Reading

Funny day, and  it has been an intense week of beginning teaching at various places, reading the obligatory crap detective novel-per-week, an uplifting read, The Hidden Life of Trees (tube journey book, which is absolutely amazing), and also No Irish-No Blacks-No Dogs by John Lydon, which has fixed me to the chair for the whole afternoon.
I thought I had lost the copy I had and so I re-ordered it; the new copy turned up halfway through the day. Still, you can never have enough copies, I guess.
Reliving punk's violence has given me nightmares, but it's important that people remember that it wasn't a musical style all on it's own that people were just playing at.
Music was our defence weapon against attack by everybody, not just the Teds and Skinheads, the Casuals and the Straights. The newspapers hated the punks, people in shops hated the punks, people on the bus hated us, people in the pub. It was no fun, but there was no alternative that any of us could see.
I am mostly writing about London but it could be about anywhere. So much is made of today's violent youth, but if young people don't feel cared about, respected or valued, then they become outlaws who make their own rules and run their lives according to those.
If people don't listen to you, you shout; and around the creative people clustered drug dealers, creeps, people who were just into violence for the sake of it and of course, the extreme politicos who wanted pet punks to deliver their messages for them.
Well, that's got that off my chest.