MakerMeeter

Chapter 6: Autumn Grady
Autumn Grady was a child-benefits millionaire, in local parlance. She had ninety-nine kids on paper. Only eleven in reality, but she was a busy girl nonetheless.
Autumn was born in eighty one. Her career began at the age of nine, when her uncle fixed her up with a position as a bagger-out on the Manchester rave scene.
Bagging out consisted of taking delivery of a plastic bag of ecstasy tablets in the morning and turning it into a bag of money by dusk. Her rounds took in the Pendleton estates of old Salford. She had a bike, a bag of change, a money purse and a wrist watch. No mobiles in the days of yore. Most evenings she'd circulate to a pretty regular schedule, so the locals roughly knew when she'd be around. From this premise, she operated much like a child completing a paper-round. Except she'd do laps.
The pubs had their own supply chain so Autumn would cater for the non-drinkers. Most kids and the smoke-from-homers.
Playgrounds, precincts and parks, plus a few gangland checkpoints. The role didn't much require a pro-active sales technique. Customers tended to "make an approach". Most locals, when sober, were predictable. Often no words were exchanged throughout a transaction.
Autumn was earning herself ten pounds a week before she turned double figures and there was no nonsense from anyone. It was well known that she was related to and acting on behalf of Twinny. Her customers tended to view her actions as a community service bound up with the requisite connotations of old fashioned altruism. She was known as "Little Autumn" or "The Twinny Girl" and treated with a respect and deference that many an adult would never know.
By ninety four Little Autumn had gotten real big, but by ninety five she was little again. She called her first son Henry after her granddad. Henry lived at home with his mum, his grandma, his step-granddad and his great uncle. The social services were fine with the arrangements. But getting a babysitter for when she was working the estate began to prove tricky, especially after she had Jermaine and Chamillah one year later. By late ninety six Autumn had quit the bagging out and moved onto child rearing for real.
She loved being a mum. Nobody called her Little Autumn or The Twinny Girl anymore. Not to her face or even in reference to her when she wasn't around. She felt like and began to be treated like an adult - a position that she felt she could never have achieved in such a tight window, without the kids.
She met Tetley at her eighteenth birthday party in Melody's bar in town. Blokes tended to come and go before Tetley, usually leaving her with a big bumpy goodbye gift, and she didn't mind that. She liked the kids knowing only her world, without having to compromise. Being a mum was hard enough without having to learn how to go steady with a fella at the same time. She figured she'd learn how to do that when she was good and ready.
She'd not long dropped Chesney so she was feeling terrific. Enjoying having her figure and her life back once more. Tetley took her home and knocked her up with Bronson by way of saying "hello" and "happy birthday" all in one. A kind of extra special introductory welcome.
The top six came through in consecutive years between two thousand and one and two thousand and seven.
Justin, Rebekah, Ashton, Little Black Mark, Sugar and Summer.
As a twenty six year old woman with eleven kids, Autumn was enjoying the top end of the social security benefits system. She was given a five bedroomed gable end house in desirable Monton village in the more well to do part of Salford.
Her time, to the last second, was devoted to her kids, and she wouldn't have switched it for the world. Her mum pitched in and they became closer and happier than ever. She'd never known her mum so continually buzzing. Like she had a new reason for being alive. It was like Christmas every day.
But the best thing was that Autumn started seeing the money roll in. All off the state so all legit. No dirty deals and dodgy hand to mouth moments. Her entitlement. By law. She was a proper upstanding citizen of the nation. She couldn't have been any prouder of herself and what she had achieved.
All the stuff she saw only as the furnishings of other peoples worlds, she now saw as within reasonable reach for her own life.
The whole house redecorated from top to toe on a yearly basis. To keep it nice and fresh and homely. A new L shaped five person white leather sofa. Two new laptops and a new massive flat screen TV mounted on the wall in the main lounge. Cable and broadband. Mobile phones for herself, her mum, her babysitter and Henry. Trips away to the Lakes and up into Scotland four or five times each summer. A second hand but good as new Renault clio. A dishwasher. A second loo and shower where the downstairs storage cupboard used to be. Five brand new sets of bunk beds and as a special treat from her mum for her twenty seventh birthday, a waterbed.
She had four triple seater super-prams and a voucher for unlimited free child minding on most weekdays. Then they suggested that she might want to think about going to college and getting some qualifications, to really harness the value of the state support for her kids right now.
She took up the offer and enrolled as a part time student of paediatric support. She figured that what she learnt she could apply at home and then, after the kids had flown the nest she'd be able to hold down a secure and enjoyable career working in the national health service. She liked to think that she would be giving something back to the system, which really was only fair. She didn't want to take advantage now. She wasn't that kind of person.
But something changed in Autumn when Tetley walked out. A switch flipped. The young woman entered a totally different mode of being. It can happen. She'd been known these last few years and a good many too now, as Autumn Tetley. First off, she set about a re-branding exercise. From early two thousand and nine onward she began referring to herself as Autumn Grady. Without fail. And she corrected anyone who left off the surname until society behaved as instructed and momentum took hold. Persistence is the key in such matters.
Autumn Grady and no mistake. It was as if she was re-feminising. Asserting her individuality and, with that surname, leaving no room for any bloke to come along and be part of her life in the future. It was an expression of new found confidence and strength and it was a warning to any potential courtiers to keep their distance.
But the name was just for starters. Then came the big make-over. The image re-work. It was, and is, a thing of beauty and class. You have to hand it to Autumn Grady. The child benefits millionaire, at least in local parlance.
.........................

Move Me Back To The Earth

Move me back to rhyme and reason

Move me back to the earth

Shine and fade me with the season

Kill me off for birth


Rise my spirit with the dawn

And set me down for dusk

Distance me from fake and fawning

Fill my air with musk

Sadden my smile with hateful love

Allow me to go wrong

The path I walk is right because

It's my path all along

Drown my sins in absolution

Colour my wins in lose

Wrap my peace in noise pollution

Free me not to choose


Make my hope the morning light

Then mute it with my pain

Paint my wrongs as black as night

Then yield for love again


Cast me out from truth and value

Deafen my ears to mirth

Then move me back to rhyme and reason

Move me back to the earth


05/11/11 gk

Arab Sprung

Arab Sprung


How many times can you flick the mud at me ?

How many lies can you sell ?

In bed with al Saud while you shout “democracy!” ?

Why do you think we can’t tell ?


How much gold do you need to satiate ?

How many truths can you bend ?

How man devils will you ingratiate ?

Where do you think it will end ?


How much oil do you need to steal from us ?

How do you think it’s OK ?

Knowing all the pain and grief you bring to us

How do you sleep until day ?


Nothing left to show but sloth obesity

Uneducated and lost

Can't find me on the map as you wobble to Burgerking

Too dumb to fathom the cost


Your TV lies

Do you think we envy you ?

Faith’s not a path you can choose

We’re not people who want to be like you

We have our country to lose


How can a man who steals from other men

Think all his dreams are on track ?

Keep up the act

But keep your wits about

Keep looking over your back

…..

GK 05/09/11

Media Flash

Gutenberg pressed and the forest got messed
It’s a paper-chase world
Eye’s down!
Hats off to the lady, though
Little Miss Radio
All move to Audio town

Don’t cook me dinner, Ma
I’m going to the cinema
Suddenly the world’s a big screen
Pop corn sellers and ice cream tellers
It’s the greatest goddam thing you ever seen!

From the science underbelly comes Logie Baird’s telly
Let’s all de-camp to home and tune in
Now you can’t make a decision
Without watching television
It’s a water-cooler wizard
You win!

VHS got giddy, though
Hooking me on video
Infra red fast forward and pause
It was whispered on the level that the Beta-max devil
Was knocking hard on radio’s doors

Time-shifting shows at home
Trumps your gramophone
All bow down to VCR
Re-runs of Sorry! and a little bit of Corrie
Tape recorders killed the radio star

Don’t blink!
Change the game
IBM’s got mainframe
Leave all the thinking to machines
Now my head is in a mess
When I’m losing games of chess
To a motherboard of silicon dreams

Suddenly I’m “free” now I have a PC
With my password, Windows and a mouse
And I’m processing words
And hanging with the nerds
There’s a dot-matrix printer in my house

Don’t call the curtain yet
Yanks have got the internet
Everyone’s a multi-media node
Firewalls, Wi-fi, router on stand-by
People talking English in code

I’m getting ever cockier
Tapping on my Nokia
SMS pushing from afar
T9 Prediction ain't foreseen my new addiction
Texting killed the radio star

Bluetooth, gigabyte
HD on satellite
44 inches flat screen
Sat Nav, hubs @ home
GPS on iPhone
RIP CD laser beam

Ethernet, Adwords
WAP, Snake, Angry Birds
Search engine spiders
MSN
Tweet, Browse,
Bill Gates
Facebook status updates
3D Avatar men

F5, GoToMeet
CNTL ALT+ DELete
Sleep
Turn it off and turn it on
Nothing kinda seedier than stalking Wikipedia
RAM
Cloud computing
Dot com

Google Earth, MP3
Cookies, blogs and 3G
iTunes streaming in my car
Paypal, Kelkoo
Anti virus, Wannadoo
Broadband killed the radio star

If you think it stops here then you haven’t learnt the lesson
From the age of information overkill
You can ban it
You can fight
But you’re chasing beams of light
Now media never ever stands still

17/05/11 GK

Panhandle: extract from Chapter 9 of MakerMeeter

extract from MakerMeeter; GKnapton

Panhandle

Pan was a bin dipper.

He loved watching old films about the California Gold Rush of 1849 where three generations of entire families upped sticks and trekked for days across the American plains, leaving everything behind. A sign hung on the outside of the door of the old house simply read "Gone west".

Those guys were able to simply re-write their lives from the bottom up. Down to every last detail. No fear. As brave as children, only adults.

Men, women and children would shovel dirt out of the ground onto a sieve pan and then finger through it for the prize that made it all worthwhile. It was a feast or famine game. You either struck gold or starved to death.

Pan liked the images of those early slag heaps. The residue of panning for gold.

When the gold ran out the temptation just ran on and on. Afterall, no one knew it had run out. They didn't have the technology we possess today. The only way you knew the gold had gone was to keep panning.

When they were sure the area was "dry" they'd pick a new spot and start all over. And years later, decades later, ever since, new jacks have been panning for glory in vain.

The vainglory of a shiny metal never seemed so apparent.

Pan loved the story of the panners.

A hundred and fifty years later a guy from England went to Cally to prospect. Everyone was in stitches. Ridiculing him. Like, yeah you're really gonna strike it lucky when the whole world and his mum have come up dry ever since those Wild West boys downed tools and beat a hasty retreat back to civilisation all those years ago.

There's no where left to prospect!

But this guy had a plan. You see, everyone prior had been panning with their hands, not with their heads.

He quickly came back laden with gold. He didn't even have to work too hard to reach it. Literally a millionaire a hundred times over, virtually over night.

See, nobody thought to pan the slag heaps of the first arrivals. Until now. It turns out that in times of plenty, we throw away an awful lot of good stuff. Stuff which, in harder times, wouldn't ever be thrown out in the first place. That goes for life in general not just gold prospectors.

This new guy's panning slag and coming up trumps. All you need is the brains and the audacity. Think first, go searching second. It seems everyone else forgot the first step and just went searching blind. But as Pan often said "there's none so blind as the man that will not see".

In this case, no one saw the sheer value in the rubbish of their predecessors. Go dipping your fingers through the rubbish of your contemporaries and you'll look crazy. You may even be a little crazy. Yet go dipping through the bins of yesteryear and you're a clever man. You're an entrepreneur of distinction.

Pan liked this learning. He liked it a lot.

He got to thinking, and soon realised that today's gold is information. Dirt. And that with dirt, the time rule doesn't apply. But the other parallels with Cally are good. For example, people throw out "gold" in times of plenty. At other times, all that gets chucked is garbage.

Now, Pan gets to thinking a little more. The way he sees it, the only people who live permanently in the good times are the rich and famous. So you can bet that the rich and famous are always creating slag heaps of significant value. Or you might say, whereas the average guys bin is just full of rubbish, the bins of the rich and famous will be full of dirt. And dirt is gold, since gold is dirt, in today's parlance.

Pan was a bin dipper. And I bet when you read that sentence right now you're feeling entirely different about Pan than when you read that sentence at the top of this chapter.

You see, that's what I like to call "perception deficit". There's a country mile between the way you see things and the way things are.

And that's just the way things are.

Whilst Walking Through the Fields in May

Whilst walking through the fields in May

The fields of misty morning dew

I saw the sunlight paint the sky

A light and lazy pastel blue

I heard the birds, the singing birds

Break out in flight across the dawn

Above the trees all gold and green

Just as the day began to yawn

I heard the paddle-patted splash of Oxford city boating crew

I heard the chimes of village church bells

Drowning under chimes anew

I saw the mist, the sinking mist

Upon the meadows, rich and deep

I spied the puff of clouds

Through which the morning heat began to seep

I felt the breeze, the dancing breeze

Give early temperance to the balm

I let the hazy spires beyond

Envelop me in summer calm

I heard the din, the hollow din

of morning shoppers leaving cars

I saw men fishing on the banks

With boxes, rods and open jars

I walked from dawn right through 'til dusk

Ten miles a stretch, not looking back

A pen, a camera, flask and fruit

A copy of Schott's Almanac

At last the sun fell through the skies

My vision stuttered to a creep

And for my prize, the longing sighs

I heard the fields fall asleep

G Knapton

(Copyright)

Love Songs in Age

I'm a child

I'm a boy

I'm a grown-ups toy

I'm a thing to be seen, never heard

I'm a school-yard bully

I'm Mulder to your Scully

I'm a homework star

I'm a nerd

I'm a teenage terror

I'm a syntax error

I'm a last minute winner

I'm a fan

I'm a library book wizard

I'm a north coast blizzard

I'm an adolescent half-grown man

I'm a gent

I'm a lover

I am weak, dear brother

I'm a stand-up comic

I'm free

I'm wrong when I am right

I'm a night club fight

I'm whoever in the world I wanna be

Book pages flutter

I'm the bread for your butter

I'm a bank of knowledge

I'm a sage

I'm the truth

Unwise

I'm the fire in my eyes

I'm me, according to my age

I'm a rapper

I'm a beast

I'm a big meat feast

I'm the PTO footer on your page

My mistakes are my mud

But I'm bad turned good

I'm the sum of all my wisdom times age

I'm a thorn to your thistle

You'll jump when I whistle

To the men in the middle

I'm the chief

I'm mental when I'm mean

I'm the ghost in the machine

I'm a chav

I'm a runner

I'm a thief

I'm Leeds

I'm Manc

I'm a septic tank

I'm a gay white nigger

I'm a fly

On the wall of your life

I'm a real house-wife

I'm my days on the planet gone by

I'm solid

I'm a rock

I'm a loud ticking clock

I'm the truth in the mirror

I am rage

I'm a saint

I'm a sinner

I'm a Booker prize winner

I'm the story, according to my age

I am old

I am weak

Now I think before I speak

I'm a bottle of vintage wine

I'm a dream

I'm a vision

I'm a head-on collision

Driving slowly down the sands of time

I'm dying in my sleep

I'm the castle and the keep

I'm no longer the big man on the stage

I have been what I have been

According to my scene

And according, forever, to my age

gknapton

Extract from the Good Book

Jeremiah 5:21-25

²¹ Hear this, you foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear:
²² Should you not fear me?
Should you not tremble in my presence?
I made the sand a boundary for the sea,
an everlasting barrier it cannot cross.
The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail;
they may roar, but they cannot cross it.
²³ But these people have stubborn and rebellious hearts;
they have turned aside and gone away.
²⁴ They do not say to themselves,
‘Let us fear the LORD our God,
who gives autumn and spring rains in season,
who assures us of the regular weeks of harvest.’
²⁵ Your wrongdoings have kept these away;
your sins have deprived you of good.

Lessons In Money Get Taught

Things that are good for the soul come freely
Things that are bad get bought
Lessons in life are incremental
Lessons in money get taught

Throw-away wealth gets stacked up hourly
Valuable trust takes time
Get hooked on a life of hard endeavour
Chill out on a life of crime

Silly little things are valued highly
Stuff that you covet is not
How many times you get what you want
Comes down to the decimal dot

Trodden-on poor get ripped off royally
Decadent rich get paid
Pretty young girls get confidence crises
Ugly old men get laid

Time flies by for the people who need more
Life stands still for the bored
Sensible men die young from cancer
Old men live by the sword

Day follows night and the world keeps spinning
It’s a non-stop repetitive blast
It doesn’t make sense
Don’t lose
Keep winning
Just get all your lessons in fast

Take Me To The Marble Street Cut

from the Spit Mancunia collection

.........

by the born-again tellers and the charity sellers

in the midst of the retail throng

by the water-fight ferals

and the chavs, jons and beryls

to the beat of the brass band gong

there's a dainty little nook

you can spot it if you look

tucked in by the ATM queues

betwixt stores multi-decker

there's an alley way Mecca

running west from the Tram Stop News

I don't think I'm being silly

looking down on Piccadilly

as a circus full of mis-fits en masse

and it goes without saying

it's a price worth paying

to escape off down the Marble Street pass

where the dole queue wizards eye the

sales-desk lizards

and silence feels a light-year hence

when the benefits mullahs

are spouting as much bull as ever

oh for a break in the fence!

with the bags getting heavy

now the shops have nicked their levy

and my wallet makes the options slam shut

it's a joy

it's a blessing

like a low-cal dressing

oh take me to the Marble Street cut

roll up! roll over

kill me now

make it over

these mall-stretch maggots turn my gut

this shopping lark is wrecked

my kingdom to eject

my kingdom for the Marble Street cut

it's oh so un-British

when the Stretford skittish

and the Moss Side mothers are afoot

and I'm praying on high

to the big man in the sky

"Lord, deliver me to Marble Street cut"

what can one feel but derision

for this Arndale "vision"

that turns people into eaters

and rash ?

I just take it on the chin

this bargain base bin

is material acquisition-soaked trash

I would miss it should I blink

and yet within a wink

I am lost to the tabloid splut

and there's no one else around

on this tranquil hallowed ground

in the freedom of the Marble Street cut

don't serve shop porridge

when a little local knowledge

will jolt you from the cattle-mart rut

take heed

take your time

never waste away in line

just take off down the Marble Street cut

gknapton

copyright