PHILISTINES RULE, OK?

July 13, 2016, 8:30 am

≪ Previous: EVERYTHING'S NOT GONNA BE OK

WHO NEEDS THE ARTS ANYWAY?

Note too that a faithful study

of the liberal arts humanizes character

and permits it not to be cruel.
OVID

As Ovid states, ‘and permits it not to be cruel’. However, what would one expect from a Philistine political party like the Conservatives other than cultural cruelty? Their idea of culture probably extends to Dire Straits and Downton Abbey and very little beyond.

So this true blue woman, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (ABOVE) berates students and educators alike with the mantra that studying the arts will wreck your chances in life. She may have voted ‘remain’ in the EU referendum, but she perversely supported Brexit’s Michael Gove in his failed bid for Tory Party leadership. Both are to education what Eric Pickles is to hang gliding.

Married to an architect and trained as a lawyer who specialised in acquisitions (surprise, surprise) Morgan’s idea of artistic pursuit is going out running every morning. One wonders if she’d ever pondered over who designed her trainers or her track suit? Some artistic slacker, no doubt. Her advice to the younger generation considering higher education is that you must follow the holy grail of STEM subjects, (science, technology, engineering and maths). In a 2014 report in The Stage, she said

“But if you wanted to do something different, or even if you didn’t know what you wanted to do … then the arts and humanities were what you chose. Because they were useful – we were told – for all kinds of jobs.

Of course now we know that couldn’t be further from the truth, that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock doors to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects.”

Let’s face it, her party means business and business means maths. To pay for the yachts and the villas they all enjoy the rich need bean counters. There’s no time for all that unprofitable malarkey of painting, sculpture, plinky-plonky music, and apart from The King’s Speech the Tories probably think there hasn’t been a decent British film made since TheDam Busters. However, they do have Julian Fellowes and Jeffrey Archer - how much art do we need anyway? As for the highly profitable junk ‘art’ the Saatchis will always be around if there’s a sale of Tory supporter Tracey Emin’s offcuts.

Nicky Morgan obviously can’t see any prospect of a world where her beloved STEM subjects could have any relation to the arts. Perhaps, though, had she studied history a little more closely, she may have noticed that down the centuries some of the best science came from men and women who had one foot in the arts camp.

Albert Einstein was a keen violinist. Leonardo da Vinci? Well, all you have to do is google images and apart from artistic brilliance he’ll give you a tank, anatomy or a helicopter … and without the facility of the Arts, how can you frame and present the STEM subjects to an inquisitive young mind? She should take a closer look at Brian Cox, Jonathan Miller, Stephen Fry, Dan Cruikshank and others. Brunel was a brilliant engineer, but his products were works of art.

Leonardo's HELICOPTER - it didn't work, but not a bad try for an artist.

The actor Colin Firth said of England “You’ll not believe what a philistine country it is.” However, I prefer the multifaceted genius of Orson Welles:

“Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.”

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Customer care: a fantasy

July 25, 2016, 11:31 am

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≪ Previous: PHILISTINES RULE, OK?

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN:

The fantasy façade of ‘Customer Care’.

When the computer became commonplace, some of us were naïve enough to think this heralded the future - those expected halcyon days the boffins talked about in the 1970s, that by the end of the 20^th century technology would ensure we’d all be working three day weeks and spend the other 4 seeking leisure activities. But these were the sad dreams of people who wear tinfoil hats, learn to speak Klingon and claim ‘Jedi Knight’ if someone asks their religion. So whilst they still live happily in the hermetically sealed world of their X-Box or PlayStation, the rest of us realise that all technology has done, especially in the field of human-to-human communications, is to obliterate soul, feeling, emotion and manners. As for freeing up time, the reverse is true. Even an English word like ‘Application’ now takes too long to say; it’s become an ‘App’. Human endeavour is now expected to swell like sawdust in a jam-jar of water; even the old routine of ‘going to lunch’ for anyone below senior management level in most offices is deemed ‘for wimps’; a sub sandwich and a bottle of water will see you through the afternoon, because under no circumstances must you take your eyes off that laptop.

One of the most visual examples of this new work-based Puritanism is the cardboard cup of coffee. It has become de rigueur now if you want to impress your boss or show your fellow workers how ‘busy-busy-busy’ you are to walk along the pavement to arrive at your office clutching your £2.20 cardboard cup from Starbucks or Costa. After all, who wants the civility of a cup of coffee in a china cup made freshly in your office kitchenette? (If you have one, other than a vending machine).

But because humans have stopped listening to humans, other than through the Troll’s ear trumpet of e-mail, the purchasers of capitalism’s myriad products, from food to a Ford Focus, have found a strange wall between them and the anonymous producers. It’s called ‘Customer Care’, and in most cases, that’s a complete oxymoron. ‘Deafening silence’ is a good example of an oxymoron. And the term ‘moron’ also seems apt.

To help who, exactly? The shareholders?

Over the years I’ve had many battles with so-called ‘customer care’ departments. Virgin Media, for example, who for months continued asking me for ever increasing amounts of money, even though I had ended my services, in the prescribed manner; nothing, including evidence of my non-connection and resignation from their clutches could prevent them from pressing on with their demands, even a debt collection agency entered the fray. A letter to Richard Branson’s London office finally resulted in an apology. The same with a ‘free’ trial for three months with a Website company owned by a European media giant who will remain nameless. I tried the ‘free offer’ pulled out before the trial expired, then suffered months of letters, threats of bailiffs, money taken from my account, rude communications but in the end, when I threw it all on the desk of their CEO in Germany it stopped - because I was the customer, I had stuck by their rules and they were deliberately wrong in their ‘profit at any price’ chicanery, and I was right.

So what about the poor people who are not articulate, creative in their battle plans, those more timid, who mistakenly imagine the words ‘customer’ and ‘care’ mean something? The very old who grew up in a world where being threatened for money was the darkest anathema possible? They must succumb to fear imposed by these immoral, un-listening corporate buccaneers.

And now I stand on the cusp of a new fight with the car manufacturers, Vauxhall. I own a Zafira B model and these cars have been prone to bursting into flames due to a fault in the heating and ventilation system. The car has been re-called for ‘rectification’ work.

After the second recall the air conditioning refused to work. When I complained I was told that the items they’d worked on had no connection to the air conditioning. I was told, however, that it could be fixed for £345 because the car required a new AC condenser. My local mechanic, a very skilled motor engineer, could find no fault with the condenser, but eventually, as the weather improved, I decided to bite the bullet and pay the Vauxhall dealer’s service department to replace the condenser. They did the ‘work’, I paid the bill, and was then told that this wouldn’t help to restore the air conditioning as the car required ‘a new compressor’ at £693.95. I was appalled, and wrote to them asking why they had not tested the condenser to establish whether or not it actually did need replacing, and then called me to tell me what was actually needed? It is now six days since the letter went off, and not an e-mail, a phone call; ‘customer care’ in action again. Stage 2 was to send copies of the letter to Vauxhall’s ‘Customer Care’ bases at Luton and Greenford. These were sent first class recorded delivery. Result: zilch. The car now goes into a local garage later this week to have the compressor fitted, not at the Vauxhall dealer’s £693.95 but a more honest £445, including parts and labour. How will this coming battle pan out? I have very little hope of anything positive. As some trolls on the Zafira Fires Face Book page have pointed out (38 of them have had a similar problem with air con not working after a recall) I was blatantly stupid to pay them the £345 in the first place. I have egg on my face and for once the Trolls are right, but we stubbornly carry on in the world of commerce imagining that we can ‘trust’ people to do the right thing.

So, simple though it would be for someone to pick up a phone or send an e-mail to re-assure me that my letters have been received and will be acted upon, no-one working under the banner ‘customer care’ can even think that this might be a good idea. This is because the essence of modern commerce is now based in pure cash-gathering greed. Give us your money, now f**k off. It’s up to us to repel these pirates and freebooters, but it’s all so very, very wearying and tiresome. Welcome to rip-off UK plc.

↧

The flea and the elephant

August 10, 2016, 9:14 am

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≪ Previous: Customer care: a fantasy

The Flea on the Elephant

My son and his wife have just paid £25 to become members of the Labour Party. They, like me, are ardent Corbynistas, but although I have much respect for the man I feel both he and his supporters are living in cloud cuckoo land. Of course, I have an axe to grind: when I applied for temporary membership a year ago for the same purpose - that being to vote Corbyn, I was, in true Stalinist style, ‘purged’. I was not admitted to the Metro-centric ‘club’ and neither did I get my £3 back. That’s because I’m a socialist, and that’s the worst thing the Blairites need in their ranks, even though Cherie, high on breathing in the corporate atmosphere, still clutches her Louis Vuitton handbag and claims to be a “S*******t”. And now you can’t even call anyone a ‘Blairite’ - it’s forbidden.

So why am I so overcome with a sense of doom over the state of the Labour Party? Where to begin? Perhaps even their title needs changing. Apart from the odd exception in the PLP, very few of the smart-suited ardent global corporatist MPs have ever experienced ‘labour’ as many of us know it. They may have pruned a few red roses or turned over their compost heap with a fork, but that’s about it. The fact that a few thousand members have recognised that Jeremy Corybyn’s politics are much closer to the ideals of their founder, Keir Hardie, (who he?) means little to the Westminster gang. They see the party as ‘their’ Labour Party, not the members, because they occupy those green benches, and that position is a meal ticket for all manner of fiscal possibilities. Consultancies, travel, TV appearances. Being an MP of any political hue is a terrific opportunity for self-aggrandisement. Does every Labour MP truly care about austerity? Do they really want to preserve and improve the NHS? Would they stand shoulder to shoulder to take back the railways into public ownership, sort out the Mickey Mouse utility companies, return the Royal Mail to its rightful owners, us, the people? Perhaps they might have believed in such programmes when they were campaigning for election. But the evidence is now that they don’t. And let’s face it, if you toe the line, don’t ruffle any feathers, even if you’re vaguely ‘working class’ like John Prescott, you could end up taking the ermine, joining the Lords and get your £300 per day attendance allowance, a sum many workers won’t earn in a week. And with ‘Lord’ in front of your name, the cash and the privileges just roll in.

In the immediate aftermath of Brexit when the Tory Party was in virtual meltdown, did Labour act as an opposition and go for the jugular? No. They concentrated on trashing their leader, with the ranks behind him at Prime Minister’s Question Time sniggering at Corbyn’s every word, joining in with their Public School snotty-nosed counterparts across the floor, all yah-boos, baying Hooray Henrys to a man (and woman). So instead of chanting ‘Tories out! They decided on a kamikaze attack on their own leader. They are a disgrace and whatever happens to them will be long overdue.

Now the election for that leadership looms, and chances are Corbyn might well win. What then? Will there be a new ‘Gang of 4’ style ‘Social/Democratic’ offshoot as there was in 1981 with people like Shirley Williams, William Rodgers, Roy Jenkins and David Owen? More than likely. Which will leave the Corbyn rump of the party out of the periphery of politics alongside the Socialist Workers, the SPGB and, (if it still exists) the Communist Party. We can all hold meetings in a telephone kiosk at the end of the street and give clenched-fist salutes to passers-by.

the roots of New Labour - the 'Gang of Four' in 1981. Ready to enjoy their Lords status for good behaviour..

Yet the basic fact in all of this is that what was once known as ‘the proletariat’ as seen by Marx and Lenin no longer exists. We no longer hardly manufacture anything much; we’ve fulfilled Thatcher’s dream of becoming a ‘service economy’ Britain’s tattooed, I-phone-clutching constantly texting, selfie-taking masses don’t want socialism for a very good reason. They don’t know what it is, and neither do they care. They have chosen unchecked, unremitting capitalism and they love every Big Mac, Starbucks KFC Virgin Railways bit of it. Corbyn’s admirable faithful are about as effective against the tumour of capitalism as a cat flea on the arse of an elephant. Half an hour studying real political theory is meaningless when you could be watching Britain’s Benefits Tenants on Channel 5, or Gogglebox. Who wants to hear about community, inequality, bankers, Philip Green or social problems and the NHS, when Celebrity Bake-Off is on?

Britain’s Brexit champions, and that’s over half the electorate, remain happy for the country to be run by a cabal of financial buccaneers and press barons. They have succumbed to Goebbels and Hitler’s diktat, so ably utilised by Farage, Johnson and Gove, that if the lies are big enough, they’ll believe them. Their Bibles are The Sun, the Daily Mail,The Express and Fox News. As Donald Trump is amply proving, people don’t mind voting for lies as long as they are colourful, entertaining mistruths, something you can ‘whoop’ for as if you’re attending a rock concert, a kind of illuminated disingenuous wallpaper to decorate the enforced drabness of their living rooms.

So old, worn out dreamers like yours truly need to bite this acrid bullet and accept the stark fact that social progress, Corbyn style or otherwise, is more of a dream now than it was in my youth. This, to me, is the real truth about politics: hopelessness. I may have a decade left, two if I’m lucky, but I’ll just turn off the news, stop reading the Guardian (another middle class rag) get through each day and fade away into the widening shadows of ignorance. And of course, in those shadows, there’ll be plenty of noisy company. Tell me lies: they’re much better than reality.

↧

GOOD READS

August 15, 2016, 7:35 am

≫ Next: Is The Flying Dutchman Real?

≪ Previous: The flea and the elephant

There’s plenty of great fiction around these days yet I still adhere to the old statement that fact is always more fascinating than fiction, and to me that makes it more entertaining. Why? Because these things actually happened. As a writer who loves researching the odd corners of history, I have a penchant for American writers who reveal the underbelly of their country’s colourful

development. So when it comes to both modern and 19^th century history, a good starting point was Stephen Ambrose, the author of Band of Brothers and the brilliant Crazy Horse and Custer. However, one of the greatest of them all, in my humble opinion, is Nathaniel Philbrick. Even his name makes him sound like the Chief Mate on a 19^th century whaler, and if you check him out on Wikipedia, you’ll see that’s not far off the mark - he’s even a skilled sailor. As an avid devotee to Herman Melville (I still think Moby-Dick to be one of the greatest books ever written), when I came across his In The Heart of the Sea three years ago, (the very bones of Melville’s marine inspiration) I wanted more, and thankfully, from the Philbrick treasure vault there’s plenty to choose from. Reading the masterful Sea of Glory,

the story of the US Navy’s huge voyage of exploration in the 1840s, led by Lieutenant Wilkes, who makes the Bounty’s Captain Bligh seem like a Teletubby, I was trapped in a nightly page-turner of sheer fascination and wonder.

I’m currently discovering an equally skilled and dedicated scribe by the name of Hampton Sides. Another unsung story of an expedition, In the Kingdom of Ice, the grand and terrible voyage of the USS Jeanette

simply has to be read in bed, late at night, when you’re warm. It’s a tragic yarn filled with Arctic ice, frostbite, struggle and deprivation, and with each chapter you’re glad to be cosily tucked in and living in the 21^st century. I shall be seeking out more works by Hampton Sides; like Philbrick and Ambrose, he too is a great writer. Next on my reading list after Kingdom of Ice I’m about to delve into Philbrick’s fascinating revelation of the truth behind the voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers, Mayflower: A Voyage to War.

All these engrossing tomes came hot on the heels of both volumes of autobiography by Alexei Sayle, Stalin Ate My Homework and Thatcher Stole my Trousers. Add to these Danny Baker’s hilarious Going to Sea in a Sieve and it becomes clear that for me, it may be a while yet before I get back to reading fiction, but watch this space…

↧

Is The Flying Dutchman Real?

August 16, 2016, 11:58 am

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≪ Previous: GOOD READS

The Flying Dutchman:

The Ultimate Ghost Ship

At the height of Second World War, on 3 August 1942, HMS Jubilee was off the South African coast, making her way on a calm sea to the Royal Navy base at Simonstown, near Cape Town. At 9 p.m., a strange phantom sailing ship was sighted. On the bridge on watch was Second Officer Davies, together with the ship’s third officer, the author of The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat. Monsarrat signalled the mystery ship, but there was no response. Filling in his report in the ship’s log, Davies recorded that a schooner, of an unrecognized rig, was moving under full sail. This was all rather odd, as there was no wind. To avoid collision, HMS Jubilee had to change course. Then the strange ship vanished. Interviewed in later life, at the height of his fame, Monsarrat admitted that the phantom ship was the inspiration for his novel The Master Mariner.

Monsarrat

The legend of the Flying Dutchman is a classic yarn from the days of sail, an age when the Bible was as important as the ship’s logbook. An irreverent skipper has trouble on board. He indulges in blasphemy. There’s a massive storm, God punishes the ship, the crew all perish and the Master is doomed to a spectral existence for all eternity. The Flying Dutchman is South Africa’s most famous spook, but the ghost ship can be seen in various locations, for example Goodwin Sands, as well as cropping up in stormy weather off the Cape of Good Hope . . . or just about anywhere on the rolling sea. The sightings usually involve a fully rigged sailing ship, sometimes engulfed in a luminescent green mist. Fully lit cabins have been reported, and occasionally there have been reports of a shindig in progress on board, singing, even women laughing. Those saucy spectral sailors . . . no wonder they got into trouble; never mind the compass, crack open another barrel.

So who was this irresponsible, libidinous mariner who was doomed to scare the bejesus out of future generations of hapless matelots? Richard Wagner (1813–1883) knew who he was back in 1843 when he wrote his opera, Der Fliegende Holländer. Four years earlier Captain Frederick Marryat had published his entertaining version of the yarn, The Phantom Ship (1839).

Marryat has the Dutch skipper’s name as Philip Vanderdecken. However, the first reference in print to the ship appears in Chapter 6 of A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795) aka A Voyage to New South Wales, attributed to a London socialite and skilled pickpocket, George Barrington (1755–1804), who was transported to Australia and is remembered for the line “We left our country for our country’s good.” Heinrich Heine published a novel in 1834, The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski, which included the story of the Dutchman. In the Netherlands, the traditional name for the Flying Dutchman is Falkenbourg. In 1855 Washington Irving wrote a version of the tale calling him Ramhout Van Dam. Another contender is a real seventeenth-century Captain called Bernard Fokke. Like the eponymous Second World War German airplane, Fokke’s ship was noted for its impressive speed, particularly for its voyages between Holland and Java. The name of his ship is not mentioned, but many Dutch mariners actually believed Fokke was in league with the devil. Naturally, when he and his speedy vessel vanished the conclusion was that Old Nick had called in the debt. Although it is easy keeping your tongue in your cheek over the Flying Dutchmen reports, some, from prominent witnesses, are very convincing.

Fokke

During the Second World War, the German Kriegsmarine’s Admiral Karl Dönitz reported that his U-Boat crews logged sightings of the Flying Dutchman off the Cape Peninsula. Seeing the Dutchman was an unwelcome omen, and usually preceded disaster for a boat. The ghostly East Indiaman was also seen by

Donitz

numerous witnesses at Muizenberg, a beach-side suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1939. On a calm day in 1941, a large crowd at the Cape coast’s Glencairn Beach saw a ship with wind-filled sails, but it vanished just as it was about to crash on to the rocks.

Of course, if a monarch sees a ghost, then it must be true. Prince George (later King George V, 1865–1936) saw the Flying Dutchman. The two oldest sons of the Prince of Wales had entered the navy in 1877 and by 1879 it had been decided by the royal family and the government that the two should take a character-building cruise. George was just fifteen when he sailed on a three-year-long voyage aboard the 4000-ton corvette HMS Bacchante with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor. Accompanying them was their tutor, Canon John Neale Dalton (1839–1931), who was a chaplain to Queen Victoria.

The squadron that set sail was commanded by Prince Louis of Battenburg, great uncle of today’s Prince Philip. Off the coast near Cape Town, George, together with Dalton and other officers on the bridge on 11 July 1881, witnessed the spectral Dutchman. George’s diary entry describes the encounter, with its grisly aftermath. (Some sources claim this report as that of Dalton):

At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her . . . At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms.

OLD SALTS HAVE ALL SEEN IT ...

The phantom was seen by other ships in the squadron, Tourmaline and Cleopatra.

Kings and pirates, deckhands, landlubbers and lighthouse keepers all have reported seeing her. Here’s a selection of sightings:

• 1823: Captain Owen, HMS Leven, recorded two sightings in the log.

• 1835: Men on a British vessel saw a sailing ship approach them in the middle of a storm. It appeared there would be a collision, but the ship suddenly vanished.

• 1879: The SS Pretoria’s crew saw the ghost ship.

• 1881: King George V saw the ship whilst another report from a Captain Larsen of an unnamed Swedish ship tells of a near collision with the phantom, which disappeared. The crewman who spotted her, an English sailor called Landersbury, died shortly afterwards.

• 1911: On 11 January, the whaling ship the Orkney Belle almost collided with her before she vanished.

• 1923: An officer aboard a British steamer saw her on 26 January and reported the event to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Fourth Officer N. K. Stone wrote an account of the fifteen-minute sighting. Second Officer Bennett, a helmsman and cadet also witnessed the ship. Stone drew a picture of the phantom. Bennett corroborated his account. Stone wrote this: “It was a very dark night, overcast, with no moon. We looked through binoculars and the ship’s telescope, and made out what appeared to be the hull of a sailing ship, luminous, with two distinct masts carrying bare yards, also luminous. No sails were visible, but there was a luminous haze between the masts. There were no navigation lights, and she appeared to be coming close to us and at the same speed as ourselves . . . when she was within about a half-mile of us she suddenly disappeared. There were four witnesses of this spectacle, the Second Officer, a cadet, the helmsman and myself. I shall never forget the Second Officer’s startled expression – ‘My God, Stone, it’s a ghost ship.’”

• 1939: People on South Africa’s Cape shore saw the Flying Dutchman. Admiral Karl Dönitz maintained logged sightings by U-Boat crews in the area.

• 1941: People at Glencairn Beach sighted the phantom ship that vanished before she crashed into rocks.

• 1942: In September, four witnesses sitting on their balcony at Mouille Point saw the Dutchman enter Table Bay, then vanish behind Robben Island.

• Second Officer Davies and Third Officer Monsarrat, HMS Jubilee, saw the Flying Dutchman. Davis recorded it in the ship’s log.

• 1959: Captain P. Algra of the Dutch freighter Straat Magelhaen reports that he nearly collided with the ghost ship.

Of course, as with all reports of unexplained phenomena, amidst all the sense of wonder and credulity that gathers around them over the decades, the fine details of provenance become blurred. For example, “a Swedish ship” – the skipper’s name survives, but where’s the ship? Then there’s “men on a British vessel” – which vessel? Look in the Ships List for “SS Pretoria” and you’ll not find one in 1879 – the nearest candidate is the USS Pretoria. That’s not to say these ships did not exist but, as we shall see, some become almost synonymous with the phantom they’ve reported. Lists are laid down and copied out ad infinitum – going back to sources is often a blind alley, but it doesn’t spoil the fun in the long run. These are justifiably the areas on to which the sceptics will eagerly latch. Paranormal atheists, when the chronicles seem fuzzy, may be able to add to their demolition by combining a yarn’s historical sloppiness with a hypothetical approach. So, for example, if the Flying Dutchman isn’t a ghost, what is it?

It could be a mass hallucination, an optical illusion or a mirage. Lights and mist on the horizon can fool the sharpest eyes. A couple of stiff rums and a touch of insomnia on a nightwatch on the bridge can produce visual hallucinations. They are all factors worth considering. Dr Frederick Meyers, the respected Society for Psychical Research parapsychologist, interviewed Stone and Bennett, the officers on the 1923 sighting. He came up with an interesting theory, widely rejected by other parapsychologists, that a type of consciousness survives physical death and has the ability to telepathically project images to the living who see them. So could the Flying Dutchman be the result of some form of an as yet unexplained energy imprinted in time and space? It seems odd that a tragedy or disaster is usually at the root of a haunting. Yet they are just appearances, apparitions and have no intelligence; might they be an indelible, sporadic projection of permanent grief? Or are we at long last facing a new revelation in physics, CERN style – are we periodically peering through the matrix between our dimensions and the ones awaiting discovery?

Or could the Flying Dutchman could be a “Fata Morgana”, a mirage that occurs in calm weather when warm air rests above dense, cold air close to the sea’s surface. The air between the two masses acts as a refracting lens, producing a distorted upside-down image of an upright object. Even though a ship could be over the horizon, the observing crew may see an inverted, blurry image of the “mirage ship” appearing much closer and several times larger than its actual size.

Back to Charles Fort; we offer the data, you decide.

DISCOVER MANY MORE YARNS LIKE THIS IN MY BOOK, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA (Constable & Robinson, 2013) and look out for the follow up volume dues out this November, The Mammoth Book of Superstition.

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Yankee Doodle Doldrums

August 23, 2016, 12:53 pm

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≪ Previous: Is The Flying Dutchman Real?

Yankee Doodle Doldrums

When Ernest Hemingway wrote that “prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over” I couldn’t have disagreed with the great man more. I’d already spent my imprudent youth reading those who came before him, including one writer whose semantic ‘architecture’ represented a veritable Versailles.

It all began with the cinema.

I just had to see the film again. In fact, I saw it five times and by the end of that week I knew most of the dialogue. It was lofty, archaic, biblical stuff, Baroque, even, yet what fascinated me most when the credits rolled was ‘Screenplay by Ray Bradbury’. I was 13 and had already read Bradbury’s Illustrated Man and his Golden Apples of the Sun. I knew he was special. Thus John Huston’s film of Moby Dick became a wider gateway to American literature. I bought Melville’s hefty book yet unlike Bradbury’s idiosyncratic, down-home prose, it would take me decades to fathom the greatness of Moby-Dick. The book’s philosophical density was perplexing for a young lad, yet what impressed me was how much of Melville’s grandiloquent dialogue Bradbury had lovingly preserved for the screen.

The great Ray Bradbury

He had led me to all the great 20^th century US science fiction writers with strange names like Vonnegut, Heinlein and Asimov, and my particular favourites Robert Sheckley and H.P. Lovecraft. Later in life, I’d get onto the ‘hard stuff’; Edgar Allan Poe, Longfellow, Thoreau and others, and as my prolonged puberty receded I’d come down to earth for Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and even Norman Mailer. 60 years after my cinematic portal into American writing, US culture, high and low, dominates everything, from the infantile vacuity of superheroes to the gripping drama of Breaking Bad. Yet it wasn’t always so.

Rev. Sidney Smith

Writing in the January 1820 edition of the Edinburgh Review, the eternally quotable Rev. Sidney Smith (1771-1845) asked: “In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” It seemed an unkind broadside aimed at a fledgling nation condemned to compete in the long literary shadow of Great Britain. As Smith sharpened his quill, across the Atlantic both Herman Melville and Walt Whitman were still in their cradles awaiting their first birthday. In Brunswick, Maine at a private liberal arts establishment, Bowdoin College, teenage student Nathaniel Hawthorne had added a ‘w’ to his name to expunge his association with his patrilineal ancestor John Hathorne, a leading judge in the Salem Witch Trials.

It’s hard to imagine what Sidney Smith would have made of the new era of American writing in the years immediately following his death. No doubt he would have scoffed at Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, although he may have recognised its themes of sin, guilt and legality. As for Whitman’s Blades of Grass or Melville’s Moby-Dick, they did little to dissuade sections of Britain’s literati from the notion that American literature remained adrift in the doldrums. Without any transatlantic copyright law and no royalties to pay, American publishers made easy money by reprinting anything worthwhile which came out of Britain. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Scott, and above all, Dickens all rolled of the presses, whilst looking down from his lofty perch, Shakespeare, as ever, remained supreme.

As American writers like Longfellow, Thoreau and others found their voice, they expressed their dismay at the situation. Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and others were more than peeved with their country’s failure to support writers, and especially with Shakespeare’s godlike status. In August 1850, still putting the finishing touches to Moby-Dick, despite his boundless admiration for the Bard, Herman Melville grumbled in the journal The Literary World, “You must believe in Shakespeare's unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of belief is this for an American, a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature?” Melville, then unknowingly on the cusp of obscurity, epitomises the tragic growing pains of American literature. It would be almost a century before we realised what a treasure chest American writing would become. Melville was no stranger to a good critical bludgeoning. Whilst Moby-Dick was still puzzling blinkered reviewers, on September 8, 1852 the New York Day Book carried a rancorous headline, "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY" above a mauling of his latest book, Ambiguities. Masquerading as a news item, it ‘reported’ the views of a ‘critical friend’ who regarded Ambiguities“to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman” and finished with a truly knock-out punch; “… his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink.” That kind of reviewing today would be a lawyer’s bean feast.

They had no need to kick Melville; he was already down. Britain’s literary dominance dragged him further, because Moby-Dickwas first published here by the London publisher of his earlier works, Richard Bentley. With those earlier works page proofs had been set by Harper in the US and sent to London for publication. This gave American critics the chance to see what they regarded as their more erudite British counterparts made of a work and then add their own bit of venom. Bentley offered Melville a £150 advance. He was already in debt to the tune of $700 to his American publisher, Harper, so they wouldn’t set the type for Moby-Dick; he was forced to borrow money and pay for the composition himself. Sadly, the Bentley edition would suffer all manner of pedantic editorial indignities. For those Americans who did read books, England may well have been a literary lighthouse, but its beams were tinged with patriotic Anglican piety. Anything remotely dismissive of Britain’s monarchy was removed. Sacrilegious passages were savaged with a vengeance. It wouldn’t do for an American upstart like Melville to attribute human failures to God, and the censorial pen would not allow Captain Ahab to stand on the deck of the godless Pequod “with a crucifixion in his face” in Chapter 28. And there was that undertow of sex; allusions to hookers, a faint whiff of gay goings-on in the fo’c’sle, Ishmael’s pondering over Queequeg’s underpants. Yet Melville got away with it in Chapter 95, "The Cassock", by using indirect language describing the whale’s penis. Yet the biggest calumny in the British edition of Moby-Dick was the inexplicable omission of the Epilogue, which explains why the story has been told by Ishmael, beginning with the quote from the Book of Job 1:15: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

In his lifetime Moby-Dicknever sold its initial print run of 3,000 copies. In fact his royalties for the American edition from Harper & Brothers amounted to a measly $556 - that’s roughly £390. After spending his final 19 years of obscurity working as the most honest customs officer in New York, Herman Melville passed away in 1891 completely forgotten, with a 47-word obituary in the New York Times, where they referred to what would become his classic as ‘Mobie’ Dick. One small report called him ‘Henry’ and in December that year Harper’s Magazine gave his death just nine words.

Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick

Herman Melville’s long poem, Clarel, published in 1876, had an initial printing of just 350 copies. By the time he’d written it, his writing career had already been over for a decade. Then, in 1925 critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of Clarel‘with its pages uncut’ in the New York Public Library, where it had remained, unread and untouched by human hands for 50 years. 30 years after they’d laid Herman Melville to rest in a poor plot in a Bronx cemetery, our own D. H. Lawrence led the charge to recognise his work and transform him into the literary monument he is today. In Lawrence’s 1924 Studies in Classic American Literature his ornate and politically awkward essay on Moby-Dick likens the crew of the Pequod, including the narrator, Ishmael, to America itself: “Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael, Quakers”. Yet it feels right that Melville’s stream of consciousness style should have finally achieved recognition in the 1920s, when James Joyce’s Ulysses was breaking new ground.

An un-collated, unfinished draft of Melville’s final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor was tidily packed away by his widow, Lizzie and would not appear in print until 1925. Albert Camus, W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster all waxed lyrical over Billy Budd, and close to death, Thomas Mann called it ‘the most beautiful story in the world’, adding ‘O that I could have written that!’

So I thank Ishmael, Queequeg and Mr. Starbuck for inspiring me to take a chance on writing. Ray Bradbury said that “Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” As for the intrepid Melville, his thoughts remain relevant in today’s corrupt, ill-mannered world. Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby-Dick should form the basis of any investigative writer’s creed:“But delight is to him who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth stands forth his own inexorable self, who destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from the robes of senators and judges!”

SOURCES:

Most material re. Melville from

DELBANCO, ANDREW: Melville, His World & Work Picador, 2006

SMITH, SYDNEY: The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith, Faber & Faber 2012.

LAWRENCE, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature: Penguin 1971, re-issued Cambridge University Press 2014.

CUNLIFFE, MARCUS: The Literature of the United States Pelican, 1970.

MELVILLE, HERMAN: Moby-Dick / Billy Budd etc., Numerous editions.

HUSTON, JOHN (Producer) Moby Dick (Film, 1956, Screenplay by Ray Bradbury, starring Gregory Peck, Orson Welles and Leo Genn) is available on Optimum Home DVD OPTD0069 and is in this writer’s opinion, although a very condensed rendition of a massive work, retains its elegance and dignity. There is also a later TV version starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Ahab. It ambitiously tells much more of the book,

But the ’56 version does it for me.

↧

The Ice Bell

September 3, 2016, 12:23 pm

≫ Next: De Profundis

≪ Previous: Yankee Doodle Doldrums

St. Romanus

Kingston Peridot

THE ICE BELL

POEM PROJECT: BACKGROUND.

I was born and raised in the port of Hull, where going into the fishing industry for a school leaver was the equivalent of having to go down the pit. Luckily I avoided having to sail on trawlers, because I joined the Merchant Navy on my 16th birthday and spent seven comparatively safe years at sea.

However, we ‘Big Boat men’ had it easy compared to fishermen. The triple trawler tragedy of 1968 when 60 men lost their lives was an illustration of just how dangerous deep sea fishing was.

Ross Cleveland

Today, Hull’s fishing industry is dead and gone, but at the Star and Garter Pub (known to all trawler men as ‘Rayner’s’) on Hull’s Hessle Road, the landlady there runs a charity for ex-fishermen and a small museum of fishing memorabilia. I wanted to contribute something in my own way in respect for those brave men, and as a writer, I thought a framed poem reminding people of the tragedy of 1968, which resulted in a massive campaign for new health and safety regulations, would make some small contribution. Well, sad to say my idea remains unclaimed, nicely framed and in the attic. But here's the poem anyway, for anyone interested.

the IceBell

v1v

‘Hello, Goodbye’ the Beatles sang

In the days before the ice bell rang.

Warm and safe, ashore seemed heaven

Oh, what a Christmas, sixty-seven.

Yet that joyful Yuletide memory,

Was crushed forever by the sea.

v2v

What sickness filled Poseidon’s mind

What rage could make a sea-god blind

To joy on shore where children sang

Their carols for a fisherman?

Did Neptune envy shore-side days

In Rayners or the old Broadway,

A deckie learner’s wages, spent,

Whatever could the fates resent?

v3v

The tides they rose, the tides they fell,

But none could hear the shrill ice bell.

Beyond the cliffs of Holderness

The grey sea beckoned, merciless,

Its bounty, haddock, plaice and cod

A prize for those who challenge God.

v4v

In January, sixty-eight,

The crews all gathered, Skippers, Mates,

Deckie learners, engineers,

Galley boys and cooks who feared

Nothing of the ocean’s rage

As they signed up to earn a wage.

v5v

As anxious families watched the clock

Their men, bound for St. Andrew’s dock

With kitbags in their taxis sped

To join the hunt their skippers led.

Hull Brewery bitter, pints of mild

Still on the breath of those who filed

On board Ross Cleveland, St. Romanus,

The Kingston Peridot, abuzz

With how this trip might stuff the hatch

To settle with a record catch.

v6v

Upon each cold departure date

Some gathered by the old lock gates

As out into the muddy Humber

Slipped those fated, fading numbers;

H61, H223, H591, bound for a sea

Where balmy summer was long past,

Replaced by winter’s wicked blast.

v7v

They’d let go for’ard, let go aft,

And listening to the radio, laughed,

As Tom Jones sang ‘I’m coming home’

Whilst steel bows cut through wind-lashed foam

And like all Hull sailors always yearn

They felt that pull of home at Spurn.

v8v

Cook got busy, stove fired up,

Sweet tea in pint mugs duly supped

Up on the bridge the Skipper paced

As they sped northwards, making haste

Un-worried by the rising swell,

For fishing grounds all known so well

By countless Captains, gone before,

Who’d heard the ice bell at death’s door.

v9v

On land, in Hull, away from harm,

The children slept in peaceful calm

Whilst many hundred miles away

The sun refused to start the day

Beneath that heavy, snow-filled sky

Not even greedy gulls could cry

Against the towering, icy waves

Mere mortal men were forced to brave

v10v

The patron saint of choirs and song

Saint Romanus did not last long

For now the ship which bore his name

Was swallowed in the raging main

A squall which peaked around force ten

Snuffed out the lives of twenty men

And whilst unknowing, families slept,

Across the North Sea silence crept.

v11v

Kingston Peridot, H591

Soon heard the ice bell’s mournful song

Off Iceland’s shores she’d dropped her trawl

Yet none could heed her tragic call

As ice piled up on masts and decks

She soon would join those tragic wrecks

Deep down upon the black sea’s floor

Where countless souls had gone before.

v12v

As throughout Hull the dark fear spread

For husbands, fathers, sons feared dead

Their anxious families tried to cope

And prayed that silence promised hope

That in the stillness all was well

Yet still more men would hear the bell.

v13v

Bold Ross Cleveland, H61

Through icy hell had struggled on

And from her Skipper, brave Phil Gay,

Came one last call that fateful day

From his doomed crew he sent their love

Whilst towering, wicked wild waves shoved

The ice-bound ship beneath the swell,

The final victory for the bell.

v14v

Neptune had swallowed 58

Yet left one man, the Cleveland’s Mate,

Washed ashore in bitter gales,

And only he could tell the tale.

Then as the cruel sea still rolled,

In Hull another bell would toll

A painful peal which spoke of fear,

As those bereaved shed bitter tears.

v15v

In mansions magnates counted costs

Of tonnage sunk and harvests lost

But as the sad hymns died away

A rising anger seized the day.

Enraged and fearless in their pain

Wives and mothers fought to gain

Safety for their fishing fleets,

Demands Westminster had to meet.

v16v

Six thousand bereft children, wives,

One hundred years, six thousand lives,

Surrendered to their masters’ wish,

How bitter, steep, the price of fish.

Yet still men brave the freezing swell,

Whilst listening for the grim Ice Bell.

↧

De Profundis

September 15, 2016, 7:38 am

≫ Next: To Hellamy and Back

≪ Previous: The Ice Bell

DE PROFUNDIS: STEPHEN REA READS OSCAR WILDE'S LETTER FROM READING JAIL.

Among the hundreds of great writers, poets and literary minds we all admire a few stand out because their work is so quotable in every paragraph; for example, everyone can quote a little bit of Shakespeare. Yet in this heartfelt letter by Oscar Wilde, almost every sentence seems like an emotional gem. This superb performance by Stephen Rea, (click on the photo) was recorded in the actual cell at Reading where Wilde wrote it. It frequently brought me to tears, and I am unashamed by the fact.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v00pm

↧

To Hellamy and Back

September 16, 2016, 3:33 am

≫ Next: Heritage Hypocrisy

≪ Previous: De Profundis

TO HELLAMY AND BACK

What the ‘Big Society’ did for a ‘Sink’ estate.

Boarded up property on Bellamy Road

Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, in fact most major UK cities still have their sink estates. They exist as media magnets when a dystopian urban narrative is required. They inspire a gritty lexicon of social catastrophe; ASBO-littered landscapes of drug-fuelled misbehaviour, burning cars, broken, urine-smelling lifts, stabbed teenagers and terrified old ladies. For a visiting hack who doesn’t live there, such a bad story is cash in the bank. But what if you do live there?

Making his first speech as Prime Minister in 1997, as a venue, Tony Blair chose South London’s rundown Aylesbury Estate, where he promised the 7,500 residents he intended to help "the poorest people in our country who have been forgotten by government". This was one of many similar New Labour speeches where hearts bled over the disparities between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ environs. Blair used the term ‘sink estates’. Such worthy sentiments no doubt denoted the plight of those poor condemned souls existing at the very depths of British society; or maybe he was hinting at animals living in overcrowded conditions.

London's Aylesbury Estate: designated a 'Sink' by Tony Blair

Eight years after his ‘sink estates’ speech the Daily Mail recognised in 2005 that nothing had changed, referring to the Aylesbury Estate as ‘like visiting hell’s waiting room’.

However, Blair’s speeches were made in those distant heady days before Chilcot, his Faith Foundation, his erroneous position as Middle East ‘Envoy’ and subsequent globe-trotting millionaire lifestyle as promoter of Louis Vuitton luggage, advising U.S. Banks and dubious dictators. Still, as Tony would probably tell us, if you can’t transform the world, transform yourself.

On February 25 2010 a BBC film crew arrived on the deeply denigrated Bellamy Road Estate in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The estate was built in the 1960s to house an influx of miners from the North East.

Pancake race on Bellamy Road in the 1970s

For the BBC, it had become a reporter’s alliterative dream as the crew immediately dubbed the location as ‘Hellamy’. However, when the 20 minute piece went out that night on BBC East Midlands few people living in the estate’s 700 dwellings recognised it as the place they lived in. The reporter soon found the grim locals he needed; the beleaguered shopkeeper, the frustrated council tenant, an angry councillor. There was also an elusive, juicy back story which remains buried and has never been resolved; money from central government for estate projects had been funnelled through Mansfield District Council into the Bellamy Road office of the Sherwood Community Development Trust, and an alleged £70,000 had gone missing. Whatever was wrong with ‘Hellamy’ Road, it would be featured, including a bellicose exchange between malcontents and Mansfield’s elected Mayor. Carefully omitted were the innovative unpaid efforts of numerous volunteer tenants and residents on the estate who had been working to improve their community since 2004.

With 42 collieries and 40,000 miners Nottinghamshire was once one of Europe’s most successful coalfields. In the region of Mansfield alone in 1987 there were 13 working pits. Today there are none. You’ll still find the odd tattooed ex-miner in Mansfield, but he’s more than likely manning the checkout aisle at Tesco. This is an angry, defiant town looking to punish a system which deprived it of its pride and industry. Thus, Europe was a handy scapegoat; a spiteful 72% of the electorate voted for Brexit.

Yet at least, giving credit where due, Tony Blair’s ‘Third way’ and New Labour did make faltering attempts to honour that Aylesbury Estate speech. Long before Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and ‘In it together’, Britain’s deprived neighbourhoods received a shot in the arm known as the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. The NRF’s origin was based in Tony Blair’s declaration that no one in future decades should be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived. The Neighbourhood Renewal Fund cost the Treasury about £500m per year. Poor neighbourhoods also received extra inputs through Sure Start Children’s Centres, Decent Homes, Housing Market Renewal, New Deal for Communities (NDC), Excellence in Cities and other assorted hopeful schemes. In the decade following the NRF’s launch, it all seemed to be working.

On Mansfield’s Bellamy Road Estate various schemes were set up, projects to improve housing, a more active police presence, two neighbourhood wardens were employed. The NRF’s estate committee held lively monthly meetings. In January 2005 the team launched their own quarterly 8 page estate newsletter, the colourful Bellamy Bugle, which is still going strong after 55 editions. Old properties were bulldozed, new housing built, an award-winning community charity shop opened, and through the input of the YMCA, an internet café, the only one in the Mansfield area, was opened. Both District and County Councillors got on board, and funds became available for various seasonal events on the estate, a Christmas pantomime in the Community Centre, and street parties throughout the summer. The dedicated Tenants and Residents’ Association organised days out for residents, and opened the small community centre on Saturdays for people to meet, have a cup of tea and a chat. A decent plot of local land was made available for a Community Allotment, which remains a highly a successful project. Bellamy Road school children also had the advantage of the Homework Club, a project which provides a tranquil, safe, learning environment for children between the ages of 5-11 to seek help with their homework. On their way home from school, they could complete their homework on the computers in the Y5 Internet Café and receive a meal and a drink. Crime and vandalism began to fall. New Labour’s investments appeared to represent value for money.

All this progress hit the buffers in May 2010 as the Cameron/Clegg Coalition came to power. The Tory obsession with reducing the size of the central state could not accommodate the altruistic notion of ‘regeneration’ or ‘renewal’ of deprived neighbourhoods. Since 2010 any stream of funding which supported regeneration has been scrapped. Labour’s work in establishing area agreements between central and local government, regional spatial strategies, Government Offices for the regions and Regional Development Agencies was consigned to the waste basket. In its place, never forgetting to link it’s ideas with the Coalition’s deficit reduction policy, the Department for Communities and Local Government took a virtually cost-free leap of faith, ostensibly to ‘give greater power and responsibility to local communities’ aligned with stimulating growth to encourage regeneration, with central government in a ‘strategic and supportive role’. According to CASE, the London School of Economics’ Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, the ‘Big Society’ goal replacing Neighbourhood Renewal was that “local economies prosper, parts of the country previously over-reliant on public funding see a resurgence in private sector enterprise and employment, and that everyone gets to share in the resulting growth … mechanisms include the Regional Growth Fund, New Homes Bonus, reforms of the planning system and investments in infrastructure projects such as the high speed rail network, Crossrail and the Olympic legacy..” Under the oppressive umbrella of continuing austerity and Brexit, this was all expected to inspire community and voluntary organisations as part of the ‘Big Society’.

For Mansfield, the advent of the Coalition in 2010 had all the effect of a social bulldozer. Other deprived areas of the town Pleasley, Ravensdale and Oak Tree Lane would all lose their NRF support. Cameron’s ‘We’re all in it together’ was simply cynical salt in the wound of slashed funding. Under the new, post-Brexit administration, there’s no place neighbourhood renewal, but a hefty £30 billion for the exclusive HS2 project, a train service which is expected to carry 26,000 people per hour, which will mean nothing in Mansfield; the nearest planned HS2 station at Toton is 25 miles away.

After 2013 David Cameron never used the term ‘Big Society’ again. In 2014 after much criticism of Cameron’s involvement, the ‘Big Society Network’ collapsed, followed in 2015 by a critical final ‘Big Society Audit’ published by Civil Exchange. It made depressing reading.

Despite all this doom and gloom, if that 2010 BBC film crew should return to Bellamy Road today, expecting to make more dystopian hay with grainy images of ASBO gangs of drug-dealing hoodies and burning cars, they may well be in for disappointment. The so-called ‘Big Society’ which Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and others thought they’d ‘invented’ was already in place long before they came to power. Certainly, the end of NRF funding has been a kick in the teeth for such estates, but on Bellamy Road, volunteers rose up and strove to keep community progress in motion. In tandem with dedicated councillors from the town’s District Council and County Council, the Bellamy Road Tenants and Residents’ Association constantly scours every available source of charitable funding. They’ve found it with the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, the Big Lottery Fund, the Nottinghamshire Community Foundation, and from the commercial sector, Tesco and N-Power’s Renewable Energy Wind Farm at nearby Rainworth. Even with its financial wings severely clipped, the Sure Start Children’s Centre struggles on to provide a service. The Bellamy Bugle, the estate’s quarterly newsletter is now printed for free by local print giants Linney plc. One disaster was the closure of the Y5 Internet Café, but the YMCA bounced back to keep the premises available for the continuing homework club. The summertime events and street parties remain, as do the popular coffee mornings and other events at the community centre. Various awards have been won by community volunteers, and all this has been in defiance of an austerity-fixated government whose mealy-mouthed proclamations on community and social structure have proved to be nothing but sardonic sound bites.

However, Bellamy Road’s past reputation still precludes it from any positive mention in local media. Press releases about positive community events on the estate are generally ignored, unlike a burning car, a drugs bust or a spot of fly-tipping.

In the final analysis, perhaps there is such a thing as ‘people power’. It simply needs more ordinary people to realise this. It could be that both Tony Blair’s and Cameron’s notion of society ultimately meant the same thing; the people they recognised as being ‘in it together’ certainly weren’t the people of Bellamy Road Estate in Mansfield. They were the rich.

For God's sake you two, CHEER UP: you're RICH!

As Blair told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2005: “It’s not a burning ambition of mine to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.” It would be nice to imagine Becks and Posh sparing a few quid for Bellamy Road. Any bets the BBC would turn out for that event.

SOURCES:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/nottingham/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8531000/8531338.stmBBC Nottingham Fall of Mansfield's Bellamy Road estate 25.2.2010

LSE SOCIAL POLICY IN A COLD CLIMATE Working Paper 6 July 201 Labour’s Record on Neighbourhood Renewal in England: Policy, Spending and Outcomes 1997-2010 WP05 Labour’s record on Neighbourhood Renewal in England http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/spcc/WP05.pdf Ruth Lupton, Alex Fenton and Amanda Fitzgerald

http://www.civilexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Whose-Society_The-Final-Big-Society-Audit_final.pdf

Blair and Paxman: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1372220.stm

↧

Heritage Hypocrisy

September 27, 2016, 4:26 am

≫ Next: FOR SARAH 1966-2012

≪ Previous: To Hellamy and Back

HERITAGE: HYPOCRISY.

Oh, how we love our stately homes

To stand in awe behind that velvet rope

As from the well-flocked walls

Privilege in oils looks smugly down.

There’s the Duchess and the Earl

But of the serving girl no sign,

No gardener, footman, cook

Yet still we look and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’.

And there hangs gilt-framed equine art

Of George Stubbs, so accurate and skilled,

But where’s the stable lads, the ostler, groom?

Who pushed brooms and drove the coach?

From what coffers came this finery?

The treasury of slavery, the profit gained

From tortured souls in chains explains

What built this august abode; a gracious greed.

Listen to the guide drop propaganda pearls

About this edifice ‘his Lordship built’

Yet blood was spilt between every chiselled stone

Hewn from the earth with toil and sweat.

For kings did not construct cathedrals

Few barons ever touched a brick

No mortar boards for Lords and Dukes,

They were not Masons; they were thick.

York and Lincoln’s mighty steeples

Were never built by soft rich hands

Nor Chatsworth, Windsor or Westminster

But by the poor, who bore the heavy hod.

Now with no sense of obloquy

They wait in line and pay a fee

To be where tyrants trod,

Around paths and gardens, lofty halls

Built through the fear of God.

↧

FOR SARAH 1966-2012

October 2, 2016, 3:49 am

≫ Next: Article 0

≪ Previous: Heritage Hypocrisy

FOR MY DAUGHTER ON HER BIRTHDAY

Today would have been a carnival

But you know this; I see your lovely face

Smiling in your frame upon the wall.

Today would be your birthday;

The half century you stringently opposed;

“I never want to be an old woman”.

And I would laugh at your words.

Yet you got your wish. But it wasn’t mine.

I wanted to sit with you today; a father

With his daughter, fifty, yet looking thirty;

I wanted to pour a glass for us all,

To raise a toast, to laugh, to celebrate.

Now the only option is observance;

Commemoration, held-back tears

In honour of a bright but vanished life.

But then I am reminded by the memory

Of your unbridled joy.

That same elation even in your final hours;

How you smiled from your pillow, asking

“Why are you looking so sad, Dad?”

And those terminal smiles have seen us through

The grief of parting, the emptiness,

For in this void I still know what you might want;

For you, Sarah, yes. Never an old woman,

Always the bright-eyed girl;

So for you, dear daughter, yes, yes, yes;

We shall make this a festive day,

Light candles, smile through tears;

We shall drink and eat and your memory

As ever, will light the room.

↧

Article 0

October 2, 2016, 11:28 am

≫ Next: THE END

≪ Previous: FOR SARAH 1966-2012

THE DEATH OF DECENCY Image result for Images Trump

Half a century ago, as a young, newly married man with a baby daughter, like many of my generation I felt that my youthful energy could be instrumental in changing the world. There was something about humanity which still offered hope; men and women could surely see that the world was unfair, and common sense, with a little political lubrication, might propel us all towards a new sense of that old French dream of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Those three words today are meaningless; as indecipherable as Inca hieroglyphics.

Back then in my early 20s it didn’t seem in anyway outrageous to join the Communist Party. It took a while for me to realise that the CPGB was a Stalinist outfit, and I was soon wooed away by the exotic ‘dark’ force known as IS: the International Socialists. I discovered Trotsky, the way he had been airbrushed out of Soviet history. The Communist Party in the mid-60s in Hull was a peculiar gathering, and as a blue-collar hands-on labourer I fondly imagined that the CP was ‘my’ party. I’d read Lenin and Marx, finding the texts difficult, yet they left me confused over one particular term; ‘the petty bourgeoisie’. Looking this up I arrived at this interpretation, which is still freely available on line:

‘A sociologically defined class, especially in contemporary times, referring to people with a certain cultural and financial capital belonging to the middle or upper stratum of the middle class: the upper (haute), middle (moyenne) and petty (petite) bourgeoisie (which are collectively designated "the Bourgeoisie"). An affluent and often opulent stratum of the middle class (capitalist class) who stood opposite the proletariat class.’

The following points from my distant past all seem petty, stupid and naïve today. Yet they were small catalysts in the formation of my later beliefs.

Hull’s Communist Party used to meet at a house on James Reckitt Avenue or at a rather smart flat off Pearson Park. It was at a meeting one night at Pearson Park when the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ concept was indelibly etched into my memory. To begin with, the party’s chairman was one of Hull Corporation’s leading Probation Officers. We had firm instructions as comrades never to mention his name to anyone at all, especially outside CP gatherings as this would seriously affect his position in the Probation Department. I always regarded this desire for anonymity as something of a cop-out. Communism was a political belief; if Comrade Chairman was sincere in his desire for a socialist state, what was the point of hiding his flame under a bushel? As Matthew 5:15 has it: ‘Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.’

In my youthful naiveté, therefore, I thought what the hell was the point of being a communist if you were scared of upsetting your boss? They all knew about my politics in Sisson’s Paint works where I laboured throughout the week. It affected everything I did on the shop floor, where I talked everyone into joining a union, a fact which led to so much opprobrium between me and the management that after a year I had to find a new job. Yet it seemed that being bourgeois meant that politics was a hidden hobby. If train spotters had no shame, why should we have any, peripheral dreamers though we were? But it got worse. At Pearson Park the meetings were attended by other closet comrades, at least one academic, and a spindly elderly lady who was always there, I recall her as ‘Miss Ellerby’, stalking among us as we listened to Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism with a large biscuit tin full of her home-made rock buns. “Do take one, comrade; I made them freshly today”. Well, although even revolutionaries have a soft spot for a bit of patisserie, I’d already had my tea and recalled that Trotsky had actually fainted just before the October Revolution because he’d forgotten to eat anything for three whole days. Then the bourgeois spectre raised its head in another way. When the coffee was served, one of the young comrades, the son of a left wing lecturer at Hull University, drained his cup then stared into it, exclaiming:

“How remarkable - there are no coffee grounds in this cup!” At which point Miss Ellerby, still floating around the room like a pale ghost proffering rock buns, replied

“Ah, that’s because it’s Nescafe.” The junior academic looked around, wide-eyed.

“You mean … this is instant coffee?” Rock bun crumbs tumbled from my sagging jaw. Who, in my social sub class, in 1966, knew the luxury of ground coffee? In our house even Nescafe was seen as an aberration - the English working class drank tea, and gallons of it, and even instant coffee was seen as vaguely Bohemian by our elders. Then another happening dented my faith in the Communist Party’s avowed sincerity. One of our senior members had a part-time hobby running a left wing book shop in Hull. He supplemented his income from this with another part time job as a representative of a fruit importer on Hull’s Humber Street Fruit market. A year earlier we had all attended a march protesting at the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the evils of Apartheid in South Africa. My fruit-selling comrade offered to pick me up one night in his Rover 80 car to take me to a meeting. When I climbed into the front passenger seat, I looked back at the rear seats where a selection of colourful posters were laid out. They were advertising South African fruit, Cape Apples. My sense of socialist puritanism was aroused. I challenged him. How does this help Comrade Mandela? He pleaded with me to keep quiet. He said he had ‘no choice’ over the matter, that he simply had to deliver the posters to various greengrocers and fruiterers around Hull, and in any case, he had no responsibility for what was imported into the country. We travelled the rest of the way in silence. Was this the level of commitment to the cause? If so, my faith was being tested. I ended that year, 1966, by speaking at the Communist Party Conference in Leeds on behalf of Hull’s Young Communist League. It was a short but well-received speech, but as I stood at the podium, I could not help but look down at one of the main conference organisers in the front row. He was wearing the most blatant, ill-fitting ginger toupee I had ever seen. Thus was vanity added to my political misgivings.

Over the next three decades I went through all the socialist ranks; IS, the Socialist Worker’s Party, I had a short and pointless dalliance with Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, and as Thatcher tightened her evil grip on the land, I had a brief but dispiriting relationship with the Militant Tendency, even travelling at one time as far as Newcastle to hear Derek Hatton speak. During the final lost battle for the working class, the Miners’ Strike, I was as active on benefit events as I could be, mainly strumming a guitar with an agitprop skiffle group. (Ah, that showed them, eh, Comrade Lenin?)

WELCOME TO THE WASTELAND

And here we are in the Brave New World of the 21^stCentury. Everything thought to be remotely possible all those decades ago has been flushed down time’s swirling drain. There is one small sliver of driftwood still floating in the sewage; Jeremy Corbyn. But whatever he believes in has a snowball’s chance in hell of being made reality. The whole political and diplomatic world, each and every nation, has abandoned any notion of international law, decency or dialogue. This new world is divided into camps, each one a bastion of dismissive hatred. The United Nations has become an empty shell; a political corpse. Bigotry, racism and spite have supplanted hope and are now my country’s new lingua franca. In Syria, thanks to the past money-grabbing gluttony of men like Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, hospitals are being deliberately bombed, and even selfless humanitarian aid workers are being murdered from the skies. The power behind a Tornado jet fighter is the same force which drives ISIS: death, and death is the new cult of our age.

Historically, no matter which side of any political fence humanity found itself on, there was still a residue of justice and outrage which could be brought to bear against those who crossed the moral boundary In the gaps between each outrage countries bared their conscience until the next criminal period. We were appalled at the Holocaust and the Third Reich, and although 90% of the SS got away with their genocide, at least the truth of their actions was widely publicised and became a yardstick of horror. We were appalled at Vietnam, the Mai Lai massacre, napalm. We punished the military criminals of the Balkan Wars. We were aghast at Nixon’s support of Pinochet in Chile and Reagan’s Contras in South America. The list of what shocked us and what reminded us of something elusive called ‘decency’ is endless. But the tree of morality and integrity has shed its leaves; it is a rotting stump.

From New York to London, from Madrid to Moscow, 2016 has been the dawn of the Era of Lies, Lies and more Lies. Politicians can utter any untruth that comes into their heads, because such behaviour is no longer attended by shame. The UK’s departure from the EU has given international bigotry the green light for a new fascism. The western world has a new Goebbels: News International and Rupert Murdoch. His SS are the Daily Mail, the Express, and many other outlets in the long dark shadow of Fox News. Vladimir Putin’s megalomania is matched only by President-in-waiting Donald Trump’s crass, inhuman ignorance. Britain gives a clown, a professional buffoon, the role of Foreign Secretary. And as this new Rome burns all around us, the British Government offers a facile palliative; Grammar Schools. The rich get richer. And richer. And richer still. Tony Blair walks away from the spineless Chilcot Inquiry and continues to earn his dubious millions, grinning back at us over his shoulder. Black is white and white is black. Lies are truth and truth is lies. No-one can stop the tragedy of the Middle East, because no-one can point to any form of moral compass; that was crushed under the tank tracks a decade ago. Millions of desperate, hapless refugees wander the globe looking for something which no longer exists; compassion.

Could I, half a century ago, with my raised little fist and rusty hammer and sickle have ever imagined such a world as this? Is there any consolation for such depth of lost hope? Yes; it is this: I may only have, if I’m unlucky enough, another decade of life left. I will not have to see or experience the world to come; a dark, evil place, where a portal in time has opened in certain parts of the globe and through that ragged door the cruel warriors of the fourth century are storming through, oblivious to all the social progress we imagined we had made in the past 1600 years. So for all my beliefs and incinerated hope, what have I got?

Three fragile truths: Ground coffee, rock buns and conscience-free South African fruit.

↧

THE END

October 5, 2016, 12:32 pm

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THE END

The world does not owe me a living. I can’t cry in my beer and condemn those declining principles of my chosen profession and blame their dissolution for my own lack of fortune. The world changes; sometimes it improves, but unfortunately, in the main, it gets worse. What has happened to bring me to my current state of mind could have been avoided had I decided to abandon some of my own haplessly proclaimed paradigms. Therein lies the trouble with my fading generation: we always imagined that the behaviour and social interaction we grew up with would become the norm. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Modern society takes its behavioural cue from those who lead the pack. Today that means the burgeoning rich, the celebrities and the vacuous pillars of fashion. They underpin humanity’s basest emotions; greed, ignorance and selfishness, and today’s social climate, rotting with inequality and gormless diversion, is replete with all these faults.

When I was a kid in junior school I had conflicting ideas about what I’d like to be when I grew up. I’d dismissed the notion that I could ever be a scientist or an astronaut as the mathematics gene was certainly never part of my make-up. For one short summer in 1952 I took an interest in sport. First it was golf (we lived at the time next to a golf course) and then, at my school, Wold Road Juniors in Hull, I volunteered to play in the junior football team. I soon realised what a huge mistake that was. I knew nothing about the rules of golf or football, nor was I prepared to learn. I had all the gear, thanks to my parents; decent boots, the school kit in green, hefty shin pads. I even had my own football. Then, in the first real match we played on a Saturday morning, I scored a goal; not for our team, but an own goal, which led to our opponents winning 3-nil. The nastiness this engendered in the school changing room sent me home in tearful dismay. I never played football again, and have hated the game (and most other sports) ever since. Cricket was a baffling mystery, and my one appearance behind the wicket in 1954 resulted in my being knocked unconscious with a bat by a diminutive over-zealous batsman. The scar this left on the back of my skull is still there.

But there was something else I could do better than anyone else at school. I could write. I got a genuine buzz when my compositions were selected by the teacher to pin on the wall. There was something thrilling and engrossing about the process of filling pages with your own words. I knew how it all worked because even from a young age I read a lot. Admitted, it was mainly comics like The Eagle, Lion and the loftier, public-school flavoured Wizard and Hotspur. I loved the stories, the corny dialogue; all Germans seemed to yell was ‘Achtung!’ and ‘Himmel!’ and Red Indians bit the dust shouting ‘Aieee!’. There were smaller comics, graphic A5 sized stories of brave commando raids where men throwing grenades said things such as ‘Crikey, Smiffy - this’ll teach the German swine!’.

During my coming-of-age years in the Merchant Navy, between 1959-65, I was a voracious ready of science fiction, horror and fantasy. Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon, H. P. Lovecraft. I carried my tattered copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick from ship to ship.

Robert Sheckley

I read history, became utterly fascinated with 19^th century America. I knew all about the Lakota Sioux and the American Civil War. Then, in my 20s, after deciding that I too would be a writer, I took the plunge and wrote something for our local paper, The Hull Daily Mail. They printed two features, even including my pen and ink sketches as illustrations. By my late 20s I’d made it onto radio, with regular appearances

H. P. Lovecraft

on the BBC. Other newspapers and magazines bought my efforts. My boyhood dreams appeared to be coming true: I had seen my name in print and heard it on the radio and it felt good.

But all this kitchen-table typing was a long way from the ultimate dream of writing full-time. That branch of creativity for a builder’s labourer (which I was back in the 70s) remained an exclusive club. I remember the resentful atmosphere I experienced at an NUJ meeting in Hull. Because he thought I showed ‘promise’, an editor, Anthony Bambridge at the Sunday Observersupported my application to join the Hull branch of the NUJ as a freelance on a six month probationary basis. I knew the gathered hacks of the Hull Daily Mail were far from happy with this untutored usurper trying to get into the profession by the back door. My membership lasted six months and ended. I knew that ‘proper’ writers wrote books. My next project was to write the history of the Hull to Withernsea railway line, which had been shut by Beeching in 1966. The helpful David St. John Thomas of the publishers David & Charles, after perusing my trial chapters, dismissed my prose as ‘too flowery’. I didn’t understand what he meant back then. But I do now.

The kindly and communicative David St. John Thomas

Dispirited, I was overcome with grim reality. What success I’d had seemed to be just a fluke. I had two children to provide for and bring up, so the typewriter gathered dust and I abandoned my muse. It wasn’t until the 1980s when I began writing reviews and small items for the music press, The New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Sounds and others, that the bug bit me again.

I felt I could do it. By 1994I was back on the radio, and even managed three major features for the New Statesman. My first book came out; a history of British Rhythm and Blues, and I had made some valuable contacts. In 1997 I was working as a travelling salesman for a major cartography company whilst supplementing my income with writing. As the writing time ate into my selling time, my employers had no choice but to fire me. I wasn’t performing well; my targets were missed. So in September 1997 my boss called me into the boardroom and, although I knew I was facing disaster and possible penury, he gave me a pleasant surprise. He agreed that I was a ‘good writer’ and that this was what I should be doing. So he agreed that I should end my employment that day, but that he would continue paying my salary for three months, and that I could keep the car for three months and the company fax machine and mobile phone. He said “Go home and start your writing career.” As an example of corporate munificence and understanding, I doubt it has been matched anywhere in British industry. That man’s name was Paul Treadwell, and without his understanding, artistic nature and generosity, I would have struggled to survive those first 12 weeks. But I did, because he gave me a breathing space, and as a writer, I have survived ever since.

And now, as I approach 74, after faltering attempts at various genres, with numerous magazine features and several published books to my name (and a new one out in a month’s time), the nature of the 21^st century publishing and writing world has convinced me that the end has come. What interests an inquisitive writer with a penchant for research does not always interest publishers or their customers. Three decades ago there existed certain channels of communication between creative souls and those who provided their market. Those channels, which in many ways represented open minds and good manners, have been closed. After all my efforts to interest readers I only have one contact left, fortunately my editor at my current publisher, Constable & Robinson, who are now owned by Little, Brown Ltd., part of the huge Hachette Group. I have tried self-publishing with scant success. Without marketing, copy editors, bona fide proof reading and corporate support, self-publishing can only serve to seriously damage one’s reputation. It’s been fine for the four slim volumes of poetry I’ve issued, but anything more ambitious stands out as a badge of rank amateurism and therefore can be disastrous.

I’m tired of writing to editors with ideas and receiving no response, not even the courtesy of a dismissive, one-line e-mail. I’m weary of the massive efforts over the past five years trying to convince some TV producers and directors that I have valid ideas for a stunning documentary. In effect, I am disgusted by my sincere, well-mannered and repeated efforts to communicate with the writing world being ignored. Perhaps my meagre talent has run its course. Maybe my bank of ideas was nothing more than a Colt .45 revolver; six bullets in the chamber, all expended. Perhaps also my kind of writer is a creature of the past, a scribe of his time. Even the BBC, with whom I once enjoyed a good relationship, has also erected a wall around its commissioning editors. The only portal open these days to a writer is the ludicrously titled ‘BBC Writers Room’ which only accepts submissions for two short periods every year. Can one expect a critical rejection slip from such a source? Of course not. Those days of artistic interaction are long gone.

So like the unknown Bohemian painter in his attic, possessing no yardstick with which to measure his talent, I shall now put an end to the frustration and close the door. I count myself lucky that at least during my creative existence there have been people along the path who offered me a chance. I did get into print. I did broadcast, I even wrote for TV. I never expected fame, nor sought it, so the fact it remained elusive is of no consequence. I had a boyhood dream of becoming a writer and I fulfilled it. It’s been good, and evidence of my effort will remain on shelves long after I’m gone. So to all those who allowed that to happen, those decent souls who took the time to read, to listen and respond to communications, I raise my hat. My writing life is over, and I shall now devote what time I have left to music and gardening and the odd unpublished poem. At least those subjects do not require me to write to anyone, and what a blessed relief that will be.

Sitting outside the old British Embassy

in St. Petersburg 2005, dreaming of a

never t be made WW1 TV documentary.

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SUPERSTITION

is published on November 20 2016 by

Constable & Robinson / Little Brown, Ltd.

↧

Hypernormalisation

October 18, 2016, 4:13 am

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Hypernormalisation

We live in a strange, inexplicable world. Take this blog, for instance. Before the internet and the PC, those of us who sought to express something about our daily lives would have kept a diary. In that little book the seasons would roll and turn, our fortunes go up and down, and no-one else would read about it all perhaps until after our death. Now, with a blog, we are exposing ourselves to the wider world. With a few people we may be making ourselves popular; “Oh, that Roy, have you seenwhat he’s written now?” But as this self-exposure becomes addictive, we can also fuel hatred and misunderstanding. Blogging is the cyber equivalent of the mad bloke on the bus, sitting on the seat no-one else wants to sit on, ranting away in a loud voice. For a writer like myself, of course, blogging is a semantic gymnasium, somewhere we go every few days to exercise our keyboard skills. And unless we delete these pages for all time, they will remain in cyberspace as a shadow of who we were for eternity. Inevitably, this is all pointless, but it keeps us occupied, and that’s the whole idea. Why talk to people or write letters with pens on paper when you can sit here in stony, silent isolation.

Man of frightening vision: Adam Curtis

Watching Adam Curtis’s epic documentary Hypernormalisationon Sunday night on BBC I-Player was both a depressing yet enlightening experience. We’re all victims of a creepy system which dupes us into distracted inactivity. I have always maintained that organisations such as the Occupy Movement were well-meaning yet directionless. The fact that you wave a placard and erect a tent on Wall Street or outside St. Paul’s cathedral may well signify to a wider world that some of us are unhappy with the greed and inequality of the system, but what happens when you all pack up and go home? The answer is nothing, because there is no cohesive plan to follow once the chanting and the marching’s over.

I’ve done a fair bit of ranting and marching in my 73 years, and were it not for my arthritic knees I’d probably still give it a try. But at least back then we were more than angry; there was a plan, a manifesto, and parts of it were actually realised. I sign most on-line petitions run by organisations such as 38 Degrees and others because of the rare occasions (and they are rare) that they actually have any effect. I support the work of Amnesty International because they make me realise that I am privileged in my still existing British freedom to sit here by this screen without a death squad r some political thug police arriving at my door to put me in shackles. But as for the greater social injustice of this current corrupt and proto-fascist UK government, one has to wonder if the on-line bleating of us angry ‘oiks’ is ever noticed, except for being logged ready for that big round-up in the future. Since the abject failure of the Stop the War protest prior to the criminal Bush/Blair war on Iraq, all that’s happened is that Westminster veers further and further to the right. I’ve mentioned him before, but the spirit of Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels stalks the corridors of media and political power with a renewed vengeance. We live in the Age of Lies.

So perhaps the only distant light at the end of this long dark tunnel is Jeremy Corbyn and the Momentum movement, yet even then I’m clutching at straws. The bulk of the Labour Party and the whole media circus are determined to bring him down, and most of the time they succeed. If a tree falls in a forest and no-one hears it, it’ll be reported as Jermy Corbyn’s fault. Socialism is a very dirty word indeed. It might never pass through the lips of the massed rear guard of Blairites, as they consider the Parliamentary Labour Party to be their own fiefdom. It has nothing to do with the electorate who put them there. After all, if you’re a member of such an exclusive club, you don’t want to invite the car park attendant or the janitor in for a drink. The only time you need to speak with them is during an election.

All a disgruntled old lefty can do is imagine. Imagine if Corybyn’s main policies became the battering ram to drive a wedge through the nasty, xenophobic right wing greed and lies on the opposite benches. Imagine if the re-nationalisation of the railways and the taking back of Royal Mail, the restoration of the NHS and other such ideas suddenly saw the PLP rallying behind such policies, ideas which Keir Hardie, Bevan and Atlee would have recognised as fair and just. Imagine all those self-centred carping harpies who sit behind the Labour Leader suddenly decided to actually fight the Tories rather than ape them. But it’ll never happen. The only way forward is for the grass roots new Labour membership which grew so dramatically during the leadership election campaign to find a common voice, get out on the streets, cause a ruckus. That groundswell needs to break through the dead air between elections. Meanwhile, everyone’s back to staring at their I-Phones, tuning in to see the execrable Ed Balls on Strictly Come Prancing, and worrying about what’s happening to Bake-Off.

Right now, in various locations in the world, people who have written much lighter polemics than this are festering in dark cells, awaiting their next round of torture. The people of Aleppo are being cruelly bombed to a bloody pulp, and thousands of displaced refugees are either drowning or rotting in makeshift camps wondering what happened to dreams of a better life. And I’m sitting here with my apparent crocodile tears in comfort.

So Adam Curtis is right; we are living in a sinisterly constructed capitalist cyber world, where protest is simply a visual vehicle, something to be either denigrated or, should it become too dangerous, manipulated, as we’ve seen with the huge success of Vladimir Putin’s political alchemist, Sarkov. Another drone strike, another suicide bomb, another beheading. As long as it’s loud and colourful, it’ll make for good TV. Then we can get back to Gogglebox and our Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Elderly fogeys like me are simply little specks of crumbling rock poking through the sea of sewage. We’re deemed to be out of touch, our old ideas representations of failure. Post Brexit, in the era of Trump, the ultimate spectre of capitalism can reach an unashamed new peak as the new fascism. Close the borders. Shut down the state. Abandon welfare. Let them drown, let them starve. Kill off compassion. Pull up the drawbridge. Dump the disabled. The only thing which matters now is more and more money; not for us at the bottom of the festering heap, but those at the top, cajoled and massaged by their parliamentary lapdogs whose salaries are just pocket money, taxi fares to get them to their other occupations in banking, business, PR and the law.

People are angry, but they are not collectively angry. This individualist rage simply flickers on and off like mayflies in the summer grass. We need our anger to be like a swarm of locusts to strip the heavy-laden trees of the arrogant, greedy rich bare. But never mind; that’s just colourful imagery - it would make a good movie.

↧

WELCOME TO LIE-LIE LAND

November 6, 2016, 8:20 am

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≪ Previous: Hypernormalisation

WELCOME TO LIE-LIE LAND

Writing something like this seems a waste of time. It is ‘preaching to the converted’. In the current dark and threatening atmosphere with its sinister, uncertain future, it could also be dangerous. Yet when one becomes frustrated with the madness which is sweeping across the world, and your only outlet is the use of words, what is there left to do? I read today that in parts of Syria where ISIS rule, the heads of executed victims are left on walls, lined up so that children can retrieve them and use them to play football. This is the far, outer edge of the madness, yet it is not far removed from the spite, anger and irrational hatred which is being promulgated by Britain’s tabloid press.

Following David Cameron’s naïve and over-confident decision to offer Britain a referendum on Europe, the fires of simplistic populism continue to be stoked daily by a rabid media (owned mostly by tax-avoiding billionaires domiciled outside the UK) and a cabal of unscrupulous politicians with duplicitous agendas.

Thus, on June 23, the People had their say, and the victorious 52% no doubt expected us to be out of the EU the following day. Now we find ourselves in a new era; it’s called ‘Post Truth’. It’s been created by people like Donald Trump, (whose new supporters include the Ku Klux Klan) Nigel Farage and others, and it means that veracity (albeit never the sharpest knife in a politician’s toolbox) has been replaced by a loud and proud dishonesty. Now you can say what you like, invent bogus ‘facts’ on the hoof, and be as insultingly incorrect in all areas as you wish, providing this keeps your followers enraged. To maintain this carpet-biting indignation, all we need to do is ignore and refuse to read any genuine facts which oppose our vitriolic frame of mind. Image result for IMAGES tRUMP AND fARAGE

Image result for IMAGES tRUMP AND fARAGE

Image result for daily mail judges headline

For example on June 8^th, 2 weeks before the referendum, David Cameron’s father in law, Lord Astor, said “The EU referendum is merely advisory; it has no legal standing to force an exit. Parliament is still sovereign.” Perversely, it was that very ‘sovereignty’ which we’d never lost that everyone was voting to ‘restore’. When three Supreme Court judges are consulted on the Parliamentary Law relating to UK sovereignty, and come up with their hapless answer, they are dubbed ‘Enemies of The People’. Meanwhile, Cameron, in the wake of his badly conceived mess, has bitten the bullet and sloped off into a well-heeled country supper oblivion, whilst his austerity ‘slash and burn’ colleague Osborne is doing a well-paid ‘Blair’ on the US lecture circuit. The new and seemingly clueless Westminster cartel have been left to clean up their mess by pandering wherever possible to the bigotry and xenophobia which increases day by day.

So we are indeed at the top of a slippery slope into social and political darkness. Will this threat subside when we thankfully leave the EU and ‘take our country back’? (Which begs the question - where had it been, who took it?) I doubt it. Politics and democracy have been injected with a powerful, deadly poison; hate. It is the same virus which infected Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s. There is no longer any room for compassion or alternative opinions. The new, growing breed of trolls who infest social media will not tolerate the sentiments expressed here, for they see their ill-informed anonymous cowardice as some form of strength. However, we should remember the words of the American philosopher Eric Hoffer: “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

↧

Walking the dog

November 10, 2016, 7:28 am

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Walking the Dog

This was a short story entered for Amnesty International's

annual competition. It did very well in the top ten but of course, it didn't win.

So what else is there to do but put it on line;

someone out there might even enjoy reading it.

It was late September and there was a distinct chill in the air. The last train to St. Petersburg had left. It was midnight and the traveller stood in the dim yellow light on the deserted station platform. He found a rickety bench, placed his rucksack on the ground and sat wearily down. He’d made a mental note to designate this ramshackle, lonely outpost surrounded by forest as ‘Fiddler on the roof’ country. It would make a good yarn in the pub when he got home. Why anyone would alight from a train here was a puzzle, yet he’d had no choice. Tired and deep in thought over the fact that he now had seven long hours to wait until the next train, he was taken aback when an old man wearing an astrakhan hat and a heavy, grubby military greatcoat emerged from the gloom.

The traveller spoke very little Russian, so he was surprised when the old man addressed him in English.

“I see you are Britishki?” The traveller looked up and smiled.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Oh, the boots. And your backpack. It was a guess. Long time before train, huh?”

“Yes. Seven’o’clock. It’s very late. What are you doing out here?”

“I walk my dog. It’s peaceful when everyone is asleep.”

The traveller looked around, but could see no dog.

“Where is your dog?”

“He died.” said the old man, seating himself alongside the traveller on the bench.

“But … you say you’re walkingwith him?”

“Ah, yes. Do not be confused. I am walking with his memory. Leo was a lovely golden Labrador, my good friend for many years, and when I think of him it gives me peace.”

The traveller was momentarily lost for words. He took out his cigarettes and offered one to the old man. He accepted and they lit up.

“What caused you to miss your train?”

“My visa was out of order. I wanted to go to Tallin but the guard said if I did I would need a new visa to return to St. Petersburg, so I left the train, but now I must wait all this time.”

“Ah yes, of course, of course. Estonia is now another country. It used to be part of the USSR.”

The traveller peered into the darkness. Above, the sharp, bright stars twinkled through scattered clouds.

“What place is this?”

The old man blew out smoke and gestured into the night, waving his hand.

“The town is called Kingisepp. This station was built when the Tsar was on the throne. It could do with a coat of paint. The last time it was decorated was when Stalin passed through.”

“What was it like?” asked the traveller.

“What was what like?”

“Well, do you remember those days, Stalin, Kruschev?”

“Of course. I am 89 years old. I remember a lot of things. Stalin? Some idolised him. Others feared him. He killed my wife.” The traveller gave a sharp intake of breath.

“Really? How did -”

“Oh, you don’t want to know that. It’s a long time ago.”

“Well, if you’d rather not talk about it …”

“How old are you, son?”

“I’m 50. Why?”

“Ah, you look so much younger. Did you ever fight in a war?”

The traveller shook his head and faintly smiled.

“Thankfully, no. And I wouldn’t like to.”

“Stalin killed my wife, Katya, because she spoke English fluently. It was a dangerous talent; speaking English got you suspected as a spy. Her parents were language teachers.”

“So who took her from you? The KGB?”

“No. We still had the Cheka in 1952. I was relieved when she died in prison.”

“Relieved? Weren’t you sad or angry?”

“Yes, both of those, but relieved, because I knew then she was at peace. She was only nineteen when the siege of Leningrad ended. They gave her the Order of Lenin for outstanding services to the State. She had saved many comrades, and especially children. But that didn’t save her. She risked her life crossing Lake Ladoga bringing supplies over the ice, and at one time she manned the anti-aircraft guns outside St. Isaac’s Cathedral. And do you know what her favourite word was?”

“Please tell me …”

“My name. I was in the Red Army bringing the trucks over the lake when I met her. She was sat one night late in ’43 when the convoy stopped. She was cross-legged by a fire. She was meditating; you know, like one of those Tibetan or Indian monks. But I was impatient. It was a cold dark night and I said ‘let’s get a move on, girl!’ and she opened her eyes and said ‘What is your name, comrade?’ And I said ‘Vladimir’. She said ‘I will come now, but you must always set aside time for peace, comrade. War is an interruption, peace, if we choose it, is forever.’”

“So why was your name her favourite word?”

The old man looked up at the sky.

“May I have another cigarette?” The traveller lit two up and passed one over. The old man pointed at the stars.

“You know about our space station up there?” The traveller nodded.

“Yes … isn’t it called ‘Mir’?”

“Yes. In the modern Russian language the word 'mir' has two different meanings. It can also mean either 'peace' or 'the world’. But before the Revolution it also meant ‘society’.”

The traveller took a long draw on his cigarette and turning to the old man, smiled.

“Yes, but didn’t Tolstoy name his great work War and Peace?”

“Yes,” replied the old man, ‘Voyná i mir’.”

“But that was … what, decadesbefore the Revolution …”

“1869. So I think Tolstoy actually meant his book to be called ‘War and Society’.”

The traveller gently laughed. “That’s an intriguing thought. But what about your name?”

“Ah, there you have it. Vladimir is a popular Russian name and it means ‘The one who owns the world’ It is made up from two Russian words: 'vladet' - which in English means 'to possess' and 'mir' - 'the world.' So when I married my peace-loving Katya, I told her she was my world and that I was proud to possess her.”

“Why was she arrested?”

“Oh, some jealous informer in Leningrad said she’d received some illegal literature from the west. Something Stalin’s blockheads couldn’t understand. Religion.”

“I see, what Marx called the ‘opium of the people’?”

“Oh, but it wasn’t anything Russian, you see. We married just after the war. She’d become a Buddhist. The Cheka’s illiterate goons had no idea what to do with this. The Orthodox Church was bad enough but this was something else. As far as they were concerned, she’d been using Buddhism as a cover for espionage. I was out of town when they came for her. When I got back to our apartment it had been ransacked. She was in prison for a few weeks then they moved her to a gulag. She died on her 31st birthday in 1956, but a fellow prisoner visited me in 1960 and gave me a letter Katya had written to me.”

The traveller felt as if he had walked into a nocturnal tragedy, an unexpected drama which felt unreal. Somewhere in the dark woods an owl hooted. He glanced up at the sky; the clouds had gone and the stars shone brightly. His curiosity was running riot now.

“Am I being too inquisitive, but … what did she write?”

Vladimir stubbed out his cigarette on the arm of the bench and delved within his greatcoat, producing a yellowing, scruffy envelope held together with sellotape. From it he took the faded, flimsy pages and began to read aloud in a faltering voice.

“We must always remember, Vladimir, that war and misunderstanding are like weeds in a cornfield. The corn is peace, and peace is the harvest. It is a gift which we give ourselves, even when the guns are firing. War and conflict comes from without; peace comes from within, and what happens outside cannot touch it. Remember this always; we fought and struggled in the darkness of those nights so that our comrades and their children could enjoy peace in the daylight.”

He folded the letter, replaced in in the envelope and returned it to his coat. The two men sat in silence for a while, then Vladimir stood and shook the traveller’s hand.

“I wish you peace, my British friend. Now I must walk my dog.” At that, he shuffled off into the surrounding gloom.

The traveller lit another cigarette. He stared across the silent railway track and saw something moving. The weak light from the platform hardly stretched that far. Yet for a brief moment his heart raced as a golden Labrador vanished into the woods.

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Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End Of Love

November 11, 2016, 8:27 am

≫ Next: Post Brexit, Post Trump

≪ Previous: Walking the dog

With Bowie and others leaving us, now the great Mr. Cohen, 2016 seems to be turning out to be the year decency, compassion, creative dialogue and hope have all been trashed. Best then to look back at the decent decades, the times when everything good seemed possible. This is just a reminder.

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Post Brexit, Post Trump

November 12, 2016, 10:53 am

≫ Next: Sergeant Reaper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

≪ Previous: Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End Of Love

Image result for Images quotes Leonard Cohen

If politics and economics were a sport,

We would congratulate the winner and shake hands.

But this is not sport. These are the whips of life

Which scar our backs.

So let us draw a line under hatred.

I know how you voted.

You know how I voted.

You won, I lost.

To the victor the spoils.

I hope that everything you wished for

Will be yours. This I accept.

Our mundane lives remain the same.

Before this battle, we may well have been friends.

Let us hope that this can still remain.

We are bound by our traditions,

By whatever happens next,

And I shall live with this, as will you.

The propaganda I believed

Is as faulty as yours,

The promises equally empty on both sides.

But we are not politicians, economists or statesmen.

We’re just the working class;

Bushy tailed, naïve and bright-eyed.

Neither Trump nor Theresa or Mr. Juncker

Know anything real about our lives.

As with all the rich, they see us only as a distant shadow,

A tool to use to maintain their wealth.

Neither you or I have any idea

Or control on what the future holds

We only have one choice;

No matter how we voted,

We must face the consequences together,

With understanding, not hate.

For whilst we squabble, they grow

More powerful and richer by the day.

‘Divide and Rule’ makes them the victors

And us the fools.

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Sergeant Reaper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

November 14, 2016, 3:25 am

≫ Next: TABULA RASA

≪ Previous: Post Brexit, Post Trump

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TABULA RASA

November 20, 2016, 12:48 pm

≫ Next: DEFEND OUR NATIONAL TREASURE

≪ Previous: Sergeant Reaper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

TABULA RASA

The concept of “Tabula Rasa” -- the Latin term for “Blank Slate” -- proposed that a child's mind was like a blank sheet of paper, void of all reason and knowledge. An idea hugely popular at the height of Victoria’s empire, this seems to be current once again, but now we’re all children, and our ‘betters’ are the corporate rich. Knowledge, and especially reason, is not for ‘the likes of us’; the blue collar oiks, the low incomed, the labouring masses. 2016 can be seen as a milestone in social, economic and political history, as this has been the year when knowledge and reason were finally flushed down the corporate toilet.

What was it, all those decades ago, that made us think we could change the world? Was it inspiration from history? Did we look back to events such as the French and Russian revolutions and imagine something similar, albeit scaled down, might be possible? Nazis and fascists were bitterly fought and defeated. The tyrannical terror of Stalin’s USSR and his perversion of ‘socialism’ crumbled with the Berlin Wall. Did we look at America’s Civil Rights movement or the huge upsurge of indignation over the Vietnam war, and later, Obama’s hopeful slogan ‘Yes we can’ and think ‘yes; humanity can progress …’

Those of us much older in the UK fondly recalled 1945 and the founding of the Welfare State and the NHS. Such achievements were social monuments, forever, we imagined, to remain unchallenged. Ghandi took back India from its imperial masters with non-violence. Even Nelson Mandela was freed in the end, after all those incarcerated years during which we campaigned and protested. Yes, we travelled, bought wine, became familiar with better food and naively imagined that the dark clouds of past oppressive decades had been swept away by our imagined ‘blue sky’ thinking.

But darkness has always been more all-consuming and powerful than our hard-won little shafts of light. The darkness stood back and let us fool ourselves. And oh, how we’ve been fooled. Capitalism is like a big garden, and there, in the far corner beneath the bramble bushes, it has allowed us, like little children, to play, to act out our leftie-liberal-luvvie fantasies whilst it sniggered behind our backs as it quietly dug up the flowerbeds, took away our slide and paddling pool and privatised the greenhouse and the garden shed. Now they’ve burned the bramble bushes, smacked us on the legs and called us indoors, never to be let out again. We’ve been sent to our rooms, locked in, the keys thrown away. We have been very, very naughty and as the saying goes, children must be seen but not heard.

It’s time to ask ourselves some hard questions. Did Sting, singing ‘They Dance Alone’ in Santiago bring back the ‘disappeared’ murdered by Pinochet? Did Elvis Costello singing ‘Shipbuilding’ prevent the Falklands War or raise the Belgrano? Has any line of any song by Billy Bragg ever made a difference? Did any speech by any actor or celebrity with a left-leaning conscience ever make a government listen? Were the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Crass, Gang of Four or any other entertainment act produce anything but a faint glow of satisfaction among a narrow band of demonstrators? The Stop the War Coalition, CND, Rock Against Racism, the Occupy Movement … have any of these projects ever improved the world and moved it forward? What has the left/liberal/luvvie ‘progressive’ Guardian-reading Corbynista alliance produced? Very little. We’re a sideshow, something the corporate elite see as a social safety valve. Let them campaign, let them protest, blow off steam. The Establishment’s position is easy: the worse they act, the more greedy and inhuman they become, the more the plebs can shout and march; it makes the world look as if something’s happening.

Well, now something hashappened, and it’s bigger, darker and more dangerous than anything conceived even by Thatcher, Reagan, Bush or Blair. Our corporate rulers have put their foot down, cranked up their media hate mill and gone all out to establish the world they’ve dreamed of, a world they last enjoyed in 1933-45. It began with a steady drip-feed of propaganda. It followed sinister and cynical plan. First, you take more away from the already dispossessed poor, and blame liberal politicians for the result. Then you blame the poor for their own poverty whilst pointing out that some of them still have the goods you sold them - 40 inch TV sets and I-Phones. You castigate them for not having work. The benefits system and the NHS, which the electorate have paid for through tax and National Insurance, is re-interpreted as scrounging and waste. As the ill-informed victims squirm under the yoke of austerity, an austerity inflicted with one purpose - to keep the rich rich, and make them even richer, you point out that all this anguish is the fault of governments, local councils, trade unions, in fact any social body which does not exist to make a profit. Because you own 95% of the celebrity-infused vacuous media which these hapless dupes consume every day, your message is powerful enough to work. And there is a grain of truth in it. The corrupt political elite which you elect to ‘advance’ society is made up of the very people who propagate the propaganda. Very few so-called ‘politicians’ are in the game to improve our lot; they are passengers on the same gravy train which benefits from the mess they cause, their disaster which the electorate are blamed for. Anyone educated at Eton knows the definition of a nation’s economy; it’s your new toy box now that your Nanny’s been sent home.

With the irresistible rise of Donald Trump, a man born with a whole canteen of gold cutlery in his rancid mouth, and his chosen gang of horror-show senators, it seems likely that the new landscape of bigotry, deliberate ignorance, aggressive irrationality and racism will become the new norm over the next decade. Aided by rapacious, greed-driven and duplicitous pocket-lining UK politicians from the Tory Party to Nigel Farage, the path is being cleared for the destruction of the European Union, which, with all its faults, has at least prevented a European war since 1945. The Dutch, Belgian and French proto Nazis are on the march. Since Britain’s Brexit vote the population have become victims of the classic right wing law of success; divide and rule. Now 52% of the population who voted leave loathe and detest the 48% who voted stay. It’s OK to hate people, and FaceBook and Twitter lets you do it. Before the Anschluss,the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in March 1938, the Jews may have been disliked, but the arrival of Hitler and Himmler gave the population the green light for absolute hatred, resulting in harmless, educated elderly men and women being forced to scrub the streets and clean toilets; because they were slightly ‘different’. Let us not kid ourselves; that same dark undercurrent is now reaching boiling point in Britain.

In 1941 Adolf Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion - the intended invasion of Britain - to concentrate on his biggest error - the invasion of the USSR. Yet let’s sit back in dismay as his foul philosophy rises from the ashes of 1945 with Marine Le Pen. The Third Reich’s troops only got as far as the Channel Islands, but 70 years on, the esprit de corps of the Waffen-SS is already here; its ubermensch spectre has taken root in the working class. Compassion, rationality and dialogue are dead. Lies are truth, truth is lies. It’s official, because The Daily Mail, The Express and The Sun give the people what they want. Hate is a hungry fire, and requires plenty of fuel. The garden has been burned; we shall now live by a new creed, last seen on the barracks walls of Dachau; Sympathy is weakness.

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