Old Gaffer

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  • I thought forewarned was forearmed

    Yesterday I watched a film made in the 80s, by Jane Fonda. As the picture unfolded I discovered that I was watching a prediction of this credit crunch in which we find ourselves. I sat through it enthralled, Sophie slept through most of it. It was broadcast early in the day, when I had recorded it from Sky Movies to look at later. Basically it was a murder story, Fonda’s husband was the victim, because he had discovered an incredible scam, perpetrated by some of the top people in the financial field. The film was called ‘Rollover ‘.

    I won’t bore you with all the details of the film, sufficient to say that a mechanism had been placed in computer systems of a dealing room, or rooms, which hived off 5% of the value of some of the bigger deals that were in hundreds of millions. This money was converted into bullion, on paper, then sent to the Middle East. Jane Fonda had formed an association with a banker, and between them they uncovered the scam, but as a result of which the whole of the banking system of the world collapsed, when remedies were tried. The head of the scam turned out to be a member of the government control unit of the financial system.

    This film raised for me a number of questions. The first is obvious, if in the 80s they could make a film which was as detailed and as a logical as this, then a large number of people at the top of the financial markets must know and have known how this scam could be perpetrated. So why was it allowed to continue from its outset? The fact of the film being made and exhibited away back in the 80s, should have alerted the financial sector to the possibility, and I would have thought that the financial sector would have been alerted, by word of mouth, that this film was on show. Perhaps like Sophie they were all asleep. Sophie and I are fortunate, in that, we are told that a certain portion of each of our savings is sacrosanct, presupposing that the government keeps its word. If I was a young man today, of honest and sober nature, who thought he had a future that was buttoned-down, and then discovered that through no fault of his nor his employer, his innovative and burgeoning firm had gone bust, I would be looking for a few heads to roll among the well off, who had perpetrated or allowed the scam to go on unheeded.

  • Read’em and weep

    Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph had a headline ‘Death of the traditional family.’ I have been writing about the fact for three years. They were quoting the national statistics, which have recently been published. I won’t bore you with them all, just say that the extended family died in the 70s, and they’re only waking up to it now. I blame the governments since then, firstly, for allowing youngsters, wet behind the ears, disillusioned, or in a fit of pique as a result of a falling out in the family, to get pregnant, and then be given and supported in a small flat. Other causes are the drop in religious adherence, affluence which is a route to self-indulgence, and places the responsibilities of marriage, parenthood and a more restrictive life, as the brake on freedom of enjoyment, whether it is in fact, real or imagined.

    The Nanny Society is partly to blame. The level of help offered by the various government, local government and charitable outlets, is incredible today, compared with the post-war era. Since I have been injured, and are not as independent as I was, I have found it amazing how many different functions are on offer to the aged the handicapped, and presumably the unemployed and single parents, than there were all those years ago, from allowances right up to cheap taxi fares. When I was demobbed from the Navy, I was skint, unemployed, and had a daughter seriously ill. Not only the family, but neighbours and friends clubbed together and helped us at a time when we really needed it, and the family stood by us while I was being educated, until I was earning, and then later I was able to repay this in-kind. You notice that I included neighbours and friends in the list. We have very kind neighbours where we now live, who would help us at the drop of a hat, but we have outlived our friends, and our family is scattered to the four winds. We are naturally independent, but when illness takes over this isn’t sufficient.

    The world is much more sophisticated, and in consequence the young, if they are able, have higher expectations, to achieve this they leave home and can travel halfway round the world to find it. When I was young a lot of the people in our street would have known me by my Christian name, my antecedents, and our family history, because people tended to remain in the vicinity where they were born because life then was rather like a rubber stamp, what was good enough for dad was good enough for the son, and as this applied right across the board, extended families were common.

    There’s been a lot of talk by the government, prior to the crunch, about building houses, and criticism of the multi-storey flat. The flats do not have to be multi-storey, but when young people are starting out, they need simple, affordable, rented accommodation, until they can build their future. In the case of the elderly, presupposing that they are still in that old mode of frugality and saving for the future, they want to reserve their assets for the benefit of the children and their grandchildren, and are conscious of the fact that they could be forced to pay for care if they have more than a certain amount of savings. They too, in many cases, would be happy living in a small flat, in a well-designed complex, either bought or rented, but mainly easy to maintain, thus avoiding the problems that detached or semi-detached properties derive. I believe it is time the government reassesses its housing programme, for the sake of green fields, those starting an adult life, and those who are elderly, infirm or handicapped. We can’t put the clock back, but I think we should step back, reassess where we are, and try and predict the future, and act accordingly. The environment, those fields and pleasant hills, are essential to our well-being, both for pleasure and psychologically. We must stop taking the easy solution of digging up Greenfield sites, and start utilising Brownfield areas and renovation, imaginatively, and with an eye to the future. We can no longer go back to the extended family as a rule, but rather as a pleasant accident, and must cater accordingly.

  • Angst for the sake of angst

    I never watched Big Brother because the whole basic principle of the thing seemed forced, it was putting people, who were stupid enough, and egotistical enough, to put themselves under stress, in the hope of some financial profit. Recently a programme entitled The Apprentices has been shown on a weekly basis on BBC television. This programme has all the hallmarks of Big Brother, the sniping, the boasting, the ill manners, and the hype. For a start, I believe most of these people have a university education. In my day an apprentice was someone with a certain amount of talent who was sent, on leaving school, to serve his time under the guidance of a journeyman, in one of the many skills of tradesmen, not managers. Managers were articled to a profession. These people put themselves forward as potential managers. The whole programme is allegedly under the guidance of Sir Alan Sugar. This is a man who is allegedly running a large number of companies, successfully. In this role he is irascible, critical to a level of ill manners, and making decisions that no sane manager of his standing would dream of making, unless there is the guiding hand of a BBC producer behind him. For a long time I was a manager, with a reasonably large workforce, a design budget and construction budget in millions, and if there was one thing I discovered early on, was that if you are going to get the best out of the staff, you treated them with dignity. What you never did was correct them or praise them in front of their contemporaries. In consequence of this, I find the whole project nothing but angst for the sake of angst. I have only watched snippets, but the general consensus must be that what these people are asked to do, in two days, is something that in industry will be done in two months. What they are asked to do is also tantamount to asking the pilot of a jumbo jet to compose a requiem. Anyone who has sat on a business boardroom will know that people talking over one another is counterproductive, and provides an atmosphere where there is an underlying dislike. In most circumstances it would not be tolerated.

    In the first few episodes the contestants were divided into two groups, male and female, they were told to choose their own project leader, and each group was given the same task. It was then discovered that the same people were being picked as leader, not necessarily for the right reasons, and in the fourth episode Sir Alan chose the leaders, not in a random fashion, because he chose for one team, a man who was clearly overawed by the whole atmosphere, was reclusive and would never have made team leader. On the other team he nominated a woman who was intelligent, constructive, and within the choice available, would have been thought suitable. It was a policy of the programme to give the people a project and then send them off in taxis to some point, and during the journey, with the teams split into two taxis for each group, communicating on mobile phones, were expected to start forming a strategy. It might have been easy to photograph the people, but the whole concept was unfair, it was difficult for them to see one another, when in the same taxi, they were distracted by being in a taxi in traffic, and communication between the two vehicles was absurd.

    I found the backbiting, the boasting, and constant jumble of a number of people all talking at once, and then the savage criticism when the project was completed and examined, to be nothing more than a rude hype. I believe Sir Alan is enjoying his role, perhaps a little cynically, because I am naive enough to believe he could never have arrived where he is if he had always behaved in this manner. I think what this programme says, more than anything, is the quality and format demanded by the audience, and the BBC is happy to pander to that. For me, it is another symptom of what is wrong in our society today, people taking dross for gems.

  • Music halls, writers, directors, and vicarious pleasure

    I am banging on again about the paucity of quality light entertainment that is also humorous. Light entertainment today is more a matter of hysteria, shouting and waving, and poor quality scripting. From the dawn of the cinema, entertainment has been, right up until the 60s, both here and across the pond, in periods when the masses were under stress due to slumps, wars, and post wars. In consequence the films and radio plays tended to be light-hearted, with a very large number of comedians and entertainers, such as Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Ronnie Barker. Today we have products like the Bourne series, where impossible technology is at the forefront, the story is dark, and there is little or no humour.

    Writing, in my experience, can be a means of solving a problem, and often it is a subconscious urge that cannot be denied. Not all writers write for publication, only for their own amusement and to solve problems. I have written 15 novels, copious short stories, doggerel, and poetry, together with these posts, but when I tried to write humour, that was a stumbling block. Setting aside the technicalities of writing, whodunnits are probably the easiest to write, stories about relationships need to have a problem that requires solving, and then they tend to write themselves. I once started a pantomime, and found it easy, but didn’t finish it. Writing humour of the quality of some of our better television series, such as Open All Hours, is not only difficult, it needs a background of the music halls, that long gone university of the comedian where every other line is a joke. The response to comedy for the individual has not changed, how could it, it is a reflex action? What has changed I believe is the writers, their personal humour, and a background, that is different from the old time comedian. John Cleese and his little band and their own offbeat humour, which most of us learned to appreciate, was a case in point. There are also other gems, like Blackadder, but these are far and few between. Writing for a joke every few minutes, for a weekly half hour series, was mostly founded on a music hall training. Recently, there was a repeat of Love Actually that made me realise that amid all the humour, and drama, there were some interesting social questions being posed to our subconscious. There was however, a level of love in its simplest universal terms that constantly lifted this film out of the ordinary. About five minutes into the story there was a scene at a wedding, within which it raised a social reaction, but above all was of a level that had me not smiling but grinning, and when I looked across at Sophie, she was grinning as well.

    What I have quoted here is not a one-off, there are other very clever and funny films, such as Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5, the problem really is that there doesn’t seem to be enough light-hearted humour and amusing stories to go round. Television today seems to be dredging the bottom of the barrel, producing films from as far back as the 30s, few of which have stood the test of time. We are drowned in dark murder and criminality, at a time when the country as a whole could do with a lift.

  • Finding dirt not nuggets, when grubbing in the gutter

    On April the first I wrote a piece, entitled Responsible Selection in which I tried to show the absurdity of journalism today, by quoting the case of the accidental expenditure claims by the Home Secretary, and which must have entailed considerable digging. Since then there has been a torrent of pieces in the press that are just purely grubbing in the gutter for sensation to sell papers. I would like to demonstrate that this is totally counter-productive.

    There seems to be some dissatisfaction with our current leaders, and I would like you to consider the following. Place yourself as a person, above-average intelligence, highly qualified, who has created through their own endeavours a company that is now capable of running itself with little intervention from you, the managing director. You have arrived, at the age of 45, where you feel that you need a change of direction, and the opportunity has now presented itself. By word of mouth your condition has reached the ears of the chairman of a political party, to which you have been contributing in small amounts over the years. He comes to you with a suggestion that there is a vacancy in a constituency that they would like to put you up for. Crunch time! You are flattered, initially interested, and then you discover a spate of press articles, that are not something one would find casually, or even diligently, they have been researched at great depth, are relatively insignificant, but being of sensational nature, are worth publishing. You are going to leave yourself open to this sort of stress, you will probably give your salary to either the party or charity, claim reasonable expenses, and will be a backbencher until you know the ropes, and there is a re-shuffle, and you’re not sure that you would ever be in a position of considerable influence. If you were a person with this background, would you still be tempted?

    When I look at the front page of the Internet, and see what they put on, as a daily diet, which must, by reason be what people want today, I find it totally light weight, in most cases frivolous, and I suppose in these days, escapist, and who can blame them. If I personally was placed on the condition that I just described above, wild horses wouldn’t drag me into public office. Allegedly there is some form of censorship, and people will tell you that you can sue, but this isn’t the solution. We are told the press regulates itself, but for the sake of us all and for the future, I think we need a strong deterrent for those who want to grub purely for greed, not information that will improve our system.

  • What a way to fight a war

    Currently, there is an upsurge in interest in the two world wars, and hardly a day passes that there is some event celebrating the past. This caused me to think about those generals and their cohorts who planned those incredible massacres, like Ypres and the Somme. With hindsight we can censure their level of personal inhumanity, stupidity, lack of reason, and an inability to learn by experience. Prior to 1914 a high proportion of the officers obtain their rank by purchase, and came from wealthy families whose lifestyle placed them outside the realms of the rest of the public, to some extent one can say they were detached from reality.

    The fact that when I was demobilised, in spite of the fact that the law stated that as I had volunteered my job was sacrosanct, I didn’t get it back, because, as I have said before, not enough of us were killed in the five years during which we served, and natural progression had overtaken us. The officers during that war came from all walks of life, they had a better understanding, and probably a quicker mentality. They weren’t hidebound by archaic rules which some quoted as being ‘ Not cricket old chap!’ War is a dirty business, and takes many forms.

    What I’m leading up to is the fact that most of us realise that the man in the street is too busy with living to want to go to war, and that it is the politicians, for reasons of their own, who instigate these atrocities. Russia, since the revolution, has shown a level of aggression in every field of law enforcement and war, that probably is equal to the Nazi regime. So why we allowed ourselves to go to war in Afghanistan, to subdue the rebels who were supplying poppy juice to the rest of the world, when the Russians hadn’t achieved it, was something I could never figure, except it was a rash ego trip by a small group of politicians. Mainly the Americans and the Brits, are fighting in Afghanistan, and therefore acting aggressively, possibly bombing, certainly shooting, and to a certain extent innocents are being caught up. My simple, uncomplicated reasoning makes me wonder why, when all you want to get rid of is the poppy fields, and we have the means of doing that, and that we could warn in advance of the fact that we propose to do it, we are not just wiping out the poppy fields, from the air, and giving money, a pittance to what the war is costing, without loss of life, to repay the growers of the poppies.

    I know I’m whistling in the wind, but am I really a simpleton as well? Sitting in this chair and thinking about it, it seems a simple, safe, and above all sensible solution. Some would say that this war is to get rid of Al Qaeda’s base, but it would appear that this is no longer the prime target, as Al Qaeda seems to have shifted to PaKistan. I suppose there is a profound reason why I am wrong? Certainly, a lot of British and American soldiers aggressively stumbling about in Afghanistan is feeding Al Qaeda with propaganda.

  • Aspects from my chair,real and philosophical

    I have already explained that due to an accident I spend most of my day in a chair because I can only walk 80 yards, and have a damaged right arm, so it is pointless thinking of going out as I would put other people to the problem of wheeling me about. A few minutes ago I saw a beautiful swan circling over the houses, obviously looking for open water, it had probably come from a nearby reservoir. My worry was that the lake that we have in our local park, and was once upon a time providing open water, over the years has become overgrown with trees, and I wondered if the Swan would have enough open water to assure itself concerning danger and sufficient length to make one of those incredible landings, with its feet acting as brakes and the wings outstretched likewise. Swans were, in there, once.

    Someone I know refers to the area that I live in as an estate. It is a pejorative term, which says more about the speaker than it does about the district. I like it because the houses may not all be individual, but the designs are sufficiently varied, and the properties maintained, so that it is a pleasure to drive through it, but what I see through my window gives me serious pause for thought. There are dozens of poor dogs of all sizes, being trailed along by their owner or walker, who in turn is carrying a little plastic bag of faeces. I recollect that this requirement was brought about because some scientist had discovered that the droppings of the animals could be injurious to humans. I had played in parks for over 60 years, and with my children and grandchildren, before this monstrous fact was discovered, and I don’t remember a single case being bruited abroad where someone had contracted the disease of this type. Now the animals and the owners are under stress, and the enjoyment and freedom of owning a dog, and seeing it bounding off across the common, is a thing of the past.

    Sitting in this chair also made me look at television more closely, and while I have a recording system that allows me to skip the ads, occasionally there is a glitch and I have had to sit through the greatest load of rubbish that one could imagine being thrust down my throat. What is most noticeable since the credit crunch, as I have said previously, is that the quality of advertising per se, not necessarily the veracity of what they tell you, has gone up tremendously. But what I object to most strongly is that in nearly all the adverts there is an overall approach of spreading fear unless their product is used, and it would seem in quantities that are obscene.

    The spate of mass murder by youngsters with high velocity rifles and machine pistols doesn’t surprise me. Children no longer walk to school for fear of abuse in some form. Inner cities have even less facilities for children, who are not as well cared for as in suburbia, thrown on their own devices in their spare time, leading therefore to gangs and gang warfare, as we all know, but nothing of serious consequence seems to being done about it. From what I’ve seen in recent years, parents no longer take the kids to an open space to play silly, but amusing games like French cricket, and you no longer see in my area anyway, bands of children playing scratch games of football. Take a look at the television films, a high proportion are dark, stories of criminality, and ruthless beatings, and mass shootings, where bullet holes appear in the sides of cars like acne. None of this is real life, it is just aggression for the sake of aggression, which itself has become today a substitute in so many dramas for drama. You know all this, I know all this, but instead of spending money to appear to be the nation leading the world, why in God’s name don’t we spend it on improving the life of the next generation?

  • United we stand, divided we fall

    I mainly addressed yesterday’s post to those readers who are 08 or over, and in consequence many of my other readers will have bypassed it. In it I wrote the following,’ When I heard, that the RBS, who had taken over our conservative and well run bank, is laying off staff in the UK, and sending the work overseas, I was appalled, because the taxpayer would now be paying unemployment benefit on top of bolstering up the bank, another example of undermining the future, symptomatic of the way in which skills are being watered down to an endangered level, and our island philosophy of self sufficiency is now an endangered specie, and we are seriously in danger of becoming totally dependent on the rest of the world. To us 80-year-olds, who knew in the 40s what it was like to have to stand alone, are worried, not for ourselves’. I repeat this because I feel that it shows the woolly thinking of our government, which seems to be running like a gerbil on a wheel, not stopping to look at what is happening, or even what makes common sense. By the same token it strikes me strongly that the main two opposition parties are more concerned with their appeal to the electorate, in the face of a possible election, than in being cooperative and working as a unit in conjunction with the government for what is the best policy to lead us forward. This approach would in no way hinder the power of the opposition parties from putting the brake on anything that they felt was wrong, the problem is that they haven’t been doing this.

  • The endangered specie and a warning

    This piece is mainly written to amuse and possibly confound my readers who are in their 80s, but is also general. Recently there has been the First World War veteran, and Second World War veterans being interviewed on television, and a lot of interest in people like Douglas Bader. A chap I know, with a glass in his hand, looked at me over the glass and said, ‘You’re an endangered specie.’ I laughed. ‘You can laugh,’ he said, ‘but how many people do you think there are now who were evacuated at the beginning of the last war? Sometime ago a Sunday programme of the Antiques Road Show where they were valuing an original diver’s helmet, stated that the use of the old fashioned diving helmet and suit with its bronze shoulder mounting had stopped in 1960, when all the other forms of pressure suits, diving bells were introduced. The whole thing was much more technical, than just grubbing about in the mud, flat on your stomach, dragging yourself along with your hands in the mud. That was what it was like for us, trained helmet diver’s away back in the 50s. At the time of the programme, it had surprised me, but I hadn’t realised that now in 2009, there was no such animal as a helmet diver, and those who were trained divers, probably at the age of 22, would now be 71.

    In 1928, 81 years ago, I lived as a six year old small boy in the depths of Rhodesia, as part of the British Empire, which now people call the Raj. There won’t be many of them left. Out of interest I looked up the current UK Census and discovered that roughly there are 32,000 people 80 and over. If you take that half of them are women, which is an underestimate, then throughout the UK there are only something like 16,000 men 80 or above.

    I firmly believe, and constantly remark, that the changes that we have seen give us a much more balanced perspective than those born since the 60s, who are now in their 50s. Our experiences between the 20s and the 50s, our formative years, were lean, disrupted to an incredible extent, but nonetheless simple in outlook. We hadn’t anything like the pressures, except in war conditions, we knew what it was like to go hungry, to be bombed, to have to live in the large company of other men, from every walk of life, and every type of character, some of them unsupportable. We learned stoicism, self-confidence, compassion, and the ability to be solitary without it having any psychological effect. Pleasures were simple and mostly cheap, our food was natural, we weren’t bombarded continuously with hype, and the celebrity was beyond our horizon, because we could rarely afford to go to the theatre, entertainment, at the cinema and on the radio was ‘nice’, generally amusing and light-hearted.

    We are now too old to be able to influence the future, but it is interesting to note that the financial situation is in some ways putting back the clock. When you think about your days in the LDV on the Downs waiting for the German paratroopers, and the total absurdity of it, fire watching during the raids in Docklands, being in the services for five years, and then having to start all over again – in another few years this will all be forgotten.

    These examples are part of the natural progression, and inevitable. But there are other endangered species which are more important to the future of this country, and the world. They are not only human, there are natural things, and inert resources. We still have coal beneath us, but the miners, and mining is in this category. Due to the rape of quality timber in this country, abroad, and especially in South America, we now only have a few quality cabinetmakers, because the materials are no longer seasoned in the way they were. There are a number of trades which are almost non-existent or of poor quality, because there is not the training, nor the work being carried out today in this country, shipbuilding and the motor industry are glaring examples. Go into any high-quality furniture retailers, and all you will see there is furniture made of composite materials, veneered and coated with a scratch proof, heat proof varnish, French polishing is another casualty. When I heard, that RBS, who had taken over our conservative and well run bank, is laying off staff in this country, and sending the work overseas, I was appalled, because the taxpayer would now be paying unemployment benefit on top of bolstering up the bank, another example of undermining the future, symptomatic of the way in which skills are being watered down to an endangered level, and our island philosophy of self sufficiency is now an endangered specie, and we are seriously in danger of becoming totally dependent on the rest of the world. To us 80-year-olds, who knew in the 40s what it was like to have to stand alone, are worried, not for ourselves, but for those who are coming after us. Be Warned

  • Views on Taxation

    The problem of wrecking yourself to the point where you are chair bound is that you get progressively bored as time goes and are more thrown back on cerebral problems. Yesterday it was taxation. I was thinking about the cost of fuel, and that the far-reaching effects of the swingeing changing in price for fuel can have right across the board. It is the government who puts on a tax levee on petrol and diesel oil, commensurate with the cost. It suddenly dawned on me, that I had forgotten over all these years, that when commerce purchases something, upon which there is a tax, that tax is passed on to the consumer as part of the overheads. If one thinks of all the processes involved in producing a product the number of times that the raw materials, the packaging and the product itself, are transported, and the fuel costs alone involved, there is a constant dribble of tax being added to the final overheads of the product.

    Hence, when we purchase a product for which the cost includes it and all the other taxes which are involved, including VAT, the amount of tax that we are actually paying is incredible. I’m not saying that the Exchequer doesn’t necessarily need this amount of money, what I don’t understand is why there are so many government departments involved in getting it in different taxes, when what it boils down to it is that the individual is footing the bill blindfold. I suppose there is a good reason, other than keeping us in the dark, but as this is a gut reaction, rather than educated knowledge, I nonetheless do think of all the printing that has to go on, all the leaflets that are sent out informing of changes in tax levels, postage, changes in legislation, the problems for the individual with so many offices to deal with, and so on for so many different taxes, when the whole lot could be done very simply, probably a lot cheaper.