When a nation gets rid of most of its traditional manufacturing base and the skilled and semi-skilled men and women who worked in it become re-employed in jobs that border on what may best be described as pathetic and semi-infantile low grade occupations such as call centre skivvies, supermarket shelf stackers, shop workers, the so called security industry, including bailiffs, for which read generalised thuggery, along with such challenging activities as ‘heritage’, cleaning, town hall and office clerical, the latter meaning rude jumped up little shits, you know a society is going down the drain fast. Most of the people who take these jobs are employed on a contract basis. They’ve lost most of whatever self-respect they once had and now have little respect for others.
Alongside these fast growing millions are a class of semi-skilled wastrels chief among whom are footballers, high level financial services jack the lads, media jerk offs and the political-civil service mob from town hall executives to parliamentarians. These are highly paid wastrels generally of low level intelligence and a mighty capacity for arrogantly putting themselves about as something they’re not. It is right, in a way, that these creepy crawlies should generally receive astronomical salaries and enjoy the sweetest life styles in a land now given over to appearance without substance, form without content and expression without quality. A place where you can create an impression, become a celebrity, be hailed as someone of economic importance when actually the worth of everything you do and everything you are is a media manipulated fantasy. These people have had all their worth made up for them or they’ve made it up for themselves. In short they’re confidence tricksters operating in a confidence tricksters’ economy.
This post is for these people who will well understand the idea of making it up as you go along because that’s exactly what street market traders spend a lot of their time doing. For me, especially, selling crystals and minerals, making up stuff as I go along and not giving a shit because no-one is any the wiser, is the stock in trade of daily life. It’s like politicians strutting their stuff! Most of what comes out of their mouths are calculated lies but they don’t care and quite frankly, why should they? They’re part of an established political framework you can’t get rid of. They don’t even have to keep their noses clean anymore.
It’s a bit like England football team managers. Football used to be a game of working class entertainment until someone realised that the working class could easily be lied to and fooled into accepting any old rubbish so they turned the game into an industry and support for the national team a matter of patriotism. Recent managers took as much as they could for doing as little as possible and laughed all the way to the bank, justifiably treating supporters with utter contempt because they couldn’t see any further than the back page of a Murdoch. Look at it like this. If England score a great victory against, say, some team from a Pacific Islands atoll or Albania, our guys get a bonus of what a nurse earns in ten years. If they beat us, on the other hand, they get a bag of coconuts or a sack of pitta breads.
So Crystal Cobblers is a post written for all you pathetic high earning wastrels out there. It’s not for science researchers, educators, firemen and nurses, anyone who really cares about their fellow human beings and wants to make a difference. Neither is it for people on low pay who slog their guts out in the National Health Service helping the sick and the tired, nor for those who care for the old or for human beings who feel despair. It’s for people who know how to talk themselves up and elevate the value of what they do in society to ludicrous proportions.
Street traders need to know how to talk. Talk about the things they are selling. If they’re ornaments, make them look better than what they actually are. Words, after all, help create appearance. Clever description can change the appearance of things. It’s called advertising and there’s a whole industry doing the business. Through description, politicians can change the appearance of their policies! Tart them up from damnable lies to digestible possibilities. Can you think of any involving the Liberal Democrats I wonder? Now there’s a really tough challenge!
Street traders know all about it. Talking cobblers is a way of life. Street traders, especially the craft mob, are practiced masters at it. Crystal Cobblers therefore isn’t a post about making high end shoes for footballers wives, it’s about strutting your gear and making it up as you go along. Take Madagascan rose quartz for example. It’s more translucent, more vitreous, with a far more beautiful rose lustre than the stuff from Brazil. Its major selling point however is a piece of pure cobblers that I made up i.e. that it contains the radioactive trace element bismuth and if you touch the area of your skin along your fingernails with it you’ll feel a tingling sensation! I let people try it out for themselves and they always confirm that it’s true. But whether Madagascan rosy has actually got any bismuth in it who the fuck knows? It’s all made up. Just another wonderful tale from the world of Crystal Cobblers.
But then there’s more than one species of Cobblers! There’s the stuff you make up as you go along. The lying bullshit variety. Then there’s what may best be described as Establishment Cobblers. The respectable bullshit kind. In the healing racket they can be names and words culled out of other subjects and appropriated by the fraternity to become part of a language, crystal cobblers speak! Words such as tantric and shakra, straight out of Hindu philosophy bullshit. Then there’s quantum, describing changes of energy levels of electrons in physics but now used to describe changes of psychic energy levels emanating from quartzes that assist in healing. Likewise there are minerals that have become incorporated in legend with magical healing properties like green apophyllite, mordovite and sugilite. Give any mineral on your table that name, whether it is or it isn’t and the price goes up fifty fold!
It’s a bit like credit rating agencies downgrading a country. Stick in a minus here, take away a plus there and the cost of borrowing goes up a percent. The international money lenders, they’re called money market traders these days, charge a country more for their loans and somehow it’s got to be paid by the Government. No problem, they just socialise the debt. Slash retirement pensions, make people work longer, create another three or four million unemployed, increase their taxes, take away benefits for the poor and the unemployed and make it impossible for students from working class backgrounds to have their dream and go to university. None of these people really understand what’s being done to them but the credit rating agencies do. The guys who run them are exchanging prostitutes and call girls with the men on the money markets over prawn sandwiches while they’re fucking up Greece on the phone.
Talking it up! Talking it up! Giving a crisis a name so they can milk it for more. Give it a name and give it a spin. Try it out for size on Ireland and Portugal, Greece and Italy! Give it a spin… give it a name. Sugilite sounds good or how about quantum. There’s financial cobblers. People without faces or names giving whole countries a spin – forget about who’s living there! Then there’s home grown cobblers in London’s financial services sector where national and international inter-bank lending rates are decided. To operate it needs the right kind of people. People who know how to put on a front. Talk themselves up first before talking up a crisis. And what they say needs to sound right so it has to be said right! Whether it actually means anything is another matter. It needs above all to sound like THE RIGHT KIND OF COBBLERS so that everyone else locked into the verbal cycle of meaningless bullshit will understand it.
Talking cobblers to sell crystals and impress the impressionable with my knowledge of crystal healing is a similar process. If I don’t talk cobblers to the cognoscente they won’t understand me. I’ve got to talk to them in a way that’s understandable and the only thing that healing enthusiasts do understand and have an empathy for is cobblers. The minute I talk in their language there is an instant rapport between us. We are at one! I say all the right phrases and they know I am the real thing. That I am who I say. Our minds are joined. Therefore let not the marriage of true minds admit impediment such as price! Say the right name and up it goes a thousand percent. This is indeed the market finesse of Crystal Cobblers.
Forget about a stall on a street market. Just think about the operation of cobblers on the scale of an international financial market. Most of the market traders who work the City of London operate out of finance houses. I mean, if I wanted to set up a stall near the Bank of England flogging gem trees and crystals I’d need a licence from the City of London Corporation and sure, no chance that I’d get it, but if I set up a stall, say with crystals at the front and currency exchange rates or money lending rates on blackboards hung round the sides or up at the back it could very well be different. I might get a licence and instead of being moved on by the police and security thugs with pepper spray at the ready I’d get a welcome salute!
So you see, there are places for trading with their kind of cobblers and places for trading with mine. The real question to ask is this… Is there a place where the Essex boys and girls who work the City of London and Wapping, and the guys who sell fruit and veg, pots and pans, ornaments and crystals can meet? A kind of Cobblers Exchange if you will. After all, there’s a Metals Exchange, a Bullion Exchange and a Stock Exchange, so why can’t there be a Cobblers Exchange, some big freemasons’ hall where traders of all kinds can get together and talk unlimited cobblers to each other?
True, the City boys and girls already have that kind of thing in wine bars where they guzzle oysters and champagne after being busy creating extensive tax evasion schemes and pension rip offs, but then they’re only mixing among themselves and circulating the same old cobblers. What they really need is a dose of association with real jack the lads on the street. Come and hear our kind of cobblers about how we sell shit to the punters and you’ll go back to your offices with your ears buzzing! And with all you’ve been up to on the inter-bank lending market, the currency exchange and the bullion market ripping off half the world your nerves might need settling. If fact you might need some healing so come and listen to me. I’ll tell you how to relax and feel calm… I’ll help restore all your energies… Rebalance the yin and the yang of your psyche.
Let’s meet then at the Cobblers Exchange. I’ll talk crystal healing and maybe sell you a double termination and you can look into your crystal ball and tell me what Futures to invest in or recommend your personal accountant who as a friend of a friend has another close friend at the Inland Revenue. And then we can see that we’re not so very far apart after all because we basically all speak the same language. Whether its Crystal Cobblers or Financial Cobblers its all the same really.
There are no controls here at the Cobblers Exchange. You can say what you like then go back to your workplace and do it. It was set up by the Party with ethical values that held freedom to be the greatest goal for mankind. They were against all controls, all regulation. The Cobblers Exchange is the place of unlimited free market bullshit so Gordon, may I suggest some rose quartz. After everything you’ve done, I promise it will help you feel better.
If you've enjoyed reading this post and others in the series, why not try reading a novel I've written? It's a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I've been through it all.
My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch's book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK, refused to publish. You can download the Foreword on Amazon for free if you like, and if you want to read more it will cost just 99 cents or around 75 pence. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it.
The story has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message. About the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers in free speech but they're nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you'll understand why.
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Saturday, 24 March 2012
GLASTONBURY : FROG ON THE ROCKS
Apart from crystals, crystal pendants and slices of agate what other commodities do you think we sell in large numbers at the Glastonbury Festival? Could they be condoms, anti-vomiting agents, diarrhoea tablets or cigarette rolling papers? None of these but come to think of it they’re really worth considering if no-one else has got the licence. Okay, I’ll give you a clue. What’s the Festival famous for? Music? Well maybe. Drugs and filth? We’re getting closer but truth to tell it’s none of these. In the mind of the public Glastonbury is synonymous with mud. Heavy rain on the festival site end of June brings with it flooding, washed out tents and mud. The televised image of people wallowing in it, dancing in it and up to their elbows in it is only too typical. All that mud amid all that greenery! And what goes with mud and greenery, croak, croak, croak? Why it’s frogs!Our best selling items at the Glastonbury Festival are frogs on marble. Little resin made frogs with big blue eyes and broad red lips glued onto pieces of polished marble or granite are the perfect complement to the oceans of greeny-grey sludge that covers most of the festival site after three days of downpour. People just love them. There they are, dozens of them sitting on our table, singly, in pairs or even three together mounted on a single piece of rock looking up at the kids like irresistible talismen. Mud, mud, mud, croak, croak, croak! Sunday mornings we can’t sell them fast enough.
They come from the wholesaler in boxes of three, same as the other resin animals we sell such as rabbits, squirrels and tortoises. One large, two small to a box. Buy them by the gross and they’re cheap. Around twenty pence each. All the small singles, whatever the animal, sell at two-fifty. The large on their own are three. Two small ones together are four pounds, a large and a small, four-fifty. All together as a family group the price is five. Not bad for our customers, the discount always appreciated. Of all the animals we sell, however, frogs outstrip everything else by at least ten to one. Here the positioning of the frogs on the rocks gives real scope for the imagination! We can put two small frogs together side by side facing each other. Very cute! Alternatively we can mount a big frog right behind a little frog, the suggestiveness of which everyone knows at a glance making the posture very much in demand. Another popular display is all three together, the large frog in the middle with a juvenile on each side facing inward or outward.
Given the serious demand and the fact that the frogs are often purchased as symbolic gifts of the Festival and its muddy experience, a great selling point is to customise each of the pieces on request. That means mounting them on pieces of rock just large enough to be written on. An example of this can be Glastonbury 2000. Equally popular is to have the name of the giver, Glastonbury and the date i.e. from John Glastonbury 2010 or even For Mum Glastonbury 2011. Most frogs sold however are kept by their purchasers so Glastonbury and the date are the most common inscriptions.
Each product is heavy and fifty together in a box weigh a ton so transportation is crucial. After making each piece we put them into strong cardboard boxes like those used for carrying bananas. Two full layers one on top of the other separated by a sheet of cardboard. Mercifully these boxes come with a space cut into each short side of the rectangle making it easy for two people to lift so that three or four days before we leave for the Festival our camper van floor is loaded with four boxes each side of the bedding area with six additional behind the driver and passenger seats. A serious weight with all that granite and marble so we need to make sure of the tyres!
Once we arrive we offload the whole lot stacking them up back of the stall, maybe a dozen or so pieces on one of the tables at any one time, most of them being frogs. Yes there’s definitely something about them, all sitting there in a bunch waiting to go to good homes. Simply irresistible if you’re wearing Wellington boots two sizes too big and you’ve already been trudging in filthy deep mud. Even irresistible if there’s no mud at all! They just sit there, on pink Italian marble, polished Aberdeen red granite or Norwegian black larvikite, glaring up at customers through baleful angry blue eyes with jaw to jaw bright red lips all merry with an insouciant smile. However you look at them, face on or from the side, they have a strange sinister demeanour. Almost like they could come alive at any moment, hop onto your cheese sandwich and let go something nasty all over it. And with such charm going for them they sell in hundreds. We just can’t make enough. Everyone loves them to pieces.
I’ve got one sitting in front of me at the computer and boy does it look malevolent! Almost like it knows what I’m typing and doesn’t like it one bit. It wants some fucking royalties out of this post make no mistake and if there’s no slugs to hand it’ll piss all over the keyboard!
You’d better not try that one on you slimy bastard or you’ll go outside on the ledge. You can try hopping off that onto the railings below!
No, seriously, I didn’t mean it! These frogs have been very good to us over the years and are favourably thought of in the highest quarters at Barclays. I’ve even thought of sending one to Chief Executive, Bob Diamond to put on his desk. Hi Bob, thought you might like to see how I get rid of my overdraft. In fact, would it be possible for the bank to lend me half a million so we could set up a factory unit in China. With a billion Chinese we could do serious business!
And what do you know all you banking cynics? You should be ashamed of yourselves. A week ago I got a letter from Barclays Head Office. Dear Valued Customer, it began. I can’t tell you how tearful it made me feel when I read it. Me! A Valued Customer! You could almost cut the sincerity. It was like having a conversation with Nick Clegg! Why, just imagine me being a liberal democrat voter; I wear stripy hooped green and black woollen stockings, pink sandals and a floral dress with water vole motifs on it and I believe in human rights for bluebottles and guess what? Someone at party headquarters phoned me up and told me I was a valued supporter, and furthermore, if I was a banking executive no worries about my million pound bonus.
In this day and age it’s so nice being made to feel that banks and politicians really care about you. It makes you feel you can trust them with any money you’ve got!
Okay, the idea of a German Ruhr size frog gluing assembly line in China on the backburner let me return to Glastonbury where two hundred and fifty thousand potential frog lovers come to chill out. A new approach to selling our frogs recently came to mind and was shown to have definite mileage. Why not, we thought, liven up their character by giving them a national identity? If a French guy or girl came to the stall we’d call a frog Henri, for a German we’d call it Fritz and for Italians Berlusconi! Most of our frog clientele however was English, particularly guys with blond dreadlocks or girls with ripped stockings. That said we needed names that fitted the type. George was out and you could forget Charles and Camilla. We needed cool. We needed iconic. Rooney was good and so too was Elton, but even better was Oggie. The punters just loved Oggie the Froggie!
By Saturday night the boxes were emptying and Sundays were always a landslide. A bit of bubble wrap then into a carrier. Customers lining up though customising took time. Non-stop activity with a gold marker pen. Me flogging the animals, Louise working flat out on the crystals, pendants and trees. We sometimes brought helpers. Young people we knew and counted on being reliable. Plenty of time to go to gigs, free admission onto the site, free food and a decent day’s pay. Sometimes our generosity paid off but not always. More than once on a Sunday, when help was needed the most, they’d fail to show up. Wander in mid-afternoon after unscheduled time in a tent with the drag end of a spliff stuck in an earring.
By late Sunday most of the boxes were empty and the frogs gone to good homes along with rabbits and squirrels. The slowest sellers were always the tortoises. By Monday tortoises were down to a quid. Nobody wanted the fuckers. It took an Attenborough program on the Galapagos to get a few moving and often not even then!
Frogs are always popular, tortoises are not, but at Glastonbury frogs are seriously popular. Why is that? There’s a simple answer. Glastonbury people are froggie people. Frogs, one way or another are full of character. Tortoises aren’t! Frogs are a like it or lump it species of being and if you don’t like it fuck off! They’re opinionated. When they croak they’re probably saying up yours or go fuck yourself. Tortoises are like dipping a knife in water. They’re yes we agree with whatever you say types. They’re well we really haven’t got any opinion right now but if you let us think about it for a few months maybe we’ll give you a call. In the meantime put some more lettuce in the bowl and a few pieces of cabbage.
Frogs are purposeful, tortoises don’t have any ambition. Now saying this you might think that things should be the other way round. You know, Glastonbury types being laid back unwashed hippies with a going nowhere philosophy as maximum cool. But in that you’d be wrong. Glastonbury people are keen to convey that appearance but to stick it on them as a generalisation is a major mistake. They’re mighty purposeful about their likes and dislikes and they know what they want. The laid back image is only an image, a device to convey cool but actually they’re more often full of something one way or another. Whether it’s shit or sound common sense is a matter for debate.
Tortoises on the other hand are full of nothing. They lack character and they lack oomph. They’re definitely not get up and go types. Frogs on the other hand are. They’re we’re out of here characters. Don’t like it and they’re off, same as Glastonbury types. Our Glastonbury frogs are on the rocks all right but the people who buy them know they’re only sitting there for their own convenience. They’re on that bit of rock because it’s where they want to be. They’re free spirits really like the people who buy them. They can hop off or piss off whenever they fancy and because they and their purchasers are genuine free spirits they can both do their thing whenever they like. Buying a frog on marble means two free spirits getting together in a kind of art-deco alliance. We know, and so do the two billionaire Russian oligarchs who approached us recently to set up a frog manufacturing facility in Eastern Siberia. One of them we understand owns a football club somewhere in England.
If you've enjoyed reading this post and others in the series, why not try reading a novel I've written? It's a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I've been through it all.My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch's book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK, refused to publish. You can download the Foreword on Amazon for free if you like, and if you want to read more it will cost just 99 cents or around 75 pence. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it.
The story has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message. About the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers in free speech but they're nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you'll understand why.
Saturday, 10 March 2012
AMEYTHYST WAS VAN GOGH’S FAVOURITE CRYSTAL : BULLSHIT FOR THE COGNOSCENTI
Okay, now you’ve read the title of this posting you may be curious. Hmm that’s interesting. Amethyst, Van Gogh’s favourite crystal eh? Well I didn’t know that. It just goes to show… The older you get and the more postings you read, the more you learn. Sounds like a knowledgeable guy, this writer. I wonder how he got to hear that?
All right, I’ll let you into a secret. We were working a crystal healing festival in Amsterdam a little while back. There we were, all stalled up on the main market and business looking good. Our table well lit and our stuff bright and attractive. We had quite a crowd round us when suddenly this short guy with reddish hair pushes his way through to the front and asks in a funny mixture of French and Dutch about the price of an amethyst crystal pendant we had on display. Strange kind of fellow I thought but you know what it’s like. It takes all sorts and on markets we get them. Even so the bandage he had round his ear caught my attention. It had reddish blotches in places like he’d been bending over a bottle of ketchup and his eyes seemed a bit wild. You know how it is, you don’t want to say anything. After all, business is business, so I slowly told him in euros. His face though seemed strangely familiar like I’d seen it before but just couldn’t place it.
“Nice isn’t it,” I said, holding it up to one of the spotlights. “And not expensive either.”
He began muttering to someone nearby but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was Dutch anyway!
The other guy gave me a look and responded in English. “He says it’s his favourite crystal.”
I nodded. “Glad to hear it. It’s a really good pendant. Tell him I said I’m selling it cheap. Half the price it would be in London,” I added encouragingly.
The man relayed my message and the short stumpy fellow’s eyes kind of gleamed. Some words came jabbering out which then got relayed. “He says he likes it and that piece you’ve got on the table but hasn’t got any money. Maybe you can do a deal on one of his paintings.”
Paintings! It was then that it hit me. Those eyes of his! The red hair and the bandage! No, this was ridiculous. It just couldn’t be! I mean, meeting Van Gogh here on the market, right in front of my stall. Of all the incredible luck! Yes it was really Van Gogh. The great man himself wanting to buy his favourite crystal from me! I can’t tell you how thrilled I felt. What an honour it was. Even more than if it had been Elton John.
I won’t go on with the story. Tell you about what we arranged. I just wanted to reply to the question you raised about how I got to know that amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal. Let you into my little secret as it were.
Please, I know you’re already amazed, probably a bit envious really. I mean, here’s this market trader, and we all know what they’re like… Don’t know nothing about art. Don’t know much about anything really, and he of all people gets to meet him! I mean, I’ve got a print of his in my living room and this bastard’s on first name terms with the man. Some people get all the jam.
It’s true then isn’t it? About amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal?
Well how the fuck would I know. I’m only a market trader as you so rightly say. If you want to know whether amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal why don’t you plonk your arse down in a library and spend a year reading some books. Then maybe you’ll get the point of this blog. It isn’t about amethyst or Van Gogh at all. It’s about what market traders spend most of their time doing, and do better than anyone else. TALKING BULLSHIT!
Sorry, I forgot about my fellow jack the lads in the House of Commons. Especially the Liberal Democrat monkeys with the New Labour jerk-offs not far behind.
Bullshit let me tell you is a very special concept indeed. Think about it. It’s not exactly what you’d call lying but something qualitatively different. I mean there are lies and there are lies. For example like telling your best mate that Churchill was really a Chinaman or that all policemen are honest. The kind of thing that’s an absolute porker. Then there are little lies. Things that obscure or distort the truth. White lies in fact. A bit like looking at yourself in a fun-fare mirror and seeing something you’re not. Lies come in all shapes and sizes but bullshit is not quite the same. It’s something that hovers around truth without being close to it. It’s what may best be described as variant absurdity. Bullshit indeed, in the hands of a skilled market trader takes on the hallmark of the absurd.
A market trader may tell you something. Respond to a question or give you a fact. All according to what he believes to be true. Yet somehow you know that there’s something not right about it. A bit like one of his bunches of bananas you see hanging up. There’s nothing else like them on the planet and if you didn’t know what they were you’d think, how absurd, those yellow things hanging there! Bullshit is characterised by absurdity. Like the truth being stretched into something it’s not, something ridiculous. Those are its key elements. The things that stretch your belief. Some story or explanation that’s too absurd, too ridiculous to be believable. Or is it? That’s the real question!
Trouble is, the shit coming out of a bull’s arse is very believable. No mistaking what that is! Its bull shit all right so how did how did the word turn into a popular expression for something you might not believe? Well if you want another story like the one about amethyst and Van Gogh I’ll tell you, but some other time. Right now it would be more interesting sharing my thoughts with you about the stock in trade bullshit that comes out of market traders, particularly in my own line of crystal healing!
Crystal healing bullshit is a wonderful thing. For the cast iron cognoscenti, those for whom crystal healing is a deadly serious matter of learning and study, going on courses, getting diplomas and setting themselves up in business as healers, a market trader’s bullshit has to be highly refined. They come to you as alumni, priests of a faith so when the crap comes out of your mouth it’s got to have knobs on it. For the vast majority on the other hand, the enthusiasts, adepts and goggle-eyed deluded who make up the 99 per-cent balance i.e. the ones who really know jack and are into pretend, a trader’s bullshit can be as ridiculous and absurd as he cares to make it. Just so long as he makes it believable with a straight face and all the sincerity he can muster. These are people who want to believe just about anything so you don’t disappoint them.
Consider this. When you’ve given yourself over to the idea that bits of rock are able to affect your personal wellbeing it doesn’t take much of a Joseph Goebbels to get hold of your soul. To this great army of crystal camp followers then may be applied all the verbal black arts of bullshit. A veritable spectrum of hocus-pocus stretching from stuff that ‘rings true’ all the way across the colours of the ‘simply incredible’ till you reach the kingdom of ‘absolute codswallop’.
Okay now you’ve got the picture, tell me the truth. When you read the title about amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal a short while ago where did that piece of bullshit fit on the spectrum of believability inside you head? Tell the truth now! Did you reject it as absolute codswallop or did it somehow ring true? Come on! Be honest! And remember, I’m not Nick Clegg!
Fine. You’ve come so far with me in this post. Want to come a bit further? I mean I could tell you things here that I know are true but I also know you’d never believe. For example, like Osama Bin Laden was seriously into crystal healing, or that somewhere in the Bible you can find a passage in which crystal healing is specifically mentioned as something you are absolutely forbidden to do i.e. it comes with a genuine thou shalt not label. There again, we’ve all heard of the prophecies of Nostradamus, but did you know that one of them was that he foretold the coming of a great healer who with his message of the sharing of hands holding crystals, all our sins would be taken from us…
Okay, so which of the above do you think is bullshit? No, let me rephrase that question. Which of the above do you think is most likely to be a piece of absolute bullshit? Yes of course you’d say, it’s the thing about Bin Laden. Even though you’ve just read in the papers his brother said that before he died the world’s number one bad guy told him that he wanted his kids to grow up leading normal lives, go to college in America and become responsible citizens. You must have seen it. It was all over the papers! So given that it’s true, and Bin Laden’s brother isn’t full of bullshit himself, are you still saying that my story about Bin Laden being into crystal healing is more likely to be bullshit than the stuff in the Bible or Nostradamus?
Well maybe you are because we all know that the Bible’s got just about everything in it and that it’s just as likely you’ll find it something in Leviticus prohibiting crystal healing as you would about gay practices. The same goes for Nostradamus. The guy seems to have made so many prophesies that he’s got everything covered. In short, if you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, has got to be true i.e. that the guy with the beard really was into crystal healing!
But then come to think of it the idea’s so absurd that maybe it’s true after all. The Americans never revealed what they found on his body, did they? And the world never got to find out what Bin Laden’s favourite crystal was, did they? And why, why did they have to keep it a secret? If you search the Internet you’ll find a whole number of theories have already sprung up. One of them about a small group of Jewish trillionaires who meet secretly every month in a house shaped like a smoked salmon bagel five miles under the Pacific because it’s the only place they can control the prophetic power of Bin Laden’s favourite crystal and stop its power taking over the world!
And do you know what is so terrifying about the above piece of absolute bullshit? That there are probably just as many whackos out there ready to believe it as there are those who believe Martians killed President Kennedy! People actually want to believe bullshit. It’s an absolute waste of time telling crystal healing enthusiasts who come to my stall that quartz crystals do nothing for you. People simply want to believe and we all know why that is. It’s because you want to believe in something, in anything really!
So many of the traditional things people used to believe in have failed. God, religion, politicians…All the words that have traditionally come from these sources have received an increasingly sceptical audience. They’re all being increasingly regarded as bullshit whereas crystal healing, aromatherapy, conspiracy theory and other new faiths are being received by an increasingly receptive audience as being more likely to be true than not. Turning it the other way around, less likely to be the bullshit they actually are!
Right now we’re on the cusp of a credibility shift. There’s more and more conspiracy theory about today than you can ever imagine, like Princess Diana, John Lennon, Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin aren’t really dead at all but all living happily together on an island in the Caribbean! What I’m saying is that an increasing number of people today prefer to believe bullshit than they do actuality. Is this because their minds have become increasingly fragmented so they just don’t know who or what to believe anymore? It’s not hard to understand why. The breakdown of traditional beliefs on the one hand and people knowing they’ve been lied to on such a regular basis by those whom they’ve given their trust are prime candidates for sponsoring an opening chasm of disaffection.
Into the gap between old certainties and economical truths comes the steady march of bullshit. People just making it up as they go along like amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal or Bin Laden into healing. But then not every purveyor has to work on markets. Some come with loud voices and armbands.
People can have their favourite mineral or crystal. There’s no harm in that. We all have a sense of what’s beautiful. We can like things that are visually pleasing, just as long as we don’t turn them into whacky ideologies or faiths and believe that it’s good for our health. What is aesthetically pleasing like a painting or natural art form can be humanising, but that’s as far as it goes. Pleasure is one thing, personal health and wellbeing quite another.
So watch out. This posting comes with a warning. It asks you to stop listening to others and start thinking again for yourselves. Only if we think for ourselves can we avoid being swallowed up by bullshit and liars. Men with funny little moustaches who tell us to go out and murder.
Thinking for ourselves... That’s our guarantee of freedom from lies, half lies and bullshit!
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
All right, I’ll let you into a secret. We were working a crystal healing festival in Amsterdam a little while back. There we were, all stalled up on the main market and business looking good. Our table well lit and our stuff bright and attractive. We had quite a crowd round us when suddenly this short guy with reddish hair pushes his way through to the front and asks in a funny mixture of French and Dutch about the price of an amethyst crystal pendant we had on display. Strange kind of fellow I thought but you know what it’s like. It takes all sorts and on markets we get them. Even so the bandage he had round his ear caught my attention. It had reddish blotches in places like he’d been bending over a bottle of ketchup and his eyes seemed a bit wild. You know how it is, you don’t want to say anything. After all, business is business, so I slowly told him in euros. His face though seemed strangely familiar like I’d seen it before but just couldn’t place it.
“Nice isn’t it,” I said, holding it up to one of the spotlights. “And not expensive either.”
He began muttering to someone nearby but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was Dutch anyway!
The other guy gave me a look and responded in English. “He says it’s his favourite crystal.”
I nodded. “Glad to hear it. It’s a really good pendant. Tell him I said I’m selling it cheap. Half the price it would be in London,” I added encouragingly.
The man relayed my message and the short stumpy fellow’s eyes kind of gleamed. Some words came jabbering out which then got relayed. “He says he likes it and that piece you’ve got on the table but hasn’t got any money. Maybe you can do a deal on one of his paintings.”
Paintings! It was then that it hit me. Those eyes of his! The red hair and the bandage! No, this was ridiculous. It just couldn’t be! I mean, meeting Van Gogh here on the market, right in front of my stall. Of all the incredible luck! Yes it was really Van Gogh. The great man himself wanting to buy his favourite crystal from me! I can’t tell you how thrilled I felt. What an honour it was. Even more than if it had been Elton John.
I won’t go on with the story. Tell you about what we arranged. I just wanted to reply to the question you raised about how I got to know that amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal. Let you into my little secret as it were.
Please, I know you’re already amazed, probably a bit envious really. I mean, here’s this market trader, and we all know what they’re like… Don’t know nothing about art. Don’t know much about anything really, and he of all people gets to meet him! I mean, I’ve got a print of his in my living room and this bastard’s on first name terms with the man. Some people get all the jam.
It’s true then isn’t it? About amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal?
Well how the fuck would I know. I’m only a market trader as you so rightly say. If you want to know whether amethyst was Van Gogh’s favourite crystal why don’t you plonk your arse down in a library and spend a year reading some books. Then maybe you’ll get the point of this blog. It isn’t about amethyst or Van Gogh at all. It’s about what market traders spend most of their time doing, and do better than anyone else. TALKING BULLSHIT!
Sorry, I forgot about my fellow jack the lads in the House of Commons. Especially the Liberal Democrat monkeys with the New Labour jerk-offs not far behind.
Bullshit let me tell you is a very special concept indeed. Think about it. It’s not exactly what you’d call lying but something qualitatively different. I mean there are lies and there are lies. For example like telling your best mate that Churchill was really a Chinaman or that all policemen are honest. The kind of thing that’s an absolute porker. Then there are little lies. Things that obscure or distort the truth. White lies in fact. A bit like looking at yourself in a fun-fare mirror and seeing something you’re not. Lies come in all shapes and sizes but bullshit is not quite the same. It’s something that hovers around truth without being close to it. It’s what may best be described as variant absurdity. Bullshit indeed, in the hands of a skilled market trader takes on the hallmark of the absurd.
A market trader may tell you something. Respond to a question or give you a fact. All according to what he believes to be true. Yet somehow you know that there’s something not right about it. A bit like one of his bunches of bananas you see hanging up. There’s nothing else like them on the planet and if you didn’t know what they were you’d think, how absurd, those yellow things hanging there! Bullshit is characterised by absurdity. Like the truth being stretched into something it’s not, something ridiculous. Those are its key elements. The things that stretch your belief. Some story or explanation that’s too absurd, too ridiculous to be believable. Or is it? That’s the real question!
Trouble is, the shit coming out of a bull’s arse is very believable. No mistaking what that is! Its bull shit all right so how did how did the word turn into a popular expression for something you might not believe? Well if you want another story like the one about amethyst and Van Gogh I’ll tell you, but some other time. Right now it would be more interesting sharing my thoughts with you about the stock in trade bullshit that comes out of market traders, particularly in my own line of crystal healing!
Crystal healing bullshit is a wonderful thing. For the cast iron cognoscenti, those for whom crystal healing is a deadly serious matter of learning and study, going on courses, getting diplomas and setting themselves up in business as healers, a market trader’s bullshit has to be highly refined. They come to you as alumni, priests of a faith so when the crap comes out of your mouth it’s got to have knobs on it. For the vast majority on the other hand, the enthusiasts, adepts and goggle-eyed deluded who make up the 99 per-cent balance i.e. the ones who really know jack and are into pretend, a trader’s bullshit can be as ridiculous and absurd as he cares to make it. Just so long as he makes it believable with a straight face and all the sincerity he can muster. These are people who want to believe just about anything so you don’t disappoint them.
Consider this. When you’ve given yourself over to the idea that bits of rock are able to affect your personal wellbeing it doesn’t take much of a Joseph Goebbels to get hold of your soul. To this great army of crystal camp followers then may be applied all the verbal black arts of bullshit. A veritable spectrum of hocus-pocus stretching from stuff that ‘rings true’ all the way across the colours of the ‘simply incredible’ till you reach the kingdom of ‘absolute codswallop’.
Okay now you’ve got the picture, tell me the truth. When you read the title about amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal a short while ago where did that piece of bullshit fit on the spectrum of believability inside you head? Tell the truth now! Did you reject it as absolute codswallop or did it somehow ring true? Come on! Be honest! And remember, I’m not Nick Clegg!
Fine. You’ve come so far with me in this post. Want to come a bit further? I mean I could tell you things here that I know are true but I also know you’d never believe. For example, like Osama Bin Laden was seriously into crystal healing, or that somewhere in the Bible you can find a passage in which crystal healing is specifically mentioned as something you are absolutely forbidden to do i.e. it comes with a genuine thou shalt not label. There again, we’ve all heard of the prophecies of Nostradamus, but did you know that one of them was that he foretold the coming of a great healer who with his message of the sharing of hands holding crystals, all our sins would be taken from us…
Okay, so which of the above do you think is bullshit? No, let me rephrase that question. Which of the above do you think is most likely to be a piece of absolute bullshit? Yes of course you’d say, it’s the thing about Bin Laden. Even though you’ve just read in the papers his brother said that before he died the world’s number one bad guy told him that he wanted his kids to grow up leading normal lives, go to college in America and become responsible citizens. You must have seen it. It was all over the papers! So given that it’s true, and Bin Laden’s brother isn’t full of bullshit himself, are you still saying that my story about Bin Laden being into crystal healing is more likely to be bullshit than the stuff in the Bible or Nostradamus?
Well maybe you are because we all know that the Bible’s got just about everything in it and that it’s just as likely you’ll find it something in Leviticus prohibiting crystal healing as you would about gay practices. The same goes for Nostradamus. The guy seems to have made so many prophesies that he’s got everything covered. In short, if you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, has got to be true i.e. that the guy with the beard really was into crystal healing!
But then come to think of it the idea’s so absurd that maybe it’s true after all. The Americans never revealed what they found on his body, did they? And the world never got to find out what Bin Laden’s favourite crystal was, did they? And why, why did they have to keep it a secret? If you search the Internet you’ll find a whole number of theories have already sprung up. One of them about a small group of Jewish trillionaires who meet secretly every month in a house shaped like a smoked salmon bagel five miles under the Pacific because it’s the only place they can control the prophetic power of Bin Laden’s favourite crystal and stop its power taking over the world!
And do you know what is so terrifying about the above piece of absolute bullshit? That there are probably just as many whackos out there ready to believe it as there are those who believe Martians killed President Kennedy! People actually want to believe bullshit. It’s an absolute waste of time telling crystal healing enthusiasts who come to my stall that quartz crystals do nothing for you. People simply want to believe and we all know why that is. It’s because you want to believe in something, in anything really!
So many of the traditional things people used to believe in have failed. God, religion, politicians…All the words that have traditionally come from these sources have received an increasingly sceptical audience. They’re all being increasingly regarded as bullshit whereas crystal healing, aromatherapy, conspiracy theory and other new faiths are being received by an increasingly receptive audience as being more likely to be true than not. Turning it the other way around, less likely to be the bullshit they actually are!
Right now we’re on the cusp of a credibility shift. There’s more and more conspiracy theory about today than you can ever imagine, like Princess Diana, John Lennon, Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin aren’t really dead at all but all living happily together on an island in the Caribbean! What I’m saying is that an increasing number of people today prefer to believe bullshit than they do actuality. Is this because their minds have become increasingly fragmented so they just don’t know who or what to believe anymore? It’s not hard to understand why. The breakdown of traditional beliefs on the one hand and people knowing they’ve been lied to on such a regular basis by those whom they’ve given their trust are prime candidates for sponsoring an opening chasm of disaffection.
Into the gap between old certainties and economical truths comes the steady march of bullshit. People just making it up as they go along like amethyst being Van Gogh’s favourite crystal or Bin Laden into healing. But then not every purveyor has to work on markets. Some come with loud voices and armbands.
People can have their favourite mineral or crystal. There’s no harm in that. We all have a sense of what’s beautiful. We can like things that are visually pleasing, just as long as we don’t turn them into whacky ideologies or faiths and believe that it’s good for our health. What is aesthetically pleasing like a painting or natural art form can be humanising, but that’s as far as it goes. Pleasure is one thing, personal health and wellbeing quite another.
So watch out. This posting comes with a warning. It asks you to stop listening to others and start thinking again for yourselves. Only if we think for ourselves can we avoid being swallowed up by bullshit and liars. Men with funny little moustaches who tell us to go out and murder.
Thinking for ourselves... That’s our guarantee of freedom from lies, half lies and bullshit!
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
ORANGE IS FOREVER! WHY NO-ONE WANTS TO BUY ANYTHING THAT’S ORANGE
As a trader who’s sold Gem Trees, crystals, minerals and jewellery on markets over many years I naturally notice what things sell best, and more than anything else, perhaps, their colour. This is especially important for our trees and the semi-precious mineral chips we use for their leaves. Some colours are ever popular such as purple amethyst, pink rose quartz, transparent rock crystal and green quartz which most people think is jade. Others sell slowly such as blue sodalite, stripy yellow-brown tiger eye and the translucent brown Madeira amber which isn’t amber at all. But then there are those colours that few people want and the chief of these is orange. The colour is in a league of its own. Nobody wants Orange! Trees with translucent warm orange leaves of the mineral Carnelian can stay on a stall month after month like a bloody reproach. And do you know something? People actually loathe them! It’s true! I’ve seen the look on their faces. They wince in disgust!
And yet, despite this, we make trees with orange leaves. Why, any sensible person would ask, do you do this when you can’t bloody-well sell them? What kind of schlemiel (that’s Yiddish for idiot) are you? All right. Don’t go on. I’ll tell you. It’s plain cussedness. I’ve got to have one tree with orange leaves on the stall. It kind of stands out. In a sea of fiery garnet reds, regal amethyst purple, delectable pinks and beautiful naturalistic greens it looks… well, it looks different. It has a deep throbbing mellow rich glow under the light!
Okay, did I make it sound good? Well I lied! No matter how much I try talking it up it still stands there like Cinderella’s sister, making everything else look great by way of contrast. Is it that, or could it be something altogether more sinister? Do you want to know the truth, I mean the real truth? Alright then I’ll tell you. There’s some bloody worm in me that actually likes it. At last I’ve got it off my chest. I’ll always have one or two trees on the stall with carnelian leaves. They could take six months to sell and by that time they look so stuffed up with the continual packing and unpacking that you might as well give them to Oxfam. And then something happens. Along comes someone who loves it to pieces and buys it for his mother. He doesn’t want anything else. It’s the only one on the stall and he’s got to have it!
By the way I’ve got a very good memory for faces and I can’t remember anyone who’s ever bought a tree with orange leaves ever coming back to the stall! However, it’s the people who do buy them that interest me. I ask them why they bought the tree with the orange leaves and they can’t say for sure. They just stare in a cold, glassy-eyed kind of way. I’ve noticed strange, almost guilty smiles. There’s no love or passion the way it is for amethyst or the merry flush for rose quartz. No, people who buy carnelian trees are strange. They have flat voices. They’re dispassionate. They don’t get excited. They’re more like… what’s the word I’m looking for? It begins with a zed but I can’t remember what it is.
Orange! It’s not just gem trees with the carnelian leaves I have to tell you. Just consider the following. Once upon a time everyone loved Rowntree’s wine gums and pastilles. You remember them don’t you? They were good days, weren’t they? You could still think back to the time when we kicked the shit out of the Germans, when the Prime Minister smoked a pipe and talked like George Formby and when the Queen said my husband and I in a funny little voice before her son started talking to tomatoes. Yes, we all loved wine gums, pastilles, and the face of the kid on the box, but do you remember the colours? Which colours you loved best and which ones you hated. The one they always saved till last especially for you. Yeah, all your mates got the reds, greens and blacks, even the yellows. And you, what colour did you get? Yeah, you always got orange. The one you hated most. I don’t care what anyone says. As far as wine gums were concerned, the most unpopular colour, the one you really didn’t want, was orange. The black ones were best, then the reds, the greens and the yellows. That order. Bottom of the list was orange. Nobody wanted orange. They were somehow always hard. You couldn’t taste anything. The black and red ones were warm. You felt you had a taste of blackberry or wine. With the green ones it was citrus. But orange? Orange tasted like plastic!
Now why should people have this thing about orange. It’s different in Holland or Northern Ireland. At least half of all the little bald men in Belfast loved orange wine gums. I mean, can you imagine Ian Paisley’s favourite being green? We don’t object to the colour of oranges, tangerines or satsumas, do we? They’re alright. I mean, they’re naturally orange. Neither do we have a problem with orange juice or Robertson’s golden shred marmalade, or any jam made out of oranges. No, it’s only some orange things that we have a problem with, and please don’t lie to me, tell me your favourite wine gum was orange and that’s how you came to be a psychiatrist. I already know the story. There you were with your mates when the silver came off the top of the tube. Someone was offering wine gums around. George, lucky bastard, always got a black or a red and Bill got a green. Now it was your turn. Next one out, always the next one out was the orange. It was always the orange so you grew up feeling the whole world was against you! So what happened? You went to University to study psychology, George became a Tory M.P. and Bill played in the Premier League. As for Angela who fancied the yellows, you can see her regularly on Babe Station.
Orange crystals are more of a rarity than anything. Very few are what you might describe as genuinely full blown orange. There are brown gypsum crystals a vague taint of the colour but the mineral that is most decidedly orange is Realgar, something you don’t want to know. It comes as short prismatic tabular style crystals commonly found as a minor constituent of hydrothermal veins carrying arsenic minerals. In other words it’s poisonous, an arsenide which for those in the know is not someone with a fixation on bottoms. Another mineral with an orange colour is the rare and expensive Vanadinite. Its crystals are prismatic in habit and transparent to sub-translucent. The mineral is found in association with lead and lead minerals, some of the best specimens coming from Mexico and Morocco. I’m sometimes asked by collectors if I sell it but the answer is rarely if ever. Try the crystal shops if you want to pay a nasty price for anything half decent or alternatively book a plane ticket to Mexico and hire a donkey. I’ve only every once been asked for Realgar and if I remember right the guy had a problem with his mother-in-law. As far as I know its crystal healing properties are zero.
Carnelian is the most orange of minerals with a vitreous lustre and belongs in the Chalcedony family. At best it’s translucent but never as transparent as quartz. It can be used as a gemstone in rings but it’s the red form that’s popular not the orange. The chips are dirt cheap at the wholesalers because few people want them. Only idiots who occasionally stick them on gem trees.
Carnelian gem trees are very strange things. I’ve sometimes tried mixing orange and green leaves on a tree to give it an autumnal quality. You know, summer’s on the turn like the leaves. I might sell one a month and by that time I might as well be using the transparent Madeira Amber! Remember the song, “all the leaves are brown, brown, brown, and the sky is grey…” shit. Actually they sell. The colour looks good, simple as that. Orange doesn’t and there’s no way round it. It’s the same with jewellery. Carnelian earrings don’t sell. Neither do bracelets or necklaces except if they’re mixed in the latter with chunks of agate. Women just aren’t interested. It’s not a matter of belief but plain first-hand experience. I once had a giant Chico tree whose leaves were little cubes of Carnelian with the ends of the thin brass wire branches drilled into the stone. I had it on display for eight months in various markets and no-one wanted it. Oh it disappeared eventually. Someone nicked it from my paste table stall at Leather Lane! Astonishing that they wanted it so much when they could have half inched just about anything else. What does it say? Well someone must have loved orange!
It set off a whole new train of thought. If someone loved it enough to steal it I’d make a whole lot more orange trees myself, but then Louise put me right. Don’t go getting enthusiastic. It was probably one of those fundamentalists over from Northern Island. Wanted it for his front window on the Shanklin Road Estate back in Belfast. I caught the gleam in her eye. Please, no more orange. The stones had no healing power and the trees never moved off the stalls unless they were nicked. The sickly colour stayed with you forever.
Unfortunately none of this answers the question. Why is orange such an unpopular colour?
Okay wise guy, come back when you’ve got a medical degree, been practicing psychiatry for ten years and Roman Abramovitch is giving you a gold bar an hour to hear all his troubles. In the meantime, that’s all I’ve got to say about that!
And yet, despite this, we make trees with orange leaves. Why, any sensible person would ask, do you do this when you can’t bloody-well sell them? What kind of schlemiel (that’s Yiddish for idiot) are you? All right. Don’t go on. I’ll tell you. It’s plain cussedness. I’ve got to have one tree with orange leaves on the stall. It kind of stands out. In a sea of fiery garnet reds, regal amethyst purple, delectable pinks and beautiful naturalistic greens it looks… well, it looks different. It has a deep throbbing mellow rich glow under the light!
Okay, did I make it sound good? Well I lied! No matter how much I try talking it up it still stands there like Cinderella’s sister, making everything else look great by way of contrast. Is it that, or could it be something altogether more sinister? Do you want to know the truth, I mean the real truth? Alright then I’ll tell you. There’s some bloody worm in me that actually likes it. At last I’ve got it off my chest. I’ll always have one or two trees on the stall with carnelian leaves. They could take six months to sell and by that time they look so stuffed up with the continual packing and unpacking that you might as well give them to Oxfam. And then something happens. Along comes someone who loves it to pieces and buys it for his mother. He doesn’t want anything else. It’s the only one on the stall and he’s got to have it!
By the way I’ve got a very good memory for faces and I can’t remember anyone who’s ever bought a tree with orange leaves ever coming back to the stall! However, it’s the people who do buy them that interest me. I ask them why they bought the tree with the orange leaves and they can’t say for sure. They just stare in a cold, glassy-eyed kind of way. I’ve noticed strange, almost guilty smiles. There’s no love or passion the way it is for amethyst or the merry flush for rose quartz. No, people who buy carnelian trees are strange. They have flat voices. They’re dispassionate. They don’t get excited. They’re more like… what’s the word I’m looking for? It begins with a zed but I can’t remember what it is.
Orange! It’s not just gem trees with the carnelian leaves I have to tell you. Just consider the following. Once upon a time everyone loved Rowntree’s wine gums and pastilles. You remember them don’t you? They were good days, weren’t they? You could still think back to the time when we kicked the shit out of the Germans, when the Prime Minister smoked a pipe and talked like George Formby and when the Queen said my husband and I in a funny little voice before her son started talking to tomatoes. Yes, we all loved wine gums, pastilles, and the face of the kid on the box, but do you remember the colours? Which colours you loved best and which ones you hated. The one they always saved till last especially for you. Yeah, all your mates got the reds, greens and blacks, even the yellows. And you, what colour did you get? Yeah, you always got orange. The one you hated most. I don’t care what anyone says. As far as wine gums were concerned, the most unpopular colour, the one you really didn’t want, was orange. The black ones were best, then the reds, the greens and the yellows. That order. Bottom of the list was orange. Nobody wanted orange. They were somehow always hard. You couldn’t taste anything. The black and red ones were warm. You felt you had a taste of blackberry or wine. With the green ones it was citrus. But orange? Orange tasted like plastic!
Now why should people have this thing about orange. It’s different in Holland or Northern Ireland. At least half of all the little bald men in Belfast loved orange wine gums. I mean, can you imagine Ian Paisley’s favourite being green? We don’t object to the colour of oranges, tangerines or satsumas, do we? They’re alright. I mean, they’re naturally orange. Neither do we have a problem with orange juice or Robertson’s golden shred marmalade, or any jam made out of oranges. No, it’s only some orange things that we have a problem with, and please don’t lie to me, tell me your favourite wine gum was orange and that’s how you came to be a psychiatrist. I already know the story. There you were with your mates when the silver came off the top of the tube. Someone was offering wine gums around. George, lucky bastard, always got a black or a red and Bill got a green. Now it was your turn. Next one out, always the next one out was the orange. It was always the orange so you grew up feeling the whole world was against you! So what happened? You went to University to study psychology, George became a Tory M.P. and Bill played in the Premier League. As for Angela who fancied the yellows, you can see her regularly on Babe Station.
Orange crystals are more of a rarity than anything. Very few are what you might describe as genuinely full blown orange. There are brown gypsum crystals a vague taint of the colour but the mineral that is most decidedly orange is Realgar, something you don’t want to know. It comes as short prismatic tabular style crystals commonly found as a minor constituent of hydrothermal veins carrying arsenic minerals. In other words it’s poisonous, an arsenide which for those in the know is not someone with a fixation on bottoms. Another mineral with an orange colour is the rare and expensive Vanadinite. Its crystals are prismatic in habit and transparent to sub-translucent. The mineral is found in association with lead and lead minerals, some of the best specimens coming from Mexico and Morocco. I’m sometimes asked by collectors if I sell it but the answer is rarely if ever. Try the crystal shops if you want to pay a nasty price for anything half decent or alternatively book a plane ticket to Mexico and hire a donkey. I’ve only every once been asked for Realgar and if I remember right the guy had a problem with his mother-in-law. As far as I know its crystal healing properties are zero.
Carnelian is the most orange of minerals with a vitreous lustre and belongs in the Chalcedony family. At best it’s translucent but never as transparent as quartz. It can be used as a gemstone in rings but it’s the red form that’s popular not the orange. The chips are dirt cheap at the wholesalers because few people want them. Only idiots who occasionally stick them on gem trees.
Carnelian gem trees are very strange things. I’ve sometimes tried mixing orange and green leaves on a tree to give it an autumnal quality. You know, summer’s on the turn like the leaves. I might sell one a month and by that time I might as well be using the transparent Madeira Amber! Remember the song, “all the leaves are brown, brown, brown, and the sky is grey…” shit. Actually they sell. The colour looks good, simple as that. Orange doesn’t and there’s no way round it. It’s the same with jewellery. Carnelian earrings don’t sell. Neither do bracelets or necklaces except if they’re mixed in the latter with chunks of agate. Women just aren’t interested. It’s not a matter of belief but plain first-hand experience. I once had a giant Chico tree whose leaves were little cubes of Carnelian with the ends of the thin brass wire branches drilled into the stone. I had it on display for eight months in various markets and no-one wanted it. Oh it disappeared eventually. Someone nicked it from my paste table stall at Leather Lane! Astonishing that they wanted it so much when they could have half inched just about anything else. What does it say? Well someone must have loved orange!
It set off a whole new train of thought. If someone loved it enough to steal it I’d make a whole lot more orange trees myself, but then Louise put me right. Don’t go getting enthusiastic. It was probably one of those fundamentalists over from Northern Island. Wanted it for his front window on the Shanklin Road Estate back in Belfast. I caught the gleam in her eye. Please, no more orange. The stones had no healing power and the trees never moved off the stalls unless they were nicked. The sickly colour stayed with you forever.
Unfortunately none of this answers the question. Why is orange such an unpopular colour?
Okay wise guy, come back when you’ve got a medical degree, been practicing psychiatry for ten years and Roman Abramovitch is giving you a gold bar an hour to hear all his troubles. In the meantime, that’s all I’ve got to say about that!
Sunday, 4 March 2012
WE'RE SENDING INTO SPACE! DESPERATION IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS AT THE READING ROCK FESTIVAL
So you think you’d like to try your hand at being a street market trader do you? We’ve all seen them. Stock piled high and happy faces. Money flowing about all over the place. Change being given from bulging wallets packed with notes. Men wearing overalls full of jingle. Everyone buying. All that easy money!
You’re not working at the present time, aka you’re unemployed, but the first sounds better, or you’ve got a job and it pays jack so you need to find other sources of income. A Saturday job would be fine only there aren’t any for the over thirties. Nobody will give you a job for a day on the weekend unless you give yourself one. Yes, that’s it, I’ll work for myself, and then you think of the men on the market and all that money you’ve seen. All that ready cash flowing in. The markets! It’s like some biblical vision and there you are in it… with all that money! Yes, that’s it you think, like you’ve had some happy revelation. I think I’ll work on the markets!
Sorry to pour a bucket of shit on your head. Don’t! I’m telling you straight. Doing you a kindness that you ignored and only remembered years later after you’d gone through a whole world of hurts. Yeah, I remember him now! The guy who wrote that post advising me against it. Nice read and all that but I wasn’t going to allow some literary jerk off tell me what to do. Not me!
Let me repeat my humble message to you good sir. If you’re thinking about working the markets, don’t! Nobody who’s ever worked markets anywhere ever got rich out of them unless they were the owners who took rent from the stallholders or traders who sold drugs on the quiet. All the rest make a fair living if they’re any good but never get rich, even if they have plenty of outlets. There’s the rent to be paid, the bribes, the cost of your gear, the endless trouble, the police, the tax man, the bitching… And that’s apart from the days when you don’t take any money, the setting up and packing away, the driving, the lousy weather, the customers with evil intent, the eight to ten hours selling each day, the dislocation of your normal nine to five life with all the consequences of less time for your family.
And what’s it all for? All that money you’ve seen is just an illusion. It isn’t there really. Gross takings before all the deductions are made. Do yourself a favour. Apply for a job as a toilet attendant. It comes without any illusions. It’s easier work with a regular income!
That said, working markets is not just a Saturday job. It’s four to six days a week, sometimes more. Like gambling you’ll wonder how much you’ll make every day. Ultimately it becomes an addiction. A whole way of life. An interesting one but not necessarily a happy one, unless that is you’ve got other ambitions. You work the markets to save money so that one day you can do something else. Something special that you’ve always wanted to do. Something you’ve set your heart on so the markets are bearable. Just a means to an end and not the be all and end all of life. It’s that special thing that you keep in your head through the drudge and the hell of it all.
If you’ve got nothing else and the markets are all that you have, then poor you. I’ve known people like that. Not unintelligent but made it their whole existence. That’s where they live and that’s where they’ll die. At some grubby stall in a filthy gutter on a cold grey November morning with no-one giving a shit and the wife and kids they’ve neglected taking the money they’ve worked so hard to save and making whoopee!
Some life! The only one you had and you pissed it up the wall so don’t do it, unless you’ve got something bigger and better inside your head.
They were the best of times, they were the worst of times… You can have some good moments working on markets but just as many are lousy. Probably more. What traders cynically describe as an experience. This post is about one such ‘experience’. Desperation for Louise and I in the wee small hours of Saturday night at the Reading Rock Festival.
We did it once. Never again. It’s a whole world of hurts. An endless sea of unlimited trouble. Violence, threats, intimidation, abuse, thieving, you name it. And there we were, hot to stay open through Saturday night like a couple of virgins. Our stall lit up to every temptation and vice with our bright, fragile goods ready and waiting for evil. We took fair money up until midnight then it began to tail off. The main event of the festival over and the crowds gone in search of food till one a.m. then back to their tents or the portaloos pissed on rough cider and vodka. From that time on only a few hundred stragglers about and most stalls on our drag closed for the night. The exceptions sold clothing and one, forty feet away, did hash pipes, chillums and other smoking paraphernalia along with shirts from Thailand, fancy jackets and a side line of ‘herbals’ and amphetamines. Their music came loud out of two high volume ghetto blasters that by one in the morning was doing our heads in.
The racket was sensible business. It brought people over from every corner on site. The heavy metal music thumping its way into the night. There was no point putting our gear away, covering our stall and going to bed in the van even if we wanted to. With the noise going full pitch there was no way we could sleep and they knew it. Four lads. All well known for dealing dope in the perfect place for it. The clothing and smoking accessories all just a front. We knew them from elsewhere. Dope dealing trouble all flush with money and flash. There’d been times when I’d wanted to put my hands on them but it just wasn’t possible. People who ran markets needed them more than they needed us. They did good business and paid for the privilege. Our stuff was just ornamental!
The noise ran on and on. Two-thirty, three, three-thirty… Its blast unabated despite our requests. It was still bringing people over to their stall so it continued. If they stopped by ours, drunk or blown out of their heads it was only to make trouble which we knew could come at any time. And if we stalled down and put away we’d still have trouble so we just sat there covered in blankets, trying to be friendly but ready for anything!
Okay, do you still want to make money on markets? In popular mythology, music festivals are where all the really big money is made. Correct… if you’re selling drugs or you’re the festival organiser!
Four a.m. Reading Rock festival site in the Thames Valley. It’s late September and the night air’s chilled down to freezing. That would be bad enough if there wasn’t an icy damp mist rolling along the drag with music hammering out of the ghetto blasters and the occasional violence merchant falling over your stall. You can’t imagine the horror of it all. We were already tough hardened market traders used to just about anything, but the damp freezing night air getting under our skin despite all the layers, the racket from forty feet away and on top of it all our exhaustion, made it all hell. Louise brewed up and we smoked incessantly.
Sickening exhausting desperation and not the sniff of a shilling! It was no longer the money. It was coming down to survival! Our minds blown away by the music. We kept looking at each other, way beyond cynical laughter. Quite frankly I was close to going over and smashing their blasters with a few kicks. I could easily have done it. I was being driven to violence, then a new sound floated our way. Easy, mellow and tuneful. I tried to catch the words. The voice sounded Caribbean…
I’m going to put on an iron shirt and chase the Devil out of Earth
We liked it and instantly picked up on the lyrics,
I’m going to send him to Outer Space to find another race…
Catchy music, catchy vocal. Never heard it before. We were soon up and stomping. Doing a strange little dance in the dark. It was so cold you couldn’t believe it but right there and then it was like we’d been taken over by some kind of madness and turned into zombies! We left the stall and walked out into the grassy field of the main drag. Past the drugs paraphernalia stall and its music and into the night with the lights of our rig already at distance. And then, like a couple of automatons, began doing a kind of zombie stomp in time to the beat of the music up the field and back!
The lads working the drugs stall had seen us and were staring with astonishment. We gave them a wave as we stomped past, freezing and gone beyond misery. It was a completely mad thing to do. What I can only think of as a dance of the desperate! All we wanted was sleep but that was impossible. Instead, we were jerking our arms and legs around like we were under the spell of some shaman’s hallucinogenic till we reached our lights. A few turns and we were jerking our way back up the field.
Put on an iron shirt… send him to Outer Space…
The lights again in the distance then back down the field to our stall. We did it three or four times till we were done for, finally getting inside the frame and collapsing into our chairs, by then shaking with cold and laughing the laugh of the hopeless. Louise held it together to brew up some tea. Moments later we heard a new sound. We couldn’t believe it. The bastards next door had switched off the music. Silence!
With a huge effort we covered the stall with tarpaulins, clamped them on, got into the van and under the duvet with a hot water bottle. Two minutes later we were asleep.
It can only have been a brief spell of oblivion before I woke with a start. There were voices, quiet voices outside near the stall. I instantly got up naked in the freezing van, dressed in seconds and rushed out with a short iron bar that was part of the stall frame. Lucky I’d moved fast. It was still dark but in the fogged out gloom I made out two shapes crawling under the frame with boxes of gear. I dropped the bar and went to work with my feet, glad I’d shoved on my boots. A few good kicks, a few yells then two undoubted thieves on the run! Couldn’t see their faces but I’d let them have it alright. I was soon back with a lamp. Great! Animals on marble scattered all over the grass. It took me an hour to pick them up and wipe off the mud. That done I plonked myself down in the chair and sat at the back of the stall till daylight feeling dead. Meanwhile Louise slept on, peacefully unaware in the van.
Six o’clock daylight and the music started up all over again. Sunday morning. Thank God only another day left. And where was that iron shirt when I needed it? I knew as I sat there that we’d both need a week to recover and Tuesday morning I was due back in London to work one of the markets. Meanwhile all I could think about was sending the bastards next door into space.
So, do you still think you’d like to try your hand being a street market trader supplementing your income with a big killing at a music festival?
Before you answer I want you to go into the bathroom and look in the mirror. Okay, now tell me what you see. Or, to be more serious, what is it that you think you see?
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.
On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
You’re not working at the present time, aka you’re unemployed, but the first sounds better, or you’ve got a job and it pays jack so you need to find other sources of income. A Saturday job would be fine only there aren’t any for the over thirties. Nobody will give you a job for a day on the weekend unless you give yourself one. Yes, that’s it, I’ll work for myself, and then you think of the men on the market and all that money you’ve seen. All that ready cash flowing in. The markets! It’s like some biblical vision and there you are in it… with all that money! Yes, that’s it you think, like you’ve had some happy revelation. I think I’ll work on the markets!
Sorry to pour a bucket of shit on your head. Don’t! I’m telling you straight. Doing you a kindness that you ignored and only remembered years later after you’d gone through a whole world of hurts. Yeah, I remember him now! The guy who wrote that post advising me against it. Nice read and all that but I wasn’t going to allow some literary jerk off tell me what to do. Not me!
Let me repeat my humble message to you good sir. If you’re thinking about working the markets, don’t! Nobody who’s ever worked markets anywhere ever got rich out of them unless they were the owners who took rent from the stallholders or traders who sold drugs on the quiet. All the rest make a fair living if they’re any good but never get rich, even if they have plenty of outlets. There’s the rent to be paid, the bribes, the cost of your gear, the endless trouble, the police, the tax man, the bitching… And that’s apart from the days when you don’t take any money, the setting up and packing away, the driving, the lousy weather, the customers with evil intent, the eight to ten hours selling each day, the dislocation of your normal nine to five life with all the consequences of less time for your family.
And what’s it all for? All that money you’ve seen is just an illusion. It isn’t there really. Gross takings before all the deductions are made. Do yourself a favour. Apply for a job as a toilet attendant. It comes without any illusions. It’s easier work with a regular income!
That said, working markets is not just a Saturday job. It’s four to six days a week, sometimes more. Like gambling you’ll wonder how much you’ll make every day. Ultimately it becomes an addiction. A whole way of life. An interesting one but not necessarily a happy one, unless that is you’ve got other ambitions. You work the markets to save money so that one day you can do something else. Something special that you’ve always wanted to do. Something you’ve set your heart on so the markets are bearable. Just a means to an end and not the be all and end all of life. It’s that special thing that you keep in your head through the drudge and the hell of it all.
If you’ve got nothing else and the markets are all that you have, then poor you. I’ve known people like that. Not unintelligent but made it their whole existence. That’s where they live and that’s where they’ll die. At some grubby stall in a filthy gutter on a cold grey November morning with no-one giving a shit and the wife and kids they’ve neglected taking the money they’ve worked so hard to save and making whoopee!
Some life! The only one you had and you pissed it up the wall so don’t do it, unless you’ve got something bigger and better inside your head.
They were the best of times, they were the worst of times… You can have some good moments working on markets but just as many are lousy. Probably more. What traders cynically describe as an experience. This post is about one such ‘experience’. Desperation for Louise and I in the wee small hours of Saturday night at the Reading Rock Festival.
We did it once. Never again. It’s a whole world of hurts. An endless sea of unlimited trouble. Violence, threats, intimidation, abuse, thieving, you name it. And there we were, hot to stay open through Saturday night like a couple of virgins. Our stall lit up to every temptation and vice with our bright, fragile goods ready and waiting for evil. We took fair money up until midnight then it began to tail off. The main event of the festival over and the crowds gone in search of food till one a.m. then back to their tents or the portaloos pissed on rough cider and vodka. From that time on only a few hundred stragglers about and most stalls on our drag closed for the night. The exceptions sold clothing and one, forty feet away, did hash pipes, chillums and other smoking paraphernalia along with shirts from Thailand, fancy jackets and a side line of ‘herbals’ and amphetamines. Their music came loud out of two high volume ghetto blasters that by one in the morning was doing our heads in.
The racket was sensible business. It brought people over from every corner on site. The heavy metal music thumping its way into the night. There was no point putting our gear away, covering our stall and going to bed in the van even if we wanted to. With the noise going full pitch there was no way we could sleep and they knew it. Four lads. All well known for dealing dope in the perfect place for it. The clothing and smoking accessories all just a front. We knew them from elsewhere. Dope dealing trouble all flush with money and flash. There’d been times when I’d wanted to put my hands on them but it just wasn’t possible. People who ran markets needed them more than they needed us. They did good business and paid for the privilege. Our stuff was just ornamental!
The noise ran on and on. Two-thirty, three, three-thirty… Its blast unabated despite our requests. It was still bringing people over to their stall so it continued. If they stopped by ours, drunk or blown out of their heads it was only to make trouble which we knew could come at any time. And if we stalled down and put away we’d still have trouble so we just sat there covered in blankets, trying to be friendly but ready for anything!
Okay, do you still want to make money on markets? In popular mythology, music festivals are where all the really big money is made. Correct… if you’re selling drugs or you’re the festival organiser!
Four a.m. Reading Rock festival site in the Thames Valley. It’s late September and the night air’s chilled down to freezing. That would be bad enough if there wasn’t an icy damp mist rolling along the drag with music hammering out of the ghetto blasters and the occasional violence merchant falling over your stall. You can’t imagine the horror of it all. We were already tough hardened market traders used to just about anything, but the damp freezing night air getting under our skin despite all the layers, the racket from forty feet away and on top of it all our exhaustion, made it all hell. Louise brewed up and we smoked incessantly.
Sickening exhausting desperation and not the sniff of a shilling! It was no longer the money. It was coming down to survival! Our minds blown away by the music. We kept looking at each other, way beyond cynical laughter. Quite frankly I was close to going over and smashing their blasters with a few kicks. I could easily have done it. I was being driven to violence, then a new sound floated our way. Easy, mellow and tuneful. I tried to catch the words. The voice sounded Caribbean…
I’m going to put on an iron shirt and chase the Devil out of Earth
We liked it and instantly picked up on the lyrics,
I’m going to send him to Outer Space to find another race…
Catchy music, catchy vocal. Never heard it before. We were soon up and stomping. Doing a strange little dance in the dark. It was so cold you couldn’t believe it but right there and then it was like we’d been taken over by some kind of madness and turned into zombies! We left the stall and walked out into the grassy field of the main drag. Past the drugs paraphernalia stall and its music and into the night with the lights of our rig already at distance. And then, like a couple of automatons, began doing a kind of zombie stomp in time to the beat of the music up the field and back!
The lads working the drugs stall had seen us and were staring with astonishment. We gave them a wave as we stomped past, freezing and gone beyond misery. It was a completely mad thing to do. What I can only think of as a dance of the desperate! All we wanted was sleep but that was impossible. Instead, we were jerking our arms and legs around like we were under the spell of some shaman’s hallucinogenic till we reached our lights. A few turns and we were jerking our way back up the field.
Put on an iron shirt… send him to Outer Space…
The lights again in the distance then back down the field to our stall. We did it three or four times till we were done for, finally getting inside the frame and collapsing into our chairs, by then shaking with cold and laughing the laugh of the hopeless. Louise held it together to brew up some tea. Moments later we heard a new sound. We couldn’t believe it. The bastards next door had switched off the music. Silence!
With a huge effort we covered the stall with tarpaulins, clamped them on, got into the van and under the duvet with a hot water bottle. Two minutes later we were asleep.
It can only have been a brief spell of oblivion before I woke with a start. There were voices, quiet voices outside near the stall. I instantly got up naked in the freezing van, dressed in seconds and rushed out with a short iron bar that was part of the stall frame. Lucky I’d moved fast. It was still dark but in the fogged out gloom I made out two shapes crawling under the frame with boxes of gear. I dropped the bar and went to work with my feet, glad I’d shoved on my boots. A few good kicks, a few yells then two undoubted thieves on the run! Couldn’t see their faces but I’d let them have it alright. I was soon back with a lamp. Great! Animals on marble scattered all over the grass. It took me an hour to pick them up and wipe off the mud. That done I plonked myself down in the chair and sat at the back of the stall till daylight feeling dead. Meanwhile Louise slept on, peacefully unaware in the van.
Six o’clock daylight and the music started up all over again. Sunday morning. Thank God only another day left. And where was that iron shirt when I needed it? I knew as I sat there that we’d both need a week to recover and Tuesday morning I was due back in London to work one of the markets. Meanwhile all I could think about was sending the bastards next door into space.
So, do you still think you’d like to try your hand being a street market trader supplementing your income with a big killing at a music festival?
Before you answer I want you to go into the bathroom and look in the mirror. Okay, now tell me what you see. Or, to be more serious, what is it that you think you see?
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.
On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
CRYSTALS AND THE WORKING CLASS: SAY A POUND AND THEY RUN A MILE
The working class have no time for crystals or crystal healing, and no interest whatsoever in either. The same goes for our gem trees, pieces of rose quartz, groups of quartz and amethyst crystals, minerals and just about 99% of everything we sell. They do however buy our little resin frogs with red eyes and blue lips mounted on bits of marble and are often interested in fossils. Crystals and crystal healing fall into the occult. Into the sphere of the impractical. A rarified world populated by hippies, people with more money than sense and middle aged women in need.
Spiritual guidance for the working class is provided once a year if that by seeing some looney looking character with a white beard holding a shepherds crook, smiling benevolently at old ladies and muttering vague utterances about social justice in the name of something ending in ghost. They’ve no time for ghosts unless they’re being busted in films and vaguely know about the Church’s lousy historical record on behalf of the poor from their grandfathers. They don’t need spiritual guidance from sparkly stones or crusty looking characters who wouldn’t look out of place at Glastonbury. Crystals and minerals are just coloured rocks. They’re not interested in Eastern religions or tantric philosophies, third eye mumbo jumbo or chakras. Try getting a welder from Newcastle or a bricklayer from Wigan to stroke a bit of rose quartz or feel the ‘energy’ in a double terminated crystal and he’ll get seriously suspicious!
As for their wives they mainly do as they’re told, when they’re not spending their time on the hen party circuit that is or walloping the kids. No, working class blokes have an altogether different set of spiritual beliefs. Theirs is a more realistic faith reinforced every week by giving fifty quid of their hard earned money to the camp they follow and whose colours they wear… to the healing balm of their local football club so they can watch their heroes spit all over the place, kick their opponents and try and put a ball where they think it should go and fail nine times out of ten! And for that their saints earn more in ninety minutes then they do in ten years. Now that’s what I call faith! What you could call being energised! Handing out your dosh every week to intellectual and moral cripples instead of giving it to their wife to buy decent food for herself and the kids rather than crap from the takeaways or cholesterol gungies in batter because they can’t be bothered to cook. Since when have you seen so many grossly fat women and children? They weren’t there in the sixties or seventies when working class girls were lithe and gangly good lookers.
So take fifty quid and chuck it at what you believe in. I mean, members of the crystal healing fraternity don’t get 200 grand for ninety minutes prancing around. But then there are con-artists and con-artists! Has anyone known a Premier League player into crystals and healing? Don’t be ridiculous. Their artistry’s in another league altogether with a mass following from a very different set of believers. If you believe in football and football players you can’t allow yourself to believe in anything else. They’re mutually exclusive. Faith is indivisible. Crystal healing and footballers don’t go. I’m not talking of just the northern working class here. It’s exactly the same in the south. Go and watch Chelsea or Spurs, Arsenal, West Ham or Fulham. How many women do you see wearing crystal pendants or men stroking bits of rose quartz let alone Bloodstone. The only yin and yang they know about is something on the menu of an oriental buffet. But then you just never know. They’ll need balance alright if they chomp into a Scotch bonnet chilli and fall off a chair.
There are exceptions of course. A hard boiled looking nut came to my stall at Leather Lane a few weeks before Christmas. Just got out of the nick rumour had it. For getting money from somewhere with violence. Wanted presents for all of his family and liked the look of the trees. Bought the whole bloody lot ten minutes later along with the malachite necklaces. Cleaned me out. Table empty for six hundred quid and got it away in a taxi. I stood there dumbfounded. Couldn’t believe what was happening. Neither could the fruit and veg men around me or Diamond Sid. How could he have sold all that shit? Later someone joked that he’d buried the money after a robbery and the police hadn’t found it. Yeah, he’d got out, dug it all up and come straight to me. The lads on the stalls could never keep a straight face.
That said I’ve tried hard to sell amethyst and quartz crystal groups to working class men and women from both north and south along with the trees. The men aren’t interested in any of it. Not even as gifts for their wives, mothers, sisters or daughters. Women are a little more so, if they’re on their own that is. They sometimes ask about the stones and if we make the trees ourselves, but they never ask for the prices. Doing that, I think, makes them feel committed to buy in the eyes of the trader. Half-way to being obliged when in truth it’s nothing like that at all. Only maybe that’s what they think! It’s indicative of a lack of self-confidence. Asking for price being on the road to commitment. Middle class women are more self-assured. Part of growing up in a specific family culture. As for healing that’s another thing altogether. I can barely broach the subject to working class men without being asked, “you taking the piss?” Working class women, however, sometimes ask questions about healing but can’t see any concrete connection between crystals, minerals and any kind of wellbeing. Feeling calm, happiness and love doesn’t necessarily follow just because you’re holding a shiny pink piece of rock. And how close to the truth they are they’ll probably never know!
Our experience on London street markets demonstrated to us that there’s no real correlation between the price of goods and working class interest. We tried dropping prices down to rock bottom. Just over cost or sometimes even taking a loss. Trying to tempt people with offers. It makes no difference. It wasn’t just a lack of interest we were dealing with. We carefully analysed this by considering the amount of time people spent looking at our goods. In the great majority of cases, working class men didn’t bother looking at all. A quick glance and they moved off, or if they did look it’s brief, while they’re still on the move. Sometimes, if they hesitate a fraction I’d try chatting to them. Always with the greatest tact and politeness. Not about our stuff. More about themselves. Were they on holiday in London or which part of the country they came from? What work they did or about family background. I only rarely ask if they like our display. Even less if they might like to buy a gift for someone. Even at a few pence for a child the answer’s invariably no. Say a quid for a crystal and their faces turn blank and they leave fast. It’s a fundamental disinterest that we’re dealing with and there’s no getting round it.
We had the perfect experience of this when like a couple of virgins we took a stall at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. It was our first and we had no idea it was a 100% working class do. Beautiful belching steam traction engines with names like the Firefly and the Goliath; brass bands playing the Floral Dance; endless fish and chips and sausage and burger outlets along with doner kebab bacteria factories; model tanks and aeroplanes and endless stalls selling industrial tools and machines, model making kits and radio controlled toys. Nearly everyone there had a dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier or cross so that whole place stank of dog shit. Put your feet somewhere you shouldn’t and you were squelching in it. Even now, at a distance, I cannot speak of the toilets!
It was into such a situation that we arrived at the stall we were given and set out our stuff. Good connections for our powerful halogen lights and that night it looked beautiful with the twin rows of crystal pendants on leathers hung out on bungies and the gem trees, quartz and amethyst groups almost glowing under the light. We’d be taking money here fast!
The next four hours till eleven disabused us completely. The people who stopped to look regarded our stuff as a total anomaly. Something that just shouldn’t have been there! “Where are you from,” they asked, meaning what are you doing here? Others, we observed, deliberately chose not to look, walking straight past the stall with their eyes staring away into the night. During that time no-one asked us a question about any item we had, what it was or where it came from, let alone price. As the experience went on we realised that it wasn’t disinterest alone. It was, we sensed, a strange kind of fear. They were afraid to talk. Afraid to ask, and it wasn’t just to do with price. The things we were selling were totally unfamiliar to them. In plain terms they felt embarrassed. They had their world and our things were from another. A middle class planet of plummy accents and Waitrose, while theirs was chip butties, sugary donuts and steam. Just after eleven a miracle happened. A lady walking the dog with her husband asked me the price of a ‘tiny’. It looked lovely with its garnet leaves. I said a quid, for a joke really, as it was six, but the look of horror on her face! “A pound!” she declaimed querulously, as though I was a banker trying to rob her. “We’re not stopping here Horace.”
That’s what we were facing for the next three days. The following day it was worse! No-one even stopped to talk to us. Not a word. It was like we’d been blackballed. No George you’re not talking to those people. They’re hippies. No jobs, never worked for a living…The experience was so interesting and strange. We knew our stuff looked beautiful and we sensed they were somehow fighting against it. They couldn’t allow themselves to like it. It would be cultural treachery!
We packed up on the evening of the second day without selling a thing and put all our stuff in the van. We weren’t middle class. We both came from working class backgrounds and regarded ourselves as such, yet we were different. Self-educated. We’d read widely as kids. H.G.Wells, Kipling and foreign classics. Had an interest in so many things. We’d gone to various universities and outshone the best the middle class had to offer. But above all we were self-assured, confident, and had boundless energy. People who were quite unafraid. We had the best of middle class values, so what did it make us?
I’ll tell you. We don’t run when we’re faced with a challenge. And we know how to talk to people. We understand what they are and we never look down on anyone, or up! That’s more than I can say for those who regard themselves as our betters.
We don’t look down on you cos we aint got the time. In it. In it. In it!
Spiritual guidance for the working class is provided once a year if that by seeing some looney looking character with a white beard holding a shepherds crook, smiling benevolently at old ladies and muttering vague utterances about social justice in the name of something ending in ghost. They’ve no time for ghosts unless they’re being busted in films and vaguely know about the Church’s lousy historical record on behalf of the poor from their grandfathers. They don’t need spiritual guidance from sparkly stones or crusty looking characters who wouldn’t look out of place at Glastonbury. Crystals and minerals are just coloured rocks. They’re not interested in Eastern religions or tantric philosophies, third eye mumbo jumbo or chakras. Try getting a welder from Newcastle or a bricklayer from Wigan to stroke a bit of rose quartz or feel the ‘energy’ in a double terminated crystal and he’ll get seriously suspicious!
As for their wives they mainly do as they’re told, when they’re not spending their time on the hen party circuit that is or walloping the kids. No, working class blokes have an altogether different set of spiritual beliefs. Theirs is a more realistic faith reinforced every week by giving fifty quid of their hard earned money to the camp they follow and whose colours they wear… to the healing balm of their local football club so they can watch their heroes spit all over the place, kick their opponents and try and put a ball where they think it should go and fail nine times out of ten! And for that their saints earn more in ninety minutes then they do in ten years. Now that’s what I call faith! What you could call being energised! Handing out your dosh every week to intellectual and moral cripples instead of giving it to their wife to buy decent food for herself and the kids rather than crap from the takeaways or cholesterol gungies in batter because they can’t be bothered to cook. Since when have you seen so many grossly fat women and children? They weren’t there in the sixties or seventies when working class girls were lithe and gangly good lookers.
So take fifty quid and chuck it at what you believe in. I mean, members of the crystal healing fraternity don’t get 200 grand for ninety minutes prancing around. But then there are con-artists and con-artists! Has anyone known a Premier League player into crystals and healing? Don’t be ridiculous. Their artistry’s in another league altogether with a mass following from a very different set of believers. If you believe in football and football players you can’t allow yourself to believe in anything else. They’re mutually exclusive. Faith is indivisible. Crystal healing and footballers don’t go. I’m not talking of just the northern working class here. It’s exactly the same in the south. Go and watch Chelsea or Spurs, Arsenal, West Ham or Fulham. How many women do you see wearing crystal pendants or men stroking bits of rose quartz let alone Bloodstone. The only yin and yang they know about is something on the menu of an oriental buffet. But then you just never know. They’ll need balance alright if they chomp into a Scotch bonnet chilli and fall off a chair.
There are exceptions of course. A hard boiled looking nut came to my stall at Leather Lane a few weeks before Christmas. Just got out of the nick rumour had it. For getting money from somewhere with violence. Wanted presents for all of his family and liked the look of the trees. Bought the whole bloody lot ten minutes later along with the malachite necklaces. Cleaned me out. Table empty for six hundred quid and got it away in a taxi. I stood there dumbfounded. Couldn’t believe what was happening. Neither could the fruit and veg men around me or Diamond Sid. How could he have sold all that shit? Later someone joked that he’d buried the money after a robbery and the police hadn’t found it. Yeah, he’d got out, dug it all up and come straight to me. The lads on the stalls could never keep a straight face.
That said I’ve tried hard to sell amethyst and quartz crystal groups to working class men and women from both north and south along with the trees. The men aren’t interested in any of it. Not even as gifts for their wives, mothers, sisters or daughters. Women are a little more so, if they’re on their own that is. They sometimes ask about the stones and if we make the trees ourselves, but they never ask for the prices. Doing that, I think, makes them feel committed to buy in the eyes of the trader. Half-way to being obliged when in truth it’s nothing like that at all. Only maybe that’s what they think! It’s indicative of a lack of self-confidence. Asking for price being on the road to commitment. Middle class women are more self-assured. Part of growing up in a specific family culture. As for healing that’s another thing altogether. I can barely broach the subject to working class men without being asked, “you taking the piss?” Working class women, however, sometimes ask questions about healing but can’t see any concrete connection between crystals, minerals and any kind of wellbeing. Feeling calm, happiness and love doesn’t necessarily follow just because you’re holding a shiny pink piece of rock. And how close to the truth they are they’ll probably never know!
Our experience on London street markets demonstrated to us that there’s no real correlation between the price of goods and working class interest. We tried dropping prices down to rock bottom. Just over cost or sometimes even taking a loss. Trying to tempt people with offers. It makes no difference. It wasn’t just a lack of interest we were dealing with. We carefully analysed this by considering the amount of time people spent looking at our goods. In the great majority of cases, working class men didn’t bother looking at all. A quick glance and they moved off, or if they did look it’s brief, while they’re still on the move. Sometimes, if they hesitate a fraction I’d try chatting to them. Always with the greatest tact and politeness. Not about our stuff. More about themselves. Were they on holiday in London or which part of the country they came from? What work they did or about family background. I only rarely ask if they like our display. Even less if they might like to buy a gift for someone. Even at a few pence for a child the answer’s invariably no. Say a quid for a crystal and their faces turn blank and they leave fast. It’s a fundamental disinterest that we’re dealing with and there’s no getting round it.
We had the perfect experience of this when like a couple of virgins we took a stall at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. It was our first and we had no idea it was a 100% working class do. Beautiful belching steam traction engines with names like the Firefly and the Goliath; brass bands playing the Floral Dance; endless fish and chips and sausage and burger outlets along with doner kebab bacteria factories; model tanks and aeroplanes and endless stalls selling industrial tools and machines, model making kits and radio controlled toys. Nearly everyone there had a dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier or cross so that whole place stank of dog shit. Put your feet somewhere you shouldn’t and you were squelching in it. Even now, at a distance, I cannot speak of the toilets!
It was into such a situation that we arrived at the stall we were given and set out our stuff. Good connections for our powerful halogen lights and that night it looked beautiful with the twin rows of crystal pendants on leathers hung out on bungies and the gem trees, quartz and amethyst groups almost glowing under the light. We’d be taking money here fast!
The next four hours till eleven disabused us completely. The people who stopped to look regarded our stuff as a total anomaly. Something that just shouldn’t have been there! “Where are you from,” they asked, meaning what are you doing here? Others, we observed, deliberately chose not to look, walking straight past the stall with their eyes staring away into the night. During that time no-one asked us a question about any item we had, what it was or where it came from, let alone price. As the experience went on we realised that it wasn’t disinterest alone. It was, we sensed, a strange kind of fear. They were afraid to talk. Afraid to ask, and it wasn’t just to do with price. The things we were selling were totally unfamiliar to them. In plain terms they felt embarrassed. They had their world and our things were from another. A middle class planet of plummy accents and Waitrose, while theirs was chip butties, sugary donuts and steam. Just after eleven a miracle happened. A lady walking the dog with her husband asked me the price of a ‘tiny’. It looked lovely with its garnet leaves. I said a quid, for a joke really, as it was six, but the look of horror on her face! “A pound!” she declaimed querulously, as though I was a banker trying to rob her. “We’re not stopping here Horace.”
That’s what we were facing for the next three days. The following day it was worse! No-one even stopped to talk to us. Not a word. It was like we’d been blackballed. No George you’re not talking to those people. They’re hippies. No jobs, never worked for a living…The experience was so interesting and strange. We knew our stuff looked beautiful and we sensed they were somehow fighting against it. They couldn’t allow themselves to like it. It would be cultural treachery!
We packed up on the evening of the second day without selling a thing and put all our stuff in the van. We weren’t middle class. We both came from working class backgrounds and regarded ourselves as such, yet we were different. Self-educated. We’d read widely as kids. H.G.Wells, Kipling and foreign classics. Had an interest in so many things. We’d gone to various universities and outshone the best the middle class had to offer. But above all we were self-assured, confident, and had boundless energy. People who were quite unafraid. We had the best of middle class values, so what did it make us?
I’ll tell you. We don’t run when we’re faced with a challenge. And we know how to talk to people. We understand what they are and we never look down on anyone, or up! That’s more than I can say for those who regard themselves as our betters.
We don’t look down on you cos we aint got the time. In it. In it. In it!
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