On April the first I wrote a piece, entitled Responsible Selection in which I tried to show the absurdity of journalism today, by quoting the case of the accidental expenditure claims by the Home Secretary, and which must have entailed considerable digging. Since then there has been a torrent of pieces in the press that are just purely grubbing in the gutter for sensation to sell papers. I would like to demonstrate that this is totally counter-productive.

There seems to be some dissatisfaction with our current leaders, and I would like you to consider the following. Place yourself as a person, above-average intelligence, highly qualified, who has created through their own endeavours a company that is now capable of running itself with little intervention from you, the managing director. You have arrived, at the age of 45, where you feel that you need a change of direction, and the opportunity has now presented itself. By word of mouth your condition has reached the ears of the chairman of a political party, to which you have been contributing in small amounts over the years. He comes to you with a suggestion that there is a vacancy in a constituency that they would like to put you up for. Crunch time! You are flattered, initially interested, and then you discover a spate of press articles, that are not something one would find casually, or even diligently, they have been researched at great depth, are relatively insignificant, but being of sensational nature, are worth publishing. You are going to leave yourself open to this sort of stress, you will probably give your salary to either the party or charity, claim reasonable expenses, and will be a backbencher until you know the ropes, and there is a re-shuffle, and you’re not sure that you would ever be in a position of considerable influence. If you were a person with this background, would you still be tempted?

When I look at the front page of the Internet, and see what they put on, as a daily diet, which must, by reason be what people want today, I find it totally light weight, in most cases frivolous, and I suppose in these days, escapist, and who can blame them. If I personally was placed on the condition that I just described above, wild horses wouldn’t drag me into public office. Allegedly there is some form of censorship, and people will tell you that you can sue, but this isn’t the solution. We are told the press regulates itself, but for the sake of us all and for the future, I think we need a strong deterrent for those who want to grub purely for greed, not information that will improve our system.

I have already explained that due to an accident I spend most of my day in a chair because I can only walk 80 yards, and have a damaged right arm, so it is pointless thinking of going out as I would put other people to the problem of wheeling me about. A few minutes ago I saw a beautiful swan circling over the houses, obviously looking for open water, it had probably come from a nearby reservoir. My worry was that the lake that we have in our local park, and was once upon a time providing open water, over the years has become overgrown with trees, and I wondered if the Swan would have enough open water to assure itself concerning danger and sufficient length to make one of those incredible landings, with its feet acting as brakes and the wings outstretched likewise. Swans were, in there, once.

Someone I know refers to the area that I live in as an estate. It is a pejorative term, which says more about the speaker than it does about the district. I like it because the houses may not all be individual, but the designs are sufficiently varied, and the properties maintained, so that it is a pleasure to drive through it, but what I see through my window gives me serious pause for thought. There are dozens of poor dogs of all sizes, being trailed along by their owner or walker, who in turn is carrying a little plastic bag of faeces. I recollect that this requirement was brought about because some scientist had discovered that the droppings of the animals could be injurious to humans. I had played in parks for over 60 years, and with my children and grandchildren, before this monstrous fact was discovered, and I don’t remember a single case being bruited abroad where someone had contracted the disease of this type. Now the animals and the owners are under stress, and the enjoyment and freedom of owning a dog, and seeing it bounding off across the common, is a thing of the past.

Sitting in this chair also made me look at television more closely, and while I have a recording system that allows me to skip the ads, occasionally there is a glitch and I have had to sit through the greatest load of rubbish that one could imagine being thrust down my throat. What is most noticeable since the credit crunch, as I have said previously, is that the quality of advertising per se, not necessarily the veracity of what they tell you, has gone up tremendously. But what I object to most strongly is that in nearly all the adverts there is an overall approach of spreading fear unless their product is used, and it would seem in quantities that are obscene.

The spate of mass murder by youngsters with high velocity rifles and machine pistols doesn’t surprise me. Children no longer walk to school for fear of abuse in some form. Inner cities have even less facilities for children, who are not as well cared for as in suburbia, thrown on their own devices in their spare time, leading therefore to gangs and gang warfare, as we all know, but nothing of serious consequence seems to being done about it. From what I’ve seen in recent years, parents no longer take the kids to an open space to play silly, but amusing games like French cricket, and you no longer see in my area anyway, bands of children playing scratch games of football. Take a look at the television films, a high proportion are dark, stories of criminality, and ruthless beatings, and mass shootings, where bullet holes appear in the sides of cars like acne. None of this is real life, it is just aggression for the sake of aggression, which itself has become today a substitute in so many dramas for drama. You know all this, I know all this, but instead of spending money to appear to be the nation leading the world, why in God’s name don’t we spend it on improving the life of the next generation?

I mainly addressed yesterday’s post to those readers who are 08 or over, and in consequence many of my other readers will have bypassed it. In it I wrote the following,’ When I heard, that the RBS, who had taken over our conservative and well run bank, is laying off staff in the UK, and sending the work overseas, I was appalled, because the taxpayer would now be paying unemployment benefit on top of bolstering up the bank, another example of undermining the future, symptomatic of the way in which skills are being watered down to an endangered level, and our island philosophy of self sufficiency is now an endangered specie, and we are seriously in danger of becoming totally dependent on the rest of the world. To us 80-year-olds, who knew in the 40s what it was like to have to stand alone, are worried, not for ourselves’. I repeat this because I feel that it shows the woolly thinking of our government, which seems to be running like a gerbil on a wheel, not stopping to look at what is happening, or even what makes common sense. By the same token it strikes me strongly that the main two opposition parties are more concerned with their appeal to the electorate, in the face of a possible election, than in being cooperative and working as a unit in conjunction with the government for what is the best policy to lead us forward. This approach would in no way hinder the power of the opposition parties from putting the brake on anything that they felt was wrong, the problem is that they haven’t been doing this.

This piece is mainly written to amuse and possibly confound my readers who are in their 80s, but is also general. Recently there has been the First World War veteran, and Second World War veterans being interviewed on television, and a lot of interest in people like Douglas Bader. A chap I know, with a glass in his hand, looked at me over the glass and said, ‘You’re an endangered specie.’ I laughed. ‘You can laugh,’ he said, ‘but how many people do you think there are now who were evacuated at the beginning of the last war? Sometime ago a Sunday programme of the Antiques Road Show where they were valuing an original diver’s helmet, stated that the use of the old fashioned diving helmet and suit with its bronze shoulder mounting had stopped in 1960, when all the other forms of pressure suits, diving bells were introduced. The whole thing was much more technical, than just grubbing about in the mud, flat on your stomach, dragging yourself along with your hands in the mud. That was what it was like for us, trained helmet diver’s away back in the 50s. At the time of the programme, it had surprised me, but I hadn’t realised that now in 2009, there was no such animal as a helmet diver, and those who were trained divers, probably at the age of 22, would now be 71.

In 1928, 81 years ago, I lived as a six year old small boy in the depths of Rhodesia, as part of the British Empire, which now people call the Raj. There won’t be many of them left. Out of interest I looked up the current UK Census and discovered that roughly there are 32,000 people 80 and over. If you take that half of them are women, which is an underestimate, then throughout the UK there are only something like 16,000 men 80 or above.

I firmly believe, and constantly remark, that the changes that we have seen give us a much more balanced perspective than those born since the 60s, who are now in their 50s. Our experiences between the 20s and the 50s, our formative years, were lean, disrupted to an incredible extent, but nonetheless simple in outlook. We hadn’t anything like the pressures, except in war conditions, we knew what it was like to go hungry, to be bombed, to have to live in the large company of other men, from every walk of life, and every type of character, some of them unsupportable. We learned stoicism, self-confidence, compassion, and the ability to be solitary without it having any psychological effect. Pleasures were simple and mostly cheap, our food was natural, we weren’t bombarded continuously with hype, and the celebrity was beyond our horizon, because we could rarely afford to go to the theatre, entertainment, at the cinema and on the radio was ‘nice’, generally amusing and light-hearted.

We are now too old to be able to influence the future, but it is interesting to note that the financial situation is in some ways putting back the clock. When you think about your days in the LDV on the Downs waiting for the German paratroopers, and the total absurdity of it, fire watching during the raids in Docklands, being in the services for five years, and then having to start all over again – in another few years this will all be forgotten.

These examples are part of the natural progression, and inevitable. But there are other endangered species which are more important to the future of this country, and the world. They are not only human, there are natural things, and inert resources. We still have coal beneath us, but the miners, and mining is in this category. Due to the rape of quality timber in this country, abroad, and especially in South America, we now only have a few quality cabinetmakers, because the materials are no longer seasoned in the way they were. There are a number of trades which are almost non-existent or of poor quality, because there is not the training, nor the work being carried out today in this country, shipbuilding and the motor industry are glaring examples. Go into any high-quality furniture retailers, and all you will see there is furniture made of composite materials, veneered and coated with a scratch proof, heat proof varnish, French polishing is another casualty. When I heard, that RBS, who had taken over our conservative and well run bank, is laying off staff in this country, and sending the work overseas, I was appalled, because the taxpayer would now be paying unemployment benefit on top of bolstering up the bank, another example of undermining the future, symptomatic of the way in which skills are being watered down to an endangered level, and our island philosophy of self sufficiency is now an endangered specie, and we are seriously in danger of becoming totally dependent on the rest of the world. To us 80-year-olds, who knew in the 40s what it was like to have to stand alone, are worried, not for ourselves, but for those who are coming after us. Be Warned