All posts by adrian

The whole country has a smile on it’s face

Monday 28th May

From one end of the country to the other the whole country has a smile on its face.  After weeks of bad news, and the constant revelations of sleaze at Leveson, the slow-motion car crash of the Euro and our Government’s very own omnishambles, at last some good news.  The Torch relay is visiting almost the whole country, and everywhere it goes it draws big crowds, with old and young alike getting excited.  And, of course, the weather has changed.  After weeks of pissy cold rain and wind, arriving almost unheralded and like a bolt out of the blue – Blazing Summer – as hot as I can remember England being in May, and so unexpected. Everywhere you go you see happy contented faces, and every open space in all the parks you see young lovers snuggling or family picnics, and even though I do not like them, disposable barbecues.  And they are probably right, all these sun-worshippers.  As well as being by far the earliest bit of good weather, it must be the hottest of the year so far.  There is also the possibility that at any moment we will revert back to those wet and grey-cloudy overcast days we have had too many of lately.  And who knows as well as being the best weekend of the year so far, it could well end up being actually the best, and perish the thought – the only one.  So out with the factor fifteen, drag yourself away from the telly, and get outside and join us all in one great big smile.

B is occasionally also for The Beautiful South

Sunday 27th May

I first heard this superb band when I was going out with Louise,( and I had a daughter, now 26, with her) so it just shows you how long they have been around, a few personnel changes agreed – but the constant factor has been the voice and songwriting of Paul Heaton.  And their first single and the lead off track from the first album still brings a smile to my face whenever I hear it – ‘Song for Whoever’, a real antidote to all the soppy songs with girls names in the title.  Jennifer, Annabel, Philipa-Sue – I forget your name.  Brilliant Lyric, as they all are, ‘A Little Time with that line ‘Funny how soon the milk turns sour, doesn’t it’, to Perfect 10 – a song about girls in different sizes, and a mention of men’s willy size too.  Or ‘Don’t marry Her – Fuck Me’; now how many times girls have you wanted to say that.  I have seen them two or three times and they end their shows with ‘Woman in the Wall’, a really jovial song about a murdered woman bricked up between two walls, which is surprisingly good fun to sing along to. As is often the case with my favourite bands their best days are probably behind them, but with the Beautiful South their songs always sound so fresh and are invariably upbeat and life-enhancing, as if they were written yesterday, so for originality and great lyrics – A Perfect 10.

Beautiful South-1

Never show an unfinished painting to Women or Children

Saturday 26th May

And very good advice it was too.  Given me by my only ever Art teacher Jack Trodd, way back in the mid-sixties, that wonderful decade ( if only we had known it at the time) when anything might be possible.  Jack Trodd wore tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows, smoked a rather fruity tobacco in his meerschaum pipe in class, was in his late fifties and was a bit of a peadophile.  Also a damn good art teacher, who let us lower sixth formers do what we wanted, including smoking cigarettes in the back of the Art room, where the seldom-used potters wheels and piles of drawing boards and easels were stacked.  He used to teach me how to do a watercolour wash, me standing next to him, watching as his sable brush drew a line just beneath the dark water line, drawing as if by magic the water margin a quarter inch down the page and leaving behind a residue of colour, the wash, as the base for the layers of watery paint to sit upon.  While concentrating fully on the task in hand Jack would also be adept at running his hand up the back of your knees, and under your grey flannel shorts, and right up to the peachy cheeks of your bum.  He never seemed to want to go any further, which was both a relief and a mystery; maybe he got off on just touching your arse, and didn’t need to actually touch your willy, who knows?   I didn’t really mind, as I was learning about Art at the same time, and nothing of any consequence actually happened.  Jack was quite high up in the Scouts, and it seemed from my experience that most of the Scoutmasters were closet boy-fanciers anyway.   To today’s generation, who know all about peadophiles, the internet and the dangers to young children it may seems strange that in fact there were loads of them around when we were growing up, the vast majority, as I suspect now, never really got up to anything that much, but a bit of touching up was quite normal behaviour.  We kids never told anyone, because it didn’t seem to be doing any harm, and anyway, we were only kids, so who was going to listen to us anyway.  But I did learn about perspective and how to draw the human body, and how to draw faces from Jack, and yes, the best advice of all – never show an unfinished painting to women or children, still holds true.   Happy days on the whole.

 

Your Sixties – the Decade of Lost Hopes

Friday 25th May

In one’s fifties the thought of being sixty fills one with dread; after all being fifty is hardly old, but the idea of reaching three score and more has a chastening and chilling effect.  One’s working life must surely be drawing to a close, and for so many of us, our work defines us.  The thought of the desert of retirement looms, and double edged sword as it might be, as much as one may hate working, the thought of nothing to do with one’s life is also oppressive.   And you finally realise that actually, you do not really matter that much anymore.  Oh, you may become a target for the advertisers of Tena-pads and mobility scooters and equity release, but is it only our money that has any value now.   But mostly one’s sixties is the decade of lost hopes.  All through those angst-filled teenage years, the relationship filled twenties and thirties, the family creating forties and the quietly confident fifties there was always a future, or a feeling that one still had the time to do things.  And that any changes would be positive, that was the thing, one felt positive about the future, mainly because there was one.  Now that one is well into one’s sixties one realizes that those hopes have faded, one is facing a future of more or less the same thing from now on.  Most of us by this time have found our niche, our little crack in the wall, into which we wedge our not-so-skinny arses, and can at least face the world with some sort of confidence.  But that niche is also a trap, one cannot dare to leave it, as, if we do, we may never find it and comfort again.  So we soldier on, plodding away the years, and telling everyone, at least everyone younger than ourselves, that we have never been happier.  By the time we are in our seventies, no-one expects much of us, and in our eighties we are marveled at for not actually dying.  But in our sixties we finally understand that this is more or less it, no more great achievements, no more to be achieved, just a question of trying to hang onto what you may have for as long as possible during the decade of lost hopes.

A change in the weather is known to be extreme

Thursday 24th May

But what’s the point of changing horses in mid-stream.  The wonderful words of Dylan keep swirling round in my head.  What are they trying to tell me, to keep on keeping on – not to give up, not to seek the easy option, though times may seem tough.  And what do we know about tough, here in the pampered twenty-first century.  Compared to even our grandparents growing up maybe a hundred years ago.  No television, no computers, no phones, no radio even; long, much longer hours of work, and hard manual labour, for men that was five and a half long days work, which was why the Saturday afternoon ritual of the football match evolved, a bit of drinking in the pub on Saturday night, then a day of rest on Sunday.  Two weeks holiday at a boarding house by the coast somewhere, retired at sixty-five and dead by seventy – that was about it for most of them.

But maybe tough is always relative; there is always somewhere worse off than oneself, and the respective quality of suffering cannot be compared anyway.  And just at the moment it seems as if a change in the weather may indeed be both extreme and permanent.  The ascendency of the West may be drawing to a close.  Just how slow and protracted that close may be is yet to be played out, but maybe the West, and by that I mean Europe and European thought, art and culture, may be heading for a long decline.  And should we therefore be thinking about changing horses, mid-stream as it is.  Should we leave this wonderful continent with all its history and variety or should we perhaps be thinking of ways to preserve the best of the past, and carry on into whatever uncertainty the future may hold with our European heads held high.  Hold on tight, it may be a rough ride.

The Moo-Cows of London

Wednesday 23rd May

You see them everywhere, and though some are undoubtedly male I still call them moo-cows.  I do not know, but strongly suspect that it is the case, if they inhabit other cities, but London is full of them, they are simply everywhere.  They wander around aimlessly chewing the cud, looking up from their grazing occasionally at all the busy people rushing around, as if these scurrying creatures were in fact from another planet altogether.  Despite it being the extended rush hour which London seems to need they seem not to be bothered by financial or in fact any other considerations at all.  You see them sitting in Starbucks staring into the middle distance, a hand occasionally mechanically raising the green-logoed cardboard cup to their lips, their gaze never faltering.  Or they may be spotted vaguely browsing their i-phones, an index finger occasionally brushing the screen as images flicker by; one wonders if they recognize any, as they never show any emotion on their moo-cow faces.   What sort of lives do they lead, these strange sedentary beasts who never hurry, but amble along, occasionally glancing at a Metro, but you suspect that they scorn any real news and content themselves with the celebrity fodder on offer.  And the female moo-cow faces are blank and all made up to look exactly the same, as if any sign of individuality would mark them out as being possibly interesting.  You never get a reaction from a moo-cow, or even a smile.  They are impassive and will not let slip the mask they have so carefully created.  Even when moo-cows meet each other, there is barely a whisper of recognition; after all who talks to a moo-cow.

But scorn them not, for they may in fact be the future of the human race – a new sub species that will eventually dominate and destroy all of us thinking busy people.  Maybe they are just watching and waiting, planning our eventual overthrow.  So beware – the day of the moo-cow may soon be upon us.

The Trouble with Belief

Tuesday 22nd May

When one looks at almost all the petty wars going on, and even the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, it seems that religion is at the core of the dispute.  Whether it is explicit as in Sunni versus Shia Muslims or implicit as in our involvement in Afghanistan, where, deny it as we might, the perception in the East is that we are there because we are Christians and they are Muslims.   And why should this be, when the leaders of every religion in the world are telling us that they are so peaceful, and believe in the goodness of whatever they call their God.  Why should such bitterness be in the hearts of these religious fanatics?  Why are young men and women prepared to lay down their lives, not even for political freedoms but for the belief that their brand of religion is superior to all others.  Is it down to the very nature of belief; in order to believe one has to in effect suspend disbelief.  One has to accept that things which cannot be seen and understood are true, because some holy book or a priest somewhere tells you they are so.  One has to positively trust an unseen deity in order to have faith to believe in that which is not provable.  Therefore one has already given away the rational part of one’s mind, and accepted that things we cannot understand have an irrational but unquestionable explanation.  Therefore the person who believes is already less understanding of the world as they see it for themselves, and sees the world through the prism of their religious belief.  Quite why this should mean that in some cases they are prepared to kill people who do not share the same ideology is beyond me.   And we in the West should not feel at all superior, our religious wars and slaughter make the current disputes in the Muslim world seem child’s play.  I cannot quite understand it – I am happy for anyone to believe whatever they want, God, Allah or Green Turtles, provided they do not attempt to make me believe it also – but maybe that is because I haven’t been corrupted by belief in the first place.

I am not holding my breath

Monday 21st May

Common sense may prevail one day, but I am not holding my breath.  We are on the brink of momentous decisions being made in the Eurozone, with the possibility of the collapse of the entire edicice, of a decade of decline in what has to date been by far the most exciting and creative continent on earth, the fate of millions of young people all over Europe hangs in the balance and the politicians seem to bumble along as if the G8 was a weekend jolly for old mates at Margate.  There seems to be no real sense of urgency, just a lot of platitudes from our leaders. They said that they all want a stable currency with tight fiscal rules but an agenda for growth too.  As if the two were old bedchums all along, and the Tories do actually purport to believe this.  They might as well have said they wanted Apple Pie covered with rich creamy Curry Sauce.   It seems as if they were all far more interested in being part of the group photograph than in coming up with any sort of an answer.  The Germans look as if they are waiting for the result of the Greek election, hoping against hope that a pro-austerity coalition will somehow miraculously appear.  Cameron never looked as if he was really serious anyway, and Barack Obama just appears to be too nice.  Do they not realise that the old sticking plasters will not even cover the wounds anymore, let alone start to heal them.  But the markets will not wait, and what they hate most is uncertainty.  If Germany had said unequivocally that Greece would not be leaving the Euro then at least we would have known they were serious.  So, I fear that any decision has once again been shelved, maybe because it is so difficult to actually come up with the obvious solution.  Greece must be both saved and reformed, not punished for earlier mistakes; the rich must pay their taxes, the politicians must be honest, and the banks must be controlled and run for the benefit of the people and not for a few shareholders.  The same must be true for Spain and Italy too.  And the Eurozone must move towards a single United States of Europe, maybe some sort of Federation but with the same taxes, and the same benefits throughout.  It is just commonsense, and it must break out one day, but I am not holding my breath.

Watching the Olympic Torch relay. I came over all sentimental

Sunday 20th May

I had slept badly; another night of fidgets and two o’clock insomnia.  The glass of water beside my bed was empty, and I knew I should go into the bathroom and fill it, but despite this obvious solution and my dry mouth I just lay there tossing and turning and looking desperately at the clock to see if yet another five minutes had passed yet.  Eventually I must have dozed off, but as soon as it was really light I was awake again.  I managed to stay in bed until 5.45, then slipped downstairs, fully intending to just make a cup of tea and bring it back to bed, read a few pages of Jean Rhys and slip back into slumber.  But I made the fatal error of sitting on the sofa, and switching the TV on.  They were showing the arrival of the Olympic Flame from last night, and even though I had seen it, I sat and watched it all over again.  Then the cameras were at Lands End, and the Torch relay proper was about to begin.  And despite my reasoning that this whole palaver was such a concocted piece of theatre to try and drum up some interest in the Olympics, I suddenly felt the first pricking of tears in my eyes.  Why on earth should I be crying, and especially at this item.  But it really tugged the old heart strings.  All those times I had watched the Olympics before as a child, Rome and Tokyo in fuzzy black and white, and Montreal and Moscow, and showbizzy Los Angeles, and beautiful Barcelona, and more recently Sydney, Athens and Beijing, I never once thought it would be happening in London.  And even when we won the bid, a degree of cynicism was always circling at the back of my mind.  But now, suddenly it was here.  And the joy of the public was palpable, even Ben Ainslie looked stunned, and as each runner took the torch on a bit further I was so excited.  For an hour or so I became again that small child marveling at the Olympic Flame being lit in far away stadia, and it was lovely.  Just that, a bit sentimental, but lovely all the same.

Ben Ainslie

What it all means

Saturday 19th May

With all the confusion surrounding the present Euro crisis, banks being downgraded daily, Greece as chaotic as ever, David Cameron turning on and off the euro-sceptic tap depending on who he thinks he is talking to, is it any wonder that it seems that no-one has any idea what is actually happening or more importantly where we are headed.  We are in unchartered waters to some degree, but one is reminded of the words of Alistair Darling almost four years ago when he said that the fiscal crisis of 2008, which he was caught in the middle of, was the worst shock to the world financial system since the 1930s.  Actually he was wrong, it is probably worse than that.   What caused the crisis is one story, and in a way it almost doesn’t matter – we are where we are and no amount of analysis of previous errors will tell us what to do now.

The G8, one of many many talking shops is meeting in America over this weekend and share prices are tumbling.  I believe we are at a turning point, or rather a crossroads.  Going straight ahead will be driving blind into the oncoming storm of a euro-zone break-up.  To the right there is the road of continuing austerity, which many believe has made the problems of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal far worse.  To the left is a possible new injection of money from, well to be frank, no-one really knows, to drag the euro-zone back into growth.  The car is in danger of stalling and being swept away.  And maybe, just maybe we are on the brink of something even more momentous; the possible creation of a new state, a real political and financial union with unified taxes and spending plans encompassing France, Germany, Denmark and the Low Countries.   We are also maybe on the verge of a revolution, but one in which barricades and guns will be absent.  There may emerge out of all this mess a revolution in the way we, the public, monitor and relate to politicians, and the way those politicians regulate and control banks and the financial sector, which since 1984 and the Big Bang has run amok, with the acquiescent nods of government – as long as they were making money nobody cared exactly how they did it.  Interesting times.