Category: General

Political correctness is currently represented as almost an act of Parliament, when in actual fact, I understand, it has no legality whatsoever. Its roots are in communism, and it is a tool for the minority to beat the majority with. From what I read and hear, I believe that it is increasing with every year, and is like a pebble in a shoe to the indigenous population. Political correctness seems to take precedence over common sense and logic. The gollywog, a prime example, is no longer seen in shops, or is not even on the dictionary in this computer. A well loved smiling, black faced, soft doll, with terrible tangled black woollen hair, was in every household in the 30s. Jam jars, and other articles had golliwogs as emblems to draw attention to them, they were loved, like the Black and White minstrels, for what they were, not what people suggest today that they represent – the Negro slave. My mother would refer to a colour as ‘nigger brown’, ‘working like a black,’ and sundry other statements, and neither she nor I ever considered how they originated at the time. As an immigrant in Northern Ireland, through my English accent, I have had to accept jokes, repeated ad nauseam, at my expense, and I never really thought anything about it. The gollywog could never be interpreted as anything other than an eccentric looking doll, but it is a convenient way of complaining, for those who wish to use political correctness as a tool to draw attention to themselves, and make a political point. We in the North of Ireland know all about political correctness; great arguments take place over the inscription on a memorial to dozens of people who were blasted to the hereafter, allegedly by a dissident organisation, which is now the phrase used to placate those who no longer wish to be blamed. This is a warning. If you allow political correctness excessive credence, over and above common decency, you are being blackmailed, and worse, manipulated. It is the camel and the tent syndrome, (an Aesop fable), whereby pleading, and acceding, repeatedly, can change the order of the day finally to be totally reversed. As an immigrant myself, I believe it is the duty of those visiting a country as guests, and having subsequently been welcomed, to make every effort to conform to the culture of the host country and not to try to impose, rather than suggest, aspects of their own culture which might ultimately lead to a ghetto culture. Harmony allows progression and understanding, insistence on political correctness and or aggression can only lead to disruption, and ultimately hatred. Before legislating, politicians should think very carefully of the long-term effects of what they do, rather than shooting from the hip, which appears to be quite common today. Above all, in today’s rapidly shifting political scene, political apathy must be avoided, it shifts the power and undermines the majority.

To some actions they are reactions, and to every reaction there is an outcome. Two things have happened recently, a woman saw a man waving her down, whose car appeared to have broken down. She stopped, went over to help, another man appeared and held and stabbed her and the two men ransacked her car. The other thing was the analysis on television and in the newspapers of the Shannon kidnapping. I am not fully aware of all the aspects to comment. So instead I would like to describe a scenario, like a TV film, press the pause button, and then assess the cause and the outcome, because I think they are most important. The scenario is a woman, who is short of cash, and has criminal tendencies, which are generally accepted, but not acceptable. The kidnapping in Portugal, with the offer of at least a million to help the cause, gave this woman the idea of obtaining money, by engineering a fake kidnapping, and getting paid by the media for interviews, if not also subscriptions to the cause. Let us assume that a great number of the police spent a long time searching for the child, and have discovered suspicious circumstances. It is at this point I press the pause button

There are aspects of this which I believe show up weaknesses in the police system, and give a serious warning for the future. When I was a boy in the early 30s, we knew a number of policeman quite well, who were permanently in our district, some even living there. There were those that we saw four times a day when they helped us through the traffic, like the lollipop men of today. The policeman talked to the residents. I remember the night, in Belfast in 1949, when I was walking home at two in the morning having taken Sophie to the nursing home to deliver our second daughter, a policeman stepped out from a gateway, demanded to know where I was going, and when he discovered that he had seen the taxi passing earlier suggested that we went for a walk together. I cite this because being a policeman on a regular beat can be boring and to relive that the constable will chat with passers-by they know. If in our scenario, there were police on the beat, I suggest that when this woman stated that her child had been kidnapped, at the age that the child was, I suspect that the policeman on the beat would have known the woman, her past, and her propinquities, so that some doubt would have been placed on her initial assertion, and more attention given to this aspect, than the wide ranged hunting for the child. The outcome of this of course, if the scenario turns out to be the case in fact, there will be a level of doubt across the board when the next parents cry kidnapper, which would be a natural reaction, understandable, but nonetheless serious in a legitimate case. There is something to be said for community policing, a trust between the community and the police, and a more detailed knowledge of the community by the police.

With the publicity in the other case, of the woman who was attacked, the outcome of that is more than likely to be that if you breakdown in your car, now, you’re on your own. It is sad to say that when these type of things happen we become more isolated, less community minded, indeed, and the repetition makes us more casehardened.

I start here by saying that what I write is my speculation, based on my own experience, and a little knowledge. You know what they say, ‘ a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

For a long time I have been frustrated by soap manufacturers, for constantly changing the ingredients in the soap, so I have to find another because I am allergic to perfume and the additives they put into soap. Right up until the 50s, when we had the copper boilers, the washboard and the galvanised iron bath, soap was soap, and except for the wealthy, or some fussy women, it was pretty basic and uninteresting stuff. When I was at sea we were issued once a month with a long hard piece of yellow soap with which we washed ourselves, our clothes, our bedding and hammock, and if need be scrubbed the deck. Housewives used bars of red carbolic, at least our family did, and I don’t ever remember people talking about allergies. Now my problems are not only with the piece of soap I use, and the shampoo, but also what my clothes are washed in, and I believe this is the greatest source of my problems to the extent that everything that I use, underclothing and towels, are rinsed twice to get rid of the additives, put in probably more to do with promotion and economy, than cleanliness. They are now adding perfume, or should I say scent to washing powder, designed to remain in the clothes and perfume them long after they’ve been dried and possibly ironed. So additives, you didn’t want anyway become a permanency. How long does the build up last, depending on the efficiency of the washing machine, how often the article is used, and to what extent can this become more than just a fad, but an irritant in every sense of the word,?

Two things in recent papers brought on these thoughts, one was fears about the addition of folic acid to bread during its manufacture to prevent spina bifida causing birth deaths, the other, eating too much bacon and sausages could give you cancer of the bowel. As a sausage and bacon freak, I believe neither the sausages, nor the bacon today, taste as they did when the butchers made their own sausages, and sliced their own bacon. For whatever reason, probably shelf-life and a perceived flavour, there are additives in these products, and are they all on the packet? There is such a thing as chemical reaction, if you put some chemicals into a product and you’ve got chemicals in the water, has anyone bothered to check that you can have a chemical reaction? Water companies in the different regions use chemicals in the water to purify it, for dental reasons, maybe others I don’t even know of, all without my permission. What really grieves me is that all of us are being asked to consume some chemical or other to save a very small minority of occurrences, mainly in health. Surely it is the responsibility of the individual, if their fear demands it, that they, not all of the rest of us, take the medication for a specific reason. I suspect that when people test for these products they don’t really follow up to see if there is a build up in the retention of these additives within the body, it would take years. When you think of the Thames for example, with water shortage in London, and sewage disposal some 50 miles from the coast, it is not surprising that the water of the Thames is recycled repeatedly. I question whether a lot of these additives, particularly in our food and soap, is totally eradicated by the filtration and treatment of the water supply, or is that also building up, as you go downstream in the quantity and effects of the additives.

I remember in the 50s that packet tea blenders went to the trouble to design the mix of the tea, to suit the water in different regions because it affected the quality of the taste of their products. I doubt they do this now, so must find a common denominator of water-taste across the board, and modify the selection of the various types of tea to suit generally, and maybe put in additives to make it more palatable.

In writing the above cases made me examine the possibility of the cumulative build up of MRSA and the other alphabet scourges in hospital wards. Some people take excessive amounts of antibiotic. Animal husbandry, I read, injects their young animals and birds with antibiotics because of intensive production. The doctors have long instructed us that excessive use of antibiotics causes the germs to become resistant and the individual’s resistance to be lowered. Can the effects of antibiotics and the injection of medicines into the animals be passed on to those eating the meat, and the effects among humans passed on through generations? Can the level of cleaning in the hospital’s today make them so drastically dirty, by comparison with those in the past which were just scrubbed by the nurses? Is there not perhaps another knock-on effect that has not been researched?

I am writing about a specific case, but it doesn’t mean we don’t all know of those selfish people who, without respect for the outcome, scrabble, possibly cheat, and certainly can ruin not only the economy of individuals, but the economy of a country. I remember there was a man, I forget his name, who played the financial markets in America, in the 70s or 80s, to the extent that he crippled the economy of some of the European countries and then himself became a billionaire.

The specific case I’m talking about here was raised by my Dutch friend Jan, during a telephone conversation I had the other day. We were talking about the English language, which he speaks perfectly, with a very wide vocabulary. He was talking about this blog, and saying he couldn’t understand why if I had the level of acceptance and the vast number of pages read every month, I hadn’t been requested to contribute to a newspaper. Of course he is my friend. I have been writing for my own amusement from I left university in 1950, until two years ago, when I started writing the blog. I wrote doggerel, short stories and about 15 novels. I wrote to solve a problem. For example I am writing a novel at the moment about a highly capable detective who was blinded by acid being thrown in his face, and yet became a consultant to the police. When I had finished a novel I sent it off, it was rejected, so instead of sending it to a few more, I sat down and wrote another novel, because that was my interest, not really publication. There was a young man some years ago whom my daughter knew, who had written a novel and had I think anything from 60 to 100 refusals before he was accepted, but when he was, the novel was actually a bestseller.

Times have changed, if you want to be published you either have to be a journalist, with the contacts that that entails, or to have a name in show business, or be a politician, or be famous for some other reason. It seems that you don’t even have to be able to write, ghost writers will be knocking on your door, and the chances of publication are very high. The reason for this is that the public today are not so much interested in the written word for its own sake. Many of us read books because the subject must interest us, but often the way in which the book is written, its approach to the subject and its vocabulary are even more entertaining. The classics are so because of the English, some of it is antiquated and for that reason even more interesting. This applies to plays and films also. Possibly some of the reasons why people are reading books less, is not only because of television, and the Internet where they read snippets, but also, perhaps at school they were no longer taught the appreciation of fine prose, as a subject in itself. To take a modern-day example, the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice has some lovely archaic English which I find a joy to listen to. There are examples that beat the trend like the Harry Potter series.

However, I suspect the real reason is Mammon. The urge to make money, which generally involves high levels of publicity, together with, in many cases, salacious tittle tattle. This is not a cry from the heart of a frustrated old man, I never had great aspirations, and was always too busy trying something else to worry if I didn’t succeed in one particular sphere. In effect of course with respect to writing, in the long-run, I have had a surprising success, thanks to the generosity of my grandson. What this is, is a plea to the book trade, or even people who are disgustingly wealthy, to fund new writers of promise, as a speculation and, if you like, charity, so that money, and a high return is not necessarily the prime movers, the quality and language are.

I don’t remember members of parliament in the past, showing so blatantly the wish to be loved, as those we have today. It seems that this wish determines some of the priorities in the order of legislation. Currently Gordon Brown is behaving as if he was permanently on the stump, with photo opportunities in hospitals, schools and pretty well anywhere, instead of at his desk in Westminster. Churchill had it very tough, and while the Royal family were going round bombsites and army headquarters, one rarely saw pictures of Churchill, unless the need was great.

Why is it that a fair proportion of the population, the press, and oddballs like me writing in blogs, have been predicting the sort of problems, like Northern Rock, single-parent families, overcrowding in prisons, and a lot more, and that those who are guiding the country seem to have set these to one side in favour of tinkering with the education system, the health service, not once or twice, but on a regular basis. Is it because they believe that the populous is more concerned with these matters than those I’ve mentioned? All of the above problems have destabilised the country, put up taxes, and made us all politically apathetic. We are subjected to highly expensive judicial enquiries, and indeed the inquest of the unfortunate Princess Diana, all at incredible expense, and trauma to the bereaved, when again the man in the street knew, before they even started, that the outcome would be no better than the original status quo.

I often think that everything that is decided, that is going to cost billions, should be set before an independent panel, selected by the electorate, not the politicians, to oversee what the money is being spent on and how it is being spent. I know all about the committees, but they didn’t stop us going to war, nor the building of the Dome. We on the periphery of the United Kingdom, think in an overall way. For example if I were to choose a place to live in England, it would probably be Cheshire, because that gives easy access to the whole of the UK. I suspect the people in Westminster are blinkered by where they live and can see no further than from the south coast to Luton. This then is why vast sums of money are spent in the southeast on things like the Dome, and the Olympic Games, things we, on the periphery, will never be able to afford to enjoy at all, or if we do, just for one day, but we are being asked to foot our proportion of the bill.

While I’m on the subject, I have always thought that today, with all the modern sciences and equipment, reasonably large sized copies of the national treasures of not only Britain, but the world, should be readily available either on stands carrying 20 or 30, or on screens, in our local museums. The quality of reproduction in the books that one gets in the library, are so poor by comparison to the original, that they almost defeat the object of having printed them. We on the periphery, unlike those in the southeast, haven’t access to many of these treasures, but we need them in some form or other, so why not large visual replicas

I wonder if all prime ministers today are as pigheaded as the last two we have had, who make parlous decisions without the money to support them, ignore the real professionals, the highly trained people at the workface, and go ahead, willy-nilly, with their own agendas. Blair’s agenda was his ego, he thought he had the potential of being the greatest politician ever. Instead his reputation has been ruined by so many of the decisions that he made in the latter part of his office, which have been paraded time and time again. I’m sorry to say the current incumbent is of a different cut, he not only wants to be loved, I suspect his agenda is driven primarily because of the fact that Labour are probably going to lose the next election, is in the forefront of his mind. What drove me to write this was his incredible arrogance, in the face of empty coffers, and the advice of the medical profession, to go into a vast screening programme, when the Health Service is so underfunded they are closing local hospitals, against the wishes of the electorate, are understaffed  in various departments including maternity. I could be wrong, but two or three of the decisions that have been made in the last few days, like the screening programme, are being aimed at the elderly because we are a large, Conservative voting wedge, with more time to vote, and are more likely to vote, than in any other section of our apathetic community.

Parental control. I think the nanny state is reaching gargantuan proportions, and instead of encouraging parental control to be a reflex action, is wasting our money bringing out new legislation to control the lives of the youngsters across the board. I read that the government is proposing to legislate for a classification system for video games, in the hope that this will reduce the violence in our young people. Where have they been? We have classification of films, and legislation up to the eyeballs about carrying knives, guns, being abusive, threatening, and violent, and yet our TV screens depict levels of shooting, or beatings, that would both be totally impossible for anyone to survive, and the hero walks out unscathed. All this legislation seems to have been ineffectual, because my tired old mind tells me that every week the level of violence in our streets is increasing. In my view it would be cheaper and quicker to legislate that parents are responsible for the actions of their children, and if they, the children, contravene the laws of the country, and by their age are outside a proper level of appropriate punishment, then the parents should be severely punished. You only have to look at the effect of parking fines over the years, to realise that adults, not children, take punishment seriously.

On a lighter note, when I want a belly laugh, I switch on Nigella Lawson, and watch her with her little shaky head movements, the flick of the eyes and her little grin, as she climbs in and out of a taxi to do a bit of shopping, sits in a corner of her house eating what she has just cooked, smiling the while. I find it very difficult to eat and smile, it makes my cheeks ache. After the programme I just marvel that she can get away with it, and people watch daily. I think her producer uses the same script every week, just changes the ingredients.

I’m referring to the way the Green Machine is changing our lifestyle, and ever more will change our lives. The problem I have with it is that it is not being applied rationally but more as a political football, the means of drawing attention to the person rather than the problem, and is so selective as to defeat its own object. In our domestic sphere we are being cajoled to turn off lights, buying food transported by air is costing the environment, and so on, but they don’t turn off vast electrically illuminated advertising after say 10 o’clock, when most people are tucked up with their tellies. All this business about charging the gas guzzlers is more of the same and equally doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t take me to list all the other absurd new strictures that are being placed upon us, blamed on the Green Machine, but are in fact sleight of hand – we all know them.

My generation was born into a period of scarcity, and subsequently relived it, all of which we took for granted. There were some things we imported by sea, like oranges and bananas, but most of what we ate was home-grown, and consequently seasonal. We didn’t feel deprived, because we knew no better, the really exotic stuff was brought in in small quantities for the ultra rich, and some of it I still think today is not worth the journey. I do quite a lot of the shopping now, and to improve our diet I try to buy fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables, but the problem is that when I buy them they are almost invariably uneatable, because they are unripe. The ripening process therefore takes place in my house, and I would suggest that 50% of the time the material rots rather than ripens, the level of waste is very high, and the taste of those parts that are ripe is in no way the same as if the products had been picked off the tree or whatever. The only way to taste a proper tomato is to grow it yourself under glass in summer. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not I who am looking for strawberries in January, it is the supermarkets who want to increase their turnover by tempting me to buy something that I hadn’t even thought of, and which in actual fact I don’t really need and is unripe anyway. The corollary of this of course is obvious, it is not that we, the population of Britain, who are demanding the air transported imports of all these exotic foods, it is the supermarkets who are thinking up ways of tempting us.

Our masters will soon be stopping people from forcing produce in tunnels, using artificial light to induce out of season conditions to meet the demands of the supermarkets. The average housewife doesn’t walk out of a house thinking I must buy a flowering cactus, she buys it because she sees it, and is tempted. In fact they are going to be stopping all sorts of things, mostly by taxation, including unnecessary flight transportation. If you add the effects of the Green Machine to those of personal security endangered by foreign bombers, our future is going to look a lot like what we had in the 30s. By now most of the readers of this blog will have got me weighed up as a traditionalist, so you won’t be surprised when I say that over the 80 odd years of my life, which I have enjoyed thoroughly, I believe that 1935 was the golden age. We hadn’t all the gadgets we have today, in fact we had very few, but I want to assure you that of all the restrictions I can see ahead for us and you after I’ve gone, you could do a lot worse than go back to the standards of probity, care, and personal responsibility, as well as the home cooking of seasonal food that is fresh and wholesome, and holidays that are not spent in the halls of the airports.

I stand gently leaning on my walking frame, with my rheumy eyes, and a mirror in my hand, I look first at the world and then I look at myself, and I wonder who’s the daftest. I wonder if we’re worse than the Frogs, the Huns, the Yanks, or those kind and selfless people who are coming all the way across Europe to help us, because we are unable to help ourselves any more. Just supposing the UK was the only nation on the globe, and the rest was all water, would we have ever reached the situation we are in today of falling apart because we appear to have insufficient labour to do the dirty jobs – ‘really darling, that job is beyond me!’. You know there’s nothing selective about having to do dirty things, when I was an engineer, with more letters after my name than you could shake a stick at, I still went up sewers, up to my waist in unmentionables, into covered sewage tanks, surrounded by the most awful smells, it was my job, I felt no degradation from having to do it. I really do think that we are an absolutely crazy and snobbish crowd. Let me give you another example of why.

When I was young my Gran used to make Scotch eggs, by wrapping fresh hard-boiled eggs in lovely pork sausage meat, coated in several coats of egg and breadcrumbs and then fried the whole lot in deep fat. Sophie made the same thing many years ago, for me and the kids. There was a fight for who had last bites. About a year ago I was in Tesco’s, I bought one for old times sake from the cold meat counter. When I got home I was firmly convinced, on my first bite, that the sausage meat was in fact reconstituted cardboard, and found the egg was actually detach from and roaming about inside the ball. Two days ago I was in Sainsbury’s, and I thought well this firm will probably be better – if anything they were worse, the egg was about the size of a Banty’s, roaming around like a lost soul in this huge void of brown coated cardboard. The question I ask is, what is happening to
us as a generation or indeed a nation, when they can actually put rubbish like that on the counter and expect to sell it? It occurred to me, they are made on an assembly line, with the cardboard shell in two halves, one half ran along until an egg was dropped in and then the other half was dropped on top and they were stuck together somehow – a million miles from the real thing.

So my thoughts naturally turned to the type of food that we are beginning to become accustomed to and think is the norm, because so many of us now have either neither the time, the skill, or the inclination, to cook good quality food in the old-fashioned way. Instead we get fobbed off with poor imitations of peasant foods, from all the nations in the world, not as they cooked them, but what the manufacturers think the suckers will buy. The fact that hardly a day goes by and there are at least three cooking programmes, and a few food programmes on television, means that we are still interested in the process, but rather than make wholesome food, we buy what other people think they can get away with. I am a very fortunate person in that my whole family are good cooks and in consequence we eat well and are well. It is time that people stop kidding themselves that they ‘get what it says on the tin’, to misquote an ad.

I suspect that part of the reason is that they have stopped teaching cookery in school, instead they choose to teach French, pronounced with English regional accents as the teachers are not trained language teachers, and the children will never use as long as they live, because it will have been forgotten by the time they finally reach the French coast.

Food Waste. The huge maw that we call the media, has to be fed with new material hourly, if not by the minute, with the result we get badgered by statistic after statistic often with no offered basis for these statements. One of them was that we in the UK waste more food than any other nation in the world. For a start I don’t believe it, I was brought up to think that everything in America was bigger than everywhere else, right down to lying, up to now I haven’t been proved wrong. On the other hand, I know that Sophie and I, as a very small unit, brought up to be sensibly careful, but not overly frugal, do waste food. This has worried me because I don’t like waste for its own sake, so I have decided the basis for all this waste is the loss of the corner shops. If you have to go a number of miles to do your shopping, you don’t want to do it every five minutes, and when you see the trolleys on a Saturday morning issuing from the supermarket, sometimes duplicated, and loaded to the gunwales, you realise that people are buying for the future, without a constructive thought of what the future holds; by the future I mean the following week. When Sophie was ill and I was doing catering, I budgeted for what I needed for about four days, planning the meals and buying accordingly, but then relatives took pity on me and turned up with packets, boxes, and plates of prepared meals. That was when I began to seriously waste food, and because this kindness was totally unpredictable there was no let up to the waste. On the wider horizon, waste is inevitable, because no longer do we buy all our produce when it is fresh. This particularly applies to fruit and vegetables. When I was a boy on holiday I went fruit picking, and we were paid by the wicker basket. I was picking Victoria plums, ripe ones, not barely ripe, coated in some sort of chemical that would ripen them over the period of time which it took to pack them, send them halfway round the world, and have them sitting on a shelf in a shop for a week. In my youth you went shopping en route from doing something else, because the shop was just round the corner and you could pick up what you wanted on the way home, so you were buying to eat, not as today, guessing what you might need, buying something because it’s on offer, and buying something that takes your fancy, over and above more than you would have wanted anyway.

If we’re going to start expanding with all these new government building proposals, let us give the corner shop the edge it needs to compete easily with a supermarket, and make provision for them in the middle of these building estates, and take us back to a time when we didn’t have to spend acouple of hours gathering up the provender, in fact, we hardly noticed that we were shopping,.