People ask why I called this blog Manx Low Life when the term “lowlife” has such negative connotations, e.g. of individuals so despicable they can’t even be excused as ordinary decent criminals.
As I’ve explained before – and any Jeff Bernard fan would understand – the blog began as a fun project to explore how someone with his old school bohemian ideals would cope on the Isle of Man. And for the record, I’ve never shared this popular romantic myth of criminals as harmless Robin Hood Jack-the-Lad types. Criminals are feckless parasites who prey on the weak like cancer cells. Always were, always are, always will be. End of.
But as I approach state retirement age, it is also tackling a different theme. I chose to leave well paid but unsatisfying finance sector work to spend my last working years elsewhere for about half the salary. Partly I wanted to scale down for life on a state pension supplemented only by a small private pension. But I was also sick of running around after the rich and wanted to do something more useful.
I chose to lead a simpler life – almost a secular monasticism – with no luxuries, no nights out, no newish car or foreign holidays, etc., so have few complaints about the results. But most of my fellow workers lack other job choices, due to lives which began with poor education and minimal family support and in which they have become trapped due to the way contemporary Manx society works.
I never planned to become a sort of embedded sociologist studying Manx life at the bottom of the heap, but these days I rarely encounter any other segment of society.
To be honest I also no longer feel the need to. I have had it with middle-class navel-gazers and busybodies. I am, in fact, now officially severing all links with such yawn-mongers.
Within the next month or two I should have resigned and handed over my last administrative duties to a group I helped found 20 years ago. We did good work, but the original vision – a little club where open-minded folk could safely have energetic discussions of controversial issues – died long ago, as have all but one of my fellow founders.
In the last two years especially I noticed nothing but blind adherence to the thinking and policies of a UK parent organisation I’ve never taken seriously, and a membership who ask me to organize meetings then don’t even bother to turn up …. because it’s raining…. or there’s an omnibus edition of Corrie…. or…well, I no longer ask why, to be honest.
There are others who want the group to continue, but their witterings about religion remind me of a comment by an old Hungarian academic colleague, a survivor of the samizdat and underground university years.
He described those who safely and loudly criticized Stalinism years after its collapse as stabbing a dead dragon with wooden swords. Similarly, while I’m as opposed to religious privilege as I ever was, I cannot be bothered to beat up a toothless near corpse.
For example, I’ve blogged on here before about the failure of Tynwald to get rid of morning prayers and the Tynwald chaplain – never mind the continued presence of a bishop on Legislative Council. But why rant about it? They’re hardly Putinistas. Like those “The End Is Nigh” street preachers, we can just laugh and walk past these semi-pro sad acts because such lunacy doesn’t affect my, your or anybody else’s life one bit.
So, I might poke fun at such lunacy and lunatics, as well as the hot air from their shoutiest critics. In fact I definitely will. From time to time I might even get serious about more worrying phenomena. But mostly I’ll just continue my experiments into having fun with minimal material resources, and spreading a little joy as I try.
Manx Low Life 