On the radio again

Yesterday. Maff and I got interviewed by Eddie Mair. Here's how it happened...

After the reports on Tuesday about the Government Chief Medical Officer recommending that the organ donor register be made opt-out, I posted something here on the PM blog about it. In another thread here a lot of people got hot under the collar about this proposal.

On Wednesday morning, someone from the PM production office called to ask whether I, and my donor, would be prepared to be interviewed about living donation. I tried to track down Maff, to be told by his office that he was in Birmingham then Milton Keynes. But anything is possible! I texted him, and got one back. I sent him the PM office number. He got the person who met him at the station to make a detour via the BBC in Birmingham on the way to the conference where he was speaking. Meanwhile, I got on my bike and rode to Broadcasting House in central London. Just after mid day, I was shown into a tiny studio, and told to put on the headphones and wait. A few minutes later, Maff and Eddie Mair were in my ears, and wwe were having a three-way conversation. There's a link to the whole thing here. A slightly shorter version was broadcast at about 5.45pm.

The Moral Maze - we need a new economics

The Moral Maze on Radio 4 this evening was interesting - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze.shtml

The first witness, Canon Peter Challen, articulated something I've thought about and read about exceptionally clearly - at least to me. It was very disappionting that the team (Melanie Phillips, Claire Fox, Michael Portillo, Clifford Longley) seemed not to really engage at all with what he said.

He talked about how the current capitalist system where banks are able to create fictitious money by magic, by lending it to people, who then need to earn real money plus interest to pay it back. This seems to be to be what's at the root of the apparent 'essential requirement' for all economies to grow, in order to thrive. From the growth comes the interest - if I've understood it correctly. Unfortunately, somewhere down the line, all 'real' money has to come from some physical thing being produced or grown and then sold or rented. Where that thing is grown or produced in a sustainable way where the source is continually replenished, then perhaps that's fine but so much of the 'stuff' which is sold in this world is mined, or fished or sucked out of the earth from finite sources. If something isn't being replaced, then eventually it runs out.

I'm no economist, and I don't claim that these are original conclusions on my part - more that the more I learn about our current economic system, the more it appears to lead inevitably to unavoidable collapse and catastrophe, whether tomorrow, next year, or in 100 years time. It seems to me that we're currently heading towards the end of an economic cycle which began in the era of global exploration and the land grab which followed (in particular, the settling of the USA). Yet, economic coverage in our media today, seems to assume that we live in a society whose economic backbone is a solid, well established thing, which has been through sufficient cycles for us to be able to assume that it will continue forever like this.

Peter Challen said something which if true is profoundly disturbing - "I've been 48 years listening to people in the economy as an industrial chaplain and what I've heard time and time again is this terrible dichotomy with the aspirations for humanity that people talk about when they trust you - takes a long time to earn that position - and the institutional imperatives which compel them to be complicit with a system they know to be wrong". For a long time I've assumed that this must be so, though I've never felt in a position of sufficient knowledge to be able to make a persuasive case that this is so. Unfortunately, not one of the panelists on the Moral Maze saw fit to probe this point any further. Who are these industrialists, and economists (and politicians?) who know the truth of this statment, but are unwilling to say it in public, and are content to continue playing the game?

'Pataphysics and Kerouac's 'Pull My Daisy'

When I was a student, in my long overcoat from Oxfam, and even longer scarf, I used to fancy that I was into surrealism. I wasn't quite sure what I liked about it - its general craziness I suppose. Perhaps it was the whole 'emperor's new clothes' thing, in that I secretly felt like the whole thing was just a piss take of over-intellectual pomposity. At least that was the spirit in which I had a go at creating some of my own, when I had the job of authoring the CDROM of 'Index to Theses' back in 1990, and inserted an abstract for a non-existant PhD by Slim Gaillard. I can't remember much about it, other than that sparrows were involved. Anyway, the catalogue of 'Atlas Press' caught my undergraduate eye in some ad, and I ordered 'The Immaculate Conception' by Andre Breton, to grace my college bookshelves. I'm sure I tried to read it, though I don't think the paperback's spine ever really got broken. There was something beautiful about it.

Then a couple weeks ago, I was invited to a book launch by some author's agent friends, at the Boogaloo pub in Highgate, where I found myself at a table next to Alistair, the founder and publisher of the Atlas Press. Today, at the Bookartbookshop in Hoxton, they celebrated their 25th anniversary - and the shop its 5th. Apart from an amazing cake,


the highlight of the evening was Stanley Chapman, President of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, reading some poetry from his new translation of "The Deliquescences of Adoré Floupette".

The whole thing reminded me of other wonderfully eccentric characters I have known, like Patrick the Plasterer, and David Amram - who I met at the Cork Jazz Festival a few years ago. He told some great stories of his days with the Beat poets, Ginsberg, Kerouac and so on. They did some of the original Jazz and Poetry gigs back in the 50s, and made a film called 'Pull My Daisy' in 1959. I'd always meant to try and track it down, but had never bothered, until tonight - and here it is.

It all seems to be the right thing to be doing at the end of George Melly's last week among us.

Kirstie's wedding

Spent the week last week in Morzine, where my sister Kirstie got married to Stéphane. Here's a little bit of what happened that day