Death strikes when least expected

The air crash in the Alps has caught the attention of our press in the way that the more conventional crashes do. We know where the plane went down and there's a finality in seeing the wreckage strewn down the side of the mountain in which no one could possibly have escaped.
Unlike the mystery of the Indonesian crash where the plane disappeared into the ocean South of Australia and the one that went down in the Indian Ocean, even the plane that was shot down over the Ukraine had a crisis factor in that we didn't understand the cause.
In this latest disaster they still have to look at the data from the so called "black box" but according to the trajectory of the plane as it virtually dived towards the ground, it is my bet that the plane lost pressure in the cabin and the pilot was trying to get lower to get air. Perhaps in this manoeuvre, over the mountains they miscalculated and hit one. 

The trauma of the families waiting at the flights arrival time to receive their loved ones is unimaginable. The scale seems to add to the collective grief but as in any disaster death is the destination and it's how we handle death, the solution.
Today a massive bomb went off in Kabul, yesterday it was in Iraq, tomorrow somewhere else.
We don't see the grief in these countries there is little fuss made of the thousands killed in Syria our concerns are naturally near to home but perhaps we should take some time to think about the terrible state the world is in. I suppose the millions who died in the World Wars and the slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia have made us immune to a thousand or so here and there.
But it puts Uncle Joe's death into perspective and perhaps we should treat death as our constant companion, close to us at all times !!!

The one and only way.

Cultural unity is a bond between people. To understand a people you have to understand their culture. In Britain we seem to want to turn this centuries old cultural observation on its head.

The concept of Multiculturalism is a mixing of cultures, each culture adding its best to the mix and in essence provide a stronger richer culture. There is no doubt that in certain areas other cultures to ones own provide an extension, an enrichment, food is a perfect example. But in many ways cultures do not meld into one another and there is a competition for ascendency to be the dominant one. The more cohesive a culture is the more likely it will predominate and therefore a more disciplined, more focused, more decisive a culture is then it's people feel more at home following its dictates.
We in Britain have been guilty of taking our culture for granted of even finding fault in having a cultural indices to call our own and easily being persuaded that this identification with long established historical norms is in some ways racist. We beat ourselves up, or at least the chattering classes do by their control of the establishment and media to make us feel unworthy of our past and our history. We feel the pressure to apologise for things done in a very different time, in a world that didn't tread lightly afraid of its own shadow but believed rightly or wrongly in its purpose which at that time was colonisation. Not a bad thing, as is now suggested but in many cases a liberating glimpse of how civilisation as it stood at that time could bring the benefits of architecture transport and a system of governance based on law to other people and cultures throughout the world. There had been other great colonisers, the Romans for instance who laid a similar footprint with similar structures and I don't hear the call for apology there.
If we don't pull ourselves together we will dissolve into not what the politically correct soothsayers wish, a better society but we will fall under the sway of a stronger more determined culture who would find it ridiculous to question their way of life as other than the only one.

Trip of a lifetime.

Sitting on a hard plastic chair in an airport lounge waiting for news of your onward flight is a bummer !!!

Setting off with all the anticipation of a 12 year old on their way to a Theme Park, the journey had been one of predictable events. The train and the transfer to the airport had gone well after the predictable mad panic to pack and the search through the pockets of the bag for the hundredth time, have I got my passport ?
Airports are a mixture of nostalgia, emotion and the bland. To the business commuter,it's another bloody day at the office and the worry of a meeting in Budapest. For the people in love, parting for a time and wondering whether the parting will seal their love since whilst absence is supposed to make the heart grow stronger, there is the doubt they might meet someone else whilst away from my influence. And then there's the holiday maker on a short leash and keen to make the most out of every minute.
People from all walks of life and persuasion pad around the Departure Lounge. The sign boards announcing the flights click over as the minutes roll into an hour or more and one seeks ways to pass the time. Eating and drinking, reading or simply watching.
I love to watch, trying to imagine where so and so is going and what for. Who does that group represent. Is that the chap you saw on TV a while back. The cleaners, the message carriers, the aircraft personnel with its flight deck hierarchy striding purposively for their plane, the careworn mothers, the squabbling children, the anticipation of reunion writ large.

As the time trickles away it's time to face the security process which seems ever more draconian each time you travel. As you strip down to your underpants (it's coming), placing all your worldly possessions into an open tray you fight the thought of picking up someone else's tray and having an unintentional identity swap. Trousers barely supported you shuffle forward, shoeless through the X-ray gate to sound off the alarm because your old lucky penny is still in your pocket. How women with wired bras ever got through to the plane is one of those unanswered questions like Malaysia MH370 ! I can't imagine First Class have to submit to this sort of humiliation but anyway, bin Laden must be laughing in his unmarked grave at the ignominy he has caused so many Kafur
Eventually,at long last the time arrives "will flight Vs300 please board at gate 12.
Joining the queue you wait to find your seat and struggle with the bag into the luggage compartment, "fasten your seat belts please". What will tomorrow bring ?
After sitting in the cramped tube for 12 hours, and now released into the warm tropical air of Delhi, part one of your trip over but wait a minute, there's a hold up on the M25 ( a wrecked plane on the runway in Kathmandu ) and all your plans are dashed.
As the old war time song goes, "Pick yourself up and dust yourself down" it's time to make new friends and test yourself under adversity. Think of those poor sods waiting to go "over the top" in World War One and you will see this as an opportunity, another notch on life's "experiences" belt

Our values.

Life, is a sexually transmitted disease !!

A graffiti sign scrawled on a wall pleads for the poverty of ambition, the hopelessness of so many people out there trying to keep head above water. 

Money the lingua franca, the bridge, the vehicle by which we negotiate our life's journey. 

Without it we are nothing on the social barometer. But what of the inherent worth we all have which is not on display but is deep within all of us. Is the laid back existence of a person living in a village within the Solomon Islands worse off than the busy busy Wall St Banker with his next deal to broker whilst the last is still hanging over his head. 

The speed and the 'instant opportunity experience' that global economics has opened up has flushed out the values society used to value so highly. We have so much, and value so little. 

When one considers the influence the media has as it exposes, for a while a new horror for us to gawk at and then, when it's time is up the searchlight moves away leaving the tragedy to play its self out as best it can. 

What happened to Ebola. Did they find a cure. Are the camps still filling with the dying. Do we care ?

Of course we have our own personal tragedies to deal with, they may be small and insignificant but to us, in the moment they are huge and as we negotiate our daily response to misfortune we can be equally heroic as the brave medics left behind in the disease ridden camps in Guinea but it is this fragility which faces us all on which we should reflect.  

Life is not a gimme and yet do we take it 'too' seriously. Given the wide ranging condition that mankind finds himself in, some would find being or not being a pretty cruel joke. 

The boarder line between life and death in Somalia is insignificant, "you go to sleep alive and wake up dead" and yet we in the security of our three score and ten (out of date, four score) do not value what the dying Ethiopian simply has no way of comprehending. 

Perhaps we put too much value on being alive. We give ourselves up each night for sleep, a sleep in which we have little or no memory (in some-ways a few hours of death), on the assumption that we will wake. Would it be so bad if we didn't ? Would we be worse off without the stress and worry, the aches and pains, the unrequited communication ?

The Ride of the Valkries

I remember when I was growing up listening to the exciting piece of music "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner. The music has this tremendous urgency as the Valkyries, the mythological female figures who carry the dead from the field of battle to Walhalla (the hall of the slain in Norse mythology). There's a link between this music and the defeated German nation at the time of their conquest by Napoleon as the Germans bitterly seek to maintain their past history by building their own Valhalla in which to assemble representations of all the important figures that had preceded the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1807. One of the most idiocentric reactions to history, this determination to keep alive what Germany stood for in this age of Napoleonic hegemony was the work of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria.

Like Goethe and Grimm where language was a utilised to develop the image of a nation, so Ludwig realising the disastrous effect occupation had on a nations people and was determined to preserve German dignity.
         How far we have travelled to our present day denial of our history and the glories of our past for the trivia of the present, where attention span is becoming less and less as people allow their minds to gallop around at breakneck speed, looking for its next fix.
History has become something to apologise for as politically correct brain washing proceeds on its course.
How often the hair shirted, sandal wearing apologist who sees nothing but pain and resentment, place all the blame of today's "human condition" on the actions of the past.
Context is lost. Today's (false) morality is is used to judge the actions of even as recent as 50 years ago, without recognising the insidious, homogenising effect of "group think"practised through mass media, particularly the television.
Sitting quietly in the corner of the lounge is the conduit for all the propaganda Joseph Goebbels could have dreamt of.
It floods our psyche with messages about ourself and who we 'should' be.
It subtly creates another type of Valhalla, not of heroes but of creatures who are but parodies of who they should be.
The 'free rein' chicken is lauded for its stress-free meat and, as a contribution to ethical breeding, but the contaminated mind set of the "pre programmed, consumer dominated human" (the PPCDH) which has been developed in the laboratories of Western capitalism would make Socrates turn in his grave (provided the Valkyries haven't carried him off) 

High expectations.

Watching a program about a contest called "Britain's brightest child" I was struck by the fact that none of the kids were white children. Of course in modern Britain I should not be asking this sort of question since there is a presumption in my question that race has an influence.

In some ways of course it does but not as measure of a child's ability, rather it is a measure of the parents willingness to encourage and become embroiled in their child's life particularly their educational attainment. These children had grown up surrounded by books and musical instruments and were encouraged to learn from them. Of course in some children this type of interaction can be stimulating whilst in others it creates a barrier and it's hard to judge which way it will turn out.
There is of course another way where the parent is obsessive about the child and their achievement whilst growing up and it is often in such a family that one sees the attainment of a skill, playing the piano, academic study, even the skills needed to play a sport are nurtured from an early age. Perhaps there's is an assumption amongst the white families who have gifted children that their normal progression in life is enough whilst Chinese and Indian parents know through experience that life's opportunities have to be grasped against fierce opposition and only by constant tutoring can the child be prepared to be one of the best.
It takes a special kind of parent who thinks ahead in this way.
Others set aside money to pay exorbitant school fees and the teacher becomes the surrogate parent whilst the child competes with his classmates but this is a far cry from a parent devoting all their time and money solely on the child to nurture the talent.
Of course it's obsessive and has drawbacks but even given the fragility that this goldfish bowl existence can do to the child's, what we would call normal social skills, the results can be mind boggling in the level of skill it extracts.
It begs the question, does this level of untapped skill lie within all of us ? Without the pummelling of this extreme parental discipline, we are but rough 'unfinished' objects of what we might have been ?

A night out.

Watching on my iPad the beautifully crystal clear Livestream broadcast from Detroit one cannot be other than struck by the professionalism of the package. The scene gradually builds up as members of the orchestra walk onto the stage to take their place within the orchestral setting, tuning their instruments and chattering between themselves, an ever so relaxed atmosphere of professionals going about their daily task. Men and women at the hight of their talent exude a speciality, a training and a dedication to their art which gives them supreme confidence and a beauty which is rare. Thousands of hours of painstaking training are straining at the leash to show us their talent.

The concert platform has filled and the lights dim. The Detroit Symphony Orchestras leader, a beautiful young Chinese woman stands up to play a note for the others in the orchestra to find their key. She sits down and with no fuss Leonard Slatkin strides onto the stage with the soloist a young Cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan.
Being in America the performance, like the surroundings is precise and exciting. Tradition and ornateness are banished and replaced by clean functionality and a sense of modern purpose. Embellishment is stripped to the bone of all that was unnecessary, leaving one to marvel at the virtuosity of the players, especially the soloist who produced (from a $3000 Chinese made cello) a hauntingly emotional mournful sound, the strings resonating as the bow crashes onto them, the sound amplified by the sound box within the body of the instrument, adding its own timbre, a tonal colour, a resonance which sets this instrument apart.
Youth is always breaking down barriers and the attacking style of the soloist brought the audience to its feet at the end of his performance. You could see from the faces of the other members of the orchestra that they to had witnessed something special.
And so with the wonder of modern communication we had been transported into another world a world in which as they spilled out into the cold wet streets of Detroit I simply reached out to fold my iPad away (after having written this bog of course) and snuggled down under the duvet switched off the light and wished you "sleep tight dear friends" !!