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I know very little about world finance, but that doesn’t stop me worrying when I see the rate at which unemployment is rising, through nothing more nor less than greed and incompetence. So I sat down yesterday and thought about possible changes in the way the world’s banking was operated. I have said before that currency is purely a convenient commodity to permit payment for services rendered, but the problem is that there is not a stable value against which all currencies can be viewed, because different currencies are bought and sold like commodities. It then occurred to me that in effect we have two forms of currency. There is the internal currency that each country uses for barter within that country. Then there are the money markets buying and selling these currencies and so allowing individuals or companies to make money. I may be an idiot, but it occurred to me that we should have an international currency that has a fixed value that never changes, what it is related to is a matter of choice, but it must be inviolate and totally stable. The same applies to the National currencies only their value would be related to the international currency.

The value of a commodity produced by a factory or sold in a shop is what the market will stand, and so the value of the commodity should be the thing that varies, not the currency. If this were the case, and the currency was stable, then we wouldn’t be in the plight we are today. There would not be any money markets, each country would only use its currency within its borders, and in any transaction outside its borders would be carried on in the international currency. The only sticking point is determining the value of the international currency and making sure that its intrinsic value never changed with time.

These last statements point to the fact that all we need is an international currency which is set in some way so its value never varies with time, rather like the metre and international measurement.

I am talking about the rumpus caused by the assessment that it is going to take over £1 million per annum to jail the members of the family who brutalised that child. One of the reasons offered is that attempts will be made by other prisoners to carry out their own form of justice, and in doing so will endanger prison officers and other prisoners. I’m assuming that this is based on the philosophy that these people are going to be treated in exactly the same way as someone caught nicking cars. My approach would be considerably different, and while I know almost nothing about running a prison, during my war service for a few days I was a jailer in a naval lock-up, in charge of two would-be murderers who were there because they failed to kill the very person the rest of us were dying to kill.

For a start off I would decide on permanent solitary confinement for each of the family. I would then put in hand the construction of a cell-block, consisting of three units, each with a bed sitting-room and a toilet-cum shower room. This block would be accessed from some part of the main prison with a suitable double door security system. At the rear of the block would be an exercise yard partially planted so that the atmosphere was not totally barren. Each unit would be provided with a flat TV and radio sets within the walls behind unbreakable glass panels and operated by remote control, to prevent vandalism. The whole unit would have CCTV connected to the control centre of the prison. Food the would be provided as it was in the prison that I was in charge of, of such a type that knives and forks were not required and the food would be eaten either by hand or using a plastic spoon. The inmates would go on exercise individually, twice a day, for acceptable periods. They wood be provided with a keyboard connected to a hidden computer, using the TV screen as part of the equipment, to give them some mental stimulation. I would assess the construction of this property, considering it was only required for a short time, unless it became popular, could be built little more than £100,000. The supervision would be remote, both sound and vision, but adequate, and they would only need to be attended morning and afternoon to have verbal communication rather than just visual, which would overcome all the worries about further excesses. I don’t care if these people have lost their human rights, as seen by some more socially advanced than I am. What I do see is that these people are not unique in this society that we have today, and we are going to have to change our views on how they are treated when they are discovered. The number of brutal attacks being perpetrated on a daily basis throughout this UK is rising steadily. Whether the thought of this solution will be a deterrent is no more likely than hanging was, but at least if it saves millions of pounds per annum, then in my book it is justified.

I know this is a dull subject, but the incredible change in such a small time, globally speaking, must have had a tremendous effect on the development of our young people. Call me an old fuddy-duddy if you like, but in retrospect I can’t believe the straitjacket in which our youngsters now grow up. Progress has given them access to unbelievable toys and tools, and until recently, prosperity has showered vast quantities of generous presents of toys into their store cupboards. Fortunately, they are totally unaware of what they have been missing over the last 60 years.

Way back in the 20s and early 30s there were so few cars that the streets were totally unencumbered by parked vehicles, and in consequence the children of the lower and middle classes were able to play simple games on the streets, sometimes in pairs, more often in groups, but these groups were having fun not mayhem. On the high street there were toyshops, with windows packed with toys of every sort and occasionally with automata, railway trains running on a track, toys well beyond the pocket of most children, but it was lovely to stands, gaze and dream. Today, if there are any toyshops at all, they’re in the form of an ugly warehouse in a shopping precinct on the edge of town, with no chance to see the toys at their best, or narrow, but deep emporia, with a narrow window filled with stuffed toys, while the shop itself and its stock disappears in the distance in this narrow space in a supermarket. There is no time to stop and stare and wish. In fact shopping for children has become a tedious procession round the same old shelves of the supermarket on Saturday mornings, not having to be dragged away from these wonderlands.

If one wants to find a shop devoted to sweets and chocolate of every variety, one has to go down some narrow little street off the main thoroughfare to find it, it’s not as it was in the old days standing like a jewel in the High Street for the kids to drool over. Today the sweet shop is either some uppercrust, pretentious oasis, devoted to expensive, rich chocolate, that the kids couldn’t afford, or toffee and sweets produced by only one maker, without brandy ball or a gobstopper insight.

Mechanisation has also done away with the simple pleasures of the harvests of corn and fruit in the countryside, by those kids having a cheap holiday in the farming environment. I suspect I have written this before, but the difference in the way my great-grandchildren are growing up in so much sophistication, compared with my own childhood, makes me feel sad, because the memories that I have are so pleasurable. These children are well brought up, within the confines of our society, it is just that progress has made everything more regimented, and consequently not simple and basic. No doubt my great grandchildren will be a lot more sophisticated and clever than my generation was, but I wonder if they will be as relaxed and carefree as we were, and there lives ultimately as gentle and unworried as ours were before 1939.

Ever since the beginning of the credit crunch, I have found that in financial programmes on television, somebody stands up and demonstrates that the markets are buoyant and suggests that things are better than quoted. A day or so later a government spokesman tells us that in fact the crunch is going to last couple of years longer than originally prognosticated. I remember in the past, when a mid-European, with vast sums of money at his disposal was trading in currency, and managed to ruin the economy of some small countries. We were told that the crunch was as a result of people trading in our country with our money and getting it wrong, so, obviously, somebody or some people elsewhere have our money tucked away. What worries me is that history can repeat itself, because as far as I understand the banks are still trading in currency. I always believed that currency was merely a tool to enable transactions to take place smoothly and with security, not a commodity. Shares are a different thing, in so much as the companies involved require them, to be able to obtain money with the promise of profit, at a time when they want to open up, or expand. It seems that this is no longer the case because the element of security in the value of the currency, as we have seen in this country, cannot be relied upon because of currency trading, with the result that purchases like pensions, shares and anything else you like to imagine are at risk, and as is happening today, being curtailed, or used for other purposes, and those who have contributed are the losers.

I am under the impression that currency trading is still taking place, and the only reason for this is that some people in the financial sector are playing Monopoly for their own aggrandisement. It seems to me that for some reason the Banks are inviolate, seeming still to be able to make their own rules without curb or redress, which in the light of recent history would seem to be a nonsense.

The elderly, possibly because they have time on their hands, often privately reminisce about the early part of their lives, their childhood in particular. It is probable that most will eschew those periods of horror subconsciously, and dwell on the more pleasant aspects that have been superseded by so-called ‘progress’. With me it generally happens at about four o’clock in the morning, and today I was thinking about the change in the landscape in 80+ years. One of the causes is the curse of inheritance tax, which has caused so many of those great estates to be sold up, and where there were avenues of trees leading to the big house, small copses as shoots, there are now roads, dwellings, shopping centres and above all, concrete and tarmac.

A long time ago I used to paint quite successfully for pleasure, mostly landscapes. In those days there was a renowned artist called Adrian Hill who had an art programme on television and published books to compliment it. One was called ‘knowing and drawing trees’, depicting almost every type of tree growing in the UK and their appearance in winter and summer. After WW2 there was an urgent need for timber and large swathes of the countryside were devoted to producing pine. These pine forests did little for the environment because the trees were planted so close together, to induce tall straight trunks, that little grew under them. One of my greatest pleasures as a boy, when I escaped from the sterility of London, was to walk in the autumn, down one of these tree-lined avenues, thick with fallen leaves, which one shovelled through with one’s feet, the atmosphere redolent of the smells of the country, clean and clear, gentle and undisturbed, where stress had no place. I strongly recommend that if you have time, go to the public library take-out books on trees. The silhouettes in winter and summer are so different and beautiful in a way that only nature can be beautiful; they are interesting both from their fruit and their effect on nature.

>From time to time there have been schemes for planting trees, but they seem to have come to nothing, because commerce is more important than the aesthetic. The forests, the copses and even a single tree standing at the corner of a field was a heritage worth leaving for our youngsters not only to enjoy, but to study, because there is more than the beauty of the trees, there is their effect on the local environment, with wildlife and flora and fauna. Inheritance tax has been a very costly imposition, aesthetically.

I was thinking the other day about the difference in our island population now and in the 20s and 30s. Then, foreigners, either resident or visitors, were as rare as weeds in a near perfect garden, yet today we are so polyglot that we have translators in our schools. What started this was a conversation I had with a plumber, he was working and I asked him, ‘Can you whistle and ride? It was a phrase that my grandmother used to use. On Saturday mornings it was my job to take a board covered with a leather sheet, and Carborundum powder, to clean all the knives, which were pure steel, and bring the blades back to their pristine shininess. Stainless steel cutlery was still a thing of the future. She would ask me that question, because I had to stop work to talk to her, and she was suggesting that I should talk and work. I started thinking then of a wider range of words and phrases that have long been lost. There was a bit of doggerel which went like, ‘Swap me bob, me mum’s a snob, me father takes in washing, me sister drives an omnibus, and me brother mends the stockings’. This was a relic of the First World War, and the music halls, sending up the fact that all the men had gone to the front, and life at home was virtually upside down.

There used to be a phrase in the Navy for free time that was called, ‘Make and mend’, because that was when Nelson’s sailors repaired their clothes, as there was little else to do at sea. The phrase was still in use in World War II That phrase also applied to the home, where, when things went wrong, they were repaired time and time again, and gypsies would go round the streets, sitting on the kerb, repairing holes in saucepans. Those were frugal times, when people couldn’t afford, as they do now, to throw away something that could be repaired. I don’t suppose it even dawned on people, other than the very rich, to even consider it. Of course life was also much more routine, and much more simple. Holidays abroad didn’t become a regular thing until about 1935, when a lot of the secondary schools sent parties of children on a collective holiday in the summer or at Easter. There used to be lexicons devoted to phrases which were common in different eras, and available in public libraries, whether that is so now I doubt.

When I wrote part one on the 28th of July, I made it clear that this was just a theory, and I had not the experience of the war conditions to be certain that it would work. In consequence, I sent a copy of the post to a friend, a now retired senior army officer, who had served in those Middle East war zones. His reply was very cogent, interesting, and pointed up aspects that one who has not been to the area, will be unaware of.

I thought it would be interesting to put down information concerning the use of explosives, which I encountered in the 50s, and is not as straightforward as films like Sharp, and some of Clint Eastwood’s, would make one believe. Explosives, to be truly effective have to be under pressure, and so are placed with a tight packing to maximise the effect, and fired either by a burning fuse, but more recently in general by an electric charge. The electric charge, coupled with packing which can give a directional effect, enable large tall buildings in built up-areas to be demolished in short order and with minimum effect on the surrounding district. This is achieved by having charges placed to weaken the structure seconds, or milliseconds, prior to the main blasts going off, and these would be angled and synchronised, in such a way that the building imploded instead of exploding. I add this note because the way in which Roadside bombs are packed would really influence the effect of the charge and the direction of it.

My friend made a number of points, he pointed out that a lot of the ground was rocky, which I take to mean that the holes were being drilled for the charge, and thus would not be as easily brought to light as one dug in sand. While I have seen the use of water cannon repeatedly in the north of Ireland, on local television, where large quantities of water were sprayed some considerable distance, he pointed out than in the Middle East water was a valuable commodity and waste would only play into the hands of the politicians who were against our presence. He also pointed out that the distances travelled by our soldiers at any one time were considerable and would thus aggravate the water situation, and progress of the units would be unnecessarily slowed down, inducing obvious additional dangers. I admit that I had been considering men walking, not fleets of vehicles. I am indebted to him because it demonstrates that armchair design badly needs on- site knowledge. Nonetheless, if my comments on the first post induced even a little lateral thinking, it wasn’t all wasted.

What I am writing about is little waterproofed tabs, in packets, that we use to cover inadvertent damage to our skin, some call them Band Aids or plasters. You know sort of thing, it is kept in a box with a red cross on it, out of harm’s way, and when you cut yourself, you can’t remember where the box is, and when you ultimately find it, you can’t get the plaster out of its wrapping, any more than you can get crisps out of the bag, or your dinner out of a plastic box. Recently, I was speared accidentally with a very sharp knife and by the time I managed to get the plaster out of its wrapping, the kitchen was like an abattoir with blood everywhere.

Small children are adventurous and pebble dashing of the knees is a common occurrence, young people have run-ins with electrical appliances and loose chunks of their bodies with experimentation, I have the scars to prove it. Very old people are held together with all sorts of medications, including aspirin to stop them going gaga, that has the disadvantage of thinning one’s blood to a point where the slightest scratch can produce a fountain of the red stuff that keeps us going. So it is essential that the plaster trade takes on board the fact that their wrappings are just that bit too unhygienic, as they ultimately cause one to have blood drying everywhere.

The strange thing is that the medical profession found this out years ago and provides their operatives with roles of plaster which they can cut to any shape with a pair of scissors, give a light tug, and hey presto, the paper covering is pulled away, and they have whacked on another plaster with no effort and lightning speed. Clearly the manufacturers are doing nicely when they supply a small cardboard box, half empty, containing a variety of plasters in individual packages that have a secret code for opening, each one of those plasters costs a bomb, while I suspect the roll comes much cheaper. We are talking about an emergency, where some people can panic with the sight of blood, so surely it is in everyone’s interest to make the amateur carry out the task more easily, if not just as easily as a professional.