September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man
Each language pours it's vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In a euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work',
And helpless governnors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleagured by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W H Auden

Never a frown, with Gordon Brown

New Labour, New Leader, New book in the shops now.
And I have to say, rather good it is too.
Eight essays about individuals who have, in Gordon Brown's opinion, shown great courage when others may have taken the easy option. Each subject has that all important moral compass to guide them, and at times it is almost as if the profiles are really parables set out in the Gospel according to Gordon.
But the profiles are written with warmth and a very healthy lack of cynicism, which is rare these days, the language used isn't overly worthy, but manages to avoid the trap of being dumbed down.
In his introduction, Gordon Brown recalls, at the age of ten, being given an encyclopedia on twentieth century history,which told of the great deeds by the likes of Ernest Shackleton, the attempt on Everest by Mallory and Irvine and the sacrifice made by Captain Oates, and yet it is the story of Edith Cavell a nurse working in Brussels at the start of the First World War that left the biggest impression on him. And it is the courage of people such as her that has inspired him to write this book. The almost super human compassion and good that can exist in even the darkest of days is what is celebrated here.
Of course, these short essays cannot tell the full story of each individual, there is much that is unsavoury in some these lives, but it does work as a good introduction to some remarkable people.
And likewise, much as I have enjoyed this book, that is all this review is of.
I will return to the author in good time.

And now, the end is near

Technophobe

My stomach is in knots as I type this. Tonight I am doing something I've done for many years, that is I 'm taking my turn as a volunteer as the technician for the Talking Newspaper service in my town.
Unfortunately, tonight is my first night since we went digital. The old equipment was solid, reliable, easy, if you like and 100% analogue. The new stuff is apparently "really easy to use, once you get used to it" which is handy. My first sighting of the our new baby was on Monday, I had a 20 minute training session, and that was it. This morning I was e-mailed the training manual. And naturally enough, the instructions sent contradict everything I was taught on Monday. And I do mean everything, right down switching the bloody computer on.
It will be, I'm sure, an adventure. If I survive, I may even be tempted to scrap this blog piece entirely as I re-write my own personal history in a Stalinesque stylie. The spell checker wants me to say Stalinist, but I say blee to the spell checker. The spell checker says blew...

Dalek Emperor

In my life, if I'm being honest, I have a few obsessions.
Anthony Hancock is just one.
To most people he was a flawed genius, a brilliant comic actor who had it all and threw it all away. Ending his life, alone in Sydney, in June 1968 at the age of 44.
That's the story everyone knows, but there was so much more to East Cheam's finest...

In 1962 Tony Hancock began working with a writer called Terry Nation for a two man show he would tour with Matt Monro. As the toured progressed Hancock and Nation would write scripts, rip them up and start again. This went on night after night, another thing that went on night after night was that the two men would drink and talk into the wee small hours as they bandied ideas about.
One of the ideas they came up for was for a film. The plot involved the human population being destroyed, only for the planet to be governed by robots. It was in the design of the robots that Hancock, no doubt fuelled by alcohol and good humour, was in his element. His favourite design was of an inverted cone, covered in table tennis balls with a sink plunger sticking out of it's head.
When the tour ended, Terry Nation returned to writing television scripts, including a commission for a new Science Fiction series on the BBC called "Doctor Who".
When Hancock saw the Daleks for the first time on screen, he pointed to the tv and shouted, "That bloody Nation, he's stolen my robots."

Next week, How Arthur Askey invented the Cybermen.

Television, still sometimes quite good.

BBC 4 have recently been devoting a somewhat unhealthy amount of time to Children's Television, and why it's not as good as it used to be. And I am sure there is many a person out there inclined to agree with the good folk of said channel, particularly if they'd ever watched the Dick and Dom re-imagining of Ask the Family, in the faint hope that the spirit of Robert Robinson would somehow spring forth and reawaken the imagination and intellect of our downtrodden yoof.

It was never going to happen. If for no other reason than in these enlightened times no child would take anyone seriously if they sported such an obvious comb-over as the thatch worn by our esteemed quizmaster.

Sadly it is all too easy to look back at the halcyon days of television through rose tinted spectacles, like so many things in life, we forget the bad things. Like the school summer holidays that were filled with sunshine, which I'm sure they were, it's just that I didn't actually get a tan until I was 16. Spent my formative years a shade of blue, with webbed feet.

As Newton's third law states, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" So for every Bagpuss, there was a Ludwig and for every Sarah Jane Smith, there was an Adric. There was always rubbish on television for children, it's just that now with so many channels all broadcasting around the clock, a lot more cheap filler programmes are being made, the quality is still there, it's just knowing where to look. In the 70's, when I grew up, after the BBC had shown Play School, Watch with Mother and Pebble Mill at One, it closed down. A lovely voice would come on and say something along the lines of "The BBC have nothing else to show you right now, so why not get on with having a life, until we show Play School again at ten to four..."

I should maybe explain that where I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, until I was about 6 we only had BBC1. No BBC2, and certainly none of that filthy commercial muck on Grampian or STV. So whatever we watched was whatever Auntie Beeb had decided was suitable for young people, so my views may be more staid or less rounded than those of somebody who grew up in the twin worlds of Thames and LWT.
Although, as a child I learnt what true disappointment was at an early age. And it was normally preceded by the phrase "...except for viewers in Scotland, who have their own programmes".

Didn't stop them from showing the bloody cricket every morning in the Summer holidays though. Why couldn't we have our own programmes then?

Thumbs up if you're a twat

A Fresh Start

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I had a blog. However, a blog, like love, needs attention. It needs to be nurtured and tended to on a regular basis or it will shrivel up and die. It will lie, neglected and alone, and by the time you do actually get round to doing something about it, it's too late. And your blog will have gone off with someone else, possibly someone they met at work, or even in the queue at the Post Office, and you find yourself alone.
Suddenly you have things you want to say, but no-one to say them to...I'm not sure if this is still about blogging, I seem to have lost my thread somewhat. Sorry.
Quite simply, what I'm trying to say is that once I had a blog, it wasn't very good, so I'm going to try again, and hopefully this time I'll avoid making the same mistakes again.
Right, are you all sitting comfortably? Good, then I'll begin...