Never Hate Anything

Warning: This post may be regarded by some as containing politically incorrect words or sentiments.

When I started blogging 1n 2007 my blog was simply a way of telling my family and friends in the country I wasn't living in at the time, what I was doing on the other side of the world. Since then it has altered and so has my Blogland friend base. The only people, so far as I can recall, who still follow regularly who followed in the first couple of years are Monica (Dawn Treader) and Adrian with Meike (Librarian) following on. There are some who still pop in and out who were New Zealand friends in the very early years too. You may find this post familiar.

There have been a lot of bloggers and non-blogging commenters recently who have become rather controversial and, for me, that takes a lot of the fun out of blogging.

If, as a child (and when I was an adult come to think of it), I ever said that I hated something my Dad always responded by saying "You should never hate anything in this world". I don't think he ever did. I'm not sure that I have ever hated either. I abhor things like intolerance and discrimination but I don't hate them. I have certainly never hated a person. Hate is too self-destructive an emotion.

When I was a child growing up in Liverpool there was a joke which went "What's green on one side, orange on the other and has a white line down the middle?" The answer was "Netherfield Road North". That road was notorious for being the boundary between the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities in Liverpool. The area was poor and largely comprised of slum dwellings. It was not wise to walk down the 'wrong' side of the road.

I digress. When I was 21 I was the deputy in the Housing Committee Section in the Town Clerk's Department (the legal and administration department of the Liverpool Corporation - City Council). That Section also dealt with slum clearance and compulsory purchase. Anthony Wedgewood Ben was the Minister of Technology at the time. He was visiting Liverpool. Even in those days (1965) politicians had press officers spinning for them. We were told that he had to be referred to as WedgeBen of MinTek to make him look modern and with it. He arrived and decreed that the word 'slum' was no longer to be used. Houses were henceforth to be referred to as 'unfit for human habitation'. Never use four words where one will do - unless you are trying to make your own title look modern.

Back to the story. Netherfield Road North was a hotbed for the violence of man on man caused by religious hatred. I recall, for example, the discrimination where the Lybro Overall Factory had a notice in huge letters outside the main entrance "No Roman Catholics (or was it Protestants?) employed". I was a Protestant but I had been sent to a Prep School owned and run by an Irish Roman Catholic family. So why did religions hate each other? Even as a very young child I wondered that and found it incomprehensible.

Liverpool Corporation in one of the most courageous and far-seeing practical acts of anti-discrimination almost eliminated the physical divisions of religion in Liverpool when it cleared the slums to the new high-rise blocks in Kirby. They took a decision to mix the orange and the green. People became next door neighbours with people whom they would not previously have tolerated on their side of Netherfield Road North.

But nothing has changed in the world. Liverpool may no longer have a significant problem with religious hatred. But the rest of the world.......

One amusing thing that always sticks in my mind was my partner's daughter who whenever she said that she hated something and I responded as my Dad had done, used to stamp her foot in mock annoyance and say "OK, Graham, I don't like it a very lot then!". And she wasn't yet a teenager.

As Andy used to say "It's a funny old world, Dad."

The Good Old Days

People of my age have a tendency to talk about the ‘good old days’. I recall that when I was young people did so then as well. In reality there has probably never been anything as general as ‘the good old days’. I recall Harold Macmillan saying “We’ve never had it so good.” and then, off the record, turning to the person at his side and saying “And we never will have it so good again.”

I happened to be in the local hospital recently and whilst I was able to walk in through the front door with no problem all other exterior doors are now open only to code-holders as are many interior doors. I can understand that I suppose.

When I started work as a (reasonably senior) public servant in Western Isles Council (as it then was) any member of the public could walk into the council offices and seek me out and knock on my office door (metaphorically because it was usually open unless I was engaged). And people frequently did.

I was recently in the Council offices and there are still a few people left from my era (I retired from there over 20 years ago). I was invited upstairs to wait for someone but this involved various people with different passcodes accompanying me just to get me through doors. Apparently now even people who work in the building do not have general access to other areas of the offices. Security in all its forms now rules most things that are done.

I can't foresee what might happen that would make people who work there now look back in thirty years and say "Ah those were the good old days." I won't be around but I hope upon hope that things don't get any worse.

Jon (now John) Sergeant

Many many moons ago in a previous incarnation when I was a young officer in the department of the Town Clerk of Liverpool (for those who live outside Britain or are younger than about 50, that was the legal and administrative department of local government) I was at a luncheon sitting next to a young (and ferociously bright) Jon (now John) Sergeant who was a reporter with the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo. It was an inspection of some of the Corporations assets.

The other day I came across his book 'Give Me Ten Seconds' published in 2001 which I read some years ago. Coincidentally I also came across a photograph taken after the luncheon when the Liverpool Corporation bus which was taking everyone on the inspection broke down.

So the ferociously bright Oxford PPE graduate witnessed some of those who would become Liverpool's great and good (and me) push starting a Leyland Atlantean double decker bus.

No More Sleeps

Well today is the day I leave Eagleton on the start of my trip for my other life in New Zealand.  Gaz and Carol are ensconsed in Hong Kong for the week.  For those of you who have been asking their Quantas flight left on time and wasn't even full.  Given that it was the first flight to HK from Heathrow after the strike, that must tell us something.

The first wash of my bedding is in the machine and I just have some final cleaning and tidying to do so that friends/family who use the house while I am away don't walk in and say 'He doesn't dust his skirting boards' (You know who you are!!).  

The weather lady this morning said that by 8am there would be sunny skies even over the Hebrides.  Well that sure ain't the case so far.  It's dull, damp and dreach.  Gales are forecast for this afternoon.  That'll mean a bumpy flight.  Oh well.  So long as it stays up in the air when it's meant to and comes down at the right time I'll be happy.

So this morning I've been catching up on Adrian's Blog while the washing machine is doing what my Grandmother would have been doing in the washing cellar under the house (by the time I was born the days of someone to that sort of thing for her were over).  I have taken the liberty of pinching one of his photos for a number of reasons.  Firstly I think a post can be just that bit more entertaining if it has a photo; particularly a superb one like this.  Secondly I think Adrian's Blog is always worth a read but the post from which I borrowed this photo is a particularly good read.  Thirdly I think that we should all look carefully at what that photo is portraying because for every one of us (and I'm being presumptuous here that my readers are all from economically developed countries) owes our current wealth, in a large part, to these men.  Without the miners to provide coal for power there would have been no industrial revolution.  And that's just the start.  Oh dear.  I'm in just the right mood for a rant and I've run out of time.  Probably just as well.

When Is Art A Con?

Dawn Treader’s wonderful recent blog series on sculptures including one on a sculptor called William Sweetlove entitled Sweetlove and Cloning made me think of an incident many years ago when I was studying.  I went to an ‘after tutorial, after coffee, gathering’  with some of my fellow students.  The party was at the flat of a famous sculptor (or perhaps it was his sister because it was she, I seem to recall, who was one of the crowd of students with whom I was at the time).  In the fireplace was a poker (for poking the coal fire) in a piece of tramline with a hole drilled in it to hold it.  Leastways that’s what I thought it was.  My evidence for that was firstly that it was in the hearth and secondly it was a piece of the worm gear on a shaft from a motor car.  Such items were commonly used as pokers after the war when money and commodities were short.  In fact Dad took a steel rod from a car engine and made a handle from a varied selection of metal and fibre washers which he then machined into the shape of a handle.  It was a splendid item. 

Anyway the sculptor in question had once worked in an art school environment as a caretaker and decided that he could produce works just as good as the works he saw coming out of the art school.  He was reported amongst my friends as having said that he thought it was a huge confidence trick and that he could do just as well.  He is supposed to have said that once he became famous he would show the art establishment up for the pretentious people that they were.  When he became famous and part of the establishment memory appears to have failed him.  Of course that may all have been apocryphal.  Whom amongst us knows?

Anyway, going back to the flat on that evening many years ago, I decided to poke the fire ‘cos it was getting a bit chilly.  Oh dear.  The ‘poker’ was in fact one of the sculptor’s works of art.  I was saved from my faux pas just in time.

I wonder why William Sweetlove reminded me of that?