I went to a restaurant with a sign that said they served breakfast at any time. So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance. (Steven Wright)

A lawyer dies and goes to Heaven. “There must be some mistake,” the lawyer argues. “I’m too young to die. I’m only fifty five.” “Fifty five?” says Saint Peter. “No, according to out calculations, you’re eighty two.” “How’s you get that?” the lawyer asks. Answers St. Peter: “We added up your time sheets.”

“Elections are like police line-ups, only with elections you pick the person before they rob you and screw you. It’s like a game of choose your mugger.” Chopper, Udderbelly Pasture (Edinburgh Fringe 2012)

have a fun day.

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In our history when we were smaller tribes one man (usually) sitting in the biggest house telling people what to do and being the last arbiter of the rules which everyone had to live by, probably worked. Not the least because everyone knew this person and even if they didn’t agree with him they couldn’t beat him in a fight – which seems to be the very unintellectual way leaders were chosen.

This system of one to rule them all works best in small tribal units. I wouldn’t know when it begins to break down but my guess would be when the general public cease to be able to listen in person to, or meet, the leader. The immediacy of leadership is an essential ingredient in the led believing they have a good system.

It seems to me impossible that men and women having to make decisions for millions they never meet, could ever work. The ramifications of the thousands of rules and subset defeats the purport of those rules time-and-again, as no one can legislate fairly for millions of individual circumstances.

We are told today there are always winners and losers with every set of rules. Right. Then the way in which we write those rules is wrong. It isn’t that there should never be losers, it is just that in a fair society there should never be winners.

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This week the Prime Minister of England told the European Community he was going to negotiate a brand new treaty with them and then hold a referendum on that treaty to see if the UK will remain a member. Albeit some of the measures in the old treaty are being redesigned anyway due to the fiscal crisis and the growing numbers of countries in the union. A move that in the opinion of many will help the upper classes in the UK because they can rewrite thirty years of workers rights in favour of the directors and shareholders of companies. The UK always makes decisions that make it richer.

This same week Iran warned that any attack on Syria would be seen as an attack on Iran. As sabre rattling goes a better invitation to the western world to be done with Iran once-and-for-all couldn’t be conceived but of course, they don’t mean it. It’s just for their public consumption to be seen as strong and fearless.

Which is of course the whole point of both ultimatums. For if the treaty is redesigned and Cameron believes in it, then he is doing the job he was elected to do: lead. The referendum is for those many who were not elected to lead but want to anyway.

We should get Iran to join the European Union and hoist a UN flag over Whitehall. Now that’s a fun world to live in.

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The news was filled today with the vote in the democratic gulag called the Kremlin that all but one vote was caste to bring into law restrictions on minorities which will impact the gay and lesbian community. A deeply conservative move backed and promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church.

We shouldn’t be surprised.

When the Berlin wall came down one of the recurrent themes of the commentators on the newly emerging countries was that they were stuck with pre-second-world war value systems. Still infected with anti-semitic leanings, still male dominated and they broke down into the ‘strong man’ leaders who had been the bullies of the communist regime hiding out in the secret police.

Russia will pull out the doldrums but it will take a while and while it does so the church will make people’s lives hell because that is what the narrow thinking of  biblical bigots always does. Enlightenment is not about facts and figures and the sudden inrush of scientific illumination, but the understanding that compassion glues society together more strongly that religion. That two men holding hands in public are not a threat any more than anal sex with a woman in partially a homosexual act.

There are at least twenty gender differentiations in the species. You can’t vote any away.

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This year Dr.Who is fifty years old. Well actually for those who know he is over none hundred ears old and dies and is resurrected when he is eleven hundred years old or so. But the TV show started in 1962, which I don’t recall but I do remember trying to see odd snippets and being terrified.

I could never get over how brave everyone was going down corridors to find out what was down them, wandering into thick undergrowth after the monsters. I thought space travel would be a much more secure affair.

But the real joy of Dr Who came to me at school when we were not allowed TV and once a week we had tea with a maths master and were able to catch up on some cricket or rugby depending upon the time of year, the generation game and then Dr.Who. Tom Baker with his ridiculous scarf making fun of people who wanted to kill him and working out the silliest disaster plots.

Can those who saw it ever forget him saying how brilliant the Master was at a particular kind of mathematics, adding “almost as good as me.”

It wasn’t slick, it was often on rickety sets, but it was different, enjoyable and engaging.

Happy Birthday.

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WORDS

OUT of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes–
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through–
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak;
Sweet as our birds
to the ear,
As the burnet rose

In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew,–
As our hills are, old,–
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales,
Whose nightingales
Have no wings,–
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there,–
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.

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I am not a great fan but I have watched some samurai films and the whole idea of honour in human  beings is one I find fascinating.

The way in which a person should hold themselves in society, how trustworthy they should be, how they should conform to certain set rules crosses the globe, but what I find particularly interesting is how extreme this idea becomes amongst soldiers.

That each soldier knows their life depends upon the small group of men around them is well documented, and indeed is the reason why armies are divided into corps, platoons, and smaller units because the bonds of friendship between the men within these units is what makes the whole army work. Comradeship aside I find this talk of honour in men trained to kill, who go to war to kill and injure and win battles, strange.

How can killing ever be honourable? Well when you are defending your home because another army has invaded it. But how many wars in history have actually been defensive wars because one side must always have ‘gone to war’, are those men less honourable amongst themselves than the defensive army? No.

Peace has to be the most honourable way to live. There is no honourable way to kill.

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There are thousands of books and hundreds of apothegms about how to make your life happy, and indeed it is written into some of the governing instruments of whole countries. The pursuit of happiness is so endemic because for the most part people find it difficult to attain and even harder to maintain if they find any.

The reason for this, as far as I am able to see, if that we direct our efforts to what we as individuals can do to make ourselves happy. But if for one instant we thought deeply about the things that make us unhappy we would see that for the most part those things are brought about by other people. Now I know what you think, you think I am going to say that if we suggest that happiness is actually the absence of unhappiness then we can be happy by getting rid of other people in our lives.

If only things were that easy. What is actually true is that our happiness and unhappiness is an affect of living with each other. We don’t live with each other with anything like the compassion and care we should. In fact we antagonise each other because we are selfish.

It is human selfishness that is at the root of all human unhappiness.

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They say that Winston Churchill used to go into his garden and disclaim before the flowers practicing phrases and put-downs which he then stored away for use in the debating chamber. I remember learning to type to become proficient enough to not have to think about it anymore and be fluent and fast enough to keep up with my thoughts, so I could concentrate upon the writing not the means. And my good friend Kevin, a book binder, told me that in calligraphy class he was made to draw a single line endlessly to make sure the hand and wrist were fluid in the execution to improve his calligraphy.

Practicing the small things, sometimes to the point of boredom, teaches the brain to use the muscles in a particular way. Once learnt you don’t have to concentrate upon the mechanics so much, and you can use your brain to concentrate on the things you cannot learn. The things unique to the work in hand, whether a new book, dance, story of whatever kind of art.

Like driving a car when gear changes become automatic, you can concentrate on the traffic, the drive, the journey disconnected from the mechanics you are using. The art is not in the brush, but through the brush.

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Once again people have been arrested for abuse who were in positions of power over children and like the hunting wolves or lions they chose the vulnerable, even those in hospital, which says a great deal to me about how these men think.

To deliberately target children who do not have money, friends or family, is more than simple abuse. It is inhuman. Since we have standards to which we aspire and since we use those standards as markers to apply our judgments, men who betray those standards betray us all. They betray the society in which the operate even though some of the time they may not be betraying their hormones though one has to say, to have sex with a child unable to have children has to be a betrayal of natural sex.

To use words like ‘dysfunctional’ and phrases like ‘abusive nature’ is to underplay what these men do: they murder childhood. It took thousands of years for us to even have an idea of childhood, and to see the emotional development of a human being as something that takes decades but these men hold it as nothing.

The scars of the mind are the hardest to heal and the challenge for us is to learn how to control these men and protect all children.

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The instinct the take physical action is obviously instilled in us at birth. It is something no one has to be taught we just have to learn the extent of our own abilities. The way in which we learn to take this action is, obviously, dependent upon how we are brought up and if there are any curbs on our aggression they have to be  instilled as we develop into adults.

In Algeria men who want political change, a freedom as they define it, money to get what they wanted, were prepared to take hostages and invade buildings. The Algerian Government was prepared to see everyone dead to deal with the matter.

Our Governments throw up their hands in horror because we don’t deal with these kinds of situations this way. Unless the prisoners are in the Falklands and the enemy is easy.

The western world has done a brilliant thing in the past three hundred years – it has created a science that is unanswerable, a view of the world that is endlessly fascinating, an intellectual future for the human race but to fund that advancement it has stolen and raped countries of their resources leaving corruption and poverty everywhere it has trodden.

We are in fact, partly responsible for how the men who took the hostages and the leaders who killed them, acted. We have never cared a damn about either.

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When the Spartans were planning to attack Athens in the 580s BCE, the Athenians , as usual, asked the oracle what they should do. Apparently she said words to the effect that they should ‘trust in their wooden walls.’ There was an argument then as to whether this meant their fortifications around their cities or their ships. If their ships she was basically telling them to run. Themistocles the Athenian leader chose the fortifications and so began the Athenian age of power.

Choices made by leaders have ramifications for all of us, but choices made by millions of individuals have ramifications for leaders. The gun is a weapon designed to disable or kill. Accuracy of shooting is regularly tested in firing ranges with paper pictures of people. The gun has long ago taken over from the dagger and sword as the weapon of choice.

But the only reason they are owned is out of fear. Fear that an enemy will come who has a gun and you have to meet them face-to-face. The idea that modern society should be a war of minds does not even enter the thoughts of millions of people and so there is an issue of being stuck in a mind-set that is not advancing society.

As long as there are guns in private use the west is still wild.

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I Speak Not

I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name;
There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame;
But the tear that now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.
Too brief for our passion, too long for our peace,
Were those hours – can their joy or their bitterness cease?
We repent, we abjure, we will break from our chain, -
We will part, we will fly to – unite it again!
Oh! thine be the gladness, and mine be the guilt!
Forgive me, adored one! – forsake if thou wilt;
But the heart which is thine shall expire undebased,
And man shall not break it – whatever thou may’st.
And stern to the haughty, but humble to thee,
This soul in its bitterest blackness shall be;
And our days seem as swift, and our moments more sweet,
With thee at my side, than with worlds at our feet.
One sigh of thy sorrow, one look of thy love,
Shall turn me or fix, shall reward or reprove.
And the heartless may wonder at all I resign -
Thy lips shall reply, not to them, but to mine.

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My mother, whom I consider to have one of the finest intellects of anyone I have ever met, pointed out to me that Stalin was not made by Communism but by his Russian village background. His entire character which has been shown in history to be selfish, paranoid and deeply suspicious as well as murderous, is the character of a Russian peasant hoarding what he has for fear of losing his status.

The lauded film about Hearst in which Orson Wells murmurs ‘Rosebud’ as he dies tries to show how the loves and wishes of a child stay with the adult no matter who that adult is or what they do. So when we look at Assad and now the kings of Arabia who are under threat, we only have to look at how they were educated to know how they react and to explain all their actions.

The body becomes an adult but the emotions are the same in the three and five year old as they are in the thirty year old because you can learn to be capricious and devious, because you can learn to long for power, because you can fall into the self-deceit of your own eminence.

When you look at Earth from space you can see the crib we are all living in.

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This lady died of cancer at sixty-four. I never knew her, I never met her. I didn’t know of her existence until her obituary appeared in the Guardian written by a friend of mine.

But she started a centre in London to teach vulnerable women self-defence. Born on Brazil she experienced brutality from her convent, her family and the military regime that rules her country when she was growing up. Her teaching was to help women protect themselves and because she is so admired it made me think that in all the flurry of activity governments are engaged upon to protect the status-quo and the newspapers are indulging in on the pregnancy of the mother of the future monarch; what exactly are we protecting here?

A society where two women a week are murdered in the UK in their own family environment. A baby being born who will be so protected he or she will never understand what it is to be afraid or to be truly alone. Cities where women and children cannot walk in freedom, societies riven with class warfare that doesn’t spill blood but permits incredible unfairness to exist as an acceptable standard.

We have to teach women how to protect themselves against certain men. That alone shows us we have not yet built a civilisation.

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By Anna Mills

Format:Paperback

This thing weaves a spell! I was reading, the phone rang and I jumped! I had been so immersed in Blueskin’s story, a hanged highwayman reincarnated as a slinky cat. A slinky cat having a hard time realizing that he is, indeed, a cat. In one breath a man and in the next, a stray, slinky cat on the streets in front of the very place where he met his human demise.
Blueskin becomes an ambivalent sidekick with the very brothers who had a hand in his hanging. They gain a female companion and embark on sailing to the Americas in order to run from her father. A seasick Blueskin endures marauding pirates on the high seas as he tries to decide where he should place his loyalties. He comes to the realization that he likes himself better as a cat.
There is no better way to sow a lifelong curiosity for the history of the world for a child than through a storybook. What I had read to me as a child stayed with me more than anything that came later. It became a part of me and helped engender my love of reading. What a magnificent gift to give a child. And Blueskin the Cat is so easy to fall in love with. It was such fun to read and so witty that you may end up quoting from it. The watercolors are enchanting in their simplicity. I loved the dark brooding stormy look of them.
Blueskin and his companions go through a terrible storm which helps save them from the pirates, become shipwrecked, and realize that Blueskin could be much more than just a stray cat. They find themselves washed up on a beach…..I will leave you there.
Mr. Nanavati says that this work of his is his mother’s favorite, all one needs to know. This is the first of a series. Imagine waiting for the next one! I’d wait in line.

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With alchemists striving to find immortality and Voltaire famously suggesting that the problem with life is that you don’t know when you are going to die, and therefore cannot plan properly, you might be forgiven in believing death is not so much a negative as the essential element that links us all.

But for every death in the world, there has to be a birth first and though to a certain extent we are all born to die, there is the living in-between that describes us as individuals. Birth and death are shared necessities, human beings are too vile and selfish to live forever, but in living we can push forward an agenda that has nothing to do with us as individuals and everything to do with us as a species.

Life is all about the mutations in our DNA and how they work out in the organism they grow. Its about change not for the sake of change but to increase the chances of survival and because we survive because of our thought processes human survival is all about thinking. It is our thoughts that define us. It is our thoughts that make surviving worthwhile and it is our thoughts, and only our thoughts, that can survive until the end of time.

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One of the most virulent viruses ever written was an e-mail which simply said in the subject ‘I Love You’, and millions of busy people around the world instantly opened it. Giles Brandreth, a B list celebrity in the UK, published a book which was small and when you opened it it contained three words, I love You. He sold Ten thousand copies. I recall the astute and latterly wise Germain Greer saying she got married (a huge mistake) partly because she was so surprised to be asked.

But this word describes a part mythical, part possibly emotional state between two people that is as varied as there are people. And when mixed up with sex it becomes even more complex and wayward. In the Crusades and times of courtly love a knight would think it a perfect Christian love to ride off with a woman’s scarf  under his armour as a pledge and kill people for ten years believing himself in love. But then religious love is also something quite different and mercenary.

People know how to describe love but have little knowledge of how to attain it. What we all really crave is closeness, trust and security. Sometimes one person cannot give us all these at the same time. Sometime no one can.

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I have never been a fan of inquiries set up by politicians, but if you have one it must define the problem before it can suggestions ways forward. In this instance the problem is that certain journalists on certain papers grew too close to police and politicians and were allowed to break the law. This closeness started with Thatcher and Murdoch and it is no coincidence that the worst offenders are journalists on his papers.

Here is no way to stop certain journalists putting their personal advancement above ethical behaviour but there seems to me to be an easy way to sort out the problem of what went on here. If a journalist breaks the law to get a story then in court judges should decide if that was in the public interest, if not then the journalist should lose their right to be a journalist in the UK.

Since personal advancement means so much to them let personal advancement be the punishment. Any police who have been found giving information that assists in law breaking, should also immediately lose their jobs and any politicians who are so close to journalists they turn a blind eye to law breaking should immediately lose their jobs.

The laws are already there that cover phone hacking and defamation of character. Use them.

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When I was at university there was an American man studying mathematics who’s family had enough to send him over to the UK but left him only about £2 a day to live on. We were all amazed when the kitchen complained that he was eating too much breakfast but that was his only meal of the day. His brother visited once and they doubled the amount of money they had for the day.

As students we all knew money was slim but we would be careful about working out the right amount of tip to leave in any restaurant as several students were working as serving staff, who never get much salary anyway,  across the city. It was always important to try to be fair. Like the man who owned an Indian restaurant my mother went to, who, when a man ran out without paying his bill, shrugged and said that he must have been very hungry.

So I was interested in Bon Jovi’s restaurant where people pay what they can, or what they think the food and service are worth. Placing the emphasis on a person’s judgment, if started young,  would be a good way to run all business. Beginning with having prices stated that are the price the business has paid to get the goods to you. Allowing profit to be a measure of conscience, not greed.

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As we read today of the worries of the Egyptian tyranny and the fallout from the Arab spring, and we forget where the Zimbabwean revolution left her people or the need for a Tibetan revolution to free her people, I reflect upon what we call revolutions. How we trade one kind of leader for another, one set of binding laws for another set and how in every revolution the greatest need, to do away with money and find new ways of building nations, has never been tried. We can also see by putting faith in people we always end up in a circle for there is no real difference between the wish for diktat between Cameron and Henry 8th, between Stalin and Putin, between King George and Washington.

But there is a difference in mind of you can fill minds with different ideas. Science has provided us with such a breadth of knowledge, and such a system for finding out what we need to know and highlighting what we don’t know, that we no longer need societal systems but only systems of thought. It may be beyond us to have every human being educated to a certain standard but it is no longer beyond us for every human being to know where to go to find out what they need to know.

It’s the revolution of self-rule.

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To understand how children’s literature works it is necessary only to look at the famous and loved books down the ages, but to understand how the ideas in those books came to be chosen you have to understand the life of the writer. There is a wholly symbiotic relationship between experience and literary output, but there are particular reasons why writers choose to write for children.

As with CS Lewis it is to describe and educate and help form the growing mind, with Tolkien it was in part to entertain his own son away from home, with Arthur Ransom it was more to do with not being able to write much else, with High Lofting and T H White it was pure spirit of invention, or with Barry it was a measure of personal tragedy and with Charles Kingsley a measure of social outrage.

There are as many reasons why writers choose to write for children as there are such writers for the spirit of pure invention is rarely alone. When Elizabeth Beresford’s child mispronounced Wimbledon, Wombledon it set the seventies alight. When Richard Adams watched the rabbits outside his house it sparked an industry.

Story-telling comes out of the life.

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The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

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When I first learned about Knossos on Crete the thing that surprised me most was the way in which after each earthquake had levelled the city, the people rebuilt. I didn’t immediately understand as a teenager that two and half thousand years ago island dwellers may have had nowhere else to live, I just understood that I wouldn’t want to live anywhere that was that dangerous.

If you have no choice, it seems, you have no options. Today 900 homes have been flooded in the UK and more are going to be but the news that these householders will be uninsured without Government help from next year raises in my mind the question, ‘why did we ever give permission for houses to be built on flood plains?’

Sometimes I wish the law was wise enough to visit the history of decision making to find out how the planning authority drew its conclusions, why the building company thought the land suitable and why in the face of changing climates the insurance companies ever insured the houses. Right now all over this country people are left in homes they will probably never be able to sell.

After thousands of years of experience, we still give people no choices.

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The world gets smaller as humanity extends its reach. There is a lovely letter in those found in a mummified crocodile in Tebtunis, Egypt of a fifteen year old boy in Rome writing to his father garrisoned in the country, excitedly talking about his first boat trip across the Mediterranean to see his father. The same excitement a child might feel crossing continents today and the same one will feel who shoots up to the space station, or to the moon in the future.

We manage to do more and go further in terms of distance,  but we are still the same.

I know the old saying that we live in a modern age but retain stone age bodies – but we also have stone age minds. We react to what previous generations would have thought of as fantasy in the same way they reacted to the facts of their day-to-day lives. Their technology was advanced for them just as it is for every generation, but technology doesn’t change human beings as quickly as it changes the world around us. Just as certain animals struggle to survive and become extinct over centuries the same is true of ideas.

Part of us is still living in caves.