Dobie's Sad World Could Have Been Otherwise

“The trick of life is to serve your own interests first”

This was no doubt true, thought Dobie. How else could one survive? He always remembered the example of George Price the eminent American scientist. Price had tried to prove something about altruism on a scientific basis. The result was that the tramps and homeless of London stole every last scrap and favour from him and he’d ended up cutting his throat out with a pen-knife. So much for altruism. Look what happened to Jesus!

“Just look out for you and yours and let others do the same”

A simple clean message from this most impressive man. Anything else was sheer cant and hypocrisy. 

Even the churches only opened a couple of mornings a week. So much for sanctuary. Scared that the desperate would steal all the precious gold and chattels. If the church can’t be seen to be keeping proper Christian values why the hell should anyone else?

“Plough your own furrow, make your own way”

Who said we all had to be so bloody precious with each other anyway? Everyone was on the make in one way or another; and if you weren’t you were a bloody fool. Human beings are intrinsically selfish animals. At best there was merely a residual sense of common humanity – at the extremes maybe. You wouldn’t want to see someone mangled under a train, or brutalised in some way. Yet it happened all the time, virtually everywhere. A starving child here, an epidemic there, a flood somewhere else. And no-one really cares about it. Do they?

You’re only concerned about it if it’s happening to you and yours. And, if it’s happening to you somewhere in Kent, you’re not expecting anyone on the Indian sub-continent to be even aware of it.

“If you find you have a little time, or food, or money left over after you’ve secured your own existence and future then maybe you can help the next man along”

Better this than a load of old baloney about us all being brothers and sisters. Maybe we will be one day if the race survives but not until we’ve wiped a goodly amount of each other out of existence altogether.

Dobie thought of life in these terms now; it was much simpler.

He didn’t know much about people in other lands, but certainly he knew the British to be a docile, selfish lot. Sure you had the Women’s Institute collecting for charity, you had do-gooders all over the place. The country was awash with do-gooders but what does that actually mean when it comes right down to it? Dobie himself had just come back from a food bank where they’d given him three Tesco bags full of sustenance. Good on them, it was a necessary last resort these days. They’d even joked about the possibility of him having to stump five pence up for each of the carrier bags. Gallows humour. But, we’re willing to go along with it. Bankers get bonuses even when they make a mess of things (do they make a mess of things? Or is that just part of some evermore elaborate scam?) and the poor end up sanctioned out of their meagre dole money and sent along to a food bank. ‘Outrage’ in the Guardian, ‘serves them right’ in the Daily Mail.

We’ll put up with just about anything in this country. Privatisation of the NHS, disabled people being forced to work, fighting wars we know or care little about. The only thing that mobilises (excuse the pun) us Brits is when our freedom to drive cars is threatened. Remember the ‘fuel crisis? Fucking apeshit we went. Out on the streets, blockades. Damn near a revolution. Punters lying in the street, sleeping in doorways. That’s OK. Tell us there aint enough fuel for our cars and we’re up the wall.

Marx was right about many things. Capitalism does have an inherent contradiction, it is essentially and progressively exploitative to the nth degree but, what he couldn’t have foreseen was that the best source of praxis was not a conciseness of brotherhood and destiny, it was threatening the luxury of getting from a to b faster in an automobile. Funnel that sort of anger into political mobilisation then you have a seriously intent revolutionary force and no mistake.

Dobie’s landlady was of the old school. No letting agents, just a one on one relationship. She charged the maximum the law would allow for a grimy little room in the house she owned and inhabited the lower half of. Dobie’s landlady was insane in all matters except financial. She’d been married to an inspector on the buses whose surname had been Blakely just like the big buffoon on the 1970s sit-com. That her name was Olive only added to the hilarity. Olive Blakey was an amalgam of all the characters on On The Buses and like that TV show she wasn’t remotely funny.

Dobie avoided her in the best ways you can when you live just upstairs. As long as she received the Housing Benefit she was usually OK but, she often spoke of relatives and friends (few of whom existed) who would ‘love a room like his’. He felt like retorting that they must be in need of urgent psychiatric care but had thus far resisted. It was her way of maintain power over him, and really, she’d be doing him a favour if she threw him out. It might force him to look for something better.

He had learned to ‘sprint silently’ up and down the stairs, thus lessening the chances of being caught in her desperate conversations – ‘too many immigrants’ ‘there’s work out there if you look’. This last, he believed was particularly pointed toward himself. He’d pretty much been one of the entrenched unemployed for three years now, and although she benefitted directly from this predicament by way of a monthly benefit cheque still she chirped on about ‘people not being willing to work’, She contradicted herself further by putting this down to the ‘country being swamped by immigrants’. She hadn’t a thought in her head that hadn’t been planted there by one tabloid or another.

Mrs Blakey had no conception of how she adversely affected Dobie’s life. He’d often stay in his room rather than go out and risk being apprehended (she never seemed to go out herself; Dobie wondered how she managed to garner supplies and the almost sixty cigarettes a day she smoked, although she allowed no smoking in the rooms of her tenants). And, of course, going out meant coming back in again which meant a double-risk. More than once he’d dreeped down the drainpipe outside of his window and scurried away through the wee scrub garden that she’d often hint he could easy sort out. Though this had raised her suspicion on his inevitable return over how he’d made his release in the first place.

The other tenant was a timid Welshman named Mr Vaughan who worked at the local library. He appeared to be quite deaf (although Dobie had caught him out on this a few times one time asking him if it was his fiver that Mrs Blakey had found in the landing? He’d heard and understood instantly; his little pixie face showing consummate interest). Dobie figured this as a tactic so as not to have to speak to Mrs Blakey, and if so he respected Vaughan greatly.

Dobie spent most of his days reading in his room and yearned to achieve something practical with this learning. The trouble was that he couldn’t work out what it was he actually believed in. The talk tonight had illuminated something; but did it represent ‘enlightened self-interest’ or ‘self-interested enlightenment’? Was there a difference? Did anyone care? More importantly of all – did he care?

He’d read somewhere that we were just physiological vessels for aggressively purposeful DNA which tended very much on the side of selfishness and there was very little we could do about: it would have its will. Such as George Price would die rather than agree to this proposition, but such as Mr Price, in attempting to disprove this chilling state of affairs had actually managed more to prove it.

Dobie was now in the deepest of shit; shit so deep that philosophy had no immediate place in the affair. The job centre had sanctioned him. In fact, they’d sanctioned him for four weeks; hence he’d been compelled to be referred to the food bank. What he’d also learned, and what was of even more pressing importance was that the sanctioning of his dole money had led to the suspension of his Housing Benefit. This occurrence would not play well with Olive Blakey.

At the job centre he’d been told he’d failed to attend a Work Focussed Interview. He told them he hadn’t been informed of any such interview. They assured him that he had and gave him an appeal form (or Mandatory Reconsideration thingy, she’d explained in a very perfunctory manner but he’d been too stunned to listen properly). He looked at the woman as she spoke but he heard little. She spoke in an abrupt manner, like a stern parent might speak to an errant child. The fact that he was saying he had not been informed of the interview was not something she was willing to consider as possible. Maybe she’d heard it before too many times. Maybe no one claiming here ever heard about interviews they were expected to attend. His reasoning that he complied with all the other demands of his ‘jobseeker’s agreement’ fell on deaf ears. The fact that he was always on time, never missed a signing, turned up each fortnight with a diary of activities Samuel Pepys would have been proud of mattered not a jot. He had missed the phantom interview and now he was doomed.

His ‘Mandatory Reconsideration’ had of course gone against him “the department issued the letter inviting you to the Work Focussed Interview on the 12^th blah, blah, blah”. He had the right of appeal but he couldn’t see the point. Neither did he possess the mental or emotional strength. He had to be very careful with his equilibrium. Shake his composure (or dearth of it) and he was in trouble. He did not deal well with life’s vagaries. Now, he was vulnerable to letters he may not receive but that they claimed he did, and his money would be stopped for longer next time. The job centre had become the stuff of nightmares. He dreaded not just his fortnightly signings (pot-luck at the best of times: if one got on reasonably well with one advisor, they may go off sick or leave and you were left with some vicious little Hitler or Hitleress who liked nothing more than to pick at your ‘job-seekers diary’ looking for ways to doubt your word, question your deeds, mock your commitment……sanction your benefit).

Dobie found that he was no longer anywhere near what one could, in any way, describe as happy. He hadn’t been anywhere near happy before and was even further from it now. His trouble was that he didn’t want to work and he wished they’d leave him the fuck alone. Life wasn’t meant to be about working in some poxy office or some even poxier factory (Christ! Thought Dobie, you’d be lucky to get a job like that these days. They had us by the balls to such an extent these days that it would be a zero-hours contract at Toys R’Us or Poundland or some evil fast-food corporation that called you in when you were needed which meant your entire life could potentially be spent awaiting a phone call to go to work). He didn’t want to report to some fucking nine-year old dickhead of a line manager and work with drones and dullards. He’d done all that and it had damn near destroyed him. Arguments over which section had sole rights to which keys and passing the buck and generally acting like over-grown children. We don’t process Z102s, that’s Transactions, they should know that. We can only process Z102As and only if it’s a Tuesday and approved by the Spandex Man from Neptune. It was all fucking nonsense.

People were so fucking stupid!

Dobie thought about the gun in his sock drawer….