Its only a game

I can't imagine eight guys sitting down in a restaurant to eat a meal and ordering eight glasses and two jugs of water. The women who had gathered were full of smiles as they grouped together, laughing and clearly enjoying each other's company. Given the unlikely event of having eight men sitting down to have a meal I would think alcohol would have to be served to loosen the inhibiting stance that men assume, other than at a football game. 

The women were soon into discussing what ever was on their mind, peeling off into smaller more manageably audible  groups, chatting away two to the dozen. Men are much more withdrawn until the alcohol kicks in and having hosted a number of men only Christmas Parties I know what a pain it is to get them all in the mood to converse, unless of course it's about football. Invite a couple of women into the mix and the mood immediately changes.

The English are inhibited in all kinds of ways. Watching the waitresses going about their business one sees the young English lass not really comfortable in the general setting of a restaurant . They don't have the natural communication skills of the foreign waitress who instinctively knows her job, not only to serve the food but to be able, in a subtle way to boss the situation. Maturity comes to mind and an understanding of their femininity, not the flaunting of their sexuality but a subtle acknowledgement of the part they play in this human game of recognition.

I say throw away the key

Parliament is a funny old game. Listing yesterday to the indignation that certain MPs had because, according to them, there was not enough time being provided by the Leader of the House to debate the proposed air strikes which the government wish to launch against ISIS.
Today we had the debate.
There is a majority in the House who are for the strikes but there are a significant number, including Jeremy Counyn the Labour Party leader, who ask the question "what then" ?

After Cameron's restatement of his and the governments position to go in and bomb, Corbyn tried to define his opposition, specifically noting the ineffectuality of bombing alone with no troops being put in the firing line. It's only outcome according to him would be a greater number of civilian casualties which will only inflame the local and world wide Muslim community.

His demeanour at the dispatch box has become a problem. He wishes is discus and debate in a chamber that wants nothing to do with him. He is not significantly aggressive to cut through the brutish baying from the Tory side. He wants them to play fair when that is the last thing a politician knows how to do.
They call this a debate but this is nothing more than a chamber 'to hear your own voice' as each politician gets to his or her feet and delivers a monolog. It doesn't matter how well prepared a speech is, no one listens to what is said, the lines are drawn along Party lines and the only interaction between the politicians is the heckling which goes on as they try to destroy the delivery of what ever is being said.
It's a farce but a farce which is played out, day after day in the name of democracy. These are our representatives, we elect them to carry our views and effect the way we are governed. Bills pass through this parliamentary procedure to become law, the laws which we are supposed to follow in our ordinary lives. Laws which if we misbehave have the weight of the legal system behind then to make us conform and yet these lawmakers behave in a way that makes one want to lock them all up and throw away the key !!!

The loner v the groupie

Are you a loaner or a group person. The loaner who would never think to join a group and a group person who could not imagine being out without the people they know being close.

One isn't right and the other wrong it simply shows us how diverse we all are and it's the diversity which I find interesting.
Setting off on ones own has some advantages. Even before you leave the house there is always room for turning back. The idea of a tramp through the countryside seemed a good one from the comfort of the arm chair but now the morning has arrived and there's rain in the air and a cold wind blowing. Reassembling your priorities is simple if you are but one since no one knows.
If it's a group meet you are committed since to turn back would be far more painful to the ego as the others asked you why and your feeble excuses would soon ring hollow.
Of course being with a group of like minded friends you soon spark off from them and the rain and the high wind are ignored or even become the reason for carrying on, adversity old chap is what made us what we are. The group made up of individuals each has a tale to tell and an interest to debate. They see what you don't, they inform when knowledge is fundamental to recognise what your eyes are looking at and they make you aware of the beauty when all you saw was the mundane.
Of course the loaner has another marvellous resource to tap into, his own brain. Walking has the magical effect of setting the blood coursing through the capillaries in the brain, sparking those self same conversations but this time with yourself. 

The flow of thoughts and the willingness to extrapolate your own sense of self is a rich process and one often wished one could captivate the thought to reflect on later. I used to carry a small tape recorder to do just that but the moment I spoke the image was gone, the thought sequence broken.
If the group are lending you the canvas to paint your thoughts on, even suggesting headings and solutions to thoughts you haven't yet had, isn't this just one more example of the human need to bond and nothing more. 

The individual brings home his own painting, like a Jackson Pollock scatter session, his colours and thoughts are all over the place but the finished product is rich in suggestive opportunities to find the person behind the tricks which we are taught from childhood to make ourselves opaque to others.

Good dog

Just down the road from where I live there lives an old lady in her 80s. Every day three times a day, come rain or shine she is to be seen trudging up and down the road taking her dogs for a walk.

It's more a slow shuffle than a walk but her resolution to fulfil her obligation to the dogs is unshakeable. She loves her dogs more than herself. She has become defined by her dogs and their needs. She spends a fortune on Vets bills, the slightest ailment and they are there at the doggy doctor. I would hasten a guess that she rarely visits the doctor on her own condition but the dogs get the full treatment.
It's funny how some people can focus so much of their love on an animal. The dog particularly has a disposition which we interpret as human. We look into their eyes, as they look into ours and we interpret the thoughts we have for them as their thoughts for us. We promote our intelligence onto them and we make them human.
It's the search for comprehension and love. We yearn for understanding, and in transposing our emotions into the dog we have a buddy who knows us and feels for us, as we feel for them.
Anything that is alive can have an effect because we cherish what being alive means. The sight of pigs, crushed together in a truck on their way to slaughter, their eyes seem full of misery and they reach right into our soul. 
But do we commit an error, aligning ourselves with their predicament. 
I'm sure the psychologists have a term for this transfer but is it just one of the mechanisms we have of searching for resolutions to problems which are artificial and lie outside our ability to comprehend things which exist beyond the brains ability to apply reasoned cognitive thought. 
The dog is not human, the pig is not human. Both are living animals and therefore we should respect them and treat them humanly but to equate them as anything other than animals, in terms of emotion is plain stupid.

The Gainsayers

Is it possible with all the aggressive press coverage and the rebellion in his own party, can Jeramy Corbyn stay the course and disprove all the gainsayers and lead his party to victory in the next election.

An example of how undemocratic the system is !!

And there lies the rub. If we look at the population and we look at the individual pools of voters split between the Conservatives, Labour, Liberals,UKIP, the SNP the Greens and Uncle Tom Cobly we see no party had a significant proportion of the vote. The Tory Party has more than 36% of the people who turned up to vote, ( massively short of those eligible to vote) and Labour had 30%.

These are the two camps (and I am talking of the rank and file voter, not the Politicians ). Tory (capitalist) Labour (socialist). Of the rest UKIP poled 12% and are a ragtag group largely held together by being anti EU but in many ways are more working class than Tory. The Liberals come next at 8%. Now the Liberals have much more in common with the socialists than being aligned with the conservative. Next the SNP who took 5% of the vote (all of it in Scotland) who are more socialist than Labour. And finally the Green Party 4% again who's members are much closer to socialism than Labour in many respects.

So you see whilst there is a large section of UKIP who would align themselves with the Conservatives the bulk of the rest would make much easier bedfellows with Labour especially if it rid itself of the Tony Blair, "son of Thatcher image".

The one thing that comes across about Corbyn is that, although he is a 'conviction' politician he is no ideologue and his reasoned tone and collaborative political message must be very appealing to those who support parties which, under the 'First Past the Post' anomaly have won, in UKIPs case only one seat in parliament, despite having polled 5 million voters. The Greens and the Liberals also attracted millions of voters but only obtained a handful of seats.

If there is any sense of commonality which I think Jeramy Corbyn will foster, given a chance, he could attract a following from the humanitarian Liberal community. Will the media which has been 'on his case' since he was elected, allow him the space to get a message across. And secondly his own party colleagues, the Blair / Brownites who sit in their barely disguised, middle of the road, junior Tory coalition, ill suited for socialism and yet not hard hearted enough to be proper Tories like George Osborn and Duncan Smith.

It's more interesting than the biased press make out and I hope Jeramy Corbyn is given the chance. He is like a beacon of light surrounded as he is by the grubby, glib totally disingenuous lot on both sides of the house.

The single Mom

I'm not a curtain twitchier but sitting in my chair, which is close to the window I see some of the comings and goings out in the street. Usually my attention is fully drawn to my iPad as I write a blog or read a ebook but sometimes my eye is caught by the movement of my neighbours car as she arrives home.

The routine is clockwork. The car comes to a halt in the drive there's a pause as she opens the drivers door and walks around the back of the car to open slightly the rear door. She then opens the front door to the house and goes in. There is another pause and then like a Chrysalis opening its wings there is movement and out tumble, first the little boy and then his sister. It's a sequence that never changes. 




Once the kids are in the house she re-emerges to fish out the bags and paraphernalia that the kids need at school and any shopping she may have done. She does it without any show of emotion not even a word, efficiently discharging her responsibilities.

I wonder what goes through her mind. This is not the life she had planned, she is still young, in her early thirties, Dutch extract, friendly in a continental way but largely keeping herself to herself.
Married young she had a life joined to another, a man of her age, convention had it to start a family but a family as an adjunct to her life with him. The source of her natural intellectual replenishment   would be the conversation as she prepared dinner, he playing with the kids asking them what they had done at school, maybe settled them into homework, possibly running the bath water for them so they could be ready for bed after the evening meal when he and she could at last relax.
This cosy family scene was blown apart by divorce and now her lot in life is to carry the burden alone. Raising kids is a burden, its a non stop, all action commitment which is more than challenging when you have to do everything on your own. The love for your children is not diminished but you must yearn for adult contact, a prop to discuss the vagaries, someone to share your guilt that you are not doing enough, somebody to allay your fears when one or other of the children are sick.
The kids tumble into home oblivious of her feelings only of their own. A slight at school, blown up into world war two, or the ongoing niggle between brother and sister a nip here and a hair pulling there and the whole world explodes with rage and self pity.
At last they are in bed. The little boy has a nasty cough but is drifting off to sleep as she returns down stairs to an empty lounge and ruminate on the day knowing that tomorrow will be much the same and so on through the best years of her life. On a treadmill only partly of her own making which will end when the children fly the nest completely and make the chore of being a single Mom even more singular, even more challenging as age takes its toll !!

Its just another name on the tin.

Where does the loyalty of an MP lay. Is it to the people who vote for them or is it to each other ?
It is of course individuals (MP's) who put themselves forward to talk and gather the votes of ordinary people. As the Barbra Streisand song goes "People, people who need people" and that other homely, "which came first, the hen or the egg" comes to mind.
Politicians used to be representative of a 'class' of people since largely the condition of people were largely described by class. The poor were in one camp and the rich were in another with marginals in the middle. The "condition of people" was no academic argument, it was crucial to who you represented. You represented your people because you were concerned for their plight and their plight came before your political career. Your convictions were in line with the people who chose to elect you, not that you chose a conviction to align yourself with a parliamentary group.

Corbyn was elected by massive support in the country from the group who called themselves socialist. They recognised in him 'one of their own' and to his everlasting credit he has stayed loyal since it is not just loyalty but conviction that has made him and keeps him a socialist. 

Those professional weathervanes who flank him on the Labour front bench would sell their grandmother if it meant garnering the praise of the commentariat. Praise means air time, air time bolsters the image and image is everything.

Listening to Corbyn this morning, reasoning his stance to his opposition to bombing ISIS without a proper and full analysis, not only of the consequences of the act, particularly the radicalisation of the disenchanted Islamic youth in this country who need martyrs to redefine their hatred but the mayhem that is left on the ground in Syria without any sense of resolution because there is no army to root out the ISIS fanatics who live amongst the general population.

Following Jeremy Cobyn came Michael Fallon the Defence Secretary. Peddling the party line with little original to say. He talked down to us about "his information" which he is not at liberty to divulge of the threat ISIS are to us in the UK and that only by defeating them in the fields of Syria will we be able to sleep safe in our beds. He parroted the line of David Cameron that there are over 60.000 fighters in Northern Syria just waiting to flatten the Jihadi once we have added our relatively merge bomb tonnage to the French and Americans. His attitude that 'we' know better and have it on our power,  has been the mantra of many an ill fated call to arms. 

Give me Corbyne's scepticism any day.  

The mighty Americans poured millions into Afghanistan to prevent Al Qaeda from being a force in the world of terrorism. "Take out the leadership, take out Bin Laden and all will be well". Even with boots on the ground and bombers in the air, the result has been failure. The Taliban (the local affiliates of Al Qaeda) are poised to reassume their dominant role in Afghanistan once the last American troops, who prop up the despotic rule in Kabul, leave.  Al Qaeda has morphed into so many Hydras. Hamas, Boko Haram, and ISIS are the main players in the Islamic ferment but many of the anti Assad fighters "who we wish to call allies" are in fact just as extreme Jihadists as ISIS.  It's just another name on the tin.