Flapping Wings And Feeding Time

Taking a walk today through the local tourist attraction we had three black swans chasing us hoping for food.  Was this an omen?  Those who follow economic and financial crashes in detail will have heard the phrase "Black Swan Event".  Essentially, it means that something that was not supposed to exist or could not happen would appear.

 

It came from the certainty at one time in Europe that all swans were white and could not be black.  A visit to Australia proved them wrong, but then if you go there with one notion or another they will be all too happy to put you right in the mistakes you make.  The idea was taken by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for his work on financial crashes.

Today our Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeffrey according to President Obama, formerly George, formerly Gideon, Osborne has been telling us of what has to be done to put the national finances to rights.  After three years of severe austerity it seems that we have spent more and owe more than ever before.

So the delicate grinding and polishing of the last three years has not done the job and given what the future may hold it is out with the adze and plane to hack and trim away.  Whether the axe may have to be used, or the sledgehammer will have to be seen. 

The basic problem is that for thirty or more years now since North Sea Oil arrived we have made so many promises pledges and political deals that we can no longer pay the bills from our own revenues and have been borrowing large scale.  Not just that but their nature meant that they were mostly compound in effect. 

Our government and governors forgot the difference between simple interest and compound interest with predictable consequences.  In the old Elementary Schools this was one of the "basics" of arithmetic taught by teachers with a moral lesson on the need to avoid debt and to save or spend only what you could be certain you could afford.

We are not alone.  In Zero Hedge today there was an item about the predicament of President O'Blimey, whose Irish Ancestry is distantly connected to that of Osborne above.  They both had very distant relatives who sailed on the "Titanic".  It says that each and every person in the USA is now in hock for over $52,000 and rising because of interest liabilities.

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-06-25/death-leverage

The President is more than anxious to do a trade deal with the EU, another entity in serious money trouble and for the UK to be part of it.  The fond hope seems to be that if we more or less pool our debts and trade with each other then somehow or another all our troubles will vanish.  The most serious and insightful comment on this prospect is possibly the nursery rhyme about the Owl and The Pussycat.

http://www.powerfulwords.info/nursery_rhymes/the_owl_and_the_pussycat.htm

What worries me is why the black swans were hungry.  It may be because all the recent run off from the unexpected wet weather has sluiced so much fertiliser into the stream serving their lake that it is now covered with algae and their natural food has gone missing.

How many hungry black swans are there out there now wanting food?

Painting Pictures

In the news this week have been stories about the exhibition of LS Lowry works at the Tate Gallery in London.  They are said to have been down in store for a long time and were dusted off for the occasion.  There is a debate in the art world as to how far Lowry is "art" and his standing, many feel his work should not have been relegated to the store. 

On the other hand The Tate has to keep coming up with major new exhibitions to bring the punters and the tourists in and as decade follows decade there are more and more artists to show and more to reclaim from the past.  So whose work stays on the wall and whose does not is a cause of some strife.  This is something I want to keep away from but simply to add some comments.

One is that the day job he had was a rent man.  This occupation did not make you many friends or welcome in the local pub or club.  If he was not sardonic and cynical before he began that work then he certainly would have been after not too long encountering the local population.  It is likely that he had few illusions about human nature and tended to see it how it was.

He would have developed a detailed knowledge about his patch which enabled to have ready insights into others and the day to day life of any of the towns and villages he knew.  There would not be much he missed or could not appreciate in terms of its own realities.

Also he was a man of his time, born in 1887  not long after my grandparents and whose lifetime overlapped well into my own.  More to the point this was very much the environment and the places which the lady knew all too well.  When she looks at Lowry it is her own childhood and her parents she sees and how it was.

One striking feature of his works is the colouring.  The memory of those surviving from the 1950's is that everything was dirty and blackened.  This is enhanced by the black and white films of the past and the photographs also mostly in the same form.  There were not many colour shots of the periods and the archives do not have a great deal to draw in that form.

But Lowry was born in 1887 and grew up in a period when large areas of new and replacement housing was being put up.  The replacements came as a result of the types of leasehold as well as  clearances.  It was also an age of local government reform and a great age of municipal life with very many public buildings going up as well.

Add to that the Churches and Chapels trying to out build each other in the race for congregations.  In this world at the time these were important social facilities.  There were not many alternatives if you wanted to keep out of the pubs.  Many of the clubs in the period were places not for drink or entertainment but also for educational and common interests, notably the Temperance Clubs. 

So he would know these buildings from the time they were built and in their original colouring and style.  Later two World Wars and a long period of depression meant years of skimped maintenance, little or no exterior cleaning and the acceptance that the soot and dirt would win.  So by the 1940's and into the 1950's we were left with grim black blocks of deteriorating buildings.  Lowry's work gives them back to us as they were.

Then there are the people, and the term "matchstick men".  But the net allows a good hard look at many of his works and it is not at all like that.  There is a variety of shapes and it is crucial to know that then people were indeed thinner.  On the whole they were far more active, had less food and also a lot less sugar.  Food costs were high, some grew fat  if they had more cash, but not many and nowhere near the numbers of today.

One thing that I can be certain of was on the typical diet of the time, anyone doing ten to fourteen hour shifts on their feet and having to do some and perhaps a good deal of walking were going to be a great deal slimmer, fitter and sharper that the great majority of people today.  Also much of life was outside.  Before radio or TV or the age of the Picture Palaces there was the incentive to go out if the weather was anything like fit enough.

One subtle thing that comes across in his works is the intense communal life that so many lived then both in work and the little leisure they had.  It is difficult to explain just what it was like in the many industrial towns of that era in how people interacted and lived. 

Unluckily as so much of the film and literary life of the period was London based with almost invariably the provincial working and other classes being caricaturised it is now lost save in the works of now little read authors who will never appear on any school or university reading list.  Who today reads Arnold Bennett?

It is a lost world and it was our world and it is a world scrubbed from the histories of ourselves.

Bumping Along On The Crest Of A Hole

When we take to the road in The Flying Shed, our ageing and unfashionable car we are all too aware of the costs involved.  The MOT test is coming up and now there are often things to be done.  This time round there is a real concern and that is the tyres.  They are not old, we do not do a high mileage and nor do either of us go in for the screeching tyre style of driving.

But they might all have to be changed at some cost.  The reason is the rough riding we have had since the winter.  Again we drive on the ordinary town roads and do not wander down many lanes or country roads.  There are too many fast hard driven "Chelsea Tractors" on them for safety.  But there are now so many pot holes and bad surfaces to do damage to the tyres and possibly the suspension.

The road damage of last winter is still extensive and unlikely to be repaired before next winter.  So any run of bad weather and by next spring our roads will be really bad.  If it is tricky for long experienced careful drivers on four wheels then it is risky for others and especially those on two wheels, cyclists or motorised forms.

Apparently this is not just the case in our area, it is common around the country, better in some places, worse in others.  But overall we have a problem with road surfaces.  So when we see schemes to spend billions of government money on new projects when existing facilities are becoming badly run down and routine maintenance is not being done we wonder why.

All of us are aware of countries elsewhere with magnificent public buildings and high profile facilities but where the great majority of the population lives in abject poverty amid filth and lack of facilities.  These are places where you might have a decent road where government needs it but off those are wrecks of a former system and tracks that are like those of centuries past.

We have new developments taking place and with new roadways attached as is the case in many other places.  But soon the other roads and those leading to them will become badly worn and then subject to all the usual delays of emergency repairs or warnings of risk.  But it is not just the roads.

Most of our services and other provision is now in the process of gradual deterioration.  It will not be a sudden business but slow steady and inevitable over a decade or two.  I have seen this before in some places, once great economic centres, now benefits based with adjacent service industry.

Apart from a few places, notably in patches of the South East favoured by the political and business class, it seems to be becoming more widespread and persistent.  Yet we are told that a huge proportion of the limited investment has to go to big schemes carried out by big companies with big finance attached which will take most of the cream.

So what kind of states are they which have these major wonderful projects sticking up in the middle of an impoverished, inefficient, backward and poorly serviced population?  They are usually corrupt, badly governed, criminalised and dangerous places to be.

Welcome to UK Unlimited. 

Crime With And Without Punishment

It is widely reported that our prisons are full and the demand for places exceeds supply.  So there are suggestions for new very large ones which take thousands who can be dealt with allegedly more effectively and what is called humanely and with the advantage of major reductions of cost per head. 

At the same time there is widespread and perhaps justified concern over the leniency in sentencing in many cases.  To this should be added large numbers of cases which are not brought to court but dealt with by cautions or warnings.  Some offenders seem to rack up an astonishing number of offences with no custodial sentence being applied.

But the media and the net are now awash with demands to bang up and for a very long time persons engaged in activities for which they were once praised and admired by those who now decry them.  They are bankers and other financiers and those who were tasked with managing the National Health Service. 

The one has lost billions, perhaps trillions in money the other thousands of patients who might have been saved and perhaps tens of thousands damaged beyond repair.  They are not alone.  The Supreme Court has said that the families of lost soldiers can go to court. 

The leading cases here are men sent into battle without the equipment they might have had.  The feeling is that there is a common thread to all these disasters and that is alleged criminal conduct of those in charge.  There are a number of questions at present about the way our defence contracts are handled.

It is perverse that the rights legislation, intended to protect privacy is said to have been a useful tool to ensure information could not get out, those responsible could not be identified to respect the rights of those they killed and those who objected and tried to call attention to the issues could be fired or subject to very rough handling. 

The puzzle is even greater.  For example in recent decades there has been a huge reduction in hospital and allied facilities for those with severe mental conditions,  For them "care in the community" was to be the answer.  When it came to priorities it was their fate that this category rated low for those engaged in providing public and complex medical services.

The upshot of this is that large numbers found themselves in trouble and packed off to prison where they neither received care or much support from the community they then found themselves in.  A number have found themselves in and out of prison.  Others are numbered among the homeless and other floating people always on the verge of breaking the law either by accident or design.

In "The Guardian" on Thursday 20th June, Joris Luyendijk pointed out that the problem with controlling the banks and allied services was that within what were supposed to be managed organisations those put in charge were not in charge but simply holding the ring to what amounted to badly run franchise operations.  Equally, managerialism applied to the NHS has had much the same effect.

In short the business of who is a criminal and therefore ought to be in prison has gone chaotic both at government and institutional levels of all kinds.  In the past in other times and in other places when this has happened other solutions have been attempted.  In the 18th and 19th Centuries Century Britain went in for hanging and transportation.

Other regimes with differing forms of government and control went in for other methods.  At the moment in the UK our contraction of defence services, couple with a good many former troops with limited futures means that there are a lot of locations available with all sorts of potential.

When will someone come up with the idea of big facilities with a wide brief to pack all and sundry of the difficult cases who are at the margins?  There many places to turn over to this function.

Welcome to the Catterick Gulag or the Bovingdon Labour Camp? 

Gloriana

After sixty years the Royal Opera is about to have another crack at "Gloriana", the Benjamin Britten piece written to celebrate the Coronation of 1953.  Then it went down with a large loud clunk and dismayed the audience rather than rousing them to the glories of Empire, victory in World War 2 and the conventional school history that the reign of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was a long feast of wonders and delight.

Having seen the Opera North performance of twenty years ago and picked up a screening of a continental production, we are aware that it is a heavy duty mental anguish evening with a grim ending and did not book.  Also it is a piece of its time.  Britten tried in the few months he was given to make the best of a bad job. 

But given his musical form and the realities of 1952 to 1953 and many periods of the reign of the Tudor Queen if he was being truthful to his art then he was never going to come up with either a fun, glory story, or a blatantly propaganda piece.

Probably those who commissioned it were influenced by the varied and colourful items of film music he had written to order and the wild success of "Peter Grimes", which we have seen a few times in different productions. 

This also is serious watching and listening but you are there for the drama and the music as much as anything.  It is also about ordinary people in an ordinary town that Britten knew well and could relate to and solidly based on a well known poem.

One problem is that Britten often assumed that people knew more than they did and whilst this was less of a problem with Grimes when it came to Gloriana those in the audience did not pick up on many of the references and allusions. There is a lot more going on in Britten's works than many think.

One interesting feature is the second Act dealing with the Progress to Norwich when the Queen has made her way to what was a major City of the period rich on the Wool Trade and others.  Then in the 16th Century the Queen openly celebrated her Boleyn family and her wider English ancestry.  We might remember that in 1953 the Queen Mother was still looked down on by some as second tier Anglo-Scots aristocracy.

When the Tudor Queen Elizabeth attended a service in Norwich Cathedral she was given a throne across from the tomb of her forebear Anne of Hoo who married Thomas Boleyn.  Above the tomb was the heraldry of the Hoo family, until 1455 when the male line failed one of the great magnate families of the Middle Ages.

The Progress to Norwich would have taken her through the lands of the Howard family, that of the mother of Anne Boleyn and amongst the plotters against her rule.  Given the history of her reign it was a very firm and particular statement as to her right to rule against the very real claims the Howard family might have had.

In 1953 we assume that Queen Elizabeth was accepted as the rightful Queen, but there was still an element, albeit a very small but well placed minority who might have wanted the abdicated Duke of Windsor to return, at first as Regent. 

This would have been on the grounds that the young Princess Elizabeth would not be able to handle all the difficulties and responsibilities.  The very subtle inference to this would not have gone down well with those who knew that plotting was going on.

Now we may be able to accept that the reign of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth had many ups and downs, with periods of disease and famine and other calamities.  Also, our present Queen has done as much as can reasonably be expected and has demonstrated her grasp and abilities from the earliest days.  So we can take the Opera for what it is and of its time.

But it is still a serious piece which illustrates a grim reality.  And there is more than enough of that about at the moment.

Love And Marriage

It is suggested that at present some 25% of children are in "lone parent" families.  A figure for this is not easy to calculate with certainty and to it might be added those in changing partnerships and circumstances.  The implication is that this is modern type of family situation and departs from the "norm" of most children being in a nuclear family with two parents.

Back in the 1890's my four great grandmothers at the time were often all lone parents.  Two were young widows and the other two were both married to merchant seamen who were more away than at home.  Trawling around Census Returns from 1841 to 1911 this was far from unusual. 

The number of families disrupted by mortality, disease, events and very often the requirements of work was very large.  We know from reports the many street children left to wander as well as the numbers being brought up in institutions because of family collapse or crisis.

In the 20th Century in the UK in the second and third decades the losses of the First War and other problems meant many lone parents and then in the fifth decade and after for a period the same happened again.  So the idea of a continuing nuclear family living in a reliable and self funded way seems to have been a short phases in a particular time of relative prosperity.

It is possible that the ideal for family has not been achieved in the past as often as we think and in until recent times came nearer to it because of an unusual situation where in the developed world health provision, incomes, housing and work structures enabled more families to survive in a relatively benign environment.  This may be over now but we are still attempting to live with the basic assumptions of recent prosperity.

A lot of this is to do with housing, property generally and the connected systems of welfare benefits.  Compared with the past we have granted ourselves astonishingly high levels of expectation, credit expansion, ideas about entitlement of space and facilities and benefit support from the state, central and local.

One effect of all this, allied to much changed cultural and social thinking has been to tip the scales against the nuclear family and the idea of continuing support in marriage.  For many the default is not marriage or wider family for many of us but the state system of benefits and social services.  Add all the "rights" legislation and law and their application this has racked up demand and entitlement to a high level.

At the same time the way the property market has worked has had perverse effects.  At the rich end of the scale persons with wealth live in properties in small numbers that once might have housed quite a lot of people.  As you move down the scale and allow for ageing as well there is a lot of space in a lot of properties. 

Then there are all the second and third homes, holiday homes, holiday lets that are rarely let out of the family and the consequence is that quite a lot of people today are taking much more room compared to the past.  Very recently money flight into the London and the South East has resulted in boosting prices and costs and often taking more space out of ordinary use. 

When one time workers two or three bedroom small terrace houses are coming in at a million or more then something is very awry with the market.  Yet politicians win more acclaim and favour for wanting to make matters worse using funny money and racking up debt than trying to get things back to a more sane and responsive market.

The collateral damage is impacting on many aspects of our lives, culture and social structures, never mind finance, tax and spending.  But one major area is families and how they do or do not function and sustain themselves.

The signs are that increasingly many are not and never will be if we attempt to go on like this and another crash or economic contraction will not be the answer.

Royal Progress

First the bad news, there was no invitation to Trooping The Colour this weekend at The  Horseguards in London.  Not even the offer of a seat on the sidelines or even to be squeezed in the plebian standing enclosure with David Cameron, his lady Samantha and a huddle of G8 people representing our once great status.  The lads on the square done good but unlike the G8 they knew what they were doing.

As CO (community organiser) of the Ragged Rabble of Redundant Skivers my unit of mob handed slouching disorganised ancients should have been there if only on diversity duty.  Shuffling past the salute waving our bus passes as ID and pulling our shopping trolleys we would have made a true statement of the state of the national defences.

It appears that the Treasury have pointed out that our Army now has more horses than tanks, said to be 227.  This is not a call to have more tanks, it means less horses, said to number over 500, entirely for ceremonial duties and the provision of eco friendly compost for the squaddies' allotments.  Lurching from long forgotten neurones in my head came the memory of tank counting.

One of my jobs was to keep track of the Divisional tanks, a lot more than 227, to let the War Box know how good we were if the Soviets decided that the provocation they were getting from GCHQ was too much.  On our signals capers we called it "making the blighters jump" although the B word then used is now incorrect.  Normally, of the tanks we had despite substantial numbers of mechanics to hand there were always quite a number not operational.

So of our present 227, give or take one or two that fell into ditches, the actual number available for effective use will be rather less.  My guess is around 180.  So it is arguable that the number of effective and available horses we have, on the evidence of Trooping The Colour is much greater. 

Once I suggested that horses might be easier and more useful to deal with but was told firmly not to say anything like that to the War Box or The Treasury would get to know and we would not have any tanks at all.  It has taken a long time but it is good to know the government has come round to my thinking at last.

The other gripe is again the omission of my name from the latest Honours list.  In truth I have never ruined a bank to the cost of the taxpayers, presided over a multi-billion spending fiasco, lobbied hard to benefit some wealthy cronies, paid a small fortune into party funds or politicians pockets or devised some lunatic flagship scheme that will take decades to fulfil and eventually cost twenty times more than it should.  It is clear, I have just not been trying hard enough.

Lastly, someone has at last got round to realising that Prince William has an extended ancestry, in this case someone from the Sub Continent and the old Raj of India turns up.  In the generation in question the potential number of ancestors is 128 and in his case the actual will be rather less because of the intermarriage of the Royal elements from his father's family.  From his mother, Princess Diana and great grandmother, the Queen Mum, it is another story.

At this at least and sometimes before the 128 level almost anyone can have someone popping up that is not expected, sometimes a happy find, sometimes not if it conflicts with a sense of identity or moral or religious stance.  As the potential figure doubles at each generation back then more and more people in places ever wider and with very different lives and beliefs are in the genes.   

In Prince William's case one is a family called Bagshawe, seemingly once Derbyshire peasants who did well out of lead mining.  This may or may not be welcome, they were a rough lot.  It was Richard Brinsley Sheridan who said that his ancestors may be very good kind of folks but not people who he would invite to dinner.  He was contemporary and associated with the great writer, Edmund Burke.  Burke was related to the Roche family, ancestors of Prince William.

Funny things families, as most of us know.