CHAPTER FOUR- Maggie

  

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Woody Allen

 

 

What is it like to die? Not for the first time, Maggie felt, she was finding out. Satan sat opposite, whistling softly. His tail was almost still, surely a good sign? The torture rack remained unused.

Buddhist masters teach that death comprises three key stages, or ‘bardos’. Firstly, the painful bardo of dying. Then a dawning of the true nature of mind, involving sound, colour and light. Known as “dharmata”, this stage offers the possibility of liberation from the life, death and rebirth cycle. Few, it is said, are enlightened or awake enough to comprehend or recall its nature.

On one occasion, God asked Buddha himself to describe “dharmata”. They sat in The Place’s top floor, sipping a deliciously peaty 18-year-old Bunnahabhain single malt from Islay. God’s massive brow wrinkled a little: “It all seems too easy from this vantage point. Remind me of the struggle,” she insisted.

Buddha gave his biggest smile. “Oh God, what a question,” he said, rocking back in mirth from his cross-legged posture. “Imagine death as the shock of coming home to see your house has been plundered, even the doors and windows stolen. Despite losing everything, you are so able to adapt that your mind immediately moves to a place of bliss, of pure, wordless surrender, where your primordial awareness rests in a silent abyss beyond all knowing.”

He continued, as God nodded. “Resting in that state of peace, you may start to glimpse the deathless nature of the enlightened mind. Training to become this aware can last thousands of lifetimes.”

—

Maggie had slipped well past this juncture. She was amid the karmic ‘bardo of becoming’, the next intermediate stage until a new birth. Her most recent life was now clear, although somehow accompanied by an inexplicable memory of a karate floor. What was that? A previous life?

Fragments of her composure were reassembling, helped by a reassuringly hot cup of tea. The Ming china reminded her of early mornings at number 10, preparing for briefings. At her happiest, helming the ship of state. Elatedly, she realised that her dementia had cleared.

So was reincarnation an option, as the Dalai Lama proclaimed? She hoped so, but suddenly remembered her refusal to meet Tibet’s leader-in-exile, due to political complexities.

The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile nonetheless expressed sadness at her demise. She “was not only a great Briton but also one of the most towering leaders of the last century,” it wrote in a letter to David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister. “Those Tibetans know how to safeguard their karma,” Buddha later told God.

The Devil looked across from an ornate and exceedingly high-backed chair. A member of Babylon’s ruling class had stolen it from an Assyrian merchant. Satan chuckled silently at the manufactured smells and other mock elements used to soften her up. The whole Prince of Darkness thing had its uses.

She stayed silent, as he reached for a box of nail files. In his heart, Satan felt Maggie deserved far more than his brief chastisement. Her foreign policies alone – support for apartheid in South Africa, and the befriending of a murderous Chilean dictator – were worth her current discomfort.

But she had reaped the greatest whirlwind at home, tearing giant holes in the social fabric. Like a demented contract killer, she had presided over the virtual dismantling of Britain’s car, steel and shipbuilding industries; and had ground mining unions to submission, while deceiving the public over pit closure plans. She shuddered every time his tail rustled. Yet he saw little remorse, looking up now and again while he ground away at the black, horny nails extending from his hairy fingers.

Satan saw so many misdeeds. Regressive taxation policies that penalised millions of the poorest, while all British citizens were encouraged to value greed and see their fellows and neighbours as competitors. As financial services were liberalised, basic human services were privatised: every time a tap turned or an oven heated, a shareholder now made a profit. Divides between North and South and rich and poor were steadily exacerbated, culminating in massive rioting in 1990 after the infamous ‘poll tax’.

Satan always winced hardest at the paedophilia drenching her regime. Her party’s deputy chairman, Peter Morrison, was arrested for sexually molesting under-age boys in a public lavatory. No charges were brought. While multiple Cabinet ministers managed to elude being named and shamed, the rape and abuse perpetrated by her personal friend, one James Savile, said it all.

He had to get past these perceptions. “Apologies. I lost my temper there,” he said. “Truth is, Mags, you’ve stored up considerable merit. That’s why we’re sitting here now.”

He looked at the torture rack, tail twitching. “Jimmy Savile was on that thing a while ago. It’s fair to say I got somewhat “medieval on his ass”, to quote that line from Pulp Fiction. Have you seen that film, where the gimps run the secret basement?”

Maggie shook her head. Better a clean house and a balanced budget, than time wasted on a sofa. She really hated being called Mags.

“He was your mate, wasn’t he? Is there anything you want to confide about that relationship? Nice Christmas dinners? Much talking turkey?”

“We thought he was a good man,” she finally said. “A mistake.”

“Yeah, he told me quite a few of his as I was pulling his toenails out.” She listened, horror rising. “Certain figures at the very top of Britain’s establishment, for whom he was a child-catcher. All covered up with money, threats and even executions. You’ll understand that we had to exact a modicum of justice. Can you imagine what I did with those cigars of his?”

She held her breath: “Long story short, he ended up with his stomach opened and his long intestine tied to my pet minotaur. A couple of helpers sent Minnie charging back up the Highway to Hell, with the AC/DC song blasting on the speakers, and our seven cats giving chase and nibbling at his remains.”

She could hardly listen. “His guts measured about 300 yards. His screams were appalling, so we cut out his vocal chords. But there is a silver lining: we converted his long intestine into a firehose.” In the corner, Maggie noticed an odd-coloured pipe wound around a reel.

A sleek black cat bounded onto Satan’s lap. Maggie thought again about the company she had kept. As if Satan could mind-read, he asked: “And how about the very urbane Lord Victor Rothschild? Quite a friend and advisor, was he not?”

Memories of Victor’s persuasive manner came tumbling back. A confidante of earlier Prime Ministers Churchill, Heath and Wilson, Victor had glowed at each rolling back of regulation in the City. How humiliating to have been so easily charmed. She straightened her gown.

Time for some praise, Satan decided.

“Don’t be disheartened. Do you remember how you stood up in the London parliament to defend your policies? Time and time again, to catcalls and boos from the red team?”

“I will never forget,” she intoned, a tear welling in her eye.

“It was gutsy. And when you took on Arthur Scargill, and his miners, we could hardly look away from the screens upstairs.”

“I comprehensively outmanoeuvred him.”

“Oh yes. Letting him win the first round while your government stockpiled coal and came back with the counter punch. Damned impressive for any watching tactician.”

“But?”

“But indeed. An enormous amount of UK citizens on both sides of that chasm you widened lived on with hatred in their hearts. And that, Maggie, is not what a well-lived life is about”.

She asked, nervously. “Does that mean I could endure my next life as a lump of coal?”

“Oh Mags you’re a hoot! You kill me. And the answer is no. I believe you are going to incarnate again very usefully. Listen, in my very humble opinion you set a fantastic example for women in the UK. No matter how tough your job, you never played that gender card that many of the lovely ladies whip out so readily. Wow!”

She agreed. “Let’s big you up girl. Look at how you took on the IRA. Scoring points here, losing points there, but you squared up. That was brave, and it was noted upstairs.” Maggie recalled God’s stern face on her book of Sunday school catechisms.

Satan realised he had nearly exhausted her positive attributes. “You did what you thought was dutiful, but you let Britain’s divisions amplify.”

Had she?

Satan sighed: “We need to move on. The Falklands saw you feted as a national hero, but eventually you lost your key cabinet ministers with that madcap poll tax lark. Another of Victor’s ideas. Then seven years later Britain elected your ‘greatest creation’, Tony Blair.” Satan took several deep breaths.

He remained furious that the so-called “serious” media in the West failed to splash across their front pages that Blair and former US President George W. Bush had – for their actions in Iraq – been found guilty in absentia of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and genocide in a November 2011 trial brought by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission. The tacit gags on mainstream reporting of uncomfortable truths had spawned one of his favourite phrases, the “Disney media”.

Weary of this retrospect, Maggie cut to the chase. “What precisely do you want of me?”

“Top question sis. By the way call me Sal if you want. Now, to answer your question, I’ll tell the tale of a guy who took a shit on a swan.”

“I beg your pardon”. Maggie could hardly believe how the most astounding conversation she had ever experienced was descending to a gutter level nightmare. And sis? Sis!!!

“I know, I know, it seems irrelevant and horrific. Swans are beautiful, majestic creatures, in which Britain’s Queen takes an interest. But one drunken night, shortly before you came to power, this guy hung his backside off a bridge in south-east Essex, took aim, and besmirched the beast. We saw it live on the screens.”

“And ……..so what?”

“God frowned massively, I can tell you. We would normally mark that as very negative karma. Even now the Buddha shakes his head at that one”.

“But”.

“Again, very perceptive. You see that swan may have had it coming because it was involved in a dodgy cygnet ring.” Satan laughed so hard that he fell off his chair, and lay, clutching his stomach.

Maggie looked more annoyed than cowed now. After he sat back down, another cat hopped onto his lap.

“Seriously, this guy had one of the finest hearts. We could see it glow sometimes. He took a few wild rides but went on to spend his life as a fireman and family man”. Satan was beaming: “We picked him out early as someone to recruit.”

This was immensely frustrating. “Your point is?”

“Thought you would have twigged, Mags. We all make mistakes but there are endless chances to atone, through service to others. Always the ladder to higher and better lives.” So much to consider, but Satan was off again.

“Bottom line: you have a talent we can put to use, and we think it will liberate and enlighten you. Now, would you like to be of so much service that you will again change Britain, and perhaps the world?”

“I’m so tired Sal” she said, risking his abbreviated name. “I want to know everything. But can I rest please?”

“Fill your boots. Ask the angels for anything you need.” He stood, blew a kiss and pointed to a tray by the door. She smiled. Lincolnshire sausage pie, mash and gravy. Her father, Alderman Alfie Roberts, would have adored that.

CHAPTER THREE – An Essex Dawn

Life is ‘trying things to see if they work’

Ray Bradbury

 

 

Around 40 miles east of London, God had big plans for a new experiment.

Humanity needed a giant kick up the backside. The initiative would start in Essex, within the town of Southend-on-Sea, once a thriving tourist resort.

Curiously enough, the town had a permanent memorial to Maggie, Margaret Thatcher House, a now-dilapidated three-floor building built back in the 1980s near to the courts and civic centre. Later, Maggie’s eyes had looked down on Southend shoppers in an advert placed across the north side of the bridge spanning the high street in autumn 2011, two years before her death.

Maggie’s biggest legacy to the wider area was of course the mythical ‘Essex Man’, an unsubtle, noisy creature who supposedly once lived in London and voted Labour, but had moved out and switched to the Tories, helping ensure her success.

 

—

 

One Southend dweller, Dawn Landais, was also preparing to seize the day. Dawn’s call-centre job fell so far short of her family’s money needs that she had circled eight pay-day lenders in the local paper. If she had bought their council house all those years ago it would probably be theirs by now, she kept telling herself.

Genevieve, her teenage daughter, was finishing some toast. The previous day, two of her rich friends at Westcliff High School for Girls said they felt ‘insecure’ because they hadn’t got a 30 grand deposit already lined up for a house.

“I told ‘em straight mum, they’re wankers.” The school had complained in writing, referencing other, similar remarks

Dawn made up her mind. She shooed Genevieve out the door, telling her to try and behave. Dawn was about to do something she’d always fancied, rather than faff about worrying. She just had to buy a few items.

Dawn had explained it to her mum on the phone. “Two minutes from home, cash in hand. I’ve always been a people’s person, mum. Here’s the plan. Hours to suit me, quid a time. I can do a car’s front and back screen in 40 seconds. Have to, or the rozzers will nick me for holding up traffic. Two months from now, I will know 400 drivers by their first names. And it’ll keep me fit.

As her mum asked about Steve, Dawn recalled her husband’s shining idea all those years ago. Sitting outside the Crooked Billet, pint in hand, on their first date, down in Leigh-on-Sea. “Just by being born, a human is entitled to a certain amount of money, shelter, water, electricity, and so on. People might be willing to put far more into the system than they took out under those conditions.”

None of the blokes in the clubs talked like that. Dawn knew straight away that he was the one.

CHAPTER TWO – The city of corruption

 

“Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned – yet whose enormous fortune…has already brought him acquittal!” 
Cicero

 

 

He awoke naked at about 7 pm, in the simply-furnished bedroom where he had slept for the past half century. A radiator gurgled softly. Stretching languorously, he switched on a lamp, threw back the white quilt and proceeded to the washbasin. Picking up the pint glass standing between the taps, he placed his glans penis over the rim, letting urine flow to its regular tidemark. Around seven eighths of a pint.

Inserting the plug in the sink, he emptied the glass. The colour was somewhere between yellow and clear: sufficient urea to be effective without excess odour. He dipped the flannel in the liquid, letting his hands sit in the warmth before squeezing the cloth. Dabbing each part of his face, head and neck. Unusually, his dream was perturbing him. His backbone had been crumbling. It was an extraordinary spine, vertebrae consisting of gold coins.

He walked to a nearby window, observing early Saturday evening humanity. This part of the City was bereft of shops. Under a cherry tree in raging pink blossom, a young woman waved an arm, tightly clad buttocks swaying as she chatted on her mobile. Good cheekbones beneath black hair. Italian?

She tilted his mind back to Oxbridge, decades ago. One Friday evening, after some execrable sludge in the communal dining room, he watched a dozen fellow undergraduates become shockingly drunk in his rooms. A small gas fire fought the January freeze. Two of the women suited his purposes, he decided, while taking tiny sips from the bottled stout and cheap French wine being rapidly passed around. He selected the more inebriated, wagering silently that she would be unable to walk home.

She vomited in his sink as the drinking games peaked. His later offer of a bed was accepted gratefully. Her snores shook the room. From the sleeping bag, he prodded her firmly with a finger. Zero reaction. Her head hung from the bed, dark hair falling almost to the floor. Her open mouth took the first ejaculation, eyelids motionless. If anything, his excitement mounted.

Following his father’s instructions, he crept into the bed’s other side, easing up the tee-shirt serving as her nightie. He pounded her shoulder several times. Dead to the world. Gently, with a smudge of vaseline, he slowly helped himself. Withdrawing at each explosion to eliminate evidence. Finally crawling out of bed on Sunday afternoon, she applauded him as “a true gentleman”, before puking again. Two weeks later, his papa slapped his back heartily. “Have we sired a veritable warrior of the bedroom? Then a bottle of 1929 Chateau Latour for you, my young hero!”

During the subsequent 60 years he continued to comprehensively screw humans without most of them having a clue.

His clan associates called him the PM, in recognition of his power. British Prime Ministers had joined in this protocol – rather uneasily, in some cases. The silver-haired leader had been his favourite, a sensible man who knew his limits, and enjoyed his time. Major had called him ‘clan man’, quite fearlessly.

The Puppet Master washed and dried his hands, drew together the curtains, and switched on the main light. In the mirror, his skin looked superb. He would read for an hour before dressing for dinner.

Perhaps one of the Huxleys.

 

CHAPTER ONE – Shock and awe

 

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Boris Pasternak

 

 

Adrift more than liberated, Maggie wanted hard facts. Where was she?

The exit, and the long tunnel, had felt like an entrance. Dreamily, walls wobbled in a worryingly un-British way. Once she had her bearings, socks would be pulled up, and knuckles rapped. Where was her handbag? Why no rings on her fingers?

Something caught her eye, high up. Two men swinging across a set of handholds, upper arms bulging, before abseiling down beside her. The oddest thing was their mining helmets, reminding her of the nonsense she had once straightened out. When was that? She hoped the men had repented.

“We know who you are,” said one, wearing a red shirt. “Aye, and back home we would have been less civil” said the second. Dark-haired, he flashed a smile. “Good luck – chances are you’ll need it.”

Confidently, they turned away. What were they referring to? Luck was for slackers. Where in God’s name was this?

Reassuringly, a beautiful woman, golden hair shining, appeared by her side. She took Maggie’s hand. “Come with me”, she said. Maggie could have sworn wings protruded from the female’s back. She recalled illustrated books from her childhood; began to wonder.

They arrived at a huge room, white walls stretching into the distance. Inside, a group of men, suited and tied, were drifting, aimlessly. Clearly, things needed sorting out. “You there, yes, you, what are you doing?” she asked the nearest chap.

“We have nowhere to go,” said the man. Again, he seemed to recognise her. His badge announced him as a ‘senior policy consultant, 1990, National Health Service’. Maggie thought him rather plain looking, and forlorn.

A klaxon rang. The group began to undress, and to don ragged clothes that made Maggie’s nostrils turn, reminding her of the dustbins piled up on Britain’s streets before she restored order. Some slumped to the floor, others were crying and soiling themselves.

“What on earth are they doing?” Maggie asked the golden one.

“Experiencing care in the community.”

“Now look, you seem like a nice girl. Is there some point to all this baloney?” Maggie asked. Less strident in her tone.

The angelic one looked hard at Maggie. “It’s about consequences. What goes out must come back.”

Mind flickers assailed her. The notions of personal accountability handed down by her father, the lay preacher. The Wesleyan Methodist.

More memory returned. Of how she had presided over the state’s closure of mental hospitals across Britain, raking in cash from the land sales and leaving thousands of patients homeless. How, every night up and down the land, shop doorways became bedrooms and bathrooms to former recipients of mental health services.

“But how long will they be here?” asked Maggie, suddenly wanting her mum. “How long is string?” replied the angel. “Might take a week. Could be a millennium. Until they understand, and can make informed choices.”

“What about me?”

“We’ll come to that” said Goldilocks. “First up, this is the ‘blue room’, where we try and rehabilitate the insane.” They entered, to be greeted by a man parroting the same phrase repeatedly. “To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches,” he intoned, eyes blazing, spittle drooling onto a dark suit.

Now another raving nutter, screaming a mantra. “There is no such thing as society, there are just individual men and women, and their families,” he barked, snot plastered across his jaw. A third individual walked right up to Maggie: “I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air” he spat.

Looking down the room, Maggie’s vision sharpened. Chanting litanies of lunacy, zombies were punching the air, jumping and shouting. Blue rosettes bobbed like the waves off Brighton and Bournemouth, outside the annual party conferences.

Goldilocks spoke. “There is no bias here. We also have a ‘red room’ full of mad socialists. For the record though, why did you ham up that ridiculous role as ‘The Iron Lady’, as if it would solve Britain’s problems.”

“We created wealth and aspiration,” replied Maggie, effortlessly, jaw jutting. The golden angel stifled a yawn. She led Maggie into a corridor. “You might recall that homelessness more than doubled during your premiership.”

“Shirkers, shirkers, workshy shirkers,” screeched Maggie, receiving a harsh squeeze on her arm. On they proceeded, past a man wearing cufflinks and a gold watch. Half of his arm was forced through the eye of a tall needle, facing a door marked Heaven. “He’s been there awhile now”, said Goldilocks.

“What about 1966?” Maggie suddenly asked, apropos of nothing. Instinctively, she sensed it was a significant year. Goldilocks frowned. “Why is that relevant? You were never into flower power.”

Maggie was ushered on, past two black cats sniffing her feet. The temperature had risen. The corridor was narrowing, sloping downwards. Images on each wall shocked her. British and Argentinean sailors flailing and screaming in the Falklands waters, and then Pinochet’s torture rooms beneath the Chilean football stadium. Blood on the ceiling. Detached limbs and eyes on the floor.

Another image. Showing Maggie and her blue team howling in derision at the red team’s support for the “terrorist” Nelson Mandela and the ANC. Something inside of her died further as the wall beamed an image of a July 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Don’t Go Wobbly”. She slowly read her own words. “It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to UN inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)”.

Then countless, unending images of Iraqi children blown to pieces, or dying of malnutrition and radiation and chemical poisoning. Of orphans and dead soldiers and weeping and starvation and hatred and suffering. No escape for the eyes.

“Interesting article,” observed the angel, wiping a dew of sweat from her brow. “You were a supporter of Saddam in the 80’s. Any thoughts on that?” She preferred to think of dining and dancing at Denis’ golf club.

A stench flowed towards them, from a glowingly red chamber entrance. “It was politics. It was sink or swim.”

“You always did know best.”

Traversing the last yards of the now broiling tunnel, Maggie saw images of her beloved son Mark shaking hands with the Saudi Royal family, transposed against pictures of UK-made jets bombing Yemeni women and children. She was shaking uncontrollably.

“This is where we part company – let’s see what you think about luck now,” remarked Goldilocks.

Well over seven foot in height, his blackly-clad frame looked as formidable as she had sometimes fantasised. For a fleeting second, fighting down her terror, Maggie wondered whether he might be “somebody I can do business with”. The Dark One looked at her, lingeringly, prodding her with a hairy, crooked index finger.

“Mmmmmm….I’ve been waiting for you, Margaret,” Satan said, circling her, tail swishing. He drank in her appearance, while she gagged on the sulphurous smell, reminiscent of undergraduate days.

Please let me wake up, she prayed.

“I don’t fuck around in my summaries,” he said. “You were not the brightest of cookies.” She disagreed, but dared not argue. “Few would blame you for marrying into money, but your views were shallow and abhorrent,” he continued. Brimstone and excrement assailed her nostrils.

“You turned Brit against Brit, almost caused a civil war,” he shouted. “God Almighty woman!”

His voice rose: “You had such a chance, such an opportunity to wipe the slate clean in Britain, heal the divisions and spiritually enrich the citizens. You could have encouraged the highest forms of compassion – meditation, contemplation, pacifism, vegetarianism – and pushed for world peace.”

Puzzlement stirred, nudging her dread.

His eyes narrowed. “But no, instead you devolved British thinking back to grocers’ epithets and crude sums involving the value of their houses. It was – still is – medieval, you moron, and now it’s your legacy.”

“Will you keep me here?” she asked, with a gulp.

A pause. He joined his fingertips. “I won’t lie. My greatest pleasure is to probe and drill deep into those who were the nastiest, most powerful humans. Boiling them down to their core views is deeply satisfying – exciting actually, to be brutally honest – but I suspect we would find regurgitated fluff in your case”.

Satan’s tone regained measure. “In truth Margaret, you are not my highest priority. I am awaiting certain individuals that will provide – how to say – quite a party!” Did his genital area quiver? He carried on: “At one time I even believed these degenerates were after my job; and never let it be said that I would not be happy to kick back, watch the flowers wilt and smell the coffee enemas.”

Satan’s humour – and its timing – have been appreciated by too few. Gripping her hand suddenly, he half-led, half-pulled her around a corner, revealing a gruesome torture rack that Saddam and Pinochet would have salivated over. Merriment danced in his dark green irises.

“Now do tell me. Is the lady for turning?” he asked.

The interview was going OK. My answers had been positive, eye contact plentiful, and I had listened hard to everything said by the HR woman, Hayley, and by Nigel, who heads up the hospital’s portering and security teams. I was mirroring back bits of the information they had provided about the job, relatively confident that my keen but considered attitude was keeping me in the picture for the post.

As they talked, I let myself project forward a little. I added together the 2.5 hours of lunch breaks, 37.5-hour week, and the half hour walk to and from Broomfield Hospital each day. 45 hours a week…yet I needed a part-time job, to be able to maintain the quality of input to the newsletter I still write each fortnight. Was I biting off more than I could chew? Probably.

The next question – how did I feel about dead bodies? – broke my reverie. Naturally enough, the portering services team regularly wheel the deceased to the hospital mortuary, they explained. Was I comfortable with that? Well, I had sat for several hours with my mum in the interim between death and funeral; and had visited Maureen’s dad as he lay at the hospice, shortly after his death. “I’m sure there might be a period of adjustment, but don’t think it would be a problem,” I suggested. “Death should always be treated with dignity and respect of course.”

My eyes stayed on their faces, but thoughts of afterlife crept in while Nigel told how gallows humour pervaded his team. “That’s hardly surprising,” I replied. “I’m quite comfortable with that.” More thoughts were creeping in, of whether my own sense of humour might be too unpredictable, or unusual. And were they thinking that I was over-qualified for portering?

Now Hayley asked if I would be comfortable transporting young babies around the hospital? Seemed like a no-brainer. “Yeah, I love being with very young kids,” I said, still thinking about acclimatising to mortuaries.

As I let the thought pass, they looked rapidly at each other. Their spreading frowns triggered my shrillest internal alarms. Bollocks, I had let my full attention slip, having described myself to them as a ‘good listener’.

I spoke up immediately. “Sorry, I think I misheard you……you were asking about babies that have died? I honestly thought you meant healthy babies. My apologies, please strike out my comment if you can!”

Fuck.

Nigel grinned. “I was about to write ‘This man is a monster’,” he said. We moved on, to more questions, but I had surely just left the job behind. A two-sentence e-mail the next day confirmed it.

It would have been good, honest work. But not to be, this time.

One of the recommendations handed out on my transcendental meditation course is to let intruding thoughts come and go during the 20 minutes, watching their passing with complete neutrality. Friends tell me that mindfulness involves a similar stance, and I can recall being advised along these lines by Buddhist teachers.

 

It was particularly helpful that the TM teacher underlined how normal these thoughts are, whatever their nature, and how they should not be fought. ‘Will I know when 20 minutes have elapsed?’ ‘Should I e-mail my cousin, to see how she is?’ ‘Will I be able to maintain concentration if my family make a noise?’ ‘Should I scratch my ear, or ignore it?’ ‘Can West Ham beat Watford on Saturday?’ ‘Will I get that job at the local hospital?’

Further advice was to treat sexual images, which definitely have intruded, in the same way. And to deal with feelings and emotions – anger, love, discomfort, worry – in exactly this manner. They come, and they will go. As will the constant questions over how to best breathe, whether I have the correct mantra sound, and how long to leave between each repetition.

It was like a permission to be totally oneself in parallel with the meditation. Very liberating for someone who struggles with most rules.

A surprising revelation occurred during this morning’s session, my 18^th day in. The intruding thoughts had almost disappeared. Mantra, mantra, mantra, and more mantra, taking me at accelerated pace to somewhere very spacious within.

As the day has unwound, something else became clear, also for the first time. My physical, exoteric, waking, external life has become less prey to intrusive thoughts and emotions. The here and now is tangibly more abundant. The colour of the leaves, the feel of the breeze, smell of the toast and the crinkles in the toilet paper.

—

Inevitably, I still get triggered into old ways. Maureen had BBC Essex Radio on this morning. The female newsreader at 10.00 talked of Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide” in the US, without using qualifying words such as apparent, purported, ostensible or alleged.  For a while, I had a little rant about the sheer ineptitude of mainstream media, but with less venom than in the past.

Nonetheless the story stinks. And, honestly, you do not have to be a so-called ‘conspiracy theorist’ to perceive with some certainty that it would be extremely difficult to commit suicide in an ultra-secure holding prison, where over 750 inmates are held but only one such case had occurred over the past 21 years. Just someone with a brain, and a smattering of logic.

Of course, as the plebs at the bottom rung of the information ladder, there is always so much we do not or cannot know. However it is common knowledge that Epstein was a key witness in a global, under-age sex-trafficking operation, who appears to have bragged of his destructive information about a large number of very powerful people. His acquaintances, among many others, included Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Nonetheless the official narrative handed down is that 11 days after being placed on suicide watch, as Epstein was after already allegedly trying to take his own life in July, he was taken off suicide watch ‘at his lawyer’s request’.

And then, against prison rules, that his cellmate was removed on August 9, one day before Epstein’s death.

At the time of his demise, the mandated 30-minute checks by prison guards had reportedly ceased. Prison protocol had ‘magically’ broken down. And, in a prison room deliberately constructed without a steel frame, bars or protruding light fixtures, Epstein ‘hung himself’. Using a bedsheet deliberately designed with a paper-thin quality, and thus of insufficient strength to hang a full adult.

It’s a cracking yarn. Tarted up and polished, it could grace the front page of the Beano. Not unlike the Skripals surviving the ‘deadliest nerve gas known to man’ in Salisbury.

Half-decent journalists would rip apart these and other mind-numbing stories (eg. the anti-semitism in the Labour Party, or Trump’s collusion with Russia) as utter drivel. Instead, the lesser writers that get to work at the dailies typically toe the official line. I can only guess that they are given editorial direction from above.

I liked a recent tweet from Cornell University professor Dave Callum. Who said: “I am a ‘conspiracy theorist’. I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don’t think so, then you are what is called ‘an idiot’. If you do believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called ‘a coward’.”

I’m at the stage where the powers-that-be, and institutions of government, have lied for so long, and so often, that it’s difficult not just to trust them but even to pay them any serious attention. The same goes for the news agencies and outlets that disseminate their narratives.

Frankly, it is better to be in the sunshine, or anywhere in nature, or to read a compelling novel, or chat with a loved one, than to ruminate too deeply on any of this stuff. That seems clearer than ever.

 

Two weeks ago I began practising transcendental meditation (TM). I’m so glad I did.

Meditation is a familiar pursuit, after a memorable immersion in Hanmi Buddhist disciplines back in 2011-12 (Blog 126). I let that practice lapse for a number of reasons, primarily lack of time and money, alongside the instinct that I had almost emptied the well of good things obtained quickly, and should quit while ahead.

Film director David Lynch, of Twin Peaks and other fames, swung it for me on the TM front. IMHO, there are few public figures more trustworthy than DL, whose love for TM has seen him set up the David Lynch Foundation, established to bring greater peace to the planet.

Hearing him talk earlier this year about the multiple benefits of TM (led by happiness, health and creativity) made it imperative to try it out (Blog 158). You can see it shine out of him.

It’s not cheap to learn the techniques, although I received a discount, for my relative poverty. 15 days in, I reckon it might be worth every penny of the £390.

The teaching venue was located just outside Chelmsford. Four lads, all around 20 years younger than me, were my co-inductees. A couple of them were clearly very certain about how they move in the world, very sovereign in their nature. So it was fascinating to witness how they had to assimilate and accommodate what is essentially a giving up of oneself to an unknown process.

It is giving little away to say that you are instructed to sit quietly, eyes closed, for 20 minutes, twice a day, not having eaten for two hours. You repeat, internally, soundlessly, an individually-tailored mantra (phrase). Those are the nuts and bolts.

I have some mega-happy memories of meditating. In 2011-12, I was fortunate enough to have experienced amazingly blissful sensations up and down the median from my stomach to my forehead, something akin to raw surges of ecstasy through what eastern religions term as the chakras. I had no expectation that TM might provide similar feelings, but it has. A stellar physical bonus.

And then there is the unexplainable process. A feeling of falling deep within oneself, deeper and down, entering a zone where the physical is felt as being far away. We were told that this is a dip into the field of pure consciousness, where healing and creativity bubble up. Whatever it is, I tend to come out of it with a start, like that sensation where you are just about to fall asleep, and feel as if you have fallen out of the tree, somewhere on the African plains. Yet the refreshment derived is immense, as if you have bathed in a pool of energy. I can feel a form of electricity in my hands, which tingle with warmth.

Outside the daily practice, a tangible benefit comes when awakening each morning. There have been times in the recent past when I have thought “ah shit, more of this poxy struggle to stay alive”. Now it is usually a languorous stretch, after a deep sleep, and an optimistic anticipation of the day bringing joys.

Confidence has risen. Quietly, beneath the radar. And I am more inclined to chuckle at things. Maureen will second that. Or to be playful, as in my Instagram photo yesterday, entitled ‘lemon squash’.

To be more precise, anxieties, some of them deep-seated, have begun – gradually but inexorably – to dilute and diminish. Headed by the worry of how we will make ends meet financially. The summer light and heat, which I adore, have offered an antidote in recent months, but the stresses are merely buried, temporarily, and would have shot up again in the autumn darkening that lays ahead.

Yet, in the space of just over a fortnight those stresses have diminished, palpably, to the extent that I can perhaps see why Mr Lynch says, quite simply, that “you get happier, each day, doing TM”.

Can’t beat being happy. Really hope it continues.

And it’s definitely time to recommence regular blogs, as the days shorten, and life outside comes with rising limits attached.

 

 

 

 

 

“Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron.”

Patricia Highsmith

After the Beginning, God span thoughts and seeded souls from The Place.

In time, dead humans boomeranged back, ready for processing.

Deep in reverie, God imagined a dream team. She recruited Satan, to dish out karma. His welcomes mirrored natural law. A hefty pricking for Vlad the Impaler’s incoming soul. Often something hot in the rectum, for arriving monarchs and popes.

Satan whipped out a bottle if Jesus popped down for a chat. Vintage single malt, guaranteed to obliterate distinctions between above and below.

If quizzed on her operation, God would cite Dante’s Inferno, which placed the most illustrious ‘Ring of Hell’ near the splendour of her Queendom.

It was Earth that tested God’s patience. Her entire Word boiled down to ‘loving thy neighbour as thyself’. But her big experiment, free will, had woven never-ending circles of war, greed, lust and reincarnation.

By 1966, her heart was all but broken, and it showed. Time magazine was asking ‘Is God Dead?’ John Lennon proclaimed the Beatles as ‘more popular than Jesus’.

Fast forward, again, to September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers spawned the world’s biggest financial crisis. God called Satan upstairs. Jesus joined them, recalling tables he once kicked over.

Humanity’s catastrophic trajectory lay lucidly clear. God had long gnashed her teeth at the financial house of cards worming through all layers of society. But who to blame, above and beyond herself? Knights Templars? The House of Medici? Dutch merchant financiers? All had developed international banking systems, funding not just trade but conflict, through loans that charged exorbitant interest rates to support wars. By the time that Charles II placed control of England’s money supply in private hands, in 1666, unnatural spirits were abroad, sucking greedily, as human desire for money outstripped curiosity about its creation.

Losing sleep, God had watched leading banking families extend their bloodlines into Europe’s royal families. In 1815, said some historians, the House of Rothschild – originally from Eastern Europe – used near real-time information on the Napoleonic wars to manipulate share markets, resulting in control of the Bank of England.

Satan was just as uneasy. He watched the control points of global wealth become increasingly hidden. Buried in an opaque ownership web which included an expanding media, able to manipulate truth with growing ease. “Bloody hell Jesus,” said Satan. “Have you noticed how big banking names are increasingly absent in media reports, because they own more and more of the media?”

Incoming financiers provided Satan’s optimal calling. He would work himself to exhaustion in the Place’s deepest dungeons. Optimistic that glimpses of love and compassion could somehow be cajoled from those who had practised fractional reserve banking and slapped on compound interest. But this breed tested every edge of his ability to guide fresh karmic courses. Returning to his wife and boys, disconsolate, he would refer to these souls as “the least among us”.

Rumours that banking clans were in league with the Devil took no account of his furies: the unleashing of fists, tail, teeth and even pliers on each arriving parasite. In the afterglow, Satan would contact Jesus immediately. In a quiet room, he received glorious bursts of purple light from his friend’s healing hands.

That radiance was needed by the shedload in 1913. Howling with sadness, Satan watched free will do its worst. The US Federal Reserve was set up by the clans via a December 23 vote taken when most Congressmen had gone home. The Fed, as it became known, still controls the supply of US money, profiting from each new dollar entering circulation. Soothed by a crate of Glenmorangie, the Firm – as God thought of her team – looked on. The Place boasted wide-screen technology that could hone in anywhere on Earth

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph it’s privately-owned – the inmates are running the asylum,” shouted God. Jesus gently poured another round. His instincts said the Fed would crucify the planet.

Several overly-inquisitive souls noted how three well-known opponents of the incipient Federal Reserve perished in 1912. Benjamin Guggenheim, Isador Strauss and John Jacob Astor had all foreseen a dismal future if American money creation sat in private hands. Each accepted invitations to sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Satan’s eye was caught when James Pierpoint Morgan cancelled his ticket, to prolong a visit to Europe. Morgan owned the White Star Line group which built the Titanic, and possessed a private suite and promenade deck on the ship. Several scurrilous individuals said the payout JP Morgan collected from the sinking was used as Fed seed money.

Given the trends, nobody at The Place was surprised by the horrors of World War One, or Wall Street’s massive 1929 crash. Jesus and a host of angels caught a percentage of bankers plunging from windows, but God’s gloomy outlook was unravelling. Nobody on Earth could prove allegations that conspiring individuals profited from the crash, through a long-planned contraction of the money supply.

The Second World War provided chilling notice that a particular surname required urgent monitoring. Union Banking Corporation (UBC) dismayed The Firm by becoming a secret channel to protect Nazi capital leaving Germany for the United States via the Netherlands. On the executive board was Prescott Bush, father of future American President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of President George W Bush.

The Firm watched in abject misery as private US finance supported and aided Adolph Hitler whilst American soldiers were being killed by German troops. It remains widely documented that in October 1942, US authorities confiscated Nazi funds from the New York-based UBC. God knew her human experiment was in deepest shit. UBC was condemned as a financial and commercial collaborator with the enemy.

It was not just financiers in bed with the Nazis. The role of the Vatican as a conduit for German money and scientists, both of which fled in droves to Latin America before the Allied forces arrived, could raise God’s wrath to Old Testament levels. “You deceitful bastard!” she shouted, throwing a whisky glass at the screens, as the details of Operation Paperclip became clearer. The Catholic Church was protecting individuals responsible for the Holocaust. “Pius XII you are a bloody disgrace to my name,” she screamed.

She had been almost as angry with the Church in the 4^th century, when the Council of Nicea and Synod of Rome contrived to delete a barrow-load of information from the Bible. If God could have changed one thing, she might have restored the Book of Enoch, which had disappeared completely from the Biblical canon by 750 AD. Enoch told of Watcher Angels, ordered to Earth by God to act as mankind’s lookouts. Instead, said Enoch, they impregnated females, created humans, and were expelled from Heaven.

“Reckon anyone will think harder about Enoch now?” asked God, after film director Steven Spielberg released his successful films ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, in 1977, followed by ‘ET’, in 1982.

“Nah” said the Devil, “they’re all too busy dancing to Madonna and calculating their property values”.

Global trends nagged increasingly. Latin American state assets began to disappear into private hands, following Milton Friedman’s theory that prices should be freed, and socialists imprisoned. As Argentine and Chilean military threw people out of helicopters, Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister, dove deeper into her dreams, throwing British miners out of jobs, and turfing the mentally ill onto uncaring streets. God felt sick most days, whereas Maggie felt there was nothing she could not sort out.

Shenanigans of every shade kept The Firm on its toes as the Millennium came and went. On 11 September 2001, the hairs in Satan’s nose twitched uncontrollably. The attacks on the US triggered rumours of financial collusion and controlled demolitions. But the Devil’s most acute observation was how hysterical media coverage completely overshadowed a televised confession from US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the previous day. Rumsfeld said the Pentagon was unable to account for a trifling US$2.3 trillion of missing money. By pure coincidence, the relevant financial records were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. The lost funds were written off.

“Wow,” said Satan. “Quite a frigging coincidence.” Jesus was unfazed. “Being human is to suffer loss”, he noted.

Worse was to come. When Allied troops were sent to Iraq in 2003. Satan watched in fascinated horror as the US military forces subjected Fallujah to attacks in March and November 2004 which involved white phosphorus and depleted uranium. Subsequent birth defects in the city included babies born without parts of their skulls; missing genitalia, limbs and eyes; severe brain damage; unusual rates of paralysing spina bifida; and encephalocele, marked by swollen sac-like protusions from the head.

The Devil vowed to eradicate the chief warmongers when they reached his end of the line. There would be no rehabilitation and no reincarnation, not even as an apple pip, as Jesus proposed. Proof of humanity’s growing mental illness came in 2009, when Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State, publicly stated that half a million Iraqi child deaths, once sanctions were included, were “worth it”. Satan cried himself to sleep that night.

Two years earlier, when the 2007 US subprime mortgage crisis erupted, God seriously began to wonder what she had put in the DNA. Traders with a bank named Goldman Sachs profited handsomely by ‘shorting’ mortgage-backed securities they knew to be almost worthless, in a process which saw countless Americans lose their homes. Goldman Sachs was significantly linked into Federal Reserve money and control. As billions were pumped from the poorest to the richest, God looked on incredulously. Her dreams bulged with towering, mile-high waves that drowned all human greed. She would wake with the familiar, nagging question: was it time to rewind and restart?

In autumn 2008, the Lehman crisis engulfed almost the entire empire of OECD banks, forcing various governments to instigate bailouts worth trillions of dollars. All footed by taxpayers.

Capitalism had failed. Demonstrably. Yet bankers who had lost their heftiest financial market bets continued to snort up fresh swills of money. God also noticed more people on Earth saying she did not exist. A final straw came when Western governments started tightening up welfare payments.

The stress of working for the Firm during this era took a grievous toll on the partners. Perhaps it was the whisky that flowed copiously at the “Maggie meeting”, as they later called it, that inspired the decision to draft a conviction politician into their team. Aged 83, Thatcher was in the throes of dementia: struggling to finish sentences, unable to remember her address and often forgetting that her husband Denis was dead. Yet, when God eventually looked at the meeting’s minutes, well into the next day, Maggie’s name was written clearly. Next to one other word: ‘Essex’.

When Satan eventually hoofed it back to his quarters, unsteadily, the three boys were asleep, tails hanging from their beds. “I love you all,” he whispered. Morgana, his wife, flashed a familiar glint. Kisses evolved to a brief, gentle spell of penetration, before the spines surrounding the base of his penis became too raised and painful for her.

Neither Satan’s drunkenness nor his genitalia interfered with a second phase they had developed, after decades of advice and tuition from another colleague, the Buddha. They caressed, gently licking each other’s tail, sensing energy flow from the lower torso to a point behind their eyes, before cascading down in spirals. Repeating the procedure, their bodies vibrated at ever-higher frequencies until Satan’s head exploded in a kaleidoscope of pleasure, where even Morgana’s yelps were inaudible. He drifted away, dreaming of Maggie enacting a series of karate positions.

Five years passed. Then she arrived.

The combine harvesters were out last night, beams illuminating the fields. With July’s heat blast behind, it is the happiest thing to sit outside. In the comfortable warmth and shallow breeze, I have been reading ‘In the Company of Angels’, by Thomas E Kennedy. Poignant, beautiful writing about the nature of ageing, death, sex, survival, compassion and love as summer peaks in Copenhagen.

One of my most glaring omissions, until around seven years ago, has been an insufficient attention to the seasons. Living in suburban streets can do that. Now I am transfixed by the shape and fruit of our courgette, dexterously positioned near the patio to elude the slugs and snails.

There is a ripening in the air. Handfuls of accessible blackberries, tomatoes showing red, and cucumbers to come.

Squashes completing their fattening.

But runner bean flowers almost depleted.

The moths are so at home that they land on me. The pigeons have never come so close to the house, wings beating musically on their rounds. Wasps stagger drunkenly around the ripest fruits.

Our more recent holiday history is such that thoughts of the Peak District are never far away. The riverside in Bakewell, the joy of climbing Win Hill, the circularity of The Manifold walk, and the views across Cressbrook Dale, after coaxing reluctant family members to the adjacent heights.

Joy-filled memories of visits to Hathersage, Chatsworth, Holmfirth, Chesterfield, Ashbourne and Buxton. Recollections of the Peak in August make me sing inside. We undertook three testing walks on our first visit in 2002. I was almost out of my body in sheer delight.

No holiday this year, but two and a half weeks of no work whatsoever looming ahead, as summer’s second half peacefully unwinds. An acceleration of the search for work, and some rewriting, to slot alongside the dedication to quiet contemplation. And a dive into transcendental meditation, just begun.

 

 

On Friday afternoon, we were sitting outside in the cooler air with Evan and Tilly, two children that Maureen looks after three days each week.

“You’ve written a book Kevin, haven’t you,” said Tilly, in her quiet, knowledgeable, 10-year-old manner.

“Yes, it’s called ‘Out of Essex’, and your family has a copy.”

“Mm.”

The ensuing silence pretty much guaranteed I would add more.

“I had 50 copies printed for friends and family……But you can’t buy it.”

“Mm.”

“I suppose I could have published it as an e-book, for kindle……But I didn’t get enough feedback that encouraged me. So I’m not sure if it would be worth all the trouble.”

“Mm.”

Maureen said later that the book had been left on a settee in Tilly’s house. My wife has witch senses working for her. “Are we being told something,” she asked me.

Yesterday I spent a few hours reading it again. It needs work, but grabbed me time and time again. I say that with humility.

This morning it turned out we have both been thinking the same thing. That I begin rewriting it, during the remaining summer downtime. And blog some chapters. See how it feels.

With the summer heat in abeyance, my writing fingers are twitching. Maureen showed me a quote from artist Georgia O’Keefe this morning. “I have already settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”

That resonated.

Some other things are falling into place. The last four Sunday mornings we have attended a Hanmi Buddhist meditation near my dad’s house in Brentwood. For both of us, each session has improved on its predecessor. It was a full house this morning, 25 bums on seats. There is a magic in the 40 minutes that words cannot capture.

And I have kept my (David Lynch-inspired) promise to try out transcendental meditation. A weekend course starts this coming Friday. Looking forward to that.