Something’s gotta give: the Baroque 10-step plan for 2012

Love this. Get the mustard roll-necks.

Last year I wrote a rather hard-hitting – well, I thought it was hard-hitting, but in retrospect it’s rather sweet – welcome to the new year post. I was already feeling weary from the recession, and all the unemployment and job-changing, and living off my life savings, and personal upheavals, and wondering where the future was going, but striving as ever  for a positive forward approach. I wrote:

Maybe the thing to do is to embrace the new code, which is cracked and has no fixed meaning. Yet. We know we’re in the throes of something, and each of us is far smaller than it is. Each of us on our own feels powerless at the moment. But the thing to do has to be to embrace that, as the saying goes. In a year nothing will be the same as it is now. Maybe the thing to do is to decide that in a year nothing will be the same as it is now. Meet it head-on, charge into the changes, aim for the epicentre. Treat 2011 as a game of chess, and l/l/ll as the moment after your opponent has made the first move. I think the time to roll with the punches has gone; it’s now time to take the bull by the horns. Here they are: l l.

I’ve heard a lot of people say things like, ’2012 is my “year of austerity”,’ and I know several who are undergoing painful restructurings right this minute. One couple, drugs workers, are working together in a team of six which is going to shrink to two.  And let the addicts eat cake. (Chris Morris shows you how, here.)

‘Austerity’ is the easy bit. You ditch the non-essentials, micro-manage the direct debits, downgrade your TV package, get rid of the cleaner, make sure you’re not overpaying your utilities (fat chance), stop your charity payments, wear your old clothes, recycle handbags, do without new shoes, mend everything, cook with dried beans and cheap basmati from the Turkish shop, do your own nails, do your own colour, leave it four months for a haircut, cancel memberships, stop going to the theatre, exhibitions, movies, restaurants, go without holidays, don’t buy things for the house, use eBay instead of shops, improvise when things break. It’s amazing what you’ll find you have in a cupboard.

And then what?

Well, we just had a great Christmas. There were very few presents. I bought one roll of wrapping paper, and no ribbon. No cards. No candles – we used the tea lights we had in the house. And we LOVED it. We had a magnificent ham, bought half-price in November and frozen, and a big chicken for less than half the price of an equivalent-sized turkey (which in turn subsidised a bottle of rum, for egg nog). So that’s austerity cracked, for the moment. (After all, something’s gotta give…)

But, en garde! Who knows what the fates have in store
from their vast, mysterious sky?*

But everyone’s afraid. We all are. Battening down hatches, and shutting a lot of the good stuff out in the process.

Click this link

Time to warm the old implacable heart, I think. So here it is:

The Baroque in Hackney/Johnny Mercer 10-step plan for a better 2012

1. Money
This remains number one, and is the absolute inescapable prerequisite to continuing to have a place to live. Leave no stone unturned, though I can’t help an unhelpful little proviso about trying to make sure it’s a stone you don’t mind seeing what’s under it. I think this is in keeping with Numbers 3 and 4.

2. Paperwork
This is also about staying alive, as it covers taxes, which are a harbinger of death. (You can see that bureaucracy gives me headaches and panic attacks; I’m not sure why. It’s the Fear.)

‘Fight, fight, fight fight, fight it with all of your might…’

I’m putting the arsenal in place: folders, files, lists, calendars, software – for the headache, you know…

3. Olympics
Ignore them, Londoners – just ignore them! They are the cause of resentment, worry, and money-wasting in a time of austerity. They’re bad for the East End. But it’s done, it’s happening, they are an implacable force. Time to just live. (I have some friends who will walk from their house along the River Lea with their kids, and Go to the Olympics. This counts as Play.)

4. Play
My publisher, the wonderful Chris Hamilton-Emery, has recently been writing again and has a book coming out. He said recently that his poetry is more playful than it used to be. Playful! An anachronism, a ghost-sign, an echo from childhood, from the me-generation, a splinter from a time-travelling spaceship crashing inanely into the Stürm-und-Drang Millennium-trilogy end-of-civilisation apocalypse – the word just went BANG.

PLAYFUL! Yes. Experiment, have fun, don’t worry about the outcome. Join with other people and do something just to be together. Make things. Break them. Let go of consequences for a bit. (It will also help you to get WORK.)

5. Work
I mean, of course, writing. Like Johnny Mercer, Freud had a thing or two to say, and he said we only need two things. Love, and Work. I suppose this could even extend to ‘your work as a maid in a hotel’, to pick one example from the annals of 2011, but I take it to be more about personal work, the work you need to do to be yourself – your project,  your purpose in life. You need a purpose.

Dostoyevsky, for example, has to have been a nightmare. He wrote his greatest books in a period that included deaths of children, a terrible gambling addiction, destitution, disaster. He pawned his wife’s frying pan, and kept writing to get the publishers to pay him some money for gambling, while she tried to look after the remaining children in a hovel, without even a frying pan to beat him with. And that is why we have The Idiot. (But seriously, folks…)

I admit I’m getting a little sick and tired of the ego-preening all over Facebook, and the emails you get when editing something, and the memememe-aren’t-I-clever, and the blank expectant faces of people who only want you to make them great in some way. Buy my book! Tell me I’m a genius! I’m on the radio! When you’re struggling to get enough in to cover the rent, you don’t care so much about who won what and how so-&-so did in Edinburgh, or even whether you were on the radio…

But work is an irresistible force – like the Olympics – and it must be honoured, and this is what Dostoyevsky, that intolerable intellectual monomaniac, knew. It’s not just an ego-trip but a way to stay alive.

As he wrote in Crime and Punishment: ‘If you run after two hares you will catch neither’.

6. Look and listen
Silence. Stop talking. No, really. Stop posting. Stop commenting. Shut up. Just shaddupayouface.

As the mime replies when the blind beggar asks him why he’s out so late: “Looking.”

7. Lose weight
Not you, me. Yes, it matters.

8. Ditch the news
I’ve resolved to consume much less of it. Really. I just don’t want all that shit going in my head.

9. Occupy something
That is, fully inhabit it. Yourself, for a start. A position. Your space. And, keeping the geographical metaphor in place, remember that all space is shared space. Occupy it for the good of others.

10. Remember who’s important
As they say in workshops, turn to your left (or right)…

Kids. Esteemed other. Family. Friends. Old friends. We help each other be ourselves. Somehow, for free…

With all the struggle going on, we need to take time, listen, help, and make sure we make enough space for the people we care about – this makes space for them to make space for us, too. No one can do it alone. If Baroque Mansions felt the force of one lesson this Christmas, it was that.

10. In short, get off the setup and into the rhyme:

Chances are, some heavenly star-spangled night,
we’ll find out, as sure as we live,
Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give.

* There’s a little lesson in this line about metrics, but not for now…