Mind Your Bike

One of the unforeseen consequences of having satellite TV is that viewing has changed radically. Instead of watching typical programmes or comedies or films or the endless repeats from past times there are choices.

Sport offers many. I do not mean the violence and bloodshed of the average World Cup game, which sent even Maradona the former famed Argentina player into a severe collapse. There are others and they do not include the flashy screening of cricket or the bump and grind of rugby.

There is golf, very green, scenic and at a predictable pace, in which you begin to understand the skills involved. The players do have clubs but these are for hitting the golf balls and not each other, although a peeved player might throw one into the water or bunker where he or she did not want to be.

There are water sports, equestrian but not cavalry charges, they are a sort of gentile way of jumping about with the ooh aah factor of will they won't they, the lively netball etc., to keep you watching when you understand the rules.

One sport which can be enjoyable is cycling. Admittedly, there is coverage of persons and large groups chasing each other along roads but the presenters realise that this is not enough and with helicopters and a range of other cameras to hand give us the pictures of the country, terrain and towns etc..

I have learned a lot from watching various races from different countries and mostly those from France. What is striking is how much Europe has changed in many places over the last half century. Looking down on towns I knew from decades ago I see the differences from the present.

Places we stayed will have expanded, taking in the nearby hamlets and farms. The roads are very different in layout and extent. But above all is the expansion upwards, so much of the recent development and therefore population growth is in much higher buildings sometimes of several stories and looking like large lumps of concrete.

Decades ago most gardens would have been tended in such a way as to provide vegetables and fruit and not just flowers. This seems to have gone and many are without flowers as well. In the rural parts the people have left the fields either to work in the many large sheds or factory installations  or into the occasional large machine to be seen either churning up the fields or ripping out the plants.

Clearly, whole ways of life are no more, histories have been lost and possibly the people of the past are replaced by others who may not know how to tend the land in the old ways and may not care to in that it means many hours of tedious work and hard labour.

There may still be crops and livestock being produced but they are not the same as in the past. They have to be suited to the needs of the food processing and manufacturing firms who now give us the bulk of our food choices, evidenced by the bulk of so many of our new adults and children of the younger generations.

These are global developments, not confined to Europe. But the EU agricultural policies and payment systems are designed to reinforce it and as our agriculture becomes locked into this because it cannot afford to or is not able to get out this is our future.

We are not longer living off the fat of the land we are the fat of the land.

State Of The Game

It is hot, the pollen is high, as is the humidity, none of it, especially the World Cup makes much sense so this is brief.

A lot of those who are active are talking about decent public services.

The real problem is that most of the media, notably the popular press and a great deal of TV is more interested in indecent personal services.

Until the weather breaks I shall be following my nose.

Laying It On Thick

Looking through The Mail among the tales of woe, mystery and disasters was an article telling us that in order to build the houses needed for all those property investing Mail readers, news stands being worth £500 a square foot, 15,000 bricklayers will be needed as of now.

But as British bricks are, well, British, it may not be possible to fly in the men, or women, or uncertain persons from far away because they do not use British bricks there. It is only a matter of hours before someone come up with a new type of National Service, requiring our poor much put upon teenagers to do the business.

There are one or two other snags. One is that bricks are made from certain kind of clay. This means stripping out many fields in a limited number of areas. So much for the rural lands and the beauties of country England. Then more fields are wanted for the houses made of bricks.

Why can't some scientist come up with a way of making building materials out of household waste? Instead of looking for more places for all that waste we have and to avoid burning it and frying the planet, could we make a sort of brick that will do for housing all those property owning peasants that now have the vote?

But when I were a lad, the idea of the people shut away in separate housing units in unwelcoming suburbs flat on the ground was thought to be so out of date. It was the age of Le Corbusier and a ravening horde of architects who wanted to build high with walkways and highways in the sky.

It did look pretty on paper, but sadly, as we know with architects, there was a problem with the costs. Those they first thought of were massively less than those we finished up having to pay. So the high rise things not only often had dodgy foundations, they created a great deal of dodgy debt.

Meanwhile we live in a way our ancestors could never have imagined possible. The young are all supposed to have their own rooms and facilities. The old are separated out, because they tend to smell a bit. The ones in between are entitled to their own separate lives as they wish. 

Our government could go in for central planning on this. But given their form they might well forget the mortar as well as having trowels the wrong shape.

And all bricklayers must be the same height and width.

Loose Fitting

In the news is the story that Duke Amstrad The Incompatible, alias Alan Sugar, went all thumbs with his Tweet button and made a racist comment.

Mentioning Marbella, dropping a hint that he is very rich because you have to be to have a property there, he asserted that a World Cup side reminded him of beach vendors from a particular Continent.

We have met many beach vendors in our time, now long ago, and they were a varied lot, having pitched up where we did. Only we were there for a "holiday" of sun, sand, sea and a dose of the runs if you were not careful. Some of the memories are still with us.

There was the English elderly lady who had splurged her savings to be there and needed to augment her pension. So in the morning when in the kitchen doing breakfast she would make cakes and later would be going along the beach with cries of "tout a beurre", "petite gateaux Anglais".

We occasionally bought some with the cry "Eh up, just like Barnsley", which caused people close to us to move giving us more space to spread out in. Then there was the Australian selling ice cream with a strident "Come and get your salmonella".

We passed on that on but asking politely if highway robbery was the crime his ancestor had committed to get to Aus'. Probably, I would get done for that one as an "ism" these days.

There were also Africans selling fabrics which in fact were very good as well as being striking in design and quite cheap. On one occasion the lady took a couple and in the evening ran up a loose frock for her when we were out later round the local bars.

That year the fashion designers from Paris were in town in the summer because Brigitte was having big parties and it was later that the annual fashion shows had African designs as a major feature of some of the collections.

Near fifty years on and in a different century and another world I suppose we would face allegations of cultural appropriation.

Learning Skills

It may seem odd to compare my wandering around the net to the business of universities granting more first class degrees than in the past, but I wonder. I started by looking at the TV schedules to find a reason to skip the sport for a change. One section was the films.

There was the usual collection of films ancient and modern, many of which are on offer for the umpteenth time and which I can almost recite by heart. But one turned up that I recalled from very long ago and wondered if it was an option.

Checking it out, I realised that while it was a "good" film of its period in terms of the drama, acting skills and plot etc. it was not one for me being very much of the past. But the name of the Director caught the eye.

Something went ping back in the memory bank, sixty years ago I had been sharing a flat with some others and one of them had that name, only a different first name. It was unusual and distinctive. A couple of minutes later I had read his obituaries, he had done very well and died a distinguished academic.

Five minutes later I had his relationship to the film director. It explained the memory. He had started his Ph.D studies and had access to some interesting stuff, one item of which he brought back to the flat in a taxi. It was a large black box.

Wire recording was new and very expensive and we had a couple of days to enjoy the march of science and play with it. We omitted to clear the wires with the consequence that when demonstrated later to a senior academic audience they were surprised at the quality of our singing and even more so by the songs.

This point is that I put this bit of history together in a few minutes. The question is how long might it have take to do all that in decades past. There is a lot of history etc. that I can do now in vastly shorter times than what was required.

In short I have become more efficient. As our students of today are almost all net experienced and capable of extensive searching, then they can be learning and understanding a lot more in far less time than the old academic things of lectures, classes, libraries and wading through print to find what you want.

If, on top of that that those providing courses are making it much clearer as to what they want studied, what the parameters are and have refined the content and structure to create a clear basis for the student work, this will have consequences.

One is that a lot more students will be turning in much better work and be more capable of coping with the nature of modern examinations. Had my lot had the advantages of those of today in the running and working of courses of atudy, how many fewer might have failed and how many more would be achieving higher standards?

I realise that suggesting that higher education could now be more efficient than it was may not be popular with many.

So how long does it take you to find out what is on TV these days?
                                                                                              

Banging Heads

When one of our governments finest thinking, policies for action, wide reforms or plans for the future culminate in an inglorious shambles we are familiar with the way the blame game begins to play out.

It is invariably messy, sometimes vicious or nasty and the one certain thing is that those responsible will be quick to accuse either their critics or anyone who is unlucky enough to be passing by at the time .

The present government is winding up to the next election and seeks to make us all happy, that is if our vote counts. So we are having all the high minded rhetoric about wonders of the future to come. The opposition have to come with schemes that sound better, at least in the media and its connections.

But who are the crucial people in all this? The media want us to believe it is them and their political affiliates and are very persuasive, money no option, 20 billion more for the NHS, the cheque is in the post. What is left of our political parties out there find themselves at pop fests with celeb's and believe this is the way.

The Civil Service, anxious to justify its numbers, vast cost and above all pension schemes lay their claim and inevitably those in Education put up their hands to say it is all down to use, chuck the loot and the money this way, and then add a bit, and then another bit.

Add to this major organisations of one kind of another, pressure groups, trade unions, Women's Institutes and the Society For Restoring Everything and the claims are big, wide and large. Most of the population seems to be in there with their hands out for all the quantitative easing to be had.

But the truth can now be told as this LSE article suggests. It is all, or at least mostly, down to the Knowledge Brokers, the new gang on the block who take the politicians etc. down the yellow brick road of policy making to a better and happier future, at least for them.

But, would you let your daughter/son marry one?

Singing Songs

The lady with the birthday this week, a star of her day is now 101.  Looking back at her career it is something that not many today might understand, a long gone and different world. Vera Lynn's first hit was back in 1936, does anyone remember it?

You may know vaguely of the title, it was "Up The Wooden Hill To Bedfordshire", in that this saying has been used by parents down the generations to urge the kids upstairs to first get a bit of peace and then second to get control of the TV remote and now to go on the net.

Why did she make it to the top and so soon? Because she recorded songs with a very good backing band and when the BBC was being told to be less stuffy and more popular because in the time of 1930's financial stringency The People were mindful of where the tax money was going and why.

A key reason lay in the actual quality of her voice. The timbre, resonance and balance fitted the technology of the period both on the records being sold and in the radio of the time. She sounded well and what is more held the audiences in live performance.

Also, she was an East End girl made good with an open manner and way of putting things over without being too serious. It worked well in the theatre and even better standing near the front line in North Africa or Burma with a thousand and more troops marveling that she was there and ready to take the same risks as they did.

In recent decades she has been retired. To put it simply her market segment is now too small for the numbers needed to gain the advertising revenue that are the stuff of modern TV and radio, or in the case of the BBC to justify its programming to committees.

In performance she sang a range of songs for the wider audience, and these included Ivor Novello songs from her parent's generation as well as those from her own. "Keep The Home Fires Burning" would have been one with a special meaning. Her father was listed in 1939 as a central heating stoker.

Perhaps that is her talent, an ordinary girl who became extraordinary in a world in crisis.