There is concern among the population generally that our national identity is being diluted, and this seems to have been taken on board by the PM, who has instructed Lord Goldsmith to look into the matter. It would appear from what has been said on television today, 11.03.08, that there is a proposal to require children to swear allegiance to the Crown. When I lived in Africa as a small child, Empire day was a great occasion and I have a feeling that allegiance to the flag was in there somewhere. When I joined the Navy, on that first day I think we were lined up and had to swear allegiance. When I was a boy scout, I think we swore allegiance at the same time as having a short prayer at the beginning of every meeting. In retrospect possibly in later years, when there were splinter groups like the Brown Shirts, the Red Shirts and the Black Shirts, we were so British it had almost hurt.

With sweeping problems like this one, I often think of an analogy, and find the reduction in scale enables me to see my way more clearly. When I think of our country I compare it to my home as an analogy, and the nation as my family. We as a family don’t need to constantly assert our affection, we take it as a given, demonstrated by our actions, our respect and concerns. I have come across people who are effusive, and I find that they’re not respected. I think Lord Goldsmith perhaps has forgotten his schooldays, when we had assembly every morning, with a Bible reading and prayers. This, unlike Sunday School, impinged not at all on my religious outlook, it was a bore and a waste of time. When I was young we not only knew we were British we were proud we were, and I do not believe that swearing allegiance in any way is a solution. All the time that we have ghettos in our country, a sense of isolation contributed to by the lack of a cohesive family life, factions determined in every way to emphasise their difference, and a level of political  apathy among the indigenous population, we will continue to be more isolated, more indifferent. I can remember when we knew the names of practically everybody in our street, and had been, at some time or other, into about 30% of the houses. I lived for 42 years in a house in its own grounds and had very little to do with the residents who were more than 4 houses away from us. It is our lifestyle, of course, which is to blame. We are so busy, today, even more than we were 15 years ago, but I believe we have little time to even think about being British, until some occurrence causes us to wake up to the fact, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury wanting to meddle with our constitutional rights.

My own experience of having been evacuated in my last year at school, and then going into the Navy, has taught me that friendships made at school, if continued into adulthood last forever, providing geographically it is possible. Friendships made in later life, as a result of work or other associations, can be equally strong, but will be fewer in number. So this reasoning could imply that if Britishness is indoctrinated during the schooling years is should last. The problem is that being British, is not like favouring a football club, there is no contact on a repetitive basis which strengthens the bond. In my day we had two wars which brought the country together as nothing else could. Now we are told we are part of Europe, but we are being more and more concerned with our effect on Europe and Europe’s effect on us. This does not strike me as fertile ground for Britishness. It only surfaces when everybody in the country rises up against some European law which is totally un-British.

When I started the blog a year and nine months ago, I never thought I would still be writing after 500 postings. The reason of course is you, my readers, who still find what I have to say of interest, even if you don’t agree with it. A lot of the interest is in the biographical sections, but I believe that my rather sour outlook on the life of today is echoed in the minds of many of you.

Recently I have been thinking about the lot of those young people in their 30s and 40s, making their way in the world, and now under such a burden of expense, and in some cases ambition, but to my sad old eyes they are spending more time going from here to there, working, shopping, baby minding and worrying, more than we ever did, because we had an extended family who helped to carry some of the burden. We were not scattered to the four winds like families today, where they spend so much time travelling. The longest journeys we had to do were to the next town, and most to the next street. I feel there is so much more to life than the material things, in some cases the isolation, and above all the responsibility that these young people now bear, which we could share. I have written another one of my bits of doggerel, to show just how miserable I can be.

Thanking you for your interests, because that’s what keeps my brain alive, John

                                Requiem to the past

The young with blinkered eyes search the horizon
For a future they can only imagine.
Am I therefore wrong in looking back, not on?
Recalling what was then as an origin
Against which to compare with a critical eye
The immediate past and the rushing present,
So foreign to my way, my roots to defy,
Selectively, seeing chaos I resent,
Not for myself, my time has passed, good and bad.
But for those I love and those who I admire.
We have mislaid the honesty we once had
And probity is foundering in a mire,
Of our own making. Or perhaps I’m just mad?
Too simplistic? Seeing ghosts that are not there?
Held in the nostalgic aspic of the past,
Not appreciating progress, just unfair
To those who are making our lives go so fast.
Are we running to stand still, or in retreat?
With commands, countermands, changes till at last
With falsehoods, lies, and apathy, we’re downbeat.
Is it unsurprising our young are confused?
Restricted as they are by their parents’ fear
That they could be molested, perhaps abused
Through incompetence of those we don’t revere.

The system is failing us, it needs revised
The pressure of minorities, paramount,
Causes our culture diluted, ostracised.
To some of us it seems we no longer count.
A steadying hand on the tiller we need,
One not tarnished with incompetence or greed,
Considerate and taking all into account.
Open, honest, trustworthy, like the old school?
Shrewd, tough, his own man, and nobody’s fool.

The small shopkeeper and a giant like Tesco, with up to 30% of the market, can use the same marketing techniques the intermediary sizes of grocers will probably find too expensive to initiate. One technique is to offer savings in some form or other if products, which are not selling well, are bought in sufficient quantities by the customers. I’m not referring to the 2 for 3 bargains, but something on a lower scale, a points system. With a vast number of products, in a large supermarket, it is impossible to visually modify the prices, selectively, as this would overburden the computerised cash-out. In a small shop the man can put up notices wherever he wishes telling of reductions, because he is doing the totting. Tescos, make points-offers on certain items if more than a certain value is spent on that type of item. The monetary differential is probably miniscule but the psychological effect is tremendous, and because they have a shop in practically every town and city in the country, and their computer systems are common throughout, it is a simple matter to download the information, so that at the cash-out, points are given on selected items by the cashier without her having any reference to a list.

Scale in financial terms. A young person said to me ‘you can’t expect to get much for £50.’ We were discussing giving presents. I only earned £50 a year in my first job, in the Navy I received ten shillings per fortnight, (50p), as most of my pay was dedicated to my mother so she would have a war pension if I were killed. Post war, at university. I had a total grant to keep a wife and two children, buy books, go on educational excursions, of £300 a year. My first job as a graduate in 1950 paid £250 a year. So it is unsurprising that pensioners like myself, and people on low incomes, still think in tens and hundreds. The professional classes, earning upwards of 40,000 a year, think in hundreds and thousands. Even the lower paid, in purchasing a house, are forced to think in tens of, or hundreds of thousands. The really wealthy, and those in the entertainment industry think in hundreds of thousands, and millions, and as a million is a thousand times a thousand my mind boggles even at that. The government, and the civil service, think in billions, or a million times a thousand, which really worries me, because I haven’t a clue what a billion really is and so I’m forced to wonder whether they do either. For a time I did deal in extremely large sums, in millions in fact, and one can have a mindset sitting behind a desk that is entirely different to the one sitting at the breakfast table trying to balance the home budget. As you will have seen in the last few posts, government spending, seems illogical to me, and I wonder if they also work in unrelated, and separate compartments, as I did, having two perspectives, but in their case in astronomically unimaginable figures.

I question the attitude, of those at the top of the civil service pyramid, our masters, as it is applied to these vast sums of money, in billions. The Cabinet talks and therefore could, I presume, think in billions. The heads of the various departments don’t see the detail, they are only concerned with the overall picture, in billions. The people who submit the budgets to department-heads seek to obtain as much capital for their own use as they can, still in billions. They in turn are supplied information being gathered for them from some gatherers right across the country, in the various sections of their department. These gatherers are given information by gatherers lower in the pyramid, which they have collected from the people responsible for determining how the work is to be done, where the work is to be done, when it will start, how long it will take, and more importantly how much it will cost. Some of this work is maintenance, generally short lived and only in hundreds of thousands of pounds, the new work can take years, and therefore has to be split up into sections, and costs anything from a few thousands to a few million. So really it is only at the very bottom of the pyramid that people evaluate costs in the smaller sums that they
understand? They are the doers, and the checkers. Once the information starts moving upwards in the pyramid, it becomes ever larger and hence, if we are honest, totally outside the imagination of those handing it. The bigger the amount is, the broader the brush is that it is used to paint the picture, and broad brushes are inevitably hard to control.

I’m not sure, because I am so old, if it is me who is going crazy or just the rest of the world. This is epitomised by the extraordinary divorce proceedings of Paul McCartney and his wife. They are fighting at great expense over sums of money that they couldn’t possibly spend. Even if I were to move house and buy a property ludicrously huge, by my standards, I would find it extremely difficult to spend two million, let alone hundreds of millions.

Today I even started to wonder whether I was responsible to some extent for where the world has arrived, and decided that I knew no one in particular at whose door one could lay the incredible change that I have seen in every area of life. This caused me to realise why there is so much naked aggression, inhibition, and manufactured pleasure, which has replaced the smooth, gentle, unsophisticated world I was born into. There is no doubt there was extreme poverty, my grandmother rubbed my nose in it to make me aware. There was a disparity between the very poor and the very rich, but as the very rich were very few, and the disparity showed itself more in accommodation, and pleasure, than materially, this meant that there was not the same urge for advancement, people were happy with the status quo. People today wouldn’t believe how many of our pleasures cost absolutely nothing, and that cost itself was not the key factor of determining the level of enjoyment. I never cease to be annoyed at how much it costs today for a father to take his son to a football match.. Seaside resorts like Hastings are, to some extent, dormitory towns because so many now go abroad.

I believe that the problem stems from affluence, merchandisers hoodwinking us into believing that we need the products they are advertising, and the high level of competition in manufacturing and retail that has spawned ever increasing, ever more expensive, ever more sophisticated ways of spending our money, and an outlook of change for the sake of change, that includes products with inbuilt redundancy. Our entertainment 70 years ago, was at that stage where each progression induced wonderment, from the rapidly expanding quality of the films and the stage shows, to the size and variety of rides and stalls at the fairs on high days and holidays. I don’t know when I last saw a really big fair. TV has superseded the cinema and the quantity of material required to feed so many competing stations is gargantuan, with the result that to maintain the flow the excellent is repeated ad nauseam, interspersed with the banal and downright awful. I believe we have become blase with so much sophistication, that some of us are striving excessively for the unattainable. The culture of the so-called ‘celebrity’ doesn’t help. At the end of World War II the film industry in England started a training programme producing our better known actors and actresses, who all spoke identically, having been trained by speech therapists to lose their own native accents. Today there seems to be no speech training, people speak with regional accents, often without moving their lips, making understanding difficult, and the dialogue today has not the quality of vocabulary and grammar that it had with the Rank Organisation. Indeed a high proportion of our films now are made by and for Afro-Americans, with Harlem patois, and a level of violence that no human body could endure and come back for more.

We are told, whether we believe it or not, that we are a wealthy nation, and it seems that we have the wages to prove it. We have an affluent society, based on national and home borrowing, and we are spending to the limit, and in a lot of cases without regard for the future. The government wrings its hands and comes out with solutions to solve the drink problem, which we never had as young people, because we couldn’t afford it, and we were taught drunkenness was antisocial. If that is an accurate assessment, it would seem that teenagers today have too much pocket money and not enough supervision. Instead of increasing alcohol taxation across the board, they should be arresting the parents for irresponsibility, if their teenagers are seen to be acting antisocially under the influence of alcohol.

Basically every sphere of life has changed, and affluence has enabled some to achieve the level of advancement that is wholly out of proportion with the good that they do. The material level of the average household is more comfortable, more easily run than it was in the 30s, but has come at a price that we are now having to pay, not only in our taxes, and in longer working hours per household, but in government imposed inhibition across-the-board. I suppose if we want to lay it at the door of anyone, it should rest at those who have become multimillionaires and have lost the notion of the value of money, and the town halls and seats of government, who want to be loved at any price, and aren’t too fussy who is paying the price..

Every week there is some proposed change in the educational system. The fact that proposing alone, means that headmasters throughout the country are having to assess the effect on a budget, their teaching staff, and the conduct of the school, even if only to protest to the union, or the government itself, which induces unnecessary stress. Often before these propositions ever come to fruition, they are cancelled. These exercises, if only proposed, are detrimental. If they are proposed and acted upon, then this not only affects the headmasters, but the whole school is disrupted and at times may be very expensive. The one thing that young people require is a stable environment, not an ever-changing scene. The parents in many cases are equally affected. Sophie tells me that the basic problem with education is that the standard of enrolment in the profession is so much lower, in both academic and social skills, (which implies IQ,) that the standards will inevitably drop. It is time a straw poll is taken of the views of teachers in work or retired, who are over 40.

One of the cries of the young house-buyers is that it’s almost impossible to get onto the housing ladder. The government keeps making proposals for building houses, but up to now it would seem that they are little more than proposals. Now with the Northern Rock problem affecting the whole of the mortgage system, the down payment required to obtain a mortgage, has been increased to a level which will inhibit even more young people.

More causes of waste are the endless judicial enquiries that seem to be insolvable from the outset. We in Northern Ireland have had more than our fair share, and the price is in millions.

I take exception to the fact that when anything and especially fuel, is subject to market forces outside the control of the government, and evidently going to make the cost of living rise across the board, affecting everyone, that the government allows the VAT to rise proportionately, influencing the cost of living even more. Because of the reasons for the increase in costs, this is not only unfair, but is a hidden tax on everyone in the country, and prompts claims for salary increases, while the pensioners suffer.

2 million children are growing up without a parent in work, which means that they are on benefit, and now the government is either giving or proposes to give, problem families a bonus of a thousand a year for three years if they go back to work. I don’t know who thought the scheme up, but according to my calculations a thousand a year amounts to £20 a week, which doesn’t seem like much of an incentive to me, when they probably like the status quo. Just think of the costs of the implementation.

Yet another proposal, is to increase the tax on alcohol, to reduce the crime rate. Whether selectively or overall is not clear. Once again, if this is put through, alcohol tax throughout the country, together with VAT will be levied on all of us, by the misbehaviour of a very small percentage of the population. This is not using a hammer, but a hydraulic ram to crack a nut. If the parents and the alcohol vendors were severely fined, if it could be proven that the vendors had sold alcohol to the under-aged, and also the age at which people could consume alcohol outside their own homes was increased to 18, these might be the first steps in the solution, before the whole population is fined for the criminality of a few. The tax on alcohol, like on petrol is excessive.

Another government money-saving dodge, is to try and reduce the prison population by letting people out ahead of time. Most of us have always felt that people were incarcerated, especially the young, with custodial sentences, which might have been dealt with in an entirely different manner. I do not believe that this country has a greater criminal population, than any other, and I’m certain, less than some I could name. The problem stems from the sterile life of many of the teenagers in the poorer districts of our country, and to some extent interracial disparagement, as a result of social inequalities. I believe that is where attention is required.

The trouble is we have complicated our lives to an unbelievable extent, and our waste in every sense, is beyond recognition. Today I was looking back at my childhood, and I estimated that the wage paid to a labourer had increased by approximately 133 times. In the 30s I could ride trams all day for sixpence. I’ve translated that and it equates to £3.33 in today’s prices. If I hadn’t a bus pass it would cost me over £1 to travel 3 miles. Someone I know well, who is not profligate, tried to sell at auction, a five years old settee, in perfect condition, they failed and it had to go to the dump. Our houses in the 30s, were furnished, even the meanest, in good quality oak or mahogany, with respected items, and all were handed down, because there was no advertising, except in newspapers, there was not this scrambling urge to keep up-to-date.. People put money on the plate on Sundays, in the cups of the injured jetsam of World War I begging on the kerb, and to the Salvation Army as they played on Sunday at the corner. We never had constant charitable demands. We didn’t carry vast insurance, we didn’t need it. We thought travelling to Devon from London, for a holiday, was an adventure, We were unsophisticated in the light of today’s gloss. Above all, we were mostly happy. If we had psychological problems we weren’t aware, because we had never heard of the word, but above all, we had the extended families. Today everything, wages, towns, houses, innovations, ideas, illnesses real or imagined, wars and egos are so big, so costly, they have taken us over. A lot of innovation is superfluous. Just lift, if you’re strong enough, an Argus catalogue. In there you will see page after page of designs of a single article, produced by different manufacturers from here and abroad. They have common functions varied on a main idea, they have different colours and shapes. Someday, go to the local supermarket, just to browse, and see how many different products fulfilling the same function there are, many of them perishable and have a very short shelf life. Guess how many are sold and how many wasted. Fashion, advertising, and pride are the cause of the duplication that is ultimately superfluous. The abandonment of the surplus, throughout the country, let alone the world, must be prodigious and represent an incredible wastage of materials perhaps in some respects, life itself. This proliferation, is engendered by people seeking to outdo one another, and make a fortune, and call it progress. I believe it is also fostered, by people treating shopping as an outing, rather than a nuisance that has to be endured. The converse to proliferation, of course, is equally repugnant, where there is no choice at all.

We have advanced so far there is no turning back, but it would be nice if different aspects of industry, inaugurated a system where there was adequate choice in design and colour, or taste, to suit most households, and held a competition every year to see if any one of the new batch of a given product, was overall better than those available, in which case, it would replace the oldest or worst design. It won’t happen, the world’s resources will go on being wasted, and it will be we who will be funding it in the cost of the products we buy, or our taxes on the disposal of our waste in packaging and old products. The generations to come will suffer as a result of some of those causes that are a knock-on affect of this level of senseless productivity It is basically crazy. We have shops filled with umpteen of the same product – take computers and their peripherals, which have a shelf life of little more than a year. This level of multiplication, surely must be unacceptable, in a world where they want us to carry out the most absurd and insignificant actions, to save the planet, all of which I personally believe is too late anyway, but I could not justify not trying, if only for the sake of our descendants.

One aspect that we must not forget and is highly relevant is that there are nations in the world who don’t have supermarkets, because they haven’t anything to put on the shelves. Whether the surplus from here goes to the tip, is given free to the very poor abroad, or is bartered, is a matter for conjecture as far as I’m concerned, as I have not the time to research it.

What I place here is part of a personal e-mail from a Dutch friend. It is un-edited, just as I received it, and I post it instead of what I originally intended for the sake of us Brits who, like me, have been appalled at what is happening to and within our country, only because the EU forced us, and I include Holland, to do away with our borders..

My friend wrote ‘One more advantage of living in an apartment we no longer have to fear for burglars. The criminality increases very fast and becomes  rougher by the day. They don’t hesitate to ram the door or break the window panes to enter and treat the people very rough and only for a few euros or a laptop. I think that soon the windows and doors will be equipped with bars.

These criminals are working most of the time in small groups and have an East European nationality. I think those people prefer the western countries because of the very soft treatment when they are caught. They stay in comfortable cells with TV, good food and books in their own language and after a couple of days they will be sent home by plane. Some days later they return and start again their crimes. Luckily, on the third floor of this building we don’t need bars!

I love reading your interesting blogs, in which I recognise all the problems and injustice we have in Holland. It seems to me that you want to carry all the problem of the world with you. But I think it is a relief for you to write it down and the fact that it will be read by others is not so important. So carry on with writing and don’t worry about the statistics.

Please revise your ideas of the discrimination of a high proportion of the people shopping with you. We’re not all mindless sheep, or obsessed with the cheap and cheerful. A lot of us were once good cooks, who are now reduced to being on our own, or just two of us, whereby cooking meals is no longer as viable or as economical as it was. There seems to be a policy whereby you introduce a new product on the food shelves, that has been carefully designed, tested, its packaging made as attractive as possible and the price is generally reduced as an introduction. We buy it, we try it, and we’re sold; it is all that it says on the tin, and so it becomes a staple, something we propose to eat, maybe once every three weeks. The honeymoon generally lasts about three months, then the price rises, but we don’t mind because we think we are still getting value for money, but then subsequently the quantity and quality starts to decline but not the price. This has happened with a number of products, staples and prepared food. For a year or so you are buying a particular article, say corned beef, Pacific salmon, tinned ravioli or maybe a Chinese meal. Then one day, the label changes, the price may stay the same or go up, but the contents of the tin or container, has definitely gone down. Ultimately not only has the quality and much of the flavour gone down, but the quantity has also gone down.There is more liquid in the tin than heretofore, if liquid is usual, the salmon looks as though it could be farmed, not wild, because of the increase in fat, and also made of the tail because of the size of the pieces and the amount of the skin. What is really aggravating is that you the purchaser have to start searching all over again, even elsewhere, to find another product of the same type to replace what you are now rejecting, and of course there is disappointment.

In the prepared meals department, almost invariably the size of the packaging and the printed picture cause one to expect more than is realised, in quantity, quality and taste, often by a big margin.I have found old-fashioned English dishes like steak and kidney with so much chilli in it, it killed the taste of the kidney, and indeed chilli seems to be a staple ingredient in a good deal of these prepared dishes. There is a marketing ploy in television, whereby the people determining the programmes operate on the principle that if you don’t like it, you can switch off. In the case of supermarkets, I suppose we can vote with our feet. Finally what really drives me crazy is this policy of changing the positions of the items, even scattering some of one kind in different parts of the supermarket, thus making them still more difficult to find. I know the principle is that it encourages you to see things that you didn’t anticipate, because you have been hunting for the last 20 minutes for something you normally found in a minute and a half, having fruitlessly looked along a few hundred yards of shelving. When so many articles of different brands are on offer, and there are so many miles of shelving, it can take a lot of time, better spent on happier things, than looking for articles on the shelves, or someone to find them for you.