LONDON DIARY MAY 21ST 2013

I don’t know whether the presence of a full moon increases a predilection toward madness, I do know that the weather has a deep and significant impact on mood. Yesterday was full of the threat of thunder that never materialized. The sky remained dark and oppressive, the air pregnant with a dense electric energy; at one time humid, at another surprisingly cold. Walking back from Notting Hill Gate I was reminded of the descent of fog in Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, strange things suddenly seemed possible.

‘Melancholy thoughts,’ Nineteenth Century writers would have said of the drift of my thinking, and they would have been right. I have written elsewhere of my fondness for melancholy, a rich soupy state of mind in which thinking becomes poetry.

I have been engaged in writing, fiction and a response to an article in an addiction magazine written by Russell Brand. Not really blog material since you need to see the original article to make sense of my response. However I do not have permission to reproduce Brand’s piece. 

I have written before about the issues raised by Russell Brand, who on the strength of his own experience seems to have established himself as an authority on the subject.

None of this would matter, celebrities have been sounding off about their run-ins with drugs and alcohol since the emergence of ‘celebrity culture’ in the Twentieth Century, but for the fact that we now have an administration buying into Brand’s brand, pardon the pun, of Twelve Step recovery. Again this would not matter so much except that Twelve Step evangelists like Brand sell it as the only game in town.

What your average punter might not know is that the Twelve Step philosophy is profoundly religious in character, its primary tenets being trust in God, normally referred to as a ‘higher power,’ confession of past sins, restitution of wrongs committed and ongoing prayer and meditation. It is rooted in Judeo- Christian tradition and wrapped in the language of an American mid western born again Christianity.*

Now of course whilst none of this discredits a Twelve Step approach to addiction treatment it does certainly suggest that it is not appropriate for everyone and that such an approach is, to put it generously, distinctly leftfield. 

Writing such a piece pulls me back in directions from which I would rather move on; it’s not so much that the issues are not of interest to me, but after thirty years working in and around issues of addiction I feel weary at the lack of progress and imaginative thinking in the field.

I also find I don’t really want to talk about politics. Watching the Tory party engage in yet another bout of infighting over Europe is about as arresting as watching a washing machine spin cycle. Describing some Tory activists, as a senior figure in the party is alleged to have done, as ‘mad swivel eyed loons’ seem to me to be an insult to all self respecting swivel eyed loons in the country. What I do object too is this obsessive mania being inflicted on a country in which vulnerable people are being made homeless and driven into poverty as a direct consequence of government policy.

When Jack straw became Home Secretary following the Labour landslide of 1997 he was asked if he had viewed his, or indeed any of his erstwhile comrades, MI5 files. He stated that he thought this would be inappropriate and trusted the security services, (in this he may possibly have been the only person in the whole of the labour movement who did).

 This told me all I needed to know about this anaemic prat. It was he incidentally, who, at Tony Blair’s insistence, watered down freedom of information legislation, thus allowing, as is happening at present, a government minister to overrule the Information Commissioner respecting e-mails from Prince Charles.

Last night I watched him on TV being confronted with the decision not to open an enquiry into the deaths at the Hillsborough football stadium. Up until then I had not fully grasped the meaning of an insult I had heard in my teens, though not since; he was like a wet fart in a lemonade bottle. 

*12-Step supporters insist that 'the programme' is 'spiritual' not religious in character, this is sophistry of a low order, merely playing with words. It speaks to a distinction without a difference.

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