I saw history. In fact i know that very very few saw quite as much of it as myself. VERY very few had my life.....work and lieusure.. weirdo lost gypsy laofin' around... .
(i would have noticed)
And as usual, once again i see it being rewritten. But like many rewrites i suppose it is almost too subtle for many to perceive. But the 'new' right who one and all squirm " but we are the old left, and still left" really are stealing all the real truth, so.... here we go, for now.
My history - no one else's mine alone, is avoiding ALL pretention nevertheless we need certain slightly more sophisticated words to keep us moving along with momentum, so a not-quite-right one will have to do...for now
Flâneur (French: [flɑnœʁ]) is a French term popularized in the 19th century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer"
(average distance - fairly brisk walk with good momentum, it is in fact the MOMENTUM which matters to the real flan...like a dancer dancin' - don't lose the momentum or maybe you break a leg or may have stillness to notice how empty and silly your life is......... about 10km per town or city - 1000s of them.... if possible 10km into the wildflower hills such as around Freiburg first choice - so easy to get onto mountain tracks from town centre ... but not always possible if urban sprawl)
I arrived in Australia with a backpack on the day a certain newsworthy man was shot - for that timestamp i need no diary. And since that day for seventeen years i more or less kept walking. The two are not connected, or maybe deep down in a way they are.
But that is not my history, From that first day in Sydney, age 18 ( quite probably being spiked with rohypnol by some dubious boho bloke, but i never complain and it's utterly irrelevant to my even then-present ) i only walked the future.
Now it just so happens that having lived in the hills of N wales and been an actual shepherd from around 13 - monitoring, gathering, a flock of a hundred which grazed the wild open hilltops of a range of hills - an open area of many thousands of acres, I had the hills in me. Wandering the hills from around that age, always alone, became me.
Australia was not me. (though i refer often to one key aspect). No one walked. I roamed a little - hitching between Youth Hostels in hillier regions such as around Canberra, but it was not a place of the outdoors.
Hopping over after a few months to New Zealand the real flanning .. began... skip Aukland a dull industrial wasteland, first stop right on the Southern shore of N island, Wellington. Off we flan... and later on some of the South Island towns from Nelson to Christchurch.
And always interspersed with plenty of near wilderness gentle saunters. I do not believe in showing strength via marching full power or even with goals - places on the map aimed for, in rural walking. That is an ONLY towny mode. Rather absurd to the hillsides wanderer.
And then almost by happenstance - no career or future desired whatsoever I meandered through a little out-of-the-way town called Motueka where there was an extremely cheap (cheapest in the world they said) hire-a-plane flight 'school' and i fell in with one or two farmer-pilots - an australian in fact i shared a shack with for a few months, who was training to be a commercial pilot, his family having had a run around small plane to get around their Australian wilderness land holdings... a very humble young man with big planes in his eyes -i never had.
Disclaimer: In fact my whole life has always had a few fundamental mental illnesses:the main one being i hate ALL machinery. Always. No machine in any way has ever made me feel even a little bit nice inside. Never. No motorbike, car, van or plane. And perhaps it may be because from the 70s and i am sure before, machines were blokey. Most blokes - though not all, defined themselves by some or other machine. I felt that, inside, sort of suspect,. especially when the blokes around our ancient farm buildings and land, were a bit. Though i didn't know what of.
Irrelevant. Merely context. I always absolutely hated admitting " i am a pilot of smaller aircraft for my living". I hardly ever - actually never, said so. 1980s parties cafes pubs ... i fluffed the "what do you do for a living"? line.
Back in Europe in the 1980s with a hundred cheap New Zealand farming-aircraft hours under my belt i drifted into what became my next 17 years.
A (VERY humbly) paid driver around Europe then further afield. usually in a beaten up old tatty-paint version of the below...
or a day in the life, sort of... i never even owned sunglasses as they were and are for stupid showoffs..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EwfuTJNo1c&ab_channel=ParAvion
Anyway 15 years of many hundred day stops maybe a thousand or so- usually flying the passengers in at breakfast time for their business breakfast, and more often than not staying a day or two (it being too expensive to fly the plane empty back to base and out to collect), returning back to home base in the evening.
Pay - extremely humble: the adrenalin required to get the show on the road - up at maybe 5am, cleaning the plane before passenger arrive sorting out some onboard breakfast etc and at the other end sometimes some part would break or something go wrong and we arrived much later than planned and thus some days were extremely long. If one worked more than 4 days a week for long periods one would have creeping dangerous fatigue and as the going rate for jobbing freelancers was £75 a day (and no holiday pay or other benefits) that worked out at in fact a bit less than average UK graduate pay ...
Right, context done.
15 ish years of being paid to barrel up ideally at some small town from Dieppe to Dundee to Pula to Pau and then various places around N America or the West Indies all interspersed with the only 'benefit' - access to 'flightcrew' discounted air travel often 10% of going rate, quiet meandering backpacking trips into N Africa and anywhere in Europe i hadnt got to yet in the air taxis...
Arriving at ideally small town - in fact the reason i remained in that aviation sector was that only rarely did ione have to go to the big cities as they had adequate airline coverage, my number one solo mission when plane packed away, to meander...walk.... NOT on some showoff health kick... but to observe.... yes some 'searching' - for love, companionship imagined better life too, but just observing became my mode...
And to 'observe' one must be in fairly ok safe-feeling and sane-feeling places...
Now, it is a strange thing in that even then most of the world was more or less the same.
Guadeloupe, Zagreb ..or more prefarable to me, some smaller
dusty place further off the beaten track is the 10am buzz…. If you wish to
perhaps make some new passing local acquaintance be seated in a café around
then. People all over the world a little more open to the actual truth of their
town or even village…
And then 11am ish…saunter.. observe, take the
temperature.
I know THE actual history of a fair bit of the world: how nice it was… how gentle almpost everywhere
was. OK not in the streets of Beirut, Sarajevo or Mogadishu during certain
ranty times.
But almost everywhere
else. Gentle… in fact I would almost say
almost universally decent.
(with a few obvious exceptions
to follow)
We do not know of course that our present reality can be
changed, and to me as objective noticver of pattern, the greatest and most
wonderful change of all - ok two I guess,
I lived.
In the early 80s
meeting or noting women in any small town, almost anywhere was a thing - and the lonesome traveller would often have
the local woman on his mind – yes ‘his’, as few women ever were in this mode, no disrespect
in fact that’s a secondary point (and also the ‘girl in every port’ thing being
absurd – to just hold on to a couple of actual friend women made over a decade
was virtually impossible as I would only be in tnhe vicinity of their town once
every couple of years ).
After a while museums lose their thrill and so just making ones ‘home’
whatever café one finds oneself in is how to live.. which means some human interaction,
too. A good book and a couple of cafes ideally al fresco. And see what happens.
From the earlier 80s the way women – younger to more middle
aged, eased themselves into the public
daytime activities was limited. As if
they didn’t quite ‘own’ the public spaces such as cafes or even a corner
shop stopped into for snacks.
10.30ish almost anywhere in the world would be the beginning
of clothes shopping-time. But it really
was not some stampede far more trickle. And a slightly nervous surreptitious
activity. One could see by the body
language and gestures of the women clothes or shoe shoppers. It was an almost guilty private
pleasure and activity. An event. And not entirely relaxed. Women would rarely linger very long in
shopping drags it was a fairly preplanned tactical sortie.
And as for cafes – always at least 75% male coffee sippers.
Many places 90%.
I never met any woman in those years who expressed disdain with that then-paradigm, or in fact
expressed in any way that they felt oppressed
or lesser. But then women mainly were in the roles (in towns) of café or
restaurant waitress, or worker, shop worker, and of
course lesser roles in companies or factories operating around the small towns.
And although it was never a ‘thing’ in
general they carried out the majority of at-home domestic chore.
Leaving aside the eternal modern bug-bear of who does the
housework and cooking (law should state 50:50 until it does there will never be
peace) there was peace. And one didn’t really
take much notice that the two sexes had different allowances of
the public space. One did not lament this on behalf of several close and
cherished women platonic but most adored
friends I managed to collect here and there, then. There was no fear in the woman going out and
about it merely wasn’t yet the culture… the exceptions generalising were Arab
places where of course a religious doctrine warps it all and the black islands
of the Caribbean to a lesser extent (likely S America also - then a bit too wild west to backpack venture
into for me). Those were places the wpoman did have more of a strictly defined
role as merely cook cleaner and food
shopper – the ‘street’ was exclusively and only about men. Women would not at
all linger.
What I saw, lived, over 20 years - ceasing that career in 1998 but still
roaming with young child in tow, until ceasing
almost all international travel 2003, was an extraordinary rightful equalising of all public space as it gradually became equal stomping ground for both of the sexes.
License. Not lifting of some ‘abuse’ or even rape culture,
but merely license. By some majic
gradually both sexes were licensed to ‘own’ all the public space, from shop to café
and piazza mall and pub, more or less equally. And above all their body
language showed this change.
And of course that meant that both sexes were licensed to be
rude, gauche consumerist, noisy, graceless,
never mind flirt, show off, or just gossip on equal terms… just as it
should have always been. A true real
actual revolution. And of course it may have its roots in the American and to a
lesser extent ‘counter culture’ of the 60s. The term ‘women’s lib’ doesn’t quite
seem to do it all justice, but maybe that too…
Almost everywhere…. Changed.
One biggest change of all. Most European even American towns and cities didn’t change that much between the mid Victorian era and the 80s and 90s…. except this one fundamental change.
And then, no one noticed or even considered, really, that
most town centre regions (of The west of course) lacked another section of the population: the
dark skinned. Gradually, and perhaps five or ten years after the first sex
equalisation change that changed too. Our public spaces became fully
representative at last by default. The body language – posture, bearing of most
in most towns became tits-out-front chin up shoulders back, I belong here….always…
Wolf whistling or even any form of real ‘exploitation’ mere
almost irrelevant detail. THE change had happened. If anyone had said to me early 80s wandering
a damp rainy Dieppe day only ever a few
local girls in sight, slightly serruptitiously gathering to pop in and
buy a blouse or two hardly lingering to check the window display first that within 20 years that would be entgtirely equalised and at
where it should be: everyone, I wouldn’t have even noticed the problem…
Now… that is not ‘rose tinted’ stupid sunglasses or any
fabulist nonsense its just fact. And of course there were some places where this was not so but
they were a pretty rare minority. And it
was almost always down to hard drugs -
parts of NYC and a few other American cities, even a few parts of London at
night, and some Italian towns….but these were the exception. And whitey
privegalge not to have to go shopping in the slums..i did…. More or less the same patterns pertained.
There is one place in my several decades that does in fact
haunt me even now, and I only drove by it. Maybe 25 years ago, on a bit of a run around the countryside
around the Washington DC area somewhere maybe 50 miles out I passed along the
edge of (I didn’t know they existed) an only ‘black town. (and I had lived in an only black very poor
Island in the west Indies for 6 months in the 80s which was kindof nice and no
bad vibes at all) The stark contrast between the surrounding not-very-wealthy towns and villages and
this blackfolk virtual concentration
camp was shocking. There was no colour
only dusty beige all around, And every person I glanced at was clad virtually
as tramp. I understood at that moment America. Even if
America perhaps did cause the other positive change that changed the rest of
the world more than anything else…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGTeqi05N2c&ab_channel=BeInformed
though I think it is underestimated the spirit of various French
women writers from the most horny one I always
forget her name of the early 20th c….maybe even Colette!.... . to de
Beauvoir etc …
In other words the
sixties and seventies were entirely new and splendid…. And WORKED.
The only one place in the world I ever went to that was
entirely different - the feeling on the ‘street’
something like nowhere else on the planet I ever found, was West Berlin.
That is nothing to do with it being German in fact I would
travel there with American bankers who needed to go there and have meetings
over dinners sometimes I would accompany them to….
As I becgan this most places were decent. Even places like famously suicidally mad motorists of Italy
nevertheless had a “HUMAN” dignity-rhythm in their frenzy… that wasn’t quite as
random violence it appeared at first look… or tiptoeing into a road.
And of course this omits the minority of city-states or
states ruled by bloodthirsty madmen like Pinochet or a little earlier Pol Pot. And white
controlled sub-Saharan Africa..Saddam or Assad (the elder’s) puppet regimes… But those were not any norm.
And they passed…
Berlin however was different – and in the 80-s any ‘avant
garde’ place-to-be was a small unmarked street off some crumbing industrial
area, no one could find except the few
in the know.
The businessmen I would briefly spend time in the company of it was if their normal decency
inhibitions were non extant. Nowhere in
the world have I ever been in a car -
BMW if memory serves me right, where some European businessman not even drunk
decides to show off to his visiting colleagues by driving fast along a pavement
on our way back to the hotel after a restaurant meal.
And there was quite obviously only ONE reason, only one game
in town. And it wasn’t “we may be invaded by the Ruskies at any minute” it was
an unspoken everybody-knew that if there ever was any new war the nukes would
all be routed overhead, one place especially, Berlin town.. Then, 1982ish I think
my first trip there, there was a thing in the air of at any moment we may only
have ten minutes of them left, especially here.
Why has this bad essay although it arose in my head as
almost fuming?
Not only does no one even bother to simplify: this one (ok
two) simply historical real change - of
course as we knew 40 years ago, equal pay, equal numbers in boardrooms and
parliaments, sooner the better, but above all that a “human” is allowed or
licensed by REAL change, almost above their stupid’ politics’ is surely the biggest shift – societal, ‘political’
of the last 500 years maybe even several thousand.
And it had nothing to do with the policy makers the stage-setters,
the historical resters …
It just gradually happened because it should, as Jane and co
…. Whoever, all around the world
Don’t forget the magnificent Scandanavians, too…
Woman was at last licensed to be more or less free
….flow
with her body language and pert of flabby bum…
her business
whether for business or pleasure
or something in between
in most public spaces
most places
(even if the 2 billion maybe have a bit of catching up to
do)
. In fact it is really quite simple, pitch up to the bar in any
small out of the way town maybe a dark damp february Friday night in Bilbao Brittany or Basle and if there were
even two young ladies sat in a booth head-to-head in free discussion there
would be a sense ofjust palpable tension around the whole place. No one ever ‘did’
anything to harm or agress or show prejudice, but there was always a sense of difficulty in their
free presence.
Within a few decades, as whole gaggles of gobby babes gather
at booth or even street corner, heading for the pub or club, no one would even remember that only a
few years past this would simply never
ever be. but nowadays no one bats an eyelid.. no one even remembers "human" rights or wrongs...
And these childmen (many i see these last few years) they make it all about something else….
They don’t know ..in all of them for a few years now, I see
HER in them….
Their perverted …..
Warped?
Bizarre….. ( "we need 'supermen'" she could only write in her jotter privately in her bedroom as the funny looks at a woman writin' in their coffee bar would have been too distractin')
Ohh yes she can’t have been their wet nurse it seems they
still think she is drip drip drip…. As she knew better than to bravely have a
child ….herself…
Rand is often associated with the modern libertarian
movement in the United states…
UK too....
she is everywhere, her sour useless unusable tit milk all over everything i can smell it even more than ever before...
" ooohhh they all are saying THE GREAT NS Lyons superstar wow lucky you Freddy.."
Ayn RAndian with nothing REAL to say
more Ayn RAndians far far too busy with their corporate lives or laptops to have looked UP and seen what...
actually changed for the great majority thats a real miracle.... no political label or brand or ideology could halt or change...
god... the men of the internet are... only kiddults
when will, the REAL women stand up and piss on them - likely what turns most of them on behind their awful one dimensional screens..
All of them.... from Bannon Peterson Shapiro all of them.... to this little self aggrandising prick, Lyons... simply have no idea.
And none of them know that the anglo-EUROEAN-yank 'project' of actual 'liberalisation' was the most massive successful change of all, almost ever....
