Untitled ground shot

Return to the fray

It is 6 months since my breakdown. Well, since it began. I was completely unhinged for 2 months. No grasp of reality whatsoever. From hallucinations to voices talking to me. There are pages of notes I made at the time. I thought of describing it in this journal but it made no sense. If there is anyone I offended I apologize. 

Mental illness is no fun. Still I feel shaky at times. Still I wake in terror but only rarely now, not every night. 

As for causes? there are many. It was down to 4 or 5 things coming in to alignment. Like some rare, fantastically improbable astrological happening. 

On the good, I have learned a lot. I have also, through meeting others in treatment for other, similar conditions found new purpose. 

I had been determined to take time to recover fully so when the Cutty Sark work came up I had to say no.

Last week I got asked to do quite a lot of furniture. It isn't often opportunities like this come up. Most makers dream of such things.

No one else can do this, I can't sub it out. I need money to take my dog to the vet. I don't have much choice. But, God help me, I am scared.

Old Gold Cover

Old followers will recognize this piece.

Working with Addicts

There can be few jobs so rewarding as helping young addicts to escape their shackles. Since my breakdown I have taken time to look in to mistakes I made, way back when I was their age, and using insight gained try to help.

In contemporary treatment the language used can have a destructive effect. One example is the use of the term 'clean' for someone who is no longer taking drugs. Many of the individuals I meet have spent their whole lives being told they are bad. Being encouraged to describe their abstinence as being clean implies that they have been unclean, dirty. When you are dealing with young people with damaged self esteem language like this further marginalizes them.

Another popular thought is to consider addiction a disease. Whilst it is true that you can create physical dependence in anyone by dosing them thrice daily with heroin this is not the part that we have problems with. Often addicts find no great hardship in kicking the drug in prison. Yes, they suffer but knowing there is no choice changes things. Once they get out is where the problems begin.

Addiction is negative habitual behavior. This makes it worse in many ways to disease. Having to change the individual through their own volition is far harder than curing disease.

Venus on my phone

Here we see two rough photos from my phone and the odd blue star below.

Filling in the Gaps

How often do you find people, rather than ask you for the truth choose to fill in the gaps using imagination and gossip. After a long stint of truancy shortly after my mothers death the school sent a social worker round to my house to see what I was up to.

She was really nice and this was a wise move. After a couple of weeks the thought of all the trouble I would be in overwhelmed me and so I stayed away longer and longer. Finally I dare not return.

Her approach was good but she had answered all the questions already. I must be sniffing glue and be a certain character type. It was easier for everyone involved to stick to a familiar script rather than address the problem.

I went back to school but nothing deep had altered.

Beech

The Archaeology of Addiction

Virtually all alcoholics and drug addicts have either mental health issues or psychological problems. The unpleasant side effects and problems drugs cause are severe. No one in their right mind buys unspecified powders off rough looking strangers on the streets and injects them in to their body. I must make this clear. Drug addiction is not a healthy life choice. It invariably leads to unhappiness on a scale you previously could never have imagined. It is very rarely an extension of partying. Whilst the addict may hide within a group of recreational drug users they are quite different in nature. The issue of responsibility is one we have yet to resolve. Whilst it takes volition to find drugs and take them it is clearly self destructive behaviour. As with obesity and depression it puts huge pressure and expense on the NHS. The costs of treating addicts are far lower than putting them in prison, though, and the sooner addiction is seen in terms other than criminal the better. Many people in jail would not be there were they not drug addicts. There is a recidivism that sees criminals finding drugs as a reason to make sense of their crime, a reason to go out robbing.    There is no clear way to separate the addicts who can be 'cured' from those who choose to indulge. All systems so far have seen addicts find ways to cloud issues. Often the requirement for remorse expressed whether real and felt or acted out over shadows any findings. Our courts, indeed our common morality requires they deny their addict lives whether they feel so inclined to do or not. This confusion, our inability to decide how we think of addicts is preventing us solving the problems. Whilst, as Irvine Welshs book Trainspotting helped to explain, many addicts do not see the straight life on offer as desirable. Some have no wish to take part in a society that deems 'a big fat television, mind numbing and spirit crushing game shows' an alternative. Many reject the healthy, noble world of achievement straights aspire to.

I can now look back, think of my school year and guess to a high degree of accuracy who would go on to use heroin. Children are shaped as soon as they get to school, often before. Those who get in to trouble or get too excited are told they are bad. The death of a parent or being the victim of abuse can compound the label. Once you are 'bad', as I was, it all seems to follow. Each telling off stamps in a fresh layer of the bad in to you. Some find they are still going to court, being told they are bad right through their lives. It is only in the last year I have accepted that I am good. I am still learning how to be with this new understanding.

The instinct is to improve your environment. The aquisition of wealth permits us to buy and decorate our surroundings. Some see they will never be able to alter their immediate environment so choose to change their relationship to it. Others who never learn to save, never find the secret of long term thinking go for the quick fix.

 As a young recreational drug user, heroin was taboo and extremely rare. In the 1990s Britain was flooded with Afghan heroin and is still awash with it. The rare exotic intellectual addict in the William Burroughs mold, familiar but rare in 1970s London, numbering in the hundreds spring to older peoples minds. The reality now is that the drug is everywhere, throughout society. Sadly, at the bottom of the pile, whole housing estates have succumbed to heroin use. To be a drug user when I was in my teens was exotic and strange. Psychonauts, expanding our consciousness. Sadly many took up the heroin habit when the epidemic hit. Now, in those areas of Leeds the divide is different. Heroin is not cool but a hazard for all. With the arrival of crack cocaine in the late 90s the twin habit of brown and white is common. So from a few hundred addicts in 1970 we now have over a million.

Most, I would say have at least a little of that rejection of societies norms in them. A hunger for a more meaningful life than contemporary British society offers. A lack of interest in wealth. What often riles the straight is the rejection of all they hold up as  sacred. Seeing the flat screen tv they hold up as a false idle, stolen and sold for a bag of brown powder hurts their sense of values. This inversion of values reveals the trivial nature of much straight aspiration.

Another aspect of modern life is the lack of desperation. In a country where we have little difficulty feeding everyone, all poverty becomes relative. Consequently there isn't the need that makes sacrifice meaningful. I have witnessed selfless acts between addicts. Times where an addict has helped out another knowing they will suffer for doing so. This kind of interaction breeds a solidarity. A community with real ties. Only in places with severe poverty where the sharing of food means ones own hunger can gifts carry such importance. It may not be survival at stake as it is with the starving but it is much closer than any desperation I have seen elsewhere in society.

For these reasons it is often difficult to help. For some addicts the pay off isn't there. Many I have known are aware that there is nothing there to promise them as a reward for stopping. All you are doing to them is taking their culture away. They will have no bond with their old friends. Each morning would have seen them rising, perhaps hurting but with purpose. Going out to see friends who can help, maybe commit crime for cash. In some city areas I know, where there is little work it is only the addicts who move with any purpose. Taking care of business. Depriving this from them takes away the only meaning they have.

But the suffering, the deaths of friends, the lack of touch with ones own emotions, not truly being your self, living in a state of delusion, can all be reasons for change. Knowing that while they are addicts they will not find a greater meaning. It is hard to articulate the separation heroin brings but it is this emotional detachment that gives it value in both pain relief in medicine and to those who take it as a life choice. It was finding my emotional reactions to everyday life too intense to handle that drew me in. I have met several schizophrenics who find it preferable to the barbarity of anti psychotics.

Most addicts are in a state of denial if not to others then to themselves. As with serious eating disorders such as anorexia the addict can be aware of their descent yet unable to quantify or apply the knowledge to help themselves. Most find ways to accommodate their habits. If the habit is heavily ritualised as with the injecting heroin addict or even the smoking off running beetles on tin foil, it can be hard to hide. Indeed it could be argued that with such visibility the addict is regularly reminded of their condition, prevented from avoiding the issue. With heroin the hit is short lived but profound. The gouch, the meditative trance like state and running around along with the practicalities of consumption keep all but the none working, be they very rich or very poor away from the practice.

More often, particularly in Britain the addict will begin this way before finding medical help. Not all but most heroin users, once they are addicted, seek medical help. Frequently as soon as addiction takes hold both to get free of the horrific surprise at their dilemna and as a safety net. Once they talk to their GP they will be referred to their local addiction services. This can take anything from 2 weeks to a year depending on how stretched the service provider is. In Leeds this is Leeds Addiction Unit, in Somerset it is Turning Point, formerly Somerset Drug Service and in Bath, with the best name of all BADAS, the Bath Addiction Drug and Alcohol Service. Here they will be allocated a key worker. The key worker will assess the depth and history of the addiction. Normally they will start with the softest touch, suggesting the addict taper off. This is incredibly hard and very few succeed.

The next step is to prescribe substitute medication. Usually they will be asked to provide a urine sample and say how much gear a day they are on. The addict will usually lie, giving a higher amount so they are not left under prescribed. On their first prescription they are expected to achieve cross over from heroin to methadone or subutex and then given a swift reduction.

Usually, if it is the addicts first habit they will underestimate the pull of the drug. Heroin withdrawal is difficult to explain. I have seen films and read books that try to capture it. They all have been wide of the mark. These first reduction courses are brutal. Often taking a few days to a month.

Usually the addict will fail these. Normally there will be several attempts and many relapses.

The next step is controversial. Containment. The addict is given a maintenance prescription.

They must continue to see their key worker and will be put on a daily pick up of their methadone or subutex. They will be required to take it in view of the pharmacist. A carrot and stick system follows. Once the addict has given three clean screens they may be able to take their medicine away. Further clean screens will earn them perhaps a bi weekly pick up.

Most addicts will go for many years on maintenance scripts. Dropping in and out of heroin habits as trauma, opportunity and other factors dictate. Methadone or physeptone, another brand is virtually interchangeable with heroin. Some claim it won't fully stave off withdrawal symptoms. The effects do not give such a clear effect. An addict maybe prescribed anywhere up to 150 ml. The policy a decade ago was to match 10 ml to a £10 bag. Bags of course vary in size and quality but as a rough guide it wasn't too bad. These days much higher doses are more common.

There is a ridiculous, unhelpful impasse in treatment. Unless you are rich and can pay for a private doctor to prescribe pharmacutical heroin , doctors are insistent the drug you take not be pleasurable. In the event of showing pleasure any medication would be stopped. This ties the doctors hands. Most see addicts as a drain on their resources and stick to whatever the current fashion with doctors is. They love to give out new untested over time drugs that alter brain chemistry such as Prozac but are reluctant to prescribe a drug that we have thousands of years of trials with. Opiates may have there faults but we know what they are.

If the addict uses on top, and methadone does not give the same pleasurable gouch of heroin so they often do use on top, it shows up in the screens they are required to give. The key worker will ask if the dose the addict is on is sufficient to hold them. The addict either has to admit that methadone doesn't hit the spot, that they just enjoy heroin or do as is required for everyone to stay happy. They say the meth doesn't quite hold them. The doctor will prescribe a bit more. An addict will not often say no to free drugs so the dose goes steadily up.

Once they are on 120 ml or more their system is pretty saturated with opiates, (bare in mind 10 ml can kill a none addict.). They may still use on top as they have often developed a quasi religious belief in heroins' properties. Most or any effect they get now will be psychological. Methadone settles in your fat deposits, it saturates your bone marrow, it has a huge half life. Because of this it is a much longer, much more savage withdrawal. Once this addicted to opiates you need godlike powers to get off it. I have known many addicts but few who have had a large methadone script for a year or more who have ever come off it.

Less popular with addicts is subutex. The replacement opiate of choice in drug treatment in France this is what is known as a partial agonist and it blankets the opiate receptors. If given a dose of 10 or more mg heroin has no effect. The addict must stop heroin for 12 or so hours, wait till withdrawal sets in then take a dose. This provides no relief and shakes off any remaining opiates. Three days follow of symptoms roughly the same as withdrawal; mentally worse but not so bad physically. On the 4th day the addict normally feels ok if they have stuck it out.

After this it can be used as a maintenance drug that acts as a heroin blocker. If the addict takes 12 or 16 mg no amount of heroin will get through. The effects are subtle but uplifting compared to methadones treacle wading sludge.

To sum up, there is no easy answer. Maintenance opiate prescriptions shock people who know nothing on the subject. Most opiate addictions take a good decade to solve, and that is only if the addict wants to. Any withdrawal involves the inverse opposite to the drugs effects. All the pain that was held back will come down on you. What is most misleading in all fictional descriptions is the duration. Ten years ago I found myself hopelessly addicted. I had been told it was like a bad flu to come off, that the worst was over in a week. It is far bigger than you can comprehend. Every part of you to the furthest corners of your soul needs to change. You can not change your nature; here the 12 steppers are right. You need a quantum shift in your self understanding. After three weeks I managed a couple of hours sleep. Even in amphetamine marathons I never knew a human could be awake that long. Six months after stopping each day was still total depression.

Now that I have decided to work in drug treatment and addiction councelling I have decided to run through my thoughts on the subject. Beware, there will be more on the subject.

Having gone through addiction and being unable at the time to find any accurate help I have chosen to put what I have learned to good use. I have theories as to the nature of addiction that I haven't seen written anywhere. There is a way to beat this but it isn't anything like I thought. 

Looking Down

Art

Before I left school, my art teacher who saw me as having great potential took me to Jacob Kramer art college. I had enjoyed art at school. It had been my salvation. After getting banned from nearly all other lessons I found peace in the art block.

What I did there was drawing and painting mainly. At the college I couldn't fully see it. I turned my back on it. I was asked to say I could see what I could not. It reminded me of the church. Everyone else appeared to be able to see it but I could not. 

To be religious or to commit myself to art full time I would be lieing to myself in some way. My whole life I have skipped round the deges of art, always hoping it would become clear. It never has. Whether I ought to make an art I can believe in or to stick to writing, I am not sure.

Design bores me these days. It sits in the background to where the real action takes place. Over interest in it seems a bit autistic. A bit like saying lets study he wallpaper before we interact. I have to get back in to the moment.

I'm a right brainer. I make the jumps, excell at domain shifts, am good with metaphor. Yet somehow art rarely seems to be objectively good. No unarguable quality. Maybe nothing is like that.

Back to Philips belief in a fixed reality. This informed his belief in good design. That some things were designed beyond taste. Nothing exists in that way. Everything is subjective.

Rock Bottom or the Epiphany

The addict is told that he must reach rock bottom before recovery can happen. The mental breakdown can be seen as an epiphany if played out right. Rarely are the veils lifted and if you get a glimpse then by god you should grab it, most people never get one. The epiphany of self is as profound as religious experience but should not be confused as one. If you are not regularly party to spiritual experience a clear sight of yourself can seem like one.

Alan Badiou speaks of the idea of the event - The rupture in the nature of being and seeming that allows, momentarily, the omnipresent, unchanging and therefore invisible truth to become evident. It is precisely because we are a creature who perceive time as linear, and only visible by change that we rarely see the truth. It requires all movement, all progress to stop for a moment for us to see.

Alcoholics speak of rock bottom. A place from which all self deception is stripped. It is the vision of yourself in its purest sense,without any spin, without denial. It is the Road to Damascus moment.

Not everyone gets one. It can not forced however ill you get. I have done other rattles but all were mere holding of the breath.

Climbers look for this feeling by exposing themselves to physical hardship, lack of food, sleep, tiredness. The analogy with the climber is a good one. Both are controversial hospital cases as they are seen to have brought on their own problems. But I would argue having to self medicate to carry out everyday things is different to climbing to experience more than the everyday.

Revolution

 There is an illusion our culture has fallen under. The concept of endless growth from finite resources is something that only Jesus has managed with his fish and loaves magic. Now we have to address the fact that, as a people we have blown tomorrows money. The game is up.

The extreme capitalism that all recent governments have promoted has left politicians incapable of seeing other options. The Tories may help the few to keep more and socialists call for redistribution. The idea of enforced meritocracy may enable those who are born poor but smart to escape their background but offers nothing to the stupid, the ugly and the just plain unlucky. As all talent drifts upwards environments are left without wisdom or heroes. We must change if we are to develope.

Each time I turn on the TV I hear the patronising consevative voices of Jeremy Kyle or David Cameron telling folk that they should get a job. No thought for purpose, just work. We can't all work anymore but we can all find purpose in life.

Looking for meaning outside of wealth is something all young people should be taught. Born in to shelter and food but little else I was fortunate to have a father who was a naturalist and bar stool philosopher. With an interest in wildlife and reading few days are dull. Socialist redistribution just reshuffles the cards of the same game.

With money you can change your environment. People need to learn to adapt. The answer to many of Kyles victims is not to get a job, get money, escape. There are not sufficient jobs. The answer is to live in ways that render wealth irelevant. We need to eat and sleep dry, of course, but entering a game rigged for you to lose deprives life of all meaning.

The skills to tap in to the true wonders of life that transcend money trump all others skills. Creative skills, the ability to make, thinking, debate, observing, gaining knowledge for its' own sake all come cheap. The idea that we need a job or even a place at university in preference to  an interest and the ability to learn is simply wrong. We have lost some, not all of the community and family skill transference where a child may learn their wildlife or joinery from uncles but cheap technology has rushed in exposure to vast information resources.

It isn't the fact the rich seal off routes to join them that is killing us but a cultural depression that has set in. Children are being groomed by television to think X Factor or the lottery will pluck them and place them in  a new world. Knowing this to be trivia should be available to all.

We need to see money as the problem, not the solution. It will always be necessary but as a measure of worth it is limited and highly corrupting. Placing it at the center of human existence is a serious mistake.

There was a time when money for its' own sake was seen as crass and people would reject it if it interfered with their integrity. Even in my lifetime, under Thatcher, those of us who knew we were disenfranchised. Those who knew we would not be able to join the property ownership game turned our backs on it to find a better way. We embraced unemployment. Each city had scenes where creative unemployed people formed bands, theatre groups, launcxhed fanzines. Some took to the road. The traveller movement offered an rural escape. An idyllic view of it perhaps but give my an ideal anytime.

Thatchers government did wage war on the travellers. Many returned to the cities where there still were no jobs. They just further clogged the dissolving social housing and welfare systems.

Our politics took a beating. Some whose creative projects had been good took advantage of the opportunities that arose through the abundance of the early New Labour days. What travellers remained became tribalised. The divisions were very clear when I returned to sights, some 17 or 18 years after I had last lived like that. Heroin had taken its' toll. Where famillies had fought for an idealistic life of clean outdoor life. many now got up angry, looking for a hit or a can.

These people would not top any applicant lists for jobs. Where they had purpose and solidarity in a lifestyle with legend and history, once pushed back to the city many died. No minimum wage job can give meaning or purpose like they once had. Even if you disagree with someones honour code it is easier to interact with someone who has one. After Nostell Priory, the Beanfield and countless further attacks on their lifestyle only the hardy, the bitter and those who could find no tow hold anywhere else survived. The prejudice they had suffered pushed them further together till those with good hearts would defend even bad actions of their own.

After my time as a traveller I returned to University. Since leaving there I have become disappointed with many who went. For three years students would talk the talk. Once out many abandoned dreams and principles in order to take low level jobs and get on the bottom rungs of the ladder. Under Blair it seemed even the alternatives aspired to this. Now they seem lost. Stuck, desperatly holding on to this shaky ladder, scared to fall down, always looking up to see who has more than them. I never saw that ladder like pattern, always an expansive, growing, organic splatter of possibility.

This is no nostalgic mid life yearning for lost punk or hippy youthful simplicity but a political realisation that not everyone can succeed in the type of game they are playing. Meritocracy excludes as much as aristocracy.

As left leaning intelectuals concern themselves with establishing level playing fields, redistribution of wealth we frequently see as soon as they are able they privately educate their children. Who would not give their kids a better chance? This is not the only game in town. I see it taking the lives of close freinds as profoundly as drugs take my other freinds. As the talented leave the places of their birth those places suffer.

It is the belief in money as your god that undermines. There is no above or below unless you make one.

My View

Spiky fractal tracery, the pixelated mandala, the shifting forms of colour tattoo my vision. The everyday is now as acid trips were. This is my normal state. Meaning and profundity connect small happenings. Each day begins with excitement and the shock of the days new but stumbles off tired and disjointed.

Subjective Reality

If there is a greater reality, one that trumps our own individual ones, how can people fall so far? Persieve it as being so bad?

How come life can batter people down, force them to their knees where they can only soften the sharp corners with drugs. If there is a true reality maybe it is not good. When confronted with its mercyless solidity, its' brutal inflexibility, those who can't perpetuate an illusion of joy crumble. Are forced to accept the crapness and make the best of it.
Perhaps I was wrong and Philip was right.

Orange Crack and Pavements

Stray Fingers

To have gone through this profound change is of comparrison to have gone through puberty

Some Thoughts

Football has shifted from glory on the day such as the FA cup victory to being about the process. So few fans of premier league teams actually go. The fanbase now has to be broad and distant and the brand of the global elite, the few teams who transcend the catchment area of the pedestrian fan to the tv driven child with no connection to the village that the club represent,

Is there such a thing as sustainable growth? Aren't the two mutually exclusive?
Like I would once, after a serious hangover or come down, not say never again but try to find a way to get off my head in a sustainable way. I wouldn't think it was the model that was wrong.
Thank god that is behind me.

Freds work is not 'about' anything, its' meaning is itself.
Mine is and as such is a slow vehicle for the ideas. I need a faster means of output.

The House of Lords still needs further reform. 92 hereditary peers! 26 bishops was terrible but we still have 12. 12 people in power advancing morality based on belief in the superstitious practices.

The subtleties of accent. It isn't merely that you feel comfortable with those that talk like you it is fine degrees of irony that are expressed through accent. Maybe this is why I find some things Damien says funny when they wind others up.

In these PC times it is worth remembering that not all fat bastards are greedy fuckers.

In Leeds fat bastard often means someone robberbly rich. The phrase has a poetic beauty with the machine gun patterof the repeated a's.

When did the search for enlightenment drift off in to bachanalian excess and when did that drift off in to self medication.

A surfeit of thrones and a pawsity of chairs

The worst thing I know is that personality goes when the brain is damaged. All this beauty, empathy and love is survival tricks. Horrible but true.

More on Damien Hirst

Beauty is in the eye of the shareholder. Capitalism is based on the severing of meaning and price and the upholding of price as the ultimate form of meaning.
Damien Hirst is an artist who grew up through the tailend of Thatcher and Blairs Britain. His work is reflective of a time many now feel at least a little ashamed of. His Sotherbies auction coming the day before the global economy began to unfurl was supreme timing giving the event a historic placing no artist could have predicted. Hirst seems to have some sort of luck, perhaps even a knowledge no other artist does.
Damien Hirst seems to upset people by appearing to laugh at the art world, even by those who will accept the logic that art has no intrinsic value. Only that we give to it.
The government ran in to trouble when it described Sherwood Forest as 'an attractive investment opportunity for the timber industry'. Some things are sacred.
Society gets the art it deserves. It acts as a mirror to our morality.
I used to see the ire Hirsts work triggers as a slightly more jealous version of the ire incurred by Carl Andres bricks, Equivalent VIII. It is different though.
We saw Telecom sold off under Thatcher. Since thenwe have seen an incremental drifting of the goal posts of acceptability. The forests may not yet be acceptable but the Royal Mail is to many considered no longer an institution but a business. Somehow Hirsts work ruptures some sense of purity many will not tolerate. As if art may be bought but not in an incivilised way.
The dislike of Hirst is the dislike of the direction culture has taken.
My liking for him is down to personal history. If I had no connection to him I am unsure what I would feel. His best art I find hard to not like. Who can not find a shark impressive? He began by making art to compete with other cultural choices, Art that could stand up to Hollywood films.
He completely changed art in Britain. Much more than any other artist has in my lifetime. It has become like rock and roll. If you are too young to remember it was a dullish, cerebral thing that us oiks were barred from.
I hear what some say about him annd it feels wrong. If he sickens us it is a sickening of ourselves for falling for Blairs lies.
I don't see a rich artist I see the lad going to Jacob Kramer, our local art college, the lad getting turned down by St Martins.

Art is as meaningful as we make it.

Under the Table

Skree bakes bread

Tacit knowledge is something I have written about many times before. Back in 1985 I was living up in the hills above Gayle, 4 miles from Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales. Twice a week I would make bread.

After moving away I hadn't made bread since. Last week I thought I would have a go.

The moves my hands slipped in to were deeply ingrained but forgotten. Never have I consciously thought about how I move my hands when needing. It triggered a stream of memories from 1985 that I can't normally tap in to.

Smell is famed for triggering memory. Perhaps because it is the sense we least verbalise.

Greeces' concentration camps

We all wonder how National Socialism could have happened in central Europe; how such horror could happen anywhere. Yet we also have heard testimony from mundane Germans who were swept up in the madness.
We hear Greek commentators pointing to the squeeze from Germany, from those from who they have borrowed. Worrying to say the least.
It is in times of severe poverty that extremist views come to the fore.
At 3 disused military bases north of Athens 30 or so migrant camps have been set up that will be operational before the Greek election in early may. Crime is up by 125%. Police chiefs say it is carried out by 70% foreigners. 90% of illegal migrants in the EU are caught in Greece. An estimated 130 000 a year use Greece as Europes back door. Yesterday we saw a decent 70 year old man, tired of living a degrading subsistence take his life near government buildings. Now in their 5th year of recession 1000s of migrants are walking the streets homeless. With native Greek workers, often still carrying out duties unpaid how can we hope for migrants to find a way?
I can only hope that these labour camps remain humane.

Dharma

The righteousness that underlines the law.

Truth.

We are at the arrows tip of evolution....