Blackbird no longer singing

I am very fortunate. I enjoy freedoms that are denied to so many others, and that is a sadness. I am sitting here listening to Mahler intermingled with birdsong from the garden just outside my window and contemplating what to write about. I have no real problems or worries in my life and yet I feel ill at ease.
"Life is nasty, brutish and short." I was reminded of that recently. For weeks, a pair of blackbirds have been building their nest in a bush by my front door. They laid a clutch of four eggs and the female has patiently sat, waiting for her brood to hatch and for her family line to continue. Such tame birds: when not on her nest she would wander around looking for food, more or less ignoring me, as I appeared no threat to her. This morning I looked into the nest, and found that the eggs have indeed hatched, and the corpses of her little brood lie cold in the remnants of the shell. The female has vanished, no doubt the victim of a neighbourhood cat or a bird of prey. I confess a sadness that is not altogether rational, and have been contemplating mortality in more general terms.
I am at a time in life when my limited range of skills and talents have less and less value. There is not much that I can do with a poorly equipped toolkit and I seem to have slipped into an uneasy contentment, that disturbs me on a more or less daily basis. I watched Morgan Freeman and jack Nicholson in The Bucket List, the other day and feel the need to perhaps produce a bucket list of my own, while I still can; and maybe to amend that list on a week by week basis. Long term goals have never been my forte, and I have never been good at resolution keeping either, but again, this is not the first time, I want to make more of what days i have left. I have given this a little thought and by recording items here, at least I have a reference point and others might wish to add items to my list. So far I have the following ;-

To learn a poem - maybe more than one
To make something with my hands.
To write a short story.
To paint and actually finish a picture.
To learn a new skill.
To do something good for somoeone else.
To meet someone new.

The last one will probably be my greatest challenge as I am not at all good at socialising any more and have lost the need for the company of others.
I will do my best to begin ticking things off the list, as and when and if I can achieve those goals. In the meantime, life passes by and I will probably continue to make little impact on the world as a whole. I hope that my comfortable existence continues as it is, at least for now, but like the blackbird, I have no idea what is coming around the next corner.

Never never land

When I was a kid, and it doesn't seem that long ago, if you wanted something, you paid for it with cash. If you hadn't enough cash, you couldn't have it and so you saved your pennies and halfpennies, your threepences and tanners, your bobs and two bobs, half crowns and so on until you could afford to pay. That way you knew the value of something and were more likely to take care of it. Of course there was hire purchase available, where you borrowed and paid off your debt week by week, but we were encouraged not to do that. Hire purchase was called the "Never never" for a good reason, and its use was a step on the road to financial disaster.
How the world has changed. Now we all have credit cards and many people are up to their necks in debts that they may never pay off. I know some whose credit cards are tiered so that each one is used to pay off the debt on the previous one. We borrow money for mortgages, the country borrows money for everything it seems, and at the neck of all this lies the poison that is our system. The real parasites of this world are not those claiming benefits, or making a few pounds on the side that the tax man does not see, but those who sit in plush offices, manipulating the markets, buying and selling debts, trading in things that do not even exist, gambling with money that belongs to someone else, secure in the knowledge that their six figure bonuses and huge profits on the side will be protected, however much they lose.
The wealthiest group in the world are those who make nothing. It is the greed of the hedge fund managers and their like, that allowed people with no income to borrow ludicrous amounts of money and thus produced the avalanche of financial crises that we are all now experiencing. The present government of course blame the previous one, but they know deep down that in such a poorly regulated system, no government can keep check on the criminal activity of the bankers that bleed us dry every moment of every day.
I have savings and no debts, but of course that is a disadvantage. My savings decrease in value and the fact that I own my house means that I will probably have to use that to fund any care that I need in my old age. Those who reach their dotage in debt, will of course have everything paid for them, and i suspect that in not many years to come, they will be the vast majority.

we're all just bricks in the wall.

The Wall, arguably, Roger Waters' magnum opus, is a strange creation. It could be viewed as an introspective whinge about the hard life that has led to his millionaire status. There can be few people that have made so much cash out of expressing their hatred for the way that they were brought up and in particular for their mother.
However, the stage show was wonderful. Waters remains a consummate showman and has put together a remarkable staging of his work. His vast ego remains intact, as does his musical ability and incredible sense of timing.
I saw this production at the O2 last weekend, and was impressed by the venue almost as much as by the performance. I was less impressed by a number of my fellow human beings however. Having paid a minimum of seventy five pounds for a seat, one might imagine that people would want to enjoy every last second of the performance; alas there are many who find the urge to drink copious amounts of alcohol, far more important, regardless of whose pleasure they may be disrupting. To drink oneself silly is of course a human right (allegedly), but to spill expensive lager , to tread on the feet, and to block the view of fellow concertgoers is to my old fashioned way of thinking, totally unacceptable. Why pay such sums of money for a ticket only to spend the whole evening walking to the bar or the toilet?
Once again, I found myself despising the behaviour of my fellow man, reinforcing my own unsociability. Waters creates a wall between himself and the audience; and to a great extent I can see where he is coming from.

Bin and Gone

It seems that the balance of world peace lies once again in the hands of two groups of religious fanatics. Watching the celebrations in New York yesterday, though understandable was quite nauseating. Ok so Bin Laden, a thoroughly disturbed individual, is dead, but the group that he represents is not and someone will rise to take his place and the rest of us will wait with bated breath to discover the horrors that the Arab world will unleash on the west. His assassination will appease the republican morons in the USA but will do nothing to defeat the growing and pernicious movements of the Arab desires to take over the world and defeat those who they perceive as unbelievers.
Christians as well as Muslims claim to be peace loving and yet here we have, bible belt USA murdering arabs all over the world, while arabs in their turn resort to equally cowardly attacks on innocent people, muslims included, all over the world. Killing their figureheads is like cutting the head off the medusa and does nothing to eradicate the toxin that is inherent within both cultures. The religious foundation simply underpins and justifies the violence, allowing adherents permission to use thuggery in the name of their own particular God.
If I were president of the USA, right now i would be feeling very nervous.