Rape, grouse, and the pathology of power

Red Grouse (source)

I got into a foolish Twitter dispute last night, and ended up saying something I fundamentally think to be true. People will say, and with good reason, 'oh, Simon's gone off on one again. He's mad, you know'. And, of course, it's true. I am insane. A really frustrating consequence of that is that sometimes my judgement is seriously wonky. But it also means I can say thing that other people are too sensible to say. Let's explore this idea.

Firstly, to roll back a little, I do not believe that anyone is irredeemable. 'Evil' is not a word that should be applied to people. And, I believe, usually, people who do evil things do so because evil has been done to them.

So this is an essay about the pathologies of power.

I want to examine a number of things:

1. The Bulingdon Club, and Alpha Epsilon Pi
2. Grouse moors
3. Jeffrey Epstein, and child sex abuse

I will argue that these are on the same spectrum.

To demonstrate huge wealth is not difficult. One merely has to drive a gold plated Lamborghini. To have power, one has to be able to use it. One has to be able to do things which other people, people with less power, cannot do. And one has to be able to do these things with impunity. To show to others that one has power, one has to actually do things which other people cannot do: one has to use power performatively. And, indeed, this is the only way one can answer the question, 'how much power do I have?'

The Bullingdon Club is a club for very rich young men at Oxford University, it has been in existence for more than two hundred years, and with very much its present reputation for at least one hundred years. The reputation of the club is for extremely bad behaviour, with records of extreme destruction of other people's property from as early as 1894 to as recently as 2010.

Apart from wrecking country houses and restaurants, notorious Bullingdon practices include

1. Forcibly removing the trousers of members of the public;
2. Burning £50 notes in front of homeless people;
3. Bestial necrophilia.

Alpha Epsilon Pi is not quite as elite as the Bullingdon Club. It is a 'fraternity' of university students at a number of universities, originally in the US, but including, specifically, St Andrews in Scotland. The chapter at St Andrews in particular has been associated with a startling number of allegations of rape. (Dani Garavelli wrote a very good piece which refers to the Alpha Epsilon Pi allegations in Scotland on Sunday this week)

All just young men's high spirits, don't you know? Or a systematic way for rich young men to explore just exactly how much bad behaviour they can get away with?

Very well. Let us move on to child sexual abuse and the sexual exploitation of very young women; and the very large number of allegations around it which centre on rich and powerful men.

Not all allegations of child sexual abuse are associated with powerful people, of course; that's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that the pathology of power draws people to explore what they can get away with. Child sexual abuse is the crime which in our modern society is most reviled and most stigmatised (and with reason). If you want to demonstrate that you can get away with anything, this is the Everest, the pinnacle.

What I'm arguing here is that the attraction of child sexual abuse to very powerful people is not (at least mainly) an erotic attraction to very young bodies, just as the alleged sexual act between a former prime minister of the United Kingdom and a dead pig was not primarily about the erotic attraction of pork. On the contrary, both are, at least in part, a pathological need to explore the limits of power.

Corpses of grouse, pheasants and geese
left to rot (source)

Which brings us on to grouse moors. Grouse moors represent the environmental destruction of large areas of countryside in order to provide an opportunity for a very few people to slaughter a large number of birds - birds which are not particularly good eating and which are in fact largely dumped and left to rot for this very reason.

The grouse, like the child sexual abuse victims and the dead pigs, are not being shot for their intrinsic value; they're being shot for their trophy value: to prove that the shooters can get away with it.

So what is it they're 'getting away with'? Shooting a few wild birds does not seem so shocking, surely? Well, no. But in order to create the environment in which birds can be shot in such numbers, hundreds of people must be driven out of their homes and off their ancestral lands.

Enclosing commons was how the powerful of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrated their power. They had the power to drive the common people out of their homes and off their land, and they did. Having enclosed the commons, of course, they could then farm the most productive parts more intensively (or at least, rent them out to farmers, who would do so, at high rents) and make profits.

But a large part of the lands from which they had driven the subsistence farmers could not be farmed profitably in any other way, so what to do with it? The answer was to create vast deserts on which to slaughter small birds.

Just as, as feminists keep saying, rape is not (mainly) about sex, so enclosing the uplands is not mainly about improving agriculture - the new 'improved' agriculture could make no use of such marginal land. What had been, from April to September, the summer shieling of tens or hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers, became an arena, for a few days in August, to display the power of the few.

Solitudinem faciunt, bona appellant.

Birds of prey - especially large birds of prey - are the most visible of the iconic species of our wildlife. Wildlife is not the 'property' of anyone: rather it is a commons for us all. Birds of prey eat meat. Not huge amounts of it, but it is what they eat. I find the idea that eagles or red kites significantly predate on red grouse improbable. Hen harriers, of course, will do so, where grouse are abundant.

There is a certain bitter rationality to gamekeepers slaughtering hen harriers, wild cats, foxes and stoats on grouse moors: the gamekeepers are paid to provide plentiful easy targets for their employers to take aim at. Predators which predate on ground nesting birds will necessarily reduce that plenty. This is how ecosystems work, after all.

Mountain hares killed on a single day on
a single estate in the Angus glens (source)

But the fact that eagles, kites, pine martens and mountain hares are also slaughtered indiscriminately on grouse moors is evidence that this isn't about bitter rationality, or any rationality at all.

The fact that ordinary people - people who are not powerful - take pleasure in seeing eagles, kites, hen harriers, ravens, wild cats, foxes, stoats and mountain hares - mountain hares! - is the only reason to exterminate them. It's a naked demonstration of power over the commons. Power to steal, to desecrate, to destroy, and to do so with impunity. Wanton and blatant destruction of common goods. Bad behaviour performed solely for the purpose of showing that you can get away with bad behaviour. And this, I claim, is evil.

Wherever you find rich and powerful people wishing to demonstrate their wealth and power, you'll find others who make their living by enabling it. The Oort cloud of lawyers and estate agents who orbit Londongrad are an example.

So Ghislaine Maxwell was, in effect, Epstein's grouse moor manager. She organised the provision of plentiful easy targets for him and his friends to take aim at, and managed the arenas in which they bagged their trophies.

What I'm arguing here is not that grouse moors are 'as bad as' child sexual abuse - clearly, in terms of direct harm to specific individual people, they are not.

But I am arguing they are on the same spectrum, driven by the same pathology.

And the reason that this matters - the reason that I believe we should look on the owners of grouse moors with the same eyes as we look on those people in the other categories I've discussed - is that it people have a propensity for performatively extremely bad behaviour in one aspect of their lives, it is highly probable that they are exhibiting equally unacceptable behaviour in others.

The car is dead. Long live the...?

My car

My car is probably - not certainly, there is still one test to do - dead, or at least beyond economic repair. All that is wrong is a mystery fault in the electronic control system - the chassis, engine, transmission and most of the bodywork are all sound - but, even if we had a certain diagnosis, it's likely that the cost of replacement parts would be unaffordable. 

It's a wrench. I really, really like that car. It is undoubtedly the most enjoyable car I've ever owned, and I have hugely enjoyed owning it. But it also leaves me faced with a very difficult decision: whether to aim to replace the car with another car, or with an electic assist cargo bike.

If I was as good a human being as I like to play on Twitter, this would be a no brainer. We cannot afford to be burning fossil fuel for personal transport, but also, equally, we cannot afford to be burning fossil fuel to build new 1.5 ton personal transport vehicles for everyone, whether or not they're electric. In any case, I cannot afford the capital cost of an electric car, and I struggle to afford the running cost of a fossil fuel car - it's more than a third of my total income. So the only car I could conceivably afford would be another elderly fossil fuel car.

The capital cost of an electric assist cargo bike would of course be more than the capital cost of an elderly car, but it would pay that cost back in reduced running costs over at most three years. What it wouldn't have is weather protection, or passenger carrying capacity.

Today, one day after the summer solstice, I had a dental appointment in Castle Douglas, ten miles away. It was raining steadily, and the wind was gusting to 45 mph (72 kmh). Cycling would have been very unpleasant, even with electric assist. High winds and heavy rain are not at all unusual here - not so common at this time of year, but very common in winter.

Fortunately, today, I was able to borrow a friend's car. Friends have also offered to help me buy a car. I have good friends, and I'm grateful to them, but I don't want to be someone who lives off charity.

I suffer from depression, and that isn't going to change. Life, for me, in winter, is quite hard anyway. If I make it too hard, it will not be worth continuing. There are folk - who I care about - who will be hurt when I choose to die, and so, although that is how I hope I'll eventually go, I'd like to put it off as long as reasonably possible. Making my life tolerable is thus a duty which, to some extent, I have to others. Yes, that sounds self-serving - to an extent it feels self-serving - but it's also true.

If there were a car club or similar scheme in the village it would solve my dilemma - I rarely need a car more than one day a week - but there isn't and it would take at least months of work and a lot of effort to set one up, and I don't feel I have that energy.

Altogether this is a problem I really wish I didn't have to face just now.

No-one here gets out alive

Avis (left) and Zoe (right) taken on Christmas Eve 2017.

My mental health, which had already been poor before my lover Avis died of cancer in July last year, has collapsed utterly since the suicide of my niece Zoe in November. Somehow I have to find my way back (or die, which would be easier). This essay is an attempt to plot a plan for the first option.

Partly as a consequence of my mental health collapse, my last remaining work contract is looking very shaky, and may not continue. I don't even really want it to continue, even though without it I have no income at all. And I don't believe I am now well enough to seek new paying work; I don't believe it's reasonable to expect that I will be well enough in the even moderately near future. But when I do seek new paying work, I need to have some story about what I was doing this year.

Finally, I'm not currently receiving any benefits, and I'm not well enough to apply for benefits. Zoe (before she died) started an application on my behalf, and my community psychiatric nurse has continued that application, but I have no faith in anything actually being paid. Fortunately, I shall inherit what little Zoe had, and I may be able to sell about £1,000 worth of cattle this autumn (if I'm well enough) but that isn't enough to keep me alive for a year.

What I need to recover health is a series of successful challenges, gradually increasing in difficulty. If I overface myself and fail, I end up further down the slope; things get worse. So it's important to pick challenges I can succeed at. So far so good.

Survey of the battlefield

Cattle

I have cattle. As I've had three calves born in the past fortnight, I now have ten cattle. Of these, one is ready for slaughter but because his paperwork is not in order cannot be sold. Three are last year's calves, and their paperwork is in order, so potentially they can be sold, but they're hybrids and not worth much except as meat, and they won't be ready for slaughter until this autumn at earliest. One of them, Draeg, is male and has not been castrated, so I urgently need to separate him from my cows (and, ideally, get him castrated). I do not want any of my three cows to get pregnant this year - lovely as calves are, I have too many cattle and could do with a year without them.
So the overall plan is

1. to slaughter Beelzebub this winter (or when I have sufficient freezer space, whichever is the earlier) - this I'm fairly confident I can do;
2. sell the three yearlings this autumn, either for slaughter or for fattening; they'll be worth at best a very few hundred each (and could fetch much less);
3. keep the three cows and their calves-at-heel.

Selling cattle is something I have not yet done, and I am not at all confident I can do it.

The Cattle Shed

For the past four years at least, I've been planning to build a cattle shed, and the plan has always been to get it finished before mid July of each of those years, so that I can put the year's hay harvest into its hay loft. The current state of play is that most of the materials are bought and paid for, the foundations and floor are in place, and most of the blocks for the lower walls are on site. Getting the blockwork up is probably about a fortnight's work, and it's something I can now definitely do: the last things blocking it were resolved yesterday.

But sawing the timber for the superstructure is not done, and building the frame can't happen until the timber is sawn. I cannot saw the timber alone, and the sawmill I'd assumed I'd be able to borrow I now probably can't borrow. So there are two options: one, abandon the timber I've already bought and buy new, sawn timber; or two, hire someone to mill the timber. I definitely cannot afford either of these. Even if I can get timber really soon, building the frame is at least a month's work, and completing the build at least another's. It's now the very end of May. So there's no way I can now get the shed finished in time for hay harvest this year. It isn't impossible that I could have it finished for winter, and having it finished for winter actually would make life easier even if the hayloft were empty (or even unfinished).

Hay

I've currently got my cattle in my bottom park; this leaves the middle and upper parks clear to grow hay. However, I'm not confident they've really got enough grass, and in any case I need to get Draeg away from the cows (or castrated) before they come into season again, which is pretty damn soon. So either I need to move my male cattle into the upper park, or else onto my neighbour Alice's land, with her permission - she has the grass. If I move the male cattle into my upper park, it makes work on the cattle shed building site vastly more difficult.

If all I am keeping over next winter is the three cows and their calves at heel, then the middle park should produce enough hay for that, assuming the winter is not too bad. But I'd really like to be able to mow the upper park as well, just as insurance.

All my hay making equipment needs quite a lot of maintenance, which I had planned to do over the winter and just have not been well enough to. If it is to be used there is at least a fortnight's work on that. However, the baler is almost ready to go, and if I can bale for James, I can get him to mow for me as a trade.

If I don't have the cattle shed up in time (and that is now virtually impossible), I can store hay in the old byre, although that's increasingly decrepit and in any case a hassle. So hay actually can be done. But also, in the last analysis, enough hay for three cows for the winter would not be enormously expensive to buy. Hay is not a major problem.

Software

Being someone who is reasonably good at writing complex software is an important part of my identity. At present I am not that person, because my attention span and concentration are mince. I feel that I need to gradually build back to the point where I am that person. One of the problems are that I have too many projects on the go, and am much better at starting new projects than at working steadily and consistently on existing ones. The current projects are:

1. Outlook add-in for SalesAgility's SuiteCRM product; this is the only paying work I currently have (and it doesn't pay much);
2. Project Hope, a voter intention/canvassing system for Indyref2, which is more than half finished;
3. The Great Game, a very large open world game project;
4. Post Scarcity, a software environment for the massively parallel computers which must, I believe, be the future of computing.

Taking these one by one:

The SuiteCRM Outlook add-in is not something I enjoy working on or would choose to work on, although I do appreciate working with the folk at SalesAgility I work with on it. However, I am increasingly not well enough to do it, and the strains of the project are not contributing to my mental health. Also, there are quite considerable costs in terms of software subscriptions involved in working on it; it is the only paid work I have, but even so it barely washes its face. If SalesAgility do not decide to drop the project, I probably ought to withdraw from it.

I have no confidence a second independence referendum will ever be held; it seems to me unlikely. The SNP will not go ahead without a Section 30 order from Westminster, and I can see no prospect at all of Westminster ever granting such an order. So Project Hope is probably useless. Even if it were useful, it is no use having such a system if the only person who can support it is an unreliable madman. So if the project is to continue, it needs help which in my present state I can't recruit: it needs a project manager, at least one additional developer, at least one evangelist, and, ultimately, a group of people to train canvassers and analysts to use it.

Nevertheless, if Project Hope could be finished, it would have real benefits:

1. It would help win a second independence referendum, if one were held;
2. Even if another independence referendum is never held, it would help with canvassing in other referenda and elections for any organisation which chose to use it;
3. It would be a solid and impressive piece of work which would form a key part of my CV when next I am well enough to seek paid work.

This is work in my core competences, in a software environment in which I am extremely comfortable, which could be genuinely useful in the real world. Rationally, it is probably the best candidate. But, without help, I cannot do it.

The Great Game is a fairly sketchy plan to build a game which would address what I perceive as many of the failings in modern computer games. It is vast and far beyond the capability of any one person to build. However, potentially, subsystems of it, especially the merchant subsystem and the gossip subsystem, could become libraries which could be sold to other game developers for use in their games; in other words, despite the overall project being ludicrous in scope, there is a potential here for a commercial business.

However, for that to be the case these modules would have to be broken out into libraries which could be called efficiently from C++ or similar code, and ideally integrated with one or more of the more common game engines.

The work which I've done on it so far is prototype work on algorithms for merchants and gossip.

Post Scarcity is even more ludicrously ambitious: to design a software environment - an operating system, if you like - which would make as yet undeveloped computers of unprecedented power tractable and useful. It's necessarily being done in very low level languages which are not my forte, and its present state is bogged down in hard-to-trace bugs. It would make a great PhD project for someone, but possibly not me. However, if I could focus on it, it would be very good mental exercise, and like eating an elephant, it can be done in teaspoonfuls.

In summary I need to focus on one project and largely abandon the others. Project Hope is rationally probably the best choice, but I can't make progress on my own and don't know how to recruit help. The Great Game (or, more specifically, its marketable subsystems) has the benefit of being something I can make progress on without outside help.

Plan for the campaign?

So it looks to me as though my best plan is

1. To erect the blockwork for the cattle shed as soon as possible, without worrying about when the superstructure can be completed: feasible, needs no outside support, can be achieved, will have some value as shelter and as a hard feeding pen even if the shed is never finished;
2. To separate the male cattle and move them at least to the upper park (but to ask Alice if I can move them into hers);
3. To procede with maintenance on the baler as soon as possible, with the rake and mower as stretch goals - if working in the Void is too stressful, fetch them down here to be worked on;
4. To ask friends for support on Project Hope, but, if I don't get that soon, to abandon it and focus software on The Great Game;
5. To not worry about anything else for the time being.

Comments?

The Changeling

My family in 1960; my father on the right, me next to him

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the 1962 Foot And Mouth outbreak, and its effect on my father; wondering to what extent his psychiatric crisis affected mine, and mine, his.

(My father wes then the Ministry of Agriculture's Regional Controller for the North of England; among his responsibilities was deciding which herds were condemned. He insisted on visiting every affected farm, talking to every vet and every farmer. He didn't have to do that. It's because of him that we now know that the disease can be carried on the tyres of cars - specifically our car. He carried the disease from farm to farm with him, infecting farms which had not previously been infected).

To what extent did he undertand the Foot and Mouth outbreak as a punishment for his sin in divorcing his first wife to marry my mother? Or for other sins of his of which I'm unaware? To what extent did both my parents understand my own collapse into a psychiatric basket case - which had started earlier, but got much worse during this period - as a punishment?

Of course, there's no-one else left alive who I can check these thoughts out with, with the exception of my sister who was also only a child at the time. The last of my parents' contemporary friends died last year.

I now know and understand that my father's childhood must have been traumatic, and that the first half of his war - the half he never spoke about - must also have been traumatic. How damaged had he been by these experiences?

As a small child, your own parents are god-like, solid, immutable, the foundations of your existence. It's hard to see them as damaged. Later, in my teens, my psychiatrists saw my own trouble as in part an expression of the conflicts in my parents' marriage, but I now realised that my then understanding of that understanding was shallow.

Both my parents' fathers were in there own way monsters; which is another way of saying both my parents's fathers were in their own way very damaged individuals - but I only dimly understand the causes of their damage. A further generation back, I understand a little of my mother's grandfather's damage, but nothing beyond that. If I had children, they - or their children - would see me as a monster; and they'd be right, of course, in many ways I am one.

Slobodan Milošević was a monster; but his parents marriage failed while he was a small child, and both of his parents committed suicide before he was thirty. I've always seen evil in the world as a consequence of evil, damage resulting from damage, feeding on and reinfecting itself from generation to generation.

This isn't to say my father was a bad man. He wasn't. He was a very brilliant, very troubled man who sincerely strove to be a good man - as I do. But each of his children were badly scarred, as mine would be if I had any, as those to whom I have acted in loco parentis have been.

But so - what? How do we act against evil, if its perpetrators are also its victims?

I have long felt that the appropriate, kind, caring response to children with psychiatric trauma would be to kill them. To put them out of their misery, because you don't recover, because no-one should be forced to live like this. But in saying that I was thinking it simply for the child's sake, to spare the child (and the adult they would grow into) suffering.

What if one should kill children who suffer psychiatric trauma in order to prevent the evil that they may - that they are likely to - cause? Hold onto that thought for a moment. It's a very dark one.

There are folk beliefs about changelings, demon children, cursed children. Does this reflect a traditional practice to driving out or killing very troubled children, and, if so, did that practice have survival benefits for the herd in cauterising evil and limiting its intergenerational spread?

Dark thoughts. I should sleep.

About taxing the car

My niece and I, in happier times long ago

This is an account of my descent into yet another psyciatric crisis this weekend. It's a bit confusing, mainly because my memory is so scrambled I can't be clear about the order of events; and, of course, it isn't really of interest to anyone else. But writing it down at least lets me get it out. Like talking to a psychiatrist who isn't there, and doesn't answer. Because that's how it is.

Taxing the car

This weekend I had to tax the car. I should have taxed it last weekend, but I hadn't; so it was out of tax, so it was urgent, so I had to do it. The modern system for taxing a car in Britain is very simple and very efficient; the things about bureaucratic websites which usually put me into meltdowns aren't an issue.

What is an issue is I actually can't afford to do this, and in looking at the extent to which I can't afford to I'm forced to face up to just how bad the mess I've spiralled into over the winter has become. My cash income comes from work I do for a wee software company in Scotland. They need me less and less, so the amount I make from it is getting less; now it averages about £500 a month. The software tools I need to do their work cost about £100 a month, and running the office, which I need to do because I don't reliably have enough electricity at home, costs about another £100; so my net income is now around £300 a month. To put it another way, in 1988 I was charging £750 for a day of my time (and getting it); now, ignoring inflation, I'm earning less than that a month.

I like working for these people; they're easy going and don't hassle me, rarely initiate a phone call unless I invite them to, and what they're building isn't in the least evil. Having something regular to do has given me grounding, steadyness, something I have to do for other people. But they don't have enough work for me for this to be viable any longer.

So, I could go out and look for other work. But

1. I don't have the confidence that I'm any use to anyone. My mental state is so unreliable, and a lot of the time I just can't focus. When I can focus, I'm still quite good, if not as good as I once was. But a lot of the time I can't, and when I get anxious about not being able to deliver work then my focus goes even worse. I can work effectively, on long term average, about fifteen hours a week. But that's long term average, and in the short term I can't guarantee even that.
2. I really don't cope well with strangers, or, actually, with interacting with people at all - even people I know well and like. Trying to sell myself to people I don't know when I can't honestly claim to be able to deliver for them is something I cannot do.
3. I cannot claim social security benefits. The degree of stress and humiliation involved is just beyond me. I honestly would rather die.

The phone and the cattle shed

Normally, I refuse to borrow. I know damn fine my sanity is so poor that debts are a strain I just can't deal with. I broke that rule twice last autumn; both times it seemed sensible at the time.

The plan for my croft has been that I keep cattle; to be able to store winter fodder for the cattle, and to be able to feed them easily through the winter, I planned to build a cattle shed. It hadn't made much progress for a couple of years mostly because I lacked the money. Last summer, a friend offered to lend me some money to help getting ahead with it. Initially I refused, but in the autumn when I was really struggling with suicide I thought that if I did borrow some money, I couldn't die until I'd paid it back, and that would act as motivation to keep going. So I borrowed £1,000, and used it to buy concrete blocks and timber. I thought, at the time, I would be able to repay this over a year or so fairly easily.

Then my niece killed herself. She was an orphan, and for complicated reasons she and I were close; we had more of a parent/child relationship than an uncle/niece one. I had to organise the clearing of her flat and her funeral. My phone was broken and I needed a new one urgently to just communicate with people; so I bought one. And between that and the travel and paying for the funeral I went into overdraft.

Which at the time felt justified and also manageable, because my neice left me most of what she had, which isn't a lot but it is something. But I can't get probate on her will until the inquest has been held, and it keeps getting delayed.

I checked my bank account before taxing the car. Usually I pay a year's tax at one go, and that's what I planned to do. But that was impossible; it's obvious to me that there is nothing I can do which will prevent me going over my overdraft limit this month.

Of course, one day the inquest will be held and the death certificate will be issued and I'll be able to get probate on the will and that will, actually, clear my current debts. Except that, it costs money to go on living. I actually can't afford to. Sometime within the next year, even if I get my niece's money, I will run out hard.

Fletcher and the cement mixer

Software is what I do, what I used to be good at, what I use to validate myself. Building software, like any other trade, needs tools, and one of my important tools is Fletcher, my 'big computer', a home built beast with eight processor cores, 16Gb of RAM, and 3Tb of disk, of which 1Tb is SSD. It's not state of the art any more, but it's still pretty fast and provides a really nice working environment; except it also has a relatively high specification video card, and the video card has failed. I think the basic machine, other than the video subsystem, is fine; but I have the security on the mean set up so that you cannot login over the network, which means, without a video subsystem, I cannot log in at all. Which means I cannot really work on the software project I want to work on (even if I had the focus, which I don't).

To do any further work on the cattle shed, I need a cement mixer. Well, I have a cement mixer; but I broke a universal joint on it last autumn. Some day last week I dismantled the drive on the cement mixer to get the universal joint out so that it can be worked on. I think that's when the crash started: I looked at the disassembled parts and thought, OK, that's fine, but I can't take it to an engineer to get it fixed because I can't pay for it.

Project Hope

So, supposing I can go on earning £300 a month, can I survive on that? Well, probably. I spend much more than I need to on telecommunications, I realise it amounts to an addiction. I spend £60 a month on my satellite link, nearly £70 on mobile, and £30 on the landline in the office that hardly works at all. I don't know if I can do the full cold turkey thing and cut myself off from the Internet all together; I've had network comms into my home since before there even was an Internet, back to 300 baud dialup modems, VT100 emulation and JANET addressing. Like software engineering, network comms is part of my identity. The landline in the office ought to go, since it really doesn't work. And, if it goes, for the summer at least the office can go. And that would save a lot.

If I terminate my satellite connection but not my mobile connection, then I'll just end up using more mobile bandwidth, which is really expensive. So it makes more sense, actually, to terminate the mobile - which does of course mean I wouldn't have a phone. But one or other could, and really has to, go.

I spend £30 a month on charity and another about £30 on various Yes movement and news things - Bella, BroadcastScot, Newsnet, the Ferret, Common Weal. Those could go.

But the one that really hurts is Project Hope. Project Hope is the canvassing voter-intention system I built for IndyRef2. It isn't finished and it doesn't work, and I've stopped working on it partly because Fletcher is broken and partly because I no longer believe that independence is going to happen. But it's still sitting there on a server out on one of Linode's web farms which is costing me £40 a month to rent. There's no point in it sitting there. It doesn't work. If Nicola Sturgeon called IndyRef2 tomorrow, it wouldn't be ready and couldn't be finished in time. But switching it off would mean I'd given up, and that all the time and effort I've put into it would be wasted.

Which, actually, it already is, but... knowing it is and facing up to the fact that it is are different.

Facing facts

Intellectually, I know my life is over, just as, intellectually, I know Project Hope has failed. Knowing it and facing it are different.

Any form of suicide takes a certain amount of courage. I used to think about a car crash, but modern cars are much too protective to make that a reliable way out. Two years ago I just stopped taking warfarin, which probably would eventually kill me (but which might just end up with a stroke, which would be even worse). I have various bladed tools with which I could easily kill myself, but I don't think I have the courage for that.

When my lover died last July, I woke up the following morning alone in her house, and spent some time tidying up. In doing so, I took a supply of morphine. I'm not proud of that; it is essentially theft. But I did it, and I have it. It has about a year of shelf-life; if I'm going to use it I'll need to do it soon.

I do not want to die with debts unpaid. But if I continue to live, the debts will accumulate.

I don't really see another alternative.

Mad software

I was listening to Eric Normand's podcast this morning, as I was making breakfast and tidying my room; he was talking about semantics and data. It started a train of thought which I shall try to unroll.

I have blogged a lot in the past about madness and about software, but I don't think I've ever blogged about madness and software in the same essay. But the reasons I'm mad and the reasons I'm (sometimes) very good at software are related; both have their roots in autism and dyslexia, or, to put it differently, how my brain is wired.

I first wrote about post scarcity software thirteen years ago. It was a thought about how software environments should be designed if were weren't held back by the cruft of the past, by tradition and by a lack, frankly, of anything much in the way of new creative thought. And seeing that the core of the system I described is a Lisp, which is to say it builds on a software architecture which is almost as old as I am, perhaps it is infected by my own take on tradition and my own lack of creativity, but let's, for the purposes of this essay, assume not.

I started actually writing the post scarcity software environment on the second of January 2017, which is to say two years ago. It's been an extremely low priority task, because I don't have enough faith in either my vision or my skill to think that it will ever be of use to anyone. Nevertheless, it does now actually work, in as much as you can write software in it. It's not at all easy yet, and I wouldn't recommend anyone try, but you can check out the master branch from Github, compile it, and it works.

As my mental health has deteriorated, I have been working on it more over the past couple of months, partly because I have lost faith in my ability to deliver the more practical projects I've been working on, and partly because doing something which is genuinely intellectually hard helps subdue the chaos in my mind.

Having said that, it is hard and I am not sharp, and so progress is slow. I started work on big number arithmetic a three weeks ago, and where I'm up to at this point is:

• addition seems to work up to at least the second bignum boundary;
• multiplication doesn't work beyond the first bignum boundary;
• subraction doesn't work, and turns out not to be as easy as just inverting addition;
• division sort of trivially works, but only in the sense that we can create a rational number out of arbitrary bignums;
• reading works beyond the first bignum boundary, but not up to the second (because multiplication doesn't work);
• printing doesn't work beyond the first bignum boundary.

I knew bignums were going to be a challenge, and I could have studied other people's bignum code and have consciously chosen not to do so; but this is not fast progress.

(I should point out that in those three weeks I've also done four days of customer work, which is .Net and boring but it's done, spent two days seeing my sister, spent several days so depressed I didn't actually do anything at all, and done a bit or practical work around the croft. But still!)

In a sense, it wasn't expected to be. Writing the underpinnings of a software environment which is conceptually without limits has challenge after challenge after challenge.

But there are ideas in post scarcity which may have wider utility than this mad idea in itself. Layering homogeneities and regularities onto Clojure maps might - perhaps would - make a useful library, might would make a very useful component for exactly the sort of data wrangling Eric Normand was talking about. Yes, you can use a map - raw data soup - to represent a company. But if this map is a member of a homogeneity, 'Companies', then we know every member of it has employees, and that every employee has a salary and an email address. Regularities and homogeneities form the building blocks of APIs; to use the example Eric discussed in his podcast, the salary is the property of the employee, but the payroll is a property of the company. So in the notation I'm using for post scarcity, you'd get the payroll figure for a company by using a method on the 'Companies' homogeneity. How it computes that value is part of the general doctrine of 'Don't Know, Don't Care': the principal that people writing software at any layer in the system do not need to know, and should not need to care, about how things are implemented in the layers below them.

So, the user needing to find the payroll value for a company would enter something like this:

    (with ((companies . ::shared:pool:companies)
           (acme . companies:acme-widgets-plc))
        (companies:methods:payroll acme))

In practice, in post scarcity notation, the payroll method probably looks something like this:

    (λ (company)
        (reduce + 
            (map ::shared:pool:employees:methods:salary 
                (:employees company))))

There are issues that I haven't resolved yet about the mutability of regularities and homogeneities; obviously, in order to provide multi-user visibility of current values of shared data, some regularities must be mutable. But mutability has potentially very serious perfomance issues for the hypercube architecture, so I think that in general they should not be.

However, that's detail, and not what I'm trying to talk about here.

What I'm trying to talk about here is the fact that if I were confident that these ideas were any good, and that I had the ability to persuade others that they were any good, it would make far more sense to implement them in Clojure and promote them as a library.

But the problem with depression is that you cannot evaluate whether your ideas are any good. The black dog tells me that I'm shit, and that my ideas are shit, and that I don't really know enough to be worth listening to, and that I'm an old tramp who lives in a hut in the woods, and probably smells, and that in any case interaction with other people quickly makes me shaky and confused, and that I can never get my act together, and that I never finish anything.

And all that is objectively true, and I know that it is true. But I also know that I can (or at least have in the past been able to) build really good software, and that I can (or have been able, in the past, to) present ideas really well.

These two collections of statements about me are both true at the same time. But the difference is that I believe the first and I don't believe the second.

And behind all this is the fact that bignum arithmetic is a solved problem. I could dig out the SBCL source code and crib from that. I could read Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who wrote down the algorithms (the word is a europeanisation of his name) for the general problems of long addition, multiplication and division in around 820AD. I could reread section 4.3 in Knuth.

I am bashing my head against bignum arithmetic and trying to solve it myself, not because it's the most efficient way to produce good code quickly, but because what I'm really trying to do is just distract myself and waste time while I can get on with dying.

And the reason beyond that that I'm working on a software system I know I'll never finish, which is designed to run on computers which don't even exist yet - and although I'm very confident that enormously parallel hardware will be used in future, I'm not at all sure it will look anything like what I'm envisaging - the reason I'm building this mad software is that, because it will never be finished, no-one will ever use it except me, and no-one will say how crap it is and how easily it could have been done better.

Because the other thing that I'm doing in writing this stuff, apart from distracting from the swirling chaos and rage in my head, apart from waiting to die, the other thing I'm doing is trying to give myself a feeling of mastery, of competence, of ability to face problems and solve them. And, to an extent, it works. But I have so little confidence that I actually have that mastery, that competence, that I don't want to expose it to criticism. I don't want my few fragile rags of self worth stripped away.

And so I work, and work, and work at something which is so arcane, so obscure, so damned pointless that no-one will ever use it.

Not because I'm even enjoying it, but just to burn the time.

This is mad.

I am mad.

I hate, hate, hate being mad.

Postscript: just writing this essay has made me tearful, headachey, sick, shaky. It's very hard to face up to the irrationalities and self-deceptions in one's own behaviour.

Coffeeneuring

Myself in Ae forest on our second ride.

I went out for a ride with my old friend Andrew Crooks back in September, when I was - and partly because I was - still deep in depression. I rode into Castle Douglas to Gareth Montgomerie's shop, where I met up with Andrew, and we rode down to Tongland, out to Twynholm, over to Kirkcudbright, and back by Loch Fergus. We stopped for cake and coffee in the very excellent Earth's Crust bakery, and that's when Andrew broached the idea of Coffeeneuring.

There's this challenge, he said, on an American blog: ride to seven different coffee shops (and drink coffee) in six weeks, starting in October and ending in November.

So we did.

Myself and Andrew near New Abbey

The first day of the challenge was the Friday the 13th October, an auspicious date - so of course we had to start then. It was a wild, blustering day with sharp showers blowing down a stiff westerly (that will become a theme). We met up at Beeswing, and rode out by the beautiful road down to New Abbey; from there we took wee backroads up to Cargenbridge, and joined the Old Military Road back to Beeswing. We had coffee and cake at Loch Arthur farm shop, which was as always excellent.

We started our second ride, on the 22nd, from Andrew's house in Dumfries, riding through the town mainly on the old railway cycle path, and thence up to Ae Forest - a 10Km climb which could have been a fair old grind, but for yet another sturdy south-westerly which fairly lifted us up the hill. We did a wee bit of zooming around the forest on green-graded single track, had an excellent cake and coffee in the Ae Forest Cafe, and then... zoomed back down the long hill into Dumfries, our speed limited only by the westering sun glaring in our eyes.

For our third - Hallowe'en - ride we again met at Gareth's shop (and again I rode in), with the intention of riding out to the Cream of Galloway ice cream factory near Gatehouse of Fleet. Again the wind was westerly, and again it was driving rain before it. We rode down to Kirkcudbright by the Loch Fergus road, and thence out via Nunmill towards Borgue. But the wind was near gale, and the rain became more intense; after a brief discussion we decided to turn back to Mulberries in Kirkcudbright, and there had soup and coffee. We rode back via Tongland. It was an enjoyable but quite tough day - what I particularly remember about it was that Andrew (who is always faster than me uphill) was also faster down. That felt an injustice!

Pete White, in impossibly bling
retro-reflective jacket, buys coffee
in the unknown coffee shop. 

I was in Edinburgh on the weekend of the 5th November, staying at my sister's; and, on the Sunday, went for a ride with my friend Pete White. We had planned a tour of the reservoirs up in the Pentlands, but it was a cracking day, and so instead we rode out of Edinburgh by the Innocent Railway path, and took the coast road fast out to North Berwick. In North Berwick we got a cairry-oot coffee and cake from a wee cafe I've totally failed to identify from Google maps; and then rode up to the train station where we got a train back into Waverley. Riding back to my sister's from the station I made a sentimental detour to the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op, one of my favourite shops.

That counted as my fourth Coffeeneuring trip; by agreement Andrew was also doing one that weekend. However, later that week I rode into Castle Douglas for Gareth to fit new non-slick tubeless tyres to the Slate, and I snuck in a coffee and cake at Streetlights Cafe, putting me one ride ahead. I rode home by the old iron-age road over the ridge by Dungairy, a long climb on mud and gravel. The new tyres made the bike feel quite different - assured and surefooted in conditions in which it had previously been decidedly sketchy.

The three mile dirt road descent from Dungairy to Culnaightrie was a complete blast.

From the start of the Coffeeneuring challenge Andrew and I had talked about doing a Roof of the World ride at some point if the weather allowed, but the weather didn't really allow and on the 13th of November, riding from Andrew's house, we decided to do the Birthplace of the Bicycle instead; Andrew promised me an interesting climb on the way home - one we've often talked about in the past, but I hadn't yet ridden.

Where the first ever pedal powered bicycle was built

It was actually a beautiful day, but cold; on the north slope of one of the first hills we encountered a patch of ice which completely covered the road for about twenty metres, and from there on our descending was a little more tentative than it would otherwise have been. But we had a good ride up Nithsdale and before too long came to the birthplace itself, where we stopped to make the customary obeisances.

Then on into Penpont for coffee in a surprisingly busy wee cafe, and back. Andrew led us across to the east side of the dale, crossing the A76 at Closeburn, onto wee back roads that were new to me.

Approaching the top of the Loch Ettrick climb - yes, it is
uphill, dammit!

Andrew is lots faster than me anyway, but on hills he's notoriously quite a lot faster. So when we came to the junction at the bottom of the "interesting" climb, he stopped for a comfort break and I went ahead. I was very pleased with myself with how far I'd got before he caught me, but the photograph he took of me near the top doesn't look at all dramatic.

However, we topped out at Loch Ettrick, high above Ae Forest, and Andrew promised me ten miles of continuous descent. It wasn't quite continuous, but pretty close to it, and apart from one huge tipper truck which wasn't taking any prisoners, it was quite a blast.

That made my sixth qualifying ride, but only Andrew's fifth.

For the next, which I number as 7.1, we met up at Mossdale on the 20th and rode up by the Raider's Road to the Otter Pool, where we enjoyed an al fresco coffee with some buns I'd bought in Castle Douglas on the way up. It was a soft, damp day with continuous fairly light rain, but not dreadfully cold; still, it wasn't weather we wanted to sit around in for too long. We'd had a plan to stop at the cafe at Clatteringshaws, but it was closed for the winter. We discussed the route back, and Andrew liked the idea of the loch shore to get us out of the wind (although it wasn't that severe).

Al fresco at the Otter Pool

So we made the glorious descent into New Galloway, where we actually could have bought a coffee at the CatStrand; but we agreed that if we stopped in our wet clothes we'd quickly get cold, so we rode on at good speed down the west shore of Loch Ken. The autumn colours were glorious, and in the shelter of the hill and the forest the loch was almost still. Burns tumbled down the hillside in wild spate. We got back to the cars at Mossdale with - for me, anyway - mixed feelings. We were droukit. It was cold. Dry clothes were delightful (although I'd carelessly forgotten dry socks). But it had been a magical ride, on largely empty roads (as, to be fair, all these rides have been), amid all the spectacular scenery of Galloway's high country.

Today's ride - 7.2 - completed the set. We met in Kirkcudbright on a day of westerly gales, although by 11:00 when we started the rain was almost through. Andrew had concern about his back tyre, which had lost a lot of air with a spectacular hiss in the car on the way over, and which neither of our mini-pumps could get hard; but, after checking he had a spare inner tube, he decided to set off anyway. Our aim, again, was the Ice Cream Factory, which as well as ice cream makes good coffee and spectacular cakes.

It's a mistake to start a ride with someone who's a much better grimpeur by going uphill, but given the wind I wanted to stay in shelter as much as possible on the way out, and get down onto the coast to take advantage of the wind on the way back. I controlled my competitiveness and didn't burn my legs on the first long climb, and, despite the weather, we had a remarkably swift and enjoyable ride out to Rainton.

Is there anybody there? said the traveller,
knocking at the moonlit door...

Sadly, the cafe was shut. We discussed alternatives, and decided to return to Kirkcudbright. I asked Andrew whether I thought his tyre would cope with an unmetalled section, intending to take the shore path from Sandgreen round to Carrick. He thought it would, but when we got down to Sandgreen felt it was just too risky. So we doubled back round to Knockbrex on the metalled road, and took a wee sentimental detour down to Carrick just because.

Then, with the sun beginning to shine and the wind behind us, we were whisked up the coast, past Knockbrex, passed the Isles of Fleet, past the Coo Palace, past Kirkanders Borgue, and up the long hill to Borgue village, at good speed. We did stop a couple of times because the views out to the Isle of Whithorn and the Isle of Man were just so good!

In Borgue I had to stop to take off my jacket and change to fingerless gloves; despite a benselling wind the sun had become warm. And then swiftly on, past the Brighouse turn, down through Senwick to the Doon and Nunmill, and up the river to Kirkcudbright. We obviously couldn't go to Mulberries again, because we'd already bagged it; and Harbour Lights and Solway Tide were closed for the winter. But the Belfry Cafe was open, and we had soup, scones and coffee to finish up.

Eight rides - actually slightly more than eight over the period, because I've done another couple which didn't involve coffee and thus don't count - averaging around thirty miles/fifty Km, longest not more than fifty miles/eighty Km. None of them epic. All but one in company and in good company. All but the one I rode alone probably faster than I ride alone.

They haven't, by themselves, cured depression - it isn't yet, completely, cured, although it's greatly better. But they've certainly contributed. And one thing I realise that this simple, light hearted challenge has done for me - aided by my friends - is that it's given me an excuse to take time off to ride just for the pleasure of riding, of enjoying the weather and the views and the roads and most of all the company.

Myself and Andrew at Clatteringshaws - with coffee!

And the coffee, of course. Let's not forget the coffee.

More pictures here.

Of means, and ends

On the cliff path

I don't really understand my own mind. I watch my behaviour, as an ethnographer would, and try to infer intent from observed action. I perform experiments to test hypotheses. I'm sure other people don't do this - I'm sure other people don't need to do this.

Last weekend I rode my bicycle up to the cliff path. In part, I went to see whether there were any razorbills or guillemots nesting this year (there weren't, or, if there were, I didn't see any). But in part I went consciously to test how suicidal I was. If you really want to die, I said to myself, here's your opportunity.

I didn't.

This morning I tried my usual mental test of the same issue: if I had a lethal dose of opiates in the house, would I take them? And this morning the answer is a confident 'no'.

It's hard (for me) to pinpoint when an episode of depression starts. One could say with a fair degree of truth that I've been depressed to varying degrees for more than three years, but a period of high intensity - a period in which I've been struggling badly with suicidal thoughts - started in late December and ran until very recently. I've been making preparations to end my life - 'setting my affairs in order', as they say. There have been a few days in that that I'm genuinely surprised to have survived.

But it seems that period is over - of which I have to say I'm very glad. Which makes my current behaviour even more bizarre.

I've had the veins removed from my left leg, as a consequence of childhood illness. Consequently it doesn't drain very well, and tends to develop clots. Consequently, for the last twenty years I've been on blood thinning drugs: specifically, warfarin. Warfarin is a nasty drug. The lethal dose is only three times the therapeutic dose, and dying of warfarin overdose would be extremely unpleasant. I've thought about this a great deal, because of course the one drug I do have a lethal dose of in the house, and have had all through this period, is warfarin.

It seems I've been at best a dilettante suicide. I have several means of lethality at my disposal, none of which I've used; as I say, my routine test of how suicidal I feel has been, if I had a lethal dose of opiates, would I take them? For the last many weeks the answer has been 'yes'; but I haven't chosen to take the drug I did have.

Instead I've done the opposite, and I'm still doing it. And that's bizarre.

The therapeutic dose of warfarin fluctuates with a range of factors, and consequently one needs to have the clotting ability of one's blood retested regularly. I'm currently supposed to be retested fortnightly, but in fact the last time I was tested was on the 11th of January; since then I've refused. And three weeks ago I decided to titrate the dose down and come off warfarin altogether.

Without it, I shall almost certainly die, probably quite quickly. That's OK; I've never been afraid of death. Much worse, though, I may have a disabling stroke. My decision to stop taking warfarin was, consciously, another test of how suicidal I was. I could at any time, I thought, reverse the process, take a dose, go and get tested.

Well, I could. But, although I no longer feel suicidal, I haven't. So what's going on? Why not? Is it just pride, a refusal to back down? Is it indecision?

Am I capable of killing myself out of sheer stubbornness?

I don't know. It seems I am. I really don't understand my own mind.

The Contemptibles, Lackwit, the Literal-Deadbeats, and the United Kleptocrats and Idiots Party

Being depressed, my view on the world is bleak; it's not necessarily irrational. Here are bleak thoughts on the current state of British politics.

The Tories are a party for the greedy, the selfish, the narcissistic and the sociopathic; the LibDems for those several sandwiches short of a picnic. UKIP are a party for those who hate and fear, and for those who seek to foment and exploit hatred and fear.

Labour comprise two tribes of essentially decent caring people, locked in a state of permanent civil war which erodes their decency.  The only party normal decent folk in England can vote for is the Greens, but it's irrational to vote for the Greens under FPTP, because they can't win.

In Scotland the SNP is composed of exactly the same decent, caring, internationalist and vaguely socialist people as Labour, except that they have one idea - independence - which unites them. This is why Labour hate the SNP so much - because the SNP actually can and do do the things Labour would like to do but can't because their chronic disunity prevents them from ever winning elections. Which is why the SNP and Labour will never be able to unite at Westminster; which means the Tory hegemony will endure the rest of my life.

The largest party in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, make even UKIP look like sweetness and light.

Here's an even bleaker thought: it is those who seek to foment and exploit hatred and fear who are now in the ascendency.

Breaking young minds

This morning I listened to a radio programme. Before it was half finished I was screaming in anger and anguish at the radio; by the time it was finished I was sobbing. For the rest of the day I've felt headachy and ill.

The programme was called 'mending young minds'. You don't mend young minds, you break them; and once they're broken it's extremely unlikely that there will be any road back. Of the twenty or so kids who were in the Young People's Unit of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital with me forty-five years ago, I'd be extremely surprised if half a dozen are still alive. Those who are will, like me, have suffered a lifetime of mental illness.

Being mad just isn't fun

It isn't fun for anyone

It isn't fun if you are mad

It isn't fun it it's your dad

If it's your child it's just as bad

There is no fun in being mad.

My mind was broken fifty-five years ago in Stamfordham Primary School in Northumberland. I've never recovered. The damage was probably irreversible after three months, but I had three years of it before there was any intervention, eight before there was useful intervention. And by that time it was far too late.

Since then I've made excuses for them. Dyslexia wasn't well understood then, I've said to myself. My parents were trying to do the right thing. The teachers had no way to know the damage they were causing.

Perhaps. But that was half a century ago. What the hell was the point of me and hundreds like me going through all that pain and suffering life-altering injury if lessons aren't going to be learned?

So when I hear on the radio today of a little girl who's now ten, who showed signs of distress immediately on being sent to school... I am overwhelmed with anger and distress and compassion.

Let's be clear about this: we have a lot of ongoing scandals about elite sexual abuse of children. We should treat that very seriously. We should hunt down, prosecute and imprison the perpetrators, because raping a child is extremely likely to lead to life-altering trauma, to damage that cannot be undone. To ruin the child's whole life.

But for fuck's sake so is sending an obviously distressed child to school.

School is a dreadful, evil institution - a place where we send people to punish them for being young. It's also, of course, an environment in which some young people blossom. But that is the point. One size does not fit all. Mainstream education - in which some flourish and most more or less cope - does dreadful, irreparable harm to many. If we are to have compulsory schooling at all it must be child-centred, highly responsive and individualy tailored. To send a child to a school at which they are clearly unhappy is an act of unconscionable cruelty.

But if the parent who sends a child day after day to a place in which they are being systematically tortured is cruel, how much more so is the educator who inflicts the damage?

This isn't acceptable. It has to stop. If we don't have enough resources to educate the children we have without injuring them, then we just need as a society to have fewer children. If we aren't prepared to have fewer children then we have to put more resources into individually tailored child centred education.

But there is no criminal worse than the adult who sees a child in distress and continues, day after day, week after week, month after month to send that child into the place of torture to be further injured. No punishment which a civilised society could impose would be sufficiently severe to fit such a crime.

You don't mend young minds, you break them. And there's no road back.

Credit where credit's due: Russell Brown MP

So this evening I fired of yet another of my intemperate emails to my MP.

I say 'my' MP. He's the MP for my home. But since I'm still legally homeless, I'm actually currently registered to vote in Glasgow. I've literally no idea who the MP where my vote is registered in Glasgow actually is, although I think my MSP may just have become First Minister. But I think of Russell Brown as my MP, because he's the MP for where I actually live.

I have very mixed feelings about Russell Brown. As a human being I think he's a very decent one. I like him. I've seen him attending events for mad people - people with mental illness - where there was no possible publicity benefit from doing so. And, furthermore, treating us with dignity and respect, as equal citizens. Which of course we are, but it still impressed me positively. I've seen him turn up in person at anti-Nazi rallies. He's also, I'm told, a 'good constituency MP' - which is to say the social worker of last resort for those defeated by the bureaucracy. Which is a good and honourable role, and someone has to do it.

But we don't actually send people to Westminster to be social workers, we send them there to be legislators. And as a legislator, Russell Brown often seems as much use as a clockwork monkey.

He has never rebelled against the party whip in this parliament - not once. In all his 17 years at Westminster, he's rebelled against the whip only eight times - so once in two years on average - but he's got progressively less rebellious with age.

The few rebellions he has made have been mostly on the side of the almost angels. He rebelled three times on Lords reform, voting twice for a fully appointed House of Lords - not just mostly Tony's Cronies, entirely Tony's Cronies, but that would at least have meant no more damned legislators by inheritance. But on the other hand he voted that the Lords be abolished entirely, so on the whole he earned some brownie points.

He voted both ways on a technical amendment to the Protection of Vulnerable Children bill. Without more context I don't know what the import of that amendment was, and, in any case, I don't know whether voting both ways was a clever political manoeuvre or a cock-up. But it was at least some sort of a rebellion, so I give him some credit for not being a clockwork monkey on that occasion. And he rebelled three times on the City of London (Ward Elections) Bill - the relevance of which to his electorate in Galloway I honestly fail to see. And finally, and honourably, he voted to allow doctors to assist terminally ill people who wished to die, to do so.

So that's his seventeen year career: eight occasions when he did what a clockwork monkey wouldn't do, and voted against his part whip; on two of those occasions, he unambiguously did the right thing.

In Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta Iolanthe, Private Willis sings:

When in that House M.P.'s divide,
If they've a brain and cerebellum, too,
They've got to leave that brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.

That was first performed one hundred and thirty years ago, but at Westminster little ever changes. Eight times in seventeen years, Russell Brown has forgotten to check in his brain at the MPs' Cloakroom; twice in seventeen years, he's done something useful with it.

For the rest of the time, he's voted with the Labour whip. For the Iraq War. For the maintenance and renewal of nuclear weapons. For tuition fees (but only for students in England, of course). For the breakup of the NHS (but only the English NHS, of course). For ID cards. Against protecting refugees. Against cracking down on tax avoidance. It's not a record of which any socialist could be proud.

And being this mindless clockwork monkey, he joined with the rest of London Labour in their collective act of suicide in the Independence Referendum in acting as willing footsoldiers for the bankers, the landowners, the imperialist fantasists against his own electorate, the working poor of Stranraer and west Dumfries who voted in their droves for an independent, socialist Scotland.

I truly do not understand this act of wilful collective folly. In Scotland, Labour could once more have become a party of government, and, what's more, a party of government implementing the policies of egalitarianism and social justice which one must assume that they all joined the Labour Party to promote. Instead, they chose to remain in a United Kingdom which they can only ever hope to govern if they discard all those of their principles they have not already recanted.

However, I didn't come, tonight, to bury Russell Brown. I came, tonight, to praise him. Credit where it's due.

My email to him was both angry and incendiary. Here it is:

Dear Mr Russell Brown MP, 

During the recent referendum campaign, you (and others) repeatedly claimed that the Yes campaign's assertion that our NHS was not safe in the Union was false. Now we face TTIP, and with it the wholesale privatisation of every aspect of our NHS, both north and south of the border. Your assurances that the NHS was safe now look very hollow. 

Of course, you can't stop this. The Tories have a majority and they will defeat your colleague Clive Efford's National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill 2014-15. But the least you can do to retain some semblance of honour is to vote with Clive Efford in favour of the bill. 

Please assure me that you will do this. 

Yours sincerely, 

Simon Brooke

Within the hour I received this response:

Simon 

Many thanks for contacting me about Clive Efford's Private Members' Bill to be heard on Friday and also the issue of TTIP. 

In respect of the latter, I received a briefing from my trade union, Unite, back in the early summer and having already looked at the potential impact of the TTIP agreement, I was a little surprised that Unite was actually fairly favourable towards the agreement. However, as time passed, it became clear that there was a genuine threat contained therein, with regards to NHS contracts, and when I and other members of the Unite Parliamentary Group met with senior officials of the union, it was determined that in going forward, opposition to TTIP should be pursued. Thankfully, this is the position that I, and other Labour colleagues, will be taking. 

I have already spoken with Clive about his Bill and I have assured him that I will be remaining in parliament on Friday to offer my support to his Bill. 

Many thanks for making contact with me and for making your views and concerns known to me. 

Regards 

Russell

Now that is a far more courteous response than I deserved. Furthermore, my understanding is that the official Labour position is still in favour of TTIP, so it looks as though he is prepared to use his brain - positively, on behalf of his constituents - once again.

On psychiatry, homeopathy, and the medicalisation of distress

I'm a damaged person; I know that. I know that that damage happened mainly in (and because of) my first six months of primary school. I know that because of that damage, I'm much more vulnerable to stress than most people are - or than I would be if I hadn't been sent to school. I'm now reasonably confident that I will carry this damage - this vulnerability - for the rest of my life, that I will never be free from the risk of another major breakdown, never free from little breakdowns such as the one I had last week.

In 1998, I broke my back for the first time. As I was driven in the ambulance to Ayr infirmary, I thought it was a foregone conclusion that I would be paralysed; in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Suppose I had been right. Suppose I had had the spinal damage which would forever prevent me from walking again. Would you consider that an 'illness'? Would anyone?

The answer is clearly 'no'. There's no infectious agent. There's no underlying biological cause. It's damage. Something is broken. It can't be repaired. It's an injury.

My mental damage is not like a broken back. It doesn't permanently prevent me from doing anything. But it is like - it's very like - a shoulder that's been dislocated. A shoulder that's never been dislocated is pretty hard to dislocate: it's very strong. But once it has been dislocated, there's permanent damage to the soft tissue that binds it together. Most of the time the shoulder works well, moves smoothly and has the full range of movement it had before. But it's much weaker; if exposed to the wrong stress, it dislocates again. Again, this is not an 'illness'. There's no underlying biological cause. There's no infectious agent. Drugs may ameliorate the symptoms (pain, inflammation  swelling), but they won't cure the problem. There's damage - permanent damage. Something is broken. It's an injury.

For hundreds of years people with sincere good will, careful study and confident professionalism, have treated illness using homeopathy. We now know that this discipline is based on a mistaken model of the world: a model that denies the atomicity of matter, which assumes that no matter how much you dilute a solution, a proportion of the original solute remains. Because we know this, we know that despite the homeopathists' confident professionalism, their careful study and their sincere good will, the cures they prescribe are bogus. They can't work. And, because people in urgent need take their prescriptions in place of more scientifically grounded treatments, they actually cause harm.

For hundreds of years people with sincere good will, careful study and confident professionalism have tried to cure mental 'illness'. They have prescribed drugs. They have hunted for the infectious agents, the underlying biological causes. As David Kupfer, Chair of the American Psychiatric Association committee responsible for the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, writes 'we've been telling patients for several decades that we're waiting for biomarkers...'. That's what you do with disease. You find the infectious agent, or the underlying biological process of the illness, and then you find a chemical compound - a drug - which will interfere with that agent or process. But the problem is, they have been hunting for a Snark. As Kupfer goes on to say '...we're still waiting.'

It's an article of faith for Kupfer as for all psychiatrists that there must be some underlying biological cause, because if there weren't, mental illness wouldn't exist. So they cannot admit that their Snark actually is a Boojum. That their entire profession is based on category error, just like that of the homeopaths. It's sad for them. I feel their pain. But they must be stopped, because like the homeopaths they actually cause harm because people in urgent need take their prescriptions in place of more scientifically grounded treatments.

It's time to consign psychiatry, like astrology and homeopathy, to the dustbin of scientific history, where it can do no more harm.