Across the pond

One election pledge that Barack Obama has apparently not yet delivered on is his pledge to give up smoking. The American media has kept very quiet about this, as they did about the compulsive womanising of John F Kennedy. So my information comes from the British press who have no such inhibitions about putting the boot in on what consenting adults do in private. The Daily Telegraph, not the most left-wing of British newspapers, even went so far as to suggest that his craving for a fag might have made him so irritated and tired that he did not show as much warmth towards the British Prime Minister hoped for.

My sympathies are with the American. If I had to spend even half an hour with Gordon Brown, I would be absolutely dying for a fag to help me keep my cool while he went on and on and on, while I was waiting to get in my questions.

Since Obama has found it so difficult to give up, we must assume that he is an addictive smoker rather than a social smoker. (There are no social smokers left in the US or in Britain, because to have a fag these days, you have deprive yourself of the warmth of human contact, and stand in windy doorways and brave the disapproving looks of the passers-by.)

He may well have experienced the bliss of inhaling deeply the first fag after enduring all the aggravations of one of those long meetings in now smoke free rooms, which are the inevitable lot of any political leader. He certainly knows how bad it is for his health.

But so absolute is the anti-smoking propaganda these days, that he may not know that there is scientific evidence that smoking helps some people, including manic depressives like me, to keep calm, when all around me are blowing their tops. And to think clearly. And none of the pills produced by the pharmaceutical industry to even out the mood swings are anything like as effective as smoking nicotine on this count. Neither are nicotine patches or chewing gum.

So carry on smoking, Mr President, although you run the risk of seriously shortening your own life. Carry on smoking for the sake of the rest of us. You have to deal with the worst US and world financial crisis and, as well, you have to initiate a new US policy towards the Middle East in time to stop a recurrence of the slaughter we all witnessed in Gaza two months ago. Etc, etc.

Most of the President’s thousands of advisers are probably giving him the opposite message, so I am asking the London Obama group to find a way of smuggling a copy of this into the Oval Room and putting in on top of the Presidential in-tray.

For the sake of all of us, please, Carry on smoking, Mr President.

Not the weather, this time, but political dawns in my lifetime.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whom I voted for since I was an American citizen at the time, and because he promised a better and fairer country than the Eisenhower administration, which was dominated by the business leaders and the generals with whom he used to play golf.

In power Kennedy did fulfill some of his promises. Most notably he fuelled the idealism of those young Americans who joined the Peace Corps and ventured forth to help the poor and oppressed of the world. He was struck down by an assassin’s bullet before he had a chance to do much for America’s poor. But, after his death, his number two, Lyndon B. Johnson, improved their lot with his Great Society programme. So the people who voted Democrat in 1959 were not betrayed.

I also voted for Tony Blair in 1997, because he promised to turn back the era of in-regulated capitalism ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, with its boom and bust economics and its fostering of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. In power Blair, and his number two, Gordon Brown, concentrated on getting the support of the business community. They lined the pockets of a new class of super-rich managers and bankers who preached the gospel of a boom which would go on forever. And, of course, they took Britain into the Iraq War on the coat tails of George W Bush, without waiting for the verdict of Britain’s European partners.

Blair and Brown certainly fulfilled their promise to make Labour electable and most of the people who voted Labour for the first time in 1997 applauded them. But what they did not do, and still have not done, has bitterly disappointed the vast majority of the Labour Party.

Not only Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee, but Harold Wilson, that most pragmatic of Labour’s Prime Ministers, have been turning in their graves at an increasing rate of knots.

It is still early days for the Barack Obama administration. Like Kennedy and Blair he can only rule with the help of the rich and powerful, and those of Republican and conservative beliefs. And there are many such in the Government he has chosen.

So many that it is impossible to make any forecast at this moment whether Obama will be able to fulfill his promises to the poor and oppressed.

But, as of now, I am still hoping.

Yesterday I woke when the sun streamed in through the windows from a cloudless sky. Jumped out of bed to prepare for the long drive to meet up with my sister. But my barometer was falling and the BBC was forecasting heavy driving rain and high winds for our parts. So we stayed home and  I fixed my new £9.95 weather machine to the fence on the terrace.

By mid-morning it was whizzing around in gusts of wind and the glass tube was collecting rain drops. After lunch the sun had broken through again, turning the conservatory into a sauna, so we togged up and went out to do the walk to Golden Cap.

Tides of pleasure flowed through my veins as we strolled through the woods, delighting in the dappled pattern the sun was painting amongst the trees, and the white horses rippling the sea in Lyme Bay. As we neared the Cap itself, the wind was rushing through the trees, and getting at me through my overcoat.

Ah, bitter chill it was. (I didn’t write that line. It is poached from John Keats, who along with his chums, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, knew all about dawns that did not fulfill their promise.)

In nature. And in politics.

This morning the sun is blazing just above a threatening black rain cloud, as I hope you can see from my picture.

Which is the perfect metaphor for our present times when President Obama is struggling to fulfill his election pledges to the American people and to help Gordon Brown save the world from the bankers.

It won’t stop you getting pneumonia or cancer, but it will reduce the chances of your becoming a charge on the mental health services of the NHS.

The picture was taken by me in my dressing gown early Thursday morning. The weather caused me to abandon a planned meet-up with my sister in Glorious Devon. But an hour or two later Spring arrived. The sun not only melted all the snow on the beach, but it enabled me to turn off the central heating for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow may see me in Devon, but the forecast is heavy driving rain. So I won’t know whether I am going until tomorrow morning when my sister and I can swap information on what the weather is actually doing.

I was intending to write a review of Tuesday’s production in Totnes of Sweetness and Badness by the Welsh National Opera. Since my credibility as an opera reviewer is close to zero, I went in to the WNO website to look at the section where the audience post their comments on the performance, hoping to discover what the teenagers, who were watching with me, really thought about it.

To do that you have to follow a log-on process, but I must have been hitting the wrong notes on my own keyboard. I tried again and again and again. But each time I was told that I was using the wrong password or the wrong user name. And I could not even find the help button, if it exists.

So the best I can do is to tell you a bit about the opera with the help of the programme notes. It has a cast of five, all teenagers. The lead is Bobby, played by the husband of my singing niece, who ‘expresses the full range and power of a teenager’s emotions from love to hate, longing to regret’.

Enzo is the baddie, a gang leader exercising his power by brute force with the help of a knife. His moll, RaRa, is likened in the programme notes to Lady Macbeth. She certainly has the capacity to command the stage and she thrusts her pelvis under Bobby’s nose with the kind of zest which Elvis Presley could not have bettered.

Beau is a girl-next-door character who really loves Bobby but is blighted by her terror of saying the wrong thing. A bit of a wimp, as is the fifth character, CJ, who ‘is always trying to impress people’

The set is a railway line running from the front of the stage to a tunnel at the rear. The illusion of trains passing is created by the clever combination of a light flashing in the tunnel and the music.

The plot revolves around the running game, in which the teenagers run along the track in the path of the train. Somewhat reminiscent of James Dean racing his car to the cliff in Rebel without a cause.

If you like the sound of this, check out the WNO site. it may be playing at a place near you.

Reading the papers, listening to the news, and watching it on the tele, these days is depressing enough to drive a ‘normal’ into clinical depression. Capitalism, as we know it, is collapsing. The architects of our ruin are grabbing their inflated pensions and bonuses, and fleeing tax-wise to their offshore havens, so they can enjoy the fruits of their failure. Leaving the ‘workers’, who include many middle-class professionals, at risk of their jobs, and with fears that they can no longer afford their mortgages.

Gordon Brown, who convinced said bankers that New Labour was on their side, has remembered that he was a socialist and is now in Washington trying to persuade Obama to help him save the world and to regulate those bankers and other tycoons, who he has been cosying up to since 1997.

Many other people in the Labour party, and many Brit conservatives and lib dems, think he ought to be staying home, and dealing with baddest boy of the banking bunch, Fred the Shed, who is insisting, in a three page letter to GB, that he is totally legally entitled to collect his £12 million pound pension, although he has admitted that he was the boss when the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed.

What Brown should be doing is inviting Goodwin for a cup of tea at Number Ten, and telling him, that whatever the legal position, he would be well-advised to do the decent thing and give up his £12 million. And take an honest job at aged 50, helping future generations not to make the same mistakes. I am sure the London Business School would be happy to make him a Prof, who would tell students the story of his life, and help them to understand, how he, and chums in City of the nineties got it so terribly wrong.

But all is not doom and gloom in the world of 2009.

This afternoon I went to, what I thought was a play, at the King Edward VI school in Totnes. In fact it turned out to be a fully-fledged modern opera, compressed into the lesson period of one hour, and put on by the Welsh National Opera. It was an opera about teenagers, put on for an audience of teenagers. I was undoubtedly the oldest in the audience, so much so that I thought that most of the teachers were nearer in age to my grand-children than to my children.

But the most important thing is that the kids were rapt. Not shuffling in their seats, or throwing paper aeroplanes at each other. But engaged with the action., moved by the music, and empathising with the characters.

Contrast my day, when a whole afternoon was spent marching us up to the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, and hear from the likes of Sir Malcolm Sargeant, explain to us, in his best Blue Peter style, why Beethoven was good for us.

So at least parts of British education have moved on since the 1940s, whereas as we all now know the bankers and the rest of the financial community have been making the same mistakes made by their equivalents in the 1920s, which led to the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing ten-year-long world depression.

So despite all the testing and vocational emphasis of the Blair/Brown years, British teachers have been doing, not Education, Education, Education.

But simply Education, delivered according to the old values, but addressed to an audience which is vastly different.

This blog as already long, so I will end here. And write the review later.

Just after I moved into this flat last November I saw a man I know walk past the house. I was in my dressing gown at the time, otherwise I would have run out and greeted him. It has happened several times since then, but, always when I was on the phone, composing a blog on my computer, or entertaining visitors. It has annoyed me, because one of things I like to do in my retirement is to look up old friends and discover whether we still have anything to say to each other, etc.

It happened again this morning, when I was again in my dressing gown and at 11 AM. But my stiff upper lip had not woken up, so, this time, I opened the window, and yelled ‘Hello’. He turned towards me, but with no look of recognition. I quickly established that he was not the man I thought he was.

Acute embarrassment.

But it stirred me to action. I googled him. The first item was a newspaper article from November 2009, which told me he was dead. There was no photo so I could not gauge just how much like the man who walks down my street he was.

That’s not quite the end of the story. But I have to do a bit more research to get it right. And also to write a short blog about him. So it might be some time before I write Part Two, because not everything you want to know can be found on the web.

To Cricket St Thomas, scene of that most popular Sunday night television programme about life in one of the stately homes of England, To the Manor Born. Alas it is now a hotel, so we were unable to commune with the gentry. And the grounds are overun with zebras, ostriches, lemur monkeys and many other animals and birds, roaming free. Well freeish. The reindeer had the tummy ache and was confined to a stall next to the incubator room. The camel was not available for rides, but he did pose for my photograph. And Joe managed to make contact with the tapir. While we had a cup of tea from a plastic cup. Audrey must have taken the best china with her when she left.

Although it’s Saturday, 8 AM, the sun is already blazing over Lyme Bay promising another bright sunny day. Little Dulcie is already awake running around the house with a smile on her face looking forward to another to the beach. I should be in a good mood.

In fact, I am working myself up from irritation to something that feels more like rage and fury.

It’s all because I woke up with three vivid dream fragments still in my memory. I am ‘sure’ that they are part of a long and important story, although they don’t seem to be connected. And a sceptic would immediately point out that they could be extracts from three entirely different stories.

My rising anger is partly to do with being a journalist. In our trade we are used to telling truthful stories, even thouh we know that we have found out only a few of the important facts, and some of those ‘facts’ may be wrong because we cannot be sure whether people who have talked us were not lying.  But these three dream fragments are no way enonugh to make a coherent story.

Worse than that they keep slipping away. It is as if I, and perhaps all human beings, are programmed to forget their dreams. Or as if God had sent one of the arch-angels to whhisper in my ear during the night, but he does not want me to know that the ideas in my head come from Him. He is playing games with. He knows I am just a puppet, pulled this way and that by his strings, but he wants me to go on believing in the illusiion of free will.

Since I have now writtenn down the three fragments in my notebook, I am now calm enough to write this. And I also know from the recent BBC Horizon programme I blogged about that when people are woken immediately after dreaming they frequently report long and interesting complete stories.

So it may be worth examining the fragments.

Fragment 1. My wife has told me that a Mr Roll has telephoned from City University. I don’t know such a man but in the dream I see an immediate visual image of an election poster for Barry Roll, who apparently is a Liberal Democrat MP. And in the dream Mr Roll calls again and says that he is a consultant for City and that they have asked him to find someone to run a new course. No selection panel. And on the phone he implies that he has already made up his mind and the interview he is offering me will be a formality.

Fragment 2. I am struggling to get round a big chasm on a cliff. It is not exactly like the landslip a hundred yards from my house in Dorset. But it is the same chasm that I have dreamt of before, though  the chasm is now bigger and I have to climb a high fence as well. I manage that, but then I am faced with a long walk to get in to the university and along many corridors. And in bare feet which I am acutely embarrassed about.

Fragment 3. I am standing with my youngest daughter on the doorstep of a house something like that owned by my eldest daughter off the Holloway Road. There are three tall rough types, one of whom is lifting the latch to the gate. Their stance is threatening. The leader asks me where I went to school in a tone which makes me feel that if I give the wrong answer me and my daughter will get beaten up.

Still feeling frustrated. I think these fragments were part of a long story my unconscious mind wrote, perhaps better than any story i have written when awake. But I have no way of filling in the gaps.

What I do notice, however, is the very powerful feelings in involved. Rosy wish fulfillment in the first fragment. Pain, struggle, fear and embarrassment in the second two. Which reminds me of the research done by one of the scientists on the Horizon programme.

Which I may check out to provide material for another blog on the thinking we do in the night.

If it were not the half-term holiday I would be reporting today on last night’s speech at City University by Obama’s internet guru, Thomas Gensemer and on the National Union of Journalists’ meeting on the crisis in British newspapers.

But it is half-term. So affairs of state will have to wait. My job is to get the grandchildren down to the seaside.

See you later.