The Old Gaffer

I am all for artistic licence in a fairy tale sense, where imaginations can run free, but when it comes to what is really real life situations, I believe everything depicted must be part of the possible, the likely, or the everyday, not mayhem, razzmatazz or hyperbole for their own sake. I know that I am old-fashioned, don’t move with the times, and often find new fashions, both ludicrous and objectionable - take the time when it was the done thing to wear trousers that exposed the crease in the buttocks. What people do to themselves as their choice. What is portrayed for wide world consumption should be possible, if not totally acceptable, because we live in a world now, where anything goes, and standards are a thing of the past.

Being trapped in a house, the television can be a relief from boredom and in consequence is turned to on a regular basis. I have saved a number of films which when I came to watch them were so ludicrous, so totally impossible and so absolutely savage, that I switch them off. If you read my CV at the top of this blog you may conclude that I’m no powder-puff, and not easily disturbed. But now I find that brutality, the beatings that would be impossible if carried out as displayed, because none of those doing the beating would find they could use their hands after two or three blows of the quality we are offered. It was first in the Dirty Harry series, with Clint Eastwood in the title role, where gangsters and hitmen could fire-off innumerable bullets without reloading. Now this has become a standard in these types of films, with cars riddled with bullets, and the hero getting away scot free. This diet of crude murder and mayhem is almost daily and so I think it is little wonder that youngsters, particularly in America, can buy a gun which can assassinate their playmates and their teachers in one mad escapade, a copy of what they see weekly on television.

Before launching into the main topic, I would like to give a hypothetical case to make valid points. Take a large cartel, with business in practically every level of life, whose managing director is dictatorial, secretive and treats the Board of Directors shamefully. He has a close friend on the board to whom he has promised his post when he retires. Strangely, instead of having his friend as deputy director, he places him in charge of finance and budgeting, while having a nominee for the post, which is basically a political and logistical move, because this man he can control. In effect the Board has no teeth. In due course the director retires, and his friend succeeds him.

The problems for the friend are that first of all he is trustworthy, and in consequence assumes that those around him are also trustworthy. Secondly he has been holding down a highly complicated department and in consequence has had little experience in running the whole cartel. Once in office he finds that he has inherited numerous advisers, some of whom are not trustworthy.

Because I was unable to write to the blog at the time when Gordon Brown, for some unbelievable reason, presumably on advice, decided to write those letters to the bereaved, I choose to mention it now in my own way. I believe Gordon is under such incredible pressure, with backbiting, the election looming, and a credit crunch, he hasn’t time to think rationally when he is advised. A moment’s thought of the logistics, the imbalances and the criticisms this idea would generate would have hit him under normal circumstances.

I have lived in Northern Ireland since I was demobbed in ‘46, I love the country, I like and respect the people, and I would wish to live nowhere else. This does not, however, mean that I approve of the way that we are governed. As I find it incredible that our senior politicians can’t come to sensible solutions, because their aims are so disparate, that they trot along to number 10 to bludgeon Gordon to come round to their individual ideas and needs, one after the other. This is a case of the sort of pressures that he is under. Unfortunately it also shows to me, a man with a brilliant brain, and a gentle nature, who is not tough enough to put people in their place.

My generation, which is well on the way to extinction, spent a large portion of its life in penury, which induced a high level of respect of the value of money. It was 1935 before we really began to come out of the recession caused by the First World War, and the change in our attitude and psychology can be seen everywhere. But then of course a few years later we were pitched into another war, and so it wasn’t until the late 50s that we began to get back to where we had been all those years before. In all that time there was no such thing as recognized minority rule, because the minority in a largely number of cases, by heredity, were ruling us anyway. To my knowledge the phrase only became common parlance when we started to have large numbers of immigrants from countries in the Empire.

What started the thoughts was the fact that recently, every time chemist delivers medication to our house, we have to sign a chitty, which literally tells us nothing, must be a bane to the chemist, a total waste of paper as far as I’m concerned, as once I wanted to find when something had been delivered, none of these chitties contain any useful information. I assume what little information there is, it is kept on record, and I can only believe that this has occurred, because somewhere, someone has been behaving in an antisocial fashion. This seems to be another of these knee-jerk reactions rather than considered thought. It is you and I who are paying every-time these reactions take place, when on a percentage basis the actual cause is committed by a very small percentage.

I don’t propose to list all the areas that are in this class, like health and safety, and above all drink-driving. Just as an example I propose to examine drink-driving. I believe that anybody who drives a car while under a dangerous level of alcohol abuse is a criminal. But the effect that the law now has, has totally wrecked what used to be pleasant social events, an invitation to dinner, a buffet party, or just a family going out on a Saturday night for a meal. At least one member can’t have a drink, this fact may seem trivial, but in reality it sets one member of the party apart from the rest. In the, 60s and 70s we used to run enjoyable dinner parties for say eight people, and quite a large number at other celebratory times of the year. These do’s were obviously reciprocated. They started generally about eight o’clock and went onto the small hours. There were no serious cases of drunkenness because by that time in the morning the effects had considerably worn off, and also traffic was so light as to be almost non-existent.

People are constantly creating about the loss of human rights, in my view it is the government’s inability to control the minority in whatever heinous act if it is involved in, by bringing such legislation that costs the country a fortune, creates mountains of paperwork, and the people who suffer most, on a percentage basis are the silent majority, both financially and with the regulated loss of legitimate freedom. Punish the criminal, not the silent, law-abiding majority. It is too easy just to introduce random criteria on a catch-all principle. It removes the need for self control.

A personal message I have not written anything for the blog since the 17th of October due to the fact that I had lost my connection to broadband. What I have been most interested in is the fact that so many people find what I have already written of interest. I rarely get comments, but I take this fact as an indication that what I write is of interest. My Dutch friend, Jan, once tried to prove to me that one of the reasons that the blog runs without my continued additions, is that schoolchildren could be using the biographical material for projects. If this is the case it is very gratifying.

Sophie, my wife has become quite ill, and you will know if you have read the blog that I am disabled also. I am now acting as a full-time carer, and pleased to be doing so, but it does give me little time to sit and cogitate about the vagaries of life today. Tomorrow I shall start once again putting down my thoughts on any subject I take an interest in, in order to stir criticism and perhaps generate a wider subject for your interests. I have said before that I run this blog because my grandson gave it to me as a present and I have had incredible fun trying to keep up with the times, and also trying to decide whether development over 87 years, to the extremes that we now enjoy have been worthwhile. Thank you for reading, John