"Corby" - a name and a trigger.

 One hundred and twenty-seven pounds sterling.  One hundred and twenty-seven pounds to renew my aged passport.  Not counting the expense of the car park and the cost of the postage to send my old passport to Corby.

Corby.  A name from the past.  The outré sister town of the so much more prim Kettering.  I remember during my first year of full time teaching in the Boys School in Kettering that I much preferred going to Corby than going in to town in Kettering - though, of course, Kettering was the place with the Waitrose and not, emphatically not, Corby.  

There was a more immediate vitality about Corby, and then there was always the shock of hearing the Scottish accent as the predominant one in that town in the centre of England.  I was told that a steel works had shut in Scotland and the work force flocked to Corby to take jobs in the steelworks there and the accent had persisted.  I was also told, to take taxis and ignore the busses there as "Corby was rough".  

I never found it so myself and often scoffed at people in Kettering who wondered at my bravery in chancing my arm in such a place.  So, as my old passport was stamped and slotted into the system in Castelldefels to get it to Corby and get a new one sent to me, I supposed that the Passport Office situated there was a government initiative to try and find some work for the folk who having moved from Scotland to find work in an open steelworks after their own had closed, had to think about upping sticks again after the Corby works closed.

It brings back a whole slice of my early working life, whose memories are now more of a melange of impressions rather than distinct narratives of day to day existence.

I can no longer find my way about the haunts that marked my home in Saint Botolph's House in Barton Seagrave and my way to school and into town.  Not unreasonable you could say as my memories are half a century old and based on my being there for little over a year before I moved back to Cardiff and promotion, in a city that would see me to the end of my teaching career.

The passport is being renewed because I am going back to Cardiff for a pre-birthday Birthday Party, and in digging out my passport (not used for years) discovering that it expires in August of 2025.

My passport is a burgundy one, with the European Union stamped across the top of it, a passport that gave access to a bewildering number of countries until the narrow-minded cretins of Brexit ensured that our insular geographical situation was mirrored in our political and social states.  

My new passport (one hundred and twenty-seven pounds worth of it) will be a British Beggared one, and my saving grace is that I moved to Spain before the idiocy of Brexit limited possibilities and therefore I have permanent residence and a card to show for it.  It means that when I come back into the country I show my residence card first so that my passport is not stamped, and therefore does not start the countdown of the time that I am allowed to spend in Spain.

The longer I spend time away from the country of my birth, the less Britain remains a living reality in my mind, and the more it appears as a sort of stage setting for past memories.

I don't really know the price of anything.  I understand that the price of 20 fags is now astronomical, though it is still not enough to repay the lost revenue from early death that the cancer of smoking steals.  I don't know how much a pint is, or how much a loaf of bread is.  I am used to Catalan prices and I am prepared to be shocked by how much the staples now cost.

But this visit is about Time, and my seventy-fifth birthday, and more importantly about seeing friends, ex-colleagues and family whose lives have gone on without my day to day involvement!

There are some people where no matter how long the time has been since last seen, to meet up is to be back where the relationship has always been.  This is something that is especially relevant considering the death of my old friend of more than sixty years, Richard.

In writing about him for his funeral service I went back to the essential triviality of shared experience, the nothing occasions that mean everything - the slight and the transient that stay with you for ever.

The death of friends of such long standing, are not tragic, they are unthinkable, in so far as it is so difficult to imagine a constant presence (in spite of geographical distance) not being there.  It takes time to realise the loss, with memory fighting to fill the gaps to kid you that nothing has really changed.

One part of my mind does, obviously, register the loss, and that will give an added urgency to the meet-up in early October (the passport office and the good folk of Corby allowing) in seeing people who have not remained the same age as I last remember seeing them, but, like me have lived the years through.

I remember talking with my Uncle Eric (a teacher who was retired and drawing a pension for longer than he had been in teaching!) once telling me that he had watched his entire generation, one by one, die off until, as he said, "I think that there is only one boy I was with in Junior School left, and I'm not sure that he is still with us."  

This was a man who was evacuated after Dunkirk, in a much less well-known chaotic rescue mission from Cherbourg, and whose stories about the farcical, quasi-Surrealistic experience of fighting in an all-out war had to be heard to be believed.

Unlike my father and my grandfather, I have not had to fight in any war.  Indeed I was a decade too late to have the horror of Conscription forced on me, and I was able to toddle my way from school to university lubricated by free milk and free tuition.

Although I seem to have digressed, it isn't really a diversion from the main theme of memory and responsibility: the memory of what was and the responsibility to articulate a response to who you are now.

And if that sounds a little pretentious and high-fauluting, then I should also say that the return to Cardiff is also the opportunity to have a decent Indian Meal and to drink a real pint of authentic Bitter, preferably a pint of Brains SA!

Onwards, onwards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is always the temptation with a new bit of technical kit, to expect it to do more than the previous versions of it that one might have possessed.  And there is the expectation too that one will have the technical ability to push the envelope of comfortable achievement just a little further with something that is bright and new.

     So with my new watch.  In spite of the fact that I need it merely to tell the time and to count the number of lengths that I do in the pool to ensure that I get to my daily target of 70 and therefore 1,500m , I always hope that I can get it to do more.

      My relationship with my mobile phone is one of restriction.  Not, you understand imposed by anyone outside, but by my own limitations in using the device.  I use my phone to read The Guardian and the various volumes on the Kindle app and do my Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app.  And that is basically it.  You stand virtually no chance whatsoever of getting me to respond to virtually any form of communication, unless I am actually handling the phone at the time of the message.  I almost invariably have my phone set to silent and so phone messages come and go without my noticing them.

     At one time and with a past version of my present smart phone, I did have, for a limited period some sort of link between the phone and my watch so that when a message or telephone call occurred, it sent some sort of message and/or a vibration to the watch that could (on a good day) alert me to the fact that someone somewhere had tried to make contact.  This brief period of being ‘linked-in’ did not last and I accepted that watch and phone were devices apart and never the twain should meet in any digital sense.

     With my ‘new’ watch – which I might also point out is now ‘so last iteration’ as the next model is already being reviewed in the more salaciously flagrant hi-tec publications in certain parts of the world – I feel, yet again, emboldened to try and get some sort of link-up so that I can deflect the opprobrium that comes my way when I fail to respond to emails, telephone calls, or any other form of electronic messaging.

     Although, in theory, a great fan of linked-up electronic devices, in reality I have always been a separates sort of guy, with each piece of gleaming expense existing in its own little branded bubble of usefulness, while never quite achieving the connectedness that has been the vain aim of justifying all the bits and pieces of historical computing that I have acquired through the years-

     But this time (he says yet again) this time will be different and, behold, there will be an efficiency of through device computing that will link everything in a professional and useful way.  Well, at least I have got Alexa to work on the phone.  Though, when, by way of experiment, I asked Alexa how she was (I was ever polite, even to the inanimate) her reply that she was feeling ‘windy’ as so many people had asked her about ‘farting’ – was something of a surprise, as was also her unsolicited offer of doing her ‘rapping on farting’ if I so desired!  I did not and turned her off.

     It says something for the way that people are using the pseudo AI of Alexa that a perfectly civil asking after health gets such a scatological response!  What sort of depraved ‘conversations’ with the poor woman have been taking place for an ingénue of AI rapport to be so abused?

     The watch has now beeped, not to obliterate the racier utterances of Alexa, but to tell me that some twisted chess grandmaster is prepared to play naked to show that he is not cheating. 

     With news like that one almost turns with relief to the political situation in the UK where the Conservative Party has gone ‘all out and obvious’ in pandering to its paymasters and is now openly boosting the wealth of the obscenely rich at the expense of the obscenely poor.  A sort of refreshing honesty from a party that has previously tried to dress up its class preferences with mealy mouthed platitudes to try and ensure that the poor people that they are fleecing to feed the rich will not notice the Tories’ real intentions.

     As my (UK taxed) pension is paid in pounds sterling and transferred to me here in Catalonia in euros, every fall in the value of the pound is not a momentary worry about how much spending money you are going to have on the next holiday, but is rather more ‘here and now’ in the worry stakes for someone who relies on the cash being sent over to pay for basic living costs.

     If you are concerned about the cost of living, you might ask, why buy a new watch, rather than use one of the many that you have in reserve?  Well, you’ve got me there.  But I might point out that you are questioning a man who went out and bought a couple of new shirts rather than ironing one of the many clean but creased ones he had waiting to be attended to.

     I am not sure, exactly, what that little anecdote is supposed to illustrate, but it does certainly point towards an attitude to money where reality is only accepted when it bites.  Hard.

     Now, off to the first concert in the new season!  Make music as the pounds falls!

The Coming Storm

 

 

          

 

 

 

 

 

Are people in denial?  Do they really think that the winter is going to be just another season?  Why isn’t there much more outrage at the threat of heat/food/accommodation poverty that IS going to take out a chunk of the population not only in the UK but also here in Catalonia?

     It is easy in an affluent seaside resort like one in which I live to see little evidence of deprivation.  The shops are open and seem to be doing well, people are coming in their drove to the beaches and exclusive new development along part of the beachfront is full steam ahead.

     And I suppose that is part of the point.  If you have money then much of the hand to mouth poverty is going to pass you by. 

     Am I going to stop plonking my bum on my expensive opera seat for the next season?  No.  Not yet. 

     But do I notice that even casual spends in the supermarket now always seem to be 100 euros and above? 

     Yes.  50 euros used to be enough to fill my tank, now it comes nowhere near.     My rent will be increased by the cost of living rise in percentage terms; my income will not.  If I wish to continue my present standard of living, then my pension will have to be augmented by dipping into my savings.  I tell myself, that savings are there to be used not to be mindlessly horded – as if I have ever had wallet that didn’t have scorch marks on it from the money burning its way through!

     I am by no means rich, but I also do not want to plead poverty.  I am aware of the increasing costs of everything and acutely aware of the diminution in the adequate provision of those social services that I have paid for throughout my life through taxes etc.

     My expectations (as a complacent Baby Boomer) are for my path through life to be relatively smooth (free education up to university level; job for life; pension; health care etc.) and I have little to complain about when I look back.  But the future is different.  Fixed income and rising costs are not good companions – and as I am reliant on my pension, government talking about the difficulties of maintaining the present levels of payment and then talk of different rates and speculation about not keeping to past rules are all things that concentrate the mind.

     The crisis of Covid was, while it was going on (and as long as you were careful, and lucky!) a fairly placid disaster.  Stuck at home, washing your hands like a fully conscious Lady Macbeth, finding ways to stay sane and waiting for things to get better.  The worry was not paying for things, but rather getting your hands on them.  It was almost as if time and the economy were in abeyance.  It was a period of waiting and hoping for something not to happen.

     That was then and this is now.  The idiocy of Brexit and its inevitable deleterious consequences; the catastrophe of the pointless invasion of Ukraine; the failure of normal politics; the lingering after-shock of Covid; the stuttering and virtual collapse of social services – a catalogue of horror and despair. 

     Yet the sun is shining and people are on the beach and in the cafes having a good time.  Because now, during the holidays, the summer holidays, is not the time to be thinking about the harsh realities that are going to hit, hard, in the autumn.

      In T S Eliot’s much quoted (and more often misquoted) “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” from The Four Quartets, he accurately summarises the tendency for us all to avoid those things that are difficult to take in or accept.  We like our dystopias and Armageddons to be narrative devices in stories or films rather than what’s going to happen in the next few months.

     We are going to have to bear it!

Things are different?

When I was a kid . . .

There probably isn’t a greater turn-off opener than that one.  It is the sort of phrase that is regularly used as a weapon by the older against the perceived privilege of the young.  There is nothing that riles a certain proportion of the older generation that seeing a very young child with a mobile phone.  And especially the young child using it with a proficiency that the resentful oldie can only wish for.

Technology means that kids have things like music players, film players, TV, radios, cameras and, yes, telephones way before the generation that includes me ever had, but – just think about what my generation had and continues to have.

Free milk, free school, university grants, free university tuition, full professional employment, good health care, generous pension scheme, professional retirement at 60 with professional pension, state pension at 65, membership of the EU throughout my working life, free access to foreign countries within the EU, access to the work markets of the EU, and so on.

Yes, my parents did not buy a television until I was 11, though we did have the radio.  I did not have a ‘real’ record player until I was in my teens, though I had had a second hand wind up version with some old 78s for one birthday.  Our holidays were usually in the UK and in B&Bs, though I did go to Spain when I was 7, and I was the only kid in my year in primary school who had been abroad.  Our camera was a Kodak box camera, until we had the next model up, eventually – and those two camera kept us going for years and years and years.

Although we were not rich as a family, I did not lack anything important.  I was loved and secure and, most importantly (as I was really too young to truly worry about the Cuban missile crisis) I felt secure.  I felt that I had a future and that I would easily be able to get a job and that I would be able to keep it for the whole of my career.

How many young people today can say as much?  I know younger colleagues in teaching who are dreading the extra years that they will have to work until they are able to retire and I sympathetically share their dread, though I cannot imagine what the awful reality must be like.  In my view you cannot be a classroom teacher beyond the age of 60 in any sort of normal school.  Forcing people to work beyond that is like a sort of death sentence, or at the very least they are not going to be paying many pensionable years for the unfortunates who are able to make it.

This serious thought was brought on my thinking about cartoons.  One channel on the television this year has been given over to a whole series of ‘blockbuster’ animated films and I am constantly amazed at their quality.  There was a scene of one of the monsters from Monsters Inc II where he was sitting by the side of a lake in moonlight which was stunning, a beautifully rendered part of the film.  And in another film I was fascinated by the sheer complexity of the rendering of hair and fur with a naturalness that would have had early animators reaching for their crucifixes!

It used to be that Christmas would see the latest-old Bond film trotted out to general delight, but I am not sure nowadays that there is a single screen franchise that would bring viewers together now in the way that 007 did.  After the gloriously clever first film of the 'Pirates' franchise, for example, the whole series descended into a narrative nightmare which denied coherence to the story, but did give individual moments of success, as for example in the umpteenth film when the company baddy walks, with manic serenity, down a flight of steps as his ship is destroyed about him.  It is a sublime moment and deserves a better film around it!

But the mechanics of showing films have changed.  When I was in school we did have 'Christmas Treat' films.  The two I remember are 'Fanstasia' and Tony Hancock's 'Punch and Judy Man' - the first we loved and the second we hated.  But both these films were shown via a film projector, the cans of film had been rented and were shown projected onto a screen.  In an age when films are available on your phone, the attitude towards a 'grand' production has changed somewhat!

So time, place, technique, everything has changed, and the 'gift' of a major film at Christmas is not longer the 'treat' that it once was.

But for me, at least, the power of a great animated film, something like 'Up' for example has me as glued to the picture as if I were a child watching fireworks - and you only have to see my open mouthed wonder and fixation with exploding rockets to understand how quickly I can regress to childhood!

Perhaps cartoons are the nearest things we get to keep us together, to bring back the sense of wonder that over exposure to CGI in so-called reality films has taken away.

The new white feather?

As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I have never had to make the sort of problematic choices that the previous generation to my own had to make.  I have not been involved in a World War, I have not had to do Military Service, I have been able to find work without problems, I have been looked after through my educational life and in terms of medical help in a way in which I have not had to think too hard about the financial consequences.  I have, in short, been fortunate in choosing the time to be born! 

Central of course to that opening paragraph of gloating, though not actually stated, is the reality of my pension.  I now have three pensions from two countries: which sounds a damn sight more impressive than the reality!  I have a professional pension from my job, I have a much smaller state pension and I have a truly tiny (but welcome) pension from Spain.  The generations that have come after my own look at my experiences and feel envy and resentment.  This is an attitude that I can easily understand, especially as the retirement age seems to be getting more and more distant for some folk.  But this piece is not about finance and comfortable old age, it is more about responsibility.

I was far too young to have an opinion about Suez and the criminal behavior of my government: I was too young to understand the trauma of moving from an imperial past to an uncertain future – and very badly managed at that; too young to understand the full import of the Cold War, though old enough to appreciate the danger of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I suppose that the first real moral challenge that I felt fully engaged with was the Apartheid system in South Africa and the United Kingdom’s culpability in the continuation of the regime.

What did I do?  Looking back on it, the answer would have to be, not very much.  I supported Anti-Apartheid; I refused to buy or eat South African fruit; I didn’t drink South African wine; I sent money to organizations against Apartheid; I put up posters; I marched; I spoke against it.  But could I have done more, could I have been more pro-active?  And what about Viet Nam?  How much, or how little did I do to show my abhorrence about that grubby conflict?  When I look back, I think that I was more worked up about the Conservative government’s imposition of museum charges for our national galleries than I ever was about a war which claimed the lives of thousands and threatened the stability of the world!

In other words, I feel a nagging sense that I could have done more, and should have done more, but I was protected by a fairly comfortable sense that, in spite of a few local and international difficulties, things would probably work themselves out with, or without, my active help.  And my involvement was my choice.

In today’s world, with the rise of the extreme right, the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, the reality of President Trump, the growing obscenity of inequality in the world, the banking crisis, corruption and on and on – it is much more difficult to remain as a vaguely involved spectator.  To do nothing, is actively to encourage the situation to worsen: disengagement is denial.

What I am saying is that life in 2017 is the equivalent of life in the 1940s: there is an international crisis and everyone has a part to play in attempting to ameliorate what is turning into a national and international disaster.  You have to make a choice, in which not making a choice is a choice in itself.  It’s the same as it was living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: the situation was dangerous, and if you had knowledge that might help the authorities then you would have to accept that your duty would put you in danger.  In just the same way involvement in the Word Wars that my parents and grandparents had to endure, put them in danger too.  Dangerous times, and god knows we are living in dangerous times now, call for positive action.

We can see that the growing opposition to Trump and so-called policies in the United States and around the world is an active statement that many people have accepted their responsibilities to hold power to account.  This is one of those times when inaction is the deadliest action of them all.

So, what am I doing, this time round?  Well, it basically comes down to reading the Guardian, shouting at the television, watching American late night political comedy on YouTube and typing futile screeds against the fading of the light!

Stuck (by my own choice) in a wealthy, sunny corner of Spain it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is going through a crisis and, in some ways, this period of time is a little like the so-called Phony-War before the actual war of 1939-45.  My Dad was in London when war was declared and remembered the sirens sounding soon after the announcement and . . . nothing happened: no enemy planes, no bombs, nothing!  Obviously that quiescence was soon to develop into the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever seen, but the immediate result of the challenge to German Nazi power was nothing.

You might say that quite a lot has happened over the last few years.  The banking crisis has weakened economies, and the paucity of cells filled by the perpetrators of one of the greatest pieces of financial fraud and duplicity ever has weakened the very concept of democratic accountability.  Governments have poured public money into the banking sector with the result that the very bankers who caused the crisis are now even more secure in their inflated pensions and high lifestyle.  Bonuses are back, the stock exchanges are booming and people are getting poorer.  This should be a time when implementing the ideals of socialism is seen as something that can take people out of poverty and make a fairer society – instead of which we see the politics of inequality and prejudice trumping any humanistic ideal.

You might think that, as a retired person with a secure pension, I am one of those people ‘sitting pretty’, but I am most certainly not.  As a British national living abroad in an EU country, I have seen the relative value of my pension fall by some 20% as the reality of Brexit gets closer and starts having a real effect.  I have the threat of punitive action by the government in which I reside when Article 50 is finally invoked and I find myself as a foreign citizen, living in a state which can, at a moment’s notice cancel my healthcare, and revoke my right to stay in the country that I now call home.  And that is just the local, Spanish situation.  Let us not consider the full ramifications of the Oaf in the White House!

We are all (including the country of origin) living in what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times” and what we do in response to those interesting times will define the conditions of development for the next generation, or indeed the next generations.  We all have to step up to the plate and ‘do’ something.