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.

Not knowing is the worst!

I have no idea what’s happening!  No, really!  I know that the world hasn’t ended because I am still here.  And, thanks to the wonders of the internet radio and (praise be!) Radio 4 I know that the Blond Buffoon has made his first Brexit speech in which he managed to do a very convincing vocal impersonation of The Donald by using sentences composed entirely of unrelated phrases and dismissive waffle.  What a repugnant, self-seeking, condescending apology for a politician he is!

           

            The Donald has some sort of reason for his putrid existence, as he is the logical outcome of the Republican excoriation of every breath that Obama has taken, irrespective of any logic or ideology – apart that is, from the pandering to the lowest possible common denominator of prejudice that they could find.  I am not sure that the previous sentence went any logical way itself, but in its own befuddled way it does at least express my sadness at what the party of Lincoln (whose speed of rotation in his monument must be approaching the speed of light at the moment) has created.

            But The Blond Buffoon is an entirely different creature.  I assume that his hair is natural (at least in its colour) but the buffoonery is entirely intentional on his part.  He is no fool.  He is capable of writing a mean sentence.  He has a sense of humour.  And he wants, oh how he wants, to be Prime Minister.  I don’t for a single solitary second believe that he went through anything even remotely approaching ‘heart searching’ to determine what position he should take on the question of Britain remaining in the EU.  The only thought, no, the main thought in his nasty tousled head was what would bring him closer to his main goal in life.  He has reasoned, because unlike The Donald he is capable of that, that opposition to British membership of the EU is likely to play best with the voters in the Conservative Party whether or not the UK votes in or out.  He has calculated that even if the vote goes against him, he can take the wishes of his discredited party towards his ultimate goal.

            The Capering Clot’s jovial mask slipped when it turned out that he (oh, sorry, not him, just one of his most trusted advisors) told senior officials in the London Mayor’s Office that they had to support his point of view or shut up!  It was, of course, a “cock-up” as he described it later, when the instruction had been discovered, using what he thinks of as the language of the common man, the man in the street (not the woman of course, they are only good for bedding and betraying) to show how blusteringly funny and out of character it all was.  Not a bit of it!  That is the man.  The privileged autocrat with the excruciating fractured conversational line of filler-filled marshmallow ideology to deflect opprobrium.

            You may wonder why this vitriol towards The Beast of Boris.  The answer is prosaic: Toni is visiting his family and I have not turned the TV on.  I am not sure that I know how.  I mean I know how to turn the television on, but not to get the programme that I want.  There is also a way of getting the language into English, but the complex button pressing to get that to occur is beyond my thumbs.  The end result is I have no idea what Spain is up to.

            You rarely hear anything about Spain on the national news on Radio 4, though I think the recent occasion of the Infanta (the sister of the present so-called king) being cross examined in court and, in answer to the questions that she deigned to answer, lying her head off – I think that made the news, and I think that Brits actually got to see pictures of her in court looking uncomfortable.  

As she should.  

But, apart from the more garish and outlandish elements in our news, the day-to-day corruption and the fact that we do not have a government are not deemed newsworthy.

            I can’t really blame the news outlets, because saying, “Oh, the Spanish Popular Party (Conservative) seems to have another case of corruption where their politicians have been stealing from the public purse!” is rather like saying, “Oh, IDS has told another corpse that it is fit for work!”  They are both so common that they are hardly noteworthy.

            But, there is a gleam of hope for Spain.  The right ‘lost’ the election and the ‘left’ won.  But the parties on the ‘left’ still have not agreed to pact – and time is running out before the so-called king has to declare another general election.

            There is a simple solution, and one in which a start could be made to try and rectify the terrible damage that PP has done to the country during their time in power.  But the two parties cannot agree and so, day by sad day, we march on to the unpredictability of a second general election.

            Even my OU studies are not helping, because I have now arrived at that part of the course where our thoughts have turned to Renaissance Art and Death.  Looking at various representations of the Danse Macabre, I feel like photocopying a few of them and sending them to the politicians who I feel are hindering the formation of a new leftist government.  Time is fleeting!  Get on with it!