Of Posties, Politics and the letter P

I should look in the dictionary at words beginning with the letter P. How many there are I don’t know, nor whether P words are more numerous than those with different initial letters. What I do know is that it’s possible to reflect on the world in which we live by using definitions of P words as indicators of the state of our planet.

The Postie was completing his walk the other day, an introspective man committed to his job of delivering letters parcels and junk mail with relentless efficiency but not a great speed; the sort of man who clearly avoids conversation and is happy with his lot. No great pretensions, just the bustle of a job needing to be done. The Postie oozes confidence and determination; he is focused, never raising his eyes nor looking left or right, he will not catch your eye and hates responding to those who greet him, but a man with a mission. Would that more were like him!

So what of this Postie (“le facteur” for my French readers)? He made me think about the Press and Politics, of Pride and Poverty, of Paranoia, of Protest.

An odd world in which we live, where the life-blood of the Press is the destruction of Politicians and the reduction of the Public to consumers of cynicism. An odd world in which we live where Politicians are and are seen as the Purveyors of greed. An odd world in which we live, where Pride in personal achievement is so often ridiculed while celebrities are made famous only for their fame. An odd world too where the Poverty of the South and East is largely ignored by the West. A world in which Paranoia is a defence for crime, where Protest is a cover for brutality by police officer and anarchist alike.

I may be doing my postie a disservice, but I half envy him his abstraction from the world, his introspection. Content with his own thoughts, he has no need for or interest in the Vox Populi; independent and autonomous, he seems unaffected by the burdens of the economy, debt and the need to be nihilistic. Or maybe I have misread my postie; maybe it is these very burdens which make him the man he is. I will never know as intrude into his private hell I never will!

The End of the Line

(A tribute to my friend Dalva whose poem this is. Poignant, sad, even a little depressing, this dark destination we all pass through!)





Ah! when I arrived at the vortex of life,
When nothing more, nothing around me, was ascending,
When at last I arrived at the end of the line
It makes no difference whether I go or come.

When the loves and passions and friendships,
And their range of inescapable emotions
No longer sound like drums inside my chest,
Being just sad, poor and sultry echoes,

When my bodily properties, if all regathered,
Again in these clothes,
My hat, one or two books, some poems
And a feeling of not winning what I wanted,

Ah! when I stopped, at last, at the end of the road
And I considered the evil that I had within me,
(and what I did not have)
I was silent, like a rock,
Like a tree in the edge of an abyss,

Like an arrow that was loose in the bow,
Like an idea that would never come to fruition,
Like a shadow, or like a rough draft,
Of everything I dreamed, and did not have.

This is the end of the line ……..

British Summer Time

The clocks go forward tomorrow night, as we move from Greenwich Mean Time to British Summer Time, but is this really a sign of summer, warmer times with happier smiling people? I think not!

The world is in crisis, not necessarily the crisis of war, but of changes to the human condition, the climate, the economy, all of which may already have tipped over the edge with few realising that this is indeed the case. Trauma and tragedy? Time will tell but when the fish of the sea are increasingly hermaphrodite, man's sperm count is less than half what it was fifty years ago, the seasons are more and more unpredictable with one polar cap soon to unfreeze each year, the world economy brought to its capitalist knees by the greed of bankers and money men, when will we see sense?

No longer are we masters of our destiny! No longer do the winners write the history books; no, history is the province of a future we can only guess at, hardly predict. Out of our hands, man has committed the gravest of sins in recent decades, maybe longer. Industry has poisoned not only rivers and soils, but our minds as well. Our right to choice, that oft proclaimed plank of the right, but also now of the left, denies the trust for our world, a trust recognised by those we scoff at as animist or primitive, by those communities which are self-supporting and whose lifestyle does not threaten the future of the planet. And what of the "civilised" world with its consumption of resources far beyond nature's ability to produce? East mimics West and the impoverished South jumps on this bandwagon to a world desert. But nature will always keep its own counsel and payback will be in its own time, not when humans decide.

So what of our future? Our best hope may be to stop, to think, to reduce the demands we make on ourselves, family, neighbours, communities, governments and nations ...... and ...... and what? Live as vegetarians or vegans? Probably not! Become pacifist? No! Go Green? Maybe! No, the answer must be to work together, black and white, rich and poor, Christian and Muslim, believer and agnostic, woman and man, and review the minimalist lifestyle needed to bring nature and nations into harmony.

So my hope for British Summer Time is that the Sun will shine, warm our hearts and minds, open our eyes and ears to the realities of this world, to aspiration not desperation, and that hand in hand, Afghan and American, Briton and Brazilian, Serbian and Sri Lankan will rebuild the future of mankind. After all things can and do change; who would have guessed in 1991 that the next American president would be called Hussein?

Henry Ford was wrong

Henry Ford was wrong! History may not have much relevance for industry or commerce which he saw as being about production and profit, but history teaches us lessons which we ignore at our peril.

I have been beside the River Thames this week, just above the great lock at Teddington. This relentless flow of dark water only half-hiding the secrets it keeps, and half reminding us of the past! Old Father Thames it is sometimes called, and like the ancients respected for their wisdom, it has seen so much, forgotten more than we can ever know, there like an icon to cherish and respect.

As I ambled along the towpath with my grandson in the early winter sun, what did I see reflected in the still, slow waters? Bridges, clouds and overhanging trees, each with their meaning or is it interpretation, vision, fantasy or truth? Bridges, symbols of contrasting cultures; clouds and trees of changing times? Or later in the week with the increasingly fast waters of winter as the rains hit the counties around Berkshire, fleeting glimpses of these same shadows but impossible to identify as they were spoilt by wind and wave. Life is like that, sometimes slow and easy to read, at other times a rushing bedlam of incident and accident thrown relentlessly and unforgivingly into the chaos of life.

There are those who pretend to unravel these mysteries, finding patterns of repetition, fate and behaviour in their or our lives; others who finding no pattern to explain the tragedies of life, blame it all on God or man. And others still who see our successes and failures as the natural or inevitable outcome of the life-chances we each inherit. Marx would have some sympathy with this last option … little choice, just the oppressive and given domination of the masses by an elite. It matters not which group we are born to, the elite to rule in largely robust health, the masses to survive for a while at least the vagaries of poverty and oppression, ill-health, unsafe employment, idleness and frequent childbirth.

How did they survive, those who mastered the oppression of the market, slaves of a political creed that was largely British and white and mostly protestant? And where did Adam Smith figure in this history of ours? There are many who writing their observations of 19th or 20th century urbanisation, Marx or Dickens, Descartes or Churchill, who did little more than describe what they saw, their analysis failing to challenge the established mores of society, simply to set them in the stone of eternity, the way that the world was established for ever and a day!

Now Lenin and Mao may have been different for they challenged established but unequal order. They tore down the century old bastions of privilege and power, and in ways which terrorised commitment to the new order, allowing other pillars of the establishment such as Christianity and the Catholic Church to adopt the Marxist theory of social disorder to sanctify its dominance of government and people. The established church was everywhere, different in each country, but everywhere. The French even built the Basilica of Sacre Coeur in penitence for their failures in the Franco-Prussian war, a fine example of the integration of church and state in the common perspectives of an allegedly secular state.

Where have I strayed on this mentally, meandering journey which began with the purchase of a Ford Focus some weeks ago. Ford’s surname, passing into our automobile history, set me thinking about the relative degrees of freedom ….. that I enjoy? … that I appreciate? ….. that I value? ….. that I understand? ….. that are worth fighting for? ….. or whether nothing has changed in one hundred years? Still trapped in the sociological quagmire that is a conurbation of several millions of people, I may dream of liberty, of equality, fraternity, even sisterhood in these politically correct days, but nothing has changed; we are all trapped in the crowds between riches and poverty, in the dreams of improvement and the fears of losing the talents we have.

Christ was right! If we accept the coin of Caesar, we also pay homage to the ethos and edicts of the Czar. Henry Ford was wrong; it’s not history which is bunk but our literal and uncritical reading of the past.

Cry Hungary

Fifty years ago tonight I lay in bed aged 13 listening to the reports of the uprising in Budapest. It is ironic that there is trouble in Budapest tonight! In 1956 the people were taking on the Russians; today there is division at home over the dishonesty of the government.

The Hungarian uprising was my political baptism. I knew nothing of politics, or democracy and oppression. I just listened all day and all night to the reports coming from Hungary of ordinary and often unarmed people facing up to the power of the soviets. This bravery was very impressive to me, a teenager. I wanted to be Hungarian, not British! I wanted to be there with the excitement and emotion of the fight. I knew nothing of the pain of living under the Soviet yoke, or the pain of death in this uprising. It was David and Goliath, and I wanted to be David.

The uprising (or was it a revolution?) changed my life, leaving me with a revulsion for "the Russians" as we called them, but not so strong that within a few years I saw capitalism as a greater threat. So today, after a lifetime of support for a political party and ideology which some might call socialism (not many I think) what is left? It is not for me to comment on Hungary and its people; their past is past, their future is theirs! But I have to say thank you ..... for my commitment to the poor against the rich, the weak against the strong, can be traced to the events in 1956 in the streets around Hősök Tere and Andrassy Avenue. so.... thank you for that. Without your struggle and the example of the Hungarian people, I would not be the person I am today.

Hero and Orator

Neil Kinnock, the man who rescued the Labour Party from impending oblivion, spoke at events in Manchester at the party Conference in late September. Great man, great orator, great photos!

Neil Kinnock was born eight months before and just a few miles from me. Always my hero both for his great oratory laced with Welsh fervour, and for the way he made Labour electable during the late 80s.

Lori Decter sings Mimi's Act I Aria from La boheme (Puccini)

My first attempt to add video to my blog. Let's hope the technology works.

As for a comment on La Boheme, just listen and enjoy!

Whose fence is this?

Sitting in my garden, I am surrounded by fencing two metres high but invisible to my eyes. It is covered from the ground upwards with ivy! Ivy? Yes that five-pointed leaf that repeats day after day, year on year and inch by inch, but never in the same shape or colour.

What do I see? Greens of every hue from dark and tough and ageing to small, new, fragile and light. And in between, every shade and misshapen size possible. There’s not a flower in sight, just millions of leaves each one covering the layers and leaves underneath, changing with the seasons and with the years but never changing the totality of cover over my lost and hidden fence.

If the fence was the ovum, the ivy was sperm! Millions of leaves which impregnated and in time turned into its own eco-system. Sustained by sun and rain, a shelter to frogs and birds, threatened by hedge-cutter and creosote, renewed by spring each year, but always home to a secret and silent community.

I closed my hand, pushed it between the leaves. More leaves? Yes, for a while, but they had lost their smoothness, and like the skin of an ancient naturist, were wrinkled, hard and crisp to the touch. They crumbled in my squeeze and fell to the ground. “Dust to dust,” says the good book?

Like motorways, railways, roads and paths, the ivy stems tangled and twisted to all points in this hedge. “Where I will,” they seemed to say. No architect, planner or bureaucracy here; just more and more growth and in amongst it, evidence of a huge range of creatures, spiders, ants, flies, beetles, centipedes, insects of every description, and all unwittingly approaching death by bird, hedgehog or other prey.

Where is the parliament to regulate this ivy? Where is the protest or the support? Where is the management and organisation? There is nothing I can find, save an eternal community, in balance but without committee. And underneath the ivy, long since lost to light, the fence lives on, save in its protective coat.

What lessons are there here for us? What can we learn from this peaceful idyll? Maybe to let nature take its course, to leave our world alone, to wrap ourselves in nature and not the reverse; but like each ivy leaf, we have no future and will not be missed. We make our input, just a little, we have our day, but in eternity, we barely figure, counting as even less than zero. A depressing thought? No, we are human, trustees of this universe, and destiny is ours, or is it mine alone?

(dedicated to Sylvie Garreau who gave me an empty book ..... in which to write!)