Taxing Times for Families

Up to a million families each stand to lose an average of £511 a year under tax and benefit changes, according to research.

Anti-poverty campaigners dubbed the start of the financial year Bad Friday, warning cuts totalling more than £2bn were taking effect over the Easter weekend.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said the impact calculated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS (SES: E1:I49.SI - news) ) was proof of a "tax credits bombshell" with up to a million households losing eligibility entirely. Mr Balls said the IFS figures revealed a "bombshell".

More than 850,000 families stood to lose their child tax credit - worth around £545 per year - from the start of the financial year.

Child Poverty Action Group chief executive Alison Garnham said: "Some of the poorest working families will lose thousands of pounds from their annual income, leaving them in a desperate struggle to pay for basics like groceries, clothes and household bills."

This sounds slightly out of step with the Coalition's "we aim to be the most family-friendly nation on Earth" objective - which you can read on page 41 in the Conservative's 2010 manifesto here:

Make Britain the Most Family-Friendly Country in Europe

http://media.conservatives.s3.amazonaws.com/manifesto/cpmanifesto2010_lowres.pdf

The key phrases are here:

"We will make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe.

We will support families in the tax and benefits system, extend flexible working and improve parental leave.

We will help parents cope with the commercialisation of childhood and give families more control over their lives.

We will support and improve Sure Start, and introduce a new universal health visiting service.

We will give targeted help to disadvantaged and dysfunctional families".

While the Conservative's intentions are good, the reality is that the brakes are applied too fiercely on benefits, when a family member is lucky enough to secure a job. There will be a shortfall in the first 3 to 6 months where the adjusted economy takes effect.

I encountered one young woman, a single parent, at a village hall who had a monthly shortfall of £400. It is hard for me to believe that this woman's circumstances are that unique and aren't frequently repeated almost everywhere in Britain.

The economy of single people is critical, to put it mildly.

The Tories have previously, never given much thought to single parent families and single people's only acknowledgement that they are up against it is the single person's Council Tax discount.

Now they are even failing to give even their much preferred one man, one woman nuclear family a helping hand in these most difficult times.

Science the poetry of creation

“Why do you have to keep reducing everything to science?” asks Jackie Tyler of the Doctor in Doctor Who, Series 2 “Army Of Ghosts”. Jackie’s way of thinking about science has never occurred to me.

I’ve always viewed science as being a portal to a truly beautiful cosmos. However, Jackie’s view is not unique. To many people, scientists are not real people, they have no sense of humour, very few social skills and always wear white coats.

This could be a masked fear people have, not of science, but of the more terrifying aspects of cosmology. The supernova of a star, a massive explosion which often has a blast area of several light years reminds people that we are very fleeting beings and even our planet Earth, is a temporary home for us humans.

Poverty, famine and wars seem to be constant companions though aeons of time. Technology affords greater life spans. We have a burgeoning population of 80 to100 year olds but our financing of retirement pensions does not afford the greater number of people who are no longer working. There is little that young people in the 1960’s could have done to manage and provide for their old age now.

At first, when I listen to Gustav Holst’s The Planets “Saturn” I am reminded of Saturn, the bringer of old age. It sounds distressing at first, but the piece evolves into calm and serenity. It is at this point, that I view old age as being a chance to smell of that coffee we never got the same chance to, while we were working and raising families.

“Creation” means something a little different when you’re an Atheist.

Not a God created universe. No-one can explain now or before, (and they may probably never will), how the universe came into being. That flashpoint, in order to have an existence, must have straddled the boundaries of our physical universe and that point where time and space were yet to exist.

While I’m pondering that, I’m looking at clouds. Rather a lot to look at in an English winter. I’m struck how beautiful they are. They are only water vapour. Now why do I have to keep reducing things to science?

Oh…

The Coalition

I well remember people saying "why can't we have a coalition government?"

We were a bit niave in those days. A coalition government would be about parties all working together for the common good. And not about the Tories telling the Lib-Dems to get stuffed, after all.

In life, I've always noticed that it's a tiny minority of families on estates who bring down the reputation of the estate. This eclipsing of the decent majority has a lot to do with our media, hell bent on selling their newspapers, because for some reason, they judge us to be only interested in bad news.

School bullies are probably no more than about a dozen, out of a school roll of 1500. In the course of my union work, I've met a great deal of people who have been bullied at school. Again, bullies seem to be very far reaching, given their very small numbers.

I have always believed that politicians, (of whatever persusaion), go into politics because they believe that they can make changes for the better. I still believe that today.

I can't help but wonder how so many would be councillors or MP's feel when they have these great ambitions steamrollered by some pompous political grandee's desire to replace their ludicrously expensive bird table, have their moat cleaned, or supply their husband with a porn DVD courtesy of the tax payer.

So are these the same MP's who've frozen for 2 years public sector worker's pay* (who didn't cause the recession) and allowed bankers bosses (who DID cause the recession) to collect huge bonuses?

*(That's of course, except for the 425,000 public sector workers who will be losing their jobs).

Ah yes, we're getting a day off on Friday 29th April. The wedding!

Come on, it's not as though we're paying for it, is it?

Happiness

Our government wants to know if we’re happy.

This is refreshing news.

I can’t recall any previous government before asking us this question. Our governments seem to be permanently locked into a continuous battle of capital versus labour. Occasionally, they say they've seen a "third way" - but I notice that it's still all rates of mortgages, unemployment that figure in their election leaflets, defining their successes. So it's not suprising that we’re still left with the same old questions. We still have a society that bases itself on citizens being enriched by hard currency, alone and not being happy, after all.

“Are we happy?”

“Is being happy what we’re supposed to be here for?”

“Are we supposed to be happy?”

We, in the west, are pretty sold on the idea, that happiness isn’t about money. I’m not at all sure about that. As someone who’s never had much money, I can tell you that there is little happiness in being poor. I have been happy, in spite of being poor. If I suddenly became rich, I predict that I would use money to free myself and those who I love, from the stress and worry that goes with not having enough money to pay the bills.

We babyboomers were not poor in a sense that our parent’s generation understood. Being poor, these days, is often a very relative state. Our parents did not have enough money to buy enough food. Actually, pretty well all parents in those days were poor. Our generation feels deprived when we can’t send our kids to school in the same trainers. So we’re aware of a bigger rich/poor gap. The pain we feel is not because we don’t have the same, it’s because we are made to feel excluded because we’re told we have failed to have the same.

If our society were more “poor-friendly” we would feel no pain about not having the same material wealth and things as our richer peers. We would simply be living different lives and we wouldn’t be feeling that our lives were somehow “inferior” just because we were poor.

Being a socialist, I am much more inclined to believe that if we were brave enough to try for a much more equal society, not only poorer people would be happier, but rich people would be too. Poor families can often be very creative when it comes to being happy. An evening with a box full of clothes, where people can dress up as a pirate or a policeman can be sometimes surprisingly wonderful. We are truly playing.

That's not to say that I wouldn’t turn my nose up at the latest Nintendo Wii, Playsation or X-Box, but neither would I turn my nose up at the box full of pirate costumes either. Or a game of "shove ha'penny".

Consider these quotes about happiness:

“Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.”

Groucho Marx

“The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.”

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The surprising thing is that each of those quotes could’ve been written by the other author. And yet, how differently we view Groucho Marx from Tenzin Gyatso the,14th Dalai Lama. We appear to be very much in unison about what happiness really is.

I can bear this wisdom out personally.

"Have no friends not equal to yourself."

Confucious (551 - 497 BC) Chinese philosopher.

Nothing is more miserable than when you don’t feel equal to someone who you’re trying to be friends with.

My life has been very varied. I have probably done it all, compared to a lot of folk. I have been married, and now, I am single again. My single life is not spent in miserable isolation, which is what many people have wondered about, when I tell them about my singleness. Perhaps I am happy being single and living alone, with no intention to become part of a couple again, precisely because I have had experience of being married. I have, like my mother, spent most of my life, living a life where I am often alone, so emotionally, that I am used to it and now have the emotional intelligence to actually relish my aloneness.

As an atheist, my idea of happiness is not seeing this life as a prelude to a better life to come. Suppose there isn't one? Wouldn't we feel cheated about.... Oh, I suppose we wouldn't know whether or not we had lived our lives not in a way that we could have chosen, had we known what would be in store for us, if you see what I mean?

A terminally ill patient usually lives life to the full. Somehow a mental, emotional focus, that eludes many of us, takes over. They do say live your day as though it were your last, don't they?

Aloneness is not interchangeable with unhappiness. It’s simply a different way of living. I found that out from a friend who is truly inspiring on lone living at its best. She packs her art, her love of creating it, learning all about history and making it her business to know about the fascinating city she lives in. Learning and the excitement you feel as it evolves you, really rocks her world. You could say that she is living life to the full, as though it were her last day.

Happiness is universal. The pathways to it are myriad. Mine is music, writing and astronomy. One never really knows why we are here. Created, evolved, sent here, who knows? It's a fair bet that while we are here, the pursuit of happiness is probably a pretty damn good shot at guessing the right reason as to why we're here. And even if that's the correct reason, well, who cares?

The government may well define happiness in a completely different way to me. So now, if the government really are serious about wanting to know whether I'm happy, what do I put on the flippin' form?

Writing

Yes, writing.
I seem to spend most of my waking hours writing something. It’s one of those magical pursuits where you can dream up a story, taking place 210 light years from Earth, in a different time and under two suns instead of one. Err.... not too much detail... you’ll have to buy the rest!

If I ever finish the thing!

On the other hand, my story could be just down the road, a few minutes walk from the Post Office, or the Co-op. It could be fiction, or fact. Writing about people, places and events is always interesting. I was sitting in a car, just resting, from a hard day’s work, waiting to go into Tesco’s supermarket. I thought of a story about the car parking space I was in; the lives it had seen, the life I was leading at that time. My story would follow the lives, events, the heartaches and the joys of the people who use that car park space.

Writers have a hard time getting life into their books. Every now and then, a writer conveys that spirit of life into their story. You can put yourself into their space, their place and feel their wonder, their fear, their incredulity of the fantastic things that happen to them, as well as the mundane, the everyday things. These things are just as amazing, and just as hard to do well, when I set them down before my reader.

Sometimes, it’s not just one story, but the other that follows it that enhances the whole experience. I’m talking about Doctor Who, the new series, series 2. I’d just seen “The Girl in the Fireplace” set in pre-Revolutionary Versailles. An alien race from the 50th century was stalking a young woman in the 18th. Although very sci-fi, the story belonged firmly to the 18th century.
The Doctor, Rose and Mickey, left 18th century Versailles and materialised on a parallel Earth, in a parallel modern England and met parallel versions of themselves and their families. At their new destination they were also facing an old enemy in “The Rise of the Cybermen”.

I was very conscious of the story it had followed, and I think it was a very powerful illustration of how incredible the Doctor and his TARDIS is. It was sheer brilliance to follow the “The Girl in the Fireplace” with “The Rise of the Cybermen”. It showed how amazing travelling though space and time is, let alone falling out of our universe altogether and ending up in a parallel one.

Like many rookie writers, I suspect, we are like the stereotypical American tourist, who is, in my opinion, is very culturally honest when he says, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like!” As though we are supposed to have read all the classics, all the great works of literature. If I read all that I’ve been told I am supposed to have read, as my literary ballast, I would have live as long as Doctor Who!

Learning all of the devices, like where to end the narrative and let the dialogue do the story telling is a skill worth knowing. Omission, where you allow your reader to imagine for them, is a very powerful technique and a holy grail for the writer. There’s a parallel in art, where you leave white space, which adds dimension to what you’re drawing, or painting. I read a review from last Saturday’s Guardian of an eclectic band of writers who give advice to the aspiring writer.

Some of it appears contradictory and yet taken together, it, nevertheless, makes sense. A bit like that last sentence! I’ve heard of stream of consciousness, studious outlining and then drafting before committing to the main road writing. I get the idea that there are, after all, as many different approaches as there are writers. This would appear to lead one to assume that there is no right or wrong way. Just a way as individual as you are.

There is some wonderful core stuff the writers all seem to agree on. Make a space for your writing; Physical space being a kitchen table, a desk, preferably in a private, quiet study. I have a desk listening to music from KCRW an eclectic radio station that streams from Santa Monica College, before it streams over the Internet to me. So I hope that’s a recommendation.

Mental space, or schedule space. Do your writing at specific times. It should be inked in, (as opposed to pencilled in, which you can rub out!) After all, wouldn’t your writing evening class be inked in?

The other thing is to do the writing.

It is amazing how many of us tell people of our writing. And yet, the finished product is less grand than our enthusiasm. When I’m not doing the writing, it does seem to be something you seem to want to put off. This makes you conclude that you can’t be much of a writer and you lack that vital dedication. This might be true. If you’re like me, you’ll find that perhaps it’s the daily routine that detunes you as a writer. Usually when you write regularly, you find you can re-tune back quicker and you can enjoy it quicker, even though it is very, very hard work indeed.

My enthusiasm is very genuine, otherwise, I guess, I wouldn’t be able to write. What I do lack is a solid grasp of project management, which plagues many writers, I am certain. Effective project management seems to go against the grain with our artistic and creative natures.

Why? Is it real? Or is it something we tell ourselves?

I can’t do recipes. Never have, never will. Instead, I learned some very rudimentary ideas about ingredient combinations, (usually based on my being reluctant to visit the supermarket!) I’ve developed an instinct about food. I learned one day, I was doing “art” with food. This empowered me to try other things with food and it occurred to me that I could transpose this to letters and paints too. The “storehouse” idea, where you store your ingredients for your writing, crops up quite a few times. So yes, those books on writing were right after all!

While I’m writing this, I am not finishing the story I’ve started. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not I’ve learned from my experiences, or my mistakes!

Happy writing!