Saturday, April 30, 2011
Miscellaneous depressions
Start with the small one, which was the result of walking back the mile or so from Sainsbury's carrying around 20lbs of flour and a few other oddments. I was carrying them in a proper ruck sack, just the right size for the job, but I would not have wanted to have been carrying very much more. Which sounded a bit feeble when compared to the 112lb bags of cement I used to unload when small and the 90lb packs that the French foot soldiers of the first world war used to have to hump about. Not to mention the 224lbs sacks of peas and such like that the parents of people I used to know used to have to hump across scarily bending plank walks across dykes in Lincolnshire.
To divert attention from such thoughts, I computed how much money I was saving by baking my own bread. Excluding fuel, I am getting around 3lb 8oz of bread for perhaps £1 in materials. So even if we include fuel but exclude labour I am still doing quite well. Add in labour at minimum wage and I am doing quite badly. Happily, by the time I had reached this point I had got home and could move onto other matters.
Then we move onto an article about the future of the Royal Mail in some pull out from the Guardian. A future which it seems will mainly be populated by self employed delivery people working from home at minimum wage, fed by crates of mail to be delivered delivered from the warehouse they never need see. No more cosy jobs in sorting offices with canteens, company, sports & social clubs, pensions, sick pay and other perks & perquisites. So part of the price of most people getting richer is going to be a lot of other people with crummy jobs.
And lastly we had a DVD sold to me by Bourne Hall library for £1 and called 'Ahlamm', a film from Iraq of which I had never heard before. A film set in and around a mental hospital in Baghdad, in and around the time of the second gulf war. A film which shocked by its portrayal of the casual brutality of the Ba'athist regime, a casual brutality which rather reminded me of that of the dying Austrian empire portrayed by Jaroslav Hašek in Švejk. A similarly multi-ethnic world. And by the casual brutality of what came after, when the Ba'athist fist was removed. Not much helped by the lack of proper preparation by the invaders. The film is not saying that the invasion was wrong, but it is saying that there was a bad regime and that it was replaced by a bad mess; something we got into without due care and attention.
The film was rather badly made by our standards, but it was not much the worse for that. One soon got used to it.
# posted by Jim @ 6:00 AM 
