Go East my child

 Subject: Go East my child





Life is like a game of golf, bunkers and fairways, just when you see the green and the flag something happens which in golf can usually be explained by faulty technique but in life it’s not so obvious. There are techniques for living your life but it depends what you want out of it and the risks you take.   In the famous 1960s film, Billy Liar, Billy the dreamer meets a girl who has the confidence to leave her northern roots to move down to London. Billy is to go with her but as she boards the train he hides in the main hall of the station unable to pluck up the courage and the movie ends with him still fantasising as he walks on the road towards his home.

The film points out the fallibility of youth in that today it doesn’t seek solutions but assumes a solution to their lives will be found by others. The Nanny State has infantilised our young people into waiting for help rather than looking around the world perhaps where opportunities are on offer. Needing to be close to a comfort zone, family and friends, an environment you know instead of understand the excitement of living in new communities and creating new foundations whilst at the same time discovering new ways of approaching life.

With, in effect the world now made smaller by cheap travel and the ease with which you can get to a new country but offset by the bureaucracy in getting visers granting a right to stay. In the past there were windows to emigrate such as the £10 passage to Australia common or garden immigrants were encouraged, today unless you belong to a group or profession needed by the host country you will struggle. That’s not to say you mustn’t try and if your destination has to be altered by circumstance then it may be just one of life’s quirks to force your hand, eventually it offers reward.

One of the worst things is to feel locked in your home environment if you know the system or its politics is letting you down. This country has been degrading itself for years, perhaps intentionally, by ignoring the need for skill training. No longer does it need the unskilled factory worker, instead  we need the skilled worker trained in robotics and computerisation but everything is dependent on investment within the productive environment to equip it to function.

I remember having returned to Yorkshire on holiday from abroad visiting a gear cutting machine shop in Shipley and seeing, side by side, gears being cut by highly skilled lathe operators whilst across the isle a computer driven machine was doing the same job, better.

Daring to invest in new ways and yet clinging on to the past has been our failure in so many fields of endeavour