Zeitgeist

I have just watched Zeitgeist, an enthralling movie that you can stream online. Ok it is unsubtle, but it packs a weighty punch and should be viewed critically by anyone who cares about the way the world is run. I think the whole thing can be summed up in a quotation, from whom I have no idea, but it went something like this - "Only when the power of love, exceeds the love of power, can the world be safe." Yes i know I got it wrong but i have the memory of a gnat these days.

The movie was made in 2007, long before the current crisis, and its focus is on power and the lies that we, mere humans are subjected to. We are lied to by organised religion as well as governments, who in their turn are the puppets of those who weild the most potent weapon of all - Money. It makes the point that the world is there for the use of the big bankers and that their greed is the root cause of most of the worlds problems.

Knowledge is power, and those in the know can do more or less as they like. Fundamentally the majority of people dont question anything. There is an inherent trust that has been made use of by the rich and powerful. The church has been culpable, and in the name of a myth, has sent millions to their deaths to defend that myth. Central banks, need wars to make profits and so provocation of delicately balanced conflicts, catapults so many innocent young people to death in the name of capitalism.

Education systems thrive on maintaing a base ignorance of the things that matter and harness minds into National Curricula that have no value and no meaning to the majority. An ignorant public is what they need and flourish on.

They say that we get the governments that we deserve and perhaps that is true.

Matilda

The other part of the last week or so goes as follows.  Matilda was born with a defective aortic valve and was due to go into hospital today for the treatment that she needs.
Last weekend we were invited to a retirement party on the IOW and we deliberated long and hard about making the journey, in the end deciding to pop down for the weekend. The arrangement was that we'd stay with son in law's parents, at  least in their house as they were away on holiday in the USA. All was planned and we set off, looking forward to catching up with old friends. On the ferry, my phone rang; it rarely does so this was somewhat of a novelty. It was my daughter, telling us that her husbands' brother had died suddenly. We were about to stay in his parents house and they were due back the following day. They had been informed and insisted that we carried on as normal. There was nothing normal about the trip believe me.  Well anyhow we did go to their house and stayed the night wondering what the following day would bring.  We picked them up from the ferry the following day and were able to offer a little hospitality, if not comfort. Losing a child, however old they may be is very hard.  Later that day we got a call telling us that Matilda was in hospital. She had suffered a febrile convulsion and had to be rushed by ambulance into Tunbridge Wells.  The party was to be the next day but clearly our enthusiasm for it was waning fast, and we decided to head for home as soon as possible.
We got home the following morning, by which time Matilda was home again, if not well, much better. As a result of her weekend, the operation has been postponed and the anxiety will have to go onto the back boiler once again.  I just hope that the next date does not coincide with the funeral.

Elite Phones and Computers - Do not go there.

This has been a strange week or so.  It began with a failure in my computer; a series of crashes due to kernel panic, whatever that may be, and led to me having to buy and fit a new hard drive. That was successful, though it did not seem to cure the problem.  Eventually I contacted a company that claimed to have nationwide branches and would collect and deal with the problem. The nice lady on the phone told me that there was a fixed fee for diagnostics and took my money. On a whim, I asked where they were and was told Manchester, which is of course not very close to here, by this time it was too late to back down and the computer was collected by courier the next day.
While my dear Mac was away, I finished watching Breaking Bad, leaving another hole in my life, and paced the floor until my machine came home.  Elite Phones and Computers  do not communicate well, but after a few days, I was informed that the repair would cost blah blah blah and so I agreed the payment.  A day later I was told that it was fixed and on its way home.  Five days later still, I called to ask where it was and was told that it would be sent that day. A mail told me that I must open the box to check for damage before signing for it as otherwise they could not be held responsible. The UPS man told me that I must sign before opening, so I signed and he evaporated. I opened the box and extracted my Mac, noticing that it was filthy and covered with fingerprints, but worse, the hinge mechanism was broken, leaving the screen facing down at the floor.  Wedging the screen in a manageable position I attempted to plug the mains lead in, only to find that the plug was bent and impossible to use. So I had my machine back, but in a worse state than it was when I parted with it. Needless to say, I was on the phone to Elite Phones and Computers and venting my spleen to someone on the switchboard.  They claim that the hinge was broken when they received it and ignored the state of the plug and the filthy condition. So now, I am financially worse off and my computer is a wreck.  Battle with Elite Phones and computers will continue but they are not having it back.

Don't Panic

I have made no progress with my Python skills and for once I have a good excuse. My trusty Mac is playing games with me. I am suffering with  frequent Kernel Panics. Now this may sound like an outbreak of lunacy, but it is a serious issue for me. Every now and then, my screen has a transparent grey veil drawn down over it and a message appears telling me to restart. The restart takes a long time and within a short period of time, the same thing happens again.  I think, but do not know, that the problem is a dying hard drive. So yesterday I went out and bought a replacement and googled the procedure for the operation. It looked simple enough and I have dismantled previous machines, and replaced parts, with success.  So I took the plunger and removed the glass screen, undid the weird starhead screws and looked inside. Alas, the guts of my machine look nothing like the guts of the one on google and the hard drive is nowhere near as accessible. Caution is the keyword when fiddling , and so I reassembled the machine and decided to tackle the problem in the morning.
This morning, before the operation, I thought I'd power up one more time, just to get the full details of the panic report. I had a mind to print it out for reference purposes, but then remembered that my printer is out of ink.  So I left the machine running, waiting for it to panic; it still hasn't, though like the old golfing joke concerning gotchers, I wait for it to happen and cannot really settle to doing anything. I have cleaned the house, made soup, made a curry, cut the grass, and still the attack hasn't happened. While this goes on, I cannot even power up my Pi, let alone focus on the intricacies of language learning.

If then goto

I have a Raspberry Pi. For the uninitiated, this is a really cheap computer, designed to encourage the re-introduction of programming into schools. I say cheap, but by the time you add a keyboard and mouse, a case and a monitor, it is not as cheap as it appears. However it is an encouragement for me to learn coding again.
I have very fond memories of a similar initiative, the BBC Micro, which was introduced decades ago, and was an introduction to the world of computing for hundreds of thousands of school children and their teachers. In those days, computer studies involved a knowledge of how programs work and many students would write sophisticated software, using BBC Basic, or the really smart ones would go the extra mile and write in what was called Machine code.  The computer room was always full of students clacking away at keyboards and I too was caught up in the tide of logic and became the proud owner of several machines.  I learned how to program and would spend hours inventing routines and even simple games.  At first loading and saving code was achieved via cassette tapes, it could take several minutes to load a big program and both processes were tedious and unreliable.  Then we progressed to disc storage and the school bought a 30Mb hard drive. This stood as the server for the whole network and each student could store their data on it.  I bought a floppy disc drive and could store my creations on those old flimsies so much more efficiently. Programs loaded quickly and far more reliably, removing the anxiety that often accompanied loading and saving.
My Pi has a memory card that holds 16Gb of data and yet it seems no faster in operation than did my BBC machines.  It uses a language called Python, though I am told that it can handle others too,  and this is very different to the Basic that I was so familiar with. To begin with there are no line numbers, so commands like GOTO no longer apply. I realise that I must erase my memory of Basic and to start completely from scratch, though my brain is far less capable than it was, and while I have my Mac sitting alongside it, the Pi offers little motivation in creating practical applications.
It is early days, and the learning curve is steep, but I will give it a try and hope that I can stay ahead of my grandchildren for a while.

Worries

Matilda is beautiful, lively and has a wonderful personality. She is not yet 18 months old and yet she has already acquired the ability to manipulate those around her.  If she is somewhere that she doesn't want to be, then she takes my finger and gently pulls me to where she does want to be. She gets what she wants by pointing and making appropriate noises and to all intents and purposes she is a perfect child, whatever that means.  However, things are not all they seem to be.  Matilda had one of her regular trips to St Thomas' hospital yesterday and the issue with her aorta has worsened.  Basically it seems that the walls are thickening and she needs intervention.  The next step is the introduction of a device to open the artery and so this poor little mite will have to undergo the procedure in the next few months.  I find it quite upsetting so goodness knows what her parents must be feeling.
On the positive side, the problem was spotted early by a very aware paediatrician, and so she is getting the best care in a centre that specialises in such problems, and of course she is totally unaware of her problem.
For now though it feels that we are living with a potential time bomb and it doesn't feel very nice.

Private education

People change so they say.  Having worked in state education for thirty three years, I have long been opposed to the divisive nature of the private school system. I could no more have applied for jobs in the private sector than do one armed press ups, and yet I now have a grandson in a private school and a grand daughter signed up for her place.  Initially my feelings about this were confused, but having had time to come to terms with it, I fully support their parents' decision to give their children such a good start in life.
I attended their open day this morning and arrived at morning breaktime. We were given a guided tour by two delightful eleven year olds and were suitably impressed by what we saw. The buildings are all new or well maintained and every classroom is attractive and well equipped with all the latest IT. The kids are well presented in smart uniforms and smiles, they are polite to vistors to teachers and seemingly to each other. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming and I am glad that my grandchildren are being given this advantageous start.
Friends of theirs, less well off financially, are finding it hard to get their children into their schools of choice, and one child is having to settle for their fourth choice of school.
Parents have been sold a lie for a number of years; there is no choice for those who cannot afford to send their children to a fee paying school. Long gone are the days of catchment areas, today school placement is a lottery with many of the better state schools implementing a selection by the back door policy. State education is underfunded and teachers constantly undermined and undervalued by a system that values statistics rather than the reality of a childs future. I know many state sector teachers and many are worn out by the ridiculous pressures placed upon them. Behaviour is deteriorating and staff have little in the way of sanctions, exclusion being old fashioned and expulsion an ancient myth. However dysfunctional a child it will be kept in school, screaming and kicking maybe, at the expense of all those others who have to put up with it.
I do not believe that all fee paying schools are wonderful, but I do understand why the middle classes wish to protect their children from some of the less desirable elements of society and at least give them an opportunity to learn in a world where education is valued by employers if not by consumers.

Huis Clos

Jean Paul Sartre said that Hell is other people. In his day, there was no such thing as a long haul flight and I am sure that was he able to experience twelve and a half hours crammed into a metal tube with over three hundred fellow sufferers, he may have had reason to modify his idea.
The flight from Hong Kong to Heathrow came on top of a one hour flight from Blenheim to Auckland, a five hour wait in Auckland and then a twelve hour flight to Hong Kong and a three hour wait there, altogether not a great start to the final leg of the journey.
To begin with, I hate crowds and boarding the plane was, as always a chaotic process with everyone ignoring their instructions, bustling to gain their seats as if it was first come first served; as it is the first on has so much longer to sit down in the confines of their seat, watching the rest of us hauling our unwilling bodies down the aisles and squabbling for space for the overhead lockers. What do people not understand about ONE item of hand baggage?  Some waddle onto the plane with so much stuff that it takes them an age to find enough locker space to contain it and generally the same people are too short to accomplish that feat without assistance.  Having taken my seat, aware that I was now confined for the next 13 hours including take off and landing,  my first aim was to get comfortable. Cattle class seats are basic and uncommodious and austere though ingeniously constructed to get everything into that tiny allocated space that is to be ones entire world for what seems forever.  My knees pressed into the back of the seat in front ensured that every movement of the large lady in front can be felt and the inevitable non aggressive battle for the armrests began.
I had an aisle seat which is a mixed blessing. I could get up and wander to the toilet without disturbing anyone unless I fell over, but then people had to disturb me if they wished to get out. Then of course anyone wandering down the aisle would brush against me, thus ensuring total lack of sleep. Babies howling, the endless white noise from the cabin, turbulence, flatulence, plastic trays and plastic cups providing food and drink that always smells and tastes the same as any other airline meal, and the map on the screen in front reminding you of just how far you still have to go, together make a less than joyous experience.
I anticipate landing with trepidation mixed with feelings of relief.  On one hand, I am soon to be freed from this metal tube filled with more than three hundred random human beings that I will never see again, whilst on the other hand I am reminded of the definition of landing. It is simply a controlled crash. Hundreds of tonnes of metal and plastic mixed with organic matter hitting the ground at two hundred miles an hour, relying on a few rubber tyres.  This has now been made terrifyingly real with the presence of a camera slung underneath the plane so you can watch the ground approaching. I am sure its role is to terrify passengers as for most of the flight all you can see is cloud tops or darkness.
Anyhow once released there is the scramble to get through immigration and the melee of baggage claim, wading through a sea of tired and tetchy travellers most of whom have failed to make their baggage easy to spot.
Sartre was right but I wish that he could have travelled more.

Diamonds

So many people measure success in terms of monetary or material ownership. Those that have the most seem to be celebrated and looked up to, while those who have least are looked down upon and are not valued at all.
We own nothing. None of us owns a thing. We have temporary custody of all those things that we strive to gain and that is all.  Take away the material wealth and we are all the same; fragile and temporary biological entities, subject to the basic drives that make us survive and breed, thus ensuring the production of further generations.
I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and know that anything that I own will be passed on to my children or their children, should there be anything other than money, that they want.  Most of what surrounds me, will, like everyone elses' posessions be consigned to black plastic bags. The most valuable things, and really the only things that we can lay claim to, are our thoughts and memories. Inside my head is a catalogue of my life and all that is me. That is something that is hard to pass on and most of it will of course vanish in the same instant as my last breath. By writing this blog, I can at least set down some of what I have inside, and perhaps one day someone will read all this and wonder why I bothered.

Clubs

In Afghanistan, and I would guess other countries, it is illegal to abandon your religion.  So we have an Afghan who has abandoned Islam, claiming asylum on the grounds that he will be criminalised if he returns to his own country.
Imagine if we insisted on our children believing in santa claus and fairies and then in later life criminalised them for having rational thoughts and rejecting that belief.  Some may think that this is not a fair comparison, or that I am being flippant, but the point is a serious one.
Most muslims have no choice about being a muslim. It is the way that they are brought up and the way that their parents and those before them are raised. Indoctrination from birth has powerful influence, and of course most muslims remain as muslims so that they can pass it on to their children. The same is to a lesser extent true of other religions, though apostasy in Catholicism is not normally punishable by death.
Surely, any club worth joining, can retain its membership without the threat of persecution from within.

Waiting for Godot

Probably my favourite college drama production was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  Classified as theatre of the absurd, his play is described as a tragicomedy in two acts. It has also been described as a play in which nothing happens - twice.  It is true that nothing really happens to the two vagrants that meet and spend their days hoping that Godot will arrive.  The characters do go through  a whole gamut of emotions, from ecstasy to despair, but the play ends on a low key of helplessness and hopelessness. There are lines that stay with me after all these years and recently having seen Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan performing it on stage, the times and circumstances of that college production came flooding back.
What got me onto this was a walk with my grand daughter this morning. She needs her nap and I need some exercise and coupling the two is a joy for me.  We have a circular route along a woodland path, and by the time we are less than half way, she is usually asleep.  Like most urban areas the place is well provided with litter bins and bins for the deposition of dog turds. It is illegal to allow your pet to poo in public places and responsible dog owners carry plastic bags to pick up the nasty stuff, and most either take it home or place it in the bin provided.  However it seems that however the community makes provision to assist people, there are still those who prefer to do things their own way. What makes people think that it is a good idea to festoon hedges with little bags of dog shit? What do they imagine becomes of them?  Are these the same people that throw empty bottles and cans around the streets, or vandalise public places?  Maybe they think that their behaviour is acceptable, not having any sense of community or even decency.
There are elements of our society, who, in true Thatcher style, are totally selfish. For them, there is no such thing as society or if there is it is not one that I'd want to be part of. We are fragmenting, of that there is no doubt and there is a whole generation growing up without criticism or the experience of failure.  The media suggests that the only worthwhile people are ephemeral pop stars and football players. Sucked in by celebrity, eschewing learning and knowledge for its own sake, people are, in Beckett's words, bloody ignorant apes.

Memories

I have never had a very good memory. Maybe the truth is that I have always been too lazy to actively assign events or whatever to my storage device. I know that there are methods that can enable a more functional memory, and one that intrigues me is the memory house. In this, one holds a three dimensional image of a house, palace of whatever you wish.  Once this model is stored, then items can be allocated to rooms or locations within that place. The theory is that recall is made so much simpler as one has a concrete filing system to search.  I confess that I have not tried this, as the effort involved would be daunting and besides, I don't really have much that I need to remember these days. There is a calendar in the kitchen and significant events are recorded there.  My passwords for virtually everything are stored in my very smart telephone, so all I need to recall is the passwords for the phone and for the password file.
I was reading the other day about people that remember numbers, in particular the digits following the decimal point in Pi. I can remember 3.14 and that is about it, but there are some out there that can remember hundreds or even thousands of decimal places.  For the life of me I cannot see how a memory palace will help there.
Years ago, I was keen on amateur dramatics and took part in a number of plays. Learning lines was always tricky but now and then I did manage it. I went to a teacher training college and became friends with those who were on the drama course. As a result, I got co-opted into a number of their productions. One notable play was Sheila Delany's A Taste of Honey. I had a fairly significant role in that one and tried very hard to get to grips with the script. By opening night however I was far from word perfect but managed to muddle through somehow.  I wasn't alone in my incompetence though. The worst moment came when we, the two leading characters came on stage for act two,  and Vicky(sorry Vicky) immediately launched into her opening speech for act three. It might have been doing the audience a favour had we carried on, especially as she was blissfully unaware, but I managed to communicate to her that she was  "in the wrong bloody act!" and we ad libbed our way back to where we should have been. It was a very uncomfortable moment and probably worse for the producer, whose assessment was based on the performance.
I am of an age now when the whole memory thing is getting worse. I know that my short term recall is declining and that it is unlikely to improve. As my next door neighbour, many moons ago, used to say - "Old age does not come by itself."

Climate change

I am sure that many of us are sick of the weather right now.  In the UK we are beset by strong winds and torrential rain, whilst over the pond, our North American cousins are experiencing unprecedented low temperatures as an arctic winter is taking hold and reaching as far as Florida. There seems no doubt that our climate is changing, and we are told that we can expect more of the same and that possibly worse is to come.
One possible cause of climate change is rising levels of what we call greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and yet I am sure that the quantities of these materials has always been in a state of flux. Our atmosphere is probably cleaner now than it was in the nineteenth century, and every volcanic eruption will produce far more carbon dioxide than human activity tends to.  However, human activity does make a significant contribution to the state of the atmosphere, that cannot be denied and yet the numbers of people continue to rise inexorably.
Even in the 1960s there was a great deal of concern about the burgeoning population, and yet since then it has more than doubled. People are living in areas that cannot sustain current numbers and yet aid pours in, feeding those people and encouraging further expansion, leading to greater poverty and  more need for aid.  In the developed world, technological developments mean that people are living longer, again putting more strain on resources and so it goes on.  There is a struggle for survival, but this is no longer a driving force for evolutionary change, it is the species that is in trouble. Environmental change is usually slow, thus giving organisms a fighting chance to evolve, however rapid change as produced by catastrophic events leads to extinction on a vast scale. We are sitting on a time bomb, or even several time bombs if we include the super volcanoes and the possibility of asteroid collisions, and yet the things that we could do something about are largely being ignored in the hope that they will go away. This is not about saving the planet, the planet takes care of itself, it is about saving the human race if indeed there is anything left worth saving.

Competition

In the natural world, (and I ask rhetorically if there is any such thing as an unnatural world?), organisms struggle to compete for more or less everything. Space, resources, mates, you name it, and in this struggle for survival, lies the mechanism for change that we call evolution.

Many schools and indeed many parents think that competition is a bad thing, and increasingly, competitive sport and competition within the classroom has been eliminated in the name of equality. We bring up children without the experience of failure, and yet for many of us it is failing that teaches us. We pick a fight with someone and we lose, thus making it less likely that we will do it again. We play games and someone always has to lose, learning how to do so gracefully is an essential part of growth. We also need to learn how to win gracefully too, but because of the way that the real world works, everyone has to face competition sooner or later.

Children are brought up to think that everything that they do is wonderful and amazing, however poor or mediocre it may be. So many children are never or rarely criticised or confronted about the way they behave and the consequences for the future remain to be seen. Everything seems child centred and the idea of children behaving as adults would like them to is seen as old fashioned and inappropriate.  It seems that many parents now do what the child dictates.  Schools and parents no longer have adequate sanctions for dealing with bad behaviour and many have no incentives for academic success.

Successive governments tinker with the education system on idealogical grounds whilst the majority of our children flounder carelessly in a sea of trivial information that will be of no use to them whatever.

We need to think long and hard about where we are heading; the Asian world seems to be taking over in so many ways and much of their success lies in their attitudes to the young.

Creationists

I just listened to Ken Ham defending his position as an ardent creationist.

 http://dangerousminds.net/comments/get_your_popcorn_ready_bill_nye_the_science_guy_to_debate_idiot_creation

I'd not usually respond to such clap trap but it struck me that all of the creationists that I have had dealings with have something in common. Apart from the obvious belief that the Earth and all of its attachments were made by a divine being a few thousand years ago, they all seem to totally misunderstand the process of evolution. The creationist idea of evolution seems to be based on lego. They seem to imagine that evolution involves a bag of lego bricks being shaken up and by sheer chance, complex models emerge.  Now I am familiar with the idea that given infinite time, and infinite bags of lego, that anything is possible, but anyone with half a brain will realise that evolution has not had infinite time or infinite resources and that it is not a random process.

There is much to reproductive processes that are random of course. In the production of eggs and sperms, the chromosomes and the genes they carry do get reshuffled to the extent that each germ cell is genetically different, and there is a randomness in which sperm fertilises which egg. The result of this is of course variation in offspring.  The reshuffling referred to though has rules, and it is only similar genes that get swapped, fundamental body plans are consistently maintained, otherwise outcomes may be chaotic.

There is always variation in any sexually reproducing population and some of those variations will be advantaged in the conditions in which they find themselves. It is environment that determines what or who survives and goes on to breed.

It seems that this fundamental process is totally misunderstood, or even ignored by Mr Ham, who dismisses evolution, a process with an evidential observable base, and yet embraces creationism, a process not supported by evidence or even logic.

It is tragic that in this day and age, people are still led by the nose into believing fairy stories written at a time when knowledge was limited, and used as a means of controlling the population.  Creationism is being taught is many schools in the United States as the truth, while evolution is seen as atheist nonsense.

People like Ken Ham are dangerous, as they appeal to, and lead unthinking and ignorant people along a path that will return them to the dark ages.

Why I hate Christmas

In just two weeks all of this will be over. The weather will get even colder but spring will be not too far away.
I am sure that in the dim and distant past, the christmas festival was a welcome treat,  eagerly anticipated, and in its execution, short and sweet, but like everything else, it has been thrashed into submission by economics.  It starts almost as soon as the summer ends, the Co-op had mince pies on sale in september, and the whole thing drags on and on, enabling fools and money to separate with greater frequency.
The shops are full of garbage, made in China by slave labour, and destined to last a very short time before filling our burgeoning landfill sites with layer upon layer of non biodegradeable detritus.
Of course the shopkeepers are desperate to palm all this stuff off, competing with internet shopping and the pound shops, struggling to survive in the cut throat world of commerce. Parents are battered daily with advertising and propaganda, pandering to what they think will make their children happy, and yet it never does, the more plastic crap that they are given, the less meaningful it all becomes.
This is a good time for the money lenders. Payday loans, and similar schemes allow those who have least, to go out and spend most, accumulating huge debts that will hang  around their necks for the rest of the year, whilst those providing the cash make huge profits.
It is a time of year when lies are propagated and even encouraged.  We tell children about a weird fat man in a red suit that flies magically around the world. We tell them that he only visits good children, and yet that lie is disproved by the evidence on Christmas morning. We tell them of flying reindeer, elves, angels, virgin birth, and a vengeful, vain and invisible god, and of course they absorb it all and many remain scarred for life, knowing that it is ok to lie.
It has become a season for excess. To party seems to be the be all and end all for many, and that is a license to behave as badly as you like. Personal freedoms ignore those of others and it has become the norm for some, to get as drunk as they can as often as they can. Post party streets are littered with the ridiculous trappings that seemed so cool at the start of the night, bottles and cans and pools of vomit are left for someone else to clear up, whilst accident and emergency departments are stretched to deal with the human debris.
Charity organisations do very well of course and some of them pass on the bulk of their funds to those needy individuals in the community; whilst others, The Salvation Army for example, dedicate a proportion of their funds to promoting their own religious dogma, including vigorous homophobic campaigns. I am sure that they also do a lot of good for those in need, but for me, their religious bias smacks a little of hypocrisy.
For weeks and weeks, the media hype the whole christmas thing, and then in two days, when everything comes to a halt, it is all over, the overindulgence wanes and the post christmas resolutions to diet and get fit begin again.
What is that all about?

A season for everything

Winter is here and lovely summer days seem a distant memory.  Fuel prices have rocketed since last year and we are all braced for the bills yet to come.
Winter when we were children had its attractions, and although the house had no central heating, just a coal fire, we didn't actually freeze. We had some very harsh winters and I remember them well, our world remained white and frozen for weeks on end and we just adapted to that. Few roads were cleared and as a result, what traffic there was simply moved more slowly.  We rarely missed school and for most people life simply went on. Market gardeners and farmers probably had the hardest time of it, but even they seemed to manage somehow.  I don't recall any old people dying from the cold, though of course a lot of the elderly may well have faded away in the winter months.   The main difference I suppose was that we wore lots and lots of clothes, even in the house, and rather than dispersing to different rooms, we's all sit around the single fire in the evenings and hustle into freezing bedrooms with hot water bottles.
The press has been sensationalising the prospect of a severe winter once again. They do it to sell papers of course but I hope that they are wrong. I know that I feel the cold these days and do not enjoy it much at all.
Then there is Christmas - my least favourite time of the year. It started a few weeks ago of course, with the local Co-op selling mince pies in festive boxes with sell by dates in late october and early november.  Call me a miserable old git but there was something nice about having a right time for things. Mince pies appeared in the week before christmas along with exotic fruits like tangerines and dates and figs; now we can get everything at any time of the year, and that makes nothing very special. We are drifting into blandness and no-one seems to be in control.

Back to school

Grandchildren grow up so fast. The time that we have with them is so precious and pretty soon they will be in the clutches of the school system and then changed forever.

The purpose of schools seems unclear to me now. I used to think that it was about opening the eyes and minds of young people, encouraging them to think and to be able to deal with problems, how to learn and how to find things out, but as time passes, it seems that is no longer the case.

Of course I can't speak from recent experience, but even when I was teaching, I was aware of a gradual change in emphasis in my own subject area and a general drift away from what seemed to be worthwhile and towards a fact based process that pushed all students through the same dull and meaningless loops in order to meet examination criteria that suited the political climate of the day. The whole curriculum is geared towards a ludicrous system of assessment and when the assessments don't work, the goalposts are changed again and again.

Exam results are published this week and as always the schools are in a lose lose situation. If the pass rates increase, then the exams are too easy and of course if they go down then the schools are failing; the press, like the government love to kick teachers around and then they seem surprised when there is a recruitment problem. 

Industry is calling for a vocational system to be introduced (again) and it does seem a sensible thing to do, and at the same time many able students are opting out of higher education and choosing apprenticeships (again).

One major issue is that a significant proportion of the population do not value education and see schools as free child minding, not caring too much about what happens during the day. Perhaps the whole system needs rethinking. Education should be freely accessible to all but should it be compulsory up until the age of 18?  Perhaps parents and students  should not expect automatic places in schools regardless of the child's behaviour. Maybe if school places had to be deserved, then they might be better valued.

My grandchildren will be encouraged to get as much out and put as much into their times in school, but once there they are in the hands of who knows who and subject to the influence of friends over whom we will have no choice.  I can only hope that things improve.

Epigenetics

The Royal family have again expanded. I am sure that the family is pleased with the new arrival and rightly so. Parents and grandparents will be proud and happy to have this new addition and no doubt there will be siblings to follow. Good luck to all of them.

It has been interesting to follow the reactions of the public this week and yet again the total gullibility of the populace has been demonstrated on a vast scale.  First there was the lead up to the "event" with people almost holding their breath whilst standing on the streets for days hoping that they might catch a glimpse of a royal minion carrying a piece of paper, and then the jubilation following the announcement.  I doubt if many people took a step back and thought about what they were doing, why should they? The programming has been going on for millennia  and is continued quite happily by the media of today.  People must behave like sheep and do what the powers that be wish them to do, otherwise we will have anarchy.  Royalty has always subjugated the population and have remained unchallenged today despite their lack of any real power, and supported by the church the masses have been herded through all the appropriate fences and kept in check.

Epigenetics is a fascinating new science, that studies the influence of environment and experience on genetic make up. It was once thought that our genes are inherited in a fixed form and that we were simply the slaves of our biology.  Now it appears that genes can be switched on and off by external and internal factors.  For example, we may carry genes that give a propensity for a particular disease or condition. These genes may be switched off but life events may be able to switch them on.
It is possible that centuries of forelock tugging and bowing and scraping, being threatened with hell and damnation and seeing others tortured and even executed for having minds of their own, has triggered a gene complex that ensures compliance in the bulk of people.

The new baby has been greeted as if he was the new Messiah; and there is a significant proportion of people that firmly believe that the Royals were appointed by some divinity; yet the only impact that this child will have on their lives other than media hype, will be further drain on the public purse.  The child will have no life of its own, however privileged it is. It will want for nothing and yet it will miss out on what it is like to be human and will simply observe the flock from afar, unable to run with it.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixmNZQH0NjU

Dulce et decorum est

I just got back from a holiday in the Somme valley.  It is a strange place to take a holiday as the area is largely agricultural, but an interest in the first world war drew me there.  The house that we rented was built before the terrible events of the early twentieth century, its walls thick and its heating inefficient and the inclement weather meant that it was warmer outside than in.  We took books of course and when not touring the battlefields and cemeteries, I read about the events and the horrific experiences of some of those who survived.

The carnage, we all know, was beyond belief, hundreds of thousands of young men from all nations were mown down in their prime and their lives torn away from them.  Even more German lives were lost than those of commonwealth and American soldiers and the landscape of the Somme will be a permanent reminder of the effectiveness of propaganda as well as man's fundamental indifference to his fellow man.

The fields are green and lush everywhere and smeared liberally with swathes of poppies that look like bright bloodstains.  There are more than a thousand military cemeteries in that area alone and white headstones stand out from the perfectly manicured lawns like young teeth. So many headstones bear the anonymity of an unidentified victim and other monuments list the thousands who were never accounted for.  Remains are still being discovered nearly a hundred years on and those remains are given due respect and interred along with the rest.

History tells us that these young men willingly volunteered and laid down their lives in a war to end wars. Did they have any choice?  The politicians decided the events of the war, they instructed the generals who in turn sent their men to their deaths.  Enlisting was not an option for many men, it was either that or being branded a coward or a traitor. The propaganda enticed women to treat non combatants as lower forms of life and those in uniform as heroes. It would have been so hard not to volunteer. 

I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of dead and the destruction of so many towns and villages in a relatively small area of France. The progress made in 1916 was minimal and it would appear that the Somme's main objective was to take pressure off Ypres, and in that sense it was a success. 

We found one small German cemetery. That in itself was very moving, the youth of that country were also decimated and they too had no choice but to kill and be killed.  Jewish and non Jewish soldiers were interred alongside each other a poignant reminder that the only lessons learned from the so called Great War were more efficient ways to kill each other, and each war passes on that lesson and no other.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) 
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12) 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13) 
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918