Reasoned argument

Subject: Reasoned argument.

It seems we live in a world of subterfuge, misinformation, and down right lies. 
Every morning I wake to the sound of announcements on the television and from journalists in the print industry, telling us about the reopening of bars and restaurants, workspaces, airline destinations and the shops in an effort to convince the general public that the pandemic is behind us and, with a few caveats, we can resume our lives again.  The business leaders and the economists are clearly happy to shake off the cobwebs of 100 days of lockdown, its business as usual and they can get back to making money.
But tucked away on the inside of the newspaper or the second or third lead story on the media news channel are the stories of new Covid 19 outbreaks popping up all over the place and worryingly enforcing the reapplication of lockdown in places which a week or more ago were deemed clear of the virus. Hot spots such as Brazil and the US,  India and Africa with higher casualties announced daily and even more pertinent for us, areas and cities in Europe declared clean, are now once again off limits.
Just as we relaxed our wishy wash restriction on what was required of travellers arriving here, we can now, not only once more go overseas but welcome all those people from abroad who can now come here with no health checks and certainly without the pesky delay of having to quarantine for two weeks. How inconvenient was that, to limit the freedom of movement of those much lorded tourists who seem to be the only source of income we have here in the UK.
When it came to the physical health of the people versus the economy (the tourist industry and the airlines) there could be only one winner and it wasn't our health. So until we start dropping like flys and the infection rate goes through the roof, we will be encouraged to believe the worst is over and we should get back to near normal.
It's the deceitfulness of this story peddled by our politicians through our media, particularly the newspaper media, who's emblazoned headlines encourage this belief that we are out of the woods when clearly we are not. The editor plays to our basic desire to have fun, to spend and gavotte on the beaches of Spain and to party nearer home. The facts that this insidious virus is highly transferable even when the carrier has no symptoms making the population at large highly susceptible. Some nations have started to relax their lockdown but only after putting into place a test and trace system which will quickly identify where a fresh outbreak is occurring and who the transmitters are. We in our incompetence have only just started a fledgling test and trace system mostly aimed at testing the people who are coming into contact with patients in hospitals and people at high risk such as the elderly. We are unwrapping a parcel with no idea what's inside and with no adequate plan if and when the contents are seen as extremely harmful.
Our incompetent Prime Minister and his assistants are running a war without understanding the enemy or if they do understand are wilfully encouraging the troops to go over the top and into battle poorly equipped and much in ignorance. History of course tells us we are good at this since in every conflict we expend lives through poor planning and executive incompetence. We always have 'half an eye on the money' with little willingness to face up to the long term consequences that if we don't plan to spend on contingencies we suffer.
PPE was a case in point, the release hospital patients into the Care Homes, the poor advice given the public when the virus was in its early stages, the denials and U turns, the inability to galvanise the manufacture of things we were short of with manufactures waiting for the call back from the ministry which never came.
We like the Americans are handicapped with an electoral system which can be tampered with to produce results which are not in our interests. Boris and Donald, not the brightest pair, are the result of a single slogan electioneering platform, "Make America Great Again" and for Brexit Briton "Take Back Control".  Populist sloganeering, high on nationalism but low on detail, they both captivated populations  pre-prepped with the propaganda of anti EU and anti China sentiment, It stirred  the ashes of discontent of a population who were in the midst of global change and had lost confidence.
The power of the Fourth Estate has never been so damaging.  The laws banning too much power held in too few hands, damaging and destroying the balanced reporting necessary to preserve both sides of any political picture were over time dismantled.
The proprietors  could now make and break the news according to an agenda, often with mercenary intent, feeding a gullible public with fake news or the vial character assignation of who ever gets in their way.
It's all too easy of course with a public who's gadfly attention span makes them unable to  read to the end of this blog, much preferring the lurid headline with little or no reasoned argument to support it.

Using your talent

Subject: Using your talent.

With the start of the F1 motor racing season in Austria I decided to by a day ticket to watch the event on television. The teams and the cars are much the same, the personalities on the media are the same, people who know their sport, ex-drivers, ex-owners, people who have lots and lots of money, people who have homes in Montecarlo and live within a bubble, a bubble of wealthy toys, yachts and expensive cars. It's a bubble where exclusivity is common and the toned tanned macho men who drive these thoroughbreds of the road, these millionaire boy racers many with lineages and connections to very wealthy parents who make it all possible parade before us.
With the corona virus pandemic decimating sporting events, with large audiences banned from watching the event outside by the track itself makes for a very different atmosphere. No spectators, no personalities wandering around the pit area, no exquisitely dressed women or ultra powerful men who head not only the sport but also the royal families on who's land many of the racing tracks are built.
We in the pleb lane, offering our £10 to peep into this other world are left to consider the opportunity that birth can bring and of course this is on everyone's lips following Louis Hamilton's plea to enlarge the cohort who compete. His call for his sport to be inclusive means that nonwhite people must in some way be fast tracked into positions where they will influence young people to try to emulate their success. 97% of the people fronting the show are white, although this doesn't count the the folks in the factories who do the work to build the cars or design them but the racial bias is there. There are other sports such as tennis which seem biased towards white audiences whilst there are sports such as cricket which in this country are overwhelmed by non white spectators when their team comes over to compete. It's also interesting that in both F1 motor racing and in cricket the top contestants, the outright champions the superstars, are black people in Louis Hamilton and Serena Williams. As white people we don't beat our breasts that these out and out champions are black, we applaud them, not as black people but as champions.
The 'Black Lives Matter' movement which has gathered momentum across countries which are predominantly peopled by white people, suggestively, in response to a historical period when black people were rounded up in their tribal areas by black people and sold to exploitative human traffickers as we would call them today, usually white people who then shipped them to the Americas to pick cotton for the white plantation owners. The trade was unimaginably cruel, the conditions on the ships were far worse than we would subject animals to these days and many of the people died before reaching America. For this we should bend out knee, but history, to this day is full of stories of brutality, the Myanmar and the Uighur to name but two but who don't seem to fall under the same umbrella of concern in Black Lives Matter because of course they are not themselves black and more importantly, they are not being persecuted by white people. People with a yellow skin or the nations in the Middle East, even the mulatto skins which make up the nations of South America are all exempt from this historical blemish, only the white traders and the white plantation owners are judged.

Louis Hamilton, a black kid growing up in England broke the mould. His family were poor certainly not rich in fact his dad worked three jobs to ensure Louis could enable his dream.  Recognising his talent on the Go-kart circuit his dad worked to ensure this talent came to the attention of people who matter such as McLaren under Ron Dennis. The rest is history. It's a history of hard work and a drive to succeed. It epitomises that even in the most exclusive environment, being black was no inhibitor if the talent is there, but the emphasise these days is that talent alone is not enough, there has to be some sort of reparation, some sort of recognition regarding our black exceptionalism.
But what about reparation for the hundreds of thousands of mostly white women who were raped by the German and Russian soldiers only 75 years ago, no bended the knee for them, no gnashing of teeth on the media.
History is full of terrible events so it can't be the event of slavery per se for which the hand ringing and media breast beating is all about but rather the events of today which prejudice the black persons  life opportunities and are now under the spotlight.
The disadvantaged poorly educated working class white child, barely literate after ten years of schooling also deserves attention but don't hold your breath. A people who will squander thousands of pounds on their pets or hand over hundreds of pounds on relief programs to help the poor in far off places are often blind to the predicament of the poor on this island. Rather depict them as work shy low life with camera teams marauding all over the estates where they live digging the dirt so the perversity which is fundamental in any class caste system, is given full reign to vent its spleen. 
We have been assailed by the so called plight of women not making it to the top and yet across the world women hold the top political jobs whilst under their stewardship  nothing much changes.  One is left thinking that perhaps the role mothers play, caring for their young simply outweighs their desire to become 'chairman of the board'.
And so it is with black aspirations. President Obama set the bar high being voted by a majority which included a high percentage of white voters. Vikram Pandit an Indian was made CEO of City Bank, one of the largest banks in America by a Board of largely white people.  There are many black people in top positions throughout politics, business and industry in this country They occupy large swaths of senior and middle management positions in Councils and Municipalities throughout the land and do not find the barriers white people meet in many parts of Asia or the Subcontinent regarding jobs and residency. Little is said of this prejudice towards white people, its accepted as part of the status quo, a form of protectionism.

Of course Black Lives Matter and the knee choke hold used by the cops in Minneapolis has now been banned in many American states. The heavy handed tactics used in Hong Kong pale when compared to the tactics used on mainland china where dissidents simply disappear, but that is off limits to the people crying abuse in this country. They  will always look for reasons of racial disparity  to bemoan their lot not willing to acknowledge that the Hamilton's and Williams's  of this world do, what people with talent always do, us it.

The lost generation

Subject: The lost generation.

"The lost generation" a termed coined in the 1930s to describe the youth of that generation and the destitution the economic events laid at their door has been rekindled in the 21st century. There have been similar cataclysmic economic upheavals in the intervening years not least the World War which forced the young men to pay the ultimate price.  Young people grow up today, only knowing the world they see, the consumer society, the society of predetermined rights, a welfare society where people are protected from the most dire economic consequences. This will undoubtedly effect them because they lack the perspective of people who have struggled through genuinely hard times or be able to understand what real hardship means.
The political establishment does't help. The political lie, that given your vote "I will represent you and your interests", is patently untrue, or the lurid newspapers headlines, blaming inequality on those most effected, by their very inequality, laying blame on their supposed lack of aspiration or a laziness born of the welfare state.
It all makes the estate kid despair.

When I was young the apprenticeship system was a way out of the cul-de-sac , it gave young people a sense of self respect, of achievement, a passport to find decent work and some sort of prosperity.

Today prosperity often only comes from crime or a win on the lottery, perhaps if your a good looker a chance to display on a dating show or, of course, the perennial way, marry a guy who is loaded. For the guys the future is more bleak, industry largely gone, their world has been further distorted by the weight of consumerism and the need to display your value by the trainers you wear or the car you buy. The value of  being open and supportive to others, or defining yourself, not in terms of how other people think of you but how you think of yourself is old fashioned. The throw away clothing bought cheap because of the cheapness we attach to the lives of the poor who slave in the Chinese factories to make them is never part of their thought process. The disconnect between price and value is all around us, the millions spent on advertising to disingenuously tell us the lie that the product is special and you need it.
How can the youth find their ethical footing when their leaders blatantly lie and unhesitatingly cover their lie with another. How does the mother protect her child when she is out covering two jobs just to pay the rent. How can we have sold off the security of municipal housing, of rent controlled homes when the vagrancy due to the uncertainty of meaningful employment was banished when a woman, yes a woman, sold off the nations stock of houses and put into place rules which made it impossible for councils to raise money to build more. When the maternal instinct for the weakest was lost in the Reaganite American dream of self progression.
The young, no matter how resilient need leadership, hopefully from a father, certainly a mother but if we now equate our working class as a 'caste', a class set aside, then the children of that caste will not forgive the class that put them there. We in this country have no religious dogma to hide behind, no mystical story telling of the many headed god, only the single minded god of money and the exclusivity that the gated society claims for itself. 
Mad Max was a fictional product of the cinema, a story of the tribe who lived outside of the gated estate and the terror they struck into the mind of people living in the estate.
Perhaps like many a fictional story, truth is never far from fiction.

India

Subject: India 

Perhaps the problem with India is India itself. A vast ill defined mystical place rooted in a complex religion with a code of social etiquette that surpasses understanding in the 21st century. India is vast,  it covers an area larger than Europe with a population of 1.3 billion compared to Europe's 0.74 billion but its social structure, with millions of people designated untouchable and the sharp demarcation in what people can do for a living which sets the continents dramatically apart.
The definition of Indian nationalism is a misnomer given the sense of separatism within the country, its system of the Caste, (Untouchable' to the 'Priestly) these  labels dictate, down to the smallest detail what a person can do and what is expected of them. 
It's a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself, expressing the old world of myth and magic and then trying to interpret the new with the old. These Caste divisions and the holy contempt of high for low have no place in a modern society. The modern reforming mind will not be allowed to play on the problems of the country as long as the mystics hold sway on the mind of the people. The 'ritual' of Indian life smothers the imagination and the strict caste structure ensures  conformity to the Hindu vision regarding fitness to uphold a position.
The informality we in the West hold regarding our birth right (other than the Etonian, another form of churchy magic) allows us to think freely about all things but if Divine Providence  has its hold on society then this distortion will dictate events.
Indians are proud of their ancient religion but they are also its victim. They accept that things are as they are because of what religion says about some matter, some ancient religious text, not the  political vision needed to improve matters. They blanket themselves in this acceptance of the human trauma experienced by so many in their society, unwilling to dismember the parts of the Hindu teaching which sustain it and unwilling even to acknowledge what the word 'society' means in its national sense. There can be no sense of a nation if the nation is so easily compartmentalised, so easily divided by divine diktat, if the depravation which they see each day doesn't make them question the religious right to do so, then there is little hope.
India is fragmented, not just the fragmentation of religion and caste but the institutionalised fragmentation of a country with no intellectual current flowing within it, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of country without an idea of how a graded but interlinked society works.
There was an overarching  concept that through independence, India and the Indian way of life had triumphed over the decadent West. The structure of Indian life was sufficient, as it had  always had been, dating at least two thousand years before the West emerged from its primitive beginnings but in today's world, the magic of tradition and social prejudice is not enough. The technological revolution and the rise of Indian billionaires is also not enough if the country does not fashion a sense that Indians are part of a whole entity and bound by a nations sense of nationhood. The clerical worker who sees his job not as a means to an end but an end in it's self, the forms pile up exemplifying  the petty bureaucracy which created the job in the first place. The sweeper who sweeps the street, not with an eye to cleaning the street but rather to fill each hour with the appearance of doing so.
Add to this the corruption, the staggering figure of 92% of the people living in India who experience the need to bribe or pay a 'baksheesh' to get a job done or shift an application for bureaucratic approval. This interdependency of a personal payment cuts to the heart of india's lack of a national ethic based on centralised or provincial governance. The politicians are just as corrupt, as are the municipal bodies and quasi councils such as that which run the multi billion dollar cricket association. The power of the deal maker with the upfront promise of corrupting backhanders distorts Indians sense of a national and ethical probity , where ones pride of country was sufficient reason to play. Fortunes are made in the betting industry feeding off a players dropped catch, or failing to run properly between the wicket and misfielding on the boundary.
Money is god, without it you are nothing. Hear the wealthy people berating their servants or the chief clerk berating his subordinates or his subordinate shouting at the sweeper and you will see the true face of India.
An India which protects the sacred cow whilst promoting its nuclear industry is a very strange mix indeed.

Time gentlemen please

Subject: Time gentlemen please

My watch had stopped, no big deal these days, more an indication of how my life has slowed down, the automatic wind up system is lacking the energy to wind up the spring.
Time and its apparent importance was instrumental in getting out of bed, walking into the bathroom and downstairs to make breakfast. Time nudged me into my car and onto the road to beat the traffic, it spoke volumes if I was late to get into the traffic on the motor way and worse if caught in the daily commute into East London. Time was important since I had people waiting for me to be there as the office opened, unloading equipment and materials to get started with the days work.
Time these days has lost much of its meaning, is it Wednesday or Tuesday today and does it matter, still in bed when, in a past life, I would be bowling along down the motor way and anyway if I do get up early, what do I do with myself now.
Facebook describes a very different life in the photos of friends and family overseas. Wine glass in hand they group together in their tasteful lounges or outside on the patio, grinning like Cheshire Cats into the camera lens, for them time stood still and its party time.
The beauty of the surroundings and the size of the houses lend the opportunity of getting together with people, a birthday or the celebration of a long weekend marking this ongoing celebratory lifestyle amongst friends.
I suppose that's one of the differences between here and there. Here the lifestyle is inhibited by the size and style of ones home and therefore encourages the wider experience of the pub or restaurant where the friendships are more tenuous.
The party overseas was usually with the same people the same round robin address proceeding along the same lines, good food, lots of booze and plenty of laughter. Here it's more introverted the bar flies are similar in some respects but because the breadth of occupation and hobbies are so different the conversation can fly off in any direction. Perhaps the thing I like best here is that I can leave when I want without causing a ripple, it's as if I hadn't been there, this lack of formality is what appeals most. Much of what goes on overseas is a sort of point score keeping, the hostess is particularly impressed if you are impressed, as you inevitably are. The guys, more down to earth discuss their handicap or reminisce of days gone by over a beer as they turn the meat.
For them time has stood still although outside the window at night the chill is not just the cool air but the thought that it might be my turn to be robbed or held up at gun point. In the 'old world' these thoughts are redundant, the system works and is wholistic, encompassing those who may feel a little less well off but understand it's all negotiable by buying the next round.

Conditional history

Subject: Conditional history.

Poverty does not fully explain the lack of an appetite to improve, skin colour does not fully explain racial hostility, being a member of the LGBT does not automatically demand that we fully understand their needs and religion does not secure salvation.  All are symptoms of of a human condition and therefore demand we give it thought.
Too easily we seek to label ourselves suggesting some sort of exclusivity. We seek reparation from those who are different and have offended us, we expect to receive special pleading from those with who we differ, we even demand a new set of laws to fit our perceived condition when in fact we should accept our condition as our own normal.
We see ourselves as being so very complex with so many phobias and culturally defined preferences that to have any sense of the a common ground, other than that ‘we are all human beings’ is a leap of faith.
Some  people have a faith in mankind's innate goodness, it's a mental construct of thought where the differences, the quirks of nature are but an aberration. The real effort should be in the furtherance of toleration, a global toleration not just a national one.
But in the real politic there has been a general collapse of sense or  sensibility, a barbarous decline in tolerance and a shallow indifference to what people see around them. Has the drabness of mind, the product of a drab society, not deadened our ability  to enjoy that individuality and not hide in a group identity.
Ritual and myth, those cornerstones of conformity, religious or cultural are the weight so many carry around with them, inhibiting any steps which stray from an ideological path. If we allow the past to taint today's reality then we have learnt nothing. We only regurgitate those bits of history which suit our discontent instead of recognising that today is very different from yesterday, as tomorrow will be when compared to today.

Media manipulation

Subject: Media manipulation.

What is the purpose of the media. Is it to inform, is it to question and criticise or is to support an ideology and better still, the interests of the shareholders who control the purse strings.
In a sense the media should be independent, have independent views and be fearless in protecting independence in what ever form it takes. The corruption of the Fourth Estate, (the media) is its overt bias and the outrageous political tampering with the minds of the electorate by printing lurid stories which have little if any truth in them  and has been a retrograde feature of the last 40 years. The media business has become the vocalisation of the political and financial needs of powerful empires and the game which is played to demerit a political leader or opposition leader has become scandalous and nationally, counter productive. There are moments when people in the political ferment have to be brought to book and I have no problem with that but the planned onslaught on a party or party leader where innuendo is used to discredit him or her and where no amount of fact paraded at a later date can shift the impact of the original damning headline.
Today we seem to be followed the line the Americans took years ago, adding to the already toxic 'pork barrel politics' and the massive distortion made to the body politic by financial lobbying, they also let loose on the airwaves the "shock jock" a person who's sole job is to shock and dig dirt.

The BBCs mandate is to appear even handed, even to the point of farce. Emily Maitlis, a senior program presenter recently received a reprimand over her remarks on Newsnight, (one of BBCs top news commentary programs) when she appeared to criticised Dominic Cummings for having been caught out flouting  the rules of non travel at the height of the pandemic lock down. The government immediately bullied the Beeb to punish her, which it did, perhaps as much in response to its own strained relationship being in conflict over funding by the Licence Fee, but the point I wish to make is that the shackles placed on the BBC are seen nowhere else in the media where it's pretty much open season.
I remember the days when The Times stood for absolute probity, the stories were factual and no one queried them. Today everything is written with a slant, reporting the facts as they happen is no longer the job a newspaper sees as its role, instead the news is tied up in 'opinion' which is usually slanted to provide an advantage for it owner/ share-holder.
Without authenticity we are cast in a black hole never quite knowing who is right or wrong, we become confused which of course is the aim of our political masters since a confused person is over ripe for manipulation.

S

Its only a journey

Subject: It was only a journey.

You could say that people 60 years ago were relatively laid back at the prospect of dying. Their lifestyle was not ring fenced with do's and don'ts, with what to eat or drink, or a regime of exercise. Even expectations of what the medical fraternity could do if you fell ill, was treated with some scepticism .  Death was an expectation, it was given a date or a span of years, usually 70 years if you were a man and 75 years a women, and people who passed these milestones were seen as special but not necessarily blessed since ageing brings its own discomfort.
Today we are encouraged  into doing what is good for us on the assumption that if you follow the advice you will live longer. This vision of living longer fixates many people as they pound the street, mile after mile, running like metronomes, ticking off the seconds as if they matter. They rise early to be at the gym to compete in a sort of fixated self adulation, a fitness fanaticism which is encouraged by advertising to buy this running shoe or this bike and you will improve, or a self imposed image thing about the way we want to look and present ourselves to others.
There is no doubt the trade off for those hours spent exercising is the feel good factor. Not just the bulky muscles to parade on the beach but the endorphins released in the brain which provide the person with a mental boost.  Of course not everyone feels they need a boost and some would even say, spending hours of the day running, skipping, bending is a waste of time. For many the very idea of exercise is painful as they munch their crisps on the couch watching Netflix. For them the dream is a box set of East Enders.
So how did we become so self absorbed, so fixated on our lifestyle and longevity. Perhaps 60 years ago the church played a larger part in our conscienceless and the idea that there was something else after this life gave us added perspective as to the importance we attach to these three score and ten. The agnostic after all has to cram as much into the life here on earth given it's all they have.
One of the things which nourishes me as I look back on my life is the variation. There has been no exceptionality just a confident process of experiencing the pleasure of each stage. A wonderful childhood blessed with loving parents who allowed me to proceed at my own pace, never over protecting. My decision to escape the conformity of growing up in this class ridden society with its myriad glass ceilings, rather to snuffle and poke around in many different countries learning as I went. The enormous privilege of having a family and raising kids, watching them grow and form their own personalities. The latter years of returning to find that not much has changed and being frustrated by that yet at the same time recognising the advantages of living here in relative security, particularly when growing old.
A life of stepping stones of uncovering not only ones own talent but of recognising the inevitability of getting things wrong and moving on to make what ever you can of life without the envy of wishing things were different.
The bubble we create for ourself is our bubble and therefore we better know who we are and what we stand for rather than some wishy washy contrivance imposed from above. To have the values which Kipling so famously set down in his poem 'If'.

Knowing the script

Subject: Knowing the script.

One of the complexities of the current uprising of black discontent in this country is on the one hand a call for black people to be treated the same as their white counterparts in business and yet on the other, to fast track them to gain some sort of parity and to square a statistical anomaly if promotion is deemed to be based on colour not ability.

The reason why people get promoted has never been solely down to ability. From time immemorial over and above talent there are preferences at work. The old school tie and  jobs for pals. the politics of gender to fulfill a gender quota, personality quirks which exclude someone in line for promotion who have the experience and the line skills but get passed over because their face doesn't fit. If we now muddy the waters further by introducing not only a gender preference but also race and ethnicity, why not religion or LGBT rights. The list could go on as we seek to create a politically correct utopia, balancing this against that, for ever referring promotion to the Human Resource Department for them to keep score on managements awareness.
As we seek to tie ourselves in a gordian knot it must be remembered there is always, the other side of the equation, the person who loses out, who's work pedigree fits him or her for the job but who, when the job becomes vacant is passed over for what is a political appointee rather than one based on ability. This trend to fit an ideological quota  is wrong, as of course was the case of racial stereotyping in the past.
But two wrongs don't make a right and generally speaking, people recognise talent in others,  if the talent is there then promotion is accepted but where tokenism pushes someone outside their attainment level, it only breeds discontent. If this is accentuated across the country instability raises its head in all kinds of ways and 'identity politics' begins to define our decisions. Groups form, racial, or religious allegiances  are created and prejudice becomes rife on all sides. 

Black Lives Matter instigated the banner flown at Burnley stating White Lives Matter.
The police are bruised by taunts of racism, using strong arm tactics to hold belligerent people down whilst at the same time expected to wade into a melee or wrestle a knife away from a terrorist in Reading and today, an immigrant in Glasgow.
We seem to have lost our sense of 'national purpose'. We don't seem to identify as a nation any longer. 'Gesture Politics, Affirmative Politics, Identity Politics, call it what you will, has taken over.
We have stopped seeing the nation as one but as groups each competing for attention and heaven help the police chief who hasn't read the very latest Politically Correct script.

Margaret Thatchers children come home to roost

Subject: Margaret Thatchers children come home to roost

One of the unknown consequences of the lock down and the dislocation of business is the effect of so many people being placed out of work by business's not returning.
Of course it a disaster for the entrepreneur who had a thriving business and was forced to close because of the restrictions. This part of the small business community has been the backbone of keeping the nation alive since we allowed industry to go to the wall and encourage the population to buy everything from China. Tax revenues and importantly employment shifted from the industrial sector to the thrifty service sector where the businesses could come and go but as a collective the new employers were encouraged, through a employee top up system to pay as little as they could get away with whilst providing few if any terms of employment. We have teetered along now for 10 years accepting the insecurity of so many in the workforce, we have brushed over the stress caused by not having any statutory rights of employment and now, with the pandemic closing so many businesses and making others incapable of making much of a profit, laying of staff will create wholesale unemployment such as we have never seen since the 1930s Great Depression. In times of depression the stoicism of the people is the only guarantee that society will continue to function and the rule of law be upheld. That implicit stoicism is no longer a trait of a multicultural society, the dangers of unrest will be amplified as the chronically sick battle  for their lives in hospital and we of course won't have many pubs open to wash away our troubles.

As a society we are cut from a different cloth to the one who lived through the 1930s. Much more compliment, much more used to real hardship, the stoicism of the workers and their families allowed them to tighten their belts and get on with what they had. Today in a society gifted with the concept of 'rights', where the second car and the annual holiday abroad is deemed a right having to downsize their aspirations is manifest in the suicidal race to the beach last weekend, a nation epitomised by, me first and to hell with everyone else, Margaret Thatchers children have indeed come home to roost.

Robert Jenrick

Subject: Robert Jenrick

In danger of being accused of saying 'I told you so', well I did when I portrayed Robert Jenrick as a person who when paraded in front of the cameras to tell us the good news about the corona virus seemed to me to represent all that was bad about the Tory party. I described him as a talking marionette, a man who said things because he allowed himself to be programmed to say what ever disingenuous government statement Boris needed to be said. He seemed to lack any personality, his dead pan face, his apparent lack of empathy and the way he batted away the questions the reporters gathered at the daily news briefings asked as if they were inconsequential to the governments will.
Well he has been caught with his proverbial pants down in his post as Secretary of State for Housing. Part of the job is to act as final arbiter on decisions regarding the go ahead or otherwise of a housing project. Local government and his ministerial department are the filter for these multi million pound and often controversial housing projects and it would appear he disregarded all advice and awarded the go ahead to Richard Desmond that grandee supporter of the Tories through his ownership of The Express newspaper who appears to be filling his boots these days in the house building market.
When forgoing all the advice not to proceed Jenrick did so after a dinner meeting with said Desmond and after saying he refused to talk about the project, in fact did so at length with emails  to confirm what had been said. Housing projects these days are supposed to include a percentage of housing which is identified as 'social housing' (although this is often a misnomer since the houses whilst slightly cheaper are certainly not affordable to the social strata the provision was aimed at) and the agreed number of social houses initially proposed was mysteriously lowered from 33% to 22%. But that's not all. The date of acceptance by Jenrick was hurried  forward to enable Desmond to benefit and save tens of millions in taxation by preempting the new Communities Levy, money we can ill afford as a nation to lose after the Chancellors massive spending on easing the hardship due to the pandemic.
Jenrick represents along with his boss that dark side of the Tory party, the side revealed in the scandal of MPs taking advantage of their already generous expense allowance system claiming for all kinds of things well outside what the expense fund was set up to provide. He is what I would describe as an apparatchik, an operative who's motives are purely self orientated with little sense of the morality needed in his decision making.
Of course he is supported by Johnson who's own grasp of morality is fleeting and calls to see him resign will be batted away by a government who carrying such a large majority have little to fear.

In the garden

Subject: In the garden

I'm sitting in the garden in the sunshine, enclosed by tall hedges, the lawn spotted with bushes and fruit trees ladened with ripening plums and apples, a verdant green oasis set under a cloudless sky to the sound of gulls proving the sea is not far away.
This is no brochure copy for an island in the West Indies but the back garden of Marie's home in Swansea and it reminded me of how lucky we are to live in this country, its lifestyle and the daily security we enjoy by being here. 

The television is awash with trauma. The Middle East is aflame with rival factions exerting their power supported by a seemingly unstoppable flow of arms coming to the region and the inescapable conclusion that tribal enmity will continue to fuel the flames of innumerable never ending contests.

At the moment it's Libya and the Yemen, yesterday it was Syria. The factional nature of these countries, primed by the political ambitions of Egypt, Turkey, Iran and the Saudi's makes for never ending misery amongst the ordinary Arab.  Hot heads ride around in their converted trucks with high powered machine guns mounted on the back and the ruined buildings are there for all to see.

It was always the signature of an Arab nation, especially in the bazaar that the men dressed in their traditional thawb were suspicious of visitors, where traders and the trade were never quite as they seemed. The contest of reaching a price was part of their makeup and often tiring when used to a shopping with the prices displayed, would find the constant bargaining unsettling. Perhaps it's this lack of conformity, this fundamental independence, every man for himself without a sense of a national politic or an administrative bottom line is where the instability comes from. In settled societies we form a general consensus on many things, we accept laws and social norms, we respect the formality of pricing for instance and the sense of conformity based on a national need.  This across the board trust is assigned on the assumption that the law can be called upon if needed and that the courts are fair. Only if you live in a patriarchal society where disagreements often lead to death, where an 'eye for an eye' has meaning then it's no wonder the concept of boarders and nationhood are pretty much meaningless.
The disturbing sight of children caught up in these struggles reminds us of how lucky we are to bring our kids up with regular meals and good sanitation. Where they won't be exploited or have an education system which, whilst not the best can offer the child  a path to a bright future.
The garden is a sanctum from the environment outside.  The birds hang onto the seed feeder  like humans queuing outside the Kentucky shop. They hop and frolic in the bird bath with an occasional glance to see if the next door neighbours cat is around. In our wisdom we have contrived an idillic setting for the birds whilst a thousand miles away there is mayhem in Banghazi

The ghost horse

Subject: The ghost horse. 

We all have memories of strange events which can't be explained. The seance we attended or the fortune teller who knows too much about you for comfort, how could she know about that from the turn of a tarot card.
I'v always been very sceptical of these future-predicting fairs which seem popular in Wales, where the various practitioners stare into their Mystic Meg globe, examine your palm, or shake the bones. The sangomas of Africa with their painted faces and the fear they spread of the tikoloshe with its malevolent power is much in evidence amongst the African black community but no less so in the tents and on the village green in Llandysul where a 'future seeking' congregation hand over their modest £5 - £10 a throw to see what the tea leaves have in store for them.
To the Chapel down the road this is Devils work and they will pray for all those who need word from the other side, (other than the word of god) but at least this is a quick fix and provides a startled buzz when Auntie Maude is mentioned.

This aside, my own trip into the paranormal started on a day on the beach near Penclawdd, or rather the boggy turf which marks one of those little estuaries which divide the land around that area. It was a bright day, a peaceful scene, sheep grazing, birds swooping down, Marie making her way along the path, me a little more adventurous hopping from turf to turf trying to stay out of the mud and hoping to get a better shot with my camera. This was in the days before we discarded proper cameras for the convenience of a smart phone camera and whilst my camera stored the pictures electronically, to be downloaded onto a computer later, it was state of the art for its time. Suddenly, whilst I was trying to compose a shot of the headland with the grazing sheep in the foreground there was the sound of pounding hooves behind me. As I swung around a black horse was galloping full speed towards where I was standing. The horse in full flight, nostrils flailed was an exciting sight, the sheep scattered out of its path as I swung my camera up to shoot the scene. Click click went the shutter as I filled by view finder with the horse and then it was gone heading off around the bend in the estuary. Wow that was a sight I said to Marie when I joined her, she had got a shock and took flight herself along the path to get out of the way.
We spent more time exploring and eventually regaining the car we drove back to the camp-sight not far away to have a look to see what they offered. In conversation with the camp sight owner I mentioned the horse and what had happened. He looked at me quizzically and told me the story of the legend of the phantom horse that was seen occasionally galloping along that part of the estuary. Look I said I have a picture of the horse and pulled out my camera. All the scenes were there before and after but of the shot of the horse there was nothing, just a blank screen like the one you used to get if you over exposed an emulsion film. No image at all other than a grey screen which showed the lens had opened and the light had activated the sensor in the camera but the pixels hadn't formed an image.
And so yes I'm convinced a ghost horse had indeed raced not 20yds away from me. It was not of this world, it was not real but belonged to the paranormal, that repository for things we can't explain, including how the tarot card reader was right in describing something which had happened to me years before.  I left the fair that day to preserve my scepticism and keep my integrity in tact but along with the horse, it all remains a mystery.

Prejudice

Subject: Prejudice.

Prejudice is a funny thing. In some cases it's ok, I'm prejudiced towards my own family, perhaps to the County I grew up in. When I'm overseas living in a foreign country I look to find people who I can reminisce with and share my prejudice. In the dictionary of course it has the connotation of doing harm, having a jaundiced view or a preconception which has no basis in fact. Synonyms include bias, partisanship, favouritism. Antonyms include neutrality, impartiality, if I am influenced by or predisposed then I am prejudiced.
The trouble is as humans we make judgement by having and holding opinions, opinions which we gain as we grow up and which are influenced by the environment we grew up in. If the people in the environment had a prejudice we were likely to absorb it into our own conscience.

Yorkshire is the greatest cricketing county, the Dales the most beautiful, the hospitality the most open and the beer the best. Each is a prejudicial view and would be contended by many but my bias, my partisanship, my favouritism are the weft which holds my tribal affiliation together. This we might conclude is good prejudice much like there is good cholesterol it's a prejudice which may cause one to make false claims or even heaven forbid, go to war and a great deal of prejudicial  jingoism has in the past whipped up our young men to go and fight battles for which they had little cause. But the prejudice towards ones own kith and kin, be it ones own family or the townspeople you grew up with is a mark of your feeling of security towards and with these people, their habits, ways of speech and thought.
In the polyglot world which has been created for us by political or economic expediency the word prejudice takes on a whole new perspective since much of what we thought we knew is replaced by the complexity of multiculturalism. The constituents which made for our sense of commonality, a sort of leavening agent, which modifies and moulds society to make it feel as one which we know intimately, is lost. There are no norms any more other than we should 'love one another' because, in some minds, the alternative is to hate. There is no centre ground no agnostic stance, instead we must put on a brave face go the extra mile and try to make sense of so many conflicting views.
My statements are loaded with prejudice because I can't be expected to canvas everyone's views to seek consensus. The fact of doing so would be to invite distrust, that I have an agenda to destabilise by the act of asking since in the asking lays the implicit danger of not agreeing with the answers I receive.
In my blogs on Black Lives Matter I am accused of distortion because I dare to put across a different view. Not that Black Lives don't Matter but the supposition that police are instinctively brutal when they seek to control black people. Also In seeking to place on record  a 'white working class view' regarding black people not getting their fair share in employment for senior positions and therefore demanding preferential treatment.
In this case my prejudice comes from my experience of growing up in a town where there were few opportunities, given the poor education we received but because we all were in the same boat we made light of it. We didn't bemoan our birthright instead we paraded it on our bikes in our beloved Dales or climbing the rocks in the Lake-district. We looked beyond the city grime and its unfairness and marvelled at our good fortune. We had our detractors, the parents of the kids who came from the better off leafy suburbs or the daily schism which presented us at work when managerial positions were inevitably taken by better prepared, private school educated people . There were no marches or public breast beating against the entrenchment of Public School advantages which money brings to the students who attend those  hallowed institutes. Instead we embraced the freedoms which this country provided and thanked our lucky stars we had been born here, but then I suppose we were prejudiced.

Safty versus the economy

Subject: Safety versus the economy

So we are poised to return to work and play in an effort to get the economy going again.
The medical opinion is that if we enact the various safety measures such as protecting our doctors and nurses with sufficient PPE, having a proper testing system with a track and trace for those in the society who have come close to an infected person, to have a sensible measure when people are entering the country through our airports, and to keep the spare hospital capacity available for when we have a second spike in people laid low by the virus then we should be ok.
Unfortunately we have little confidence in any of the medical experts paraded each evening on our television screen nor the politicians who sign off on these preconditions. Promises have been made and broken over and over again by the politicians and our trust in the political establishment is at rock bottom.

Therefore when we return to work we know there will be an upturn in death from the virus and it's really a matter of how far these deaths will become acceptable and common place.
We don't analyse the dangers of a car journey or that the plane we due to fly in will crash, we assume that in a long list of medical complications we won't be on that list and  in fact throughout  life, it's optimism which keeps us going otherwise we would be crushed by a host of 'what ifs'.
The virus, and there are others heading our way, easily transferable through air travel, viruses which spend their lives in the animal kingdom but have learnt how to cross the species barrier and infect humans just as they do animals and are queuing up to inflict what is a purposeless process of cell destruction. If there there ever was such a thing as a creative scheme behind life's evolution then this seems pretty pointless.
Animals are allowed to die or are exterminated to prevent disease spreading and so a far less less draconian method such as permanently isolating the ones at high risk whilst at the same time compulsory testing is carried out when a person enters a high density environment such as a train or a bus, when they enter a shop or office or a sports arena with an immediate response if shown positive. We need a litmus test which shouts at us as soon as it turns blue, we need infra red temperature monitoring at home and in the street to tell us who has it and who hasn't. We need to adjust our sense of freedom or alternatively go to live in a society which is not as strict. We need to rearrange our priorities and if the overseas holiday is one of them, we have to accept quarantine when we get back. Sadly the general groundswell of comment coming back from business is get them back irrespective "I need to make money". The economy and making money in the short term will be the deciding factor. Ensuring safety for the population at large always did come far down the list.

All lives matter

Subject: All Lives Matter.

Events dear boy events. Some events stimulate, some inflame, some make you laugh and some make you cry. The human psych is so varied and often pre-programmed such that seen through different eyes the same event is interpreted in a different way.
Events then are the starting point, they are the stimulus to get us thinking and in my case writing. Sometimes we judge unfairly sometimes we are too hidebound, too soft, too forgiving but what ever the result is it's much better than disinterest or the claim of being too bored or busy to take any notice.
The Black Lives Matter debate continues to blanket our screens and from a black persons perspective the issue is raw since it garners so much of the injustice they see of being black in this country its part of their perceived failure to achieve, their failure to be judged for the person they are within this society.
For a white person (and I know this incites many people who think identity politics is a dangerous concept) living in what traditionally was assumed a white persons country,  largely because the bulk of people here, before 1947 were white, the issue has never really arisen. Much as feminism is a quirk of being a women, (a matter for which men fear to have an opinion) so also the LGBT community is an out-layer to many people's thought process and whilst individually there is simply no difference, collectively the movement in their name seem to amplify not only our lack of knowledge from both sides but the opaque way we view most things in life.
One of the most striking things about the Black Lives Matter movement is the intensity it brings to focus on ones self image and to do a calculation on how you rate in society at large.
If you have a sense of grievance it is amplified and the grievance has a convenient hook to place that grievance on. The reason why I was not promoted was because I was black, the reason I failed at school was because I was bullied because I was black, the name calling when tempers are inflamed makes me as a black person a target, the isolation I feel in the society at large is because I am black and it's unfair.
These hooks are genuine but not unique to a black person. Bullying, being targeted, not getting a job (never mind promoted) and the feeling of isolation in parts of the country in its towns and cities is  just as much a problem to a white person as it is to a black person the difference is there is no ethnicity focus, there is no banner to march under.
The lost voice of the white working class person used to be protected by the labour movement but after a brief flirtation with proper socialism under Jeremy Corbyn unfortunately, that  ship has sailed and we are back with a middle class, politically correct agenda where matters such as LGBT rights get tabled and debated to the exclusion of the under performing, poorly educated white working class child who is off the media radar.
Black Lives Matter, of course they do but so do White Lives, Asian Lives, in fact the whole gambit of human life matters and it's wrong to proclaim that because what happens in America is somehow equivalent to what happens here.  If so then we must include what happens in China or India, the Middle East, in fact all countries across the globe, for a better perspective.
The influence the media gives to any 'identity' political issue usually inflames the subject beyond all recognition. The activists seize the microphone and seek to exploit their own agenda, their own sense of their identity crisis. It might be a genuine agenda but it might also inflate the prejudice they already have (and we all have prejudice) and it will likely drive a wedge between people with ill thought through rhetoric, much like Donald Trump uses to divide his nation and it will deliver a body blow to those who genuinely see themselves as individuals not representatives of their race or gender, performing to the best of their ability and finding success is often directly proportional to the effort you put in.

Who do we trust

Subject: Who do we trust

Having had explained the X Ray images taken by an orbiting telescope far out in space, and the forces at play as galactic events play out in the cosmos, black holes and disintegrating stars, mind boggling emissions  of energy, enough to destroy our own galaxy, one is forced to wonder at the place of god in all this.
The energy released and destroyed is on the edge of physics as we know it. Far from stable it is destructive and its purpose more the elemental balance between mass and the forces which created the structure of mass in the first place.
Stretching the metaphor and on the opposite end of the spectrum I listened fascinated to a House of Lords sitting of one of these committees where it is able to test the minds of the experts, in this case the Immunologists and medical scientists who are leading the fight to understand the corona virus and ways to combat it. It was edge of the chair stuff and whilst my mind has not been trained to follow the relevance of many of the medical terms I was able to scale the wall, hanging on to the handholds of what I do know, for instance  a virus contains the following components (a). A nucleic acid genome and (b) a protein capsid that covers the genome. Together this is called nucleocapsid. In addition many animal viruses contain (c) a lipid envelope and the entire virus is called a virion. These terms were batted around as they described the traumatic effect of the thrombosis in the blood vessels particularly in the lungs and the drugs used to try to offset the effects of the thrombosis.
And so we have the fields of scientific exploration. The astral with their long term observations and mathematical hypothesise and the short term rush of the medical scientist as they battle to understand the virus and find some sort of remedy to the destruction it produces.
Both worlds are fascinating and reveal more of what we don't know than what we do. One has an innate sense of security listening to these professors debate the findings and hypothesise, the opinions based on known facts and far removed from the political circus, the lies and deceit of a government who are their masters, at least as far as the funding to do their research is concerned.
Democracy was thought to be the best system of ironing out the prejudice of a dictatorship but with the manipulation of the electorate with its slavish use of the internet for information one wonders if the voting public is not too susceptible to the Machiavellian tricks of another Cambridge Analytica

I had a dream

Subject: I had a dream.

One of the most difficult bridges to cross is the one which tells me that everything is ok in a world peopled with such divergent views. It's as if the people who make light of the divisions amongst us have fallen for their own hype without looking around and seeing the world as it is.
The world is a mess, it always was, it's peopled by Individuals who have developed their own sense of who they are and in doing so they create an artifice to deceive others and protect that which is valuable to them. Every tribe, every nation, every religion and every ethnicity has skin in the game as they seek to survive the claim and counter claim of the others around. Globalisation has sort to minimise these differences and sell the concept of oneness, of elemental sameness be it race or gender. The identification of difference is frowned upon, it's become an anathema to accept that cultural inheritance makes us different from birth. As children we see and imbibe the functions which people perform daily, not merely to survive but to identify themselves with their close neighbours all for the sake of belonging to a community.
For the last 25 years Western academia has expressed the need for a political construct, an ideological sameness who's agenda is a sort of interchangeable commodity across the whole of mankind, a sort of Orwellian led thought control project where 'people are taught what to think before they are even aware that thinking is actually about choice'.
Listening to the excuses for the poor choices made in the course of the pandemic, or listening to the groundswell of disharmony and self loathing as street marches gather on our streets protesting issues of race, horrified at police brutality, absorbing the condemnation of our white society like a flagellating sponge, as if we alone had created the idea of self identification.
The world is rife with conflict, of how people see each other and what the other person stands for and it's been this way for time immemorial. Our tolerance as a nation is as good, if not better than in so many other parts of the world but this tolerance is never the topic of debate rather its the underlying discontent within the society at large with the laws in that society which were put in place to ensure the society doesn't harm itself, and of course, the main condemnation these days is toward the very people who are there to enforce them.
The ratios are trotted out about 'stop and search', why are so many black people are searched in our towns and cities. The fact that many of these cities have become religious and ethnic ghettos, in part by created wholesale immigration and the difficulty the immigrant has in finding like minded people to live and settle amongst. He created his own version of a suburb in Karachi or Lagos and with these hot spots of racial exclusivity in place, the gangs hold their turf. At night a white youth seen in certain areas of Lambeth, Toxteth  or Little Horton is in danger whilst and the same is true for a black person seen in an area which the white youths claim as theirs.  During the daytime multiculturalism works but at night the ordinary man and woman, working families, stay at home living a normal family life in front of the television but in the street younger, often aggressive young men are the people the police come into contact with and with the stimulation of drugs, everything escalates, mental aberration becomes  the mindset to ignore the pain of authority and it all becomes highly dangerous.  Is it any wonder the police, facing this drug fueled antagonism become battle hardened.
The bobby we know who helps the little old lady across the road or you approach to get directions becomes a different person when confronted in the war zone which our inner cities have become over the last 15 years. His survival is on the line and who would blame him or her for combating violence with violence.

These realities are ignored by the academic wishing to prove, or test a social point. Never out on the streets after dark, rather tucked up in bed with Horlicks and Proust, they dream of a better land where rational debates heal the wounds of conflict, not the slender knife blade thrust into someone's chest.
Imagine their dismay at the savagery of an honour killing or the removal of the hand of a pickpocket. Imagine the quarrel 1500 years ago which segregated the Shia from the Sunni and caused so much enmity still as unresolved as the day it started. Imagine in their world of rational debate an irrational force much more ingrained, much more relevant to millions and millions of people  than their multicultural dream.
But no their focus is on us, a tiny island in the North Sea undergoing severe economic disintegration and a pandemic which has been made much worse by the incompetence of a government only recently elected, largely on the distortion of a single entity issue Brexit, with a huge majority, a government which can do much as it pleases for the next five years.

We are in for a rough ride made so much rougher by sowing disharmony and perhaps unintentionally widening the gap between the people who live here.

Black lives matter

Subject: Black lives matter.

The human psychic seems so easily shifted from peace to violence. It doesn't take much for football fans to erupt in anger at a decision which goes against them. It doesn't take much for law abiding citizens to be confirmed opponents of a scheme if news papers publish incendiary stories or the news editor contrives a headline which reflects the papers bias not the facts on the ground. Young men easily whipped up by the jingoism of Kitchener, enlisted in their hundreds of thousands to go to war, or the mob on the streets of Minnesota who become frenzied  as they egg each other on and focus their helpless rage against authority. 

'A policeman's lot is never a happy one' according to Gilbert and Sullivan in their Pirates  of Penzance opera and watching the police face off with the angry crowd one is reminded of the dreadful dilemma of a 'them and us' situation where the police are seen as the enemy, not the security we need in our neighbourhoods.

The world has its fair share of really bad people and of course, since the police force is made up of people there are some amongst them. Actions made under the pressure of a conflict situation exacerbate the action and confrontation overwhelms common sense.
The latest killing seems to come from the contempt and the brutality inherent in overt authority. I don't think it was the policeman's intention to kill but the power of knowing that the uniform protected him from the constrains which limit our own violence meant he was obsessed with that power and failed to listen to the pleas of the victim. His fellow officers were similarly constrained by their collegiate understanding of non interference between each other and the mantra 'watch each other's back'.
'It's a war out there', I'm sure is the common refrain amongst law enforcement officers, particularly in the USA,  who's job it is to stick their noses into the sewer which awful conditions breed amongst those forced to live there. The hostility and the brutality are on both sides but we rarely hear from the well meaning protesters of the drug inspired brutality meted out by the gangs who the police regularly come into conflict with.

The contempt is on both sides but of course we expect more from a trained force of men who should be guided into letting the courts decide what to do with the detainee but savagery is never far away from the human condition. The marvel is that there is so little overt savagery around given the daily contest which goes on for a limited piece of bread.

Savagery is a strong word. One thinks of a savage dog, out of control and dangerous, one thinks of violence, viciousness, ferocity, all words which could be interspersed with savage when one sees a crowd rampaging through the streets hurling rocks or breaking windows to gain access to shops. We see a disciplined line of police officers protected by their helmets, staves in hand advancing towards the crowd.  What goes through our mind.  Is this state brutality.  The weapons, the tear gas and the indemnity make the police hold the upper hand but we fear this overt use of force when used on civilians. We see the civilian as one of us, a protester with rights, a needful counterbalance to the power of the state. We see the State as representing other interests to our own, interests of the few and not the many, we see the police as upholding those powerful minority rights and are unhappy with our inequality.
The 'them and us' is at work sowing it's seeds of hate and distrust on both sides, neither side having the moral upper hand. The Constitution (if there is one) lends an ear to both and it's only afterwards when the people go home and the rocks are swept away,  do we ask ourselves the question " how did we get here".

Sent from my iPad

Risk and our divided view

Subject: Risk and our divided view.

How do we evaluate risk, how do we reach conclusions which place ourselves in situations where we understand that there are risks and along with the risk, danger.

How do we view danger when we have to accept that there is some danger in virtually everything we do. The motor car journey, the airline trip to a holiday destination, the dingy sailor or the kayak enthusiast, the rock climber or the downhill skier describe the variations in human acceptance of danger.
Danger today is different from the social acceptance we had 50 years ago in those days we encouraged our sons and daughters to go out and experience new adventures on the basis that danger whilst present could be negotiated and good old common sense was a good antidote. Our children were used to escaping the parental overview. Kids would go, on their own, to meet up with friends to climb trees, and ride bikes, would tease each other to do things which had an increased risk. We were out all day in the fields and woods and if you lived in a village we worked and played amongst farm animals helping the farmer, especially at harvest time when we were of use gathering the bundles of hay and stacking them together. The combined harvester was not a special threat, the cows in the milking shed, the pigs in their sty, only the bull was off limits.
The risks today is that if I go for a walk I might meet someone contaminated with the virus, I increase that risk if I go into a crowded shop and therefore I treat the risk, given my age differently, as someone who is continually at risk of becoming seriously ill. I can cut out the risk by deciding not to go out or I can decide to take a risk, just like I do when I travel by car or fly and ignore it.
Of course we, as a society are not disciplined like the Japanese or even the Germans, we are more likely to thumb our collective nose at authority and have a built in aversion to being told what is good for us. The process of wearing a mask and cleaning surfaces  in a store each time a client has transacted business is foreign to us, it seems to  fly against our sense of reserve and our independence.
The large gatherings last weekend at a series of beauty spots and on beaches, was an example of the Innate ignorance and bloody mindedness of a poorly educated society and a perfect example of many people's approach to risk, ignore it.
The mass gatherings against police brutality is another case in point. The risk of transmission is magnified by a factor of 10 in a large crowd and yet we were out in our thousands protesting, its as if there is a dual reality going on. The stern admonishment evoked  by the politicians regarding social gathering was contrasted by the inevitable disbelief we now have that what ever a politician says  is a lie and leads a segment of society to raise two fingers towards the political system. Many people have lost trust in their leaders and also the so called scientific experts who flank them. This lack of trust has been a long time coming and reflects the British way of circumspection with facts, not trusting the publics reaction to bad news, they obfuscate and manipulate rather than share. "The we know better" divide has always been amongst us, a divide accentuated  by a divisive education system which encourages the 'them and us mentality'. Through the corridors of business and commerce, education and social interaction we carry and even encourage this belief in the divide. Is it any wonder when we need everyone to pull together that the divide raises it ugly head.

Hot air and inaccuracies

Subject: Hot air and inaccuracies. 

It's eerie to think that the films we watch today on Netflix or made for television last year were made when the world was a very different place. The street scenes, the offices were all filmed in that world which followed the period of black and white moves and colour movies in the pre virus era when people mixed and cavorted without masks. It was a period when aeroplanes flew regularly and you could buy a ticket without a medical examination. It was a time when people used to meet at restaurants and in pubs to say hi and swop stories. It was a time when doctors surgeries and hospitals treated a whole range of things not just Covid 19, when to enter a hospital wasn't like entering a war zone with specially contrived routes to get around open spaces and sanitisers positioned on every corner. It was a time when you parked your car and entered the shop of choice without a queue and a limit on how many people could enter the shop at any one time.
Looking at the film made only last year the environment we lived in was so totally different. There was no sight on the faces of the people appearing that this was a finale, a final showing of life before the virus arrived and the pandemic got under way. There was no flag waving in the streets, no last hurrah as the curtain came down, no drum roll, no Vera Lynn melody to sing us all to sleep.

Instead we woke up in January to a news story from Wuhan in china, one of those eternal stories of people far away facing some sort of trauma but as usual, remote enough not to register. The following few days there was a quickening of the blood and more attention as our trusted politicians nervously mounted the rostrum to announce restrictions, well not actually restrictions rather a polite sort of "help us out" and oh please stop shaking hands (even though our esteemed Prime Minister continued to do so) above all "wash your hands" became the mantra. Slowly but surely the volume was ramped up and the worried face of the politicians began to recite their new lines disclaiming what they had said the day before. 'Lock down, everybody inside', no more work until further notice was announced to a public throughly confused as to the seriousness of the matter having been informed that it wasn't serious.

We learnt that it killed but only the old and infirmed. We discovered that the Old Age Care Homes had been forgotten in the rush to reorganise the hospitals and had become the new charnel houses with, in some cases, as many as 50% of the inmates dying. No one thought to close the door and isolate the poor old buggers.

One minute testing was the flavour of the month (as it still remains across the world) but we knew better (as we always do) and stopped testing. We now find was due to the inadequacy of our testing labs, and the insistence we use only the NHS ones which, due to a chronic shortage of funding were unable to provide the analysis.

Another instance of running down stocks to balance the budget, the protective equipment for frontline doctors and nurses, desperately needed in their fight to keep patients alive, was unavailable, stocks run down and unable to be replenished because our 'one supplier' need them to fight the disease at home in china. No war time spirit was evoked by letting our own industry get on with producing the PPE, instead, companies, able and willing, are still waiting 'the return call' from the ministry.
From beginning to end we have shown the world how 'second rate' we have become. How incompetent we are at pressing the right buttons, how ignorant even of which button to press.
With Brexit just down the track and the guys in charge being the same ones who made such a mess of providing for the pandemic, I feel for the country. Ideologues, blindly wanting to get out, chanting the same jingoistic phrases, much like the pandemic phrases, full of hot air and inaccuracies.