An Appeal to the American People - Straight from the President's Gut

 

Ok, I know that anyone with an iota of sense or compassion knows that Donald Trump is a ruthless, scheming bastard and the most divisive, cruel and stupid President our country has ever had the misfortune to have. As one listens again to his endless lies, to his violent abuse of anyone who dares to question him, or perhaps if one is truly masochistic, reads yet another one of his inane, aggressive tweets, many people must begin to wonder if this man, who so many voted to be their leader (Ok, I know not the majority, but lets draw a veil for the moment over how undemocratic a country that likes to boast of its democracy really is), who is nothing but a stupid bully-boy pawn in the claws of the Russian bully-boy King, those people who care about the terrible state of their country being made so much worse by the rule of a despotic, greedy psychopath, must be beginning to think, no matter how generous and optimistic their usual view of human nature, that Mr Donald Trump possesses not the smallest grain of good within his ridiculous body.

Much as I share the despair of those, who have reached such a conclusion, I am here to reluctantly inform them they are wrong. It is admittedly very hard to find but if you travel from the lying, vindictive mouth, down the disgusting throat, through the foul-smelling oesophagus, you will eventually reach the President’s gut. It is here and here alone that you can find some traces of goodness within the monster that is called Donald Trump. Indeed, I am one of those traces for I am amongst the dwindling band of good bacteria, that help the President’s bowels to function. Much as we may wish to down tools, go on strike, take a long and much needed vacation, so that our host becomes more and more blocked, until in a moment of rare and uncharacteristic anger, he finally explodes all over The White House Lawn, we are sadly not like humans and we are never allowed a break. We have to keep performing our vital function till we hopefully ascend or descend to Bacteria Heaven. I sometimes curse the fates that gave me such a host –how much more pleasant to have inhabited the gut of Michelle or Barack Obama, but bacteria like people often have no choice but to play the hand that they’ve been given.

So as the United States gears itself up again for the bizarre pantomime of a Presidential election, made even more bizarre now by the Coronavirus and the hostile invasion of Russian algorhythms, perhaps it’s time that instead of listening to the rubbish that comes out of the president’s mouth, the American people stopped to listen to the one good part of their current leader, the good bacteria in Donald Trump’s gut. Alas, we cannot get together to form The Good Bacteria Party, and gradually take over the mind of our host until we persuade him that Coronavirus does need to be taken seriously, that the climate emergency does need urgent action, and that both his own and other American’s racism needs to be rooted out. Our power is limited to the President’s gut, or to put it a bit more crudely we are the shit assisters, that enables the beast to carry on functioning. Yet we do occasionally exchange the odd word around the metaphorical bacteria water cooler, and we are all agreed that we want to play our part in preventing our bloated, power-mad host from staying in office any longer than he has to.

So, dear American voters, please listen to us. We know this President far better than you – try living in someone’s gut and you get a very good impression of their character. Alas we are the only redeeming features in the man you mistakenly gave the top job to four years ago. You need to get him out of the White House, put him on trial for all the money he’s screwed out of the country, and let him waste away in some Southern prison, tended kindly and forgivingly by black guards. Of course, even if the vast majority of you vote in the right way, it will not necessarily be easy to remove him. He will revert to the screaming, angry toddler, that refuses to give up a toy he’s stolen from his younger weaker brother. Yet, with any luck the US army will remember there is such a thing as The American Constitution, and forcefully evict the unwanted tenant from a property he wasn’t fit to clean the windows of.

Well, that’s it really. We have no choice but to continue doing our job, but in November you will have a choice. For in decent democracies, it is not only governments that should admit their mistakes, but also sometimes people need to do the same. Some of you made a terrible mistake four years ago, for which your country and the rest of the world has paid a high price. Now is the time to rectify that mistake, to push that Human-Trump-Monster back into the slimy, evil-smelling pond he crawled out of. You have heard the expression that you should listen to your gut. Now is the time to listen to your president’s gut.

Searching for Zuckerbergs to Save the Rainforests

 

Searching for Zuckerbergs

 

I typed Mark Zuckerberg into the Facebook Search Engine,

Friend Requests for 15 Mark Zuckerbergs - now pending.

Apparently one of them invented Facebook,

Caught and made millions with a social media hook,

But I saw in a film that this Zuckerberg said

He wanted Facebook to do good, so when he went to bed

He’d dream not of trolls, Russians or those

Who use algorhythms to bloody the nose

Of honest discussion and political discourse.

It was safer when we just got by with morse,

But with Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok,

Who knows where we’re heading. Perhaps it’s time to take stock,

For it’s easy to talk about doing good,

But the proof of the pudding is what’s understood,

So if any of my potential Zuckerberg friends

Want to prove that their means are as good as their ends,

They might like to donate to a poem that gives

Help to the rainforests, and helps farmers to live

More sustainable lives, and helps us all breathe,

For if we need oxygen, we all need more trees,

So come on you Zuckerbergs, please lend me a hand,

For Generosity’s a word that I understand.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-poem-to-plant-trees-and-help-poor-farmers?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cf%20share-flow-1&fbclid=IwAR3NhLSX2t8UJuzScNEkE7PLxdsZjMYrmqlIxpH0n0UjuFNrG0IyAckw6PA 

 

Community Artist with a Sense of Adventure wanted for Exciting Public Art Project

WANTED

An artist willing to develop and manage a community arts project, that highlights both the plight of the rainforests and the wasteful nature of our modern British society.

The art installation will be produced by the people of Croydon, supervised by the artist, and will be the centre of attraction in a run-down area of central Croydon.

It will also serve as the focus for a series of artistic events and performances that will take place in 2017.

 This is an exciting opportunity for a young artist to become better known, and an exciting, experimental project to bring art to the local community. If you are at all interested and want to know more, please email or ring Charles (details below)

Charles Barber  -  Chairman of Rainforest Saver - www.rainforestsaver.org

&

Founding member of The Croydon Rainforest Club - http://thecroydoncitizen.com/politics-society/croydon-rainforest/

Email : charles.barber13@gmail.com

Mb : 07866 722209   

The Soul of Croydon?

The Soul of Croydon?

‘Croydon is a soulless place now’, said a very amiable gentleman, that I recently met in a Croydon pub. ‘Those planners tore down the old town and gave us big main roads and underpasses instead’. This was a rather dispiriting thing to hear, for someone like myself, who had not yet been a Croydon resident for a fortnight. Yet this friendly character had made this particular solitary pub-visitor, feel more at home in this apparently soulless place, and had spent most of the time, regaling me with very funny, rude jokes. I couldn’t help thinking that if a few more of Croydon’s residents were as entertaining as this particular gentleman, Croydon would have an awful lot more soul. I was wetting my whistle in the Dog and Bull on Surrey Street. The previous Friday they had offered a free drink to anyone who visited them for their grand reopening. They were doing up their back yard in an effort to entice a few more customers through the doors. On their first day back in business after a week’s closure, it certainly seemed to be working. I hadn’t been having a great day, but after a couple of glasses of their house red in very convivial company, the world began to seem like a much friendlier place.

The Dog and Bull is a delightfully traditional English pub without any of the modern accoutrements that publicans seem to think they need to get people through the doors. No big screens, no one arm bandits, not even a juke machine yet it still seemed to be full of people, having a jolly good time. Located on Surrey Street, one of the oldest thorough fares in Croydon, where a thriving local market existed even before 1276, when it was given the blessing of a royal charter. This has already become one of my favourite places in Croydon. Discovering a bowlful of ripe plums for a pound in early March seemed nothing short of of a miracle on my first full day as a Croydon resident and I have been making use of this veritable treasure trove of fruit and veg. ever since. There is a nice mixture of traditional English fare with some more exotic looking vegetables, and I am looking forward to trying them all as the days roll by.

                                                       The wonderful Surrey Street Market

Someone at the pub had told me that South Croydon was the place to eat. ‘Aye, you can eat your way round the world in South Croydon’, he said, and as it was well within walking distance and I was beginning to feel peckish, I thought I’d leave the pub and see if any of South Croydon’s numerous restaurants could tempt this particular culinary punter to part with his cash. My wife was eating out with a friend, and I didn't feel much like cooking. I looked for somewhere small and cosy, where my solitary state wouldn’t stand out too much like a sore thumb, yet all the trendy, very open plan eateries only seemed to make me feel more alone. Why should I waste my money, dining on my own, when I’d much prefer to save it so that I could perhaps occasionally take my wife out. Yet, there was a cold wind, I was getting hungry and I knew I didn’t really want the bother of cooking. At last a chippie on the road to South Croydon Station came to my rescue. Armed with my open bag of chips, my morale was restored and I wondered homewards, stopping only to buy a couple of smoked haddock fishcakes, from our local mini-Morrisons. These, together with a couple of lettuce leaves and a tomato, would completely quell my hunger. They just needed to be popped in the oven for 16-18 minutes, giving me ample time to peruse the articles in the latest edition of the Croydon Advertiser.

As I savoured my haddock fishcakes, I pondered how Croydon had and would develop. Part of its attraction is the juxtaposition of new architecture with old buildings, yet it sounded as if my friend at the pub, considered that far too much of the Old Croydon had been destroyed in the rush to modernise and develop. It seems to me, that in the headlong drive to make money and try to be more economic, so many places, including Croydon have destroyed the buildings that tend to give places their character. This is not to say that new buildings don’t have character, and to be fair to Croydon, it does have some interesting and colourful new buildings, but rather that planners and developers should perhaps have more respect for the good things that were created in the past. If I had my way, no-one would be allowed to be a planner or a developer in Britain, before they had taken a course on Historical Architecture in the British Isles, and shown that they had some understanding and appreciation of it. These days it has become all too easy to knock down buildings and put up new ones, yet many of the buildings that are destroyed have a value and worth that goes far beyond the costs of the land, bricks and mortar. They are often a part of a place’s history with roots that go deep into the past, and with stories that are well worth listening to. In this rapidly changing world, it is worth remembering that places also have souls, and the buildings of those that lived and worked here before, are an important component of such a vital if rather intangible phenomena.      

Moving to Croydon...

Moving to Croydon…

The Ikea Towers, viewed from Wandle Park 

‘A change is as good as a rest’ was one of my dad’s favourite sayings. He forget to mention however, that there is sometimes a big difference between the two experiences. A rest suggests a period of recovery from the stresses and strains of modern everyday life. A change, on the other hand, can involve a different way of approaching life, and might include challenges and actions that are both demanding and stressful. Yet some of these challenges can also be enervating, fun and exciting, providing the opportunity to look at and experience the world with a fresh pair of eyes. Our move from a 3 bedroom quiet semi in a sleepy part of a dormitory town outside London to a flat on a main road,  in a part of south London, that has some justifications for claiming itself to be a city within a city, is certainly proving itself to be quite a change.

It is interesting to consider the associations that are contained within the two different addresses. Our old address of 10 Hanbury Path, Sheerwater, Woking, Surrey, GU21 5RB sounds to me quite middle class, a secluded hideaway in leafy, suburban Surrey. Our new address though gives little away. I now reside at 200C St James Road, Croydon. I live in a flat in a place, that is a part of London but in some sense (at least via its address) seems a bit unwilling to commit to it. It has become apparent to me, having lived here for a mere 3 days, that the people of Croydon can have very different senses of identity. The friendly young lad at the Co-op supermarket, where I purchased the items for my first Croydon breakfast, was insistent that Croydon was really a part of Surrey, though he did admit that many other Croydon residents would consider it a part of London, as indeed it officially is. Yet perusing a more than a week’s old local newspaper, that they were still selling at the supermarket, I read of how some of Croydon’s ambitious movers and shakers were keen to get Croydon recognized as a city. I must confess that the idea of cities within cities was a novel one to me, and yet London has now become so fast, that perhaps such an idea is not as ridiculous as it first sounds.

Yet names can sometimes mislead. My old address was in what the current Woking Council wished (for its own ulterior purposes) to describe as a ‘very deprived’ part of the borough. Yet you should not always fully believe what a Council tells you. When it was first built in the early 1950s, the Sheerwater Housing Estate was considered a fine example of what a modern housing estate should be. The houses had decent sized rooms and gardens, and many of the pine trees, planted in the 19^th century to help drain the land, still stood as  guardians to a development, where people took a certain pride in the appearance of their properties. Although in the intervening 60 odd years, the estate has experienced some of the negative changes that seem to go hand in hand with the modern world, many of its current residents are still decent, hard-working people, striving like most of us to improve their lives. Many were therefore shocked and dismayed when the Council, using the excuse that it was such ‘a deprived area’, joined forces with a developer to come up with a proposal that involved knocking down many of the houses on the estate and building all over the recreation ground. Although not directly affected by the proposal, (my wife and I’s house not being within the dreaded red zone), the sheer injustice of a proposal that intended destroying perfectly good homes, in order to provide the developer with a profit and assist the Council to fulfil its housing obligations spurred me into playing a small role in the opposition to such a greedy, ill thought out proposal. The only good thing that can be said about the whole episode, which is still being debated, is that the community of Sheerwater has come together in almost wholesale opposition to the current proposal, and that it has shown itself to be a place, which still takes pride in itself and which deserves far more respect and appreciation than the Council and Developer have so far given it.

Strangely enough, having lived in Sheerwater, Woking for more than 21 years, it has been the prospect of facing much of its demolition, that has made me feel much more attached to the place. I remember an elderly lady, named Sue, who’s allotment I had done a bit of work on, standing up at a public meeting and explaining to both Councillors and Developers that she was quite happy in her small house and garden and had no desire to be transferred into a 4^th floor flat with some communal garden. Being able to potter in her own garden and chat over the fence to the neighbours was one of life’s little pleasures, that neither Council nor Developer could fully seem to appreciate. I remember also the two leaders of the Sheerwater Homes Alliance, Ian and Sue, who have recently spent all their spare time publicizing what was really going on, organizing meetings and fighting not just to save their own homes but those of many others, and who, one feels would make far better Councillors than the ones currently in post.

As a lover of nature though, I can’t help but raise a wry smile when I think of the many tree blessed estate of Sheerwater, and compare it to the busy main road, on which I now reside. I seem to have moved from a place, struggling valiantly to keep the developer and bulldozers at bay to one that is clearly a continuous building site. Numerous cranes rear their stately metal heads over the surrounding buildings, and before one tower block has been completed, another is half constructed and yet another is about to be begun. I am relieved however that the funds have finally been found to finish the large tower block, situated about half a mile from where I live on St James Road. When we first began visiting Croydon about 3 years ago, it was a half-built monstrosity, seemingly abandoned to remain a hideous eyesore, a veritable stain, like the fairly recent riots, on Croydon’s declining reputation. Now that it is finally finished, its coloured glass seems to convey a certain brash confidence, yet already it risks being overshadowed by its taller, more colourful twin brother, which is being built nearby.

                                                       The Unfinished Brother

The view from our front room though is far more prosaic. From our large sash window, I can see a Newsagents, some kind of delivery company, a doctor’s surgery, a motorbike shop, a small general store, which is also an off license, and a chemists. There are two stories of flats above the shops, so that I could conceivably wave to a number of my neighbours across the road. On our busy street, there is a more or less constant flow of vehicles and a continuous trickle of pedestrians. Such a view encourages a degree of voyeurism, and my wife and I have become avid people watchers, watching and even recognizing after less than a week some of the people that wait around the bus stop. This is located in front of the motorbikes, being displayed for sale, as if to encourage the bus passengers to indulge in a more exciting , glamorous form of transport.

One of the ways we assess these strangers is by how likely they are to visit our imaginary Tea Rooms. How temped do we think they’d be by the prospect of recuperating for a while from the stresses and strains of modern life, by a visit to a cosy quiet sanctuary, where the most difficult decision would be whether to have a cake or scone with their tea? Perhaps it is a sign of our business naivety but we have reached the conclusion that more than 50% of our pedestrianised passers by would be tempted by the comfort and refuge of our wonderful Tea Rooms. It’s just a shame that we’ll probably never have the opportunity to test out such a conclusion.

                                          Bus stop and motorbikes       

It is now 5 days since I arrived to live in Croydon, and I have explored a reasonable amount of the central area on foot, discovered the whereabouts of East and West Croydon stations, found the fruit and veg market on Surrey Street and a good, helpful chemists in Addiscombe. I have revelled in the variety of buildings and people that I’ve come across, and been pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of most of the people I’ve met.  As I sit in a civilized café near the Job Centre, where I perhaps rashly told a nice lady, that I was going to set up my own business, rather than claim Jobseekers Allowance, I again have time to sit and watch the passers by. Their backdrop is a grey fence, on top of which is advertised a new housing development, named Ruskin Square, a development that is clearly still in its infancy, as I can see no sign of buildings above the fence. Croydon seems to be a growing and dynamic place and I only hope that I can find my niche within it. I have given up my job as a self-employed gardener, and come to Croydon in search of fame and fortune. Such rash and reckless behaviour may merely be the sign of a mid-life crisis, but I can only hope that my discovery of Croydon will coincide with a discovery of something worthwhile within myself.