Opening my curtains on Thursday morning, the curtain rail collapses – wee bits of plastic flying everywhere. Drive into Edinburgh for replacement – find Homebase is selling rolls of turf – five for £20; remember recent decision to get some – helpful assistant loads boot. I can no longer mount a ladder, then use both hands – too unsteady; phone local handyman, Tommy, who comes after his work – cheerful and competent – takes him less than an hour to re-hang curtains. Rude to eat while he’s working – so after, starving, I drive into South Queensferry for a Lamb Bhuna. I have a favourite parking spot – looking across the three bridges to Fife. While unloading my supper, I somehow lose the boiled rice – eat my delicious lamb without it – then I remember I put it under the passenger seat? I also expect to remember soon why I have acquired five rolls of turf.
This true sketch of Thursday is to illustrate, that old age is about managing the decline of certain capabilities; if you can no longer use a ladder or remember where you just put something, you better start adjusting to external help; before we need too much of it, we hope life ends. If you have the pleasure of writing a weekly column, you have an extra decision – how long can I continue reporting my decline ‘hopefully’. Vaclav Havel said that either we have hope within us, or we don’t – that it’s a ‘dimension of the soul’ – independent of circumstances. I think I ‘get’ this. Havel’s hope is timeless.
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The system, that everyone contributes to a central fund according on their means – then receives healthcare according to their needs, is not only the blueprint for our NHS – but is a template for how the future wellbeing economy could be organised: co-operatively. The potential of Covid to overwhelm the health provision has made us even more aware of how precious the NHS is. Media reports on the pressure on GPs and their teams, have tightened my own resolve to minimise my demands and expectations as much as possible. Us auld yins are to get a booster and flu jab together – then it’s ‘batten down the hatches’ for winter.
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The UK Treasury has repeatedly warned that keeping the £20 on Universal Credit would require tax increases – which, I think, is exactly what should happen; it would be difficult to think of a better ‘levelling up’ that £1040 annually into millions of our poorest households. While they’ll want to – I think the Tories will be too scared to make this cut.
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I was a great fan of The Wire, particularly episodes about the American drug scene; my favourite character was the morally ambiguous Omar Little, played by Michael K Williams, who died this week from a suspected drug overdose. I enjoyed this Conversation piece, looking at the considerable influence of The Wire on TV.
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The people who set up Big Society Capital (BSC) intended that our third sector become a ‘new asset class for the money markets’; but most the social sector needs grant finance, or very patient investment, and BSC now sits remote, and underused. Now, onwards, a right wing think tank wants to move BSC even further from the social economy.
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Lesley Riddoch’s Monday Herald Column this week is about the SNP Leadership’s intention, that the ‘transitional constitution’ for an independent Scotland, will be written by their own hand-picked group. Like myself, she thinks that the business of ‘nation building’ is too big for one party. This is a job for ‘the people’ – with professionals on tap – not on top.
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Brilliant short reflection from a native American sage.
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In November 2016, the late Ursula Le Guin posted this beautiful short essay: ‘The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water’ It rejects American fondness for the metaphor of war – destructive aggression as the only way to meet any challenge. In its place, she offers the Taoist model of ‘the flow of water’:
“We have glamorized the way of the warrior for millennia. We have identified it as the supreme test and example of courage, strength, duty, generosity, and manhood. If I turn from the way of the warrior, where am I to seek those qualities? What way have I to go? Lao Tzu says, the way of water:…’water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on Earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element’…The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going — carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant by choice and uses force only when compelled, always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”
