Here we are on the 27th and it is all over bar the shouting and the singing of the fat lady. All that overindulgence will be replaced with a yearning for something other than turkey, and as the mail comes back to life tomorrow, the bills will trickle in along with the notifications of the January sales. The shops will soon be full again, with people trying to exchange things that are too small, the wrong colour or just in utter bad taste. Within a day or two though, some will be bracing themselves for the last night of the year - a chance to wear silly clothes and to drink to ridiculous excess before making resolutions that are repeats of the previous year's, and then 2010 will begin the teenies in an optimistic way, short lived though that might be.
It is a scary thought that I have seen (just), seven decades so far and next week it will be eight. I can't say that any of them was remarkable, though the changes that have taken place have been incredible. In my lifetime virtually everything has changed and not all of it for the worse. I have lived through most of the history of pop music for example. I was born at a good time for that, being an incipient teen when the Beatles and the rest of those bands raised pop music into a wonderfully creative and original art form. Since then, the likes of Simon Cowell has managed to transform it into mass produced plastic pap, an artistic equivalent to Christmas cracker contents made in China. Pretty soon the people's Republic will be exporting our entertainment along with everything else that is cheap and nasty.
I have seen the rise in Information Technology from the first hand held calculators to the amazing if frustrating broadband internet connections that we now take for granted. Photography, access to music, you name it, has all been transformed by easy access for everyone, and now most people have digital cameras, iPods and mobile phones, none of which was even conceivable when I was a child. Now of course it is hard to find something to strive for. When everyone has everything they want, where do we go from there?
I was dragged up to believe that if you wanted something, you saved for it and debt was seen as unacceptable. Such training has a way of sticking and even now I hate owing anyone anything. I guess that I am fortunate that I have no debts but I have always tried to live within my means. Now people are encouraged to take on debt by the banks and credit card companies, to the extent that they are taking on new debts in order to pay off the ones they already have. It is no wonder that our economy is in such a bad state. Capitalism seems to have reached it's logical conclusion. Infinite growth is neither possible nor desirable.
Well there - probably my last rant of the year. I have been less than regular lately and must endeavour to be more organised with my life. Gosh that sounds like a resolution of the kind that I never make.
Sunday 27 December 2009
Wednesday 23 December 2009
Bah Humbug
It has been a few days since I wrote and not much has gone on that is worth commenting on. Though having said that, the climate summit in Copenhagen came to a predictable end with no-one really giving anything away and with all vested interests well protected. The rich nations, as well as China, pulled up the ladder and declared that we are ok Jack! What did anyone expect them to do?
Abdul Dinnerjacket has assured us all that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear trigger, despite evidence to the contrary, and we are supposed to believe that this man who openly declared a desire to erase Israel from the map, has peaceful and honourable intentions. What is honourable to some is clearly not understood by others. For some it is honourable to murder their wives and daughters in the name of honour, simply because they have accepted and adopted the customs of the country in which they have found themselves. Only recently was a young Muslim girl killed by her father to protect the honour of the family. How can anyone with a civilised bone in their body see any sense or justification for that?
It is no surprise that the middle eastern problem has not gone away. Can it ever? The two worlds are so far apart in so many ways that there seems little middle ground. Perhaps the solution would be to build a wall around the middle east and fill it with the surplus water from the melting of the ice caps.
On the home front the final run down towards the most silly day of the year has begun. Money has been spent, fridges and freezers are stuffed and blood alcohol levels are reaching saturation point. The TV is bursting with pap and ready to deliver the usual dreary mass of crap to millions of dispeptic sleepers and bored children. Here we will be cut off from the mainland for a whole day and even the Curry houses will close, not out of respect for the Christian festival but because there will be no takers; and so the unregistered and nameless thousands of employees can take a break from their less than minimum waged jobs, and be seen in the streets, no-one will care.
If you are reading this then i hope that you have a good holiday and, in the words of the late great Dave Allen, May your god go with you.
Abdul Dinnerjacket has assured us all that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear trigger, despite evidence to the contrary, and we are supposed to believe that this man who openly declared a desire to erase Israel from the map, has peaceful and honourable intentions. What is honourable to some is clearly not understood by others. For some it is honourable to murder their wives and daughters in the name of honour, simply because they have accepted and adopted the customs of the country in which they have found themselves. Only recently was a young Muslim girl killed by her father to protect the honour of the family. How can anyone with a civilised bone in their body see any sense or justification for that?
It is no surprise that the middle eastern problem has not gone away. Can it ever? The two worlds are so far apart in so many ways that there seems little middle ground. Perhaps the solution would be to build a wall around the middle east and fill it with the surplus water from the melting of the ice caps.
On the home front the final run down towards the most silly day of the year has begun. Money has been spent, fridges and freezers are stuffed and blood alcohol levels are reaching saturation point. The TV is bursting with pap and ready to deliver the usual dreary mass of crap to millions of dispeptic sleepers and bored children. Here we will be cut off from the mainland for a whole day and even the Curry houses will close, not out of respect for the Christian festival but because there will be no takers; and so the unregistered and nameless thousands of employees can take a break from their less than minimum waged jobs, and be seen in the streets, no-one will care.
If you are reading this then i hope that you have a good holiday and, in the words of the late great Dave Allen, May your god go with you.
Thursday 17 December 2009
Time passes - listen, time passes.
Coming from a dysfunctional family has its advantages, and my peculiar childhood prepared me for most of life's dissapointments. I learned very early in life to be self contained, knowing that the vast majority of people can only be relied upon to let you down. People say that I am a pessimist but I disagree. I prefer to think of myself as being a pragmatist or a realist. However none of that matters to anyone but myself and is not what I intended to write about. I was thinking about growing up with my overbearing father who, would never allow us to waste any time. If we were sitting around doing nothing, we were committing a sin, though that is a word he'd never use. We had to be occupied all of the time. Only he was allowed to fall asleep in front of the TV because only he was in need of resting his eyes. We were expected to be up early and actively doing something all of the day until sent to bed. I suppose it was a clever way of getting us out of the house because it worked.
Wasting time is a strange idea and means different things to different people. Many have a very powerful work ethic and unless they are redecorating the house for the nth time, or cleaning or filling in their time in a practical manner they are very uncomfortable. It is believed by some that kids today waste time sitting in front of computer games or TV, but what choice do they have? Freedom of children has been much curtailed by health and safety regulations as well as the threat of a paedophile on every corner, and so thanks to the media and paranoid parents, kids are kept off the streets and have to find ways of filling their days
Each of us can expect to experience a finite stretch of time and it is up to us how we use that time. It could be said that much of what we do is a waste of time. Cleaning the house, raking leaves, washing, ironing etc are all pretty thankless tasks, all of which need repeating over and over again and yet we still do them. A walk around the block achieves nothing and yet it can be pleasant.
I read a lot and if anything can be costrued as a waste of time it has to be reading novels. Filling our imaginations with other peoples fantasies achieves nothing at all and yet millions of people do it. In the eyes of others the time could be better spent, and perhaps it could but I don't care.
There comes a time in life when one has achieved everything that one is likely to. After that most of what we do is a pretty futile anyway and so whatever we do is self indulgent and of little value to anyone. Ironically, the less purpose one has the longer the days seem to be while the years seem to vanish like the last grain in the hourglass. Friends either pass away or pass on and we sit back on the timeline in anticipation of hitting the buffers.
My father spent his last years doing nothing. He'd sit in his chair, staring out of the window, read a book or vanish into his bedroom to drown himself is whisky and loud music probably ruing the life that he has misspent. He had never travelled of his own volition, never seen a live concert or visited an art gallery of the theatre. He's never driven a car or enjoyed the love and respect of his children or grandchildren. When I think that I am wasting time, and i do so a lot, I think of him and what he missed in his life, and as I approach the age when he died, and his father before him, I hope that at least some of my time has been well spent.
Wasting time is a strange idea and means different things to different people. Many have a very powerful work ethic and unless they are redecorating the house for the nth time, or cleaning or filling in their time in a practical manner they are very uncomfortable. It is believed by some that kids today waste time sitting in front of computer games or TV, but what choice do they have? Freedom of children has been much curtailed by health and safety regulations as well as the threat of a paedophile on every corner, and so thanks to the media and paranoid parents, kids are kept off the streets and have to find ways of filling their days
Each of us can expect to experience a finite stretch of time and it is up to us how we use that time. It could be said that much of what we do is a waste of time. Cleaning the house, raking leaves, washing, ironing etc are all pretty thankless tasks, all of which need repeating over and over again and yet we still do them. A walk around the block achieves nothing and yet it can be pleasant.
I read a lot and if anything can be costrued as a waste of time it has to be reading novels. Filling our imaginations with other peoples fantasies achieves nothing at all and yet millions of people do it. In the eyes of others the time could be better spent, and perhaps it could but I don't care.
There comes a time in life when one has achieved everything that one is likely to. After that most of what we do is a pretty futile anyway and so whatever we do is self indulgent and of little value to anyone. Ironically, the less purpose one has the longer the days seem to be while the years seem to vanish like the last grain in the hourglass. Friends either pass away or pass on and we sit back on the timeline in anticipation of hitting the buffers.
My father spent his last years doing nothing. He'd sit in his chair, staring out of the window, read a book or vanish into his bedroom to drown himself is whisky and loud music probably ruing the life that he has misspent. He had never travelled of his own volition, never seen a live concert or visited an art gallery of the theatre. He's never driven a car or enjoyed the love and respect of his children or grandchildren. When I think that I am wasting time, and i do so a lot, I think of him and what he missed in his life, and as I approach the age when he died, and his father before him, I hope that at least some of my time has been well spent.
Tuesday 15 December 2009
December days
Today is one of those days that never gets light. I loathe December more than any other month I think, though it does have one saving grace and that is the winter solstice - beyond that the days get longer again.
The lemmings are all out spending money that they haven't got on things that no-one needs, stocking larders to bursting point with food that will largely go to waste, and all of this for one day that has no meaning whatever for most of those that celebrate it.
There is an irony in that a very important conference of climate change is going on while houses, streets and shops are festooned with the tacky and tasteless light shows that have carbon footprints as big as a family car, while merely contributing light pollution to our already overlit streets. The same people that spend a whole year switching off lights wherever they go will be negating those actions with jolly fat santas in red suits flashing merry xmas to one and all.
Houses are already filling with paper and card as the christmas card barrage enters its final days. I suppose at least people who were thought dead put up their heads momentarily and get added once more to that inexorable list of those who we simply must send cards to.
Looking on the bright side - we have the coldest months yet to come and this year I got my cheque for heating allowance, so perhaps I can throw a few extra twigs onto the fire and wish you all a happy humbug!
The lemmings are all out spending money that they haven't got on things that no-one needs, stocking larders to bursting point with food that will largely go to waste, and all of this for one day that has no meaning whatever for most of those that celebrate it.
There is an irony in that a very important conference of climate change is going on while houses, streets and shops are festooned with the tacky and tasteless light shows that have carbon footprints as big as a family car, while merely contributing light pollution to our already overlit streets. The same people that spend a whole year switching off lights wherever they go will be negating those actions with jolly fat santas in red suits flashing merry xmas to one and all.
Houses are already filling with paper and card as the christmas card barrage enters its final days. I suppose at least people who were thought dead put up their heads momentarily and get added once more to that inexorable list of those who we simply must send cards to.
Looking on the bright side - we have the coldest months yet to come and this year I got my cheque for heating allowance, so perhaps I can throw a few extra twigs onto the fire and wish you all a happy humbug!
Tuesday 8 December 2009
Save the planet?
Well the Copenhagen summit is in progress and highly paid politicians and boffins will sit around in not very smoke filled rooms, pontification on the state of the environment. At the end of it I predict that there will be no concensus and the only step towards reducing greenhouse gases will be to increase the costs of energy.
There was a woman on TV last night saying that she had turned vegetarian in order to save the planet! Now while I am aware of the importance of flatulent cattle and their role in climate change, I cannot see how any of us can save the planet! It isn't the planet that is in danger, it is the human race that is, and not just through climate change.
One of the biggest producers of methane, possibly the greater of the greenhouse gases, are the termites and they have been around a lot longer than we have. Nobody talks about extermination of insects in order to save the planet.
It wouldn't surprise me if the whole global warming issue was merely a political tool. People are more easily led by the nose when they are scared. Oil and gas are dwindling resources and unless we cut down on their use there will be unprecedented crises in the future with the rich and powerful riding roughshod over the poorer nations in the fight for the last drops of the stuff. So scare people now, increase the prices to the consumers and people just might travel less and sit in cold houses through the winter. As always it will be the less well off that will suffer, the bankers and their like don't notice the prices of the energy that they use, while those at the base of the pecking order do. Even a small increase in prices makes a big difference to the less well off.
There can be no turning back. We are a world that runs on fuels that produce Carbon Dioxide. Efforts to utilize renewable energy are largely supressed by the oil industry, which in turn is governed by enormously wealthy individuals who wield the real power in the world today. If the fuel runs out then life as we know it Jim, will come to an end. If it doesn't then perhaps the planet will get warmer, maybe even considerably so. The worst that can happen to the planet is that it might just sterilise it's surface and start all over again.
There was a woman on TV last night saying that she had turned vegetarian in order to save the planet! Now while I am aware of the importance of flatulent cattle and their role in climate change, I cannot see how any of us can save the planet! It isn't the planet that is in danger, it is the human race that is, and not just through climate change.
One of the biggest producers of methane, possibly the greater of the greenhouse gases, are the termites and they have been around a lot longer than we have. Nobody talks about extermination of insects in order to save the planet.
It wouldn't surprise me if the whole global warming issue was merely a political tool. People are more easily led by the nose when they are scared. Oil and gas are dwindling resources and unless we cut down on their use there will be unprecedented crises in the future with the rich and powerful riding roughshod over the poorer nations in the fight for the last drops of the stuff. So scare people now, increase the prices to the consumers and people just might travel less and sit in cold houses through the winter. As always it will be the less well off that will suffer, the bankers and their like don't notice the prices of the energy that they use, while those at the base of the pecking order do. Even a small increase in prices makes a big difference to the less well off.
There can be no turning back. We are a world that runs on fuels that produce Carbon Dioxide. Efforts to utilize renewable energy are largely supressed by the oil industry, which in turn is governed by enormously wealthy individuals who wield the real power in the world today. If the fuel runs out then life as we know it Jim, will come to an end. If it doesn't then perhaps the planet will get warmer, maybe even considerably so. The worst that can happen to the planet is that it might just sterilise it's surface and start all over again.
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