I know that this is going to be a controversial posting, but it is something that is one of those issues that nags at me so that I need to get it out of my system. That was the prime purpose of my blog, which is why I need to write this posting even though I guess that, in turn it will irritate others. It is a factor which has come up many times certainly in my memory over the past 20 years, but the particular occasion recently that it has come to my attention is following the sentencing of Vincent Tabak for the murder of architect Jo Yeates in December 2010. Tabak received a life sentence with a tariff of a minimum of 20 years. However, for Yeates's parents this was not enough. I accept that they grieve for their daughter, but the statements they made after the sentencing suggest that the pair of them are very nasty people in themselves with an outlook which is barely different from Tabak. The couple are David Yeates aged 64 and Teresa Yeates aged 58. They seem symptomatic of the 'indignitary' approach which is so common in British society and is reinforced by the hysterical tabloid newspapers, notably 'The Sun' part of the Murdoch media empire of News International.
I have no sympathy for Tabak and certainly believe he deserves a life sentence in prison. What alarms me is the desire for the destruction of our legal processes, the move to arbitrary sentencing including execution and the fact that the language used in condemning the killer in fact help create an atmosphere which promotes such violence rather than seeks to reduce it.
The Yeateses, who have no legal training, complained that there was no death penalty in Britain and regretted it was not an option. However, in fact it seems as if even that would have been insufficient for them. Instead it appears they would have preferred to have Tabak tortured to death. In an official statement they said: 'The best we can hope for him is that he spends the rest of his life incarcerated where his life is a living hell, being the recipient of all evils, deprivations and degradations that his situation can provide.' They should be at least cautioned for trying to provoke fellow prisoners of Tabak from doing him harm. What they have no understanding of, is that the behaviour they are lauding is just the kind that excited their daughter's killer. To urge prisoners to visit such behaviour on the convicted man is simply to legitimise the kind of violence he carried out himself. In turn this will add to an 'atmosphere of permissiveness' in that others will things such 'deprivations and degradations' are acceptable for them to turn on any man or woman they feel is 'guilty'. Rather than doing anything to reduce future perpetrators, the Yeateses' language simply lionises such behaviour.
These days it seems entirely legitimate to wish for a 'lynch mob' approach to sentencing. You only have to sit in a pub when the news of such cases comes on television to know how many volunteer executioners there would be. In many ways all the legal reforms of the past three centuries seem to be forgotten and the average person in the street feels they are qualified to act as judge, jury and executioner for the person they believe to be guilty. The selection of the 'guilty' seems more based on the appearance of the person than any legal arguments. I am convinced that Amanda Knox is guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. The murder was a particularly perverse one and yet because Knox happens to be a beautiful American, she has to be innocent in the public eye and no-one is going around saying she should suffer the kind of 'deprivations and degradations' that were visited on Kercher. In fact, with her release on appeal earlier this year, she has mutated into a victim herself. This highlights how patronising the Americans are to other people's justice systems. Knox is portrayed as suffering at the hands of a foolish Italian court that somehow missed seeing her 'innocence' shining through.
A patronising attitude towards courts was seen in the Yeates case. It is clear that her parents had no faith in the legal system. Her father said: 'I always knew he was guilty but feel relief because I don't know how I would have reacted if the jury had come back with a verdict of manslaughter.' Again the father feels he should have been the judge, deciding on the sentence, not through the approach of law, but simply on his gut feeling. It is interesting, he probably felt the same about Christopher Jefferies, Jo Yeates's landlord who was an early suspect on to whom Tabak tried to shift guilt. I am sure if Jefferies had been charged, even though we now know he was innocent of the crime, David Yeates would be telling us how he should have been executed and how he knew that man was guilty.
The simplicity of this ability to sniff out guilt without any legal training, simply by looking at a person, leads the indignitaries to become exasperated with the legal processes. Teresa Yeates was disappointed that it took three days for the jury to decide on a majority guilty verdict (10:2) for Tabak. She said: 'It was the right verdict but it took so very long.' Of course, she sees the jurors as stupid for not being equipped as she clearly feels she is, to simply detect a guilty man and to sufficient level to satisfy the courts. Of course, the courts, juries and the whole legal system are disparaged by people like the Yeateses and organs like 'The Sun'. They self-righteously know the guilty and see any chance for the so-clearly guilty to have defence or to go through any legal process. Their favoured approach would take us back in Britain literally to the Middle Ages, to the kind of situation England had before Magna Carta of 1215. Such arbitrary execution characterises dictatorships of the kind the UK has helped to overthrow in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but apparently for our own criminals, it is perfectly the kind of system we need to introduce.
Of course, for 'The Sun' even the Yeates's ostentatious statement about the punishments they want inflicted on Tabak are insufficient. The newspaper went further not missing the opportunity to slag off misguided foreigners, in this case, the prison system of the Netherlands, Tabak's home country on 29th October, appended to their article on the Yeateses saying: 'Dutch prisons are known for their luxurious hotel-style facilities, with each cell having its own heater, fridge and microwave'. The British are stunningly nationalistic, no other country, bar perhaps the USA, can be good enough in punishing criminals. Clearly they relish the overcrowded, insanitary conditions of British prisons which lead to murders and widespread reoffending. Much of the British public and the majority of the UK press have no faith in what our Victorian predecessors did, that there is a chance of rehabilitation. In their view as in the USA, guilty is guilty for eternity so the best thing to do is to kill the perpetrator, who will always be easily to detect, quite often because he is always going to be something like a 33-year old European man rather than a 24-year old American woman.
Infected by American culture the UK is now a society in which no emotion is sufficient unless it is taken to the fullest extent. You some how appear neglectful if you are not howling in sorrow or in anger or in calling for vengeance. Few seem alert to the actual words, most extreme so far in the Yeateses' statements, foster the kind of violent society which created the murder in the first place, a society with utter distrust in legal procedures so a society in which lawlessness in all its forms seems to be the only 'solution'. By being indignant, by howling in the media, you only foster more of the same kind of behaviour as that which distressed you in the first place. This is not civilisation it is a return to a barbaric age in all aspects.
Friday, 11 November 2011
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
The Strange Delight Of Lost Corners
This is another of those postings of me thinking back over quirky things that have caught my attention down the years and probably mean very little to anyone else. However, perhaps I am wrong and my fascination with areas that I term 'lost corners' may intrigue others too. When I was a boy at secondary school I was once on a school trip to London. I was sitting in a coach somewhere like Wandsworth probably heading to the Imperial War Museum, maybe somewhere else. Anyway I was on board a coach which was stuck in a traffic jam. I was sat next to the window, uncommon for me as I generally sit in the aisle given the length of my legs and my concern about escaping from crashes. Anyway, I looked down at a metal railing fence that enclosed the garden of a large house. I was looking at the bit that came up to a post which marked the end of the wooden fence that surrounded the garden next door. The garden with the railing fence was terribly overgrown, I remember. Consequently I assumed that no-one ever went up to that corner of the fence, no-one picked up the litter there or did anything with the railings from that side let alone the concrete pole. However, there had to have been some day when all of this had been important to someone. Somebody had worked to erect the fence, to dig the hole and insert the concrete pole and yet now it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever set foot in that corner, perhaps for decades perhaps for even longer. Of course, someone may have cut back the rhododendron and demolished the railings and removed the fence post later that day. Even if they had, here was a space in which no human and probably few birds or other animals had been.
That was the day I realised that I had a fascination for spaces which were not invisible, but certainly lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. It made me think that even in cities where we believe that every corner is jammed full of people, there are many areas which are untouched by people. It reminded me of the UK as a whole. We have some of the densest populations in Europe but there are large swathes of the country, vast areas of Scotland, Wales, the national parks, much of the South-West and the northern English counties, that are in fact almost empty of humans. We are all jammed into quite restricted areas and there are these other spaces in which we do not go into. I think it would be fascinating to map areas, particularly in London, where no-one goes. I think this was one of the reasons why the Open House scheme has proven so popular. Every year buildings to which the public and in fact very few people in general have access, are open for free. I have been inside Marble Arch and down into Aldwych underground station plus various water pumping stations. Typically those places for which you see a door but one that presents a blank face, a door as a wall in effect.
I have often thought this too about television and movie dramas when people come to London or some other great city trying to find someone. Generally they do not experience how it is in reality. Even if you manage to find the person among the teeming millions, you might reach their building and simply be faced with a door that will not open, through which no-one will let you. So much of our cities are like this. Wherever you walk you go passed location after location after location into which you could never gain access no matter how hard you tried. I do wonder if one of the appeals of Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry's 'Neverwhere' (series & novelisation, 1996) was that there was an entire 'London Below' (in fact, often above as well) that could be accessed by forming doors in those very blanks walls. I have a feeling that Gaiman and Henry saw such spaces, especially in London much as I have done, though saw a way through rather than for me, just feeling repeatedly rejected by them.
That silent rejection, I feel is different to the lost corners. Of course, someone may have had the intention to close them off; fenced them around. Yet, for me the best of them have become a lost corner because they have become overgrown or simply because they are no longer important. In the house I currently rent a room in, from the kitchen I look at the back of another house, set at right-angles as it opens on another road. I have never seen the residents, but the entirety of the back of the house, is overgrown and blocked from the side of my house by an old iron fence. Once that space was important, part of a building site for the house, perhaps a location where children sneaked around the house as I used to go between my parents' house and my neighbours' down the narrow gap. Certainly for many days people tramped around that space and at some time, maybe then, maybe later put and iron fence in, presumably along precisely defined lines. The space is still there and plants inhabit it, and yet whilst I can see it, without great effort I could never be in that space. It reminds me too, of the wonderful views you see while driving down the motorway knowing that however beautiful it is, there is no way you can capture that precise view certainly not without a severe risk of death and being arrested, perhaps in the reverse order.
I think it is that fact, 'so near, yet so far', like the eyots you see from the trains as you go over or alongside the Thames. You would love to go on to them. There would be very little on most of them and one or two are protected, but it would be that excitement of stepping somewhere no-one has been for so long. Maybe I am wrong and they would be full of leftovers of drunken student parties. I wonder if it is a little like what motivates people to climb mountains or explore jungles, to go into spaces which you feel are rather outside the flow of time. Reflecting on this interest of mine, I know that it is not restrained to overgrown gardens or disused yards. It also stems to those rooms you see on the top of old buildings, equipped with windows and yet with no-one to look out of them. You see them all over old cities, London, Oxford, Bath particularly among them. Does anyone go into those spaces and what do they contain, bar dust?
My feelings about lost corners is one of wistfulness, feeling perhaps because they are not entered and walked across, that they retain a small scoop of the past of some days when they were something that warranted the attention of people, even if just the workers sent to put in a fence. A teacher of mine explained how when he had gone to Arizona and saw so much of it as it would have looked many centuries earlier, he felt unnerved. Returning to Britain he realised it was the starkness of the American South West that alarmed him in the very fact that it was wild, it had not been softened, worked on by humans. Britain, in contrast, is very different. You can go almost everywhere in this country and see the trace of humans. Many rural fields have tumuli dating back millenia; others have Roman roads or forts or banjo enclosures or filled in quarries or torn up railtracks. As 'Time Team' has shown seemingly ever corner of Britain has been impacted upon directly by humans, not simply in terms of pollution but messing around with it. Archaeology programmes show us that not only has our back garden been part of centuries of structures but even on remote Scottish islands the trace of humans is there; the rolling valleys of the Yorkshire Dales were deforested before there was a written language. I have never been anywhere as untouched as my teacher, but I imagine I would feel as unnerved as him. This is why, I guess I am fascinated by these corners that show human intervention, but unlike the average stretch of pavement or even garden, that intervention has ceased and it is as if we are walking past a snapshot from some particular time, not out of time, but somehow on a parallel rather than bisecting path to the spaces we habitually go into. I have wondered whether to take photos of some of these places and put them up on this blog. However, I guess that is taking being a nerd just that little too far and instead will confine myself to the wistful enjoyment of such forgotten corners whenever I see them.
That was the day I realised that I had a fascination for spaces which were not invisible, but certainly lost to humanity for the foreseeable future. It made me think that even in cities where we believe that every corner is jammed full of people, there are many areas which are untouched by people. It reminded me of the UK as a whole. We have some of the densest populations in Europe but there are large swathes of the country, vast areas of Scotland, Wales, the national parks, much of the South-West and the northern English counties, that are in fact almost empty of humans. We are all jammed into quite restricted areas and there are these other spaces in which we do not go into. I think it would be fascinating to map areas, particularly in London, where no-one goes. I think this was one of the reasons why the Open House scheme has proven so popular. Every year buildings to which the public and in fact very few people in general have access, are open for free. I have been inside Marble Arch and down into Aldwych underground station plus various water pumping stations. Typically those places for which you see a door but one that presents a blank face, a door as a wall in effect.
I have often thought this too about television and movie dramas when people come to London or some other great city trying to find someone. Generally they do not experience how it is in reality. Even if you manage to find the person among the teeming millions, you might reach their building and simply be faced with a door that will not open, through which no-one will let you. So much of our cities are like this. Wherever you walk you go passed location after location after location into which you could never gain access no matter how hard you tried. I do wonder if one of the appeals of Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry's 'Neverwhere' (series & novelisation, 1996) was that there was an entire 'London Below' (in fact, often above as well) that could be accessed by forming doors in those very blanks walls. I have a feeling that Gaiman and Henry saw such spaces, especially in London much as I have done, though saw a way through rather than for me, just feeling repeatedly rejected by them.
That silent rejection, I feel is different to the lost corners. Of course, someone may have had the intention to close them off; fenced them around. Yet, for me the best of them have become a lost corner because they have become overgrown or simply because they are no longer important. In the house I currently rent a room in, from the kitchen I look at the back of another house, set at right-angles as it opens on another road. I have never seen the residents, but the entirety of the back of the house, is overgrown and blocked from the side of my house by an old iron fence. Once that space was important, part of a building site for the house, perhaps a location where children sneaked around the house as I used to go between my parents' house and my neighbours' down the narrow gap. Certainly for many days people tramped around that space and at some time, maybe then, maybe later put and iron fence in, presumably along precisely defined lines. The space is still there and plants inhabit it, and yet whilst I can see it, without great effort I could never be in that space. It reminds me too, of the wonderful views you see while driving down the motorway knowing that however beautiful it is, there is no way you can capture that precise view certainly not without a severe risk of death and being arrested, perhaps in the reverse order.
I think it is that fact, 'so near, yet so far', like the eyots you see from the trains as you go over or alongside the Thames. You would love to go on to them. There would be very little on most of them and one or two are protected, but it would be that excitement of stepping somewhere no-one has been for so long. Maybe I am wrong and they would be full of leftovers of drunken student parties. I wonder if it is a little like what motivates people to climb mountains or explore jungles, to go into spaces which you feel are rather outside the flow of time. Reflecting on this interest of mine, I know that it is not restrained to overgrown gardens or disused yards. It also stems to those rooms you see on the top of old buildings, equipped with windows and yet with no-one to look out of them. You see them all over old cities, London, Oxford, Bath particularly among them. Does anyone go into those spaces and what do they contain, bar dust?
My feelings about lost corners is one of wistfulness, feeling perhaps because they are not entered and walked across, that they retain a small scoop of the past of some days when they were something that warranted the attention of people, even if just the workers sent to put in a fence. A teacher of mine explained how when he had gone to Arizona and saw so much of it as it would have looked many centuries earlier, he felt unnerved. Returning to Britain he realised it was the starkness of the American South West that alarmed him in the very fact that it was wild, it had not been softened, worked on by humans. Britain, in contrast, is very different. You can go almost everywhere in this country and see the trace of humans. Many rural fields have tumuli dating back millenia; others have Roman roads or forts or banjo enclosures or filled in quarries or torn up railtracks. As 'Time Team' has shown seemingly ever corner of Britain has been impacted upon directly by humans, not simply in terms of pollution but messing around with it. Archaeology programmes show us that not only has our back garden been part of centuries of structures but even on remote Scottish islands the trace of humans is there; the rolling valleys of the Yorkshire Dales were deforested before there was a written language. I have never been anywhere as untouched as my teacher, but I imagine I would feel as unnerved as him. This is why, I guess I am fascinated by these corners that show human intervention, but unlike the average stretch of pavement or even garden, that intervention has ceased and it is as if we are walking past a snapshot from some particular time, not out of time, but somehow on a parallel rather than bisecting path to the spaces we habitually go into. I have wondered whether to take photos of some of these places and put them up on this blog. However, I guess that is taking being a nerd just that little too far and instead will confine myself to the wistful enjoyment of such forgotten corners whenever I see them.
Monday, 7 November 2011
We Walk Straight So ...
When I was a boy at primary school, one of the activities that we would do in the playground was stand side-by-side with a friend, always another boy and cross over our arms so that we were locked together. We would then march around the playground saying loudly in unison ‘we walk straight so you’d better get out the way’ (enunciated so it sounded like ‘we want straitsa you’d bettah get out tha-way!). Generally we did not actually walk straight we would simply march into other boys who would often pair up just like us so they could march into us and the whole thing would descend into what was then termed ‘a bundle’. Where this ‘game’ originated from I do not know, presumably from the place most physical games did especially for children for whom kicking a ball around was forbidden as none of the playgrounds that I used while at primary school had less than one side which was a row of windows and in some cases three sides were windows. Why I was suddenly reminded of this game which I cannot have witnessed in over thirty years was as a result of trying to walk down a street in London.
I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.
I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.
When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.
It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.
Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.
I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.
To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.
I heard on BBC radio that officially Britain has become more polite than in recent decades, but as yet I have to see any evidence of this and one case in point is how difficult it is to move around as a pedestrian. Places like Oxford Circus and Leicester Square in central London have always been difficult not only from the numbers of people but the fact that many people on the street have no idea where they are going and/or have their attention distracted by everything that is going on around them. However, even in suburban areas of London, places like Ealing or Harrow or Richmond, you find it difficult. This is because on the pavement, as on the roads, no-one seems willing to yield even a few centimetres nor to wait even a matter of seconds to allow someone else to pass. I suppose if I see people in cars forcing their way out of side roads into the main flow of traffic and bullying people out of lanes, I should not be surprised that I see the equivalent of such behaviour on the pavement, especially as unlike car drivers, many pedestrians are young people. A television advertisement for an insurance company shows pedestrians behaving like cars and says we would not behave like drivers when walking. However, they are in fact wrong and most people do behave precisely like that replicating the scenes they show in their advertisement.
I am not going to go on demonising children and teenagers. However, it is probably unsurprising that witnessing what their parents and other adults do it should seem to them to be ‘weak’ to move even a fraction of a step. It is exacerbated by the fact that unlike older people, children and teenagers often travel in groups, and all want to walk side-by-side. Going along the pavement, even walking through pedestrian areas I find myself being pushed to the sides, hard up against buildings. No matter how large the space is, groups of pedestrians spread to fill it. Where I live during the week has broad pedestrianised areas but I find myself dodging between four or five family members or students strung out for a couple of metres across the space.
When I have run out of space and am squeezed against a shop window, even this does not seem enough and I get a tut or a sigh as if I have done something wrong as one person for a matter of seconds has to expend the effort to step around me. My journeys are lengthened by this constantly being squeezed to the side, having to pull my jacket or shoulder bag in, even having to turn side-on so the people can get by without having to adjust how they are walking. Often rather than be pushed into the wall, I am compelled to step into the road with all the risk that that entails. The difficulty is not only that the people I encounter have an utter unwillingness to move even a little, but they seemed exasperated that anyone should be walking in the opposite direction to them; they also tire of people moving too slowly in their direction too as she witness from the complaints about the elderly and disabled or parents with the off-road pushchairs if they are not proceeding fast enough for the bulk of pedestrians.
It often not the case that the people who are unwilling to move are aware that you are liable to collide with them. I have written before about how people are cut off from the world by their mp3 player and their mobile phone: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/08/mind-out-that-child-might-be-wearing.html
Ever since mobile phones were invented no-one has seemed able to stand still while using them, I guess hence the name, it is not the phone but the user who is in fact mobile. The thing is now, with smartphones that there is so much to look at on the screen that using them takes the full extent of the owner’s vision. Yet, they do not stop, they keep ploughing on, gazing intently and fingering the screen of their phone, assuming that everyone will navigate around them. These people can be slow moving, giving you time to get out of their way. However, to me it rather seems an insult to the blind that people with sight do not use the faculty they have been blessed with. Maybe in the future mobile phones will be constructed with white sticks extending from them. Certainly someone needs to invent facilities that alert the user to other bodies within a certain proximity or even to allow the user to see in front of them as they are looking down at the screen, through having a camera in the top of the phone rather than on the back.
Despite all my ailments I can move freely and sufficiently speedily to avoid colliding with the ‘we walk straight’ pedestrians. However, this is not the case for all pavement users. The elderly, disabled people, people with small children or pets, are a lot less manoeuvrable and it appears that the message to them is simply that they should not be out walking at the times when ‘normal people’ wanting to walking in strict lines to get places. The issue of the we-walk-straighters is that they are symptomatic of a broader problem, the manifestation of the Thatcherite belief that there is no society just individuals and families (or their equivalent on the street, gangs of friends). Why it is so difficult to move around a British town on foot or by car is because so few people these days understand that to travel in an urban area is to become part of a machine or even an organism, one that has different components moving at different speeds.
I once saw an art installation which consisted of a video the artist had shot at a junction in Vietnam where five roads met. The range of traffic was incredibly diverse and included pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, vans and lorries all on the road rather than the pavement. The video was shot from an apartment overlooking the junction. What was startling was how soothing it was to watch. This is because despite all the variety of the traffic the different elements flowed so that no-one collided and no-one even held up someone else. To me it looked rather like blood flowing around the body. I am sure there are accidents and arguments in that city as anywhere but it is apparent that the Vietnamese in cities often far more crowded than London, had the necessary attributes to make such incidents rare rather than happening almost every minute.
To march through as a pedestrian is to disrupt the traffic ‘machinery’ to the extent that it causes jolts to the system, tensions and upsets. Things move far more smoothly when people look ahead, have patience and work in co-ordination with others. However, none of those attributes are now valued in British society so as a consequence we have all the huffing and puffing and the arguments, the need to squeeze against a wall to avoid a confrontation and the stresses that all this brings.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
What If The Maginot Line Had Been Built Along The Franco-Belgian Border?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Roads:
Alternate Outcomes of the Second World War’ It is available for purchase on
Amazon:
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342737&sr=1-25
Australian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.com.au/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342887&sr=1-25
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Beginning To Live Like An Old Man
Back in October 2007, when I turned 40, I noted that unlike the old saying 'life begins at 40', it seemed that the reverse was the case and you began to feel that your life was clearly running down towards its end: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html Almost three years on, my prophecy seems to have been borne out. In the last couple of months I have heard that officially 'middle age' runs from the age of 36 to the age of 59; after that you are 'elderly'. Thus, I have actually been middle aged longer than I had realised back in 2007. It also appears that, on average, from the age of 41 your body generally starts to deteriorate. This is no surprise really if you think that the average working man just a century ago had a life expectancy of 41 and a woman of 45. If I had been 43 in 1911, then I would be an old man in my community.
This analysis has reassured me. For the past year, if not longer, I have felt old. Now I know that that should not be surprising, because by the measures of when my mother's father (a man I knew in his 70s and 80s) was a boy (he was born in 1900), I am in fact an old man. There has been no sudden deterioration, but a steady accumulation of ailments (as opposed to diseases or even conditions) and with them a changed outlook on life. Of course, I have suffered from diabetes for over twenty years and that is accelerating the decay of my body, but there are other aspects which seem to stem simply from ageing. I think you can tell you are old when doctors say they can do nothing more for whatever mild condition you are suffering from.
Two years ago my left knee swelled up; it was blamed on me carrying too much shopping (I invested in a shopping trolley as a consequence, adding to my sense of ageing) and all the creams I was offered have had no effect. It is not painful, it is just still swollen and squidges when I kneel down. My joints, limbs and other parts of my body now ache even if I happen to run a short distance, something it is hard to avoid when you have a 9-year old boy living in your house; throwing a ball to him for 20 minutes left my right arm in pain the next day. Cycling now leaves me nauseous and dizzy; travelling on an aeroplane leaves one ear and the skull around it in pain and me with partial deafness for days afterwards. Driving about 200Km is enough to leave my hands and calves aching for days after. Even one quick session of sex, with my established partner, with me on top, leaves my chest and arms aching as if I have been pressed under heavy stones.
My digestive system has suffered most. I have become incredibly flatulent and also belch a great deal. In the past few weeks constipation has come to give me a variant from very loose bowels, often ringed by haemorroids and faeces so large that they jam the toilet (I have to keep plumber's equipment by the toilet; no domestic version will work). I have no appetite and very little taste, my tongue now being furrier by far than my head. This has helped me loose weight as I always feel full, which I guess has to be a plus, because apparently from 41 onwards you naturally begin to become heavier. Eating food is often not a pleasant experience, which is a shame as I used to really enjoy good food. Now I can get heartburn even before I have eaten a mouthful and it gets worse as the food goes down. I have been told this may be due to 'acid reflux' which means stomach acid now randomly decides to bubble up towards my throat. Often after a meal no matter how small, it feels as if someone has jammed a stake with the diameter the size of my palm, between my lungs and then out through my back. I had to abandon drinking coffee as doing so made swallowing every mouthful of food painful.
This analysis has reassured me. For the past year, if not longer, I have felt old. Now I know that that should not be surprising, because by the measures of when my mother's father (a man I knew in his 70s and 80s) was a boy (he was born in 1900), I am in fact an old man. There has been no sudden deterioration, but a steady accumulation of ailments (as opposed to diseases or even conditions) and with them a changed outlook on life. Of course, I have suffered from diabetes for over twenty years and that is accelerating the decay of my body, but there are other aspects which seem to stem simply from ageing. I think you can tell you are old when doctors say they can do nothing more for whatever mild condition you are suffering from.
Two years ago my left knee swelled up; it was blamed on me carrying too much shopping (I invested in a shopping trolley as a consequence, adding to my sense of ageing) and all the creams I was offered have had no effect. It is not painful, it is just still swollen and squidges when I kneel down. My joints, limbs and other parts of my body now ache even if I happen to run a short distance, something it is hard to avoid when you have a 9-year old boy living in your house; throwing a ball to him for 20 minutes left my right arm in pain the next day. Cycling now leaves me nauseous and dizzy; travelling on an aeroplane leaves one ear and the skull around it in pain and me with partial deafness for days afterwards. Driving about 200Km is enough to leave my hands and calves aching for days after. Even one quick session of sex, with my established partner, with me on top, leaves my chest and arms aching as if I have been pressed under heavy stones.
My digestive system has suffered most. I have become incredibly flatulent and also belch a great deal. In the past few weeks constipation has come to give me a variant from very loose bowels, often ringed by haemorroids and faeces so large that they jam the toilet (I have to keep plumber's equipment by the toilet; no domestic version will work). I have no appetite and very little taste, my tongue now being furrier by far than my head. This has helped me loose weight as I always feel full, which I guess has to be a plus, because apparently from 41 onwards you naturally begin to become heavier. Eating food is often not a pleasant experience, which is a shame as I used to really enjoy good food. Now I can get heartburn even before I have eaten a mouthful and it gets worse as the food goes down. I have been told this may be due to 'acid reflux' which means stomach acid now randomly decides to bubble up towards my throat. Often after a meal no matter how small, it feels as if someone has jammed a stake with the diameter the size of my palm, between my lungs and then out through my back. I had to abandon drinking coffee as doing so made swallowing every mouthful of food painful.
I guess a definition of old age is that you are no longer physically capable of doing the things you have always enjoyed, not least without paying the price in subsequent discomfort. Mentally I am less active too. My writing of fiction has dropped away severely as has my reading of any books. Partly this has been due to a sustained period of unemployment, but nothing seems to be able to stimulate my interest again, even having got a job. I struggle to concentrate to follow an 2-hour episode of 'Foyle's War'. I must say, however, that my manner has improved, I get far less grumpy with bad drivers, lost documents and my computer going wrong. That, however, may simply stem from the resignation of getting old: you know there is no point in getting angry as no-one will pay you any attention and you can change nothing. One consolation is that I have lost important things right throughout my life and this does not seem to have increased now I am getting older, so I can probably cope with this far better than people coming to it anew. My memory has deteriorated. I know that I was never good at remembering names, foreign words or martial arts moves, but now I am finding that I am mis-remembering things. Scenes I thought were in a particular movie turn out to be very different to how I remember them and buildings in very different places. I am fortunate that my current girlfriend is far more forgiving of these flaws than her predecessor who was angered if I forgot even the tiniest detail she had mentioned once in passing.
Above all, I am very tired. It goes beyond simply needing more sleep. Like many people, in the past, I hoped that I would live to a certain age and see certain things or achieve certain things in my life. However, now, I realise that if death came to me now and I had not read a particular book or had not visited a particular place then I would not feel disgruntled in the way I would have done a few days ago. I certainly understand now how people see death as a rest. However, I had a premonition that I will die aged 57, so I will have to hang around for a bit more yet, with more decay and ailments to put up with.
Other consolations for my physical and mental decay is that I am beginning to enjoy things that older people do. My parents, madly, have become far more active in their old age than when my age. My father now cycles 35-50 Km per week; my mother has joined a gym which she visits every week to work out in and walks 11 Km; they are both 73. However, I have found I am enjoying more leisurely pursuits. At the park with the 9-year old boy from my house, I found rather than playing with him, I got far more pleasure simply sitting on the bench and watching the activity around me. I did not need any other physical or mental activity to be content.
I accept that my medical condition has made my body older than my age would typically warrant. I do worry that given I feel as if I am twenty to thirty years older than I am, how bad will I feel when I am actually 65. It seems highly unlikely that I will be as active as my parents and in fact, by then, may simply be bedridden and ready for a nursing home. In some ways, though, in contrast to two or three years ago, my mind seems to have caught up with my body and that is a great relief. It would be incredibly frustrating if I still had the desire to travel or start up new things only to find my body was constantly complaining. I am glad I have found the contentment to fit with the age of my body and that now, I can quite happily sit and watch life go by.
Sunday, 9 October 2011
What If The Industrial Revolution Had Never Happened?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Down
Other Tracks: Alternate Outcomes of the 19th Century’ by Alexander
Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase
on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338820140&sr=8-1
UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338820087&sr=1-5
Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043896&sr=8-3&keywords=Rooksmoor
Friday, 7 October 2011
Blogging the Blog 12: Most Interest & Mostly Americans
I was looking around the various functions that this Blogger site provides for us bloggers and came across a tab I had not used before: Stats. I took a look at it and it revealed interesting data about you, yes, the people who read my blog. It was a little depressing but the information is not going to get me to change what I post here. However, it is interesting to look at what I have found out.The first thing I looked at was where the 99,000+ hits on my blog had come from. Over a third were from the USA and 16,000 were from the UK. I guess that I should not be surprised that half of those visiting the site were from English-speaking countries and these two in particular given that I write a lot about the UK and often feature US movies. The third highest source was Germany with 6,000 visitors followed reasonably closely behind by Canada and France, almost equal with each other; Australia in sixth place has provided 3,000 visitors, the Netherlands next with 2,000; Italy and interestingly, the Philippines both with 700+ and finally Sweden with just over 500. I guess this spread may come from the topics I have covered.
The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh. Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3. The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.
The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set. Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming. It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.
When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened. My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000. This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done. He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'. Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags. In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'. I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result. Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.
I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog. It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates. I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on. As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read. As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text. It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009. I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages. I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog. 'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog. Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.
The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh. Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3. The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.
The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set. Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming. It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.
When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened. My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000. This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done. He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'. Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags. In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'. I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result. Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.
I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog. It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates. I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on. As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read. As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text. It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009. I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages. I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog. 'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog. Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
