fact, opinion and poetry (not airy-fairy)


Tuesday 27 December 2011

Guantanamadu

In Guantam' did Rumsfeld Don
A stately torture camp decree:
Where raghead stragglers, lost to life,
Were forced in orange suits to fall 
Down upon their bended knee.

So twice five miles of barren ground
With guns and towers were girdled round:
And there were compounds rife with fetid cells,
Where blossomed many a keen agony;
And here were torments ancient as the hills,
Enfolded by sunny greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic spasm which warped
The minds of those who waged that struggle!
A savage space! as hellish and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By soldier marching as an order-lover!
And from this spasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if these imps in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty empire momently was forced:
Amid whose swift expanding burst
Great nations burned like exploding hells,
Of shock and awe beneath the bomber's flail:
And 'mid these dancing bombs once and ever
Was smashed up momently their ancient culture.
Five thousand miles with a crazy motion
Through desert valleys the accurs'd armies ran,
Then reached the citadels of ancient power,
And sank in arrogance to an inept rule:
And 'midst this chaos Rumsfeld heard from far
Domestic voices calling him a fool!

 Here's one of many online versions of the original:
http://www.poetry-online.org/coleridge_kubla_khan.htm 


Feel free to compare the two, bearing in mind they were written in a different century, and reflect a different mood.

Wednesday 21 December 2011

A Guilty Pleasure

 Recently I've taken a job, driven by financial necessity. Together with minor illnesses, this has curbed my writing, until this week's sudden splurge. I had planned to commute to Whitwick by bus, a laborious process, till my new employer offered me a company car!


        How smoothly I swoop across a land
        Haunted by mist.
        Green and brown flow swiftly past,
        An eerie dream of freedom.

        A sonorous drone engulfs me,
        Bearing me forward.
        A more virtuous past,
        Wrapped in global concern,
        Slips away behind.
        Enraptured now by machinery,
        Thrust on me by circumstance;
        Or was it chance?

        How to refuse this delicious temptation,
        When I must get to work?
        Poverty the goad, effortless speed the allure,
        Rubber's soft whispers soothe.
        The road to Whitwick is paved with bad intentions.

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Teeth

Who can speak of such evil times,
The truth's become a thought crime;
The people are forced by traitor's decree,
To grind their teeth in silence.

Life is strangely harsh today.
It must be stress, the dentists say,
It' s now an epidemic:
Our patient's teeth are wearing away!

One Leicester! is the bosses cry,
We're all in this together.
The quietly seething city knows
Of lies we've had an overdose.

EU expansion was the key,
To knock us down to poverty;
With joy we are supposed to crave
To be a minimum wage slave.

Our leaders tell us that our woes
Are due to Broken Britain;
They hope that we will never know
Just who it was that broke it.

Law says that we must force a smile,
While anger stimulates our bile:
Unable to express our rage,
We gnash our teeth in silence.

The way of freedom's land today,
If we speak our minds,
They'll make us pay:
So pass the day in silence.

To Wrest the Meaning from the News - and Give Us What's Left Behind

The newsmen drown us in the facts,
But meaning their rendition lacks;
They have a hidden agenda,
To treat it like a soap opera.

One dismal image trails another,
To tell us why is too much bother;
Our leaders speak an in-group code,
A thing which to our ill must bode.

The rich and powerful rule the roost,
War gives their profits quite a boost;
The media folk are in their sway,
They acquiesce in every way.

Who pays the piper calls the tune,
They drench us in a fact monsoon;
They say it is democracy,
But why not call it shite?

Ring Out Those Solstice Tills

At Samaritans, the crisis piles up,
Calls come thick and fast.
In the season of good will,
Wills needed more than usual.

In the centre of town,
The drink flows free,
Streaming curses and threats.

Children fight over toys;
Parents wearied by noise
Are at wits' end.

Why do the Christians
Covet this festival?
Surely it's better left to Auld Nick?
Seems more his bailiwick.

It wasn't always thus;
Once Yule was mild,
Rather than wild;
But all was changed to feed
The businessman's greed.

Thursday 3 November 2011

Poetic Biography of Rabbie Burns


A short biographical tribute to the Immortal Bard.

NB (for English folk)  oggan = ocean; fu' =  had a skinful.

Rabbie the Rhyming Alkie

                                                O Rabbie Burns, he got sae fu',
                                                They thought that he might ne'er come to;
                                                "Go easy, Rab," his friends all said,
                                                "Or you will very soon be dead;
                                                Your way of life, it is not wise."
                                                But Rab thought they were telling lies.

                                                On Hogmanay, he got so drunk,
                                                He took a freezing midnight dunk;
                                                He fell right off of his toboggan,
                                                And leapt full-clothed into the oggan;
                                                His escapade did not come free,
                                                He croaked it from the pneumonie.


With Amy Winehouse drinking herself to death, and England rugby players jumping in the sea at the World Cup, it seems that little has changed among the famous.

To a Mouse (the Update)


This is an attempt to make Robert Burns world-famous poem more accessible to a modern urban audience. Burns lived in a stone country cottage, a world away from how we live now. Not only his archaic dialect words, but also his rustic sentimentality, are alien to today's people. I was inspired to bring it up-to-date by similar treatments accorded to Shakespeare's plays for the school audience.

To a Mouse

                                    Wee sleekit, cowrin' tim'rous beastie,
                                    O what a panic's in thy breastie;
                                    It's wise ye've run away so hasty,
                                    For ye've been nibblin' at ma pastry.

                                    Furtively ye steal ma food,
                                    And what ye leave is nae so guid;
                                    Ye reek so bad I can aye smell it,
                                    Ye've strewn ma flat wi' wee brown pellets.

                                    Behind the plasterboard ye scurry,
                                    Ye're always in an awfu' hurry;
                                    Both night and day ye're scamp'rin' proud,
                                    Frae one so small, it sounds quite loud.

                                    If I can lay ma hands on ye,
                                    I'll smash ye tae a pulp.

Three Dodgy Haiku from the Word! workshop

The organiser, Jan Fox, challenged us to be in the now, and write haiku to perform in front of the group. She told us that 'now presence' was the key to successful live performance, in her experience.
The first is based on what happened while we were trying to write them.

                                    The fire brigade's here;
                                    We're living in denial,
                                    But get the all clear.

Someone cooking upstairs. Lucky we weren't killed as we ignored the alarm and wrote. Fanatics, eh?

                                    Should I eat Greg's bun?
                                    It's full of sticky toffee
                                    Which will rot my teeth.

It was sitting in front of me after I had finished my first effort, and he had been trying to get someone to take it, as he only wanted one of the pair he had bought.

                                    The cherry blossom
                                    Is gone; they've cut down the trees,
                                    To build a new shed.

Jan mentioned flippantly that real haiku should feature the cherry blossom. This, sadly, is also based on what has happened in my home street, where the prettiest cherry trees in the city have been sacrificed to church expansion.

We had five minutes to write one, and I did three. The secret to churning out the doggerel against the clock is to not be overly fussy about quality.
                                   
                                   

The Word! Poetry Workshop


A friend and I went to the Word! poetry workshop at the YMCA Theatre mainly out of curiosity. It was too small to sit at the back trying to look inconspicuous, so there was no escape. The first challenge was to write a poem about our journey to the workshop. We had five minutes. For someone who never writes and rarely reads poetry, this was a bit of a task.

                                    Walking along, bopping along,
                                    Startled by unseasonal sun.
                                    Greg keeps talking winter coats
                                    While I'm still feeling hot,
                                    He's telling me 'bout clothing shops.

                                    Curiosity killed the cat;
                                    What am I interloping at?
                                    The door is locked, my mind is clocked.
                                    To go or stay?
                                    Nothing else to do today;
                                    And now I'm trapped,
                                    Into trying to write a poem.



Saturday 29 October 2011

Empire of the Clouds


When I was a young boy, my family lived not far from RAF Leuchars. Aircraft were constantly in the skies, and we were fascinated by them in a way that today's children don't seem to be. At school, if a plane went over, we would rush to the windows to look at it, over the plaintive protests of the teacher.
            This fascination was shared by adults too; my mother taught me to identify the different types of V-bomber, and she was no petrolhead. Was it the Cold War which sparked this fascination, or the awareness that Britain had recently been saved by the RAF from being overrun by the Hun? World War Two seemed a long way away to us children, but not so to our parents.
             We went to Leuchars to see the annual air display, and watched the English Electric Lightning perform its astonishing feat of climbing vertically to the stratosphere direct from the runway. I was too young and naive to fully appreciate it. I got to sit in the cockpit of an aircraft, and familiarise myself with the RAF style of toilet, which was a bucket in a tent. My first ambition was to be an RAF pilot, one which collapsed when it became clear I was very short-sighted.
            The other day I was scanning a sale of damaged books at Waterstone's, gobsmacked by the sight of books going for a pound in there. I picked up one called 'Empire of the Clouds', by James Hamilton-Patterson. It was subtitled 'When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World', which turned out to be a wild exaggeration once I got to reading it. It has pictures of all the old favourites, the Vulcan, Victor, and Valiant, not to mention the Hawker Hunter, which I once assembled a model of, and the Buccaneer, which my brother built.
            The book is a combination of a valediction to a lost Britain, with its delusions of victory, and its huge but hopelessly balkanised aircraft industry; and on the other hand, a searing expose of how the 'powers that be' blundered it all away, often after a few sherries over a long lunch. Arrogance and laziness are a potent combination, and our aircraft industry, on which so much depended, seems to have been well-endowed with both, to counter and defeat its amazing talent.
            Profound ineptitude at the highest levels of government played a huge role in the fiasco. Ministers seem to have preferred the half-baked nostrum to careful analysis. Tragically, it seems to me that they reflect the limitations of our whole society in that. The public, in spite of vast expenditure on education, remain to this day untrained in the assessment of relative probabilities, or the weighing of pros and cons. The author himself seems unaware that he too shares this syndrome, and his own analysis lunges between extremes in much the same way as that of the decision-makers he berates. For example, he states that the Lightning was a much faster performer than the hugely successful Dassault Mirage, having previously stated that our aircraft's worst problem was a small fuel tank. The Lightning could sustain Mach 2 for only two minutes to the French plane's twenty. Surely it's obvious that the Lightning would climb faster, unencumbered as it was by the heavy fuel? He makes no mention of this, preferring to lord it over the French for a face-saving moment.
            Another failing which he shares with many is the awe in which he seems to hold the Americans. He praises the F86 Sabre, and laments the terrible casualty rate of our own inferior Meteors and Hunters. He seems quite unaware that the Sabre also had a catastrophic casualty rate. I have heard from RAF maintainers, that the F4 Phantom, which we bought from the USA, had such unreliable electronics that the radar frequently failed just as it left the runway. It was useless.
            The deadly indifference to casualties of the post-war nation fell heavily on the pilots, who were badly paid and not valued. The bosses seemed to think there was an endless supply of expendable young daredevils, and there was; but they weren't a good choice to take care of valuable aircraft, frequently destroying plane and self in some tomfool stunt. The author seems to admire this behaviour, for unfathomable reasons.
            We have long been suffering from 'posh numskull in charge' syndrome; we could defeat Argentina in the Falklands only because they suffer from it even more. The curse of Britain is at least partly secrecy. The unholy trinity of stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance dominates the minds of the powers that be; whenever they take a decision in secret the consequences are appalling. Only public debate can restrain their fecklessness.

Monday 17 October 2011

Sad Decline of Leicester's Victoria Park

The state of Victoria Park is now quite laughable. The poorly-maintained football pitches have covered the park with bare patches, to such an extent that even on a warm summer day the number of people using it is much smaller than it was before football activity recommenced a few years ago. When the park was used purely as a park it was highly popular; that is hardly the case today.
            The problems began a couple of years ago. The grass was cut very short in the Autumn, presumably on the expectation of yet another mild winter. Instead the winter was bitterly cold, with snow and heavy rain for months. The football pitches deteriorated into a sea of mud, and have never recovered. When Spring came, the park authorities reseeded, but apparently without watering, seemingly relying on the rain to germinate the grass. A severe drought immediately followed, and none of the grass seed germinated at all. It gradually blew away in the wind, over a period of weeks.
            This did not prevent the pitches being used for football again when the season recommenced, even though they were scarcely fit for play. After a long hard year of muddiness, exactly the same sequence of events took place again with reseeding. During the summer, I noticed that couch grass had begun to claim the edges of the bare bits for itself, something the planted grass was obviously unable to do, resulting in a dark green ring of long, tough grass surrounding each patch of bare brown earth. If the city cannot afford to pay for water for the seed, why cannot they collect rainwater from the many roofs the Council controls? It could also be used to refill the pond, which dries out in the summer.
            Some of the park had, until recently, been preserved from devastation. The area to the Welford Road side had not been marked out as a pitch, and was made into some sort of underused cricket area, which left at least some grass for picnicers and the like. Unfortunately, that too has now been turned into a pitch. It seems the City Council doesn't care about any park users other than the footballers.
           

Friday 14 October 2011

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the supermarket.


I bumped into Andy. With his long hair and beard, he looks a bit like Gandalf. And he is a wizard at knowing where to scrounge free food and drink. This was on University Road. The last time I bumped into him there, in almost exactly the same place, he was on the way to an inaugural lecture by a newly minted professor. I went along with him and got free wine and snacks, as well as an education in how iffy the pharmaceutical biz is.
            I caught up with him, and found it was exactly the same situation again! What a coincidence. We went up to a lecture theatre, and a new prof gave us a talk on neuroscience. Andy is genuinely interested in this stuff, and would go even if it weren't for the freebies. I think.
            The prof was introduced by a bearded bloke in a suit, who said he was a ProViceChancellor, whatever that is. He was very serious, and told us the prof had been promoted from the post of Reader, and was the bee's knees. It was a Leicester tradition to have these inaugural lectures, in which the new prof communicated to the public the results of his distinguished research. The ProVC believed it was very difficult to give these talks, as the scientists had to decode their stuff into language even I could understand, which many found the hardest thing they had ever done. He said we were starting a little early, but didn't think anyone else would be coming. I was puzzled by this. Was he claiming to be psychic? Of course he was wrong, and a few people drifted in on time, only to find they had missed the start! Boy were they surprised!
            The prof gave an interesting talk, which included some witty animations, just to prove he had a sense of humour, even though he was such a swot. We learned interesting things, such as the fact that some professors can't turn the jargon off, even when they are trying very hard to. We also learned that most of neuroscience is bullshit, as the silly fellows are using the brains of rodents, which are very different from those of larger mammals. Large animals such as us have more white cells than grey ones, whereas the mice are the other way round. The white cells are used for communication. As a result, most of what children are taught in school about the brain is part-smart, at best. Apparently Albert Einstein left his brain to science. Instead of using it for scientific research, the Yank universities just cut it into pieces and divvied it up for souvenirs. We also learned that most of the drugs being used to treat stroke patients don't work, as effective doses have excessively severe side-effects. The prof and his henchpersons have managed to show that a cocktail of different drugs at acceptable dosage levels may produce better outcomes, which is a very important piece of research.
            After the talk, we repaired to the Charles Wilson Building to scarf the freebies. This is a skyscraper in the middle of the Uni, named after an absolute nonentity. He was the gaffer of Glasgow Uni when I was a student there, and I don't know why anyone would name a building after him. Still, that is where the grub is usually doled out for these events. People drifted up quite slowly. Only about half the people who had been to the lecture came to the nosh-up. I was first up for the wine, and it was a very palatable red. Andy went off to another lecture! What an intellectual. There was another of his cronies there, but he didn't hang about very long. Perhaps that was because the scientist types were totally deffing us out. I hung around the edges of various groups of people, in hopes of being sociable, but they acted as though I was invisible. I began to worry about deodorant failure. I had washed quite carefully before I came out, but it had been a warm and humid day. Or was it the grey beard I sport? Perhaps they thought I was a down-and-out, coming to get smashed on the free wine. I only had a couple of small glasses, a few handfuls of peanuts, and some crisps. I noticed that most of the insiders were on the juice, rather than the wine.
            I had hoped to get some tips from the prof on stroke prevention, but was unable to get his attention. This was quite different from the previous gig I went to, when everyone had been very friendly, and we had discussed meta-analysis of treatment methods quite freely.
            After I got home, it occurred to me that it wasn't just me who was being ignored. The whole do had divided up into small cliques of people, who talked only amongst themselves, and completely ignored all the other groups. Since I wasn't a member of any of them, I was imperceptible. Perhaps the people who didn't come up from the lecture knew they wouldn't be welcome. It seems that studying neuroscience appeals to very clannish people. Or makes them that way.

Tuesday 11 October 2011

The Challenge of Increasing Longevity

Increasing longevity is the source of considerable economic strain. The system is not adapted to it.  People used to die very shortly after retirement. Now they may live till they are ninety, but often not in the best of health. This creates great strain upon the NHS, and upon Social Services.
            It also creates an inner emotional crisis for people who may not have the psychic resources to cope with decades of low physical activity. Unhealthy modern diet has exacerbated the situation. Many of us gain weight as we get older, or suffer unnecessary degenerative disease caused by junk food.
            Scientific researchers predict that in the near future, we may live to an average age of one hundred and twenty. Unless we get much better at preserving our faculties and physical prowess, this may not prove to be a blessing. There may also be issues of material poverty to cope with. Old age pensions are under threat from the increased demand. If Britain continues to lurch into economic decline, and food and fuel prices continue to skyrocket, the situation will become very difficult indeed.
            Each of us is presented with a challenge by this situation. We need to ask ourselves what we must do to avoid sinking down into eventual despair. It requires self-discipline and courage to think seriously about the future, when it seems like a rearguard action.

Everybody's Reading - well, some of us are.

The festival got off to a curious start for me. I had decided that my own contribution to it would include reading books in public places, as a form of propaganda. (I have also been carrying them around without using bags, so that passers-by can see what my intentions are.) On the first day, I was sitting in the elliptical park on New Walk, reading a chess book under a pleasant afternoon sun. Some drunken young men entered the park, and sat down with their cans to enjoy a bit of loud cursing and complaining about the heat. Suddenly one of them  declared loudly, "I feel sorry for that bloke over there, he's reading a book!" I didn't understand why this made me an object of pity. After a while I wandered off, as I found their noisy behaviour was disturbing my concentration. The incident demonstrated why we need the Everybody's Reading Festival, and that it needs to improve and develop to reach more people. By reading in public, I am not trying to persuade people like that young loudmouth to read books, but rather trying to dissuade his kind from intimidating other people out of doing so, by accustoming them to the sight.
            On Sunday night, some of us went to hear Corey Mwamba's music group perform in the café at the Phoenix. At first it seemed as though very few people would come, and we were thinking in terms of taking away the buffet in doggy bags. Gradually the place filled up, and in the end virtually all the grub disappeared, and an insufficiency was threatened. Fortunately the two children present turned their noses up at the fare on offer, and fetched themselves food from a well-known fried chicken chain, thus alleviating a shortage caused mainly by the way I'd been stuffing myself.
            In Leicester, it is traditional to be what elsewhere is known as 'fashionably late'; so we shouldn't have been surprised that people floated in when they felt like it. It's a wonder anyone manages to catch a train any more.
            The music began after the buffet, and took the form of some kind of jazz improvisation. Corey performed on a kind of xylophone, looking a bit like Gollum at times, as he seemed to be almost  crawling over the instrument; at other moments he stood back and hammered away. He was accompanied by sidemen with an acoustic bass and a small drum kit. It created a very pleasant sound, at a felicitous volume level for the size of venue. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, though the link between his composition and the reading festival which had inspired it was not obvious to the musically inexpert like myself. He had done some of the composition at the Central Library Story Café, and I had watched him doing it. He uses an unique notation of his own, in the form of a kind of mind map on a single sheet of paper, with all sorts of strange squiggles.
            On Friday night I attended the highlight of the festival, the panel discussion featuring successful SF author Peter F. Hamilton and Professor George Fraser of Leicester University's Space Research Centre. It was on the theme of 'science vs sci-fi', or how SF has influenced or predicted the real progress of technology. It was well-attended, and the auditorium was full. Damien Walter of Everybody's Reading chaired the meeting, and asked questions of the participants, which had been composed by popular local SF writer Catherine Digman. It was an interesting session, in which I learned that twenty exoplanets have been discovered right here in Leicester! Not a lot of people know that. (An exoplanet is one that orbits a star other than our own Sun.) The panel went on to discuss the issue of the 'singularity'. This is a popular idea in SF, in which it is postulated that exponential technical change will continue to accelerate until we are no longer capable of keeping up with it. Neither panellist seemed to think this likely, and Prof. Fraser suggested that technological civilisation had plateaued, and maybe even entered a decline. A question-and-answer session with the audience followed, and Prof. Fraser was asked if he was worried about being abducted by aliens. He replied that even the University students didn't know where the Space Centre was, so he didn't think the aliens would be able to find him. I asked him about the feasibility of my favourite idea for a space drive capable of reaching Mars in a few days. He said that it would require a step change in technology, and no-one was working on it; so it's still there for me to invent, once I am rich enough to own my own development lab.
            On Saturday, I went to the session on starting a blog, run by John Coster and a Canadian film activist called Kenton. I got my blog started OK, though I'm not sure what I want to put on it yet. Possibly bits of stuff I've written for the story café, initially. Many of the participants seemed a bit naïve about how competitive it is, and how dedicated a writer you have to be. Kenton put all this across quite forcefully. The most interesting thing I learned was that I could contribute pieces to Citizen's Eye, which might or might not get published by them. This is an amazing Leicestershire online newspaper, an all-volunteer effort. There is also a Creative Media Week coming up in November, which will give opportunities to meet all sorts of people involved with grass roots media and learn how it's done. I'm looking forward to it.

The Tyranny of Time

Out on to the  story cafe table came the stuff from our pockets; like a visit to the police station. I contributed a pocket watch with chain. A genuine family heirloom, an antique pocket watch with quartz-controlled precision timing.
            I took to using pocket watches because I didn't like to wear a wrist-watch during the summer heat. It made my arm hot and uncomfortable. I had never liked to wear them loose and have them sliding about. A pocket watch takes longer to consult, but causes no discomfort and is satisfyingly traditional. A bit like wearing your grandad's weskit.
            It transpired that quite a few of those present no longer wear wrist-watches. Alison said that she uses her mobile phone instead, so doesn't need one. It seems they are on the way out. A good thing too, as they were a horrible invention. Easy to break, and an invitation to crime. Unless you wore a cheap one, in which case people would think you were destitute, and doormen would refuse you admission to posh hotels.
            When did it become de rigueur to carry the time? In the good old days public clocks would sound out the time every quarter of an hour, and that was considered quite sufficient. Before that, nobody cared. Now we are obsessed by the time, enslaved by it even more than by any other instrument of control. Except for those who are wearing a tag, of course. Was it the need to catch public transport which forced us into subjection to the clock? Or was it the invention of the factory clocking-on device? The factory owners were happy to dock a quarter-hour's pay for one minute of lateness. That certainly put pressure on people to know the exact time. In the Clydebank shipyards after World War 2, you were allowed five minutes to go to the toilet, with the foreman timing you with his watch. A few seconds over and you would be fined half-a-crown, a substantial sum in those days. So by then the time tyranny already held full sway, at least over some people.
            Did radio broadcast time checks institute the new era? Before that, how did people synchronise their watches? Perhaps not very accurately. Presumably public clocks  could be used, but how were they set? A puzzle which was solved by discussions at the next week's story cafe, where Greg told us that the time wasn't well standardised across the country until the railway system was developed, when the train companies started sending electrical time signals through their signal lines.

Learning to read

I was slow at learning to read. I was almost the slowest in the class. The teacher used to tell me how far behind the others I was. At one time, my parents were afraid I would never learn at all. We had a book about Dick and Dora and Nip the dog to learn from. My mother realised I just wasn't interested in these dull characters who never did anything remotely interesting. She got me the Lion comic which had stories like Paddy Payne -Spitfire Pilot, and Sky-High Bannion, who was a kind of globe-trotting aviator. She read me the comic two weeks in a row, and on the third week, when I asked her to read it to me, she told me to read it myself. That is how I learned to read. I wonder how many other people have failed to learn to read for similar reasons, and not got the help I got from my mother? To a five-year-old the merit of reading is not obvious.
            It has become fashionable to blame the failure to learn to read on dyslexia, a rare disorder of the nervous system. This is in most cases incorrect. Most failure to grasp reading has emotional reasons, such as dislike for the teacher.
            I recently read a report that said that a majority of teenage children are afraid to be seen with a book by their friends, in case they laugh at them. How has this deplorable state of affairs come about? Some kind of moral failure by adults would seem to be involved. We have failed to communicate the importance of books to the younger generation. In this society, people who don't read books will probably be stuck at the bottom of the economic heap, and those who don't read at all almost certainly will. Do the teenagers know this? If not, why not? Some people are going about saying that reading will be less important in the future because of computers. The opposite is, of course, the case. It is hard to imagine an illiterate person mastering a computer. The World Wide Web is unlikely to interest the illiterate. How would they know what to click on?
            More and more young children are growing up in dysfunctional families, due to the growth in drug abuse and crime. I recently heard a young man talking in the street with a friend. He said things had been going quite well for him, and he had been accepted at the university, but had had a set-back, as he had 'Had to go jail for a couple of munfs.' Does he even know it's not spelt with an 'f'? Unless something radical is done, more and more class stratification will take place, and a barbaric future lies ahead of us. Too many of the better educated people believe that ignorance is an innate and unalterable aspect of the lower orders, that they are uniformly beyond any kind of uplift. While this is certainly true for some, there must be many trapped in the underclass by bad luck, something which previous generations seemed to know, yet which is in danger of being forgotten.


The Silver Arcade

The Silver Arcade is a historic Victorian shopping complex in the heart of Leicester City Centre. When I first arrived in Leicester, more than thirty years ago, it was one of my favourite places in the City. Like the other arcades, it is a kind of covered footpath between streets.  It has two limbs, one running between the Market Place and Cank Street, and the other between  Cank Street and Silver Street, which is the main one. The main Silver Arcade is more ambitious than the nearby Royal or Odeon Arcades, it has four floors of gallery shops surrounding the open centre, where a large skylight provides illumination.
            It was closed for business, except for the ground floor, in 2000. All the quirky little shops were evicted, and many ceased trading. They had been unique little one-person businesses for the most part, taking advantage of the very low rents the Arcade charged. They sold all sorts of strange products, creating a kind of alternative shopping reality perched in the air, almost resembling a Himalayan temple.
            Access was gained either by the tiny, dimly-lit,  creaking lift, or the rather steep and bleak stairs. It was like a museum of Victoriana, popular mostly with the younger people who could face the staircase. There were unusual views over the rooftops of the city from the staircase windows. It was fun to look down from the balconies and watch people passing beneath, or browse all the odd little shops with their quaint contents. Many were so small you could examine their entire stock without needing to go in. Others were like caverns needing to be explored, like the Black Cat Bookshop, one of my favourite haunts. You could obtain tantalising glimpses of the ones on the upper floors by peering up through the railings. Signs hung down on cables trying to lure you upstairs, rather like an Eastern bazaar.
            Suddenly it was rudely shut by a new owner, who wanted to smash out the interior and modernise it. A public petition could not save the place, and part of Leicester's heritage died. The City Council denied permission for the new owner's plans, and it has been derelict ever since.
            Now, however, redevelopment has commenced, at an asserted cost of three million pounds. Workmen are busy smashing away, putting in new lifts and toilets. There are plans for a top-floor restaurant, and other new facilities. This is welcome news, but the reality is that we will not see the old Arcade again. What replaces it will have to be very much more upmarket in order to recover the redevelopment cost. It will be yuppy and chi-chi and expensive. Once historic things are vandalised, there is no reversing it. The past is a different country, and you can never go back.

Town Hall Square - A Collage of Impressions

During the steaming hot days of August, when I staggered out of the Central Library after hours slaving over a hot computer, I would collapse onto a bench in the Town Hall Square in front of the fountain. No matter how sultry the weather, the fountain always brought some relief. The slightest gust of breeze would blow some drops of water over me, and the air always seems fresher near a fountain. Negative ions, or so we are told.
            The fountain is the jewel in Leicester's crown. A copy of one originally made for Barçelona, it allows you to pretend you are in Cataluña, as a flight of fancy. While I was sitting there with a friend, she closed her eyes,  and said we should pretend to be at the seaside. Zephyrs were blowing the spray over us, but unfortunately the pigeons didn't co-operate by making the appropriate noises.
            More and more often these days, the fountain is shut down, with repairmen hovering around it. In the first two weeks of September, the water has been shut off completely. On a recent visit, I went over to see if something was wrong. There were no real clues as to why it wasn't spouting away, but I was shocked to see the extent of the corrosion on it. Some of the toes of the griffins have been almost eaten away. Orange streaks and rust pits are everywhere. It isn't really made of bronze, as I had naively imagined. It must be cast iron or steel, with a bronze-coloured coating, which is deteriorating rapidly. Urgent action is required, if irreversible decline is to be arrested.
            There are some genuine bronze statues in the square. The memorial to the Boer War at one corner of the garden is made of real cast bronze, and shows no sign of deterioration. It is in three parts, each depicting beautiful women in erotic postures, arching their backs and displaying bare breasts with erect nipples. One of them is crouching on her knees, entirely nude with one bare buttock showing, the other covered by her companion's dangling clothing, as though by accident. She is perilously close to displaying it all. Oddly, these women are carrying daggers in semi-concealed positions. I'm not sure what it's all supposed to mean. Perhaps it is a cryptic message from the artist, about the nature of war. The ladies seem very friendly, but if you get too close, they slip you a length, rather than the other way round. A bit like the Sirens of Greek mythology. A kind of metaphor for the allure of war, something which is all too often denied rather than admitted.
            The square acts as an urban refuge for all sorts of people. Young lovers occupy a bench, while the next one is colonised by down-and-outs. The other day, I saw a man lying asleep on one of the benches, while on the other side of the fountain a woman was reading a book, and in-between small children were chasing pigeons. A flock of dozens of the birds whizzed over the top of my head at terrific speed, and very low altitude. Clearly they believe that a miss is as good as a mile. This kind of thing seems to be happening more often recently, the birds behaviour is changing in an odd way. Quite recently, I saw one of them try to perch on a man's shoulder, in the manner of Long John Silver's parrot. He had some difficulty shaking it off, and was naturally taken aback. We agreed we had never seen this before. It's as though the pigeons had started taking amphetamines.
            The grass in the square is still popular with people sitting or lying down on a hot day, but this summer it has shown signs of deterioration. It has been scrubby and parched, with bare earth showing in many places. It is obvious that it was cut too short. In these days of global warming, drought is to be expected, and cutting grass short is no longer a good idea. It needs to be left long enough to withstand the combination of burning sun and human feet. This problem is also commonplace in the city's parks. We need to adapt, or our public grassland will suffer.

           

Trouble is Brewing

According to an article by John Walsh in the Independent, we spend more on coffee in a year than we do on our electricity bills. Amazingly, half of the cups of coffee are drunk in franchised coffee shops. Not by me; though these exist in Leicester, I prefer more economical establishments.
            The problem, allegedly, is that the price of coffee beans has doubled in the last year. The boss of Starbucks, Mr Howard Schulz, is whingeing. The cost increase is not due to a shortage of supply, but to the actions of speculators, the mysterious force which the media would have us believe is the cause of all human misfortune. He claims that a ton of money will be made, and the farmers won't get any of it. He is probably right that the farmers won't benefit, but the idea that speculation invariably leads to profit should have been exploded by the collapse of Wall St a mere few years ago. In speculative bubbles, there are big winners and big losers. For some reason, Governments seem now to believe that the taxpayer should reimburse the losers, provided that they were rich enough to start with.
            This process has been going on for a while. Martin Luther King described it as "socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor." We have been here before, and I wish that, instead of grumbling, Starbucks would show a bit of initiative and deal direct with the coffee growers, and leave the speculators squealing in horror. Starbucks have the muscle to burst this bubble.
            More to the point from the customer point of view, "Starbucks ... didn't [raise prices].... then again it is already charging £3.45 for a venti white caffe mocha. But it knows it cannot hold out for long, because ... demand for coffee is increasing." How can a respectable journalist publish this nonsense? How much of the price of Starbuck's coffee is due to the price of beans? You can still buy a whole jar of coffee at the supermarket for the price of one cup at Starbucks and its imitators. Mr Schulz has already pointed out that the problem isn't a shortage anyway, so increasing demand will probably not have much effect. There is a long way to go before the price of beans becomes a significant cost-driver for the coffee shops, or the restaurants which try so hard to sell you a drink if you order a meal. If prices rise in Starbucks, it will be because Mr Schulz thinks we are stupid enough to pay.

Who gets to run in top athletics?

Dominic Lawson in the Independent comments on the Pistorius controversy at some length. Pistorius is a man with no feet, who runs in athletic events using a pair of carbon-fibre leg extensions. He has made the transition from disabled events to able-bodied events. In 2007, the IAAF banned his extensions from able-bodied events after receiving a scientific report which said they give an unfair advantage.
      A year later, they reversed this decision without adequate explanation. Sports scientist Dr. Ross Tucker complained that Pistorius own scientists had said that he gains a ten second advantage. It appears as if IAAF abandoned principle in order to take advantage of his popularity and fame. They did so in the knowledge that he wasn't good enough to win a gold medal. Who is to say that someone else will not emerge who is, possibly as a result of a car accident? Pistorius is slow out of the blocks, but fast towards the end of the event. What will they do if he changes to the 800 metres? The regulators have opened Pandora's Box.
      Hugh Herr of MIT says that in the future, competitors in the Paralympics will run faster than in the regular Olympics. He is not necessarily correct in my opinion, as the runners in the regular Olympics are allegedly free to use Pistorius devices. Lawson imagines they will not do so as it would require radical surgery, but the need for this is not obvious to me. A differently-shaped attachment bracket would suffice. The able-bodied runner using them would not get as much advantage as Pistorius, because of the weight of his feet, but I suspect he could still get some, especially if the devices were made even longer.
      If the authorities were to specify that athletes with feet were not allowed to use the devices, even more unpleasant possibilities could arise. It's clear that Pistorius is not a great athlete, or he would win easily. Suppose one of the near-top athletes was desperate enough to win that he had his feet chopped off? A lot of competitors have been willing to do themselves horrifying amounts of harm to win at sport.
      Where does it all end? What is the distinction between a prosthesis and a piece of transportation machinery? It is not obvious, once the criterion of not conferring advantage over natural feet has been abandoned. Are roller-skates acceptable? Bicycles? Presumably not, but on what basis are they to be refused if Pistorius device is acceptable? Are stilts a prosthesis? Pogosticks? Pistorius runs, but equipped with the right device, why not bound along like a kangaroo?
      Lawson suggests that "surely the time has come to insist that those taking part in able-bodied athletics should do so without anything attached to their lower limbs beyond standardised running shoes." I'm sure he is right, but this idea is insufficient to solve the problem, as running shoes are currently not well standardised. Efforts to enforce standardisation would encounter fierce resistance from the manufacturers. If they are allowed to have different brands, and engage in technical innovation, the problem will recur in disguised form. If a manufacturer develops a new 'shoe', which the authorities think is not just a shoe but an enhancement, then courtroom battle will be joined, with large sums at stake. The authorities need to get ahead of the game, and develop appropriate rules without waiting for technical developments of an unacceptable type. It is necessary to come up with a technically rigorous definition of a shoe. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
      Golf failed to grasp this nettle many years ago, and has had serious trouble ever since. They failed to adequately specify what constituted golf equipment. As a result new clubs were developed which allowed players to hit the ball too far, with the result that the course bunkers and streams are now in the wrong place.
      Lawson briefly discusses the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, a 'female' athlete who has been subject to a prolonged investigation to discover whether she is actually female. Again, the IAAF has reversed itself, first banning, then allowing her to compete. Lawson points out that new medical knowledge has blurred the distinction between male and female, and suggests that segregated women's sport should simply be abolished. I don't know if this suggestion is tongue-in-cheek, but it is clear that confronted with persons of intermediate sexuality, the authorities are in a muddle.
      Sport has historically lagged behind innovation, which often causes harm rather than bringing benefit. Another dangerous technical challenge is emerging. High-tech nanobots are being developed which allow delivery of drugs to specific sites within the body. Medically this is beneficial, as it reduces side-effects, but it will make drug testing much more difficult, perhaps impossible. The drug will not appear in the athlete's urine in any recognisable form. Athletics is in big trouble, and its rulers seem unequal to the challenge.