Traditions - do we need them?

Traditions are habits, behaviours or ways of thinking that are passed on from generation to generation. Modern Biology refers to these phenomena as Memes and there is now a branch of science called Memetics. They are elements of what we call culture and each culture has its own set of traditions.

One such group of traditions we call Christmas. This is in essence a midwinter festival that was hijacked by the church as another means of manipulating the poor. Now that the church has lost most of its power, the reins have been handed over to the world of commerce with all the might of the media behind it. Christmas is huge business and still the poor are the ones who are being manipulated. The have nots are encouraged to spend what they do not have in order to accumulate the trappings of what the media tell them they want, and the financiers allow them to max out credit cards in order to pay for it. People already in debt, exacerbate their situation each year by going along with the herd in the hope that they can clear the debt before next Christmas.

It is such a silly season with people buying stuff for others, largely stuff that no-one wants or needs. Fortunes are spent sending greetings cards around the world, often to people that we barely know, let alone care about. Why do we do it? So many people loathe the whole festival these days; even the churches fill up with once a year worshipers who only go because it is traditional. Nowadays it is likely that a midnight mass will turn out to be a drunken brawl, as getting drunk and fighting are seen by some to be traditional. Even priests were brawling in Greece this year.

We also seem to be accumulating traditions. Covering your house with gaudy tasteless illuminated decoration has spread from somewhere; probably America, the seat of tastelessness. We are supposed to be concerned with energy efficiency and yet millions of Megawatts are wasted each year in high streets, stores and on the houses of so many. Those people would not go around wearing a tee shirt with “I am a twat” written on the front and yet they will adorn their houses with frosty the snowman or inflatable Santa Clauses, sucking energy from the National grid like hungry leeches. No doubt the huge energy bills will add to the ever increasing debt.

It has become a season of greed and selfishness. It perpetuates the consumer society and is one cause of misery for so many. It is a bone of contention between faith groups, and therefore another cause of dispute and lack of understanding. Rubbing any aspect of religion into people’s faces is wrong, traditional or not.

The end of the year

Another year has passed and the world is no better a place than it ever has been. The human race remains stupid, greedy and divided, and those divisions have little to do with geography and much to do with philosophy. In Douglas Adams' Hitchikers guide to the galaxy, there is a philosopher's strike, which though seemingly idiotic, would in many ways be a wonderful reality. Philosophy is by it's very nature divisive and has been the root cause of so much suffering. Philosophy gives us religion and it gave us communism. It gives us Conservatism and Socialism, it gave the wealthy excuses for the perpetuation of the class system that still lies like a canker at the heart of our society. Any philosophical system asserts an authority that is undeserved, and yet people follow in their droves, content to allow other, "cleverer" people to think for them. In the west, we value freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and yet there is precious little evidence for the latter in the bulk of the population. We switch on the TV and accept what we are told, trudging ever onwards towards whatever the capitalist system offers.

The end of the year has been stress filled for so many people who have seen their incomes devalued or even being taken away, thanks largely to a system that is based on greed and gambling with other people's livelihoods. We have a government that serves only the wealthy whilst claiming that we are all in this mess together, and yet there seems to be no alternative. We are in a hole and yet we keep digging, hoping to find treasure.

I am moving house. At least I hope so. Our fates lie in the hands of the solicitors who make money out of us by shuffling paper. Documents are sent out via email, printed out by clients, signed and posted to them. They seem to do no chasing up, leaving all phone calls to the clients. I am sure that they do something but it seems that they are taking a lot of money for a service that has seen better days.

I will be sorry to leave this Island. I have spent forty years here and it feels like home. However, the crossing to the mainland is so expensive and at present so frequent, that it makes sense, economically and familywise to make the move while we are still capable. So this could be my last entry from this side of the water. Thank you for taking minutes of your life to read this, and I do wish you a happy holiday and the very best luck for next year.

Moving on

I have lived in the same town since 1971, and now it is time to move The great stimulus being Oscar of course. At 20 months he has a huge pull and it will be so nice to spend more time with him. (I think)
So the house is in a state of chaos, even though we do not have a moving date, there is so much that needs sorting and rationalising. So much clutter accumulates with time and i am a hoarder - I can't seem to throw anything away on the basis that i deplore waste. However, black bags are filling and being dispatched to the appropriate places. Charity shops are benefitting and through local freecycle groups, individuals too are making use of stuff that I have been hanging on to.
There is sadness and joy associated with such a big upheaval. It has been a long time since i experienced mainland life and no doubt there will be a change in pace that I will need to acclimatise to, though I will probably stay at home just as much as I do now.
However, there will be new opportunities of course and I am sure that babysitting skills will be called upon frequently.
I will miss friends that I have known for a long time and maybe there will be new ones, but I am not good at socialising so we shall see what happens there.
On the whole I feel that it is the right thing to do and that this is the right time. I now await the legal processing to be completed before we get a date for completion - I just hope that it doesn't take too long.

He is growing up

baby boomers

So Michael Jackson's family are planning a series of law suits, blaming everyone in sight for the shortcomings and death of their famous cash cow. They must be obscenely wealthy already and yet rather than grieve the loss of their relative, they are grasping for yet more money. They are representative of the avaricious unpleasant society that we live in today.
Those of us born in the years immediately following the second world war are referred to as the baby boomer generation, and are being held responsible for the current state of the world. Every generation blames the one that came before, and so I guess that the current younger generation will one day be held accountable too, probably for the appalling quality of music as well as the debt ridden state of the nation.
As a child, I, and many of my own generation, was brought up to abhor debt. If you wanted something, you worked and saved until you could afford it. People saved money all year long so that they could afford christmas. Summer holidays were almost unheard of, and we accepted wearing clothes until they wore out. There were no credit cards, many people didn't even have bank accounts.
Now, everyone wants everything whether or not they have the means to pay. Everyone has a car, or more than one, no-one is without a washing machine, tumble drier, flat screen TV, games console and most impressively the latest and most expensive mobile phone. Many people are up to their necks in debt, taking out more credit cards to pay off what they owe until they get to the state when they can no longer pay. Nowadays it seems that debt is a badge of honour and no longer a stigma.
We live in an age of consumerism, driven by the capitalist system that thrives on the perpetuation of greed. By making those at the bottom of the pile think that they are somewhere else if they accumulate the trappings of those at the top, the parasites at the top make sure that the wealth continues to flow in the right direction. The bank accounts of the wealthy, like black holes, suck in more and more gaining a stronger and stronger pull, while the rest of us struggle to keep up. The spiral intensifies and sooner or later the whole edifice must collapse.

The late and the very late

I seem to get annoyed so very easily these days, and by such trivial things. Bigger things don’t seem to bother me in the same way, the big things worry me and concern me but do not irritate me like the trivia do.
One current gripe is TV advertising and the way that they set and describe prices. What once was say five hundred pounds has now become four hundred and ninety nine pounds; irritating enough but when spoken is has become just four nine nine. Is the language becoming digitised along with everything else? I can see no justification for this trend but the practice is firmly embedded now and seems unlikely to change.
Another cause of my discontent lies in the media as a whole, and refers to perpetrators of crimes and also their victims. It seems now that should you be unfortunate enough to be murdered, robbed, raped or pillaged, you are judged according to your way of making a living. Beth Scroggins is never referred to as simply Beth Scroggins, she has to beBeth Scroggins, solicitors clerk. Why? Why not beth Scroggins, lovely girl, or Beth Scroggins stamp collector, or even just plain and simple Beth Scroggins. I once saw an ad in a local Portsmouth paper, offering a job in a Tampax factory as a fitter. Imagine that. It would be bad enough being murdered but then being referred to as Bill Sykes, tampon fitter would compound the misery.
We as a society seem obsessed with success that is measured in terms of our earning potential, and in the eyes of the press our worth is not in who we are but in what we do to make a living. When I am murdered, probably for irritating the wrong person, will I be reported as unemployed or as a retired teacher, ex farm hand, ex factory worker, ex fruit picker, ex Portsmouth Football club sweeper, ex barman or what? I think that Corpse would be more appropriate.

Cheese on toast

I love to cook. When i go out to eat, I find myself analysing the dishes that I enjoy and trying to work out the ingredients and the methods used by the chef. I then take those ideas and attempt to replicate them at home. I read cookery books and steal ideas from them too, but when it comes to cooking, I rarely follow a recipe. I see cooking as a creative art and love to invent and tweak dishes. Mostly it works quite well and most people consider my food acceptable at worst. Good food need not be expensive, and most things that I prepare are done on a low budget.
Not long ago, I went with the family to Pizza Hut for lunch. I am renowned for my attitude to pizza, which I often refer to as cheese on toast, which fundamentally it bears a striking resemblance to, though in the latter there is more cheese. A pizza may look wonderful when it arrives at the table, but my word what a mark up in price. A handful of dough is flattened, baked and smeared with tomato slurry, various scraps are thrown on and the whole thing is baked again for a few minutes, and for that you can pay up to ten pounds. A rapid analysis suggest that the ingredients could cost up to a pound, unless of course you are buying in bulk, in which case you can probably halve that. Ok they taste nice but why are we prepared to pay such inflated prices for something so simple?
Try lightly toasting some bread, smearing it with tomato puree, sprinkling some grated cheese, some chopped olives or anything else that takes your fancy, popping it under the grill and voila - faux pizza, cheap and cheerful.

Hair

I have been listening to the soundtrack from Hair. It was a wonderful show, and in the sixties it was full of hope, colour, freshness and melody as well as protest and pathos.
The 1960s did seem a time when a generation looked at the rotten world of politics and through protest, both physical and in song, hoped to change the world for the better. Let the sun shine in was the mantra and many believed that it would happen.
Yes some changes did take place, there was a break away from the previous generation and the greyness of post war life. Pop music became a phenomenon, fashions and lifestyles slowly changed and there was a sense of liberation and optimism that now seems so misplaced.
The planet is still polluted, there are more wars going on than ever, black people are still seen as inferiors by huge parts of the American population, ignorance and apathy are rife, and still the politicians bleat on about how much better their policies are than others.
We are in a worse mess than we were post war. Yes then the country was in deep debt, the population living largely in basic accommodation and yet there was that ray of hope that things would get better. It seems now that things can only get worse, and still the men in suits are making decisions that feather their own nests at the cost of the rest of us as well as the planet upon which we depend. It is not the planet that needs saving, it is us.

Gender issues

I am a little weary of hearing that women get a raw deal, of glass ceilings and of sexual inequality. In my humble opinion, women get a pretty good deal these days and in so many ways are advantaged rather than the reverse.
There was a time when this was not the case, women had to struggle to gain what they have today and in doing so, have brought about huge changes in society, which while being of benefit to women in general have not necessarily improved the society in which we live.
Our education system changed even before the advent of the National Curriculum, in order to shift the balance in favour of girls. There was a time when boys were higher achievers in many subjects in schools. This was recognised and strategies employed that disadvantaged boys and enhanced the achievements of girls. Now, more or less across the board, girls achieve greater academic levels than boys. This of course follows through into the fields of further and higher education with more girls gaining qualifications than boys, with all of the consequences that follow. Has anyone noticed how many police chiefs, doctors, solicitors and heads of educational establishments are women?
The media offers strong positive role models for girls, some more desirable models than others, but nevertheless, a disproportionate amount of presenters, newsreaders and so on are women. In TV drama, women are more often than not presented as strong characters with men presented as being weak and inferior or just downright stupid. The consequences of this will be far reaching and downright dangerous. It seems that the only role models for boys are sportsmen and bland members of boy bands.
Women in the west are so very fortunate. Only this week in Saudi Arabia, after having been given voting rights, a woman has been sentence to public lashing for daring to drive a car. A large proportion of the world population are repressed, subjugated and have plenty to complain about. Maybe those women who shout so loud about equality should count their blessings.

Indian summer

Strictly speaking the current wave of warm weather is not an "Indian Summer". Indian summers are usually periods of warm weather that follow heavy frosts and as yet we have had nothing like a single figure temperature. I am being pedantic I know, and enjoying the sunny spell just like everyone else that is not a farmer.
Autumn is a lovely time of year and for some people that I know, it is their favourite season. The colours of leaves, the hedgerow fruits, the smells and the misty mornings all have their charms, but for me, all of these are the harbingers of winter to come. The shorter days, the dying plants and the migrating birds and insects are a sadness and i am reminded that spring is a long way away.
The economic life of the EEC has been quite short, and it seems to have reached a state of development where the super wealthy have harvested the fruits and filled their larders to bursting and migrated to their winter homes in the sun, while the rest remain. The frosts are biting hard and the damage done may be irrepairable. There is little left to sustain the community in its current form, and the prospects for a financial Indian Summer do not seem very likely. Winter will be very long, very cold and very expensive.

Oscar

Points of view

It seems that I go through phases where I have plenty to say and others when think, what is the point? I know that I have a tendency to rant and that others find it tiresome; some even being bold enough to tell me so. Most people that I know, see the world, all of it, in shades of grey, whilst I have a tendency to see some aspects in black and white.
For me, sometimes, trying to see both sides of an argument is like being a liberal democrat. By sitting on the fence, you are neither one thing or the other, diluting and diluting everything down to some mediocre regression to the mean. While keeping the peace it rarely solves anything; though polarised viewpoints may not either.
When two people take on views that are totally opposed to each other, it does not mean that the reality of the argument lies somewhere in between. It is quite possible that one of those arguments is actually right and the other wrong; so accommodation of an opposing point of view may well be a distortion of the truth. For example, there are, I believe, some people who think that the Earth is flat. Now i believe, on the basis of a great deal of evidence that the Earth is more or less spherical. To meet somewhere in the middle of this would mean that the Earth is a hemisphere with a flat side and a rounded side. Ok that is a compromise and a ridiculous solution that appeases no-one and so i will continue to argue my case and so will the flat earth devotee. Many arguments are as polarised as this one and rather than fight in one corner, so many people will do their utmost to appease both parties in the hope of keeping the peace. It doesn't work.
Agreed there are arguments where an appreciation of shades of grey are clearly desirable, and where entrenched viewpoints are counterproductive. The situation in Israel and the relations with Palestine being a good example. Both sides are deeply entrenched in political and religious dogma and neither side is prepared to give way. In That situation middle ground must be found and agreed upon, and that seems so unlikely.
By making stands and arguing a case, i am considered by some to be bigotted, and perhaps i am; another failing to add to my list, but I will continue to voice my opinion even if no-one else wants to listen.

Canary Islands

Since I lost put finger to key, I have been on holiday in Lanzarote. A haven for ex pats, lots of English bars, but despite that, a wonderful place. I am not fond of travelling, especially by air, and the flights were predictably uncomfortable, noisy and not very pleasant. I have to say t this point that I was not at all looking forward to the trip, the thought of spending a week in Chavland in the sun did not appeal, but things turned out well in the end.

The Island is not as i expected it, and although there are the shaven headed, tattooed Lobsteroids present, they are thin on the ground and easily avoided. The local people are so very hospitable and pleasant, the food wonderful and the climate perfect.

Putting airplanes aside, I would go again.

Times to come

Well the riots came and went again, for now. In that time people have ranted and raved, expounded, pontificated and ranted; it has brought out the worst in most of us. To watch our young people behaving so badly was very disturbing and although they were blindly attacking property rather than people, it was still very frightening to watch.
I remember realising that as a high school teacher, my role was largely about bluff. At any time those students could, if organised, simply walk out of the school, run riot and do whatever they wanted. There was nothing that the school could do to stop them. The same is true of gangs in the streets; if organised, they have great power and there is little that can be done to stop them. These I am sure are just the beginnings of more widespread civil unrest.
We live in a society that thrives on blame and accountability. When anything happens, someone has to be blamed and suitably punished, and so of course gut reactions required the rioting youths to be shot, horse whipped, disembowelled or locked up for life. Parents were to be evicted from their council homes, benefits were to be stopped and all those involved publicly humiliated.
Only days later, heavy prison sentences are being handed out and there is now an outcry saying that the sentences are too harsh.
Our police force are being granted new guidelines (powers) so that they can respond differently, if and when the unrest breaks out again; when it does and heads get broken and young people die, there will be further claims of police brutality and so it goes on. This is part of the price we pay for living in a democracy, and a very divided nation.
I certainly do not condone the actions of a relatively small number of mindless hooligans who bashed up their own communities, but the damage they inflicted was contained. The damage done by the bankers in recent years is widespread, long lasting, and the perpetrators were never brought to any form of justice and are still being rewarded, while the rest of us suffer from their greed and vandalism.
Yes the rioters should be punished; they should have been sprayed with a dye so that all of them could be caught, not just the ones who showed their faces, and then perhaps rather than take away the benefits from those who claim them, they should all have been given long terms of curfew and community service, repairing some of the damage and cleaning up the communities that they normally terrorise, earning the benefits instead of expecting them. Obligatory evening classes in citizenship and responsible parenting might also keep them from the streets and give them insights into a different way of life.
The greatest challenge though is to give people some hope and something to strive towards. This will never happen under a government that is more interested in the welfare of those that already have everything.

Midsummer madness

The tabloids, and therefore the bulk of our population seem more interested this weekend in the demise of yet another unfortunate junkie, than they are of the terrible events in Norway or the catastrophic famine that is sweeping through eastern Africa.
Amy Winehouse made some bad choices in her life, but they were hers to make and she probably died appropriately, and at the same age as so many teen idols have done before. The peoples of Somalia do not have the luxury of choosing how to die. That choice has been removed, partly by the drought that has gripped their lands for so long, but also by the civil strife brought about by warring factions, probably funded by other countries. The Islamic forces that maintain chaos in Somalia are refusing still, to allow aid from foreign sources, claiming that moves to help their people are politically motivated and so the people continue to die or to undergo terrible hardship and long journeys to neighbouring countries.
The world of Islam is utterly contradictory. Muslims will generally claim that they are peace loving, caring and charitable people, and yet virtually all centres of conflict in this world involve Islamic forces. Yes there are Islamic countries in the United nations, but when do we ever see any of them supporting their fellow Muslims in places like Somalia. It would seem that religious dogma is far more important than the lives of women and children. It is a pity that Saudi Arabia, and the other wealthy Arab nations cannot practice what they preach, and plough some of their enormous wealth into supporting those who never were given a choice when it came to their religion.

The boy done good innit!

I know that I am getting old and with that comes inflexibility and to some degree intolerance. I also know that languages are dynamic and constantly evolving to suit the needs of changing cultures. Having said that, I do get irritated by some trends that seem to be creeping slowly and steadily forward.
There is a leaning, in North America at the moment, but we all know that what happens there will happen here too, towards the abandonment of handwriting being taught in schools. The reasoning being that it is no longer necessary to be able to write anything by hand. This will do for literacy what the calculator did for numeracy, and generations to come will be utterly reliant on electronic devices for any sort of communication.
English is a beautiful language. It is the language of Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Tennyson and Terry Pratchett; it is the chosen language of international communication and yet is is becoming devalued by the popular media to such an extent that within the forseeable future, it will bear little similarity to that spoken by my generation or even that of our children.
Influences from poorly educated sports pundits and commentators have eroded the use of adverbs to the extent that they are on the verge of extinction. Afro-caribbean youthspeak dominates youth culture, and then there is the slow but steady trickle of Americanisms that are forever polluting the vocabulary of English speakers everywhere.
I am no expert in the fine use of words, but to me the spoken word can be beautiful. Continued erosion of the literacy of the young can only lead to the conversion of what once was wonderful into something akin to gibberish.

Pot luck

I find it amusing when people come into large sums of money and say that it won't change their life. True it may not change them as a person, though even that is debatable, but money does make a difference to the way people live and the way that others see them.
Last night, someone in this country won 160 million pounds on the lottery. I find it hard to envisage that much money, but I know for certain that should that person be me, my life would change and so would the lives of a lot of people that I care about. I would probably not be tempted to pour it into the major charities as i suspect that much of the cash that they raise does little good in the long term, but I'd like to think that I could give a lot of people a step up the ladder.
When you think about it, money is only meaningful when you don't have enough to pay the bills. I have been in that position many times and like a lot of people, I spent most of my younger days trying hard to avoid debt. It wasn't always possible and of course for all of my working life, I had a mortgage that meant that I had to keep working in order to make the payments. Now I "own" my house, though of course all that means is that I have a lot of money tied up in bricks and mortar and I no longer am indebted to one of the modern day usurers. When I die, the house will eventually be sold and all that money will then be passed on to my family and so it goes on.
I have enough money at the moments to fulfil my basic needs, and I guess that is because my needs are becoming simpler as the years pass by. My needs are governed by my income and my desire not to get into debt, and I know that should I be lucky enough to win the lottery, my needs may suddenly change. However in order for that to happen, I'd first have to buy a ticket.

Spot the child

Oscar has chicken pox. Childhood diseases are things that we all take for granted as we all survived them. We think of many of these ailments as trivial and for some that may have been the case, but what people forget is that some of these illnesses can have catastrophic effects. When i was a child, illnesses were matter of fact, and if a child got say chicken pox, everyone would bring their kids around to make sure that they all became infected, in the sure knowledge that once you'd had it, you didn't get it again. It was the same with measles, though now we know that measles is a nasty disease that can cause all sorts of problems including, in a worst case scenario, death. So in an enlightened age we have vaccinations against many of these infections.
A few years ago, a renegade doctor, whose work has since been discredited, claimed that there was a causal relationship between the MMR vaccination, and the likelihood of a child becoming autistic. Many parents, understandably as it appeared in the Daily Mail, refused to have their children vaccinated. Of course some of them went on to develop autism, and the rest were simply prone to contracting measles, mumps and rubella.
In order to be effective, vaccination must be given to a significant proportion of the population. This confers what is called herd immunity, and means that should the disease occur, then it will be contained within a local area. Lack of herd immunity allows epidemics to arise, and in some cases pandemics.
There are new strains of some diseases that are being imported through immigration from third world countries and we are all at potential risk from resistant strains of TB and Polio. Antibiotic effectiveness is rapidly being eroded by overprescription and lazy application, and all of the time, bacteria and viruses are mutating and evolving into forms against which we have little or no protection.
Obsession with personal hygeine, though not apparent in everyone, means that infants environments are virtually sterile; their immune systems are not allowed to develop properly, and so they are more easy targets for infection. Our warm draught free homes are incubators for all sorts of unseen agents, and these agents are beginning to win more battles in this war that seems unwinnable.
Oscar may or may not get chicken pox again; that is down to his ability to generate the antibodies that he needs. he has had his MMR vaccination but there are so many other enemies out there. Whether he meets them or not, and how he copes with them are largely down to luck, and perhaps pharmacologists receiving enough grants to produce the ammunition that we need to turn things around once more.

Os

Behaviour

There is a school of thought, probably with a low attendance rate and failed by OFSTED, that believes in behavioural change as a mechanism for driving evolution. Natural selection, as described so eloquently by Charles darwin in the nineteenth century, cannot fully explain the way that the human race has evolved, and now it would seem that there are no real selective agents at work. There are no advantages in physical strength or even mental agility in terms of survival value; thus it is likely that the way we behave will be more significant for generations to come.

From a distance it would appear that most people behave in ways that are expected of them, led largely by the media, through advertising, populist TV and a weak and watered down education system that has been manipulated as a political football and watered down by successive governments in order to reduce the ability of people to think for themselves.

This week and last, thousands have flocked to Wimbledon to pay huge sums of money in order to watch tennis, many worshipping at the shrine of a young arrogant Scot who declared his feelings about England a long time ago. The media is full of him, only because there is no Englishman out there who can bonk as well as he can. So his adoring fans cheer and shout for someone who loathes England and the English. Fascinating media manipulation and a true demonstration as to the way in which we are led.