When Death Came Knocking

It's such a long time since I sat down to write a post for S.P. I really ought to rebrand the blog as S.P. Volume 2 (or 3, or 6). But it wasn't just my habitual laziness keeping me away from blogging duties (I promise). In the immortal words of Kettering's J.L.Carr, "It's been a summer" - one I still haven't quite worked out the meaning of.

I nearly died in late June. From somewhere I caught pneumonia, which made my lung fill up with gunk. I also had something growing on the outside of my lung. I don't remember what the doctors said it was, but I do remember the description of it as thicker than four orange peels. The combination of the gunk on my lung and the gunk in my lung made it collapse one frightening night and within a week (I left it because I thought I'd got food poisoning!) I was in the worst pain I'd ever experienced. I'd also lost all control of my bladder.

After I was admitted to hospital things improved. I did get an infection of some sort in my left hand, which swelled up to twice its normal size, after a junior doctor messed up an injection (I have veins that are hard to locate apparently), but the huge amount of drugs they put me on got rid of all my pain and from that point on it was just a matter of enjoying the drug hallucinations and waiting for my op. (I saw all four of the Beatles in a stuffed red pepper. Morphine is great.)

Have you ever signed a form in which you acknowledge that before the day is out the surgery you're facing might kill you? I have and it's pretty scary. I did that just after I'd finally agreed to have an epidural, which I'd resisted furiously because I knew that if I had an epidural I'd also have to have a catheter. I'd seen those things inserted in my days as a care worker and I'd always sworn I'd rather die than have one.Unfortunately I'd reached the point where that was probably the choice.

As it turned out, having a catheter was oddly pleasant. It was great not getting up three or four times during the night to go to the toilet the way I normally do. And because I was still tranked up to the gills I didn't really feel it when it was taken out either. Thank you, Nurse Whoever-You-Are, for your gentle hands and for letting me keep my shorts on.

The operation itself was a success. It left me with a motherf**ker of a scar (see photo), but I also came back into the conscious world with a reinflated gunk-free lung. Getting rid of the pneumonia took a little longer, but the antibiotics finally drove that away too, and I have now been restored to my previous peak physical condition.

Psychologically, though, the impact of nearly dying has been severe. I was afraid to go out for a while because I saw omens of death in everything. Then I went to the other extreme and developed a kind of mania for going out. I had to do everything it was possible to do on my tiny student budget. Life was short and death was long: no more afternoons listening to Five Live and eating biscuits.

And now I'm wary of excessive sociability. I was always a man who appreciated his own company. I worked best, as a writer, when there were fewer people around. I have pushed myself so far into a social sphere I might not belong in I feel mentally naked, exposed, raw; I fear I may have lost the balance that is so precious to me as a Buddhist, and a borderline nutcase. But I'm not sure, either, that that feeling is honest or that balance is what I really need.

See what I mean about how death doesn't have to take you to mess your mind up? There is still quite a lot to work out here, clearly.

Happy Father's Day

I've been writing about the old days recently for my next unpublishable book, My Hometown. Don't do it. Even when you don't get into anything too personal, as I haven't - not about anybody else anyway - too much reflection can be a horrendous experience. And what good is it, really, looking back on a lifetime of bad moves, relationships burned, friendships lost? You can look for justifications and explanations but everything you say will be from the perspective of the person you are today. And it won't change a bloody thing either.

I have been a shiftless, parasitical, pretentious, passive-aggressive, selfish, lying shit for the better part of my life. I have tried to change the world, castigating everything around me, but inside I've been as rotten as the last fruit at the bottom of the drawer, and as deranged as a hermit in a moth-eaten dressing gown crouched at my letter box shouting curses at the children playing football in the street. I don't like to think of myself that way. I would rather have been a hero that the world could admire. I wasn't; and now I've got to do something about it. Untangling that ball of wire should keep me busy for a decade.

But I can say one thing to get me started, and it's probably the most important on the list: Happy Father's Day, Martin Hodder, writer, editor, publisher, and dad. You deserved more credit, more respect, than I ever gave you then, even though I used your achievements to make me feel big and your money to feed and clothe me when anyone with dignity would have been out working. Well, here's a little credit back - too little, yes, too late, of course. I still stand in your long, long shadow, though I pretended otherwise for years;  I see now that it's as good a place as I could ask to be.

Ads and Making Money

I don't know why I have ads on here. I thought I cancelled them long ago, after getting what the counter reported as several thousands of hits and making no money on them at all. Being a techno-dunce, however, I probably pushed the wrong button and doubled the number of them or something.

Now times are tough I should probably work out a way of making this page really attractive to readers so thousands join. Then I should slant the posts in such a way that they generate ads (it functions on some sort of key word principle) that people are going to want to click on. [By the way, butter; lamborghini; tennis.]

Yeah, right. I wouldn't know how to create a commercial product the best day I ever lived.

5 Becomes 4

To have only 5 members and then to lose one of them is quite an achievement, don't you think? I don't know what happened, but they haven't made the person yet that I couldn't offend without even trying.

Email to Richard Sanders. Unanswered.

Dear Professor Sanders,

As a mature student at Northampton preparing for a dissertation on postcolonial studies, I was most interested to read about the work that the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Enterprise and Governance has done with the Chinese Government.

I'm not sure if it's something I will be able to use in my dissertation yet, but I am particularly keen to find out what sort of ethical considerations a body like yours brings to bear on its dealings with a government colonising another country, as China is colonising Tibet.

As you will know hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, including those who've taken the tragic decision to self-immolate - the exact number of these is not known, but most calculations put it at around 30 since 2008.

Does your centre address these issues with its Chinese partners? Are concerns passed to the appropriate bodies before British expertise is shared? Or are these issues considered outside of the remit of the CEEG?

I'd also be interested to know if money is made for the CEEG or for Northampton University as a result of its partnership with the Chinese.

I hope you will be able to give these questions your attention as I think they are genuinely important in our understanding of how colonialism takes root and perpetuates itself, especially in the absence of a stratum of the indigenous population co-operating with the occupying force, which is normally the case in these situations but appears to be largely absent in Tibet.

Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder.

For Those Who Need To See It

THIS PHOTO SUMS UP WHY I CONTINUE TO PRESS MY CASE ABOUT NORTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY'S SHAMEFUL INVOLVEMENT WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT, AND WHY THE REFUSAL OF ALMOST EVERYONE I HAVE APPROACHED ON THE STAFF HERE EVEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE MY RIGHT TO RAISE CONCERNS DISGRACES THEM.

The Help That Never Came

Since the lecturers' union rep completely ignored my appeal to them for help re: the University stonewalling me on China, here's a slightly edited version of the email I sent him.

Dear       ,

I am a mature student (no. 10341251) at Northampton in the second year of an English degree. I have been advised to contact you about some concerns I have with regard to the university and its involvement with the Chinese Government.

In Tibet, approximately 30 people have self-immolated since 2009 to protest the continuing Chinese presence there; arrests and disappearances are commonplace; dissenters are sent for "re-education"; monks are made to denounce the Dalai Lama; the diminishing number of monasteries is subject to Government monitoring; Chinese citizens (Tibet is used as a population overspill for China) are paid to report on the activities of Tibetans; Chinese language textbooks are replacing Tibetan books in schoolrooms; and the rich natural resources are being scavenged by Chinese companies, ruining the livelihoods of indigenous people.There were unconfirmed reports of forced sterilization of young women too, when China was still attempting to establish a dominant population in the country.

Watching the situation deteriorate in Tibet has grieved me as a Buddhist and a human being for a long time. And one thing that gave me hope in the past year was the participation of the Borough Council in the "Shine a Light" ceremony in early March, when the Mayor attended a gathering of supporters of the Tibetan cause and helped raise the Tibetan flag at the Guildhall. I was present at that ceremony; and as the organizer correctly said, raising a Tibetan flag in Tibet would have got us all arrested.

The Chinese Embassy had tried to stop the ceremony from going ahead. When it did go ahead, with messages of support from the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Embassy formally complained about the presence of the Mayor.

A week later Minister Counsellor Zhou Xiaoming from the very same Embassy appeared by invitation at Northampton University to speak as part of "Engineering Week". Given the situation in Tibet, not to mention the dreadful abuses of human rights in China - which have been the subject of recent reports by the United Nations and the American Government, among others - I thought it was incredibly inappropriate, and morally rather repugnant, to invite Mr. Xiaoming to Northampton. So acting on the advice of the Student Union, I wrote to the Vice-Chancellor to express my serious concerns. If he didn't mind the Chinese Embassy trying to interfere with local democracy, I thought, he wouldn't object to one of his students using local democracy to raise objections about a visit by a Chinese Embassy representative to the uni.

Disappointingly, the Vice-Chancellor ignored my email completely. I wrote twice to the University's Facebook page after that, which was probably a rather impotent gesture, and I heard nothing at all from them either. In fact, my only recent communication from the university was an email inviting me to come and meet people from Graduates2China next week, which was so annoying I can't even begin to explain it.

I didn't expect the Vice-Chancellor to withdraw the invitation to Zhou Xiaoming on my say-so or for the university to change its apparent policy of engagement with China. I presume there would be financial implications to a decision of that sort. But the uni makes money from my presence here as well - quite a bit - and from the presence of all the other students who would have objected to the hosting of a Chinese minister if the uni had publicised it properly, and if they were made fully aware of what was happening in China and Tibet.

The deafening silence that greeted my efforts to raise this subject sent the unfortunate message that the opinions of students don't matter if they run counter to the policies of the university. It also threw into question the whole purpose of the English department continuing to run its Post-Colonial Literature module. Superb lecturers are telling students every week about the traumatic pan-generational impact of Britain's colonisation of half the world when the university is getting into bed with the world's leading contemporary coloniser.

At the very least if the uni is going to pursue a policy of "constructive engagement" with dictators (I place the term in inverted commas because it is such a misnomer), it should create a parallel space in which human rights can be debated freely and openly. A representative of the Tibetan government-in-exile should be invited to address students the next time someone from the Chinese government visits. Either that or students must be allowed to present ministers with petitions and other documents of objection and grill them on their policies in the Chinese homeland and in Tibet. If something of that sort doesn't happen the university is positioning itself in a very worrying ethical place.

I don't know what you can do with any of the aforementioned ramblings, but as I mentioned, your name was recommended to me as someone on the staff who might be interested in hearing what I had to say. Thank you very much for your patience and feel free to use what I've shared here if it's helpful.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder.

Rude Notes in a Den of Whores: The Truth About Northampton and China

Another week has gone by since I posted about a mysterious 'new lead' in my long quest to have someone at Northampton University engage with me over China and Tibet, and not surprisingly, I haven't heard a thing from him. Clearly, nobody in this place is going to talk to me, not even the lecturers' union - you know, those people who were supposed to care about these things.

In the meantime, on Thursday last week, the local paper - who wouldn't publish a letter from me on the subject either - announced that the University was expected to have the sixth largest fall in the number of enrollments for 2012/ 13 in the whole country. Which works out, apparently, at roughly 350 fewer students.

Of course, this had nothing to do with increased tuition fees, according to someone from the University, and was "in line with their predictions" (they used some management-speak phrase like that). And the Uni wasn't concerned because they were seeing a concomitant rise in students from overseas, who don't register on the same enrollment list. So the edifice wasn't about to fall down around their ears or anything.

Just think about that for a moment, gentle reader. Overseas students. How much do you want to bet a large number of those are from China?

The closeness of the University's relationship with China is truly staggering. I did a little research today and found out that the CEEG, or the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Enterprise and Governance, based at Northampton, has what it calls "international partners" in Shaoguan and Beijing, and a partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, set up in 2010. Since 2011 the centre has included the China, Transitional and Developing Economies Group.

"The work of Professor Richard Sanders," I quote from the university's own website, "has influenced Chinese government policy towards the management and funding of rural business development." All of which is fine and dandy. Shame it hasn't done anything to prevent the thirty+ deaths by self-immolation in Tibet since 2009, not to mention the shootings, beatings,disappearances and persecution of anyone
trying to practise their religion in peace.

Funny how what Mr. Sanders and Nick Petford and Bruce Hodder (just about, although I have no money) enjoy in England - the freedom to live our own lives without undue molestation or the presence of an occupying army on our streets - isn't supposed to matter to other people. Not when it gets in the way of a good profit anyway.

I almost wish I hadn't found these things out because now I feel as if I'm studying in a den of whores. Northampton University should be thoroughly ashamed of itself for associating with those murdering CCP bastards but it won't see anything even vaguely wrong with what it's doing; and if any of the people I've tried to talk to over this spent even sixty seconds thinking about my emails before they pressed the delete button I know I'll be the one who's dismissed as a crank.

Better to be a crank than a realist, I say, if realism is doing business with killers.

But now I'm stuck in a University I've lost every ounce of respect for with one year of my degree left to do and a dissertation on postcolonial literature,of all fucking things, to write. Yes, these people teach that invading other countries, brutally suppressing the native population, destroying their culture and stealing all their natural resources is wrong.

I love some of the people I've met since I started at the Uni, but the more I think about the institution itself, the more I have to hold my nose just to get through the door.

Mark Twain:

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”

My "Tibet Thing": The Leads Keep Tumbling

I have a powerful feeling I'm heading for another disappointment with what even I have come to think of as "my Tibet thing" and Northampton University. I've been given another lead. Another chance to make my point. To get my voice heard. But it seems to be going the same way as all the others.

I've been stonewalled by the powers that be here for so long now I wondered for a while if my emails were even getting out. You look for reasons. Rational, if paranoid, explanations that might justify the total lack of engagement by anybody in authority with your complaint.

Here's a simple one: they don't give a shit. There's just too much money involved in the university having a high profile in the business community for it to risk being viewed as (excuse the expression) ethical. And there's too little money being made from my presence as a student here for my dissenting view to matter. Students aren't even supposed to have a dissenting view. People aren't supposed to have a dissenting view. The world that the hierarchy at the university is preparing its students for is one in which we are all obedient cogs in the capitalist machine. As that great philosopher Puff Daddy once said, "It's all about the Benjamins" and university is teaching you how to get more of them than people who didn't have your privileges.

As another great philosopher, Hunter S. Thompson, once said, "Shit on that." (See what a vast storehouse of quotable knowledge I have after two years at university?)

My "lead" is a member of staff. He/ she is supposed to be the go-to person when it comes to disputes. I won't name them here or mention who told me about them. But I did feel a cautious sense that I was making some progress when I was advised to contact them. They, I was assured, would speak out not only for me, but for all the lecturers who didn't know Zhou Xiaoming was coming and would not have been thrilled about it if they'd been informed. They, I was led to believe, would take up the cudgels without hesitation and get things sorted. I had acted alone for long enough.

And they still might, I suppose. I don't want to give up hope too quickly. But I wrote to them nine days ago now and I've been met with the same silence I got twice from Nick Petford. I hope they don't turn out to be another person who cares until it really matters.

Shouting in an Empty Room: How Northampton Deals with Dissent

My email to the careers officer was, predictably, ignored. It seems to be the way Northampton University deals with dissent. I've just had a whole load more 'meet the employer' emails from the university delivered to my inbox.

I did have what looked like another chance to raise the issue of Tibet last week. Every year at the university - it's probably the same everywhere - they send out 'student satisfaction' surveys and these go back directly to the office of Nick Petford, the Vice-Chancellor. I'd had mine lying in my inbox for a few days and I'd done nothing about it. I don't, for the most part, believe these things are a legitimate exercise in improving the student experience. But when Mr. Petford failed to answer my email and the university's Facebook page also ignored me, I realised the survey might be a golden opportunity to get somebody to acknowledge my concerns. How naive could an old man be.

With all my usual flaming indignation I filled out the survey online, adding a long paragraph in the optional section at the end about how disturbing it was not only to see my university hosting visits from representatives of a brutal dictatorship, but also to be treated with disdain by the university hierarchy because I dared to protest about it.

When I clicked the 'send' button on the computer I felt good. For some reason, despite my scepticism about the student surveys, I felt as if I'd finally made my point. Someone, at least, would read what I'd written, searching the way they probably do for quotable plaudits to go into the next promotional brochure. At the very least I would create that moment of seething annoyance when they realised I hadn't shut up yet.

No.

The next day, opening my email looking for something else, what did I find but an invitation from the university to fill out one of their annual student satisfaction surveys. Receipt of my previous one had been acknowledged by the automated system, but somehow it had vanished into the ether with all my other attempts to raise a lone voice of protest about the university's love affair with China.

Email to Robert Owen, Northampton University, Careers

After being antagonized almost beyond the point of human endurance by Northampton Uni's refusal to engage with me on the ethical problems raised by Zhou Xiaoming's visit on the 15th, I received an email the other day from Robert Owen, the University's "Careers and Employability" man, inviting me to come and meet representatives from Graduates2China when they visit on Thursday. Apparently, if I'm lucky, I could come away with the beginnings of a plan to teach English to students in Chinese schools for a year. Very good for my cv, etc. etc. etc.

You might as well have thrown an aerosol can on a fire as send me that, especially in the wake of my arrogant treatment by the University hierarchy. Does capitalism have no morals at all?

Here's my reply:

Thanks Robert, but until China stops abusing the human rights of its own citizens and ceases the genocide against Tibet I don't think it's moral either for me to think about this or for the university to be lending its facilities to those who offer it.The number of people who have self-immolated in Tibet since 2009 to protest against the Chinese occupation of their country has now reached 30, and that's too high a price to pay for my selfish advancement.

Regards,

Bruce.

Zhou Xiaoming: The Silence is Deafening

Shame, shame and shame again on Northampton Uni, who have ignored for six days the email I sent to them complaining about their decision to invite Chinese Embassy Minister Zhou Xiaoming to the University today. Does my opinion only matter if the University hierarchy can use it in some way to further their business profile or their position in the league tables? The bodies may be burning far away from England, ladies and gentlemen, but they are still burning.

Email to Nick Petford, Vice-Chancellor of Northampton University

on learning that Minister Counsellor Zhou Xiaoming will be visiting the University next week

 

Dear Mr. Petford,

As a mature student at the University, I was extremely surprised and disappointed to learn, from the newspaper rather than from the University itself, of the visit this coming Thursday of Minister Counsellor Zhou Xiaoming from the Chinese Embassy.

As you are undoubtedly aware, Mr. Xiaoming represents a Government whose record on human rights has been consistently condemned by other Governments and independent bodies around the world. In Tibet, which China has occupied illegitimately for several  decades, religious freedoms are severely restricted, the native language is being erased and as fundamental a freedom (from a fortunate Western perspective) as flying the Tibetan national flag will result in your arrest. (Mr. Xiaoming's Embassy even had the temerity to complain to the Borough Council because the Mayor was present at a ceremony in which the Tibetan flag was raised in Northampton.)

Hundreds of thousands have been beaten, imprisoned, tortured, maimed and killed by the occupying Chinese army during the long years of the Tibetan struggle for independence. Since 2009 alone, approximately 26 monks, nuns and lay people have been driven to self-immolate by the desperateness of the situation there. Most call for the liberation of their country and the return of their spiritual leader, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, while their bodies burn.

These are not wild exaggerations or the product of my fanciful imagination, but solid, provable facts. In the light of the above, and the campaigns around the world to end the Tibetan genocide by boycotting Chinese goods and services, I believe the University should not make its facilities available to representatives of the Chinese Government, either by direct invitation or indirectly, by hosting conferences or seminars to which these representatives are invited.

I know that the University is a business, but business has a duty to be moral as well as profitable, especially when a large area of its focus is the education of the next generation of adults; surely it would be better not to send them the message, however unintentionally, that genocide is less important than money. Or if more visits like Mr. Xiaoming's are to be arranged (I appreciate it is probably too late to withdraw his invitation now), perhaps you should consider dropping the "Empire and After" module from the BA English degree. I take that module - it is mandatory, actually - and we are told in it, consistently, and rightly of course, that invasion and colonisation of other countries by military force, followed by the subjection of the native population, is a crime against humanity which all civilised people should condemn.

I found it a rather bitter irony to come home yesterday, after my Empire and After lecture, to find that the University is playing host to a representative of the largest and most brutal colonial oppressor on Earth.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder
BA English, Second Year.