Archive
on reading
Reading is one of the great loves of my life, it falls behind the Berkshire Belle, who is also a great reader, that’s one of the things that brought us closer way back, and probably sits alongside music as a joint second.
In my early days we didn’t have pre-school or play school, so the basics of reading came from my parents. Having been born in October my start at primary school aged 5 came a month before my 5th birthday, and so I was usually always the oldest in my class, and such things can make a difference. Reading was one of the joys of school for me, even if it was the teacher who was doing the reading whilst we tried to follow in the book.
My education was spread across three primary, and two secondary, schools as my parents moved around, and my primary education was also interrupted by illness, bouts of bronchial asthma keeping me off school for weeks at a time, but that brought a different dimension to my learning. My parents were in service, and the big house always had a library, amongst which could be found books that the owner’s sons had read. I had a fount of learning that I could enjoy whilst flat on my back in bed, with even the slightest exertion causing me breathing spasms.
I also had a world atlas, bought cheaply at a jumble sale, and a 1940’s copy of Webster’s dictionary. As I read I could look up words that I didn’t know, and I could find on the map the places where my stories were set (even fictional places are usually given some geographic context). I was learning to read, a modicum of history and geography plus some moral values, all whilst lying in bed. I also had the family ratio brought up to me every morning, and could listen to that; Worker’s Playtime, Women’s Hour, Mrs Dale’s Diary and more all entertained me, and taught me, even if I didn’t understand all that I was learning at that stage.
I had read Rider Haggard before I was ten, and was along way ahead of my classmates when at school, even allowing for being nearly a year older that some of them. Once I got to secondary school we got into specific reading through the terms with the aim of critiquing and explaining these books. Rumer Golden’s An Episode of Sparrows is the first of these that I remember, and I have a copy of that on my Kindle now. We moved on to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice an Men, and both of these books taught me a little of a book having more than just the story about them. I didn’t really understand it until some years later; for me a story was a story, and I either liked to or not.
I knew from bible studies about parables, but it took me years to pick up that many books have moral values and social commentary floating along with the story. When asked to write an essay on the background to a passage from Mice and Men, I wrote something facetious about what Mr Steinbeck had eaten for breakfast having upset his digestion. My English Literature teacher launched into me over that one, but once she had got that off her chest, she did admit that it was both beautifully written and had made her laugh. I went back to enjoying stories and didn’t bother about allegorical writing.
I was in the generation that followed the beat one, and, Steinbeck aside, I struggled with a lot of the modern writing of my schooldays; Jack Kerouac I went back to 15 years or so ago, and still can’t get on with him, nor could I relate to Huncke, Ginsberg, Hemingway et al, and still can’t. And whilst my tastes haven’t changed to accommodate them, they have in terms of some authors that I used to avidly read, but now don’t enjoy.
The Berkshire Belle and I read two or three books a week each at least. I always have an ebook on my ‘phone to read during breaks at work, another on my iPad mini for reading at home, a talking book to listen to in the car on my commute and a physical book beside my armchair. We have over a thousand books around the house, and almost three thousand in our shared ebook library. We share a love of books, and will read almost anything, including the ingredient lists on food containers, but whilst I read, and enjoy, some of her books, she has no interest in mine, we just love reading.
Most of my reading these days is non-fiction, but I still enjoy a story, and the use of language to tell it. I don’t read much modern fiction, some I like, but little of it compares, for me, with what Verne, Wells, Conan-Doyle, Buchan and co could turn out. Amongst my favourites are the first two Musketeer sagas, and both of these are Victorian translations from books written earlier that century. Language has evolved, but I enjoy much of the earlier incarnations.
The advent of the ebook has been a blessing in that we just don’t have enough space in the house. I am planning more bookshelves at the moment, as we have one cupboard that we can’t access because my lady has a vast collection of cook books stacked on the floor in front of it. Ebooks allow us to keep collecting, but there is nothing to compare with the joy of a new hardback book.
My eyesight is not what it was and loss of my sight is one of my greatest concerns. To no longer to be able to read would take away a massive part of my life. People who say that they have bought a book to read on holiday I can’t understand; I would need at least four for a fortnight away, and would probably take six. One of the great joys of our thirty plus years of American vacations were the bookstores; Barnes and Noble, Borders, BooksaMillion and many others. A lot of our trips, where we were booked for an overnight stop before driving on, were planned around dinner and a Barnes and Noble visit before bed. We would inevitably spend more on books that evening that on dinner, there was no point in taking books with us when we could buy them at the other end.
Reading has taught me much, but, whilst I get pleasure from learning, I also get it from a good story, one that draws me in, where I feel I know the characters, and am sad to part from them at the end. I love it.
on Africa
This I read a piece by Andrew Harding, a British journalist currently working for the BBC, and entitled Break the Silence About South Africa. It’s around on the internet if you’re interested, and talks about the situation there in their brave new world.
I became interested in Africa through reading H Rider Haggard’s books and, whilst I understand that these were fictional, there was a strong element of truth in the scene setting, especially when describing the main cities. I read these books around 1960/61, and later read other books set in various African locations.
Nelson Mandela seemed an attractive name, certainly memorable, and I began to read of him, his trial and imprisonment in the British press, but I had no real feeling either way about the rights or wrongs of his case until around 1967 when, whilst heading for the ‘bus home from Marble Arch in London one Sunday I picked up a Free Nelson Mandela badge; there had, presumably, been a rally in support of him. On the ‘bus I pinned the badge to my duffle bag and thought no more of it.
On day the next week I transgressed at school in some way and, having seen the badge on my bag, the teacher imposed a punishment of writing two essays, each to be exactly 500 words, one in support of Mandela’s freedom, the other for his continued incarceration. I had no clue either way, so had to find one.
One of our teachers was my first port of call. He was what was known as a Cape Coloured, and he was very forthcoming in his opinions. A chain smoker, he gave me twenty minutes in exchange for twenty cigarettes, and I think that I learned more from him about how the world worked than in any other twenty minutes of my life.
Another source was from a man that I thought of as an Indian, but who was from what we now call Bangladesh by way of South Africa. He, too, taught me a lot about the realities of life in the colonies. Between them I had enough to write my two essays, but I had a view of the former Empire that seemed different to anything that I had read about to that point. I never wore the Mandela badge again for a start.
It is a complicated continent, and I do not profess to understand it. My own experience of it is confined to a short period of work in Libya, which is a story in its own right. In around 2015 I declined to take on a job in Nigeria because of the situation there. Back in my late schooldays we had adopted the Biafran troubles as a charity, and our interest in what had happened there still horrifies me, so to go to the country that had wiped out Biafra was, for me, not on, especially as the Foreign Office were advising against travel there. However, I did work with the Nigerian Ministry of Education when a team of their people came over to Oxford.
Africa is still somewhere that fascinates me, although I have left it too late to go there again, at least in terms of working there, and it is in working abroad that I have learned so much more from other countries than I would have done had I gone there as a tourist. I shall have to satisfy my interest through my reading, and Mr Harding’s piece was intriguing.
on fatherhood
As a parent you have the benefit of having been a child, and you will have lived through having a father (OK, I know that some will not have had one at home). As a father you have no experience of doing the job yourself until the need arrives.
There is an assumption that there will have been things that your father did that you did not like, and so you may, instinctively, avoid these. You do your best to bring your children up in the best way as you see it, but there is a fundamental flaw in that logic.
Your children are not you. You may have been involved in their production, and they may look like you and have some characteristics in common, but they are from another generation (and, perhaps, from a different planet). To assume that what may, or may not, have been important to you as a child is not, necessarily, going to help you.
Each generation is programmed to reject the world of the generation before. This is the generation gap and may well have had some impact on how you got on with your own parents. It’s a fact of life, and should help us progress as a race.
I had a distant relationship with my father. In the way that things develop, I was more my mother’s boy and my younger sister was daddy’s girl. Dad and I did communicate, but not much, and I felt guilty when, many years after his death, I found that I had a half-brother, Jim, who dad had abandoned when he was very young. He had been searching for news of his father for many years. Dad died when I was in my mid-twenties; Jim never knew him, nor, despite having him my life for that long, didn’t really know him either.
Did that distance influence my relationship with my own children? Probably, but I tried to be closer to my children, and, unlike dad, kept in touch with mine even after I left their mother. That I have little contact with one, and none with the other, is another thing, but I wanted to try and give mine space to develop in their own way. I gave them counsel when asked, but never tried to run their lives.
I hasn’t worked out too badly: My daughter works for the NHS and is part of the team at Oxford who carried out the first womb transplant, and my son, despite health issues that could see him gone before me, now runs his own business. Both are now in their forties. Oddly, I have a closer relationship with my step-daughter, and we are so alike in many ways that we could be biologically related.She lives in Australia, so most of our contact is via video calls.
I am a great grandfather these days, and have not too many years to go before I shuffle off. I don’t think that I have been a great father and, anyway, my opinion does not matter. My assorted children are out there and are part of the future, al I can really claim is to have played a part in producing them.
on reincarnation
As an atheist I believe that this is my one life, and that when it is over, that’s it. Lights out, gone, finito. I’m very comfortable with that.
Of course I may be wrong. If so it will be a nasty surprise to find myself in some form of afterlife. But then there is also the concept of reincarnation, that I might come back as someone, or something, else.
Does the essence of life get recycled? Over the years my, better than average, navigational skills have often drawn the thought that I might have been Vasco da Gama in a previous life. Perhaps, but I have no recollection of any such existence. If I do have to come back again I want no knowledge of this life I have now cluttering up my new stint.
I have had a decent run at living, and don’t want a second go. Yes, I could, possibly, avoid some of the stuff that I would rather not have done, but the reality is that things worked out in a way that I am fairly content with. I got to where I am because of the twists and turns along the way. Any one decision made differently would have changed the outcome. It might have been a better one, but it might not. I’m happy with the ending that I have, for half of my life has been spent with the woman that I love.
If one comes back do you know anything of your former existence? Jokes about da Gama aside, and he was lost most of the time, so any navigational skills I have didn’t come from him, I have no feeling of having been someone else. If it’s true, maybe I was an ant last time around, but my belief is that it’s a nonsense.
Coming back, and knowing that I was on a rerun of my life would be a form of purgatory. Perhaps I am wrong, and maybe that’s the hell that I deserve to go to? Time will tell, but I will not be around to let you know, or at least, I hope not,
on aging
Yesterday I became a year older. It’s a very granular way of recording age, but it’s what we do. Do I feel any older? Not really, aside from the general wear and tear that comes with more than seventy years on the planet, but there are things that I notice as I have got older.
Change is constant, and perhaps you notice it more as you age, simply because you have lived through more of it. The value of experience is often underestimated, but that experience can be relevant to a different time and place, so it always needs to be evaluated in the modern context: What worked, or failed, in the past may yield a different result today. Whatever, we all need to learn our own lessons as part of growth. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
For me, I didn’t really think too much about aging until I was well into my sixties, and the generation gap became vividly obvious. Some of my work involved teaching and mentoring young people with aspirations to obtain professional qualifications, and I would often explain how and why processes and legislation had come about, things that, according to my young hopefuls, was before they were born. Talking to them about the way the world had been was akin to describing an alien landscape.
The gap was equally clear the other way, and the lifestyle and tastes of these folks were just as alien to me. The music, films and other entertainment that they enjoyed, in the main, left me cold, but I accepted that. It was some of the attitudes to work, and business, that differed so much from my own that began to make me feel old. Had I become a dinosaur? I tried not to think that way, but it was clear that the baton had been passed from my generation. Time had moved on.
Physically I know that my body is well past its sell-by date, with joints in particular showing signs of wear. I don’t have the same stamina either, and two serious illnesses in the last year, one nearly fatal and the other caught quickly enough for it not to have got that far, have left a mark. During last years’ spell in hospital I had to learn to walk again, and I walked with a stick for some weeks. In other ways I have been lucky; at 72 I can still walk seven miles a day, and occasionally hit double figures, I still have my hair and am often told that I don’t look my age. Recent tests after my illnesses have shown that there isn’t much wrong with my vital systems, so that part of aging hasn’t taken too much of a toll.
The worst aspect, for me, is that the world I now inhabit is not one that I enjoy. Changes in society do not suit me, not here, nor in America, where the Berkshire Belle and I had been considering emigrating to. We are ten years apart in age, and had hoped to grow old together in the sort of world that we grew up in, but that world is long gone and will never come back. If I had a choice, I would like my seventy odd year old self to be living in the England I knew around 1966-68. I could happily swap mobile ‘phones and the internet for a gentler way of life.
That’s the problem with aging for me: I no longer fit in the world around me.
on fact or fiction
I would not describe myself as an historian, but I do a lot of research into a variety of subjects, and I often find that the truth is hard to get to. Some things are fine, because there is enough corroborating evidence, especially when the event concerned is prominent: Dates, such as the day that someone died on, the date of a sporting event or similar, are all fairly reliable pieces of information and can be found readily enough.
However, other information is harder to pin down, and you cannot rely on written records. Biographies, and even autobiographies, are notoriously unreliable. Sometimes this is due to imperfect memory, but surely these things could be picked up by a decent sub-editor doing some fact checking? For example, I read a lot of motor racing books, and, sometimes, the subject will say something like: “I crashed out of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1968”. Well, the ’68 BGP was at Brands Hatch, but the accident referred to was at Silverstone, but in 1969. It’s only a small thing perhaps, but it is an error, and, for someone researching the subject, unless they dig deeper, they may perpetuate it.
Some people like to spin a good yarn, and if you look at appearances of personalities on talk shows, they often tell different versions of the same story. They are not being duplicitous, merely trying to entertain, but in doing so they embellish the tale in different ways. Trying to sort fact from fiction can be very difficult, and often the story that is told is not a true one, more an amalgam of several events that, twisted together, make up a good story. There is no harm in that, but it can make life difficult for the historian.
Documentaries also have a story to tell, and a limit in the time available, so telling the whole story is not possible. What gets left out skews the truth, but this assumes that the story has been throughly researched. If the researcher is working from flawed material, then the story is screwed from the start, and will perpetrate the falsehoods.
I watched a TV programme recently that mentioned Bletchley Park, and naturally the work done there in World War 2. It mentioned Alan Turing as the man who built the Bombe machine and cracked the Enigma code. Fine, but it isn’t true. Yes, he was a brilliant man, but the Bombe computer was designed and built by Post Office engineers, based on an existing decoding machine that the Polish intelligence services had been using for some years to read Enigma messages, and the Enigma code was better understood after an Enigma machine and codebooks were captured intact. So a throwaway statement in a documentary, about railways, perpetrates a fiction.
Trying to find the truth is not always easy, but does it really matter? In many ways, no. It is not likely to change many lives, and the vast majority of the population if the world couldn’t care less. For those of us with a specific interest in a topic, it does matter, and it will matter to you if you ever find yourself with a problem that the truth will get you out of.
Fact or fiction? The choice is yours.
on walking away
There was a time in my life when I came to believe that walking away was, whilst it seemed the easy option, was the wrong one, and that I should face what life brought me head on. To walk away was the coward’s option, I thought. This would have been when I was in my late teenage years, on the threshold of manhood, and, perhaps, there was a macho element to that way of thinking. I suppose that it is one of the ways that life teaches you, for it was an approach that got me knocked about a bit a times, both mentally and physically.
I learned that I needed to judge when to stand fast and when to walk away. My father had always told me that the best weapon in a fight was a four minute mile, and maybe I should have listened to him more carefully, for I was to find out later that he had some experience that he didn’t share with me, but more of that later. Walking away is not the easy option that I had initially thought, and it certainly is not cowardice. It often requires a lot of strength to do it.
When a relationship goes wrong, whether personal or professional, it’s not often that you can get it back to where it was, so you have to decide whether or not it is worth salvaging. For the party that lost faith, it is hard to get back the level of trust that you once had, and trust is at the heart of every successful relationship. Sticking with it and trying to repair the damage is always an option, but it is rarely the best one. In business, the risks to reputation are huge, and in a personal relationship the emotional baggage is not worth carrying.
I remember a classic business case. We had won a contract to store and distribute, throughout the UK, stock for a client. We had not been allowed to see the previous contractor’s operation, but the product was of a type we were very familiar with, and we foresaw few problems. We were wrong. The client could not have organised a bonk in a brothel and their systems and processes were chaotic. The same stock codes were shared between multiple, and unrelated, items and there was no catalogue, amongst other fundamental issues.
We offered to put all of this right at our own expense, but the client would not allow us to, so we wanted out. We decided to let them carry out their threat to sack us, and that they did, albeit that they tried to walk the threats back when they realised that they would invoke penalty clauses in our favour by getting rid of us, but the end result, for us, was that walking away was our best option. They were the client from hell.
Later, and in another job, I walked away from a contract worth around £15m over two years, simply because the cleint’s wishes were unviable. They awarded the deal split between two other contractors, but had to come to us on an ad-hoc basis because neither of those contractors could work with the way that the job was set up. We ended up earning close to £20m from the work, but doing it our way. Walking out on the original deal was the right thing to have done.
In my personal life I have walked away from five relationships that were doomed, but with three of them I held on, for various reasons, far longer than I should have done. The last of those relationships brought me to the brink of suicide, but I walked away from both that extreme solution and the relationship. It was later that I found out that I had followed my father down exactly the same route, in terms of leaving a wife and two children, albeit that I had held on for twice as long before making my move. Like father, like son, but he never told me about that piece of his history.
Even if it is the other party that wants to end the relationship, as it was with the three of my personal relationships that went wrong, two of the ones that I held on to for too long were that way, I had to accept that I had lost, and that walking away and not looking back was best for me. I may still want you, but if you don’t want me anymore, what is the point? Life is too short to waste, so walk on and get on with living.
on hacks and scams
I used to be “an IT Professional”, writing various commercial programmes before moving on the designing, specifying and various other roles in computing. It was fun, a challenge and I enjoyed it. Later in life, having shaken off the shackles of corporate life, I had a number of business ventures for which I did all my own coding in HTML. Enough of the bragging, let’s just say that I have a little knowledge.
Having had an internet presence, in various guises, for more than twenty five years, I am also relatively visible on the web, and that brings all sorts of nonsense to my assorted devices. A couple of hundred emails a day into the spam folders, for example.
I am cautious; at my age I have been around a bit and have learned the hard way that there are people who would like to screw me out of my hard earned cash, so I am fairly good at fending off the scammers. But, as they say, even Homer nods, and I have had a couple of problems over the last month.
The first was one day when I was a bit fed up, and as I scanned through Facebook I saw an advert from one of the guitar shops that I but from regularly. They had a batch of bluetooth speakers at a giveaway price, and I thought that I would have one. Clicking on the link I was interrupted by the Berkshire Belle wanting to impart some news from that morning’s paper, and so I was not paying full attention as I did the necessary and paid my bargain price. Alarm bells were already ringing as the transaction concluded, and subsequent investigation showed that I was not dealing with my guitar friends at all, nor had I bought a speaker. Instead I had paid for some form of subscription, which I cancelled and reported.
That one was my fault entirely, but the more recent one wasn’t. I was at work when I noticed that I had a series of emails telling me that I had successfully changed my LinkedIn password, turned on, and off, 2 stage verification, added a ‘phone number and email address, and so on. I could not deal with that at the time, and so had to do it a little later when I had got home from that day’s assignment. It seems that LinkedIn had already picked up suspicious activity and had suspended my account, and I went through a precess of verifying my ID to the point where I was able to recover the account.
One of the reasons for having moved my remaining web sites over here to WordPress was that my previous hosting company was taken over by a Russian based organisation and I quickly began to have issues with my email accounts being hacked. That brought a variety of things from spam at the lower end, to blackmail threats at the other.
There is a lot of bad stuff out on the internet, and it is very easy to get caught up in it. I’ve been lucky so far, but, as the last month has shown, the ice is very thin.
on bucket lists
I did, once, list my buckets; I had about five at the time, and they were scattered around the garage, shed, on the deck, down the sideway etc. If asked which was my favourite destination on my bucket list I would always say; “Whichever is nearest”.
I am being obtuse, of course, but “bucket list” is one of those modern expressions that annoy me. Yes, I have things that I would like to do, and places that I would like to go to, but I don’t have a list of them, even a mental one.
If pushed I could probably reel some of them off; I’d like to do a tour of, some, European capitals, see Switzerland and Italy, take a light aircraft over the general area where one of my uncles was shot down off Stavanger, go somewhere on Eurostar, drive various things, fly other things, I’ll leave it there.
Recently I wrote that to kick the bucket was an acceptable way to refer to my demise, and bucket lists are the things that you want to do before kicking the proverbial container. I get that, but there is something about the way that the term is used that, to me, implies that these things are being rushed at. I can remember a discussion with my American daughter-in-law about her first visit to the UK. She had itineraries for each of the days that they would be spending in London, and some places got 5 minutes. Even St Pauls only got 10.
I had the feeling that there was a “tick the box” element to it all; she would have seen, and possibly entered, these places, and so could claim to have done them, but I have always liked to take my time and to let the feeling of a place soak into me. Talking of doing one’s bucket list, people often say that they have ticked that off, again implying doing it by rote.
Given my age, and all that that brings with it, I had no doubt that I will kick the bucket with many things left undone. I have neither the time nor the money to do them all, but I am not going to rush about trying to tick things off’ if I do any of them, I will take my time and enjoy them.. If I don’t experience things, then so be it. I have done a lot so far, most of which I could not have dreamed of when I was younger, so I can’t complain. For now, my bucket list will be just that: 3 black plastic, one yellow plastic, one orange plastic…
on childhood influences
The Berkshire Belle has been trawling the myriad of channels looking for something to watch instead of the dross that TV serves up, and she has found the old series of Soldier Soldier. It was the theme tune for that that has prompted this train of thought.
We have a lot of violence amongst the current youth of this country. Knife crime, in particular, seems to be rife, and I read that the blame lies in the access that kids have to the internet, social media and violent films. Are they really that influential? I don’t know; I have had no experience of dealing with children for thirty years or so, but I know a little of what goes on in my neighbourhood, and it worries the heck out of me.
In my childhood we had no internet, social media or anything like them. We lived in a community that was fairly closed, and where almost everyone knew everyone else. It was largely self-policing in that, if you got up to mischief, someone would have seen you and your parents would soon know too.
But we were exposed to violence in some ways. Books may not have been too graphic, and broadcast media, films, TV, radio, were subject to censorship. However, some of the content of songs would raise eyebrows now, and that is where Soldier, Soldier kicks me off this week.
The song tells the tale of a young lady infatuated by a soldier who she desires to marry, but he tells her that he needs clothes which she buys, asking after each item if he will marry her. In the end, with a new outfit, he admits to already being married. Shocking behaviour, but just a con-man.
We also had “Tom Dooley”, telling of a man about to hang, “Don’t Jump off the Rood, Dad”, about a suicide attempt, “The Hole in the Ground” about a workman who kills an annoying member of the public, “Oh, My Darling Clementine” about a drowning, “El Paso”, and “Delilah”, both murders. “Folsom Prison Blues” contains on of the most chilling lines in any song: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”.
These songs were regularly played on the radio in programmes aimed at children, often in response to requests for them to be played. OK, some of them are comedy songs, but the themes are dark, and not only did we listen to them on the radio, but we would also sing some of them at school, in lessons. Yes, we were taught them.
These things might offend sensibilities these days, but did they corrupt us? certainly not the majority of us, and if any of us did commit violent acts in later life, I doubt that singing a song in childhood was behind it, and nor was any of the violence that we saw on TV or in films, even if it was less graphic than now. As boys, some of us had knives; I had a sheath knife from about the age of 10, and I know of a couple of my schoolmates towards the end of my schooldays who had flick knives. I know that I did not use mine for any form of violence, and I am not aware that any of the others did either.
I used my brother-in-law’s air rifle, also from around the age of 10, and by the time that I was 13 I had used various shotguns. Living out in the country it was a rite-of-passage to learn how to handle these things, and earning the trust of the adults in one’s life was an important part of the transition from boy to man. To betray that trust, to lose it, was unthinkable, for it was part of being taught to accept responsibility and the value of that, to me, was incalculable. I would not take the risk.
I was brought up, by parents and schools, to understand that there were consequences to my actions, and these included punishment as well as reward. The same applied when I went to work, and it was left to me to decide which I preferred. It was a different time then, I understand that, and we can’t go back to it, but, as supposedly civilised society, can we not get back to the sort of values that I grew up amongst?
It is the children of the current generation that we need to convince.
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