Chapter Ten: How I Came To Be A Pilgrim

At 15 I was on an orienteering exercise organised by the Air Training Corps. We had to find our way by maps and compasses along the Pilgrim's Way near Guildford and Dorking in Surrey.
The day chosen for the exercise was one of the rainiest days I've ever seen. The sky was the colour of battleships in anger and the trackway was a mudslide throughout the whole journey. The gods threw lightning bolts and giant buckets of slop at us and we slid down gullies and squelched up slippery slopes.

This is the opening paragraph of the latest chapter, Chapter Ten, from my book 'How I Came To Be' which I'm publishing online under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence. Each new chapter will be posted as a blog so you can read it as I'm writing it.

The link for the main page is:

http://how-i-came-to-be.blogspot.com/

and the link for this chapter is:

http://how-i-came-to-be.blogspot.com/2009/09/chapter-ten-how-i-came-to-be-pilgrim.html

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

One of my favourite satirical science fiction stories of all time can now be embedded on a webpage thanks to issuu.com:

This story always speaks directly to my feelings about having an unusually high IQ and working in a job which could just as easily be done by a trained chimpanzee. One of the places where I worked they used to play the mindless middle-of-the-road pop music station in all departments to prevent anyone from having an original thought. Thanks a lot Lord Sainsbury.

Open publication - Free publishing - More short story

Thinking About Freedom

Lyrics which refuse to be hushed up.

Earth Tesseract

The latest little video:

Winona Ryder

This is my excursion into the realms of making desktop wallpapers. Free for downloading and decorating your computer desktop.

It Seemed As Though Something

This is a mixture of real painting with conventional materials and a digital collage treatment of the work:

A Comedy Mix

Weapon of Choice

And now my favourite pop video from the 1990s: Christopher Walken, Spike Jonze, Fatboy Slim: 'Weapon of Choice' (Ok it's Not from the 90s):

I've been having loads of fun with Photofunia. At some stage I should get back to making my own art, but at the moment I've enjoyed making these images to flatter my ego with:

My Favourite Video - Billy Ocean

This my favourite pop video of the 80s. 'When the Going Gets Tough' by Billy Ocean. I love this video because it has Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito as backing singers. Look at their choreography!

At Drama School in the 1980s

Hiding out in drama school in London. Trying to survive through Thatcher's decade of mass unemployment.

At Art School in the 1990s

Japanese Greatness

Here's another mix I put together. This one celebrating the greatness of Japanese rock and jazz.

British Jazz

British Weather is the Worst

This is a collection of music by British artists who were successful in the British pop charts back in the days when virtually no-one had heard of The Beatles yet:

Police Brutality

I work for the local city council in a minimum wage job. A few months ago, as I was on my way home from work I was beaten up and pinned to the ground by two men.

I'm an old man with grey hair. I get up early in the morning and cycle to work. I then do a physically exhausting job for eight and a half hours and then make my weary way home.

I was walking along, very, very tired, dressed in yellow waterproof city council issue high visibility clothing and wheeling my bicycle along by my side. Suddenly the first of the two men hit me from behind and began pushing me. Then the second man came up from in front of me and gripped me tightly, pinning my arms. The two men sandwiched me between them, the one behind pushing me violently forward while the one in front pushed me violently backward. Then they both pushed me down to the ground on top of my fallen bicycle. They didn't speak.

I shouted at the top of my voice to witnesses all along the street. I shouted over and over again for someone to dial 999 and call the police. The two men held me down to the ground, one of them sitting on me. One of the two men frantically shouted at the other one 'Shut him up! Shut him up! Can't you shut him up?' When it became clear that they couldn't shut me up and that witnesses were beginning to gather one of the two men owned up with the words 'We are the police.'

By this time a police vehicle was approaching. I asked the plainclothes man to provide some means of identification. He brought something out of his pocket, possibly a wallet or a card of some kind, waved it in front of my face and then put it back in his pocket. I asked to be allowed to actually read what was on it, to see if it was an ID or not. The officer refused with the words 'Nope, that's all you're getting'.

I was then handcuffed. I was cautioned that I did not have to say anything. At no time was I informed that I was being arrested. I was then searched. My backpack was searched 3 times, by 3 different officers, while still attached to my back and while I was handcuffed, so that I was not able to observe the conduct of the searches. I was asked if could describe the contents of the backpack, to which I replied that, since the 3 searches had all taken place behind my back and outside of my field of vision I had no way of knowing what was now in the bag. The 3 officers who had searched the bag had had every opportunity to take out of or put into the bag any item they wished and I would not have been able to see.

I was then told by a uniformed officer repeatedly to 'relax'. I reminded the officer who said this that it was an extremely stupid word to use when speaking to a member of the public who was in the process of being assaulted by police officers. Obviously to 'relax' in such a situation would be both impossible and undesirable. I was made to stand there handcuffed for a long time and then eventually released without charge. The plainclothes officers who committed the assault made no apology. One of them eventually identified himself while the other one declined.

Towards the end of the ordeal I overheard one of the police officers say to his colleague that the chap they actually wanted wasn't me at all but a man in a white anorak who had just been spotted again, further along the street.

I didn't have video making making equipment with me while these events were taking place but here, instead, is a video from the Guardian newspaper to illustrate the level of disrespect toward the public currently being practised by the British police:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jun/21/fit-watch-kingsnorth-arrests

OR:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/21/kingsnorth-protester-arrests-video-complaint