A good O Level man

           I heard in the news that the Education minister wants to take us is back to Fifties Britain and somebody mentioned that GCE O levels are for clever children. Oh no, not what I recall. When I was at school I scraped five O levels on the first hit and another two on the resit. I actually failed O level Woodwork but got 85% a term later and two terms later grade A at A level (normally a two year course). I put that down to the woodwork teacher being sacked and an excellent completely eccentric but inspiring woodwork teacher taking over. However, sport and woodwork were what I excelled at. I felt pretty stupid generally and my sixth form classmates went on to University. I think you needed five O levels to get into Sixth form. Nowadays you will more likely get into university if you played with Transformers (killing machines) in your childhood.  It does seem that anybody can get to university so I am inclined to believe that standards were much higher in my youth. But more than that, there was a sense of history that was part of general knowledge that has been lost today. Churchill is an insurance company and the colour of Cheryl Cole's knickers is general knowledge.

         Curiously the words GCE O level triggered a memory - a few years (decades) ago I applied to be a part-time tutor at a prestigious furniture college in Dorset, made famous because one of its students was a nephew to the Queen. At the interview a psychologist had been hired! I remember during my written examination (!) him jangling with coins in his pocket which was making me feel nervous. He came over and criticised the way I held my pen in my left hand. I am left-handed as many creative people are! Later at what I can only describe as an intimidating interview he suddenly announced 'I see you haven't stated your grades at O level on your application form'. I was completely stunned by this and being the gentleman I am, I refrained from saying 'Oh I'm sorry I didn't realise you were looking for a good O level man' and promptly getting up and walking out. My highly accomplished artist sister (Barbara Broun) later suggested that is exactly what I should have done. The fact that I had won numerous regional and national awards since school seemed to slip the psychologist's attention! 

     When you look at the careers of people such as the late Paul Ghetty (once the richest man in the world), Lord Stokes (who was tea boy but became SEO of British Leyland) and Alan Sugar, one is reminded of the saying:

'Examinations are for failures'.
    
   

Which Commandment?

    Busking with my guitar late last evening I clashed with another street performer who does a 'Funny Walk' act in my home city reigning in a lot of people and also a lot of money every evening. When I say 'clash' I mean I had to stop playing my guitar to tourists sitting outside a cafe as this guy suddenly appeared to do his ten minute hilarious(?) jokes expecting to me to be brushed aside. I was actually there first! Dancing to my music was a Columbian guy I know who happens to be a devout Christian. He thought this other street entertainer was extremely rude (a view echoed later on by some of the cafe punters who spoke with us) to expect me to suddenly stop my guitar playing that they were enjoying.

     My friend then listened to the funny guy's jokes around the Abbey poking fun at the carved figure of Jesus Christ as being gay to which my friend was extremely offended and went up to the entertainer and told him he was being blasphemous and anti the Bible etcetera. I may not share my friend's fundamentalist views but I do respect his right to object to some cheap laugh a second offending his religion. This religion, actually, that is called Christianity has been the core religion of our nation historically and offers a humanistic code of behaviour that arguably, because it is now so fashionable to attack Christianity, is in demise and I believe is part of the breakdown in British society and certainly the abandonment of many decent values. As yet we have nothing better to replace it. No wonder the East call us decadent.  

    Curiously had this entertainer delivered his jokes in many Arab countries he would have been publicly stoned rather than rewarded. I don't go to Church anymore and have my own private views/uncertainties about whether there is a God or not but it is sad there is a lack of respect which clearly this street entertainer failed to have for a fellow street entertainer. I didn't actually mind stopping playing for ten minutes. The guy might have slipped me a fiver as a tip for the inconvenience but I guess the word 'greed' would have no currency with someone who mocks Christianity!  

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Krays had a mum

     Yes, Britain's legendary gangsters had a mum and anyone watching the film on television this evening would see the power of a mum. Without a mum you face a world blindfolded; a long and silent journey where you find your own path and hear just your own screams when you lose your way.

     Paradoxically in the film the mum teaches her boys not to fight each other but to stick together and fight 'them' out there. Without their mum reprimanding them for knocking the shit out of each other in a boxing ring - I mean without a mum at all, how would life have panned out for them? Why is the mum (played by Billie Whitelaw) actually the central character in the film? Perhaps it is neither here nor there that the mum of the Krays' is so powerful and that only I perceive it as such because I had no mum and I fought the world with bare knuckles on my own. I took some bruisings but cannot ever recall losing a fight. The number of times I would plead with an aggressor who was provoking me and presumably thought I was easy meat, to back off, not because I was scared of them but scared of my own strength fuelled by a deep rage that they had a mum and I didn't.  

    Only once did I ever walk away from a fight when two thugs picked on me and a mate when we were about 30 years old because we were 'posh'. My mate, who grew up in Hong Kong with knives on the street, raised his fists but I grabbed him and yelled 'run'. I knew in a split second by the look in these guys' eyes they would have killed us. It is all in the eyes and nothing to do with size. Some times in life you perservere and fight (other people's battles as well) and other times you just walk away.  

Class War

     I heard on Radio Four this morning about a rapper songwriter called Plan B, announcing that if Sexism and Racism is not accepted publicly why not Classism also? Interesting question. When I was a kid I got a beating from my father for speaking with a West country accent that I acquired to avoid a beating from the kids on the street! Indeed a few years ago I found I was victim to blatant classism in a technical college where I was teaching that ultimately cost me my job (I swore at a student when the culture amongst the staff was to use four letter language!) and I was informed there was no CURRENT legislation in place to argue a case. I was teaching carpentry part-time and both students and staff clearly discriminated against me because I was 'posh' and stood out like a sore thumb in the building site arena. 

    After all I must be posh to listen to Radio Four but actualy I have argued for years that classism is rampant in Britain and just because it is subtle does not mean it is not still very powerful and it also works both ways. 

   I would suggest that actually it can be an advantage to have a strong working class accent (television is full of it) and the one thing the British Working Class has in common with the Aristocracy is a strong and proud sense of social identity. On that basis one could almost argue that class is a good thing! The more 'mobile' middle class is the victim of consumersim as it trades on insecurity and dissatisfaction! However, the radio discussion prompted me to dig out a chapter from my book 'Missing Jean' (originally titled 'Glass Wall') and a chapter called 'Class War' going back to when I was about nine years old: 

   

    Trevor Lang lived in a terraced council house a few streets away from our big house in Marlborough. He was small, mean and tough. He was both my best friend and worst enemy. It was class war really. I was the ‘posh’ upper middle class kid who spoke proper and he was the working class tyke who was leader of the pack.  His right hand man Mervyn cycled past me one day and shouted that Trevor was going to beat me up. I told Mervyn to tell Trevor I would take him on any day of the week. Well, Trevor chose a good day as I returned from Scouts dressed in my short trousers and tassels on my socks as he confronted me with his gang all dressed in long trousers. Funny how important trousers were in my youth. Long trousers were so grown up and streetwise but father insisted I wore short trousers even when I went to Grammar School and the other boys wore long trousers.

  Trevor jumped out of the bushes with his gang and said “What's this Mervyn tells me you're going to do to me?”  I  managed to stall him by agreeing that Mervyn had got it right as I walked nearer the side gate to our house. I knew the latch of the gate was on the inside and the gate was high so I would need to time things perfectly and make a jump for it. But the talking was running out and Trevor was getting impatient. Curiously there must have been a gentlemanly side to Trevor's character as he refrained from delivering the first blow. He had every opportunity but maybe he would have lost face in front of his gang if he hit me first. He would be a bigger hero if I hit him and then he could finish me off to their cheers.  After all, he was challenging me to stand to my word. 

    I wasn't afraid of the gang as Trevor was tough enough to settle matters one to one, the gang were hangers-on really.  He was itching to engage and my heart was racing faster and faster as we got nearer the side gate of our house. The green painted gate was high and sturdily built and my attention was on the hidden latch behind it and how to get to it quickly.  “Right Trevor” and in a flash I turned round and caught him on the jaw. It knocked him off his feet, it was so sudden. I then scrambled up over the gate as Trevor groaned, got up and lunged at me grabbing my Boy Scout legs with the stupid tassels on my socks. I managed to kick him off. I rushed over to the house where the coal shed was and began hurling large chunks of coal at the gate as he tried to climb over. I probably emptied the entire coal bin in a matter of seconds. My hands were oily, black and sore.

     Amidst all the rumpus the back door was suddenly thrown open and father stood sternly on the doorstep powering over me, silhouetted by the bare dangling electric kitchen lamp behind. The smell of Dana's cooking scones for tomorrow’s high tea wafted out. “What the hell's going on?” I immediately burst into tears at the relief of refuge but instead my father roared “Fight him like a man” and slammed the door on me. I hid crouching in the coal shed interrniitedly slinging last chunks of coal towards the green gate fearing Trevor would climb over. I probably got the beating from Trevor on another day but strangely time would pass and Trevor and I would be mates again.

   One day Trevor was pushing me in a pram up the high street while I was firing my cap gun. “Blimey, that's my stepmother coming” I said to Trevor. He quickly pulled a mackintosh over me as Dana approached on the same pavement. “Hello Trevor, what are you doing out of school at this time of day?”  I had blown my school dinner money on caps for my cap gun. Had Dana spotted me under the raincoat and this matter been reported back to my father a few more garden canes would have been broken for sure.  I invited Trevor to my ninth birthday party. While the washing up was being done after tea he was busy beating me up in the garden because I had not given him a big slice of the cake. Veronica (my older sister) hurled open an upstairs window and screamed “Get off him Trevor” in a deliberate West country accent.

   So there it was, ducking and diving between beatings from my father and kids on the street, when I eventually got an all important place at the grammar school - we wore green uniform and were called 'the grammar grubs' by the blue uniformed secondary Modern school kids who waited at the school gates to engage in fights with us. British Class war at its finest! 

   Has much changed actually in Britain since my childhood? I chose to design and make really innovative modern wood furniture as an adult trying over decades to make my furniture accessible to anybody interested in good modern design only to find I have been engulfed in a class/social game for all these years where high expense and exclusivity defines the field! Not my choosing and not my philosophy and it is probably because of classism that my furniture designs are not really acknowledged in the way they were in the Seventies when for a brief period cash flowed more easily across the social class system! Now if your work is too cheap it is looked down upon! 

Caesar's orgy

    Oh come on, don't be so prudish: 'Families were horrified to see more than 2000 (?) drunken Cambridge University students stripping off, vomitting and drinking themselves unconscious at a riotous (Caesarian Sunday) summer party in a public park. Some were seen acting out sexual positions, while male students chanted and ran around with their trousers round their ankles. Girls seen drinking port through condoms'. All in view of middle England families walking their innocent children in the park. 

   Yes, I recall my own student days at Shoreditch College in the Sixties and our inititation ceremonies - pelting freshers with flour bombs whilst they sat smartly dressed innocently posing for a college photograph and a handful of third year students dressing up as medics and staging a fake health check where freshers joined two queues with signs saying 'pass' and 'fail'. Fortunately I passed!

   Well that shocked you didn't it? I mean our sense of fun back in the Sixties was so tame and clean but for us as students at the time it was very funny to watch and even reminisce on now. Turn the clock forward fifty years and we have become so insensitised that we glorify these young cream of the crop intellectuals yet many of them will land up as lawyers and judges - the kind who sentence a young footballer to five years gaol for committing 'rape' on a drunken young woman. 

   Okay so I am the prude but don't listen to me, I am now an invisible citizen past his sell by date in this youth and sex obsessed hedonistic culture. But the fact is that only a week or two ago a very talented rising star young Welsh footballer was very severely dealt with over an issue that is becoming increasingly blurred and that is consential sex. Nobody in the press mention the responsibility of the rape victim and millions of other young women who parade with their knickers in full view totally drunken on our streets every Friday and Saturday night. Yet this footballer got five years in gaol totally wrecking his career. 

   There is something wrong somewhere not just the obvious fact that a female holds enormous power to accuse a man of sexual misconduct. I'm not saying he should not have gone to gaol, I wasn't in court to hear the facts but my gut instinct tells me perhaps a year would have taught him a lesson. His mates walked free yet they apparantly looked on and the girl wakes up in the morning not knowing where she was. Half the kids born in Britain in the Seventies were to young women who woke up at pop festivals in the morning, not knowing where they were after revelling the night away on cannabis! 

  We have lost the plot and I am concerned that even when these young often over indulged Cambridge undergraduates have settled down into conventional married life in a few years time and they are walking their children in the park they in turn may be shocked to see the latest Caesar's Summer initiation commiting acts of bestiality and probably worse. But who cares, it sells newspapers and is good material for the soaps! 

Murphy's Radio

       Many will know the colour and style of Cheryl Cole's hair, few will know who Cheryl Cole is and everybody knows who Simon Cowell is. Few will know that in 1934 Gordon Russell made Murphy radios and few will know who Gordon Russell was.

       It was on BBC 4's Today programme that I woke up today to the words  'Gordon Russell was one of the greatest designers of the Twentieth Century'. Not only one of the greatest designers, I have chosen to refer to Sir Gordon Russell as 'The Father of 20th Century British Furniture Design' in my film documentary 'Furniture today 3' (available at www.furnituretodayuk.com). 

       Gordon Russell was a hugely important figure having been involved with The Festival of Britain, The Design Council and Utility Furniture. It is perhaps Utility Furniture that strikes the main chord with me; functional simple furniture designs born out of necessity when there were material shortages during the Second World War and made in modest workshops around the country. A lesson indeed for furniture students to toughen up and design to a disciplined brief but above all making furniture accessible. 

      Gordon Russell although inspired by the Arts & Crafts and in particular the understated forms of Ernest Gimson, differed with that movement in his total acceptance of the machine embracing it with hand skill. Such snobbery or indeed ignorance still exists today not least in the minds of a small section of the public who expect a crafted object to be totally made by hand.  Even in the sweat shops of India and China the machine is fast replacing handskill. Curiously, William Morris a pioneer of the English Arts & Crafts movement cried 'Let us be masters of machines not their slaves', but his work was predominantly taken up by the Bloomsbury Set and still assumes a whiff of exclusivity today.

     The BBC Radio Four design competition for amateurs to design a radio sounds a great inititiative. Let's hope some innovative wooden radios will persuade the judges. For many years I have listened to a Roberts radio in my workshop, a plywood chassis housed in solid Teak. Today Roberts Radio fill the shelves of Currys stores shining in their glossy plastic. Arguably modern technology transcends the superiority of wood as a sound baffle although I still have some massive "Class A" KEF speakers I built in 1970 using chipboard.

    One of the features of Gordon Russell Utility furniture was the use of thin plywood for door panels. Plywood for much of my furniture making career was looked down upon. A local furniture shop declined my plywood rocking chairs saying 'the public don't like plywood'. Russell, of course, was building airplanes for the War Effort and plywood was clearly a superior material then. 
       Unlike Murphy's Law, Murphy radios seldom went wrong!

A Murphy radio built at the Gordon Russell factory in Broadway in1934

Veneered plywood would have been used in the construction.

Aunt Betty

      Aunt Betty died on 19 March 2012. 'A long life lived'. Betty was my father's brother's wife and had lost a newborn child at the same time as my mother Jean died having me. She became a kind of foster mother to me until I was 18 months old, when apparantly my father suddenly arrived on her doorstep and dragged me away with me apparantly screaming 'mummy'. Christmas cards were exchanged throughout my childhood and then I lost contact with her until I looked her up 50 years later, visiting her in Dollar in Scotland. She told me that my father had severely reprimanded her for teaching me the word 'mummy' but she had told him she didn't teach me, I simply copied her own children Francis and Elizabeth!  

      Silly daddy for  not understanding how the young infant's mind works, especially as he was a schoolmaster. Sadly he constantly compared me to his favourite ultra bright nephew (her son) Francis who could put no foot wrong and throughout my youth and despite my passing the Eleven Plus and attending one of the best grammar schools in Wiltshire, I felt completely stupid and a failure in contrast to this academically bright first cousin, who my father constantly banged on about.   

      I guess  this is a rather poor excuse for my not keeping more in touch with dear Aunt Betty who in fulfilling her need in her hour of grief, met my need as a vulnerable motherless infant. Her daughter Lizzie, sadly a heroin addict and close friend of my late sister Veronica Jill, died many years ago. May Aunt Betty rest in peace.

Hello

     One of the most priceless gifts is a smile and although I am privileged to live in one of the most beautiful cities in England it is not that common to be greeted by a hello or a smile on the street, except by tourists when I busk with my guitar.

    A feature of the 'special' (or is it 'essential') relationship with the USA is the common term 'enjoy' when you have been served a meal in a restaurant which is just too often insincere and I cannot help but notice when I walk off the street in my home city (which is one of Britain's foremost upmarket consumer meccas), and go into a clothes boutique as I rarely do but did yesterday, I was greeted by an enthusiastic 'hello' and 'are you having a good day today?'

  It is a sad fact that sales staff up and down the land are trained to be nice in order to grab your money and that the more affluence and material wealth that abounds, the less humanity of a simple smile or hello exists.

    A few Christmases ago I was spending it alone and decided to wash my car outside my house. Someone passed silently and as he walked by I called 'Happy Christmas'!

    When somebody smiles and makes eye contact in that brief moment you glow for the rest of the day and it costs nothing to give.   

Backing down and coming out

    It was heartening to read that the world's most famous atheist professor Richard Dawkins is only 6.9 out of 7 sure there is no God and denies he is atheistic. Billions of people worldwide have believed in the existence of God and billions probably will after him, yet here we had two academics 'battling' it out (Rowan Williams) in tv debate where no new punches were pulled and I suspect it was mainly intellectual one-upmanship.

     Then I learn that Lord Melvyn Bragg has come out about his depression. I first wrote about my own autobiographical novel 'Glass Wall' (now 'Missing Jean') over fifteen years ago and depression has largely sapped my energy to get it published! Macmillan publishing was interested but then said it wasn't quite their bag. I have come to the conclusion that only those who have suffered the terrifying depths can understand it and many fear it is a plague that could knock on heir own front door so shun its existence. It is not something one would wish on one's worst enemy and is sure to chase away all but your very closest friends. 

    As Bragg says it is an elastic term and for some an excuse not to go into work and a form of negative self pity. What is important is trying to cope with it and hang on to the extremely fine straw of hope that things will ever change and improve. One strategy I have tried that works to a degree is to make a friend of my enemy depression on the basis that if I can't fight or change it I can try to accept it. Going to bed and surrendering to it is in a way, for me at least, a way of letting nature heal as the worst of the storm can pass by sleeping it off but at other times it makes it worse. Nutrients, exercise and laughter can help and watching a Charlie Chaplin movie can take the sting out of the terrifying silence of isolation which is a major cause of depression.

      I read today Esther Rantzen's soul-bearing piece about prolonged isolation after the loss of a loved one on the MailOnline and she is particularly brave because if you are famous you meet even more hostility if you challenge our odd taboos. But we are still living in the Dark Ages and the problem ain't goin away. If you've got a broken leg you get it fixed and everybody signs the plastercast but if you have a broken mind (which probably mean a broken heart as well) then you walk alone!  

Ankle Deep in humanity

    Many many years ago a friend told me there is no place in this world for sensitive people. Indeed the sensitive particularly suffer in this involuntary confusing journey. The problem is that in an insensitive world compassion, the very thing that surely binds the human race together, disappears. Compassion is bound up in 'doing the right thing' and sometimes in the flash of a second, anybody would do the right thing, when for instance a man is drowning?

     Many years ago I was in Australia swimming off the famous Bondi beach. I am not a strong swimmer and was being pulled under by dangerous rip currents only a few metres from the beach. Just as I was struggling to swim ashore I became aware of a man on his back fully clothed bobbing up and down in the water and purple looking (I am colour blind so thats what he looked like to me). He was basically drowning. Another swimmer and myself immediately went to his rescue. The other man, much younger and fitter than me (I was 43) attended to the drowning man in this dangerous water and yelled to me to get help so I swam using all my reserves to the beach, bobbing under as I did so. 

    Exhausted I managed to scream 'help, man drowning' and was just stared at by motionless beautiful people in the prime of their youth, beautifully tanned just sitting there in their vanity and doing absolutely nothing (this shock haunted me for years afterwards). However, quite quickly the rescue guys came in their red motorised rubber dinghy (or was it orange) and in the meantime the hero in this story had pulled the man on shore and gave him mouth-to-mouth. As the lifeguards took over and applied an oxygen mask to the nearly drowned man, his rescuer just quietly walked away, through the beautiful people just sitting there unaffected. I followed him and grabbed his arm  'Hey, you just saved that man's life - well done mate'.

    Back in Britain, in fact yesterday, I read in the newspaper a man had drowned in a boating pond as fire rescue officers stood and watched. They were not authorised to go into water more than ankle deep. A police officer was about to wade in but his superior fiercely reprimanded him apparantly. So the man drowned while our rescue services just stood and watched. He was trying to rescue a capsised model boat I think.  

Great - Britain!

Marathon

     About five years ago I met a talented harmonica player in Dordogne on a working holiday with some woodworking friends from Bristol. His name is Kristof and he invited me to participate in a 1500km canoe trip through Mongolia the following year, to film it and then play guitar to his harmonica around the campfire in the evenings. 

    He organized these survival marathons drawing globally for his victims. I thought hard and not so much about my age but more my lack of physical fitness as at the time I was in very slow recovery from a serious bout of paralysing depression. Two years earlier I was doing well to spend two hours per day out of bed as I had lost the will to live and there were no hospital beds when I 'fell down' so it took many many years to stand up again. I also feared I would get bored canoeing over such a long stretch.

      I have just completed a similar marathon of primarily mental endurance (the complete opposite of the deeply depressive state) and also physical endurance in that since October I have been working mostly on average fourteen hours per days on a film project called 'Furniture Today Part Three'. It took a long time getting started, had no support of funding, nor did anybody ask me to do it, most people in Britain are tuned into furniture yesterday and I had no proper 'business plan' or strategy to sell the film other than a confidence that the story I was telling would one day be heard (seen). 

       Curiously at school, whilst not much good at academic stuff I always came first or a close second at cross country running and the distance was something like 20 miles as it was an outward bound type progressive school. The film has been made single handed breaking all the rules as it is a team based profession. I'm also self-taught as six UK film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43.

        Computer software crashes, glitches, etc meant I probably spent at least five days on every running minute of the film. The documentary is 70 minutes long and will have its premiere screening at the University of Bath on the evening of Thursday 15 March 2012. A 200-seater lecture theatre has been booked and improvised jazz music will be played by a legendary rock guitarist to welcome people as they sit down. I am pleased with the film. It is my best shot. 

        I therefore extend my invitation to you, my reader as there might be one seat left. Visit my website www.furnituretodayuk.com for details. My You Tube channel WOODOMAIN includes videos of the film trailer, how it was made and also a short one including the harmonica player Kristof.

Mother - Hell hath no fury

    Hell hath no fury like a .....mother's love. Slightly unusual that someone who never had a mother watches a two-hour South Korean film called 'Mother' by Bong Joon-ho. An alternative film deserves an alternative review surely! I accompanied a friend who wanted to see the film at the last minute and I had no idea what it was about. Bradford on Avon Film Society is arguably one of the best in the country and its mainly middle class late middle aged audience was full capacity at the screening of this tense psychological thriller. 

   The film is certainly shocking and disturbing not least in exposing taboos such as a retarded man in his early twenties sleeping with his mother, although clearly it emphasised the point he was still a child. The sub titles use the word 'retard' but this is a taboo in Britain so I use the adjective for want of a better description for someone of a simple-minded disposition (I think we call it 'learning difficulties'). In contrast the mother has a powerful mind and a relentless determination to prove the innocence of her somewhat rebellious son accused of murdering a young woman, making Agatha Christie's Poirot look tamely bourgeois in the search for who dunnit. 

  The film is also about justice (coming from unexpected quarters) and as a piece of film making I think is a work of art with very powerful imagery and an Oscar deserving performance by its 59 year old star Kim Hye-ja. There is a powerful surrealistic opening scene of her dancing in a field and as the cameras slowly zoomed in I thought this was a 45 year old woman with the trim and lithe body of a 30 year old. The only part I found predictable in the film was the return to this scene near the end of the story as part of the film genre was flashback and as a film maker myself I could see it coming. 

   To articulate the story and give a clever conventional opinion its best to read the Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw and there is a very high probability he had a mum so I will try to keep this review relevant to my unusual perspective that I watched it through the eyes of someone not having a mum and relying on a fair bit of guess work about what exactly the emotions flying around are all about. Perhaps I am writing this in the hope that somebody else of my disposition might read this!      

   The most powerful scene for me was when the mother discovers her son really did kill the girl (albeit accidentally) and she batters to death the person who witnessed it as he is about to phone the police. She uses a King Dick and although this film has mildly pornographic content a 'King Dick' to the technically unititiated is a giant adjustable spanner used for farm machinery. This scene is more graphic than the nubile sex scene which is sparing to the largely senior audience - graphic in its shocking sound effects - you almost feel the blows. This scene is so ferocious and the subsequent act of the mother setting fire to the house and burning all evidence of the witness illustrates the power of a mother. Perhaps power is a limited word as it gets mixed up with control and a whole gammit of roles and emotions a mother has. Paradoxically whilst in Western culture the mother has more legal rights to underpin her power, this Korean woman was up against corruption in the legal system and public ridicule in her endless pursuit to protect her boy at any cost. No wonder many western women accuse their men of having limited emotional intelligence when the mother, like a hand being cut off, retains the power of the umbilical cord throughout her life?      

   Back to the plot, the son in his simplicity roams around the burned ruins of the house his mother has set alight to remove all evidence of her crime and he finds her metal box containing her accupunture needles (she is an unlicenced practitioner) and right at the end of the film my only confusion is when she can bear the emotions no more she gets on a bus full of dancing parents of sons like her own and uses a needle on her amazingly nubile thigh (for a 59 year old woman!) and I thought she was going to commit suicide but instead she triggered a happiness nerve in  the brain and the film ends with her dancing with the others. 

  From the perspective of my own youth-dominated culture I questioned why the leading character was a woman of 59 with a son of around 21 (I thought having children later in life was a luxury of First World countries?), but perhaps the lines on her face and the experience an older woman carried added to the poignancy. Certainly the face of Kim Hye-ja was amazingly expressive. I like a film that has a really strong central character (such as Gene Hackman in The French Connection) and although my cinema companion (a mother herself) thought the film was ghastly I can say I would uncomfortably watch it again.  
   Although the film was about a mother's protection of her son, the lengths she would go to, and paradoxically the ultimate powerlessness she had. If the film has any message it is always carry your acupunture kit with you if the pain, guilt and anguish gets too much.  

   
The guardian Review of 'Mother' by Peter Bradshaw can be found at:

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/aug/19/mother-review

Life ends at 45

   Okay so now we've been told. Its official. And I have a sneaking suspicion only people over 45 read my blog. According to the latest News your brain cells are dying earlier than we thought and if the word 'retirement' isn't enough to make any 65 year old feel on the crap heap, being told you are brain dead after 45 is going to really do the trick.

   Well let me tell you I have hardly started living yet and I'm a good few years over 45. I haven't even been married let lone divorced three times and I haven't reached the pinnacle of my creative work yet so there's still a lot to pack in. I did the online mental agility test included in the news item and wondered whether it was an error and intended for twelve year olds. I play at least one game of chess every day and am more in touch with the news than ever before, using an iPad as a very handy device to gather information. I also play and compose music at least twice a week. 

   Although I was deemed "thick" at school in the days when getting into university was actually very difficult I reckon I would leave many young graduates standing if brain/reasoning power was tested today and not least in stamina as my current video project am working roughly fourteen hours a day.

  So, please forgive the lack of modesty here but spurred by increasing irritation that generalisations, frequently contradictory are thrust upon us.  I refuse to succumb to being a victim of Ageism. My uncle who was my guardian in his fifties, when I was seventeen, was a highly capable and distinguished man, being the chairman of the largest Timber Sawmills in Scotland and the Dean of Guild of Glasgow, said to me that a man reaches his prime in his late fifties. Today we are told that the new twenty is the old thirty, that the new forty is the old sixty so this is another piece of unconnected 'official' thinking.

   Whereas I am supposed to be well into an era of 'managed decline' I would prefer to say I am in an era of 'managed time' - with luck another thirty years of active service. One of my heros and someone I once met is the broadcaster John Humphries and who out-speeds and outwits our youthful politicians.

Loss and Integrity

    It was only in August last year (2011) I bumped into an old friend Alan Mitchell who was the kingpin of woodworking magazine editors in the Seventies and Eighties. Out of respect I captured him on film to include in 'Furniture Today Part Three'. 

   With sadness I learned today that Alan had died in early December. I discovered this while Googling for some dates of his editorial office. Alan was a legendary 'fixture' in the woodworking media for many years, in fact a kingpin. Not just that he was a truly democratic and friendly person who went out of his way to scoop interesting stories and even landed up unnannounced at my small furniture gallery in Bath in the mid 1980's, having climbed a very steep hill, to run a feature. 

   It was heartening to see him at the Cheltenham 'Celebration of Craftsmanship and Design' exhibition Private View and he was immediately friendly and thanks to the organizer Jason Heap for having a 'flexible approach' regarding who is invited to Private Views that the impromptu opportunity arose for me to pay my respect to Alan on film. The policy at this major UK annual furniture show before Jason took over was to limit the Private view to clients and exhibitors only, breaking with the great tradition that Private Views are also social events and to use modern media language are the equivalent of Facebook to do business in a social networking environment! 

   Anybody who is in the tough business of sustained economic survival surely knows that you have to think outside the box and consider all sorts of ways to find customers and often the best results come from indirect means. Alan Mitchell was neither a prospective client nor a current craft journalist at this exhibition Private View so under the old regime he would not have been invited but clearly he was a man who gave his life and passion to woodworking and was not one for cultivating favourites or enemies but just did his job fair and square and genuinely liked the people. 

    Magazine editors and the craft media have great power and 'make and break' names. It was unusual to come across a magazine editor with the integrity Alan Mitchell had, but perhaps that was an age when the term might be more frequently used.

    It has been a challenging couple of years for me  - the great furniture maker Alan Peters died in 2009. He was my schoolboy hero and later a good professional acquaintance, someone of great integrity in his work, then a good male friend of mine who seemed to have everything, took his own life in the same year. Then in 2010 my charasmatic and colourful older sister Jill (who once turned down a date with Jimmi Hendrix) died of cancer within about three months, and then my half-sister Barbara died of a brain tumour, having suffered dementia at a shockingly young age. Now in 2012 my aunt who was my guardian and offered me a home when I was 17, is on her deathbed and probably has weeks to live.

Life is strong yet fragile. We know it all, yet we know nothing. We are here today and gone tomorrow, but the show goes on with new kids on the block re-inventing wheels and who one day will follow the same destiny!!

The buzzword is Making Things

    The great thing about a blog is that you can say what you want without a magazine editor changing or messing up what you have written. The downside is that hardly anyone reads a blog unless you are a celeb. 

    Today's blog is about a true celeb in my life and that is my woodwork teacher. He more than anyone else has influenced my life - a true genius of a teacher and such is this man's modesty I could only find one Google result (below) about a Telegraph article about him riding a Royal Enfield Bullet in 2001. Curiously I owned one of those motorcycles as well as follow Howard in his footsteps and train at the legendary Shoreditch College as a Handicrafts teacher on leaving school. We were well ahead of the game teaching youngsters how to think creatively as well as use their hands. We were teaching design as an integrated part of Handicraft years before Design took over and eventually became embedded in Technology. The buzzword now is 'Making Things'. A bit late when the subject has been systemmatically dismantled over decades! 

    Howard Orme became woodwork master at Abbotsholme school as I entered the Lower Sixth form having failed Woodwork O level with the rest of the class under the previous uninspiring teacher who swiftly vanished. In the December resits I got 85% and two terms later Grade A at GCE A level (normally a two year course)! The thing about Howard, apart from him having a very glamourous young wife at this all boys' boarding school was that he was mildly eccentric and a damned good cabinetmaker as well as an inspiring teacher. Enthusiasm is what comes to mind and this certainly rubbed off, but he must have liked me and for someone who spent much of his school life in trouble that was quite something. 

    My father died when I was 17 and the headmaster gave me the day off lessons to be quiet and on my own. I took the day off fly fishing on the River Dove and feel no remorse in saying it was the first day of my freedom and so I guess Howard would have become a role model. He made learning woodwork fun and even gave me the keys to the woodwork shop one Friday night to make my first guitar. I worked throughout Friday and Saturday night and slumped over the bench around 4pm on the Sunday with one completed acoustic guitar. We had run out of French polish so I used shoe polish.  It was an exciting moment of truth to string the guitar and it sounded good. 

   Above all Howard was a superb craftsman and he would invite me to his flat to inspect his cabinets while his lovely young wife made coffee! Howard had just left the RAF and I guess he was about 23 years old when he joined the Abbotsholme teaching staff.

   On one occasion the headmaster brought some parents of a prospective new boy into the workshop. Howard and I were competing on mini crossbows we had made aiming at a poster of Edward Barnsley at the far end of the workshop. The headmaster was speechless but this was an independent progressive school and I was Howard's star pupil. 

    I dedicated one of my woodworking books to Howard Orme and later met up with him at Eton College where he took up a post in what he described as the Department of Maniacs (Mechanics).  I don't think Howard ever really knew how much he had influenced me and not just in a selfish way of my becoming a renowned designer maker but more importantly to hand on the gift of education and in particular the undervalued Practical Arts that was my particular vehicle for personal development and expression. The greatest reward and one more lasting than the acclaim of (transient) fame as performer is when out of the blue ten, twenty or thirty years on an ex pupil or student appears out of nowhere and says you helped them find their direction in life. Especially in the field of teaching when at the time you have no real measure of whether you are any good at all.

However, one thing for sure is that anybody in the business of education - a teacher, has no business there unless they have not just enthusiasm but a passion for what they are teaching. A university degree proving you are clever is not enough. 

Jeremy Broun with teacher Howard Orme at Abbotsholme School

Howard Orme and Jeremy Broun at Eton College where Howard taught

Howard Orme's Telegraph article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/4753067/Typical-biker-Howard-Orme.html

Lost in the Myre

 Twitter, Flitter, Blog, Smog, Tweet, Ted, Gawker,  Flicker,  Bicker,  Facebook,  Faceless - it goes on and on just like university degrees, so many of them yet what are they worth? Who is the supreme champion of the grab your attention platform? Whoever it is today (Facebook Business page?) one thing for sure it won't be next year. There will be a new kid on the blog. In the time it has taken for some corners of society to understand what a blog is and finally succumbing to peer group pressure that they are less than inadequate not to use one, those in the know tell us the blog is out of fashion. Its been left behind. Even this blog is admittedly a cathartic exercise, with the deluded hope that one day a small iota of its drivel will be of use to some fellow inhabitor of this planet.

   I suspect I may be bookmarked for the 'Grumpy old men' folder but to quote a young teenage age girl's mother last Christmas when I led my street against the neighbouring street in an impromtu snowball fight. As the girl hit me fair and square on the snout, she screamed 'I got that old man'. Mother quickly reprimanded her ' Don't be rude, he's not an old man, well, if he is, he's a very young old man'.

Moral compass

   Professor Richard Dawkins reportedly says 'The Bible is good reading but an appalling moral compass'. What makes it good reading then prof?!

   I would disagree with this renowned atheist scientist who is implying that all religious doctrine is altogether bad for us!! I don't think faith or non-belief is the issue here but that the Christian code as stated in the Ten commandments in The Old Testament is hard to beat as a moral humanistic code or compass. Does Mr Dawkins suggest something better? 'Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself' and 'love your neighbour' is a lot better than the moral code that has taken over from church worship which is the television and namely the soaps that have millions of addicts and is socially indoctrinating. Whether The Bible is truth or a fairy story is neither here nor there if it serves a purpose, that purpose being to offer a guide. 

   I am no Christian in the claimed sense and am probably more an atheist now than an agnostic and do not have the arrogance of scientific knowledge or certainty about anything but I question those who pull down bricks without anything positive to rebuild with. It suddenly seems very fashionable to knock Christians and yet we have the hypocrisy (or fickleness) to celebrate an important Christian festival - Christmas with only one thing in mind to overindulge and over consume with money a lot of us don't have!  Playing Devil's Advocate it is curious the Bible has survived two thousand years of interpretation and ambiguity, even if it a human construct. The problem with science is it often leaves a vacuum!
  I think the late John Lennon is more convincing when he said 'whatever gets you through the night' and that is how I would view the tradition of leaving Gideons Bible in lonely hotels nationwide.

A community

    Many years ago, in fact in 1972 I was one of a dozen craftsmen and women who established the UK's first residential craft commune. I gave freely of my time and expertise as a 'carpenter' to help renovate the property in erecting 22 ledge and brace doors and a long refectory table with a dozen or so Glastonbury chairs all in the spirit of this exciting new co-operative and just in return for my food. My workshop rent was nominal and I recall there was a budget for modestly equipping the woodworking workshop where I was obliged to allow members of the public learn alongside me whilst I attempted to make a living creating my furniture designs. We had a communal gallery and the dream was that a van would collect our craft wares on a Friday and take them away and sell them. 

   The commune was called "The Dove Centre of Creativity" not far from Glastonbury and we were written about in the Colour Supplements as a pioneer model. The twelve craftspeople including myself agreed to a modest percentage markup on our produce to be sold through the commune's gallery. Very soon the harsh reality of commercial survival kicked in and a two-tier markup was introduced by the commune's charismatic leader whereby the 'strong crafts' such as furniture making supported the weaker crafts such as printmaking. Some craftspeople stayed in bed til late whilst others were disciplined early risers. It was inherently unfair that one craft should support another nor was it correct that one craft was stronger than another as it all boiled down to the individual.

    I had invested my time in this venture (and others had given all their savings) and although it was in my heart I found I was actually restricted from making a living by needing to sell outside the commune, yet prevented, and I was forced to leave. I was the first which was quite painful and at the time I was accused of abandoning the philosophy and spreading panic around the centre as others were soon to follow. It was a naive dream but I have no regrets and amicably met up for a re-union twenty five years later and made a film about it called "Silver Dove".
    Interestingly we were in theory a community of like-minded people, all creatives, but very quickly it fell apart and individual private enterprise and self-determination took over. When David Cameron walked away from the Eurozone summit it kind of reminded me of when I was the first to see the reality behind the dream all those years ago. But even then there was no certainty ahead.

Jeremy Broun at the Dove Centre in 1972

The table and chairs built by Jeremy Broun at the centre

The Dove Centre of Creativity

Peer Group Pressure

    One thing I learned at a fairly young age is that peer group pressure can be limiting to positive outcomes and often paradoxically the weakest influence. Fortunately when I was young it was not the dominant almost obsessive force it seems to be today and one so entrenched in consumerism. 

    However, if David Cameron felt alone amongst 26 other nations it somewhat presumes the outcome of their coherence or fate. Time will tell and he may have seen the writings on the wall. I don't quite understand how he can be held responsible (by his deputy Nick Clegg) for a bad outcome when the will of France, Germany and others is to diminish the power of the City and that by setting our own rules we have a better chance of regulating that absolutely vital sector. Cameron could influence but not determine the outcome. What would others have brought away from the table and Labour would not declare its hand at all. We will become 'isolated' if we have nothing to sell but determining our own fate I sense is better and who knows we may pull together better as a nation and mobilise our remarkable resources without the increasing madness of European bureacracy. Human nature anywhere around the world is to look after its own first and that is what we are doing but the British always seem perverse. Clegg agreed to what Cameron was asking for at the Summit the week before! 

    I took the trouble today to watch BBC Parliament long enough to get a feel of its climate and thoroughly disagree with their BBC political commentator who later said on the Six O'Clock News that labours jeers at the absence of Nick Clegg dominated the session. Rubbish, if anything or anyone dominated it was Cameron who was extremely clear, firm and straight forward in his arguments and showed the kind of leadership we scream out for and that many in the House stood up and applauded. 

    Another surprise today from one of our other reverred institutions - the politically correct Guardian newspaper was the admission of the journalist Nick Davis that he may have got it wrong about the News of The World phonehackers deleting the Milly Dowler voicemails. Police intelligence eventually revealed the voicemail may have been automatically deleted the messages!! You mean nobody at the time considered that most telephone answering devices hold a limited number of messages before they are chronologically deleted? Interesting whether the weight of this small factual discrepancy is significant in the cause of the demise of the News of the World. But again, peer group pressure is the order of the day as everybody was at it and nobody pointed a finger at the millions of people who bought the newspapers that relayed information via phone hackings! 

   Britain has a little work to do on regaining its sense of greatness!

Black Dog

     Catching a snippet of the local television news this evening a woman in a high responsibility council job won record damages for Industrial Injury (circa £300,000) for depression caused through stress in the job. I think it was a counter claim as she was sued for a million for not declaring she was prone to depression at the outset.  Tricky situation and many would argue that a high profile job would demand a person with robust mental health and that the judgment would also send a signal out to employers not to touch with a bargepole anyone suffering a history of depression. So what do you do? Lie about it on the application form?  However, regarding this particular case others on high salaries do tend to justify their pay as commensurate with their ability to deal with high stress.

    Many people suffering from depression actually work to an exceptionally high level of ability and  conscientiousness but there is still the stigma. I actually believe that one should be honest despite the risk.  I was able to convalesce on full pay for two thirds of a year by a compassionate employer (Millfield School where I was teaching) in 1970 at the age of 23 but nobody threatened anyone with court action or pointed fingers but it was simply a gesture and out of gratitude I returned to the job a year later before leaving school teaching. At the time the breakdown was so severe I was lucky to be able to take in food.

   I read not long ago of the case of a man in  the USA who won half a million dollars for the 'emotional damage' of losing his mother early in his life. My mother died in childbirth as a result of blatant hospital neglect. she bled to death. That would have made me a comfortable millionaire!

   What is surely needed is a more compassionate but pragmatic approach to mental health. The statistic is one in six suffer mental health problems. I take some comfort amidst the shame of suffering crippling depression that Churchill suffered  'The black Dog' Someone told me Spike Milligan wrote his epitaph 'I told you I was ill' and that lightening sharp witted comedian on Not the Nine O'Clock News - Paul Merton has also suffered severe depression.

   Not that I would wish depression on my enemy but apparantly there is a high correlation with highly intelligent creative people succumbing to it.  A small comfort to me in that my father regarded me as completely stupid until the day he died!

   High achievers often fall into two categories - encouraged by competitive parents or suffering so starkly in low self-esteem they continually try to prove they are at least worthy! Possibly the former also applies in the child wanting to be noticed by over-competitive parents. Over a lifetime of seeking therapy and finding little help, the best tonic in my opinion for 'The Black Dog' is to get a dog (my little dog is the best human being I know) and enjoy good sex - but not with the dog please!

From a sense of outrage comes great art

   It seems balmy that only a few weeks ago I was hanging on to the roof of my dormer window by the strength of my fingers whilst confronting likely death when on many occasion previously in my life I was considering jumping off that same roof. Whilst I composed myself to gather all my strength at 67 years of age to pull myself up to safety the thought had crossed my mind it might not be a clean death as I could land up a cabbage in a wheelchair or on a life support system with no next of kin to pull the plug.  

   Yesterday I could have jumped off that roof as I had potentially burned my boats with the editor of the only woodworking magazine I haven't fallen out with over what I feel is a lack of respect and I have no comeback as the plug can be instantly pulled. I am also under immense pressure working 14 hours a day currently to complete a film about furniture makers that is not just a thankless unfunded task but has moments of insult added to it. I had just returned from filming a very 'important' fellow furniture maker whose work I have always greatly admired with the casual comment stuck in my head 'I don't mind being in your home movie'.

    My 'home movie' is using equipment I sold a house for to invest in when six film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43 and skills I had to teach myself!  I now have to spend several days editing through hours of largely irrelevant banter (that is - to my intended film audience) to create a coherent flowing short story that is both relevant and fascinating and will probably knock spots off anything on television and I am doing this whilst battling daily with herrendous depression that I have suffered probably since the day my father rubbed my nose in my own shit at the age of three, but died before I was man enough to stand up to him. And here I am surrounded by all these priviliged and indulged people in the field of my passion, so full of themselves.

   Doesn't anybody realize film making is a highly skilled team game and yet I am doing it all single handed and just need a little help occasionally! There is no justice and there is one hell of a lot of wilful misunderstanding in the world because so many people choose to exist in just their cocoon. I never had anybody who believed in me as a child, no mum to say 'it will be okay' but a dad (who I had to call 'father' because only working class people use the word 'dad') who beat the shit out of me physically and mentally. 'From a sense of outrage comes great art'* and my film will be great art despite the fact nobody supported me, I had to bully some to be in it, and all the usual funding suspects wilfully rejected me in preference of more worthy projects! Great!

   While many are taking their kids to football matches this sunny Sunday or going for walks with loved ones or whatever is "conventional" I must be mad spending another hugely time consuming lonely day editing my 'home movie' trying to make it up to BBC standard, yet this film will be better than anything on the BBC and once I start a project I have to finish it and when you are weighed down by the heavy lead of depression that saps the energy (and is a solitary prison because no one understands it), it is all the more daunting. But hey ho - who cares a shit!

*quote from the actress Glenn Close.

Woman power

   Had my mother lived I wonder what lessons or wisdom she would have passed on to me. All I know is that she was gentle but also a bit of a tomboy, catching large trout on the family loch. But what opinion would she cast on the young and not so young women of today? I belong to a furniture makers' forum and am already too opinionated on it so I confine these views to my blog which only a few people read (and probably few furniture makers)! 

   Recently a woman member announced an all woman exhibition, inviting everyone to attend. A couple of comments followed, something about dressing up in a nightie to attend and then a bit of a row broke out as one young pc male accused the forum of harbouring what he called 'sexist pigs'. A bit strong! Strictly speaking the exhibition is sexist in being gender specific and receiving funding for it. 

  I felt saddened as I thought all that had past. I have certainly always treated women as equals at woodworking and observed they are more careful and if anything slightly better than men at learning design skills but this is also respecting and wanting to celebrate differences between the sexes. The woman organizing the exhibition (and someone who made it clear to me a few years ago she didn't want her sophisticated green woodwork next to 'rustic' work in my 'Furniture Today' DVD) then posted onto the forum the exhibition manifesto which was clearly feminist and aimed to draw more women into furniture making. This is surely badly needed as it is a male dominated craft, but why not draw them onto the forum as new members instead of create a feminist camp of furniture makers? We men are inclusive. It seems a shame to me but I've probably got it all wrong so I'm going to go off and organize an exhibition of 'Forgotten young-old-men in sheds'.

    

Private Eye

I couldn't believe this photograph was published in the newspaper without an appropriate caption so I added one of my own before Private Eye gets hold of it:

'Come on Sarko, you know Smerkels up for a threesome'

Far from the madding crowd

   Yesterday I drove through the early morning November mist into the heart of rural England to visit a fellow furniture maker to film his work for a documentary DVD I am making. Not the kind of documentary you are likely to see on British television!  It was an uplifting experience to witness and indeed be part of a valuable yet largely unseen aspect of British cultural life and heritage. Far from the madding crowd of endless television celebrity garbage, late night gambling channels, Babestations and kiss and tell tabloid sensations that have aeons ago dulled our senses. Even our Royal 'lad' has been asked to keep it in his pants during his military training visit to a devoutly religious North American town.
   I am not devoutly religious but I am passionate about beauty and good workmanship in wood. What made my intensive day particularly worth getting out of bed for (intensive because armed with a tiny HD camcorder I handled all the skills of a television production team single-handed) - was the quiet modesty of the maker I interviewed, whose work clearly is amongst the very best in Britain today. Some shout from the rooftops about how great or prominent they are in my chosen field and one realises that the Grayson Perry's of this world by crossdressing and cleverly denouncing their own work ('oh please don't take my work seriously darling, its crap really') are the ones who get noticed and are shaping the values and aspirations of innocent young minds, although today I guess the age of innocence is out of the window by the age of five.
    I once shared a flat in London with someone who bought a sports car belonging to Julie Christie, the star of "Far from the madding crowd". Oh such beauty - Julie Christie! We used to hang out at The Troubador in Old Brompton Road, saw Samantha Eggar bomb around Chelsea in her mini Moke and visited some late night basement dive I think was called Cafe de Paris?  But as they say 'if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there'!
   







  

The human condition

   Many years ago I attended the funeral of a 19 year old youth who had been making furniture with me on a government funded work experience scheme. His mum called him 'the gentle giant' and I remember he was indeed a lovely young man.  She broke the news to me that he had overturned his landrover into a ditch one evening. 

   The family invited me to the funeral and whilst a thick plate glass screen silenced their crying anguish in the back of the funeral car I was in the front of the car next to the driver and all was eerily quiet except for the whine of the engine. In a desperate bid to make conversation I found myself blurting out 'how's business' and the undertaker replied 'really good this month, we've been rushed off our feet'. I not only realised my clumsy attempt at making conversation but that most of us are caught in a mindset and despite two thousand years of civilization are limited by our own experience and see the world through just our own particular window.

   Economists are blinkered by the word 'growth' and yet in nature uncontrolled growth is a cancer. There are ultimately finite resources on this planet.  Recent news of motorway carnage that cannot agree on whether it was white fog or black smoke is very quick to put the blame on an expensive firework display emitting dense smoke, using the health and safety trump card again, when on motorway sections nationwide, marked by chevrons (keep two visible in front of you) very few drivers distance themselves safely enough to stop in an emergency.  Lorry drivers bunch together on most motorways daily and it takes a lot to stop a lorry. Meanwhile the road safety lobbysists have more fuel to attack the proposed raising of the speed limit to 80 yet the focus of blame is on one risk assessment officer at a fireworks event. 

  The media is very quick to blame and judge and the Police are now focussing on a criminal investigation whilst macho rugby players protest they are being used as a scapegoat. Solicitors will be rolling their sleeves up as more lolly comes their way. Meanwhile regulation will increase. I must say it does seems odd that such potentially serious road safety hazard as dense smoke is entertained anywhere close to a motorway and that according to one newspaper the winds were not forecast to blow that way on that evening. 

   Perhaps we should blame the meteorologists and dig up all the records of accident resulting from the London 'Pea Soup' smogs in the 1960's caused by industrialization and then we might take the argument further and consider which way the wind is blowing when there is a nuclear reactor disaster... perhaps we should blame God. It seems to be the human condition.

     

     

Mortality

   Whilst the issue of Health & Safety is topical regarding the protest camp outside St Pauls Cathedral and the astonishing resignation of senior clerics,  I got a taste of reality today (for the first time) as I clambered onto my roof to do some essential repairs. I am no longer a young man, and actually got stuck and was aware I was about to slide down the steep roof and to a probable death, from some four stories up. I thought I would just pull myself up onto the top of the dormer window I built in 1995 and view my plan of action as to what scaffolding I needed to construct in order to carry out my repairs (which was more a matter of completing some cladding on the original build of the dormer window). I struggled whilst fear kicked in.

   In 1995 I totally redesigned and rebuilt the roof, constructing a polythene and batten tent over the house and constructed my own scaffolding using a hefty timber framework. After all the majority of scaffolding globally is made of wood (bamboo). What I overlooked then, because I was young, fit and an ex rock climber, was the erection of safety barriers and harnesses. Although my intention today was not to walk too far  unsupported on a 42 degree tiled incline with gym shoes I was shocked at how I lacked the strength to straddle a mere metre of roof and pull myself up onto the roof of the dormer window, which I eventually completed gripped by fear!  This had never happened to me before and I had defied in my head getting older. A man half my age would have struggled to do this.  So the realization of one's mortality hit home as I sit here and sketch out the improvised scaffolding platform I will build, including safety harness and anchor points should I slip. All common sense stuff of course. The preparation for a few hours work will take a good day and the biggest issue I now realize I have to deal with is the fear of walking the plank so high up. 

   As a young man I was a gymnast and even as recent as 2006 (when I was 62 years old!) I was teaching guys in their twenties how to do back somersaults into a pool in Dordogne. I had been invited to join a working party of young woodworking friends from Bristol. The fear was not so much to do with physical agility (as indeed I was very unfit in 2006) but was about mental attitude and much of tumbling gymnastics is about mindset, without it you break your neck easily. 

   My realization today is that I am not as strong physically as I thought I was and I somehow kidded myself I would be.  There is no moral to this impromptu blog other than to suggest you don't know your limitations until you push them, but that we have to adapt, hopefully gradually but it was for a good reason I thought I was Peter Pan - who wants to get old!  Now I have to change my mindset and plan at some time in the future my wooden stairlift while I am still fit enough to build it. What an exciting challenge. Now, possibly it will be solar powered because were going to run out of energy soon ..... 

Unguarded improvised timber scaffolding four stories up

The roof canopy constructed from timber and covered with polythene

working at a slightly safer height