A lesson in how to"

Subject: A lesson in "how to".

Life can be very complicated if you let it, if we let our emotions overrule our heads, if we lose our equilibrium by trying to keep up with someone else.
Life teaches you that there are seasons. Being caught out in a t shirt when it's raining and cold means you haven't taken the precaution to look outside the window. The world outside is forever changing and one of the disadvantages of life is that change is more difficult to manoeuvre around as you get older. An older person has a history within which he or she has been culturally acclimatised over a period of years where past experience is continually getting in the way with the 'present', never mind the 'future'.
Take the workings of a computer program, not the technical bits but the procedures you carry out through a sequence of key strokes to get the thing to work and do the things you want it to do. Now there is the problem that word 'sequence' a sequence which is unforgiving, one wrong stroke and the destination is denied.
Added to this the Windows 'techies' or the Google 'boffins' are forever changing the track on which you travel. Switch off the computer tonight and it's likely that the path has been changed and a fork put in the road by tomorrow.
If you are young and not set in your ways this is of no concern but if like me your happy to do the same old thing, week in week out then when you get a deviation you stumble around like a drunkard completely unable to think your way through. Memory which has becoming a little stretched is of no help since you do things by rote rather than by comprehension.
Probably the hardest thing to bear is the creeping sarcasm which meets your every fumble. Hard because in years gone by you were the rock who knew everything and now, like the Emperor with no clothes, you know nothing. The skids are truly on and the descent is swift and steep.
Best not trouble yourself with the need to know, apparently things change so fast these days, every bit of knowledge you need is on Google. So long as you can understand the language and know how to disseminate the obscurity of the directions you might just get there and if you don't, too bad the worlds a crazy place these days and the computer describes much of what is wrong anyway.

The health of a nation

Subject: The health of a nation

"It's the economy stupid" Bill Clintons famous rebuff highlights the importance we attach to economics and economists in their pronouncements as to our success or failure as nation state. 
The measurement of an economy in terms of GDP, Gross Domestic Product says much for how we value success both in our personal lives as well as as a nation. When GDP is up we are all expected to applauded even if the growth which it is supposed to represent, is not a characteristic of our personal experience. If we are poor we will not find any growth in our own income or lifestyle other than perhaps the benefit cheques are maintained. Perhaps this is all we can expect since our position within the economy is only peripheral to the success of the economy and as the world economy changes and automation and artificial intelligence start to make people redundant, what reference will we, the common or garden humans, have to GDP.
The measurement of the 'total value of everything produced' is fine when measuring widgets flowing off a production line but how does it measure the dedication of a violinist playing for a symphony orchestra or a nurse tucking up her patient in bed.
The word "value" has more than an economic ring to it, but thank god nations should be measured by more than their GDP.  The value of a social conscience is immeasurable, it's a marker for the civilised refinement within a society as to how it's

citizens judge and evaluate not only their own lives but also those around them as fellow human beings.
The insistence that everyone has a right to procure arms in the US, ostensibly for their own self defense has to have the caveat that lives are at risk and that other people's lives has less value than your own. Of course this is the natural presumption right across the animal kingdom but in a civilised country attempts are made to alleviate the 'them and us scenario'. 

The Japanese had a remarkable period of growth in the 80s far out pacing every country in the world in terms of economic growth and then came the strange economic phenomena "stagflation'. Their economy has stubbornly refused to grow in terms we would normally attribute to GDP and yet the society has in someways prospered by socially sidestepping the personnel accumulation of wealth as an indicator of a successful nation. The plateau which the people had reached and stayed on has produced a normalisation, a sort of breathing space where enough is determined by the population as a whole and not driven by outside economic forces. Admittedly the Japanese always a very private and individualistic nation is not the norm but it shows that in terms of measurements of other factors of a nations health such as diet, longevity, personnel finance the Japanese are extremely wealthy and only in so far as the stock market and the economic volatility  which the investors find so attractive because of their opportunity to manipulate an often artificial volatility and make massive profit. Only this concept of Western Capitalism where GDP is the main sometimes only indicator of the health of a nation.

The death of "Long held conviction"

Subject: The death of "Long held conviction" 

It's all perfectly reasonable. Listening to transgender people discuss their reality. Who couldn't be sympathetic towards their predicament now rapidly being made "normal" by those fringes of our society who care about these sort of issues.

For people of my generation it's one more instance where the foundations on which we built our concept of right and wrong, normal and abnormal is again challenged and we are asked to realign our understanding in a fragmented gender relevant world.

The issue of equal pay and promotional equality is a mere  shadow on the complex stage of rights. The rights of a woman to be a man, or a man to be a woman would have seemed bizarre when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s. Society concerned itself on being where it could, uniform and together. The strength of the working class was its commonality, its ability to recognise, as in a mirror image the people around you. Racial contrasting had not yet begun since the first substantial wave of immigration from the West Indies and Pakistan had not started. The mills still largely employed white women to do the work and it was only a realisation that people from the subcontinent could be much more easily exploited by the mill owners, not only in terms of wages but in the hours worked and the conditions the workers were having to work under as we struggled to compete with Taiwanese cloth made in postwar investment rich Taiwan.

Gradually the complexion of places like Bradford changed as large families combined under one roof in a way which was an anathema to the English. A them and us phobia, largely peaceful, began to define, particularly northern towns as the local indigenous people struggled to understand what was going on. Today in places like East Ham a complete transformation has taken place and people's, largely from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh provide the culture with Middle Eastern and East European societies increasing every day staking their own claim. The pockets of Cockney lineage are still found gathering in the cafes discussing their benefit cheques but the cafe is owned by a Polish woman who employs her own ethnicity for trust and the common bond which a shared national experience brings. Whilst the English are busy reinventing themselves to suit circumstances outside their control, now, the new locals, remain fiercely independent of their rights of ethnic descendency drawing their own ethnic boundaries 
The English ever pliant have made as good a fist of this as they can with relatively little overt racism. That's not to say they are happy with their newly defined role of being, in many cities, the minority but largely it's soto voice with the majority of the noise coming from the intellectual wing, berating any descent of the new order and hurling their own abuse in the form of labeling. Racist, Misogynist,Homophobic, are but a few which when used to describe someone or some group close down any discussion.

Gender, trans or cross is another topic which we, confused, and trying our best to keep up are hopelessly out of our depth as the firebrands of "change" make their way into the deepest recesses of our long held convictions. 

Perhaps we are wrong and there is no surety or descriptive norm under which we can form opinions. Perhaps life is such a transitory game that it is foolish to hold opinion at all.

Reading, one of life's big adventures

One of the things about memory loss, and I am not talking about alzheimers here but the normal loss of memory as you grow older. Names, or where you left things are the bane of an older persons life and can have been a problem throughout life depending on how your brain works. If you have a busy mind which skips about from one subject to the next then your 'consecration span' is effected. If you religiously log every thing you do with a coating of rational thought,  then the memory retention is going to be different. 
One of my pleasures is reading. My house is littered with books. Some read, some part read each staring at me from the bookcases or from the table, begging for me, as it were to turn to them and open the cover. There is the unseen library in my Kindle available at the tap of a key, immediately expandable by a visit to Amazon Books, infinitely available for a relatively small amount of money.
All these books, all these words crafted by someone who's life is often encapsulated within the pages, who's thoughts leap out at you, bowling a bumper ball to your own long founded prejudice. A maelstrom of ideas and revelations, of laughter and tears which at some moment in the past you had shared with the author.
Today, the problem, if it is a problem, is the retention of those moments or even of remembering the thread of the story that got you there. Looking at the covers of these old friends it's like meeting someone in the car park who you know but can't quite put a name to. The books as a whole you remember but the detail of the story is missing.
Not quite a clean slate but sufficiently vague as to make one worry, 'where did the experience of reading the book go'.
My Yorkshire trait tells me that I can read them all again for nowt since the impressions and the knowledge gained has become sufficiently hazy for me to start again. 
But somehow starting again is frightening since the innocence of youth is now replaced with the ticking time bomb of old age. There's not enough time to do it all again and even if there was one could be forgiven for not feeling up to it since the realisation that knowledge dies with you, blatantly apparent now as it wasn't when you started on the great adventure.

A distorted prism

Subject: A distorted prism

I'm not sure which is the most worthwhile. A life of tempering the mind to fulfill a new profile for one to follow in this human journey through the years we spend on earth 'or' simply relying on an open Interrogation and interaction with the people around us and the part we play, with them in that passage.

If I were to become a monk and define myself by my beliefs, attaining some sort of purification by defining the mind and the thoughts it thinks, which in turn defines our actions towards people in general, is this process collectively beneficial other than to the individual undertaking the hours of study and meditation.
Do the people who crusade against the ills of the world who set themselves against what they perceive to be bad, do they have any worthwhile traction in what we might perceive as worthwhile or is worthwhile purely subjective.
There is nothing more single minded or in fact more cruel than a religious evangelist who seem to reward or damn with equal fervor. There can only be one path and because of the opaque nature of belief the path is often based on at best a speculative assumption dressed up as fact. Fact is misunderstood for belief and with the absolute surety which belief poses to a willing mind, any attempt to rationalise is verboten.

The term being 'political' with my 'fast held belief' is leveled if one attempts to argue. The discussion becomes heated because the 'surety' comes into question and when one has spent so much time and effort defining yourself in terms of what you believe it is difficult to fathom any reason a person would doubt you in your analysis.

The atheist in effect is winging it through life on the gamble that his rationality is sufficiently robust not to need to commit to either a life of blind faith or to the hours and years of committed study as to the cause of our existence.
The atheist doesn't have the answers other than 'there can be no answer' to what lies around him other than what can be tested by rational thought. His assumption that he is what he is by an act of Darwinistic chance and that natural selection, through the chromosomes and the genetic soup which concoct his person at the moment of conception, is for good or for bad. The part that nurture and environment  play are also acknowledged but in the end you are what you are. Tinkering with the mind in an effort to determine more is a bit like the problem in quantum physics where to observe a particular of quantum proportions effects the partial so radically it moves in time and space to be elsewhere. 
So perhaps the zealous over interrogation of purpose when it comes to the mind also distorts it into becoming something not real, something which in the asking of the questions put too much stress on the outcome that the person asking becomes not only someone else but lives in a reality which is also distorted.  

Radio 702

Subject: Radio 702.

I have been very impressed with the response and the maturity of the questioners ringing in to Radio 702 regarding the drought that is facing Cape Town.
Zero date is April 10th when the water is due to be shut off to homes and people will have to queue to collect water at various points across the city. I suppose those living in the more rudimentary parts of the Cape Flats would say "so what it's what I do every day since we were old enough to walk". But the rudimentary nature of life's chores is alien to most of us grown used to hot and cold running water.
The what if scenario, what if the rains do not come, was dealt with very expertly by a woman Zinthia who heads the Cape Town Councils division regarding water affairs. She was on top of her game and seemed to know and cope with any issues raised about the crisis and future planning. Perhaps she should have been in charge of the budgetary resource which could have prevented this happening in the first place but with so many urgent needs and only one pot of money the chances are that the expensive solution to finding more ways of storing water gets kicked into the long grass Year on Year.
So often one gets the impression that the country is falling apart because of corrupt governance at the national level and no doubt it's true but Cape Town still seems to keep its democratic head with a relatively non racially absorbed group of Councillors. 
Zinthia seemed one of those, caught in a predicament she gave one confidence that help was at hand and a system worked out to survive.

Radio 702 was the station we listened to if we wanted to get away from the government propaganda of the SABC. John Robbie the ex-Irish rugby player who had decided to settle in South Africa was one of the dynamic, tell it as it is, radio show hosts (recently retired) who, from the early days of the station (1986) had been a sort of civilising thread running through the tumultuous world of Apartheid South Africa. 

Even today living in England  I love to listen to the traffic reports on 702 describing the traffic hold ups at places such as Gillooly's or Bedford View. The problems then are much the same as today for motorists traveling along those roads and through suburbs. It brings so many memories back of the many happy years that I spent there and it's still  happening without any input from me. A life and a vibrancy so different to the rather staid life in England but of course distance and sentiment clouds the vision and the voices on 702 do not echo the chaos of surviving for many of the people living today within the violence of modern day Johannesburg. The map sets in aspic the routes and the suburbs we used to call home but does not shine a light on the shadowy world of the unemployed who filter in at night to pick up what they can. The knife edge existence for the many does not emerge from the map or the calm voices on the radio, even the statistics are grossly inaccurate since surveys are meaningless in Alexander Township where the structure required for a census or an opinion poll is not part of the largely itinerant mass of people.  
"Permanence" is a joke, a sad joke. Life is a question mark from day to day, survival of the fittest means that you are in perpetual fear once the sun sets, locked behind your shack door praying that the gangs have not found reason to search you out. 
Hell on earth indeed.

Biblical profundity

Subject: Biblical profundity 

Listening to biblical academics argue and disagree about the meaning of newly discovered scrolls purporting to reveal fresh aspects of the society who lived in the lands within the state of what we know as Israel and bound up in the teachings of the Old Testament, the arrival of Jesus and his influence on the local society one is struck by the Biblical conflation of all matters we call religious.

The descriptions taken from new discoveries paint a very different picture of the boy and the man Jesus. The surety of believers rests on the image of a son of god come down to mend our ways and give us new hope in following the diktat laid down in the Old Testament rule book. "Thou shalt not" is the guiding mantra for good social practice and in this guise there has been no better parenting of humankind. The rules with the caveat that to fail to follow has some very bad outcomes has created an alternative to the barbarism which was as prevalent then as it is now.
This is all well and good but the issue of the authenticity of these rules which is based on the reading of the bible, is continually challenged by further discovery. 
Does this matter. Are the teachings more important than their authenticity. Apart from the stick which lies behind the teachings, that of eternal damnation in hell, it also carries the carrot of heaven and a god who loves us. If as seems possible that the writings were fables which had conflicting stories to tell but, in the assembly of a book of faith, the censor already had his pen redacting the parts which went 'off piste' it all rather blurs the dynamic of God.
Was there a god or was there a philosophical movement which prescribed the ingenuity of man's wisdom, much as in Ancient Greece. 
Did the gods of 'fire' and 'earth' which define superstition not simply go through a reasoned metamorphosis which, due to its social practicality, caught on and further, through the art of books and publication found a niche in men's hearts.