10 Pieces of my Life

Rarely do I see something programmed on the BBC that mirrors closely the working environment that I occupied until I stopped working around 2003.

Up until this point, I had worked in a number of ways that introduced people to unfamiliar art-forms.

Principally, I worked closely within large arts organisations receiving considerable sums from the Arts Council of England.

Perhaps it is quite natural that the investment of significant sums of public money in such ways should be accompanied by the proviso that these organisations should offer an education opportunity so that the widest possible audience should have the opportunity to appreciate the activity offered.

Thus at the age of around 25 I began working within the education department of Opera North based in Leeds, one of only a handful of professional opera companies in the United Kingdom.

Opera North was established as an independent offshoot of English National Opera, to enable Opera of the highest professional quality to tour principally the North of England, occasionally reaching further afield such as to Scotland and even overseas.

For example, in the time that I was working for the company a production of Attila by Giuseppe Verdi was taken to Rotterdam, helping to establish the international reputation of the company which had already achieved a significant National reputation for both its reach across the North of England, as well as a reputation for high quality education opportunities that enabled people unfamiliar with this art-form to attend performances and explore in more detail exactly what Opera is all about.

When I began working for the organisation, I had very limited experience myself of opera, but my work gave me the opportunity to see numerous opera performances as part of the company’s output.

With its base in Leeds at the Grand Theatre, where rehearsals and opening performances took place, the company travelled regularly to Manchester, Hull, Nottingham, and other occasional venues and festivals across England.

Whilst I am not musically trained, not even with an aptitude for music, I found myself working in the creative environment of the education department of an opera company, thanks I suppose to an interest I have always held concerning the empowerment of people.

Whilst this may sound rather strange, I can look back at my entire working life and see that this strand of empowerment has been critical in every aspect of every employment I have undertaken.

For the first 10 years of my working life, I became involved first with housing co-operatives, and then perhaps as a natural progression, with workers co-operatives.

In other words, I have often worked in ways that treat people as equals, and in some respects, the same can be said of creativity.

It is something that people of all ages and backgrounds and indeed capacity can participate in, and in many respects, the fact that I first worked in a department associated with an opera company is simply representative of the fact that I lived in a small northern town that was lucky enough to possess a large opera company.

When this was established in the late 1980s, originally as a linked and strategic component of English National Opera, somebody somewhere must have made the assumption that developing such a large creative organisation would have a transformation and regeneration impact on this city.

Opera North’s orchestra also has its own identity as a symphony orchestra, providing a regular season of concerts at the local town hall.

You cannot have 60 or 70 professional musicians and all of the ancillary staff associated with an opera company and not have an impact on its local economy.

Opera North also had a regular full-time chorus of over 50 people, occasionally swelling to larger numbers when particular repertoire was performed.

Although I began as a novice in my own right, I quickly benefited from the opportunity to be able to see as much opera as the company produced.

Opera is typically produced in small seasons consisting of between three and four different operas, for the sensible reason that professional opera singers are not able to sing every night of the week, and therefore different operas are performed each night of a season so that the principal singers can arrest their voices in between performances.

So in the course of a year it is likely that a company will produce and tour about a dozen different operas.

In each season, there will be a couple of fairly popular operas, which may have two performances each, and one less common opera, which may only be performed one night each week.

Touring Opera is a logistical exercise, often involving two or three enormous juggernauts, which contain all of the sets and costumes for each opera, as well as all of the technical equipment required to light each work, as well as any ancillary equipment such as for enabling performances to have surtitles or subtitles on stage.

Something that I quickly discovered as part of my initial involvement in the work of the company was that I cannot hear classical music of the kind that is performed by the professional orchestras involved with professional opera without appreciating it in perhaps a rather unique way.

Opera is of course made up from an extraordinary combination of story, music, and staging.

It thus involves every imaginable art form from the written word, through the visual arts concerned with staging and costumes, as well as music.

My experience of the kind of music played by a professional orchestra is where I have drawn my parallel with the recent BBC programme entitled 10 pieces.

This took an unusual approach in its attempt at making classical music more accessible to young people in particular, by showing the music of several well-known works performed both live by the orchestra in a studio context, but with specially commissioned film material designed to encourage those unfamiliar with classical music to see it as a form of storytelling.

We will all be familiar with this as a technique, whether we consciously realise it or not.

The classic example of this kind of ways to familiarise people with classical music was used by Walt Disney in his Fantasia.

What I find fascinating is my own particular experience of classical music, and the way in which it seems to speak to me as if I am unable to hear the music without seeing some kind of story.

Synaesthesia, the way in which our brains can experience sensory stimulus that results in additional perceptions, is not as unusual as you might think.

My best friend, for example, associates various words in the form of colours, so that for each of the days of the week, she associates a different colour.

Perhaps other people may have their own experience of synaesthesia, in my own case, one of my strongest interests lies with creative writing, and so it is perhaps not unusual that I should experience the kind of narrative that I have suggested when listening to classical music.

This has served me particularly well in the context of for example introducing the instruments of the orchestra to primary school children, as it is a very familiar exercise to simply play a piece of music to a small audience and discuss the feelings generated from it. This is a good starting point for looking at the way in which something like opera tells a story with many different emotional colours that have been portrayed by the composer in their use of the instruments available to them.

I have been very fortunate to have met and worked with some extraordinarily creative people and I have been privileged to be able to introduce their abilities to a wide variety of people, young and old, as diverse as inmates in prison to people with learning disabilities, all in the name of the art form education that has been the focus of my work.

It is perhaps no surprise that I have been inspired by the people that I have worked with to explore my own creativity later in life, especially now that I have so much more time than most, as a consequence of my disability with multiple sclerosis.

But it was nevertheless remarkable to see such a specific exploration of what I have spent my life exploring in that BBC programme, 10 pieces.

Rarely Seen or Praised

It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis over 10 years ago now, and although I am severely disabled and limited physically in what I can still undertake, there are so many things that I have the time to appreciate.

Time is that most valuable of commodities, which few of us can appreciate unless we have the opportunity to pause in the muddle of our modern lives.

Of course I would not have wished to have my life prevented from achieving its full flowering, but I have had to remind myself that there are worse things.

At least the condition that I live with is no more fatal than everything else that we live with.

And since I live in the United Kingdom I am able to benefit from the fact of a system that protects and preserves those that cannot undertake those things that most of us take for granted.

The apartment in which I live has been made more extensible for my use as a wheelchair user thanks to alterations undertaken under the terms of a special grant, converting my bathroom to a shower room, and giving me a ramped access from the rear entrance.

A superior kind of ceiling hoist enables me to be transferred to and from my electric wheelchair, and I have a team of carers that ensure that I am well looked after.

The bed which I spend considerable time, but not so much that I consider myself to be bedridden, has been installed and is serviced by a special department operated by my local county council.

Recently, the handset that controls the movements of the bed had to be replaced, and the replacement handset has the additional buttons that enables the full function of this extraordinary item to be fully used.

My previous handset only had four pairs of buttons to raise the head, the bed itself, and what is called the leg break.

But the new controls enable the top and the bottom of this electric bed to be raised and lowered independently, a function that glorious in the unusual name of the Trendellenberg  effect, something that will be unfamiliar to most people.

Quite simply, it enables the bed to be raised or lowered so that the person in the bed slips in either direction.

More information about this can be discovered online.

With such an important piece of equipment, it is essential that it is properly maintained, and recently I had cause to discover that an engineer is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the event of problems occurring that disable search an essential piece of equipment.

I had cause to request that the engineer assist as part of the power supply had become disconnected, and although a backup battery ensures that the equipment will operate on an emergency basis for a fuel hours, the engineer arrived within a few hours to reconnect and have the bed working once again.

Few people have reason to know that such a service operates, and it is one of those hidden benefits of the system that of course we pay for through our taxes. And it is only when we need such services that we fully appreciate their existence.

Are We Really In Charge?

I had a soft spot for George Orwell when I was doing an A-level in English Literature.

I read many of his novels, his short stories, and his writings in general.

I admire much of his work, and there is no doubt that he has had much influence on our cultural ideas, if the measure of his influence might be judged by the number of words and phrases that he has introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Perhaps his greatest and most influential novel has been 1984, and although we do not feel explicitly that we are as controlled as the social system described in this work, closer examination is worthwhile to assess the degree to which the State has become Big Brother.

I have been struck recently by the extent to which we are encouraged to experience emotion on a regular basis by the television schedule.

To this extent, clearly I am talking about the United Kingdom, although I am sure that someone with more local knowledge might be able to assess other cultures that share a similar set of control issues.

What has particularly struck me is for example the way in which Strictly Come Dancing has become as a ‘must watch’ programme within the BBC schedule.

Even from the perspective of its production values we are encouraged to perceive the success or failure of participants as an emotional journey, which we become excited about, and indeed feel as if we are participating directly in by way of public voting to determine the fate of our chosen favourites.

There is no doubting the quality of the professional dancers, and the skills of those that principally guide our thoughts about what we are seeing.

And the judges that guide our thinking also appear in many other televised contexts, often engaging additional emotional aspects of our lives, such as memories of holidays from times past, or as recently demonstrated, the way in which dance as an artform links to its expression in films from as far back as the 1930s.

There is a subtle link here with other aspects of our culture, and through such films as The Hunger Games, adapted from the book written by an author, Michael Morepogo, questioning the same territory that I am here touching upon.

The Poet, a Marchioness, and the Wardrobe

In the mid-1990s, I had reason to attend with my then wife the residence of the Earl of March and Wemyss, just south of Edinburgh.

It was not given to dropping in on members of the Scottish aristocracy, but my wife had good reason for this particular visit.

As a director of Opera, with her own company, she had been asked to put together a short tour of the Opera Venus and Adonis by John Blow, which would be performed by a small company in stately homes across Scotland.

The Earl was to be visited because of his role in being the founder of the National Trust for Scotland, and it was his wife, the Marchioness, that we were to meet on that day in order to look at the venue for one of the performances, his own house at Gosford, to which he intended to invite his own personal invitation list for what amounted to a private performance of the work.

The Marchioness was more than happy to show us the venue for the performance, and to help us to perhaps find an item of costume that we could use for one of the characters.

And  thus we found ourselves having tea with the Marchioness, and rummaging through a most extraordinary series of wardrobes in which the Earl kept several generations of clothing appropriate to his position as the most senior  noble in Scotland.

We had been looking for something specific form one of the cast members, and it had been the Earl himself that had suggested we may find something suitable in this storehouse.

As we soon discovered, the wardrobes at Gosford House  contained a vast quantity of historic items, much of which the National Museum of Scotland was anxious to become the curator of.

But the family resisted this, preferring to keep the items close at hand, although acquiescing to the need to keep much of the contents wrapped in archival quality tissue paper to ensure its protection.

After much searching through the contents of much by way of would be worn at the house of lords in London, we eventually found what we had been looking for, by way of a bright red cavalry officers uniform from the 19th century.

Though it was quite heavy in weight, thanks to solid silver epaulettes, it fitted perfectly with the costumes scheme for the performers, who would in effect dress themselves from a trunk that they would bring with them as they entered for the performance.

Which was to take place in the hallway of one wing of the house, which makes it sound like a small place.

But over 100 people were to attend this performance, as the hallway was like no other I had ever seen.

For a start, it  was white marble, with an open area at its summit that could hold about 100 people quite easily in an open space.

Gosford House is a substantial stately home in its own rigt  and one whole wing had been destroyed by fire during the second world war when it has been used as the barracks for soldiers, and they had accidentally literally set fire to one part of it, which had never been restored.

And so the hallway with its magnificent staircase was in a whole wing to itself, constituting one half of what remains of the original house.

Appropriately to the position of its owner, it was furnished with extraordinary things, and one such item we were able to use as the principal image in advertising the opera and its tour.

This was a 16th century painting of Venus and Adonis, a beautiful Renaissance oil painting, which we were able to have propped on an easel at the bottom of the stairs as people came to this particular performance.

Interestingly, a couple of years after the performance had taken place, this painting was sold at Christie’s in London for just under £20 million. Quite some set decoration.

It was a wonderfully informal performance at Gosford House, very much made up of people invited by the Earl and his wife the Marchioness.

People were encouraged to attend in fancy dress, and I remember that the Earl attended wearing nothing more than a simple toga, then I do not remember how the Marchioness dressed.

On The Interpretation of Dreams

I  rarely speak in my blog of my dreams. Quite simply, most people simply switch off if you were to relate to them the strange goings on in the world of your own dreams.

But this morning, I had the strangest of dreams, and I wanted to make a particular effort to remember this dream. And the only way of doing so is to make some notes about it immediately.

In this dream, the principal activity seemed to be some form of competition at the heart of which was to be the unlikely activity of moving meteorites around a physical course, meteorites of different shapes and weights, for no other reason than to see whom of the participants could do so most easily.

As an adjunct to this central component of the dream, an additional prize offered was something along the lines of entry into a competition that involved filming an activity also taking place on the same rural location.

In trying to identify what this might have been, the closest I have come is that activities were taking place which I have seen in the context of a program like Time Team. Something for participants in the principal activity won the opportunity to film or some ritual reenactment or some kind of ancient manufacturing process, but the most important aspect of this dream was that the choice of film material used was to be something fly blown, which I can only assume must meant timelapse photography.

But it is Interesting. here to think about other interpretations of this, so that the filming process involves watching something taking shape in the same way that for example you might watch the entire life-cycle of insects.

I can only think that having this dream may have been the result of having recently read the Dan Brown novel Deception Point, a principal part of which is concerned with the falsification of the origin of a meteorite discovered locked in Arctic ice.

This would account for an interest in passing with meteorites, although it says nothing about the other part of the dream.

Because I am severely disabled because of multiple sclerosis, I am always keen to appreciate that my brain is still functioning in some way, however strange. I am always reminded of the scene in the Matrix film, where near Neo is first told how the matrix works.

A battery is held up as an example of what the machine world is doing by exploiting the capacity of human development simply to produce electricity.

I take it for granted that the human nervous system is not fully understood, and that as long as I am still producing animal electricity, and because the brain has the capacity to find new ways of making connections in the body even if nerves of themselves cannot be repaired this plasticity of the overall system, giving me some hope that my brain might one day find those collections which are currently blocked by the sclerotic nature of the condition.

If nothing else, this is a demonstration of hope in the face of adversity. Never give up, never surrender.

Annonymity Even in The Information Age

We have become so accustomed to having information at our fingertips.

It is sobering sometimes to come across something elusive, and one such elusive thing has come to my attention recently.

We are of course that a critical point in remembering those that have fallen in conflicts across the 20th century.

There has been much moving coverage across the BBC capturing perhaps before lost in the mists of time first-hand accounts of those that have exhibited extraordinary bravery during the second world war, a conflict which is so nearly slipping into obscurity as those with personal experience begin to reach an age that prevents them from participation in person, Leaving only recollections for future generations.

It is important to remember, and although it is quite possible for the argument to be put forward that it is wrong to glamorise that sense of sacrifice. It is equally the case that we must never forget the importance of taking a stand against what is both brutal and at times offensive.

Although my father died many years ago, the fact that he served in the Armed Forces remains with me as a memory even though only second-hand. At one remove from personal experience.

I have on the wall of my bedroom, visible from my electric bed, the recruiting poster that remains perhaps one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

I Cannot imagine that anyone the world over will not at some point have seen this image, that of Lord Kitchener facing straight to the onlooker and exclaiming that Your Country Needs You.

There are few images which can claim to have been so successful, if that is the term to use, in capturing the spirit of a time.

The poster that I have framed was given to me by one of my carers recently, having been a special giveaway with a Sunday newspaper at some point in the recent past.

It is a striking image, and I have it framed in front of me for several reasons.

One of them is simply as a reminder of so much of what is being remembered at the moment, but there is another very personal reason why it is important to me at the moment.

This is simply that Lord Kitchener possesses a stupendous moustache, very much a reminder of the kind of facial hair that was common at the time.

I have recently grown moustache of my own, which I use moustache wax for, and of which I am particularly proud.

Perhaps it is simply that when you have a red car, you see red cars everywhere.

I have begun to notice that there is an increasing fashion for extravagant facial hair such as was more common in the early part of the 20th century.

I was recently delighted to discover that thanks to the Internet, it was quite straightforward for me to find the source of moustache wax, a product which might be considered to be of interest only to a very small minority.

One interesting consequence of having this poster regularly in my vision is that I have noted the name of the artist that creates is the original poster image.

His name is Alfred Leete, and what I was surprised to discover was the fact that it seemed impossible to discover anything meaningful about this artists work.

Beyond the fact that the first appearance of the image came about in an obscure local newspaper, I have discovered nothing about the artist whatsoever.

This is something that I find so surprising given the times in which we live that I have felt it worthwhile to raise it.

It is strangely satisfying to discover something unknowable.

We are so used to being able to access information instantly, that it is quite remarkable that something so iconic should be so shrouded in anonymity.

The Warp and Weft of History

It’s not so much that I am obsessed with celebrity, and I have no illusions about my own sense of impact on history.

But I am fascinated at observing the way in which I can perceive the threads of connection between people and places.

There is great comfort to be had from a sense that I have been wrapped in these threads, and though it is clearly the case that we are all in some way connected to these threads and by these threads to everything, it is not necessarily the case that we are aware of those threads that bind us.

I suppose this particular blog is partly my reminiscing about the way in which I have been fortunate to have uncovered and become aware of some of these threads, and partly a means of finding some sense of meaning that I have gained from the whole process.

If I ever try to name drop about some of the people that I have met or worked with, more often than not other people do not know who I am talking about.

This only amuses me is, and perhaps underlines the fact that I have spent my life in a rarefied not to say mysterious world.

But it has been a world nevertheless connected to so many things.

This morning, as I was beginning to contemplate what I might write about, one of my starting points was to think of a title, such as why Les Miserables is such a favourite of mine.

Most recently, I am meaning the 25th anniversary film that Cameron Mackintosh commissioned to celebrate this important anniversary of his stage adaptation.

I did once see the staged adaptation, and it may have been in the 1980s, since I remember attending with my wife. Or at least the woman that was to become my wife.

I saw it at the Prince Edward Theatre on Drury Lane in theatre land.

When I was at university I lived only 30 minutes walk or so from Drury Lane, when I lived in Gower Street as a student. I was a student at University College London, the godless college in Gower Street.

Strangely enough, it was from an old-fashioned theatrical costumier close  to here that I first obtained moustache wax, when in my early 20s I first attempted to grow a relaxed moustache.

I have only one photograph from that time, the identity photograph from my London tube ticket.

I am currently attempting my second waxed moustache, and after much stress about whether or not I would be able to find another supplier for moustache wax, I searched on Amazon and was amazed at how many suppliers there were to be found.

This is an extraordinary reminder of how times have changed. It would have been unfixable in the early 1980s to use the Internet to shop for this kind of product, and yet today we can almost take it for granted.

I was even able to get some tips on how to wax my moustache from YouTube. Another unthinkable thing.

And of course having thought of Les Miserables, I made the connection with syndicalism.

Perhaps not everyone might have made this collection, but since my first working years were spent building a cooperative business, for me the link from those last scenes in the film where idealistic young men are talking about the blood of angry men and black, the colour of ages past.

Black and red are the colours of the anarchist flag.

Although I would not consider myself an anarchist, I would consider myself a syndicalist. And the two have a great deal in common.

Much of the Basque region in Spain has been the focus of significant industrial co-operatives, and I once owned a washing machine manufactured in one such business.

Working in eight co-operatives context has been an important part of my early experience, and indeed made me aware of some significant historical threads.

So for example the premises within which we operated a conference centre providing residential facilities for up to 40 people were provided to us at a peppercorn rent by a Christian socialist named Tom Lupton whose family had owned the Beechwood estate since Victorian times.

They had been manufacturers of fine woollen carriage cloth, and this substantial estate on the edge of Leeds was where they lived, in fairly grand style.

Examples of their cloth had been exhibited at the great exhibition in 1851.

Tom Lupton trained as an architect, and became a manufacturer of furniture. He eventually sold his furniture business to Terence Conran when that entrepreneur was building the Habitat empire, and since he lived in Oxfordshire he had no use for the Beechwood estate that he inherited from two spinster aunts in 1972.

As a Christian socialist, Tom Lupton was motivated to ensure that this resource was made available to pursue objectives that he had some belief in.

And so I became aware of the way in which Christian Socialists like him have had an important influence in the UK.

For example, the Scott Bader Commonwealth, located I believe somewhere close to Middlesbrough, is a chemical factory making injection moulding chemicals. The owner of the factory, Scott Bader, gave the entire factory to his workforce, in perpetuity, in the 1950s.

It is one of few examples of industrial cooperation in the UK, where co-operatives have tended to be consumer co-operatives.

Later, when I was working as the education officer for Opera North in Leeds, I became involved in a project to help the co-operative movement celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Rochdale Pioneers.

This took place at a national centre owned by the co-operative movement nationally, located in Staffordshire.

Strange how threads can link up on themselves, and I found myself in a unique position to appreciate what I was helping to celebrate by virtue of my own history.

It was whilst working at Opera North that I had the opportunity to meet and work with an extraordinary range of creative people, broadening my own horizons substantially.

Opera was not an art form that I had ever previously experienced, but for five years, I had the opportunity to see as many shows as I could, and never had to pay a thing.

I even had the opportunity to see work at other opera houses, including Glyndebourne and English National Opera, since the education officers at all of these institutions formed a small but unique network.

Thus I got to go to Glyndebourne twice, and though I did not possess a dinner suit, working for Opera North meant that I was able to be kitted out with a very fine dinner suit thanks to the wardrobe department.

And so it is that I have met many of the most important composers working in the 20th century, often only at those kind of drinks parties that take place when a production opens.

But nevertheless, to someone like myself interested in those threads of history, I have had a field day.

I met Sir Michael Tippett during the opera lost production of his last opera, New Year.

He was in his 90s and almost blind, but still composing.

As a conscientious objector, he was imprisoned for his beliefs during the Second World War.

Later, working as the development director for the Scottish chamber Orchestra, I would work closely with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the Queens music, organising his international young composers course on his island home of Orkney.

And so in the course of my work, I have had dinner with the likes of Arnold Wesker, at the Cheltenham Festival, and gave Sophie Dahl her acting debut in Goldilocks and the three Bears.

When I tell people that I have had dinner with Sophie Dahl I usually omit to mention that another dozen people were at the table with us, including her mother.

But that is the nature of personal experience, you can choose what you wish to include in any anecdotes.

Where I now live in Worthing in West Sussex is just across the road from the Queen Alexandra Hospital home for soldiers, and every year this important place has an open day.

I have met Dame Vera Lynn at the open day twice now, and because I included a short story about meeting with her at the hospital, in a special edition of my first collection of poems, a copy of this collection has been included in the local history collection of West Sussex county council, where it is rubbing shoulders with works by Shelley, Balzac, and Kipling.

I must have no illusions about the reason for my poems being included in this prestigious selection, it is the importance of the hospital and of its connection with Dame Vera Lynn, but it is nice to be thus included.

Keeping Back The Damp

I have lived in my own home in Worthing for just over 10 years. I live alone, although with a dog, you are never alone.

When I first moved in, I received a small settlement as a consequence of an accident in a public space. It was entirely not my fault, and as someone that was still walking but with crutches, my fall though not serious did much to damage my confidence.

This small settlement I spent almost entirely on the redecoration of my small apartment, just one bedroom, two or three streets back from the seafront.

It is a 1920s house, the ground floor or what we would in the UK  call a garden flat.

I have access to the rear of my property over the adjoining property, which enables me to gain access in my wheelchair from the street.

When I bought the house, on a mortgage, I was aware that all of the internal walls had been dry lined with plasterboard.

After 10 years, what I might have suspected has proven to be the case, that the plasterboard walls hide a general problem of damp.

Not serious damp, but sufficient to require sorting out properly now.

When I first moved in, I was able to benefit from a disabled facilities Grant, which meant that the local council spent a considerable sum turning my bathroom into a wet room, and giving me a new ramped access at the rear, with new double glazed wider opening to the ramped access, as well as the installation of superior fire alarms.

In spite of these improvements, when it rains and the wind is from the south, I get water coming in and spoiling the decoration, which is simple and minimalist white throughout.

I had the notion that I would like to live in something that approached a gallery space, and so the ceilings throughout were skimmed to smooth out the stippled texture, and the overall feel is simple and perfect for the display of my numerous pictures and photographs.

One of my last means of earning money before I ceased working entirely because of my condition, multiple sclerosis, was as a freelance graphic designer.

To facilitate this, I purchased a large format printer, which can print in full colour up to A1 size. At very high quality.

This means that some of my picture frames contain images that I have printed myself, either from photographs I have taken myself, or of images that I like.

Thus I can change my environment to a great extent. And I can offer to print large images at photographic quality for friends.

This printer is a great luxury, and I still keep it in working order even though it is much less used them once it was.

It is a great pleasure to be able to print images in this such a large format, and at such a high resolution.

To complete the needed improvements to my small apartment will cost more than I can afford, and a good friend of mine has offered to help me with some fundraising that may be needed.

I have already had the assurance of a local council officer that I may be able to secure a small grant from the same council that helped me with the disabled facilities Grant, but the available money is small, and I may have to find some additional resources.

This is my project for the next season, it may be that work will not be able to commence until next spring, and I will need to be relocated for about six weeks whilst the work takes place.

But my independence depends upon having this island of my own in my sea of troubles, somewhere that is shaped to my needs, and from where I can survey the world.

I don’t know exactly how much will be needed, but the issues and problems have begun to be more closely identified.

So as experts are consulted, my dog has new people to bark at. And she barks so well.

Oscar is a girl, and we have been together for the whole of her life, since she was rescued at the age of just over a year.

And so she is elderly, very protective, pays no attention to my commands, and yet remains my constant companion.

She is walked professionally by my most important carer daily, and so in spite of suffering arthritis for which she receives anti-inflammatories, she is happy and healthy for her age.

Any help the two of us, strays both, can keep back the waters will be most gratefully received.

No doubt this blog will regularly update any readers on the progress of my little scheme.

A Radical Idea Concerning The Socialisation Of People with Physical Disabilities

No lifts, no stairs, no steps and no barriers: an innovation in the care and long-term support and socialisation for people with physical disabilities

If at first this proposal sounds like it might begin as an architectural competition, then that is precisely my intention.

My proposal is multilayered in the suggests that there could be considerable savings of scale to be made in the way that people like myself with physical disabilities are supported and accommodated.

Further, and very much by way of improving opportunities for socialisation and integration, my early work experience as a member of a workers co-operative providing conference accommodation for person centred organisations with small budgets has proven to me that there is a substantial need for meeting and conference space that could generate substantial sums of money that could cover the running and operational costs of such an innovative type of building.

The early 1980s, from an overdraft of £3000 I was part of a team that grew a conference business with a turnover of £250,000 per annum during a five-year period.

Clearly, the circumstances in which the business operated were rather different. In our case, we’ve benefited from the provision of a substantial Victorian estate by the goodwill of its owner at a peppercorn rent, and located only 3 miles or so from Leeds city station, we were ideally placed to attract a national audience.

But the need still remains today for businesses of all kinds to find affordable conference and meeting space, on both a daily basis and on a residential basis.

For the purposes of an architectural competition, I have plucked out all my head the notion that the capacity to accommodate 30 to 40 people on a residential basis in single rooms would be initially adequate, with perhaps 10 additional twin rooms that were organised so that they were fully disabled access suited, perhaps in such a way that carers and cared for people of different sexes might have sufficient privacy within that accommodation.

In addition, on a more permanent basis, accommodation for between 10 and 20 people with a variety of needs would need to be created, and their accommodation might consist of the kind of space within which all of their living needs could take place - such as a small bedsit.

On-site catering would be an important component of servicing conference needs, and on a day-to-day basis should be able to accommodate meetings of up to 150 people plus the residential people and their carers.

A licensed bar could be included, although some innovation might look at the way in which this is an innovation in what it stocks.

So for an example, it might be much more like a cafe bar rather than simply an alcohol bar, and indeed could offer a wide range of alcohol free and healthy drinks as an alternative for everyone when socialising.

It is such a building used the most recent innovations in every aspect of its accommodation and the way in which it were designed to be fully accessible by people in wheelchairs, then it might also be attractive for use in respect of functions such as wedding receptions, and indeed it should be attractively presented with work commissioned by a range of artists in disciplines that would make it an attractive space in which to meet.

A multiplicity of breakout rooms could be used for all kinds of specialist small meetings, and should be equipped with a high level of technical equipment.

This level of technical equipment would of course be available outside of conference times for the use of residents, and it may be possible for residents to be able to contribute to some of the work supporting the conference business, such as graphic design for the creation of reports and follow-up for each event.

Any fees that might be generated could be made over to the social enterprise at the heart of this community business, because of the sensitive earning position of those people.

One of the principal benefits of such integrated living and working circumstances would be the way in which residents would be able to socialise with visiting conference and meeting attenders, and if more than one of these kind of facilities were to exist, as centres of excellence in their accessibility, it would make it possible for residents to be able to have a change of environment, typical hotel accommodation be out of the question for the majority of them.

It may be possible to have some additional services available to be rented out to commercial purposes, and so for example it may be advisable for someone like cooperative legal services to have a branch office within the premises. Preference should always be given to the type of business and how it is structured, so that other community businesses or cooperatives might be deemed more suitable.

If constructed on a brownfield site, there may be scope for substantial parking, for the use of residents, residents families and carers, and of course those attending meetings.

I stressed at the beginning of the concept of no barriers, and the use of technology for door opening and the ability of wheelchair users to access all areas with the minimum of assistance is critical.

Hence the idea of access to different levels being by way of gentle slopes rather than by lifts or by stairs.

The Pictures Are So Much Better...

This might have been written by way of advertisement.

It is unashamedly a positive reflection upon a new service available through Amazon.

I have been subscribing to this service for only a couple of months, and it may sound trite, but it has rather suddenly transformed my life.

This may sound grand, but if I may recount is little background this claim will make much more sense.

The service I am talking about is Audible, the means by which it has become possible to download audiobooks at a fraction of their normal cost.

I have become an avid listener to audiobooks more recently, quite simply because though I have been an inveterate reader for much of my life, the fact of my multiple sclerosis means that I cannot hold a book, nor turnEach page.

Although I am able to make out what the text of a computer document is, my eyesight has been severely affected by optic neuritis.

And so, my recent discovery of this means by which I can immerse myself in the written word has restored something important that otherwise had been lost to me.

Now the only issue is that age old problem, what to read.

Over the past couple of years, perhaps for obvious reasons, I have become much more interested in film as a medium.

Now suddenly I have become fascinated with reading the novels that have become the basis of films, and it is extremely interesting to me as someone that has been interested in creative writing for many years to see where the resulting film perhaps differs from the novel that inspired it

This is one of numerous possible ways in which I might direct line interest the written word, although there may be numerous other means by which I could navigate and make choices.

But for now, this is an important first step, and goodness I have much distance to travel to catch up with where I may have reached is books had remained accessible to me.

I still like to surround myself with antiquarian books, their pages filled with extraordinary images, and the wondrous smell of old paper.

But my imagination is once again inspired by accessing works which I thought were beyond me.

And after all, just like listening to radio, the pictures are so much better.

Tthe Land of Memories

I watched a fascinating documentary on BBC recently, about British whaling and how it had continued into the 1960s.

This was quite a surprise to me, as I am sure it would have been to so many people. Something that is unthinkable today, and yet was happening as recently as in the 60s.

What perhaps has stimulated my thoughts in an unexpected way was simply the knowledge that the principal whaling station on South Georgia was called Port of Leith.

This is the kind of geography that no one would be expected to know, not even to remember.

I suppose I only remember it because for three years I lived in Leith, the port of Edinburgh, between 1995 and 1998.

In this period of my life, two years before I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I was working as the Development Director for the Scottish chamber Orchestra.

I have fond memories of my time in this employment, and it is perhaps more frequently in my thoughts these days as the vote for Scottish secession comes potentially closer.

Who knows which way the Scots will vote, and far be it from me to second-guess them.

But I do have personal experience of that peculiar sense of Scottish nationalism, in that working for a National Scottish company, I did experience at times what can only be described as racism.

I was told to my face on one occasion that the job I was doing should be done by a Scot, but when I spoke about this to my boss, who was also an Englishman, he reassured me and said quite simply that they had appointed the best person for the job.

What this has reminded me of our those experiences that I had living in Scotland, almost exclusively positive, as Leith in Edinburgh was definitely on the up during my time there, thanks primarily to the fact that a new Scottish office building had recently been constructed in the port area, as a preliminary to the construction of the new Scottish Parliament building.

This meant that the flat in which my wife and I lived was within 400 yards of an extraordinary selection of world class restaurants, most of which had been opened in the wake of the transformation of the old port as part of the general tidying up of a depressed part of Scotland’s capital.

We loved eating out, and we truly had an incredible selection within short walking distance of where we were living.

This was a purpose built block of flats, but constructed in about 1816. The style of apartment is particular to Edinburgh, and would be described as a drawing room flat.

In short, this meant high ceilings and a huge living room.

We had a period shutters and a truly gigantic living room, that gave us spacious living, and good views from our second floor position.

Another proposed development that happened whilst we were in Edinburgh was the location of a permanent mooring for the Royal yacht Britannia, in the Port of Leith itself, with an associated shopping mall linked to a mooring station for transatlantic shipping.

This certainly added to reasons why people might visit Leith, and perhaps explains why when we left Edinburgh, we made a small killing on the sale of our flat, after owning it for just three years.

Of all of the restaurants available to us, perhaps our favourite was a small French restaurant, the name of which escapes me.

This was located just a little out of the way in the conversion of one of the many old warehouse buildings that would have served the merchants of the port.

It was an excellent conversion, and whilst we never ate upstairs, there was apparently an upstairs room that could be used for functions is required.

But we quickly felt completely at home in the beautifully and simply designed ground floor restaurant, and we seemed never to have a problem getting a table.

Service was attentive and efficient, and the linen was crisp and white.

And the food. French influenced but of the minimalist and uncluttered by sauces, but beautifully presented on a fabulous selection of square white plates.

It became a home from home for us, and though not as inexpensive as we might have liked, it became the place that we regularly dined weekly at, and if occasion presented itself, at the least excuse.

I remember precious little detail of the menus, but then, this is not a restaurant review. Suffice that the food was excellent and to our taste.

I remember that the restaurant was presided over by the portrait of a woman, that was I think uncompleted. But this only added to the sense of the space, and it may have been a genuine period antique, though it may equally have been painted only recently but with an accomplished hand.

Everything about the place spoke of style, and no wonder that we wished we could eat there on a daily basis.

I wonder sometimes if it still exists, though it matters not as it remains one of my fondest memories of time spent in Scotland.

And in the land of memories, nothing need change.

Confessions Of A Moustache Waxer

I have recently started to wax my moustache.

Why this feels like some kind of confession, I don’t know.

It isn’t the first time that I have waxed my moustache, although to be honest I had thought that I was no longer subject to the vanities of youth.

I am 53 years of age, and severely disabled thanks to multiple sclerosis. So this is hardly something that is designed to improve my Saturday nights on the town.

The first time that I waxed my moustache was when I was much younger, and years before MS was over on the scene.

I was 22 years of age, living as a recently graduated student in London, and active in the management of the housing in which I had been living since my last year at university.

This was a housing co-operative in East London, and my only photographic evidence of my appearance at the time is my old underground monthly tube pass, which has a small passport sized photograph showing me with my waxed moustache.

Although I display this small image proudly tucked into the frame of a picture on one of my walls, most people that see it think of it as something rather quirky, and my ex-wife and good friend (still) has been quite frank with me, and says that I look as if I were some kind of terrorist.

I can’t say that I agree, but perhaps there is something less than typical about this photograph.

This would have been taken in about 1982, and at the time, I obtained my supplies of moustache wax from a small costume supplier somewhere off Drury Lane in the West End of London.

It was the kind of small shop that I imagine would have gone out of business many years ago, and so when it came to obtaining supplies of moustache wax once again only recently, I had no idea where I would obtain supplies.

Of course, what I had failed to take into account was the fact that we live in the Internet age, and a swift search of the Internet led me to a page of moustache wax suppliers on Amazon which quite took me aback.

The choice was astonishing, I had no idea that I would be presented with the problem of choice rather than the difficulty of finding the stuff.

Clearly, there has been a resurgence of interest in moustache waxing.

And of course, since I have started to wax my moustache, I have started to see waxed moustaches in many contexts where otherwise I might have entirely missed them.

So for example garden designers at the recent Chelsea flower show, and this has made me reflect simply that when you get a red car, you see red cars everywhere.

Another inspiration for me has been the recent BBC dramatised documentary of the 37 days leading up to the start of the First World War.

Set in that summer of 1914, it is a veritable parade of extraordinary moustaches, from all across Europe.

It has made me start to ruminate about the way in which this was of course the glory day of the waxed moustache, and I realise that I have been a secret collector of old photographs of men with grand moustaches, picking them up in junk shops and at the markets. Almost rescuing them or adopting them when they have become forgotten and unloved.

But there is perhaps something sombre and sad in the realisation that it was the First World War that put an end to this aspect of male vanity in its ultimate flowering.

Because all of those grand moustaches from the Edwardian period were destroyed in that terrible conflict, and in some respects, it is a terrible cliche that the young officer leading his troops from the trenches and into battle would have sported some kind of handlebar moustache.

But there it is, I have started to cultivate a waxed moustache, and in my case, given the limitations placed upon me by my multiple sclerosis, I am fortunate that my carers have risen to the challenge of waxing my moustache for me.

It has become part of my daily routine, being assisted with shaving using an electric razor, rather than having a three-day stubble which has been my typical appearance since forever.

And then, a slap and a wax. The application of aftershave, the slap, and then the waxing of the moustache.

It’s my only vanity, I console myself.

An Inspector Calls (1954)

For the first decade of my working life I lived in Leeds in West Yorkshire. This meant that I was a fairly regular visitor to Bradford.

Bradford has many attractions, not least of all the quality of its curry houses.

Fairly central to the city is the National Museum of Film and Photography, in my memory one of the first major national museums located purposefully outside of London.

And just outside of the Museum is a bronze statue of the novelist and playwright JB Priestley, someone whose writings have somewhat fallen out of fashion in more recent times.

One of his most important early works is his English Journey, and I remember that 50 years after it was written, another important writer of a different generation was commissioned to write a similar work that followed in the kind of footsteps of this pioneering writer.

In spite of having what might be described as socialist leanings, one of the most interesting facts concerning the original JB Priestley English Journey is that he undertook it from the back seat of his chauffeured limousine.

This perhaps sets him apart from someone like George Orwell, who of course famously went down and out in London and Paris, and whilst not exactly adopting a disguise to do so, he actually lived the life of someone without a penny to his name.

And this is the background to the man that wrote An Inspector Calls, perhaps one of his most famous stage works, and one that I have at some point in my theatre going life seen presented on the London stage.

Most recently, I have recorded a broadcast version of this work, and transferred it to my growing collection of over 600 films, accessible at the click of a mouse from a 2 TB hard disk attached to my computer.

It is extraordinary that such an elderly play can be so fabulously engaging even in the present day.

A recent blog entry of mine talked about the way in which the BBC has been looking at the circumstances in the lead up to the First World War, in this centenary year.

In some respects, this play is closely linked to an understanding of what was lost by the destruction of the generation that fought this terrible war.

At the outset of the play, we are told that it is 1912, and the events that take place on a single night that will forever transform the lives of the participants shed great light on this time in our nation’s history.

Without giving away any of the plot details, no spoilers, sufficient to say that a mysterious police inspector interrupts a family in the middle of a family celebration.

Without providing any significant detail, but simply by asking questions about the knowledge that the family members have of a young girl that has taken poison and died horribly at the local infirmary, it is discovered that each of them has played some crucial role in determining the fate of this woman.

It is an extraordinarily moral work, and one which it would be difficult to imagine staged outside of its own period.

But it is fundamentally a work of great insight into the human condition, and the way in which we affect the lives of others, quite fitting then that such an imposing statue of the author should stand so prominently as a memorial to him in his home town.

I am sure it was not simply a quirk of fate that it should be shown at this point in time, when there is so much s thought about the world left behind after this conflict.

That the play should have had such a durable life is a tribute to its quality, and if anyone has not read or seen it, catching the film is an excellent way of appreciating it.

Goodbye Mr Chips (1939)

Bank holidays in Britain are famous for several things. Atrocious weather is one of them, and it is typical that the films scheduled for broadcast fall into the category of family favourites.

This recent Monday May bank holiday has been exceptional as far as the weather has been concerned. And I was fortunate to catch an early morning film, one which I almost certainly have seen before, but which this particular viewing somewhat astonished me for its capacity to evoke an emotional response.

Quite simply, I think it is the fact that we are in the centenary year of the commencement of the Great War.

The BBC has been remarkable at the range and number of extraordinary documentaries looking at different aspects of this important historical moment.

It is only a couple of years since the last of the surviving soldiers that fought in the trenches died. It is now only something that can be remembered through the recorded reminiscences of those that experienced life at the frontline, and there is an added poignancy to the relics of this period in our history, such as the medals and trench art that have survived to come down to us.

It is sobering to think that it will be shortly similarly the case for the Second World War, as those that served in this conflict age sufficiently so that they have become a tiny minority of the population.

And so perhaps it is possible for me to have seen this film before and for it to have changed its significance viewing it now, when so much seems present in our minds.

One of the most moving documentaries that I have recently viewed is a dramatisation of the 37 days leading up to the declaration of war in 1914, subsequent to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

This has been an exceptionally well realised programme, that has essentially sen the whole of the complex political story from the viewpoint of a lowly clerk in one of the foreign office departments, giving an interesting perspective on the way in which Britain was at the centre of an extraordinary empire at the time of the events that led inextricably toward the chaos of the war to end all wars.

What I suppose I had forgotten was the way in which this particular film captured a sense of the world that was destroyed by that conflict, as it amounts to the story of an elderly master at an English boys school, who is invited to become the headmaster of his school as a consequence of the decimation of his peers and the younger masters, called up to fight for King and country.

The achievement of one man’s lifetime ambition is related in the context of his own personal story, including the loss of his wife and child during childbirth.

The sense of the history of the time suddenly becoming more relevant, makes it emotionally compelling in a way that I could not have appreciated at previous viewings.

And I have just discovered that the film was made in 1939, almost certainly during that period of impending war. Perhaps that it should have won five Oscars is a fitting tribute to its quality, and perhaps a deep wish that the lessons of the history that it contains should not be forgotten.

Time And Space

So you think the clocks going back Is Difficult

Spare a thought for those that were living in 1582 when the Gregorian calendar reform took place.

We might think that we are hard done by in the United Kingdom, when the clocks are reset by an hour and in effect we have two get up an hour earlier.

Of course, this is balanced by the fact that at the autumn equinox, when the clocks go forward, we feel as if we have gained an extra hour of sleep.

Of course, few of us will ever think about the reason for this, and least of all, connect this shift in our management of time to the Gregorian calendar.

But the fact is that in truth our calendar is founded on the solar year, and we have the church of Rome to thank for the reform to that calendar in 1582, undertaken primarily so that the calculation for the date of Easter could be more accurately connected with the lunar calendar.

There is an interesting connection between the lunar calendar and the solar, but it is a connection that we are not fully conscious of.

But the truth of the matter is that the old Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, failed to take account of small inaccuracies in the differences between the two.

The consequence of this was that lunar and solar had become unsynchronised, and the adjustments made were intended to bring things back into order.

And so the length of the solar year was properly recognised to be 365.25 days in duration, with alternate leap years providing the additional necessary time between the two.

But in addition, there was a 10 day difference to be taken into account, and the solution to this was simply to forget 10 days of the calendar, which as you can imagine, for a mostly illiterate population, felt a little bit like losing 10 days of your life.

And if your birthday happened to fall in one of those 10 days, it must have felt as if you had been deprived of an entire year of your life.

And so, whilst we cope with this simple daylight saving means of adjusting our clocks, spare a moment for those mediaeval folk, who must have pondered hard as to the way in which they were being dealt with by the church, and all for the sake of calculations concerning which they would have found mystifying.

But there is something of poetic beauty in the way in which time has been distilled from an observation of the way in which the Earth moves in space, in the context of our solar system.

And although time is a particularly human means of making sense of things, it is ultimately something outside of ourselves, and immutable.

How well do you speak Klingon?

I don’t often use this blog to talk about my dreams. In the specific sense of what I have been dreaming about.

But last night, I had a dream. One that I find of sufficient interest to want to write about.

They say that sometimes in your dreams you can process ideas that you might otherwise have missed in your conscious waking life.

This perhaps constitutes one such example.

Quite simply, at some point in my dream, I think I woke up, or perhaps at least had a moment of conscious self awareness.

Enough to be able to remember my dream, and to smile at the thought of it.

Quite simply, in my dream, I was reading a lengthy article in some respectable newspaper which was all about the potential to develop communication with an alien race.

And the entire article was written in Klingon.

Now, I first want to make it clear that I do not speak Klingon.

Most of you will know that Klingon is an invented language, created for the purpose of pursuing an unhealthy interest in the Star Trek series.

I haven’t bothered to research Klingon using the Internet, although it would be a fair guess that it would be possible to discover an entire community of people that spend much time spreading understanding and knowledge of Klingon.

But, I am not one of them.

Although I did find it very funny, and interesting, that in the film Paul, the two young men travelling to America for a comic convention were able to speak fluent Klingon.

They were deluded in thinking that this language might be a useful means of communicating when they do not wish anyone else in earshot to understand what they are communicating about.

Since they have just met Paul, the little green alien in the title of the film, one of them uses his Klingon to be able to suggest that they overpower the alien.

Paul, however, asks if those words being spoken are in fact Klingon.

The idea that Paul is actually an alien, and that he is a danger to either of them, becomes quite farcical when it is realised that he recognises Klingon.

And all that this knowledge arouses in him is confirmation that the rescuers that have picked him up our complete nerds.

Now I am a fan of the new Star Trek films, that have given new life to this old idea.

Into the dark, released in 2013, is an exciting rebirth of the Star Trek film series.

But the idea that Klingon might hold some kind of key to alien languages, and that an interesting article in Klingon might be written for a serious newspaper, is in itself entering the realms of farce.

But as in most intense dreams, I read this article with interest, clearly making some sense of this strange language, and being interested in what was being communicated.

I do not recall anything exact of what was being communicated, and my only residual memory is that I was amused at the context of what I had been doing. Reading an article written in Klingon.

And hence this blog entry.

The conclusion of which is I think simply to be amazed at the possibilities in dreaming.

And part of me is simply relieved that I can have such lucid dreams, in spite of the fact that I have multiple sclerosis, and that although physically I am unable to explore the world, I can still travel to extraordinary places in my dreams.

Long may it still continue.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

It strikes me as a particularly relevant that this film by Hitchcock should have been shown recently.

Events in the news have been surprisingly reminiscent of some of the issues raised in this wartime propaganda film, which I found amusingly described on the BBC as a humorous thriller.

It is some measure of the quality of the film that it has been remade, and although I have only seen one of the remade versions, it is just as successful as the original.

Although there are aspects of the original that make it preferable, as ever, over subsequent remakes.

Hitchcock is not terribly well known for his humorous films, but this certainly has its moment of finding humour in the way that it pokes fun at two cricket obsessives.

But humour that is balanced perfectly with the deportment of those two otherwise laughable characters when confronted with danger.

This is as much part of the critical message of the film, in the same way that the ‘pacifist’ that is killed by a ruthless foe makes it clear that this is not the way of dealing with such an enemy.

That the vanished lady is an amiable elderly lady is another aspect in which characters are painted so as to be different from the stereotype.

The subtle message is perhaps that it is important not to underestimate the capacity of those that we might otherwise find humorous.

The McGuffin in this film is the notion that the contents of a secret treaty can be contained in a snatch of music, music that is smuggled out of the country in which the action takes place, and music which then unites Miss Froy with those who in turn have saved her from the clutches of foreign agents.

That it is a love story as well as at turns a spy thriller and a comic portrayal of the English abroad is part of the genius of the director.

Mathematics in Animals

Some time ago I wrote a blog about how my dog tends to bark in prime numbers.

In the morning when she is let into the garden, she runs the length of her domain and barks as if to reiterate that she is the master of her territory.

It was of course a playful piece, drawing upon the way in which a Hollywood film, Contact, uses the fact that prime numbers do not occur naturally.

However, watching a BBC documentary recently, has reminded me of how shortsighted sometimes we can be when it comes to observing the world around us.

The documentary was about much more than simply the capacity that some animals have for using mathematics.

But it is sobering to realise that something as simple as its a honey bee can measure the angle of the sun in the sky, and communicate through this information the location of food that may ensure the survival of the hive over winter.

It was claimed in the programme that the waggle dance, which is the means by which one bee can communicate to others this information, is hardwired into the genetics of the animal.

This may be so, but it is no less amazing that a simple insect is capable of measuring the angle of the sun in relation to the horizon, and also the distance from the hive, two pieces of information which together are sufficient to locate a source of food.

It is fascinating to become aware of how complex and diverse nature can be, and although the programme was by no means simply about the way in which animals make use of mathematics in their survival.

This revelation was one of many that came about because of the way scientists have been observing complex behaviour in a range of animals.

Though there may not be some arcane significance to my dog barking in prime numbers every morning, it does demonstrate the importance sometimes of paying attention to what we can learn of the world around us beyond ourselves.

The Best And Worst Of Us

Films often explore ethics and morals.

Quite recently, I watched a film that seems to have examined one extreme of what it is to be human.

Looking at the very worst of what we can imagine to be the consequences of our progression as a race. Not wanting to accept the limitations placed upon us by the lives we lead.

The Island is quite a recent film, and supposes that in the near future, techniques of cloning have been developed that enable those with sufficient resources, money, to purchase duplicates of themselves, that can be used for the transplantation of organs, should an accident occur, or disease threaten the life of the ‘sponsor’.

This kind of medical development is not as far-fetched as we might think.

What is interesting about the film is the way in which the cloned ‘property’ is kept unaware of its purpose and fate, as a means of ensuring that the organs contained within the clone have the kind of resilience that millions of years of human evolution have given ‘ordinary’ people.

The ethical issues involved in keeping to protect people alive simply for the purpose of use as spam parts is well presented.

The clones are kept in an isolated location, where the live their lives as innocent childlike beings, convinced that they are the survivors of a contamination that has destroyed the great majority of the human race.

A lottery is used to determine which of the clones might be transported to the mythical island as the film’s title, which is reckoned to be the place from which the Earth will be repopulated by those that have ‘survived’ the calamitous contamination.

But what the businessmen that have created this financially rewarding experiment I have not taken into account is the notion that the clones might develop something of the personalities of the people that they have replicated.

And one particular person, played by our hero, discovers a flying bug, a butterfly, he begins to question what he has been taught to believe without question.

His curiosity leads to him discovering the fate of lottery winners, as they are euthanised after their organs are harvested.

And when someone that he has against the rules become a little too friendly with is chosen for “relocation” to the island, he makes a desperate bid for freedom, and the two of them escape into the outside world, that they expect to be severely contaminated, but isn’t.

With the threat this poses to the business of providing clones that genetically match their ‘owners’, a hunting party is in hot pursuit of these naive escapees.

They head for a modern futuristic Los Angeles, expecting that confronting their sponsors will result in them achieving some kind of safety.

But of course it is not as simple as that.

Our hero interestingly has started to develop the kind of memories that his wealthy sponsor has developed, which means that he inexplicably is able to drive at speed, knows how to operate this kind of high-speed machinery.

It becomes a fight for survival, when his sponsor reports his arrival to the pursuing hunters.

But in an unexpected twist, it is the sponsor that is gunned down, mistaken for the clone, and suddenly the tables are turned on this morally doubtful business.

Since his clone has been destroyed by the pursuing hunters, he is taken back to the facility where the clones are kept isolated from the world, and just as the disreputable business is about to eliminate several generations of product, manages to free the entire population of clones.

The film ends with several hundred naive clones, escaping from the isolated plant where they have been kept and misled their entire brief lives.

It is impossible not to draw parallels with other failed attempts at eugenics, and whilst there is no complete resolution of what happens next, this is not necessary.

It is enough that the failed contravention of everything that is good about humanity has been ended.

Interestingly, the day after having watched this film, I watched a much older film, Accidental Hero, in which a very different perspective on what it is to be ethically and morally human is presented.

In this film, Dustin Hoffman is a small time crook, who by accident of fate saves 54 people from certain death when their aeroplane crashes on its way across America from the west coast.

Dustin Hoffman is an unlikely hero, and he flees the scene of his heroism.

Because one of the people that he has saved is a television journalist, the action takes on a search for the hero of the day.

Through an accidental misplacing of one of his shoes, when the television company offers a reward of $1 million for the identification of the hero, an indigent friend to whom he has given the one shoe that he retained claims the reward.

What follows is a humorous at times series of events, but the end is somehow resolved, when he is able to agree with the mistaken hero that he can blackmail him, ensuring the future education of his young son.

The film finishes with a tantalising moment when the accidental hero is explaining to his young son what really happened, whilst they are both at the zoo.

The film finishes just at the point where a mother has screamed that her daughter has fallen into the Lions enclosure, and father says to son, “watch my shoes”.

Seen together, the two films represent the extraordinary spectrum of possibilities, for human action to be ethical and appropriate, what we might hope of ourselves or others, and what we would wish to be not even conceived as possible.

An Excellent Lunch Companion

I recently discovered that a poem I wrote in commemoration of the death of writer Francis King was still available on the PEN website.

English PEN is part of a worldwide network of writers, and the fact that my poem was accepted at all I considered a prestigious honour.

Discovering it is still alive and available for perusal three years after it was written and sent when I had received news of the writers’ recent death at the age of 88.

Francis King was someone that I only met briefly, but I am sure like many, meeting with him has remained in my memory. He was an excellent lunch companion.

Few people can have so many interesting anecdotes drawn mostly from a life well lived.

His circle of friends was extraordinary, and when he mentioned someone that he called Morgan, it took a later gentle reminder that he was talking about EM Forster, a writer that most of us will have heard of, but few will count as close friends.

There is the generational thing, of course. Francis King was of an older generation. A very different generation, in which being homosexual was itself considered criminal.

Impossible for most people to understand in these very different times.

And he moved in a circle where he knew WH Auden, he of the famous funeral poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It is ironic that my life should have crossed with that of Francis when it did, and that I should have even been able to write that poem in honour of his memory.

That it can be viewed on the English PEN website is an added bonus, but it reminds me that I have written many poems in the context of Humanist funerals, some of which are published in my collection, 50 x 50 -Useful Poetry For Troubled Times.

It is not so much that I have a particular fascination for memorial poems, but simply that I had a Humanist Celebrant friend for whom I wrote to order a number of such poetic expressions.

I suppose I had, and still have, the time to be able to respond quickly. Funerals of course are never planned far in advance.

But this is certainly the most prestigious opportunity to have the last word.

My style as a poet lends itself perhaps, unpretentious, and when I worked closely with my humanist celebrant friend, she was grateful to have someone at that could take a simple narrative of someone’s life, and frame it within blank verse, that came across as a poetic expression of those things that had been communicated to me.

This facility of mine became the focus of my application to the Arts Council of England for a small grant. The first and only time that I have received funding from this source for my own work.

I mentioned in the poem I wrote that was simply entitled Francis King CBE that he had been generous enough to have read some of my poetry and commented positively on it, and said that he would write on my behalf to the Arts Council. It was how he himself had started out as an author, in very different times, with the receipt of an award from that body.

But Francis spent most of his long life working for the British Council, often overseas, and he had a particular liking for Japan.

Which was something we could talk about, because I had the good fortune to travel to Japan when I worked as the Development Director for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

My week in Japan is one of the highlights of a life that is far more constrained these days, and such travel would simply be impossible these days.

But I am glad to have done it when I could, and in some style too.

It is a simple fact that when you work for a National orchestra, that when you stay abroad, you stay in five-star hotels. And a size star hotel in Japan is quite an experience.

But that lunch with Francis King was an excellent one, and he was an extraordinary raconteur.





Francis King CBE

The family has gathered, the struggle ceased
but sadness should not cloud the day.
Your life must end, but it has been long
and filled with so many friends along the way
who have already sung their song.
I like to think that you will soon be drinking tea
with many of them, Japanese style
- and how you will admire the waiters!

You were kind to me, and read my words
for which I am so grateful. Better still
you said you liked them, and wrote as much
to those that gave you your first start
for which I'm truly humbled.
But then, you are a gentleman, and a nearly-knight
though a sword, in truth, wouldn't suit you quite
for it would clash with your convictions.

The conversations over tea
would be well worth overhearing.
Such a literary gathering it will be
and a library's worth of worthies.
Besides, so many shelves across the world
will keep your memory fresh
for you chose for your profession
one in which death is only the beginning.