Where America treads Britain soon follows. The third world is getting closer to home.

BBC News – Panorama – America's homeless resort to tent cities

Panorama's Hilary Andersson meets some of America's most desperate families and finds that some are now being sent to live in tented encampments as a last resort.

Listening to the Medway Eyes compilation album ME3 all the way. A right mixed bag of some of Medway’s finest musicians and players.  A perfect treat for any aficionado of Medway music; a beautiful introduction to the musical talent of the towns for those that are unfamiliar. Click on the artwork and in just a couple more links you can download it for free. You could / should also donate what you can to Oxjam to show your appreciation. Promise you there’s nothing in the download to harm you or your poncuter.

Medway Eyes presents...ME3

1: Los Salvadores - Billy Ruffian
02: Maker - Soaked Up
03: Ben Jones - Hit and Run (Fait Accompli)
04: Dave Read – Lightbending
05: Brigadier Ambrose - Chatham Hill (Ranscombe Brass Demo Version)
06: Unlucky Fried Kitten - This Is England
07: Reg Varney Trio - Psycho Lust
08: Frau Pouch - Sexy Architecture (Sunlight session)
09: Crybaby Special and the Monsters - I Don’t Mind
10: Damsel - Monster
11: Falling Lucid - Blue Room Green Room

12: The Flowing – Lullabies
13: Stuart Turner and the Flat Earth Society - Holiday Song (edit)
14: Firstborn Heroes - Down And Out
15: The Galileo 7 - Ella (demo)
16: Billy Wears Dresses - Sittingbourne Annual Carnival Parade
17: Arcelia - Cupid
18: Upcdownc - Boneyard
19: The Ambience - Falsifier
20: Simon Bunyan – Death Of A Friend (demo)
21: Archie Wah Wahs - Hunchback
22: Tyrannosaurus Alan - The Officer Problem [explicit]
23: Baron Von Marlon - Several Pairs Of Socks
24: Wheels - Carlo Rossi
25: Glenn Barnes - Journey’s End
26: The Blissful Mop - Euphoria
27: The Love Family - A Foreign Country
28: Theatre Royal - Death On The River (Grace Bell session)
29: Bob Collins - Emily
30: Mr Bridger - Out For Tea
31: Groovy Uncle - Danger Zone (stereo mix)
32: James Doyle - Let’s Hear It For The Nice Guy
33: Thomas Turner Band - Nothing Left For Me
34: One Eleven Edmund - I Have Seen
35: Porlie Eidolon & Spindly Killers - You’re Still Mine
36: Reavsey - Wild Day In Whitstable
37: The Shagmonroes - Seafood
38: Houdini - Deadlines
39: Science Noodles - Dirty Streets
40: Z Stacks - Toffee Hammer
41: Kids Unique - Lab Conditions (Rubber Duck Dub Remix)
42: Wolfgang Riot - Five Bars Hotel
43: Lupen Crook - Tale Of An Everyman (acoustic) [explicit]
44: Tape Error - Home
45: Didi Bergman - Happy Song #1 (Sunlight Session)
46: Survivors Of Suki - Sing
47: The Singing Loins - House In The Woods

The quality and quantity of individuals' social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality.

This studies findings indicate that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.

How To Be Emotionally Stable Without Getting Bored
JAN. 20, 2012 By NICK COX

Start as someone who loves with above-average intensity. Fall so in love with people and with things that you forget to eat and sleep. Stay up all night reading a certain book or listening to a certain song or gazing into a certain person’s eyes or just pacing back and forth thinking about whatever it is you can’t stop thinking. Know what it’s like to lose all control over the operation of your mind. See abyssal profundity where others see only surface. Experience moments in which the whole universe seems to close in around you and your head feels like an astrolabe and you feel the entire concentric cosmos click together into one unified image of perfect beauty and harmony and all you want to do is hold it in your mind forever and fall down on your knees and worship it.

Start to see this image more and more frequently, often at inopportune moments. Feel its beauty morph slowly but inexorably into terror. Start looking for ways to drown it out; settle on booze and drugs and deafening music. Go to bed every night drunk enough to pass out immediately, but then wake at 5am, feel it bearing down upon you once again, press your face into your pillow, and weep with fear.

Slide into the dark period you knew was coming. Go for months feeling okay only when you’re asleep. Open your eyes every morning just in time to feel the okay-ness seep out of you like blood from a stab-wound. Stop checking your email because you know it will just be your friends asking you if you’re okay, and you don’t want to admit that you really aren’t but know they won’t believe you if you lie and say you are. Stop showering because it seems like too much effort to undress. Step outside on the first beautiful day of spring and think absently about how it does nothing for you. Feel like everything is impossible; feel like doing anything at all would require a greater suspension of disbelief than you are capable of. Feel burning itches in places like the lining of your stomach and the backsides of your retinas.

Hit rock bottom. Lose your job; flunk out of school; drive your car into a tree. Wake up in a hospital bed and see your parents staring at you, weeping. Move back into the room you grew up in and spend weeks in your pajamas eating canned soup and staring at the ceiling. Feel as though you are lying on the ocean floor with seven miles of water pressing down on you. Let your mouth hang open because it seems like too much effort to raise your jaw. Feel nothing. Forget that you exist; forget that anything exists. Feel like you have passed into death.

See a psychiatrist; get on meds. Start feeling a bit better. Watch a sitcom with your parents and laugh a little. Go for a walk expecting it to do nothing for you and find that it does a little. Pull fresh air through your nostrils and feel something. Feel, after a few weeks, a vague sense of coming out of something; feel a certain presence, which you had taken for granted since before you can remember, start to pass out of you. See a bird flapping its wings on a telephone wire and laugh for no reason. Wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about happiness.

Start seeing a therapist. For the first time ever, see your entire life laid out in front of you all at once, like a dollhouse. Realize with a shock of recognition that you were depressed the whole time. Realize that, the whole time, you just assumed that life was this difficult for everyone, and that everyone else just had better self-discipline or better self-control or a better attitude than you did. Realize it wasn’t your fault and feel something inside you burst and dissipate. Talk about your life — family, friends, relationships, traumas — and realize that everything is connected to everything else, that every feeling you carry inside you has a history and a reason for existing. Start to figure out which of the feelings are yours and which are not; start to let go of the ones that aren’t.

Start to understand that feelings are much more than just the amorphous clouds of pain or pleasure that they feel like when you’re in them; start to see those clouds as mere surfaces, concealing complex and highly specific configurations of memories and obsolete assumptions and vestigial unfulfilled desires and lingering residues of people and things that you used to love, all hooked into one another and pulled taut like a cat’s cradle whose total shape sometimes flashes in your mind for a moment all at once. Notice that the experience of these moments of Gestalt illumination reminds you a little of what it used to feel like to fall in love, before love turned into terror and finally burnt itself out, except that now it’s not scary or overwhelming so much as gently rewarding, something like the feeling of solving a challenging but still low-key riddle.

Keep feeling out, little by little, the inner structures of the emotions that once ruled you. As you explore, start to feel them coalesce into something solid and unmoving. Start to understand that the solid and unmoving thing was there all along, waiting patiently for you to notice it. Realize you have already begun to think of it as home. Wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about emotional stability.

Realize one day in the shower that the unmoving thing you’ve arrived at and the cosmic image that once drove you mad are one and the same. Realize that it’s just you, that all along it was just you and nothing more. Laugh at how stupidly obvious that seems now. Feel the unmoving thing settle into you, and you into it, and notice, almost casually, that for the first time in your life you are completely without fear. Look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror and feel like you are seeing an old friend you haven’t seen in ages. Realize that after years of false hopes, you have finally arrived at something real, something that no one can ever take away from you.

Realize that this arrival, which is what people mean when they talk about “finding yourself,” is not an end but a beginning. You have nailed down the vital center; now for a lifetime of filling out the periphery. In living through, then recollecting, your own story, you have learned implicitly that there is a story coiled up inside of everyone and everything. Maybe you knew this all along. Maybe this was why you were so quick to fall in love with everything in sight; maybe you sensed instinctively the overflowing fullness of all things too soon, before you were ready to grasp their interior complexity. Maybe when you were in love with things, what you were really in love with was not the things themselves but rather something inside them that you could never quite get at, which was why you loved them with such annihilating desperation, as if throwing yourself over and over against a locked door. But now that you have found yourself, now that you have fought for and won your emotional stability, you will find that you have been granted a master key. As that unmoving thing was waiting all along for you to notice it, so too does the whole world now stretch out in all directions, patiently awaiting your discovering gaze; and so too does every thing hold its story trapped inside it like a spirit, waiting for you to utter the incantation that will release it. Don’t be overwhelmed by the abundance: your life has only just begun, and you have all the time in the world.

My rear gear cable snapped at the shifter about a mile from home. This means being stuck in the highest gear on the cassette. I’ve got Shimano Tiagra 4500 9 speed STI Shift/Brake levers; not something I thought much about until now.

The old cable was jammed inside with just a cm of the frayed ends sticking out. It seems that this is not an uncommon problem. I’ve read that the knack is to get the shifter into the highest gear (ie smallest cog). Once that’s done then the old cable should pop out easily and the new one simply threads through from the outside of the shifter. You need to squeeze the brake lever to get the cable in or out.

When all is well and the cable is not snapped the derailleur spring pulls on the cable which helps pull the shifter to a higher gear when pressing the upshift lever (the small black one in case you’re still interested). When the cable is broken, the spring obviously does not pull, and the upshift lever won’t get you to the highest gear. Grabbing the frayed cable with a pair of pliers and pulling on it whilst operating the upshift lever gets the shifter to the highest gear. Once the shifter is in the highest gear getting the cable out and back in should be easy.

Should is such a loaded word. Saturday morning. I tinkered. I followed instructions. I then took apart. I swore a lot. I put back together. I made no progress in getting the damn thing out. In the end I gave up before I broke something. I went to a local bike shop which is where my bike is now. Hoping to get it back on Monday or early next week. Fingers crossed they have the knack better than I do.

The Friday before Christmas we had a big home delivery from Tescos. Just before we got the knock on the door there was a loud clunk followed by a metallic clatter. I got up to answer the door. I asked the delivery man if he’d dropped some thing to which he replied that he had not. He left the first of the boxes and returned to his van to fetch more.

Wondering what then caused the noise I had a look round and saw that one of our cast iron railings and been broken and fallen to the bottom of the basement stairwell. Soon as the driver came back I pointed this out to him to which he shrugged his shoulders and gave a noncommittal reply of ignorance of the fact.

I told him that we’d be contacting Tescos and seeking some recompense for the damage caused. He maintained his disinterest and carried on with the delivery. My wife, Monica, at this point commented that another of our railings had been knocked out in a similar manner by a previous driver. On that occasion Monica had noticed it the day after so did not feel confident in making a claim. Given that it had now happened again we felt it appropriate to share with Tescos that incident and now this one. Monica phoned Tescos Home Delivery Customer Service line straight away. There was nobody that could help that evening, our contact details were taken and Monica was informed that she would be contacted the next day.

Nobody contacted Monica the next day so she phoned again. Monica was put through to the local home delivery depot. They told her to take photos of the damage, get a quote for the repair and together with the photos and a covering letter to contact Tesco Stores Ltd, 1-2 Priory Park, Mills Road, Aylesford, Kent, ME20 7PP. This we did.

Due to nature of the damage it was important that we have it fixed without delay. Without two railings there was a big drop which needed to be made safe. We have 4 children two of which are small enough to go through the gap. Whilst we do as any parent would to keep them safe the chance of them going through the gap could not be ignored. Monica had the railings replaced costing us £120.00; it would have been a lot more if we had them replaced like for like i.e. period scrolled cast iron railings. As it goes all we could afford was square steel railings. It was Christmas after all! We duly sent photos, letter and invoice to Tescos.

Today we got the following letter:

Brush off letter from Tescos shoddy Customer Service Centre

Needless to say we are disappointed with this obvious brush off. I have no idea what force it would take to break the metal apart. I am confident that neither does Sam Relph, Customer Service Manager. I would argue though that the momentum and weight of a carelessly handled fully loaded Tesco home delivery trolley would be perfectly adequate in delivering whatever force was required.

The assertion that the railings were not fit for purpose nor in a safe condition before he collided with them; it seems somewhat presumptuous to make such a judgement without the benefit of physically examining the damage and the condition of the remaining railings. Tescos did not visit to do so.

Furthermore Tecos obvious strategy to avoid responsibility by having in place an inadequate process to reply and respond to such complaints comes over as a cynical manipulation of the busy lives we all lead. No email address in 2012 for correspondence! Who do they think they are kidding!

Curiosity taking the lead a quick search of the term “tescos complaint handling” interestingly comes up with many examples of other dissatisfied customers in relation to how Tescos have handled their complaint, indeed the top ranked search result is a blog seeking to expose their shoddy practice in this area.

Where to go from here? The internet of course. Will it make any difference? I’ll let you know if it does. Please feel free to repost or link to this post (short link here – http://www.monaxle.com/?p=76). In the meantime I suppose it would be fitting for us to boycott Tescos. Of course Tescos won’t  miss our business given the size of the organisation but perhaps they care a little bit more about protecting their reputation. Or not.

Reassuring to know that there is a scientific explanation for my slackness.

The Willpower Trick

January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for t…