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The Home of Shehaios

The Home of Shehaios

The Shehaios series of books by S.A. Rule

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Keep the faith

The Home of Shehaios Posted on January 16, 2020 by Sue RuleJanuary 16, 2020

So here’s my prediction.

In time – not quite sure how long, maybe twenty years, maybe fifty – human civilisation will transition to more localised, less monetary, economies, with a minimal, high-level international connection. How much international connection we retain, at what level of society, will depend on how much pain and damage we inflict on ourselves in making the transition.

By transitioning methodically in an enlightened and co-operative manner, we could create flourishing local economies of much happier, more connected, prosperous people who are still able to trade  goods, services and – most important of all – knowledge around the world. Knowledge, compassion and generosity – in other words, the best that humans are capable of – take us to this scenario.

Unfortunately, the political culture of the dominant global powers is driving us to create instead  isolated, impoverished local economies, fearful and suspicious of each other, all clinging to life on a much, much more hostile planet. And most of the people who hold the privilege, fought for by our ancestors, of electing their leaders haven’t even got a clue that we’re on a journey, let alone where we’re going. By the time their cosy bubble of complacent self-justification bursts, it will be way too late. The clueless eco-cidal criminals who currently pass for political leaders in the dominant global powers of the world will have torn everything of beauty and value apart and left only a degraded form of human, displaying all the worst characteristics of humanity, to eke out a miserable existence on a dying planet.

So it is up to those of us who strive in our lives to embrace the best human beings are capable of to build the future in spite of the politicians. To build local communities of happier, more connected and  contented people who truly understand what is valuable in life, take care of themselves and each other and do not measure everything in terms of money. We may not succeed. But if everything beautiful about humankind is doomed to extinction anyway, we can at least celebrate that we were part of what was good, and creative and amazing about humanity.  

Hence my greeting to all those of goodwill as we progress through the first month of 2020 is not “Happy New Year” but  “Keep the faith”.

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Songs and Poems

The Home of Shehaios Posted on January 1, 2020 by Sue RuleJanuary 1, 2020

I have been looking back through some of my past scribblings this Christmas. I wrote the following poem some time in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when my children were young. It’s never been published or performed, no-one’s ever read it except me. Maybe it only makes sense to me. But I find the sentiment has surfaced strongly in the latest book, so perhaps the time has come to share the insights of a thirty-something stay-at-home Mum living in South-East England in the time of Thatcher’s Britain, wondering why no-one in power was getting as worried as I was about our relationship with the rest of the natural world.

The Promised Land

They came with spear and sword and bow
Upon the promised land
The glory caught their hearts and souls
They cried, here do we stand!
Here shall we stay and feel no more
The desert ocean’s scourge
Here root and branch we stake our claim
Turn from the restless urge
Here shall we plant our seed and grow
Great riches to defend
           But the wiser heads kept travelling
           For they knew how it would end

Other searchers found them
And other hearts were lost
To greenness and to fairness
So they did not heed the cost
The prize was worth the winning
To fight for or defend
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end

With horse and bloody sword a host
Of conquerors came down
To burn and raze and kill and steal
And win a great reknown
Till the lure of milk and honey
Drew them to the soil
They beat their swords to ploughshares
And turned to honest toil
And sought all ways they knew
The ever-weeping wound to mend
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end.

Armies marched with fire and bow
And raged from shore to shore
Invoking gods and devils
And claiming more, and more
Seduced by dreams of glory
And the ever-promised land
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end

Machinery of war grew grim
And peace it built it’s own
The massive bulk of factories
The huddle of the town
And fires burned in chimney stacks
And fires burned in hell
And fires burned in seas of mud
Where nameless heroes fell
And dreams of new Jerusalem
Took up the age old steel
That cuts the soil and cuts the flesh
And will not let man feel
The wind across the desert
The gale upon the sea
The spirit of the traveller
Or the raven flying free

And all the laws we’ve built to keep us from each others’ throats
Aren’t worth the trees crushed in the mills for wasted paper votes
If we cannot learn the lesson that the ancient travellers teach
The horizon is a promised land that lives beyond our reach

When spring upon the promised land has turned a bitter cold
And the mightiest of structures is built with bricks of old
And finished riches when the wealth has moved away
The prize is still ahead of us, the game is yet to play

And more and more the pieces, and the tools are changing fast
The rules get further left behind, the only things that last
Are the wisdom of the traveller, the raven flying free
The wind across the desert and the gale upon the sea

And all those through the ages who strove to get it right
So we reach out for the promised land, not destroy it in the fight
And the wiser heads keep travelling
Into the deepening night.

 

 

 

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Defeat – Regroup

The Home of Shehaios Posted on December 17, 2019 by Sue RuleDecember 17, 2019

So the view from Rosehaugh today is beautiful. The sun is shining, and the loch reflects a patchwork of white clouds and blue sky. There was a flock of gulls wheeling about high over the water, screeching and bickering, as I walked up the road to my Tai Chi class this morning.

Every time I walk up the road to the village hall, it reminds me how beautiful this place is. There is still a cap of snow on the mountains above the Rest and Be Thankful, visible in the distance. In the foreground, the Saltire on the end of the pier flutters bravely in a brisk breeze.

I used to feel the same about the fields of Gabriel’s Farm in Edenbridge that I could see from the window of my old house in Kent – more intensely so because that was my own country, my own land. My own history lay beneath my feet as I tramped across the fields to Marsh Green with the dog, or the kids, or both. I rode across those fields. We picked blackberries in autumn and sledged down the hill in winter. Scotland is beautiful, but it isn’t mine in the same way. I miss not belonging to England.

Last night was the first time I slept since the grim results of the election were announced. I expected the Tories to win, but not to win by 80 seats. It’s a very difficult thing to come to terms with. In five years time, much more of what we treasure about Britain will have been consigned to history.

I really haven’t been able to stop crying. I tried to rally and look for the positive, but honestly, there isn’t any. There’s no getting away from the fact that we lost the battle. We’ve been defeated. The enemy is in the ascendant. We must all be kind to ourselves, and each other, and accept that it’s going to take time to get over this defeat. I realised this morning that what I was suffering from was grief. It feels very much like how I felt when Grant died. Then, I lost one dream of who I was and what life was all about. Now, I’ve lost another.

The history of Scotland is littered with noble defeats. Listen to the songs. Listen to the heartbreak of Flodden in the Flowers of the Forest. The passionate hope pinned to Bonnie Prince Charlie –

“If I had fifty thousand sons I’d give them all for Charlie” – trad. Over The Water To Charlie

But in spite of the heartbreak and betrayal that litters Scottish history, Scotland is still proudly, defiantly, Scotland and the West of Scotland where I live is the home of the Gael. If you want a miserable song, look for a Gaelic one, but I find inspiration in a more modern Scottish folksong from a great band called Skipinnish:

“Don’t tell me I’m dead when my heart is beating strong
Though I’m down upon my knees I will rise in song…”

The song is called Anchors of the Soul, and the second verse says,

“In our day we stand now to lose or to live
We have one last chance before the lifelines give
Use the history and the pull of our people and our plight
To wake up now and see the morning light.”

We need time to grieve. Time to rage against the machinery of power that inflicted this defeat on us. I will probably cry more tears for the people who were so desperately deceived when the truth was staring them right in the face – you can’t say Boris pretended to be anything other than the lying, bullying, elitist bastard that he is. And people still believed it was decent, honest, caring Jeremy Corbyn who was the threat. That decency and honesty and compassion are weak and a dishonest, callous disregard for humanity is a sign of strength. All the time people believe that, we will be spiralling down to oblivion – and I think we’ll probably deserve it. That’s not the kind of human being I want to be.

I don’t think it’s the kind of human being most people want to be, but everybody is just trying to survive, and sometimes the work of survival simply doesn’t leave time to think – not about politics, anyway. This is why the machine makes it so hard to survive. In the words of one of my characters, “People don’t want deep they’re too busy trying to stay afloat.” There are all sorts of ways of stealing voices – death is only the most final. But even after the death of an individual, the songs remain. The expressions of how we felt, and what we dreamed about. And in those songs you can reach back and connect with people long dead; reach across boundaries and barriers and connect with people in other places, other desperate situations. Even if we can’t rescue them, we can say, I feel your pain. I share your anger. I grieve for you.

And we still have a voice. We have the power to keep fighting. We just need to fight smarter.

This morning, our Tai Chi tutor gave us a demonstration using a sword. (It’s not every day you get handed a sword and asked to sweep it down towards your tutor…)  Tai Chi is like a ballet to watch, a sequence of graceful movements as the energy flows back and forth, but it is a martial art. That energy is being gathered in, sucked from your opponent and then unleashed in targetted blows. That’s how we have to fight. We need to understand the power we have, gather it in and focus it where it will have the most impact.

We are living through the collapse of the old system, and it is throwing up grotesque distortions of all its best features as it dies – twisting democracy into the travesty that is Trump and Johnson, twisting enterprise into the malevolent greed of a Nestle or a Monsanto, twisting commercial competitiveness into the control freakery of Google and Amazon and Uber and all the others. Appropriating the freedom of the internet to spread the old messages of hate and bile and contempt. Brow-beating us with information technology until we start behaving like programmable algorithms ourselves. Feed a big lie in one end and get the power of popular support out of the other.

“There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare, Hamlet

The rich and powerful won’t save us, they’re only interested in themselves – they think they can live without us, besieged inside their castles, numbing their souls with drink, drugs and excess and telling people this is what success looks like. The things won’t save us – the money, the politics, business, science, theories. They’re just things, tools.  Only the people can save the people.

“Hold, hold and live for the goal
We still can save our soul
Hold, hold and live for the goal
And the anchors of our soul”
                Skipinnish, Anchors of the Soul

Hate and anger cannot create anything but hate and anger, and they will tear us apart. Love and understanding can hone the rage into a sword, and learn to wield it effectively. Look back at why we lost this battle not in recrimination and blame, but to learn how we can avoid making the same mistakes next time. For there will be a next time. We are fighting to make sure there’s a future for our species, and there will be a next time right up until Earth’s patience runs out and she destroys us all.

The next battle for me will be for Scottish independence. The chance to forge the future without the dead weight of Westminster on our backs. We might lose that one, too, but my point is that my English friends should not see the Scottish fight as a betrayal, as Scotland bailing out, but as Scotland leading the way for a better way of organising ourselves.

People are people and politicians are people too. Even the best of them will probably get more wrong than they get right, but if Jeremy Corbyn has taught us anything it’s that winning or losing means nothing if you don’t stand up for the values you believe in. The SNP believes in Scotland. The Tories believe in the British Empire and the God-given right of the rich and powerful to rule over us. I know which history I prefer. So I’m going to give the last word to Skipinnish:

“We will look to the future with the power of our past
And the wounds long held will be healed at last
And the rise of the Gael in our time will come
From the old through the passion of the young.”

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When Love Came Back to Judge Us

The Home of Shehaios Posted on December 3, 2019 by Sue RuleDecember 3, 2019

There are two things you traditionally do not talk about in polite company. Religion and politics. 

I’m finding that a bit of a struggle at the moment, because as I said in an earlier blog post, these are two big themes in the next sequence of books in the Shaihen Heritage series Children of the Spirit (still not sure if it’s another trilogy or just two books – I’ll let you know when I get to an end!). So I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking recently not only about politics, which seem to me to be a pretty useless tool for achieving anything meaningful, and about religion. For me, as I’m of British descent, that means Christianity.

When I was in my late teens, I did actually read and indeed study quite a lot of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and this is where  inspiration for the following poem comes from. I call it Revelation, or When Love Came Back to Judge Us.  

When Love came back to judge us

She asked how we had done

“Did you care for all my creatures?

Did you cherish every one?”

 

“And have you left the children

All the bounties of my Earth?

The sea, the sky, the mountains

All the gifts they had at birth?”

 

We showed her our technology

We offered her our gold

Our buildings and computers

But these things left Love cold

 

We showed her all our artworks

She thought them very fine

“You’ve created things of beauty

But none as good as mine.”

 

“Where are all the tigers?

The Orang and the whale?

Why can’t I hear the birdsong?

Is this the ending of my tale?

 

I gave you love. I gave you life.

You’re the children of my womb

Yet all you give me back is death.

You seal me in a tomb.

 

And this shall be Love’s judgement

The earth stripped of its worth

By the hungry, curious creatures

The earth herself brought forth.

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System Change

The Home of Shehaios Posted on September 1, 2019 by Sue RuleSeptember 1, 2019

The second draft of Leaving On The Tide (Book 4 of the Shaihen Heritage series) is complete. It’s out with a small team of beta readers for a verdict – if they think it’s worth it, I’ll start on the process of getting it published and try to figure out how the hell to promote it. There will be further tweaks, but essentially the second draft is the finished item.

I’ve completed Myo’s quest for the Fair Land just as the Brexit circus lurches to its final ignominious conclusion and Britain takes a sickening lurch to the right. I hate to break this to my friends, but…we’ve lost, guys. We lost in June 2016. Just like decent Americans lost when Trump got elected. The left and centre are hanging on in Europe by their fingernails.

While the liberals and the lefties are howling with rage over the prorogation of Parliament, it’s a move that has increased the Boris-in-a-Chinashop’s lead in the polls. Make no mistake, he wouldn’t be doing any of this if he didn’t think it was popular. As my friend and fellow-author Bev Allan said to me a while back, you can never under estimate the socialist tendencies of the British public. From white van man to the smart lady in the tea shop, the disengaged British electorate are by and large conservative.

Having said that, the vast majority of the current electorate have grown up and prospered under the system that produced Boris Johnson. I once thought that system was broken, but it isn’t. It was designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and it is continuing to do that with vigorous success. The middling sort (neither rich nor poor) have been bought off for decades with special offers – from ever increasing wages to buying your council house, and making a killing by selling it on. Conned by the myth of the “trickle down effect” we were encouraged to live on credit, duped by lots of bright shiny things with buttons on that made life so much easier. I know. I lived through it. Grant and I built a business from it. It’s been very good for me, financially. You see why others who have benefitted from it don’t want it to stop.

What’s happening now is that the cost of this increasing inequality is getting more and more apparent, and the supply of special offers is drying up. The price of this system that has made quite a lot of Britons a lot better off than their forebears has been paid in lives. Human lives and life on Earth generally. The prospect for the so-called millenials, brought up with all the expectations of their parents plus a few bells and whistles, is grim. The bill landed on the mat some time ago and now we’re facing the final demand.

So why would millenials vote conservative? There is very little in the status quo for them. But don’t think the right wing haven’t thought of that. When bribery fails, try good old fashioned patriotism. Us and Them. Divide and conquer.

We are at a tipping point politically and whatever happens, things are going to change. How we change will determine the future of human life on this planet because we are at a tipping point environmentally as well, with just a decade or so to start reversing the damage we’ve done.

To explain how I see the choice we’re facing, I think the easiest thing is to quote from Leaving On The Tide;

“There were broadly two schools of political thought [in Kivor City]. The party arising from the Imperial past was called Liberty, and its ethos was one of heritable individual wealth, defined by laws of ownership. The opposing group, called Commonality, was inspired by the Shaihen myth, and believed that people inherited everything jointly, to be used for the common good. Sometimes one group held the upper hand, and sometimes the other, and between them, these two covalent beliefs had forged the Kivorian state.”

Needless to say, I am a Commonality supporter. And yes, it was difficult to come up with a term that wasn’t “communism”. All political ideas are expressed and interpreted by flawed and fallible human beings, corrupted, abused and cynically misappropriated. Reality never lives up to the myth.

The most resonant slogan of the Leave campaign was “take back control” – and it has become ever clearer as the Remain strategy unravelled both before and after the referendum that ordinary people have lost what little control they ever had over their lives. We’re all individual ants running around squabbling among ourselves while the real players do just what they want. By eviscerating the Labour movement, those in power have left us all in fear of losing the jobs and incomes we have, scrabbling for worthless zero-hour contracts for dead-end jobs or surrendering our lives, loves, hopes and dreams to the slavery of the corporate ladder – a goal that gets ever harder as technology steals more and more of the jobs people used to do. Despite our youthful dreams of self-sufficient living, Grant and I succombed to the norm along with almost everyone else under the pressure of social expectations and the responsibilities of raising a family. It gave us a lovely home and a comfortable living, and left me financially secure. But I firmly believe it was the stress of trying to keep the business afloat, coupled with chronic back pain, that contributed to Grant’s early death. And I colluded with him, both in throwing everything into the business and in accepting that nothing could be done about the back pain. I had neither the strength, courage nor insight to turn round and say, this is not the life we want, let’s change it. And why? Because, in our late 50s, without the business what would we do for money?

Well, a large part of the reason I have money now is because I don’t have Grant. When he was down, he even used to make a black joke of saying I would be better off without him. Financially, thanks to the life insurance, I am. But even writing that statement fills me with revulsion. Of course Grant was so much more valuable to me than money could ever be. The idea that you can measure peoples’ worth in monetary terms is repulsive, ludicrous, unthinkable. Yet we live in and support a system that is designed to do just that.

We might have lived in it, but we never voted for it. Now, it looks like even the control we thought we had through the checks and balances of Parliamentary democracy was just another circus, and our vaunted constitution not worth the paper it isn’t written on. My term for so called “direct democracy” is mob rule.

The people of Britain are disempowered and impoverished. We have been cheated and lied to by those in power (that’s what people in power do, read the book). If we are to rebuild the Britain that our forefathers died to defend, we need to start doing it from the bottom up. We have to generate a whole new system of living. And we start not with this generation of voters but the next.

There is a passionate movement for change among some young people. Supporters of Momentum are predominantly young. Extinction Rebellion and the whole environmental protest movement around climate change has engaged a whole bunch of youth activists. But for every young person campaigning for change, there are probably at least ten who are more interested in football, fashion, sex or whatever mind-numbing technological entertainment passes for circuses to today’s teenagers. There will be others already dedicating themselves to a lifetime of climbing the corporate ladder. Those are the ones the right will be targetting, and if they get their claws into them the future electorate will be just as right wing as their parents and grandparents. If that happens, then not to put too fine a point on it, we are fucked. We’re at a tipping point environmentally as well. The natural debt of the past century or more is overdue for payment, and the cost of ignoring it is likely to be, eventually, the end of life on Earth as we know it today.

We live in a chaotic adaptive system – Boris, like Trump, is nothing if not chaotically adaptive. Us intellectual lefties are still wedded to the idea of controlling things, trying to make everyone subscribe to our happy clappy faith, but social media immerses us in the raw anarchy of chaos. There’s no real story, no real narrative, just a steaming pile of emotional outbursts resonating around the echo chambers of our networks. It’s the pirates who continually sail a warship through Myo’s search for the Fair Land, all guns blazing. 

So my manifesto for change is threefold, and tries to address the influencers of the chaotic adaptive system of democratic power while we still have some semblance of it:

• Citizen empowerment

• Accountability

• Education

It may be a bit presumptous of me to put this forward – after all, what do I know? – but I’m getting fed up with waiting for the people who should be doing it to show any real sign that they are. As with the book, I’ll have to figure out if I try to publish through the recognised channels or self-publish, whether its worth it and if so how the hell I go about promoting it. If you want to read more, go to the post headed “Sue’s Manifesto for Change”

 

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Sue’s Manifesto For Change

The Home of Shehaios Posted on September 1, 2019 by Sue RuleSeptember 1, 2019

If we are to heal the wounds of Brexit and change society for the better we need to start by preparing the soil. Only then can we expect healthy shoots to flourish and prosper. 

Citizen Empowerment

For too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of a small elite, largely white, largely male, largely public school educated. This has to fundamentally change. Its no good placing your bet on the knight wearing a blue favour or the knight wearing the red favour – the problem is the existence of the knights. We are not damsels in distress. We are sovereign individuals with a right to determine our own future. We need a democratic system that reflects that. 

How do we do that?

  • We should create a system of regional Citizens Assemblies to debate the core political issues of the nation – immigration, wealth distribution and taxation, the health service, education, public services, our environmental responsibilities, devolution, our relationship with Europe (more accurately, our role in global trade) Etc.

 

  • People will be randomly selected from a cross-section of society to serve on these Citizens Assemblies. As with Jury Service, attendance if selected will be mandatory unless an individual has a compelling reason not to to attend, and employers will be obliged to release staff to serve.

 

Accountability

Having won the tournament, the knights and their entourage sit in government for five years screwing things up and telling us what’s good for us. They are at the beck and call of powerful lobby groups and vested interests. Faced with an impossible task, most of the time they lie to us, and when they’re not lying they’re demonstrating near-criminal incompetence. 

It’s our country, not theirs. We need to hold MPs to account not for what they say, but for what they actually do with the power we entrust to them. 

How do we do that?

  • The Citizens Assemblies will determine what kind of a Britain the people of Britain want. It will be the job of MPs to deliver on that vision. An MP will be answerable to the CA (or CAs) in their constituency for the decisions made in Parliament. The Prime Minister, as now, will be answerable to Parliament.

 

  • Individual voters will still vote in General Elections based on our individual opinion of a candidate’s, or political party’s, ability to deliver the Britain we want. There should also be a system for individuals to gather support to table topics for discussion at the Citizens Assembly.

 

Education

The standard of debate in Parliament, on social media and in the traditional media, in the pub or on the street corner has gone down the pan. We shout slogans at each other. We make snap decisions based on nothing much more than an emotional response and defend those decisions against any logical argument. We’ve been taught to sneer at experts. We ask figures in the public eye to explain complex issues in a soundbite and lose interest when they can’t. When it comes to the nuances of democracy, we argue passionately about it from positions of supreme ignorance. 

While this might be entertaining for some its hugely damaging to our country and our prospects. It has to stop. We’ve got to move on from playground politics, if not adversarial politics.

How do we do that?

  • All children should be taught the rights and responsibilities of being a British citizen. This includes those attending state schools, Academies, public schools, private schools, special schools, faith schools, and those who are home educated. It should include Young Offenders and military cadets. Everyone, including immigrants wanting to take up British citizenship, should be taught the same syllabus, which would cover how Parliamentary democracy works, how the justice system works, how the taxation system works, how the health and benefits systems work and the contributions every citizen is expected to make to these systems. Serving in a Citizen’s Assembly. Voting. Filling in a tax form. Claiming benefit. First Aid. Parenting. Jury Service. Military service. The role of carers, doctors, teachers, police and emergency service workers. How a business works. How the public sector works. What the difference is.

 

  • All children, specifically those in state education, should be taught debating skills. How to frame, examine and interrogate an argument. How marketing works and how to tell fake news from real news. The difference between scientific evidence and unfounded opinion. Mindfullness and the role of emotion in decision making. Root cause analysis and scenario building. Cause and effect. How to reach consensus.

 

  • Older children should have the opportunity to contribute to the political debate of the day, either in school-based mock-ups of Citizens Assemblies, or from the age of 16, having the right to participate in actual Citizens Assemblies.

 

What is to stop such an agenda getting cross-party support? It doesn’t propose any political agenda, other than putting power in the hands of the people. Not the politicians. 

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A Poem for Brexit

The Home of Shehaios Posted on August 11, 2019 by Sue RuleAugust 11, 2019

Those who know me will be very well aware that I am deeply opposed to Britain leaving the EU. I have sleepless nights worrying about the impending catastrophe about to hit my country – especially at the point where we should be working flat out together to divert the impending catastrophe about to hit the whole planet. It causes me to despair of humanity’s future, and question whether our adaptation for survival – our intelligence – is all it’s cracked up to be.

But as a writer, I am always trying to put myself inside the head of my characters, to see the world how they see it. In this poem I try to imagine the hurt, anger and emotion that led to the Leave victory in 2016. 

It is, of course, light years away from the arrogant egotism that’s driving the political leadership of this country. That, I think, is a desperate last-ditch response to the volcanic rage that’s simmering beneath the surface in this country and around the world. 

Anyway. Here’s the poem. It might turn into a song at some point. 

Brexit

I’ve built your bloody liners
I’ve hewn your bloody coal
One week working fit to bust
One week on the dole

I’ve a zero hours contract
For a zero value job
I’ve a zero value life
And you’re a zero value snob

I’ve fought your bloody wars for you
Was always proud to serve
To make this bloody country
Fit for heroes to deserve

But you mechanised production
Sold the factory, closed the mine
You traded in my labour
For a tax haven in the sun

So forget your global village
Forget your euro, too
You’ve taken everything I was
And I’m coming now for you.

© Sue Rule 2018

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Freedom’s Just Another Word

The Home of Shehaios Posted on June 22, 2019 by Sue RuleJune 22, 2019

I read an amusing quote on Facebook the other day, apparently from Somerset Maugham. When it comes to writing a novel, he said, there are three rules. Unfortunately, no-one knows what they are. I’m sure people write for all sorts of reasons, but I have come to the conclusion that when I write I set out on an intellectual journey. I play with words and ideas, putting them into interesting patterns, turning them inside out to see them from a different angle. I am part explorer, part detective and part experimental scientist, pairing things that don’t go together to see what happens.

The whole idea of the Shaihen Heritage series started with just such a juxtaposition of ideas – Shehaios was a feudal anarchy. You then have to start asking the questions, what do I mean by that? What’s it like to live in this place that couldn’t possibly exist? So the journey begins.

Shehaios has become the Fair Land, the Home of the Free. Book 1 was about the magic that created this place that couldn’t possibly exist. Book 2 was about the power contained within it and how that power could corrupt. Book 3 was about the enduring spirit that keeps the vision of the Fair Land alive.

I’m pleased to report that the manuscript for Book 4 is now making good progress after its many years stuck in the doldrums and I have finished the first draft. That means I’ve told the story to myself. I’ve conducted my investigations, and completed my expedition into the unknown – I heard Terry Pratchett speak once, and he said starting a new book was like standing on the edge of a cliff above a mist-filled river valley he had to cross: he knew where he was starting from, and he could see where he wanted to go, but to reach it he had to descend into the fog and flounder about a bit until he found a way back up the other side. I’ve got to the other side, but I lost a few of the party in the fog on the way, so I’m back down there looking for them at the moment.

Book 4 is about freedom. Shehaios is the Fair Land, where wealth is shared equally; but it is also the Home of the Free. That’s another juxtaposition of political opposites I shoved together to see what happened.

They always say you should write what you know (though that does rather assume any of us know anything) and freedom has been a dominant theme of human civilisation throughout my lifetime. I was born in the mid 1950s, not long after the end of a war I was told we fought to defend freedom from an aggressive, exclusive, Imperialist nationalism personified by Hitler and the Nazi Party. I grew up in a 1960s dominated by American culture, heavy on the myth of the Land of the Free and the liberating effects of capitalism. I was a teenager in the 1970s during the age of flower power, free love and freeing the mind through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. I was a parent in the 1980s when we all started living on credit, free to fill our houses and our lives with heaps of valueless stuff. In the 90s and 00s I was running a business, in an age of start-ups, where technology was going to provide freedom from drudgery. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, I begin to see that the story I’ve been telling myself about the march of freedom under the banner of the stars and stripes is just that. It’s a story. It’s not true. Capitalism has enslaved the world and now it’s destroying it.

I’ve enjoyed a life of freedom – I’ve lived through the rise of the women’s movement, enjoyed the ability to earn my own living, and live my own life free from religious proscription of my choices. I was born to loving parents, who weren’t especially rich but certainly weren’t poor. I benefitted from a good education, and a National Health Service without which I, like many others, probably wouldn’t be here today. I have prospered and done well, but others in the world have not had the opportunities I’ve had and I see very little hope that they ever will. As one of my characters says, “If some people live in the Fair Land and others don’t then by definition it isn’t fair.”

American songwriters of the 20th century – the ones I grew up with – generally have a somewhat jaded view of their own Land of the Free. Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics for Me and Bobby McGee include the immortal lines:

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free”

And The Eagles sang:

“Freedom – that’s just some people talkin’
Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone”
(“Desperado” by Glenn Frey and Don Henley)

So my definition of freedom – the Shaihen definition – is to be ruled only by the things and the people you love. That’s the feudal anarchy. Not that you owe allegiance, but that you give it, freely. To the people you love. To the land you love. To the principles you hold to be true.

If you love money and power, that is the thing that will govern your life and shape the lives of those around you. If you love the vision of the Fair Land, the Home of the Free, then that is the vision that will govern your life and that too will influence those around you. Just imagine, if we all started doing it, we might find ourselves actually living in the Fair Land, the Home of the Free. But then again, my magician is a fictional character.

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Musings on Music

The Home of Shehaios Posted on April 5, 2019 by Sue RuleApril 5, 2019

Folksongs don’t always get the facts right. In folksongs, the rain always falls softly and the rambling sailor goes whistling on his way without a care in the world.

The truth that music tells is an emotional one. The middle classes of the Victorian era created a Merrie England of maypoles and jolly ploughboys because that is the world they wanted to inhabit. The middle classes of today’s Britain have very similar ideas, using their money to ‘escape’ to the country, do a bit of hobby farming or ‘get involved in the community’. They too like children dancing round maypoles with pretty ribbons, and don’t have a clue that this version of maypole dancing is their own tradition, not that of the historic agricultural workers.

Does it matter?

Not really. We use music to express what we care about, what we are passionate about. Much popular music (traditionally the province of young folk) is concerned with young people falling in and out of love, and all the associated heartaches, thrills, drama and deceptions associated with that most basic of human passions.

Little surprise then that the popular music of the past – the songs sung in pubs, parlours, barns and foc’s’ls – covers the same territory. The abundance of songs about women ‘marrying for gold not for love’ – sometimes under duress – remind us how newly-won are the freedoms women have in Britain. Other cultures still strongly pressurize their young people to make “suitable” matches.

Likewise, songs about poverty, industrial accidents, and long separations due to work, show us how people felt about the lives they led. What mattered to them is pretty much what matters to us; we can see the motivation for the rise of the Labour movement in the angry polemics about mining disasters, young men pressed into the army and navy, and the grinding poverty of the disenfranchised. We can also see the roots of working class conservatism, in the songs of grateful and contented farm workers toasting the health of the “squire”. No need to upset the applecart, the lord of the manor will see us right.

Songs tend to be about people, but in the rural areas – where most people lived before the Industrial Revolution – they are laced with the images of the world in which those people lived. Images that show not only how much people who lived and worked on the land knew about the natural world but also how they felt about it. The poacher stealing the rich man’s game is a folk hero. Magpies may be the enemy of the gamekeeper, but in folklore they are messengers those in the know can commune with. The link between the peasant’s understanding of the natural world from which he wrestled a hard-won living and today’s environmental science is only just beginning to be explored.

I was into Trad. Arr. from my teenage years. Rock’n’roll just sounded like noise, and taking drugs seemed like a stupid thing to do. I never felt any great need to rebel against my parents – or anything, really. I was one of those middle class people dreaming of my own “escape to the country.” But I have recently been listening, for the first time, to a lot of what is actually the popular music of my youth – blues music and Americana, from my husband’s extensive collection of vinyl.

It would be stupid not to acknowledge that there are unquestionably some great songs in the American canon. Some of them in particular resonate with me, depicting as they do a gritty reality of 20th century American culture. The directionless quest for personal freedom expressed so well in songs like “Me and Bobby McGee” was one of the sentiments that did register at the time – I just love the lines:
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
Freedom ain’t worth nothin’ but its free’.

That, to me, is so quintessentially American.

Many songs from the blues stable are of course the usual fare of young lovers, tales of bliss and heartbreak with the emphasis on heartbreak, but I have to say that much of the later stuff, particularly the singer-songwriter genre, sounds to my ears incredibly self-indulgent. Perhaps its because there is just so much of it, navel-gazing lyrics which wallow in an emotional angst of impossibly unrealistic romantic expectations and implausible alliances. Its blues by people who really have no business having the blues – people who think the world revolves around them and their personal desires, and are plunged into despondency when reality smacks them in the face.

I guess all of us who have benefitted so much from the inexorable rise of capitalism in the 20th century are a bit guilty of such a complacent presumption of privilege. We’ve grown up in a world where we kind of could have everything we wanted, and with the increasing use of credit, we could have it now.

Its how we respond to adversity that is the acid test of post-war Western civilisation – and its not looking good. We are supposed to learn as children that life is not easy. You don’t get everything you want. Its not someone’s fault, it’s the way it is. You pick yourself up, dust yourself down and find another way. These are lessons so many of the generations between the baby boomers and the millenials have not had to learn. So many people with this privileged mindset have developed a habit of denying responsibility and looking for someone else to blame for what they perceive to be their misfortunes – whether that’s the guy or gal who “done them wrong”, or the man down the road who looks different and follows a different religion.

Sufficient numbers of people seem sufficiently immune to self-doubt and objective examination of the facts to vote in a President of the USA who agrees with them that all their problems are someone else’s fault. If they just “Make America Great Again” everything will be fine. Closer to home, millions of Britons have been persuaded that Europe is the source of all the ills besetting our country, and we have to leave the European Union to “Make Britain Great Again.”

These are all simple answers based on an immature emotional response to adversity. Simple answers mismatched with complex questions will set us on the road to oblivion. If ever we get out of this prickly bush, we must never get in it any more.

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Faith, Hope and Charity

The Home of Shehaios Posted on October 31, 2018 by Sue RuleFebruary 22, 2019

“And the greatest of these is charity*” *aka love

I consider the novels I write to be political fantasy. I’m not going to get into the whole debate about what’s Science Fiction and what’s Science Fantasy (life is to short) – by ‘fantasy’, I simply mean novels that take a big (and generally unlikely, or ‘fantastic’) “what if” as the starting point for the world in which the story takes place.

My big “what if” is “what if a land where equality, fraternity and liberty actually did reign supreme really existed?”. I call it Shehaios. The Fair Land. The Whole Land. The Home of the Free.

Why do I call this political fantasy? Because for me politics is about the pursuit of an ideal. A belief, for instance, that we can make things better for our descendants, as our ancestors made things better for us. My novels explore the way various characters do – or don’t – seek to do that. The stories they tell themselves. The constructs they create. The legacies they leave. That is a political story.

Out here in the real world, we who believe in creating a better world for our descendants are at a crisis point right now. The path we all thought was going to take us whistling our cheery way to that better future has led us to the brink of hell. We are at a point where the decisions we make over the next few decades could determine whether or not our civilisation survives and evolves, or crashes into oblivion. We could ultimately be determining whether the planet remains a place human beings can inhabit. The UN has warned us how limited a time we have left to get a grip on climate change, before the planet itself takes control of our destiny. According to figures published by that well-known generator of fake news, the World Wide Fund for Nature, we have already exterminated 60% of the world’s animal population. We are choking the seas with our waste, squabbling over land, and our insatiable appetite for energy is rapidly compromising our supplies of air and water.

This is all big, scary stuff. Taken together with the breakneck speed of technological development, most of us just feel we want to get off the merry-go-round before we throw up.

But life is a complex adaptive system – change is a constant state. Trying to stop change doesn’t stop change happening, it just means you have no understanding, let alone control, of it. This ride is scary, but we have no choice but to stay with it. If you’re hurtling round a racetrack, the worst thing you can do is to let go of the steering wheel. Humans have been outstandingly good at adapting. We’ve learned to survive, even live, in the most hostile environments – in hot places, in cold places, under the oceans, even off-planet in outer space. We’ve learned to fly. We’ve learned to communicate, and now we can do that almost instantaneously from one side of the planet to another. We raise our voices together and create amazing sounds. We appreciate and are able to create beauty. Above all, we’ve learned to store and share knowledge, and understand what our species’ dominance of the world we live in is doing to that world.

If we don’t value these amazing human attributes, and use them to inspire us to work out how to survive on this planet, the ingenious adaptability of life will simply take another route. Unfortunately for humanity, Gaia doesn’t really care about our future. Mankind will be just an interesting layer of geology buried in the Earth’s crust.

This is a depressing prospect. Its so depressing, and so huge, we don’t know what to do with it. The temptation is just to give up, stick your head in the sand and hope you die before the worst happens. But although humanity as a real, amorphous mass of fearful, fallible, flawed people often drives me up the wall, I am rather fond of quite a number of human beings, and some of them are very young. I don’t want to bequeath them this vision of the future.

I want to believe in a land where equality, fraternity and liberty really do reign supreme. A land that actually stretches the length and breadth of the Earth’s habitable surface – because if it didn’t, how could it truly embody any of those qualities? If you have to live in a particular place, have a particular heritage or a particular store of resources to enjoy equality, justice and peace, that is not freedom. By definition, equality cannot be confined to an elite, however the elite defines itself.

These lofty ideals have informed great political changes in the past. Such revolutions are always conducted by people, and the people inevitably don’t adhere to the ideal that inspired the movement in the first place. They are, like all of us, fearful, fallible, and flawed. But we should not use the fallibility of human nature as a reason not to pursue the ideal.

Likewise, given human nature is what it is, the likelihood is that actually creating a global Fair Land is impossible. But that’s the nature of ideals. It should not be a reason not to try.

Politics in practice of course is the pursuit of power, and it’s corrupted by endemic self-interest – all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Narrow-minded self-interest has spread its tendrils of decay throughout the whole construct of power, from Presidents and Prime Ministers to the lowliest voter who sabotages themselves by believing they can make no difference so its easier not to try. Cynicism and defeatism are the enemy of idealism. Progress comes through faith, and hope. Which is why my novels also lead me to ponder the nature of religion.

It is my premise that human beings created god, rather than the other way round. I came to this conclusion by observing that my dog (whom I loved, and who responded with something that I interpreted as love) never saw the need to say her prayers, and was incapable of reading a holy text. If there was an omniscient, omnipotent Creator of all things, why did that Creator only endow humanity with the ability to communicate with Him? Having done so, why did He make that means of communication so appallingly bad that there were multiple different versions of how He wanted us to behave? Nah. That doesn’t sound like God to me. That sounds like people telling stories.

But stories are how we humans communicate. Ask any marketing professional. Stories are particularly how we communicate complex, abstract ideas. Having created a god, we and others can come to believe in that god, and by doing so we give that god agency. He/she/it can effect change.

Now, I grew up in a country very much shaped by the Christian religion – and Protestant Christianity at that. So my take on religion is very much shaped by that form of Christianity, as my take on history is very much shaped by the history of Britain and Europe – I am British, I am European. I write what I know. As an adolescent, I was very enamoured of the New Testament, of a prophet who preached about loving your neighbour, sharing your wealth, and pursuing truth. Who turned water into wine, fed the 5,000 and threw the moneylenders out of the temple – and in doing all this, claimed to be the Son of God. This is my kind of a god. I think this is the kind of god who inspired the Abolition of Slavery act, the campaign for universal suffrage, the rise of the Labour movement and the social changes that has brought about. So if you ask me now, ‘do I believe in God?’ my answer is that I believe in my god.

My god is the god of love. The Way, the Truth and the Light. I think believing in compassion, justice, fairness and a common humanity is powerful, and can bring about change.

Many of us alive today, particularly in Europe, enjoy a common public good we take for granted – public education systems, public health, pensions, employment rights, state support for the physically, mentally or socially disabled. With our short human memories, we think it could be no other way. Our complacency denies the suffering, heroism, and dogged determination of those who kept the faith in times when such priveleges would have seemed impossible for the vast majority of the population, and in denying that heritage we abdicate responsibility for stewarding the wealth we have inherited. For decades we have been working towards rolling out these privileges around the world – turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000. But we neglected to throw the money-lenders out of the temple.

In a world where basic resources and habitable land surfaces become increasingly scarce, we need to learn how to defend that public good and continue to establish it globally – because make no mistake, far from dismissing climate change, the rich and the powerful have already seen the writing on the wall, and they’re doing their damndest to make sure they grab as much of the pie as they can while we’re not looking. If we wait for the prince to give us a kiss before we wake up, we’ll be back to depending on his whims for the right to live on this planet.

We who live in established democracies have power and influence our ancestors, working the land of their feudal masters, could never have dreamed of. Their well-being – their very survival – depended entirely on the mindset of their overlord; whether he understood and appreciated his responsibilities for the people who depended on him, or not. Some did. Some were good rulers. Others weren’t. They lead their people to death and destruction. Their wars never had anything much to do with the safety, security or well-being of the people who fought them, they were conducted entirely to serve the ambitions of the warlords. Wars have no place in the creation of the Fair Land.

In a democracy, we choose our own leaders. We must start choosing ones who want to create the kind of world we believe in, the kind of world we want our children and grandchildren to live in. The others, the ones who choose the road to destruction, are incredibly good con-artists, but you can spot them in a moment, because everything they use to fire people up is a negative. They don’t inspire you. They don’t empower you. They get you feeling angry and discontented, ready to find someone to blame rather than engage with trying to make things better. They frighten you with phantoms to keep you from facing up to the big scary reality that actually, you are responsible for shaping the future of your people. And we’re human. We can’t not fall for it. I get angry. I want to blame people for not seeing what’s being done to them. I despair and I want to give up. But I know that I can’t, because that’s letting them win.

We have to keep the faith, and truly believe in creating a better world for our descendants. We are in charge of our own destiny – never more so. But none of us can do it alone. We have to join with others who share that ideal, and do it together. I’ve just taken part in my first fiddle rally, playing with Cowal Fiddle Workshop, and for much of the concert, I was miming – the bow was moving, but there was no contact with the strings, because I’d stumbled over a tricky bit and lost track of where I was in the music. A significant number of the orchestra was doing the same – but we weren’t missing out the same bits, so overall it sounded great. That’s how we do it. If you lose hope, you just let others take over, while you do whatever it takes to keep yourself sane and hold on to hope. Take a break, play music, re-connect with nature, re-connect with people you love. With joy. With hope.

When you are feeling bullish, and strong, you can take up the flame and be the strength for the down-hearted. You can give joy to others when they’re feeling disheartened, and comfort to the bereaved, the wounded, the destitute. This is the power of love, and we must believe in it. In the greatness and kindness that human beings can be capable of. People rise to greatness on the shoulders of others – we’re not all going to be Martin Luther King. But we can be in the congregation.

Look, I have to tell you something. Shehaios exists through magic. In the real world, there is no Magician, and there are no magic answers. All we can do is start asking the right questions, facing up to the truth no matter how scary it is. Then maybe we can start having a grown-up discussion about where we might find some answers. We might find that my little bit of knowledge and experience, put together with yours, uncovers a way of doing things that had never occurred to either of us before. That’s how human beings create things. That’s the magic. Some people actually call it science.

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The View From Rosehaugh

A Journal of life, music, politics, writing, and anything else that comes to mind, by S.A. Rule.

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