A trip into London

Subject: A trip into London.

Early Autumn sunshine the air is a little chilly in the shade. Around us the great buildings of state. I'm in London with Andrew on a trip to the South African Consulate to renew his South African passport, the old passport having run out whilst he was in Australia. I've become the family archive for documents relating to the events and the bureaucracy which rules our lives, forgotten until we wish to trace and prove who we say we are. I have taken over the role from my father who used to keep all such documents, in a large ornate roller topped bureau. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, documents proving rights of abode, and our citizenship as we sail through life's choppy seas.

The relevance of my dad's own passage was in that bureau.  From the birth certificate to the one we shall not see, the death certificate, certificates of education, these bits of paper which allow the institutions, who follow us so meticulously, caring little for our substance but diligent in their imposition that they have the final say.

Well I was up to scratch, once again finding the faded scraps of officialdom. "Proof of existence" as if that were all to prove, a life in which your existence, the fact that you drew breath said it all your word not good enough not even the word of a thousand bishops could turn the clerk in their duty 'to see and confirm'. 

Emerging from the Consulate into the sunshine we elected to walk along the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. Leaving behind the bustle and cacophony of Trafalgar Square, the bulky South African House Embassy and observer of many angry demonstrations in the days of Apartheid, the demonstrators now strangely quiet towards the iniquities of President Zuma, their tirades stopped by the racial impasse which ties us in knots when black people mimic the whites. 

The sound of horses hooves and the clink of breastplate armour drew our attention to the entrance, off the Mall, into Horse Guards Parade where one of the many ceremonies which enrich London was taking place. Not sure what was going on but it had all the traditional significance for the Guard to keep them ramrod straight sitting on their beautiful horses awaiting the bellow of a command to swing away under the courtyard entrance into Whitehall.  

The space of Horse Guards Parade the scene of so many ceremonials is bounded by the Admiralty Building with its impressive array of wireless aerials. I explained to Andrew the significance of this to me as a small boy visiting London for the first time in 1950. Of the part they played in communicating to our navy across the seas. Brought up to believe  in the importance of Britain, her navy was the symbol of our power and the significance of this building in Whitehall, extending its reach to the far corners of the world made a small boy dream.

As of then with my father, I played the role of interlocutor weaving the story of the greatness and import in these buildings of state down Whitehall. The Foreign Office, the Treasury, Downing Street itself, now gated and forlorn, in my day open and available to stand and have your picture taken outside No 11. 
The Abby, the Houses of Parliament clothed in scaffold.  The great Methodist Hall which like the South Africa House was ringed in 1994 by queues of South Africans wishing to vote in the first full and free election to include all its citizens. It was a heady day with so much optimism for a new future South Africa.  When for the first time in many years its citizens could stop feeling outcast, needing to explain the unexplainable.

Yesterday the sun shone brightly on the buildings and on the people always busy going somewhere. I looked up at the windows of these solid massive architectural reflections of Empire, into the Treasury and thought of the demons which were being exorcised by the workings of Brexit. 

Back into the Park which boarders the Mall across the Mall and up towards Regent Street into Piccadilly and off through the narrow lanes to Soho. 

It was not on my dad's itinerary to walk his 10 year old into this seedy world of debauchery but my 36 year old was on a mission. Not to show me what I had missed in some sort of tawdry fetish but a fetish of a different kind, that of food and not just any old kind of food but the culinary delight of a "falafel".  Winding through the streets passed the bookshops my dad probably didn't know existed, passed the massage parlours and the kinky trade where anything and everything is available until we arrive at a stall which apparently is outside the Middle East, the Mecca of "falafel".

Did I want one ? Looking at the ingredients I thought I will skip this one this time and went in search of an exotic burger. I must take my hat off to Andrew, although he has his moments of selling the praises and benefits of a Vegan diet, his concerns that I get some food in me outweighed his horror of the killing trade and I had my Berger.

It was a lovely day and I think we both enjoyed it walking the walk and talking the talk.

I found myself plodding, a little tired with an aching ankle only too happy to allow the roles of 'protector and protected' to be reversed as he led me down the labyrinth tunnels into the Tube to emerge in Stratford where we had left the car.

Everything is so precious

Subject: Everyone is so precious.

With the sacking of the successful England's women's football manager Mark Sampson the potential for continued improvement with the team becomes questionable. Sampson who seems to have welded a great resilient football side fell foul of a players criticism of him and comments he made which she attributed to him as a slur on her race. To add flavour, she was black and the comments were said to be racist.

Eniola Aluko the lady in question just happens to be a lawyer as well as a footballer, she has a long memory and was part of a claim made against Spencer by Dew Spence, a mixed race women who in 2015 claimed that Sampson had said to her "had she been arrested" during a tournament played in 2015.  Whether this was banter which I presume it was, the claim was made by Spencer's team mate Ms Aluko that it was inappropriate. In 2017 Ms Aluko made another claim against him when he made the joke "make sure your Nigerian relatives didn't bring Ebola into England".

This could be seen as racially crass or an offside comment as part of a discussion about the risk of Ebola which was current during the outbreak and we were being warned of its spread through travellers to this country from central Africa.
Anyway the upshot has been he has been fired from his job amid much sorrow from other members of the team who say he was a great manager and very supportive.
It reminds me of the cycling coach who was also fired for being too abrasive towards one of the women in his world cycling championship team. Again the rest of the team, men and women supported him but the craven management caved in rather than risk their reputation.
What is this reputation. That at the slightest sign of racial bias they would rather fire the successful manager coach irrespective of the national success both men brought to their respective teams.
It's worth noting Ms Aliko was paid £80.000 to drop her suite against Sampson, so much for her moral indignation.
It seems we are bound for an ever decreasing role in any area where we need competitive bluster and team building through what used to be called locker room talk.
The women are too precious, too easily appalled, too willing to use their gender to sway the authorities.
It's noticeable that we have declined substantially in cycling since Shane Sutton the cycling coach was fired and I would expect the same in women's football as we now seek a 'politically correct' coach manager who will weigh every syllable before he lectures his team.

The diamonds at your feet

 

Subject: The diamonds at your feet

How do we equate a walk down the beach in Rio and a stroll through the fields close to my home in Bishop's Stortford. One has all the passion and the glitz, the other a more mundane reflective experience.
Life has a yearning for the exceptional, be it a luxurious car, a plush hotel, to be where the rich and famous live and it also has this inner sense of connectivity with things around you because they more reflect the person you are, or would like to be.
It's a comparison between the large panoramic canvas where the size and scale loses innate perspective in its grandeur and magnificence  when compared to a softer, more self centred scale, where perhaps an  inner voice can be heard.
That's not to say that the panoramic experience, especially if it is archived by dint of your own exertion, perhaps placing yourself on top of a mountain, or out at sea in a small boat is not personal but the scope of the experience, the 'sense of achievement' is pre-eminent rather than just learning about yourself when immersed in the simple things.  
It's these inner conversations you have with yourself, a sort of manifest of your personal life and character which identifies the individual you. It's that acknowledgement of your place in the 'local day to day scheme of things', an attempt to fit in and make sense of it all. Always on the look out, all the time trying to spot an opportunity is to forget what's at our feet and latent within your head.
From a hermit to world traveller, from standing room on the roof of a train out of Rawalpindi to a helicopter touch down on the private pad of a seven star hotel, each is an experience and it's short sighted for a person to ridicule one or the other. Both are characteristics of the human psych and it's desire. But since it's likely neither is available and the experience we come into contact with each day has more relevance, it would I submit be best to unearth the diamonds around you and see what, in our youth you were too busy, too involved in your own narcissism to see what was in front of our nose.

You were not altogether wrong

You were not altogether wrong.

 

I have no talent for writing.
Real writing comes when characters on the page begin to take on some sort of reality and you begin to believe, as you to read, that in your subconscious they take hold with some sort of pseudo actuality. The writer subtly introduces them and their phobias for you to form opinions and it in this opinion forming phase that they become real in your imagination.
It been reading a delightful book 'Saying On' by Paul Scott. It describes a old retired ex army couple who stay on in a fast changing India after the fall of the Raj. It's a sensitive documentary of people left behind in a setting which is decaying around them but which even at their zenith they were never really a part of in terms of rank and privilege. The privilege of being white and part of the administration of the vast country brought them at least privilege and power amongst the Indian community but when Independence came and the roles reversed, they were left behind, acting a part but to an empty house.
The pathos of a married life, with servants to do the things which, back home, would have kept them rooted in a state of late Middle age responsibility, was missing and so the clock ticked on and they continued to live in some sort of time warp to which they were sadly oblivious or worse powerless to do anything about.

India, South Africa, large parts of Africa which had been colonised and then handed back left people on the ground marginalised as they reconstructed their lives around the fact that the roles had been reversed and the native was top man.

The trappings of the past are retained in that the housing and initially the community remained to bolster the illusion that there had been no change in circumstance but slowly standards change and deteriorate from the way they were. The clubs are full of mutter and discontent, even ridicule at the direction society is taking as the future becomes less rosy. Change which takes place in all societies is seen through the prism of the past but in the case of the disenfranchised colonial, the date is etched in the imagination, the date "they" took over. 

For some people "staying on" is all they can do. Their passport indicate their right of abode but they have neither the skills of the money to move. The world is changing as countries began to make moving to another country much more difficult and many are left to wallow in a sort of no man's land, resented and blamed by the newly empowered for not bringing the nirvana which the local indigenous politician had promised. 

Time moves on and one thing we learn is to move with it. That's not to say you can't criticise the changes but stopping them is impossible. The best is to try and understand them and understand the reasons behind them. To remain a 'stick in the mud' is to act as a lightening rod from left, right and centre, isolated and marginalised, surrounded by unfathomable compromise of ones own beliefs but inherent in the belief that you and the past were not altogether wrong. 

Avoiding "common cause"

  Avoiding "common cause"

 

 

One of the problems about dissent in any form is that the 'powers that be' usually stay stum, rarely comment and usually wait out the storm until the rage dissipates.

Watching the Ken Loach film, "I Danial Blake" about a 55 year old man who having had a heart attack is waiting to be signed off sickness disability so he can find work by applying for a job seekers allowance. The only problem is the job seekers say he must look for a job but he can't look for a job until the doctor says he can. He falls between the proverbial cracks of an unwieldy bureaucratic system.

Of course a film maker like Loach has a story to tell and a point to make. 

His depiction of Job Centre staff as stereotypical, 'jobs worth's', 'uncaring', mindless people who are following the rules laid down by government, irrespective of the trauma of the people in front of them is debatable and if there is a demon in the system it's the politician. 

Iain Duncan Smith under David Cameron and George Osborn the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who's obsession with deficit reduction, had promised to modernise the Welfare payment system and get closer to a single, much simplified overarching payment. The difficulty was in merging the various categories for consideration there were winners and losers. The bureaucracy meant that to capture the individual claimants  picture required pages of questions, many of them not pertinent to the actual individual. The method of capture and correspondence was through a government web site but of course many of the claimants we not computer savvy. The assumption by the 'think tanks' that formulate policy had little or no concept of the conditions on the ground. The claimants inability to access, still less their understand how to manipulate the computer meant that large numbers of claimants were invisible.

The gap between the comprehension of what the privately educated designers of the paperless application system thought they were dealing with and actuality, led to enormous suffering and in a number of cases death through suicide as people lost their self esteem by being treated as less than human.

The award winning film made in 2016 made waves but didn't cause enough of an affront within society to make the government soften its stance. The deep seated resentment towards the unemployed, fed by the tabloid press and repeated on television with many turgid depiction's of the worst scrounges were revealed as if they were typical of all welfare claimants.

For a Berger flipper at MacDonald's on the minimum wage (£7.50ph), under 20 (£5.60ph), the thought of someone getting the equivalent income plus a range of other benefits is galling and the use of divide and rule and was again successfully used by government to avoid "common cause".

    

Ethical morality

Subject: Ethical morality.

The world has always been a mixed place, full of conflict and competing ideas. Of course we now have it all thrust in our faces each hour, every hour as the program directors on the TV channel sort out what they decide is the juiciest news. The agenda is usually dramatic topped with disaster and a touch of carnage.
Is this a true picture of our planet and the people living on it, or is this a complete distortion of the reality which faces the billions who live here. Are we kept in an unnatural state of perpetual tension because we now know what is happening in specific corners of the world as if these problems were in our own back yard. Even the misery caused by these upheavals have an effect on us, magnified by the natural concern we have for the poverty and distress of people caught up in the disaster.
So the world is a mess. The man made struggles and conflict add to the natural problems which starvation and lack of sanitation bring, often also brought on by man's inability to act in terms of the needs of others.
Boil all this down into a national multicultural soup where culture and tradition clash, where the failings across the world are seen by some segments in the soup as somehow the result of Colonial and Post Colonial excess. Where religious tension is blamed on anything other than the inherent tensions built up by religion itself. Where colour seems to signify an inherent fault line as seen in countries who in the past we knew so little about but who are now on our screens in such bloody gore.
As one of the worlds melting pots we are faced in this country with a clamour, well away from the actuality of their natural home (home is now claimed as here), for equal recognition in all kinds of things which are seen as pretty alien to the indigenous population. Is it any wonder we are faced with terrorism and bombs left unattended to blow anyone in this multicultural exercise up, since one of the last things a terrorist would wish is for there to be harmony.
Of course this harmony comes at a price. We have to put the past behind us for an uncertain future. A future in which we recognise that what we do and approve of is a manufactured thing suggested as necessary to accommodate the equally manufactured world around us. Normal evolutionary biology has been supplanted by a subset of the human mind, a set of criteria to fit the master plan of global activity and planning.
The plans and their effects on the human race has moved away from being beneficial to humans to being beneficial to the corporate. On the eve of robotic artificial intelligence we are becoming redundant and with it, the protection of an ethical morality. 

When the time comes

Subject: When the,time comes.

It's all very much in the eye of the beholder.
As Kim Jong Un goes on the offensive with an array of weaponry which both excites and worries defence experts to say nothing of the man in the street.  Clearly it has worried the countries who have armed themselves such as the US, Russia, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, with other nations bordering on the brink of crossing the line and becoming nuclear.
The argument of the need for global action in preventing countries from developing mass destruction weaponry has to be seen from the point of view of who is speaking. Why should the world feel satisfied that a man with Donald Trumps pedigree is better able to restrict firing them at someone he has lost patience with or the Indian Prime Minister or Prime Minister Netanyahu. Is Kim Jong Un with his parades of armed might any more to be feared than President Putin who also still puts on quite a show.
Leaders of many nation states have often been known to be egotists, how other did they bully their way into power. History is littered with paranoid persona seeking attention through politics and Kim seems to be one in a long line. His brainwashed nation is in no condition to judge him rationally and much as Moe Zedtung drew fanaticism out of the constructed Chinese mind it seems more an Asian phenomena rather than a European one.
The Chinese along with their newly found Russian friends have decided to cock a snoop at America in another throw of power politics in a dangerous game of pit bull bravado. Kim with his teeth bared is a terrifying sight especially to his close neighbours and one wonders at the technical strides he has made to fire off rocket after rocket with near perfect symmetry.
Here in the UK we have privatised our rocket industry and count ourselves lucky if some billionaire can be induced to launch a satellite for some scientific payload. We have given up the Kim Jong Un urge to sabre rattle and with the depleting funds we rather spend it on Welfare but even then, we still miss the target.   
Most nations are happy to sit under a security umbrella such as NATO and receive assurance that to attack one is to attack all. Unfortunately this assurance has worn a little thin by Mr Trumps disdain of NATO particularly the large bill the Americans have to pick up to give it teeth.
Assurances are one thing but as at the lead up to the Second World War we dithered under Chamberlain to meet our commitments and go to war against Germany. Leadership comes in all shapes and sizes and it's the luck of the draw if you have a good-un when the time comes and you need one.

Running in isolation

Subject: Fw: Running in isolation.

 

 

Watching the start of the Great North Run one is drawn to the sight of so many people culminating hours and hours of training with a race to see how they compete with their peers. "The loneliness of the long distance runner" by Alan Stilliteo is a story of a young lad who races to release himself from the harsh reality off living in a depressed northern town. I wonder how many of these marathon runners who pound the road, early morning and evening, obsessed with their fitness and the time they take to complete the race but also with the pull which isolation brings. Is it a question of being so self absorbed that the runner avoids the chores into which they become ensnared through the overall commitment of marriage and raising children. 

The race like all these events is fully covered by television and attracts it's fair share of attention seekers who dress up in bazaar costumes. I remember a few years ago a chap ran in a full deep sea diving suit, well I say ran, he rather stumbled around in his lead lined boots and finished six days later. His was an effort to raise money for charity, he deserved every penny as do the others who desire to put their time into charity work. 

It a feature of the modern world how reliant we have become on charity to raise money, to provide a service which in the past the funding for the service would have come out of general taxation or municipal rates. In the non too distant past the municipality would organise and provide a plethora of vital social services  such as an old people's retirement home or a youth centre.
Sadly no more as Government withdraw their responsibility  for the big social picture, believing in the American obsession of small Government, whilst at the same time shrinking the funds they used to supply to local government. 

I wonder if sometime in the future we will look back in pure amazement at how benign the populous were as the things which made society function were taken away, one by one. Hardly a murmur is raised as old people's homes are privatised and the charges for accommodation skyrocket. Youth centres close their doors and we wonder at the increase in youth crime. Playing fields are concreted over or make way for more 'unaffordable' houses leaving little relief from the congestion of suburban living.

Will we think this Thatcheresque Paradise was inevitable, that as the employable work force become more difficult to employ their understanding of what is permissible is due for a massive new rewrite.

There is simply no alternative to a diminution of standards when the population are so submissive. Brain washed they go along with what they are told by the tabloids and subjugate their own desires for the good of the corporate agenda. An agenda for which we are told we must be grateful since, along with the financial manipulators they pull all the strings these days.

Living not quite in a mud hut along the banks of the Limpopo but occupying a small semi in Otley along side of the River Wharf each society suffering the pangs of outrageous capitalism. Empire turned on its head.

Poverty

Subject: Poverty.

What do we mean by poverty. What do we mean by being poor. Is being poor merely an indication of income or is it a measure of an inadequate cultural knowledge base where we don't recognise the dilemma we are in.
"Money makes the world go round" of course and we all wish we had more of it. But money does not produce happiness and we can be extremely poor in human love and respect irrespective of the car we drive. There is an argument to say that we are rich if we see ourselves as being successful, irrespective of how that success is measured. You could be poor economically but give and receive love within and from the family. It is difficult to imagine the sense of failure if your family, no matter how hard you work or the size of the pay cheque, disengage with you or show their disdain no matter what you do for them.
Poverty of emotion is on a par with actual poverty since 'actual poverty' is a created indices, measured by people who statistically create norms under or over which they declare their findings but which take little notice of the actual segment of society from which they lift their findings.
In the extremist case there are people who decline to live in society or accept societies norms and distinguish themselves by the abstinence of all those things which the cultural/economic statistician deems necessary. It has always been a feature of cultural life that women can often make a small amount go very far indeed. During  and after the war due to the imposition of rationing families were forced to cut back and use their own ingenuity to feed themselves. People have very happy memories often in their childhood when things were scarce, clothing passed down and "necessity was the mother of invention".
Of course we are not speaking of the starving people in North Africa. We are not describing true hunger which we see on our screens, of wild eyed children suffering emaciation through real and never ending hunger. These people fall outside the definition of being poor.
To be poor in England is different to being poor in South Africa but the common line which runs through is the definition and the personal interpretation of being poor.
Would I feel I was poor if I couldn't afford a large flat screened TV, some people do.
Would I feel poor if I couldn't afford a holiday, some people do. A trip to the pub or a night playing bingo, some people would convince themselves they were poor.
The poor are the people who can't find money in their purse for a meal, or money to buy their children shoes for school. They are the ones who in desperation scratch at the bottom of their purse to put money in the gas meter or the electric meter when it runs out. The poor are the ones who suffer the ignominy of failing to secure funds for their kids to go on a school trip.
Usually the poor are the people who fail to measure up to 'expectations', especially of their children. People who would willingly go without themselves and not bat an eyelid but as a failure in society, reading the opprobrium reigned down on them by certain of the tabloid press and feel oppressed by their failure cry buckets of tears when no one is looking.

The vegan conversion

Subject: The vegan conversion

The weather never one to hang your proverbial hat on had started sunny as we set off leaving the green rural setting of Bishops Stortford behind as we sought the lottery of the M25 to take us westward across southern England and once more into Wales.
The M25 somehow encapsulates the busy helter-skelter life which personifies London. Its overcrowded suburbs where people live, cheek by jowl close to the economic power house of jobs and prosperity. There are not many days when you can drive along this 4 lane strip of concrete without being forced down into a crawl as drivers inch their way forward cursing their luck and ringing on ahead to say they will be late. The highway at enormous cost has been widened to take more and more traffic but it's never enough. Like a sponge it absorbs more until it becomes and once more waterlogged with cars and gigantic lorries which, with messianic determination enter the road each day believing that this time it will be ok.
Well this time it was, having avoided rush hour ( more like three hours of rush ). The sky was blue I was being chauffeured by Andrew and I thought I can now relax. Settling in a car for a 4 hour journey we sped  along at between 70 and 80mph discussing the benefits of Veganism !!!
Now it seems to me that like religion being a vegan  brings out a messianic aspects of character, the belief is so strong that we who are not yet disciples are missing out on one of the great truths of life. We have to be converted, we have to see the errors of our ways, and in the case of a vegan conversion we have to hear the squeal of the dying pig. After sitting in the car for 4 hours, I was then dragged off to a vegan restaurant to be fed food which strangely has been modified to look like the stuff you mustn't eat, a sausage look a like non sausage.

The vegans eating in the restaurant all looked revoltingly healthy compared to the fatties emerging from MacDonald's but somehow I feel they may, like the 60s hippies indulge in other habits which I frown on.
This morning I'm hoping for bacon and eggs when Angela comes around.

Mark Prisk MP

Subject: Mr Mark Prisk.

MP

Dear Mr Prisk
One of the most damaging aspects to the letters which flow between a member of a voting constituency such as myself and his/her MP is that it is like talking/shouting into an echo chamber where the sounds coming back are mainly those of ones own voice.
It's all carried out in a very British way with respectful phrases designed to show diffidence and respect when in fact there is little political respect between a somewhat shattered society and its political masters.
Brexit was the final nail which decides our slow decline in international importance. Days of Empire long gone we will soon be trawling the same waters of a small country with a diminishing trade balance and ever growing borrowing. Our ability to borrow will depend on the abnormally low interest rates kept artificially low by central banks after the 2008 banking debacle and the analysis of the credit agencies and the attitude towards us by the sovereign funds from who we borrow will be crucial.
The reason for writing was your dismissive attempt to justify the powers taken on by the current Government to  largely excluding Parliaments role in scrutinising bills in their passage through parliament following the cut and paste of European legislation onto our statute book.
This followed closely by the gerrymandering of the make up and balance of party representation on the ever more important role of Parliamentary Committees.
One of the roles  the Clerks in parliament play is to adjudicate a time honoured tradition to find some sort of balance in reflecting the size of a parties majority with its weight and participation in these scrutinising committees. A small majority or in fact, given the number of MPs in parties who theoretically make up the governments opposition, a minority Government such as the Tories currently command then the clerks do the arithmetic and decide the composition in numbers of each committee. This is to be abandoned in some sort of British version of South American putsch. A total disregard for parliamentary tradition and the fine balance these unwritten rules play in our democratic process.
Remember Parliament and the MPs who attend no longer have the respect they used to have from a public who already feel that Parliament no longer represents their needs. As the economic strain of our departure from the single market begins to bite and people reflect the arbitrary nature of the public sector pay increase, crumbs thrown to them by the Government of just over 1% after a pay freeze of 8 years, people will remember the generous pay increase the MPs awarded themselves, a £9000 a year increase in 2015. Talk of it being an award made by an adjudicating committee outside their control will fall on deaf ears as the implications of our economic plight are revealed and politicians are seen no longer as being custodians of our future but people who can not be trusted, even amongst themselves to leave the mechanism of parliamentary debate as a last bastion of the democratic process.

Diversity is a weapon against white people.

Subject: Re: "Diversity" Is a Weapon Against White People

Red Ice is propaganda station based in Sweden and North America. It's ideology is based on off-setting the bias we receive each day regarding ethnicity and the need for diversity.

In the west the need for cheap labour has meant that for the last 60 years there has been a need, by successive governments to incentivise immigration. A falling birth rate, an ageing population and the need to overwhelm organised labour by flooding the labour market with people willing to work longer and for less. A Capitalist dream.

In so doing there arose the twin track approach of down playing nationalism and up playing the importance of diversity. Part of the story was to disparage the past and the West's role in exploration, and exploitation. The two went hand in hand since there were no trade equivalents and the stark differences between the early colonised nations and those who arrived from Europe meant that the trade off was always going to be to the advantage of the more sophisticated European.

The fear was that the potential violence of racism in Europe which up until and including the Second World War had been a violence based on nationalism in the form of jingoism would be violence based on the immigrant and business couldn't or wouldn't allow this to happen. The dread was that the incoming people who came from countries newly inoculated with western culture would be intimidated by the local population and so the spectre of the "importance of diversity" was launched and has become, along with gender diversity, mental diversity, able bodied diversity, key indicators in our new social health check. Fail on any one and you are cast out by the new age bigots who advise you that your satisfaction in being  a white, able-bodied man, is somehow misplaced.

The truth of course always lies a little deeper than a video which has been made specifically to counter the onslaught of Political Correctness. But It does no harm to have a counterweight to the equally bigoted views held by so many factions in our society today.

The brain and judgement

Subject: The brain and judgement.

What does the Bosnian genocide or the Rwandan genocide, where neighbours with long standing historical relationships turn on each other in a frenzy of killing, what does it tell us about the human brain and how malleable it can be.

Prejudice is a manufactured trait in which we judge others in a way which disadvantages them and sets them apart from our judgement of others. The brain becomes influenced by factors outside its own local cognisance, it becomes brainwashed by propaganda, by being fed information that is often false and design to promote a sense of superiority or disgust even fear of people. We are told to recognise people by differences such as colour or racial profiles. These profiles are stigmatised and promoted politically for the purposes of distinguishing certain sectors of a population, usually with the intention of doing them harm.

But how can the brain be so easily manipulated by outside stimuli to perform in ways which previously would have been thought abhorrent. How could the Serbs turn on their neighbours the Bosnians or the Germans turn on the Jews with a ferocity or a disdain for knowing what was going on.
The socialising process we all learn from our mothers knee is based on a set of rules and experiences which we inculcate depending on the stimulation we receive when we are growing up. Without the stimulation there is a blank hole in our personality which in later life, like a cavity in ones tooth attracts tooth decay, becomes a cause for a decay in our willingness to try to understand and question the propaganda which floods into our consciousness  particularly these days through the internet and the colloquially termed, false news.
The foundation for our social understanding is communication. To communicate is to find out for ourselves about the world and the people around us, to engage in conversation and to find that we have so much more in common than we previously believed and that the propaganda is seen for what it is, a decisive tool used by others to support their own agenda.
Of course on a one to one basis this is the way to proceed through your life but one has to acknowledge that whilst you have maybe rid yourself of your bias and prejudice the person who you were perhaps prejudiced towards have to rid themselves of their prejudice also.
Sadly it is all too easy for the pack mentality to reassert its self and the contagion of prejudice and misunderstanding re-emerge but the more we go out of our way to talk and engage to all and sundry, or at least that part of society to which we have some contact, the conversation will add to our collective knowledge that generally speaking people are much like ourselves and in the act of reaching out means that they too are liberated in their prejudice towards you.

An unforgiving church

 

Subject: An unforgiving church.

The revelation this morning of over 150 children found buried in a mass grave, not in Rwanda or some far-flung corner of our primitive world but in the grounds of a disused Catholic children's home in Scotland. It's not suggested these children were massacred but that proper tribute was not paid to their young lives by affording them with a proper burial and a notification of their lives with a grave.
It seems incomprehensible that a religious order would have been found guilty, yet again, of ignoring the most basic human instinct, that of respect. Once again it took a newspaper investigation to uncover what had gone on as one of the pillars of the Establishment was found wanting. It is once again an example of the dark secrets hidden behind the doors and the smokescreen of officialdom since the trail of these short lives and their resting place must have been known in the places where these events are recorded. Once again it is an example of the gulf which divides segments within our society and like the infamous Indian Caste system, people born outside the social norms of our society receive different treatment and are afforded a different level of respect.

The Catholic Church in its treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland and the severance of their children is now common knowledge and it seems a part of the Celtic inheritance that Scotland or at least the Catholic Church treated the "wee bairns" in their care with the same disdain. The Catholic Church school known for its often harsh treatment meted out by some nuns towards their charges, is as if It was part of the child's redemption that they should be punished. 

The sins of the parent were vested on the child, particularly if the mother had been unmarried, a  sin of the first magnitude before God. Sinning must be purged by abstinence. In this case the abstinence of love or the understanding of compassion. One  of the tenants one would have expected of a person dedicated to holy orders and a deep understanding of scripture.
Perhaps a too literal understanding is at fault as Christ struggled to forgive, so the church was unforgiving.  

Test Match Special

Subject: Test Match Special

Yesterday England decisively beat the West Indies in the final cricket test at Lords. It was a game in which the West Indies were expected to do well, having beaten England in good game last week. My mind went back to the great West Indian sides of the 50s and the birth of the calypso "Those little friends of mine Ramadhin and Valentine". The batting power of the three Ws, Weeks, Worrall, and Walcott turned the test series on its head to the delirious approval of the large, noisy West Indian contingent amongst the spectators. England were no pushover, led by perhaps the greatest English batsman Len Hutton, Cyril Washbrook ably supported by Alec Bedser and Godfrey Evans. The verve and light hearted spirit induced to the games by the enthusiastic spectators, West Indians not long off the boat and dying for their nation to make their mark, an antidote to the hostility they sometimes found in their attempt to make a new life for themselves here in this cold wet island. 

Pace bowling though was what the Windies were best known for, Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh, Michael Holding, Joel Gardner and Curtly Ambrose all names to strike fear into the minds of the batsman and we gathered around our radio sets to listen to the commentary of a contest so far away it could have been the other side of the moon.

Test Match Special commented on them all. The inimitable tone and pace of John Arlott 

the light heated banter of Brian Johnson and Johnathan Agnew, who can forget the moment in one of the matches when Agnew said something which had a double entente meaning and devolved Johnson into tears, neither commentator able to say a thing, over come with the giggles which seemed to go on interminably.  It's a recording in which the giggles and the gasping for air are infectious and I dare anyone not to be caught up in the moment. 

Test Match Special was a uniquely English mixture of serious cricket reporting mixed with reminiscence and humour. The commentators, between balls, would describe a hundred and one things which were going on in the ground or describe incidents which had happened to them on tour all around the world. It was a conversation between friends and we were privileged to be able to eaves drop.

One of the best raconteurs with his oh so upperclass English accent was Henry Blofeld. His penchant was to see the smallest  off scene event and bring it to our attention. It enriched the commentary and endeared the man to his listeners. 

Yesterday as the match drew to an early close it was his last appearance in the commentary box. There was much to reminisce especially the tours overseas, a lifetime of exporting his English mannerisms and quirks to I'm sure, a baffled locale be it South Africa, India, the West Indies or the most raucous of them all, the Pom bashing Aussie. The last bowl balled, the last word said and he was out of the commentary box to do a tour of the Lords Ground to the enthusiastic applause of both cricketer and spectator for whom he had been a linchpin pin in their game describing the matches for over 45 years.

Blowers departs and the men in the mould of Arlott and Johnson are joined by another, a classic of a passing age, probably never to be repeated.

A chance meeting with Jacque Kallis

Subject: A chance meeting with Jacque Kallis

One of the delights of waking up and being stimulated to write is that an emotion stirred can then be fleshed out to find what at the bottom of it. The mental research you do within your memory is somehow sharpened by the act of writing and recall.
This morning I hit the button on NowTV, my short flirtation with sky sports (I bought a weeks pass for £10) usually I buy a stint with them when I want to watch a special event and it's not on terrestrial TV.
They were showing a piece on Jacque Kallis the great cricketing all rounder, snippets of his innings as batsman, bowler and tremendous fielder. His record speaks for itself. Eye watering statistics with the bat and equally eye watering with the ball. His catching and territorial supremacy in the field sealed off that part of the ground as a no go area for opposing batsmen.
The stats say it all:- 10,000 runs and 250 wickets in 'both' the Test and OCI formats of the game as well as catching 200 Test Match catches and 131 in the OCI game.
His temperament and his demeanour both on and off the pitch made him a generally good egg to everyone who came into contact with him.
It was the accolades from his peers in South African cricket, the equally great Graeme Pollack and his son Shaun, Jonty Rhodes, Peter Kirsten, Barry Richards,  a list of unimpeachably great cricketers from a golden age in South African cricket, singing their tribute and praise on the great man.
But it wasn't just that, it was she shots of Newlands with the mountain in the back-ground and the fond memories that it brought.
Cricket in South Africa was not played behind closed doors with players sealed off as in this country. The players were ordinary South Africans but with special gifts. Taking Andrew to Wanders to practice in the nets one was as likely to have in the adjacent net one of the top test players practicing. The stimulation for young South Africans to see and speak to their heroes was inestimable and contributed to the sense of confidence South Africans had in those days.
The crisp sunlit stadiums, the knowledgable friendly crowd, the glorious ability with bat and ball made a day out watching cricket very special. Rain rarely stopped play, and the drive or walk to and from the ground was a pleasure, passing through the sunlit trees which bordered the roads and graceful houses of the surrounding suburbs.
The Long Room bar in Wanderers and its equally famous equivalent in Newlands where my friends in Cape Town from Southern Life used to drag me struggling (?) for a drink at lunch time is now but a memory but a memory I'm very lucky to have. 

When rights were earned and not demanded

Subject: When rights were earned and not demanded.

How do we regain balance in this, population explosion versus the availability of jobs to obtain the money to live by.
In what used to be called the Third World the surge in population was coped with by natural wastage. High childhood mortality, swathing cuts in the life span of people through disease and high rates of violence and yet women continue to have babies either willingly or unwillingly. The issues which the Western woman consider such as affordability is not on the radar of a woman in Bangladesh. As the exponential growth in fertile girls makes the matter exponentially worse, year on year it seems that as we globalise our thinking and values, making the assumptions we make in the West fit the conditions in the Third World, the humanitarian efforts we make to head off the ravages of disease also make matters worse.
In the West jobs are being created to fit the growing workforce but often these jobs are consumerist in the sense they fit the service industry rather than manufacturing.

Consumers, you and I have not seen any growth in earnings for over eight years now which is unprecedented in recent times. As the disposable income shrinks then the consumer business becomes unsustainable. Credit in the form of credit card loans has sustained and falsified the merry go round of the the western capitalistic experiment. Printing money with no asset security, in effect devaluation your currency on a monthly basis to feed the debt monster, now in the trillions, is so far from the Keynesian ideal of managed budgets and centrally controlled economic stimulus. Everyone is holding their breath, afraid to look under the bed to see what sort of bogieman is there.

Population control, something in the water perhaps (like the armed forces used to have in their tea) flys against our human rights. But what our these human rights.
Are they a religious concept since god seems to bring enough disaster and pestilence on our heads for it to be ruled out as a religious right.
Is it a philosophical right something reasoned by individuals for and on behalf of individuals. A concept born of a legal construct to protect people as citizens.
Is it a natural construct, a piece of common sense which we all pride ourselves upon.
What ever it's foundation it seems to be leading us into to some strange places.
It often fly's against the civic understanding of what is best. It makes claims for individuality which can only be sustained by the collective at a cost and sometimes against the grain of what the civic feels happy with. It has the power of personal experience and a story line which is hard to resist but has little or no actual resonance in the collectives experience of the population as a whole but somehow it trumps the general public's concern with an appeal to the 'individual's right'.
The world is under the spotlight. Can it survive. Will population growth outstrip our ability to clothe and feed, not in the form of the abject poverty of the Untouchables in India or the drought prone misery of people living in Somalia. Not even the squallar of the poor in the inner cities of the north of England or in the dying shells of cities such as Detroit which hold in their name an industrial past in America.
Can we, as the robots gobble up more and more of the available work find a way to educate our children not to follow their fathers down the mine but to reinvest in the idea of how to do with less. Of how banal consumerism is, how we tie ourselves in a knot of debt repayment, two and three jobs, and never ending worry.
It's only 60 years ago when I was growing up that credit was a dirty word. When people who couldn't afford something were content to be without both the purchase and the debt. When a household had a single breadwinner and mothers if they so desired could concentrate on nurturing their young.
When 'rights' were earned and not demanded.