Self Directed Payments Benefits and You

If through no fault of your own you find yourself in receipt of government welfare benefits, you'll very likely have developed an open-hand and open-mouthed attitude regarding the money you get. As a bird in the family nest you'll have begun your life by learning to open your beak and squawking loudly until your parents dropped food into it. To start with, they'd have done it because they felt compassion for your helpless plight, but as things progressed they'd have fed you, more to shut you up than anything. And as you opened your eyes and moved around your nest, you'd have elbow-winged your way ahead of your siblings to get to the front first, to squawk the loudest and open your beak the widest, in order to get as much as you can.

And if you're in the United Kingdom you may end up on one of the many disability-related benefits to make sure you didn't starve through inability to stretch your hand. For a long time, if you didn't get better, you'd have stayed there. And stayed and stayed and stayed, growing more stately than an overgrown cabbage in an open society which is nonetheless an institutional cabbage patch but with invisible walls and wardens and with locks and keys removed. But remember: Your progression from oversized flightless bird to woody vegetable was not sudden. As you rooted into your virtual institution, you became set in your ways; yet as your once mobile arms ossified and your neck became less easy to turn, your jaw and mouth would have remained fully mobile. In one way or another, food and caring services would have arrived for you.

Don't Turn into an Ent

Sometimes this would have been great, but on occasions you may not have liked the food and something about the caring would have seemed off-kilter, may not not have been liked, or even uncomfortable and things may have been a little painful for you. Worst of all, you may have found that you'd been pushed headlong into that nightmare of scenes — the personality clash. You simply could not stand the person who had been assigned to you, and very likely the feeling would be mutual. What they did for you would have been carried out grudgingly and with a bad grace. You'd have been left feeling helpless and tense. You'd have been asked to sign your helper's time sheet and she'd have left 15 minutes earlier than stated. You'd have signed, of course. It would have been worse for you if you hadn't.

Yet remember that you were left with a moving mouth and open jaw. You first were able to squawk, but you ended up able to speak. At some point you may have moaned and groaned about your lot, and when it came to money you'd have doubtless remonstrated at how it was being spent. "Well if I was put in charge of the way it's spent I certainly wouldn't use it like this" "I'd do this" "I'd do that" "I'd do any number of things".

Now then listen up. If you really know what you want to the line of receiving care services, and you can keep records (and keep up with keeping them) there is a chance that you may end up being able to do just that. Every county in the UK has its own method of achieving this, and some no doubt will be better funded than others. In the area where I live, Cambridgeshire East Anglia, Self-Directed Payments just might accomodate your needs and put you in charge of who you're going to have, and how and when it will be done.

Every case is different, so there is no way of being able to describe the overall process. All I can do is explain what happened with me.

It was suggested to me on the 29th April that there was something which may be of more interest to me than the Royal Wedding. A spider I'd just seen on a bunch of bananas purchased was disappearing into a dark crevice in the hand of fruits. Already I was more interested, and as I listened to my storyteller's narrative I found my interest had waxed to a tantalizing degree. I wanted to get on the phone straight away, but the people on the end of the Social Services line were going ga-ga over a Royal Kiss, and I wondered if their mood of sheer gullibility would last until Tuesday when the country returned from holiday.

This is briefly what happened to me and may well happen to you:

You'll call up, and after speaking to their friendly receptionist your brief details will be taken, and you'll be told that you'll get a call-back. Nothing will happen, and will continue to happen for quite a while. Ten to 15 days later you'll call again and remind them you're still there and again they'll offer to call you back. Another week, and you'll be calling to remind them again, only to be told "That's three times you've called us now. You won't get seen any quicker if you keep calling." You bite back your impulse to ask them what their definition of "keep calling" is and resign yourself to another wait. Nonetheless, you may well get a phone call that very afternoon from a lady (Let's call her Mesq'ita) who'll ask if you're up to a 45-minute interview over the phone and you agree.

Agree by all means, but have some water and an energy bar at hand to nibble. You'll need it, for Mesq'ita will then morph into a hybrid between Jack Russel and a Snapping Turtle. Her questions about your needs will snarl and snip. You'll have to to think fast and think deft. You may be tempted to play with some of her words and bundle them back at her in a slugging volleyball, but you'll find Mesq'ita's totally lacking in humour, and your tarball of sticky adjectives will be vapourised by her solvent-busting adverbial snaps.

Left defenceless for a moment, Mesq'ita cuts right in at me with a slick razor-thrust, and I am wounded. Without sufficient time to recover from her carbon tetrachloride squirt, I can only croak a reply that my head is spinning for a second and could I please be granted a moment's recovery time. "Do you fatigue easily?" was Mesq'ita's rejoinder here. I wondered if there was any young male in the land who could come through her fusillade unscathed and unfatigued, but I answered yes, by which time my breaths were coming in gasps, the room was spinning and hypoxia set in. Barney took over the phone, ¡bless him! and soon those two were snapping and hissing at one another down the line. Not long after that he finished, telling me that she would return if need be.

2nd Column Shows refusal

The following morning the phone went again. It was taken by Barney who said, "One moment, I'll see if he's available. Who shall I say is calling, please?" whispering "It's someone called Mesq'ita and she'd like a word with you". My body went stiff into rigid spasm again and I lay myself on the verbal altar, waiting for her to finish me off, but to my astonishment the claws were fully retracted and she spoke to me now in velveteen tones, licking my scars and asking me how I was doing. She added that the last thing she wanted was to cause me stress, and gave me time to get my breath back between questions. Quick, quick slow, ask ask... wait. Jab jab... stroke.

2nd Column = Refusal

I remember being arrested once. One cop jabbed and quizzed me with his probing words, then another one came in all offering me fags and slapping my back and telling me what a bastard the other guy was. Now we're in a recession. Who can afford the luxury of paying a Good Cop and also a Bad One? Double 'em up and roll them into one. Just have Mesq'ita, but give her a different hat. Have your own hats on too, practise your quick changes and with a fair wind, and truth to back you up, you may win your with your written plan and enter into a contract with your local government.

Guilt

Guilt is mainly on my mind
a) That I haven't kept up with Diaspora
b) That I have left undone those things that I ought to have done
c) That I have done those things that I ought not to have done.
d) That I love doing things I didn't ought to be doing.
e) That I think I don't love the things I ought to be doing.
f) That I end up loving the things I ought to be doing anyway.
g) That I ever thought I wouldn't love the things I end up loving
h) That I determined never again to tell myself I didn't want to do the
things I thought I'd hate
i) That I didn't complete the job I should have completed three days
ago and ended up writing this instead.

The Surprise Prize

I was sittin' in me old winged armchair this morning, grumbling about the weather and the price of postage stamps and feeling a sneaky suspicion that I'd turned into an old grandpa somewhere along the line, when one of the boys sauntered in with a parcel, saying “Looks like your shower gel”. After giving it a good old rattle Barney added that it “feels like you’ve got about six bottles of it here. We told you not to order *that* batch! S’pose we’re all gonna run round the village ponging of ‘Lynx Aluminium’ now!”

I mumbled to put it on one side and said we’d stow it all away later before I went back to the mysteries of why my scanner wasn’t working with 64-bit architecture. I’m someone who hates geeks and geeky things when the current project drifts into realms I don’t understand, but once things have fallen into place and pennies have begun to drop, I admit to being quietly impressed, wondering why people don’t take a little more trouble to understand the mysteries of their black boxes.

That box of 6 shower gels, ordered in a moment of hypoxic haze, annoyed me by not being tidied away and I asked Barney to unpack it and stow it away as it looked as if we might be in for a storm. His sentence began with a whinge, but half-way through opening the package his tone changed to wonder. He said that the parcel appeared to be somewhat different. Unexpected and unexplained.

It was all in a "Whiskas" box which had presumably held an assortment of delicate meals for Puss, he said, adding that on the inner cardboard sleeve someone had written “Old People's Breakfasts”. So I decided that the solution was clear: An old people's home had stocked up on shower gel, and the new Health and Safety Rules had banned the old timers from using it in case they slipped. I speculated that tubs of Fullers Earth had been ordered instead and now the old folks could take dust baths along with their cats. Both cats and old ladies would be far cleaner than with shower gel, anyway.

My excuses and implausible explanations quickly run out as the contents of the box began to seed out like a tombola onto our ample table:

Lots of small parcels spewed out of the box, each individually wrapped in pink tissue paper. There was a sugar mouse with a string tail such as I hadn't seen since the days of Christmas stockings, sweets, shells, a plastic rattle, a stick of rock, a bubble-blower, little pot of sand, a clay pipe and last but not least, a yellow clammy slug. I think you're supposed to eat it!

The boys whooped and laughed like little kids — and everybody was completely baffled.
Which is where we leave the tale. A packet of Bulls' Eyes was included in the mix and they're so good, we're going to suck our way through those first, and then try to find out who sent them.

It Ran Out of Steam!

Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don’t like stories where ladies go out to a disco for a good time “dancing in that red dress until I caught the eye of someone, anyone, and best of all finding some dark corner of the club and being fucked against a wall” and I like it even less when it’s from ladies who are personnel officers. Sluts who give interviews and hand out important jobs are certainly not by cup of tea. Indeed had I known that there was going to be an abundance of this type of language in the book, I simply wouldn’t have bought it.

However I’d bought it for a song, and whereas some people don’t mind throwing things away which they don’t use, I am not of that ilk. Neither was I going to waste my precious breath complaining to Amazon until they relented to give me my 99p back.

The story opens with a court scene with the two major players, the accused Lee Brightman and the – alleged – victim Cathy Bailey (really! couldn’t the author have picked another surname?). The dialogue doesn’t pick up very well on the Kindle so we see:

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MACLEAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

BRIGHTMAN---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MACLEAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

MR ---------------------------------------------------------------------

BRIGHTMAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

with the dotted lines being the dialogue. Took a while untangling the skein there. Not a good start at all, so combined with my opening paragraph, which runs on with little if any separation, so it can be tricky seeing who’s saying what. And what is being said is pretty boring.

Nonetheless there were a few things which began to intrigue me slightly: Cathy can only go shopping on even days. She has to check the locks on all her apertures when leaving the flat, starting with the outer window and ending with the front door, and in the right order too. This twanged deep sympathy notes within me from my own past and furthermore when coupled with the realisation that Cathy was entering into an abusive relationship with Mr Brightman, chords in the minor key vibrated inside me, and I was siding with our heroine, desperately hoping she wouldn’t come to too much harm ~ even if she remained a committed two-dimensional character throughout the narrative.

As everything boiled up to a seething climax I sided with Cathy, urging her on to biff, bonk and humiliate and torture the nasty man with everything she’d got. I was jumping up and down clenching my little fists and cheering at the end as loudly as if Tottenham Hotspur had just scored a goal when, all off a sudden:

The tale ended.

We were 91% of the way through the book. The tale had ended. This is the bit where the audience rises and walks out of the cinema, with 9% of the film left to run. I don’t. I have to remain in the cinema until the last credit has been shown, the projecting equipment switched off and the lights have come back on. So I read and read and read, wading through the incredibly dreary bits. The new lover-boy, Stuart, is a one-dimensional being. He is quite attractive for me, but only because “he smells of hospitals”.

The dreary dialogue ends with yet another terribly-formatted court room scene, and after all that an incredibly boring spiel from the authoress relating what gave her the idea, and how she had started to form and draft the book.

Ms Haynes works for the Police Force, as I understand it. If she attends to her work with the same care she writes her novels, I’d begin to get a little concerned if she were to be in charge of my patch.


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The Hyperglycæmic Birthday Cake

The Christmas Throwaway by R.J. Scott

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I was in two minds whether I'd ever admit to anybody that I'd gone and bought this book. It would be giving in to teenage crushes, which have never really left me. An incurable romantic, I'd just ventured out into the big brave world of futuristic cyberpunk*. Reading this story of futuristic techno macho men (and even more macho women), I'd swum in the rough-and-tumble of waters I hate and found that, despite myself, I'd been shaken, bounced and depressed, sent on a bad acid trip and rattled to the bones. Yet not entirely put off, for the author had pampered me with my favourite chemical tipple: 10 ml of Brompton Cocktail† and I fancied I saw light at the end of the tunnel, for I really loved the hero by this time and looked forward to the time when I'd become strong enough to read the next volume in the series.

But shame on me! This review isn't about the young Richard Morgan and his creations, the spotlight has to be on Mr (?Mrs ?Miss ?Ms) RJ Scott, the author of an 'unwanted present in the toecap of an Xmas stocking' (the book under review). The reason I bought it was I wanted a delicious and indulgent dessert after my wickedly spicy first course of Altered Carbon as I felt I needed pampering, pleasuring, massaging and being touched up in the nice as well as the naughty places, because I had fallen out of my wheelchair when I was ten years old and been picked up (before hitting the ground) by a policeman in shiny uniform and lovely gleaming buttons and things. He'd held me tightly and affectionately, implanting a fetish within my psyche which had embedded itself into the genetic make-up of my being, imbuing me with a delightful malady which I've no intention of attempting to cure. So imagine that the clock had wound its way on so that I was a teenager again and the wheelchair had been replaced by a park bench and I was sleeping rough on it and been woken by a dashing 24 year-old copper who asked me to move on.

This copper, Ben, feels all protective and things towards this shivering chilled waif (whilst the seeds of desire swell) and the waif has a big chip on his shoulder which he wants to remove by throwing it at the copper; however once he's thawed out in the copper's mother's house, he discards the chip in favour of Mum's Christmas baking and bon-femmie. Warmed by the moisture of the homely grub, his own hormone-enriched seeds begin to swell and sprout and he starts to fancy Ben's pants and uniform, as long as he keeps them on.

Meanwhile, the dashing policeman develops the hots for the lad, especial if he can get his pants are off. Well the boy's 17, but with his 18th birthday at the stroke of midnight on December 27th, both parties can just about manage to hold their love-tanks in reserve until that date. What's more, they show admirable self-control, merely cuddling on the sofa at 11 pm on the night of the 26th and are so enwrapt snoozing and snogging that they don't open the release valve of their mutual passions at the stroke of midnight: they wait a whole two hours more before they have their wicked way with one another.

And that... is that. The cake looked lovely while it was on the stand in the shop, but it was altogether too sickly-sweet. My worry now is what I'm going to read for my dessert to Broken Angels‡ after reading it. I'd had the vague plan of taking it to the bathroom with me to flagellate the bishop over the Christmas Throwaway story, but the occasion just didn't rise to it. The one who was thumped was me, on the back by my friend when I choked on apple. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I wasn't even in the right fairy tale.

* Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
† Brompton Cocktail: Interpret according to your proclivities.
‡ Broken Angels will be the second book in the Trilogy which began with Altered Carbon



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James Bond on Empathic Methedrine

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Typing limitations urge me to try reviewing this in Q/A format:

Did it linger or stay in Mind?
Did You Dream About It?
Very much so.

Did it have "Got-to-Get-Backness?"
I used every spare moment I had to switch on my Kindle, even to the extent of letting friends decide which food I'd probably like to eat.

Did it Tweak Deep Past Memories?
Yes. Ancient composted memories stirred up their fine tilth.

Did it have "I-don't-want-it-to-End"-ability?
Yes, I wished it wouldn't.

Glad you read it?
Definitely.

Did it go "soggy" in the middle?
A little bit. I rushed through the Innenin and italicized Jimmy de Soto bits, feeling it was stronger without them.

Did you get lost in it?
Indeed I did.

Would I want to read another one of his?
Definitely, but not yet.

If it was an eBook, was it it well formatted? Were there chapter divisions?
Well formatted, well indexed and only a few typos.

Was it swamped by/did it swamp another book & if so which one?
Yes, it squished The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which was beginning to irk me. I've been to University and got Eng Lit Degree and all that jazz too. It was a bit like know-all students playing literary consequences. I look forward to returning to it, however.

Anything Else?
I hate tough-guy macho violent books, preferring gentler, deeper strings of my harp to be played, so I was surprised when I found myself being magnetised by it despite myself. Takeshi Kovacs [hero], you're a tough brutal thug, but I can see your thinking and I sense that there's something loving buried deep inside you. You'd never admit it, of course.

Now, Richard Morgan, please let me clear you out of my head for a month or so while I look for something Completely Different.



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The Frozen Sky ~ Needs Thawing and Proper Cooking

The Frozen Sky by Jeff Carlson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book sparked a lot of interest for me. Apparently, Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, has the potential for supporting Life, particularly in the light thrown by the discovery that tube worms and various clams can and do thrive in deep oceanic geothermal vents. In the story, this is a given and I was heartened to find that our heroine Vonnie is spurred on by ecology and outreaching rather than pulling out your laser and blasting everything that moves (although as I recall, there is some blasting and splatting as well). I also liked it that I could dredge up my schoolboy memories of chemistry, and go out on the net and investigate and find out fascinating details such as the poisonous hydrogen sulphide (bad egg gas) being a potential 'messenger molecule' between brain cells and elsewhere in the body. All in all, a fascinating bundle of things for me to go out and investigate and learn from.

And that strength was for me the inherent weakness of the 'book': although I thoroughly enjoyed my explorations, I had to remind myself that this was a 'novel' and not a research project given to me by my biochemistry master. If it had been that, I'd have grasped the project with aplomb, gophered some essential data, showed him the draft of draft of my 'story' and waited to see what Sir thought. If Sir had given me a pat on the back and told me it was a splendid start, but please flesh out the story more (if I intended to lengthen it) and to cut out some of the clutter (if I was going to keep it short) I'd have been heartened and begin to make my plans.

However, this is quite dreadful as it stands. It was a "fascinating bundle of things for me to go out and investigate" indeed, but I had to go out and do the investigating which I loved doing, but I was reading it on my Kindle, and can press buttons and things which go out and investigate for me. But supposing I hadn't got a Kindle or a good net connection?. What then? I would be well and truly stumped, stymied, painted and snookered into my corner! My dinner was supposed to be presented to me on a plate. Admittedly it was tasty chicken drum-sticks on the bone, but they weren't even thoroughly cooked. I had to finish them off in the oven myself and go to find tissues I could clean my fingers with!


More can be read on the Jupiter Project which is purported to be happening in 2020.

On the Europa Jupiter System Mission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Jupi...



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