hey because I’m moving I decided I need to cut down on the masses of books I have – I cut down my books by about a third, which wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it would be. but what to do with them? well I tried to shift them at car boot sales but it seems my tastes don’t overlap much with the car boot buying public.

so do any of youz guys want them? If you shout up in the comments or email artiseasy(at)hotmail.co.uk we’ll figure out a way of getting them to you, that will probably involve you turning up to my ‘Goodbye Birmingham’ do in the Flapper on friday (27th).

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Drinking scotch straight out of the bottle can’t be a good sign, its been the same bottle now for a couple of weeks which means at least I’m not guzzling it down. But forgoing the glass and drinking straight from the bottle itself I suppose is not a milestone on a very dark path, but its a laminated notice put on one of the lampposts.

But actually maybe it is good for me I’ve been depressed now for roughly about six months, its not gone to the doctor depression, but I have that dangerous amount of little enough knowledge to put a few things together. Okay – I didn’t put it together THAT took losing someone. But I can see it now. The interesting thing about it is the signs that I missed, sleeping all the time, catching every tiny bug and cold like my immune system were doing nothing more than staying in its room listening to Smiths songs, and my utter lack of motivation to do anything. It sneaks up on you depression. Everything has another explanation, I sleep weird because I always have, I figured sleeping more was just me catching up on the sleep I lost in my twenties, the illnesses I put down to working with kids that are just as likely as to be exploring their nappies as scratching you with their fingernails, and the lack of motivation I put down to contentment.

I’m not seeing a Doctor yet, I’m exercising more, trying to eat right and swapping my life around so I have no time to sleep and watch stolen television. That is not to say anyone that suffers with depression should just ‘snap out of it’ or any other such bollocks. I’m just merely doing the simple things most good doctors would recommend before prescribing any medication. And frankly I would try being a bastard vegan before I give up the drinks.

The thing about my bad spell is that I wasn’t really drinking, I count that as part of the symptoms.

And so far it seems to be working. Blogging more is one of those things. So expect words. Unpolished, angry, and sometimes nonsense words, but words none the less.

What follows are a couple of competition entries that didn’t get anywhere. Although now I can only see their flaws, its nice to have them on record somewhere and while I’m still writing the book its the most you’re going to get on here.

The first one is a bit old, so reference’s Cheryl Cole.

Sticks and Mud

The eternal contradiction of pop culture is that no-one defends it but it sells, and sells big. Millions of people fall over to denounce Eastenders as depressing grey brain porridge with the wit and sophistication of a Punch and Judy show, but it’s run for 26 years and still keeps spinning its tawdry web of misery like an immortal cockney spider nihilist. He-man ran for a magnificent 130 episodes and shifted countless lunch boxes and action figures but if you try and engage someone in conversation about him they’ll look at you like you just rode in naked on a rainbow surfboard.

X-factor is an interesting case, although being the very epitome of pop culture and drawing the sneers of everyone who would rather watch an opera, in the delightfully orchestrated move to, and sacking from, the American version of the show Cheryl Cole has all the elements of a tragic hero the subject of countless operas and classical plays; her own hubris sown in the first act being her downfall in the third.

It’s not just the accent, I mean of course the accent was always going to be the problem. it’s a cartoon Geordie parody that bears as much relation to the real thing as Pirates of the Caribbean is a historical document about the shipping lanes of the 18th century. American TV has subtitles for accents of other Americans. How can you be expected to be respected on a panel of judges in a country where the highest chart position was as a guest vocalist on a will.I.am record?

But now they know her name so and she can take another run at the American charts. She can return here the fallen angel, a figure we crave in our headlines. And Simon can add another wing to his house.

And we loved every second of it, some of us actually invested in ‘Our Cheryl’, some whooping at the success of the pin slid into red headed gris gris dolls, and some loving feeling of superiority sneering at the whole affair. But all of us bound by the common story.

Pop culture is the shared experiences of the global village, in cave men days we would be able to sit round the same camp fire and tell stories about the time that guy fell in the mud, or the time Gurp found a particularly interesting stick that was larger than the other stick he found yesterday and we would bond over that.

Now we sit around different camp fires in massively different villages.

Our pop-cultural fragments are the fragile handholds we grab as we hurtle down the gravity well towards the future. They are the flags we use to signal to each other. They are the short-cuts we take to other people.

They are as important.
They are our sticks and mud.

The second is the most recent and looking back owes quite a lot to  Kurt Vonnegut.

IV Blue

Welcome to the Earth Ivy Blue, it’s cramped, wonderful, dirty, quick, and, if Mayans are to be believed, irretrievably doomed. but if we are all sucked into an eagle headed gods nostril in December then don’t feel too hard done by – your first year on the planet is generally spent sleeping, sucking on boobs, and shitting yourself indiscriminately; I only get to do that on the weekends.

First of all, sorry about the name. To be fair to your parents neither of them have a surname so they had to come up with something from scratch. Yes, it does sound like a second string Batman villain but you see, mommy and daddy are something we call “famous”. Which means they don’t really have to follow the same rules as most of the other people they share this planet with (also see: “rich” in the handbook). Just be happy that they didn’t go for the alliterative option, like poor Zowie Bowie or Rolan Bolan, the twee like Apple Paltrow or Fifi Trixabelle Geldof, or even the plain old bugshit mental route like poor Moon-Unit Zappa.

It’s a very special year to arrive, 2012 is the year of the London Olympics, which is kind of a very expensive sports day that the entire world is invited to. There’s going to be all sorts of running and jumping about and in the end everyone will go home with some nice medals and London can use the big buildings it built specially for the Olympics to let people without houses to sleep in, or turn them into giant Job Centres or something.

You will have to excuse us at the moment Ivy, we got a bit confused about our sums so a very small amount of people ended up with lots of money and the rest of them didn’t really get any. Now the people that got the money are keeping it and not playing with us anymore, which has got lots of people cross.

Not that you are ever going to have to worry about this though, because your Daddy helped develop one of the most progressive forms of music that came out of the twentieth century, and your mommy wiggles about and peddles a water thin version of something called ‘feminism’ which is the brilliant idea that people shouldn’t be made to feel bad because they don’t have a certain set of private bits. Anyway they have enough money to make sure you never have to meet any of the cross people and your private bits will be nobody’s business, unless you put them somewhere you shouldn’t, then for some reason it’s everybody’s business.

Please don’t worry too much about the Mayan thing. the Mayans never stuck around in any major way because they were too dumb to realise that over-farming the surrounding natural resources would have major ecological ramifications, luckily were smarter than that now. I think.

Just remember, being scared is normally worse than the thing you’re scared of, you should only stroke most animals one way, and people are, generally, nice. The rest you’ll have a lot of fun figuring it out for yourself.

Coming out as a RHCP fan isn’t going to win me any favours with the bleedin’ edge crowd, saying you like a stadium rock band pegs you as out of touch, or the worst crime of all; being old.

When I was a teenager I fell in with a bad crowd, that’s not to say I was particularly good to begin with or they were particularly bad, we were the cliché misfits you find everywhere but still manage to isolate themselves. They say you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, but I really don’t think you get that much say in your friends – the whole school process is a giant filter shifting out the different grains of dysfunction, the others caught in your trap are ipso facto your friends, like it or not. We burnt a few bibles, shoplifted whenever we could, had the odd joint, and sold home-made wine to the first years, you know, normal kid stuff.

I Don’t remember how but I found Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and loved it. All my friends were listening to the theatrical anger of Metallica and rehearsed pain of Guns & Roses, RHCP offered something different, a model of masculinity that could be sexy without being overwrought and silly without the sneer. My friends didn’t like it and it took a small leap of confidence, a dwindling resource during my teenage years, to say they were wrong and carry on listening to them anyway. It wasn’t a big split but it was enough.

In the space of five years the odd joint turned into speed, the hubris of youth and being part of that tight circle carried me along with it. Looking back we threw ourselves down that path not unaware of the danger but hard for it, smart enough to know that drugs we’re not an instant death sentence like we’d been told, but dumb enough not to know there’s a grain of truth in even the most restrictive lies. When that speed stopped working like it used to, this was back in the mid nineties when you could find decent speed too, the next step was to inject it. I remember dirty mattresses in council flats and defiant punk slogans written on the walls. it was only that candle flame of difference that allowed me to step back. When the speed turned into heroin, I was watching from afar. And when all my friends were gone, mad, in prison, left the city, and, sadly in the case of one, dead, I was alive but alone.

Now I hate to agree with the hipsters and music snobs, but its true that RHCP hasn’t made a decent album since 2002 and, nostalgia aside, I wasn’t looking forward to their recent gig at the MEN which my girlfriend had scored free tickets too. It was only to stop the fourteen year old that lives in my brain from throwing a migraine and the promise of box seats (which never happened) that made the journey to Manchester at all inviting. But it was everything I could have wanted.

After a career of struggling with his voice Kedis finally seems comfortable with being a singer and his frenetic showmanship even made the Emo Hitler haircut work. Chad beat the drums so hard he broke at least three sticks per song and smiled his big American shit eating grin between songs. The new guy, Josh Klinghoffer, showed real chops making the solos his own with a laid back fuzz style somewhere between Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix. And Flea just being Flea, bouncing around the stage like the herald of the Weird Funk Love Army as it Marches triumphant home from the Vibe Wars of 2079.

What I also didn’t expect is to hear songs from ALL their albums, even the early ones. Their policy was described by Flea as ‘one fish, two fish, old song, new song’ but it was more like two or three earlier songs too one off the new album. Not that that was a bad thing, the songs off the new album, I’m With You, sounded much better live, they made sense and worked, unlike the album itself which even now, after the gig, sounds a little flat.

Despite myself, when the simple clear notes of the introduction from Under The Bridge rang out into the crowd, it all came back, the loss, the bad decisions, the sheer waste of essentially kids too smart to be lullabied by a system who’s end game was factory jobs and pregnancy. But too dumb to reach beyond petty rebellion and self destruction. The jumbled second hand hippie philosophies offered by RHCP had give me the chaos theories butterfly wing flap which in my case had diverted the typhoon.

I don’t know if this tour is the final muster, like the last hard-on of a dying man, or the start of a new phase of the RHCP’s career, maybe one where they start not to take themselves so seriously again and produce an album that doesn’t contain mostly filler. But I’m glad I went, not only did I get to see a seminal band perform the songs that mean so much to me. But I finally got proved right, that small difference that saved my life didn’t seem that small, and the life it saved seemed worth saving.

There’s going to be lots of blog posts, editorials and god knows there’s been enough Twitter activity about the recent riots. And god also knows, because he knows everything*, you won’t agree with most of it.

Twitter is the strongest example of this, mostly because its 140 character limit makes everything sound like a clumsy aphorisms or rallying calls from Dickhead Island.

I don’t think that this glut of words come from anyone claiming to have any answers, or even any real strong arguments either way. The reason why there will be a lot of people writing is that is how most people think. Writing forces you to reach into the brain soup and pull out the mixture of vague ideas, feelings and images things that will make sense to others, and often as a result, yourself.

What I’m saying is: I don’t have the answers. Its gone three in the morning, and I’m sitting out of my window watching the lights of the city in the distance, trying to make out the sound of sirens. If you don’t agree with the things I write here I’m not interested in an argument. Partly because I’ve lost a lot of respect for some people over the last few days and gain a lot more for others, and partly because these are notes, a man trying to find himself a way out of a maze of smoke using words as his bread crumbs back to normality.

First of all I want to make it very clear that I condemn the riots in the strongest possible terms. I’m looking to find the cause rather than excuse the behaviour. And if you can’t see a difference then I probably wouldn’t carry on reading.

One criticism of the rioters is there lack of agenda, or the agenda being shallow. That theft and malice are enough to get people into the streets. This bothers me, does there have to be a coherent agenda and organised thought for there to be a message?

We’ve scoffed at anyone interviewed because of the inarticulate way they’ve expressed themselves rather than ask why they can’t. Marshall McLuhan pointed out ‘the medium is the message’ Rioting is a primal scream, guttural and clumsy but undeniably loud. So what are we being told?

Riots are about anger, fire being man’s most natural extension of his rage, violence following anger like smoke follows the flames. We must ask ourselves ‘why are people angry?’

Riots are about control, normal rules suspended and briefly in some patches, mob rule and empowerment over the very people who’s status over you is something you’re aware of everyday. We have to ask ‘why do people feel powerless?’

And yes riots are about looting, a easy answer leapt upon like the lame gazelle by most commentators to explain it all in one dismissive pounce. Instantly demonising everyone involved as ‘greedy’ thus providing the an answer which leaves no one complicit, especially not them. But why are our generation rioters looting so much? Why is greed higher on this generations agenda than any other?

Could it be that given no prospects to advance the only way perceived way to improve your status is through material goods? It’s a generation raised fluent in the idea of themselves as a perceived brand than supported to grow spiritually or emotionally. I’ve seen this idea of brand of self override self-preservation, common decency and in a few case’s basic human empathy – the idea that you can’t be seen to weaken, concede to save face.

Nike tells them to ‘just do it’ but none tells them how or even what ‘it’ is.

In a society where people can only articulate themselves with violence, education has failed. In a system where the police use fear and ignorance instead of respect and communication then our state has failed. And anywhere where we only start having these sorts of conversations is after violent protest then democracy itself has failed.

Of course spending two years at the sharp end of our educational system in the most deprived and violent catchment areas in Birmingham will colour my thinking somewhat. So if you must dismiss me on the grounds of my hand wringing leftism please don’t think its because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

*except how to stop his representatives from diddling kids.

This is a series of blog posts sponsored by generous contributors who helped cover my renewal costs for this site. Next up is Mike Cummins (@mikelc).

An Artist’s Life is his Art (Art capital ‘A’ always capital fucking A), everything they do will have the itch in the back of their head, that drive to create, to express, to communicate. And when not directly creating an artist should be collecting: images, smells, experiences, sailing to the edges of normality so the tales they can tell are are not necessarily bigger or better but have a wider context.

Its an artist’s job to live life at the opposite end of the spectrum – consensus reality is a middle ground, so if enough of us live fabulously enough we can drag the whole world into the bizarre and beautiful.

Capitalism works because it can make us crave the next thing, the next shrink wrapped, focus grouped, polished ‘thing’ it can shit out. Being an artist should be revolutionary because creating makes you apart from that system, and shame on the artist that swims in that sea of shit, believing the reviews of the financially invested in their success, becoming a ‘brand’ and being tainted by the soulless money hungry zombies the capitalist machine holds up as heroes.

Artists are shaman unfettered from the responsibility of conforming to the rest of the tribe. It’s his job to heal your soul, bring insight from the beyond and walk the path of excess with a big fucking stick to loot that palace of wisdom bringing back the treasures for all.

An artist thinks the unthunk thoughts, drinks the weirdest thing in the bar, talks to the pariahs, steps on the cracks not giving two fucks about his mothers’ backs and they always open the doors marked ‘private’.

This won’t make you famous, fuck fame anyway. Fame is a tawdry empty thing chased by airheads and the untalented. And what does fame get you anyway? hour an hour hash tag on twitter with people making the same joke about whatever the media decided what your catchphrase was? fuck that, fuck them, and fuck the three seconds it takes someone to type ‘RIP’.

If work is your focus and your life an example you’ll change the people and thus the whole fucking world. Living free won’t make you famous it’ll make you something better, it’ll make you notorious.

if you are guided by your inner artist, that spark inside that try take make you go swimming at midnight or get on the roof and dance, then you don’t have to worry about morality. Picasso was a leather skinned sex addict, Dali an egotard and Pollock a degenerate drinker, these were not good men by any description. They were great men.

An artist’s life, ultimately, is the only currency they will ever value. and should be spent chasing the art that their heart needs them to create.

So I’m going to be travelling to all the working piers in England and Wales in two weeks. A round trip of 2,035 miles. I know. My mom’s first reaction was “Jesus Christ Danny, you’re wasting your life” but I see it as quite the opposite. I intend to write a book based on the experience. Look here.

The book will be co-written by Jon Bounds and the narrative will be split between me and Jon, both accounts probably varying wildly but giving the reader a better idea of what actually went on. Finding The Truth by triangulating different reference point on the same map.

The third person, ingredient X in our mad brew, who will not have a voice in the book but will be keeping his own account of the journey is Midge Diabloik. Midge is a Birmingham feature, a spirit loci of our alternative scene. We ambushed him at a barbecue with promises of fame and Monster Munch.

Now this mixture normally gets on in a social environment, but I worry about the trip. And, of course, as much as I worry, I also know that a little tension will actually make the book a lot more interesting than ‘I went to the seaside, it was nice’.

You see I come from a background of hedge magic and chaos dabbling and one of the overwhelming legacies of this is the tendency to see the overlaying symbolic and resonance with the old myths, reoccurring archetypes, and superstitions of the past.

Please don’t let that put off the hard line sceptics that, amusingly cult like, have sprung up everywhere and are asserting themselves everywhere at the moment. I just think that the brain works using layers of symbols and stories, by playing with these we can bring about new ways of thinking. And like it or not the ways we think influence the world.

Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water were probably first identified as the elements by the Babylonians in the ancient world, and survived via the Egyptians and into Classical thought; right into the terrible cartoon Captain Planet where the idea died. Now this idea could be dismissed as hopelessly reductionist and outdated, I would argue that its useful because of its reductionist model.

Group dynamics are complicated and nuanced, by reducing them down into four different parts we can at least have a model of how to begin to understand the relationships and roles, and set our foots down a broad path of cohesion.

The best example of The four classical elements relating to group dynamics is The A-Team. Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith is the leader so naturally the Fire of the group, he’s the instigator, the catalyst of change and the most dynamic of the group. People associated with the Fire element often are portrayed as bad tempered and stubborn something that Hannibal is defiantly shown as. The rest of the team often refer to Hannibal as ‘being on the jazz’ meaning exactly that. And while its worth noting that in the film version Hannibal is shown as a master tactician displaying many of the elements of Water, in the TV series nearly all of his ‘plans’ involve a full frontal assault, which show more of the impatience and drive best represented by fire, than anything else.

Water is Lieutenant Templeton ‘Face’ Pek, mercurial and laid back, able to fill and role given to him. Face is the one with the deepest emotion life of all the characters often having relationships and life outside of the narrative.

Master Sergeant Bosco Albert ‘B.A.’ Baracus is Earth, practical and grounded, his concerns are real world logistics and transport. He makes the fanciful ideas and drive of the others a reality, normally once and episode he would be welding something or unscrewing nuts with meaty gold laden fingers. Even his fearsome prowess and ‘bad attitude’ are used more than a reliable resource than unpredictable personality elements. His penchant for gold can even be viewed in as an affinity to a base mineral and concern with physical resource.

Finally Air best exemplified by someone who is changeable and flighty, concerned with ideas and concepts. In The A-Team cleverly turned into the worst that this type of personalty can offer a unpredictable emotionally damaged Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock, who out, technically, outranks Face but can never be relied upon for leadership. Both figuratively and literally the character of Murdock has his head in the clouds and in this model predictably clashes with the Earth sign, B.A.

None of these are set in stone, Hannibal could be argued as the water sign (he is after all a ‘master of disguise’, but lets be honest his disguise were terrible). The the way Murdoch’s madness represented itself was a rotating cast of personalities, which could be Water, but B.A’s temper could be also interpreted as overwhelmingly Fire which would still make the clash between them cromulent.

It doesn’t really matter about the interpretation, its using the model as an insight into the group dynamics.

But what does this say about the trip? for a start there’s three of of us. I suppose one constant in the trip is the sea, so maybe the role of water could be argued to be taken up with actual water. As Midge will be driving and mostly sober, lets call him Earth, it’s a good fit especially when you consider that he studied Physics at university. The thing that bothers me is what role do I take? Naturally I suppose I would gravitate towards Air, intellectual, communicative, social and helpful. But then who or what is Fire? Jon won’t mind me saying that he certainly won’t be.

Or maybe, as usual, I’m thinking too much. That while this model is good for understanding relationships that already exist, it’s pointless trying to plan using using them because nobody really knows how the chaotic human personality will react.

It’ll be bloody interesting finding out though.

We need a little help in getting the project together, please visit our Crowdfunder page for how you can contribute and spread the link far and wide so we can reach as far out of our network we possibly can.

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This is more or less how it goes. I’m approached by Fused to write something for the Independent Issue of there listing magazine Area, which is out now by the way and looks fantastic. This is not unusual, I have written for them quite a bit and am happy do so.

So I drink in all the independent pubs in Birmingham in one day, getting hammered in the name of Truth (capital T). I was joined by Jon Bounds my good friend and co-editor of Dirty Bristow and we decided to do a joint but alternating perspective on the day. Unfortunately while in the process of turning my weird drunk scrawl into human text I had amassed over four thousand words or so with Jon clocking up about the same.

Now Fused put up with a lot from me, but an eight thousand word article is a little heavy to go in the magazine. So me and Jon decided to print it as an e-book and release it into the wild for free.

To put it on Amazon, we had to charge, so we set it for the lowest price we could. A side effect of this is that on its listings it tells you where you are on the various charts. And a side effect of that is that I was checking it at a boringly regular interval. I’m not really competitive per say, but I can have egotard tendencies.

Then a really strange thing happened, it started going up the charts. And up, and up. It peaked at not only Number 12 in the Kindle Travelogues and travel essays, But 29 in the Amazon Travelogues and Travel Essays Bestsellers Chart.

Don’t believe me?

look, there we are, betwixt the Danny Wallaces as it were.

Now I know there’s probably a million reasons why it got up there, and yes I know the category isn’t particularly hard fought, and no, I won’t let Jon tell me how little we’ve actually sold/downloaded.

Because, for a few minutes, I was a bestselling author.

you can get your copy of the book here 

But to be honest the reason we released the book in the first place was to encorage people to buy issue two of the magazine and more importantly get people to buy tickets to the launch event

You can buy the tickets here.

this is a series of blog posts sponsored by generous contributors who helped cover my renewal costs for this site. Next up is Rob Wickings (@Conojito) who I hope doesn’t mind me talking about Buddhism badly for  a little bit.

Bliss

The human race is a marvellous mould, a creeping infection that can spread and exist anywhere and everywhere. And we, as part of that mould, have individually the characteristics of it. We adapt, we spread out our consciousness to fill the space we allow for it, and normalise any experience until even the most extreme conditions become background.

Our human brains adapt, given any harsh environment or background agony we accept and weave it into the containing narrative of our existence. It’s one of our biggest strengths but its also why eternal states of bliss promised by most of the world religions must be bullshit. We simply can’t do it, if in an eternal state of ecstasy we would simply recalibrate our mind settings and the ecstasy would become normal. We can only handle small moments of joy, bliss nuggets embedded in an overall malaise of human experience.

By this rational these moments are rare, so for a truly happier, more blissful life me must become adept in, not seeking these moments out, but recognising them when we have them. So these are some of my moments of bliss.

• A really enthusiastic excited dog licking your face and you being too paralysed with laughter to stop it.
• The texture of the tiny bit of denim you’re chewing between your teeth.
• The shock of how salty the sea is the first time you swim in it after a while away.
• The feeling of a big comfortable hoodie after being wet and cold.
• cinnamon flavoured anything.
• when your dad drove over a hill or bump too fast and your stomach flipped over.
• ice cold beer.
• Shuffling a new deck of cards
• the dust in the bottom of a packet of Spicy Trans-form-a-snacks
• being in a tent when its raining.

I like Buddhism its one of the few religions that I can get behind and would probably take up if it didn’t require so much discipline and allowed me to eat all the meat. One of the concepts stolen from Buddhism by rabid self help jerks and new age wankers, watered down and spunked into the idiot public’s ever eager face is the practise of ‘mindfulness’. And while New Ager Baby Boomers can take a short yogic leap off a big fucking cliff, Mindfulness is perhaps one of the most pleasing exercises to do and should be taught in schools.

Mindfulness is when you become so conscious and aware of the moment, by just reflecting on and allowing the tiniest sensory feedback to encompass your experience of the world that all thoughts, desires and worries of events both future and past just recede. its like not just eating a sandwich, but really eating a fucking sandwich. These moments are bliss.

I suck at surfing, but took a surfing tour anyway. Yes every night we ate barbecue and drank and partied and howled at the moon. But every morning as fresh as a daisy in the cold pre dawn we would be in the car park putting on the wet-suit and trying to remember which parts of this particular beach were deadly. As I said, I sucked, but part of surfing is waiting. You sit on the surfboard and wait for a wave to paddle into. You can’t just paddle after all of them, you have to wait till its right. You can spend what feels like hour communing with the sea trying to guess its every ebb. And after while it’s like watching the world breathe.

That to me was bliss.

this is a series of blog posts sponsored by generous contributors who helped cover my renewal costs for this site. First up is Ben Waddington (@falsedog) who’s subject ‘take people as you find them’ had me stumped for a while

Take People As You Find Them

My Nan was very proud that she took people as she found them, she often said this, when questioned, about the bikers she knew. My Granddad used to say things like ‘Nick Knack Noo’ and randomly shouted ‘HEY – ty two AND a quarter’. So you can see why I favoured Nan.

My Nan and Mom both worked at the arcade in Rednal that was locally known as ‘The Doss’ or ‘the copper coin’ after the six foot in diameter back lit penny sign.  This for many years was a biker hangout. The fact I grew up around bikers, flashing lights and repetitive noises actually will explain a lot about my attention span and general attitude to those that know me.

These days its no real surprise that bikers in this country aren’t the violent sociopaths that populate the American and Australian gangs. Most a decent working men with families. Of course that’s not to say they’re all angels, I mean they are groups of testosterone driven males with reputations to uphold and fondness for chains.

But back then there was still a stigma attached to the bikers and many people wouldn’t look past their appearance. Many people didn’t know for instance that the MAG rally from the Lickey Hills that still goes on to this day, is not just a protest against the helmet laws, but is also a massive fund raising event for local children’s charities. I still remember scores of men of all shades of leather and hair on bikes, I remember the smell of exhaust as hundreds of chrome and rubber monsters rode past. My nan never made any judgements about these guys, they looked after her and she still tells story of the one biker running in front of moving traffic to grab a small child that had wandered away from his parents into the busy road.

I’ve got to admit that I still have trouble understanding ‘take people as you find them’. I used to work with kids that had been expelled from school, often from underprivileged background and with criminal records. I would often find these guys to be rude, obnoxious, and downright aggressive. If we at the centre had carried on expecting this standard of behaviour this is exactly what we would have got. So we expected more and often got it.

But there’s another meaning, these kids I worked with did have scary reputation and the files we were allowed to read were horrible. But I made a decision early on to to be polite to the kids that were polite to me regardless of their past transgressions (‘transgressions’ being a nice term for ‘holding a knife to a stranger’). This often paid off.

Those kids were a lot like the Bikers, exiled from the mainstream with only half deserved reputations. And in both instances it’s not so much about them, its about you and the bullshit you bring to any relationship you have. Not too drag the best out of people but give them the room to impress you. And most importantly treat people how they treat you.