Heroes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCt0x98Y2SY

As a boy I grew up imagining that characters portrayed in comics were heroes. Dan Dare was there to protect the Earth from the Mekon, Roy of the Rovers was a hero on the football pitch and then along came the Marvel superheroes like Superman and Marvel man. Almost exclusively the heroes were men and they were there to inspire. I guess they did and like the newspapers, they manipulated those young minds.

So what is a hero?  I think that we can all recognise real acts of heroism; a fire fighter risking his own life to rescue someone from a burning building for example but there are many uses of the word hero that seem much overused and out of place.   Let me be controversial and take the armed services. Mostly people go into the services as a career move and a way to see the world. Some may go in wanting to kill other people, but there are psychopaths in all walks of life.  Today most troops who are sent to fight do so in middle eastern countries defending the interests of big business and yet whilst everything is done to keep them safe, some do get killed. Does being killed defending oil interests make someone a hero?

The propaganda machines in 1913 and in 1939 convinced many young men to enlist in the forces and go to war defending the interests of the rich, and later in both campaigns huge numbers were conscripted and had no choice in meeting the butchery that they were led to. Wars are inevitably futile and the carnage on both sides serves to make rich people even wealthier. 

Conscientious objectors who refused to go along with things were branded as cowards and imprisoned or shot, they suffered and died for their convictions, maybe they were heroes.  

Women who became the Suffragettes refused to endure the status quo any longer and made personal sacrifices in order to bring about change. Maybe that is an act of heroism.  

When I see footage of football teams returning after a successful campaign being referred to as heroes, or even those who have been maimed in action; serving not their country but those who own it; I cannot see them as real heroes at all. The former are overblown, overvalued athletes while the latter are just victims of propaganda.

Old friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPTOY8FrvN

We grow up taking so much for granted. As we get taken over by careers and families, ambitions  and disappointments, we do lose track of things that are important, and often we do not realise that until it is too late.  This year it is fifty years since I left home and started college in Portsmouth, an event which sometime this year will probably be marked by a small and simple reunion. I know that when I left home, I did leave behind a lot of friends almost completely. I was never a writer of letters and of course we had no mobile phones and no computers in those days, so maintaining relationships was not easy. Moving on meant making new friends, and that was pretty easy in those days with all those young bodies oozing hormones were thrust together into a quickly declining regime of partial retriction. The sixties were a time of teenage rebellion as we all know and were a time when respect for established authority was changing somewhat.

Hall rules were paid lips service to and by the time we left they had almost vanished except in the small print of the college handbook.  So people could spend a lot of time together, in groups of in pairs or whatever you chose to do. Many deep relationships were forged in those days and many couples were drawn together into lasting relationships. My wife and I met in my last year at college and apart from her my links with college are now very few and far between.

Thanks to social media, a dear friend from 1967 recently made contact and we have been in communication on a more or less daily basis, sharing memories and histories. We of course took different paths and our stories are very very different. It has been lovely recalling some of those shred memories and it makes me struggle to remember others that mattered at the time, even if it was only for a short time.

There are phases to our lives as we grow up, one phase is weddings, then christenings then a long hiatus, followed by funerals. It is the saddest of phases in that we slowly lose those people that we once held dear.  I seem to have lost all but one of my original family and many of my old friends, so finding some that still are there is a wonderful thing.  

Old friends are the best friends - they have stood the test of time.      

Jean Genie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQo6zpVzt8

Futility is arguing with fundamentalists, or should I say that arguing with fundamentalists is futile, either way I have spent too much time arguing against the creationist idea, largely because I find it entertaining.  Recently they have been citing the existence of DNA as evidence for a creator. The argument being that something as beautiful and amazing could not possibly have arisen by chance alone, therefore it must have been created.

DNA is of course the mechanism of inheritance, it is in essence who we are and much of what we will ever be. Even the means of our demise is possibly coded in our DNA.  Family traits, strengths and weaknesses are transmitted through DNA and yes, it is amazing.

I read the other day that intelligence is inherited from your mother, suggesting a link with the X chromosome but it was a newspaper article and I skimmed it so cannot really comment.  We are, of course much more than the product of our genes, we are capable of making decisions and choosing the way we live. Thus if you have a genetic propensity towards certain diseases, you can, by choice, avoid the conditions that favour the development of that disease.

Talents and skills may be to some extent genetically determined, but most great skills are learned through sheer hard work as much as by innate ability. We would not wish for our doctors, dentists or any other professionals to inherit their positions, even from their mothers, neither would we expect them to be inbred so as to maintain a family line, and yet many people think that Royalty is a good thing.  We as a nation support a growing band of inbreds that have simply inherited their positions because they have been allowed to do so. They serve no real purpose and surely they have become an embarrassing anachronism as well as a huge expense.  I know that there are vested interests in maintaining them as a symbol of the ruling class but in the interests of unification, can we not grow up and realise that they are not needed.

Napolean Bonaparte said that religion was the only thing that stopped the poor from murdering the rich; I think that ignorance has a role there too.

The sound of silence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk7RVw3I8eg

If  you have never heard this cover version, then I strongly suggest that you try it to the end. Rarely does a cover version change the meaning off a song in  quite the way that this one does. I suppose that Joe Cocker's  With a little help from my friends had the same sort of impact, but that one never reduced me to tears in the way that this one does.

Cover versions are interesting and I do like to  compare  originals and covers. In the days of Napster, I once downloaded 20 different covers of The House of the Rising Sun, a traditional song arranged by Bob Dylan and made famous by the Animals in the sixties. No two recordings are the same and they vary in length too. The longest is by Santa Esmeralda and is a sort of disco version that I actually like. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkgIlXqIfzk

Most bands at some time in their careers have done covers of music that went before them, I am sure that there are exceptions to that but I can't think of any apart from Maybe Jethro Tull.  Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery after all.

If you listened to Santa Esmerelda I told you it was long :-)  I love it though.

Does anyone ever listen to the songs by the way? or am I wasting my time? Anyhow in the interest of symmetry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4oInT79CUk

Je t'aime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Fa4lOQfbA

I was reading today about a man who has been banned from a Weatherspoons pub. Allegedly he complained too much about the food. Now look, if you want cordon bleu you don't go to a Weatherspoons pub and expect to get it for less than a tenner. This got me thinking about bans and of course these things are becoming topical again. Some of us hope that the Trump creature will be barred from his state visit, though that could have consequences further down the road, while in his turn Trump is banning some peoples from entering his country on the grounds that he hs no business connections with them.

There was a time when the BBC would ban the playing of certain songs on the basis that they were rude or risqué or in some way insulted the status quo. I remember the above song being banned and then we all heard it on pirate stations and bought the record anyway. There is nothing like a ban to persuade people to buy it.  I once bought a book - Spy Catcher - only because Margaret Thatcher said I couldn't. It wasn't even a good read but I was in New York and they were on sale.

I was banned from the cinema once. We were watching a movie called The Trap, Oliver Reed and Rita Tushingham. There was a very tense and dramatic scene where she has to cut off his gangrenous leg with an axe, as she did so, the thought that came into my mind and out of my mouth was "Wrong Leg" at which all within hearing range fell bout laughing.  I guess we had been nuisances before because I was singled out and escorted from the premises.   It didn't last though as staff constantly changed and no one really recognised me anyway.

I think being banned from a Weatherspoons pub must deserve some sort of accolade though. It takes some doing, not that I have tried.

Women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKBgolojkhU

Now before I get controversial, let me just say that I love women. Not all women of course but the  group as a whole. I have total respect for those that I know and see most as equals, some as superiors and none as inferiors.  I also believe firmly that women should enjoy the same rights and freedoms as men, including equal pay etc etc.

 Ok got that out of the way, and if you start to get angry just let me refer you back to the first paragraph.

What I wanted to say goes along the lines of - do women make good leaders?  My own view is that they on the whole do not.  I know that is is just an opinion but I can only name it upon my own experiences and what has happened in my lifetime.  Some people believe that Margaret Thatcher was a good leader.  They are entitled to that belief of course but she presided over a government that divided the nation like no leader ever had before. It was also a deliberate act, divide and rule seemed her mantra. She promoted hatred that still endures in many parts of the country and never before have I seen a death celebrated in the way that hers was.

Our current leader seems little better. I do not envy her job but she seems to ebb and flow like the tide, pushed this way and that buy her own party and again continuing the divisive processes of her previous heroine.  Perhaps she is incapable of standing up against those that really wield the power, and maybe like Thatcher she will eventually be stabbed in the back by her supporters.

I worked under five head teachers in my career, and the only one who managed to divide the staff was a woman. I won't name her, obviously, but she seemed to feel the need to wield power and make people tow whatever line she threw them. She was not a good negotiator and insisted always on having things done her way.  She probably was the cause of a number of nervous breakdowns among staff, people that she did not like were victimised and fell by the wayside.  She eventually fell herself and was not missed by many.

Ok I am sure that there have been good women leaders.  I can think of none off the top of my head apart from Helen Clark in New Zealand, though I am sure that is the fault of my limited education and some people out there will come up with good examples. Marine Le Penn could be the next leader of France - personally I hope not.

Rat Trap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=024UcB1m7Do

I cannot begin to describe how much I loathe rats. Even the tame little buggers with pink eyes and noses are anathema to me.  A few years ago, when I was able to do such things, I was turning over my compost heap when a rat shot out; I say a rat but it looked as big as  a cat and was probably as scared as I was because it just ran in circles around me while I tried in vain to prong it with my fork. I panicked I admit and eventually gave in to my fear and scarpered.

Another time at an open university summer school I found myself in a cubicle with a woman who smelled of cigarettes, having to condition a rat. Admittedly there were bars between us but even so....

Anyway the point of this is that we have a leaky toilet once again.  The waste pipe that is is leaking behind the tiled and boxed structure that hides those pipes. The smell gave it away and so again we wrecked the structure that took so long to rebuild last time in order to determine the cause of the problem. The pipe is leaking again and why? Because bits of it have been nibbled away by rodents.  I lifted an inspection hatch and sure enough there are plenty of fresh droppings, though they look big enough to have come from an elephant. So not only do we need a plumber, we also need a rat man or woman to exterminate the creatures that are causing me so much irritation and expense.

The plumber is coming tomorrow and the rat man/woman next tuesday.  I just hope that the pipes can hold out until the rat man/woman, gets here or the plumbers work will be pointless.  Fortunately we do have an alternative wc but I, like the little bastards in question like my own territory.

Video killed the radio star

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

If ever I feel the need to watch daytime TV, feel free to shoot me.  TV has become utterly banal; maybe it always was but today it seems that the programming has been designed for those in care homes.
My first experience of TV was at my grandparents house when I was very small. memories are very  thin but I do recall a tiny black and white screen that took an age to warm up and when switched off, the picture diminished slowly to a small bright dot that gradually faded.  The only think I remember seeing was a program called What's my line? in which a group of posh people were required to guess the occupation of someone from the  real world.    Much later, when we were teens probably, my parents rented a TV and we began our absorption of whatever garbage was pumped into the house.

We are all influenced by what we see and hear, the news is carefully edited and filtered so as to make us think what we are meant to think and do as we are meant to do. In the meantime we sit on our sofas and get fat and unfit, consuming more and more garbage.

Radio is more stimulating in many ways and  with digital systems there is so much to choose from.  We recently  bought a SONOS sound system and can now access digital radio stations or the music stored on my computer from all over the house.  Listening to music means that I can forget about Brexit and Trump for a while and remember better times.

There is a petition around that is calling for the government to sell the BBC on the grounds that it has lost its independence, the right think that it is biased to the left and the left think that it is biased towards the right. Maybe they are both right and that it lies somewhere in the middle. We do need an information system that provides truth, though for many people the truth is what they want to believe, and I believe that daytime TV is the beginning of the end.