Old Gaffer

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  • Criticism,Art and Chicanery

    Art today is driven more by money and exposure, than by genius and the quality of the work. So many of the artists, whose paintings are now so in demand as investments, were quite often very poor. In the earlier centuries they had to depend upon patronage or commission. At the time of the Impressionists they were mainly dependent, as it is today day, on agents. Agents tend to set trends which suits their clientele rather than the artist. If there is collusion between the agents and the critics, especially in this age of sound bites, then the artist will suffer. Success in submitting material for exhibition, in any of the fields of art, will be dependent upon the taste of the judges. You can offer, say two paintings, for submission, one because you have great faith in it, and it has attracted respect and praise. However, judges could easily prefer another painting, submitted by the same artist, who feels that it contains errors and in consequence is nowhere near the quality of the other, yet is hung. This experience says something about selection, which is a form of criticism and possibly fashion. Criticism applies to a great extent in amateur circles, where people’s sensitivities are more vulnerable, and hurt is not uncommon. Teaching, explanation, example should be the tools of instruction by experts, not random criticism. Criticism is a blunt tool easily misunderstood.

    The appreciation of art: might be learned from explanation and presentation, but it will also always be subjective, that is obvious, but what is not obvious to me at least, is the spate of presentations in national and private galleries of what amounts to little more than everyday experience. This is then further stretched to represent conditions that may occur, as demonstrated in a website entitled, Channel 4, Anatomy Of Disgust, which demonstrates art that wishes to portray openly to the viewer, domestic conditions they consider hold a special message. The purpose of art is to provide not so much a palliative, but stimulation of a positive kind to the mind, through vision, and I fail to see how various versions of an unkempt bedroom of the worst kind could be a positive stimulation.

    I accept that once students have seen illustrations of, or visited the sites of the incredible work, as paintings and sculptures, that have been executed over hundreds of years, it is hard to believe that there is room to better them. It would seem, therefore, that they must find another way of self-expression. In many fields today advancers have almost reached saturation point and innovation has become considerably more difficult. What the new breed of artists do, and how they do it, is their business. The responsibility for maintaining the standards rests solely with the exhibitors, some private, some nationally funded. It is they and the media who hold sway, broadcast their opinions, while the man in the street is sceptical, unable to understand how a set of bricks that he sees daily as he drives past a builder’s yard, can ever be, art when set out in a rectangle. When you see the better work of regional artists in all the different media, they raise the spirits in many cases, because they see a landscape, a situation or a portrait, with different eyes, and the next time you see anything similar, perhaps your own appreciation will be modified. Looking at my own bedroom when I get up in the morning is depressing enough, God knows, I have no wish to look at someone else’s clutter.

  • Irrational thinking

    With the governments of the world clearly in a tailspin, it is difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff and this hasn’t been helped with respect to our own economy, when doubts have been cast on the high reputation of the last Chancellor, and few seem to trust our current one. There are some extraordinarily wealthy people who are buying up companies at this very moment at knockdown prices, there are others who are complaining that they’re in trouble. I find it incredible that, in the middle of this crisis, Bombardier have contracts for new aircraft for companies, when there appear to be dozens of aircraft grounded due to the collapse of the companys across the globe. It is this level of irrationality that makes me feel that this panic has in some way been engineered, or if not, is perhaps not as serious as the politicians would like us to believe

    Somewhere, someone has put the frighteners on us all, and I just wonder, just how valid this is. Pensioners who can afford to, are forced to save for that evil day when they can no longer look after themselves, and yet the government insists that if they have savings they will be required to pay for themselves for care in a nursing home. So we put money into savings accounts and buy stocks and shares that we think are blue-chip and consequently believe them to be safe. Suddenly we discover they ain’t safe, and we lose that security we were banking on, because the government, while happily proposing to take our money, did nothing to secure it.

    Unless we also lose our pension we still have to shop, buy clothes – how ever little, travel, and give small gifts to our great grandchildren, so to some extent the economy is going to be bolstered. Apart from those poor devils who lose their jobs, this will be the status quo of a very high proportion of the whole of our nation, we have to eat, we have to clothe, public transport will still be running, hospitals will still be full, and life for a large proportion of us will be relatively normal, except that we might just be peering over a shoulder, to see what the government has in store for us. It is this latter that frightens us, not because of the collapse of the financial markets, because we can’t make head nor tail of that, but because we do expect swingeing increases in taxation as a result of enormous bailouts, and possibly some irrational thinking by our Chancellor.

    As I understand it, the real problem is the liquidity of money in the commercial sector. It has been for many years an accepted policy that business is run on an overdraft, just think of an unnamed company the size of Tesco’s, the vast number of shops, the incredible variety of products on offer, and the inevitable waste, all of which must cost millions, and is unlikely to have been supported by cash, so the unnamed company is paying the interests to the banks on the money borrowed, at this moment. This must apply to a tremendous amount of the high Street, so why the panic? From where I sit I see a feeding frenzy by the media, government officials running about like chickens with their heads cut off, and yet me and my much younger neighbours can still sit down to a reasonable meal, go shopping in the car, they even go to work, and even if we choose, go and spend a night in a hotel at a seaside resort. Anybody who knows anything about finance will probably think me a total idiot, but then, I don’t think I’m alone, because I am finding the whole business of so-called meltdown to be difficult to understand, and believe that it contains elements that have nothing to do with me, that I would find irrational, and even suspect.

  • Cause and Effect, part 3

    Yesterday I received an e-mail from my friend in Holland . Previously I had said that I would like somebody to elucidate. And while I’m not sure that he has done that totally, he has certainly given me yet another slant on the whole sorry business. It is interesting that a quiet and charming, very conservative man, living in a very conservative country, can suddenly have this level revulsion.

    This is part of what Jan wrote
    It is amazing what is happening at this moment. All the money is simply evaporating, just like boiling water. It disappears but then it returns very slowly to condense in other places. I think that especially the small investors, who wanted to increase their profit a bit because the interest does not compensate for the amount of taxes they have to pay, will be the losers.

    Who will be the great winners? One day the buying will exceed the selling, the rates will rise and the grabbing by the very wealthy will start. Money makes money. Also a number of Banks will pull off a big stroke of business, leaving pension funds and small investors with their losses.

    In an interview on TV we were told that all the bonuses which were given to the presidents of Banks, companies and concerns in the USA in 2007, were equal to the amount of the 37000 Human help organisations, that are giving their assistance in Africa. That must be many billions.

    I don’t know what will happen. For the first time in many years the price of houses is going down, and inflation is rising up to 5%. Why do so many banks become bankrupt? This could be the moment to hide earlier terrible losses or fraud? In time we will learn. We hear alarming messages about the Fortis Bank which I wrote to you about. This Bank is now nationalised.

    My final comment
    What I’ve found disgusting about this whole business is that once again it is the poor and the innocent who are being made to pay for their naiveté, when what we are really discussing is a form of theft, where those with no shares, very little income, will be taxed, even if, at the end of the day, they have any incomes to tax, to pay for this enormous bill that even the financiers can’t grasp properly. Our governments across the world have let us down, have kowtowed to wealth, instead of being critical of how it was achieved. What worries me is that the new cycle of buying and selling has already started.

  • Cause and Effect, part 2. The Fallout

    Because I know little about banking, and even less about worldwide financial interchange, I am a putting my thoughts on paper, in the hope that perhaps someone will elucidate. The question all of us are asking, possibly subconsciously, is where the hell has all the money gone? Perhaps like foreign aid to some of the African countries, it has been siphoned off to Swiss or similar secret banks, but surely not in the quantities we are talking about. I fail to understand why we, the taxpayer must provide the money for banks to actually lend to one another, which is what I’m being told on TV. If there was sufficient cash a few days ago, it surely isn’t, in fact, cash that they want, but it is cash that they are taking away from us.

    We are told that the problem is across the world’s financial institutions as a result of them buying up promissory notes for properties throughout the world, and especially in parts of Europe and America, which in turn represent the value of properties, and the value of those properties is dropping, primarily because once there was trust between these institutions and banks, but when a few of them failed, panic spread like a virus and the whole system collapsed like a pack of cards. I believe it has been universally accepted that part of the cause has been as a result of what can only be referred to as a response to a mindless dealing by the finance houses for short-term profit. The overall problem as I see it, put simplistically, is that if I buy a second-hand Rolls-Royce I can hardly afford, at a price in excess of its value, and then try to resell it, I’m going to lose money, but surely I am not so stupid as to buy at a price that includes the value of my house, my assets and my income. So if I lose a packet on the deal, I may have lost some of my assets, but surely not all, and I will still have my income. In other words it is a matter of scale, and bearing in mind that the assets that these people bought still have a value, because throughout the world, there is a shortage of accommodation, and they surely are also trading at the same time in other commodities for which there is a market and a profit, I find it difficult in my simple way of understanding exactly what is going on. Can you imagine 700,1000,1000,1000 dollars even as a number, let alone as a value?

    What I find equally surprising, if my assumption is correct concerning the actions and motives of those involved in the finance houses, is a that they are not being asked to repay the hundreds, thousands and millions that they received in bonuses and handshakes. If when all this mayhem started I immediately guessed the cause, I cannot believe that those within the industry including members of the civil service, did not realise what was happening could lead to disaster. After all, it didn’t happen overnight.

    Is it purely panic that is responsible for the meltdown, or is there a serious underlying cause of some monumental scam, financial or political, that has wrecked the economy of so many countries, but not all? I notice that the markets are still functioning, people are still buying and selling, and rather like in the wild, there are hyenas circling the kill, only these are called ‘bargain hunters’.

  • Cause and Effect, part 1.The cause of our current situation

    It started with the ‘Silly Sixties’, when anything was permissible, and coincided with the new age of the computer. Prior to the sixties the average man in the street had pretty parochial horizons and ambitions, because he was not wealthy, but he was sure of his own security of tenure in employment and some if meagre support in old age. Mortgages were for the wealthy and upper middle-class, Joe Bloggs paid rent weekly or monthly, and the repair of the property was not his responsibility. He had no car to maintain and replace, he didn’t need it, public transport was efficient and abundant, and his house was unlikely to contain many electrical goods apart from a radio. About this time foreign travel started to become more available, where office boys, on low salaries could have aspirations to sun themselves on a beach in the Costas, and this financial relaxation also applied in every aspect of our lives. Exotic foods were brought in, new cheap furniture replaced the family heirlooms of mahogany and oak, because the design was alleged to be chic. People ran about half naked, and the crease in someone’s buttocks was a common sight. In effect it was all change for the sake of change, from the type of soap that we used, to the new electrical labour-saving equipment we bought, all of which became a must-have, and we as a nation became borrowers instead of savers. This was accentuated because the warehouses that used to sell spare parts, enabling the repair of damaged products, rather than buying new, went out of existence, causing the throwaway society to become established. Takeovers became common and competition for markets increased, enlarging the availability of different designs of the same product, which in turn encouraged people to keep up with trends. People no longer shopped as a necessity, instead shopping developed into a pastime, which had a price. If the money wasn’t available, it was just too easy to use the credit cards so gratuitously rained upon one. Finally there spawned a new market, car boot sales, where products that had cost not only tens of pounds, but some 100 of pounds, sold, in pristine condition for a pittance.

    Global meltdown results primarily through the existence of the World Wide Web. Previously traders could not make instant assessment and instant decisions which were instantly implemented. In which case Greed, always with us in every walk of life, would have been discovered and dealt with before it became dangerous. Before the computer, trading was done by telephone, by telegram, and by Telexes, and this meant that the information at some point had to be written down, or typed by hand. In other words the whole process was slowed down to a pace whereby reflection was possible, and it was more likely that the instructions would require a second opinion before being sent. The new traders were not playing with their own money, were given a smack on the wrist if their performance was poor, or a thumping bonus if they made a killing. They presented an entirely different and new set of circumstances. People in charge could now be in office for a short time, and their contracts permitted them to leave with a golden handshake commensurate with their success.

  • The Ilogicality of the Law

    What I write here is really only relevant to people who are interested in the law, or over 50 years of age. The fact that a woman had to go to the High Court to discover whether her husband would be charged with the criminal offence or not, of aiding and abetting suicide, if he went with her to Switzerland to help her and be with her, in her last hours, for a clinical suicide, to me is totally illogical. First of all, on his wedding day, he took an oath to keep her and look after her in sickness and in health. That was a religious undertaking, as well as a legal one as it is used in the oath in registry offices. The fact that suicide is a criminal act, even if it is justified, because the condition is unendurable, is surely based on religious doctrines that have come down through the ages. So here we have a dichotomy, do we obey the law, or standby our oath? The history of religious intolerance, with heinous acts, and unspeakable punishment for merely having adherence to a different version of the same religion, should itself make any law based on religious doctrine, suspect.

    I wish to tell you about a painting my mother made just before she died. She had contracted cancer in the neck and shoulder and come to us in Ireland for company and to be cared for. Religious all her life, she became a Christian Scientist in latter years, so when she became seriously ill she took no medicine, nor the help of a doctor. Shortly before she died she painted a picture in water-colours. The picture was a series of concentric rough circles, in varying intensity of colours starting in brown going through deep red, red, a light red through orange and yellow until she came to a blistering white in the centre. The ragged edges where the colours intercepted, and indeed sometimes merged, were spattered with dark thorns at irregular intervals. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is what it feels like.’

    I wrote on ‘The sterile landscape of the old, 25, 4, 07’, and ‘The responsibilities of old age, 28, 5, 08,’ which can be found currently on the blog, I also wrote a piece about euthanasia which has since been withdrawn. What is undeniably essential is that there is a legal framework to ensure that people do not take their own lives without careful thought and guidance if necessary, and that if they do so, they do it within a legal framework, approved by two professional opinions, either medical or legal, and conducted in an approved and regulated environment.

    We will never stop people from committing suicide, but the cost to the individual concerned in the act, also to him or her if it’s a botched attempt, to relatives, and to the officials who have to clear up afterwards must surely demand a better system. This doesn’t take into account the cost to the ratepayer or the government in the subsequent investigation, which could include heavy plant and divers, to ascertain whether it was indeed suicide or murder.

    It is time that those responsible for our lives and our welfare, appreciate the problems that the elderly face, and in many cases suffer, starting with their dignity, stretching to intolerable pain and psychological suffering, unnecessarily, even in some conditions not being aware of such. If a racehorse breaks its leg, in some cases it could be saved, but it is shot out of hand, mainly for economy’s sake. In the case of the humans it is not finance that is at stake, it is psychological and physical suffering from an outdated concept, in a country that does not hold anywhere near the religious belief that it once did.

  • A letter to my MP.

    Having listened to David Cameron stating that the Conservatives intend saving money by getting rid of consultants, I felt I had to write to you, as I believe this short-term approach would lead to total disaster. I believe him to be wrong both in principle and in practice, what is required is long-term change in policy. While I am speaking only as an engineer, I do believe that where possible, governments should not be handing out work to consultants but carrying out the work themselves, but to revert to this system will take time, This would also be particularly applicable to the use of computers in the civil service where currently I believe the interest of the supplier is put before the interest of the civil service.

    I have worked as a consultant, a contractor, and in government service as a design engineer and a construction engineer, in the civil engineering field. I have designed and constructed marine works, sewage works, waterworks, runways, and tunnels, while working for Belfast Corporation and the civil service, and have been in charge of large workforces handling millions.

    On retirement in 81, I left a team of experienced, well-trained engineers in both construction and design, It saddened me later to discover that the civil service, had decided to farm out all design work to contractors. In-house-trained people at any level or position, are a priceless asset. In engineering one starts at the bottom, progresses, gaining experience year-on-year, handling more and more money and controlling more and more people. This is essential, firstly for the engineer to know the quality of the work and the reasons for it, but more importantly he will retain the information, should it be required later if problems occur. His designs will be let to contract, and then the construction supervised, by him or a colleague, examining the quality, the competence of the work and agreeing the payments. The beauty of the in-house system is that accurate information is available in the face of unseen problems, and local knowledge is invaluable. It would seem that Mr Cameron proposes to delete all this. When Departments hand out work to consultant, they are detracting from the training of the very people who will be responsible for supervising and approving the work of the consultants, which includes the preliminary assessments, the designs, the implementation and verifying the payment.. If the in-house engineers have not had sufficient experience, then the government department has either totally to accept what the consultant is offering, or employ staff of the quality of standing and experience to be able to control the contract and oversee the consultants. Some contracts are for millions of pounds, some for a few hundred thousand, and as most contracts contain a contingency sum, placed in the contract precisely because in civil engineering the unexpected can be expected, the man responsible has got to be able to understand the problem and make the right decision, where a tyro would be totally lost.

    You will see from what I’ve said above, either you have to lift experience off-the-shelf and this is not easy, is divisive, nor always successful, as the best are always in great demand, or it will take years to sow the seed and reap the harvest, in-house. Small organisations generally have small contracts and so the experience of the engineers is commensurate. Big organisations consequently require people versed in large works. I’m sure that these remarks apply not only to civil engineering, but in all the professions.

  • Poor, that overused word.

    The word is being used to such a great extent these days that I started thinking about it in the round. It is misused at every turn. When they talk about the poor, it can mean anything, or indeed nothing, because the relationship has to be stated to have relevance, and this is often the stumbling block.

    The current financial squeeze will not be over for quite a time, so inevitably peoples’ savings, possibly their jobs, and even their homes will be, if not sacrificed, diminished in some way, and while not poor in the true accepted sense, their lifestyle will unhappily revert to the one that, in the 30s we would have said, we enjoyed. Unfortunately, the downsizing will be grossly unwelcome, hard to accept, and will in some cases lead to psychological problems.

    Poverty, sometimes, can be a state of mind, it is certainly relative.. Some people are really poor. Over several periods in my life I have dropped into that category, where others in our extended family, not the state, had to help support my mother and me, or me and mine. In the 30 it was more than once as a result of family break-up, and post war when I left the Navy and was unemployed, or at university living on a grant of £210 a year to support a wife and two children. In those conditions every penny spent detracts from the ability to buy something else, and to me, this is the true condition known as poor. A lot of the Poor suffer from pride, and especially the elderly, and will do everything they can to avoid being classed as such, almost certainly to their own disadvantage. From the time of the Industrial Revolution, until the late 30s the factory workers, farm labourers, the lower orders of the armed forces, and others, were often very poor, but would have resented being classed as such. The one thing they had was security of tenure, they had a job for life, and might live, from when they were born until they died, from hand to mouth, but they did not feel denied because their aspirations were so parochial. When we were poor, a lot of our friends had a better style of living, but I don’t remember that we envied them, or strove to emulate them, we were too busy with life itself and its problems, and we accepted that it was impossible in our condition. We budgeted both financially and mentally for the horizons that were possible.

    The years of affluence that we have enjoyed have changed our outlook, with the throwaway society, the buy now and pay later philosophy, where some enjoyed, what my grandmother would have said was a condition above their station, and there were phrases from the politicians convincing us not only that we have never had it so good, but that It was here to stay. This sudden reversal of our fortunes, will have serious effects on many. One of the problems is that we have become used to a nanny state, where everything is done for us, and we have stopped looking over our shoulder. Unfortunately legislation has moved on, with the result, that unlike the labourers in the Victorian era, every year a large number of us are now legislated out of the security that our forebears enjoyed, and we have also lost that self-sufficiency in many cases, to think for ourselves. Otherwise the stripping of the world’s assets by a greedy few would have been assessed almost as soon as it happened

  • A Letter to All UK Politicians Wherever You Are

    A long time ago, when keyhole surgery started to become a common procedure, I felt that there should have been some form of profit and loss bookkeeping, in the health service, so that when new procedures, inventions, medicines and treatments were introduced that showed a cost saving in parallel areas when compared with the earlier systems, the savings should be set against more expensive procedures, medicines etc., so that people could benefit where they hadn’t previously. In this way I felt that the health service could maintain its quality, increase the number of procedures that were open to the general public, while not increasing the overall expenditure by any great amount, and so provide a more extensive service at roughly the same cost. It didn’t happen, but then perhaps I was on the wrong track

    Currently free prescription charges are being brought in, in stages throughout the UK. There is no shadow of doubt, as is happening with the loss of subsidised dental care, that people who are strapped for cash, tend to go without essential remedial measures. Consequently free prescription charges will somewhat alleviate this problem, but I do see problems ahead of the system as it is currently being discussed by the politicians who are, by default, broadly implying that there will be a blank cheque. The pharmaceutical industry is constantly discovering new medicines and cures, and it is the introduction of this research that creates the greatest income for the companies. I’m only guessing when I say that my experience of pharmaceutical products over a period of over 70 of my 86 years, is that the development and the spread and quality of these items has been exponential over that period, and will tend to be more so in the future. We are hearing of cures for various diseases that can cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds a year for just one individual.

    I am aware that the health service tries to use viable products that are cheaper than some of the more popular ones. The problem that I see that requires addressing, with this new regime, is, there inevitably has to be a limit on what is available and to whom it is available. If I am right, also taking into account our current fiscal problems, then the rules must apply to all, the whole UK, and the postcode lottery must come to an end. In addition, the politicians must not only face up to this fact that some discrimination is inevitable, they must construct a feasible, legal structure for it to function smoothly, and admit that this is essential to the populace at large, if they are not to have a running battle of who is to get what where. Perhaps, with like the surgery, I’ve got it all wrong.

  • Burglary on Holiday

    I’m not very well up on holidays abroad any more, and so I don’t know if the heinous crime which took place where my daughter, her family and friends were staying, is unusual, or now part of the holiday scene. What I did feel was that I should draw attention to what has happened, as between them the family’s jewellery, money, sleep and all the ambiance that one pays for with a foreign holiday was lost.

    My daughter’s family and friends have been using a particular villa in Portugal for holidays over a number of years. It is nicely situated with respect to the sea, surrounding landscape, and access to towns for shopping and meals-out, in other words it was ideal. It has its own swimming pool, which means that the little tiny children, some who can barely walk, can swim away safely under the watchful eye of their parents. One day, on this last holiday, my daughter, her husband and their friends went out for an evening meal. When they returned they found the house had been broken into, and all the lockable, inbuilt safes in which were all their valuables and money, had been bodily removed with the contents. The shock, the disappointment, and the worry that it could happen again, perhaps with them in the house, ruined the holiday.

    My daughter hasn’t gone into the logistics of what had happened, presumably because she doesn’t know. My interpretation is that this while the villa must lie idle between occupations for periods of time, this would give the thieves the opportunity to break in at their leisure, dismantle and re-erect the safes so the owners of the villa it would notice nothing out of the ordinary. It would then be a simple matter to watch the house and in particular if there were no small children, to assume that the holidaymakers would venture out for an evening in a restaurant, which would then give ample time to break in, break out the safes, and depart with the loot.

    It seems that generally, we have lost yet another one of our freedoms, to enjoy safekeeping and