Humans weren’t meant to do this sort of thing

Tuesday 17th July

It is only a fraction of a second in evolutionary terms since Human Beings stopped being hunter-gatherers and started to become settled farmers.  And for a few thousand years most of us led a maybe hard, but basically stress-free life.  It is only in the last couple of hundred years that things have got bad, and of course the rate of acceleration is increasing so fast now, that we are hurtling into a more and more uncertain future.  The rate of technological development means that we are having to constantly adapt.  Even ten years ago no-one had heard of Facebook or Twitter, which will surely soon be consigned to the rubbish bin themselves.  I can remember in the late nineties, people talking about e-mail, and yet I am sure even the most enthusiastic of those early converts had no idea how central to the working life of us all it would soon become.   And now hardly anyone is not involved with sitting in front of a screen for at least part of their day.  But all of this technology comes at a price, and stress is one of the methods of payment.  As we become more and more reliant on this ‘wonderful’ new technology, so we panic when it doesn’t work.  Colleagues e-mail me desperate that they have left their mobile phone at home – the end of the world is looming as they realise that for a few hours they are un-contactable. ‘Enjoy the moment’ I reply, but sad to report I am one of the first to stress out if my own laptop starts to play up, or refuses to start, or won’t connect to the internet. And I realise more and more that human beings were just not designed to be doing this.  Of course, we cannot just opt out either, or not until retirement and a sedentary lifestyle is well established.  At some point I suspect we will all give in, throw in the mouse and hang up our modem.  But till then – be prepared for many stressful days ahead.

Capital and Income

Monday 16th July

I had a boss once, who was almost part of the ‘Aristocracy’; in fact his mother had been a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother at one time.  God only knows how these things are decided, if at all nowadays, but his family were certainly somebodies.  They were from Scotland, but ‘Mac’, as he was known to all was more English than ‘tuppence’, private schooling had done its worst, and he was a real posh boy.  Despite this he was very down to earth and loved dirty jokes and had a wicked sense of humour.  Whether working in Catering was his very own form of rebelling I don’t know, but he always assured me that he didn’t have to work at all, that he had plenty of money invested and could live ‘orf the interest’(that was in the days when interest was worth having, of course).  One of his mantras was that one must never spend one’s Capital, and even Income should be spared if any of it could be added to the Capital.  I was just a working class oik, and had no idea what Capital meant.  You got your wages on a Friday, and would be lucky to have any left by Thursday.  I did have a small amount in savings, but this was in case I lost my job, not in any way as Capital.  But then came the house-buying boom of the seventies, and desperate not to be left behind, despite living in a nice controlled-rent flat, I bought my first property.  So at last I had some Capital, or a Mortgage in place of it.  Those of us who lived through the eighties and nineties were so so lucky.  House prices kept going up in leaps and bounds, and it was almost ‘de rigeur’ to boast of how much more ones house was worth today than when one bought it.  And one consequence was that as your Mortgage slowed diminished and the value of your house increased, you had a larger and larger lump of equity.  But it was sitting useless in your property, you couldn’t actually spend it.  Many friends and colleagues at the time were busily re-mortgaging their houses, sometimes annually, and so releasing this Capital, and spending it.  Some were clever and used it to buy other properties, but most bought cars or holidays or a new kitchen.  I, on the other hand took the advice of Mac, and tried to pay my mortgage off even quicker, which I did.  I then sold the house and got a large sum of money, which I have now mostly spent on two properties, one here and one in France.  But in a way it doesn’t really matter, as long as you still have an income.  You will die and others will inherit your Capital and probably spend it foolishly anyway. Funny old game though.

No real News to report

Sunday 15th July

There is always news, but what constitutes News is not always new.  The problem is that we have an infrastructure that is quite unsuited to the reporting of news.  In the Middle Ages a Town Crier might be sent out to proclaim the death of a King, or a great military victory, the rest of the time there would be nothing except the usual gossip at the weekly markets.  With the coming of newspapers, editors soon realised that they had to fill their papers with something, and it was often made up, or if not actually invented then highly exaggerated, not only in its content but its importance.  Here we also started to see the blurring of comment and opinion with the personal interest of the owner, culminating in the late Twentieth Century and beyond with News International using its papers for both political and business ends.  For a long time TV news was trusted to be impartial, though anyone who knows anything will tell you that it was the News editing that was the most important element; in other words what was decided as News was as important as the actual reporting of that news.  So, in a way the Media make the News, or at least decide what prominence to give different bits of news.  And every year we have the silly season stories, where for lack of anything really decisive, especially when Parliament is on one of its many long breaks, the news schedules are filled with items that wouldn’t normally get in on the rolling news channels let alone the evening main bulletins.  And they have to fill in their allotted half hour with something, don’t they.  So, how does the discerning member of the public decide what is important, apart from as an increasing majority do and switch off completely.  You just have use the boredom factor, where at present Syria probably scores the highest followed by the Olympic Torch Relay which seems to have been going on all year already.  Wouldn’t it just be lovely if Huw Edwards were to say after five minutes, “And actually that is all that has really happened of any significance today; there really was no News to report, so goodnight.”

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Saturday 14th July

I have got a thing about these Nordic detectives and having watched Wallander on TV played so brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the books.  Being the logical sort of person I am I decided to start with the first Wallander novel, so Faceless Killers was the one I started with.  Well, it was brilliant and almost from the first page too.  The sense of a life careening out of control was captured without any sentimentality.  The prose is quite terse and there isn’t a lot of action or description, but somehow it just works.  The character of Kurt Wallander is quite sad really, a bit like a younger Scandinavian version of our very own John Rebus.  And why is it that we like our detectives to be miserable.  In the twenties and thirties we seemed to like them jovial and rich like Hercule Poirot, but as times have got grittier then we seem to like our detectives grittier too. The weather is also a constant factor in this book, almost every page there is some reference to the weather getting worse or slightly better.  And the desolate landscape of Sweden is captured in a few bleak phrases.  The story wasn’t actually that great, a few dead ends and the killers in the end aren’t that interesting.  One’s whole attention is on the pretty miserable lives of Kurt and his team of cops.  And I find that this is what I really like;  I don’t really care who dunnit, or how they were discovered, but the character of Kurt or Rebus is all important, even the little details of what they are eating and drinking and the clothes they are wearing.   I finished it in record time and now feel a bit empty that I have got to the end.  So a definite hit – and I will be reading more.  Shall we say 8 out of 10.

Mysterious Death of a Cow

Friday 13th July

The scientific community is buzzing at the moment with excitement.  It has long been understood that the domestic farm cow is actually quite intelligent and far from the popular conception that all these animals do all day is stand around chewing the cud.  Well of course, they do stand around chewing the cud, as this is part of the digestive process, but there may well be more going on than meets the eye. It has long been suspected that there is some form of cow language, or at least some form of communication rather than the occasional moo.  Farmers have long observed that cows know when bad weather is on the way at least a couple of hours before it arrives, and it has often been observed that younger animals, who have never seen the cattle transporter, appear to know that the arrival of this vehicle, a true harbinger of their death, means not only their separation from the herd but their eventual demise too. More evidence has arisen recently when Daisy Brown, a seven year old milker suddenly ran dry.  This is an infrequent but not unknown problem, and if it persists the farmer knows he will have no alternative but to send the unproductive cow to the pet food factory.  It seems that Daisy was aware of this too, because she appears to have colluded with others to arrange her own demise rather than face the inevitable.  Farmer Brown farms several acres of the Sussex Downs, right up to some very high cliffs.  The day that he decided poor Daisy was no longer a viable proposition and he went to collect her he noticed that she was being protected by a solid ring of other cows who, seemingly in concert shielded her from his advance.  Gradually the whole herd moved as one nearer and nearer to the edge of the cliffs, until poor Daisy was forced over the edge to her death. Officials from the EU are investigating as this would appear to be the first recorded case of assisted moo-icide.

B is also for, and let us not forget, The Byrds

Thursday 12th July

So many fabulous bands from the sixties, a time of musical creativity almost unmatched, and one of the most influential was ‘The Byrds’.  Formed around a nucleus of Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Chris Hillman they took folk and country and mixed it with pop and everything going to create their own special sound.  And the defining element of that was always Roger’s jangling guitar sound.  Formed in 1965 and broke up in 1971, but they had about ten albums and were constantly changing, both personnel and styles, but they always sounded fresh and exciting.  They took a Bob Dylan song ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and put a funky beat behind it and gentle harmonies and it was an instant hit, so much so that it surely impressed Bob to get rockier too. They kick-started the whole West Coast thing with groups like the Eagles and Tom Petty carrying on where they left off.  The whole Americana scene that is now so popular has been widely influenced by The Byrds.  And let us not forget the songs, 5D, Eight Miles High, Chestnut Mare and So You Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star, which provided a counterpoint to the Beatles poppiness..  In fact it was Roger’s use of the sitar in many Byrds songs that inspired George Harrison to play it too.  It was an incredibly fast moving scene and everyone influenced everyone else to some degree, but every time I put on a Byrds record I just feel like I have come home again.  Most people have forgotten them now, but at one time they were up there with The Beatles and The Stones and The Beach Boys, and deservedly so too.

Byrdmaniax (Exp)

I just feel so tired

Wednesday 11th July

Is it the weather, which never seems to really improve day after day?  Maybe it is the news, the constant battle to prop up the Euro, the daily slanging match in Parliament, but I am just so tired lately.  I wake up tired, and yet I had lain awake in the night, willing sleep on myself to no avail.  It isn’t as if life is particularly hard, it has been much tougher in the past, it just seems that everything is pure repetition.  I am a hamster stuck in a wheel of repetitious tasks which mean nothing and leave me irritated that I am still doing the same things so many years after I had resolved again and again to shed this tired skin and start living again.  And when I look around me, we are all the same, tired worn out faces on the tube, we are all hamsters going round and round on our own little wheels, seeming incapable of either stopping the wheel or our own pathetic scampering.  Is there no other way then?  At times one envies the reckless young, who having nothing to lose go trekking over the world, or just drift from town to town, from job to job, a few carrier bags contain their life story.  But maybe they are just on a different treadmill themselves, who knows.  I just have to get on with it I suppose.  It is called Modern life, and there is almost no escaping it.

Lies, Smears and Just Bad Politics

Tuesday 10th July

Not that most people are concerned at all, after all they mostly ignore politicians.  They still blame them, of course, for what goes wrong, which is most of the time, but they cannot be bothered between elections to actually listen to what is being said.  The daily nitty gritty, the cut and thrust of daily politics, is just too boring for them.  Or so they think, it all just passes over their head, or so they will tell you.  But in its insidious way it does seep in.  Dismiss the papers by all means, and most of us don’t read them every day as we used to, but they still matter.  It is also all too easy to avoid the news these days, with hundreds of channels to switch over too, when those dread news drumbeats roll out after your favourite escapist viewing.   But still it gets through and we form impressions of politicians or parties despite our apathy. ‘Labour are in the hands of the unions’   ‘Cameron is a posh boy’  ‘the Liberals cannot be trusted’  etc etc.  But much of what we hear is planted, and most of it to denigrate the opposition; after all it is much easier to criticise the other lot than to say something constructive yourself.   And this is where the lies, the smears and the truly bad politics come in.  It is almost an industry these days, because like advertising, no matter how much you may disagree – it works. And that is why Ed Balls was so angry with George Osborne when he was accused of trying to persuade Barclays to lower it’s Libor submissions.  As if it really matters, but it certainly did to Ed.  Because one of the main deciders of the next election will be for the Tories to portray Labour as untrustworthy, and so far they are doing quite a good job.  They reckon that no matter the state of the economy in their hands the public perception will be that it will be better to stick with us than trust that lot again.  But sometimes those lies and smears can just be bad politics.  If Labour can turn it on its head and show that the Tories are blatant liars they become discredited and the voters will feel that maybe Labour aren’t that bad after all.  It is still three years to the next election, but believe me it has already started.

It didn’t go quite to plan

Monday 9th July

Well, it didn’t go quite to plan, although against Roger Federer, and back to his best again, what plan could have worked.  All you can say is that Andy Murray gave his all, but his all wasn’t quite good enough.  And even at the end you felt that Roger could just as easily have stepped up another gear if required. So, the excitement is over, and another year’s Wimbledon is at an end, though there will not be one quite like it for a while one suspects.  The game of tennis is a superb contest of skills and temperament, and the part of the game that is maybe the hardest is the psychological one.  This year Andy was much cooler, the work of Ivan Lendl no doubt, but there were still signs of his frustration, the occasional banging of the racquet, the reckless line challenges and the hanging head.  It is this part of Andy’s game that still needs work.  And how important ones serve is, personally I could never serve for toffee; I have no idea where the ball is going when I hit it, and if it gets over the net at all I am as surprised as my opponent.  Federer’s serve was rock solid, and seldom wavered, whereas Murray’s went slowly downhill.

Let us hope that this is a stepping stone in his career, not the pinnacle.  And at least he can comfort himself that he did get to the final, which no other British man has done for over seventy years.  Well done Andy.  And even better done Roger

Roger Federer The Championships - Wimbledon 2012: Day Thirteen

 

Weather Turmoil all over the World

Sunday 8th July

Of course we in Britain are weather obsessed and always have been.  Though this year it seems we are quite justified, it simply hasn’t stopped raining.  It is now official, April May and June were the three wettest months on record.  And it is all the fault of the Jet-stream moving south.  We get most of our weather from the Gulf of Mexico, flowing across the Atlantic and hitting us with a belt of mild air.  But this year, so the Meterologists say it has shifted a bit south meaning that we are getting the weather that normally passes to the North of us; that is rain and rain and then more rain.  Every year there are unusual weather phenomena all over the world, but I have just seen on the news that Russia has just had severe flooding with about seventy-six people killed, and in America on the Eastern Seaboard they are suffering an unusually ferocious heat-wave.  So is this weather turmoil something unusual, is it the first harbinger of truly devastating stuff to come, is it perhaps the first tangible evidence of Global Warming.  Ever since the financial crash of 2008 the whole worlds attention had been on economics, and the environment has slipped down on the agenda.  But it certainly hasn’t gone away, and is perhaps a far greater threat to mankind than the fate of the euro, or whether China continues its march towards world domination at quite the same pace. The trouble is that even more than the financial crisis, the environmental one requires united action.  And we cannot seem to get different countries to agree on anything at the moment.

But as I write this the sun is shining, apologies to those of you in Devon or anywhere else where there is torrential rain, and though we know it is but a brief respite before the rain begins again, one cannot help but just bask in it for a while.  What the solution may be I really do not know, but I suppose if it is still raining like this in a year’s time, it might just jog someone into action.