(Un)Helpfulness

Over the past few years and months and weeks and days there have been many opportunities for people to be helpful. And I am sure there will continue to be. I have nothing against being helpful. Even I have been known to helpful - though very probably not as frequently as I should. However, I really question the motives of some of these ‘helpful’ actions. There are the obvious ones that needed questioning - invading Iraq. Was that helpful? Yes - if you were an arms dealer, but evidently not so much for anyone else involved.

I heard recently about Investors suing Tesco for damaging the profitability of their shares. In amongst the various fines, investigations and acute competition from other high street retailers - namely Lidl and Aldi - in what sense is this activity helpful? Will the shareholders recover their losses? Will Tesco perform better? Will it even survive? Could this action prevent similar activities in any other company trying to protect it’s image? The answer to all of these questions is no. So who does it help? Actually, the only people likely to come out ahead on this one are the lawyers. Lawyers can fulfil a need, but this cynical action is mostly self serving and probably no benefit to anyone else.

On a more personal level it is surely necessary to examine our own motives when we intend being helpful, as much as we should carefully examine the possible consequences of our ‘helpfulness’. A recent Grauniad comment made the excellent point that flying out to help in Nepal was not necessarily any help at all. Unless they had certain specific and immediately useful skills, cluttering up the place with purposeless do-gooders exacerbated the problem. Unprepared, unqualified and finally useless they are a drain on much needed resources and divert attention from the most needy. So, this is merely an exercise in self gratification and self importance. 

In a similar vein, the amount of unsolicited ‘helpful’ advice flying around is astounding. Take a well tested example; divorce. Plenty of advice to be thrown around here. But really, if advice is not sought it should most probably not be offered. Friendship is not about growing our own egos at the cost of someone else's discomfort and pain. Who benefits here? The advisor or the person advised? There is an aphorism - “the empty vessel makes the most noise” - and when it comes to offering advice, my experience to date is that this is most frequently the case. Furthermore, walking away leaving a trail of chaos and destruction for someone else to manage whilst proclaiming “I was only trying to be helpful’ very keenly demonstrates how unhelpful those actions actually were.

So finally, on helpfulness, the key question is, and always should be, who benefits? After some thought, if the answer is not absolutely the person being offered help, then what is actually taking place is unhelpfulness. The world could certainly do with a whole lot less of that.

Oh no. Knot again!

Ever wondered why it’s impossible to coil earbuds up without getting the cable into a tangle. It would be easier to unravel the Gordian Knot than it is to try picking apart the bird’s nest that spontaneously appears out of a mere 1 metre of audio cable. One moment it is neatly coiled around three fingers and carefully placed into a pouch. Nothing much happens in the pouch …. probably. And yet, when extracted, my neat coil has metamorphosed into an amorphous, randomised mass of wire and plastic. The earbuds and jack, though obviously the endpoints, seemingly fused into the tangled mass that is the interconnecting segments of wire. No matter how I start, as I loosen one section, another tightens and makes the whole unpicking process that much more tedious.

Which end should I start from? The jack - only one of those. Or the earbuds — two of those and an awkward shape guaranteed to catch annoyingly with each loop they’re threaded through. No matter how I start, the process is lengthy and for short tube journeys, almost not worth the effort. Maybe I should follow another philosophy, just pull the ends out and tighten the knots. Then, if the music sounds a bit strangled off and choked, at least I’ll know why.

Election Blues

Conservatives on for an outright majority. Miliband loses his Balls and the confidence of the rest of the UK - so two Eds definitely not better than one. The SNP steal Scotland. Clegg’s LibDems, prophetic with their leader’s recent pose by Land’s End signpost, are one small step away from pitching entirely off the political map in the UK. What a joke this election has been. Polls suggesting a close run match, except in Scotland, right up to the start of voting, when suddenly the exit polls indicated a Conservative landslide. Wonder where Paddy Ashdown’s hat is now? I certainly don’t want to be anywhere nearby when it reappears.

What we have now is a more of a DisUK than a UK - grandiose optimistic intentions for one nation Toryism aside - Scotland have isolated themselves ideologically from the rest of the country, and the Democratic Unionists have almost achieved the same in Northern Ireland.

One ironic thought, when Cameron puts the EU referendum before the people his staunchest allies in campaigning to maintain the status quo will be his otherwise fiercest foes. UKIP and the Tory EU sceptics will have had their day, but it is unlikely that should they lose, and they probably will, they will accept that verdict. Expect years of carping and back biting to follow.

So now I await with 'bated breath the Queen’s speech with new business for this parliament. With such a narrow margin for governing, every bill will be a close fought battle with the opposition parties and the dissident rank in his party. Three line whips will be the order of the day, a single abstaining MP could be the downfall of any legislation. And, with all this whipping going on, will BDSM now become even more mainstream than since 50 Shades?

Citychosis

London really is a place to be wary of. I'm now minus my motorbike. It was parked in a public motorcycle bay, on a busy road, locked. It's 250Kg of bike, so not small. It wasn't sporty, it wasn't new and shiny, in fact well overdue for a proper wash and polish and heading for a set of new tyres to boot. And yet it vapourised. I'd not suspected a bike could evaporate so completely in full public view and yet it did. Needless to say I reported the evaporation of my vehicle to the police, it seems that this kind of event is pretty frequent, bikes evaporate all the time. Occasionally they even precipitate out in different parts of the country, I suspect this will not be the case with mine, more likely there will be a diffuse spread of motorbike parts over the next few months appearing sporadically in an eBay auction or Gumtree advert. RIP BMW.

More Of The Same

'Tis late at night and any sane individual would have hit the sack by now. Still, no-one has ever accused me of being sane. I'm thinking about earthquakes and deaths and how these are reported. Does it ever seem petty to focus on the few Brits that may have been caught up in this nightmare when several hundreds, if not thousands, of other souls have also perished or been injured? For those that did not die outright there is the subsequent devastation, the loss of family members and friends, houses, schools, offices destroyed, livelihoods lost and treasured belongings buried. And yet it seems our red tops constantly miss the bigger picture either centering their attention on some trivial local banality, or bypassing the greater tragedy to focus on a tiny few. It is these indications of introspective selfishness I find worrying, the Little Britain mentality. Pretending nothing much happened to anyone but a few unfortunate Britons trivialises these major events in the worst possible way.
Sorry, not much humour in this post, but somehow sarcasm seems a little inappropriate just now.

Election Ennui

After a break of some few years I've decided to pick up the keyboard and let my random musings loose on the world once more. Time has moved on since my previous posts and if anything I am more Unsapient now than I ever was. In the midst of the most monumentally boring general election the UK has ever seen, where the frightening likelihood of the SNP being the power broker is too close to reality, shining a cold cold light of cynicism, sarcasm on this dismal process is probably my only relief short of euthanising myself.
Why boring? I hear the screams of the political classes clamouring about how close the polls are, how exciting the counts will be. The teetering of the Swing-o-meter, or whatever they use these days to show the balance of party power, will have you gripping the edge of your seats and grinding your teeth in anticipation. Or, perhaps not. There is not single policy that excites, austerity measures necessarily hold sway and any party that ends up being prime will be stealing from Peter to pay Paul or vice versa. There are no winners, except in the figments of the febrile imaginations of the final occupants of the House of Commons and the press hounds sniffing around their random droppings.
Too bad then that this battle between Cameron, Miliband, Sturgeon, Farage and Clegg has no real meaning. The illusion of having any power over the destiny of this country is no more sane than the delirious ravings of a drunk believing he is dodging the faeries as he staggers down the street. Global industries, global markets, global investment, global poverty, global pollution are what really matter. And, without this global view, any insular attempt to resolve the problems of an economy so dependent upon the rest of the world for any semblance of stability is doomed to fail. It is precisely this global perspective that our candidates and parties appear to be missing. And so, this election is a mere sideshow on a sideshow on the global stage.