Archive | Features/current affairs RSS feed for this section

Silence is Golden..

14 Oct

This was a 60s hit for the Tremeloes. The chorus: Silence is golden/but my eyes still see tells the tale of my blog-absence these past few weeks. What has occurred – and is still occurring – on both sides of the Atlantic, beggars belief. I’m sick to the stomach of it all. And now Theresa Maybe is flexing her awkward muscles and we sit in wide-eyed dumbfoundedness as the horror-shows play out.

This week I have been celebrating Sir Bobby Charlton’s 79th birthday. He is lucky to share the same day – 11th October – as me. I am a mere 14years younger but he could work magic with his feet; I can just about walk straight. More importantly, he behaved impeccably in the heat of battle…do you get where I’m going?

I had to shut out the Trump/Hard-Brexit noise. I turned to Facebook for some silent succour. Well what with it being my birthday and all…

A Golden Treasury emerged. I have a truckload of FB friends, many of whom I never see or speak with. Accumulations, you might say, over the years. There are those I taught over nigh on 40 years at the black/whiteboard/sports pitch/boarding house(s). They are far flung and have made what they could of their lives on their own merits. I remember their youth and talent and enthusiasms and hope that they retain much of that zest. If their FB stories are anything to go by, they do. I love seeing their families grow and discovering their latest exploits. What a social voyeur!

I have family FB friends, ex-colleagues, the sporting fraternity of a lifetime, close buddies and not-so close buddies, And more. When my birthday comes around, I love hearing from them all because each and every one stirs a memory – and with that memory, a smile.

This week, after the car-crash that was the Trump/Clinton debate and the Tory Conference, I retreated to the silence of Facebook and the comfort of friends near and far; some last seen yesterday, some many years since. I salute you all, you nourish me from a distance. And, just for now, the silence is golden.

The Lying Game..

2 Sep

…was a song by Dave Berry back in the 60s. Or was it the Crying Game?  If so it no longer fits my subject matter and I wish I had used one of a vast number of starters such as The Decay of Lying by dear Oscar or Lies, that power-poem by Yevgeny Yevtuschenko. Even that song by Fleetwood Mac. Possibly Disraeli’s Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. Ah! Now I’m warming to my theme. The Eagles’ Lying Eyes springs to mind. Ricky Gervais’s film The Invention of Lying. The book I am reading  The Good Liar by Nicholas Searle about a conman who has lied his way through life. Lies, lying and liars are woven into the fabric of society – and I have already lied in this paragraph about the title of a pop song.

We bang on about telling the truth to our children but we tell them a fat man in a red suit will wedge himself down a chimney to visit our little darlings on Christmas Day. We differentiate between white lies (justifiable) and black lies (heinous). Kids learn pretty early on that we adult don’t really mean what we say and certainly don’t say what we mean. hey what’s a fib or two between grown ups. There is no institution that I can think of that doesn’t practise the art of lying. And it’s getting worse at very high levels of our bruised society.

These days we expect schools for example, to lie about their results. The choice of the most inappropriate stat. will be banner-headlined to soften the blow that, this year, results were crap. Of course the league-table game means every headteacher is forced down the ‘economical with the truth’ path. OK, no big deal you might say but when soundbite is valued more than sound judgement we get what we deserve. How else do we explain the serial lying of a Trump, a Gove or Farage or a Johnson; a Blatter, a Lance Armstrong; the Russian Olympic association and its government? And that’s mostly just the last two months.

Trump’s lying has a perverse honesty. Bear with me here. He will utter almost any falsehood if the cheers ring long and loud in response. If they don’t he’ll select another lie and try that. He wants reaction, not understanding. Truth is unimportant, there is greater honesty in deception. He knows that his fawning supporters don’t believe him but they prefer an obvious charlatan to the two-faced, conniving, Washington in-crowd of Harvard privilege and moneyed back-scratchers.

Now our triumvirate of lies -Pouty Gove, Farridge and Boris the Spider have come a bit unstuck. They have half-admitted that they were taking the piss. You can’t do that. A really top quality liar follows through, indeed gets worse, as I fully expect the Trumpet Major to do.

I note that Southern rail have posted profits nearing £100million. What lies can their chief exec. (recently granted a gargantuan pay rise) come up with to persuade his workforce and hordes of pissed-off commuters that it is all their fault really? The doctors are on dodgy ground now. Patient Safety is their cry. Hmm. The BMA recommended that they accept the last compromise offer from Jeremy Rhyming Slang but no, they are up for thousands upon thousands of postponed and cancelled ops and appointments. If they told the truth, that it’s all about money, I’d feel a little better. I wouldn’t expect Jeremy RS to tell the truth – after all he’s a politician.

 

 

Proper Charlies ……..

4 Aug

My son’s name is Charlie. A few years ago his passport expired and he missed meeting up with me on holiday. He took the consequences on the chin – along with suitable admonishments and savage subtle banter. ‘You d***head’ was my favourite. Lizzie Armistead’s going AWOL when three testers came calling is beyond careless, beyond banter. Her excuses shame her further: ‘…he didn’t do enough to find me.’ she said of her third avoidance.  She shouldn’t be at the Olympics.

Steve Woolfe is a potential UKIP leadership challenger. Not any more. He filed his nomination papers 17 minutes late. An important phone call got in the way, apparently. Another d***head. Now he’s crying foul. I do know some people who would put life on hold for an episode of the Archers but for the leadership of a party, I might prioritise: 1. Give papers to secretary, 2. Go to hotel room for cuppa and iPlayer.

I have been considering nominating my barber Louie for a knighthood. I understand that anyone who has done my hair or been on my side or given me money can get one. So my Mum should have featured by now and I can’t understand why she hasn’t. As she’s dead I remain hopeful of a posthumous award. I suppose all those worthy recipients of years gone by might carp at my indulgent, self-seeking, narcissistic, myopic, pretentious, cronyism but I don’t really give a s**t.

My recent protégé Kevin Roberts, Saatchi and Saatchi’s CEO, has resigned after his ludicrous, appalling remarks about women in the advertising business. He said to that important organ, the Business Insider Website, “Women say ‘Actually guys, I’m way happier than you,'” explaining that some women’s ambition is circular not vertical. Shock, horror, the female right-on mafia went for his jugular! Much like Charles Saatchi had done with Nigella. Gardening leave first followed by honourable hari-kari. He has fallen on his sword, saying “Fail fast, fix fast, learn fast.”

Would that a few other Charlies could follow Kevin’s lead. And he didn’t do much wrong in the first place.

Ali now trending…..even transcending

6 Jun

A weekend to consider sportsmen and push politicians to the corners of our minds. Mohammad Ali’s death brought with it the necessary hyperbole as the world’s media tried to capture the impact of the greatest boxer, probably the greatest sportsman of the twentieth century. He transcended boxing, his influence transcended sport, so we heard. The T word is often used to convey a degree of influence and excellence beyond that of the activity for which someone is paid. Transcendent Ali certainly was- and somewhat transcendental into the bargain. As a teenage growing up during the height of his fame and power, he was simply the greatest sporting show on earth.

Ali’s rejection of the ‘slave’ name by which his fame had first flickered, Cassius Clay, was the first of many publicly honourable and seismic shifts in his life which became world headlines. Embracing Islam; rejecting the draft and suffering nearly 4 years in the boxing wilderness; wit and wisdom to fight with words as well as fists; showmanship of an unparalleled order; extraordinary public exposure of his decline-by-Parkinson’s; and the Parkinson Show, of course. A few marital slips ‘twixt cup and lip but heroes need an Achilles heel,  I suppose.

Now he’s gone; another hero bites the dust. Are we running out of titans who raise the spirits and transcend? Well, I thought Djokovic got close to transcendent when he defeated grunty, grumbly Andy at Roland Garros on Sunday. The sheer elan of the Serbian makes him, along with Federer, a man of some substance. Both of them have sportsmanship writ large in the psyche. Novak was supreme in his graciousness in victory. All four slams in one year. There is something about the man v man, woman v woman gladiatorial thing. The confrontation is raised to a heroic level that team sport can’t quite manage. To be fair to shouty Andy, his magnanimity in defeat was heartwarming and noble. George Foreman talking about his old adversary, Ali, likewise. The Rumble in the Jungle lives on.

Now politicians don’t transcend much do they? This literary technique which I have just employed is bathos – a somewhat ludicrous descent from the exalted to the ordinary. Geddit? The EU back (and front) stabbing debates have been evasive, shabby, vindictive, scaremongering, fictional (mostly), unworthy, divisive, uninformative and unprincipled. This last word – unprincipled – may be the most significant. The rhetoric has rarely risen above the gutter when most of us want to aim for the stars – or something like that. Cameron and Corbyn have been abjectly disappointing. So too, the little minx north of the border. Sturge the scourge is backing both horses, methinks. Principles be hanged.

As for pouty Gove and Boris the Spider – they have reduced the whole thing to an opportunistic roadshow of high-sounding nothings. No wonder the media people were pleased to stop the front pages for Ali this weekend. The footage from the last 60years told a mesmeric tale. His grandstanding was part-circus, part high-principles. As a boxer he was the consummate and brave ringmaster with a smile on his face and a lion in his heart. Boris and the others fall woefully short. Our politicians need to find some honest values from somewhere, stick to them, work hard and behave honourably. Most of them will never find themselves in the position of defying the US government, fighting for the right to eat in a restaurant in their home town or face the biggest, most brutal punchers on the planet. Sadly they are more bovvered by trending, than transcending.

Pigs in Full Flight…

18 May

Who’d have thought a bigoted, misogynist, racist, hair fly-away would make the Republican nomination for President? What black swan could have predicted an ageing, unreconstructed leftie, who tells his own truth, and doesn’t slag off others would lead the Labour Party into the next election? Who on earth would place money – even at 5000 to 1 – on little Leicester taking the premiership title, with some ease?

The world doesn’t always behave as the elites would want it to. Occasionally the proletariat realise that the tops dogs are, mostly, in it for themselves. Opportunism, advancement and wealth tend to be the guiding watchwords of the political elite – and the wealthiest soccer clubs. There is the assumption that top dogs can’t lose.

I read that George Osborne vociferously denounced university tuition fees more than a decade ago. He pledged that a Tory government would scrap them. Are we surprised that his apparent principled stance metamorphosed into a cackling scepticism once he had climbed up another rung on the ladder of ambition? Our parliamentary system – as well as our educational – breeds short-termism. Say anything you need to get elected; tell lies, breed fear, massage figures, slag off any opponent. And when you are at the top of the pile, continue in the same vein and jump into bed with any country whose economic, military and personal aspirations match yours. Tony Blair. George Bush.

Moving on – and leaving the Trumpmeister on one side for the moment, I haven’t seen Jezza Corbyn employ any of the standard elite tactics so far. He even disappoints his own party by not conforming to the normal rules of engagement, never mind his sartorial ineptitude.  He has perplexed our shallow PM with his principled agenda and refusal to Punch and Judy at PM’s questions. Very strange.

As for the football fantasy story of Leicester – this is more than just a victory for David over the Goliaths. The manner of the triumph, epitomised by the gentle, avuncular niceness of everyone’s favourite Italian, Claudio Ranieri, warmed the hearts of the nation. As we approach the Euro referendum I shall be voting to remain mates with Claudio despite both campaigns peddling untruths and smears as fast as Boz and Dave can think them up. Little Nicci Sturge in Scotland is keeping quiet; I wonder what game she is playing? She strikes me as someone who has yet to decide whether she wants to remain an honest politician or not. Her ship has sailed, I fear. The elites’ gravy-train sucks ’em in and spits ’em out with inherited wealth and pensions and book deals and the speaking circuit to look forward to in their dotage.

Now Claudio might write a book or two – he deserves a bit of glory in print – but I’m guessing that only the Leicester faithful would buy it. Claudio’s niceness doesn’t sell books. But could Leicester’s lightning strike again? Trump for President? Corbyn the PM? England winning the Euro Championship? Pigs might just fly…

Spitting Images…

10 May

It’s such a pity that the satirical hit-show of the 1980s remains in mothballs. Nicky Morgan’s thyroidic madness, as she leads our schools not so gently into that good night, would be a delicious but apocalyptic joy to behold. As I sipped tea with two jolly roofers in the back garden this morning, I offered them the prepositional conundrum presented to our year 6 kiddies in their English SAT this week. The laughter echoed around suburbia. Two roofers and an English teacher.

Now the dangerous Mrs M took no national test until GCSEs came calling when she was 16. Nor did she attend a state school – ie the schools which 94% of all children throughout the UK attend. Her rise to a degree in Jurisprudence at Oxford was via the leafy comfort of Surbiton High School, fees currently £16,000. Her life as a solicitor, then quickly professional politician, was a glittering race through the corridors of advantage and networking. And now she directs the education of the masses whose access to preferment is a tad shaky.

For many politicians born with silver spoons, I get the idea that their brains, desire for service and, hopefully, the ability to see the bigger picture, can overcome the disadvantages of a myopic view born of the playing fields of Eton or, indeed, the slums of Toxteth. But with Education (education, education…) the need for a sensitive, perspicacious leader is vital. We have been plagued by successive encumbents of high office being paralysed by a combination of their own privileged experienced combined with a corporate, profit-toxic view of how education should be organised and evaluated. Pupils and teachers, particularly at key stages 1 and 2, are the losers. Thank goodness a few parents this week stood their ground: enough is enough, they said. Children must be allowed to grow broadly before the examined world takes over;  not moulded from five to regurgitate irrelevancies which their young brains can’t compute anyway.

As I watched my roofing mates, Shaun and Dan, flash through their iPhones, we chatted about the schools they went to. Local lads from Carshalton. Housing estate. Fun growing up. Both failed 11 plus but the teachers at primary and secondary were OK, some brilliant. Quality of teaching was assessed by personality, running the soccer team after hours, engaging an interest – for Dan it was poetry, for Shaun history. Both were sport mad. Neither thought that those on high – Nicky Morgan – understand what education is really about. They admired their bright mates who went to university but it wasn’t for them. They wanted cash-in-hand and were pleased with the choices they had made. Dan calculated the VAT for the bill in a heartbeat.

The more we chatted, the more my glottal stops began to match theirs. Strange how we leafy suburban orators enjoy the chumminess of estuary English. Jack Whitehall tries plenty of innit-speak in his stage show but the Marlborough posh is hard to hide. I was pondering linguistic tics when a young woman wandered past me (by now I’m in London sitting in Victoria Embankment Gardens) hoicked up a substantial globule of phlegm and spit-fired into the rather beautiful tulip garden by which I was sitting, not spitting. Strange, I thought, that in gardens crowded with office workers enjoying the last minutes of a sunny lunch-hour, a rather chic looking filly (excuse, please the non-PC personification of a young thoroughbred. I had thought of revealing that the pretty thing in question was an olive-skinned Asian but, decided not to chance the rabid vitriol of my right-on readership) would choose to mimic the action of press-ganged sailors in 17th century whorehouses. My audible intake of breath resulted in an embarrassed explanation, en-passant, that a fly-dive through the glossed lips was the culprit. Big bloody fly, I smartly retorted.

She hurried on and my attention was drawn to the incongruous sight of a couple of young chaps, jackets off, playing table tennis. I had noticed the appearance of a number of these fun-tables in the various gardens along the embankment from Blackfriars to Whitehall. What a top idea! The two young men, with ties still on, looked a little sad, as if they were convicts getting exercise before returning to condemned cells. The spitting image of the tulip garden gobber and the bulbous-eyed Nicky Morgan faded as I wandered up Whitehall and met some retired teachers in the Harp (what a fine pub!). We didn’t mention education.

 

Music to my Ears..

28 Apr

Two star-crossed lovers in a novel I read recently shared their ‘moments of beauty’ each day while their flame of passion burned. It was their way of rescuing something fine and untainted from the carnage of the dead and broken. They drove blood-drenched ambulances from the battlefields of Northern France during WWI. Cows canoodling in the sunshine, unaware of man’s inhumanity; a child’s song coming from a farmhouse; a hot bath; silence.

I woke this morning to more news about the Hillsborough verdict fallout. A woman said that the rest of the country was against them. That wasn’t true. The Sun maybe; the South Yorkshire police hierarchy maybe. Perhaps a siege-mentality was needed to keep the great fight going all these years. I admire the fortitude and bravery of the families and the wider Liverpudlian community. But they didn’t walk alone.

I was intrigued by the news that we are going to scrap what Cuba owes us and, what’s more, give them £350million for unspecified ‘good works’ to boost their economy. Hmm. Methinks the Yanks have been pressing our buttons. I’ll ask my economist friends what all this is about.

Further scans of the news brought no moments of beauty. Much news is shabby stuff. Edginess, controversy, scandal, disaster and death prevail. A Muslim MP is anti-Semitic. A cycling guru calls disabled bikers ‘gimps’. Greedy entrepreneurs raid BHS pension pots. I needed some beauty. I turned on radio 2.

Now my relationship with music compares, I am sure, with plenty of my generation of 50s children. Buying singles of the Beatles and Dusty Springfield were rare pocket-money treats. Pop music was in short supply and the BBC struggled to find airspace. Radio Luxembourg filed the black hole and I gobbled up whatever was on offer for the first three decades of my life. And then I stopped. Life, work, children, TV…I’m not quite sure what really got in the way but my encyclopaediac knowledge finished around 1978. I can identify my children’s music (80s/90s) – but only the stuff that blared from their bedrooms. Naturally I couldn’t make out the words but the creeping realisation that much of it was very good sat uneasily with my stance that the 60s couldn’t be bettered. And so I am sad that too much great music has flowed under my bridge and I have let it go downstream without a thought. I do have my old-man modern favourites (Coldplay, Keane, Killers…you know the type) but I’m a CD in the car man and tend to watch Newsnight rather than relax in the arms of Ed Sheeran. You know what I mean.

Ken Bruce played Sounds of Silence by Disturbed, the record of the week. I was transfixed, transported. It’s a beautifully chilling cover of the great Simon and Garfunkel classic. I sat very quietly. Uplifted. Disturbed. I listened on and Peter Skellern was singing You’re a Lady; I’m a Man. Nostalgia. I went to the radio 2 website to check on the BBC Folk awards and found myself watching Rufus Wainwright ‘s tribute to Sandy Denny – a gentle, mesmerising performance of Who Knows Where the Time Goes. He looked like a young, gently rolling Joe Cocker – and, along with the audience, I was spellbound.

Who knows where the time goes? Indeed. Music and Beauty. Made my day.

Fork handles, Two Soups…Ch,ch,ch,Changes..

26 Apr

I saw Victoria Wood at The Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone twenty years ago. The audience was largely female and, from the opening minutes, splitting its sides. As a male sitting among guffawing females, I smirked amiably at the cascade of jokes about corsets, tampons and stretch marks. The rapid-fire songs were ingeniously funny and the night’s conclusion was a standing ovation of several minutes. Now this unique little flame is extinguished – along with so many others of too young an age this year. Prince.

Today I have tuned in to hear a couple of sanctimonious doctors rail about patient safety. I wish the ‘junior doctors’ would come clean and say that this is about money, Saturday overtime pay and Jeremy Hunt. I’d be more inclined to appreciate that their subsidised education and high income potential was worth the effort of my latest missed appointment. The BMA have some questions to answer too.  And as for Jeremy Hunt, the sooner he becomes rhyming slang the better.

Talking of money, I notice that someone you won’t have heard of, a soccer luminary by the name of Dominic Solanke, is asking to be paid £50,000 a week by Chelsea. He has yet to play in the first  team but believes that his efforts to get in the top XI deserve a huge reward. Unlike doctors he doesn’t appear to work on Saturdays at the moment; nor at any other time in the week. He’ll soon be in the Sunday Times Rich List, published at the weekend, along with a number of premiership soccer players, most of whom actually get selected.

Obama’s entry to the EU in/out  thing was tedious wasn’t it? Does anyone care who the next mayor of London is? And at £29million do we really need to repair Big Ben? I’m only asking. Other questions that have plagued me of late include: Why has it taken so long for BHS to become insolvent? How much more mud will stick on John Whittingdale before he falls on his prostitute’s sword? Has anyone got a good word for Donald Trump? Even his supporters revel in the anti-hero unpleasantness of the man.

As we slouch towards voting for this or that in May and June bigger pictures appear above me. The value added to our lives by Victoria Wood et al. Justice for the 96 of Liverpool. And debates on big issues where self-interest and lust for power come second to what is right and what is wrong. It would be good to ch, ch, ch, change things for the better, not just for ourselves.

The i Caught my Eye.

10 Mar

I read papers at the weekend but the 40p in my pocket was burning a hole. I saw the obit. of George Martin advertised on the front of the i and went for it. Before I got to the warm and fulsome tribute to the great man, I was hi-jacked by a number of curious items.

Firstly a piece on how ‘battlers and bruisers’ are needed as secondary headteachers to sort out standards. “Uniforms”, said Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, “are all over the place. Scrappy worksheets abound as does low level disruption.” Weighing in to the problem was Nick Gibb, ex KPMG accountant specialising in tax, now Schools’ Minister.

The lifelong Tory activist and financier called for young teachers to be fast-tracked. “Able headteachers should be promoted swiftly from the ranks.” Well, I thought, don’t they need to practise their profession for a while before they catapult to stardom? Promotion too soon can be a double disaster. Firstly the superhead has yet to spend enough time doing what he/she is good at – presumably teaching; secondly, the erroneous assumption that the skills required of a headteacher are similar to the classroom teacher and that experience counts for less that confrontational ability. In my experience the quickly-promoted young star confronts more than reflects. Nick Gibb, as with so many politicians, is an amateur observer. I noted from his Wiki info that, of all the schools which he attended, Maidstone Grammar was far and away the best. Second came Bedford Modern, a noted private school. Not too many of the hoi polloi or top buttons undone in either place. I see that he is MP for Bognor Regis. I spent many an unhappy summer holiday there in the 1950s.

I scanned further items about which I couldn’t have cared less: Sunday trading (SNP taking the piss), Junior Doctors (sorry but both sides are getting it wrong), the Queen and Brexit, the link between obesity and sleeplessness, Chelsea getting PSG -ed and, of course, the EU.

However the news that Ashfield District Council has banned comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown from appearing at the Festival Hall in Kirby had me chuckling. They said that his humour was ‘inappropriate’. Of course it is you stupid dickheads – that’s why he’s popular. And, as far as I am aware, he doesn’t incite terrorism.

There were a number of short items from round the world which kept me abreast of vital matters. The rebels in Columbia and the Polish government ruling that their own courts were unlawful were two items to make me smile and yawn simultaneously. It’s hard to avoid the Trumpmeister and his curious unstoppability. The circus going on over the pond is a joy to behold…from a distance. Did you know that the Kennel Club celebrates its 125th birthday this year and 22,000 tails will be wagging at Crufts today, apparently. Similar events.

I turned back to George Martin. A gentle genius.Go to you tube. All You Need is Love.

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned.

28 Jan

I was reminded of W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem The Second Coming yesterday. Written in 1919 after the carnage of world war, WB speculated on the cycle of human depravity that comes to a head periodically. The idea of the falcon spinning out of control, far away from the guidance and civilised control of the falconer, is just one powerful metaphor for the scrambling of values, the coruscating rush of greed and decline in compassion and understanding which characterises our world in 2016.

Back to yesterday. Prime Minister’s questions. Corbyn, for whom I have a healthy liking and mild distrust, asked a series of questions. Refugees/migrants; bedroom tax; Google. Cameron’s responses were baying criticisms of the last Labour administration and irrelevant grandstanding about what the Tories have done, not what they haven’t. Why can’t he – and all the sorry wankers who sit on front benches – just front up and explain, for example on Google – that this fat-arsed giant of a money-making machine can afford better tax lawyers than the HMRC. The paltry amount that Google have, in their magnanimity, agreed to pay in ‘back’ taxes is a cheque written with a snide smile. Their game is avoidance and, until a Second Coming, ‘twill always be. Mr Cameron why can’t you be honest? We, the public, wouldn’t mind so much. We wouldn’t think that you’re weak. Your performance yesterday was such a charade that the beige-jacketed Corbs won hands down. Your ‘people’ probably told you otherwise.

I caught the news about tennis match-fixing. In a microsecond I had thoughts about Lance Armstrong, FIFA, Seb Coe and his mates at the IAAF, Suarez biting, Tyson Fury fighting and so on. Putin hove into view, not sure why. So too Volkswagen. I saw pictures of a disabled grandfather with a severely disabled grandson lamenting the burden of the bedroom tax. On my Thameslink rail journey the Evening Standard told me that my service provider was the worst performing train operator in the country. The chief executive’s pay has advanced to £2.1 million. There was a piece about brokers being cleared of libor rate fixing and great news about Russians and Chinese and other overseas billionaires buying up the middle of London so the rest of us can all move out to two-bed terraced boxes in Hornchurch or Morden for upwards of 500k. Thankfully no beheadings or terrorist atrocities within a couple of hours’ travel from where I live but one can only guess at what’s on the agenda in further flung places that we all don’t want to think about. The boat people. And what about the white Oscar agenda?

Have a look at WB’s poem. Don’t worry about its oddities – get the drift. What world would the son of God find if he returned to earth today? Atheist I may be but I get where WB was coming from. Almost everywhere I look there is greed, falsehood, evasion, corruption, self-interest, protectionism, criticism, lack of empathy, lack of sympathy, lack of understanding, lack of compassion, self-righteousness, short-termism, lack of principle, screwed values. On the ground, as they say, things are hopeful. People are kind, respectful, friendly, generous, warm, funny, hard-working, moral, do their best…not all but the vast majority. What has happened to our public people, our public values? What responsibility is the media prepared to accept? What happens to the politicians and other important people when they move too far from innocence? What happens to all of us?

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →