Different blog this week. One of my many fan (s missing on purpose) wrote to me recently and asked what are all the pictures in my top banner. Obviously, like me, their eyesight is failing and they couldn’t make out what it all is. So, explanation coming up.
Reading from left top to left bottom we have 3 cars. The first is a Formula 1 Vanwall from 1958, round about the time I started watching motor racing. In those days countries had their own national colours. There was no multi-coloured advertising hoarding on four wheels for you to see. The Vanwalls, being British, were green. The Ferraris, Maseratis and Alfa Romeos were Italian and red while the Gordinis were French and blue, You may also notice that the cars had numbers which you could read, a really funny idea. In England we only got about 4 races on live TV. Monaco, France and Italy via Eurovision (yes the Eurovision song contest was so called as the company giving Europe wide pictures was called Eurovision) and the British GP at Silverstone or Aintree (minus the jumps of course).
The Ford Anglia was introduced in 1959 in the days when most cars actually looked different. The mini was actually a mini, the Sunbeam Rapier had small fins at the back while this Ford Anglia had the back window slanting back toward the car. I would guess, in the interests of economy, several police forces around the country decided to buy a fleet of these. Others had the Ford Zephyr or Zodiac as seen on Z cars on TV. We didn’t have speed limits so much in those days so there wasn’t a need for two policeman in a Ford Anglia to chase a Jaguar 3.8 across country.
This Ford Cortina was the first car I officially, note the use of that word, drove on the road. I managed to persuade my father in 1966, when I reached 17, that this was exactly the car he wanted. He actually agreed, lovely man, and for the next 3 years until I bought my own car, this was really mine. You may ask why was I surprised he agreed. Well, I convinced him that the ordinary Cortina was a bit boring so he agreed to buy the most powerful one available at the time, excluding the Lotus Cortina which he did baulk at buying, and we had a Ford Cortina GT.
In the 1960’s communication devices weren’t as advanced, as common or as mobile as now. The standard black telephone was a fixture in many homes, although probably not as many as you would expect. You dialled the number you wanted by inserting your finger (you can say that telephonically) into the appropriate hole. Most numbers were no more than seven digits and the dial had letters as well as numbers as you can see. So if I had a friend living in Harrow, I would dial HAR 4674 or whatever their number was. If you look closely you will see that HAR corresponds to 427 which is now part of the Harrow code.
Next to this is one of the first mobile (!!!!) phones from the early nineties. You could hold it in the palm of your hand providing you didn’t mind a large degree of overspill. The chargers that fitted in cars were even bigger and took up a considerable amount of space. When you think of the size of a mobile phone now it seems mazing that we have moved so far in less than 20 years. My question of course is why, if phones have got smaller, have people grown taller. That would seem to spit in the face of natural evolution.
Oh look how small and compact the BBC computer was in 1986. Keyboard was twice as big as a modern laptop, the screen was like a TV (and the picture quality, shall we say, interesting), while all the peripheral parts were also made so that the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk would feel at home. They were most used in education for quite a long time and so many of the 40 somethings wandering around today will have grown up with one of these. Luckily while they have grown up the size of home computers has decreased.
This one will give you a laugh, I promise. This is a calculator from the 1960’s Some were electric while others had a handle at the side which you turned. Basically you keyed in a number, pressed plus or minus, keyed in another number, pressed a few more buttons, it would whirr away and, hey presto, give you the answer. You could also divide and multiply. It was so much fun but somewhat prone to jamming when, in time honoured fashion, you would switch it off, shake it a bit, and plug it back in. I used one of these for the first 6 or 7 years of my working life. I was lucky and had an electric one but the lower rungs on the ladder of progress had hand operated models which meant, during the time when we would have electricity switched off on alternate days in 1973/4, they could keep calculating although it was winter it did get a bit dark. Such fun.
The London Bus, London Taxi and underground train are still around today. Steam trains are not and when you look at the amount of dirt they spat out into the air, it’s not that surprising.
A 1960’s television. Simple because at the start of that decade there were only 2 channels but by the end of it we had 3. It was 1982 until we had 4 and then it all exploded. We also didn’t have non-stop programmes. Breakfast TV started in the eighties so programmes would start just after or around lunchtime and run through till about 11pm at night. There were no video recorders so if you missed a programme, you missed a programme. I have to just stop for a moment here and become grumpy. People can now record four programmes and watch a fifth. That’s OK. But there is also +1 which allows you watch an hour later plus “catch-up” TV which means you can watch what you missed, forgot to record and weren’t around when it began an hour later and nearly all channels repeat their schedules on a regular basis. I have heard of belt and braces but this is belt, braces, elasticated knickers, bits of string, glue, zips, press-studs and Velcro. I don’t understand it. Honestly.
This is a transistor radio, one of which I would take under my bed covers on Sunday night to listen to Radio Luxembourg’s Top Twenty. Sadly I have to admit that I have therefore spent time in that position with the disgusting piece of humanity called Jimmy Saville, who presented the show. I never liked him then, thinking he was really creepy especially when later I saw him on Top of the Pops. I am also amazed at how he got away with things for so long and it is a shame that he died before we could all tell what a piece of shit he was.
Why a picture of a crowd of people? This is because, around this time, some of us who had grown up in the after effects of WWII were worried about the way the world was heading. So, we protested, usually peacefully and in the larger picture in this blog from Getty Images I spot a young Michael Foot, still with a walking cane, leading one of the more famous marches. Did we make a difference. I really don’t know. I do know that there hasn’t been another world war but what about the future. It’s nice to see that at least one politician in these modern times still has the courage to stick to his beliefs and try to make us live in a more peaceful, less aggressive world. Thank you Jeremy.
Three to go and another for “you’re joking” brigade of today’s youngsters. Nothing against them of course but how quickly things change. When I was a kid, each night as the sunset, a man would come round and light each street light in our road. The picture shows one such performance. Then each morning at dawn he would be back again and snuff them out. They were gas lights. I used to sometimes sit in my parent’s bedroom and wait for him to come and watch as, bit by bit, or should I say, lit by lit, the whole street would come alight. Simple, maybe but it employed a good few more people than a man sitting in an office and turning on the whole of a massive area. What’s more, if a light failed the guy would know and have it fixed instead of in the modern world reporting it to an automated voice.
Music, and beauty. I’m not noticing these two attributes being combined so often nowadays but, even more, I wonder what the young singers of today will look like in their seventies. The pictures below show Joan Baez, a folk and protest singer from the sixties, then and now and Francoise Hardy over the same period. What can you say? Personally I think a older woman looks far more beautiful when she actually looks like an older woman rather a botoxed, plastically enhanced piece of ironed flesh clinging to bones. Age is not ugly, self-induced disfigurement is.
September 9
Is there a doctor on the board?
The average GP earns about £80,000 a year as far as I can see. I have no idea what the average GP earned when I was young but I do know that not many had a practice manager to sort things out. There was a receptionist, often the Doctor’s wife, who would book appointments and take messages because, of course, when the doctor was out on his rounds he was out of touch with the surgery.
This all seemed to function pretty well and I heard very little by way of complaint against this system. The doctor could take on private patients if he wanted and would also be paid a fee for the NHS patients who were on his books.
Why, you may ask, am I writing all this. Well today I am always hearing about a lack of money in the NHS, long waiting lists and, in quite a few cases, poor practices. There has been a recent case where a Chairperson of a local trust resigned. The trust had been investigated by independent government reviews after it was revealed that it had failed to investigate hundreds of unexpected deaths of their patients between 2011 and 2015. I think we would all feel her resignation was the correct thing to do.
However, I then discover that this person was then re-employed by the same trust in to a position that had never existed before and was not advertised to anyone else. Furthermore she would remain on the same salary as previously.
In my simple little mind the only people who can treat sick people, care for ill people and try to prevent, where possible, even more illlnesses, are the wonderful trained professionals within the Health Service. Without doctors, nurses, midwives (if they still exist) and many others, there would be no health care at all. However without trust chairman, practice managers, hospital boards, we could still survive. Some may argue, and I need a hell of a lot of convincing, that these people allow things to function more efficiently. My personal view is that they merely create work to solidify their positions but I am not an industry professional so it is only an opinion.
My reason for all this is that the aforementioned trust chairperson’s new job was as to provide strategic advice to local GPs: GPs on an average salary of under £80,000. The salary this person was on as chair of the trust and is still on is, so it says, £240,000 a year or looked at more cynically the salary of 3 GPs.
Wikipedia, not always reliable but I haven’t time to check elsewhere, says there are about 470 NHS trusts. Assuming chairpersons are all paid the same, which I accept is not likely, that would mean, if we get rid of them, 1,410 extra GPs could be paid for and I cannot see how that is a bad thing.
This modern world is convinced that we need more managers than we need people who can actually do a job productively. Maybe this is because someone has been peddling management courses and qualifications which, without a job to fill, would be useless. I don’t know. I do know that it doesn’t make sense to me. Matron used to run her hospital very well thank you.
September 16
When will they ever learn
The late, great folk singer, activist and humanitarian, Pete Seeger wrote one of the most simple yet poignant anti-war songs when he penned “where have all the flowers gone”. The final line of each verse was “when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn”.I was reminded of those words this week when I saw that, yet again, chaos and disaster has followed the removal of the leader of a country we, the Western World, didn’t like.
I am referring to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee report on the aftermath of our bombing of Libya and the subsequent removal and death of Colonel Gaddafi. There is no doubt that Gaddafi was a tyrant and that he was ruthless in dealing with his enemies inside his own country. The fear that he would somehow kill those opposed to his regime who were assembling in the city of Benghazi prompted the bombing that France and the United Kingdom undertook.
The report said that the intervention had no proper intelligence analysis, it aimlessly drifted to regime change and there was no plan to deal with the situation in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi. The report added that the country was now a failed state on the verge of all-out civil war. It has to be said that Libya, now, is also a destination for tens of thousands of refugees from the rest of Africa who then take the incredibly dangerous sea journey across the Mediterranean to some part of Europe. It is also a breeding and recruiting ground for factions of ISIS. There is hardly any support for the government in Tripoli and there is total economic chaos with no organised control of the oil terminals. All in all the report makes pretty damning reading for anyone who supported the bombing and even worse for those who initiated it.
The response from the British government was that the bombing was done with a UN mandate, presumably making it okay. However the original objective to protect Benghazi was achieved within 24 hours. Did the UN mandate cover “regime change”? David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time and the chief UK proponent of the whole episode, refused to give evidence to the committee but, it is said, that he blamed the failure of the intervention on the Libyan people who failed to take their chance of democracy. That Eton education sure makes you think outside the box, possibly even live outside the planet.
Can you spot a similarity here with Iraq? When will they ever learn? Remember dear old George standing on that aircraft carrier. What a success that was? Since 2003 it is estimated that almost 1 million, yes 1 million, Iraqis have died in their own country. Well done George and let’s not forget your friend Tony Bliar. It’s all very well to have these wonderful ideas about protecting a small group of people, usually in opposition to the established government (whether you like that government or not) but once you have toppled that government it’s always a bit useful to have an idea what to do next. Actually, on reflection, it is even better to have an idea what you are going to do before you throw the country in chaos.
People like Pete Seeger were opposed to this sort of military action because it is evil. Jimmy Carter, ex US President, has been quoted as saying that “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good”. He finished the quote by saying “We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children”.
I sometimes think the politicians today are too young and have not seen what war, an evil action, can do in their own land, near their own homes. They don’t understand and possibly that is true of the soldiers too. Today the Ministry of Defence said it was “extremely sorry” that four British soldiers had, let’s say, allowed a young boy of 15 to drown in a canal in Basra in Iraq in 2003. Well, let’s say too that the four soldiers had forced the young boy into the canal in the first place.
The report by Sir George Newman, a former High Court Judge, into the incident of which the Ministry were extremely sorry, described the soldiers’ actions as a “clumsy, ill-directed and bullying piece of conduct”. The four soldiers involved were granted anonymity in the report. Apparently, according to the report, there were “grave concerns” about the ability of the soldiers to cope with responsibilities placed on them. Really? If one is unable to take the responsible decision to save the life of a 15 year old boy who was, maybe, guilty of looting, and if one actually puts his life in danger in the first place, are you a fit person to be a soldier? Are you a fit person to be a human being? Is something wrong with the recruiting process? I had hoped that soldiers were recruited to, or indeed voluntarily joined, our armed forces to keep the peace and avoid any unnecessary loss of life, not to inflict it. “We will not live together in peace by killing each others’ children”.
I find it so sad that in my 60 or so years on this planet we call home, politicians and military leaders still have not learned how to attain peace, only how to solve one minor problem and create several major ones.
In his last years I noticed Pete Seeger would change the last line of the final verse of his song to “when will WE ever learn, when will WE ever learn”. He fought for peace in his own way, that legacy, that fighting for what is right, that never give up attitude cannot be allowed to die like so many innocent people have because someone thought they had a good idea to get rid of something they perceived as wrong. “WE” can make a difference and “they” must be forced to learn that lesson.There is another way.
September 23
Loyalty
Loyalty; now there’s an interesting word. Quite popular when I was young and suddenly, these last two weeks it is back again. It would appear that the BBC did not want to spend enough money to continue to broadcast the Great British Bake Off. From what I read, they had been paying about £7,5 million for the latest series and upped their offer to £15 million for a new series to start in 2017. The company who make the show, called Love Productions, didn’t think this was enough so accepted an offer of £25 million from Channel 4. The show has very high ratings and is one of the BBC’s most popular shows.
The question I first have to ask is what will the viewer be getting that is worth another £17.5 million. A genuine question and one to which I would really love to know the answer. As a mere mortal, who has in his lifetime, earned about the average wage, yearly, I cannot see how you need that amount of money more to produce what will basically be the same show. From where I sit, it looks like pure greed on behalf of the people at Love Productions but what do I know, I am just a small part of the audience, entitled to an opinion nevertheless.
The show, for those of you don’t know, relies very heavily on the two judges, Mary Berry, a delightful lady of 81 who positively exudes old world charm and manners, and Paul Hollywood, a 50 ish chef who may be a very good cook but I am not really in a position to judge. Mr Hollywood is, so I am told a bit of a petrol-head, a word not in my vocabulary, but he has recently taken to motor racing, something, after nearly 60 years of devotion, I do have some knowledge about. His efforts this year haven’t exactly flambéed the brulee. He finds it difficult to get within 4 seconds of the best in the class he is racing in. It seems more like an expensive piece of self-gratification to me but, again, I cannot do other than give an opinion.
Thinking about it, the last time I heard the word petrol-head, it was being applied to Chris Evans, a man who managed one series hosting Top Gear before admitting, I believe, that he wasn’t much good. Anyone, Mr Hollywood, can bake a cake and anyone can drive a fast car fast; those that are any good stand out among their fellows.
The show also has Mel Geidroyc and Sue Perkins as hosts, injecting some gentle humour into the whole proceedings. After the BBC lost the show both Geidroyc and Perkins said they would not be going to Channel 4 with the show and a little later Mary Berry also said she would not move, “out of loyalty to the BBC”. Mr Hollywood, who may well need the money more, has agreed to move, almost certainly for an increased salary, presumably to allow him to fund his little boy racer dream.
But enough of Mr Hollywood, you can make your own decision about him, I would just like to say how nice it is to see some people can still show loyalty. If stories are to be believed Mary Berry was paid £500,000 by the BBC per series and Channel 4 offered her £7 million. That’s loyalty and I hope Channel 4 can make something of a show that Love Productions say will still be basically the same, although of course costing over 3 times as much to make and without 75% of the people who made it a success.
Mary Berry and the other two obviously had The Beatles song in mind, can’t buy me, Love Productions.
September 30
Democracy
Democracy – a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
I have, for several years, maybe even longer, lost faith in democracy. For a start if democracy does indeed mean government by the whole population, how come governments can be elected, under so-called democratic systems, by less than half the number of people eligible to vote.
Let me give you a silly example under the British system. There are five constituencies, each with 100 voters. We’ll make even more simple by having just two parties. Shall we call them Labour and Tory? As is usual in British elections only 70% turn out to vote; and that’s only because it isn’t raining.
In the first 3 constituencies, the Tory candidates receive 36 votes each and the Labour candidates 34 votes each. In the other two, the Labour candidates each get 65 votes and the Tories 5 each. The Tories win the elections as they have 3 seats against the Labour 2. There were 500 eligible voters. The Tories received 118 votes, or just over 23% of all voters. Labour got 232 votes or just over 46%. How come, in a democracy you would end up with a Tory government.
To be honest the only real democratic elections we have in the UK is when we have a referendum. Everyone can vote and the most votes wins. Seems simple to me.
But that is not my only reason for losing faith in democracy. In the UK, you cannot register to vote if you are an idiot (really?), an imbecile or a lunatic. But what does the average voter really know about governing a country? How can they tell who is suitable?
The current events across the pond would seem to indicate a very definite answer to those questions. By the way, their system of electing a President is even less democratic than ours as it relies on electoral colleges to vote on behalf of everyone else.
This was all brought home to me this week while watching a BBC news broadcast following the re-election, democratically as it happens, of Jeremy Corbyn. The BBC were going out on the old “vox pop” to see if Mr Corbyn would be seen as a good, potential, PM. One lady when questioned said no. When pushed she revealed that it was because he was too weak. Now you may hate him, his policies, his beliefs; you may think he is an ineffectual leader as 170 of his MP’s did (they were not interested in democracy by the way) but weak. This man had just stood up to what I consider to be bullying, to being disparaged by people he thought were colleagues and had never once wavered in his stance. If this was an indication of how the general public view a politician then we are all up shit creek without a paddle. Mr Corbyn showed amazing strength whether you agree with him or not.
Maybe, when either Clinton or Trump are elected, the public will do so because they are both seen as being so honest. Oh there goes a flying pig in a month of Sundays just rushing past a blue moon.