Buying a computer

Subject: Buying a computer.

"If awe we had the giftie gie us so see our sen as others see us it would from many a silly notation free us"
I bought another Lap Top computer on Saturday, part of the mad Black Friday spending spree, a replacement for my ageing 10 year old Dell which was running so slow that it was driving me crazy !!  

I chose one, with the help of Andrew, who nudged me the moment I said "this one is ok", onto the next with a suggestion that it was better. 

We emerged from the shop with an HP Pavilion 360 Convertible touch screen SSD and went home to unpack this latest piece of wizardry.

A rather sexy female voice emanating from the computers 'set up' menu prompted me to select this or that, customising the computer with passwords and PIN numbers.

I thought I did ok but little did I know, Andrew was filming me throughout and on watching this 'old man' stumbling around,  clearly out of his comfort zone, pondering the last instruction, aware, like people of my generation that a false keystroke at this point in time would cause the computer to explode and dissolve in front of me. 

Unlike the young today who live a virtual world, we were brought up on a secure, step by step upbringing where a wrong move had consequences which no longer apply to them but still does to me.

As I watched the image of my dad in his advancing years unfold in the Doppelganger that was me I realised the self image I carry around is not true. It's an amalgam of past shots, of fleeting glances in the mirror, of remembered actions and reactions, all a far cry from the stumbling old bugger now on the screen trying to follow instructions. 

An identity shift into the old people's home might be more appropriate, snoozing the time away in an armchair or eating custard through a straw.

Robert Burns was rights, we have this image of ourselves as a protection from reality. We can still run and catch a bus but we prefer the car. We can still attract the opposite sex if it weren't for the fact that their interest seems elsewhere. We can still desire to explore new pastures if it weren't that our comfort zone is slowly closing in.

Andrew had no idea the emotions he stirred in his bit of fun. Not sad emotions, no sense of being resentful, no anger, only a realisation that my Doppelganger friend and I are so far advanced along the road, a road from which there is no return !!!

Happy Birthday John.

Subject: A gift.

Happy Birthday John. You made it.

Another year has flown by and my 77th  birthday signals something I never thought would happen, that I would progress to such old age. I know I am just a 'spring chicken' in some of your books, where 80 is but a pathway to 90 and 100 for the few.
I grew up when, in a working class household, reaching 70 was an achievement, women lived roughly 5 years more. To retire at 65 usually meant that 5 or so years were available to enjoy in retirement on the state pension, a pension, not in any way generous, but marginal and supportive, being frugal one could just get by.
Old men aimlessly walking the street, fag in mouth waiting for opening time, nursing a pint until 3pm when the pub closed its doors for two hours, until reopening at 5pm.
It was a lonely life after the camaraderie of work.  The wife usually had her own routine and didn't  want her husband getting in the way.  The reality of living together all those years didn't mean that either party understood the other any the better and now, enclosed in the same set of rooms the chance for conflict was high.
The myriad problems of getting older, finding in these years, a slow tailing off of ones health and energy, the aches and pains, a little dizziness and short of breath made one even more aware that the old physique we had always taken for granted, was  not as good as it used to be.
We have just had bonfire night, with Christmas and new year to come, all signposts heralding  time passing. Occasions which in the past spoke of parties and gifts, of a child's fantasy towards Father Christmas and an adults expectation of a happy cheerful family event.
Old age can simply brings a telephone call, or now-a-days, if the "oldie" can work a computer a connection via the internet to say Hi to a family living on the other side of the world. Christmas spirit barely leaks under the door, the odd card and a television set showing repeats of the "Two Ronnie's" or a traditional white, middle class American family with presents galore  and a table so full of food one can only wonder what people on welfare, or worse the homeless, think of it all.
It's strange to reflect that from the moment the young child grasps his mothers hand to the moment he/she is dropped off at nursery school, then primary followed by secondary school, perhaps eventually that special bubble, the 6th form and out into the big world of a job or university, the plan and the path seemed so assured. As I watch young men and women striding up the road towards the railway station, already fixated on their routine of catching the 7.35, their lives a treadmill of walking, eventually running trying to keep up with the competition,becoming so immersed in the corporate need, that their life is simply not their own. 

The years pass, a family of ones own comes along and, ill equipped, you make as good a job of it as you can. So much intellectualised input went astray, and with it so many good intentions. Love there was plenty but that mystical concoction of fireside cohesion and bedroom stories, read to an 'appreciative' child were somehow missed. 

The years fly by until all of a sudden there is no competition, no urgency to catch the 7.35, only the silence of an empty street, the cars and the train catchers long gone as you eat your porridge and scan the TVs programming guide for another day indoors.

But in reality we should all thankful for what we got and hope for more of the same next year.

Mothers Birthday

 

Subject: Mothers Birthday.

Now all is revealed. 

How I came to have my birthday celebrated 5 days early.
I have been educated, by Andrew into the workings of "Face Book" and see that in my profile, I'm entered as being born on the 11th.  

Yet another data error to add to the billions of errors promoted by data accounting firms each day. Try investigating the information they hold on you in the files of Experian, you will be amazed to find the rubbish which attaches to your profile, a profile on which others may take an opinion about your financial situation.
Anyway to get back to my theme. It's interesting to think of my mother, five days before I was actually born.
She, a tiny, slight built 4' 10'', and me, a bursting 10 pounder, I must have been an enormous physical discomfort to her,  mixed in with her thrill of becoming a mother. 

Five days to go before birth and what a contrary blighter I was. Not withstanding my size I seemed determined to stay put in this warm womb of a home. A nine months tenancy and I was doing everything a 'breech' baby could do to stop the eviction. 

On reflection "feet first" should be written on my epitaph. Leading with the feet and not with the head, seems to be something I  specialise in.
Reading, even in these high tech days, of the trauma of giving birth to a breech baby, it makes it all the more remarkable to think back in 1940, without the scans and the information readily available which pregnant mums expect, how terrified my mom must have been.
Perhaps we shouldn't celebrate "our" birthday at all, it should be, our "Mothers" birthday.

Being British

Subject: Being British.

It's a difficult balancing act being British, what in fact does it mean to be British ?
Is it an amalgam of Scotland, Wales and England with a bit of Ireland tagged on. Is it reflected in the centralised Parliament, the so called mother of Parliaments where we deal with recalcitrant members of the family with a democratic process, the envy of places such as Catalonia. Is it the dry observance of authority without the use to arms, even in our police force. Is it our talent for not only demeaning others but also ourselves.
If we examine our character, which section of our society are we looking at since we are so class-ridden it's hard to see any resemblance between people coming from a housing estate and those from a leafy village not 20 miles away.
Is it our obsession with history and the part we played in forming what we assume as civilised society,  in this instance I mean the laws governing behaviour, the structure of commerce , rules and an accounting process which doesn't only count money.
As a nation it is suggested that after Brexit we need to invent a plan to reconstruct ourselves, to become noticed and listened to once again. To sit at the high table and have our say. The concern is that we may become a minnow like one of the Scandinavian countries, admired for a working grasp of a just society.  But then we are at a disadvantage as a country. Pretty shambolic, lacking the emotional tools to  understanding how a successful society is made up of the 'sum of its parts' we can hardly be called a paragon  of virtue within our own shores and towards our own people.
Constant mismanagement of our affairs in both politics, in the field of business and in the task of educating our children leaves us ill equipped to weather the storms ahead. Perhaps our only salvation will be to disassociate ourselves from 'competing' and simply run the croft as we used to all those years ago. To isolate ourselves behind the 21 miles of water and make ourselves feel superior. Unfortunately to look and judge from afar is to miss the detail and, as in most matters, it's the detail which counts.
Walking the streets of Newham in the East of London the very essence of the multi -ethnic fabric which has grown here from the time the immigrants landed here. It resembles a Middle or Far East enclave, reflected in the shops and the food from lands far far away. But now there is a difference. A resilience of younger people, the sons and daughters of the immigrant, who are forging their futures in the schools and collages built for them. Confident, and determined they reflect a new generation, not of shop keepers or the unskilled cleaner but of future bosses. They, with the determination of their parents who had not fallen and become infected by welfare but instead had  sorted out a path of their own successfully  inculcated in their young, a work ethic and a will to succeed. In the '6th Form Collage' opened only a couple of years ago they are turning out 6 double star plus graduates, whilst the school not half a mile away, is struggling to teach their youngsters (mostly white children) to read and write in their mother tongue.
Is it in the genes or is it living in a feckless society, growing up on a diet of assumed "rights" that the indigenous kids fail so spectacularly . If everything is given as a "right" is there any point in working, still less studying to gain their own 'right of passage', or will it rather come my way anyway, as a right.
If the mind of the white person is seeped in the banality of the 'quick fix', supported by a mainstream tabloid  press which goes out of its way to coarsen the mind with its short term popularism, then the children of parents who themselves have not matured to any great degree, what chance then the children of these pitiful characters to become pitiful themselves.

Misinformed

Subject: Misinformed.

As the labyrinth argument drags on about our future arrangement with the EU, a series of articles were commissioned by the magazine Prospect from writers putting a perspective on the UK which is not often found in the commentators who report the party line as it were. The writers sometimes Europeans, who had spent a number of years living in the UK and had a pan European view of this island and its people.
It's not been an easy read since we often dress up our existence with fantasy, a balm to reality.
All nations and nationalities do it, they concoct an image of themselves which is flattering and then proceed to sell this image to the population as a whole. It's not quite Orwellian brain washing rather it's a process of endlessly repeating the good and turning a blind eye to the bad.
The structure of our establishment, its reflection of the same old faces from the same old school illuminati has been our social downfall. Our basic insensitivity, describing elite schools as 'public schools' when nothing could be further from the truth. In describing society as egalitarian when your whole future prospects is tied up in the type of school you attended.   (It's interesting to note that in Holland, schools are not ranked against each other but share a common platform that of educating all children in Holland without preference.) The great tragedy is that we have been inculcated to believe that this discrepancy, that the rich can buy their education, is some sort of norm. That its right for money to be able to get away with tax havens by employing expensive accountants, that the rich can buy anonymity and justice by hiring highly paid lawyers to distort a law which is applicable to us. We have been told that having money places you outside the norms of society and we have swallowed it, hook line and sinker.  

The poison which permeates the tabloid press, the public schooled billionaires who own these papers and seep away at our common decency with rabid trash, day in and day out such that the man and the women in the street doesn't know right from wrong, truth from falsehood.
We are conditioned from an early age to respect our elders a view which is all well and good so long as the views come from a wide spectrum but if our opinions are formed by a half dozen or so of powerful men, each with an agenda unaccustomed to the life we, the ordinary person live,, then we are at risk of being led, like cattle to the slaughter.
It's a convenient metaphor today. armistice Day when wreaths are laid at the Cenotaph to commemorate the hundreds of thousands who have fallen in battle. They too were led to believe "your county needs you" until the bullet made them superfluous.

Inappropriate behaviour

Subject: Inappropriate behaviour

I'm trying not to become obsessed with this the Westminster groping scandal but since it has reached saturation point over here, with news bulletins, on the hour full of claim and denial about the behaviour of men towards women in Parliament.  I think it pertinent to point out that we are developing a schizophrenic set of values highlighting man's gross attitude towards women whilst ignoring the equally wanton part a women plays in the drama.
The headlines of a news paper which was flashed onto our screen to highlight the story also had on the same page, alongside the story a picture of a film star who's breasts were virtually hanging outside her dress. The two story's portray a separate set of values, separate but in so many ways, it illustrated the mess we have landed ourselves in.
Sexual explicit pictures in the papers and in television shows are full of this primeval subject. The shows on TV are nothing more than a total denial of the required behaviour expected across the land, in parliament, in the office, in any place men and women mix.
And so sexual gratification is depicted all around in a way it never was. The publications which held nude pictures on their centre page were explicit and exclusive. They could only be bought in certain shops and precluded children from seeing them by placing them on the top shelf away from young praying eyes. People who subscribed did so on the understanding that they were not left lying around and in a sense they were made to feel that they themselves were mentally deviant.
An exposay, in the old fashioned use of the word meant to expose a criminal act, the term to expose 'to exhibit openly' is now common in our daily experience, a sort of digest of what goes on in ordinary life. The who-hare in parliament and Hollywood takes place in the rarefied atmosphere of self analysis which these people continually indulge in. Their esteem is only topped by their egos as they jostle for centre stage.
It's a parallel universe. On the one hand, even the mildest innuendo can be misconstrued and a claim of 'inappropriate behaviour' levelled, whist the norms, in so far as the general public is concerned, behaviour, sinks each year. The appetite, shown by the ratings of these voyeuristic shows on TV and the numbers of copies sold with "page three nudity", confirms to me that the furore is synthetic.
We might do better to explore the sexual education our children get through the Internet and the sexually explicit behaviour of filming themselves in the nude sometimes performing acts mimicking the pornography they see at the touch of a key before sending their own pornographic offering to friends. This perversion is far more damaging than the hand on a knee or a comment in the coffee area and yet the same parliamentarians who are now clambering for recognition that they were some how damaged by the unwanted attention, seem strangely quiet in perusing the real damage done each day on the television and on the internet in glorifying sex in all its disturbing manifestations.
Sure there is something wrong in promoting and sexualising women but equally it can't be right, crying foul in some sectors of society whilst ignoring the influence of the 'sex industry' or the many women who are complicit in it.

Faith in being pragmatic

Subject: Faith in being pragmatic.

Is there a danger of over intellectualising things, of taking things to pieces and examining all sides before reassembling and passing them on for something else.
Does one in the process miss the under laying story, the emotional story, the story about belief which can't be examined and dissected, only believed in its entirety.
Faith in something other than the common sense which you see and ponder about, it includes  "the joy that passes all man's understanding".
To be described as pragmatic is never to be disappointed, never to feel let down or feel disappointment for things which are out of reach. The pragmatist believes himself to be the realist, feet planted firmly on the ground, he or she believes in what they can see or touch and rejects the assumptions made by the believers in their religious causation,  a method we have evolved of placing our lives in the hands of a benign creator with the true reward, after death.
It's difficult arguing for space to find your own salvation in this life here on earth. The intensity of religious belief or belief in rebirth is so strong that ones own muddled thoughts about your own life and death have little substance when compared to the collective assurance of so many.
But doubt for doubting sake is a characteristic of a thinking individual. To question even the syntax of a statement, the use of words which may evoke a different meaning in the secular world raises the ire of the believer because in his or her belief, these questions are answered in their commitment to unquestioned belief.
But for those with no footing amongst a quagmire of conflicting claims, the effort to remain grounded in the simple things and not embark in flights of fancy are what keeps us sane.
Never the less there is the lingering doubt that we could be wrong and in the face of such faith based positivity, it takes a stalwart to stay within the bounds of pragmatic surety.