Saturday, 4 December 2010

1608 Lazy and cold Sunday January 2009

Lazy Saturday, a cold one though, provided the opportunity to catch up on a variety of the unconnected. I had intended to go into the town centre for some fruit and a copy of the Mail on Saturday but it was so cold that I only got as far as the corner shop. The mail has launched a two week issuing of DVD‘s of TV costume dramas commencing with Cranford a delightful study of small town life in 1842, the era of my ancestors in Calne Wiltshire although Cranford is set in the North West with outstanding actors such as Judy Dench, Imelda Staunton, Julia McKenzie, Michael Gabon, Eileen Atkins and Francesca Annis.

Having acquired the paper, I then was able to obtain an overview of TV programmes for the coming week with their excellent magazine and which featured am article interview with Emma Thompson who complains how inhibited British men are from expresses their feelings. The expression of feelings and the giving way to emotions is not in fact the good thing it is often portrayed as being. Being emotional is not the same as caring and being empathetic, being understanding and enlightened. Being emotional and giving way to feelings can be dangerous as well as therapeutic, especially by those in positions of power or authority over others. At a personal level I know I need to lose weight and get more exercise but emotionally I have given way to comfort food eating. It has taken time to build up the mental strength to take the required action and over come emotional needs.

The first programme which attracted my attention is a new eight part series on Christianity a History which promises to be a frank and accurate account of the reality, Sunday at 7 and then on Wednesday a programme about the City of London as the financial capital of Europe at 9. A new series of Dancing on Ice begins on Sunday and the American Idol new series is being shown on Thursday at 8 on ITV 2 followed by The Paul Burrell Story at 10 on Four. There is the second part of Trial and Retribution on Friday so Must catch up with the first perhaps over this weekend.

I have not watch any American Football this season, a game which I enjoy and have seen a couple of live games at Wembley having supported the Chicago Bears and San Francisco 49ers with the T Shirts and there is Man U and Chelsea on Sunday afternoon as well as listening to two radio’s at the same time as Newcastle and Sunderland are playing at the same time on Saturday afternoon, Sunderland away at the Boro. On his way elsewhere Michael Owen scored first at St James and former Newcastle bad boy Bellamy took a pass from former Newcastle Captain Parker to equalise. West Ham went ahead and then 20 year old Carrol playing as number 9 with a new continental London style hair cut headed the draw although there was opportunity to win in the closing minutes. It was a good game, confirmed on Match of the Day later. Sunderland were poor, especially in the first half and the one goal lead, a good goal which Boro had until the last eighty minutes reflected their control of the game. However Kenwyn scored a good equalise and Cisse appeared to be certain to score when a full back managed to toe the ball from his feat in a nano second. This was also a fair result.

The one film from the overview worth seeing appears to be Snow Cake with Alan Rickman at 11.10 this evening. However it conflicted with Match of the Day and when I came to view I decided I was not in the mood. I had watched an Italian actress listed as Gina Lolllobrigida in film earlier in the week called Women of the River, the kind of film designed for the Italian audience rather than international although it had an English dialogue. It was photographed through pastel colours with a laid back style, more Italian Pink Neorealism than Neorealism. Gina plays a small town girl who lives on her own and appeared distinctly out of place young woman living on her own who falls the local spiv smuggler whop dumps her and goes off as she talks of marriage and without knowing she is pregnant. She shops him to the police and three years later breaks out of jail and returns to his smuggling pals but hates having to live a secret life and gives himself up. Gina has been courted by a local policeman who is aware of her relationship with the smuggler, and then of the pregnancy but continues to offer her a home together.

When the father of her child breaks out of prison the policeman suitor goes off in search to offer engaged protection and find she living in a small coastal/riverside community engage in cutting the canes which appeared to be cultivated for harvesting. The cane cutters, men and women go off for the day leaving their very children in the care of a young teenage girl. The policeman suitor tells the young child minder to show him when Gina is working and during her absence Gina’s child drowns. The cane cutters come into town for the funeral just as Gino’s former lover is giving himself up. He is allowed to attend the funeral of their son and the film ends as the couple appear reconciled through tragedy and grief. The film is 1950’s in the era of the Mambo Italiano. Obviously today the mother would have been prosecuted for child neglect the policeman sacked and prosecuted for endangering the lives of a several pre school children.

Oddly I could find no record of the film under this title or in the list of the films of Gina Lolllobrigida in the I.M.D-Internet Movie Database which gives the English translation of most of her film titles or in the Wikipedia article. The article reveals that she was born in Subiaco my place of stay for a visit this decade to Italy. A religious and tourist spa town which was also the birth place of Lucrezia Borgia, with an ancient hill top old town and modern tourist centre just below.

I had commenced to write about Revenge and Feuds, also the subject of a Taggart when inspiration hit me, what if it was not Gina but Sophia Loren and bingo. It is called La Donna del fiume or The River Girl in the USA and then subsequently Women of the River. I have decided not to amend my early comments. The river is the River PO as I suspected. Sophia was born in Rome and when her father refused to marry her mother they went to live in bear Naples and then in Naples with her grandmother, They were extremely poor. The Taggart episode has a very different setting. One of those grim coal mining communities in central Scotland which never recovered from the Miner’s strike, let alone the pit closure. Whatever one encounters individuals or as in this instance a community that says something is best forgotten and left to the past, you know it never has and never should be and as in this instance there is going more tragedy and disaster. In this instance a young miner and his wife were murdered by four other miners because the young man had gone back to work in order to feed his wife and baby, The boy, who had not been registered was adopted by one of the murderers ad he finds out what happened when the bodies of the couple are discovered as the mine is reopened to be turned into a museum.

I attended an international management training course during the later part of the Miner’s strike and the team of which I was a member was allocated the task of preparing a plan for the future of the coal industry as part of an attempt to establish a national energy policy something which Thatcher was resisting. I read the evidence which was quite clearly that the coal industry in the UK was finished because significantly cheaper coal could be obtained elsewhere including the transport costs. The consequences of the all out strike is that governments, then and since, have ensured that the country could not be held to ransom again by buying in supplies and stocking them against future disruption. Last year I went on a trip along the Rive Tyne to Newcastle from where coal was one transported throughout the UK and to the world. Now at South Shields there is a coal terminal taking deliveries from Russia and elsewhere with hills of stockpiled coal.

No doubt the Communist supporting Miner’s Leader, Arthur Scargill, had read the same reports and forecasts which revealed that the industry would be reduced by a half to two thirds within a short period of years. As head of the union what was he going to do, accept that half to two thirds of the men would lose their jobs and livelihoods or fight? What happens in this situation is that basic tribal behaviour takes over and emotions rule the head. However the way Scargill conducted the strike alienated the greater population and with Thatcher as the Prime Minister he and the union was destined to lose. His mistake was not use the power of the union and its position in the wider trade union movement to negotiate the pace of change and the financial and political support to bring alternative employment to the affected communities. The evidence is that he thought he could bring the government down and that this would bring him power within the British Labour Party and movement and push the nation towards far left of centre government.

The rest of the team were all in favour of admitting that coal was to place an increasing smaller in energy policy overall and that the great part of the supply should be brought in. I took a broader and political approach persuading my colleagues that we should press for the retention of the coal industry because of the economic and social impact on the coal mining communities, accepting there would have to be reductions and job losses. I then asked the management college to write a letter as if from the Prime Minister asking the man preparing to present this single energy plan to amend the obvious position of coal to take account of the economic, political and social consequences of buying in from other countries, indicating that he would be recommended for an honour by putting the national interest first. The college arranged for the message to be hand delivered by a fake government messenger on a motorcycle, so while the individual concerned knew it had not actually come from the Prime Minister he assumed it was a college manoeuvre and so he made reference to the communication and that he had decided to amend the plan accordingly. It was one of my finest moments in the world of managements games.

I must make time to read the Audacity of Hope by President Elect Obama before the inauguration later this month, I noted the article by Rachel Swarns in the New York Times that the President’s mother in law is to move into the White House to continuing caring for his daughters while he and his wife went on the long campaigning road. Having a mother or mother in law one trusts to care for one‘s children is not just a wonderful experience for both the children and the grandparent but has saved many a marriage, enabling holidays and outings without worrying too much what is happening to them.

Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post argued earlier in the week that the President Elect is attempting to achieve a balance between his White House staff and the heads of his government and their administrators and advisers without going as far as Nixon’s attempt to reduce the authority of his Cabinet colleagues, He is bringing to the White House experienced operators to lead his priority reforms in health, environment and urban issues with power to cut through the traditional system with Carol M Browner who ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton Administration to control for him implementation of the environment agenda, energy and climate change. Adolfo Carrion, a Bronx politician is wanted for the education and Housing programme in the cities and former Senator Thomas A Daschle will be become the first Cabinet secretary in decades to have an office in the West Wing as Director of Health Reform.

There are critics of the this approach who argue he is creating additional problems not reducing them because they will have to work with the “Ministers” and their departments as well as being able to influence Congress directly and keep the President and his other staff close informed of progress and the inevitable problems Daniel J Weiss a Fellow at the Centre for American progress has described the new positions as Presidential quarterbacks which I think is a great way of explaining their role.

His priority remains creating new jobs or replace those which will inevitable end such as in the motor industry as people approach the environmental issues more seriously as well as from the economic rub down due to the greedy and incompetent baking and trading community, send them all to the Afghanistan Front line I say. One problem to be faced in the likelihood that China will not continue to buy up the USA government Debt, using about one seventh of its new economy so far, at anything like recent levels according top Keith Bradsher in the New York Times. There has also been a warning article in the Washington Post the new president will follow the approach also adopted by the UK Prime Minister of attempting to reign in government expenditure of social security cutting out waste in the Health care Programme both of which appear to have failed in the good time to any impact on total spending and where the use of contracted cleaning in hospital is believed to be a contributor to the number of hospital deaths.

There are also conflicting reports about public participation in the inaugural day. The President to be has achieved power through the support of the American working class, covering all those who depend on their weekly or monthly pay cheques for their standard of living above the underclass but there are indications that the masses are being discouraged from trying to join the party at Washington if they do not have an official invitation or not. One reports states that decisions have been taken by one neighbour state to put controls on who gets through bridges and interstate highways on the day itself- Eric Weiss and Brigid Shulte Washington post. Apparently this is a reaction to reports that 4 million might attempt to assemble in the Mall, a total which has subsequently been downgraded. One encouraging development is that all those who decided they could make a quick buck renting out their homes for the week at inflated price, sufficient for them arrange expensive holidays have been left with no takers, thus misunderstanding where the core support has come from.

I have become much more disciplined about food this week with only two main meals a day, no alcohol, no late night snacks, no sweets and a good reduction in anything which might add fat or cholesterol. Keep it up for the next month and add more exercise and I will be on my way again. The encouraging aspect is that I called in at the giant Azda Wal-Mart at Bolden after going to the pictures on Friday and came out, with one exception only with items on my list. The exception is an Indian dinner package for 2 which included two small portions of different curries, a large portion for two of egg fried rice, two spring rolls and a packet of prawn crackers fro £4, thus £2 when divided into two meals. This will make a break from the eating up the meats and chicken which packed the freezer since about a week before Christmas after the unplanned mini thaw out. On Friday it was fish with everything with two small pieces of bream for lunch and a piece of smoked Mackerel and two salmon fish cakes for the evening meal.

Around midnight on last Wednesday I decided to watch/listen to the third in the series of Royal Institution for the Advancement of Science Christmas lectures which meant switching browsers in order to get a feed to Channel Five which listed the programme under documentaries on demand. Possibly the limited service I had obtained had led to the programme being removed or some other problem so I tried to find a contact page or email and first arrived at a technical service live help page so I stated the problem with a PS about the missing Christmas lecture series. I then went to the “Other problem” response box and mentioned the missing programmes. The result of this or something separate was that I lost both internet connections to the two browsers.

For over two hours I attempted to restore the link and then before going to bed decided to switch the desktop on again and write a note of the sequence of events for the morning when I planned to contact technical service of my internet server for assistance. I thought why not one more attempt and pressed a different link to my multi browser home page and hey presto bingo eureka I was back on line.

What had happened in between was distinctly odd for my lap showed a full connection to my domestic network but there was clearly a blockage directed from the desktop to the wireless modem. I followed an approach previously taken on a similar situation and this eventually led to the Internet settings box on the control panel where I successfully but unintentionally managed to remove the recorded addresses for the two browsers replacing with the default browser which did nor respond and then managed to achieve blank. The sense of failure about what I have done mounted at which point I decided to go to bed and then returned to make notes and found all was well.

Disappointed that I was unable to complete the viewing I found the site of the Royal Institution where it is possible, in theory, to pre order a DVD on the series for £6 including postage. A copy of the DVD is being sent to every school in the UK for free. However before an order can be accepted on line it is necessary to register which I did with the promise that an acknowledgement email will b sent to activate the account. No E mail arrived so I attempted to use the direct contact system and found that this is also required information which was not available and which I had reservations about providing the information anyway. So much for computer technology now. Bah!

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