All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 15

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Experiment, week 15. This week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. Coleslaw. I’ve always liked coleslaw; good commercially made coleslaw. Home-made somehow just doesn’t work as well for me.
  2. Bacon & Avocado. They’re nice individually but also make a great combination in salad. I wonder why we’ve eaten this twice in the last week?

  3. Confit of Duck. On Tuesday we had lunch with our friend Patric (see below) at Café Rouge near St Paul’s Cathedral. The confit of duck was most excellent, although I wasn’t struck on the plum sauce that came with it which was sweet rather than sharp.
  4. Solving Family History Problems. I’ve had a couple of breakthroughs this week on my family history. One was courtesy of …

  5. Clarenceux King of Arms. I’m lucky to know Patric Dickinson who is Clarenceux King of Arms, England’s second most senior Herald (and not to be confused with the deceased poet of the same name). Now that sounds grand and as a title and position it is. Although he spends a significant part of his time involved with royalty (as a herald he has various ceremonial roles in the Royal Household), Patric isn’t at all grand. Like me he’s a grammar school boy and a normal human being. And as a professional genealogist he is fascinated by families. Consequently some while ago he wrested from me a copy of my family tree and quite unexpectedly and unbidden went about solving a conundrum about one set of my very ordinary, working class great-great-grandparents. He explained all this to me on Tuesday, prior to lunch together. It is a tale of non-marriages, second families and unexpected connections from the 1840s and 1850s. A fascinating piece of detective work which had defeated me. Many thanks, Patric!

[Both pictures culled from the internet. The top one is Patric being his normal self, albeit at a formal function. The lower is of Patric, enrobed, in procession at Windsor in his role as Secretary to the Order of the Garter. Sadly I don’t have a picture of him in his herald’s tabard.]

photography, ramblings

Spring Rolls

Well, we’re rolling on towards Spring anyway. And just to prove it here are some photos from our garden today.

First the snowdrops. We have only a couple of small clusters under the apple tree but they’re still looking good …

Snowdrops

Most of the early mauve crocuses are now past their best, partly I think due to last week’s breezes knocking them over. But here are a couple that are still good.

Crocuses

I especially like this one …

Crocus

And finally a feral pigeon enjoying the Spring sunshine between bouts of feeding and rutting.

Feral Pigeon

The photo doesn’t show off the wonderful iridescent pink and green shades on their necks and breasts which are really stunning when they catch the light right. Well who wouldn’t want iridescent pink breasts?

quotes

Cynics Are Us

A handful of recently discovered, somewhat cynical quotes …

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
[Soren Kierkegaard]

Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
[Robert Heinlein]

If you can’t convince them … Confuse them!
[Harry S Truman]

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
[Vilhjalmur Stefansson]

thoughts

Lent On, or Off

OK, so it’s Lent. At least they tell me it is. Not being of a religious turn of mind I really wouldn’t know — or care.

But I keep being asked what I’ve given up.

Answer: Nothing.

I gave up giving things up years ago. Just as I don’t do New Year resolutions (see here and here).

Giving things up is a synonym for misery. For unnecessary guilt. For unnecessary mortification of the brain as well as (sometimes) the flesh. It isn’t good for you.

Doing things like giving up stuff because someone tells you to takes you a long way towards having your mind controlled for you. Change has to come from within otherwise it is pointless and destructive.

In fact thinking back, I never did do Lent. Even when I was purporting to be a Christian. The whole idea always did seem pointless and even dangerous.

As my friend Katy says (specifically of her children, but equally appropriate to anyone in my view):

I really am not sure what not eating chocolate does for a person’s soul and their general state of grace, frankly. Does their abstinence from spending every free hour glued to CBBC mean that they are a better person at the end of 40 days and nights?
No. I don’t think so.

I don’t think so either.

And in case anyone thinks I’m being specifically anti-Christian, I’m not.

I feel the same about the Islamic adherence to Ramadan, which in my view is positively dangerous medically as it specifically involves the absence of food and drink during daylight which must have a major effect on one’s ability to function safely.

And the totally a-religious New Year resolutions are no better; they mostly achieve nothing except increasing the adherent’s level of guilt when they (almost inevitably) fail.

Let’s keep things in perspective and balanced. Let’s just take things as they come, ride the storm waves and (if feeling philosophical) contemplate the meaning of life.

Surely, if you must follow a religious dogma, then some quiet contemplation of what it means, and why, and perhaps doing something practical (for someone else or the environment) to further those ends is a better way forward? Just giving up some random thing “because it says so in the book” doesn’t achieve any of that.

And if you’re not religious why are you even bothering with this religious stuff anyway?

photography

Buggered Britain 1

This is the first in a new occasional series in which I photograph the underbelly of Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country (poetically I just typed “country” without an “o”!) flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient.

So here is the first in the series …

Buggered Britain 1

This row of semi-derelict houses was seen in Slough. The photo is a composite of two shots taken from the (stationary) car.

current affairs, ramblings, science

Fukushima Revisited

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph there was a very interesting perspective on the Tōhoku earthquake disaster, almost a year on, from journalist Michael Hanlon in which he argues:

The world has forgotten the real victims of Fukushima
A natural disaster that cost the lives of thousands of people was
ignored in favour of a nuclear ‘disaster’ that never was


In the article Hanlon says, and I quote directly as I cannot say it with such conviction …

Most terrible of all, was the black wave, a tide of death which we saw apparently creeping over the landscape …

Hundreds, thousands of people were being killed before my eyes [and] like all journalists, I began writing about the disaster much as I had written about the 2004 earthquake and tsunamis which had devastated the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

But then something odd happened. When it became clear the waves had struck a nuclear power plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi … it was almost as if the great disaster we had witnessed had been erased from view. Suddenly, all the reports concentrated on the possibility of a reactor meltdown, the overheating fuel rods, and the design flaws in this ancient plant …

[A]round day three … I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story …

[N]ot only was the global media’s reaction to the Tohoku earthquake skewed in favour of a nuclear “disaster” that never was, but that this reporting had profound economic and even environmental implications …

[A]lthough outdated, riddled with design flaws and struck by geological forces that went way beyond the design brief, the Fukushima plant had survived remarkably intact.

There are bitter ironies in all of this … governments in Europe, including ours, were offering to fly expats home from places where the radiation levels were lower than the natural background count in Aberdeen or Cornwall.

As Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, says: “The reporting of Fukushima was guided by the Cold War reflex that matched radiation with fear and mortal danger. Reactors have been destroyed, but the radiation at Fukushima has caused no loss of life and is unlikely to do so, even in the next 50 years. The voices of science and common sense on which the future of mankind depends were drowned out and remain to be heard, even today. The result has been unnecessary suffering and great socio-economic damage.” …

[P]olicymakers should have waited until at least some science was in before cancelling programmes which, in the case of Germany, will lead to some 70 million metric tonnes annually of increased CO2 emissions, because the shortfall will almost certainly be met by coal-fired power. Nobody, to date, has died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Zero — a number you will have read even less about than the 20,000 dead.

Yes, OK, I’m guilty as well. But then as a scientist I was at least concerned to try to keep the nuclear problems in perspective — as my posts over the months will testify. Nonetheless there has been a humanitarian disaster which we have all quietly forgotten. Shame on us!

photography

Armco Sundown

4 Comments

This week’s challenge at The Gallery is Landscape. So I’ll contribute this …

Armco Sundown

There’s no real story attached to this. It was just a grab shot from the car (no I wasn’t driving!) on A11 on the way home from my mother’s an evening in February 2009. I saw the picture but didn’t expect to get it across the traffic and from a moving car, let alone for it to be as successful as this. Driving from Norwich to London in the evening is driving into the sunset — and East Anglian sunsets can be spectacular even on a grey day such as this. I love the silhouettes of these trees and although I almost always look at them for picture, I’ve never yet seen anything nearly as spectacular as this.

personal

Listography: Happiness

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Kate is making life difficult! Her Listography this week is asking that we tell the top five things that make us happy.

No, Kate that isn’t easy! It’s hard. It’s hard because either lots of things make me happy or nothing really does at all. And being a pessimistic old git I lean towards the latter view.

No seriously, and despite my weekly experiment, I really don’t know what truly does make me happy. It’s a bit like Noreen and I always say: we don’t do panic and we don’t do really excited; we just get on with whatever life throws at us. That doesn’t mean we don’t do a certain level of worry or pleasure; just that we don’t do the extremes. Bugger it, I’m just too controlled; the emotions don’t get enough of a look in?

Anyway, let’s try to find five things that actually do make me happy. Whether they’re the top five, I dunno!

  1. [[REDACTED]]. Yes, that’s right you really don’t want me to go into the first one, if only to protect your sensibilities! 🙂
  2. Beer. I always enjoy a good pint of beer, preferably English bitter, but also preferably not traditionally warm; slightly chilled is better.

  3. Being Nude. And warm. As in being relaxed in the sun. Regular readers will know I was brought up by bohemian parents, who viewed nudity as no big deal: it’s normal and doesn’t per se have any sexual implication. We even had a couple of holidays at a nudist club (the photo is me being watered by my mother on one of these holidays) when I would have been about nine or ten. The ethos has stayed with me. And it hasn’t damaged me!
  4. Summer Sunshine. Well sunshine at any time, but especially that lovely warm English Spring and Summer sun when one can sit and relax in the garden and feel at peace with the world.
  5. The Sea. Or perhaps I mean the seaside. Not the ghastly English seaside resort crawling with brats of all ages type of seaside. I mean more the quiet English seaside town with beach and harbour type seaside. The smell of the sea. And the ability to lounge on the beach in the sun and again be at peace with the world.

But then again maybe I’m just being too romantic?

food+drink, ramblings

Collop Monday

Thanks to IanVisits for reminding us yesterday that today is Collop Monday. I agree with his suggestion that it should be restored as a festivity.

For those who might have not forgotten about Collop Monday — or more likely have never heard of it — this is the day preceding Shrove Tuesday when the remaining pieces of bacon or pork from the winter store, which would be “life expired” by Easter, were traditionally eaten. It was sort of the feast preceding the feast before Lent.

As Wikipedia says “The British name Collop Monday is after the traditional dish of the day, consisting of slices of leftover meat (collops of bacon) along with eggs”.

So having been reminded of the feast what could we do but … feast! After all one never needs much of an excuse to eat bacon.

We always have a large pack of smoked bacon offcuts in the freezer. The local supermarket near where my mother used to live nearly always has these packs. They’re cheap and usually contain lots of half rashers and/or thick ends of bacon: brilliant bacon but not uniform and nice for supermarket packaging. Who cares?! They’re tremendous for just about anything you want bacon for: there are scraps for quiche or risotto or to use as lardons; rasher-ettes for bacon butties; and chunky bits you can chop up, fry for jumbo bacon butties, for breakfast or, well, just eating. So whenever we’re there we buy a couple of packs.

This evening we cracked open a pack of said bacon offcuts. It contained the usual selection. So we ate our fill of a good English fry-up of bacon, eggs, tomatoes and mushrooms; with lots of bread and butter; and a couple of beers.

What better way to celebrate an old English tradition!

personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 14

Experiment, week 14. This week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

    Crocus

  1. Free Bus Fares. I don’t like buses, but occasionally I have to use one. One thing I do like though is having a Freedom Pass: the London Boroughs’ free bus pass for us wrinklies. Yes it provides free bus fares. But it also provides a lot of free tube and rail fares within London. It feels good to get something back for all the times one has had to pay full fare.
  2. Sleep. I like my sleep; I always have done. For some reason I seem to be sleeping much better recently with very few nights where I wake up in the small hours and can’t get back to sleep. In fact I’ve been sleeping so well that if we don’t have to set the alarm I’m likely to sleep soundly well into the morning. Guess it’s probably catching up on all those early mornings over the years.
  3. Hypnotherapy. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been having hypnotherapy for a year or more. It’s slow progress, largely because my brain is so analytical that it is forever butting in and trying to work out what happens next. But finally Chris thinks he’s found a way in, and when I saw him this week he was able to hypnotise me to a deeper level than ever before. Which was interesting. In fact the hypnotherapy has always been interesting as well as very relaxing. But there’s a lot to do yet.

  4. Snowdrops & Crocuses. Spring must be well on the way because the snowdrops are out; so are some of our purple crocuses. We have only a small clump of snowdrops under the apple tree, but the woods out at Dorney, near Eton, were just a sea of snowdrops when we were there on Thursday.
  5. Oriental Tree. Three or four times a year we have dinner with our friends Sue & Ziggy and (usually) their two boys. More often than not we go out to a local restaurant. So it was that last night we went to their local Chinese restaurant, Oriental Tree in Northfields. And I have to say the food was most excellent as well as being substantial. The prawns and the beef, especially, were to die for. The menu is Chinese based but with Mongolian, Vietnamese and Thai dishes and not expensive — Ziggy’s and my wallets ouched a bit but that was largely due to the amount of drink we consumed as much as the food! The restaurant is small (barely more than 40 covers) and was full all evening as well as doing a steady stream of take-outs. Having met at 7 we had eaten ourselves to a standstill by 10 — perhaps more to the point 9-year-old Harry (a child who loves his food and would have ordered everything on the menu, if allowed!) had almost eaten himself to sleep! I think we might be going back there!