Carer’s tales

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

There are rhythms to the deployment of carers. Some arrive according to a rigid timetable set by tablets. If a certain medication has to be taken at regular intervals, with no more than a 10 or 15 minute variation, the carer has to turn up at those times.

This tends to mean that the carer who arrives is more often than not the same one. They have their regulars and a regular schedule so they can get from one client to the next on a predictable timetable. They are, of course, not paid for travel time and the pressure to get from one job to another can lead to road accidents. One we know was trying to save a second or two and crocked her car gliding into the one in front, damaging it enough for it to be out of action for a week. She was unable to get work until it was fixed because they are all dependent on cars to get from one job to the next. She now drives very carefully because the pressure isn’t worth it.

Because they travel by car, they come from quite a range of places, from Forest Gate in the West to Canvey Island in the East. One had moved from a flat off Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London down to Purfleet – because the housing is more affordable – and taken the job for the excitement; explaining that “Nothing ever happens in Purfleet”.

Pay for each visit is presumed to match the half hour or 15 minute slot that the company is paid for. This does not always match reality. If a client has a medical emergency it can take longer, so there has to be a scramble to fill the slots that are down the line. If all goes well, the routines of getting a client onto the commode, sorting all that out, getting them washed, dressed and chatted to can be done more quickly. In the case of housebound people with no family support, the last job is the only social contact and conversation they will get all day and is a crucial part of the job.

One that came to ours a few days ago said that she has a core of bedbound people who are her regulars. Somehow she has got into the habit of singing to them, and taking requests. Some of the old ladies like the Ronettes, and bands like that, but she has one old gentleman who is into heavy rock and usually wants something by Metallica – which is truly above and beyond.

Some carers are chatty, some quietly get on with things and converse functionally. Most are pretty upbeat. Most of them are women. Many are black. Most of the white ones have tattoos. There is a high turnover. A core of veterans keep things going while newcomers either adapt or, finding it too much, leave.

Some of them wear fans around their necks because, even during a heatwave, some of the clients have their heating on, and cranked up high.

None of them are in a union.

I complement one on her pair of colouful converses and she says that she loves them, has 14 pairs, but is now boycotting them because of Nike’s sponsorship and partnership deals with Israel.

Several have said they like coming to us because we are friendly and take an interest. Many of the clients have dementia, so can be terrified and aggressive. Some are racist and don’t hold back about it even though they are being looked after – possibly because they are being looked after and resent it. This is sometimes the case with relatives too.

If the family is covering meds and, to a lesser extent, food, the schedule for visits can swing quite wildly, with the getting up arrival ranging from slightly before 7am one day to well after 9am the next. During the Summer holidays schedules get stretched because carers with children have them on their hands, but as Winter approaches they also get harder to fill because its getting dark, dank and miserable and, people get ill.

Some of the overnight crews, who are always in twos and arrive in the wee small hours to give bedbound people a turn, or deal with pads, can be loud – car door slams, a conversation that would be loud for the middle of the day erupts up and down the path to the back door, a scrabble for the door lock, the door goes crunch and the loud conversation imposes itself on the living room downstairs for a while, before the whole thing repeats itself in reverse on the way out. Others arrive with the stealth of Ninjas, but greater consideration. Some of them close the side and front gates on the way out. Some let them swing in the breeze.

Aromatherapy in Thurrock, and other bits and bobs.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Overheard in Boots.

“If she says she caught thrush from sitting on a toilet seat, she’s doing it all wrong.”

Walking down to town I am passed on the other side of the road by an elderly Irish bloke I chat to sometimes, absolutely bombing along in his mobility vehicle. He hurtles off up the sharp incline of Cromwell Road, leaving me limping behind eating his electric dust.

The trees on Cromwell Road now look almost primeval, with huge boles you couldn’t put your arms round anymore. Oak. Lime. Massive crowns hissing in the wind. At the brow of the hill there used to be a Horse Chestnut, magnificently flowered in May and the source of many a childhood conker. Now gone, diseased and rusted and eventually chainsawed, leaving a sawdust and a naked stump; and the road looking like a smile with an extracted front tooth.

Further down the hill a bloke built like a silverback gorrilla – arms like hams, big belly, a neck with one of Rusell Kane’s “Essex triple ripple” rolls of muscle – is drilling and hammering insulation panels on the outside of a house as though he is attacking it. Despite the power in his body, he carries an air of nervous truculence about him.

The street name plate by the car park outside the Tae Kwando Centre at the foot of the hill, pointing to a pair of houses evidenty constructed as an afterthought to fill in a bit of spare space overlooking the Titan pit, is a rhyming couplet. “Quarry View – Nos 1 – 2”. As mind worms go, this is the road sign equivalent of “baby shark”.

As I pass the war memorial opposite the old police station (now posh flats and renamed “The Old Courthouse”; which has a slightly Western feel about it to me) workers from the council are planting out dense blue banks of lavendar in the flower beds on either side. The waft of aromatherapy is almost overwhelming even from the other side of the road.

The vista approaching Wallace Road across “The Field”. More homely state than stately home.

In the playing field opposite the house, now glorified as “Hathaway Park”, a strikingly tall woman stands alone on the bank of grass, bright green in the sunlight, looking up towards the redbrick facades of Wallace Road – a proletarian version of the entrance to Blenheim Palace – wearing a chador from head to foot in the same celestial blue as renaissance painters used for the Virgin Mary – so a sort of Muslim Blue Nun. he is alone in a sea of green, and looks as though she has been beamed down from the heavens. It looks like a still from a film. The staginess of everyday life.

Things my Grandmother used to say.

On the News. “Not to worry, it won’t happen here”. On the “nothing ever happens in Grays” principle.

On illness. “What’s moveable’s curable”. Which, I suppose means that if you’re not dead, you can be fixed.

On the elasticity of the perception of time. “It don’t half get late early, don’t it?”

Fear and Loathing on Kilburn High Road.

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Chatting to some stall holders at the Brent Green Day at the Kiln Theatre about how the vibe inside it, quiet, prosperous, with a clientelle that is evidently well to do – drifting over from various manifestations of Hampstead perhaps – is such a striking contrast to the hard bitten, impoverished, tough dramas of everyday life on the streets outside. The Kiln puts on a lot of challenging drama, addressing some of those issues, but rarely engaging with the people they affect, in a sort of performative bubble, it seems to me.

Outside Tescos a woman sits on her knees begging. A bearded, slightly wild eyed, man marches past and snarls “Why don’t you get up off your arse and get a job? How about that?” He marches on feeling better about himself no doubt. The woman just stares.

Further up, outside a pawnbrokers, a ragged looking bloke with wild looking hair and some missing teeth sits astride a Lime bike waiting for something and mutters at me as I walk past. I ask him what he said and he repeats “Do you buy gold?” I am wearing a preoccupied expression, a crumpled shirt, with at least one curry stain, and carrying an overfull rusksack and Morrisons plastic bag. I’m not my idea of a gold dealer. Deep cover perhaps? Or perhaps a different sort of “gold”?

Eyeless in Gaza – a curious moral blindness

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

When shameless Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calls the UK government’s block on just 30 of 350 arms export licences to Israel a “shameful decision”, he is speaking as a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and corruption, including including breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, in Israel’s own courts. Watching him its hard to imagine that he has any self awareness at all.

He also seems incapable of grasping that his description of Hamas, as “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7”, begs the question of how anyone objective would define his own armed forces; who have killed 40 times as many people since. A lot of weight is being put on the adverbs and adjectives in this description. Are those 40,000 deaths not murders? Are the killings not savage? Are the people of Gaza not being terrorised? Is this not genocidal? The International Criminal Court has made an interim ruling saying that it is.

The comment on this limited ban below by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis (in italics) is similarly morally compromised; which is shown when you consider the situation in the round (not in italics).

“It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts. The “war for its very survival” takes the form of a massacre in Gaza courtesy of US arms supplies and diplomatic backing, escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a nervous stand off in the North with Hezbollah. Any other “fronts”, like the Red Sea, Eastern Med or Persian Gulf are being covered by gigantic US aircraft carrier task forces; with a few Royal Navy frigates to show willing.

But clearly, for Sir Ephraim, the over 40,000 people killed by the IDF in the Gaza strip since October 7th and the further 502 in the West Bank are not enough. Many more have to die to ensure Israel’s survival as an apartheid state. For Mirvis, because Israel is a “strategic ally”, we should be prepared to turn a blind eye to what it is doing and keep passing it the ammunition so it can keep doing it. The UK complicity here is its usual auxiliary effort to the main supply from the United States, which is rushing just under two arms shipments a day; which it would not be doing if it didn’t think doing so was in its own interests.

And that means that all too often the game that is played in the media is to treat Israeli victims as rounded human beings deserving of sympathy and identification, while Palestinian victims are just statistics. Because large numbers tend to blur in the mind, it might bring the reality home more to condiers just the casualties of the Israeli assault in the last three days.

This is from the UN OCHA report.

  • On 1 September, 11 Palestinians were killed and tens of others injured when Safad school hosting Internally Displaced Persons was hit in Az Zaitoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza city.
  • On 29 August, nine Palestinians, including three children (of whom two were newborn), and two women (of whom one was pregnant), were killed when the upper floor of a residential tower was hit in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah.
  • On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and at least 13 others injured in Deir al Balah.
  • On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and others injured when internally displaced people’s (IDP) tents were hit in Wadi Saber area, east Khan Younis.
  • On 31 August, seven Palestinians from the same family were killed when a house was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city.
  • On 31 August, five Palestinians, including three females and a doctor, were killed when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
  • On 31 August, five Palestinians, including four females, were killed and 15 others injured when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.

Mirvis goes on that such action has been forced upon it (Israel) on the 7th October, as if the genocidal scale of the reaction is not Israel’s responsibility and without reflecting that,

  • before Oct 7th, 20 Palestinians were being killed in the conflict for every Israeli
  • and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank was proceeding slowly but surely in the face of world indifference.

This is odd because he is very well aware of the latter, having taken part in National Day demonstrations in East Jerusalem in which settlers march through Palestinian Streets while chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn”.

He emphasises that this is “at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families” – without reflecting that had Netanyahu not sabotaged the recent ceasefire deal those hostages would probably still be alive. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel itself, leading to a General Strike and furious demonstrations last Monday.

He also does not mention the 184 Palestinians killed over the weekend by the IDF. Does he think those 184 people were not killed in cold blood? Or that their killers were kind? And consider the numbers. 184 to 6. Thirty one times as many people. Nearly three Grenfells. Half a primary school full.

That ratio of 31 deaths to 1 indicates how little these lives weigh in the balance. Their names will not be published. Nor will their pictures. Their relatives will not be interviewed. Their stories will barely be acknowledged. So, Sir Ephraim can look, and not see. Truly eyeless in Gaza.

On the same page, on the same day, as part of his pitch for the Conservative leadership, Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to be “willing to stand by our allies” (Israel) by continuing to supply it with arms as it, according to Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, creates a “situation in Gaza that is beyond desperate… Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear,” including

  • Severe overcrowding, coupled with the lack of clean water, sanitation facilities and basic hygiene items like soap, which is taking a heavy toll on children, with skin infections continuing to increase among them. As of 30 June, WHO had already recorded 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, 65,368 cases of skin rashes and 11,214 cases of chickenpox in the Strip.
  • With MSF support, the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC) has been providing emergency latrines, solar water pumps and basic health care to some of the displaced people arriving in the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis. “Every day, we see between 300 to 400 people at the medical clinic, of which 200 cases are related to skin conditions,” explained PARC pediatrician Dr. Youssef Salaf Al-Farra, underscoring that children are the most affected by highly contagious skin conditions.
  • MSF claims that, for three months, it has been trying to import 4,000 hygiene kits, comprising items such as soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and laundry power, to improve living conditions in Khan Younis, but the importation has not been allowed by Israeli authorities (my emphasis).

As Tugendhat puts it, if you can’t “stand by an ally” at times like this when it is busily reducing children to misery, “what is the point of an alliance?” So true. Because in an alliance, what “our” allies do gets brushed under the carpet, understated, justified, euphemised out of existence.

UK defence secretary, John Healey’s comment that that Britain remained “a staunch ally” of Israel and that the ban on just 30 liscences out of 350 would not “have a material impact on Israel’s security” shows that he hopes this level of gesture will be enough to defuse the pressure of the solidarity movement on the government, while it continues to “stand by an ally” no matter what it does. It won’t be. Israel reacts so aggresively to these gestures not because they undermine its practical capacity to keep killing on a mass scale, but because they undermine its perceived legitimacy in doing so. When even “unshakable” allies like the UK feel compelled to take even a symbolic distance, the ground is moving under its feet.

All the more reason to keep up the pressure. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign petition for a complete end to the arms trade with Israel is here.

The scale of desperation to keep the narrative under control in the UK is shown by the deeply repressive arrests of journalists like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under “terrorism” legislation. This follows the Israeli style of narrative control, in which they have put 52 Palestinian journalists in prison and have killed 116 in Gaza.

The arrest of Medhurst – who was held for 24 hours – was under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This means that it doesn’t matter what is true. In a conflict in which

  • our government defines one side as “terrorist” and the other side as a “democracy with a right to defend itself”
  • and a context in which it is increasingly normative to describe inconvenient facts as ideologically driven opinions

reporting on facts that put that ally in a bad light can be framed as being supportive of a proscribed organisation especially if they are true. I must admit a certain trepidation in writing this, in case 16 counter-terrorism officers in balaclavas descend my home at 7.30 in the morning, and sieze this laptop and my phone for “content posted online” like they did to Helen Wilkinson.

At the same time, the police look as though they are angling for a confrontation at Saturday’s first mass solidarity demonstration of the Autumn by putting such restrictions on its assembly point and timing that will give them many excuses to make arrests, no matter how peaceful the demonstrators are.

The statement condemning this has so far been signed by

  • Palestine Solidarity Campaign
  • Palestinian Forum in Britain
  • Friends of Al-Aqsa
  • Stop the War Coalition
  • Muslim Association of Britain
  • Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Signatories

  • Apsana Begum MP
  • Baroness Christine Blower
  • Richard Burgon MP
  • Ian Byrne MP
  • Jeremy Corbyn MP
  • Lord Bryn Davies
  • Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary TSSA
  • Alex Gordon, President RMT
  • Fran Heathcote, General Secretary, PCS
  • Lord John Hendy
  • Imran Hussain MP
  • Daniel Kebede, General Secretary NEU
  • Ayoub Khan MP
  • Ian Lavery MP
  • John Leach, Assistant General Secretary RMT
  • Clive Lewis MP
  • Mick Lynch, General Secretary RMT
  • Andy McDonald MP
  • John McDonnell MP
  • Iqbal Mohammed MP
  • Grahame Morris MP
  • Zarah Sultana MP
  • Jon Trickett MP
  • Mick Whelan, General Secretary ASLEF
  • Sarah Woolley, General Secretary BFAWU

Energy. Go Green. End the Wars. Cut the Prices.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In response to the 10% hike in energy prices this winter, the media last Friday was graced by two stunningly misleading statements, by Claire Coutinho and Ed Miliband, one after the other.

Claire Coutinho, said that cheap, non-renewable energy should be prioritised over carbon reduction targets to help struggling families this winter. This is the truth turned upside down and inside out.

To start with, perhaps Coutinho hasn’t noticed that the increase in energy prices this winter is being caused by increases in the prices of oil and gas. These are “non renewable” not cheap, and getting more expensive. Ceratinly more expensive than renewable sources.

Renewable energy became cheaper than fossil fuels as long ago as 2020.

Moreover, Eco experts reports that the IEA reported that in 2023, an estimated 96% of newly installed, utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind capacity had lower generation costs than new coal and natural gas and three-quarters of these new wind and solar PV plants offered cheaper power than existing fossil fuel facilities.

And renewables are becoming cheaper, while fossil fuels are becoming more expensive. Very profitable for that reason, however. Which is why Coutinho – formerly a senior fellow at fossil fuel funded right wing think tank Policy Exchange – wants to promote them.

So, doing what Countinho wants would increase bills, not reduce them and force struggling families to struggle even more. She either doesn’t know this, and is just a fool, or she does, and is cynically carrying on the Great Conservative Johnsonian tradition of bare faced lying, in the hope that if she brasses it out with enough self confidence no one will point out that she is speaking gibberish.

In an attempt not to be outdone, after rightly saying that this increase is partly a result of the Tory failure to invest sufficiently in renewables – assessed by Carbon Brief as now costing the average household around £40 to £60 a year – Ed Miliband went on to say that the prices are also going up because the UK is at the mercy of international markets controlled by dictators.

This trips off the tongue as one of those off the peg soundbites that requires no thought at all, and slides effortlessly along the the simplistic Foreign Policy groove shared by both front benches, and in so doing hides the fact that the increase in both oil and gas prices is caused by wars driven by Western allies; as it is designed to do.

  • the increase in oil prices is caused by fears of wider war in West Asia caused by Israel’s assassination of the top Hamas negotiator in Iran and several Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon; which at the very least sabotages ceasefire negotiations for Gaza, and at the most, could lead to a war across West Asian as the “democratic” far right government in Israel seeks to carry out the Samson doctrine on an apocalyptic scale. It pretty much an iron law that when US aircraft carrier task forces mass in the Eastern Med’ and Persian Gulf, oil prices go up in case there’s trouble ahead.
  • the price of gas started rising again this year because NATO is sustaining the Ukraine war instead of looking for a negotiated peace, and given an extra boost when the Ukrainian armed forces launched their reckless and doomed offensive into the Kursk region of Russia, further threatening gas supply. As the Financial Times put it The latest increase in the price cap is also connected to the war in Ukraine, with wholesale prices climbing over the past few months because of uncertainty over Russia’s remaining gas supplies to Europe. My emphasis.

The top suppliers of imported gas to the UK are Norway (by pipeline) and the USA (very expensive LNG, much of it fracked which has a carbon footprint as bad as coal).

Go green. End the wars. Cut the prices.

The Gay Gnomes of Fenchurch Street.

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And WAVE!

On a seemingly inaccesible girder opposite platform 4, someone has arranged a line of happy looking gnomes, some carrying rainbow flags.

The barrista at the Costa in the station now sees me as a regular, which I guess I am, passing through about once a week seeking a caffeine boost on my treek to Essex, and anticipates my order because its always the same. Creature of habit. Give it a year and I’ll have a mug hanging up behind the counter.

The tiny young barista in a hijab swiftly sets up six coffees of different sorts at once, causing the well spoken gent in the queue behind me – a man with a slight touch of the Alan Bennets – to complment her on her speed and efficiency. It occurs to me that had she been digging coal in the Soviet Union they’d have given her medals and put her on posters. Shock Barrista! She explains that getting the coffees done quickly en masse is essential when people are catching (or might miss) trains.

Fenchurch Street always used to be smoky, closed in, quite dingy, in a cosy and friendly sort of way. Rather down at heel bar and cafe with curly sandwiches, more routine than inspirational, dark brown tea and watery coffee. The recent remodelling has opened the concourse up to a floor to ceiling window at the back which floods it with light and a sense of space that makes getting to London somehow more optimistic.

Just round the corner towards Tower Hill is St Olaves church and graveyard, where Samuel Pepys and his wife are buried. The gateway to the graveyard is surmounted by a carving of three skulls – just as a reminder. “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that”, as Hamlet put it to another skull. The churchyard is tiny, green, a peaceful haven with a stone labyrinth in the corner. This is a representation of a labyrinth, being decidedly 2 dimensional, not an impenetrable stone maze that a Minotaur might be found at the heart of. The idea is to walk along the route from the edge to the centre while thinking about the almighty. The route loops around and back on itself, so it has the same disorienting effect as ecclesiastical architecture; designed to make you dizzy and vertiginous when you look up.

St Olaves itself is one of the few medieval City churches to survive the Great Fire. Going in, there’s only me and a middle aged black woman with a huge Bible, who seems slightly offended that I’m in there with such little Faith, but situating herself on a higher plane to cope with it. It is extraordinarily quiet and peaceful inside, set lower than the street, with colourful Tudor looking carvings of praying figures around the pulpit and beautiful stained glass that seemed to have survived being “knocked about a bit” by Oliver Cromwell and Restoration plaques and carvings of Pepys types with magnificent flowing wigs framing plump and sensuous faces.

Stands still the station clock at nine thirty one…?

A flying visit to the ruins of the “thousand year Reich” in 1947

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My Dad in ATC uniform in 1947.

My Dad was in the Air Training Corps towards the end of WW2 and for several years afterwards. It used to meet in the Main Hall at Grays Tech (now the Hathaway Academy) – where I was to stand through many an Assembly 20 years after.

The high point of being in the ATC, literally, was to get flight experience, usually in a Lancaster (painted white). The best of these was a trip in the ball turrent on the spine of the plane at the top. Some of these flights involved dogfight simulation, where a Spitfire or Mustang fighter would suddenly appear and act out an attack, so the bomber pilot would have to take evasive action, involving yawing, rolling and corkscrewing in a manner guaranteed to give everyone on board acute airsickness. My Dad felt he was very lucky to have avoided one of those.

In 1947, someone higher up in the RAF thought it would be a good idea to send keen cadets from the ATC to have a look at some of the places the RAF was based overseas. A brasshat came down and interviewed my dad and his cousin Len and, a little later sent a message through that they’d decided to send my Dad to Germany and Len to Egypt. Len’s Dad put a veto on that for him, but my Grandad didn’t. So, my Dad got a warrant to go to Northolt for the flight to Germany.

What’s weird about this is that they were sending 17 year old cadets off on their own, with no apparent plan or purpose beyond the trip as an end in itself. The aircrew Dad was flying with in their DC3 didn’t know he was coming, weren’t keen to have him aboard, and had no idea what to do with him. After a bit of discussion they decided to give him the title “Air Quartermaster”; and got him to dish out the sandwiches (dainty things from BOAC on the way out) coffee, and pass on messages – “we’re now over the Hague” etc. Air Safety demonstrations were not part of the job description, and he got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat which had an exellent view of the impenetrable cloud cover they were flying over.

When they arrived at Bucheburg (Bookyburg to them) the cloud cover was still solid and the pilot had to confer with the navigator to make sure they were in the right place – as the airfield was surrounded by hills on three sides; which at that time presented an obvious risk if he couldn’t see where he was. The Navigator being confident enough, they descended through the cloud flying in a spiral until they broke through to clear air beneath and landed.

On landing, no one knew what to do with my Dad, the crew had places to go and Frauleins to see and didn’t want a 17 year old cadet cramping their style, no one from the base was expecting him, nor had he been given any guidance on what he might do. One of the crew grudgingly took him to the bar on the base where the German barman protectively refused to serve Schapps when the crewman ordered it, possibly for the entertainment value – “not for the boy”. After a while the crew member went off leaving Dad to his own devices and to finish his beer. On a visit to the toilet he was approached by a German civilian who asked him for cigarettes – “Zigaretten?” – so he gave him three. In the late 1940s in Germany these were not usually to smoke, but use as currency.

He then walked a little way into the town, which was lively in a “Bachanalian orgy” sort of way. There were “no fraternisation” bans on relations with German civilians, but the RAF crews and the local women did not seem to be paying much attention to them. Leaning on a lampost at the corner of the street, taking some of this in, he was shouted at by a Military Policeman sitting in a jeep on the other side of the road. “Airman! Over here!” Standing in front of him the MP noticed the ATC patch on the shoulder of his uniform and asked what it was. The other MP in the back of the jeep said “He’s just a boy”, so the first one contented himself with telling Dad off for standing with his hands in his pockets. “It creates a bad impression”. Wouldn’t want that with a Bachanalian orgy going on.

The following morning at breakfast, the crew were sitting around regaling each other with tales of exploits and conquests from the previous night, some of which might have been true. Before the trip back Dad went for a walk to the hanger where the DC3 was waiting. The doors to the hold were open, giving off an overpowering smell of coffee – which implied a certain amount of off the books trading.

On the trip back – in which one of the passengers was a former German soldier in handcuffs heading for a war crimes trial – the “Air Quartermaster” had to dish out the sandwiches again – thick RAF doorsteps filled with Corned Beef this time – and, having landed was, as with every other step of this trip, left to his own devices to get home.

Other cadets must have had these trips, but there seems to have been no debriefing beyond the local ATC CO asking if it was a good trip. The expected (opaque) response “Yes Sir!” may not have been universal, because this particular experiment was never repeated. Unless it simply petered out in the same aimless way that it seems to have been set up.

So endeth my Dad’s first trip overseas.

Ca ira! France celebrates avoiding Far Right government in surreal Olympic ceremony.

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Taking place in a torrential rainstorm, the opening ceremony at the Olympics was as much under the water as on it.

A parade of random sized boats with national atheletic contingents that reflected in size the wealth and power of the countries sending them – more for the USA, fewer for Djibouti – all grinning and waving gamely, processed up the Seine alongside cartoon giant heads emerging from the water like an animation by Terry Gilliam accompanied by performances for the TV audience on the bridges and buildings alongside.

These had a extraordinarily surreal feel that had the Rassamblement Nationale spluttering over their post election tarte au ressentiment. Aya Nakamura’s magnificent mash up with the band of the Republican Guard providing accompaniment, where their rigid ranks tapping out rhythm on snare drums broke into a mildly bopping circle around her, which Marion Marechal described as a “humiliation”, may have been inspired by the delirious and liberating scene in the Tin Drum where Oscar taps his drum as the Nazi leaders march into a rally, the band loses the beat for the bombastic march they are playing and settle into the Blue Danube instead; and the iron ranks of the rally break into a swirl of people waltzing. This would be appropriate given how much fuss the French far right made about her singing at the event because, having been born in Mali, she “isn’t French”. Not an issue they raised for Celine Dione or Lady Gaga oddly enough.

For me, the most striking performance was the one in the Conciergerie, the rather grim former prison on the river bank, in which every window was occupied by a Marie Antoinette figure in flame red, singing the “Ca Ira” from a head tucked under her arm, while some dreadful French heavy metal band hammered and shrieked a demonic descant from the balconies, and a boat representing the Paris coat of arms floated by underneath with a soprano at the front – who bore a disturbing resemblance to Rachel Reeves (same Laurence Olivier playing Richard III hair thing going on) – singing “L’amour est enfant de boheme” (Love is a Gypsy child) from Carmen. Lacking the historical context, the BBC commentators translated “Ca ira” as “all will be well”, when it was actually the chant of the columns of the French revolutionary armies as they went into the attack at the armies of the European Ancien Regime in the 1790s. “Ca ira!” We’ll get through! To underline the point, the performance ended with an explosion of red streamers. Take that aristocrats! How unlike the Olympic ceremony of our own dear Queen…

As the tiny Palestinian delegation sallied past, the commentators talked of how they were performing under the shadow of Gaza and added “we wish them well”. The best thing they said all evening.

Barbarism

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I originally wrote this in December, shortly after Refaat Alareer was killed by the IDF, in the spirit of his poem If I must die but didn’t publish it at the time because I thought it didn’t do him justice.

But, now Netanyahu has repeated the line “We are in a battle of civilization against barbarism” in his deranged rant at the US Congress calling for more weapons to “finish the job faster”; so, time to fly the kite.

On the day this was written, Palestinian casualties stood at 18, 412. Today, it is more than twice that. What price “civilisation”?

Barbarism

In the battle of civilisation against barbarism

It is necessary for the civilised

To bomb the schools of the barbarians and kill their children

To bomb the homes of the barbarians and kill their families

To bomb the hospitals of the barbarians and kill their doctors and nurses

To stop the barbarians’ sources of fresh water, so they thirst

To stop the barbarians access to food, so they hunger

To cut off the barbarians’ access to medicines, so they sicken

To kill the barbarians teachers and poets to still their stories

To bulldoze the barbarians olive groves to empty their land

so you can say later that they were never on it

To flood the ground water with salt so nothing can grow

To bomb the barbarians libraries and archives to erase their history

in the futile hope that, this time, “the young will forget”

To drive the barbarians away from shelter

Make them move, again and again

To make sure that they despair

To strip barbarian prisoners to their underclothes and make them kneel in the dust

To kill a hundred or a thousand barbarians for every civilised casualty

So everyone knows that order is restored

Because every civilised mother knows

That their children can only sleep safely

When the barbarian children are all safely dead.

In a grave

Still digging…

12/12/23

High Noon in Fairfields Crescent?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Because it is so steep, few cars run up or down Fairfields Crescent. Its therefore tempting to walk down the middle of the road. A move that irresistibly conjures up a projection into an old Western like you are approaching three gunslingers with bad intent (and no lines). The heroic mythologies of John Ford aside of course, projecting ritual duel like six gun shoot outs – when the historic reality was that most people who died of gunshot wounds back then were shot in the back – it comes with a series of grand musical accompaniments in the head. The theme from The Big Country probably the grandest; and most thrilling. From 1958. The year before Sputnik ushered in the age of the Space Opera.

Half way back up Wakeman’s Hill from dumping our old, clapped out oven at the Community Skip; which appears every couple of months for two hours only at a convenient local spot – a wonderful innovation from the local council that prevents an awful lot of fly tipping – I spot a very thin, quite small, semi deflated Father Christmas suspended half way up the front wall of a house near the summit. Originally meant to look like he was climbing purposefully up with presents, encapsulating hope and anticipation, he is now hanging with his limbs dangling at awkward angles like an animal someone has shot, perhaps as a warning to other Santas not to try it. At any time of the year…

As Wakeman’s Hill is long and steep, and the old oven heavy and awkward, I took it down on the chassis of our shopping trolley, which worked extremely well. Wonderful invention. Everyone should be issued with one when they retire as a rite of passage. Let the wheels take the strain. It should be in Manifestoes at the next election; One Person. One Trolley!

Being away in Thurrock most of the time at the moment, local changes in Kingsbury jump out when you come back. One pleasing development is the number of Lime Bikes that are obviously being well used. A scattering outside the tube station, and some outside flats, showing that people are using them for short term commutes, probably regularly. Some are dumped on their side – which is slobbish of whoever does it – and I tend to pick them up even though my knee is too far gone to use them, as they should be presented by all of us as the community asset they are, not the piece of pavement clutter cyclophobes like to moan about on the local “Next Door” (let’s moan about something local) site.