The City.

Darien was born in the city. Like everyone else he was extremely wealthy and had all that money could buy, but lately he hadn’t been visiting the machines. For one reason or another it had just slipped his mind. He’d probably just got used to it, and anyway the wall was some distance away. But things were very expensive and the money he had was running out. He would go tomorrow he thought. The wall that encircled the city was high and though it was rumoured there was a gate there was no reason anyone would use it when they had the machines. The machines, twenty in all, spaced evenly along the wall were the reason for the wealth. Set securely in the stonework of the wall these cash machines dispensed cash a little differently to normal. For every pound you inserted they dispensed five pounds. They were the reason for the wealth and why the city dwellers did very little work except of course for regular trips to the machines with whatever cash they had. Darien would go tomorrow. No one in the city questioned how the machines worked, why would they? He visited a coffee shop and asked for a latté. He drank the latté and asked for the bill. £5. I said it was expensive. He realised with horror that was exactly the amount he had left. He pleaded with the waitress to let him go to the machines but to no avail. With no money he couldn’t get more and without more he couldn’t get even more. He was stuffed. After trying everything he asked in desperation where the gate was. Maybe out there he could at least find some food. He found it grown over with brambles. No one had used it in years. He went outside the city. Outside there were many more people and all much poorer than anyone he’d ever known. And every day they worked. Darien asked them, “Don’t you have cash machines?” They of course said yes, that they were set in the stonework of the city wall. He asked, “So why do you need to work?” they laughed and explained that they worked to feed the machines, that every £5 they earned and put in the machine it would give them one pound to spend. Suddenly Darien realised how the machines in the city were able to do what they did. He set about working to make £5 and put it in the machine then went back to the gate, but it was locked from the inside.  

Shoreham Air Show Crash.

I watched footage of the Shoreham crash on the news, a massive fireball of aviation fuel engulfing a stretch of the A27 and its unfortunate motorists. The Hawker Hunter involved was a trans sonic fighter weighing 20,000 lbs with a single Rolls Royce Avon engine and a range of 2,000 miles.

A Boeing 737 by comparison weighs 70,000 lbs, has a similar range, two Pratt & Whitney JT8D engines and carries around three time the fuel load. In Shoreham the damage apart from the cars appears minimal given the impressive fireball that engulfed it all. Aviation fuel will burn like that but only for a relatively short time. And although it burns hot it doesn’t reach the temperature to melt steel. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The last time I saw a massive fireball of aviation fuel like that in Shoreham was on 9/11. Back then it engulfed several floors of Towers 1 and 2. I’ve just watched an old video of that and the burn lasted less than twenty seconds before it turned to black smoke. It’s funny how seeing such a catastrophic image obliterates all thoughts of physics. Could the massive steel structure of the towers really be brought down by twenty seconds of burning fuel? Most structural engineers, physicists etc (outside NIST) think not, but the public saw it with their own eyes. Try this at home; put a kebab skewer in the gas flame for twenty seconds. Did it melt, even bend, even get white hot? No, the melting point of steel is around 1510*C where the hottest a petrol fire gets is 1200*C. Thermite as used in controlled demolitions though burns at 2200*C. You do the maths.

Automated Football Results.

Our local pub runs a football competition throughout the season. Choose four teams from the four leagues then add up their league positions to get a total. To do this for seventy odd people so they know how they’re doing was an onerous task that took Chrismouse a couple of hours every week; that’s eighty hours over the season. Chrismouse needed a spreadsheet. Stiffmouse to the rescue! Well it seemed simple enough. After some evaluation it wasn’t. How do you get from data on a website to a list of people’s scores to post up in the pub? I started learning about Look-ups, Macros and how to write Visual Basic. Did all that and by week one I’d got it working and sent it to Chrismouse with considerable pride. Week two and it crumbled into dust. Got it working again, sent it off again and then dust again. And again. My file was acquiring so many suffixes of variants it ran to two paragraphs and Chrismouse was loosing confidence. Breakthrough. The BBC data was screwing things up. It was getting bigger and bigger as more matches were played. More learning, more rewriting of macros and bam it was conquered. By this point I couldn’t put it down so went for the ultimate, buttons. Yes you can put user buttons on spreadsheets, just click and they’ll do anything you want. So now all Chrismouse has to do is copy/paste data, press the appropriate button, repeat and press the Results button. It should take him around 80 seconds. That’s seventy-nine hours, six minutes, forty seconds saved every year, and I’m two weeks older. 

Hit Squads Target Corbynites.

As we speak, well OK we’re not actually speaking but as we would if we were, thousands of Corbynites are being disappeared from the streets and held in West Ham’s new ground under police protection for the foreseeable future. The opposition front bench are signing rub-out notices on anyone foolish enough to vote for JC. OMG he’s not the second coming is he? Well you might think so judging by the Mugabe-esc tactics of his own party. Lucky for him we don’t stock polonium 210 in this country. It feels reminiscent of the fear and anger of the moneychangers in the Temple, the end of the world as they know it; a politician that listens, considers and responds. They after all inhabit the world of listen, ignore and spin some guff till they lose interest. This is about the constituents of power, its component parts. Take parties, policies and collective responsibility. These are forged in committee and disseminated to voters via maximum persuasiveness. JC is not a backroom plotter nor is his thoughtful language persuasive as we’ve come to understand the word. Take ‘on message’ bluster and the dismissal of pertinent questions and facts. Here again JC’s stile of listening and putting forward considered answers and views utterly fails to fulfil expectations. No, when his party’s collective responsibility will be to pull the rug from under him he won’t last five minutes. But people at large love his style and his views and hate being deceived by bluster and dissembling rhetoric. Last evening I watched a documentary on the West Indian cricket team led by the mild bespectacled Clive Lloyd during the 70’s. Through the years of his captaincy they began as underdogs and grew to dominate world cricket. No bluster, no rhetoric, no backroom committees, they just did with honesty what was necessary to succeed and grew in well-justified belief. This is what the English people are hearing in Jeremy Corbyn, the voice of genuine leadership, but I doubt the Labour Party is that astute. 

Automated results

Inadequate Policing.

I read somewhere of a woman in danger of being raped in her own home in Cleveland or some place in the US phoning the police. She was told “the police no longer work weekends due to the cuts.” One nil for rapists. When pondering Calais I’ve often wondered, a) how immigrants get the 5,000 euros for the journey and, b) why England? If they get here they’ll be lucky to get subsistence wages and even luckier to get government help. That’s hardly a case for economic migration. I suspect like the woman in Cleveland they want safety. Even the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais is a safe place compared to where they’ve left. They are not economic migrants nor political asylum seekers, they’re safety seekers and England with its population of law abiding disorganised mongrels seems a good bet. So Calais is a symptom of inadequate policing. Not police state policing but the policing of fairness, safety and well-being. It’s also testament to humanity’s desire for these above all else even to the point of dying under a train. In the face of them the ideologies of greed, power and religious supremacy have little credence, accept to those indebted to them. So here’s a solution. A million airdropped leaflets over Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.

“A MESSAGE FROM EUROPE- For centuries we have fought and are still fighting many battles against religious, political and economic tyrants. Slowly and through many rebellions and deaths we have curbed their power to provide fairness, safety and well-being for everyone. This is your desire for your own country and within your gift. Achieve what we have achieved and there will be no need to come here and endure the perilous journey. Good luck, we’re on your side. It’s possible.” 

My Oldest Friend.

The oldest friend I still know intimately is my guitar. Not the same one but a procession like a long multiple train journey, nine of which I still have. They follow my sixty-year procession through skiffle, classical and jazz, through gentle and more recently upbeat. But this is about how rather than what. I wasn’t a natural performer, not your born front man, I didn’t know that connection. Like many introvert folk singers I hid somewhere between the song and the audience not really connecting with either. It was a quite lonely place with only myself for company, up there exposed yet hidden in some protective cloak of invisibility. I got a clap and that helped but I knew it was a consolation prize. Slowly through mastering the technicals I found space to play the song, to let it flow through without obstruction. But churning covers out to order wasn’t enough. I found songs I wanted to connect to and began affairs with them. I began to build the confidence to be their lover, to build a mutuality, to sing them in the moment as lovers do. That connection was made. Then the greater challenge, to be exposed; to perform this love making in public. Performance and acting are often mistaken to be forms of duplicity. Some are but true performance is real. Only true feeling will illicit true feeling. Through clowning I began to venture into the innocence of the moment that connects us all. There are countless elsewheres to get lost in but only one moment that we are all in together, this one. That’s the power of it. So finally I’m beginning to glimpse a way of being, a way of showing heart through music. It’s taken a long time and is easier for some but this has been my process. I suspect Robert Downey Junior knows it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crxmBTxRlM