One of my preoccupations is the nature of time and the ability to switch from one reality into another outside of what is usually understood as time. Time then is an agreed form of measuring between one moment and another and normal time is the awareness of time that we develop in adulthood which enables us to make an approximate judgement - of the time of day, or how much time has elapsed or remains if we are asked, or ask ourselves to make a judgement without having to look at a watch or clock. However when we are engaged in something which we find interesting or pleasurable it can appear that time is moving fast and too quickly while in moments of boredom or when we are looking forward to future event it can appear that time has slowed down. Both states are real to us although they may appear very different to any other person standing immediately next to us.
It is when one attempts to defining reality that the description is more complicated. Look at a photograph of a place which you have visited and what do you see, think and feel? It will not be the same as someone who has not visited, or who has visited at a different time than you or is from a different land culture, or generation. A young person who passes by the site where the twin towers stood before 9/11 in twenty five and fifty years time will not be emotionally upset by the experience, as someone who watched with helpless horror as the second plane hit and then saw the towers collapse. I found it difficult to go and see any of the films about that day because I thought and felt what it would have been like to have been involved and I thought of the pain of their families, friends and work colleagues. I remember without difficulty who I was with, what I was doing, what I then did, what then happened, the reaction of school girls on joining my train into central London as they talked together and on their mobile phones, to the atmosphere in the restaurant compared to previous visits and watching 24 hour news programmes from both sides of the Atlantic when I return to the home of my mother and aunt, staying up until the early hours.
As a consequence of 9/11 some people have developed a concern about being in a tall building and one has only to see the security measures at Canary Wharf to understand the impact such an event can have for decades afterwards. Yet when before Christmas my motel room was in the centre of a city on the seventh floor, I did not make such a connection, even when at one point I went to Canary Wharf en route to cinema for which I had a free voucher. I looked out of my window several times and what I saw was different, not because of the impact of different times of day or weather because I could see where I had worked for two years as a young man, the road which I also walked on many occasions after midnight when visiting jazz clubs in central London and I missed the last train to my nearest home station and then walked the six miles from East Croydon station, and I also kept seeing images from the film Lost in Translation, looking out for a hotel in the sky over a city full of life from which you were separated. As I switched between such thoughts, memories and images, my experience of reality would have been different from anyone looking out at the same moment, even if they had also experienced the things I remembered at the same time, If two people sat in adjacent rooms looking out of their windows with phones or recording machines describing what they could see, it is unlikely they would select the same parts of the image at the same time. I can see a double length tram cross over the junction, which I would miss when I focussed on the further education college which O attended for evening classes for a local government examination, Even descriptions of static objects are likely to be different, such as the height and width of buildings and their colours. Both sets of experience are real to the two individuals describing and to anyone else looking out of the 50 to 100 windows with the same broad perspective but they would be different
An interesting example of the question, was do we mean by reality happened on Saturday through the 2003 Richard Donner film Timeline whose actors included a subdued Billy Connolly as a Scottish archaeology Professor excavating a site in France where in the 100 years war a young female aristocrat was hanged by the English in view of her countrymen thus enraging them sufficiently to achieve victory which otherwise would not have occurred. The Team included the son of the archaeologist, a bright and creative young women and a French speaker afraid of his own shadow. The team become concerned when the archaeology Professor disappears and they only learn where he is when taken to the experimental laboratory of the organisation sponsoring the dig. The organisation has mastered the ability to breakdown matter into the smallest particles and reassemble, but unlike beam me up Scotty, which is from one point to another in an instant, the device is so far only able to transport back and forth to a specific point in time on the Dig, to the ruins of the village of Castlegard and the nearby La Roque Castle in 1357. One unusual aspect is that the film takes the aside of the French against the English, what interested me most is that of one other member of the group decides to remain, because of a relationship established, and its subsequent outcome. The films experiments with time and each of the four characters who survive being in the same war and events possesses very different form of reality and as someone with a vivid imagination, I was able to transport myself in time with them, but also stand back and observe what took place and the different perspectives. The film was enjoyable as a film with the careful reproduction of the period, knights fighting, a besieged castle, individual heroics and romance, and Anna Friel, last seen a few days ago in Goal 2 as Geordie nurse. Earlier I had switched from a Newcastle humiliation by Manchester United to watch Bridge of Time in which an aid and peace Worker, who is also a published humanitarian and philosopher, is hijacked en route to a mission in Africa and taken to a Shangri-La. I would have not switched films had I not seen and critically enjoyed this film before.
A second preoccupation of mine is the interlinking of people and events and the previous night Alistair Campbell, known as former Prime Minister Tony Blair's spin doctor visited a family in the North East who when several decades ago. a daughter contracted leukaemia and died as a child, they decided that they wanted to do something to further the understanding and treatment of this killer disease and set about fund raising for what has become an internationally recognised charity and where from 20 to 30 percent chance of survival with treatment, the odds have increased to more 4 out of every five. As some 24500 new cases are diagnosed each year, that is still nearly 5000 individuals who do not survive. The parents who first started the fund raising have died but a sister was able to talk on camera about her family and the fund raising.
It is easy to be cynical about the involvement of politicians, sports personalities, film and stage actors and other personalities who have a high profile involvement in charities. Long before Alistair Campbell feature daily in the media a close friend of his died from Leukaemia and then the man's daughter and Mr Campbell has been actively involved since and with his national position became one of the celebrity faces of what has become the main fund raising for research body in the UK. In my previous writing I mentioned that over the past two decades Sir Ian Botham has walked, twice from Lands end to John O'Groats, once over the Alps with Elephants and his most recent effort was to walk through 15 cities in 9 days at average of 4.5 miles an hour and walking a marathon every one of the days in order to raise millions, some ten, for Leukaemia research. However his efforts are just one many of celebrities, some like Gary Lineker, were directly affected when his eldest son was diagnosed 15 years ago, while others do it because it needs to be done, as do all those families of the survivors and those who do not. Their efforts and the successes and the tragedies ought to be a constant reminder of the fragility of any belief in the ongoing nature of our physical being and of any time of happiness, achievement, wealth and power we might inherit or acquire. We should always enjoy and appreciate the great and wonderful times but never assume their permanence, or that such moment can be recaptured in the same way, although contemporary photos, films and subsequently created, writing, poems, music, films, theatricals and paintings can provide an approximation.
My immediate response to drafting the above was not to seek my cheque book or resolve to join or become activity in a charity but to give the kitchen a thorough clean for the second time in a month, as the precursor of a house clean and dust also for the second time in the month, to make a good salad lunch with the remaining King prawns, with two slices of bread and watch the film Kinky Boots on DVD. Kinky Boots has to be compared with the Full Monty, the tale of a group of men on the dole as the core steel goods industry of Sheffield downsized in the face of international competition and changes in public consumer demand. I had been thinking about the decline of the Sheffield cutlery making industry earlier after looking at one internet firm in the city and also looking up the Hallmarks for silver plate in order to try an establish the value of a remaining 81 place set which my mother and aunt had provided at least three decades ago but which were only used when they visited at Christmas or Easter. Where are the missing three items?
Kinky Boots is about a 4 generation shoe factory in Northampton which faced a loss of international and home demand for its products and decided to experiment with a lime of erotic footwear for men who like to dress up in female attire and those who perform as drag Queens. The culmination of the Full Monty is when the men make their first full strip on stage and fitted into the development in the eighties and nineties of men stripping exclusively for women which started with small shows in public houses and led to full shows on theatres. The development demonstrated the change in social attitudes and acceptability between the days when only stationary nude posing was allowed on the London stage at the Windmill Theatre and the widespread development of licences strip clubs, sex shops and those selling erotic wear and goods prominently located in town and city centres.
I know a little about the shoe and boot industry over the past 150 years because my maternal great grandfather is known to have been a shoe maker throughout his working life who with one of his sons recorded in one census the change to making boots and other goods from leather imported from one area of Spain as first industrial processes were introduced in Northampton and other Midland towns. His son became a rural messenger and postman but the trade of shoemaking was continued by the youngest son in a neighbouring county town. Some of the main features of the film are factual in that the firm was a four generation enterprise in Northampton. The change to making the erotic footwear occurred by chance with an enquiry from a fetish shop in Folkestone which selected the factory from a list obtained from the Footwear Federation and the company was able to develop and expand the range after attending a footwear show in Germany, the film ends with a show in Milan. The actual firm became the Kinky Boots Factory, after the BBC gave the name to its programme Trouble at the Top. The basic facts do not make a full length fictional story so the film tackles the issue of sexual orientation and identity by also focussing on the life of one drag Queen performer who is transported from Soho club land to becoming the creative designed for the factory and its Milan collection. The film does overlook the seedier aspects of the lives of those who enjoy thigh length boots with a whip built into the side of one so that it possible see such wear displayed in the High Street, just as the growth of public stripping, including persuading several hundred Tynesiders to strip off for contemporary art photographs, overlooks the recruitment of young middle European teenagers into sexual slavery as lap dancers for capital city centre clubs. It also led to members of the Women's Institute in Yorkshire stripping off for a Calendar to raise funds for Leukaemia Research, raising over £1 million for the same organisation of which Sir Ian Botham is the fund raising President.
I mention this fact because to launch the film premier in London, the film company, Buena Vista International who also created the Calendar Girls film, held a charity Kinky Boot auction on behalf of the Elton John AIDS Foundation with a host of celebrities contributing designs, including Cher, Joan Collins and Elton, plus e the original boot designed for the Folkestone store and those worn in the film by its Drag Queen Lola. Ok so some of my links are flimsy but who is to prove that my perception of time and reality is less closer to the truth than yours?
It is when one attempts to defining reality that the description is more complicated. Look at a photograph of a place which you have visited and what do you see, think and feel? It will not be the same as someone who has not visited, or who has visited at a different time than you or is from a different land culture, or generation. A young person who passes by the site where the twin towers stood before 9/11 in twenty five and fifty years time will not be emotionally upset by the experience, as someone who watched with helpless horror as the second plane hit and then saw the towers collapse. I found it difficult to go and see any of the films about that day because I thought and felt what it would have been like to have been involved and I thought of the pain of their families, friends and work colleagues. I remember without difficulty who I was with, what I was doing, what I then did, what then happened, the reaction of school girls on joining my train into central London as they talked together and on their mobile phones, to the atmosphere in the restaurant compared to previous visits and watching 24 hour news programmes from both sides of the Atlantic when I return to the home of my mother and aunt, staying up until the early hours.
As a consequence of 9/11 some people have developed a concern about being in a tall building and one has only to see the security measures at Canary Wharf to understand the impact such an event can have for decades afterwards. Yet when before Christmas my motel room was in the centre of a city on the seventh floor, I did not make such a connection, even when at one point I went to Canary Wharf en route to cinema for which I had a free voucher. I looked out of my window several times and what I saw was different, not because of the impact of different times of day or weather because I could see where I had worked for two years as a young man, the road which I also walked on many occasions after midnight when visiting jazz clubs in central London and I missed the last train to my nearest home station and then walked the six miles from East Croydon station, and I also kept seeing images from the film Lost in Translation, looking out for a hotel in the sky over a city full of life from which you were separated. As I switched between such thoughts, memories and images, my experience of reality would have been different from anyone looking out at the same moment, even if they had also experienced the things I remembered at the same time, If two people sat in adjacent rooms looking out of their windows with phones or recording machines describing what they could see, it is unlikely they would select the same parts of the image at the same time. I can see a double length tram cross over the junction, which I would miss when I focussed on the further education college which O attended for evening classes for a local government examination, Even descriptions of static objects are likely to be different, such as the height and width of buildings and their colours. Both sets of experience are real to the two individuals describing and to anyone else looking out of the 50 to 100 windows with the same broad perspective but they would be different
An interesting example of the question, was do we mean by reality happened on Saturday through the 2003 Richard Donner film Timeline whose actors included a subdued Billy Connolly as a Scottish archaeology Professor excavating a site in France where in the 100 years war a young female aristocrat was hanged by the English in view of her countrymen thus enraging them sufficiently to achieve victory which otherwise would not have occurred. The Team included the son of the archaeologist, a bright and creative young women and a French speaker afraid of his own shadow. The team become concerned when the archaeology Professor disappears and they only learn where he is when taken to the experimental laboratory of the organisation sponsoring the dig. The organisation has mastered the ability to breakdown matter into the smallest particles and reassemble, but unlike beam me up Scotty, which is from one point to another in an instant, the device is so far only able to transport back and forth to a specific point in time on the Dig, to the ruins of the village of Castlegard and the nearby La Roque Castle in 1357. One unusual aspect is that the film takes the aside of the French against the English, what interested me most is that of one other member of the group decides to remain, because of a relationship established, and its subsequent outcome. The films experiments with time and each of the four characters who survive being in the same war and events possesses very different form of reality and as someone with a vivid imagination, I was able to transport myself in time with them, but also stand back and observe what took place and the different perspectives. The film was enjoyable as a film with the careful reproduction of the period, knights fighting, a besieged castle, individual heroics and romance, and Anna Friel, last seen a few days ago in Goal 2 as Geordie nurse. Earlier I had switched from a Newcastle humiliation by Manchester United to watch Bridge of Time in which an aid and peace Worker, who is also a published humanitarian and philosopher, is hijacked en route to a mission in Africa and taken to a Shangri-La. I would have not switched films had I not seen and critically enjoyed this film before.
A second preoccupation of mine is the interlinking of people and events and the previous night Alistair Campbell, known as former Prime Minister Tony Blair's spin doctor visited a family in the North East who when several decades ago. a daughter contracted leukaemia and died as a child, they decided that they wanted to do something to further the understanding and treatment of this killer disease and set about fund raising for what has become an internationally recognised charity and where from 20 to 30 percent chance of survival with treatment, the odds have increased to more 4 out of every five. As some 24500 new cases are diagnosed each year, that is still nearly 5000 individuals who do not survive. The parents who first started the fund raising have died but a sister was able to talk on camera about her family and the fund raising.
It is easy to be cynical about the involvement of politicians, sports personalities, film and stage actors and other personalities who have a high profile involvement in charities. Long before Alistair Campbell feature daily in the media a close friend of his died from Leukaemia and then the man's daughter and Mr Campbell has been actively involved since and with his national position became one of the celebrity faces of what has become the main fund raising for research body in the UK. In my previous writing I mentioned that over the past two decades Sir Ian Botham has walked, twice from Lands end to John O'Groats, once over the Alps with Elephants and his most recent effort was to walk through 15 cities in 9 days at average of 4.5 miles an hour and walking a marathon every one of the days in order to raise millions, some ten, for Leukaemia research. However his efforts are just one many of celebrities, some like Gary Lineker, were directly affected when his eldest son was diagnosed 15 years ago, while others do it because it needs to be done, as do all those families of the survivors and those who do not. Their efforts and the successes and the tragedies ought to be a constant reminder of the fragility of any belief in the ongoing nature of our physical being and of any time of happiness, achievement, wealth and power we might inherit or acquire. We should always enjoy and appreciate the great and wonderful times but never assume their permanence, or that such moment can be recaptured in the same way, although contemporary photos, films and subsequently created, writing, poems, music, films, theatricals and paintings can provide an approximation.
My immediate response to drafting the above was not to seek my cheque book or resolve to join or become activity in a charity but to give the kitchen a thorough clean for the second time in a month, as the precursor of a house clean and dust also for the second time in the month, to make a good salad lunch with the remaining King prawns, with two slices of bread and watch the film Kinky Boots on DVD. Kinky Boots has to be compared with the Full Monty, the tale of a group of men on the dole as the core steel goods industry of Sheffield downsized in the face of international competition and changes in public consumer demand. I had been thinking about the decline of the Sheffield cutlery making industry earlier after looking at one internet firm in the city and also looking up the Hallmarks for silver plate in order to try an establish the value of a remaining 81 place set which my mother and aunt had provided at least three decades ago but which were only used when they visited at Christmas or Easter. Where are the missing three items?
Kinky Boots is about a 4 generation shoe factory in Northampton which faced a loss of international and home demand for its products and decided to experiment with a lime of erotic footwear for men who like to dress up in female attire and those who perform as drag Queens. The culmination of the Full Monty is when the men make their first full strip on stage and fitted into the development in the eighties and nineties of men stripping exclusively for women which started with small shows in public houses and led to full shows on theatres. The development demonstrated the change in social attitudes and acceptability between the days when only stationary nude posing was allowed on the London stage at the Windmill Theatre and the widespread development of licences strip clubs, sex shops and those selling erotic wear and goods prominently located in town and city centres.
I know a little about the shoe and boot industry over the past 150 years because my maternal great grandfather is known to have been a shoe maker throughout his working life who with one of his sons recorded in one census the change to making boots and other goods from leather imported from one area of Spain as first industrial processes were introduced in Northampton and other Midland towns. His son became a rural messenger and postman but the trade of shoemaking was continued by the youngest son in a neighbouring county town. Some of the main features of the film are factual in that the firm was a four generation enterprise in Northampton. The change to making the erotic footwear occurred by chance with an enquiry from a fetish shop in Folkestone which selected the factory from a list obtained from the Footwear Federation and the company was able to develop and expand the range after attending a footwear show in Germany, the film ends with a show in Milan. The actual firm became the Kinky Boots Factory, after the BBC gave the name to its programme Trouble at the Top. The basic facts do not make a full length fictional story so the film tackles the issue of sexual orientation and identity by also focussing on the life of one drag Queen performer who is transported from Soho club land to becoming the creative designed for the factory and its Milan collection. The film does overlook the seedier aspects of the lives of those who enjoy thigh length boots with a whip built into the side of one so that it possible see such wear displayed in the High Street, just as the growth of public stripping, including persuading several hundred Tynesiders to strip off for contemporary art photographs, overlooks the recruitment of young middle European teenagers into sexual slavery as lap dancers for capital city centre clubs. It also led to members of the Women's Institute in Yorkshire stripping off for a Calendar to raise funds for Leukaemia Research, raising over £1 million for the same organisation of which Sir Ian Botham is the fund raising President.
I mention this fact because to launch the film premier in London, the film company, Buena Vista International who also created the Calendar Girls film, held a charity Kinky Boot auction on behalf of the Elton John AIDS Foundation with a host of celebrities contributing designs, including Cher, Joan Collins and Elton, plus e the original boot designed for the Folkestone store and those worn in the film by its Drag Queen Lola. Ok so some of my links are flimsy but who is to prove that my perception of time and reality is less closer to the truth than yours?
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