The question I keep asking myself.

This one is a bit of a two parter as questions go… I think it’s best to start with the first part and I suspect you may know what the second part will be by then…

I have asked myself this question constantly since March 2003 but it’s only over the past 7 years that it has become much more personal and more nuanced.

“Do bad people know they are bad? Do evil people know they are evil?”

I gave up smoking on the 19th of March 2003, it was the only thing I could do to stop the Iraq war. Isn’t that pathetic? I figured that it was the least I could do to deny the government of that tax money in case some of it went towards killing some poor sod in George W Bush’s quest to finish what his daddy started. I often wonder if Tony Blair knowns what he is, does he roll out of bed in the morning and think, “f%%k me! Did I kill a lot of people?” Clearly not, as his actions since are those of someone who regards themselves as a great statesperson rather than the war criminal that everyone outside of his close circle thinks him to be. That is part of question too I guess… is good subjective? Depending on who you speak to. Or is it that people specifically choose who they speak to so as to elicit the desired response? If that is the case though, do people know they are doing that? Do they hang around with those that will reinforce their conformation bias as a means to safeguard their self image? We are definitely into ‘inception’ territory here aren’t we?

I have had a lot of bad and evil done to me over the years and it is still happening. I could never have imagined that sham medical assessor Atos and the Work Capability Assessment could be unleashed on the sick and disabled and I am still amazed now about how few care or even remember the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people under the first wave of Tory austerity. The man in charge throughout this, Iain Duncan Smith, clearly thinks that he is a thoroughly decent human being, so much so that not only did he insist that protesters calling him ‘Tory Scum’ were arrested, charged and brought to trial but that they be tried again when the first trial found them innocent. The amusing upshot is that after the second trial upheld the defendants’ description of Smith as ‘Tory Scum’ we can all call him the same. Thanks Iain!

I’ve had evil upon evil done to me and everyone else for as long as I can remember, from Thatcher onwards, the Conservative party have torn this country to shreds. Do they know they are evil? Again, they band together with likeminded folks to justify their appalling actions. To the Tories, evil is contextual, they ‘other’ the rest of the population and tell themselves that they deserve their success and it had nothing to do with family money, school connections or some other systemic unfairness.

When I was being thrown out of my home I couldn’t believe just how many people would happily sign up to work for letting agents and do the bidding of greedy, vile, people. I would be threatened by court orders just because I didn’t want to vacate my home during covid in the coldest months because some potential buyer wanted to poke around in my home of 13 years that they only saw as a money making opportunity.

Most evil or wrong doing seems to be diluted in some way or another, the estate agents, the surveyors, the builders and trades people that make a living working for these people all make up little excuses in their heads to tell themselves that they are ok people. They can point a finger at someone else up the food chain and tell themselves that they are the bad guy, not them.

I wonder how that applies to the property developer that gutted the entire building around me over 6 or more months (I’ve blotted a lot of this out). He knew my mother had just died and he threw me out of my home because he saw he could make a lot more money if he jammed in a second bedroom; sure, there would be partition walls halfway across windows and rooms in perma-darkness but… money. he really liked money. He exposed me to constant noise and torment for all that time, invaded my space and poisoned my lungs when I should have been grieving for my loss in peace. If done out of sheer spite, that’s a prison sentence, if done as he did it, he’s an entrepreneur. Evil is indeed a matter of context.

I have had awful things done to me by those that know me for even less and those events hurt even more. I have been cheated on, lied to, had people try and intimidate me on the internet (hence no comments) and in the real world. Partly through this annoyingly autistic habit of speaking the truth and partly through the blowback of someone trying to cover their tracks whilst two-timing me. Was evil intended? I don’t think so, but it happened regardless. The concept of good and evil gets very muddied when the notion of virtue signalling comes into play. I was attacked by people who live in the most ostentatious house in their street, Where everyone around them scrapes by as renters in one floor as a flat, they own an entire building and yet woe betide anyone that questions their socialist credibility. Hypocrisy comes into much of this; homeowners gentrifying the area, championing renters rights after they have indirectly caused their plight in the first place, anti capitalists with awfully nice homes and cars and the fanciest of houses in the fanciest of areas, environmental campaigners who jump on a short hall flight at the first opportunity. It’s amazing just how quickly these people will turn on a disabled person who has suffered at the hands of the Tories, the Department of Work and Pensions and bad landlords when their left wing values are put into question.

The reason I put myself through hell to write a book about my experience of the housing crisis was to put a human face on it. Most evil is carried out through ‘othering’ as mentioned above. It’s easy to take someone’s money away if you tell yourself that they are lazy, it’s easy to move into an already crowded area and force the prices up if you tell yourself that you are improving the area, it’s easier to put up rents or force people out on the streets if you can tell yourself that you worked harder or they are lesser people. I wanted to show that you can be a tea total, drug free, hardworking, ‘decent’ human being and have your life utterly destroyed by a combination of bad luck and greed, there is not much in the way of those but the most dedicated of fascists or the most rabid of capitalists who could claim that I in any way brought my situation upon myself. Not that, in a fair and just society, those things I described should mean anything but, sadly, they do, everyone deserves a safe and warm home, they are just the basic building blocks of a sane and healthy society. I wanted to create something real, shockingly real, and very human to possibly nudge a few consciouses into some human beings that are clearly lacking them. From everything that I have learned about people, though, it is a bit of a fool’s hope but then I am not denying that I am a fool.

Imagine how I felt, though, when the person who had already aimed human hand grenades in mine and other peoples’ (I later discovered) path had now declared themselves to be an expert in the area of rental housing, despite owning their own home for longer than many of their fellow renters rights campaigners have been alive and being involved in numerous enterprises that have indirectly whacked up the housing and rental prices… Can you imagine how that felt?… Hang on! Can you though?

Much of what I have described is about empathy, could Tony Blair put himself in the position of an Iraqi child as smart bombs rained down upon Baghdad? Could the ‘healthcare professional’ that described me as perfectly fit for work despite being a shut in for the decade prior imagine the toll of a year of appeals had on my mental and physical health? (I have had ptsd from that ever since). Does Iain Duncan Smith ever imagine how many deaths he directly caused and feel the fear and desperation of all those that died? Did Margaret Thatcher ever stop to consider her destruction of British industry, the deaths of soldiers for a rain sodden island in the middle of nowhere or just what would happen when the council housing disappeared? Do the people who nailed my photo to lampposts still believe that I am a ‘bad man’ because someone else told them so and I dared to question the sense of what they were doing and the damage it could cause, did they imagine how it must feel to have that much hate and those sort of threats directed at you from unnamed sources? Do the estate agents who threatened me with court action even remember my name? Would the guy who profited from my being slung out of my home of fourteen years so he could make an extra few thousand pounds even recognise me if he passed me in the street? It’s amazing the mental gymnastics that some people go through just to make what they do seem okay and the juggling that they go through to justify their continued wrong doing.

Which brings me to the situation right now. Does the person who knew me and now is blocking my path to promote my book on the housing crisis locally know that they are causing harm to me and to the whole cause of improving the housing crisis and, if so, do they care? The truth is, I haven’t a clue. To be honest, I honestly don’t know who that person truly is and I doubt that I ever did. Their actions seem entirely insane to me and completely unfathomable.

This brings me, finally, to the second part of the question… Am I a good person?

Surely this one fact must have a massive effect on who and what I see as wrong or indeed evil.

In a way, I am the last person to even judge that as I cannot separate myself fully from my actions to judge. The fact that I don’t think I am is actually a sign that I’m probably better than I think but we are getting into the realms of circular logic here. I can be ratty sometimes, I swear a lot and I am less forgiving than I’d like to be, I could be better at recycling, I didn’t go to my own mother’s funeral and I would never go on a protest march, however the last two are down to autism but I still didn’t do them and they haunt me. There are things I know upset other people that I don’t feel in the slightest bit sorry about, like not going to weddings or their social gatherings (autism again) but the ones that really upset people are the drawings… I have done some horrendous drawings of people over the years (I can’t judge as to their technical competence or ‘badness’) but, to be frank, I’ve just held up a mirror to them or the situation so those that are offended always deserve it (although , to be fair, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)… and that is about it, I think. There are a lot of people that hate me though… although I have a good idea who instigated most of that and why.

Autistic people can put people’s backs up, there is no secret to that. It’s sometimes because of the uncanny valley thing of trying to act more ‘normal’ (whatever that is) and allistic people sensing that somethings is ‘off’ or the complete honesty thing upsetting someone or the sensory processing disorder meaning that we have massively misunderstood something or have been misunderstood ourselves. We are disabled in some very unique ways that are hard to comprehend and these are some of them and it causes us to often be disliked ‘just because’.

I don’t even want to write this bit as I can’t bear vanity or virtue signalling and I make a point of keeping much of what I do very private…. Do you know what? I’ve written and deleted this paragraph of good things that I’ve done a number of times and it nauseates me. I don’t keep a score of this stuff and it would be indelicate to list who I’ve helped and why. You are going to have to trust me on this… But that is part of the point isn’t it? I have found that if you look in the papers and online sites, the shittier a human being is, the more mentions they seem to have. You will not have heard of the nicest people I know and never will as they hate publicity.

We have hit an impasse then in that how can we actually know who is good and who is bad? If the bad think they are good and the good won’t admit that they are, then how can anyone judge anyone’s actions? And my answer to that is….

Have you had a good look at the state of the world recently?

You can buy my book about the housing crisis here.

Who put you in charge?

Some people are utterly amazing, I spent six months or so liaising with a team of palliative carers a few years back. They’d come in twice a day to give personal care to a friend I was keeping an eye on. Their work was backbreaking at times but they did everything with such good humour; the humour was vital. I’d make them a drink if they had time to knock it back before the next client, they knew I made good coffee and deeply respected what they did. There is an invisible army in Britain of underpaid, mostly, women that live out of cars and go from person to person caring for the sick and vulnerable. I was offered a job with them, funnily enough, but my life took a massive downslide and the opportunity passed. I’ve always known that humanity is as much bodily fluids as poetry and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise (but many do).

There is a lot of skill that comes with caring for the sick and dying, they knew more than the doctors in most cases as they saw it every day, the lady in charge was an SRN (state registered nurse) but it was only because I am very observant that I spotted that she was the boss, they were a unit and functioned so. They were part cleaner, part medic, part counsellor and part comedian and all of this with utter grace.

And so undervalued.

I’ve met so many others who treat such people like dirt, they give themselves airs and graces and waft through life as if they own the world; that it and the people in it are their playthings, little person shaped pieces on a board that they can pick up and move around for their own ends and amusement.

Other people would like you to think they are amazing, they give themselves big titles or act like they speak for everybody. I was doing some maths in my head this morning I’d counted about 15 people that I know of that, for no good reason I can see, have appointed themselves as pillars of the community. They weren’t born with extra brains (far from it in mostly) they have no visible gifts but for some unfathomable reason they act like they are in charge and their opinions matter more than everybody else’s.

For the sake of argument (and easy maths), let’s say there are a hundred people like that in this town who are (as they would describe it) bringing the community together. so one hundred out of 92,000 is… Roughly 0. 1% have appointed themselves as leaders, champions, heads of the community. Questions spring to mind; Who by? Why? What qualifications? What are the other 99.9% of people doing?

I have regretfully had a window into this world and watched these characters scurrying from cafe to cafe, getting this person to do this while that person does that and not actually doing anything themselves in-between, there might be loads of people involved in whatever but as they are the spokesperson, it’s them in the press, it’s them in the media and years later when you put their name in google, they are often the only one linked to the project. It’s a clever trick to say ‘community’ when what is really meant is ‘me! me! me!”

I think of those beautiful people up top and it angers me that while they are wiping bums, changing incontinence pants, emptying catheter bags and applying cream to bed sores there is a ridiculously visible minority that lift nothing heavier than a full cup of coffee and deal with nothing messier that a rare leaking ball point pen that will get paid twice as much and rewarded with attention.

I was wise to their game from the get go. Often, those that set up a ‘community’ project become the most important thing about it. You will find their name attached to some focal point or a statement that could have come from a whole team. All those little minions that they shined their light upon so briefly are left behind in obscurity as they inevitability move on to the next thing when the funding money runs out. They are like animals moving through the savanna , going from water hole to water hole, draining it back to dry mud and heading on, leaving a barren wasteland behind them.

I hate the insincerity of such people, they are all smiles and eye contact and they overuse your name because they did a course once where they learned how to manipulate people into getting what they want. They are the equivalent of the sets in an old western, painted fronts and bare boards and props for the parts that you aren’t supposed to see. That charm is linked to a switch, not a dial, and it flicks on when needed and off as quickly.

I have tried to remain anonymous for most of my life and I’ve met these types when they haven’t been aware of my skill set and they have looked right through me and every kind word is met with stoney silence and a glare; and then I’ve been introduced to them later, maybe a week, maybe a months, maybe a year as Chris Hoggins, “whatever” and you see the light bulb moment of what use I could be to their goal for attention and suddenly they are all charm and loveliness… but I never forget a name… or when someone blanks me.

Whether it’s turning your birthday party into a charity fund-raising event, using your victimhood as a moneymaking exercise, humiliating the homeless for your childhood ambition that you should have grown out of when you learnt the difference between right and wrong, claiming to be something you are not so that you can become the focus of a cause or running groups for the vulnerable while you and your immediate family are making their lives worse, a few people in my town or in any other town will always have an obscene need to be loved, admired and / or worshiped.

One thing that particularly fascinates me is how willing they are to scupper anyone else’s good works, often much better than their’s, for no other reason than it wasn’t their idea. They do not stand for the public good, just their own.

It’s safe to say that such people have some serious psychological issues that need to be addressed but like most of a narcissistic bent, they can never see that the problem that needs fixing most of all is them.

Imagine

There is a myth that Autistic people don’t feel empathy or indeed much at all. It’s actually the exact opposite, we feel far too much and then blow a fuse.

In my case, I can’t be around certain people because they make my skin crawl; I can feel their awfulness and it makes my insides feel polluted.

Here’s a little empathy test for you… I hope you will play along.

Imagine feeling terrified for a day, a whole day with no respite, you are feeling the worst threat that you have ever felt in your whole life. Have You got that? Good!

Now times that by three hundred and sixty five. You wake up terrified, you go through every second of the day under threat. You develop all sorts of illnesses and your body falls apart on you. Can you imagine that? Have you got it yet? keep trying….

Now imagine another six months of that. Go on! you’ve done so much already…

Now your mother dies!

Oh! and one your closest friends on the exact same day.

Can you imagine that? Go on! Try really really hard!

Now cope with that grief while on the same day a complete stranger is ripping your floor up and a spoilt, rich, man-child, landlord is looking at you like shit on his shoes.

Now spend six more months in noise and terror and filth and dirt… You are still with me aren’t you? You haven’t sneaked off yet? Because I can’t; there is no escape for me from this, I have to live this.

And then after all that fear, and grief, and uncertainty and degradations and pollution you finally get out.

…

…

…

Oh! No! It’s not over yet, silly!

Now imagine a spoilt millionaire is breathing down your neck for a fortune to you and pocket change to him back that they had lent you to (part) move.

And imagine that you cannot get any of the last few years’ horrors from your mind and you relive them every day and you are just waiting to lose your home again because it doesn’t feel real or safe.

Now imagine your mother had left your inheritance in the care of your sister with learning disabilities (except mum refused to believe it and never told her) and that she has frittered away tens of thousands of your money because she is so utterly clueless and that (now ex) friend is still pestering you.

Now imagine that the only way you can make sense of all this and to give it some validation is to write and illustrate about what you experienced, why it happened and what can be done to improve matters; and imagine that that action make you feel slightly less hopeless.

Now imagine that is what you did, you spend the best part of the years writing and illustrating your nightmares and eventually got something together that was your testament to the pain and grief and misery you ploughed through, so you may at least have a tangible human account of the horrors our political climate can do to us. Are you still there? Are you coping ok? because by then I was leaking like a rusty bucket.

Now imagine that someone who could never be in that position because of wealth, privilege and sheer dumb luck tried to steal all that from you for nothing more than their own silly vanity. Can you imagine the level of hurt that I must feel because they dared try and rob me of the one good thing to come from years of pain and horror?

Now imagine what could possibly be going through their head to allow them to think that is an okay thing to do? Imagine how you could square that so that you could sleep at night or ever look anyone decent in the eye ever again. Can you do that? Good! That’s really good!

Because I cannot.

I’ve got nothing!

I am a camera

When I first visited here, maybe twenty years ago, I fell in love with the place; the eccentricity, the thrown-togetherness and all the strange little details that made the place unique. I had been a shut in for the best part of ten years on a soulless 80’s housing estate in a northern town where I was constantly glared at for being me.

Hastings started to feature in my painting back then as almost a mythical land and the paintings I made were filled with the curious characters I spotted. The art would be fun and vibrant and I met some lovely people; and then austerity happened.

My first few years’ paintings here were incredibly jolly, I’d let my imagination run away with and from me at a breakneck speed. I felt pride to be a part of this town and the locals I met accepted me for who and what I was and I went native. There were nods to the tragedies brought about by the Torys but the people shined through and many of them appeared in my art.

People liked what I did much more back then, the vibrant colours, the happy faces and when I painted someone, they were genuinely happy about it… Not so much now… There was a time where my portraits hung on walls. now they are mostly viewed through the gaps in closed fingers as the anger wells up.

When the art you make is a reflection of what you see it really isn’t your fault when you are exposed to and start creating a horror-show. If you woke up this morning with a spot on your nose or those bags are exceptionally droopy, do you smash the mirror? Is it the mirror’s fault for what it reflects?

Something changed in the mid twenty-tens; it was partly the austerity kicking in as one support network after another collapsed and partly that a certain type of people were getting a stranglehold over the town. The DFL (Down From London) is less a geographical demarcation than a group mentality. It is a group of self-serving people that often wrap themselves up in the word ‘community’ as a wolf would wrap themselves up in grandma’s bloodied shawl. They hit a critical mess(sic) around 2016 and proceeded to change the area from the, slightly run down, seaside town to which the poor, the eccentric and the creative had gravitated into their own money making and attention seeking playground.

Like many autistic people, I can spot patterns in, what to others is, random chaos; it’s a relief to know that now as it helps to explain the level of prescience that I have to events that could previously be written off as me being a nutter. There are over 80,000 people that live here and I only ever saw the same few faces and names pop up and I wondered why…

There is something wrong with some people, they have a deep seated need for attention and they need to be seen as good or clever or talented; to be seen as such but it is not important if they actually are. I think social media helped, it allowed a lot of pretty talentless and definitely unpleasant people to bind together in common cause. Echo chambers, for that is what this was, only reflect the views of those inside them. if thirty people stand in a circle, looking inwards, it’s unlikely that they will see the other seventy nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy people outside of that who are looking at them in disgust.

As I said, DFL is a state of mind and there were a few willing locals who had psychologically burnt most of the other local people in the town and found some new friends to play with. It was hard to remember at what point and with what it started. It might have been when the illuminated bike rides became co-opted into ‘events’ and the sound systems grew bigger and they thought that blocking the roads and waking up all the children by riding through the Old Town at night was big and clever and impressed people. I know exactly what state they were in and I’m not saying 😉. It could have been when one vaguely successful (basically, where else’s was anyone going to go with nothing else on?) New Years Eve party turned into a franchise and a bunch of has-beens that had retired early and used the discrepancy between (then) London prices and here to clear their mortgages and pretend they were the next New York Club Kids or the crew from Blitz and, suddenly, all the monster egos came out.

I remember a conversation with one of them at the time, saying that they neither had any comprehension of poverty or any of the damage that they were doing to the town and their reply was this, “Yes, we did move down from London and buy a big house, so what? The rich have made London expensive for us so it’s only natural that we will move down here and pass that onto someone else. That’s how capitalism works!” That was said to me by someone who now volunteers with a housing pressure group…

Once the DFLs had taken over the town and firmly wedged themselves in the arts, media and all the community groups they branched out into good causes. Well… perceived good causes… They would wave banners, spray shit up shit and, for some bizarre reason, everything had a choir for a while.

This is where my disgust fully sets in as many of the problems they claimed to be fixing were exacerbated by them in the first place.. If you spend years buying up the houses and specing them out for Londoners with the fancy kitchens and grey London paint jobs and you encourage your greedy mates down to buy everywhere that would have been bought by first time buyers and rent it back to them at a premium, if you gentrify the area and get funding money to pay yourself to tart up all the brownfield sites and put little community gardens everywhere that only you go to, then don’t be surprised when the house prices sore and the locals are priced out. This wasn’t helped by all those with chums in the London media rubbing their hands in glee as they came down for a weekend and went back with glowing reviews because all they saw was what their DFL friends chose to show them; not the drugs (well only the sort they like) not the poverty and hardship, just a narrow spectrum of exactly what they left in London and we got the name “Shoreditch on Sea”… Lucky us!

As things got grimmer the virtue signalling became more grotesque, public school ‘socialists’ not explaining how their massive house was paid for by hiring their London pad out to a chum’s film crew for three seasons of a comedy show. The one that spent their time not protesting working as a landing strip for yet more DFLs and funnelling them into all the cushy projects in return for her own ancillary services. The town grew more and more choked with nice ‘London types’ tapping away at their laptops in every cafe with wi-fi discussing funding, grants and social funds and the best way to extract money from them.

The projects got more and more grandiose, a festival for this, an event for that and pretty soon the town was a cut price Disneyland where all the locals were merely ‘colour’ and just unpaid bit-part actors sent to starve in their garrets now that the big wigs have moved to town. (but only as their weekend home of course)

I saw all this and I heard even more, like the people who let a child choke to death on sick and then did much worse than nothing, someone ‘helping’ the homeless that got the council to pay their mortgage with a very interesting little wheeze, I saw a wannabe working class hero let their partner struggle while they puffed themselves up in public. I saw the most damaged and depraved exploiting the most vulnerable. I saw greed and fraud and cruelty and infidelity and every single one of the seven deadly sins writ large…

As I said, I am a camera… my lens is wide open, I documented it; and then a lot of people got upset. They got upset because they recognised what they saw and did not like it; because they saw what I saw staring at them in the mirror first thing in those few picoseconds before the shutters go down and they start to believe their own lies again. Of course it didn’t help that someone lied about me a lot to cover up their seedy behaviour and they got their flying monkey chums to put the word out on me too. That’s the thing, while honesty is supposed to be a virtue, no one really wants to hear the truth.

Suffice to say, my art no longer sells that well. It rarely flatters and it doesn’t lie. And that’s about it for today.

I talk more about gentrification and the housing crisis in my book Roof-Less, available here.

I care because you don’t.

I remember getting my first pay slip in 1989, looking at it and feeling sick.

Not because it was so little, but because it was so much. I felt so guilty for having so much but in a world with so much awfulness in it. Okay, so I was 19, Thatcher was still PM and I had to walk past cardboard City most days. (And Rachel Reeves talked today about Thatcherism in glowing terms) and I couldn’t cope with having anything when so many had nothing.

Knowing that I have autism is such a relief. Knowing that the reason I get so hurt by greed, by mendaciousness and corruption is because it is literally hard wired into my brain to do so explains so much about my relationship with the world. It has also caused me so much trouble.

A lot of people pretend to care and the most cynical of all (the virtue signallers ) make sure that they are visibly seen to care but only within a given value of caring.

I used to know a wonderful man by the name of Kwame Ofori (what a beautiful sounding name, a bit like Graham Green’s “cellar door”) back in the early nineties Kwame was eating an apple and spotted a “produce of South Africa” sticker on it. He then stuck his fingers down his throat and proceeded to vomit it back up again into a waste paper bin. You have to admire that! He definitely cared.

I have upset so many people and got into so much trouble in my life for actually doing the right thing. I have, unfortunately, found that there are few better ways to guarantee poverty and people crossing the road to avoid you than doing the right thing and being honest.

We all like to tell ourselves that we are good people, that if we were challenged, we would stand up and do the right thing. But we probably wouldn’t. If my life were a report card, it would have “could do better” on it. But at least I have the guts to admit that and at least I am trying… Very trying by all accounts.

As I said, most people want to look like a good person; but there is a narcissistic and even calculating proportion that go the extra mile to look it even when they cause trouble by doing so. So many people get in a position to do good and then don’t; Keir Starmer anyone?

I know so many people that are too afraid to call out one particular person, around here, for the loathsome, greedy, conceited, arrogant and thoroughly deluded human being that they are because they have weaponised their particular protected characteristic and they beat any of the nice, virtue signalling, middle class, networkers over the head with it if they even think about questioning any of their many terrible actions. I’ve seen them all rally round this person and attack people on their behalf, they aren’t stupid (at least I think they aren’t) but they all want to remain on the ‘right on’ gravy train until they retire. I’m reminded of that episode of the Twilight Zone, hmm! What’s it called? Oh Yes! “It’s a good life!” Where everyone dances around a spoiled child because he has the power to destroy with a thought. Just how bad does someone have to be to take a wonderful quality like equality and subvert it for their own greed? I think I’ve come the nearest to standing up to them of anyone I know and I’m sure it’s cost me lost work, possibly a lost relationship; thinking about it now. I know they even tanked a business partnership to wreck someone else’s career when someone crossed them, so why wouldn’t they have?

That’s the problem with autism, we actually can’t stop telling the truth and that is one of the things that actually makes what we have a registered disability. We can’t function in this world as it is as we get into all sorts of bother and yet we are punished for it. I wonder if I could use the same logic other grifters use to get what I want and wrap all those nice do-gooders around my little finger with the threat of public shaming? Probably not; and because I, like so many autistic people, am hardwired to do the right thing, none of us would think to even try.

It’s okay in our society to consign the likes of me to paraih status because, in the hierarchy of victimhood, we don’t matter. Which, in a rather perverse way and one worth acknowledging in the week where we are supposed to be actually celebrating the neurodiverse, this failure for anyone to bat an eyelid about ostracising the autistic makes us more subject to prejudice than anyone.

I am past the point of caring if I look good, I know the difference between right and wrong and refuse to only do right when I will be applauded or rewarded for doing so. Truth be told I feel sorry for all those I see that only wave the right placard at the right time and champion the cause that gets them the most kudos because under that micron thick veneer of good I think that they are all rotten to the core.

Guilty?

I am fascinated why people do what they do. Some people have amazing passions, they paint, they sculpt they write poetry. There is a lady in Japan that sews facsimiles of all the people that have left the ghost town that she lives in. A friend of mine took up pottery late in life and now those plates and bowls are all that I have left of her. I taught myself how to solder the other day and I’m so glad that at 53 years old, there is just so much that I don’t know. I do everything that I do because I love learning and I love being constantly surprised by new things.

Then there are the other people…

I know exactly why Rishi Sunak wanted to be Prime Minister and it is no coincidence that his reticence to hold a general election coincided with the fact that the Indian trade deal that will double the price of his family’s Infosys shares has been kicked into the long grass by the Indian elections and it won’t go through till around September.

I know why most politicians do what they do nowadays and it is rarely for a good reason, left or right.

I am curious about one situation closer to home though as I’m not sure what that is about.

I have narrowed it down to two things, vanity or guilt and neither are good reasons to do anything. It could be someone feeling bad for everything they have and how easy their life is and all the shitty things they have done over the years or it could be nothing more than vanity.

Some bad people just go with it, like the landlords I watched talking to someone from Politics Joe last week. There wasn’t an ounce of remorse or compassion in any of those people and I bet they all sleep soundly at night. There are other bad people for whom it haunts them to an extent, they know what they are and they are trying to do better; not because they have suddenly become better people but because they don’t like feeling bad and want the feeling to stop. They are haunted by their own guilt and want it to go away.

There are others who are just vain, they want to feel good about themselves at any cost, and if people get hurt as a side effect of that, they will find a way to cognitively reframe the situation and erase that part of the narrative. Virtue signallers as these are now called, are a phenomenon that has arisen since the advent of social media. They are a turbo charged version of do-gooders where instead of learning ballroom dancing, the banjo or getting 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, they meddle in the lives of those they deem less fortunate and inflict their idea of good on them, even if it kills them.

I rescued someone’s dog today, it had shot under the promenade and was dangling from a lead that had got wrapped around the railing. I was telling this to a friend tonight and because the dog owner was a woman with a young child who might have been single, my friend was asking whether she was attractive. My answer was that I hadn’t a clue. I was aware that this woman was vulnerable, with a very confused dog and a young child who was interacting with a, much larger, man who could have been anyone and I didn’t even make eye contact, I just lowered myself down, picked up the dog, checked everyone was safe and walked away. That is what you are supposed to do, you understand what is actually needed, do it and move on.

Doing the right thing should not be a hobby, it should not be something you should expect gratitude from, it is just an extension of good manners… This seems a hard thing for some people to grasp though. It could be argued that virtue signallers have mental health problems, while they might genuinely feel some sense of unfairness that they want to address, the way they choose to do it could arguably be a form of grandiose narcissism. There are plenty of ways to make the world a better place; you could donate to a good cause, go and volunteer at a homeless shelter on days other than Christmas, The Samaritans always need people. These rarely work for virtue signallers though as there are minimal photo opportunities and when your name is put into Google, a list of worthy causes and activities fail to appear.

I was talking to a chap on the board of a housing advice charity last week and they are crying out for more advisers; The only snag is the money isn’t great, it would do genuine good though and would actively help people. Would any of the usual suspects hereabouts sign up for it though? No chance!

And then we come to my book on the housing situation? Could that be construed as virtue signalling? Doubtful! I have been accused of all sorts over the years but I think the autism has excused me that particular personality flaw. The book was the same as much of what I do; someone needs to do that thing! Is anyone going to do it? No? So I guess I’m lumbered with the job! Bugger!

Now here is an interesting suggestion… I’m going to call a few people’s bluff! There are people hereabout who are claiming that they are good people, that they genuinely want to do something to help. I need help with this housing book! I have autism, I have executive functioning issues which mean that I lack the skill set to schmooze. Maybe one of you lot can do that? Just think, you can actually do something useful AND force me to feel a sense of gratitude towards you; that’s a double win! That’s got to appeal to all those do-goody, virtue signally types. Go on! I dare you! 😉

Crawl under a cow.

A few years ago now, I did a project with some vulnerable people. This has happened quite a lot over the years and on this particular occasion, there was going to be quite a bit of publicity. I walked in while the charity workers were doing the set up and there was a big photo of me…

I instantly asked them to take in down and any mention of me with it.

It was nothing to do with me, I just helped the people do the best they could, It was their work, their show. I was irrelevant. They were a little surprised but they were aware that I thought differently to most of the visiting artists (even I wasn’t aware how differently though as it was pre autism diagnosis)

I picked the wrong career basically. Or should I say, the wrong career picked me? Whatever! I don’t like publicity, I don’t like praise, I don’t like attention. I just try and do the right thing and that is that.

I have a motto; it’s slightly vulgar, “If you want a pat on the back, crawl under a cow.”

I cannot abide people that put more effort into seeming to do good than actually doing so. Particularly when I know the harm that they have already done in the past and the horrendous lies they are telling now.

Imagine, that you have experienced the most horrendous few years of your life and rather than put it behind you and bury it somewhere in your mind, you instead spend a year and a half trying to turn that into something positive that will help other people in a similar situation to help raise awareness and make a difference. Imagine just how traumatic that must have been and how much that must have taken out of someone with autism to relive nightmares and some of the worst moments of their life to ultimately help other people. Now imagine how it must feel to know that someone that has already demeaned and patronised vulnerable people has turned what you have experienced first hand into their latest hobby and source of virtue signalling?

What kind of person would do that? Is it virtue signalling? Some desperate need for approval? Or is it some sort of cynical career move?

I am reminded of the fake poor girl in Pulp’s Common People, the anger in that song. The barefaced, diabolical liberty of someone wrapping themselves in the cloak of the poverty of others for their own selfish reasons.

Does someone like that have any shame? Or is there just something missing in their psyche that allows them to behave in such a manner?

You never get a straight answer from people like that, they squirm and lie and obfuscate and even turn on the tears and pretend to be hurt, but it’s all just defence mechanisms. I doubt that beneath all that deceit there is even a person there. People like that don’t exist unless they are being validated by others and it doesn’t matter how horrible those people are. You can hope after hope that they will develop a conscience but it’s a waste of time. They cannot afford to take a good hard look at themselves as they would be horrified by what they see.

All that I can take from this bitter experience is the knowledge that I’m glad that I’m not like them. I’ve done everything for the right reasons and if that helps others great, and it it’s overshadowed by someone else’s vanity project, Its still out there in the world. At least I and a few other good souls will know the truth and it’s there for anyone else that wishes to join that number.

I would ask everyone out there to think twice before trying to feel good at the expense of the dignity of others and if you truly want to get a pat on the back for your, all too visible, good deeds…

Go crawl under a cow!

Amateur Hour

I’ve been feeling very frustrated of late for a number of reasons and, unlike many people nowadays, the first person I look to for blame is myself. It’s important to check the basics first and it is usually much more simple to change something in you than to look for others to blame. Years of therapy have told me to be wary of being too hard on myself and I’ve had too many people in the past, from parents to partners blame me before themselves for what clearly were their problems.

I also have to acknowledge that autism is a given and a constant that I have to factor into every aspect of my life and it is, in the world we live in, in the country I live in, a life limiting condition. Have we got that out of the way then? Good!

I am sick to death of the amount of people who should not be doing what they do.

There seems to be whole swathes of society who involve themselves in situations that they have no right or no level of training or even basic competence in doing and they insist on doing it anyway. It seems to be horrifically easy to set oneself and one’s most deranged friends up in organisations that put themselves in contact with society’s most vulnerable. People often much more damaged and less competent than any of those poor souls that they purport to be helping.

It appears that we have created a society in which the most important qualification in doing anything is to be perceived to be competent rather than actually being so and the sad thing is just how many people fall for it. What’s even worse is the amount of people who bob along through life, giving everything ‘a go’ and go from failure to failure leaving a trail of chaos and misery in their wake only to go and do the same thing, somewhere else, without any hint of the damage that they caused.

It is the curse of many autistic people (but not all) that this sort of person can run rings around us in the perception stakes and where we will be weighing up all the logistical factors to do the best job we can, they will be spending the same time and effort in rallying ’round the troops without a clue what to do next. But we are an extreme variation in a society that values bullshit over brains. The Boris Johnson factor, for want of a better phrase.

Whilst I tend to get bogged down in local matters and the fact that I could draw a half a mile ring around where I am and name you two disturbingly staffed mental health organisation and one housing one, places that I would not send my worse enemy to, it is the way politics in Grate Britain is run that is utterly shocking and the scariest aspect of this is that it’s always been this way.

Politics has taken a particularly bad nosedive over the last twenty years with the number of career politicians and the popularity of Oxford University’ PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) course and similar. It used to be that politicians would drift into the field after successful careers of some description as an almost philanthropic activity akin to extended jury service. Sadly, now it is often seen as a stepping stone to a life of lucrative public speaking engagements and nominal seats on the boards of large companies. There are very few ‘experts’ in politics, just enthusiastic all rounders that see whichever department they are currently heading as a managerial role into which they have been parachuted to the very top with zero understanding of the consequences.

We have suffered for years from the best efforts of deluded amateurs, many of whom are spat out of public schools and blunder into areas that are way beyond their level of competence through the chumocracy that is Britains political and media classes and we wonder why society is on its knees. We have a Prime Minister who is so wealthy and out of touch that he couldn’t even work out how to use a debit card, let alone apply for housing benefit and then try and rent a flat from the discriminatory estate agents that put everything in the way of vulnerable renters. How can anyone like this make decisions for anyone else?

Whether it is the undiagnosed sociopath trying to run an art therapy group for the mentally ill while coming down from their weekend’s coke and pill binge, the housing volunteer who has owned their own home for forty years and will never know the fear of a Section 21 landing on their doormat, let alone understand why the wretched things were created or some toffee nosed tory (or labour) MP consigning another 100,000 vulnerable people to their inevitable deaths, society will never really improve unless we make damn sure to keep, the inept, the arrogant and the plain deluded at out every walk of life that involves the safety of others.

Falling Down in the Echo Chamber

I love the film Falling Down, for those that are unfamiliar with this classic nineties blockbuster, it follows an everyday bloke played by Micheal Douglas on a trail of revenge against the system and and all the horrors of urban living; or that’s how it seems… Somewhere down the line, the, by the numbers, plot takes a swerve as it becomes clear that the ‘everyman’ tale will end in murder suicide with his estranged wife and daughter.

As the movie draws to a close he see’s his crusade through the eyes of the exhausted cop whose trying to get to the end of the day to retire and realises;

“I’m the bad guy?”

It’s a question that most people should ask themselves every time they make a decision that affects other people’s lives, “Am I the bad guy / girl/ whatever?”

Keeping on a good life path can be hard but it gets much worse when everyone that you are surrounded by is a terrible person. I’ve listened to some horror stories recently; stories about the same people from the lips of witnesses that don’t know each other with similar tails of the same few people.

In crime terms, it’s called an M.O, a modus operandi a, sort of, fingerprint of the way someone behaves. and with everyone I spoke to, the M.Os matched up

Good friends are a keystone of a decent life, “show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.” As the saying goes. Some friends we are stuck with, people from school or an odd part of our life that we are too kind to ditch but we try and keep at a distance. But, on the whole, an important part of being a good friend is showing concern if you start to go off the rails.

As I mentioned, I was listening to a disparate group of people talking about a bunch of characters, most of them are quite narcissistic, a couple particularly two faced, one is a bit bullying and the other a complete and utter harridan. None of these people try to hide their negative personality traits, to be honest, it would be easier to hide a jumbo jet behind the sofa, so I can only gather that each member of this collection of hideousness can see the many and massive flaws in each of their friends. The weirdest bit about all these people is that they have all appeared in the local press in some virtuous way or other, the hypocrisy of them is astounding.

How does that work I wonder? This isn’t one of those blogs where I pose a question and then go around the houses and reveal a genius answer, just like Peter Falk’s Columbo, I genuinely cannot understand how circles of friends like that function. Do they look around each other as they recount their latest act of spite or cruelty and think it’s utterly hilarious or do people like that sort of cancel each other out and infidelity, deviousness and hurting people becomes the norm?

Maybe it’s my autism showing but this is a real struggle for me, how does one stumble over such a weight of evidence of nastiness and not think, “Oh wait! I’m a bad guy too!”

Maybe that’s it though, maybe they know, maybe they all get off on the badness of it like some middle aged, middle class, mafia, Hell’s WI! with M&S and Boden instead of denim and leather… It makes as much sense as anything I guess.

I suspect the answer is that I’ll never ever know.

Over the top

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The General, Siegfried Sassoon.

It’s very easy to encourage others into hazardous behaviour when it has no effect on you.

I have recently witnessed someone pontificating about a subject that they clearly know next to nothing about. They were coming out with suggestions for others to carry out that could easily put their security in jeopardy, they are twisting their life into a fantasy where their lifestyle and their experiences are on a par with those that they claim to be helping and they seem not to care about exposing them to harm in the process.

The first World War shattered everyone’s illusions about those that behaved like they were leaders. Anyone who has read the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, read Birdsong, watched ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and ‘Oh What a lovely war’ or taken the time to visit the Imperial War Museum would understand what happens when clueless people with little to no concept of reality are put in a position to effect the lives of others. If you are removed from suffering the consequences of your decisions, there is absolutely no reason for changing them or learning to make better ones.

It is no small irony that the Imperial War Museum was set up in the building created for Bethlehem Mental hospital, more infamously known as Bedlam lunatic asylum. I wonder whether it was chance or by design that the home of London’s maddest became the home of the insanity that is war. Regardless, it makes me think of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, “The definition of madness is to keep performing the same actions and expect different results.” War is a prime example of this insanity.

It seems to be an eternally repeating phenomena that the privileged feel they have the right to throw those less fortunate than themselves at problems of their making. From World Wars down to office politics it’s always easier to make hard decisions if you know that they will never touch you. Sadly, such people rarely change their ways, why would they? Without the consequences, what is someone’s incentive to make less damaging decisions? There isn’t any!

Right now, in Britain, I feel like I am living in a world that is the product of such people, our unelected prime minister will never know what it feels like to go cold and hungry. Even closer to home I see those that will never have to worry if they will have a roof over their head risking the security of others for something as petty as a yet another photo in the local paper despite the trail of human carnage that they have already left in their wake. While the scale of the damage changes, I find it hard to see much difference between the oaf in 10 Downing street prattling on about ‘fixing’ the economy and the home owning virtue signallers up the road encouraging those clinging on to their last bit of security into actions that could see them on the streets. Both are the products of a combination of unconscious bias and a wilful ignorance towards the harm that they do.

Sadly, whilst we allow the clueless and invulnerable to effect the lives of others, the world will always be a terrible place in which to live.