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I usually avoid leaving home between 8,20 and nine o’clock, because the Mummy Run is in full swing, with cars nose to tail for miles rather than hundreds of yards. There is no shadow of doubt the current system is a total waste of time for the parents, the other drivers who wish to use the roads, and also a waste of valuable fuel, so we need to find an acceptable solution. The reason for the Mummy Run is clearly to do with safety, the lack of safety in cycling in our congested streets and the general fear of gang fights and molestation. The government seems either disinclined or unable to tackle the problem. I have a suggestion, whether it has already been approached, tested and rejected, or whether it is really a viable one, would need work, but if it were, it would save so many families from having to run two cars, at a time of financial stringency, and would save damage to the environment as well.

The proposal is based upon the mass use of minibuses, driven by retired people with proper accreditation, to meet the logistics demanded by the school’s. Put simply, professional drivers, and competent driver’s who have passed the required tests, who are also retired, but keen to have a new job and to augment their pensions would be employed and paid for by the government, which would also supply the buses and the cost of maintenance and fuelling, while the children’s fares would be met by some sort of monthly payment from the parents and surrendered to the government. The schedules and logistics for the collection of the children, their return home and their transport to sports and other activities, could all be accommodated, because the drivers would themselves have no fixed schedule other than the standard runs. The economy to the parents, considering that the second cars would have very low mileages but the same overheads as a family car, would surely be an inducement to make the system work. The governing body could possibly be the local education authority or Local Government.

The one foreseeable problem would be the children being late at the meeting points, and thus vulnerable. Another would be those children living off the beaten track, but it might be possible to have one bus that does a wider sweep of these children specially. There could be a problem with some of the parents falling behind in the payments. But I believe that if the trial was made, even for one large school alone, placed in a County Town, where the children come from both the town, the outlying estates and the rural area, it would be worth the expense to try to make it work, iron out any problems and reassess it on a nationwide basis.

Until the 60s most people were naive enough to trust all but those with an inherent reputation for deceit, such as men selling things off the back of a lorry. We didn’t bother locking the front door, a lot of houses had the key on a string so the kids could let themselves in if the parents were out. We trusted the government without question, as we did most trades-people we dealt with. We never really trusted foreigners, which hasn’t changed. Now we trust very few, and very few trust the government any more. The government doesn’t trust the trades-people, having an army of people checking up on them. So all in all we don’t believe what we’re told, what we read, and what we see, – an insecure world. Are we right to be so untrusting?

The heating oil caper. Up until 2003 I had never used heating oil. The first two or three deliveries I accepted what I was given and then I decided to calibrate the oil tank. It is not an exact science because of its shape. I was able to mark where one delivery started and stopped on the plastic visions tube. Over a period of time, because deliveries started at the same spot and finished at different spots, it showed that there was no control over what was being delivered, and I became suspicious. I improved my calculations and found I was often given short measure but I had no legal proof. The delivery printout starts at nought and registers the total amount, not as it should do, by starting at whatever the tanker first contained and to the remainder in the tanker. I’m sure not all dealers are crooked, but as the tanks don’t have a reliable recorder the system is open to abuse.

Sound quality. Recently I have found the speech in films on television to be muffled, and often difficult to make out. I blamed the filmmakers, until I discovered that similar films on CD, viewed on the same television set had no such problems. I also found that the really good films could only be got on HD (high-definition), to which one had to pay yet again. I just wondered, but couldn’t really believe, that the difference in quality could possibly be engineered to make me buy into HD out of pure frustration. But then, I’m fanciful!

This is one of those subjects where even the title could be misconstrued, and the blog stats go up disproportionately. The reporting of the Shannon kidnapping, and reference to her mother, who is alleged to have a string of children, five of whom also allegedly have five different fathers, prompted me to go back into my mental archives and view the changes in sex and romance over the last roughly 100 years.

My mother was very Victorian, sex was definitely the taboo subject, she didn’t even appreciate slightly salacious jokes on the two valve radio, but thankfully my grandmother did. I remember at the age of about seven I accidentally went into the bathroom, in our African home, and she was naked. The rage that followed has lived with me for 80 years. In the middle 30s, I remember having a friend, when I was in primary school, who used to tell me jokes that he thought were hilarious, and with hindsight I realise were mildly blue, but to me I could never see the point, I was that ignorant. Like every other generation, boys and girls from single sex secondary schools would meet up going home, but my experience was that any fumbling was not even in the mind, let alone an urge. Our relationships with girls were, I think, governed mainly by a level of ignorance probably fostered by our parents. We tended to pair off, and took the whole business quite seriously, but the outcome was defeated because she would be evacuated to one part of England and the bloke to another.

In the services the attitude to sex, and to women, was still dictated to some extent by the values that had been instilled at home. I remember sitting at a table in a chiefs’ and petty officers’ mess, where one of the men was carrying on a typical naval conversation scattered with swear words. Somebody protested, because the people serving were WRNS, he replied, with startling logic, ‘if she has never heard it before she won’t understand it, and if she has, it won’t do her any harm to hear again.’ There was no shadow of doubt that casual sex was quite common, for I remember a girl I knew who was in the ATS, who would be asked by the other women with a great deal of hilarity, when she returned from a night out, if she been introduced to Fagan. When I left my ship, totally drunk from having been given ‘Sippers’ of rum throughout the ship, when I came too on the dockside, surrounded by my kit, I found that my friend the sick bay tiffy, had filled my pockets on one side with aspirin, and on the other with contraceptives. After the war, when I returned home, while I was married, from my own experience I would say on average the mores of the 30s had not been seriously tarnished.

The freedom loving 60s changed all that. In the meantime jokes, references on the radio, and in the magazines had steadily become less censored, and sex in all its aspects was becoming more recognized. The 60s introduced drugs becaming more common, society itself was less critical, to the extent that by the 80s sophisticates thought it rather fun to play the key game. I was reliably informed that married couples, or couples comprised of single people, would go to a standard party where there was drink, food, dancing and party games; at the end of the evening the men put their car keys in a hat and the ladies would take a gamble on whose key they lifted and they would be paired off with one of the men whose car it was. What happened after that, presumably, was a joint decision. My informant said that some of the ladies knew the tabs on the rings and when they fumbled in the hat, selected the person they wanted, and who was expecting to be selected. At this time casual sex was still disapproved of by parents, but was nonetheless increasing, and often portrayed graphically on television and in the cinema.

We now come to our present condition, where only 50% of the children born are of parents in wedlock, that the government has had to advertise in order to try to reduce the rise in sexually transmitted diseases, the number of single-parent families has increased dramatically and casual sex, while not yet quite the norm, is no longer frowned upon. It seems today, for reasons I’m not clear about, the sexual act, or the directors idea of it, has to be included in practically every other film. The question is, where will we go from here, and what will be the long-term affect on society generally?

If it wasn’t so criminally wasteful of taxation, it would be laughable. The government is proposing in conjunction with the bed manufacturers Dream, to inaugurate at the new Buckinghamshire University, a two year course on selling beds. Just imagine, one hilarious moment in the practicals, with all climbing on and off beds. Where have these people in Westminster been all their lives, have they never heard of second-hand car salesman, few of them came from a university, but they have the apocryphal reputation of being able to sell you something you later regret, in the wink of an eye. I have known salesman, and commercial reps, who started life on the shop floor, and through their natural talents of selling, communicating and being sociable, rose to great heights. These talents cannot be taught, and I suggest the whole idea is farcical. To even give diplomas will be over the top, where will it stop, university courses for checkout girls, after all that’s very technical?

University Education, Then And Now. I matriculated in June 1940, when the universities were evacuated. I only had one relation and no acquaintances who, had been to university. Today, of my 10 grandchildren and their spouses, eight have been to university. I became articled to a profession before the war, but it didn’t give me a feeling, at the time, of being second-class. Today, if you haven’t been to university, there is a social stigma, so everyone is clamouring to go. On being demobbed, I went to university on an ex-service grant. I believe that only two people dropped out of our 40 student, four-year course, one through illness. Today one in five students drops out. Being at university, after the rigours of school, was rather like being let out of jail, you were free, you made your own decisions, not acting under instruction. This freedom affected different people in different ways, and varied according to the subjects that you took. We all had some free periods, the curriculum logistics required this, and how you spent those free periods was of your own choice. Some played poker, or billiards, others studied individually or in groups. The sciences, medicine and engineering were more concentrated in the number of lectures that we had to attend, than the arts and more philosophical
degrees. As a result unlike those in the arts etc, the rest of us had fewer free periods and I believe had to work harder.

I’m sure the reason that medicine, the sciences, and engineering generally have not been the chosen subjects for university degrees, is because the other degrees offer more free time, are in no way as concentrated, and the chances of passing are greater. In spite of an £800 million effort to stem the rate of dropout, there is still a 22% drop out from university, which is costing us millions every year. Sophie, who was a grammar school teacher, and taught many children to university level, is convinced as I am, that the problem lies squarely in the fact that the level of achievement at A Level is lower, and the corresponding reduction in entrance standards, in order to keep up the university intake and to maintain viability, is the stumbling block. There must be some reason why the rate of dropout has increased. When I was at work, every year I had an intake of a number of university graduates, and had to train them. Their knowledge in some of the more abstruse aspects of engineering was more advanced than anything I knew, but they were deficient in the bread-and-butter issues, and it was there that I had to do the training. The chances of them ever having to design the fancy structures that they had been taught was minimal and in most cases zero. I wonder therefore whether the academics, running the degree courses, for their own satisfaction and interest are widening the range of the subject to an abstruse level, and consequently reducing the overall quality of the
teaching of the bread-and-butter issues, which is what the examination should be testing on.

Doing away with selection examinations, is doing away with any yardstick by which an employer, or a university, can evaluate the overall intelligence, achievement and general ability of a student under scrutiny for a job or a university place. Any system of assessment has a serious weakness, it is dependant upon personal preferences and bias. Unequivocally individuals have favourites. The reverse is also a given, people can take unreasonable exceptions which ultimately could influence others’ lives. It is the principle of the ‘old boy net’. In spite of this, as a result of pressure by a minority, because exams are allegedly stressful, the government intends imposing an assessment system whereby school students are assessed, in lieu of written and oral examination. It is a tortuous path to mediocrity. There is no assurance the assessments are standard, across-the-board, by their very nature this would be impossible. Assessment only transfers the stress from the examination room to the ignominy felt, by those not meeting the standards that they have been assessed at, in a job or at university, and are sacked or sent down.

The incredible circus, which built up around what I believe to be an unnecessary inquest on Princess Diana was nothing short of abominable. It must have been hell for the Princes and her close friends. It would certainly not have been at the request of the Queen, and so one assumes that the press, with the paparazzi, engineered this for increased sales. Many of us feel that if there had been no paparazzi there would have been no accident. This prompted me to consider manipulation in the round.

The dictionary definition states, ‘to give a false appearance to; to turn to one’s own purpose or advantage.’ This does not cover the wide range of applications, and the sheer terror and horror that it can cover, such as the plight of subjugated peoples in dictatorships, throughout the world.

We are currently being subjected to a mild form of manipulation by our politicians who are playing childish games with our lives, by making speeches and counter speeches, which are not necessarily policy, but rather inducements to make us vote for them. When the incumbent sees which way the wind is blowing he will then make up his mind whether it is in ‘his ‘ interest to go to the polls, not ours. This I believe is manipulation. It was noticeable that when David Cameron was talking without notes, a point which was strongly made, (even Soph thought it great), to indicate that he was speaking from the heart, it made me wonder if all our actors and actresses who can go through a three-hour play without a note, are also speaking from the heart. I suggest this is another form of manipulation. Just in passing, I noted that his speech from the heart, was only his heart, not that of the party, it was always the first person singular. Another Blair?

In Northern Ireland we have been manipulated constantly, by Westminster, Dublin, the USA Government, the American Irish Lobby with its funding-raising and back-seat driving, our own political factions, the UN the EU and anybody else who can stick their finger in, for nearly 40 years, and we are worse off now than when it all started, certainly politically, the infrastructure, and of our personal knowledge of our place in things generally. If you think about it, you too may have been thoroughly manipulated.

The most subtle form of manipulation, of course, is advertising. They use fear, especially to do with infection, health and cleanliness. Subtle sex is another tool, along with suggestion rather than fact in its many forms, and usually portrayed in a Utopian environment, obviously associated with their products.

I did a survey of how much people read, and that TV and the Internet are on the increase in providing information, while written matter is being reduced by 40%. I don’t know how this affects newspaper, but I think it applies to them as well. but as a result of this the paparazzi will not be reduced proportionately, because the sensational press will probably maintain its position, which says a lot about the taste of the average citizen.

In my childhood, religion was centre stage and the churches were full. Today, religious leaders, contrary to the edicts of their religion, are encouraging young, educated people to blast the innocent across the world, with baseless inducements of a fictitious hereafter, I find this not only shocking and astounding, it is the extreme of manipulation for political ends.

A hundred years ago soapbox politics was simple, unsophisticated and what you saw is what you got. Today with the professional use of psychology, with spin doctors, speech writers and all the plethora of outside interests and influences, in our everyday lives, not only in politics, we must become ourselves more sophisticated, more aware and above all more questioning. When a man stands up giving a long speech, not necessarily a politician, it is difficult to take it all in and to remember it, therefore what you get is a warm impression, and if he is any good at manipulation, a few nuggets that will cheer you, and the cold hard facts, while still being there, are enshrouded in verbiage and showmanship.

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

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

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

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