Rant

The culture has been dumbed and dumbfounded, the language has been cheapened and blunted and everybody thinks they have to be so gawdam nice. No you don't. Be true, be good, be yourself. Be brave, be splendid, be ridiculous, anything.

Using big words is more offensive to some people than using bad words. They think you're putting one over on them.

The hardest thing to deal with is the truth. Power dictates its own, the New Labour spin machine set the template and so politics and business (two sides of the same bent coin) monopolise a soundbite vocabulary trying to tell you how it is, with all their dreadful cliches and jargon, "going forward"...(erm where exactly?) (Experience teaches that we experience things more in circular and cyclical fashion anyway - there is always change, but "progress" is a tired old myth.)

We need the truth and its cognate (?), trust to keep us sane. Not in the George Washington never-tell-a-lie way (tactful white mendacity has its place) but in order to maintain relationships, advance common purposes, even do business. Decent business, not glib customer service on a first name how-are-you-today basis. (You may wish me good day and establish that our relationships starts on good-mannered terms, but how I am, to you, a complete stranger, is neither here nor there and quite beside the point. We are effecting an impersonal transaction after all, not getting to know each other.)

I have been lied to so much that some basic honesty, even when it hurts, refreshes the soul. At least I know where I stand, even if I don't like it. If I'm not wanted, well, it may hurt a bit, I may smart and sulk, regret the loss of a connection that seemed sweet and valuable. But there are others. Soon come.

"Is it wrong to want to live on your own?" sang Morrissey. Well probably, but perhaps it's necessary to maintain sanity. "I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another's", wrote Blake, who Yeats so memorably described as "beating against the wall/Till truth obeyed his call."

It is a hard option, staying true to yourself in a society full of niceness and nonsense and bloody lies, risking isolation, being misunderstood or half understood or having people think you're an eccentric fool. Make a living, make a life. Combine them? Still haven't cracked it. Or as Joni sang, "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling" Still.