I awoke this morning to news of the death of a nine year old boy in Zimbabwe from cholera whose mother had gone to South Africa in search of work to achieve a better life for him, returning in time for him to die in her arms. It is the old and young who are dying from the disease as the basics of life and care break down and the rest of Africa watches a familiar story for this continent, knowing that if they, particularly South Africa, was to intervene then should circumstances change they too could become the subject of external intervention, The rest of the world also looks away for this and that reason, the credit crunch and Christmas being two.
Shaun Mercer was aged 16 years went he grabbed his gun and set off on his bicycle to hunt and gun down another teenage rival, killing by mistake 11 year old Rhys Jones, returning home from football practice.
It is said that there were over 100 children involved in two gangs of which Mercer was a member of one. Liverpool has been ultra sensitive about its image as a city with areas of lawlessness, drugs, violence and serious juvenile crime. It is in reality no different from the dreadful aspects of other cities London, Manchester and Birmingham, but it does have the habit of hitting the headlines in the wrong way decade after decade.
In the 1970’s and early 1980’s the problem was one of economic decline and inadequate city politics. I became alarmed at the prospects for its future twice. One night I was stuck in a football coach around 10 pm, one of 100 from Sunderland who had played Everton in a cup game as we were escorted by police north towards the M6 and Carlisle. Some distance from the football ground and city centre and for half an hour the coaches moved a few yards further from standstill, youths most barely teens, threw stones or whatever was to hand, at the coaches, appearing from behind parked cars and garden walls and fencing, usually close to a side road so they could run off after delivering the missiles. One coach ahead had a side window broken and we passed another that had pulled up for the same reason. There were members of the public also passing by but no police, I was given to understand this was a regular occurrence. No doubt some went home to boast to parents or older bothers and sisters as they returned home from the pub, or looked up from the TV in a smoked filled living room.
In the mid 1980’s I also visited Liverpool again with the Local Government Drug Advisory Forum and we were taken to housing areas where the drug culture ruled and adolescents had become involved in the distribution where the council and the local community offered nothing to the underclass except street and gang life.
At least once a Parliament the politicians rediscover the underclass of the cities and say they will do this and that, and the situation gets worse, or so it seems if you looks as those in prisons and the number of serious crimes of violence. I blame the parents, the schools and the local politicians.
Although everyone in the area knew who had murdered Rhys Jones it took 8 months before the authorities were able to persuade the child who had hidden the gun to give evidence, promising the lad immunity from the law.
The relationship of one mother and one son is the subject of the 1997 Aleksandr Suvorov Mother and Son. The two adults exist in an uninhabited landscape of countryside close to the sea. The mother is dying, the son is about to be left alone. The film is shot with a golden glow of late summer and you are made look, examine every detail of their landscape as if painted as a series of canvasses with only light changes, smoke or mist drifts, a train passing in the distance, a boat out at sea, the wind or the sound of birds disturbing their tranquillity. At times it looked as if the two were moving around a painted study. There was little dialogue and movement was slow, concentrated. The DVD contains a Japanese film of the same quality and intensity. Keith Uhlich in his profound review for Slant Magazine describes the film as a painting in perpetual motion. Another critic writing a Blog after the Toronto Film festival showing said that the film was distilled almost to the point of nothingness, a beautiful, but empty, lesson in dying gracefully.
It was too richly colourful a tone poem for me, in praise of simple lives unpolluted by industrialization, but skimming over what would have been the harshness of their lives had their lives been real ones in such an environment. Of course I had the experience of the long horrible death of my mother a year ago of my mother to remember, and where her peaceful acceptance was inspirational. I cared nothing for two on the screen and I doubt if anyone else would either.
The Prime Minister has been in Iraq this morning to announce the end of combat troops before June 2009. Alas the involvement in Afghanistan will be long and bloody. It is regrettable than many of those who enjoy the benefits of membership of the European Community and whose citizens rush to Britain in search of work and new opportunities have failed to share in this burden. I do not blame the individuals but their governments and which has demonstrated the powerlessness and ineffectiveness of our own. It is not good enough
It is to be hoped that the new USA administration knows who their one true friend has been and remains. We disagree on many things and we have competing interests, but when it comes to shedding blood in the cause of the rights and interests of others as well as our own, Britain and the USA are unequalled.
Tuesday was a relaxed day working slowly. I made a visit to Azda after posting some Christmas items and checking that the old four number code for the replacement bank debit card worked. It did. I also had a look at Woolworths where the bargains are 10 to 20 percent and not a fifty reduction anywhere left in store. Their pick and mix sweets are half the price of those at the cinema and could not be resisted. I also went in search of the cost of Wii console and Fit board and software but these appear to have been sold out in the Christmas rush. Commercial sellers on E Bay have a price of over £300 usually bundled with games. The basic console has a five game disk and the Fit various programmes. I eventually discovered the information I was seeking , that the balance board would take a weight of up to 23 stone. There are some 6000 Wii items available on E Bay and I monitored a score of consoles or consoles plus fit items during the day just to get a measure of the pre Christmas. It is evident there are buying rings in existence top push up the price. Ten sales of both items were completed within the price range of £220-£340 plus costs of £15 to £25. There were six consoles sold from £132 to £180 plus costs. However one has to look closely at what is included as some only have one set of remotes and personal sensors and these are expensive to buy separately as are the individual games. I shall monitor again in a couple of days time and then immediately after Christmas and the New Year as well as watching for the New Year Sales.
I messed up with the printing cartridges running out of one colour and expect it will take several days because of the Christmas post Just as the Post office counters is trying to turn itself into financial services and bullies its staff through commission into making the hard sell especially with old people. Business Minister Peter Mandelson has announced the intention to introduce a partner so as to modernise the management of the postal service which has got worse and more expensive with the passing of every year. There will be trouble before the change occurs. Michael Heseltine tried in the 1980’s but his colleagues yielded to public pressure.
The television was return in good working order after an absence of ten days and the handset also works. Hallelujah. I therefore had a TV binge watching three other films during the day.
The first was an old friend, the Hitchcock The 39 Steps which I know by heart. What I had not appreciated is that his visit to Scotland centres on the area of Killin and Kenmore either end of Loch Tay. Now given that he got off the train on the Tay Bridge he must have had several lifts to bring him across country to within 14 miles of his destination for the overnight stop. Even today the journey is a half a days trip on improved roads and reliable cars. I could also understand the device of using a Memory man to learn the details of the secret government project but it beggars belief that he would be told that the 39 steps was the name of the spy organisation.
I watched two syrupy Christmas family films on the free 24 hour movies channel. A Christmas Card 2006 is wonderful tale set in the perfect USA county town where everyone knows each other and goes to the same church. The parents and relatives run a logging company and the daughter who loves her family, her home and her job with the family firm has a long standing attachment with an international wine broker. In the improbability of this relationship especially as he is an obvious creep is only matched by the recipient of one of the letters sent by the daughter to USA service men Afghanistan as part of a community church effort. After losing one of his men in a rocket attack and visiting his fiancée with the dog tags he goes off in search of the town, the church and the writer of letter when he told to take leave by his commanding officer. When he saves her dad from a potential road accident he i welcomed into the family over the holiday and earns his keep at the mill. Love finds a way and the wine creep is given the heave-ho.
Even more dodgy is A Christmas Visitor 2002 which has the excellent William Devane the role of a grieving father with daily talks to his son at the town war memorial who died as a special ops volunteer in Desert Storm 1990/1991. Since the news arrived on Christmas Eve more than a decade before the family has not celebrated Christmas much to the distress of the rest of the town where the father is much loved because of his good works and general neighbourliness. First father is saved from three young drunks by a mysterious unseen figure then he believes he has been told by his son that it is time to celebrate Christmas again and then a mysterious stranger who was also part of special forces helps him when his vehicles goes off the road. He too is welcomed into the home on Christmas Eve although there is to be no romance with the daughter who believed she was being punished by the absence of Christmas throughout her growing up. Just as well for in truth this Christmas Angel is the spirit of their son who has come to tell the family it is time to move on.
Before going to bed I watched an episode of Taggart which marked the death of Jardine, the youngish man who took over when the actor playing Taggart Mark MacManus died in 1995 after 31 episodes from the start of the series in 1983. McPherson who joined the show in 1987 appeared in 48 episodes before his fictional demise. Blthye Duff who plays Jackie Read has appeared in 78 episodes from 1990, along with Colin McCredie 63 and John Mitchie 53, have remained constant headliners for close on two decades, This series always entertains, with good twists and turns in the plot but its enduring success is the relationship between the main characters, real with feet firmly on ground.
Shaun Mercer was aged 16 years went he grabbed his gun and set off on his bicycle to hunt and gun down another teenage rival, killing by mistake 11 year old Rhys Jones, returning home from football practice.
It is said that there were over 100 children involved in two gangs of which Mercer was a member of one. Liverpool has been ultra sensitive about its image as a city with areas of lawlessness, drugs, violence and serious juvenile crime. It is in reality no different from the dreadful aspects of other cities London, Manchester and Birmingham, but it does have the habit of hitting the headlines in the wrong way decade after decade.
In the 1970’s and early 1980’s the problem was one of economic decline and inadequate city politics. I became alarmed at the prospects for its future twice. One night I was stuck in a football coach around 10 pm, one of 100 from Sunderland who had played Everton in a cup game as we were escorted by police north towards the M6 and Carlisle. Some distance from the football ground and city centre and for half an hour the coaches moved a few yards further from standstill, youths most barely teens, threw stones or whatever was to hand, at the coaches, appearing from behind parked cars and garden walls and fencing, usually close to a side road so they could run off after delivering the missiles. One coach ahead had a side window broken and we passed another that had pulled up for the same reason. There were members of the public also passing by but no police, I was given to understand this was a regular occurrence. No doubt some went home to boast to parents or older bothers and sisters as they returned home from the pub, or looked up from the TV in a smoked filled living room.
In the mid 1980’s I also visited Liverpool again with the Local Government Drug Advisory Forum and we were taken to housing areas where the drug culture ruled and adolescents had become involved in the distribution where the council and the local community offered nothing to the underclass except street and gang life.
At least once a Parliament the politicians rediscover the underclass of the cities and say they will do this and that, and the situation gets worse, or so it seems if you looks as those in prisons and the number of serious crimes of violence. I blame the parents, the schools and the local politicians.
Although everyone in the area knew who had murdered Rhys Jones it took 8 months before the authorities were able to persuade the child who had hidden the gun to give evidence, promising the lad immunity from the law.
The relationship of one mother and one son is the subject of the 1997 Aleksandr Suvorov Mother and Son. The two adults exist in an uninhabited landscape of countryside close to the sea. The mother is dying, the son is about to be left alone. The film is shot with a golden glow of late summer and you are made look, examine every detail of their landscape as if painted as a series of canvasses with only light changes, smoke or mist drifts, a train passing in the distance, a boat out at sea, the wind or the sound of birds disturbing their tranquillity. At times it looked as if the two were moving around a painted study. There was little dialogue and movement was slow, concentrated. The DVD contains a Japanese film of the same quality and intensity. Keith Uhlich in his profound review for Slant Magazine describes the film as a painting in perpetual motion. Another critic writing a Blog after the Toronto Film festival showing said that the film was distilled almost to the point of nothingness, a beautiful, but empty, lesson in dying gracefully.
It was too richly colourful a tone poem for me, in praise of simple lives unpolluted by industrialization, but skimming over what would have been the harshness of their lives had their lives been real ones in such an environment. Of course I had the experience of the long horrible death of my mother a year ago of my mother to remember, and where her peaceful acceptance was inspirational. I cared nothing for two on the screen and I doubt if anyone else would either.
The Prime Minister has been in Iraq this morning to announce the end of combat troops before June 2009. Alas the involvement in Afghanistan will be long and bloody. It is regrettable than many of those who enjoy the benefits of membership of the European Community and whose citizens rush to Britain in search of work and new opportunities have failed to share in this burden. I do not blame the individuals but their governments and which has demonstrated the powerlessness and ineffectiveness of our own. It is not good enough
It is to be hoped that the new USA administration knows who their one true friend has been and remains. We disagree on many things and we have competing interests, but when it comes to shedding blood in the cause of the rights and interests of others as well as our own, Britain and the USA are unequalled.
Tuesday was a relaxed day working slowly. I made a visit to Azda after posting some Christmas items and checking that the old four number code for the replacement bank debit card worked. It did. I also had a look at Woolworths where the bargains are 10 to 20 percent and not a fifty reduction anywhere left in store. Their pick and mix sweets are half the price of those at the cinema and could not be resisted. I also went in search of the cost of Wii console and Fit board and software but these appear to have been sold out in the Christmas rush. Commercial sellers on E Bay have a price of over £300 usually bundled with games. The basic console has a five game disk and the Fit various programmes. I eventually discovered the information I was seeking , that the balance board would take a weight of up to 23 stone. There are some 6000 Wii items available on E Bay and I monitored a score of consoles or consoles plus fit items during the day just to get a measure of the pre Christmas. It is evident there are buying rings in existence top push up the price. Ten sales of both items were completed within the price range of £220-£340 plus costs of £15 to £25. There were six consoles sold from £132 to £180 plus costs. However one has to look closely at what is included as some only have one set of remotes and personal sensors and these are expensive to buy separately as are the individual games. I shall monitor again in a couple of days time and then immediately after Christmas and the New Year as well as watching for the New Year Sales.
I messed up with the printing cartridges running out of one colour and expect it will take several days because of the Christmas post Just as the Post office counters is trying to turn itself into financial services and bullies its staff through commission into making the hard sell especially with old people. Business Minister Peter Mandelson has announced the intention to introduce a partner so as to modernise the management of the postal service which has got worse and more expensive with the passing of every year. There will be trouble before the change occurs. Michael Heseltine tried in the 1980’s but his colleagues yielded to public pressure.
The television was return in good working order after an absence of ten days and the handset also works. Hallelujah. I therefore had a TV binge watching three other films during the day.
The first was an old friend, the Hitchcock The 39 Steps which I know by heart. What I had not appreciated is that his visit to Scotland centres on the area of Killin and Kenmore either end of Loch Tay. Now given that he got off the train on the Tay Bridge he must have had several lifts to bring him across country to within 14 miles of his destination for the overnight stop. Even today the journey is a half a days trip on improved roads and reliable cars. I could also understand the device of using a Memory man to learn the details of the secret government project but it beggars belief that he would be told that the 39 steps was the name of the spy organisation.
I watched two syrupy Christmas family films on the free 24 hour movies channel. A Christmas Card 2006 is wonderful tale set in the perfect USA county town where everyone knows each other and goes to the same church. The parents and relatives run a logging company and the daughter who loves her family, her home and her job with the family firm has a long standing attachment with an international wine broker. In the improbability of this relationship especially as he is an obvious creep is only matched by the recipient of one of the letters sent by the daughter to USA service men Afghanistan as part of a community church effort. After losing one of his men in a rocket attack and visiting his fiancée with the dog tags he goes off in search of the town, the church and the writer of letter when he told to take leave by his commanding officer. When he saves her dad from a potential road accident he i welcomed into the family over the holiday and earns his keep at the mill. Love finds a way and the wine creep is given the heave-ho.
Even more dodgy is A Christmas Visitor 2002 which has the excellent William Devane the role of a grieving father with daily talks to his son at the town war memorial who died as a special ops volunteer in Desert Storm 1990/1991. Since the news arrived on Christmas Eve more than a decade before the family has not celebrated Christmas much to the distress of the rest of the town where the father is much loved because of his good works and general neighbourliness. First father is saved from three young drunks by a mysterious unseen figure then he believes he has been told by his son that it is time to celebrate Christmas again and then a mysterious stranger who was also part of special forces helps him when his vehicles goes off the road. He too is welcomed into the home on Christmas Eve although there is to be no romance with the daughter who believed she was being punished by the absence of Christmas throughout her growing up. Just as well for in truth this Christmas Angel is the spirit of their son who has come to tell the family it is time to move on.
Before going to bed I watched an episode of Taggart which marked the death of Jardine, the youngish man who took over when the actor playing Taggart Mark MacManus died in 1995 after 31 episodes from the start of the series in 1983. McPherson who joined the show in 1987 appeared in 48 episodes before his fictional demise. Blthye Duff who plays Jackie Read has appeared in 78 episodes from 1990, along with Colin McCredie 63 and John Mitchie 53, have remained constant headliners for close on two decades, This series always entertains, with good twists and turns in the plot but its enduring success is the relationship between the main characters, real with feet firmly on ground.
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