It all depends what you mean by harmful!

The one interesting part about buying shoes when I was a child was The Machine.

Norvic Kiltie (?) was a firm I seem to remember which made kids shoes. The reason I (half) remember the firm is because they used to send me a birthday card: I thought that was very cool. I didn’t actually use a word like that, though, at that time in the 50s it was being used by long haired weed smokers with real sincerity.

Norvic Kiltie (?) were good with the cards but they didn’t have The Machine.

Let me explain. When you bought new shoes, or your mother forced you to buy something as boring as new shoes, it was a considerable investment. They had to be right. To convince worried mothers that their little darlings were being shod in the right way The Machine could give ocular proof that the little feet were correctly aligned in the new shoes. To achieve this the child put his feet in what looked like a giant letter box opening while the assistant and or mother looked down a viewing porthole above the feet. What they saw was a ghostly outline of the shoe with the second ghostly outline of the bones of the little foot, almost as if The Machine was using x-rays!

This was the fifties, and The Machine was using x-rays! Unprotected! In a shoe shop!

It’s the sort of thing that leaves you breathless with horror, but at that time atomic power was seen as the ultimate type of friendly power, a source of cheap unlimited electricity, so cheap that the metering of the electricity in your house would not be worth it! We all live and learn!

Though not apparently the Labour Party.

They are seriously discussing the advisability of renewing the Trident system of nuclear weapons. One feels that this is yet another betrayal. Yet one only has to read a very helpful site devised by completely neutral newspaper, The Telegraph, to wonder about the commitment of the Labour party to an issue which is close to my heart. The site gives questions and answers about the Trident nuclear missile debate at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/04/uqanda104.xml from which I have extracted the following:

“Hasn't Labour always been the anti-nuclear party?

No. It was Labour's post-war leader Clem Attlee who first set up a committee to look into the possibility of Britain acquiring nuclear weapons.

Aneurin Bevan told anti-nuclear activists in 1957 that giving up the bomb would mean Britain's Foreign Secretary "going naked into the conference chamber" in international negotiations.

Harold Wilson conducted the first tests of the UK's Polaris system.

Apart from a brief flirtation with unilateralism in the early 1960s, it was only under the leadership of CND founder member Michael Foot that opposing nuclear weapons became official party policy from 1980, until the position was dumped by Neil Kinnock in 1989.

Labour's 2005 manifesto committed the party to retaining the independent nuclear deterrent, but many left-wing MPs will most likely rebel against Trident's replacement.”

I’m not sure what this illustrates, but I certainly feel lonely still clutching my anti-apartheid CND ethos in an age of football players aspiring to ‘earn’ £100,000 a week or sports shoes costing over £150 a pair.

Watching ‘The Departed’ with another, excellent performance by DiCaprio I began to wonder why a perfectly acceptable, but unremarkable action film had so many competent and recognisable actors in it. At the end the director’s name made it all clear: Martin Scorsese.

That man’s name must be a sort of Royal Command when the possibility of acting in one of his films is mooted.

The basic premise of the film: the infiltration of a loner failed cop into the gang of the leading Boston criminal fraternity in an attempt to gain enough evidence to get the head of the organization incarcerated is complicated by the existence of an informant in the very organization trying to get him imprisoned. This narrative outline is, to put it mildly, hackneyed.

The filming is competent and there are some very effective scenes of violence which are almost balletic in their choreography, but there is little to distinguish this film from many others.

DiCaprio’s performance, in my opinion, is head and shoulders above everyone else. His portrayal is detailed and convincing and what ever he does, says or even when he says nothing, he commands attention.

Jack Nicholson does what Jack Nicholson does on film: looks manic and demented and does that thing with his eyes so you can see the whites; presumably that’s why he was employed – to play the disreputable and slightly disgusting character, but with charisma enough to make us mildly concerned about what happens to him.

The end of the film is like the end of a Shakespearean tragedy: bodies everywhere. There’s a nice little coda and an obvious symbol which anyone other than Scorsese would have hesitated to try and get away with.

A competent little film, but compared with the second film we chose, ‘The Guardian’ directed by Andrew Davis, it is an unparalleled masterpiece on a par with ‘Citizen Kane’.

‘The Guardian’ is an unscrupulous piece of filmic collage, mindlessly stitching together bits from better films and actually expecting the audience to be surprised by the narrative direction.

One to miss.

Though one has to say that two elements of idiocy remain in the mind: the gung-ho shout of “OohhArgh!” as a sort of clan cry of the coastguards which fits just about everywhere in a normal conversation with militaristic devotees. The other interesting phrase was “pop tall” which seemed to mean something like, “Do please rise from that uncomfortable recumbent position and feel free to extend your frame in a vertical direction, and, if you could do it quite expeditiously I would be enormously grateful.”

It does seem to me to indicate a film of some vacuity if that is the level of memorability!

I want my money back