its purpose.

People are sheep and always have been. Any time they’ve tried to raise the state of humankind, it’s been hijacked by agents of Them. Returning to Bond, the finale, where he stands over the fallen Mr. White is a lovely moment, showing they can’t have it all Their own way but in the final analysis, it is a temporary, Pyrrhic victory and where is the James Bond who’s going to serve your best interests anyway?

Coming back to Anon, he’ll be posting a series of articles at this blog which will be linked in the sidebar. I’d ask you to also have a look at the series of articles at Pro-Liberi, especially the one on civilization. I'll link when it's up.

This blog is in pursuit of truth. I’ve tried to answer the question of Them but have no monopoly on truth. The truth is discovered through looking at all points of view and that’s my motivation for recommending those series of articles.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

[growing old gracefully] and the problem of seagulls


Look, I honestly do appreciate my residential location, which I’ve somehow accidentally or on purpose [depending on which deity you follow] found myself in.

I really am grateful … but what I do not appreciate is being woken every morning by the squawk of bleedin’ seabirds outside my window at 03:50.

I know that that was the time because I got up and had a look, didn’t I, before telling them to stop their bloody racket. All very yo-ho-ho in the morning light it was too, with birds screeching about over by the ships, very Robert Louis indeed as I gazed down on the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of a one legged man or to musket my way to a few of those pieces of eight.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about today.

Yesterday, as you’d understand because I posted, I did the long bike trek into town, taking my two part spectacles into ASDA for repair. They refused, which is fine, so I had to go elsewhere but one thing which struck me was that ageing women shouldn’t try to dress as if they were still thirty. A mini-skirt and boots on a sixty-year old lady is not a pretty thing.

What is a pretty thing on a sixty year old lady is grace and elegance.

Who said a matriarch or that indefinable person called a ‘lady’ cannot be an alluring prospect if she is obviously some kind of Segie whom the years have treated kindly and who goes in for the Arthurian motif? Has anyone not heard of Queen Margot either - although I think she was a bit younger, wasn’t she?

Which brings me to the men.

In about 1995, I was asked by a girl hockey player of nineteen, with thighs like tree stumps [I have to get my own back somehow]: ‘Why do you try to dress like you’re nineteen?’

Rather than tell her to get knotted, I heeded the pastry-loving damsel’s words, took a look and yes, I’d basically grown older and forgotten to adjust the attire in accordance with the years.

Soon after, I passed my psychedelic yellow Sonnetti jacket and jeans on to a deserving teenager, discarded the designer trainers and went in for the loose top, straight cut jeans and black leather Echos on the feet. All I needed then was the body to go with it but that’s a later tale from Russia which you’ll never hear because I don’t want a certain person to know with whom I went.

So yes, a woman of sixty can look quite alluring if she:

1. is not a man-hating misandrist;
2. does not carp on and on and on about women’s rights and how wonderful Germaine Greer is;
3. looks after herself;
4. plays the part of the mysterious woman with a past.

What a man does, when the chin goes double, triple and finally becomes not unlike a pelican, is another matter. Maybe he should:

1. give away the pastries and sweet comestibles;
2. get back into the training;
3. fail to notice the younger ladies;
4. get involved in some noble pursuit which will bring the women in anyway;
5. have lots of money.

One thing he should not do is ride about on a bicycle at top speed, weaving in and out of cars parked at the lights as if it was a slalom course and then tear off down the road because as sure as a plaster cast, those worthy drivers will catch up with him further down the track and no amount of riding up on the footpath, playing chicken with stationary pedestrians and running lights will alter a car owner’s gleam of determination.

The moral is that people of a certain age should start to act their age. The two words ‘concrete boots’ leap apppealingly to the imagination for cheeky sods like the aforementioned.

Disclaimer: I didn’t really do any of the above – it was just fantasy, like the rest of my life.

Speaking of fantasy, there’s another aspect I’d like to touch on and that’s the ‘old farts – young tarts’ syndrome. With the best will in the world, chaps – that’s a fantasy unless you’re in a third world country and we all know about Gary Glitter, don’t we?

And by the way, have you seen some of the YTs today? What are they doing looking like that at that age? Is it their parents’ fault, their fault, society’s or Gordon Brown’s?

Having written all the above, I wonder if it isn’t easier for a woman in the early years and a man in the later years.

Perhaps not but it seems so.

Seems to me that a younger lady who wishes to enjoy the company of men no sooner need announce, ‘Here I am, boys,’ than she has an instantly loyal clientele. A man announcing, ‘Here I am, girls,’ might not attract quite the same degree of attention.

I saw one just now in the town and she was like a magnet for the middle-aged and yes, I would have.

Conversely, lovable, well dressed rogues who enjoy dancing might find felicity beyond fifty. In fact, I know a number of them. In Tenerife, I saw one Spaniard, maybe sixty-five, not all that tall, an expressive rather than a good dancer, cleanly dressed, with a very pleasant manner and women of all ages dripping off him. I looked at my girlfriend of the time and asked how he managed that. Later, he came over and we chatted about things – he really was one very cool dude without realizing why, I was sure of that.

So yes, perhaps we have to come to terms with where we are and not keep deluding ourselves. I shouldn’t imagine this will get too many comments as it’s a deeply personal issue for many and there’s a lot of either self-delusion or despondency about.

Solution? Perhaps an attitude and values makeover first, followed by a dose of reality – Britain’s good for that. Then a lifestyle change with a new game plan thought out.

[the cabbage] neo-feudal staple


As we slip into the neo-feudal, post-democratic, Richard Briars and Felicity Kendall society, it would be as well to reflect on the two staple foods you should have planted in your garden plot.

The cabbage [from Wiki]

Cabbage is an excellent source of Vitamin C. It also contains significant amounts of glutamine, an amino acid, which has anti-inflammatory properties.

It is a source of indole-3-carbinol, or I3C, a compound used as an adjuvent therapy for recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, a disease of the head and neck caused by human papillomavirus (usually types 6 and 11) that causes growths in the airway that can lead to death.

In European folk medicine, cabbage leaves are used to treat acute inflammation.[7] A paste of raw cabbage may be placed in a cabbage leaf and wrapped around the affected area to reduce discomfort. Some claim it is effective in relieving painfully engorged breasts in breastfeeding women.

Buckwheat [from Wiki]

Buckwheat contains rutin, a medicinal chemical that strengthens capillary walls, reducing hemorrhaging in people with high blood pressure and increasing microcirculation in people with chronic venous insufficiency.[23] Dried buckwheat leaves for tea were manufactured in Europe under the brand name "Fagorutin."

Buckwheat contains D-chiro-inositol, a component of the secondary messenger pathway for insulin signal transduction found to be deficient in Type II diabetes and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). It is being studied for use in treating Type II diabetes.[24] Research on D-chiro-inositol and PCOS has shown promising results.[25][26]

A buckwheat protein has been found to bind cholesterol tightly. It is being studied for reducing plasma cholesterol in people with an excess of this compound.

The Russians have sworn by these two for centuries and with good reason. Get yourself onto a diet where these are the framework and your digestive tract will leap up and thank you for it.

[the eu] and its interface with the great british workman


Sometimes the more mundane issues are the more interesting.

Last Thursday, I heard a knock on the door and there was The Great British Workman, named Chris, to be known for simplicity’s sake as The Great British Workman, wearing a sickly yellow green jacket.

‘We’re ah, going to do the lekky, like.’

All right, there were a number of assumptions here. Firstly, what the hell was he talking about? Secondly, what ‘lekky’ needed to be done? I was happy, I had my pay meter, the shop was not far away to do the top ups, the sun was shining.

‘We’re moving your meter, like.’

‘Ah, and where, Chris, are you moving it to, pray?’

‘Downstairs.’

‘Why would you move my personal paymeter, which currently houses my electronic key, which I had to negotiate with the electririty company over a period of twenty five ‘press one if you need to be confused’ days, to some remote part of this mansion, accessible only by three flights of stairs and five intervening doors, when the whole point of a personal paymeter is to know instantly and at hand, how much electricity you have, to take the aforementioned key, go to the shop with it and say, ‘Ten quid on the lekky, please?’’

‘Health and Safety.’

‘Yes and I fervently believe it’s a great idea, health and safety but how does this come into the discussion about my paymeter?’

‘Well, it’s unsafe like.’

‘Who says?’

‘Health and Safety.’

‘Right, let me get this straight. Last week, you’d concede, my personal paymeter was perfectly safe, no sparks or conflagration of any kind? Good. Today though, it’s become unsafe, a liability lurking in a box, ready to spring out and incinerate my children and hopefully my missus?’

‘The EU like. New regulations come through.’

‘Now I understand. Right Chris, when do you want to do this?’

‘Tomorrow – wil you be in all day?’ he innocently asked, expecting everyone to phone up work at a moment’s notice and say, ‘Think I won’t drop in today; I’m having my paymeter removed.’’

‘I’ll be in.’

.o0o.

TGBW arrived only thirty minutes after the designated time [and I appreciated that I’d been given an actual time in the first place], with stepladders, tools, a sheet and a mate, wearing a sickly yellow green jacket.

Soon they were up in the loft, there was a lot of yelling at someone called Tel, elsewhere in the loft and then a great thick black cable was passed through, maybe an inch thick, snaking its way into my bathroom.

‘This is moving the meter, is it?’

‘We have to change the cable.’

‘What, for the whole building?’

‘Yeah, the old cable doesn’t meet specifications.’

‘This is a new flat, that was new cable you put through a month back’

‘Well yeah but it doesn’t meet specifications now. The EU like.’

‘At this point, I ran into the owner of the complex, an exceedingly nice chap named Frazzled to a Cinder, hereafter to be known as FTAC, not wearing a sickly yellow green jacket. You can always tell the owner of a venture in this land - where things are actually built, rather than a few figures being creatively moved about on a page as he applies to be bailed out – he’s the one with the worry lines on his brow and the glazed eyes at age thirty-two and he doesn’t wear a sickly yellow green jacket unless he has to.

‘FTAC, what’s all this about? I don’t want my fucking meter moved downstairs, excuse my French. I was perfectly happy in this nice little complex with its gardens, fountains, triple glazed gas filled, acoustic glass, CCTV, bicycle sheds, carpark, domaphone and piped music.’

‘James,’ he said, in that exasperated voice, ‘tell me about it. This is costing me a thousand fucking pounds to change the fucking cable over. The thing’s cost twenty three thou so far. Scottish Power. We’ll try to get them to keep the disruption to a minimum.’

‘And I thought I had problems. Thanks, FTAC.’

.o0o.

Three and a half hours later, with me still stuck in the flat, TGBW reappeared. ‘Ah, look mate, they say they’ll be in to do it Monday morning now. Problem with the new meters like.’

‘Oh thanks a whole lot for that, GBW, I appreciate being cooped up here all day. What time Monday?’

‘Well, we can’t tell, can we? I’ll be here eight o’clock though. Will you be in Monday like?’

‘For you, Chris, anything.’

.o0o.

The trip to my mate was also stymied due to certain internal issues at that end so a pleasant weekend was had writing and editing the book.

.o0o.

Monday morning duly arrived and no one appeared, as I’d suspected.

About ten, TGBW appeared and said, ‘Right, we’re shutting off the power in an hour. Will you be in, like?’’

‘How long for?’

‘An hour.’

‘No, how long will the power be off for?’

‘An hour. We’ll finish the cable now.’

Thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. There was TGBW, Tel, a stepladder and the ubiquitous sickly yellow green jackets. I knew he was my mate because he said, ‘Awright, mate?’

They now went into a four hour session of cursing, swearing to themselves and whatever in the loft, every so often resulting in cable coming through to the flat, dust and debris going over the carpet and walls.

‘You got a vacuum?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Right, brush and pan ’ll do.’

The other one was at my box, incising cable, drilling, screwing, unscrewing and generally enjoying himself. I felt ravaged.

Then the drilling in the walls and roof began.

A couple of hours later, I caught TGBW and asked when the ‘lekky’ was going off.

‘Tomorrah now. They didn’t get the right meters.’

I wondered if he’d meant to say Gomorrah rather than tomorrah. ‘Tell me, Chris, are you expecting me to be in tomorrow?’

‘Yeah, if ya can like. We need ta get in the flats.’

‘That’s very kind of you. For how many more days will this happen?’

‘Only tomorrah.’

At this point, some very official people with clipboards appeared – I knew they were official because they had clipboards and weren’t wearing wearing sickly yellow green jackets - and I made the mistake of asking, ‘Is it absolutely necessary that the personal paymeter go downstairs?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘You’re electricity, right?’

‘British Gas and Electric.’

‘Not Southern Electric?’

‘No. Ah, you’re not one of ours then. What, are you, Npower?’

I went and found a Scottish Power man downstairs – he was the one looking on approvingly and not much else but his jacket was orange, which provided pleasant relief, like – and I asked him the same question.

‘No, not at all.’

Good, my severed cables and debris notwithstanding, my interruptions and inconvenience were soon to be ended. Now, quite a number of hours after the threatened shut down of electricity, I sought out TGBW.

‘Well, we’re not shutting it off until tomorrow morning now.’

.o0o.

Tuesday morning.

About ten, TGBW appeared and went through the ‘we’re shutting the lekky off in an hour’ spiel.

An hour later, it was shut off but everything had been done – washing, ironing etc.

Two hours later, I went for a wander in the strangely silent building and found an interesting sight downstairs. Leaning on his van, with a bemused smile on his face, was FTAC.

‘Morning, James.’

He wandered over and we found an alcove. To my questioning glance, he explained, ‘These people standing about are the first gang, for the cable. There’s another lot meant to be here but they were sent to another site instead and we’re waiting for a third gang to arrive. This lot are costing me by the hour.’

‘They’ve cut off the power.’

‘Maybe you’ll have better luck than me. We’ve got flats to build.’

‘I wondered why it was so quiet.’

‘Look, that’s him over there. Go and have a chat.’

I did. It was a rotund, red-faced little man with Scottish Power tattooed on his forehead and wearing an orange jacket. ‘Excuse my presumption but is it necessary to have the power off while no one’s doing anything?’

‘Don’t blame me mate – it’s them wot didn’t turn up.’

‘Yes but while everyone’s hanging about chatting and having cuppas, could be have a smidgeon of lekky perhaps?’

‘Nah. Regulations. Health and Safety. Sorry.’

FTAC was grinning, fit to burst. I went upstairs, crestfallen.

One hour.

Two hours.

Three hours.

I went downstairs to find out and TGBW explained to me, ‘Yeah, the meters came but they were the wrong ones. We’re waiting for the new meters.’

‘Chris, forgive me for being stupid but I thought you were actually getting my meter out and putting downstairs behind an old washbasin?’

‘Oh no, we can’t touch them. They belong to the company.’

‘You mean I have to phone my electricity supplier, with whom it took weeks just to get an identity code, to come out and shift my personal paymeter downstairs here, coordinating with Scottish Power?’

‘Yeah, it might be worth calling ’em like.’

I went upstairs, intending to do no such thing.

Half and hour later, there was a knock on the door. It was TGBW. ‘I’ve come to take out your meter.’

I ushered him in and watched the start of the complex process of about a dozen little sub-boxes needing removing, new cable attached and so on. There was still a little bit of battery power on the Mac so I went back to that.

Late afternoon now, I went looking for them all and found TGBW, a success in itself. He explained, ‘They need these lugs,’ he drew a diagram on the wall with his finger, ‘and they didn’t bring ’em. You’d think seein’ as we’d put new cable in, we’d need lugs too.’

‘Hold on – do you need the lugs or do they?’

‘Them. We put ’em in but they have to supervise it, like.’

‘Why?’

‘Regulations.’

‘Health and Safety?’

‘Yeah.’

Just before my regular meeting with my mate of a Tuesday evening, TGBW appeared at the door and knocked. ‘Your juice is back on.’ He then moved to the next flat.

In the car, my mate chuckled, ‘There might be a blog post in that, you know.’

This morning I told FTAC I was running a post on this and he grinned. He’s heard of blogs, of course but being involved in building things, he doesn’t have a lot of time.

If you want to meet him, he’s the one with the polished accent, his sentences punctuated by he word ‘fucking’, looking like a navvy and driving the van.