Jeff's Post

Those who play us false are themselves false
Keith Lindsay-Cameron·Wednesday, 2 November 2016
In the early 1970's I returned to my home turf of the London Borough of Hillingdon (LBH) having spent a couple of years working for an outdoor adventure company, learning and eventually qualifying to be a canoeing instructor and river leader. Those two pivotal years were spent in the company of a mixed bag of raving lunatics who introduced me to my first rapid by filling my kayak with beer and telling me to get it down the rapid to our watering hole for the day without losing it by capsizing. 

I had not seen the rapid and from my kayak it appeared that the river disappeared past a line across the river into who knew what kind of maelstrom accompanied by a great deal of busy water noises and the tales of the savageness of what awaited me, all of which had reduced me to a bone melting state of terror. I had been warned to stay in the centre of the river at all costs. Bastards! A bathroom duck could have navigated that rapid and I learned that this was the standard introduction to Symonds Yat on the River Wye and to never overlook the chance of a good wind up.

Returning jobless to LBH I began working for the council on a tree gang. Our job was to fell all the Elms smitten with Dutch Elm disease in the north of the borough. I was young, I was fit and the money was great because we made damned sure we hit our bonus target every week. I enjoyed both jobs, the first setting me on a path I was to pursue for the rest of my working life, and the second working with a great team, earning good money in the great outdoors. The Tories would have been proud of our tree gang, we treated it as a fitness training camp and the work made us very fit and well indeed. But that was not the point.

The point was to earn money and when they cut our bonus time to impossible to reach targets all but two of the gang resigned for having the royal piss taken out of us, not unlike what the shower of charlatans currently in government are doing with their ridiculous rebranding of work as something essential to good health and peddling the 'value of work as a health outcome'. It never was and never will be, but, hey, as long as they keep saying it, people will believe it. Reality takes a back seat to a dialogue of meaningless gobbledegook from a government stealing the life out of our bones.