Bad dreams in the night

What is it about Kate Bush and her breakthrough single? I thought she was kind of ridiculous when that song first came out, but I liked it in spite of myself, floppy sleeves, overwrought mannerisms and all. As I got older it came to represent a certain kind of romanticism and female strength, and a connection to ye olde English tales and landscapes. Not just the Bronte connection, but the long tangled thread back to Herne the hunter, talking badgers, lions, hounds, and unicorns. Maybe it was those misty trees.

Kate Bush herself was uncompromisingly individual and unpackaged, and quite apart

Wuthery trees    source

from her sheer musicality, there was the furniture-chewing drama of her videos, the romanticism, the female-centric stories of her songs. Now I can’t tell – is my ongoing fandom ironic? Or am I invested more deeply, retrospectively approving my younger self’s taste; celebrating my own successful transition into adulthood after an adolescence full of darkness and gothic misery.

I expect all women of my vintage had similar struggles as teenagers, sulking alone in our rooms, but this week we all got together in the park, on a bright wintery Wellington Saturday, to recreate the famous Wuthering Heights dance. Thank f*k we made it through, we could be saying with every flouncey spin, because that adolescence could have gone horribly wrong. But here we are: all of us who used to prance around in private, imagining we were as powerful, as confident in our weirdness and our talents, and our silliness, as Kate Bush.

The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever: Wellington.
Photo credit: Joanna Holden

She was only 18 when she wrote Wuthering Heights; no one can say she didn’t own her own twee-ness as a teenager. She celebrated it. At an age where the rest of us were self-consciously trying to hide our more goofy facets, Kate Bush was in full flight, emoting wildly. She was unrelentingly herself, in a way that the cookie-cutter mouthpieces who dominate pop music have never been brave or intelligent enough to be.

While she surely had her influences, you couldn’t say she modeled herself on them, and although there were some great songs on the charts in 1978, in pop music terms she really was out on her own: a unique talent. She might not fit the stereotype of punk but she embodied its ethos more authentically than many a spiky-haired hobby band that followed.

So thanks, Kate Bush, you gave me something to admire and giggle at in the same breath, through some very tough times. And thanks, adolescence, you made me who I am. I hated you (I loved you too).

Predators

This call, said the message, is time critical. If you wish to avoid prosecution you should return this call immediately. Back home after suffering a stroke, my aunty has only recently been able to use the phone again, and it’s a shame she remembered her pin number for this one. She’s always been very canny with the likes of the Nigerian-lottery-winner phone calls, and “your computer has a virus” – in a mischievous mood she might lead those spammers a merry dance before wishing them an ice-cold goodbye.

But now she’s vulnerable. She's part of a generation that sets great store by reputation and this really got under her skin, in a way that’s hard for younger people to understand, with our life-long student debts and bad credit ratings. She knew it was a scam, but it niggled at her, and it’s niggling at me. I’m wondering, did some psychologist decide this was a good angle for targeting the elderly? But then that’s me taking it just as personally as she did.

The scammers don’t know she’s in her eighties, suddenly housebound and no longer independent. They don’t know she has an old-fashioned sense of morality and honour. She’s just a name and phone number on a mailing list that they’ve bought from some low-rate mail order retailer (I told her not to buy that boxed set of The Onedin Line).

Arrest that tree!           Source

I still don’t think she’s reassured, even though I asked her, what might you have ever done that you could reasonably be prosecuted for? Having a tree that’s growing out over the footpath?

Every now and then I suppose these scammers will strike it lucky and call someone who has a dirty secret they’re scared of being caught for. Some old crime or misdemeanor they never confessed to. Oh no, what if they’ve finally been sprung? That would push your buttons.

It made me think of the letter my father got, many years ago: Dear Friend, my name is Maria and I am psychic. I saw your house at [insert target’s address here] in a vision last week. It was bathed in a golden glow, a beautiful light shone from inside your house and I knew that you are a special person indeed, blessed by the universe and about to come into some extremely good fortune. My vision contained much detail that I would like to share with you in order to help you maximise the benefits of your extremely lucky situation, and I invite you to contact me at xxx so that I may advise you.

That pushed dad’s buttons big time, as he came from a family of fey Cornish

I see....the vulnerable...            Source

spookies, and while he didn’t have visions like his mother, he could find water with a couple of bent coat hangers and famously found my brother when he ran away by sitting quietly in the car with a pen in his hand. He didn’t tell us at the time how he knew where to go, just popped his head around the kitchen door and said “I’m off now to go and get him.” But years later when we sold that car he showed me the manual in the glovebox. Inside the back cover was Dad’s scrawly ‘automatic writing’, “main road Makara, turn left under the pine tree” or somesuch. And that’s where my brother was, where his bike had conked out.

For a scientific type, dad was a bit of a spooky. He loved that stuff. When he showed me the letter we laughed about it, but I could see it had got to him, even though he knew it was a scam. I made sure I took it away with me. As his daughter I was so angry that someone had picked on him like that, an elderIy man rattling round alone at home, dwelling on things. I wrote back to Maria, using the address provided. I like to imagine she was very excited, expecting a cheque from one of her targets who believed their house had been bathed in a golden light.

It was just a simple message, on my best notepaper, with no return address. “If you’re psychic,” I wrote, “who am I then?”

Milk

Intriguingly, in a world where we’re happy to drink poo-brown fizz without knowing its ingredients, take pills because we’re told to, and eat the flesh of animals we’ve never met, last week some people were grossed out that women in New Zealand have been sharing breast milk.

Wet nurses are nothing new. Besides which, in these modern days, with breast

Image credit: Mary Cassatt

pumps, packaging options and those new-fangled freezers, surely the ick factor is rather reduced? The non-related baby is not actually latched on to the unrelated mother’s breast. Or is the reaction more about some fundamental sense of betrayal: we believe mums are there, body and mind, for their own. Not for anyone ‘other’.

Mother’s milk: the very definition of trust, and comfort food. Does the notion bring up primal fears of disloyalty and abandonment?

Photo credit: Alamy

Or maybe they’re just worried about health issues. You don’t even know the other woman, what if she has…the Black Plague? What if she eats junkfood, drinks like a fish, snorts P?

Well what about you? We all eat such crap these days, and who knows what's in our drinking water (if we even drink water), we breathe in carbon monoxide, VOCs and particulates every day: we're all toxic.

With all the toxins in human breast milk, maybe your baby would actually be better off on cow’s milk. Or formula, made from cow’s milk, but with all the water processed out. That way you can buy it in a tin, and add some water back in. Makes total sense.

Cows eat grass after all, and in New Zealand they live outdoors, not in battery farm environments. Reassuringly bucolic and traditional. Natural. But wait: there’s actually not enough pasture to go around anymore, what with the 4.9 million cows grazing in NZ these days. So in reality they don’t get much grass. Now they eat mainly PKE – a palm oil by-product, imported from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia where the environment is being thoroughly trashed in order to grow this lucrative cash crop.

Still, might as well get your kids started on palm oil early, it’s in virtually every processed food product these days.

But while we’re busy being grossed out by food produced by someone else’s body,

Photo credit: Telegraph

let’s recap. How much of your food today was, actually, someone else's body?

And when it’s normal for adults to drink milk made by another species, what, exactly, is so gross about a baby drinking milk that was produced by another human?

All that we see or seem

‘The Secret’: omg. You can get anything you want, with the power of your mind. Your thoughts can control reality, affecting events in the physical world outside your mind. Because the whole universe is energy, and you are fundamentally energy yourself.

It’s a cheerful idea that’s made its author a lot of money, which rather proves her point, except that the universe is made of energy and matter.

Meaning, if you want to have any effect on events in the physical world outside your mind, you’ll have to get up off your arse and do something about it. Write a best-selling pseudoscience book, for instance.

But it’s no secret that the world inside our minds is where we really live, so the way

Scientific diagram. Image credit: Erich Stauffer

we think is critical to our quality of life. And if we reframe the ‘law of attraction’ slightly, it does hold true, kind of.

Not so much that angry people attract events to themselves that will make them angrier (with the ‘frequencies’ they’re giving off). Just, whatever event occurs will make them angrier, no matter what it is. Or as my father used to say, “even if it was good you wouldn’t like it.”

And naturally if you’re of a happy disposition, you’re more likely to look at developments – whatever they may be – through a lens of positivity. You Pollyanna, you. Frequencies though? Do your thoughts give off energy that influences objects and events around you? Let’s see you bend that spoon.

This week Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur and multi-planetarian, advised that we are unlikely to be living in, like, actual reality. For real. Statistically speaking it’s way

Image credit: Zephyr76

more likely that you and I are merely avatars in a complicated virtual reality game, which makes sense if you consider how much we all live in our heads these days. What better than a game that you can play sitting in a chair, plugged in to a gadget, where instead of say, rambling the virtual world having wild adventures and brandishing medieval weaponry, your character is just sitting in a virtual chair, plugged into a virtual gadget, &c.

I guess it’s no more or less a waste of time than dreaming you're a butterfly.

This week too researchers found that the universe is expanding rather faster than expected, indicating that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Rhonda Byrne's philosophy. Though it fits in nicely with the ancient Hindu belief that the universe itself is only the dream of a god, and we live inside an endless cycle of the death and rebirth of our world, as the god dreams, and wakes, and dreams again.

Meantime I long since wrote my own self-help book, which is an easy read for any god or avatar, the size of a matchbox and only three pages long. Obviously I could make a fortune, which really would be helping myself, in the grand American tradition. But in the interests of attracting more kindness, compassion and generosity into my own life, here you go – it’s a gift. My Guide to Life.

Image credit: Ike no Taiga

Unemployed? Get a job. 

Feeling sick? See a doctor.

Always tired? Go to bed.

Sweet dreams.