May summary

13,000 words in 26 posts in May, linked and summarised. There's some duplication in this list because it's not easy to categorise things, and also a lot more overlap between some sections than even the duplication suggests:

Advocacy:

• Helping someone not to get angry - a practical advocacy intervention
• No advocating for avocados - seriously, ban the verb 'to advocate'
• Advocacy and therapy
• Humility is not a passive state - but it is an important part of advocacy practice
  
• Recipe for paranoia - for advocates to guard against
• Being non-judgemental - another important skill
• Being independent - how you can be, and how you can tell
  

Complaints:

• Complaints are great
  

Ethics:

• The boiling water principle - ethics is about economics too
• An apology - sorry I gave money to a multinational oppressor
• All work and no pay - partly about the problem of 'intellectual property' and some alternatives
• Being non-judgemental - this links in very closely with an ethical approach
• Ethics vs. morality - first proper description of my approach to ethics
• Theory and practice - there is only practice - throw all theory books away!

Blog organisation and methodology:

• Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom - a critical and clinical approach to the blog, and some juicy quotes
• Ethics vs. morality - ethics is one of the key principles of this blog, and here's some ideas about how that is
• Theory and practice - there is only practice - throw all theory books away!
  

State violence and discrimination:

• Rather they convict me than abase myself - the continuing story of Shaun
• The boiling water principle - we need to rethink economics if we're going to solve these problems
  
• An apology - supermarkets are violent too
• Recipe for paranoia - a problem for psychiatric units
• Bullying and harassment of doctors - it's not all one way
  

Links, discoveries and other things:

• "we all have an obligation to intervene" - from an interview with a Portuguese novelist
  
• Welcome to the Mental Health Hotline - humour from the Mental Nurse
• Bullying and harassment of doctors - from the 'work related blogs' blog
• intueri: to contemplate - another medical blog, but very thoughtful and quite ethical
  

Creativity and literature:

• A practical novel - Face by Benjamin Zephaniah
  

Spirituality and healing:

• Happy Beltane - keeping in touch with the seasons and ourselves
  

Computers and IT:

• Google good...? - some of the background to an increasingly powerful force in computing
• Best viewed in Firefox - if your not using it, get this browser
• Linux for human beings - this blog is written in the spirit of Ubuntu
  

Humour:

• An apology
  
• Welcome to the Mental Health Hotline - humour from the Mental Nurse
• No advocating for avocados - seriously, ban the verb 'to advocate'

Others:

• Cantonese/Mandarin reading matter sought
• Cats have voices too
  

A practical novel

I read an interesting book this weekend, Benjamin Zephaniah's first novel, Face. The reviews on Amazon are indicative: the first two say the book is real and fantastic, and the second two say it's simplistic and empty...

I think this disagreement is because it's a very practical book. It was dedicated to the Changing Faces charity, whose aim is to 'change the way we all see disfigurement', and Zephaniah seems to be targeting a specific audience of people who have come into contact with some sort of disfigurement (either themselves or through a friend or family member). The book is not really targeted at 'the good readers of literature' however, and this is where the latter two reviewers fall down.

One of these reviewers even suggests that Zephaniah should stick to poetry, which I think also manages to miss the point that his poetry is very practical too, and arguably no more 'literary' (in the egotistical and elitist sense) than the text of Face. I've seen Zephaniah perform a couple of times, I met him very briefly last year when my friend Shaun arranged for him to come and perform in Leeds, and I have the greatest respect for the guy. I hope he doesn't think I'm damning him with faint praise (he shouldn't, given the context of this blog) but I think what does it for me is the simplicity and directness of his poetry, and it's clear entertainment value, especially in performance.

There are no literary pretensions in this poetry (except in the eyes of some Amazon reviewers): the aim is to talk about politics in life stories that will make people laugh and cry and think and talk instead of just turning off. There is more debt to the (Afro-Caribbean) history of story-telling and entertaining than the modern experience of poetry. The literary elite may say that there needs to be more 'poetry', more space, more fluidity, more depth; but then the sort of talking they end up doing often does little to help the rest of us...

Face doesn't have these poetic niceties, but I'm very happy that I've read it, and I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I see it, apart, obviously, from being a novel, almost as an extended case study. Martin, the main protagonist, obviously has a unique story just like anybody else, but he is real enough for many of us to believe in, and recognise in lots of ways. I see that the book is in some English curriculums, and I can certainly see it's pedagogical value. I think it would also be of value, not only to the specific target audience I've already mentioned, but to a wide range of people who suffer discrimination because of something about how they look.

I'm always looking out for good case studies, and I think we should encourage more books like Face. This isn't the sort of thing you could fit on half a side of A4, and neither is life. For many people we need to get longer case studies, but they need to be practical, and not too poetic.

Linux for human beings

This weekend I upgraded to the latest verion of Ubuntu Linux. This was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, mainly because it was so easy, and secondly because things immediately worked even better. Little things like being able to watch videos and listen again to radio programmes on the BBC, and getting the most up-to-date version of OpenOffice.org.

Of course Linux is a free and more ethical alternative to MS Windows, and getting more and more attractive to ordinary computer users. I've been using it for a year now and I'm a happy penguin...

To see what all the fuss is about, click here:

Best viewed in Firefox

Of course Firefox is one of the best web browsers. And Internet Explorer is one of the worst. The reasons?

• Firefox is standards compliant, IE is not
  
• Firefox is less vulnerable to security issues
  
• Firefox has tabbed browsing and integrated search
• and many other reasons (link 1, link 2)

Anyone trying to create standards compliant web sites knows the problems of IE particularly well - because they have to add extra code to make sure the pages display properly in IE.

Anyway, this blog isn't properly standards compliant, but it also hits a problem with IE. The sidebar for some reason ends up right at the bottom of the page. I've tried fiddling with this, and I know it worked once (so I've done something to break it). At the moment I can't fix it though, so if anyone has any suggestions I'd be grateful. [Update 16/12/06]

But basically,

:-)

Theory and practice

For anyone who reads Maria's post (linked to below) I should say that although there are some terrible books and papers out there, and her assessment of Muller's piece was probably as ethically real as it appears from my quote, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I read such negative experiences of reading.

This is for two reasons. Firstly I tend to think that any article that makes you that unhappy is probably not worth advertising. In fact it's not worth wasting any time over and I'm glad she didn't read it to the end. (This is contrary to the traditional 'wisdom' that we should study the mistakes of history so we can learn from them, and I'll write later about why it's necessary to oppose this latter view).

Secondly, there are also loads of great books and bits of writing out there. Much of this is written in extremis: Bataille called writing (amongst other things) the 'impossible': that which we are compelled to do, because of it's very impossibility: that is there's something that drives you to write, but it's outside the realm of the written word, but the words that come out seem to circle and begin to clarify this driving force. Like any force, this is creative. People have published great books from the world of academia and the world of psychology as much as from the world of mental illness or art or stories of life.

These books are people's practice, and I've been meaning for a while now to write something about theory and practice. I want to say that theory doesn't exist. By this I mean that the artificial distinction between practice and theory is both wrong and unnecessary. In other words theory shouldn't exist.

Now I find myself with a good example to explain this better. There are some writers who do amazing things for us. They come in all shapes and sizes, and again some of them write about ethics or psychoanalysis, while others write survivor stories or blogs. This is the writing, and this is what we should spend our time interacting with (and hopefully trying to do). On the other hand, sadly, there is theory. Our history and development have created it. Our teachers haven't always had faith in us: they've said, the original is too hard, read this secondary text which explains it. Quickly most books seemed to become books about books.

We get trapped in the game of mainly just absorbing and regurgitating knowledge that we forget to see and listen to the person in front of us. We really should forget all this garbage: it really is turning us grey.

Spend time reading and writing about proper writing, and about life, and things will keep on moving.

This is our practice - keep it up.

intueri: to contemplate

This is an interesting blog. From a link from Mental Nurse again. Well written and creative and questioning ethics in an interesting way. The posts are even longer than mine, but still worth reading...

Here is a little snippet.

[This] was in relation to a (psychotic) patient becoming angry with Muller (the analyst) who ultimately yelled at him for reasons that were not entirely clear to him.

I don’t know—again, maybe it’s just me utilizing “primitive defense mechanisms”—but the above just sounds like he’s blaming the patient. “Yeah, it’s most probably your fault that you took what I said personally—I wasn’t persecuting you at all. You just can’t handle understanding yourself, but your ego structure is so weak that you need someone to understand it for you. I mean, yeah, perhaps the yelling thing happened because I was feeling anxious, but most probably it was your fault.”

That’s crap. Where is the empathy in that? The warmth? How about reframing the situation, just describing it for what it is? (There you go again, Maria, being all concrete.) How about: “Something about this interaction between us didn’t go well; maybe I was pushing too hard; maybe I didn’t communicate my ideas too well; maybe you misinterpreted what I said; maybe you misheard. I don’t know exactly why this happened, but I’d like for the interaction to proceed better. What can we do together so this doesn’t happen again?”

Complaints are great

Am I mad? Well maybe a little hungry and sleep deprived... Anyway today I completed the 'final draft' of a code of practice for children and young people's complaints, and I think I've convinced myself that complaints really are great. Now all I need is a few other people with the same attitude.

Of course in practice people don't seem to deal with complaints very well:

• they're often seen as threatening and horrible
• people can respond extremely defensively
• sometimes as soon as you mention a complaint senior managers get involved and it all becomes very bureaucratic (e.g. in the NHS I'm told)
• in the end the whole experience is very painful for everyone

My personal experiences have been bittersweet. Several complaints have been made against me in the past, and they were usually quite painful experiences while they were being investigated. Powerful people have warned me not to defend myself or projects I cared about would suffer. I had to do a lot of extra work dealing with the complaints. Other people have been forced to get involved and do lots of extra work unnecessarily. There's the worry that something bad is going to happen at the end...

...then when it comes down to it, so far (touch wood), all the complaints have either been dropped (when I get a chance to have my say) or they've been turned around and the complainants have had to mend their ways. In practice I'm very careful and conscientious about my work, although my 'principled' approach does sometimes lead me into dangerous territory where my actions can be misunderstood (or people just jump to false assumptions).

Of course I have also learned good lessons myself in the process, but these lessons have often seemed to be despite the complaint, not because of it. What I mean is that I spent so much time carefully analysing what happened that I would be foolish not to be able to find some lessons, but usually the complaints are out of all proportion to the lesson, and the lesson is often more about avoiding complaints rather than mending alleged bad practice.

I've also had a couple of experiences recently where I haven't been complaining, but my requests or interventions have been taken as complaints. One recent request ended up on the desk of a very senior finance manager, who assured me my complaint would be responded to within 10 days. This sent shivers down my spine: I didn't want that sort of attention, and I could see all the middle managers dealing with the issue bristling with indignation that such a minor issue was causing all this fuss.

So despite all this, I think complaints are great? Yes, but to really realise how great they are we need much more of them, and we need to learn to deal with them more effectively.

Potentially some of the benefits of complaints:

• they can help us to identify potential improvements to services
• they are a form of 'customer feedback'
• they are a form of mutual problem solving: people can express their frustrations and see some positive results
• if they are handled well, they are empowering (because of the mutual problem solving aspect)
• they break down the barriers between staff and 'clients'
  
• they can show an organisation cares, beyond the fact of simply delivering a service, if they handle complaints well

Also of course, if complaints are properly handled, you avoid all the negative sides of current responses to complaints:

• people won't be so upset by them
• they shouldn't grow into such time-consuming bureaucratic messes
• people will be able to work on them between individuals, and avoid involving too many others

So take a complaint today, and be nice about it - it may make you feel better...

Being independent...

We talk about independent advocates, but what are they independent from? In fact we talk about being independent in lots of different contexts: sometimes the word actually means different things, but there's often some confusion if you ask someone to actually explain it...

Advocates have a good and simple way of explaining it. I don't think I can add anything to the published explanations - but who knows where they are...? So here goes:

'independent means free from conflicts of interest'

This is a special case of the sort of independent used in 'independent living' which means 'able to make your own choices'. The 'freedom from conflicts of interest' definition is aimed at professionals (paid or unpaid).

A conflict of interest is when one person is asking you to do one thing, but you also feel you should be doing something else. You may feel this conflict because of your own beliefs or morals or professional approach; you may expect your manager or colleague or friend to disapprove; or someone may have specifically given you a contradictory instruction.

What about some examples (based on advocacy practice):

• you start working with a person with learning difficulties, and then their wife or brother or mother get involved too... who is making the decisions here?
  
• your contract says you can only work for 4 hours with each client, but this person clearly (to you) needs more time
• you are asked to support someone to make a complaint against a colleague
• you go into a meeting with your partner, and since you've been an advocate for ten years now all the senior managers know you and greet you like a friend (your partner meanwhile is looking at you as if they're wondering who you really are after all...)
• someone tells you that your partner may have all their problems solved if this great new project happens in about 4 weeks - but it's all hush hush at the moment and you can't say anything to anybody until it's officially announced...
• you and a colleague have been working independently for a long time with two people in the same care home, then they have a fight and each want the other to move out
• most of the funding for your project comes from the local authority, and most of your work is for people in local authority care
• there's been a recent funding crisis and several new committee members have been recruited including a psychiatrist, a GP and a local councillor: they think the project needs to do much more effective recording of its work, but you think this will take away from the time you have to do advocacy (and your personal record is exemplary)

How can you avoid conflicts of interest?

• make sure people understand what they are and when they can occur
• clearly define the boundaries of your work
• have a clear confidentiality policy (anything told to you is liable to be told to your advocacy partner)
• develop working relationships with other local advocacy projects so they can take on work that possibly involves conflicts
• get funding from a range of sources, and have clear clauses in your local authority or PCT contracts to safeguard you from potential conflicts
• let people, especially senior managers, know that you will be rude to them when you're with an advocacy client (or at least seem to ignore them)
• anyway, don't talk much to people who might cause a conflict, including managers, parents or other siblings, care staff, etc. (but be nice and don't cause different sorts of conflicts)
  

Ethics vs morality

This blog is obviously about advocacy, but another constant underlying theme will be what I call ethics. It's ethics that got me into advocacy, and ethics that keeps me going. This needs some explanation.

Originally ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character, or way of living, and I want to recall this sense of the word when I use it. Morality came from similar roots (in Latin), but to me over the years even though both words have become confused, morality has become much more associated with an idea of 'moral law'.

In talking about ethics I want to remember both that it means our way of life, and to distinguish it from laws and rules.

How can you see this in the blog?

1. I will write about things like humility, independence, violence, etc. We need to think about these things rather than make rules about them; we need to explore how we use these ideas in our lives and in our working practices. These ideas and others like them are the ground where an ethical practice can grow.
   
2. We need to understand these ideas in terms of stories, and we will never learn their lessons in the real world unless our bodies experience some kind of incorporeal transformation (you may well have already gone through this, I'm not trying to preach). Learning a definition of humility as an objective fact is not going to be any use, and I won't present ideas in these terms.
3. Laws are relatively closed - they can be changed, but it's not easy to do. This blog will on the contrary try to remain especially open. It is published openly, and its contents are openly reusable. It is also published 'on the fly', without much editing, warts and all. I'm not trying at all to say everything, just to open up conversations. I will inevitably make mistakes and say things that I will clarify or correct later.
4. You will see an interplay between ethics, practice and methodology: these all mean basically the same thing, but in slightly different contexts. Ethics is more about the way we live our lives; practice is more about how we act, what we do; and methodology is more about planning, tactics and strategy.

Is this a new way of looking at ethics?

No. Firstly, having learnt from some books about this way of thinking about ethics, I've noticed that actually this really is the way many people live their lives. This is especially true of people who haven't been too much damaged by education, or people who have been excluded from normal society for one reason or another. I think many of my readers will recognise what I'm saying, it's not that strange.

Secondly, I'm not an academic, but I have found that this approach is similar to the work of some of the very early pre-Socratic Greek philosophers as well as later writers including Lucretius (Roman), the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and people like Foucault and Deleuze and others more recently.

More down to earth, I recently saw a section in the Barefoot Doctor's Handbook for the Urban Warrior subtitled 'Morals make the moron' - this coming from a sort of modern Taoist perspective.

Being non-judgemental

One of the things that attracts me to advocacy is the basically non-judgemental approach. We help people to make their voices heard: their own voices and their own wishes. We don't give advice, we try not to let our own feelings or beliefs get in the way of our work, we'll even help people to say things that we think are just wrong - in the hope, perhaps, that by effectively saying them they'll be able to get into a debate with other people that might help them develop more palatable aims.

I want to get away from some of the issues I've been dealing with recently, although there's some pretty good examples among these, especially among the acute psychiatric patients. Perhaps an interesting one is an example from Advocacy 2000's Key Ideas on Independent Advocacy:

An advocate works with a person wanting to be rehoused because they object to the ethnic origin of their neighbours. How can the advocate support this view without comprising the inclusive principles of advocacy?

It seems to me that today many people would be pretty judgemental about this one, and in fact I have spent so much time working with people on the receiving end of racial discrimination that I'm quite keen on these issues myself. On the other hand, this person has come to an advocacy project, so maybe things can turn out a little differently...

So the 'judgemental' people, quite possibly with the best intentions, may well say that 'we can't possibly help you express your racist views, that isn't a good reason to move, pull yourself together and learn to be less offensive.'

I would hope that most advocates would take a deep breath, combat their natural alarm bells, and start to ask this person some open questions to find out what really lies behind their basic question.

Now this is a difficult one, and I would support any advocate who felt they couldn't work with this person: we can try to find an alternative advocate (although if another person comes along later with a similar request I hope you wouldn't still find it so difficult).

The next thing I would hope is that through working with an advocate this person will develop some more clarity about their needs and wishes. I can imagine they've said this to quite a few people before they found an advocate, and I can imagine the housing officer, the police, the advice service, maybe even the social worker all getting quite offended and refusing to talk about the issue. The advocate talks though, and through this talking probably finds several other underlying issues that are translated into race discrimination through lack of communication skills. Talking to the advocate helps them to identify these issues more clearly, and sometimes talk about them, instead of the ethnicity of their neighbour.

Anyway I'm sure you can continue the argument from there. And to put this into the context of the not very ethnically diverse and mainly rural metropolitan district I currently live and work in, I have found myself supporting asylum seekers to be moved from almost entirely 'white' communities into more ethnically diverse areas, which I see as closely analagous to this example.

So this was an example of being non-judgemental. You will have noticed that the advocate took a deep breath just before they started work. This is because being non-judgemental in this way is an active process: it requires hard work and commitment. Like my recent post Humility is not a passive state, it is important to see that being non-judgemental is more than simply not doing something.

-------------------------

OK. So now we've established that, I also want to say something related but slightly different about being non-judgemental. This is about the sort of statements we make, and it is a move against the sort of political correctness which is slowly creeping through society, even though we reject the term as it was popularised in the States in the 1980's and 90's.

I have a friend who is fat. Occasionally she gets fed up with people who pussy-foot around the subject and feel embarrassed to say the word fat in her presence. Some people wouldn't even say the word when she was life-threateningly obese. She thinks they should grow up and get a life. There are also people who want to reclaim the words mad or crazy or dwarf or midget. Look at midget gems after all: they're pretty sweet, so why can't I be? (and believe you me, I can be...)

On the other hand my fat friend has knocked grown men out after inappropriate comments. She's easily able to tell the difference, and so are they (when they wake up). There are also boderline cases. I have a laugh with my friend and most of the time she appreciates it, but there have been occasions where I've upset her. This is partly to do with her health at that moment, but I don't want to make excuses.

The fact is that I need to strike a balance between speaking the truth and remaining sensitive. In the end this is an impossible task, but it is a task which I feel duty bound to attempt.

This is being non-judgemental: it is an impossible task, but if we are going to acheive it at all we can't simply go in one direction towards what we think is safety - that is judging safety to be better. If we spend too much time seeking safety though we just end up in that grey world that I have already said I am working against (see Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom).

Bullying and harassment of doctors

From the Work related blogs and news blog:

instead of taking the view that bullying and harassment is the work of errant individuals, it is the context of the NHS that provides the main basis of analysis. This includes:

1) The training of doctors includes an ‘initiation rite’, justifying the bullying and harassment that is often a feature of the undergraduate medical culture.

2) Bullies are attracted to the caring and health professions by opportunities to exercise power over vulnerable patients and employees. It is viewed that this problem is not just confined to junior doctors, but senior doctors and consultants may be bullied by other consultants or senior managers.

3) The established culture of the medical profession is one that potentially perpetuates an environment of bullying and harassment, especially during training.

4) A culture of secrecy exists in the NHS which prevents people from speaking out and reporting bullying and harassment behaviour.

No wonder the standards af care can be so unpredictable, when the carers are spending half the time looking out for the bullies...

Recipe for paranoia

I recently saw in the Education Guardian a description of how to make a staff member clinically depressed. It was too frighteningly true to reproduce here - I was left hoping that it wouldn't give anyone ideas...

It does strike me though, that there is a similar recipe for paranoia. There's no chance of an individual carrying out this plan fortunately. Actually it's more of an accidental recipe, and it depends on mental health systems rather than individual relationships. This is also a caricature (if you've read Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom) that is knowingly dramatic but seeks to bring together a set of images of reality in a familiar and useful form.

The first ingredient in this version of the recipe, although there could be many variations, is an admission to a psychiatric hospital. Imagine. You must be thinking you're in pretty deep shit when you wake up. You'll quite possibly be wondering why you got there and what's going to happen to you. The seeds are set for paranoia already: the uncertainty, the questions, the doubts.

Then you meet your consultant. She explains where you are and who she is. She tries to make you feel at ease: she just wants to find out how you are and what's going on, and she's there to help you. There's no rush, we've got 28 days to assess you. Despite all the words though, you feel there's something menacing about her: she seems a bit distant and machine-like, as if she's following some sort of instructions or procedure.

Around you there's all sorts of strange things going on, and you've also got to live with a whole load of other crazy people. Some of these will be nurses ;-) and they've each got their techniques and approaches for caring for you, some of which will probably be helpful. But there are so many things going on it's not easy to assess what's helpful at this stage, or how you should be conducting yourself. There will also be plenty of advice from your fellow patients, also somehow contradictory, and some of them could well be really paranoid...

Another thing that you could well be feeling at the moment is anger. There's a lot of anger in society today, and expressing your anger inappropriately can be one of the triggers to getting you into this sort of hospital. Even if you're not usually an angry person, it's quite possible that your developing sense of injustice is beginning to make you feel quite irate. And anger is a natural defensive reaction to feeling cornered and powerless.

Anyway, a week goes by. If you're on medication you're probably feeling pretty sick at this stage as your body adapts. You're hoping that your body will adapt and you'll feel better soon, but the evidence from your fellow patients is not too hopeful. Your consultant returns. There may only be one more meeting before your assessment period is over, although obviously nurses and social workers and other more junior doctors will also be involved in the process. She's still quite nice and reassuring and she's not going to jump too quickly to any diagnosis, but there is this one thing...

Now this one thing may be quite clear and relevant to everyone, especially if its a body under the stairs, but you're a more complex case, more borderline. The hospital, and especially the consultants, have a duty to carry out risk assessments as well as psychiatric assessments. This is the other key ingredient in this recipe. We all have some skeletons in our closet, we could have just split with our partner, our dog could have died, or we bought a golf club to mess about on the park. You've had a hard time recently, and you don't think that this one thing that they've picked up on is very relevant to the situation, but they seem to think it's much more important.

This is where we come back to the Guardian article. It's the small things after all that really trouble and disturb us. When we have family arguments we often find that the real issue is a really small misunderstanding, but these small misunderstandings can multiply remarkably. And the really upsetting thing is that it's so small it should be easy to resolve, but you still can't make each other understand...

If you're cruel you'll confound and disturb someone by causing small difficulties and changes, and then rebuke them remorselessly for their failures and inadequacies, thus causing mental distress. If you're caring for someone's mental health problem you probably don't want to do this at all, but it seems that the risk assessment compels you to enquire about that one thing, and your patient's anguished reaction of denial and avoidance rings alarm bells that force you to continue the questioning.

Finally, the diagnosis. They didn't want to tell you earlier because they thought it would upset you. You're showing symptoms of paranoia - and you'd better not argue because that'll only make it worse...

Everyone can help in this situation, and I look forward to a time when we won't need advocates, but in the meantime you'd better write down your local advocacy scheme's number somewhere handy.

Humility is not a passive state

I've thought of several ways to write this, but I think to be true I need to preface my thoughts with a bit about my personal history.

When Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror finally came to an end in late 1990, I had just become able to vote. However much I rebelled against them, those preceeding eleven and a half years of egos and yuppiedom must have rubbed off on me a bit (although looking at the current state of politics I may have had a lucky escape...)

At the same time I did well at school and decided I loved the 'poetry' of mathematics. Like most young people, by my early twenties I was feeling pretty confident about myself.

Luckily I got involved in community work and quickly realised that knowledge and logic were a recipe for disaster: they were the barriers that would prevent me from properly listening to people. Of course I could have spent my time with others like me and we probably would have got on ok, but I dedicated myself to the needs of the local community, and many people had different ways of thinking and expressing themselves.

This was a challenging time for me personally. I challenged myself and I allowed myself to be challenged by others. I worked hard for no financial reward. I teetered on the edge of depression. Looking back on it I was going through a process of self-negation and re-creation, and this is inevitably painful.

What I was trying to do was to learn to listen to people, and to learn to effectively and appropriately change things. I was really actively trying to develop a personal humility that would help me to do these two things, and the idea or aim of humilty really was important to me at the time.

One of the results was my first independent charity, Hyde Park Source. We aimed to involve local people in the creative reclamation of disused space in this inner city part of Leeds. My role was to do all the shit admin jobs that no one else wanted to or could effectively do - this included storing tools and bags of cement in my cellar, pushing a wheelbarrow to work every morning, and carring my office around in a Morrison's plastic bag. This was to enable other people to come along, get practically involved, and achieve things without too much hassle.

That was eight years ago, and things have continued to develop. I'm a lot more calm and relaxed now - an important part of humility - and I think I continue to challenge myself to learn and develop. Then today someone questioned my humility.

First of all, I was fine with this question. I've see plenty of people who seem to particularly hate the faults in others that they don't like to admit in themselves, and I can see that sometimes if you think you've been working on something you can become blind to the realities that others can still see in you. I can also see that this blog could be taken as an example of my burgeoning ego, although at this stage I would still disagree with that.

Anyway, I had some interesting responses to this questioning of my humility (I wasn't attacked or questioned in a nasty way, someone just decided to underline the importance of humility to their organisation).

1. I think it's important not to confuse humility with inaction. Some people do humbly accept all the problems that come their way, but this attitude doesn't help anyone.
2. Humility is about properly, actively listening and engaging, and about taking on board what's being said or what's going on around you.
   
3. It's about sacrifice in many ways: giving time, pretending you're not too busy (or making yourself not too busy), giving food or lifts or just spontaneously going out of your way to do some small thing for someone.
   
4. It's also bound up with the way we accept gifts: something I've particularly learned from the various refugee communities that I've had the fortune to spend time with over the years. (N.B. Some official policies on this really upset the fine balance that exists here.)
5. Finally, what I said today, was that humility should involve speaking out loudly about things that are more important than you, but also being open and able able to take criticism in return. In other words to subjugate yourself to your principles but also be open to the fact that you may make mistakes while trying to do this.

So finally we have this blog. I started in ignorance, and I believe that by opening out what I have to say in this informal unedited way, I'm trying to give some free gifts to anyone who is interested, and continue my exercise in learning humility. If you think I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from you, particularly if you can convince me to think again...

Advocacy and therapy

I'm usually keen to distinguish advocacy from other disciplines, especially advice, mentoring, mediation, and the model of support work that underlies so many professional roles.

Some other roles, notably interpreting and befriending, are still different but have a more interesting and closer interplay with advocacy work.

Recently however I've realised that advocacy falls wholly within the realm of therapy, and we should see it as part of an 'art of healing'.

Some quick notes to begin to explain and explore this:

• There are lots of modern therapies (whose practitioners can guard the boundaries jealously) but the art of healing has been practised for millennia;
• Healing isn't just based on specific medical symptoms - it's wider than 'curing' for example. In it's more holistic sense it's more about re-adapting people to their environment (and sometimes trying to adapt the environment for people);
• The idea of 'just therapy' developed by the Family Centre in New Zealand makes these observations, but also describes therapy as helping people to place new and more positive meaning structures on their experiences, to replace problem-centred meanings that can make life seem so difficult;
• There is an analogue here with the description I wrote about Helping someone not to get angry, and with many other advocacy interventions: people feel they can't communicate with services, or people are not listening to them, but working with an advocate helps them to develop communication skills and strategies that can overcome these difficulties, so they can get services and live more easily.

I think there's a lot of interesting potential in exploring the links between therapy and advocacy further. I know some other people have got some ideas in this direction too. Watch this space.

Cat's have voices too...

This isn't a fluffy and personal blog really, but since I've updated my profile picture I thought I should give proper credit to my companion in the photo, Maisie.

Maisie lives a long way away from me, but whenever we see each other we have long conversations. I don't think I fully understand them, but I get the gist: she's pleased to see me again.

Anyway, here she is in mid-expression, and in her full glory:

No advocating for avocados!

I don't really know about this whole Gillian McKeith phenomenon, and I'm glad I run little risk of seeing her on television, but the comedy value (to my geeky self at least) of one comment at least in her book makes up for any problems. She says:

"I generally advocate ... avocados to my patients."

I laugh at this partly because of the similarity between the words, but mainly because of the painful conflict between McKeith's approach to advocating and my approach to advocacy.

Let's get straight to the point: I'd like to ban the verb 'to advocate'. I don't think advocates need it, and I think it causes a great deal of confusion and maybe even bad practice. It leads to statements like 'advocate on behalf of...' or 'advocate for...'

We are advocates, we practise advocacy. These nouns are enough, we can celebrate them. But if we do too much advocating for avocados the joke will quickly get worn out, so please, just don't go there.

Helping someone not to get angry

In a way there is a potential subtle conflict here: if someone is angered by something, shouldn't we, as advocates, help them to express this anger? In this case however the individual had clearly expressed the view that they saw their anger wasn't helping and they wanted me to help them avoid it.

In a way, this situation appeared entirely ordinary to me, and I just saw it as a normal sort of advocacy activity. But then when I was describing some of the work I'd done, to another much more experienced advocate than me, whose work I really respect, they said that they'd never thought of doing that, and it sounded like a really good thing to do. So maybe its a useful thing to write about...?

Hopefully I'll soon be posting a Recipe for paranoia which also touches upon this problem, and maybe this is something like an approach or maybe even a solution to the situation. The context this time was mental health, but I also think it has relevance to any other sorts of client: we all get angry when (allegedly, we feel) spurious events get into official reports or discussions about us. So what do we do?

It seems that often people get more angry about the apparently small issues. The problem is that quite often it seems that small issues for an individual advocacy partner can easily grow into big issues for various professionals. It is the gulf in perceptions that generate the anger or distress however, not the nature of the action (say self-harm or drug use, or sex or travelling on a bus). These issues or incidents then become the focus of reports, especially in this risk-averse society. Social workers or doctors or others then start asking all sorts of questions which aggravate the already antagonistic perceptions and provoke anger or other aggressive or defensive responses.

I used a much more local and specific description of this phenomenon with my partner, but we spent quite a lot of time talking about the things that made them angry or upset or anguished, and we developed ways of dealing with these issues in less destructive ways, and concentrating on making more positive statements, recognising what sort of arguments provoked conflict and which sort of arguments encouraged sympathy and understanding in people.

Here's an advantage of the advocate's role. My partner and I and the professionals all saw these issues as something that needed to be dealt with. The professionals needed to clarify, objectify and assess various bits of conflicting information, so they continued to need to ask objective questions. The fact that my partner would react badly to these questions caused particular difficulties for the assessment part of the process and led back to more questions.

My partner didn't want to talk about these things, because they didn't see them as particularly relevant, or even valid or based in truth. But I could provide a valuable space for them to talk about the issues they didn't want to talk about without getting angry, to talk about how they became angry, to identify the issues and where the problems were developing from. This comes from a basic approach of advocacy: giving people a safe space to vocalise things that they may not have been able to vocalise before, and being able to speak about something is an important boost to being able to think about it, put it in a new perspective, and relax about it.

To me this is one of the important methods of advocacy: to help people express themselves in a way that is more understandable to others and less confrontational. There are risks with this sort of approach: you risk at a not too distant extreme the problem of neglecting people's real wishes in favour of ready compromises. However I believe it is possible to maintain your commitment to specific goals, but develop less confrontational and more effective strategies and tactics to achieve these goals.

I don't know what more to say at this point. I feel as if I haven't really managed in this short space, confined by the written word, to explain clearly what I set out to explain. I seem to have got a bit repetitive, and at this point I wish I just had a few bullet points and a discussion group to explore these ideas. Anyway, as always I'd value comments.

Cheers.

Google good...?

This is a kind of interesting article on The Register, The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?

In a way you need to know some of the history. I'm hardly qualified to provide this, but what I understand is that Google were originally a smart couple of guys who developed a radically improved way of searching the web as a research project. They put their service online and it gained huge popularity. They also had another brainwave: to fund their service through tageted advertisements based on your search and the results. Google has now become very rich, and has developed a whole range of other innovative services along the way. The article picks up on this history and talks about some of the problems that beset the search engine now - and why Google might be happy about this.

Another important part of the story is that Google made lots of very principled ethical statements about their company, their services, and the way they worked. In many ways they appeared the ethical opposite of Microsoft just at the time when people were beginning to recognise the depths of the problems with Microsoft and its monopolistic practices and shoddy goods (and realising that we'd been quite successfully conned into believing that MS software was still high quality).

Google was going to bring a new democracy to the net, a democracy perhaps better than any of our governments provided because it would be a true people's democracy. There's something worrying me about this idea, although I wish there wasn't. Anyway this democratic vision has been challenged on a number of fronts: the scanning of people's computers and their emails to generate targeted ads on their webpages and emails; the censorship thing in China; the dispute with the previous owners of Gmail.co.uk, and I'm sure there are more examples. There are some people who claim that Google is just turning into another big bad bully, trying to out-microsoft Microsoft. The link above touches on some of these issues too.

It also seems to me, and I don't know if I read this somewhere or inferred it, that the top results in Google searches are self-sustaining. We search for something, usually just try the top few sites, and then put links on to what we've found. The more links to a site the better its rating in Google, the higher the site is the more likely you are to create a link to it. This potentially stifles creativity and innovation because the smaller and less well-know sites are less likely to be highly rated.

Getting back on to the more positive, I do think the apparently person focused approach of Google is interesting. Most people say its a great place to work - lots of freedom and creativity and different ways of working (although I bet they still work ridiculously long hours). People used to think Microsoft did this, with all their plush offices and employee benefits, but some high profile desertions to Google suggest they're winning on this front too.

Another people-focused approach of Google is to support voluntary open source projects, both financially and in their wider working practices (although not as much as they should, and I believe they still retain trade secrets, patents and copyrights - and defend them).

One people-focused thing that most observers leave out of discussions about individual companies or services though, is that although access to computers and the internet is growing, there are still huge numbers of people who are simply excluded from participating in net culture or benefitting from web-based services. And many of the people who do have web access lack basic knowledge to enable them to navigate and use it effectively). I think any company worth its ethics must take responsibility for this too.

At the moment, while many people are benefitting positively from Google, it is still getting inexorably caught up in the cash trap. There is now so much money invested in Google, not just the giant company itself but all the other companies and individuals that syndicate their services like search boxes, and also all the advertisers ploughing revenues into the system, not to mention all the organisations for whom Google falls somehow into their business plans. This is why Google is silting up, and why it likes the mud.

This is just a microcosm of the current economic situation though. Everything seems to be getting silted up with bureaucracy and business plans and cash. I'm not sure if I'd choose the word democratic (although it's not a bad word), but if we are to try to go in this direction we need to recognise that this cash trap we're getting ourselves into is really damaging society, not to mention the environment, and freedom and democracy require breaking out of the trap.

This can't be done quickly. Like it or not, Google is trapped in the current economic system, and we don't want it to suddenly become so principled that it cancells all its advertising and goes bust. They really do seem to need to put their ethics where their search engine is and ensure that their results focus on high quality and relevance rather than advertising potential, and they really need to respond more directly to the problem of all the people who can't access computers effectively today. Then when they've made some progress against these hurdles they should look at the wider issues.

Of course this blog is powered by Google. I constantly use Google services at the moment (although I need them to support Linux more). I'd be interested to hear about more ethical alternatives (in fact various competitor blogs are good examples, and I will swap over sometime, but I'm stuck here for a bit now I've just started). I'm even listed quite high in Google searches despite the fact that my sites are so small and new and obscure.

Finally, I was delighted to find out today that if you search for "incorporeal transformations" deleuze on Google Canada, this blog is the top result!

Thank you Google, I love you
;-)

All work and no pay

Actually I'm feeling quite relaxed at the moment. Since the money ran out to pay me at the end of April, I don't have to work so hard. I can catch up with some of the other things that have been falling behind a bit recently.

Of course this not working so hard thing hasn't worked out so well. I realised this after ten and a half hours in the office today. But I had promised to do various things for people and it all felt quite productive really.

And I do have a nice little rewarding and quite flexible part time job for 10 hours a week that will keep the bailiffs away for a while.

In a way this is my response to the boiling water principle, trying to take myself off the burn a bit and be productive in non-monetary ways, and not worrying too much about growth. Time to be more flexible about my options and my thinking and to ready myself for the next wave of activity.

I'm also wondering at the moment about this whole copyright and intellectual property thing. Most people today seem to think that if they write something or invent something or have a new idea, then they must protect it. There's a vague hope that they may be able to make money out of it and thus make their daily life easier. This is a terrible restriction on innovation and shared good practice though, and terrible in so many other ways as well. I haven't read all this chapter, and I can't find any better online resources tonight, but here is a good start:

There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.

Against Intellectual Property
Brian Martin

Why is it so difficult to find a range of high quality free policies or training materials today? Why is it that so much advice that is given, or services that are sold to us, are so wrong or inadequate. If there was an open economy of knowledge, would it be so easy for people to pull a fast one on us?

The FLOSS community seem to be developing some really good responses. Many people are managing today to get paid to produce high quality free software, in collaboration with an international community of like-minded people.

Can the advocacy community similarly benefit from these sorts of approaches? What resources do we have amongst us that are currently being 'protected' by concerns about intellectual property that we could use to strengthen ourselves and further develop quality services?

An apology

I'm sorry to all the small farmers out there trying to make a living, especially the organic ones, and especially the ones nearest to me. I'm sorry to all the independent shop owners and market traders, especially those that sell locally produced goods. I'm sorry to all the people who work for any of the big supermarkets.

I have a terrible confession to make: I've been shopping at Asda.

I promise I don't do it often and I bought the bare minimum, but I've worked a long time today and it was after 10pm so everywhere else was closed. I just needed something wholesome and nutritious to eat and keep me going another day.

I'm not sure what my penitence should be. It almost makes me hark back to the good old days when the police would dispense you a good beating if someone put a word in on your behalf.

Since this isn't going to happen though, I'll have to make do with inviting comments. Please let me know how you've managed to give up supermarket shopping. Take the pledge online, and vow never to set foot into one of those horrible places again. Think up some imaginative chastisement that may help me, or some words of gentle support and encouragement to have a similar effect.

I'm relying on your good nature and support now. Thanks in advance.

The boiling water principle

There seems to be an expectation today that we should all be better: that we should learn more, work more, achieve more and produce more, be tested, monitored and assessed more, and at the same time keep fit, cook, clean, look after the kids, and keep up with your social and cultural interests. This is only the beginning, but it's already exhausting.

It seems that the main reason for this improvement drive is economic: the growth economy. The idea is that development, health and happiness requires that the economy must grow year on year: it would be nice if the total of all the economic transactions in 2006 will be 2.5% (or even 5%) bigger than the total in 2005. The alternative is apparently depression, in every sense of the word.

I don't agree with this. I can't help thinking about the image of a pan of water sitting on a gas flame. As the water is heated, the temperature grows. Quite quickly we get to a point where some of the water gets so hot it's transformed into steam and evaporates away. The more we heat it, the more we get out of it (that is the more water turns to steam and gets out of the pan). Gradually all the water disappears and we're left with an empty pan (or, under other circumstances, perhaps an explosion).

Classical economists would reject this image out of hand: they say the economy is a closed system and all the profits get reinvested. Today it's clear to many people that this is a scandalous conceit which completely fails to account for the raw materials that are being turned into landfill and pollution on a massive scale. Our oil, gas and mineral reserves are being increasingly relied on and depleted, intensive forestry and agriculture is taking all the nutrients from the soil and replacing them with pesticides and other chemicals, and on a human level we seem to be suffering in ways we don't quite recognise from our past.

It seems that we cannot go on as we are: certainly not indefinitely, and maybe not even for as long as 20 years. It seems quite likely that in 20 years the environmental and economic restrictions on many materials that are basic to our lives today will make them largely unavailable to the majority of people and change our lives drastically. And what does this insistence on an ever growing economy really mean to the working lives of people? I don't think we can really know, although I feel that some of the stories in this blog are indicative of some of the trends. Can you see yourself becoming 2% more productive every year for the next 20 years? Can people and communities and societies manage to average out at this growth level for ever? And even more importantly, what is the cost? What is it in these people that's going to evaporate off like the steam from the pan?

I think we need to start to take a look at some of our services and their cost and sustainability and maybe use some economic questions like these to develop new critiques and alternatives.

This will be an ongoing discussion, comments welcome...

Cantonese/Mandarin reading matter sought

Donations of reading matter only please, for a lonely Chinese woman with limited mobility.

Please email me for delivery/collection arrangements: blogger@visctrix.net

Thanks

Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom

I've been slowing down a bit with the posting over the last week, but partly because I've been having so many interesting conversations. This seems to be turning into an interesting project, with lots of potential.

To try and make more sense of it all I feel I need to keep some kind of 'clinical' and 'methodological' diary. In other words, I need to break down the different elements and find the links between them (in a clinical way); and develop a practice and an ethic that will propel the project and give it a sense of consistency and direction (a methodology). I've already started in a small way, for example clinical: the April summary, What's this blog about, links and refereces in the text and the sidebar, etc.; and methodological: the advantage of ignorance, the space not enclosed by words, and in a practical if not objective sense in protecting vulnerable people from objectivity, etc.]

You don't need to understand the jargon to understand the situation. Some people have already suggested that I need to be careful about the contents of my blog. This would be a simple truism if they clearly hadn't meant a whole variety of other things behind these plain words. Even my mother is concerned that I might get myself into trouble, and many of my friends have urged caution.

At the same time, most of the same people are very positive about the blog and its contents, which are important to them too. Also many of these people see me as quite cautious and responsible really, and it is true that I've spent a lot of time and thought and caution on my words so far.

OK, so I need to work out what we mean by caution, and what I need to be cautious of.

I think the key to my response lies in the idea of the 'greying society'. I'm sure loads of people have written about this, but I don't know where. The greying society sits around in meetings, often without clear agendas, or without a clear vision of how they are going to act on their decisions. They often struggle against the constant chaos around them, or they sail obliviously through it (they're managed by Scylla and Charybdis). They're exhausted by a constant demand to do more work, to fill in forms, to be assessed and reviewed. They can be stressed and irritable, although usually they manage to put on a brave and professional face. They have to spend lots of time doing admin work. Their task is Herculean, and their performance heroic, but they achieve about as much as Sisyphus. And finally, amongst other things, they do a funny little dance between trying hard not to upset each other on the one side and occasionally flaring up into threats and retribution on the other. We could find similar images in people's experiences of education and in the general lives of the many and various adults that cannot or are not 'working' (earning money in the system).

I use caricatures like this to briefly summarise various aspects, to make a general picture of a society that may be developing. I think this way of characterising ideas is a useful way to go about thinking - in an important way, it is a subjective thinking. [I think I'll have to come back to this in another post as there's no space here, but one claim I want to boldly make is that you cannot accuse someone of a subjective crime, which is also to say you should not be offended by a subjective statement. N.B. There are important scholia to this.]

I suppose people like John Major or GW Bush are probably up there too as prominent examples of the greying society (as in, 'thou shall not be seen to have had a life in the past...'). I don't know; I'm happier talking about people I do know (with their permission of course) and I get the feeling from lots of different people that they recognise this grey world but they can't see what to do about it. But I think you can see what to do about it. I think you have seen many times and you can see again, and many of us have made a difference and we all can in the future.

So all of this blog will be approached from the perspective of what I will call a positive ethics, an ethics that will help us to recognise and move out of this grey society. I am looking for an ethics that will help us do more and to recognise our own and others achievements. I do think that this goal is realised on many levels in good advocacy practice, and I will continue to explore this idea in the blog.

How cautious can I be? Such an ethics will inevitably challenge the greying society, however it manifests itself, and it will also challenge real individuals, communities and organisations. It's inevitable that any ethical stance, any action, is going to encourage equal and opposite reactions. It also seems clear, contrary to the objective laws of physics, that sometimes apparently small actions or events can become multiplied out of all proportion and have serious implications.

I will vigorously act to minimise conflict, within the context of the ethics that I am trying to set out. This is my promise to caution and to my interlocutors (electronic or otherwise).

At the end of this post I must quote my friend Georges Bataille, who made a significant impact on work around positive ethics in the last century. At the same time as I make this promise I can't escape the fact that life is challenge, and avoiding challenge is greyness and death. In Bataille's immortal words,

the future will belong not to those for who action is a demand for morose and disagreeable work, but to those who, on the contrary, will deliver the world from its exhausting boredom

I hope you're looking forward to that future with me.

Rather they convict me than abase myself

I spent some time with Shaun today going over some things in more detail and trying to work out a strategy. It's a good thing I have advocacy experience, or what he said would have been difficult to deal with. [For background see More Police Racism and Undressed, humiliated and lied to.]

I'll get to what I mean by this by the end of this post, but first the details and the strategy.

The first detail to suddenly jump out at me was the date he was stopped. The 5 January: just two days after he was last in Court (because the police failed to record that he had produced his documents) and just three days after I wrote him a supporting letter pointing out his good character and reliability at producing his documents on all the other occasions...

The next detail was that the receipt he was given for the stop and search. I knew he was given a fixed penalty notice for a faulty brake light, but this receipt that he was given at the same time tells another story. It says he was spotted outside the 'Latzian Club' [sic] 'drug dealing' (he was actually getting a take-away from Cantor's Fish Shop a few doors down). They then followed him all the way from Chapeltown Road, through Little London, to Clay Pit Lane near the City Centre. Then they stopped and searched him and the car and wrote 'the car smelled very strongly of cannabis' (not true, just an excuse). It was only after all this following, searching and making up a story that they finally brought up the brake light issue.

Shaun and others wonder whether it's legal to stop someone for one reason and then slap a fine on them for something else? If a Police Officer decides to search you for any reason other than suspected terrorism, they have to explain why they're searching you first. There's a list of potential reasons on the back of the receipt. They said it was to look for drugs, not a faulty brake light (which isn't a reason). Shaun also wonders if it's legal to immediately give someone a penalty notice for something so minor - isn't the usual procedure to tell you to get it fixed?

The third detail that seems key to any defence is that Shaun is an extremely cautious driver. Because he gets stopped so often and he knows the Police could pick on any minor issue to justify stopping him, he literally checks his car once or twice a week. I've been frustrated before when we've been on our way somewhere and he's stopping yet again to do basic maintenance like checking the tyres and topping up the washer water. With all these stops and checks and producers, and all the care Shaun takes, this brake light was a very unlucky event. I can't see how he could do any more than he already does to ensure his car is always roadworthy.

Anyway, our defence is building up, but on Thursday I got some pro bono legal advice from my kind and distinguished friend Ruth Bundey that confirmed some nagging doubts of mine and kind of put a dampener on things.

The fact is that the light wasn't working at the time Shaun was stopped. Shaun has not denied this, just said that he is very cautious and that the police are simply victimising him for an unlucky coincidence (if it had been a day or two later he would have spotted and fixed the broken light anyway).

Unfortunately the language of the Courts and the language of Shaun differ here. Shaun says he's not guilty because the broken light wasn't the real issue: the real issue is that at that point the police were looking for any excuse to justify their failed stop and search. It seems that the Court will say that this is not a valid defence: it doesn't challenge the material basis of the charge, that the light was faulty.

There are two strategies at this point. Firstly write to the CPS on Monday and try to persuade them that this prosecution is not in the public interest (it will cost more than any fine Shaun receives, and it cannot make him any more careful about his car). This is ok with Shaun, letter to be posted Monday.

The second strategy, if this fails, is to plead guilty on 7 June. That is, to agree that at 18.30 on 5 January the brake light was faulty. Then there is an opportunity to detail the mitigating circumstances (the caution, the many times the lights have been ok, the fact that he was stopped for another reason, etc.). If we do a good job of this mitigation then at the very least the fine will be minimised, and there is a chance the penalty could be waived (I don't know the proper legal terminology here, but Shaun may not have to pay any fine).

This is not ok. This is the interesting bit.

'Plead guilty? But I'm not guilty. I'm not willing to say I'm guilty for something I don't believe in. It's not about the fine - they're abusing me enough already and any fine would just be a continuation and a confirmation of this abuse. I don't care about a fine.

'I want to stand up and say what I believe in. I don't feel I'm guilty, and I think I've got enough evidence to persuade the Court to dismiss the charges.'

So we come to a third strategy. I'd like to call this the brave and principled strategy, although I suspect you readers may like to categorise it in other ways...

Luckily, both as an advocate and as a friend I respect Shaun's right to decide how he wants to defend himself. I also understand that by following his own path, with the support of myself and other friends, Shaun will gain in self-respect even if he loses in dollars. We have agreed to write a statement together for the Court, outlining his defence and helping to ensure that Shaun can say what he wants to say as coherently and effectively as possible.

I just hope we get a sympathetic magistrate.

Welcome to the mental health hotline...

Mental Health Hotline (MP3)

File under humour.

Thank you to the Mental Nurse for this, and for adding me to their blogroll...

;-)

"We all have an obligation to intervene"

'In his first interview in an English newspaper, 83-year-old Portuguese novelist José Saramago [is asked if he believes] that the artist is obliged to take on a political role?'

"It isn't a role," he says, almost sharply. "The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level."

Still a street-fighting man in yesterday's Observer

Happy Beltane

Amongst other things, today is the first day of summer in the old Celtic calendar. It is exactly six months until Samhain, more commonly known as Halloween.

Samhain is the most important festival of the Celtic year - the Celtic new year, the time of death and also the time to begin to reflect on the new life that will bring. Beltane is the complement of this, the height of spring and a celebration of flowers, fertility and delight.

There's lots of good information on the internet. If you were more organised than me you will have been out at one of the many fires and celebrations that were held around the country last night. But many people have never even heard of Beltane, and it makes very little impression on our lives today.

On the other hand, thinking about health and self-expression, thinking about the visions that some of the people I work with in hospital have, thinking about Jung's faltering engagements with Shamanism, I can't help feeling that these ancient festivals do have an impact on us today - only we are so distracted by other things we usually don't notice.

I'll write about this again, but on this special day I just want to make the point that our society, so focused on economic consumption and growth, so focused on objectivity, knowledge and truth, seems to be quickly destroying itself.

Now I'm going to get away from this radiation emmitting screen and go far a walk...