horsemouth is better off out of it

horsemouth has passed 100 listens to his mixcloud session of 9 months ago (this was why howard texted him at 7am - ok 07:04:57). normally they take a lot longer to get to a 100 (more like 4 years). as usual horsemouth has no idea why. 

horsemouth will now give it a listen to see if he can detect any magic formula.

it starts with a very witchy lena platonos then one of those terrifying things with children singing by ennio morricone from a dario argento horror film (could be a christmas single).  then richard and mimi farina do a great dulcimer and percussion thing until we get to linda perhacs chimicum rain and then pharoah sanders' mighty harvest time.

his follow up mix is also doing well at 58 listens in 4 months - they both feature stills from the fall of the house of fitzgerald which has a slightly sun ra-ish vibe (maybe that's it). 

in other digital news horsemouth had a look at what selling his books might bring him - he had to laugh,  being and time (martin heidegger) would have raised 44p on webuybooks.com now horsemouth has a lot of books but obviously if he's selling them at a rate of 23p for machiavelli's the discourses it's going to take a rucksack just to make the rent for a week. the records and CDs he hasn't looked at. 

nonetheless if he's going to get mobile he needs to have a serious book purge (and possibly more than one). it's a shame. he likes his room (he's got it just how he would like it) - lots of books, lots of natural wood, lots of guitars, carpets. he's going to have to gaffer tape the windows shut soon (winter is coming). he has time to sort it out. he still has his redundancy cheque and the advance on his pension. 

horsemouth is now a pensioner - the works pension that he can take early because he was made redundant over the age of 55 has started arriving (though at the rate of £50 a month it will probably only keep him in beer). all horsemouth has to do is survive until the age of 67 and then the state pension will kick in and... er. he'll be poor (again). 

'the enforced downtime of the pandemic caused many of us to reassess our attitudes to work'

horsemouth recognises he is on a privileged position. he was born into the west and into the middle classes during the post-war period of sustained prosperity and growth. if, like the sweden of brown's book, the egalitarian dream died to be replaced by a shoddy mean spirited neo-liberalism, then at least horsemouth always got by. horsemouth has no children. he is ultimately free to suit himself. during the pandemic itself he was alternately furloughed or working from home and ultimately he was working a job that provided auto-enrolment on a works pension and a redundancy cheque.  

this of course was, and is, not most people's experience of the pandemic. they have had to keep working at face to face jobs throughout, keep travelling into work by public transport and at the end of it many face redundancy (or just the plain sack) as patterns of work are changed. the crises (brexit and covid) demand the capitalists restructure and they will because they must. many people were employed because the state was picking up part of the wages bill through in-work benefits (to create the illusion of grinding poverty - horsemouth jokes), if the state is less willing to do this then those jobs will go and the choice between (over)work and a grimmer poverty will become even more stark. 

a few wage rises in a few sectors does not prosperity make. 

horsemouth is better off out of it, he opines.