Simply a pity

 

Subject: Simply a pity.

At the start of the Tour de France those of us who have followed with pride the British riders who had won the Tour, with Bradly Wiggings, Chris Froome and Garient Thomas were astounded when Team Ineos, now owned by the British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe but then in the guise of team Sky, were unbeatable with Froome winning four Tours and Thomas one. So when Team Sky was rebranded as Team Ineos In 2019 we thought it would be more of the same, either Froome or Thomas were destined to ride and win this years Tour.

A Colombian cyclist, Egan Bernal riding for Ineos had won the 2019 race. Froome was absent through having had a horrific crash prior to the race and it seemed for a while he might not race again. In this years race both Froome and Thomas were left out in favour of Bernal and speaking for myself I was both amazed and disappointed that such talent could be jettisoned and asthings have turned out Team Ineos have proved a shadow of their former self, with Bernal being dropped and retired in the second week of the three week race.

I wonder what Froome and Thomas feel today.  Not been given the opportunity to race, I would think a wry smile wouldn't  go amiss.

Neither Froome or Thomas are the self publicists that Lance Armstrong was in his drug ridden hay day, in fact reading Froome's biography he comes across as a person who whilst fiercely competitive on the bike is a quietly spoken personable human being off  the bike, so I doubt if there will be any "I told you so" from the riders but the Team Manager and mastermind, Dave Brailsford  has a lot to answer for.

The life of a professional cyclist is tough, having to sustain long periods of energy sapping effort day after day in terrain that most of us would be unable to ride takes a special kind of person.  The sight of those mountain passes, zigzagging up the side of the mountain, spectators cheering and running alongside the riders as they force the peddles around, mile after mile is a sight to behold. The superhuman effort required to go that little bit faster, to make a break from the pack, to sustain it down a terrifying death defying decent, is the story of heroes.

Perhaps because of the on going grind day in day out, of the superhuman effort and the physical pain which accompanies riding these three week tours, drugs and stimulants were often taken and became the scourge of the sport. The infamy of Lance Armstrong and a career in numerous Tour wins stimulated by drug use meant, when discovered  he became a pariah in the sport and although sadly not the only one to use drugs it was the start of a clean up across the whole of athletics but especially cycling with stringent testing. Froome's career in Africa starting in Kenya, his schooling at St Johns College, the school my son attended and his rise through the ranks in Europe make interesting reading. He seemed to have lost nothing of that 'old world' colonial respect for manners and the way he commands himself towards others is a breath of fresh air after the arrogance of the American, Armstrong.

Yes he might sneak a wry smile when he contemplates what might have been. Another win in the Tour would have brought him along side those continental greats, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain but now, next year he will be racing for an untried Israeli team but I doubt if he will get another chance to win this most coveted accomplishment, 5 Tour de France wins, which is simply a pity.

The debt we owe them

 

Subject: The debt we owe them

One of the incomplete phases in my life is that I didn't discover knowledge of my parents lives before they married and in the period when I disrupted any serenity they might of had as a couple by arriving, squawking and squirming into their lives. .  That they were in love with each other until they died is clearly evident and I'm lucky to have heard and recorded many conversations between them when the concern for each other flows across the expanse of time. The recording were laboriously captured on open reel tapes, made and sent, not as today's intermate messages are sent at the click of a button but in those days, stowed on a magnetic tape wound on a small plastic reel, placed in a box suitably stamped and franked and then handed in at the post office to start its 3/5 week trip on a mail carrying passenger ship. Where ever I happened to be living at that time equipped with a bulky tape recorder I switched onto play and waited to hear Mom and Dad reciting their lives at an address I knew so well, the sitting room, the furniture and two ageing parents who thoughtlessly I had parted company with on reaching 21 and set off on my own travels.

I suppose it's only when you get old yourself and have your own family scattered around the world do you realise the enormity of leaving home to live somewhere else.. More so in those days when few people made a break and moved far away from home, 20 miles was average, only a bus ride away.. Those links which are  important to maintain were irrevocably broken as a new environment and new friends formed into a new bubble as the parental bubble, was put aside.

I always tried to maintain the link as best I could with lengthy letters, audio tapes and film clips of the places I visited and stories of the friends I made along the way but nothing made up for my own presence, especially for my Mom who had had such a difficult time bringing me into this world. We are essentially selfish at heart, perhaps we have to be to survive. It's made easier today's with the easy capture through the smart phone camera and the miraculous ability to transmit images and messages in nano seconds to anywhere  in the world, it certainly has been a game changer for the nuclear family.

But beyond this there is still an indistinct image or knowledge of the lives of our parents before they met, the conditions they grew up in, the town and the schools they attended and their own home life and upbringing. One of my cousins has completed  a family tree of our family living in Bradford in the early part of the 20th century. It reveals or substantiates ones own memories of the city fabric in this period after the First World War. The privation, the row upon row of small black grey, soot impregnated houses facing directly onto a cobbled street. No garden, only a well scrubbed step which led from the front door straight onto the pavement which itself led to the satanic mill lurking, a reminder of the  domination it represented on everyone's life, standing sentinel at the end of the road, waiting for the siren to call, at 7am the first shift to start work.  

The small closed rooms, the tiny kitchen two bedrooms upstairs and a toilet outside opposite the coal house. No bathroom or bath, no central heating only a small coal fire to heat the house. Is it any wonder that people visiting from abroad, from those lands of plenty such as the USA, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand wondered, not at the welcome they were given  but for them at least, the straightened circumstance under which people lived in these much vaunted islands. The gracious homes where today the tourist flock, the large walled estates and magnificent gardens was one prospect but  only a few miles away at an appropriate distance, towns distinguished by their squaller providing a stark contrast to the democracy of one person one vote and it's suggestion of equality.

What were the inner workings of the mind of my Mom and Dad as they grew up, what were their dreams, their aspirations. I will never know since it was an age when children didn't  ask such questions of their parents and probably didn't think to ask since we were captured in our own bubble which was the experience we had and was all we knew.

So much of my own knowledge of my parents is seen from the security they gave me and the unqualified love they offered. At that stage i didn't recognise the word love, it was taken for granted as so many important things are and it only came into focus later as a reflection of the debt I owe them.

When did Xenophobia replace Patriotism

 

Subject: When did Xenophobia replace Patriotism

When did Xenophobia displace patriotism, when does our instinctive love for our country, it’s practices and character become a barrier to accepting people who lived and grew up in a foreign land and who now reside along side us but demand their own customs and character.

Do we have an instinctive right to try to ensure that things should continue to proceed along a well established traditional path or should we at all times welcome outsiders for the diversity they bring, including their customs and religious affiliation.

Are we intrinsically pliable, cautiously amenable or are we hesitantly cautious not wishing to stray from the path we know.

Watching a program based in South Africa and the recent troubles and violence displayed towards black economic migrants from countries to the north, the feeling on the ground is that unemployment and scarce resources demands that these problems have to be fixed first before other people are allowed to come in and exacerbate the problem.

The panelist’s who I thought were impressive, perusing an argument for understanding and improved communication as to what is going on. Their's was the old story, tell the people the truth and they will support you but of course the truth to these articulate academically minded people is very different to the truth in the township. The very root of the program, (broadcast on Al Jazeera), was to define and condemn the apparent xenophobic attitude in the South African Townships as if it were a crime, whilst people living in such dire poverty  with massive unemployment, unimaginable here in Europe, they too only ask for understanding. 

Erudite and schooled in debate these young black, middle class people in Africa (as their white counterparts in Europe) argue from a philosophical convention, from the mores of longstanding classical questions regarding moral judgement and ethical rules. Perhaps the truth is, we are not naturally global but instead inclined to supporting what we can see around us, what we might call 'our own kith and kin', or at least would have before the economic drive to establish a global hegemony which disrupted everything.

It's a bit rich to expect poor people trapped in their impoverished communities to bail us out on the grounds of morality when our "betters" clearly don't understand the word as they troop like lemmings through the 'Aye lobby' in support of that arch dissembler of truth and morality, Boris Johnson.

The quality of the cloth

 

Subject: The quality of the cloth.

Living in a club has the disadvantage that the views of other members largely reflect each other's views, they are cut from the same cloth and live in an echo chamber simply rehearsing  what has been said before, ad nauseam.

Listening to a parliamentary committee debating the role of Scotland and Wales regarding decisions coming from the Westminster Parliament one is forced to conclude that there is an actual dearth of talent in the Conservative Party.  MPs representing English constituencies seem staid and robotic when compared to the more open free thinking views offered by the Welsh and the Scottish parliamentarians.

I know I will be accused of bias against the Conservative party and the type of people who represent it, middle and upper middle class, members of the legal fraternity, a financial consortium, plus those privately educated monied people who naturally gravitate into the Tory Party with its conservative views and the aim of preserving, not only the status quo but the actual status of their bank balance. It would be unfair to say they have become stultified listening to constant reminders of as they see it their exclusive right to control the levers of power  but in the verbal duelling which has just taken place, the Scots and the Welsh shone with ideas and common sense whilst the English came across as dull and visionless. 

I am influenced by reason in a debate. The apparent 'tin eared' approach in the so called 'Mother of Parliaments', bound by its traditional rule making, blinkered by its self centred vision of the world and particularly by the need to perpetuate the two tier divide running through the British Isles (but particularly so in England), where opportunity is largely governed by birth, which itself in turn governs the education a person receives and inevitably the opportunity to work with the 'power brokers', in this highly discriminatory country.

The Scots appear clear minded and passionate, given their great success in persuading the Scottish people to vote for the SNP and Scottish Independence. Their reasoned argument  made the Tory sound positively antediluvian.

The Tory poster boy, (other than Boris himself) is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the louche, well scrubbed, pinstriped suited toff. His claim to fame, other than his accentuated accent, has to be his Latin quoting circle which he draws around himself, emphasised by names he chose for his severn children :

 : Sixtus Boniface Theodore Alphege Somerset Dunstan Anselm Fizwilliam Wulfric Leyson Pius. He clearly lives in the past and would be better suited to a medieval court. Perhaps on reflection, he has got his wish.

Who are we

 

Subject: Who are we.

It’s funny how we all yearn, deep down for human contact but then on receiving it we find reasons for seeking our own space. We are indeed contrary, full of impulse and insecurities, we fill our minds with flights of fancy mixing them up with the actuality that "no man is an island".

As much as we wish to be independent, free to go where we wish and do our own thing there’s always that nagging doubt that we are missing a special ingredient, that talent we all have for love. Not everyone of course wears their heart on their sleeve, or is unabashed to openly reveal their feelings in this increasingly individualistic world. People sit, hunched up over their computer screen, a doppelgänger, trading their actual reality for a series of phantom realities deep in the twisted cables of a Cloud Based Server linking millions of other phantom relationships across the globe. That sense of security which comes when real people interact isn’t present on the internet, that awareness of presence and companionship is missing and we are the worse for it.

One of the curses of Covid 19 has been the forced segregation of friends and family. The internment within four walls particularly of single people many of them old and infirmed , some nursing pain and thoughts of impending death. Generally speaking we are not designed, mentally, to cope with being on our own, it isolates and draws our thoughts and attention towards ourselves and to the often dismal life we lead.

When we are young we had the optimism to believe that things would improve and we were constantly reminded of our worth as we interact with our young, hedonistic friends. Gradually we whittle down the circle to one, 'the special one' who we then join forces with only, once more, to find ourselves becoming isolated within the forces which make up the in-laws and even their extended family. This is natural, even healthy but we do have to submerge our doppelgänger friend for one more ideologically pleasing to the company we now keep. This double life which subordinates the real you and projects this  manufactured personality for years seeking the approval of those around, people who have no idea of your background and the fundamental essence of who you are. Its a weight which often strains the true values of ones cultural identity.

This diversity is  not black on white, more fish fingers and scampi, a life of contrasts, not conformity, of cricket and not another food program.

At some stage along the path we get our wish and have all the choices we can imagine. Unfortunately by that time our imagination has given up on us and we have to resort to a mishmash of the same old, same old. A trip to see Rome on arthritic ankles or hauling your overweight frame along the beach amongst the naked beauties in the South of France with sun cream and a silly hat takes the edge of everything. Even dinner in a good restaurant is surreal listening to the chatter and the flirting with only the waitress, hoping for a larger tip, making the effort to be nice.

Some people have always been outsiders, standing on the edge of the group and even on a busy street conscious of everyone but with reluctance to feel anything other than being an observer. Albert Camus in his book "The Outsider" describes the existential nature of an individual who refuses to conform to norms, an anti hero who will not conform to the deceit of society and refuses to lie when his life depended on it. The ultimate sacrifice !

Communication

 

Subject: Communication

Communication is such a difficult thing to achieve. Even the words I use in this blog may be understood by different people in different ways. 

There is though another type of communication, communication through music and watching a program based on the life of conductor Bernard Haitink, one was drawn into a world of subtlety and tension, a world of tenderness and respect, a world of interpretation especially of the music of Gustav Mahler  or Richard Wagner the  controversial German composer who was used by Hitler to describe the special talent the German nation held in the world of classical music, some sort of civilised pinnacle. That strange  confliction  the Germans have between the the bestial instincts of the Gestapo and the longstanding tradition of German exceptionality in the field of music and in academia as a whole.

The music of Mahler for instance is a layered geological dig, of light and dark, of deep emotional texture where the very pauses, the silence between the passages of music deliver an ethereal sensation which can bring tears to the eyes.

This then is another form of  communication which for those who enjoy it indicates an opportunity an inner ability to understand both themselves and each other, possibly beyond words, it plucks at some sort of inner sensibility which when struck vibrates through to ones very being.

Laughter and story telling are the props of good communication.anyone who can hold an audience with a series of jokes or has a way with a story is a communicator but theirs is a different form of communicating not the one of having a sympathetic ear to the the travails of a friend or a lover. The blend of listening and understanding, of fitting their emotion to yours is a gift not many people have. We often plead lack of time, lack of interest, lack of empathy but in fact we are in danger of missing a great opportunity to start to understand someone properly. Throw it away by pleading a poverty of something or other and it may never come again

A man in his castle

 

Subject: A man in his castle.

Do married men resemble characters carrying out  a sort of bit part, slightly off centre, an extra in the unfolding scene around.It's an interesting mental composition. Women generally take centre stage in much of what we call family life, and increasingly theses days, life outside the home, maybe this is the reason we flee to work so early in the morning.

Femininity in a house determines its make up.  A males house is generally temporary and unstructured, it relies on make do and corner cutting, it has sentimentality but without the tears. There's little or no sense of an overview and judgement, it's a get along place where visitors make space amongst last nights projects and drink tea from a cracked cup. Its a make do, not pretentious or mocking, it's what's on the label. It's a man cave, welcoming and warm in its banter and discourse, keen to discuss the latest sporting feature or issue of work perhaps the difficulty of paying bills but not you'll notice in paying the bills but in their recurrent importance in accounting for so much of an income we thought was discretionary. Bills and money are the defining way a man determines his house, not in a need to compete with other households but an understanding of money not as a commodity to spend but a bolster for the future.

For the man his vision of the future is always present, part of his sense of ultimate responsibility, continually balancing  frugality against the wonton spend. Frugality is not a term of failure in his book but one of success, it's his way of pairing down to basics without feeling unbalanced, in fact his frugality is his badge of competence unsullied by anyone's  view of what is required. A man is rich in cast off ambitions, he decries the consumerist, the shopper and the catalog as belonging to a another's view of reality and is happy not to be a slave to fashion. His fashions are drawn from another time, a time when he didn't need fashion to strike a pose. His pose was what he believed in, it was internal rather than external, it was individualistic and not born of the crowd.

And so he sits in later life not bothered if the door bell rings, his encounters are minimal but sufficient, he would rather encounter his own thoughts in a book or a piece of writing than have to listen to the blather and the discord of voices from that other planet

Yet another kind of scourge

Subject: Yet another scourge.

How to change lanes from the fast to the slow as we decelerate once again. The threat of little or no income will cause us to reduce our spend, only buying the necessities and closing our eyes to the rest.  The pub the restaurant, the theatre and the club life will be put on hold as a series of predetermined steps are brought into play to provide an envelope under which we can shelter. It will require courage to conform. It will take empathy as the population are withered and torn by unemployment. The spectre of food banks and the grubbiness of making do is getting ever closer. It will increase the  differentiation within society with many who are even now putting a brave face on life by just getting by but soon, unable to earn even a meagre living as they bear the extra weight of being unemployed they will inevitably crumble.

Those who were planning for tomorrow have now the dilemma of wondering if there will be a tomorrow, the mind reprogrammed to accept the unpalatable truth that things may never be the same again. Our employment threatened, our children's future threatened, the relationships with others threatened, all has the fragrance of a war psychosis, of a country at war through our own short sightedness.

The 'wet markets' in china where live animals are traded, not necessarily as food but for erotic purposes is the place where the virus skipped species. In its natural habitat in and amongst bats  is unseen and it has this enormous reservoir of carriers to live and mutate  and having mutated it learnt how to skip the barriers which evolution placed as protection.

Emotionally there's no end to the destruction, how ever slight of the confidence we once had in each other. We now see a stranger, a friend, even member of our own family as a potential threat, so contagious is the virus. What damage might this do to our psyche as we hesitate to embrace or show affection. How will our motivation to travel and meet people, even make love be effected by the R factor.

Of course we came through the 'Bubonic Plague', the Spanish Flue , Smallpox and so no doubt the resilience of our species will come through this. Early death from any cause in the population in the 1800s was common as it was in era of the Spanish flue in 1913 the Depression of 1933 and two ghastly World wars which alone killed a combined total of over 100 million but in today's more sensitive society which must have answers and someone to blame we are less able to put aside calamity and take responsibility for what we can. With cultural assumptions of longevity and our right to be protected we a less equipped than previous generations to overcome this particular scourge.

 

A lifetimes experience of coping

 

Subject: A lifetimes experience of coping.

I lived in a golden era. An era when newly released from war, people elected a new form of government. Not one fixated of balance sheets and the financial bottom line but on the population as a whole. There was a sense that for the first time a government cared for the ordinary people, the masses and didn't just pay lip service to them at election time. This was a  massive change of political heart which saw people for the first time offered protection  covering ill health and unemployment, a situation almost unheard of in the pre-war Britain. The post-war government was built on men and women made from a different cloth with different ideas of what was right and wrong, who sided with humanity as a whole and not just the privileged class.

There were many obstacles. The City for one, entrenched in its own self preservation and a county who's finances had been plundered by war and debts, which would continue stretch through the generation growing up, but the underlying difference between what had gone before was the ideology 'that we all counted' and must 'all be valued the same'.

The aristocracy and its wealth, a wealth built on stock holdings and not productive capital, as in Germany, was ill placed to reignite the economy and instead it depended on the nationalisation of critical industries including the Bank of England to focus on specific investment projects to rebuild the countries infrastructure in time of need. With a work force depleted by the slaughter of men at the front women came to the fore and entered the factories doing the work normally expected of men. This was not only a necessity but it placed women on the front line of any recovery. For many working women, released from keeping house and becoming financially independent meant that there was the start of an assertion of their equality in society and at work and the respect became due, not only as the fundamental home makers but as a providers also.

This tussle is still with us today. One opinion seeking to impress their role as mother over their ability to earn since there is the danger of a clash of priorities.

The single mother was born of this assumption that a woman was equally capable in the home and in the work space. With the dreadful attitude of some men towards their responsibility as breadwinners, the absent father forced more and more women out to work with a diminution of their important role in bringing up children. In some homes the children seem like a commodity, a badge of womanhood in which poorly educated young women feel that having a baby is part of a 'passage of right' irrespective of the unending role of being a parent. There is no relief for the single mom no one in the home to turn to, no adult conversation, only a never ending series of demands from naturally hedonistic children who having played no part in the decision to be born had views to their importance growing up. For the single mother trying to find ways to fulfil these competing claims on her time, the job on the one hand the kids on the other there are few moments they can call their own. Fitting the hours of the day and the night, into the chaotic demands of work and child raising would be well beyond the competence of most men who's egotistical sense of themselves and of what can and should be done limits them to single tasking, clearly way short of what's required in the single parent family.  

Why I ask myself do women do it. Is the urge to be a mother is greater than their sense of what's involved. Did they believe the father of their child and his promises to stand by them or was the cohort of motherhood just too great to let common sense prevail. And what of the children who grow up in a home unbalance by not having the genetically linked dad who was expected to grow into the role of father. His imprint on their lives is missing and he sometimes becomes what can be the corrosive element in the mother's life, the occasional dad who when around, spoils the children but isn't there when they need discipline.

Still the young girls fall pregnant and decide to go it alone. It's not like it was in the 50s when society was indignant that girls should have children out of wedlock. It's not through lack of education or the methods to prevent an unwanted birth, it's almost a perverse reaction which is maybe part of societies attitude towards sex as a recreational pastime and not an evolutionary, or god given act of procreation with all the implicit importance attached.

Of course there are thousands of unhappy marriages where living under the same roof becomes a problem. In theses cases the advantages of not rowing and constant fighting outweigh the privation and the economic hardship. For them the task is clarified and their decisions become a sort of life force within the home. Conflict which used to sap out the energy is gone and this energy can be redirected towards the children's needs for as long as they need it, but what then. There's no putting up ones feet over a bottle of wine to reminisce and grow old gracefully. The reason which made it all worthwhile is gone to make their own lives leaving the single mom in a bit of a bind.

We have travelled far from that Golden era (which of course it never really was) into our neoliberal world of individual needs outflanking those of the collective need. Soon with untold unemployment due to those twin evils of the pandemic and Brexit, we are about to to have enforced pressures that the modern society is ill equipped to handle. Maybe the single mom is best placed to cope having had a lifetimes experience of coping.