Sir, Miss - a little more effort to get the rest of us proles on board, please...

I don't want to sound anti-teachers, anti-pensions campaign, or even anti-strike. I'm none of those things - but honestly, teachers, you're doing a pretty poor job of getting people on board with today's London only teachers strike.

From my children's teachers, there's been no mention at all of what the strike is about - only that it's happening. The only information aimed at parents on the NUT homepage is this Pension Facts for Parents (PDF) - a rather shouty one pager of five unreferenced statements, presented as facts.

I'm not saying I disagree. But beyond the NUT's page of 'facts' there's been nothing to try and get the rest of us on board. Surely getting broad buy-in from other proles is key to a successful industrial action.

It isn't just about you and the politicians. Today's actions spread a bit wider than that. So here's a little common sense communications advice for the next strike (not from a disgruntled parent but from a union officer and fairly accomplished communications flunky): keep the wider school community sweet, keep us in the loop, don't act as though we aren't here. Do that and you'll win support. Don't do it and you'll lose it. Simple.

Just saying.

After the madness, more madness

I felt strangely detached the other day when London, then Enfield, then the rest of the country started to rape itself.

I feel strangely detached now, because it hasn't really stopped.

When it all kicked off, I was on holiday with the family in the tiny Welsh village of Bryneglwys. With an intermittent (at best) mobile internet connection and the kids with other things on their minds, the online news view of the riots was fragmented and painfully slow.

WTF?! - they're rioting outside Pearsons...

There was something unreal about it. The images didn't look like home, at least not until we spotted familiar landmarks in unfamiliar circumstances - riot police outside Pearsons, scuffles outside the kids' dental practice (and its Photoshopped version here) and others that looked more like a rush hour than a riot.

There were other stories too - about the Sony warehouse going up in flames (still smouldering on Wednesday as we came off the M25 - its smoke the first thing we saw on the horizon as we neared Enfield), about a group of English Defence League pitchfork wielding peasants vigilantes patrolling the streets on Tuesday evening, not to mention lots of visits from politicians.

What the hell was happening? We couldn't figure out what it meant. It all seemed mad - partly because we were away and weren't entirely convinced it was happening and partly because, well, this is Enfield of all places. Enfield is nice. Enfield doesn't riot.

The price of shorts...

Then the first lot of insanity gave way to the second. Not a second wave of rioting, but retribution from the moral majority.

Now I'm all for revenge - I'm a big one for personal vigilante fantasies when I've just witnessed something that riled me and I spend the next half hour replaying the scene with me turning tables on the self-important authority figure / yob / city lad / bad parent / bad driver (delete as applicable). I did it up in Wales too - played out scenarios of coming back to Enfield, standing in the middle of our street, alone, armed with a baseball bat (I've never owned one), screaming "get the hell away from my kids", as the madding crowd approached.

Perhaps society is feeling a bit of that at the moment - not just individuals, but the collective machines that are supposed to work for us. Central government, local government, police, justice. They've all gone a bit off the rails in their desire for quick Dirty Harry style problem solving.

And yes, those involved need to face consequences - but if the courts are working through the night with exhausted staff, witnesses and defendants, can the system really serve as it should?

One seemingly Red Bull fuelled bit of sentencing was handed out this morning - a mother of two jailed for five months. She was actually asleep during the rioting in Manchester but accepted a pair of looted shorts the next day. Five months for one pair of shorts - a sentence that arguably damages her children more than it punishes her, on top of which there's the bill for her prison stay (a quick google reckons this at around £40,000 pa - so around £16,500 for her five months).

Greater Manchester Police gloated on Twitter: "Mum-of-two, not involved in disorder, jailed for FIVE months for accepting shorts looted from shop. There are no excuses!" before deleting the tweet after a wave of replies, and issuing this sort-of-apology: "Thanks to all for feedback messages - all your comments have been noted. You are right, it is not our place to comment on sentences."

But what a result, eh! - for police, for justice and all things good. What a big win-win all round. Five months for a pair of shorts. A £16,500 bill for board and lodging. Yes, I'm sure that'll show her what's what.

I sentence you to homelessness...

Then came the calls from central government to make convicted tenants homeless (ironically from the same department that only last month published an excellent commitment to tackle homelessness) - followed within 48 hours by Wandsworth Council serving an eviction notice on a mother whose 18 year old son has been accused (but not yet convicted) of taking part in the riots. The idea is to label these people 'intentionally homeless' so local authorities have no legal obligation to house them.

This made me quite uncomfortable - partly because an entire household is being evicted because of a charge against one of them, partly because it's throwing around the term 'homeless' as a means of punishment to be forced on individuals because they deserve it.

Working in the homelessness sector, I'm pretty sure that referring to homelessness in that way is unhelpful. The people the sector helps are already stigmatised on many levels. To dole out homelessness as a punishment for criminal behaviour seems to forge an unnecessary direct link in the public consciousness between criminality and homelessness. It's a dangerous stick to wield. It risks deep marginalisation of the people who are struck by it. It insults and further sidelines those who are already in that situation through no fault of their own.

Beyond that, if you render someone homeless then by definition you make their life more complex. Whether or not that is your intention, that complexity will come at a cost, with financial, societal, community and moral implications for everyone, not just the people you are punishing.

I tweeted my local MP, Nick de Bois to get his thoughts on this and he replied (within minutes, which was impressive) that he couldn't possibly explain his thinking in 140 characters. He said he'd email me though, so I look forward to that. I hope that in Enfield we can at least avoid some of the knee-jerk reactions that are beginning to happen elsewhere. It's difficult, I know - the pull of those vigilante fantasies can be potent - but we need to do it.

To try to understand is not to condone...

This isn't about us and them. We're in this together - us, the more or less moral majority, and them, the apparently unthinking rioters. It's all just us. Uncomfortable, I know, but that's how it is. We're all from the same broad community, so we need to think through the consequences before we decide how to react.

I'm not trying to detract from the impact these events have had on individuals and communities. It has been devastating. But what I'm seeing now more than anything is a series of reactions, without a lot of effort outside the liberal media to figure out what went wrong. We're biting back without any real hunger to understand why we were bitten in the first place.

A new approach to running homelessness services has become popular recently. It's called PIE - or Psychologically Informed Environment (article on page 18 of this edition of CONNECT magazine). It aims to foster an atmosphere of responsibility and accountability, it empowers individuals and helps them engage with their community - and most importantly, it treats behaviour, even negative and disruptive behaviour, as a communication to be understood.

If we think of ourselves as living in one big Psychologically Informed Environment, then whatever else they might have been, we have to see the riots as a very big, very loud, mass communication. Maybe they were collectively saying 'fuck you'. Probably the message is a lot more complex than that. But whatever punishments we dish out or messages we send back, we also need to move way beyond the "WTF?! They're rioting outside Pearsons!" stage, hear the message and learn from it. If we don't, it'll be shouted twice as loud next time.

EDIT: just spotted this on a friend's Facebook page - an African proverb...

"If the children are not initiated into the village they may burn it down just to feel its warmth."

Too convenient and simplistic, perhaps, but no more simplistic than the "mindless criminality" explanation offered by others.

Not so sudoku

Writing fast the other day, I found myself having to give a new character something to do. He needed some sort of hobby or compulsion. Something to keep his mind busy while travelling to work. Something to keep his mind off certain things he'd rather not think about. I was writing fast, as I said, so I just wrote the first thing that came to mind for him. I gave him a pencil and a newspaper open at the puzzles page. I had him playing sudoku.

All well and good, but as I wrote, I realised I was doing more than my usual level of bullshitting to explain his thoughts. I'd never done (played?) sudoku. Sums or what? I had no idea. So I needed to figure out whether it could actually do for him what I needed it to do. I had to try it myself.

Easily done of course. I downloaded a free sudoku app for my iPhone, googled the rules, opened up an easy puzzle, and within minutes I was feeling all Keanu with the words I know sudoku rattling tackily in my head.

I've done four sudoku puzzles over the past 24 hours - rated easy, medium, hard and expert, in that order. They are the last I'll ever do. I got sudoku in that I finished the puzzles easily enough. But I didn't get sudoku in that I'm still no wiser about what my character (or anyone else for that matter) could possibly be getting out of it.

Is it the rush of finishing the thing faster than your last one? Or of doing it quicker than the person next to you?

Is it about the compulsion or addiction to repeat an exercise with only a slight variance to the patterns each time?

Or is it about reducing your thought processes to pure, simple numbers with no deeper context than their place on the puzzle in front of you? I suppose this is what I wanted to get from it. Some sort of calm, zen state that might explain why my character keeps returning to it over and over. But I didn't get that at all.

I'm missing something, obviously, and my character is exploring other distraction techniques at present. Masturbation helps, he finds, but he'd really prefer something he can do on the Tube.

On Saturday, there was no news

I'm confused. On Saturday afternoon I managed to convince myself of events that clearly never happened.

I thought, or at least I seem to remember, that I travelled by train to London with my daughter. I was sure we met with some people there, latched onto something of a parade at Trafalgar Square.

There was a lot of noise, singing and chanting, whistles and horns. Children on parents' shoulders, eyeing giant purple balloons.

We were happy to be marching for something in which we believed. We thought we were doing something important, for ourselves, for everybody, for the many who couldn't make it to London that day.

But it didn't happen, of course. We went out, certainly, my daughter and I. We have train tickets to prove it. But there can't have been any meeting of half a million minds. I must have imagined that vast parade. If it had happened, it would have been on the news and it would still be on there now. The passion of half a million people. Wow. Enough to keep TV reporters stocked with material for weeks. And beyond those half a million. What of the stories beyond the march? The media wouldn't have missed that, if it had happened.

But news, it seems, was cancelled yesterday. Instead there was a cops and villains show where the cops did what they had to do, because that's what they do, and the villains were truly evil, even when they were laughing and dancing, especially when they were laughing and dancing.

I don't recall what it was called. Bastard Villains vs the Cake Shop. Or Last Stand at the Fourth Plinth. All very exciting but not what I was expecting from BBC. Or Sky. Or ITN. And the incessant repeats, as though the same fireworks, the same cheeky grins, the same tweeting villains were worth watching over and over to a disjointed narration spoken by someone who clearly hadn't seen the script.

I found myself thinking my march delusion might have made a better film. Perhaps the news channels might consider it for a future no-news day. I remember there was a man in my delusion. He said something like: "we are not a minority". But he's vanished from sight today, along with the other half a million, swept away like crumbs and toppled boxes in a cake shop, somewhere.

But here's a thought, based on the delusion I described above, if half a million people ever did have something they all believed in and felt the need to share, perhaps they could think about getting together, walking through somewhere, perhaps, one day, making some noise. It might be fun. It might make a point.

It might even get on the telly.

In the meantime, although I'm still half convinced otherwise, I know that nothing happened yesterday. Because yesterday, there was no news.

Gory Jackanory

The book my seven year old daughter chose to read having finished Macbeth is absolutely...

Sorry? Yes, that Macbeth. And yes, of course she's seven. And I suppose she only really started reading Macbeth because she enjoyed Hamlet so much. And Hamlet, I suppose, because of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

No, of course not the original Shakespeare. Well sort of. A little. It's a series of books from Franklin Watts called Shakespeare Retold - rewritten for 7-11 year olds by Martin Waddell and illustrated by Alan Marks.

They're quite fabulous.

Written in prose, the books concentrate mainly on the general story of the plays - but dotted throughout the dialogue are passages from the originals. A "to be or not to be" here; a "hail Macbeth, who shall be king" there. And she was reading them, and getting them.

I interrupted Macbeth at one point to offer a helpfully simplified explanation of Lady M's disturbed state of mind. "I know, I know," my daughter cut me off, "Lady Macbeth feels stupid about being so horrible and now it's made her mad. She's going to die, isn't she." "Yes, sweetheart. She's going to die." "Oh well. At least she's having a good think about how evil she's been."

My daughter shuddered a bit at the picture of Macbeth's severed head, but all in all seemed to feel that justice had been done.

My only disappointment (on behalf of my daughter) is that they don't do King Lear. She would have loved it. Out vile jelly and all that. Kids love jelly.

But anyway, back to the point. After Macbeth, she's started reading Shannon the Ocean Fairy. It is absolutely shite. There are about fifty putrid books in the series. They're all the same. Dull witted, formulaic bullshit 'written' by some marketing team scribbling under the unlikely pen name of Daisy Meadows. Hideous stuff. And that, I think, is sort of my point.

"Paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub"

It's reassuring to learn from the New York Times that I'm not the only hideous quitter of novels in the world. Loads of others have been guilty of literary abandonment.

In fact they're all at it. They have been for centuries. From Truman Capote to Stephen King to Nikolai Gogol to Saul Bellow and more.

The difference is that they're all famous for doing a bit of finishing as well as quitting.

But hell, at least I know I can give up with the best of them.

Toilet trouble

In a few hundred pages, some books try and take us through the entire gamut of what it means to be human and how we must hold ourselves to account. Their authors confront us with grand truths. They strive to make us understand our frailties. They consider the movement of time and how it makes us ignore the horrors of our own recent history. They muse on the imperfection of humanity. Because, dammit, there is so much to say. So very much to say.

Other books don't.

Other books throw a few characters in a room and show us what happens. Sometimes that isn't much. And sometimes, in spite of that (or because of it), they end up saying more than those books with grand intentions and such big things to say.

After The Reader I desperately needed to read something with smaller ambitions. While I enjoyed the philosophical arguments in the end, I think it overreached itself. It tried to say too much and in the process it stopped being a novel.

So I picked up Gents by Warwick Collins ("British novelist, screenwriter, yacht designer, and evolutionary theorist" according to his Wikipedia entry).

What to say. It's bloody lovely.

It has warmth, genuinely likeable characters, humour and a quiet message (if message is the right word) along the lines of 'live and let live'. Its sparse prose and constant dialogue was a relief after the long exposition heavy pages of The Reader.

Oh, and of course most of the action is set in a gents lavatory. What more can I ask of a novel?