Further to March 21 post "no loo Inverness to Edinburgh".
Perhaps randomly by the right person being in the office, I got a reply to another incident of the stopping Citylinks failing to observe the Forth road bridge stop, which are not always answered at all and has been a recurrent problem ever since the present road layout was put in after the tolls were abolished. Getting an answer to this, I combined a response to it with asking again after the Inverness loo incident and how it had never been answered. So 8 months after it happened, I have extracted these thoughts from Citylink:
"Our coaches are equipped with on-board toilet facilities, however on the occasion where these are not functioning or an alterative vehicle without toilet facilities is used, the driver should make toilet stops for passengers. I am very sorry that on this occasion the driver did not make a toilet stop en route, however please note that he/she may not have known to do so unless a request was made by a passenger." and "If there are no toilet facilities or they are not functioning properly, the driver will make stops at the request of passengers. If you are not comfortable asking the driver to stop during the journey, then you can explain when boarding that you may need a toilet stop and the driver should schedule a stop en route."
Still none of this announced routinely to passengers: you have to suffer and complain and chase up a missing answer before you get this.
Perhaps at the time the blog post here made them decide it was scarier to answer than not, because the absence of a toilet at Broxden was clearly going to be indefensible in any answer they could give. "I can advise you that there are now toilet facilities at Perth Broxden, which were installed in April." Of course that's after we were there, and knowing that facility did not yet exist on the day we were there, they let that driver drive for 3 1/2 hours without any routine instruction to stop.
The present position is still unsatisfactory. They are sticking to making you make a request to the driver. That means you have to realise the situation as soon as you get on, and that is when he is busy checking everyone else on and loading the baggage. To make a request during the journey you have to distract the driver when on a fast road, which may be dangerous or not allowed, and it may be ages before he has any cause to stop. Has customer services thought of that? You have to know a good time to make the request, when travelling through remote country. Those are too much logical burdens to leave to passengers. The only way I can see it being safe to use these long distance services, is if I carry a printed copy of their email with me, so that if landed with a no toilet bus I can show the driver there is an instruction from a higher level to make a stop. You could carry a printed copy of this posting.
Maurice Frank
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
tickety boo
Sailing Calmac's ferries in the Western Isles has become safer since I did an island hopping holiday back in 1992. Then, they collected your ticket only at the sailing's end. Anyone could get on but it committed you to still have this losable small object in your possession, not lost or stolen, at destination. Exactly what would happen to you carried fear through uncertainty. During that holiday I did indeed come across a case, an old lady in a disembarking queue in front of me had lost her ticket during the journey and was trying to cope by cracking jokes about going to jail. But this is a humanly sick situation against all practical common sense. What if she had been robbed, and she the victim had to talk of going to jail? I last saw her standing to 1 side with the ticket man, no idea what happened, I just wonder if the same would have happened to a teenager as to an old lady, both equally innocent.
I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.
Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.
What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.
What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.
Maurice Frank
I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.
Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.
What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.
What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.
Maurice Frank
Sunday, August 21, 2011
not the driver's fault
Usually when I post crossly about buses, it is because of what the driver has done. Of course, drivers are human and humans are usually bad but drivers are not always bad. This time the driver was very apologetic and friendly about the bureaucracy he had been subject to and it wasn't his fault at all.
Consider a bus, in a rural area where they can't easily put a replacement on, that suffers a big delay from a breakdown, but eventually manages to limp to its outer destination. It arrives there in time to turn round and operate a return service on time. But it doesn't. Why? the driver is not allowed to. The situation has caught up with the rules about his driving hours. he is forced to take a half hour break and sit twiddling his thumbs, even thought it means the bus will run half an hour late, and passengers will be half an hour late and miss connections event though the bus was physically there in time to run on time. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This actually happened this week on the Carse of Stirling services by First bus.
This may be health and safety, from the point of view of regulating the driving. But what use is that if passengers' coping safety is affected by having their day's plan and connection knocked out. As encountered on meet-ups, some aspies do get bewildered in unfamiliar places. The power to run transport late and not to make passengers immune from the consequences for further transport, is still an issue of power and that's why no health and safety rules get made out of that. Like, having to employ more staff so that buses can't get trapped at the outer end of routes and forced to do a silly delay like this.
Maurice Frank
Consider a bus, in a rural area where they can't easily put a replacement on, that suffers a big delay from a breakdown, but eventually manages to limp to its outer destination. It arrives there in time to turn round and operate a return service on time. But it doesn't. Why? the driver is not allowed to. The situation has caught up with the rules about his driving hours. he is forced to take a half hour break and sit twiddling his thumbs, even thought it means the bus will run half an hour late, and passengers will be half an hour late and miss connections event though the bus was physically there in time to run on time. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This actually happened this week on the Carse of Stirling services by First bus.
This may be health and safety, from the point of view of regulating the driving. But what use is that if passengers' coping safety is affected by having their day's plan and connection knocked out. As encountered on meet-ups, some aspies do get bewildered in unfamiliar places. The power to run transport late and not to make passengers immune from the consequences for further transport, is still an issue of power and that's why no health and safety rules get made out of that. Like, having to employ more staff so that buses can't get trapped at the outer end of routes and forced to do a silly delay like this.
Maurice Frank
Friday, August 5, 2011
DELICATE TOPICS MUST BE DISCUSSED OBJECTIVELY
Though I have formidable academic and extracurricular achievements to my credit I am a desperately unfulfilled man burdened with irrational guilt after childhood traumas and my Christian father’s constant denigration. My life has been so blighted by stigma that I have struggled to solve it by turning it upside down and writing about characters who suffer the way I still do.
“The Librarian of Charford” was to have been a TV serial life “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook” which was to disseminate information about delicate topics EXPRESSLY sp that those who suffer badly from stigmatisation would cease to feel bad and develop coping strategies. I had written episodes soon after graduation. Leading character Alan (Moelwyn)-Wright moved back to Charford in Avalonshire to become its librarian. He teams up with head librarian Bill Carter and others who have relatives with mental health problems. Each harrowing situation is portrayed accurately but sensitively and some touch upon taboo topics. At the end of each episode the public were to be shown BOOKS on the topic in question. It was rejected OUT OF HAND because Alan is the purported inventor of a Code of Behaviour called Contributionism that makes institutionalised religion REDUNDANT and he is a shameless reincarnationist.
Had it gone ahead, the English speaking world would be fully equipped to deal with the entire range of distressing events that happen to everybody sometimes in our lives. By now I would have a worldwide reputation as a scriptwriter who has successfully and creatively transformed my very own most hurtful experiences into episodes with the explicit moral messages that all of us deserve to be treated with dignity; and it would have substantially alleviated the acute mental pain which accomplishes a variety of situations where formerly people suffered in silence rather than risk being ridiculed, ostracised or perish the thought incarcerated in mental hospitals.
John Stuart Mill the champion of women’s rights in Victorian Britain declared that whenever influential minorities declare that certain topics are TABOO it’s the duty of wise and caring people to OFFEND such people by open unbiased discussions of the taboo topics. I have in fact clashed with CATHOLICS because I live by Mill’s principles and Alan Wright a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford is necessarily true to his/my Contributionist view that he has a categoric duty to help all who suffer from the affliction itself compounded by the public prejudice about it.
I have written scripts based upon my very own hurtful experiences and those of people such as a young psychology graduate wrongfully detained in a mental hospital (This is the monologue called ANDREW SINCLAIR YOU ENJOY YOUR DIGNITY) whilst I have two other Monologues of varying length, and a Radio Play. I have written Video Scripts about characters with OCD and Asperger’s Syndrome, both of which I suffer from. A supremely hurtful event invariably gives rise to a work where I carefully alter the details so that only I myself know the real people involved. This is why I set my works in a very necessary parallel universe with alarmingly altered geography and fictional Parliamentary constituencies &c.
Despite the sexual liberation of the 1960s, many people are loath to talk about their sexual problems. In the recent past, religious authoritarians have put unseemly pressures on broadcasters to suppress debates on sexual deviations that are quite harmless, which are lumped together with practices that can do long term damage. Moreover research into the effects of sexual deviations and abuse has ceased (perhaps because of interference by church people?) I read of far too many adults burdened with DELUSIONS OF FLAWEDNESS like myself and all this has come about from Christian upbringings and notably from mis-education in Christian schools. Then there are people like myself who dare not disclose that they have intense aversions to particular minorities for fear of being branded racists or misogynists. A supremely hurtful experience in early childhood might be scrambled up with a memory of somebody who looks rather peculiar or speaks differently. When I was about 5 I was scared of NUNS who looked sinister – I thought that they had NO HEADS! Even now I feel a mental tremor at the sight of a nun. An acute aversion to a regional accent may have arisen from say a teacher with that accent who was a bully. A deep seated revulsion can be firmed early in life and persist. The sufferer feels that he will be ridiculed if he talks about it.
My “Pure OCD” is bound up with experiences in early childhood and still flares up when triggered by such matters as the sight of my brother’s handwriting. I can provide a Video-script where the names of real people in my life have been artfully swapped around. It deals with a young man who like Lord Reith, assaulted his elder brother and was never allowed to forget the event. He develops an intense irrational conviction that he will go mad and assault short bespectacled men (who resemble MYSELF!) and this gets the better of him until he meets MY DOPPELGANGER after this doppelganger LIKE MYSELF gets assaulted by 3 boys. Then a young lady enters his world and she too suffers. The work ends in a paradox where MY DOPPELGANGER, physically incapable of harming anybody, discloses that he is still besieged by a delusion that he will go mad and assault his well-built, bullying brother Dominic.
I have begun to write video scripts where the action takes place on hikes through beauty spots and the characters enjoy restorative calm – see my Flyer about Wilderness Hikes. I contend that if actual people adopted my principle of writing about taboo topics set in a parallel universe they would not only cathart their own mental abscesses but enable fellow sufferers the wide world over to compare experiences and discover common ground, therefore to adopting coping strategies.
With Alan Wright’s strict consequentialism as a better yardstick than Christian morality the outcome would be that sufferers from acute mental agony about taboo topics would CEASE TO FEEL BAD and recover, so resume their dignified roles in Society.
Q.E.D.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 6-8-2010.
“The Librarian of Charford” was to have been a TV serial life “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook” which was to disseminate information about delicate topics EXPRESSLY sp that those who suffer badly from stigmatisation would cease to feel bad and develop coping strategies. I had written episodes soon after graduation. Leading character Alan (Moelwyn)-Wright moved back to Charford in Avalonshire to become its librarian. He teams up with head librarian Bill Carter and others who have relatives with mental health problems. Each harrowing situation is portrayed accurately but sensitively and some touch upon taboo topics. At the end of each episode the public were to be shown BOOKS on the topic in question. It was rejected OUT OF HAND because Alan is the purported inventor of a Code of Behaviour called Contributionism that makes institutionalised religion REDUNDANT and he is a shameless reincarnationist.
Had it gone ahead, the English speaking world would be fully equipped to deal with the entire range of distressing events that happen to everybody sometimes in our lives. By now I would have a worldwide reputation as a scriptwriter who has successfully and creatively transformed my very own most hurtful experiences into episodes with the explicit moral messages that all of us deserve to be treated with dignity; and it would have substantially alleviated the acute mental pain which accomplishes a variety of situations where formerly people suffered in silence rather than risk being ridiculed, ostracised or perish the thought incarcerated in mental hospitals.
John Stuart Mill the champion of women’s rights in Victorian Britain declared that whenever influential minorities declare that certain topics are TABOO it’s the duty of wise and caring people to OFFEND such people by open unbiased discussions of the taboo topics. I have in fact clashed with CATHOLICS because I live by Mill’s principles and Alan Wright a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford is necessarily true to his/my Contributionist view that he has a categoric duty to help all who suffer from the affliction itself compounded by the public prejudice about it.
I have written scripts based upon my very own hurtful experiences and those of people such as a young psychology graduate wrongfully detained in a mental hospital (This is the monologue called ANDREW SINCLAIR YOU ENJOY YOUR DIGNITY) whilst I have two other Monologues of varying length, and a Radio Play. I have written Video Scripts about characters with OCD and Asperger’s Syndrome, both of which I suffer from. A supremely hurtful event invariably gives rise to a work where I carefully alter the details so that only I myself know the real people involved. This is why I set my works in a very necessary parallel universe with alarmingly altered geography and fictional Parliamentary constituencies &c.
Despite the sexual liberation of the 1960s, many people are loath to talk about their sexual problems. In the recent past, religious authoritarians have put unseemly pressures on broadcasters to suppress debates on sexual deviations that are quite harmless, which are lumped together with practices that can do long term damage. Moreover research into the effects of sexual deviations and abuse has ceased (perhaps because of interference by church people?) I read of far too many adults burdened with DELUSIONS OF FLAWEDNESS like myself and all this has come about from Christian upbringings and notably from mis-education in Christian schools. Then there are people like myself who dare not disclose that they have intense aversions to particular minorities for fear of being branded racists or misogynists. A supremely hurtful experience in early childhood might be scrambled up with a memory of somebody who looks rather peculiar or speaks differently. When I was about 5 I was scared of NUNS who looked sinister – I thought that they had NO HEADS! Even now I feel a mental tremor at the sight of a nun. An acute aversion to a regional accent may have arisen from say a teacher with that accent who was a bully. A deep seated revulsion can be firmed early in life and persist. The sufferer feels that he will be ridiculed if he talks about it.
My “Pure OCD” is bound up with experiences in early childhood and still flares up when triggered by such matters as the sight of my brother’s handwriting. I can provide a Video-script where the names of real people in my life have been artfully swapped around. It deals with a young man who like Lord Reith, assaulted his elder brother and was never allowed to forget the event. He develops an intense irrational conviction that he will go mad and assault short bespectacled men (who resemble MYSELF!) and this gets the better of him until he meets MY DOPPELGANGER after this doppelganger LIKE MYSELF gets assaulted by 3 boys. Then a young lady enters his world and she too suffers. The work ends in a paradox where MY DOPPELGANGER, physically incapable of harming anybody, discloses that he is still besieged by a delusion that he will go mad and assault his well-built, bullying brother Dominic.
I have begun to write video scripts where the action takes place on hikes through beauty spots and the characters enjoy restorative calm – see my Flyer about Wilderness Hikes. I contend that if actual people adopted my principle of writing about taboo topics set in a parallel universe they would not only cathart their own mental abscesses but enable fellow sufferers the wide world over to compare experiences and discover common ground, therefore to adopting coping strategies.
With Alan Wright’s strict consequentialism as a better yardstick than Christian morality the outcome would be that sufferers from acute mental agony about taboo topics would CEASE TO FEEL BAD and recover, so resume their dignified roles in Society.
Q.E.D.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 6-8-2010.
BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD
BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD
I see myself reflected in the glass doors of the Ronald Laing Building at Glasgow University on this bright spring morning - all clean, white shirt, knife-edged creased grey flannel trousers, tweed jacket and most important of all the Contributionist tie with dragon’s wings outspread which allegorises the Founder of our movement. To think that before I was referred to him I took no pride in my appearance and was oblivious of my shabbiness! Nor did I know that I had Asperger’s Syndrome.
“Tony Bratch” enquires the receptionist and I nod assent. She pins on my lapel a badge bearing my name then I file into the lecture theatre ten minutes early with my two heavy holdalls filled with teaching aids. Students arrive and I check the equipment. A screen lights up and it displays the structure of polytime – a convoluted shape resembling a tangle-up of hosepipe that goes on for ever and ever. Longitudinal stripes in contrasting colours bisect lines like bar codes.
“Ladies and gentlemen we have here Tony Bratch who is going to explain what he calls “Polytime” – and he will make shattering disclosures about the destiny of every one of us... Over to you, Tony.”
I am no longer scared of speaking in public. I say I come from Corchester in Corveshire and I am a disciple of the illustrious Welsh philosopher Alan Moelwyn-Wright who is also the headmaster of Treheol College in Delormebury, for children with distressing peculiarities. I am going to talk about the structure of Time and how is affects all of our destinies. I myself have time warp experiences and so has my sister Gillian. When I was a baby, my parents told me, my sister shook me violently, when she was six. This may account for my persistent lucid dreams of being a boy called John Eccleshall from Staffordshire, a county that cannot possibly exist. She is older than me and she somehow had foreknowledge of where I would go when I was a small boy such as the precise spot in the Longmynd – a miniature mountain in Shropshire where I had scrambled at the age of three. I too had precognitive dreams about Wolstanbury which I had never set foot in when my sister took up her job there... that is dreams of its market square and Gothic chapel like structure covering the market cross, and the precise colour of the walls in her office as though my soul had taken leave of my body and I floated through walls to see Gillian with a man who has a handlebar moustache – her boss – I described him precisely and that was the trigger for her to tell me all her precognitions about myself. Then she showed me J W Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time and J B Priestley’s play I Have Been Here Before...
I brandish the books and resume.
Dunne has dreams of seeing the Daily Telegraph three weeks ahead of publication and one dream was that there had been a disaster that claimed four thousand lives – a volcanic eruption in the West Indies. Three weeks alter Dunne was horrified to pick up the paper and read that FORTY thousand people had died on the island of Martinique when they were burnt alive by incandescent gas. That prompted Dunne to do private research and ultimately write this now famous book that explains polytime. Some time later Dunne met the playwright J B Priestley who wrote the play about parallel universes I Have Been Here Before... Yes it has been performed in the University theatre nearby so all in the audience are familiar with the plot, how the scientist Gortler from a parallel universe steps into our time to prevent a suicide and save a firm from closing down and other effects of that catastrophe.
“I have stepped from one parallel universe to another in lucid dreams”, I continue. In these dreams I am a pupil at a Stafford school in this cathedral city located where a tributary of the Trent loops around a low gravel hill deposited by a glacier, on which the cathedral stands. One line forks to London and the other to Bristol I presume. In the heart of Stafford is a windmill without sails and a waterwheel beside a mill lade and also a row of old almshouses. I feel that I have lived in Stafford all my life but on waking I am in Corchester where the Trent Gorge cuts through the blood-red sandstones of the Pinnacle Country..... with the main railway from London going underneath the Shrewsbury to Derby line and opposite Corchester as you full well know the lofty cliffs of Honours Broadstone that fall sheer a hundred meters and loom above the London to Glasgow line... I hope that I am not boring you with my description of this preposterous city of my dreams...”
I seem to have got everybody’s attention as I continue, feeling very anxious now...
“In my dreams about my life as John Eccleshall I find myself on a bicycle cycling towards the town which bears my name. It is a charming place of Tudor houses with timber colonnades and it lines in a hollow. On the way there is a lace there the road dips, and a roundabout is perched on a hillock above a railway line. I lose control here and I am thrown over the handlebars onto the track and an electric train bears down and I cannot move and I wake up in terror in Corchester...”
Bright-eyed people in the sea of faces. I am not boring them, I hope...
“My sister Gillian has similar nightmares which end when she is told by a policeman that her brother John was pitched off his bicycle near Norton Bridge. In her dreams she sees signposts bearing authentic names which do not appear on our gazetteers. They are of Saxon derivation and allude to the topography of this preposterous Staffordshire – a county where rovers wind across fertile plains crossed by busy railways and highways, definitely not the rugged Pinnacle Country of Corveshire clothes in pine forests.”
I then point to the big diagram and say that this represents a simplification of polytime, then I enlarge a section to show what I mean... a shape like a salami sausage with slices and a longitudinal line marked arbitrarily with my birth year 1981 and my sister’s birth year 1974 and this year 2008. I declare that our universe is an infinitessimally thin salami slice of the complex slice in the first diagram which is itself only schematic. I cannot draw polydimensional shapes but I simplify...
I show an enlargement. The hosepipe is curved and along its length there is a line marked 14 Sept. 1981 and another, my sister’s birthdate 15 June 1974. I say in every 14 Sept 1981 I will be born, perhaps as Tony Bratch, perhaps as John Eccleshall, likewise my sister Gillian will be born on successive 15th Junes in every salami slice, then I point to serial reincarnations since the dawn of history and now refer to my mentor’s past lives starting from ancient Greek times when he was a contemporary of Pericles. I extrapolate Alan’s future lives as ref lines of segments of a huge circle which may be part of a spiral reading back to successive Ancient Greek Hegemonies, Roman Empires, Albigensian Crusades and so on to reincarnations as part of a Windsor King where Alan will not be burnt as a heretic but flourish in a Britain with free speech and become the founder of a movement which lifts the veil of Mortality to show how if we struggle to live exemplary lives we will be born again and again in serial reincarnations and in parallel universes to become Hands of the Cosmic Mind we call God. I now project the points on this spiral where my lives interact with Alan’s lives and what flows from them is a burst of light – symbolising how Alan has taught me the ways of Right Living but before I was referred to him I was a very disturbed adolescent. Now he has unlocked my mind it is my duty as his disciple to pass on to everybody my experience of the parallel universe where I was John Eccleshall who was evidently drunk in charge of a bicycle and lost his life by crass carelessness. But the Gods in the Great Beyond reincarnated me as Tony Bratch expressly in order to meet Alan and absorb his teaching...
(Will I be flayed by the Christians for saying that?)
..... + I must talk about theology but not repeat not Christian theology. We are all immortal souls and we are reborn in successive parallel universes. Some of us have acquired the faculty to slip between universes... and this gives rise to what is the most important finding of all. There is serial reincarnation and there is parallel universe reincarnation. My mentor lives several lives and so did his wife and son. Bob Wright has proved to the world that he was headmaster of Friarshill Grammar School in Romanbridge in Tudor times till he was flung off the Roman Bridge by Mary Tudor’s thugs. Now in every life we live, to quote Masefield’s Creed we suffer the consequences of dissoluteness in past lives or reap the rewards of being virtuous. So our immortal souls, everybody have a kind of psychic DNA which is modified by our personal behaviour. As Masefield so eloquently expounded in A Creed it behoves us all to live virtuous lives.
On the train I suffered a gypsy who stank of unwashedness as I was busy preparing for this presentation. I threatened to have him put out of the train as he was looking over my shoulder at my portabrain and reading my lecture notes and so I quizzed him. It was obvious that he was of lowly intelligence and he was trapped in a karmic cycle of what we call gricehood.
(Do these people understand Alan’s beautiful coinage from the German word Greis to denote self-inflicted stupefaction...? Carry on, Bratch!)
I am simply horrified to read about the alcohol problem with grips Scotland. We Contributionists are strict teetotallers and one of our number is David Derrypool, graduate of your University who lives at Carkilty. There he is in the audience. David has vainly tried to provide edifying pursuits for his neighbours but he has been rebuffed at every attempt. Now we Contributionsists regard the Poet Laureate John Masefield as no less an avatar – a messenger of God than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and of course Christ. Masefield’s Creed has apparently been written in every parallel Universe as that Code of Behaviour which is founded in the teachings of avatars sent to us...
I show the next diagram. How souls migrate from one Dunnean time-cycle to the next. I say that the most highly evolved souls of all may have this faculty to slip along the axis of polytime at right angles to our own cycles. In all the successive parallel universes there can be slight differences caused by changes in people’s fortunes – a shop is sold to another owner – a boy is killed when pitched into the path of a train – a frail child dies – but in another cycle he survives to become a judge. A battle might have been won by someone else long ago and Britain became part of a French or Norwegian empire so her people alive in the equivalent of 2008 might speak languages more akin to French or Norwegian than our English. Then there will be universes where glaciers completely altered geography as seems to be the case when I was John Eccleshall. Now David Derrypool might pick up the thread after our presentation because HE has had disturbing dreams of a world where he lived in a city called Stafford with much in common with the Stafford of my lucid dreams to the extent that I hold that he and I have slipped along this axis – our life-lines clearly marked – precisely in order that we should meet and collaborate to elucidate the nature of polytime....
Another diagram. A globe marked Tony Bratch emanates light. Next to the globe is the likeness of a dishevelled man as a silhouette. I say that there is no way I can teach the concept of polytime and all that flows from it, to the gypsy on the train as he simply lacks the intelligence to grasp it. He is doomed for evermore to live like Plato’s cave dwellers...
I show a globe marked Tony Bratch speaking into a microphone and a symbolic world listening. The world-globe and the Tony Bratch globe emanate rhythmic pulses of light as on the time-sausage sparks fly along its longitudinal axis.
“If you understand the mechanics of your own immortality, dear friends, as a result of my talk, you will daily endeavour to improve yourselves and one another...”
(Globes grow bigger as they emit sparks of varying colours and merge with one another to shower rays in all directions.)
“and that is how you create your own psychic DNA... for as Masefield declared, every thought or deed in every life affects your potential to be either trapped in the darkness of gricehood like that gypsy – or growth to enjoy such superior abilities and aesthetic awareness - that like all of us Dragon Tie wearers your only passion will be to share the fruits of your self-createdness – and so all of you dear friends I trust will say NO to the DEMON DRINK and grow to be beautiful Hands of God.”
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, May 2008
I see myself reflected in the glass doors of the Ronald Laing Building at Glasgow University on this bright spring morning - all clean, white shirt, knife-edged creased grey flannel trousers, tweed jacket and most important of all the Contributionist tie with dragon’s wings outspread which allegorises the Founder of our movement. To think that before I was referred to him I took no pride in my appearance and was oblivious of my shabbiness! Nor did I know that I had Asperger’s Syndrome.
“Tony Bratch” enquires the receptionist and I nod assent. She pins on my lapel a badge bearing my name then I file into the lecture theatre ten minutes early with my two heavy holdalls filled with teaching aids. Students arrive and I check the equipment. A screen lights up and it displays the structure of polytime – a convoluted shape resembling a tangle-up of hosepipe that goes on for ever and ever. Longitudinal stripes in contrasting colours bisect lines like bar codes.
“Ladies and gentlemen we have here Tony Bratch who is going to explain what he calls “Polytime” – and he will make shattering disclosures about the destiny of every one of us... Over to you, Tony.”
I am no longer scared of speaking in public. I say I come from Corchester in Corveshire and I am a disciple of the illustrious Welsh philosopher Alan Moelwyn-Wright who is also the headmaster of Treheol College in Delormebury, for children with distressing peculiarities. I am going to talk about the structure of Time and how is affects all of our destinies. I myself have time warp experiences and so has my sister Gillian. When I was a baby, my parents told me, my sister shook me violently, when she was six. This may account for my persistent lucid dreams of being a boy called John Eccleshall from Staffordshire, a county that cannot possibly exist. She is older than me and she somehow had foreknowledge of where I would go when I was a small boy such as the precise spot in the Longmynd – a miniature mountain in Shropshire where I had scrambled at the age of three. I too had precognitive dreams about Wolstanbury which I had never set foot in when my sister took up her job there... that is dreams of its market square and Gothic chapel like structure covering the market cross, and the precise colour of the walls in her office as though my soul had taken leave of my body and I floated through walls to see Gillian with a man who has a handlebar moustache – her boss – I described him precisely and that was the trigger for her to tell me all her precognitions about myself. Then she showed me J W Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time and J B Priestley’s play I Have Been Here Before...
I brandish the books and resume.
Dunne has dreams of seeing the Daily Telegraph three weeks ahead of publication and one dream was that there had been a disaster that claimed four thousand lives – a volcanic eruption in the West Indies. Three weeks alter Dunne was horrified to pick up the paper and read that FORTY thousand people had died on the island of Martinique when they were burnt alive by incandescent gas. That prompted Dunne to do private research and ultimately write this now famous book that explains polytime. Some time later Dunne met the playwright J B Priestley who wrote the play about parallel universes I Have Been Here Before... Yes it has been performed in the University theatre nearby so all in the audience are familiar with the plot, how the scientist Gortler from a parallel universe steps into our time to prevent a suicide and save a firm from closing down and other effects of that catastrophe.
“I have stepped from one parallel universe to another in lucid dreams”, I continue. In these dreams I am a pupil at a Stafford school in this cathedral city located where a tributary of the Trent loops around a low gravel hill deposited by a glacier, on which the cathedral stands. One line forks to London and the other to Bristol I presume. In the heart of Stafford is a windmill without sails and a waterwheel beside a mill lade and also a row of old almshouses. I feel that I have lived in Stafford all my life but on waking I am in Corchester where the Trent Gorge cuts through the blood-red sandstones of the Pinnacle Country..... with the main railway from London going underneath the Shrewsbury to Derby line and opposite Corchester as you full well know the lofty cliffs of Honours Broadstone that fall sheer a hundred meters and loom above the London to Glasgow line... I hope that I am not boring you with my description of this preposterous city of my dreams...”
I seem to have got everybody’s attention as I continue, feeling very anxious now...
“In my dreams about my life as John Eccleshall I find myself on a bicycle cycling towards the town which bears my name. It is a charming place of Tudor houses with timber colonnades and it lines in a hollow. On the way there is a lace there the road dips, and a roundabout is perched on a hillock above a railway line. I lose control here and I am thrown over the handlebars onto the track and an electric train bears down and I cannot move and I wake up in terror in Corchester...”
Bright-eyed people in the sea of faces. I am not boring them, I hope...
“My sister Gillian has similar nightmares which end when she is told by a policeman that her brother John was pitched off his bicycle near Norton Bridge. In her dreams she sees signposts bearing authentic names which do not appear on our gazetteers. They are of Saxon derivation and allude to the topography of this preposterous Staffordshire – a county where rovers wind across fertile plains crossed by busy railways and highways, definitely not the rugged Pinnacle Country of Corveshire clothes in pine forests.”
I then point to the big diagram and say that this represents a simplification of polytime, then I enlarge a section to show what I mean... a shape like a salami sausage with slices and a longitudinal line marked arbitrarily with my birth year 1981 and my sister’s birth year 1974 and this year 2008. I declare that our universe is an infinitessimally thin salami slice of the complex slice in the first diagram which is itself only schematic. I cannot draw polydimensional shapes but I simplify...
I show an enlargement. The hosepipe is curved and along its length there is a line marked 14 Sept. 1981 and another, my sister’s birthdate 15 June 1974. I say in every 14 Sept 1981 I will be born, perhaps as Tony Bratch, perhaps as John Eccleshall, likewise my sister Gillian will be born on successive 15th Junes in every salami slice, then I point to serial reincarnations since the dawn of history and now refer to my mentor’s past lives starting from ancient Greek times when he was a contemporary of Pericles. I extrapolate Alan’s future lives as ref lines of segments of a huge circle which may be part of a spiral reading back to successive Ancient Greek Hegemonies, Roman Empires, Albigensian Crusades and so on to reincarnations as part of a Windsor King where Alan will not be burnt as a heretic but flourish in a Britain with free speech and become the founder of a movement which lifts the veil of Mortality to show how if we struggle to live exemplary lives we will be born again and again in serial reincarnations and in parallel universes to become Hands of the Cosmic Mind we call God. I now project the points on this spiral where my lives interact with Alan’s lives and what flows from them is a burst of light – symbolising how Alan has taught me the ways of Right Living but before I was referred to him I was a very disturbed adolescent. Now he has unlocked my mind it is my duty as his disciple to pass on to everybody my experience of the parallel universe where I was John Eccleshall who was evidently drunk in charge of a bicycle and lost his life by crass carelessness. But the Gods in the Great Beyond reincarnated me as Tony Bratch expressly in order to meet Alan and absorb his teaching...
(Will I be flayed by the Christians for saying that?)
..... + I must talk about theology but not repeat not Christian theology. We are all immortal souls and we are reborn in successive parallel universes. Some of us have acquired the faculty to slip between universes... and this gives rise to what is the most important finding of all. There is serial reincarnation and there is parallel universe reincarnation. My mentor lives several lives and so did his wife and son. Bob Wright has proved to the world that he was headmaster of Friarshill Grammar School in Romanbridge in Tudor times till he was flung off the Roman Bridge by Mary Tudor’s thugs. Now in every life we live, to quote Masefield’s Creed we suffer the consequences of dissoluteness in past lives or reap the rewards of being virtuous. So our immortal souls, everybody have a kind of psychic DNA which is modified by our personal behaviour. As Masefield so eloquently expounded in A Creed it behoves us all to live virtuous lives.
On the train I suffered a gypsy who stank of unwashedness as I was busy preparing for this presentation. I threatened to have him put out of the train as he was looking over my shoulder at my portabrain and reading my lecture notes and so I quizzed him. It was obvious that he was of lowly intelligence and he was trapped in a karmic cycle of what we call gricehood.
(Do these people understand Alan’s beautiful coinage from the German word Greis to denote self-inflicted stupefaction...? Carry on, Bratch!)
I am simply horrified to read about the alcohol problem with grips Scotland. We Contributionists are strict teetotallers and one of our number is David Derrypool, graduate of your University who lives at Carkilty. There he is in the audience. David has vainly tried to provide edifying pursuits for his neighbours but he has been rebuffed at every attempt. Now we Contributionsists regard the Poet Laureate John Masefield as no less an avatar – a messenger of God than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and of course Christ. Masefield’s Creed has apparently been written in every parallel Universe as that Code of Behaviour which is founded in the teachings of avatars sent to us...
I show the next diagram. How souls migrate from one Dunnean time-cycle to the next. I say that the most highly evolved souls of all may have this faculty to slip along the axis of polytime at right angles to our own cycles. In all the successive parallel universes there can be slight differences caused by changes in people’s fortunes – a shop is sold to another owner – a boy is killed when pitched into the path of a train – a frail child dies – but in another cycle he survives to become a judge. A battle might have been won by someone else long ago and Britain became part of a French or Norwegian empire so her people alive in the equivalent of 2008 might speak languages more akin to French or Norwegian than our English. Then there will be universes where glaciers completely altered geography as seems to be the case when I was John Eccleshall. Now David Derrypool might pick up the thread after our presentation because HE has had disturbing dreams of a world where he lived in a city called Stafford with much in common with the Stafford of my lucid dreams to the extent that I hold that he and I have slipped along this axis – our life-lines clearly marked – precisely in order that we should meet and collaborate to elucidate the nature of polytime....
Another diagram. A globe marked Tony Bratch emanates light. Next to the globe is the likeness of a dishevelled man as a silhouette. I say that there is no way I can teach the concept of polytime and all that flows from it, to the gypsy on the train as he simply lacks the intelligence to grasp it. He is doomed for evermore to live like Plato’s cave dwellers...
I show a globe marked Tony Bratch speaking into a microphone and a symbolic world listening. The world-globe and the Tony Bratch globe emanate rhythmic pulses of light as on the time-sausage sparks fly along its longitudinal axis.
“If you understand the mechanics of your own immortality, dear friends, as a result of my talk, you will daily endeavour to improve yourselves and one another...”
(Globes grow bigger as they emit sparks of varying colours and merge with one another to shower rays in all directions.)
“and that is how you create your own psychic DNA... for as Masefield declared, every thought or deed in every life affects your potential to be either trapped in the darkness of gricehood like that gypsy – or growth to enjoy such superior abilities and aesthetic awareness - that like all of us Dragon Tie wearers your only passion will be to share the fruits of your self-createdness – and so all of you dear friends I trust will say NO to the DEMON DRINK and grow to be beautiful Hands of God.”
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, May 2008
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
nor the NHS, when it means catching you with hidden charges
Experienced today the surgery in South Queensferry trying to do this.
You go to see your GP about a medical enquiry he needs to write a letter about for you to show to a third party. There are lots of situations in which a public office might ask you to make such an enquiry, e.g. the council. When you go back to surgery later to collect the letter, reception tells you there should be a charge of £15 for it. Tells you it does not count as NHS work. You had been to your GP appointment in good faith as an ordinary NHS appointment. There is no publicised or displayed info saying otherwise.
In this case, nothing of this had been told to me at the appointment nor ever by the GP himself. The situation was even more irresponsible for it being left to word of mouth whether you were informed, and the receptionist herself having to ask doubtfully whether the the doctor had said it - and hence did not feel able to press the charge, so at least a small victory there. A frightened elderly patient without any self confidence might not be so lucky. But receptionist put in place a notice to expect charging for any future letters: and this interferes with something in mid stream. It may well not be the GP's fault either, but done undercutting his work, for his good helpful letter concluded, "If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact me" - those are not words consistent with any idea of charging the reader for acting on them.
NHS Lothian complaints department made known that GP surgeries are now working semi-independently under contract and there are no consistent NHS rules on what they can charge for. Not very widely known to vulnerably trappable patients is it? I have made a complaint about the boundaries in any case like this, and about any charging when you go to your GP for health info that another public office wants from you.
You go to see your GP about a medical enquiry he needs to write a letter about for you to show to a third party. There are lots of situations in which a public office might ask you to make such an enquiry, e.g. the council. When you go back to surgery later to collect the letter, reception tells you there should be a charge of £15 for it. Tells you it does not count as NHS work. You had been to your GP appointment in good faith as an ordinary NHS appointment. There is no publicised or displayed info saying otherwise.
In this case, nothing of this had been told to me at the appointment nor ever by the GP himself. The situation was even more irresponsible for it being left to word of mouth whether you were informed, and the receptionist herself having to ask doubtfully whether the the doctor had said it - and hence did not feel able to press the charge, so at least a small victory there. A frightened elderly patient without any self confidence might not be so lucky. But receptionist put in place a notice to expect charging for any future letters: and this interferes with something in mid stream. It may well not be the GP's fault either, but done undercutting his work, for his good helpful letter concluded, "If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact me" - those are not words consistent with any idea of charging the reader for acting on them.
NHS Lothian complaints department made known that GP surgeries are now working semi-independently under contract and there are no consistent NHS rules on what they can charge for. Not very widely known to vulnerably trappable patients is it? I have made a complaint about the boundaries in any case like this, and about any charging when you go to your GP for health info that another public office wants from you.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Don't let the council make it up as it goes along
From Local Government Finance Act 1992 section 81, which creates the power of council tax appeals in the Act's Scottish section:
(1) A person may appeal to a valuation appeal committee if he is aggrieved by -
(a) any decision of a local authority that a dwelling is a chargeable dwelling, or that he is liable to pay a council tax in respect of such a dwelling.
(b) any calculation made by a local authority of an amount which he is liable to pay to the authority in respect of council tax ....
From www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/localgov/ctha-00.asp "What are the grounds for appeal?"
You can check out the full act yourself. It states simply and clearly that if you want to appeal any disagreement you have with the calculation, any error that you personally perceive in it, you are absolutely entitled to do that. That power of appeal is written literally in the law. As aspies know, what is literally said is what is said. In the written law and the public info on it there is absolutely nothing, not a word, that says the council ever has any power to say that it refuses to recgonise your appeal's existence or to carry it out as a case, on grounds of its view of your appeal's merits. It has no power whatever to say, we don't think this is a "relevant" subject for an appeal so by our say-so you are not getting an appeal held.
It follows that it has no power or entitlement further to threaten to take you to court unless you acquiesce to this. You would then be under threat of legal penalties precisely for following exactly what the law says!! It would not be possible to rely on any law as literally meant, or to know that following it means less trouble than not following it. A system of law would not be operating, arbitrary terror would be operating instead, if a council was ever upheld in behaving this way. Over council tax appeals or over anything else ever.
The duty that public bodies have to communicate fully and effectively with us, especially with us because we come under disability equality, rules out the council inventing rules of its own that are not there in the rules issued to the public, of a nature as to let it conveniently suppress appeal cases lodged against its own actions - and for it to claim to enforce what it has invented while ignoring the actual position.
More info from within the scene:
Autism, as a recognised disability, implies a number of rights in court settings. Probably the relevant one to follow up here is to have an ‘appropriate adult’ to provide support. The courts will generally take a helpful and sympathetic view of how to help people who are vulnerable or have disabilities, so long as they are primed beforehand to understand the situation. Often what happens with autism is that there is insufficient prior knowledge provided regarding what the problems are, and the person may present superficially as not having any particular disability.
Statutory rights are conferred by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which the UK Government is a signatory. These include a number of general principles and obligations in relation to equality and non-discrimination (Articles 3-5), and the requirement for States to take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity (Article 12), and to ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others (Article 13).
The principle is that to provide an ‘equal basis’ a person with a disability requires such measures as will provide a level playing field with people who do not have a disability.
Written straight after a meeting with the council, that had to be lobbied for before it could be held!! about a dispute of this nature.
Maurice Frank
(1) A person may appeal to a valuation appeal committee if he is aggrieved by -
(a) any decision of a local authority that a dwelling is a chargeable dwelling, or that he is liable to pay a council tax in respect of such a dwelling.
(b) any calculation made by a local authority of an amount which he is liable to pay to the authority in respect of council tax ....
From www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/localgov/ctha-00.asp "What are the grounds for appeal?"
- If you disagree with the levying authority's decision that your dwelling is chargeable,
- if you disagree with the levying authority's decision that you are liable to pay the council tax in respect of a particular dwelling, or,
- if you disagree with the calculation of your bill
You can check out the full act yourself. It states simply and clearly that if you want to appeal any disagreement you have with the calculation, any error that you personally perceive in it, you are absolutely entitled to do that. That power of appeal is written literally in the law. As aspies know, what is literally said is what is said. In the written law and the public info on it there is absolutely nothing, not a word, that says the council ever has any power to say that it refuses to recgonise your appeal's existence or to carry it out as a case, on grounds of its view of your appeal's merits. It has no power whatever to say, we don't think this is a "relevant" subject for an appeal so by our say-so you are not getting an appeal held.
It follows that it has no power or entitlement further to threaten to take you to court unless you acquiesce to this. You would then be under threat of legal penalties precisely for following exactly what the law says!! It would not be possible to rely on any law as literally meant, or to know that following it means less trouble than not following it. A system of law would not be operating, arbitrary terror would be operating instead, if a council was ever upheld in behaving this way. Over council tax appeals or over anything else ever.
The duty that public bodies have to communicate fully and effectively with us, especially with us because we come under disability equality, rules out the council inventing rules of its own that are not there in the rules issued to the public, of a nature as to let it conveniently suppress appeal cases lodged against its own actions - and for it to claim to enforce what it has invented while ignoring the actual position.
More info from within the scene:
Autism, as a recognised disability, implies a number of rights in court settings. Probably the relevant one to follow up here is to have an ‘appropriate adult’ to provide support. The courts will generally take a helpful and sympathetic view of how to help people who are vulnerable or have disabilities, so long as they are primed beforehand to understand the situation. Often what happens with autism is that there is insufficient prior knowledge provided regarding what the problems are, and the person may present superficially as not having any particular disability.
Statutory rights are conferred by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which the UK Government is a signatory. These include a number of general principles and obligations in relation to equality and non-discrimination (Articles 3-5), and the requirement for States to take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity (Article 12), and to ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others (Article 13).
The principle is that to provide an ‘equal basis’ a person with a disability requires such measures as will provide a level playing field with people who do not have a disability.
Written straight after a meeting with the council, that had to be lobbied for before it could be held!! about a dispute of this nature.
Maurice Frank
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