Taking the Pith

Taking the Pith

Long ago, but not very far away, children could write using a pen on paper. Moreover they could write at length. They didn’t use post-its. Consequently the first English lesson of September was to write a composition. The two word title was on the blackboard: My Holiday. The teacher would set us to write about our summer holidays. The poor or indolent among us would put up their hands and say, “But we didn’t have a holiday, we didn’t go away anywhere.”

The teacher (who would not be denied his or her forty minutes of grace before the melee of a new term) sighed gently and said, “Well just write about what you did, how you spent your time. Begin!”

The peremptory tone confirmed discussion was over. Silence reigned over the exercise books and desks. At the end, books would be collected in, class dismissed, and the teacher would set the next class the same task while marking the books of the previous lot.

Only when I became a teacher and set my new class this classic new term task did I understand the depths of banality such an exercise could produce.

My Holiday by Annette Davies

My Mum woke us up at six o’clock – in the morning! She and Dad were dressed and making breakfast. We had corn flakes and a cup of tea and then helped wash-up while Mum made the sandwiches and a flask of tea. Dad started putting the cases in the car and the tent. It was a bit of a squash. Then we loaded pillows and sheets and blankets and toys and games until you couldn’t see out of the windows. Janet and I were stuffed on the back seat under all the pillows. We were really squashed and then she started kicking me so I hit her with a pillow and Dad dragged Janet out of one side and smacked her and Mum dragged me out of my side and smacked me so we both started crying. The neighbours were starting to go to work so Mum and Dad got embarrassed and banged us back in the car and locked the door.

Wales was really boring. It rained all the time so we just sat in the tent playing cards while Dad and Mum went to Club bar. Then we came home.

The End.

Suffice it to say I never set such a composition again. I am now 73 and retired from teaching for fifteen years. But now and again the ghosts of Annette and Janet rear up again when I am listening to seemingly sapient, articulate and educated women of my age begin to tell me something of import. Nothing trivial or frivolous, no trifles, rather weighty subjects such as receiving dramatic news that a family member had been hospitalised, a dramatic emergency in the night calling kith and kin across the land to the hospital where a close relative may lie dying.

I listen sympathetically with bated breath to hear the meat of the matter, the pith of urgency if you like. This is what I often hear:

Well, I’d been out shopping and there were huge queues so it took me ages and then I was late for my hair appointment. Justine was telling me about the flat she and her boyfriend were moving into soon in Ludlow and how her Nails technician Samantha had got another job in Birmingham no less and was leaving in a fortnight so she was on the look-out for a new girl to do the nails and did I know anyone. Well, with one thing and another we ran out of time so I couldn’t get my nails done after all . . .

I say, “Yes, but who’s in hospital? What’s the emergency? Which hospital? Is it Jackie?

Rather waspishly: Let me explain, will you! I’m trying to tell you but you keep interrupting! Where was I? You’ve made me lose my thread now . . . Oh, yes, well, Justine said she’d book me in for a manicure and toe-nails as soon as she found a new Nails technician.

I say with some asperity: Yes, so who’s in hospital? What’s wrong?

I’m coming to that! Don’t be so impatient, let me tell my own story in my own way. So, I get home and unload the shopping and Bill was coming round for supper when the phone rang just as I was about to phone him. It was Bill!

Shussh, darling, let me finish. So he tells me that Sally has been rushed to hospital and he’ll be round in 20 minutes to pick me up and to pack an overnight bag. We’re going straight down to London to meet my brother Tommy and his son Owen and Vic, Sally’s husband. So I was in a flap putting the shopping away and throwing things into a holdall. Of course I forgot my charger, my makeup bag and my deep cleanser but on the dot he rang the doorbell, bungled me into his car and we sped off to London . . .

At this point I should point out that Sally, aged 62, is her younger and only sister, Tommy in his fifties her only brother. I foolishly interjected “Yes but what’s wrong with Sally? Is it the cancer again? Which hospital is she in?”

Stop it, Daniel, I’m telling you, can’t you see? Now, where was I . . .

So the spirit of Annette and millions of other hapless children are alive today in ladies of all ages across the country. The mystery of why the pith of the matter seems invariably to elude the fairer sex is surely deserving of scientific investigation. To ensure utter impartiality I suggest a team of female researchers at Oxford and Cambridge from a range of relevant disciplines put their heads together and finally account for one of the strangest variances between men and women.

I have found in my experience that men tend to be all pith and women primarily embroidery. What do others think?

DK            from a secret hiding place on the Long Mynd       7 February, 2024

The Holy Family

It’s gonna take some time, but I’ll get there
Top to toe in tailbacks
Oh, I got red lights all around
But soon there’ll be a freeway, yeah
Get my feet on holy ground

So I sing for you
Though you can’t hear me
When I get through
And feel you near me
Driving in my car
I’m driving home for Christmas

Driving home for Christmas
With a thousand memories
I take a look at the driver next to me
He’s just the same
Just the same.            ‘Driving Home for Christmas’, Chris Rea   

The profound and ancient myth of Christmas is the miraculous birth of the Son of God in a stable in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.

Not any more. For decades now anyone driving much over the month of December will have heard Christmas pop songs relentlessly. They all propagate the new myths of Christmas:

1. Everybody’s having fun
2. Spending Christmas with family is the new ‘holy ground’

Alas, like the original Christmas myth, they are without foundation. Apart from the most devout Christians, hardly anyone believes in the myth of Baby Jesus, gentle, meek and mild in the stable with the menagerie around him and Magi in residence applauding the virgin birth and the arrival of the Messiah. Hardly anyone.

And now the new myths have lost their lustre. Christmas is and has been for some time now an orgy of consumption with drunkenness the lubrication oiling the wheels.

And why do we need to be so sedated at this holy, festive time? Myth 2.

If your own memory doesn’t speak truth to you the facts will: every single organisation charitably devoted to our well-being records Christmas as the most distressing and upsetting time of year for many of us. The Samaritans receive an overwhelming number of calls from severely depressed people contemplating suicide. In the days following Christmas, Relate and solicitors receive more inquiries about divorce than at any other time of year.

So I think we can lay Chris Rea’s myth of the family as ‘holy ground’ to rest. And all the other exhibitions of the joys of a family Christmas as well. To put it bluntly, Christmas is such a hyped-up myth of universal fun and how fabulous family get-togethers are that, while the anticipation is great, the consummation is devoutly to be missed.

I shall conclude with a line from Coleridge’s ‘Ode: On Dejection’:

We cannot hope from outward forms to win

The joy whose spring and fountains lie within.

Then and Now

Then: populist = popular, broadly supported by the majority of voters

Now: Fascist

Then: Right wing or Conservative = the established, traditional, common view on most affairs, balanced, tolerant, open to discussion based on evidence, reason and logic

Now: Fascist

Then: Left Wing = Socialist or Communist

Now: indisputably virtuous, wise and unchallengeable

Then: Centre Ground = the broad consensus in society on what is fair, just and true

Now: ?????

Sir Winston Churchill once observed that the greatest argument against democracy would be found simply by asking the man or woman in the street for their views on politics and society in general.

US President Bill Clinton whilst in office said that “The average guy is an ass-hole.”

It seems that someone who enters politics may not despise his electorate but by the time he leaves it he will. This is particularly true of those who rise to cabinet office.

 If you encourage a fool in his folly and a knave in his knavery the result is a government led by Boris Johnson with Matt Hancock as Health Secretary and Gavin Williamson ruling Education.

We, the electorate, of course have our follies and vices but there is only one way we damage our fellow citizens: by electing to office fools and knaves.

The Achilles’ heel of democracy now extends all the way to the head.

And solution there is none save decline and fall. Thus perish all tyrants and democracy has turned into the greatest tyranny of all.

The Edge of War

02/12/23 Watching the excellent film ‘Munich: The Edge of War’ featuring a superb cast including Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain and Ulrich Matthes as Hitler signing the Munich Agreement of September 1938,  (one year before Chamberlain declared war on Germany). I was struck by a remarkable echo of our leaders today.

I detected the same clubbishness, the same naivete and glib gullibility, the same old boy network in new clothes. Rishi Sunak is the odd one out but since he has transferred policy to Lord Cameron, James Cleverley and Jeremy Hunt the parallel pertains.

Lord Cameron is The Great Appeaser. He is the ‘clubbable’ sort who wants to get on with all sorts of people and will in due course sell our allies down the river, Israel, Ukraine, all a matter of time.

“I have a piece of paper from Herr Hitler,” Chamberlain waved the flimsy about. Is that not Lord Cameron to the life?

History has warned us in the most brutal terms. And still we learn nothing.

Brain-worms

                                      Brain-worms

There are certain works of the imagination which although imperfectly crafted contain an idea, a thought which the mind entertains it, can never be banished. You may be familiar with some of them. The three which come to mind immediately are all Gothic classics of the 19^th century.

Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ – 1818

Her frightening account of the folly of o’er-reaching Science and the monstrosities which ensue. We recall the nobility of Dr Frankenstein’s project: to overcome death. The novel confirms conclusively how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ – 1886

Ah, the good Doctor Jekyll, a man dedicated to healing the sick and relieving the poor. A selfless physician who has observed at close hand the suffering caused by the evil that lurks in the heart of a man. Surely some potion could excise this heart of darkness and leave only a pure, good-hearted, kindly Christian nature? As we know, Dr Jekyll is diligent in his researches and eventually synthesises the very thing. Alas he brings into being his own evil shadow: Mr Hyde takes over the doctor’s soul with a vengeance. We are left to contemplate how a man’s evil can dwarf and eventually destroy his goodness. And the notion of a split personality is with us for all time.

Bram Stoker’s ‘Count Dracula’ – 1897.

Again, conquering death, achieving immortality is the goal but Dracula’s motives are far from noble. The Count’s existence is laced with bad blood, a study in serology and sin. The fangs, the biting of the necks, the sucking of the innocent blood to sustain the vampire’s conscienceless, predatory lust for life: his at the cost of others’. Like the grotesque figure of the monster, Dracula’s visage, fangs, blood lust cloaked in darkness is imprinted on our imaginations forever.As you will have noted, all three novels are studies in the misuses of Science. All have a Calvinist sense of ineradicable evil in men. All defy the ameliorism of 19^th century thought: Science and Reason will of course eliminate villainy and vice. And interestingly, all feature women solely as victims or bystanders. Make of that you will. Autre temps, autres moeurs. All three, of course, have the same theme and mood: morbidity.

So far we have saluted the great and good of the Gothic imagination. Nearer our own time, a Hollywood film from 1956 has made an equally haunting impression upon me. Although I was only 6 when the film was released and blissfully unaware of it, I became in my teens an avid reader of science fiction and a keen viewer of films of that genre on television. So it was that around 1062 I think I finally watched ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ in black and white on the BBC. A Wikipedia summary of the film, for those unacquainted with it, can be found below.

Why did this SF film make such a lasting impression upon me? Taking the reasons in turn:

1. It was pungently and powerfully of its time: the post-war boom in America, the McCarthy era, the suffocating conformity, the fear of ‘Reds’, aliens in human form, communists all around you in invisible conspiracies. The Cold War, the Arms race, the nuclear bunkers and the four minute warnings. The film portrays the sinister change coming over the citizens of a small town in Middle America. Conformity, agreeing with everyone else, sounding and thinking like everyone else was contagious, a disease passed silently from one to another. Individuality and independence of mind drained away. The town doctor played by Kevin McCarthy is increasingly aware and disturbed by this malaise but the townspeople succumb so rapidly, including the police, medical and emergency services that he soon realises he is the odd one out, he is the outsider, the alien. The irony is razor sharp. There is no happy ending: the final shot is of Main Street, the doctor surrounded by the zombie townsfolk, no help at hand. His expression of bewilderment, fear and horror says it all.

None of this had to do with me as a teenager in Birkenhead in 1962 but . . . it resonated.

Years passed and in my twenties and thirties I’d come across the film again and watch it again. I found it compelling.

• Twenty years on I knew that the extra-terrestrial invasion of the body snatchers was pure metaphor and a brilliant one at that. Director Don Siegal (later to work with Clint Eastwood, ‘Dirty Harry’ et al) turned SF hokum into a deadly, deadpan, ice-cold satire on the suffocating timidity and conformity of American life post McCarthy.

Today I see exactly that phenomenon in every aspect of modern life in the UK and the US. Cancel culture, micro-aggressions, utter intolerance of contrary views, a hatred and fear of debate and argument, a jihadist frenzy in which those who disagree with you are infidels. Meanwhile governments stand idly by, shuffling their feet and nodding sagely, looking away, mouthing empty words or plainly indulging hysterical fanatics. I cannot believe there is a family or town in the land that is not riven by the divide between the ‘woke’ and those who attempt to engage with them in reasoned, evidence-based discussion.

What to do? Watch the 1956 film and follow the doctor on his mission. But don’t hold your breath.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 American science-fiction horror film produced by Walter Wanger, directed by Don Siegel, and starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. The black-and-white film was shot in 2.00:1 Superscope and in the film noir style. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the screenplay from Jack Finney‘s 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers.^[2] The film was released efiction film The Atomic Man (and in some markets with Indestructible Man).^[3]

The film’s storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this “quiet” invasion and attempts to stop it.

The slang expression “pod people” that arose in late 20th-century U.S. culture refers to the emotionless duplicates seen in the film.^[2] Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”^[4][5]

Wikipedia

Original article by David Kelly                                             23/10/23

Great Bedlam

Great Bedlam                        (formerly known as Britain, a land where things once worked.)

Great Bedlam is the sixth largest economy in the world. Its history is one of conquest, naval supremacy, sound money, an established democracy, the Mother of Parliaments, outstanding schools and universities and a remarkable roll-call of artistic and cultural achievements from architecture to music, from poetry to palaces. Its police force was once the envy of the world.

That was then (c 1500 to 1950). In the 20^th and 21^st centurieswhat wasonceBritain suffered the most precipitous decline ever witnessed. The Fall of Rome in 476 AD seems a model of clarity, reason and piety in comparison.

Despite having a GDP of £2.2 Trillion and the appearance of being a 1^st world country, Great Bedlam is in fact bankrupt in every way it can be. GB is a member of the UN Security Council, the G7, the G20, gee whiz and Cop the Lot.

Alas, GB owes £2,365 Billion to mysterious foreign investors who bizarrely seem to think us a good investment. I may not know much about economics and high finance but I know asset-stripping when I smell it in the wind. If you go to the pawn-broker and pledge away everything, come pay-back time you’re left busted. Thus Great Bedlam plc.

This level of national debt requires the government to borrow a further £137 B pa to keep the welfare state going. The NHS, for example, costs us £190 B pa but we don’t really pay that: we borrow as much as £90 B pa to get by. Clearly this is unsustainable. How will we know when the House of GB starts falling down?

Look around you: it already has.

‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Shelley in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 1821. We shall see.

1. for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

             From ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, 1867

• I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

            From ‘Easter 1916’ by W B Yeats

• Because the barbarians are coming today

      and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

      And some of our men just in from the border say

      there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

From ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by C P Cavafy, 1898

So, what think’st thou? I cannot tell you what you think or what to think. All I know is that these poems show me the true Great Bedlam through a mirror darkly. Are things so bad?

The Pillars of Society and Civilisation

1. Legitimate and effective parliamentary democracy?                No
2. A serious, legitimate and beneficial education and university system?                                                                                               No
3. A well-organised, cost-effective health service which treats all patients equally, fairly and effectively?                                        No
4. A Criminal Justice system which serves the citizen and victim rapidly and convincingly and not the criminal?                       No
5. A Police Service dedicated solely to protecting the public, deterring or detecting criminals and then charging and bringing them to court promptly?                                                                               No
6. With rapid and vigorous agencies to investigate miscarriages of justice to ensure the innocent are not penalised and the guilty (whether in the police or on the bench) are exposed and punished?  No
7. In all aspects and at all levels of public service, dereliction of duty, incompetence, dishonesty, corruption and self-serving greed are rooted out and met with instant dismissal without pension?  No        
8.  These strictures to apply throughout local government?       No
9. A strong, diligent and effective Border Security service, military in character, training and dedication to protecting our borders?    No
10. A fully equipped and resourced military with rigorous evaluation and recruitment processes focusing unflinchingly on national security and dismissing ‘woke’ gobbledegook out of hand? No 

I could go on but you get the point. I see no remedy or alternative to this mass decline in the principles, convictions, confidence and courage of the myriad groups on which the Pillars of Civilisation stand.

Decline is followed by Fall, just as the apple drops from the tree. And lands. And rots.

Are we waiting for the barbarians, as Cavafy wrote?

No, they’re already here. Prepare for the ruins.

Oh, they’re around us already.

David Kelly                                                                                             29/08/23

Boris: Trashing the Office

Re Tim Stanley (“It would be utterly wrong to pin every problem on Boris”, DT 12 June)

When will the commentariat admit what the rest of us know: Boris Johnson was the most catastrophic leader we have ever had. He even managed to make Tony Blair look at least acceptable.

Boris is a true Con-Man. Not a true Conservative, far from it. A dishonest, corrupt, chaotic, incompetent, pathological liar for whom cronyism, evasion and subterfuge were a way of life. Oh, but he called the big issues right, his vassals cry. Really? Huawei? HS2? Lockdown?

He was forced by wiser counsel and force majeure to drop Huawei. In his pig-headed fashion he ploughed on with HS2 saddling all of us with the most expensive white elephant in history. And Lockdown – at a stroke, the panic reaction of an hysterical coward who did more to damage this country in six months than Hitler and the Third Reich did in six years.

Oh yes, and COP 26. What a Boris farrago. A myriad of private jets from the world over descending on garbage-ridden Glasgow, the streets awash with litter because council workers were on strike demanding Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP pay them more. A few days of huff and puff promising preposterous paths to Net Zero before jetting off again leaving vapour trails of their green credentials. Even Boris took a jet from Glasgow to London. Pressing affairs of state? No, he just didn’t want to miss a swanky dinner party at the Ritz with cordon bleu to bust and the finest vintage wines and champagne courtesy of his host and Tory crony Sir Charles Moore.

And now we are saddled with Net Zero, certain suicide for any advanced industrial society with EVs that run out or crush bridges and crash through multi-storey car parks because of the infernal weight of their bloated, unfeasibly huge batteries. Oh, and don’t forget heat-pumps, the most expensive, impractical and ruinous way to heat your home known to humanity.

You seek his monument: Net Zero; The NHS. Our ‘education’ system. Transgender madness; Wokery that has poisoned the well of learning taking our universities back to the Dark Ages; Furloughing; Working From Home? The fissures running through every strata of society after Lockdown. Every pillar of our society wracked by strikes. GB plc bankrupt. Boris is remarkably responsible for the insane levels of public debt that will sink his successors of whatever party.

And he’s planning a come-back? This country is finished if it is deluded enough to think that Boris Johnson is the answer to anything.

Discretion is the Lesser Part of Valour

And I believe this with every fibre of my bedding.

Whistle-blowing is the opposite of discretion. Whistle-blowers are insiders who see corruption, dishonesty, deception, hypocrisy, cupidity and egotistical self-interest in the ivory towers and on the hands of the ‘Great and the Good’.

NHS: No Health Service

Matthew Taylor, the jaundiced looking chap with the preposterously black hair, is popping up on telly a lot these days. He is, apparently, the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation. He was, you may recall, a great crony of Tony Blair in the good old days of Debacle New Labour. He was around the table when in 2006 John Reid, Health Secretary, reported to Cabinet that under Tony Blair’s instructions he had concluded an new deal with doctors and GPs whereby the state would pay them significantly more for significantly less work and a real reduction in patient reduction. We had 24 hours to save the NHS, Blair proclaimed in 1997. If you seek his monument, look around you.

I only mention this v because Matthew Taylor is doing a lot of gnashing and wailing about the dire, existential state of our crisis-ridden health service, dying under the waves of emergencies lapping around it. A chorus of highly paid cronies daily echo his piteous cries about the doom and disaster upon us – someone must do something! By this they mean pumping more and more borrowed billions which tax-players will have to fund to save the most disorganised and poorly managed health service in the developed world.

What have all these chief executives and senior, middle and minor managers been doing for the past twenty years apart from sucking up billions and billions (156 B pa, at last count) for treating fewer and fewer patients and having the worst rates for patient care and recovery in the West?

We know we have endured lamentable governments for the last 30 years but politicians don’t actually run the NHS or work for it in any capacity. So who does?

Chief Executives like Taylor and the elusive almost invisible Head of NHS England Amanda Pritchard who was Deputy alongside Stephen Smith during the lockdown debacle. And with a CV with nothing to boast about she was promoted on the nod by the hapless and hopeless Matt Hancock. Three no-marks in a row.

The massed managers of the NHS, on bloated salaries and growing every year. We can apparently dispense with nurses, doctors, anaesthetists, surgeons, ambulance drivers, paramedics but shed a single manage? Quelle Horreur! They shriek as if the tumbrils were in their way.

And when Health Secretary Sajid Javid commissioned a retired brigadier to conduct a root and branch review of NHS staffing and management, what did he recommend? More managers! When Boris blustered and blew an extra £36 billion on the NHS last year, what happened to it? An additional 47 managers were appointed on salaries of minimum £47 k pa to oversee this bonus expenditure. Has the NHS produced one iota of information on how these billions were spent and the improvements to patient care that resulted? Of course not. Grow up, son, this is the No Health Service, a racket designed to suck up and swallow billions of BORROWED money to line their own pockets. And we’re long past tax-payers paying for it. Bond markets pay for it, loaning us trillions and so interest rates rise catastrophically and Joe Blow goes home broke.

Thank you Boris. Thank you, NHS.

The unions. Say no more. So many caring professionals going on repeated strikes demanding money that doesn’t exist in the bankrupt GB plc.

So, after 30 years of tinkering with the NHS we have a bankrupt No Health Service with more managers and administrators and fewer clinicians than any other developed country and we call ourselves ‘world beating’? A terrible truth is dawning. What happens next will be ugly. Lie low. And whatever you do, don’t get ill.

                                                                                                                

The Thatcher Revolution

Has anyone else noticed that during the 1980s this island race gave birth to a great number of perfectly formed and delightful girls who would go on to dominate every television channel in the land to present the news, comment on every aspect of modern society from sport to economics and interview all of the leaders in their field from the PM downwards. Or upwards.

In almost every programme I watch I see stylish, attractive women, invariably with long, lustrous blonde or black hair and make- up worthy of a Hollywood star. Surely this is the Thatcher revolution at its best.

Does anyone have an explanation for this remarkable phenomenon?