Once Upon A Time

To tell you the truth, things seem to be speeding up at such an alarming rate, it’s all I can do to make sure I eat at roughly the right time, let alone sit down and take the time to write anything resembling coherence, about any blooming subject.

I mean, whatever happened to Cyprus’ banks? What happened to North Korea’s bid to start WWIII? What is it now? The end of May. It was only on 12 February that Kim Jong-Un conducted his country’s third underground nuclear test and America decided to move part of its arsenal to Guam to counter the threat. It was only on 25 March that the EU agreed a 10million Euro bail-out and the banks in a tiny corner of South-Eastern Europe finally felt propped up safe enough to re-open. That was eight weeks ago!

Granted, I was in my thirties back then, but still it wasn’t that long ago. How can I be expected to formulate and express an opinion about anything when it all comes and goes so quickly? We’ve had a couple of Boston bombs since then, as well as a state funeral in all but name. Hell, we’ve even got a new Pope. Add to that a Bangladeshi death-trap, an Oklahoma tornado and of all things, Nigel Farage gaining traction… Hold on, I’m getting dizzy.

And where is it all now? These stories were of earth-shattering, cataclysmic importance a fortnight ago. Why aren”t we all volunteering to rebuild the town of Moore? Where are the follow-up stories, the consequences, the continuing reports of the struggles of the people directly affected by the real-life stories drowned out by the headlines? Who cares? The paper’s sodden with salt, vinegar and ketchup, and the printed words – so important and earnestly spoken a fortnight ago, are now rotting on a rubbish dump, obliterated by mouldy sausage supper. Right now, evil has a new face. So let’s all get excited for a few days, bemoan how utterly disparate and ghettoised our society has become, before the next tragedy unfolds and someone’s smartphone footage becomes the latest top story at the top of the hour – disgusting and graphic enough to distract us from what we should really be concentrating on. And all the while we’ll be wondering what it is that radicalises young, disaffected men to cold-bloodied butchery? Here’s a hint William Hague – stop puffing out your chest and put down the gun!

Oh, and what about the brinkmanship brought about by the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill? The vote that carried through the Westminster Parliament was last Tuesday.

Such a very, very long time ago.

A breast-plate filled with diamonds

I understand the attraction of monarchy.

I understand the comforting sense of cohesion it brings, the steadfast idea of nationhood it evokes.

I do not underestimate its influence; its fortified power and the enduring psychological effect it has on people. Across the world today, nations are ripping themselves apart in search of what it means to be a nation, killing each other along the way. How fortunate we are, some surely say, that we have a pair of such experienced, unflappable hands on the tiller. Elizabeth the Great (“Mummy”) is at the helm.

Britannia steers a true course through choppy seas.

Matters can appear sadly disparate on our islands sometimes. And as waves of separateness continue to sweep in, affecting all of us in their path, I’m sure nothing makes people feel safer than something as familiar, as concrete and immovable as the rock on which British monarchy is built. To many it must be a real tonic to warm the body against the frightful chilly winds of disconnect that have buffeted all the other immovable institutions we used to fool ourselves into believing in, to shreds.

I have heard people talk about the monarchy in the most cosy of terms over this weekend. They swoon, sigh and giggle as they transform back into children before my very eyes. Suddenly they are mollified, pacified and anaesthetised, full up on “Mummy’s” breast milk. Wow! What a crazy drug it must be. How blissfully numbing it must feel to willfully lobotomise yourself and sink into a kaleidoscopic psychedelic sea of red, white and blue, of a Britannic breast-plate filled with diamonds.

I get how intoxicating it is. But no matter how close I may come to succumbing to peer pressure, to being convinced of all the monarchy may positively, tribally reinforce, the whole concept leaves a nasty, sour taste in my mouth.

For there is nothing more distasteful to me than the calculated spectacle of two generations of heirs to Elizabeth the Great’s throne standing beside her, aloft on a balcony while the pomp and circumstance of her family’s continuing power thunders around her. What greater testament to inequality could one ever hope to see? Even more saddening is the almighty cheer that arises from the street below the balcony, through the drizzle and Spitfire exhaust fumes.

Therefore, it is on a weekend such as this that I must stay away and keep my own counsel. For it appears that a large majority of my countrymen seem content to continue to champion and cheer hereditary privilege and a hierarchical class mentality, come what may, no matter what the cost to themselves.

In this regard, the flag-waving, wet-nursed hoards need have no fear; the line of succession is alive, well and waiting in the wings;

Long to reign over us.

Related Posts:

Presenting Representations

Going to Word

Ignoring the elephant on the forecourt

So, what was all that about?

No, I’m not talking about the unseasonably summer-like temperatures we’ve all enjoyed over the last 10 days or so. I’m referring to the 72 hours of petro-madness that had forecourts running dry country-wide.

A lot has been made of the so-called collective panic that gripped us all on Tuesday evening through to Friday morning of this week; how all it took was one off the cuff remark from a little known Cabinet Office Minister to have us buying up Halford’s entire supply of jerry cans, queueing at the pumps, fighting each other on the forecourts, and; in one extreme case, decanting petrol in the kitchen (of all places) with the dinner cooking and ending up with 40% burns.

A lot has been made of the possibility of government conspiracy, designed to fire the first shot in a defining “Thatcher moment” against the UNITE Union and their strike ballot of tanker drivers. Other theories talk of either an engineered crisis to swell government coffers before the end of the tax year, or of a convenient distraction from what has been, in anyone’s language, a truly awful week for the government. First there was the Budget, its tax cuts for the wealthy and pension income freezes for the over 65s. Then there were covert recordings of nefarious offers of influence over government policy, but only if you could afford the quarter million price tag for dinner with Dave. And then, to top it all off with a nice tasty crust, there was (of all things) the pasty tax!

Perhaps it’s not that silly to consider that any political animal, of any persuasion, would gladly rub their hands with glee at the prospect of turning all those awful headlines on their head, by whatever means necessary. We’ve already established that the majority of our representatives are woefully removed from what most of us would consider an ordinary life. (How many of us have garages to store petrol in anyway?) Combine that with an unyielding desire to change the subject at any given moment and it’s easy to imagine Whitehall boffins without an ounce of common sense between them suddenly dreaming up the bonkers notion of creating a panic for fuel when all they had to go on, in fact, was a UNITE Union vote – nothing more.

Stranger things have happened.

But, to my mind, all of this theory and anger directed towards the people running the country misses the gigantic elephant in the room (or in this case, on our nation’s petrol forecourts) that everybody seems content to ignore.

It wasn’t collective panic we witnessed this week – there was nothing collective about it. If we had all been thinking of our collective need, Francis Maude’s comments would’ve already been forgotten. The fact is, it was individualism of the most selfish kind that created the scenes we saw. It was about our disconnect from the people and the communities around us, both locally and nationally. We’ve all been out for ourselves over the last few days, to hell with everyone else, and we should all hang our collective heads in shame. Indeed, the inevitable clamouring for Maude’s resignation since yesterday is evidence enough of the fact that the process has already begun. But it’s always very convenient and perhaps predictable that we transfer our shame into anger and re-direct it at someone, anyone so that we don’t, collectively, have to question our own actions and how completely distasteful they were. But the reality is, we’re not angry with Francis Maude, we’re angry with ourselves. We’re angry that we could be so inconsiderate, so unreasoning, so selfish, and so completely ignorant of the needs of others.

And so we should be.

There can only be one positive outcome from this alarming episode. We have to learn from what we’ve just witnessed within ourselves. It’s no good blaming our own behaviour on silly remarks from daft Cabinet ministers. On any other day of the week we wouldn’t trust a single word of what they said. We need to stop looking for a scapegoat for our own narrow self-centredness and be a bit more grown-up. That means looking at ourselves fully in the blackened, oil-soaked mirror and being honest about our own vulgar, heedless, self-destructive actions. Only by accepting how completely cannibalistic we became, can we ever hope to guard against it happening again. One has to be hopeful that this is a lesson learned. Because it is only a matter of time before real energy crises develop as the Age of Oil enters its death-throes. Perhaps we’re already there? Perhaps all we saw on our petrol forecourts this week was a crude exhibition from a bunch of drug addicts scrapping and hollering for one last fix? If that’s the case, each one of us should be quite rightly panicked. Not by a need to stockpile the stuff. But by how hopelessly ill-prepared we are for when the pumps really do run dry.

Related Links:

Pennorama

John Hefford

Sex, slaves, shellfish and spectacles

I find myself enveloped in a reflective, pensive mood this evening – the first night of my first week of annual leave of the year. Various workplace scenarios and current events skirt across my mind at varying, feverish intervals. They may shout loudly to begin with – vying for attention. But they’re all pretty light and airy-fairy affairs – muslin dreams rather than lead weights. None have yet become arrogantly lodged – stubborn in their refusal to leave. So, I’m allowing them to come and go as they please.

The mind always takes a while to let go.

Oddly, I’m preoccupied with the announcement today that the Most Reverend Rowan Williams is to step down from his role as Archbishop of Canterbury by the end of the year. Mr Williams has held the title of the most senior figurehead in the Anglican Church since 2003.

I won’t even pretend to know anything more about the man than his name and what he looks like. I also won’t suggest I know anything about the Anglican Church other than that which is coloured by my own, biased opinion of religion in general. That is why I turn to people who are perhaps better placed to offer an opinion of the timing, the reasons, and the consequences of his departure. There seem to be two primary points of view involved in the initial reaction to his announcement. On the one hand, Williams has been a calm eye at the storm of debates surrounding homosexuality and the ordination of women bishops. Without him, the Anglican Church would’ve torn itself apart by now. And on the other is described a man, too vague and non-reactionary to be heard by the majority of modern Britain – too softly intelligent and poetic to pull the Church up by its cassocks and lead.

In the last analysis, his legacy will probably contain elements of both.

But, it’s not Rowan Williams who necessarily occupies me. Who his successor may be is a much more thought-provoking concern. And if I’m honest about it, I find myself saying; “Let it be Sentamu, please let it be Sentamu”.

John Sentamu, currently Archbishop of York and second most senior cleric after Rowan Williams is the Ugandan-born, British immigrant whose recent outspoken views on same-sex marriage have, to anyone with half an ability to think for themselves, betrayed a man at best hypocritical and at worst, dangerously bigoted.

Why then would I find myself calling internally for the elevation to the most powerful position in the Church of England of a man so diametrically opposed to my own way of thinking?

Well, I’m not sure, but I have an inkling my motivation could be less than honourable? Elect a leader like Sentamu and the “Church” as an institution will take an almighty public lurch into a polarising direction it may never recover from. I can see them doing it – an extreme figurehead for extreme times. (A rod for their own backs). I can hear them convince themselves; “We’re losing the argument”. “We need someone like Sentamu to stand up for our values, for the moral majority”. “We need to stem the flow of this turgid sexual agenda”. Of course what I suspect they might fail to appreciate is that sanctioning and legitimising Sentamu as their spokesperson might very well come back to haunt them. Perhaps I’m wrong? Ignorant? At the very least, I’m biased. But as far as I can see, his appointment will only marginalise their cause further and disassociate them more from the everyday experiences of the majority of the population. I’m talking about people who live in the real world – away from Leviticus and the acceptable trade in slaves, the labelling of shellfish as unclean or the knowledge that approaching the altar of the Lord if you wear glasses is gonna send you straight to Hell.

But as I said, these are extreme times. When you’re faced with characters like Abu Qatada, what good is a humble, placid diplomat like Williams? When you live in a world where metrosexual men take longer in the bathroom and have less body hair than their girlfriends or their wives, something’s just got to be done. And the temptation to begin shouting louder, more aggressively and more outlandishly than the other guy may have a certain appeal?

So, am I rather distastefully gunning for Sentamu in the hope that he’ll bring the Walls of Jericho falling down around his intolerant, intransigent ears? If I am, then it is a moment of weakness, and you’ll have to forgive me for it. I wish him nothing but the best of luck. Because if it falls to a black, immigrant refugee with spectacles to argue the last, lost case for rigid obeisance towards an ancient manuscript or a definition of marriage as described by an Act of Parliament written at the same time the Atlantic slave trade was getting up a head of steam, then the “Church” is already doomed to crumble into a miasma of laughable, sanctimonious irrelevance.

Prawn sandwich, Archbishop?

Related Links:

Prejudice Stripped in Public

Friday Question

A good old fashioned hug

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, President of the Bishop’s Conference in Scotland, and Britain’s most senior Catholic has written a letter to today’s Sunday Telegraph;

“We cannot afford to indulge this madness”

Ooo, I just want to give him a good old fashioned hug, stroke his temples, fetch his ruby slippers and reassure him that everything’s going to be alright.

My dearest, frightened little Keith,

The world will not end if I can marry. The Four Horsemen will not suddenly be unleashed. Your Institution will not crumble. You can rest easy in your sumptuous palace. It’s all just a bad dream. Cats will go on killing mice, and daffodils will still bloom in Spring. Children will continue to be born into safe, nurturing heterosexual “marriages”, only to grow up to be homos. Over half of all said “marriages” will still end in bitter acrimony and divorce, and the innocent offspring of those legitimate unions will continue to be physically, mentally and sexually abused by men (and women) in institutions just like your’s the world over. Fear not my friend. The distilled utopia your brethren have fashioned for us out of two millennia of endless religious wars, dark age inquisition, witch-burning, sexual repression and misogyny is strong enough to survive such ground-shaking immorality. Quash that stubborn man-on-man mental imagery from your mind and sing with me…

“You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night. Step into the sun, step into the light”.

There, there. That’s better.

Yours,

The Buttons Blog

Related Links:

This Fragile Tent

Redefining Reality: Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s Fear

Liberal Reflections

White Noise

Tragic, needless deaths occur every day but they very rarely get noticed other than by those people intimately involved. If they do get publicised or commented on by the media, I’m sure most if not all of us consider the hollow, wastefulness of the circumstances only so long as it takes us to turn the page, click the mouse or switch the washing machine on. It’s not that we’re at all unfeeling, or immune to the pathos, it’s simply because there is only so much information our brains can sequester from the rest of the rhythmic white noise which surrounds our own, daily lives. The telephone needs answering, the cats need feeding and the toast needs buttered. One just has to be choosy.

It was announced today that the body of PC David Rathband was found last night, in his flat in Blyth, Northumberland where he had been living since separating from his wife, Kath last year. PC Rathband was the unarmed traffic officer on duty in his marked police car, sat on a roundabout on the A1 on 4 July 2010 – the day Raoul Moat began the killing spree that sparked one of the biggest manhunts in British history. Moat shot PC Rathband twice with a shotgun at point blank range, destroying his eyes, ending his career, and ultimately claiming his life.

In October 2010, three months after he was shot and blinded, PC Rathband set up the Blue Lamp Foundation, a charity to help emergency services staff injured in the line of duty. Mr. Rathband often chose to speak frequently and candidly in public about his difficulties coping with sudden disability and the impact it had on his family, particularly his two young children. But those close to him hoped his energetic charity campaigning and natural determination would see him through the physical and mental anguish that endured.

In September last year however, he gave a moving interview in which the extent of his struggle began to make itself felt.

“I don’t know whether a lot of this is my own perceptions and my insecurities but I hear people’s voices when they’re talking to me and I feel the resentment in their voice for having to guide me round. There’s lots of things like that.”

By November, he had separated from his wife.

Apparently, it was his conversations on Twitter over the last few days that alerted followers to his worrying mental state. So much so that the police were contacted and urged to check up on him.

His death is believed to have been suicide.

On any other day I may have indeed chosen to acknowledge this particular story of one man’s tragedy only so long as it took for the kettle to boil. But not today. Consider for a moment getting up out of bed, washing, dressing, eating breakfast, brushing your teeth, kissing your partner goodbye as you absent-mindedly open your front door onto another working day. Consider continuing into that unremarkable day, and then for no other reason than you happen to be in a certain place at a certain time, having your life convulse and cataclysmically change in an instant. You go to work with vision, and come home blind.

“The first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, is darkness.”

Unimaginable.

So yes, I feel like remembering PC David Rathband and feeling sad. I choose to ignore the white noise of the rest of my life and consider the man – the human being behind the news headline. I choose to contemplate the hollow, wastefulness of the personal tragedy that befell him – the horrifying debilitating consequences of a random encounter with a paranoid madman.

I feel I owe him that much.

Related links:

Blue Lamp Foundation

Ruminating with Sally House-Coat

William Wallace vs. Jemima Puddle-duck

It’s been a big week for Scottish politics.

The question of Scotland and the referendum on her independence from Britain was firmly placed at the top of the UK’s national headlines until Wednesday. That was before the conversation was relegated in favour of video showing US army personnel urinating on dead Taliban and an Italian cruise ship disaster. The world does keep on spinning after all.

It became obvious what David Cameron’s new year resolution had been, as he emerged like a rabbit out of the traps, seemingly calling the SNP’s bluff, questioning why Alex Salmond needed to wait until 2014 before asking his people whether they wished their country to secede from the United Kingdom. However, his initiative-seizing didn’t last long. Before a day and a half had passed the noises coming out of Westminster, repeated ad nauseum by Scottish Labour MPs, consisted mainly of veiled threats and filibustering; what would be Scotland’s share of the UK’s national debt?, would Scotland be able to keep the pound?, would Scotland become bankrupt? All too quickly (and all too predictably), Cameron’s argument was reduced to little more than the tired old rhetoric of fear and the “impossible to prove a negative” campaigning that the people of Scotland have become all too used to.

Why?

Purely and simply, because of the personalities involved.

Alex Salmond is by far the separatists trump card and is arguably the only reason why the battle lines for independence from the UK are being drawn at all. Love him or loathe him, everyone admits he is a supreme political animal. His voice is fluent, measured and calm, especially when faced with an accusatory Englishman or woman, throwing half-baked, half-hidden abuse and throw-away racist attacks in his direction. That’s when he really comes into his own. Any tired argument put to him by a misguided and mis-educated English commentator is always met with a risible smile and a twinkle behind the eyes. He knows that all he really needs to do is stand in front of a bust of William Wallace while playing the “Scotland won’t be bullied by a Tory government in Westminster” card, and you can hear the whole sordid history of Empire reverberate between his words. He may as well just play a clip of Mel Gibson prostrated on the gallows with his innards hanging out crying “Freedom!” on repeat. That always does the trick. But there is something else Salmond understands, something else behind the satirical smile…

David Cameron. Anyone who really wishes for the United Kingdom to remain united should lock him in a cupboard and prevent him from going anywhere near the question of Scottish independence. It is simply a fact, quite possibly beyond the understanding of the English political machine, that the more Scots are treated to images of Cameron, with his plum Eton-educated dialect and his Jemima Puddle-duck features, the more the Tory toff does the SNP’s job for them.

You would think Cameron’s advisers would have cottoned onto it by now. The more the English establishment meddles and attempts to cajole, the more distant and alienated Scotland becomes. Back in May last year, exactly 7 days after the wedding of Catherine Middleton and William, Prince of Wales (heir to the throne of the United Kingdom and all its subjugated dominions), the Scottish people returned the SNP to government north of the border, with the first ever working majority in the newly devolved Holyrood parliament. This was no aberration. It was precisely the sight of continuing English herditary power, I believe, that motivated Scots to vote in this way. And now, we have an increasingly chunky, clunky Conservative Prime Minister in London mouthing off about Scottish self-determination, at a time when the Tories have all but disappeared from the landscape of Scottish political life.

No wonder Alex Salmond is giggling under his breath.

Perhaps the SNP should invite Cameron up to Edinburgh? Keep him centre-stage. Let him prance around like a prig for all he’s worth. You get where I’m going with this, right?

Throughout the week, and moreso this weekend as the various broadsheets attempt to digest and explain this sudden heightening of the frisson between the two neighbours, commentators and lauded experts have begun to suggest that Cameron may be playing a wily double-bluff? They raise the thorny question of English subsidies and ask, quite rightly, if the English argument is correct and Westminster does subsidise the Scottish economy as heavily as is claimed, why on earth would Cameron be so staunchly opposed to removing Scottish reliance on the English to balance the books? They suggest that Cameron is all too aware of how he (and various other Shire-folk) are perceived anywhere north of Gretna, and is cannily using it to foster independence, while publicly de-crying it.

Personally, I just can’t see it. Firstly I can’t see Cameron or his ilk as being that politically savvy. Tories very rarely are. By their very nature they are stubborn, self-righteous creatures, deluded in their intractable vision of Britannia – the war-winner; of an influence that is worldwide, of a nation to be envied. In their eyes, it is a land of rolling green fields, of cricket on the lawn, of inestimable courage and fair play. It is the nation that brought modern democracy to the barbarians. Why would anyone seriously wish to leave?

That’s the truth of it. It is this peculiar English fantasy, this continuing imperial daydream which perpetually blinds England, and her rulers to how she is really perceived. You can see it in their sport. Whenever a world cup of any description comes around, to the English, it is practically a given that they will progress, and win. There is always something in the under-current of comment that balks at the idea of there being a contest at all. Of course the English will triumph – they are world leaders at absolutely everything after all!

But they are not. Everyone else knows that. Unfortunately, they (still) don’t. For proof of this, you need only have watched Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun newspaper on Question Time this week. He is well known for his derogatory outbursts towards the Scots, but it was his reference to letting the “Jocks” go their own way and lose the pound so that they could adopt the “Skinto” which really grated the most. It was his casual, throwaway racism and general demeanour of natural, self-inflated superiority which best illuminates the problem with the English attitude. And he bellowed and guffawed without even realising he was doing it. Such sleight of hand, sarcastic triumphalism may play well to the gallery south of the M4, but you can bet your life, no one in Scotland was impressed whether they believe in independence or not.  I was surprised Nicola Sturgeon (Deputy Leader of the SNP) didn’t call him up on it. Alex Salmond certainly would have. But then, Sturgeon didn’t exactly do herself any favours during that particular round-table discussion. She stumbled into, as far as I can see, the only weakness in the SNP’s argument. It has to evolve. It has to become just a little bit more layered. Sooner or later, simply repeating that she “believes in Scottish independence”, that she “believes in an independent Scotland”, or that she “believes in the right of the Scottish people to choose” is not going to be enough. It was David Dimbleby who rightly intervened at one point to suggest to her that “we know that, we aren’t beginners in all of this”.

Then there is Labour’s position, personified by Douglas Alexander during the same edition of Question Time. Oh yes, they did indeed have not one, but two Scottish politicians on the same show! His view, and the view of his Party, is that Scotland and England are stronger together, and weaker apart. He believes wholeheartedly in the Union. As well he might. It is the Union that has fostered Labour’s political dominance of Scotland throughout most of the last hundred years. It is the English right of centre preference for government that has naturally led to its Scottish antithesis. It is only since devolution that Labour’s star has begun to wane. Of course, he wants the Union to remain, not because he thinks it’s best for his people, but because it is in the best interests of his Party. Labour need Scotland joined forever to England’s conservative hip. To remain the only (so-called credible) vote of opposition to English Toryism, Labour must keep itself hamstrung to it. This, to my mind, is the worst of motives. Alexander and his ilk are sycophants, entombed within a cage of their own design. They are financial and philosophical adulterers and I have absolutely no time for them.

So how will things progress during 2012? Well, we’ve got the diamond jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s succession to the throne to look forward to, as well as the London Olympics. Basically another highly visible exercise in English pomp and pageantry followed by a long pretentious, media-imposed gawp at the United Kingdom’s capital city frenetically masturbating itself in front of a worldwide audience.

I wonder if Alex Salmond need even bother getting out of bed?

Related links:

A handbag, a chair, and the historic tale of an unparalleled majority

The simple case for Scottish independence

The end of Britain

Day 11 of Project 31 – a Buttons Blog for every day of December.

I still haven’t quite made up my mind. I tweeted the other night that I wasn’t sure whether David Cameron had balls of steel or whether he had completely lost his mind? I think this is one of those times when I need to let the dust settle, let the press move on and see what comes of it all.

Paddy Ashdown (former leader of the Liberal Democrats and High Representative for Bosnia & Herzegovina) has written a great article in today’s Guardian about the implications of David Cameron’s unexpected veto at the European summit on Thursday. To my ears Paddy Ashdown usually talks a lot of sense. Actually it was Mr. Ashdown who was quoting the wife of Hugh Gaitskell CBE (leader of the Labour party from 1955 until his death in 1963). In a speech to his party’s conference in October 1962 Gaitskell claimed that Britain’s participation in a Federal Europe would mean “the end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of a thousand years of history!” Ashdown commented today that after Gaitskell had finished his speech, he turned to his wife and said “Look how many are clapping, dear!” She replied: “Yes, dear. But it’s the wrong people who are clapping.”

That’s pretty much how it’s felt since Thursday. There are an awful lot of people who seem to think Cameron, in the words of the Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, “played a blinder”. But when the headline in today’s Mail on Sunday reads: ‘Yes, Cameron got it right’, I can’t help but be suspicious. Coincidentally, the paper divides its front page in half. Sat directly above the Mail’s headline, sharing equal space sits a picture of a young man saluting, dressed in a Nazi uniform; the banner to accompany it reads: ‘Tory MP and a toast to the Third Reich’. I’m not exactly sure if the Mail on Sunday isn’t being purposefully ironic.

I’ll post the link to Paddy Ashdown’s column if you fancy reading it for yourself. Although the most intriguing part of the piece for me comes when Ashdown begins to talk about Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond and the implications for David Cameron north of the border. It is surprising that commentators and the media have picked up so soon on the early Christmas present Cameron may have given Salmond. And I suppose it’s true that Cameron’s isolation in Europe may make it easier for Salmond to gain independence? One senior English Lib Dem MP was quoted last night as saying;

So Scotland walks away… and leaves the Little Englanders having finally got their Little England. The Little Englanders think we will be like Switzerland, but with nuclear weapons. Actually, we’ll be like Norway, but without the oil.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/10/paddy-ashdown-foreign-policy

Various bright red triangles

Day 8 of Project 31 – a Buttons Blog for every day of December.

It started to become obvious late last night that this was no ordinary spell of windy weather. At about 11.15pm the imposing red breaking news banner flashed intermittently at the bottom of the screen as Chris Eakin from the BBC’s News Channel reported that the Scottish Government had sent out an advisory notice to the majority of Scotland’s boroughs not to open their schools today. The advice was delivered by Chris in his usual calm, reassuring yet mono-chromatic style. (The world could be coming to an end and Chris Eakin’s voice would barely register an inflection). He is wonderfully, sarcastically dry. And it was laudable but more than a little amusing to watch him try to reel off the names of all the counties affected by the Scottish Government’s advice. You wouldn’t think areas such as South Ayrshire, Strathclyde or East Renfrewshire would give him that much difficulty. English is his first language after all. But he’s obviously happier pronouncing the names of the Syrian Cabinet than he is getting his head round Scottish boroughs.

I do love the BBC News Channel. Some of the presenters have wonderful personalities. It must be difficult to insert a little bit of spontaneity when you’re rigidly institutionalised by autocues and split-second timing while a producer screams into your ear. At time of writing, police have advised people in Central Scotland “not to travel” with various trunk roads and bridges closed as the numbers of the population without power continues to grow. The storm is now important enough for the BBC to have its roaming Scottish reporter attempt to conduct a outside broadcast from Helensburgh. She’ll have definitely earned her pennies by the end of the day. So too will the engineers along with the emergency services, as they grapple with as severe a storm as Scotland usually gets.

For my part, I’m currently snug as a bug in a rug, although the tumult raging around me outside is pretty darn wild. I had a short walk out in it earlier and I can tell you, it’s one of those damaging, dominant winds that leaves you feeling as though you’ve fought for every step. To be honest, the winds haven’t let up for days now. Low pressure systems have raced across the part of the world where I live all week and they just keep on coming. Hopefully this particular storm, although by far the strongest, will be the one that blows it all away and leaves us with a window of peaceful winter weather, for a change? So far, in central, southern Scotland, December has been a wild, wet and windy place to live.

If you’re reading this and are living anywhere within the central belt, south to Dumfries and Kelso, don’t travel, don’t go out unless you have to, and stay safe.

Pale Blue Dot

Day 7 of Project 31 – a Buttons Blog for every day of December.

I’d like to talk a little bit about Voyager.

Now now, what’s with the groans? I don’t mean the one borne out of Gene Roddenberry’s socialist utopia where money has gone the way of the dinosaur, guilt-sodden women from Indiana captain starships and Emergency Medical Holograms gain voting rights. Wow! What a future! I’m talking about Voyager 1, launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 5 September 1977. Despite the fact that its primary mission, which included the closest ever fly-by of both Jupiter and Saturn, ended on 20 November 1980, Voyager 1 has kept going, and is now close to leaving the Solar System behind and heading outward into interstellar Space.

Voyager 1 was one of two probes launched by NASA in the autumn of 1977; its sister, Voyager 2 was launched 2 weeks earlier on 20 August. But although it launched later, Voyager 1 reached both Jupiter and Saturn sooner, having followed a shorter trajectory.

Voyager 1 began photographing Jupiter in January 1979 and made its closest approach on 5 March of that year. Then, following a successful gravitational sling-shot around Jupiter, it reached Saturn by November 1980 and made its closest approach on the 12th of the month. It was the first space probe to provide detailed images of the two largest planets and their moons. After Saturn, the possibility existed to re-program Voyager 1 to use another sling-shot trajectory to steer it out to a fly-by of Pluto (at that time considered to be the farthest most planet). However, this option was not taken and a closer inspection of Saturn’s moon, Titan was decided upon. It was this decision which ultimately ended Voyager 1‘s primary mission and lead to its present (eternal) one.

At time of writing, scientists have reported that Voyager 1 is within imminent reach of the Heliopause; a theoretical boundary where the Sun’s solar wind is no longer strong enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. In other words, the absolute limit of our Sun’s influence – the external limit of our Solar System. Once Voyager 1 passes this threshold, it will truly have reached outer space.

Each of the Voyager space probes carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life. The discs carry photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from people (among them, the then Secretary General of the United Nations (Kurt Waldheim) and the President of the United States (Jimmy Carter), as well as the children of the Planet Earth). The discs also carry a medley of the Sounds of Earth. These include the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a collection of Earth music, including works by Mozart and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode.

Ah, the Seventies!

On 14 February 1990, Voyager 1 took the first ever family portrait of our Solar System as seen from outside,which includes the famous image known as Pale Blue Dot. The photograph was taken at the request of the astronomer, Carl Sagan. After work on the Saturn project had been completed, Sagan began promoting the idea of the spacecraft taking one last picture of Earth. He pointed out at the time that the picture would not be terribly scientific, as the Earth would appear too small for the Voyager‘s cameras to make out any detail, but that such a picture might be useful as a perspective on our place in the cosmos. At first, NASA scientists were sceptical and a whole host of lay-offs and staff re-deployments almost prevented it being taken. Ultimately however, it was, and just as Sagan suggested, it provided humanity with a unique glance in the mirror.

Sagan offered his thoughts on the photograph in his book, A Vision of the Human Future in Space;

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Voyager 1 is expected to continue operating until at least 2025 and is likely to remain the farthest man-made object from Earth.