Oh, but when it rains, it doth pour, eh? Today our gas hob suddenly decided to start clicking constantly, which I suppose is a continual triggering of the ignition(s)?
Sometimes all four hobs were sparking continually, sometimes one or another. But the clicking was, more or less, constant, from around midday or lunchtime, till now (9pm)
Of course I first tried solving it myself. This has happened once before. On that occasion I switched off everything (electric and gas*), and cleaned all the hobs. Cleaning can involve liquids, and liquids can short the spark circuitry! But I got everything as dry as I could. And, lo! Everything worked just fine.
* Or so I thought! Turns out I only knew how to switch the gas off for the hobs. The fuse on the main fuse board only switches off the oven and grill, not the hobs! More on this shortly.
Did the same this time, albeit ultimately spending much, much, much more time cleaning, but no dice. No change whatsoever! Clicking and firing continued unabated. Every now and again it’d lessen or stop. Only to start all over again.
World’s most thrilling video… awesome!
Anyway, having gone back and forth, Googling the issue, and trying very hard to really clean out all the parts – the hobs comprise three components, plus the little (ceramic?) ignition ‘nipples’ – hoping it all might eventually dry out or summat, and stop firing, it was all to no avail.
I called a Gas Safe engineer at about 8.30pm. He arrived around 9.20pm. He determined we had no gas leaks. He also helped me identify the correct power socket for the hobs. I thought I’d done so. But apparently not. Whatever it was I’d found, it was the wrong power outlet!
Once the right power source had been identified, it became apparent that it did (the other lead/wall socket didn’t) have a switch. Mercifully, when this was flipped, the eternal and infernal clicking finally stopped.
I have strong memories of recently packing away another four-hob cooker top. I think with a view to eventually installing it in our mooted Hobbit Hole guest accommodation? I tried to locate that today. But failed! We have way too much stuff, and way too little storage, so most of our stuff is in a cluttered state of disarray.
I’ve described myself to some folk, over the years, as a misanthrope. I’ve always done so out of a vague notion of what that means. So I decided to look it up today.
I find that the Wikipedia entry on Misanthropy resonates with me in many, albeit not all, particulars.
One typically assumes that most folk would view misanthropy with scorn and disdain, as it’s not an obviously positive or helpful outlook. And that’s the kind of view of the outlook or philosophy portrayed by the Brueghel painting above.
One of the chief areas in which I might not be a misanthrope is in relation to sex; apparently many misanthropes are antinatalist. Well, I can see that humanity is somewhat overstocked, which appears to adversely effecting the planet and everything in it (inc. ironically, humanity itself!).
But like nice wine, sex – whether for reproduction or just plain fun – is one of our few solaces. So I’m all for lots of it, whether it produces offspring or not. Though I feel compelled to confess that the misanthrope in me does wish that there were a lot less humans on the planet.
And now, having read most of the Wikipedia entry on Misanthropy? I actually feel more not less inclined to self identify in that manner.
PS – The inscription at the bottom of Brueghel’s painting reads (acc. to Wikipedia):
Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru, Daer om gha ic in den ru
‘Because the world is perfidious, I am going into mourning’
Brueghel’s painting suggests this makes the misanthrope a fool. He’s having his purse pinched by a figure representing vanity, and is blindly walking into some ‘caltrops’ (little spiky things humans invented, with which to hurt each other, lame horses with, etc. *). Meanwhile a shepherd in the background contrasts with the misanthrope by humbly going about his business.
These days I try and avoid the political. Or at least I kind of do. It’s just sooo depressing! Butt, for some reason I can never quite shake an interest in how and by whom we are ‘governed’.
One thing that I really hate to hear, is the über lazy cop out of ‘it makes no difference who’s in power/office’. I do appreciate that politicians of all types can be wearisome, and may at times seem to share many regrettable qualities. But I strongly disagree with the idea they’re all exactly the same.
Labour gave us the NHS, the Tories (or at least large powerful sections thereof, sections that are also usually in power at the time) have always wanted rid of it, and have acted – albeit slowly and surreptitiously (aware that is a much loved national institution) – to undermine it, as a prelude to dismemberment and privatisation.
One of the greatest ironies in all of this is how the Tories, and their sickening allies in the billionaire non-dom owned press, continue to stoke fears of Socialist Bogeymen taxing us all to oblivion.* When in fact the Tories are both taxing everyone more than ever (oh, except for the wealthiest pensioners), and borrowing on a totally unsustainable scale.
Aye-aye!
* Some of the insanely bizarre crap I’ve heard working class Tories say beggars (buggers is much more apt) belief. Such folk are so obviously parroting propaganda they’re fed, day in day out, by a press in cahoots with the country’s ruling Tory elite.
The greatest irony of all is that actually the Tories – supposedly (ie according to their own much trumpeted hype) good with money – are actually totally fiscally incompetent. Should that come as any surprise? They are the (a)morally if not fiscally bankrupt heirs to the traditions of Serfdom, and Royalty, ie they remain the ‘robber barons’.
They got rich, just as they continue to get rich, not because of skill or intelligence, but thanks, mostly, to inheriting wealth and power, and/or ‘insider trading’, corruption, bullying, and plain old-fashioned theft.
The Covid pandemic, during which our government ought to have been looking after the most vulnerable, was used as an excuse for an orgy of state-organised larceny. And the right wing capitalist ideologues ‘masterminding’ this short-term grab for the greedy even openly talked of the benefits of Covid ‘culling elderly dependents’. Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS, was absolutely correct: Tories are lower than vermin.
Hokusai’s Wave is a beautiful piece of art. I’m choosing it for today’s post because it represents the tidal wave of sh!t I’m currently facing.
The politics of this obscure it’s personal resonance!
My tip-top favourite political satirist, Steve Bell, has done this great scatalogical reimagining of Hokusai’s masterpiece. The specific topical political baggage with this image – King (Tony) Cnut trying to face down a literal (Gordon) Brown tsunami – somewhat obscures my more generalised reading of it.
My only defence!
And how am I to stave off this towering wall, this fast-flowing fecal apocalypse? Naturally enough, with naught but a sticking-plaster. A Band-Aid. Well, it does say it’s ‘water-proof’!
The above thumb (also a link on the FB ‘feed’) cropped up in my FB account today. I didn’t click on the link. And I’m not going to.
My immediate thought/riposte, to ‘Why Ginger Baker HATED John Bonham’? Because he (Ginger) was a dick.
Baker fancied himself as a jazzer, and held that Bonham didn’t or couldn’t swing. Complete and utter bollocks. In terms of technique and smooth execution Bonham is way better than Baker (or Moon The Loon, for that matter).
Why figures like Baker get, or got, so catty about it all is, if not a mystery, at least a shame. Why not just admit that they’re different, but both great, in their own ways?
It has to be confessed that I’m not having the best time of my life right now. I woke up, after some very interesting dreams, felt mighty sick. And pretty shortly thereafter, barfed.
I’m not sure the fish and chips dad and Claire kindly bought us last night totally agreed with me. But the neither am I sure that this was plain ol’ food poisoning.
I’ve been suffering from hyper anxiety and agitation just recently. And a disturbed mind can manifest in many ways physically (please note, this is not an endorsement of Louise Hay’s insane ideas)
Simon, Teresa, and Claire, Sunday evening.
I spent almost the entire day today in bed. Feeling thoroughly wretched. I had ‘cotton mouth’ the entire day, despite eating next to nothing and drinking lots of water.
There’s some shit going down in my life at present that I’m keeping to myself. Maybe just for the time being, maybe forever. But it ain’t pretty.
And today it culminated in a mammoth visit to the A&E at Peterborough Hospital. Mammoth in the sense we were there from 3.50-10.20pm… six and a half hours!
And, glory be to our ultra-capitalist society, not only am I there as an ill person, I also have the joy of paying £9 parking for the privilege of this exhaustingly long visit.
Our Tory Overlords sure know how to milk us Serfs.
But back to the Joys of Spring: acid-reflux, bloated stomach, wind. Eyes red and puffy from a mixture of disturbed sleep and all sorts of other shit. This weird upper respiratory bullshit that’s been bugging me now for three or four years straight!?
Let’s do the show right here!
It’s enough to make one sooo miserable one feels compelled to write a musical, and make everyone else’s lives a misery as well.
It seems my cup o’erflo’eth with naught so much as bile. Will I even make it through this week? Past evidence suggests I will. But that doth not fill me with The Joys of Spring.
A friend on Facebook just shared this. How great are squirrels? Just watch to learn. A fun and uplifting video.
We have squirrels. We also have a walnut tree, actually in a neighbour’s garden. But overhanging ours. When we moved in here, I wondered, for a while, how and why we were continually being carpet-bombed with empty walnut shells.
Reflecting rather poorly on my Sherlockian powers of deduction, it wasn’t until I was literally sat ‘neath the trees at the back end of the garden, that I twigged. I could hear debris falling around me and I could hear an odd ‘scrit-scrit-scrit-scrit’ sound.
I looked up, and cool as a cucumber, there was a rather ballsy (very literally) squirrel, leisurely enjoying chomping away on his walnuts. I don’t know how many squirrels we have living nearby. The most I see is a couple chasing each other.
As this video demonstrates, it can be quite rewarding to pay more attention to these fabulous little furry critters.
This is both a book review (my first zero stars one!) and a polemic, I guess. It also touches upon troubled familial relations.
Many years ago my mother gifted me a copy of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I read the first half, and found it asinine. But, in essence, I agreed with Hay, that thinking positively is healthier than thinking negatively.
But the second half of the book? That was another matter entirely. And it is in that part of her ‘work’ that Hay’s true colours are shown to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a motley flag of insanity. Insane, and very dangerous for anyone taking her advice to heart.
I have, I suppose, some unresolved issues with my mother, around both the break up of our original ‘nuclear’ family. And, subsequently, being treated less equitably than other siblings. When my sister lived abroad, my mum visited Spain far more frequently than travelling the few miles to us, for example (I’ll leave it at that, for now).
Anyway, back to the main topic of this post. Her having bought me this book, whilst in part motivated by good intentions, perhaps, revealed a deeper – I might say unstated, except it wasn’t/isn’t – view of her apparent opinion of my life circumstances.
What it boils down to is what is nowadays referred to as ‘victim blaming’. In this case it’s the ancient pre-scientific idea that illness is a form of punishment for ‘sin’, wrongdoing, evil, or just a bad attitude. Call it what you will.
When I first read You Can Heal Your Life I put it down in absolute shock, horror and disgust when I read Hay’s moronic assertion that the disease Polio is caused by ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone.’ She has an A-Z, or, more accurately, an A-W, of similarly ridiculous ‘explanations’, for everything from Abdominal Cramps to Warts! [1]
The impact of polio on my family’s lives is huge. Polio killed my grandmother on my father‘s side, contributing to the consequent disruption of his life (he and his brothers were brought up in foster care, as orphans). Polio also disabled my maternal grandmother, meaning she lived her adult life on crutches, and eventually in a wheelchair. My mother had issues with family, quite possibly related again, in part, to the knock-on effects of this disease, running away from home very young (so I’ve been told), and ultimately into the arms of my father.
Does she really and truly believe that these two ladies got polio as a kind of cosmic or psychic punishment for ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone?’ Such views are horrific; they are obscenely offensive, and totally unfounded. The actual cause of polio is, as should be universally known now, a virus, identified in 1909, transmitted for the most part via water contaminated by human faeces. [2]
Something that struck me very forcibly when I decided to research this post is the total mismatch between endorsements and critiques in relation to Hay. Everybody , from Wikipedia’s entry on her, to the Guardian’s obituary, simply parrot Hay’s own completely unsubstantiated ‘personal history’. There’s no mention at all of any sceptical views of her anti-scientific ideas and claims.
I find this deeply shocking. Does her financial success make her immune to proper evaluation? Apparently so. The only objective or balanced critiques I could find were those of individuals, pointing out what crackpot nonsense she grew rich peddling.
It’s a great shame, I feel, that so many people – millions, perhaps, if sales of her stuff is any indication – are suckered into uncritically adopting her bullshit. Even if only thanks to the positivity aspect of her ideas. It smacks of a blinkered desperation. I can understand that. Having chronic ailments myself, I recognise that deep longing for some kind of simple solution to what might otherwise appear to be intractable problems.
It has been demonstrated – the placebo effect, for example – that the mind can be very powerful in relation physical health. But to adopt Hay’s alleged position (her own life needs to be thoroughly investigated, as to the truth of her own claims/actions [3]) is to fly in the face of the findings of all modern medical science.
It has been medical science, not New-Age quackery, that has dealt with my psoriasis and related arthritis, and manages both my physical pain and mental ill health. We can thank (or curse?) developments in public hygiene, in light of this hard won knowledge, for creating the conditions that have allowed for humanity’s demographic explosion.
I thought about giving this book half, or maybe even just one star, for the first part, about the benefits of positive thinking. But the issue is that these come attached to the second part, which, in my view, is poisonously bad. Evil, in fact. The rose here is attached to an enormous stinking turd that really cannot be ignored.
It has oft been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’d be damning enough if one were to know how many desperately ill people have died as a result of taking Hay’s unfounded nonsense as truth [4]. That people will have died following her advice is sadly inevitable.
But, just as bad in my view, is the pernicious and completely bogus idea that illness is the fault of and consequence of the sufferer’s thoughts and/or actions. This adds self-righteous condemnation to the arsenal of the healthy, and unnecessary guilt and self-condemnation (how ironic, given the alleged healing of loving oneself Hay professes to peddle!) to the afflicted.
My mum needs both her hips replacing. According to Hay’s worldview this is somehow my mother’s own fault, on some negative psychological level: ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’*
This would be laughably preposterous applied to a car; do my tires regularly need replacing because, A) they have a ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’ Or B) due to physical wear and tear?
If your local garage mechanic said ‘You don’t need new tires, your tires just need to truly love and value themselves. Here are some affirmations for them to repeat.’ Would you pay them, or go back there in future?
Not the cartoon I wanted. But the same idea.
In her lifetime Hay profited monumentally from peddling her dangerous brand of nonsense. Her personal claims are all totally unsubstantiated. And her broader claims fly in the face of medical science. Why – other than the toxic marriage of hopelessness to comforting BS – has she not been taken off her pedestal? It has to be the present day sanctification of success. She’s made lots of money, so she must be right.
Louise Hay (source: wiki)
* These quotes are lifted from the appalling second part of You Can Heal Your Life. It ought to have a Government health warning: New Age BS is no substitute for scientifically grounded medicine.
NOTES:
[1] Her ‘explanation’ as to the cause of warts would be hilarious, if it weren’t so frighteningly vacuous: ‘Little expressions of hate. Belief in ugliness.’ Her list reads like a dotty New Age analogue of horoscopes; arbitrary, open to wide interpretations, and based not on real knowledge of understanding underlying facts, but a vague even whimsical form of associative imagining. Warts are in fact caused by a virus. Not by the mind of a person who may have them.
[2] Tragically, under our current Tory rulers the potential return and rise of such diseases is being increased by the total disrespect shown to both the environment and the humanity it sustains, by their rampantly capitalist ideology. Brexit is part of this downward scramble towards private profit-motivated deregulation.
[3] As far as I’m aware none of Hay’s autobiographical claims, from the alleged facts of her childhood, to her ‘miraculous’ curing of her self from cancer are in any way reliably documented.
[4] I need to re-find the quote, but one of the few critical things I found about Hay included a comment from a bereaved man whose wife died whilst following Hay’s imbecilic ideas.
Well… ‘least said soonest mended’! As several of the ‘downstairs’ characters in You Rang, M’Lord were always saying.
Without giving too much away, I hit some sort of crunch or crisis point this evening. Not a pretty sight.
Thankfully some things were in place to minister to a mind in turmoil. And I appear – for the moment at least – to have weathered this latest storm.
It’s been brewing a while. I kind of knew it was coming. I’m hoping it was like a pressure valve releasing. Fervently and devoutly wishing for better days ahead!
The two R. Crumb pics illustrating this post are chosen purely for their ‘poetic truth’; they aptly get across where my head was at today. Melt-downs and explosions!
I’d kind of like to get into some of the nitty-gritty. But I’m too close to it right now!
Some while ago I posted excitedly about ordering a bunch of groovy green tops. Well, turns out the company in question are Chinese bandits. They pinch pics of expensive fashion-wear from genuine makers/sellers, and pretend they’ll sell you it for peanuts. Should’ve known it was too good to be true.
The only upside is that I filed a complaint and a request for a refund. And, somewhat to my surprise, they did refund me. Now I’m worried they might be flogging my card/account details! This and another recent and similar farce have taught me to NEVER EVER buy clothes off FB marketing links!
