The Old Gaffer

Undertaking the caring of a loved one, with similar duties to those in a care home, being totally housebound, you have a lot of time, either due to circumstances or fatigue, to look back on the past. When that past represents at least three and a half generations, and one is of an analytical trend, it is surprising to me, what you discover.

Life is a series of learning curves, some incredibly steep, and some almost non-existent. The beauty of this type of perspective is that you can see, from your own childhood, through the development of your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, all the phases, and what is more important, the changes that time has wrought. I write this because it is only now these aspects of life have become clear to me, and I find it so interesting that I feel the need to introduce others to this ploy. When you see little children in their first year or so, not only learning so rabidly, but aping their parents, you realise that they have almost a blank sheet of memory, filling hourly. Then there are the stages of learning, both in education and experience, changing every five or six years, until one day one is proficient enough to be self supporting. It is then that the new phases start with the arrival of the next generation, more responsibility, wider experience both in work and leisure, but often with less time now than would have been the case three generations ago.

It is at this point in the analysis that one might ask the question of what mechanism changes the standards, the attitudes, the tastes, and the politics, generation upon generation. There is no shadow of doubt that if one was to draw a graph of the quality of the changes in the life of the individual, generation upon generation, it would depend on your perspective as to whether the graph rose in jerks ever upwards, or where there were serious dips, or even that the graph started to fall. There are areas such as education, health, welfare and general well-being, where the graph would be rising steeply. When it comes to probity, respect, and political honesty, one has to make one’s own judgement, from one’s own perspective, as no one can decide what is totally best for others. This I believe is the stumbling block of the nanny state, where they’re so busy trying to anticipate and cure what they see as the wrongs in society, that they hog-tie any chance of individual initiative. Their approach has induced a money grabbing society, ready to sue at the drop of a hat, and I believe removes the initiative the individual’s needs to make his own decisions, even if he has to suffer the consequences.

TV advertising, TV game shows and TV talk shows have changed more than anything over time. Today it seems that razzmatazz takes the place of quality, the screen is shouting and screaming at you as you sit in your chair, it is crude, cheap and I believe counter-productive because it is setting new standards of aesthetic which is downgraded. Quality is being sacrificed for all those reasons I have said, and TV has more influence on the young than probably any other medium. The crude drawings are accepted by the children because there is no alternative choice, and taken on board and loved, as golly-wogs and teddy bears were in my day, but let’s face it, aesthetically they really are crude, and in my estimate, totally ugly. Industry has now taught us that throwaway is easier and cheaper than repair. What it hasn’t taught us is that in many cases quality is being sacrificed for commercial expediency. The advertisements advising us to claim, was something we would never have dreamed of before, is an element of the get rich quick at somebody else’s expense, mentality, demonstrated by the way in which pension funds are stolen, and is a trend that my perspective finds to be prevalent in practically every walk of society today.

The question I asked after all this, is has the graph slumped nearly off the board, or has it even further to slump?

I wonder if anybody in the government has sat down and questioned this absurd urge placed upon us to drive 5 miles less every day to save the planet. The logistics alone are impossible, and at what point does one make a decision not to go somewhere, because it is more than 5 miles longer than you have allowed for the day. Who’s going to sit down and map out their mileage to achieve this? I know that it is a ruse to make a point, but it is so pettifogging and muddled, I believe the point is lost.

Reality in filmmaking
So many of the films that are produced these days are divorced from reality, not because the story is unreal, but because its interpretation by the director includes bizarre, impossible features. Okay, if you want a fairy story then it should be couched in that environment, not in an everyday one. These martial art pictures are fair enough, you know the hero is going to be able to, not only leap vast distances, but is also going to be able to nail half a dozen of his own kind in a matter of minutes.

The other day I was looking at Notting Hill, and in particular at that section in the story where the hero has parted from his truelove, and is walking down the street to the tune of a song which says, that it snows when she has gone. To my simple mind this was one of the greatest piece of filming I have ever witnessed, because the hero not only walked full-length of the road, he started in sunlight went through all the stages of rain hail and snow, with barely a break, surrounded by a very lively street market. When I thought about it I realised that it must have taken days to choreograph so that it was so seamless, which in turn made it so very effective.

When you are, as I am, responsible for somebody’s health, you have long hours a night to watch old films you have seen before, and very often it is the duplication which causes you to see things that you would have missed the first or second time. The opening sequence of, ‘ Once upon a time in the West’. Where there is a thug sitting waiting for a train, in order to kill one of the passengers descending from it. The sequence follows the route of a fly creeping across this man’s face slowly and aggravating him, until at last he catches it in the barrel of his 6-gun. To me that was pure genius, what with the time that it took to choreograph and film, and the incredible delay in the viewing of what one knew was going to be a stand-off, slowly built up the suspense.

A lot of our lives today are governed by economy rather than skill, and the quality of the goods, the choices we have, and the speed with which we now rush, doesn’t allow the sort of quality of expression and product that I have mentioned above. You have to be as old as I am to be able to draw comparisons; they say comparisons are odious, believe me, if more time was given to the aesthetic rather than the throughput, I think the quality would rise rapidly

‘Why what?’ you will ask, and my reply is ‘So many things I don’t understand’. For a start, why it is that in spite of the fact that one doctor complained to the authorities that the department was heavily overworked, but the Department in the hospital dealing with the baby who was so badly injured, ignored the warning and later another doctor was censured for missing apparently serious damage to the spine and other injuries, allegedly as a result of these pressures. I myself have been amazed, sitting in hospital, having been injured, at the throughput of patients that are necessary to keep abreast of demand. I have seen surgeons coming out of surgery into the seating area to collect the patients that they needed, because of lack of staff, when this should have been done by a less senior person.

I raise this matter as an example of the chasm between ordinary functioning professionals, and banking. I have never understood why, when the banking system failed, which was not only predicted by practically every newspaper, and scribblers like myself, month after month, that the banks were not left to sink or swim as they saw fit, while the government inaugurated a banking system under the auspices of the Bank of England, and public money would then have been secure against any form of excessive rewards being given for what is nothing more than doing the job they’re being paid for. When people in other walks of life, who have the safety of the population in their hands, such as design and build engineers, surgeons, the police and many others, they are expected to do their job to their best ability without any handouts. Just as an amusing aside, my son-in-law was a professional golfer, and everybody came up to me and asked me how he had done the previous day’s championship, but they never asked me how many piles I had arranged to be driven, or what structures I was putting up.

What is it about the bankers that gives them a licence to ignore, so it would seem, ordinary common practice, even though they are now in effect, civil servants being paid by the populace? It is our money that is keeping the banks afloat.

Another typical question is why when the Prime Minister acted outside his mandate, tries to justify his actions in the face of extreme opposition from true professionals, runs the country into billions of cost for wars that I as a child, reading my comics in the 20s and 30s about the problems that were faced by our troops in the Indian mountain passes, was totally aware of then and if I had been involved I would have been wary now, It seems that there is some distinction between the attitude of government to the misdemeanours, or mistakes of the man in the street, and those of a select few. The question is, why?