9/11

September 11th, 1999, I was with my three brothers, sitting in a bar in Carlisle as we watched Liverpool v Manchester United on Sky Sports. Man Utd won 3-2.

It was the wrong result.

My second oldest brother was on leave from the Army. He had a wife and two children at that point (as he does now), and a home in the Midlands of England, so it was all the more rare an occasion that he’d travel up north to Carlisle during his time off, and that we’d all have an opportunity to group up again.

After the majority disappointment of the football match (since Army-brother is an arch-rival Everton fan and was laughing at the rest of us), we went for a few games of ten-pin bowling.

I had never seen anyone throw a bowling ball backwards until my oldest brother, who’s had a couple of hip replacements due to complications from two kidney transplants, shuffled up after a few pints and managed to send it in completely the opposite direction – and if the pins had have been back there instead, he would have had the force for a strike.

It was a great night. Oldest bro lived in Carlisle and went home, then the rest of us (I being the youngest) headed back to my mother’s place.

About half an hour after, we remembered that it was oldest brother’s birthday… and none of us had said a thing. Not a hug, a handshake or a celebratory pint to mark the occasion. And he’d gone home. As you can imagine, we felt awful, particularly as we couldn’t raise him on the phone.

We never forget his birthday, now.

* * * * *

Two years later, at around 2:10pm (9:10am in New York) my mother shook me awake. It was during my ‘dark times’ and that was almost in a literal sense, as I barely saw daylight. I lived a shadow-life.

“Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Centre,” she said. “There’s been a newsflash. They think it’s a terrorist attack.” Concern hushed her voice and she said the words gently, sounding like she didn’t know how to sound when delivering such news.

I was just out of dreams, with a muddled – probably hung-over – head, not picking up on the gravity of the situation which, I realise now,  her voice inferred. I was thinking that it could only have been light, propeller planes. I remember the truck bomb on one of the towers and there being just a handful of deaths, but no real damage to the building itself. They wanted to bring it down, but failed.

She went back downstairs and I got dressed.

When I got to the TV…  I was struck with a numbing sense of horror. A chill ran right through me as I watched those incomprehensible scenes being played over, and that belched, bloating fireball rising up from the impact wound of the first plane strike. Footage of the second attack hadn’t yet started rolling.

The live feed was the stuff of living hell. A lot of people have said, since, that they first thought it was a scene from some Hollywood action movie, but I knew already that it wasn’t, and that the loss of life was real and must have been huge. People incinerated at their desks and they just went out that morning to do their fucking jobs, not get blown to bits, torn to unrecognisable lumps and thrown down across the streets of the city they’d made home.

I saw people waving clothing from windows above the level of impact and I wondered how the heck they were going to get out with that raging fire beneath them. Why weren’t the news helicopters on the roof already, evacuating all the people they could instead of just watching? Then I realised that the insane thermals rising up from the inferno would have just spun them out of the sky, and – like me – there was nothing they could do but watch. Anything else would have been suicide.

And then there were the jumpers.

There was a ‘video nasty’ around in the 1980s called ‘Faces of Death’ which was a compilation of footage, including animal murders and fatal human incidents and accidents. Video was still a new thing around then – just taking off, really – and this was some macabre icon of that age. I never watched it, and have never watched it. It sickened me just to be told about it, and that people found a perverse enjoyment… I just couldn’t understand that.

When I was 12 or 13, the road safety/traffic officers from the local Police came in to school and gave us a talk… except it wasn’t a talk… it included a slide-show of scenes-of-accident photographs that showed the damage that could be done by irresponsible driving. There was a motorcyclist who had come off his bike and hit a truck, and by some freak dynamic, his hand was found holding the truck's tax disc between thumb and forefinger, hundreds of feet down the road from his body. They showed us a face that seemed to be smiling, eyes open, before telling us that it was a top-down photo and this young guy was on a morgue slab. The most disturbing image they… forced on us… was of an accident where another motorcyclist, a teenager, had gone too fast over the crest of a hill, swapping lanes and landing the bike right through the window of an oncoming car, between the driver and passenger seat, and the fuel tank exploded. All that was left there were two grinning, charred skeletons, encased in scorched steel, and the rider was way down the road, dead but still recognisable to his parents.

And I’d seen the pompous military footage display of ‘precision’ air strikes on bunkers and vehicles during the Gulf War (circa 1990), knowing that people will have died…

… but there I was, watching people jumping from those towers, from a place too high, knowing that in the very same moment I was watching them, they were facing their very last moments and hadn’t even hit the ground, yet.

For the first time in my life, I was witnessing death… watching people die.

You wonder what the conditions must have been like up there to spur a person into jumping, knowing that they wouldn’t survive the fall. Or did they think in those last moments that there must be a way that they could still survive, because nobody really expects to die when they’ve just gone out to work, do they? They want to go home and hug the people they love.

In 1994, on the first occasion of living in London – far away from the farmlands and tranquillity of rural Cumbria, where I grew up – I was caught in a bomb scare, while on the 11^th floor of Archway Tower, in Islington, which was a government building, and that floor houses the Social Security offices.

I was just there to claim benefit. I was basically in poverty, living at a YMCA, and needed to eat. I had no qualm with the world.

The IRA (Irish Republican Army) were still very active at the time, and there had been a bombing campaign in the area in the October of the previous year, so it wasn’t like some random warning.

A klaxon began sounding and I’d never heard anything like it. Then a voice, and although I can’t remember word for word, it said something like: “This is a bomb alert. There may be a bomb in the building. Please stay away from the windows. Do not attempt to use the lifts or staircases until you are given the all clear.”

And everyone looks around, and they don’t know what to say, and you know that they’re feeling that same bone-chilling fear that you are, because you’re 190ft up in the air, and if some car bomb blew off the support column that’s right outside the entrance of the building, you could picture the whole place coming tumbling down.

There were women holding on to their children, trying to reassure through their own fear.

Everyone was suddenly a friend. In every pair of worried eyes, there was that reflection that we were in this together.

I’ll never forget that.

The audio warning and the klaxon repeated over and over again.

It was the highest I’d ever been in my life. I remember coming out of the lift on that floor and feeling like dropping to the ground and crawling because there were floor to ceiling windows just in front, and I could see right down to miniature red, double-decker buses turning at the junction of the road, below.

Half an hour later, we were told to evacuate.

There was no bomb.

Watching that footage, live on the television on September 11^th, 2001, I could empathise, and so deeply… but I couldn’t really imagine what those people trapped were going through. Like my experience with the cancer scare, I lived the good news.

On April 15^th, 1986 – a week after my 12^th birthday - the US Air Force bombed Tripoli, in Libya, in revenge for the bombing of a nightclub in West Germany – specifically West Berlin - which killed three and injured hundreds.

This was still the Cold War… Germany divided by the Berlin Wall… the Iron Curtain… the USSR and USA were opposing superpowers and the fear of nuclear conflict was real.

I was just a little boy… some innocent little kid… I’d kissed Janine Sterling, a few years earlier, and no other girl since…  I probably hadn’t developed ‘special hair’ by then, and I should have had other things not to worry about, but I was terrified that this reaction from the US – against, at the time, USSR-backed Libya – would propel the human race into World War III.

I remember coming home from school one day and my next oldest brother was there (only 15 at the time, himself) and I started crying when I saw the TV, with angry diplomats shouting at each other in some debating chamber. I was terrified for all of us. Maybe it’s the churning, developing mind of a developing brain at that age, but I was convinced it would all lead to nuclear war… all out apocalypse… that we were on the brink of absolute destruction, and that our end was on a hair-trigger of decision.

A few months ago, after posting the blog about the death of my little guy, Itchy, someone made a comment that they felt I may have embellished events, but I really don’t. I’ve only ever written what I’ve experienced and remembered, and though I may throw in a few extra adjectives than others, it’s the truth as I remember it. I have a very high IQ (or did – I’m happier to have grown stupider with age) and my first, very clear and very vivid memory was from when I was a couple of weeks old.

But, I digress back to 1986… and I’m not too sure how long after the Tripoli bombings, but remembering that I was still terrified of the possibility of nuclear war…

… I was sitting in Maths class at William Howard School, in Brampton, just going through the motions of the lesson. I recall that it was spring – though I’m not sure if it was ’86 or ’87 – and there was a clear blue sky and it was quite chilly.

Then… the most awful, twisted, grotesque, ripping sound that I never really thought I’d ever hear…

The air-raid siren at the local police station, a few hundred meters away, began to sound.

That noise meant, in 1986/1987... nuclear attack. It was the most fearsome and disgusting whine, pitching up to a scream and then back down, then repeating. And it was so loud.

I had this sensation like my teeth were made of metal and acid was dripping off them, making my whole mouth bitter and sour. I was frozen in fear.

I looked about my classroom and for the other kids, the noise was just an amusement. The teacher didn’t seem to pay any attention, but I absolutely knew that we were all going to be dead in a few minutes. I had my jaw on the table, my blood running cold, knowing that the last moments of my life were playing out – that my worst fears were actually happening.

I and everyone I loved were going to die.

I found out the week after that the police station were just carrying out an annual test of the siren.

I’m wondering if I can still sue them for that?

Back to the future, in 2001…

… watching these people die, facing what they thought would never happen to them, knowing the emotion of being caught up in incidents, but never the horror that I and hundreds of millions around the world were watching… it was heart-breaking.

Unreal.

Then the Pentagon.

Nobody knew how far it would spread, what was still in the air, whether there were flying bombs on their way to other cities in other nations, or who was behind it all.

There must have been a break or an away-to-the-studio talk from an expert moment in the footage I was watching, but I remember when focus was back on New York, it looked like a small nuclear bomb had gone off, and there was this colossal cloud of dust rising over the city.

One of the American reporters, in a helicopter or on the ground (I can’t remember which), said that one face of one of the towers had collapsed – and that seemed just impossible.

I knew about the plane hitting the Empire State Building in 1945 and that no building of this size had ever collapsed (there was a Russian tower with a fire a few years previous to the WTC attacks that never fell), so you trusted that that part of the building had collapsed… not the whole thing, not with all those survivors waiting to be rescued.

And when you could see behind that dust, there was no tower there at all. It had gone.

It moved from a disaster to a cataclysm.

I watched the second tower collapse in real-time.

At that same moment, heartbreak spread across the planet, because all hope was lost.

And yes, some people celebrated in the streets, in faraway lands, to see that happen, but they voiced their anger and rejoiced their revenge in just the same way that saw the streets of New York lit up in revelry and triumph when Osama Bin Laden was killed, earlier this year.

We are all alike, and we are all One.

We were all New Yorkers...

... we remembered the link, for a moment.

Hundreds of thousands of people – likely more than a million – have been slaughtered in the ten years since September 11^th, 2001.

I’ve seen my own brother and my nephew go to war, and my nephew was a child in 2001.

When are we going to stop this obsession with killing each other?

When will we decide to live in peace, and teach those who believe they are our masters that we are in charge?

We should do that now...

UK Nationals killed on 9/11

1. Sarah Ali, 35, from Balham, south west London, was at a conference on the 106th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre.

2. Andrew Joseph Bailey, 29, married with an eight-year-old daughter, was originally from Birmingham. He worked as a security supervisor for insurance brokers Marsh and McLellan on the 93rd floor of the north tower and lived and worked in New York.

3. Michele Beale, 37, a director with London-based Risk Waters, was attending a conference at the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11.

4. Jane Beatty.

5. Oliver Bennett, 32, was a journalist with Risk Waters publishers.

6. Graham Berkeley, 37, an IT consultant, whose parents live in Shrewsbury, was on board the United Airlines flight which plunged into the World Trade Centre's south tower.

7. Paul Gary Bristow, 27, a publisher for Risk Waters group, was at a seminar in the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor.

8. Geoffrey Thomas Campbell, 31, a Reuters employee from Great Billing, Northamptonshire, who had been due to take part in a conference hosted by English publishing company Risk Waters Group, in the World Trade Centre.

9. Jeremy Mark Carrington, 34, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the WTC's north tower. Brought up in Essex, he moved to New York 12 years ago, where he met his wife, Pattie. Jeremy had survived the 1993 WTC bombing. His mother, Catherine Ross, lives in Gillingham, Dorset.

10. Suria Clarke, 30, was working in the towers. Her brother Tom is from London.

11. Neil James Cudmore, 38, worked in the advertising department of a financial journal. He was believed to have been planning to marry colleague and fellow victim Dinah Webster.

12. Michael Joseph Cunningham, 39, originally from Ilford, Essex, was a broker for Eurobrokers in the South Tower. He lived in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Teresa, 35. His son Liam was 13 days old when the jets hit the World Trade Centre.

13. Gavin Anthony Cushny, 48, of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He was working as computer consultant for Cantor Fitzgerald on 104th floor of the north tower.

14. Caleb Arron Dack.

15. Anthony Richard Dawson, of Southampton, had been attending a convention in one of the towers when the second plane struck.

16. Calvin Dawson.

17. Kevin Dennis, 43, a stockbroker, who lived in St John's Wood, north London, before he moved to New York to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. He had been on the 101st floor of the north tower of World Trade Centre.

18. Melanie Louise Devere. The 30-year-old publishing assistant with Risk Waters grew up in Hayling Island, Hants, before moving to London.

19. Richard Anthony Dunstan.

20. Michael Egan, 51, the Hull-born vice president of multinational insurance company AON, is believed to have died as he helped colleagues escape from the south tower.

21. Christine Egan, 55, a nurse working in Canada, was visiting her brother's office while on a week-long holiday in New York.

22. Robert Eaton, 37, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker, believed to have been working on the 105th floor of the north tower.

23. Godwin Forde, 38, a security guard for Morgan Stanley, was at work on the 42nd floor of the south tower.

24. Christopher Forsythe.

25. Boyd Gatton.

26. Andrew Clive Gilbert, in his thirties, originally from Ipswich, worked at the World Trade Centre.

27. Timothy Paul Gilbert, like his brother Andrew, was also in his thirties and working at the World Trade Centre. The brothers had been living and working in New York for some time.

28. Paul Gilbey, from Southend-on-Sea, a money trader with Euro Bank, worked on the 84th floor of the south tower. He and his wife had moved to the US eight years before the terrorist strike.

29. Ronald Lawrence Gilligan, 43, from Merseyside, is thought to have been behind his 103rd-floor desk at Cantor Fitzgerald when disaster struck.

30. Robert Halligan, originally from Kent.

31. Nicholas John, a 33-year-old banker from Swansea, had been due to attend a meeting at the World Trade Centre.

32. Christopher Jones.

33. Robin Blair Larkey, 48, from Surrey, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. He left a wife and three young sons.

34. Steven Lawn, 29, from Broadstairs, Kent, moved to New York three years ago to work as a money dealer. He was on the 91st floor of the south tower. Parents John and Angela had just retired after running the family newsagents for 35 years.

35. Leon Lebor.

36. Michael William Lomax, 37, from Heaton Moor, Stockport, was working on the 93rd floor of the south tower when it was hit by one of the planes.

37. Mark Ludvigsen, was an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald.

38. Gavin MacMahon, 35, from County Durham, was working as an insurance executive on the 99th floor of one of the World Trade Centre towers.

39. Simon Percy Maddison, 40, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. Lived with wife Maureen and three children in New Jersey. Originally from Harlow, Essex.

40. Keithroy Maynard.

41. Colin McArthur, 52, from Scotland, was vice-president of insurance company Aon Inc.

42. Christina Sheila McNulty.

43. John Moran.

44. Stephen Philip Morris, 31, whose parents live in Nantglyn, near Denbigh in Clwyd. He worked for a finance company in the World Trade Centre.

45. Alex Napier.

46. Marcus Neblett.

47. Christopher Newton-Carter, 52, from London, was an associate director for banker Sandley O'Neill. He was six floors from the top when the second plane plunged into his building.

48. Avnish Raman Patel, worked on the 93rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre as a financial analyst with Fred Alger Management. Mr Patel, a single 28-year-old whose parents live in Clapham, south London, had lived in the US since he was 13.

49. Hashmukh Parmar.

50. David Alan James Rathkey, 47, from Maidenhead, Berks, was working on the 83rd floor of the North Tower. The father-of-three was a systems consultant who was married to an American and had lived in the country for 20 years.

51. Sarah Anne Redheffer, 35, from Enfield, north London, was working for Risk Waters on the 106th floor of the north tower when the first jet struck.

52. Rick Rescorla, 62, born in Hayle, Cornwall, was vice president for security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. He was helping his colleagues flee the World Trade Centre's south tower.

53. Karlie Rogers, 25, a Sussex University graduate from London, worked for Risk Waters publishers.

54. Howard Selwyn, 47, from Leeds, was told to evacuate the south tower while on the phone to a colleague at his desk on the 84th floor.

55. Jane Simpkin.

56. Michael Stewart, 42, a banker, from Belfast.

57. Derek Sword, 29, from Dundee, was working for American finance firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods when the second jet went into the south tower.

58. Rhondell Tankard.

59. Ian Clive Thompson, 43, was born in Hampshire.

60. Nigel Bruce Thompson, 30, from Sheffield, was working on the 105th floor of the twin towers for brokers Cantor Fitzgerald.

61. Simon James Turner, 39, was among seven other British employees working at the technology conference in the quarter mile-high building.

62. Benjamin James Walker, 41, was on the 91st floor of the north tower, working for Marsh McClennan insurance brokers. He had moved to New York five years ago from Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. He left an American wife, Laura, and three children.

63. Dinah Webster, 50, was attending a conference on the 109th floor of the south tower. She and fellow victim Neil Cudmore worked in the advertising department of a financial journal.

64. Vincent Wells, 22, from Ilford, Essex, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

65. Kathryn Wolf.

66. Martin Wortley, 29, from Woolpit, Suffolk, was working as a dealer with Cantor Fitzgerald.

67. Neil Robin Wright, 30, an options broker from Tilbury, Essex, was also in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald when the building was struck. 

Foreign nationals with close UK ties

1. Carol Blake.

2. Bettina Brown.

3. Sal-uddin Choudhury.

4. Richard Cudina, 46, originally from Swanage, in Devon. He was a bond broker with Cantor Fitzgerald.

5. Kieran Gorman, 35, was a labourer.

6. Waleed Iskandar.

7. Yvonne Kennedy.

8. Bojan Kostic.

9. John Lozowsky.

10. Israel Pabon.

11. Edward Saiya, 49, whose brother Art is from Camberley, Surrey.

12. Joyce Smith, 55, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. Her brother Roy Hudson is from Syston, Leics.

13. Vladimir Tomasevic.

14. Jonathan Uman, 33, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

15. James Walsh, 37, originally from Nottingham, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

16. Maudlyn White.

Death

Death...

… it’s been around for quite some time, now, but we still haven’t really come to terms with it, have we?

It’s the bleakest and most traumatic example of resistance against what is - that mental non-acceptance of the moment - yet it’s inevitable and inescapable that, from birth, we move towards it.

This human life is short, even at its longest… but although there are medical and scientific advances in preventing and curing disease, disablement and all other ailments, would we really want to stop the process of death entirely?

It freaks most people out when they hit 40.

I see centenarians on the TV that look like they want to sleep… but they’re bothered by nurses and carers and forced to blow out candles for the cameras.

I watch their faces and think of stretched days of hard toil when all you long for at the end of them is to rest your head and slide away into nothingness.

But, unless you’re really into fashion, death is seen as the ultimate tragedy…

I’m not about to say it doesn’t matter; that staying in the moment is all you need to remember, and the passing of a loved one is just the same psychological mismatch between the reality of life and what your mind wants life to be like, as it would be if you were stuck in traffic on the way to a gig when you knew that Kylie had already taken to the stage in one of her little outfits.

If death wasn’t such an inconceivable enigma… if it wasn’t regarded with such finality, or if we could see past the veil to what comes after, life wouldn’t be so valued.

You can argue - if you withdraw your perspective to a global, governmental level - there’s little value put on a human life, or on life at all, but zoom back in to a personal, family or community view, and life becomes the most precious thing there is.

Where governments rubber stamp a ‘shocked and saddened’ response to disasters and are ‘regretful’ of the loss of life in war, get in close and there are hearts breaking… every death tears the world apart for someone.

(On a tangent, if our communities led the government – as it should be - rather than the other way around, World War II would have been Churchill and Hitler having a punch-up in a field, surrounded by a handful of men in suits egging them on. The other 120 million people from their respective countries would have told them to take a hike when called to arms. We’d have come up with a beer brewing competition, instead.)

We are here to live… on this planet to experience life… and death gives a focus to remind us of how important our time here is.

If there was no perceived ‘final curtain’ and we knew we moved on after physical death to somewhere better, there’d be mass suicides in traffic jams and at Morrissey concerts; stressed-out teachers would deal out capital punishment in schools; death would be the answer to and through almost every really tough challenge we faced.

If there was no respect for life, there would be no impulse to make the best we can of it.  

Death affects the living. Death has never troubled the dead.

As catastrophic as the experience of close death is, and however weak and powerless it may make us feel, we generally carry on living as best we can… reminded that our time is precious and, before very long – in the grand scheme of things – our own death will arrive.

All that comes to being in this Universe is subject to the same fate. People die. Mountains crumble into sand. Continents collide or are ripped asunder and their form is destroyed. Planets are obliterated in the death throes of stars. Galaxies are torn apart.

Yet there is one thing that defies that rule…

Energy.

Energy doesn’t die and nor is it born. It’s just there. Look around your room and you’ll see some of it, in various manifestations – whether it be in the shape of a cat, a flower pot, some wallpaper, your own hand, or if you’re very lucky indeed, in the form of Keira Knightley… and she’s maybe beckoning you to bed, with a wink and a cheeky glint in her eyes.

Without that energy flowing through your body, you would have no perceivable consciousness or life right now, and if that energy was entirely absent from the Universe, there would be no body at all… no ground for it not to lay on… no Earth… no Sun… no other sparkly stars in the sky… nothing.

But it is there… and… therefore… you are immortal.

All that you’re made from is eternal.

You are life.

Earlier this week, I was stomping up the mountain in Lochgoilhead and stopped for a moment, wiping a sheen of sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand… looking up at the clouds forming and trailing from the peak.

The sweat on my body was my internal cooling system kicking in, and the fingers of mist at the summit of the hill was the planet’s own cooling system in action.

The Earth rotates around the Sun in just the right way to allow a changing of the seasons, to cool and warm the hemispheres at just the right time so as not to completely fry or freeze life, here.

We’re part of something so extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly complicated, subject to countless chaotic rules, yet there’s a perfection to it all.

An atheist could dismiss it all as nature… but then, like an ocean is made from drops of water, we are a microcosm of the whole, which makes us, by nature, that nature.

A devout religious-type could argue that God makes it all work like that, and we’re inferior, but that infers separation. I don’t buy it… and nor do I buy angry-sky-god that would have the power of this entire Universe at his disposal and be so petty as to judge people on their actions within a flicker of a lifetime, and condemn them to the rest of eternity in pain and anguish.

Your energy is inextricably connected to this whole, ancient, Universal energy, that defies the process of birth and death… billions of years old, and then infinity before and after.

You always were, you are, now, and you always will be that energy.

So… um… we’re all a fragment of what could be regarded as God – the Universal power.

That’s pretty much fact.

We know that energy can have consciousness, because we are experiencing it right now, in this life, and we see it in so many different forms on this planet alone…

The thing is, we don’t need to know everything there is to know to live and learn from this lifetime.

And perhaps that’s why our time is short and these bodies are so fragile.

Death is to be respected, but it frames lifetimes rather than steals life.

You are a child of the universe,

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

- Desiderata, Max Erhmann

A Spiritual Homecoming

Scout Rock - looking a bit Easter Islandy

“I want to see mountains again, mountains Gandalf! And then find somewhere quiet where I can finish my book.” – Bilbo Baggins

On Monday, after some sixteen months absence, I returned to my spiritual home of Lochgoilhead – a small village located deep into the Arrochar Alps, at the head of the tidal Loch Goil, surrounded by arguably the most breathtaking and picturesque scenery in all of the Highlands of Scotland.

This was the area I travelled to live and work in not long after my awakening, in February last year, and it will always be a very special, magical place to me, both in my heart and in my mind.

I woke up that morning with an impulse for mountains and, initially, planned to go through to Borrowdale, in the English Lake District, but balancing up travel times, Lochgoilhead was only an extra hour away… and my return had been a long time coming.

I looked online and booked a cheap room for a couple of nights, did some hasty packing, then set off on my Bagginsesque adventure.

After a relaxed train ride up to Glasgow, then another to reach Helensburgh, I boarded the bus that would take me into the mountains… and what a journey that is. The route skirts the banks of the immense Loch Lomond – the largest lake in all of Great Britain - where I worked from February to April of this year, and that stretch alone had me grinning like a child on Christmas morning.

Passing the mighty Ben Lomond, I looked up at the 3,196ft summit that I hiked to in the Spring, and it was almost as though I could feel myself staring back down. I remembered standing there, gazing at the road far off in the distance, across the loch… the same road I was travelling on… and there not being a sound. Almost a kilometre up in the sky, the bustle of the busy world is silenced.

Ben Lomond

Approaching Lochgoilhead itself – after travelling six miles along a twisting single-track mountain pass – I was filled with a supreme sense of euphoria. I had a huge smile on my face as the bus pulled up outside the village post office and I stepped down, planting my feet on that sacred ground once more.

It was surreal to be there again after so long, while at the same time feeling like I’d never left – as though those sixteen months had passed in a heartbeat.

After booking in to my room at the pub on the edge of the loch, dropping off my bag, I went for a wander around the village, then back to the scout centre I’d worked at last year. My old boss, Mike, had a big smile and a man-hug for me, and I saw a few more friendly faces before heading up to my meditation post on the mountain, the wonderful Scout Rock.

Scout Rock is a place of such immense peace. Though only around 400ft above the village, it offers a tranquil viewpoint on the world, and without moving my head, I could see all of my old haunts… from the building I used to live in, the post office and the pub, to the hotel across the loch where I’d go to the gym.

I sat there, meditating and smiling, just soaking up the view, filled with joy.

One tragic change I learnt was that one of the women I used to work with, Anne, had died this May from pancreatic cancer. She’d been a support to me when I went through my own cancer scare, up there, last year, so it was particularly poignant. It seems there was only a space of weeks between her diagnosis and death – she’d declined treatment because there was nothing they could do to save her…

In such surroundings, though, we’re reminded just how fleeting our time is in this world, and that even mountains crumble and fall. None of us know how long we have here, so it’s important to remember to make the best of each moment… and life is filled with beauty, if you choose to look at it the right way.

As far as I can be, I’m sure that it wasn’t my last visit to Lochgoilhead. I hope someday to return there to stay. It’s a writer’s paradise, with scenery that inspires and nurtures creativity. Until then, it will always be my spiritual home, always calling me back.

Here are a selection of photos... click on them to see the full-size images:

Lochgoilhead, under The Steeple - Scout Rock at the centre

Living in the Moment

You’re third in line in the supermarket queue, and the person directly in front – a woman in her late twenties with slicked-back, oily hair, a screaming child and a look of near-psychosis in her eyes  - has a trolley piled high with groceries.

Looking down at your own hand basket, you have only a few items. It would take just a minute for the checkout assistant to serve you. A quick glance to your left and right and you see the other queues are longer, so there’s no point swapping. You consider asking the woman with the heaving trolley if you can just nip in front of her. It seems a reasonable request, especially since you’re in a hurry to be somewhere else.

Just as you open your mouth to speak, she glares at her child with unblinking eyes and whispers, with a clenched jaw: “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”

You decide not to ask.

So you stand there… your new enemy and her demon offspring in front of you… and you’re getting increasingly frustrated by the unfairness of it all. I mean, what on earth is she doing, coming to a supermarket and buying so much stuff? And look at the processed crap she’s got in her basket! No wonder the child is hyperactive.

If you’d just got to the till faster… if that old woman with the limp and the curled-down lip hadn’t dawdled in front of you when you were marching down the vegetable aisle, you’d have now been standing IN FRONT of this monstrous woman ahead of you, rather than behind her.

She couldn’t even be bothered to wash her hair.

You purse your lips and exhale. The agitation is rising.

A glance at your watch reveals it’s 2:33pm, and you think, what are all these idiots doing clogging up the supermarket at 2:33pm on a Wednesday? What sort of moron does their shopping at this time of day, on this day of the week?

Then you see that two checkouts at the other side of the store are closed and you shake your head, thinking ‘bastards’ as you curse the supermarket for their inefficiency, their inability to provide anything close to even a basic standard of good service and you also call into question their human rights record.

As your nemesis finishes piling the absurd amount of crappy, non-nutritious foodstuffs onto the checkout console’s conveyor belt, and you notice that she’s readied a fistful of time consuming money-off coupons; and as her child wails in such a high pitch you expect the storefront windows to shatter, your brain begins to swell and your heart creaks in your chest.

Then… horror of horrors… there’s that buzz, and the checkout assistant (who you’ve now decided is both gormless and fat, and the other way around) lifts a pack of tampons above her head and shouts: “Can I have a price check on these?”

You don’t know whether to throw your basket on the floor and storm out or start yelling at everyone in the store about how they must be doing this deliberately.

Sound familiar?

It’s perhaps a slightly exaggerated example, but I’m sure it will strike a chord with most.

Resistance to what is - that mismatch between what is real, in the living moment, and what your mind wants, through its synaptic reflections or projections – is the greatest cause of stress, anxiety, frustration, sadness, anger, misery and general negativity there is for our species.

If you’re in that supermarket queue, wanting to be and thinking about being somewhere else, and getting annoyed about not being there, where are you?

You’re still in the supermarket queue.

At that moment… and in any given moment… you can’t be anywhere else but where you are, so why resist it?

Amongst that swell of life, surrounded by thousands of years of stories and experience, you reduce your perception of it all to near-nothing by retreating into a critical, grumpy state of mind.

Yet, by recognising and letting go of that negativity, you could immediately immerse yourself in the same state of peace you’d find and feel in yourself if you were sitting on a mountain, or on the shore of a lake…

Life is what is. Life is right now. Life is always and will only ever be in the living moment.

If your mind tells you you should be somewhere else, when you’re not, and that’s causing you stress, then recognise that your mind is at fault and reject its flawed thinking.

This extends to every situation and circumstance in your life…

If you’re overweight, you’re overweight and no matter how much your mind castigates you about being so, you will still be overweight in that moment.

If you’re in debt, then you’re in debt and unless you can pay that debt in that exact moment of realisation, you’re still going to be in debt.

If you’re locked up in prison, that is where you are, and no matter how much your mind protests and aches for you to be free, those are your circumstances of the moment.

And so on…

Acceptance of the moment allows you to shed the anxiety and negativity which your mind may wish to attach to and label that moment with. It allows you to move from a mentally constructed fabrication of virtual reality into actual reality… from thought into form.

Life is an ongoing process of change, so accepting the moment doesn’t mean that things won’t change… it just means you won’t be beating yourself up, psychologically, while you’re moving through that change.

And you can make plans, in the moment, to drive that change. In that space where negativity once lay, creativity and positivity pour in.

If you’re overweight and you’re uncomfortable with it, make plans to get fit.

If you’re in debt, make plans to repay it. If you can’t possibly repay it, make plans to tell the companies you owe to that you can’t possibly repay it. If you can’t possibly repay it to ‘Evil Steven’ the loan shark, make plans to move to a different area of the country and change your name.

If you’re in prison, make it the place you want to be, right now – not with such enthusiasm that you punch the prison governor in the eye to get a few extra years, but by recognising that, whatever the circumstances, that is your life and every moment of your time on this Earth is precious to you. Use the time as wisely as you can, in whichever way you can.

If those plans don’t work out right away, keep adjusting them. If you stumble or falter, get back up and start again. Never give up.

In time, you’ll be in the moment where you’re slim, out of debt or at your liberty again, and what certainly wouldn’t have got you there was all that needless worry or frustration.

Life is now and this human incarnation has a limited and unpredictable timespan, which is true for every single person on the planet… so why waste a moment of it?

Next time you’re in the supermarket, let go and live.

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” – Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Rings

***

If you appreciated this blog and would like to donate the price of a cup of coffee or help towards my mobility bus pass (which is £100 per month, but gives me access to the Lake District, right over to Newcastle, down to Manchester, across to Blackpool and around the south-west of Scotland) my PayPal address is:

Lesism@btinternet.com

Thank you!

Justice & Compassion

It’s a tumultuous time for England, for the United Kingdom and the planet as a whole. Globally, we’ve had protests and full-on riots, uprisings and rebellions, unemployment levels are very dodgy indeed, people are starving to death, caught up in a civil war nobody seems to care about, and we’re on the verge of that feared double-dip recession, because if you look beyond the rhetoric of politicians, you’ll find every country on Earth is essentially bankrupt.

Let’s face facts… things are going to get worse before they get better.

What is not going to help make things better is Western countries being transformed (or perhaps further transformed) into police states in order to deal with the inevitable increase in protests against our governments, or our courts of law handing out knee-jerk sentences in order to quell dissent.

So, the topic of today’s blog is ‘Justice and Compassion’ and why the problems we are facing today will never be solved when the two are separated.

Charlie Gilmour, aged 21, was sentenced to 16-months imprisonment in July for taking part in protests - in London, last December - against the colossal rise in student fees… and convicted of kicking a window and throwing a bin ‘in the direction’ of a Royal convoy.

He was ‘intoxicated by drink and drugs’ on the day and although things got a bit out of hand, it’s hardly crime of the century, is it?

Much was made of the fact he was seen swinging from a Union Flag at the Cenotaph, but as much as it was mentioned - and even though he wrote a very humble apology admitting it was him photographed - it wasn’t something he was charged for… though he appears to have been judged for it by the courts, by the media and by the general public.

I would argue that it’s a disgrace to the memory of those people that the Cenotaph represents, that it could be used so cynically by the media to rouse the emotions of the general public.

The Fallen died for our freedom.

At the time of Charlie’s run-around, there were tens of thousands of peaceful protesters – many of them children – being charged by police on horseback and ‘kettled’ into areas which were then cordoned-off. They were kept there in the freezing cold, in the middle of Winter, for hours.

The freedom that The Fallen died for includes the right to peaceful protest, and that’s what was happening, until the police decided to scare the living daylights out of children and adults alike, risking crushes and trampling as the crowds were forced into smaller and smaller areas.

This is an account, published on the BBC News website a day later (December 10^th, 2010), from a 17-year-old girl called Rachel Bergen:

"We were right at the front. There was a huge crowd behind us so we were pushed forward. There was nothing we could do about it.

"They [the police] saw us coming towards them, these teenage girls who wanted to go home.

"They didn't show any mercy whatsoever. They threw around my friends who were just 17 year old slim girls. They were beating my friends with batons.

"They didn't show any sympathy in their voice and I didn't see anything in their eyes.

"It was awful. I've never experienced anything like it."

No wonder tensions were high.

Twitter lit up with outrage, watching the live footage of this happening on the TV and Internet. If everyone in the UK had a teleportation device in their house, there would have been ten million of us on the streets of London that night.

Charlie’s 16-month sentence isn’t justice. It’s revenge. They threw the book at him and made him a scapegoat.

If he’d committed those same crimes on the streets of Carlisle, while ‘socially confused’ on a Saturday night, he’d have got a caution, or maybe a criminal damage charge and a fine.

It’s not as if he had a long string of previous convictions and - exasperated at his continuance to show disregard for the law - the judge decided, finally, to give him a bit of prison time. He was of previously good character. He’d just finished second year of degree studies.

Charlie, with his Mum and Dad

How could any judge handing out this sentence possibly argue that it was for the public good to keep this guy incarcerated - at the cost to the tax payer of over £100 per day - when he was clearly repentant and embarrassed by his behaviour, admitted his guilt, and there were a whole host of other, non-custodial options available to deal with him?

Charlie threw a bin and ‘alarmed’ a few people. Okay, so those alarmed people may have included ‘Big Charlie’ (aka the future King of England) and his wife, but my binman alarms me every second Thursday at stupid o’clock in the morning, throwing bins around. Will I press charges? No.

Why should the public status of the person alarmed affect in any way at all the process of justice? Aren’t we all the same in the eyes of the law?

Likewise, why are judges bowing to media and political pressure when applying such ludicrous sentencing? Even now, in the aftermath of the riots in England over the past week, judges are being told to jail those convicted of involvement.

There are also plans in the pipeline to evict these people from any council properties, and even the suggestion that they could lose benefit payments.

That is, surely, just making a bad situation worse?

When you take compassion out of the justice system,  it becomes a machine without a heart… it processes people like a computer would, rather than applying humanity, in which case the bigger picture would be looked at, with empathy, and a solution that benefits everyone would be pursued.

Justice without compassion is simply revenge, and that’s not the sort of foundation that a society should be built upon.

What also gets my goat (not literally, as I don’t have one) is that Charlie’s father wrote to his local Member of Parliament, Francis Maude MP, but it was reported that Maude was ‘not minded to take a stance’.

MPs are not masters over their constituents… they are servants. They are voted for and elected by the people, to represent the people, and not just the people who voted for them, not just the people they agree with or like… but everyone in their constituency.

Charlie has clearly been given an inflated prison sentence, and – in the interests of true justice, human rights and freedom – his MP should be straight on the case… not cow-towing to his party or the papers.

Charlie Gilmour should be taken back before the courts, given an appropriate, sensible, community sentence and you bet, he’ll never be standing in front of a magistrate or judge again for the rest of his life.

Behind every great man...

I’ve written about Gary McKinnon before on my blog, but again, compassion seems to be absent from his treatment, both by the government and the courts.

To remind you, Gary hacked in to various US government computer systems in 2001/2002… systems without passwords… and he left a few messages. He didn’t trash or rob anything. He was curious, looking for repressed clean energy technology and information on UFOs.

Gary has Asperger’s Syndrome, and this sort of obsessive behaviour is common in people with such a condition.

His crime is akin to him looking around for ATMs that haven’t been locked, then, finding one, leaving a note saying: “I can see your money!”

He didn’t actually steal anything, yet he’s facing a sentence as harsh as if he’d walked into a branch of his local bank, opened up on the customers with a shotgun, then emptied and ran off with the contents of the safe.

To put it in perspective, Anders Breivik – who committed the atrocities in Norway in July – faces a maximum sentence of 21 years for murdering 76 people. That’s a little over three months for each person he killed.

If extradited, Gary faces 70 years in prison for accessing ‘top secret’ computer networks… which were connected to the Internet with entry gateways left wide open. Not that ‘top secret’, then?

At the time of Gary’s poking around, it was clear that the US government’s cyber security was woefully lacking, and that embarrassed them… so, again, they are using a mask of justice to hide the fact that they want revenge. They want to save face, to make an example of him… and they still want to do this, nearly ten years later.

Like when the doctor told me he suspected I had cancer, the waiting must be the worst thing; an almost unbearable strain on Gary, his mother, Janis Sharp, and all their family.

I don’t know how Janis does it each day, and after every knock-back in her tireless campaign to have her son’s extradition stopped… she just gets back up, hides the tears and the heartache and marches on. She’s powered by a limitless fuel of love.

If rehabilitation, rather than vengeance, were at the heart of justice (and it should be), this would have been sorted out years ago in the UK courts – again, most likely with a fine or a community sentence – and Gary would have been at liberty to get his life in order and make a contribution to society, rather than being trapped in the limbo his life is right now.

The governmental and media stance that all of the people involved in the recent rioting should be jailed is ludicrous, short sighted and – if the courts are bowing to politics and the flame-fanning of the newspapers – an aberration of justice.

It would cost in excess of £300,000 ($488,000) to jail ten people for a year, yet if you gave all of them community orders and invested that same amount of money in community projects that encourage positive change, you could help hundreds of people – you could give them opportunities and hope to transform their lives, which in turn could change the fortunes of generations to come.

Compassion. Empathy. Humanity. Separate those qualities from justice, and what example does that set for the rest of society? Isn’t that exactly what was lacking from the rioters last week?

An eye for an eye and the whole world becomes blind.

Let’s open our eyes and hearts wide, and let’s be part of the solution.