Divide and conquer

Today’s economic policies seem designed to break community spirit. Yet, for those alienated from today’s brutal working culture, there are riches to be found

I’ve baked sourdough from scratch (to be fair Tom, who’s in Paris for the night, got it going), made soup, and some more homemade bounce balls for Jonah’s climbing – this time from dried apricots, walnuts, pistachios, desiccated coconut, and sweetened with blackstrap molasses, held together with coconut oil; and all this before 9.30, after a run, and a chance catch up with our new lodger doing situps at the local exercise playground. I don’t want to be a New Year bore with a smug post about wellbeing – yesterday I crawled back to bed with a hangover, following a catch up with colleagues from my dearly departed workplace and felt a keen delight in being able to do so. It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance.

There is the deep joy to be found in doing largely as one pleases – the only parametres to my day being drop off, pick up, and the frugal urge not to overspend while I’m not earning. I’ve read a book on philosophy, made connections with people doing interesting stuff in the village and made plans to see old friends. I’ve found classes I want to join, thought about business ideas I could pursue, and books I could write, and volunteering I could offer. I’ve dug up and re-edited juvenalia, some of it gut wrenching (though whether for good or bad, perhaps the reader can let me know?) I’ve booked J and A on the local Coder Dojo, and myself and Tom on a weekend course to teach us to climb. I’ve thought about going to – but not actually made it – to the local Buddhist centre for its pay-what-you-can -afford lunchtime yoga and meditation session.  But in any case, there’s plenty of time now for that.

I’ve chatted to an old lady called Doris for an hour over tea in Reprobate Kate’s caf, neither of us having any other place to be and to my and society’s shame, the only time in my life that I’ve passed much more than the time of day with an unfamiliar pensioner. We talked about how the local school (she used to teach there) was before it doubled in size and management consultants took it over. It feels like a lost world, one in which community did not evoke the dutiful and patronising connotations of Cameron’s free-market dichotomy, where society is big, apparently, yet capital remains king.

In this society, emotional labour is all very worthy, but self-worth, in this day and age, feels so very much linked to income or a job title or fame that it’s hard not to feel at the same time, a crisis of confidence about who I have become since I lost my job. Who you are very much depends on how much power you have, and it feels as though I have very little, and it’s hard not to feel frustrated about that. Whatever I end up doing, I need to find something to do with the rest of my life, and this can feel like an overwhelming task. A philosopher would say, do what you want. I have a more realistic approach: do what you can.

I’ve thought about running my own business,  the only way, it seems to maintain some autonomy in one’s work, but the sheer complexity involved terrifies me, as well as the potential risks and near-on full-time graft it implies, but it was last night’s programme on corporate tax avoidance that really put me off. The tax legislation supported by this government makes it almost impossible to compete with multinationals who, no doubt will begin to embed themselves like a fungus in our area before too long, choking out smaller entrepreneurial spirits, and local enterprise. In the oncoming corporate dictatorship we live in, the unequal playing fields we are on as individuals astounds me, and it’s hard not to feel alienated when it feels there is such little room for maneuver for those who don’t neatly fit the corporate model.

It’s big business, too, which is infiltrating schools, as Doris and I discussed over tea, the malign influence of corporations undermining the autonomy of established local voices, and a franchise model rolling out a one size fits all model supplying McEducation, complete with Teflon uniform policies (by which I mean they are a rigid as they are inflammable) and stifling opposition as governing bodies and unions are legislated out of office. Sponsored academies, like the HSBC sponsored London Academy of Excellence, dubbed the Eton of the East for its links with private schools, but lacking the heritage and the funding enjoyed by more established institutions, perhaps only serves to rub the noses of its students in the armpit of privilege which, with the best will in the world, they will likely never inhabit without  the network that goes with it. In any case, it gives us another option for A-levels when some of the local school only run until 16, which perhaps speaks volumes about their own heritage and the ambitions they have had for their students in years gone by. But then, perhaps that says more about the way the community is changing here too.

The last thing I did today before I collapsed was to get a massage, offered, for free, by a local man on a community thread. This too speaks volumes about the local demographic. Of course, in the age of paranoia, I worried it might be creepy, or half-hearted, but this generous soul – a writer in his other life –  gave me a full hour and a half of unhurried, restorative bliss, a cup of green tea, and a better massage that I’ve ever paid for, so much so that I will attempt to pass on as much business – and fellow feeling his way, than had he brutally extracted a pound a minute for his troubles. If only we, and society, and the policymakers can see how the free market steals our soul, by making unpaid labour feel unvalued, and that generosity and goodwill can make oligarchs of us all.

But then, I guess it has brought prosperity to this corner of East London, and with it, greater aspirations than social deprivation, which is being priced out – or forced, some would say – can hope to achieve.