Use Your Delusion.

Charles VI of France reigned from 1380 to 1422 and it was an eventful time to be the King of France. While he was on the throne the country was plunged into the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War which was inconvenient as they were still fighting The Hundred Years War (which actually lasted, on and off, for 116 years) with England. In 1415 his army was crushed by the English at the Battle of Agincourt.

That's a lot to deal with but Charles had another problem. He believed that he had been turned to glass. He wrapped himself in blankets and avoided hard surfaces as he was fearful that he may shatter or smash into pieces. When documentary producer Victoria Shepherd discovered this story she became fascinated by it and has put together a book, a ten part series for BBC Radio 4, and a talk, The History of Delusions, which she was serving up at Conway Hall last Thursday evening.

"Don't blog about it" implored the compere Scott Wood - and I'm sure he was looking in my direction. I am - but I am being very careful to leave quite a lot out because it's worth reading that book and it's worth checking out that radio series. It was worth going to the talk to and I was pleased that I was able to put my hands on my hips, look contentedly around the room, and declare a 'good turnout". 

It was nice, too, to enjoy a couple of drinks in the nearby Enterprise pub afterwards with Dewi, Jade, Kelly, Scott, Tim, David, and Sid. Nice to feel part of this curious little Fortean community. There was lots of laughter but probably not as much as was once directed towards King Charles VI of France who was, perhaps unsurprisingly, widely derided for his delusion.

Victoria Shepherd wanted to learn more. She became, in her own words, a "detective of delusions". She discovered that, in the Middle Ages, glass was a relatively new material. It was seen as precious yet vulnerable, an example of alchemy, something quite magical even.

The King was not the only person to suffer this delusion in early modern Europe. Scores of "glass men" were reported (and they were nearly all men, "glass women" came much later and, for the most part, it was just their legs that were believed to be glass!) and, in fact, the initial meaning of melancholia included a sensation of being made of glass. Cervantes even wrote about it.

More widely speaking, delusions demand attention, they demand an audience and it is popularly believed that almost everyone is deluded about something. They may be deluded that someone who doesn't love them does love them, they may be deluded in thinking Tottenham will win the league, or they may be so far gone they genuinely believe Boris Johnson is not a liar.

But believing you're made of glass, of course, makes for a better talk. Delusions have, over the years, been variously thought to be the result of too much black bile, demonic possession, or, more recently, brain disease but it seems only mildly contentious to suggest that delusions are subconsciously formed as a strategy to reverse unfortunate situation or to make sense of wretched circumstance.

Delusions can help organise your enemy (witness Trump and Ted Cruz in the wake of the latest US school shooting suggesting that more guns are the answer), they can help reframe conflict, and they can create ambivalence and ambiguity in situations where those things might prove useful.

Some still baffle though. The Parisienne lady (Paris seems to do delusions better than anywhere) who believed she had a double (helping to bring the word doppelganger into the English language and providing source material for both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Catherine Crowe) and lead to Freud suggesting such behaviour stemmed from repression and fear of death.

Of course! The lady's name has, seemingly, not been remembered by history but there are accounts of people finding the graves of four of her children in the catacombs of Paris so it's likely she'd suffered some horrendous trauma. She'd also have been even more freaked out if she'd known that a cardboard model of Paris was being built a few miles north of Paris to confuse enemy pilots in World War I.

And what of the 43 year old woman in an asylum, in France - of course, who believed that a lightning bolt had split her in two and that she was already dead. She pleaded to be burnt alive (or burnt dead, I suppose) but it is not recorded what eventually became of her.

It is said that at a hugely religious time she felt massive guilt and shame regarding some unnamed inappropriate behaviour at her first communion. But it seems quite a stretch to go from that to believing you're dead and asking to be set on fire.

Delusions both make sense and they make no sense at all - in that they're very much like many other things in life - and though there were more stories at Conway Hall last week I'll partially respect Scott's wish and not share them here now. Just to say it was an enjoyable evening and though Victoria seemed a tiny bit nervous, understandably, at first she became more confident as she warmed to her themes and I had a nice time. I was even happier than usual because I'm going to win the lottery this weekend and then get married to Jennifer Connelly. Don't say I'm deluded. 

Come Together As One:Wide Awake Festival 2022.

About half-past nine last night I was in Brockwell Park with my friends, Primal Scream were playing Come Together, and 'Big' Neil Bacchus was waving his arms in the air and putting his arms round both friends and strangers while singing along to that song's chorus.

It was, without a doubt, the most authentic - and most enjoyable, festival experience I have had in well over two years. That's hardly a surprise. Neil, Bee, Catherine, Pam, and Colin are tried and trusted festival friends and the likelihood of any of them bailing out early, or not giving it their all, was virtually nil. If anything, it was me who was most likely to take an afternoon nap.

Which would not have been the right behaviour at all for a festival styled as The Wide Awake Festival. I'd woken early and walked down to Brockwell Park (stopping for a cup of tea and an aubergine, goat's cheese, and pesto panini in the reliable old favourite Gusto Italiano on Half Moon Lane in Herne Hill - just as well as I ate nothing else for the rest of the day and woke up with a rumbly in my tumbly) where I had to sort out some minor faff with tickets at the box office.

Only slightly distracted by a man in bright yellow Crocs and matching dungarees atop a Cat in the Hat onesie. Entering the festival involved a labyrinthine stroll that helped push my daily step toll up to 23,000 and when I got in I did a quick recce of the site and worked out where the stages are and which bars were serving pints and which just cans. Pints were either £6.75 or £7 which is pretty steep but sadly expected. It didn't put any of us off.

I caught a bit of Crows (noisy) and Katy J Pearson (reminded me of Courtney Barnett - but not as good) and then saw Pam entering the festival. I waved to her and she turned towards me - and then walked straight past me. Turns out she'd spotted Neil, Bee, and Catherine who had been stood just behind me, at an ice cream van, all along.

Soon, Colin arrived and we were quorate and ready to roll. Pints of Heffes lager on the go, we headed to the Windmill Stage (where we'd spend most of the day) where Fatoumata Diawara had began her set.

From a distance, it sounded pleasant but as we got closer we realised that Fatoumata and her band were really rocking. Pam went right up the front (and it's her photos, as ever, I've mostly nicked for this blog) and the rest of us, bar Bee - who'd gone exploring, hung back as Fatoumata charmed the audience, not least with her big and breezy hit Sowa.

Yard Act, on next, had a different approach entirely. Debate raged as to just how pissed frontman James Smith was but he certainly makes for a formidable presence. Mentioning South London (not London - South London) between every song, boasting about his wealth - humorously and with tongue very much in cheek, berating the audience for being less enthusiastic than last night's much smaller crowd in Norwich,.and swearing as freely as you'd like, he swirled in the afternoon heat and shouted out his sprechgesang lyrics with fierce abandon as guitarist Sam Shjipstone, with Nick Cave 'tache and mullet and Peaky Blinders schmutter, jerked randomly as if on loan from Gang of Four.

Perhaps a bit oddly, they didn't play Fixer Upper but The Overload, Pour Another, and 100% Endurance all went down very well indeed. Nothing, though - for me, could top their cover of Jonathan Richman's Road Runner which gave me one of those festival highs in which you come running back from the bogs, fresh beer in hand naturally, full of enthusiasm for the rest of the day.

If not for a ride on the Sky Swing. Catherine and I discussed a go on this (it was very high and Brockwell Park already has great views of the London skyline so I can only imagine how good they were up on that thing) but were put off by the fact they were charging £10 for a roughly thirty second spin.

Fat White Family had just finished and, again - for me, they'd been a bit disappointing. They have attitude in droves (witness Lias Saoudi in nothing but skin coloured shorts, jumping into the audience, and sweating profusely), they have a great sound - but what they don't really have is great songs.

Their set began with Saul Adamczewski banging a beer barrel with drumsticks for what felt like half a fucking hour and when they finally ended that, they did rock and they rocked noisily and aggressively but, I dunno, I never really felt it. Nor did Pam. She shot off to see Billy No Mates on another stage and get some 'scran' (her choice of word, not mine).

We met again for The Comet Is Coming (who'd drawn a disappointingly small crowd) and they were great. Imagine if Loop had a saxophone player and then imagine that that saxophone player is 'King' Shabaka Hutchings. Summon The Fire, I think - they're instrumental so I get them mixed up, sounded utterly ace and could have easily filled an arena ten times as big.

I didn't have high hopes for Amyl and the Sniffers. Despite sniggering at their name like a naughty schoolboy I've always found them a bit regressive. The amount of mullet headed fans hovering around suggested I was outnumbered but I was won over - and won over quick.

The surprise act of the day. Amy Taylor is an astonishing presence (without her they'd be a workaday pub rock band) and she urges the band to be the best version of themselves while unashamedly and proudly singing in a strangely affecting kind of 'bogan' Melbourne accent. They sound nothing like them but her attitude reminded me of The Streets' Mike Skinner in his pomp.

Best song of the set was Knifey. A sadly ever topical anthem about women's freedom to do things men take for granted without being objectified, mentally undressed, threatened, or even raped and killed. Things like walk in the park, look at the stars, or even attend a music festival.

Music festivals are, of course, more right on now. There's "dog spending" areas, warnings you can be ejected for pissing against a fence- in Reading '88 it was practically mandatory to do so, and both a male and female signer on stage. It was fun watching them sign Yard Act's swearing and even more fun when they signed Fat White Family's theremin. Best of all though was when there was a guitar or drum solo they simply did air guitar or drums. 

Truly the heroes of the day. Which is not to do Primal Scream a disservice. Ver Scream have been doing this a long time so they were unlikely to fuck up - and they didn't. Of all their albums, Screamadelica is a safe bet and with its producer, Andrew Weatherall, and one of the vocalists, Denise Johnson, having passed in recent years the gig took on a form of tribute.

Not a gloomy one though. Not at all. How could it when it starts with Movin' On Up. That got people dancing which is no mean achievement when you consider that Screamadelica is thirty years old and most of the crowd looked old enough to have bought it first time round.

Slip Inside This House, Don't Fight It Feel It, and a gorgeous Inner Flight all sounded majestic, Higher Than The Sun and Loaded even better, and if the set lagged a bit two thirds in - Damaged and I'm Comin' Down were always the album's weakest songs - it was more than made up for by an encore of Jailbird, Country Girl, and, of course, Rocks.

Best of all though was Come Together which seemed to encapsulate the whole vibe of the day and the whole euphoric feeling of the festival experience. One that is, obviously, best spent with friends and when those friends are Pam, Neil, Bee, Colin, and Catherine that makes it all the better. When we doing it again?

Love Me, I'm A Neoliberal.

"It hardly makes any difference who will be the next President. The world is governed by market forces" - Alan Greenspan

The area around Lee Green, even on a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon, is not the fanciest. There's a bleak looking Wetherspoons pub, The Edmund Halley, under a heavily graffitied tower block, there's a closed coffee shop caled rhubarb & CUSTARD, there's boarded up shops, and there's rubbish blowing around in the wind.

There's also, until they pull down the whole arcade - something that's been on the cards for a while, the Museum of Neoliberalism and as you may well suspect it's not a museum that pays tribute to neoliberalism but one that aims to critique it heavily, to turn you against it, and, and this is a very long shot, to ultimately destroy it.

Fiverr advertisement (2017)

Alerted to its existence by a piece on TheQuietus website, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect except for a supposedly genuine bottle of an Amazon delivery driver's piss. That had made me suspect that there wouldn't be much about the philosophy of neoliberalism or the thoughts of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly as even the window of the museum had the quote from Greenspan that heads up this assessment on it. It's a small museum, very small, but they pack a lot in. Beginning with a brief introduction to neoliberalism and its attendant evils.

Which are listed:- food banks, zero hours contrcats, Trump, Bolsonaro, and Brexit being some of the lowlights. The museum's curators, Darren Cullen and Gavin Grindon, believe we arrived at these hellish answers by allowing what began in the 1970s as an "obscure and ideological cult" to rise to power and shape our lives in "dramatic and often terrible ways"

Neoliberalism proposed that the market was an ethic in itself and that businesses should be deregulated and freed to control our lives. It argued that the role of governments should not be to have visionary and transformative policies but simply to manage the markets, defend the realm, and protect private property.

It's something you'll have possibly heard Adam Curtis talk about many times and you may have also heard Curtis go on to say that these ideas are neither "universal or inevitable". The Museum of Neoliberalism goes further, correctly I believe, in saying that neoliberalism has, quite recently been artificially placed centre stage in Western society, sometimes violently, as if it is the only ideology available to people.

It's propped up a capitalist society that serves the rich and debases the poor. It not only debases the poor but it holds them up as failures and makes them responsible for all the degradation they suffer. You only have to witness the latest round of Tory MPs mouthing off about working class people not being able to cook or budget properly in an attempt to cover up their lack of policy regarding the cost of living crisis we are all sleepwalking in to to realise how deeply embedded these ideas are in the upper echelons of our society.

It is the mission of this museum to show how neoliberalism has "wrecked our society in ways large and small" and this it does quite easily and with no little humour. What it doesn't do, however, is offer an alternative and in these times of rampant populism, fake news, normalising racism, and social media algorithms that feels to me like something of a misstep.

There's also a slight suspicion that this is a Corbynista project and Jeremy Corbyn has fought, and lost, two general elections and can no longer be viewed as the solution to our problems. I've always thought that when people start referring to politicians by their first name, there's a cult-like feeling about it and, for me, that applies just as much with Jeremy as it does Boris. A serious politician does not need to be spoken about as if they are a personal friend of yours.

Scout, Beaver and Cub Sponsored Badges

Cullen, Grindon, and their associates don't hold back though. At one point they list neoliberalism alongside serial killers as one of the disasters of the 1970s (though I'm absolutely certain we had serial killers a long time before the 1970s). They're on firmer ground when they take as their starting point the worldwide protests of 1968 (the year I was born) and go on to suggest that because of the rise of new rights and freedoms for everyone including women and LGBTQ+ people, and newly independent nations in Africa and Asia, we were starting to see global inequality slowly reducing and that that in itself was a crisis for the ruling classes.

The likes of Hayek and Friedman proposed an illiberal form of liberalism as a solution and this was adopted by world leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As well as, even more lethally, the CIA approved Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. A man who had women held captive in football stadiums and raped by dogs.

Essentially, what the world was witnessing was class war but not in the way Crass or Conflict fans would recognise it. It was a class war waged from above. It was a class war that seemed to say that to be rich is simply not enough. Others must become poor to enable that wealth.

The PFI Game

"Our vision is that the forces of the market are just that:they are forces;- they are like the wind and the tides" - Arnold Harberger

Arnold Harberger, a colleague of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, was wrong. Markets are not forces like the wind and the tides. Markets are not natural occurrences. Markets are invented and maintained by force. The Thatcher government sell offs of the 1980s and those that have followed on from it were not inevitable like rain but were direct policy of a government whose agenda was to find any part of society that was not run entirely for profit and make sure that that changed.

Be that gas, railways, water, telephone services - these companies would now be run not for the benefits of the customers - or 'clients' - but for the benefit of the market. Companies had to make money for investors and because capitalism is never satisfied those profits had to rise year on year. Which meant that the clients had to pay more to access what had once been a public service.

Inevitably education, healthcare, and social services would be taken over by market forces but because these are such emotive arenas this has been carried out far more insidiously:- in education - academies were created and university fees have been tripled.

'Shock doctrines', where crises are juiced to push through neoliberal policies, have been used to defund public services and to move policy towards deregulation and privatisation. The idea is to float a belief that the NHS, the BBC, the schools, and the judiciary are no longer fit for purpose and have to be destroyed so that something else, something that serves the elite but not the general public, can be created in its place.

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women. People must look after themselves first" - Margaret Thatcher

The idea of putting yourself first, the idea that there is no such thing as society - no such thing as the greater good, first took firm route in Britain under Margaret Thatcher but has been turbocharged under the premiership of the lying criminal Boris Johnson. But what is truly worrying is just how many people have bought into this line of thinking.

The Museum of Neoliberalism contains a list of companies that have been privatised in the last fifty years and it runs from the likes of Lunn Poly, Thomas Cook, and Rolls-Royce in the early seventies to the Royal Mail and East Coast Trains in the last decade. The railways are a good example of how this has failed.

Not only are most services worse than before, they are far far more expensive. On its own, that's a shocking state of affairs but when you consider that this government, and others around the world, have subsidised, propped up, and bailed out these private rail networks you have to ask yourself why you're not only still paying taxes to go to the railways but that these taxes are bypassing the network and going directly into the pockets of fat cat investors.

Motorola WT-4000 terminal (2006)

Ever had the feeling you've been cheated? You will have if you work in an Amazon warehouse. Especially if you're legally required to wear a Motorola terminal which instructs you to PICK FASTER. Of course, Amazon don't call them warehouses, they prefer the term 'fulfilment centres' and it's not just Jeff Bezos who uses these things. Tesco do too.

Amazon fulfilment centre staff are expected to work ten hour shifts that usually involve walking about eleven miles per day. Regularly, people are let go because they can't do this - and that includes pregnant women. It's instructive to learn that the first place that made use of these monitoring devices were private prisons operated by G4S. Now, of course, many of us wear similar devices to monitor our step count, how much sleep we get. All in the name of 'wellness'

Something we may be stressing about so much about that it's undoing all the good sleep and long walks we force ourselves to have. At least when we're walking for leisure, we're allowed to visit the toilet. Many Amazon delivery drivers don't have that 'luxury' and, as mentioned earlier, there's a bottle of piss on show.

Taking breaks, comfort or otherwise, or falling ill can mean Amazon delivery drivers may not hit their targets and ultimately lose their jobs. Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You did a better job of illustrating this insidious behaviour than the Museum of Neoliberalism but, nevertheless, it's a scandal that is worth shining further light on. We have let ourselves become components of society, no more important than office chairs or keyboards, when we should be citizens. Society should work for us. Not us for it.

Bottle of Amazon employee urine (2019)

Serious incidents have become so common at Amazon fulfilment centres that ambulances are regularly seen parked outside them. Is this really how we should treat other human beings?

One way to avoid being treated that way is, of course, for staff to unionise but the neoliberals have an answer to that too. It's to discredit union activity or, in some cases, completely ban it. A compliant press helps demonise union leaders and Margaret Thatcher considered workers who stood up for their rights to be "the enemy within'. Delta Air Lines went as far as to print up anti-union propaganda.

Delta Air Lines Anti-Union Propaganda (2019)

A section in the museum dedicated to BULLSHIT JOBS tells us how laws have been created to reduce the power of unions and how, because of that, the quality of many people's lives have deteriorated. Workloads and hours have intensified while pay has stagnated and windfalls have fallen in to the hands of those already obscenely wealth - hedge fund managers and Tory politicians often.

Freelance work, zero hours contracts, and constantly being on call via mobile devices have contributed to a mental health crisis which I confidently predict is soon to get much worse as the cost of living crisis hits more and more people. I'd even go so far as to predict there will soon be another huge rise in homelessness and a jump in the suicide statistics. Neoliberalism doesn't free us. It enslaves us.

In some cases, it kills us. The dismantling of regulations that began, in the UK, under Margaret Thatcher didn't just apply to businesses but also to homes. Housing quality was lowered and so were fire safety standards and on the 14th of June 2017 we saw the ultimate result of that when the Grenfell Tower in London caught fire and seventy-two people died. 

When Grenfell Tower had been renovated - just one year earlier in 2016 - residents had complained they felt the building had been made a 'firetrap' with the addition of cheaper, but highly flammable, plastic-aluminium cladding. A saving had been made of nearly £300,000 and it was this, in the end - as well as the flammable foam insulation (below), that cost those seventy-two people their lives.

Celotex RS5000 foam insulation

Darren Cullen - Satiricial Anti-Serco Poster (2021)

Grenfell was a tragedy but it was an avoidable tragedy, Serco's failed Covid test and trace system (which cost the country tens of billions of pounds) was a tragedy but it was an avoidable tragedy, and the neoliberal line of thinking has been a tragedy but it has been an avoidable tragedy

The Museum of Neoliberalism makes a pretty good job of showing how neoliberal ideas are exhausted and that the world needs to find new ways to organise itself, ways that help people and not corporations. The Museum doesn't have the answers to that but it is, at least, asking the questions and getting a small number of people to think about potential responses. There's also (see below) a shop with some quite amusing stuff in it.

It's free, it's easy to get to, and it's worth a visit but the conversation regarding the failures of neoliberalism to meet the needs of the vast majority of people needs to be escalated towards far more mainstream channels and soon. The Serco circus needs to come to an end because if it doesn't many more people will die at its hands.