Category: General

This is not just a bit of fun, it is a search by someone not particularly politically orientated, or knowledgeable, to find a system which will improve on the one we have. Instead of writing this as I usually do, I shall do what it says on the tin, put down random thoughts. I have previously stated that Blair went his presidential way, because he believed that only he knew what was to be done. I know of no deputy Prime Minister who was treated like John Prescott. Now it’s got Menzies Campbell (I can’t spell Minges) adopting, basically, the same attitude. It doesn’t surprise any of us, we have known it for some time. The problem is what to do about it: Start by examining our political structure. We have local government, mostly part-timers, guided by civil servants, and loosely responsible to their community. They in turn have to obtain the approval of the civil service for what they choose to do and how they carry it out. The civil service, allegedly, is handling or passing on instructions from the ruling government, performing functions which run the country, and dealing with foreign powers. The civil service, to put it crudely, is divided into the secretariat and the technocrats. The technocrats are the professionals who run the services, engineers, medicals, lawyers, tax collectors, and so on. The secretariat liaises with government, advises government, sets the parameters in which the technocrats must operate, does the purchasing, oversees the running of the civil service, and monitors the running of local government. Some parameters the civil service sets can be contrary to good management when forced to be used by the technocrats, but it is set in stone from the distant past.

Presidents can be ruled by their advisers and pressure groups. Dictators are obviously a disaster. We need to ensure the people governing the country, in all its complexity, are trained, and of a very high standard of ability and political nous,. It is clearly dangerous for a party to have such an overall majority that none can gainsay a party policy be it right or wrong. The current level of political apathy indicates people no longer trust politicians. This is serious. The electorate must have a say. These parameters demand a rethink of the political system I have written before, that as a technocrat, operating within local government was simpler, more flexible, and less frustrating than National government – and I have experience of both.

Taking into account the Lords, I consider the system has four tiers, because I suspect, especially if a parliamentarian is weak, that the civil service is a tier in itself. Q one, if we limit the majority of the leading party, are we disfranchising? A, yes. Q two, do we really need, local government, national government and the Lords? A. we would never get away with taking one of them out, but we might be able to modify. Q three. Do we really need all these MPs, if some of their duties were taken over by full-time representatives at local level vetting the work previously done by committee and proposed to be done by civil servants, would this not suffice? That is to say, at local level you have full-time and part-time councillors, the full-time ones, fixed number from major parties, not raving loonies, while the part-timers can represent anybody including raving loonies.. In effect the full-time councillors will act as backbenchers, have a much better knowledge, I suspect than now, of what is going on locally and would feed the information, the wishes of the electorate, and anything else pertinent, to the frontbench MPs in Westminster. If the elections at local level for both the local authority and Westminster, were concurrent, and with a proportional representation system for determining who moves to Parliament and who stays at local level, was considered, it would enable the electorate to vote for whom they liked, while understanding some of the candidates were professionals and some unpaid, part-time. Each member of the electorate would be provided with a. number of votes and the opportunity to give preference. It may sound complicated, but not a lot more so than people are finding today when they have both local and Westminster elections at the same time. One thing is certain, the system will be cheaper even with increased remuneration for the professionals., and I believe if properly organised, will give better service at grassroots level. The professionals’ selection would be conditional to passing some form of scrutiny with respect to training, social experience and competence. People would not be able to offer themselves for candidature as now, except for the part-time posts at local level.

This is merely a thought, perhaps a crazy one, but even if it makes people think that there must be a better way than the one we have, which has served us for hundreds of years. Now, there are fewer people of quality interested in going into politics, the pickings are better and the interest greater outside. So it is clear that not only the system needs change, but the remuneration.

Ask schoolchildren about the environment and they will probably know more than you do, added to which they are probably more enthusiastic about preventing global warming. Ask some old man like me the same question and he will tell you that he’s sick of it, it is used as a stick to beat us with, it is used as a means of extracting more taxes, and when about 80% of the world’s population has absolutely no intention of doing anything about it, fiddling about with solar panels on the roof, driving at fixed speeds, and all the other plethora of things they heap on us, isn’t going to make a jot of difference. People I’ve spoken to tell me it has got to start somewhere.. Okay! But why does everything seem to have to start here? I won’t give you the list it is too long. I know that what follows will never come to pass, until it’s too late. What seems obvious to most people, would appear to be considered absurd by governments, if their actions are a gauge, and so things get done when they become more complicated and dearer, because governments have other agendas, reviews, white papers, and U turns.

Take transport for example, we are constantly being badgered about how we can save the environment by driving this car and not that, driving this way and not that’ When all the time we shouldn’t be driving at all, we should be using public transport, most people did up until the mid-50s, and they were happy with the situation. Then they took away the trains, people had more money and wanted to be free to get up and go when it suited them, not when they had to meet a bus schedule. One thing has been evident throughout the years, the government draws a tremendous amount of tax from the motor industry and people using cars as transport, so there clearly isn’t an incentive to underwrite a tremendously sophisticated public transport system, which would meet the needs of most reasonable people. I find it totally ironic that the government at the present time in Northern Ireland is bringing out legislation that planning and the sale of houses has CO2-saving elements, when the roads are burgeoning with one-man-one-car, with children being taken to school, only short distances in a car. This sort of reasoning defeats credulity, and I think it is widening to include the whole country. There is no shadow of doubt that to create a comprehensive, integrated public transport system would not be cheap. But on the other hand the sooner it is done the better, because it will be done eventually anyway.

To my mind, although I have not costed it, by the time you take into account the rising cost of fuel which will be inevitable, the increased road works with flyovers, multiple lanes etc, to cater for the  the heavy lorry and trailer combinations, there probably won’t be a saving, because the government will no longer be able to draw on the same taxes on  insurance, licenses, fuel and vehicles, they will have reduced. One other consequence will be that there will be once again, more small shops in town centres and locally, and land available for building, because the car parks at supermarkets will be empty. There is one other certainty, Gordon Brown will be pleased, because he’s exhorting us to exercise more, and by the nature of the system we will have to walk a lot more, like we did all those years ago, so it cannot be all bad. It will probably never happen!

Just to demonstrate the bizarre thinking of our various political parties, this notion of differential taxation, according to size and fuel consumption already exists, because the gas-guzzlers cost more and use more fuel, so those drivers are already being differentially taxed. Bringing in another tier of taxation is only going to add work for the licensing offices, and, all the time we have the mummy run, make little difference.

For pure electioneering, yesterday, Gordon Brown, The PM, surrounded by professional footballers, youths and children, extolled the merits of supervised sport and training as the way forward to produce a healthier nation and subvert the street violence so prevalent. Where has he been? People with Blogs have been preaching it for ages. If you read on you will find it isn’t as simple as that, there are risks.

Are people today as universally interested in sport for its own sake as they were 40 years ago? Then amateurism was at its height. Professionals, in games such as golf, unless top flight, earned a pittance, nonetheless respected, but not idolised. All of us played games, such as rough cricket for a pub team, and I actually scored, 50 not out for the only time.. I played rugby as a prop forward, and when the scrum collapsed on me, I heard the creaking of the bones of my skull. We learned by attrition, not classes, a lot of fun, with the odd bruise. My father, as a young man, joined my uncle in the Surrey Walking Club, to walk from Westminster to Brighton, with that strange gait. The Club joined the army at the outbreak of World War1 en masse.

Not only are amateur clubs thin on the ground now, TV, international leagues, and now our league system, are reducing the number of viable clubs in the lower ranks through lack of funding, legislation, greed, and aggrandisement by the major clubs. It grieves me to see families on low income with maybe a couple of boys in the family, having to fork out ridiculous sums for tickets, and for kit for special presents for the children, at prices these people can ill afford, the money being used to boost the salary for some hotshot foreigner. It doesn’t stop there, the kit has to be changed yearly, because changing the hotshots is on the same basis, and the club needs cash. Over the years the attitude of athletes, footballers, and other sportsmen has changed, from the amateur ranks where success was rewarded with a cup, a medal, or just a silver, engraved spoon, to the point where money talks, and second-best walks. I am not worried about the state of sport, I gave that up when dope taking to obtain excellence became common, for money rather than success. I fear the latest trend, where very young children are being sent to groups to be coached in some sport or other, as if they were teenagers, and recently it has been reported that several children have suffered heart attacks, and I believe, died. One reason we know, there aren’t sufficient play areas for children to gather together, to make up small teams and entertain themselves. Another is that there is a culture in all sports now for the young people to start almost when they fall out of the cradle, to achieve excellence in tennis, and other sports, instead of being left to develop normally, and that has developed because in the professional game training is paramount, and I believe, not only is it too severe, games are at such intervals, stress fractures and the like are now common – not in my day!. Even amateur and school sides now train as if they were the professionals of the 70s. In my day, the playing and the enjoyment were paramount, excellence was a bonus.

One other cause of the Training Group’s success is that the parents know their children are safe from mindless aggression. Whether they are safe from excessive pressures, physical and psychological, especially as there would inevitably be a pecking order based on ability is something else. There is a doubt in my mind that the sports trainer can supervise at least 22 kids, to the extent that he is aware of their physical condition as the period progresses. It is my untutored opinion, from my own experience of learning rugby and cricket at school, and nowhere near under the pressures that there are today, that accidents will happen. They used to happen when we played on the common, a boy would get a cricket ball in the eye, twist an ankle, but when he got tired, he would probably lounge on the grass and then the others would join him. There was no pressure, ,it wasn’t exerted by the whole, nor was the external pressure to be the best, to be a success, to excel.

Finally, one of the reasons I don’t watch much sport any more, even on Sky TV, is because I’m disappointed that so many of the players in the teams, allegedly representing this country, the counties, and in the professional football clubs, come from abroad. Youngsters have to be honed by playing at increasingly high levels, but if those high levels are not available, because the ‘name’ from some other country is in the team, it all becomes purely an international moneymaking system on behalf of a select few. I find it incredible, probably because I’m not interested in sport any more, that people want to buy the shirts when the team they are supporting is 80 percent foreign. It is no longer Chelsea, Arsenal et al, it is a cosmopolitan team, playing good football, but not for Chelsea or Arsenal, but for money. As to the Olympics, that is a bottomless hole for the money that we need for essentials and a spectacle for only a few at the cost to the majority.

MRSA. There seems to be no end to the various viruses attacking patients in hospitals, I started to wonder about it. I know that I should not be writing this, I have never worked in a hospital, I have only been in hospital for operations twice, and apart from sticking a plaster on a cut and swallowing my pride, I have no knowledge about viruses or even medical matters other than what I read in the press. So what I write here is basically applied common sense.

I come from a generation, that when young, rarely had reason to attend hospital. From my own memory they were dark, greenish places, shrouded in discipline and overseen by an autocratic hierarchy I don’t remember hearing any complaints, let alone the deluge heaped on the DHSS there is today. Even then there was a discrepancy between the quality of the older and newer hospitals, which is inevitable. As a result I ask a question which may have been asked recently, whether there is a differential between the known cases of viruses, over a given period, in hospitals based in socially disparate areas. Another question that seems obvious, is, if these viruses like to attack open wounds, which are attended in doctors’ surgeries as well as hospital wards, how it is that no mention has been made of people having caught MRSA or the other bugs by being treated in our surgery treatment rooms? With all the publicity, and in consequence extreme activity in hospitals over cleanliness, while surgeries are left to the good sense of the nurses responsible, you would think that the boot might be on the other foot.

We read that viruses have a surprising longevity, in water, in dirt, and in people especially. When these viruses are discussed on television, they are always accompanied by shots of people washing their hands, and others sweeping or polishing the floor. It is possible, that the infection does not come mainly from the floor, unless patients contact the floor or articles stored there. If I were asked, although I never will be, where in the wards I would think most vulnerable, I would say, common toilets, the sluice, and areas from knee height to angle-poise-lamp level – hand touching areas. With the nurses urged to wash their hands repeatedly, the bookie would give you odds, that the contamination was more likely to come from other sources, possibly even the kitchen staff, going from ward to ward, collecting dirty dishes.

I assume that like in all contagion, there are carriers. It would then seem logical that the introduction of the virus happens in visiting hours, visitors move chairs, open and shut cupboards, adjust the pillows of the patients, and bring food from home. This must have been examined in detail, but I find it surprising it has never been brought to public attention. Presupposing that I am right, it will be a lot cheaper for every visitor to be given disposable latex gloves to wear within the hospital than all the cleaning an outbreak prompts. The hospitals pride themselves, in many cases, on their cleanliness, and yet there is infection. One assumes that apart from the serious emergencies, there is a checking system of the blood of all those taken into care in a hospital, and that these reception areas and wards are clinically divorced from the A&E department, with some sort of quarantine area, before the latter patient is allowed to become part of the general ward environment.

I appreciate that this will be thought rubbish by the medicals and hospital staff generally, but I needed to write it, because I am a belt and braces man.

Pensions. I may have touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating. As a pensioner, not just an old-age pensioner, I’m aware of the value of a steady income when you are not as capable of doing things for yourself as you were 10 years ago. I am worried, not for my own sake, but for the millions out there working away, who cannot be sure whether they will have a pension or not. The current state of the financial markets doesn’t give confidence, and especially because those same markets hold the pension investments, people are worried. It seems to be a heads you win, tails you lose, type of lottery, probably with less than even odds, ‘for’. The government has always tried to persuade us to save, surely if they undertook to take over the whole of the pension system for all people at work, they would achieve this aim, and at the same time ensure that at some date in the future half the population would not be destitute, with all that implies with respect to taxes and welfare.

Say what you like, Blair deserves at least one gold star, he taught us that at face value, you can believe nothing that comes out of Westminster, irrespective of the colour, be it red or blue. Most of it is so patently absurd, so thoughtless, an eleven-year-old could see it as tripe. Take the latest nonsense about driving cars at a constant speed, to save the environment. It’s electionitis – open your mouth say what first comes into your mind, irrespective if it makes sense or not, as long as it sounds that you care. One thing I am certain of is that this new policy will in fact, if implemented, save nothing, how could it? In this country, unlike America, we don’t have vast stretches of road with little traffic, here we have clogged motorways; you need to drive at night to get a free run, without logjams due to roadworks, or traffic in excess of what the roads were designed for.

As I understand it, the spokesman, I think he was Conservative, said we should drive cars at a steady speed which reduces CO2 emissions, and thus save the environment. He also suggested that traffic lights should be repositioned to permit steadier flow patterns. I always thought traffic lights were there to aid the flow, in all directions, to allow pedestrians to cross the road, aid changing direction, and so maintain the flow. Perhaps it’s because he’s now got a ministry car, sits at the back, dozes, reads the newspaper, and isn’t really aware of the traffic anyway. Where has he been? Hasn’t he heard of the mummy run, when the whole system grinds to a steady five MPH? That saves the environment? When I see pictures of the M25 at rush hour, or the bank holiday rush, with cars nose to tail all the way to the coast, crawling at a steady 10 miles an hour, and then listen to this rubbish, with theory replacing reason, I fear for the future, if people like that will be running the country. Just think of the cost of redesigning road junctions so that there is at least one lane that can travel at a steady speed of, say, 55 MPH. Every time politicians mention the environment, it seems to me it inevitably will cost us more in taxation. Perhaps that s the ploy.

It Is Beyond My Understanding, the circus that surrounded the kidnapping, or murder, of that smiling child, Madeline McCann. I make no comment other than on the exceptional circumstances the parents found themselves in. Firstly, they are both doctors, with more than adequate incomes. Why then was a fund raised for them, what was it intended to be used for, who initiated it, and was it properly monitored subsequently? There was the very public reception by the Pope at the Vatican. Surely, considering the numbers of children stolen, and abused, it would have been more appropriate, if the Pope had used this tragedy to preach about the callous trade of young children for sex and pornography, and the theft of children for sale to wealthy parents for adoption. Some do not know how they would react if caught up in a similar situation, I personally believe I would be so shattered, so at sea when it came to knowing how to get the child back, that I would probably sit on my hands, certainly not be trekking from country to country, when I would know, having stood surrounded by representatives of the world’s media, that the story was being published throughout the world From the very beginning I felt that the parents were enveloped by some puppet-master with his own agenda.

The TV films did make me realise, generally people who have to face the media in tragic or highly charged circumstances, often they take their wives along and hold hands all the way. Perhaps my family are different, we link arms, as one does, but only rarely do we hold hands. Just out of interest, see how often politicians, people going to court, and celebrities in the floodlights, hold hands with their wives, their partners or their mistresses.

Education and Training. A Warning! Since the dawn of time until the 1950s, the main educational routes in the professions, the trades and selling, was more commonly as a result of being apprenticed or articled to a respectable company. In those days it was dead men’s shoes, you had a rough idea where you were going, and a good idea of where you would finish up. There was security, and because of the class system, people tended to be content with their lot, only a few were overcome with extreme ambition. WW1 had been such carnage that the government, at the beginning of WW2, made a ruling that everyone who left their job to join the services, would be entitled to their job back when the war was over. In actual fact, as I can speak from my own experience, not enough of us were killed to make this a reality. The employers were faced with men and women in place who had served their time over five years of the war, and yet there were those returning, looking for work, but were at a disadvantage, in that it would take some time for them to get up to speed.

We are in a situation now which is just the reverse. With cheap imports, sending so much of our manufacture abroad, we are not training sufficient people to the highest standards, which one needs to be competitive, and I believe if we are too dependent on teaching, of a poor quality, in schools instead of the quality training by well qualified journeymen in workshop situations, we will suffer severely. The educationalists are often theorists who have not come up the hard way. Being married to a teacher one tends to move in teaching circles, and in spite of what University chancellors, the government, and statisticians say, teachers of the old school will tell you bluntly, that the products today from schools and universities, as a mean, are below the standard that would have been expected back in the 30s and 40s. From my own experience in engineering in the post war years, the older men were competent and reliable, the new trainees from technical schools were often useless, The current wave may have technical skills, and understand things which have come to light since those days, but their basic skills, the skills necessary for industry to forge ahead, are not what they should be. If the government doesn’t take on these basic fundamentals, and step up the quantity and quality of the training that is necessary for a vibrant economy, we will sink. It is not coincidence that we have such a vast influx of tradesmen from Poland and other Eastern European countries. Soft university options, degrees in subjects that are oversubscribed to, and are theoretical rather than practical, mean we do not build a technical base. I am told the wealth of this country is based on its financial dealings and its inventions. But I believe if the bottom falls out of the market, we will be suffering the consequence, if we haven’t a manufacturing base of high-quality – deep trouble!.

I am not suggesting that a high proportion of children are not well fed, well clothed, and their every wish fulfilled. Indeed, it is this very fact that everything is done for them, the world is their oyster, that perhaps is one of the problems that teenagers are facing today. I believe there is such a chasm between the haves and have-nots, with advertising filling the imagination of the have-nots, it now raises jealousies, discontent, and in consequence aggression.

I write, from my own experience. My mother, my brother and I, through family circumstances, dropped from a house with six servants and a secure income, to destitution overnight. It was the extended family that held us together. The perception of one’s situation by a child, expands with age and experience, from the point where his plight doesn’t impinge, up to a point where he is not only totally aware of the disparity in his circumstances, critical, he might even resent it. In my day, the 30s, we had a number of simple pleasures, sweet shops and toy shops in particular, brightened our day. In our case there were dozens of sweet shops to choose from, with rows and rows of bottles, with highly coloured sweets at rock bottom prices. There were shops on the high Street devoted totally to selling toys, from the cheap little imports of windups from Germany, to huge dolls houses, dolls prams, sets of railway trains motor cars a child could sit in and pedal. .You didn’t need to have pocket money, it would have been nice, but it was often enough to just breathe on the window and wish, knowing there was little hope, but there was always a chance that one of the minor items might be yours at some time in the future. Today sweet shops tend to be franchises of a particular brand, and the source of sweets, instead of a vast quantity in glass bottles to choose from, a series of packets dangling uninterestingly among the day-to-day commestibles. As far as I can see the only toy shop is a catalogue, just pictures, not objects to excite the imagination and determine a savings campaign for the future.

Am I wrong in thinking there is a sterility about the life of young children today? .We were little horrors who played in the street, but horse-drawn traffic was unlikely to put us in hospital. We had open spaces with small woods on them, where cowboys could chase indians, cops could chase robbers, except in the evenings after dark, when the woods were taken over by what my Gran referred to as ‘Ladies’ mark you, ‘of ill repute.’. We played cricket, (have kids today day even heard of French cricket?), football, rounders and a number of weird games made up on the spot. Where are these children today? A lot are seated in front of the television or the computer screen. The lucky ones play games organised by their schools or perhaps are members of gymnasia. We cycled, but that today is virtually impossible, and we went to the cinema on Saturday mornings for a pittance.

I really do believe that circumstances, alleged progress, and the vast amount of traffic we now generate, are to blame, and because a lot of parents feel, possibly subconsciously, that their kids are not having the fun they had, they salve this by being lenient, and generous. The other side of the coin is the case of the single parent family, struggling to bring up one or two children on an infinitesimal income, too young to have enough experience, and too tired and too bewildered to do a proper job.

I am out of jail! An optician examined my eyes, and discovered that I had cataracts in both eyes, but one much more than the other. He decided that the condition of my eyes, was inadequate to allow me to drive, in accordance with the requirements of the Road Code. In consequence, as he had written it, this immediately negated my insurance. For six weeks I have been unable to drive at all, and for anyone who has experienced this, particularly if they haven’t others they can call upon, it becomes a choice between taking taxis, or not going. In time one feels that one is jail-bound, such is the dependence we build on the use of the car. Because I could see very clearly over long distances, like 2 miles, I got a second opinion, and I write this, not out of annoyance with the optician, who I’m assuming was being cautious on my account, but to tell those who are driving what a fabulous skill it is, and how desperately frustrating it is, in this era of zero public transport not to be able to. I can’t understand why in the 50s I could run a whole family without a car, and never really noticed the loss. We went on trips, I went to work and we were well supplied with transport of one sort or another. Now there is none. I wonder if this is a contributory factor to the reason that young people, going nowhere, are just hanging about on street corners in a lot of our cities. When I was about 10 years of age, I was given sixpence for an all-day ticket on the trams, a lunch, and sent off to discover London. Times were different.

It is reasonable to assume that generally, Radio, TV and the Press gain most of their revenue from advertising. The corollary, therefore, must be that the quality of the product of these organisations is determined by the tastes of the advertisers. One thing that has always defeated me is how the vast number of photographers, reporters and cameramen, who are seen fighting for content, in so many situations, can make a living. There must be a mountain of money involved. What started this essay was that in station-hopping, I came across two quiz programmes running concurrently which were so different, with one so psychologically cruel, that I was repelled and the other treated the contestants not as fodder, but human beings. ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ was conducted with humour, and anticipation, and when a man, through his own greed, lost about 100 pounds, one was sorry, but it was his decision. In ‘Take it or leave it’, contestants are required to successively answer questions, in competition with one another, to build up a large financial pot. Having achieved this they still have the final hurdle, which is a five to one lottery that they’ll be going home with nothing. I found this abominable, greedy, and sadistic, on the part of the Channel. When programmes are devised, I believe that their niche, their slots, and the audience, have been evaluated, together with the revenue that these parameters will generate. So they know how much money they have to give away, to start with, so it is reasonable that they could modify the rules to allow people who have amassed quite a lot of money to at least go home with a portion. But we have now created the society which demands more than just fun, a bit of stupidity, and success and failure. There is now a brutal, confrontational element introduced, witness  Big Brother, that demands that the contestants should be humiliated – grieved. There are also those programmes that while the prize-money appears to be astronomical, the take home quantity is a lot less. There are many programmes, from the Japanese endurance tests to Eggheads, that fall into these unpleasant categories.

In my slightly critical mind, as it is the advertisers who are calling the tune, it is the general public, whose reaction to the adverts, who are endorsing this trend – not the other way round. In effect, we only have ourselves to blame. Big Brother, for example, treats the contestants as if they were not humans at all, but some strange beings that they can put under a microscope, selected and manipulated so there will be every emotion, from love, hate to near murder. This isn’t entertainment, it is a zoo for people to gawp at, and akin to dog baiting. You will have heard that dog baiting is a big European industry, flourishing in spite of the law and in spite of good taste and a respect for animals. Another vicious trend, with money at the core.

As I have said before, films being produced today are far more violent, crazily so, to the extent that it is the violence not the story, which is the product. With this sort of trend in all the aspects of so-called ‘entertainment’, that is what it is categorised as by Sky, I find it unsurprising that more young people today are clearly more mindlessly vicious, more unruly and more ill-mannered than in living memory. It is interesting also that films like Notting Hill and Pride and Prejudice are so popular they are repeated ad nauseam –  perhaps there is also an audience for mannerly fun.

The other day I was contemplating the chaos throughout the World caused by suicide bombers, young dissidents and the like, with no end product to show for their efforts but mayhem. I wondered if I was right to blame it all on adrenalin. So I examined my own life in relation to circumstances where adrenalin played a part.

Firstly there was the ridiculous period when I was in the Local Defence Volunteers, at about the time of Dunkirk. There we were, old men, chatting about their experiences in WW1; shopkeepers, farmers etc and me. We were waiting for the hordes of German, trained, well armed paratroopers, with about one shotgun or WW1 revolver, between two of us. If the paratroopers had arrived how far down the hill would I have been able to cycle with my dispatch, before being brought down, and the alarm would have been raised anyway. I believe we were all there for excitement and to be part of the action.

Next it was the London Blitz. I and my mates patrolled the area, especially the gun batteries on nights when we were not fire watching in some hazardous part of the City. Both activities were exciting, a break from the dull old day.

The Home Guard too, creeping about on exorcises in the dark in uniform, shooting at Bisley, or doing guard duty with the regular soldiers in blockhouses in Westminster. It was interesting, exciting and not to be missed.

The Royal Navy, on convoy. There is nothing that will stir the blood like the fierce clanging of the Action Stations Bell. What with the rush to one’s station, be it a gun turret, the Plot, the stern with the depth charges, or an office in the bowels of the ship, with the ominous bangs and clatters as all the water-tight doors and hatches were locked behind one, the adrenalin was high. There would be times when the ship quietly kept station at six knots, we were going through a suspected minefield. but others when the bow would rise, the ship would turn on a sixpence, with all the loose gear sliding across the deck, or across the mess table onto the deck, as we headed off after a target – then the adrenalin level changed.

Think of Diving, especially in the old helmet and heavy weight suits. Imagine, alone down there, on your first dive, you sink up to your waist in thick black mud, in water so polluted you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You have had a day’s training in a tank, suddenly you realise you are sinking deeper, and can’t kick yourself out. I believe it is the adrenalin which permits you to stop panicking, take stock, remember your training and get yourself out of the mud. At the same time I was also taught closed-circuit breathing, using pure oxygen being recycled through carbon, so that you have no air bubbles for people to discover – frogmen’s gear. In the early fifties, at the time of Suez, I was working for the Admiralty, and my boss came to me and told me I might be sent as a diver to the Middle East with the rank of Commander, I assumed as a frogman. I was surprised, but elated, couldn’t wait! It didn’t happen, the war was too short – thankfully.

Finally there was the Police in Belfast at the height of the Troubles – ’70 to ’72. I was so appalled, and frustrated with the situation. Although I had a responsible job I joined up as a constable, on duty several nights a week. Standing like a target, doesn’t create adrenalin, but a sudden call, and flying through the city in the dark in a Landrover to a shooting incident really does, as does creeping up alleys looking for a gunman.

I relate all this for three reasons, I feel I know what it is like to want to get into the action, be part of it, and to assume if anyone is injured it won’t be me. Secondly, because I believe there are those who sometimes subconsciously seek risk, and are truly confident they can handle it when thrust into it. Included in these is the psychological urge for the excitement of risk, especially in the teenager. Finally there is also the uncontrollable urge to right a wrong, which is so immense, so frustrating it has to be tackled.

From my experience and the view of my own character, I do not believe most of the suicide bombers are really up for a serious cause, they are out for excitement, when one adds martyrdom as an ingredient, and also contradictorily, the Koran’s teaching being against the murder of the innocents.