In psychoanalysis, literary criticism and any kind of hermeneutic analytic discipline, a preliminary concern plagues the beginner. How deep, we ask, is it legitimate to go? How detailed an interpretation can we sensibly make? This question arises for the student of literature-'but does the author actually mean that?'-and it plagues those working in the therapeutic profession. Any action or word can be linked to a symbolic meaning. Any number of interpretative layers can be applied and the project of finding links and hidden references is potentially endless. This is especially true for psychotherapists, whose central self governing rule states that once they stop asking themselves how effective they are they cease to have any therapeutic value at all.
The experience of the interpretater/therapist/analyst/critic is one of decryption. We are, we tell ourselves, drawing out more or less flimsy associations and meanings and unveiling segments of a constantly unravelling but nonetheless coherent picture. This feeling can be extremely comforting. It provides the grounding for an important theoretical dogma. If any emotion, any meaning, is therapeutic then it is never OK to stop digging. But how far is it necessary or even acceptable to go? For many analysts the notion of sanity connotes some form of inhumanity. We are all more or less insane, deviating around an unattainable mean with mechanisms that make us more or less stable. If this is true then anyone is a valid subject for therapy and we could all benefit from the agonising soul search of a full course of analysis.
What this constant quest(ioning) generates is ever more uncertainty. Each concrete given we encounter we are forced to deconstruct (a 'science' of perennial doubt), be it a moral or emotional conjecture. Everything we say actually 'says' something else- about us or on our behalf.
This only seems absurd to the outsider. The initiated cease to question the value of a Marxist approach to Jane Austen, a libinal economy at work in the soul of the traumatised. Becoming fully used to the activity of interpretation and deeper interpretation, we stop asking ourselves whether the systems we superimpose retain any meaning or value. We assume they do because they illuminate something but exactly what they illuminate it is not always necessary to see.

Some questions really do not bear being asked; where does our 'self' reside?; am I truly happy?; Can we successfully get on?

What bears asking and what we can bear to ask are rarely the same. We pursue some questions to the point of the ridiculous. Others we break down into ever smaller pieces losing sight of the original frame. When we find ourselves locked into this journey of continual asking we have to consider the possibiluty of stopping. Of carrying on confidant that even if an answer did exist, we wouldn't care to know.

So today I am making a cocktail, a Screaming Orgasm if you must know, and carefully plopping the cream on top with nothing less than my usual haste. One of the locals interrupts me. ‘Take your time’ he says, and I give him a look that is supposed to say ‘I’ll be with you shortly sir but surely you can appreciate that this is one of the drinks we serve and if someone asks for it then I have no choice but to make it up’. In fact it probably says ‘argghh, give me a break’, but who’s counting. I serve the customers who were there before him, subjecting myself to the expected torrent of sarcasm and anger. When I finally get around to pouring out his John Smiths it is clear that he is drunk. His words are slurring and he is just plain cross. I engage in a playful little debate, not our first, in which I explain how one has to wait in queues from time to time when one is in a bar. My half falls on deaf ears. Fair’s fair though, his half does as well.
An hour or so passes before he tries to order again; this time I refuse because he had been abusive before and was obviously still drunk enough to have difficulty staying awake. As I expected (and secretly hoped) he flies off the handle. The usual garbage ensues and he winds himself into a fury by asking me incredulously and repeatedly ‘me? You’re refusing to serve me?’ He says he’s fine. He’s not.
Then two unexpected things happen. First off he tells me his brother died this morning. I feel guilty but stick to my guns. Getting drunk and argumentative is hardly the most respectful way to honour your sibling’s life but I do feel sorry for the guy. Anyway my deputy manager Carl stepped in and backed me up all the way so I felt more as though I’d made the right decision.
The second unexpected thing happened when he’d finally been persuaded we weren’t going to serve him. He started to fit. The sound of a scraping chair and a dull thud as he hits the floor and shakes violently against the hard wood. The man has worked himself into such a temper that he has brought on the epilepsy which I later discover the management knew about. It’s out of my hands, Carl is talking to some young men who are helping the man. An ambulance is called. He comes out of the fit. Shouts more abuse, starts fitting again. The people he was with order more drinks and tell me they don’t really know him that well: ‘It’s nothing to do with me, I’ve got my own problems, know what I mean?’
People stare but don’t do anything. They buy drinks. The ambulance arrives and he gets carted out to much relief.
When they don’t have family, when they have no need to go to the NHS, when Social Services can’t help them, that’s when they end up with us, and really, by giving them what they want (and would only obtain elsewhere) we only make the problems worse.

More than one reader has mentioned that it has been a long time since I last blogged. As more than one reader is more than I had ever hoped for in my wildest dreams I feel I might do worse than oblige. As luck would have it I have recently come across an issue I feel requires some discussion.
I have been a non-student, upstanding member of society for all of two months now (three if my contract of employment is to be believed; spot the mistake) and I have already noticed that what passes for passable when you are doing a degree is not so normal when you join the rat race.
Luckily, it is not personal experience that has taught me this.
You may be aware of a recent case that has hit the nationals, that of John Hagan, a Nottingham maths finalist accused (and acquitted) of rape. Needless to say his recent saga has been all over the local papers in recent weeks. I know John Hagan, not well; he was in the year below me when I was a rep for my hall Broadgate Park. His high level of involvement in Broadgate life led to his election as hall president and it was in this position that he was said to have become involved with a drunk fresher in the year below him one night.
Now I am not sure of the facts of the case beyond what has been said in the papers, and this is not the place to speculate as to the wheres and hows and the ahh!-is-it-really?s.
However, the official story does need recounting. On the night after a fresher’s ball, Hagan slept with a girl one week into her course, which, apart from the stern (but sensible) advice of the Student’s Union does not seem unforgivable. Unfortunately she was drunk and, upon finding the words, ‘I pulled the president’ on her stomach in red biro the next morning, saw fit to call the police.
What ensued was a criminal case which saw Hagan accused of rape. A not guilty verdict seemed fair as lack of consent could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, but what is concerning is not the set of bare legal facts so much as the context.
The situation described by the papers is not new. When I was in my first and second year of university I was surrounded by people whose sole purpose in life was to bed a fresher; their level of intoxication was not deemed a problem or even an issue worthy of mention. Had a fresher wound up in a stranger’s bed with biro scrawled across their stomach and no memory of the night before I would have been bemused by the hedonism of it all but certainly not surprised. In fact I would have been amazed if it had not happened.
This seems symptomatic of a failure to look after vulnerable students. Plenty of young people go to university ‘for the experience’ and that, while positive in some senses, needs to be checked by someone. I myself found some enjoyment in the consumption of large quantities of Sainsbury’s own Scotch Whiskey at £6 a 70cl bottle. Partly I enjoyed the warm smile it produced, and partly it was the confidence with which I could, by the final term of my first year, see off the best part of a bottle without so much as a stumble.
Now I can’t drink more than a generous single without beginning to notice; I have higher priorities and find sobriety preferable. As a fresher I saw the bottle as a continent and its end a frontier to be explored. With no real frame of reference to suggest this might be verging on the pathological I never had recourse to stop and think that I was behaving like a lunatic. If I spent an evening working my way through a bottle of cheap Scotch now, I would be faced with concern and possibly be physically constrained by people who just know it is not the way to behave. Then it was just a game, part of what it meant to be at uni.
I think that this might underlie what has happened in the Hagan case. To sleep with someone who is sufficiently drunk to not remember and call the police is a stupid and ruthless act. That such behaviour may have gone unchecked by a broader moral consensus about how students ought to behave is telling of quite how far we have come in thinking of the student lifestyle as a necessary and forgivable whirl of hedonism before the real world. Sanity ought to permeate these depths. Exactly how, I don’t know.

Tonight I am training new recruit Eva on the bar. This means I have accrued some semblance of a hint of responsibility in a job that just the other day I was being told I had become lax and slipshod at. The news is surprisingly satisfying. I have become sufficiently proficient that I can impart my wisdom to someone else. I become concerned to project an industrious image, I become conscientious; keeping an eye on the bar, maintaining standards of cleanliness and walking up and down in a self important fashion.
It is seconds before Eva arrives when I realise what has been done. I have been had. The choice of yours truly to carry out staff training was a managerial tool, a technique, a way of buying me into (and having me buy into) the folds of this company and its dubious goals and pursuits. For a brief second I have turned into the kind of monstrous jobsworth that anyone with any sense despises. Briefly my entire being is directed toward the pursuit of a job which has at times brought me to tears of despair for the state of humanity. I have compromised my entire identity for the sake of some sense of worth and prestige and now I can see clearly that this is the precise point at which the rot sets in, the very moment at which I would have been turned into a hateful drone by the economic powers that detest every pore of my free being.
Eva arrives. I tone down my thoughts and turn to an honest run through of how best to get through a night without wanting to hang oneself. We discuss her degree in Eastern European Studies and I introduce her to the collective sense of despair surrounding the repetitive playing of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’. Being human and not harbouring any significant brain injury, she picks up the job very quickly. The night passes smoothly and I go home to try and get some sleep before the next round of soul punching.
Today I am met by a challenge. After a morning spent in the library I return to the flat to post while Mike and his friend Carl are discussing Mike’s thesis in the living room. Carl comes in to say hello and asks what I am doing. Upon being told he tells me his feelings about blogging. About how it is not true to its own ideological sense of plurality because it organises itself into nodes of opinion and influence and is only available as a resource to those with computers. About how many bloggers allow their lives to become subjugated to the act of writing. I point out that he has perhaps conflated the act of keeping a blog with the ideological commitment to what is called blogging and that by writing a blog, one does not necessarily buy into the ‘blogosphere’ and all that term conveys. I do not meet other bloggers (unless they happen to have been friends first) and I try to avoid centring my life around my blog, furthermore, I actually read very little of what else is out there. I am what you might call a casual blog user, barely a blogger at all and more of dabbler. Perhaps we should christen the ‘dabblersphere’ and those of us with a less headstrong attitude to writing a blog would be able to separate themselves from that curious strain of the liberal press that cherishes the blog proper as a new form of human interaction. Nonetheless, I feel suitably chastised and sit here to finish my post with a question mark and curious sense of emptiness hanging over me.

I encountered a customer today who I simply must write about. I was working a day shift at Bar Circle (yes, Squares does have a sister bar and it is called Circle) and things were pretty quiet. I was just on the point of trying to recreate the Basilica of St Peter with glace cherries when in walked this chap who could have been cheeky kid’s science presenter Johnny Ball were it not for the leather jacket and faded four letter word tattooed on his knuckle. He ordered a pint of John Smiths (actually I had already poured half of it before he reached the bar- you can tell you know) and we passed the transaction in the normal way. It was only when he returned to the bar for his second pint that he engaged me in conversation. This began with discussion of ‘undesirables’, a term he reserves for people who drink in Wetherspoons whom he detests because they ask him for money for drinks/fags/the sake of it. He was of the opinion that our £1.50 pints would attract this peculiar class of person and the force of his argument was split between praise of our cheapness and a warning that it would attract a less suitable type of person (it’s funny that just about everyone who comes into the pub has a lower class of person to who they attribute all of society’s ills, no one ever comes in and says “I’m a fucking layabout me, no
good to anyone and frankly I really should get my act together”-there lies a lesson for us all).

Up to this point I allowed myself the usual pleasure of basking in his rant and nodding my head at appropriate intervals. This is the true mark of the old fashioned barman I aspire to be, a friend to everyone and the very model of a patient yet unspeaking wisdom and understanding. However, being as he was talking about good-for-nothing evil doers, it was natural that the conversation would soon turn to people who aren’t British. If ever there were an underclass to assimilate everyone’s misgivings. He told me about the Indian he knew with British citizen-ship who had come to the UK to claim a pension even though he’d never lived here before and ‘without putting anything in’. He told me about the time he’d asked a ‘Muslim-looking-fella’ whether the backpack he was containing actually contained a bomb. He told me about how said Muslim had been quite indignant and (how unreasonable) the bar staff had asked him to make less of a fuss. The highpoint of the conversation was definitely when he said “I’ve never been a racist (pause) I’ve never been a racist…but I am one now”.

I did not intervene until he used the term asylum seeker, at which point I politely pointed out that this particular status was not a favourable one and that they can hardly be asked not to claim benefit while they are waiting for their claim to be processed and are forbidden to work. Once this had happened, I was condemned for a further hour to debate with him, going over the same points and never being allowed to finish without his finger jabbing the air before me and him saying “You only know what you’ve been told”. It is a marvellous irony how people who suppose themselves to be maverick thinkers are seldom the ones who actually give the least bit of decent thought to any of their pronouncements. All it seems to take is the hint of a conspiracy theory and they are convinced that Diana was killed by The Queen who is actually a martian who abducted Lord Lucan and had sex with the federal gold reserves of the USA in Area 51.

The debate had to end (and it did on good terms due to my fear of offending him) when I realised we were arguing from such totally different premises. I am lucky enough to be born into a country where there is a system to catch me if I fall upon hard times, but I don’t see why that luck entitles me to the rewards more than someone from another country. Now I am a tax payer I am more than entitled to desire that it gets spent on supporting asylum seekers and refugees. However, this is a qualitatively different position from that of my friend today. From his starting point (that there is a thing called British-ness and it makes you decent, hardworking and entitled to benefits) you can’t argue round to the position that non-British people should get benefits. You have to make a kind of leap of faith where you believe in a common humanity joining us all. I am clearly going to have to take my bar-room counselling service to the next level.

On indecision and doing what we want

When Nietzche articulated his idea about eternal recurrence he was simultaneously illuminating a hope we hold for our understanding of our own lives and condemning us to one of our greatest fears. On the one hand there is the possibility of complete knowledge, an appreciation of life’s lack of direction and the freedom from fear that comes when a certain kind of pressure about the future is lifted from our shoulders. On the other, and at the kernel of the word recurrence, is the realisation that somehow nothing can ever be achieved and nothing can ever be different. Eternal recurrence is a metaphor for reality, with all its force, pervading our present and ensuring that we are stuck in a perpetual moment.

The idea is a hard one to grasp (indeed I don’t believe I have) but its importance seems to lie in the way it makes us think about time. I think the insight can be usefully applied to the concept of direction and desire in the undertaking of our lives. When anyone acts, they are faced with the question ‘why?’ and this answerable underscores all of our behaviour. For many (including myself) a trade off exists between behaviour that answers to immediate needs and desires and that which contributes to some kind of long term plan. This is doing what I want; the true imperative guiding my actions.

Unfortunately, the two ends are often at conflict. I am driven by the desire to pursue a particular life plan and to simultaneously meet the needs presented by the present. This is superficially an easy equation to master and is often framed; ‘short term loss for long term gain’ or vice versa. However, the reality of our future is more complex than this dictum would have us believe. Our actions can only ever be guided by factors available in the present. This includes not only dispassionate analysis of how best to behave according to our beliefs and ambitions but also short term decision making; whim, the ever present handmaiden of desire. In short, the trade off is based on a false dichotomy.

Live for the moment runs an oft-quoted maxim, designed to free us of the burden of our future. The point of this is to highlight the importance of our present to us. It is based on the teaching that the future does not yet exist and is therefore not worth worrying about. Take care of doing what you want to now, find happiness by acting in the way that you consider best at any given moment. There is no watershed point by which you will be able to look back and assess yourself so you should behave as if now is the only point you can experience. This is a sentiment often associated with hedonism as it appears to throw the long term plan out of the window and open the gates to whim.

But the future does exist, it is present in everyone’s experience of now as part of the mixture of guiding imperatives. Living for the moment is inclusive of the yet-to-occur and to suggest that you can successfully banish the future is to ignore the past, our experience of which tells us that time does unveil itself in an apparently contingent way. ‘You might get hit by a bus tomorrow’ cannot count as a reason to live as if that were certainly the case. If I were going to get hit by a bus tomorrow, I certainly wouldn’t go to work this evening. I will go to work this evening, because I want to go away next summer and have time to develop my life in the way that I find most tasteful to me.

But that the future exists is not, unfortunately, any truth of its fixity. Everyday the future travels with me and regulates my actions, making me earn money, apply for more satisfactory jobs. But it is an elusive beast, and morphs and changes. In some ways my future exists to me like a hair in my peripheral vision; whenever I move my head to focus on it, it moves too. One day my future looks one way and the other day it can be entirely different. On days when I desire a particular career plan I am guided by the knowledge of what needs to be done. Other days this career plan changes and I need to think again about how best to conduct myself. Yet other occasions arise when the future, regardless of its content, is weaker in influence than conflicting concerns like hunger or loneliness.

Everything I do is hinged on such fragile motives and can be reasoned away by the slightest twist of fortune. How can I enjoy the experience of control over my life? How can I set to directing myself where I want when I can barely decide what needs to be done and when I am stuck between the moment and the continuing onslaught of unpredictable time and experience?

Toilets and Bins

I have been busy for a while. Yesterday I was at the BBC where I am known as the guy who writes the loo reviews. They are continuing on the beeb site so if you are familiar with and are missing the impact column then the section can be found through the following address:

www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/features/loo_reviews/index.shtml

They are great fun to write and should provide a space for angry ranting away from my blog. Work at Squares is also very busy at the moment. I have this afternoon off and the time feels like a slice of lemon I need to squeeze all the juice from. Tomorrow I am on a day shift and a night shift (A so called 'split', which I believe to be illegal) and the same is true on Friday. With Saturday night thrown into the mix I will be truly exhausted come Sunday. I think the playworker vacancy I applied for might be in the pipeline as one of the references I supplied has been contacted.

This morning I slept in until 11, when I was meant to begin my shift. I actually woke at 9 but told myself I would lie awake and enjoy the warmth for a few minutes. Of course what everyone knows about how difficult it is to not fall back to sleep is lost on you when you are actually in bed. I didn't care though. I am cultivating a less anxious approach to life-especially with this job, which is not worth getting stressed about. The reason for my temporal indiscretion? After last night's shift I embarked on my first forray into freeganism. For those unfamiliar with this, it is basically a buzz-word term that means eating out of bins. I am deeply in love with the idea of salvaging the kilo upon kilo of perfectly eatable food that I am sure Supermarkets throw away each day and I decided I would pop down to Sainsbury's for a look at what they had to offer. Unfortunately they must be aware of the illegality of taking stuff from bins (it is stealing) and, in a bid to deter would-be freegans, they have a well fortified fence surrounding their bins. Even were it not for this security precaution, I would have been seen by the late night delivery boys. It was deeply disappointing, I had pictured an exhilarating hop over a small fence into a dark paddock full of tins of beans and expensive jars of olives. It wasn't to be. After a desultory prowl past McDonalds and The American Grille I came into town and Investigated the bins behind some of the pubs and restaurants. I know Squares barely throws away anything edible but I figured a proper eatery would have plenty of excess food that must get chucked. So far the most promising has been Pizza Hut, which has well positioned bins in a dark alley. Does anyone reading this have any suggestions as to how I might make my forraging more profitable? Short of two balloons-promotional material sent to The Old Salutation by a brewer- I am yet to get anything. I suspect I may have to get rummaging and I am a bit nervous about this as we throw alot of things away at Squares that I would hate to go anywhere near.