Halloween II

Yet another reason to move to France

Halloween

Finally, all the ghoul masks that have greeted me as I walked into Tesco over the last month will be gone. All we need is one evening of not answering the door, praying that nobody throws things at the house or keys the car, and it will be over for another year. I see that BBC magazine have picked up on Halloween Choice - maybe next year consumer pressure might give us a few more alternatives, though I'm sure that the juggernaut of rising sales (a tenfold increase in the last five years) will continue to push endless Hannibal Lecter masks and bottles of fake blood in our faces. The younger children will go to the Bright and Beautiful Party at church; maybe later we can turn the lights off and catch up on Spooks and Torchwood.

Choice

Walking past Burger King in town today, I noticed that their current slogan is "Have it your way" (an article on that here - including interesting reading on targeted advertising for BK's demographic; "more important to be provocative than pleasant"). This reminded me of an ongoing conversation with Nick over choice, sparked by me reading Rowan William's "Lost Icons", which discusses the importance given to choice in this culture from a psychoanalytic perspective. As far as I understood it, the argument was that in analysis the analyst stands in for the "unattainable Other", the ideal that we measure ourselves against or wish to become. The Other must always be unattainable, or else there is no desire, no process of becoming, no development (personally or socially). The task of the analyst is to avoid becoming the Other, to resist the urge to satisfy the analysand's needs, and in the transference relationship to enable the analysand to engage with the process of growth through frustration.

Walking past Burger King, I was reminded again how dangerous a culture is that minimises or removes frustration. Rowan Williams suggests that sexualised or violent behaviour is a result of the loss of identity caused by the absence of the Other; I'm sure that there's a good argument for the idea that when there is no frustration of needs to promote my growth as a person, I'm more likely to engage in behaviour that both connects me with another person and which objectifies them, which establishes them as "not-me", something compared with which I can know myself. There's probably a good link here too with racist and xenophobic behaviour. I wonder if a society that promises choices - of goods, lifestyles, bodies - to its members is also inevitably going to be a society that demonises outsiders, such as asylum seekers and those judged to be sufficiently different to be classed as "not-us".

I'm not sure how this fits with the fact that choice is an illusion for many in this culture; that a consumer society promises more than it delivers. Perhaps it is the illusion that's important here; the quaintly old-fashioned notion of "knowing your place" is distasteful to those who believe that everyone can make it to the top, but when the truth is that only a few make it to the top, the many are fed on celebrity gossip dreams, identifying on first-name terms with "ordinary" people who have made it big. When "knowing your place" meant having a realistic assessment of the world and your place in it, frustration, recognition of the unattainableness of the Other, was a key to genuine growth. When everyone believes that they should have whatever they want, and frustration is replaced with over-identification with (fallible, ordinary, destroyable) celebrities, there is nowhere to go to seek the unattainable other except in violence and xenophobia.

I'll try and post more thoughts on this, especially how it fits with my current understanding of the Kingdom of God, sometime soon.

Back from the quiz

with a creditable score of 53 and second place. Though at least part of that due to John coming and helping us with the sheet of faces; I'm sure none of us would recognise Sir Geoff Hurst. I didn't even manage to get Rachel Weisz, or to remember that The Agony And The Ecstasy was about Michelangelo and Lust For Life was about Van Gogh. Never mind. Bedtime now I think, since I have to get up in time to iron school shirts. I'll see if I can manage another chapter of the current library book, Ideas: a history from fire to Freud, which is fascinating but heavy in every sense - though it's very readable it deluges you with information, and the hardback edition could be used for weight training if you didn't have a medicine ball handy.

Short of time, as always

Sunday evening, just about to go out to the quiz at the Fox and Hounds, and yet again I'm trying to write a blog post about what we've been doing but feel like all I have time for is a sentence saying I can't write much because I've not got time.

We had a good couple of days at my Mum and Dad's, would like to have stayed a bit longer. Went over to Leicester to see my Nanna, still doing pretty well for 98. Went out for a walk at Bradgate Park - nice but slightly strange to see the children enjoying themselves climbing the same trees and rocks I used to climb.

First post

So here we are. The start of another blog, taking up where my last blog left off... or rather, taking up a little while after my last blog petered off. I've moved from Tagworld because of consistent problems with being able to access my page, and also because one of the disadvantages of a social networking site is the stream of vacuous friendship requests, usually from bands looking to build a fan base. All I really want is a place to post thoughts, ideas and updates on my life, plus a few pictures from time to time, so let's see what Blogger can do...