Having graduated from the Bond Villain School of Bastards and Bastardry, Nestlé, the world’s biggest food and drinks company, apparently set out to also be the world’s biggest contributor to infant mortality, aggressively marketing its baby milk substitute in countries where the water used to make it was so filthy it killed babies…
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I decided to spend ten days off my tits with fever, and then most of March struggling to breathe, and then half of April self-isolating while I downgraded my cough from persistent to lingering to socially awkward. It’s been frustrating. But I’ve been up and about for a few weeks now, and the old nagging feeling that I should be doing more is kicking back in.
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It’s fair to say I’ve been banging on a bit about poverty recently, what with all those articles about the government assault on welfare and charities covering the gaps and such and such, and while this sentence started out with the intention of apologising for all my banging on it’s looking more like ending on a justification for it because banging on’s what you get for me being around poverty all day and everyone else voting Tory. Poverty, as I was saying, is shit.
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The thing with this here social work is you see an awful lot of people’s awful lots in life. The stuff you read about and don’t think about and mostly never see. Child abuse, obviously. Domestic violence, like how we talked about. Poverty. Real poverty. Bare floorboards poverty. Eating food or making rent but never both poverty. Oxfam reckons 1 in 5 people in the UK are living below the poverty line, living hard and unhappy lives made harder and unhappier by cuts to services that mean the help they used to get isn’t around any more.
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And so, all being well, I’ve made it to the end of this here social work course. I handed in my dissertation after a run of long days, short nights and endless, endless tedium, the results say I did okay and now it’s just a matter of waiting for the graduation to be absolutely sure I don’t have to do that shit any more. Let’s hope I don’t jinx myself by blogging about it too soon. Or by building my new house on that old Indian burial ground I just bought.
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Steve Jobs died last week, and here I find myself writing about it with all the delayed topicality of a Ben Elton novel. He’s been on my mind for two reasons: first, because he was cracking and, second, because of how he wasn’t.
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As you’ll recall, back before the running and the freecycling and the e-petitioning and the Nepal Diarying and Nepal diarrheaing I was banging on about buying a car. I’d looked into emissions and fuel types and hybrids and because I wrote it on the way to the airport bound for Nepal I ended up with a really lousy title pun, the kind of shit The Sun would turn down for being insufficiently cerebral: Emission impossible. Seriously. And that was before the jet-lag and the bowel problems set in, there’s really no excuse.
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Read through the Nepal Diaries, you could reach the end thinking I hate the place, presenting as they do an endless parade of poverty, frustration and half-empty glasses. But it’s a cracking country, a ramshackle would-be paradise packed full of friendly, generous people, packed full of culture and tradition and cracking food, packed full of energy and activity and ambition. It’s just a shame so much of it gives me the shits.
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Like Bryan Adams before me, my talent, wealth and international fame bring me much attention when in Nepal, but unless my fans speak English our conversations struggle to go beyond their names, how they are and if they know the way to the nearest emergency diarrhea clinic. And so it is I’ve started to learn Nepali. It serves as another example of how anything in life can be turned into a moral dilemma if you’re principled, determined to live ethically and short of ideas for blog entries.
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What with all this talk about the Big Society, by which I mean what with all this insincere talk about the Big Society which is only revolutionary if you’re a selfish Thatcherite former public schoolboy who didn’t realise the rest of the world already cared about each other while you were getting rich, it seems timely to update you on how the old social work degree’s going.
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The first of every month brings with it two important things: a needlessly aggressive pinch/punch combo for my friends and loved ones and the announcement of the Charity of the Month. So without further stalling, hesitation or ado, let’s begin a paragraph that delays announcing it.
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Your world has been rocked, no doubt, by the apparent delay in announcing the Charity of the Month. You sit at your computer on or around the 15th of every month, hitting the refresh button with increasing anxiety to learn where we should direct our payday donations. I’ve kept you waiting there for over two weeks leading to disciplinaries at work, broken marriages at home and stood up mistresses at motels. While I apologise for the upset, distress and scandal caused I had good reason: I don’t get paid no more.
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