Awake early on 11 12 13 and in a good mood after an excellent which over time my prove to have been an important day in terms of the decisions taken on the matters on which I reflected as the day progressed. On the way home I had to deal with three men who entered a packed Metro train high on something but not drink who were make an exhibition upsetting the young women in the window sat opposite and the other passengers. I resurrected the best social work skills and what could have been a nasty situation ended well. The day had gone well with the speech of President Obama in South Africa and restless population turning against their president. I then enjoyed a visit by public Transport to Newcastle and onward to the Metro Centre for an Imax production of the Hunger Games, catching Fire which was excellent and certainly one of my films of the year so far. In the evening situation comedy Hebburn took a giant leap forward in whit, understanding and exceptionally well acted emotions also then catching up on episodes three and four of the third and final series, I believe of Borgen.
So there is a lot to write before I can return to reflections on matter more important to me and to others covering the issues of state and professional integrity and confidentiality, the Official Secrets Act, a Confidentiality agreement in the High Court as well as countless statues covering my former work of a thirty years period an which includes the use of information technology and data protection all one on one side and Freedom of Speech, access to information and duties within the law as well as professional and ethical commitment to protect and further the interest of those unable or prevented from protecting and furthering their own interests.
The organised memorial service spectacle arranged by the South African Government for heads of states, other personalities and for the worlds media reminded me of the spectacle later witnessed in the film The Hunger Games-Catching fire.
It was however brilliant to see that while the South African people present in the stadium came to celebrate the life of their former president and civil rights hero Nelson Mandela who had shifted from a man of violence and terror while in prison to one of peace and reconciliation and they also warmly received the words of President Obama and someone of the calibre of Archbishop Tutu, they expressed open contempt for their current president and corrupt government as well as indifference to the platitudes and the Johnny come lately converts and the brazen two faced leaders Obama came to eulogise what Mandela came to stand for while terrorising their own people at home. Political hypocrisy, double talk, blatant misrepresentation, and rewriting history knows no bounds.
South Africa politicians rightly can talk of being a young democracy and that it will take generations to undo the lack of education, lack of economic advancement of the black and coloured people before the country can improve the lives of the majority but this is no excuse for politicians to line their own pockets, protecting their own and their families future at the expense of the people. There is also hypocrisy on the part of the media whose criticism of the widening gulf between the rich and poor in South Africa appears to help them turning of the spotlight to the widening gulf in the UK.
When I came to begin writing found the internet was down as was the link to the TV but remembering the appropriate text from the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Don’t Panic I disconnected everything turned the wireless router off, waited a minute or two switched back on and whaala, everything worked so I celebrated with a game of chess, number fifteen the present run of winning games level 5 and then made progress in the latest game of Mah-Jong although I do not believe this game will prove a top of the leader board experience while I have achieved the latest run of 1000 games of patience without abandoning a game in defeat, but still some way of the run of 1350 as I also approach 3000 games played on the current PC.
After a light lunch of two pieces of smoked mackerel I made my way down to the Metro and into Newcastle when I notice that individuals were touching their passes on the barriers although these were pen. I queried with an official who explained they were encouraging everyone to get into the habit of using the system on entry and exist before the barriers became fully operational. Later there as a notice about this flashed on the platform notice board. I purchased a £1.50 bad of winkles in the Grainger market and then enjoyed a coffee at McDonalds for £1.19 my only expenses on this part of the trip although in returning home I was able to purchased more hard boiled sweets for the night, a packet of soft liquorice and two packs of shaving razors for just over £5.
Making my way into Eldon Square and don to the central bus station I caught a quick service to the Metro Centre although on return I found that the 100 is non stop and appears to take half as long starting and ending at Monument and operating about 5 buses an hour. Although I had my digital radio and earphones with me I spent the journey writing a series of letters so on arrival at the centre and seeing a WH Smith I went for the an additional notebook and ball point pens but stopped on finding that a reported book cost £3 with a similar price for a pack of pens, about twice as expensive as elsewhere. After collecting both tickets from the machine at the Odeon which is in a direct route from the Blue branch immediately passing Wetherspoons and an expensive eat all you can buffet with significantly less choice that in the restaurant area in the red/ yellow link sections. I went in search of an alternative newsagent and from the electronic do it yourself store locater discovered there was another newsagent just below with the Boots and my Smiths some distance away. Could I find the one below but the exercise walking about in search did me good and eventually it was located where it was shown on the map but just a kiosk with limited stock and no pens or notebooks.
On returning to the Odeon I used most of my remaining Premium card points for a cherry one scoop ice cream although there were sufficient left for a two or three scoop helping an then enjoyed sitting in a comfy chair before entering the theatre which was not ready. The selected Premium seat was too close to the screen for my liking and I was able to move two rows back which was excellent.
Given the good publicity I had nearly gone to see the first film but the subject of a competition in which the contestants killed each other did not appeal.
After surviving the 74th Hunger Games, "tributes" Katniss( the female) Everdeen and Peeta( the male) Mellark return home to District 12. They now are required to take a victory tour of the country. President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) visits Katniss and tells her she inspired rebellions in the districts when she and Peeta threatened suicide so both might survive the games. He orders Katniss to convince the country her and Peeta's love was real and the reason for their actions, and to convince Snow himself.
The tour first visits District 11, home of Rue, the young girl Katniss tried to protect in the Games. Katniss and Peeta voice their personal thoughts regarding both districts' fallen tributes. A man in the crowd whistles the tune Katniss and Rue used to signal each other, and makes the three-finger salute of District 12. Everyone in the crowd follows suit until a Peacekeeper shoots the man dead, shocking Katniss. Their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, tells Katniss and Peeta the "show" of their relationship must continue for the rest of their lives. Katniss suggests a public engagement between herself and Peeta, which is carried out and celebrated at Snow's home in the Capitol. They are horrified at the extravagance and the food where as once the Romans are reported to do, they make themselves sick in order to be able to eat all the food available while those in the district starve.
Returning home, Katniss warns her friend Gale Hawthorne(male) of Snow's threat to kill both their families. Peacekeepers crack down in District 12, and Gale is publicly whipped after attacking new Head Peacekeeper Romulus Thread because of his action in attacking an elder without cause. As he threatens to also kill Katniss he is informed who she is and also about Peeta and reluctantly holds back promising that next time he will not be influenced thus also revealing that having give free reign to his security butchers the President is unable to control what they do,
Snow announces Panem's third Quarter Quell, a special version of the Games held every 25 years. This is the idea of Plutarch Heavensbee, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a way of turning the population away from Katniss as she is forced to kill the other Tribute involved in order to survive although she is to be killed as well. The Tribute survivors from previous years are also viewed as threat and therefore will be killed as a consequence..
Katniss immediately devotes herself to ensuring Peeta becomes the Quarter Quell's victor, should he compete in the Games, still full of guilt about those she has killed and reluctant to kill again, with only the threat to her family holding her back from open rebellion.
At the selection process, Katniss, the district's only living female tribute is selected, and Haymitch as arranged selected by chaperone Effie Trinket an extraordinary vain and superficial female creature who appears oblivious to the reality of the world around her, or so t appears. However Peeta volunteers to take Haymitch's place and the system is such that this has to be accepted be accepted and the couple are taken quickly tot eh official trains, without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones.
We see the process of training, developing their skills and a performance test together with introductions to the other contestants. Katniss resists the plan to join forces with some of the contestants but under pressures selects Mags an elderly woman who has volunteers to protect a younger woman from her district as a couple who although intelligent appear to lack the ferociousness of the other including a city socialite who appears self cantered an confident. She is counselled to reconsidered. Peeta pretends they have married in secret and that Katniss is also pregnant and while this also affects the audience is has no effect on he President
They have already attracted great attention in the City on the official grand drive in chariot when their outfit appears to catch fire in a form of phosphorescence. For the TV audience watched ceremony, the dress designer had insisted she wears When she twirls in the dress to display it to the audience, it bursts into flames and transforms into an outfit resembling a mocking jay, designed by Cinna. As a punishment for the scene it caused, Cinna is savagely beaten seconds before an onlooking Katniss enters the arena.
This they quickly find is a large area of tropical forest with beach and pools and where there is one pool which appears to marked in twelve segments with a construction at the centre which appears as the contest continues.`
Moments after the Games begin, Katniss allies with Finnick Odair the self possessed young socialite from the city who also has been given a hold present to indicate that he is one of her allies together with the elderly woman called Mags and soon after moving forward in the jungle an electrical forecefield shocks Peeta, stopping his heartbeat until Finnick revives him.
It begins to emerge that once every hours lightening strikes the same tree causing a new threat to beset the competitors with the second a dense low lying creeping fogs which becomes poisonous to the exposed body when touched.
Mags sacrifices herself to a poisonous fog to allow Finnick to save Peeta instead of her and they only survive by realising that although painful water acts as mins to cleansing the skin. The temperature in the forest and atmosphere causes dehydration but somehow supporter part of the games organisation has provided them with a tap which can be used by inserting into tree to siphon off water.
The next problem encountered are murderous apes attack. Peeta is again saved when a woman from District 6, a camouflage expert and drug addict, sacrifices herself. They escape to the beach, and are met by District 3's tributes, Wires and Beetle, and District 7's tribute, Johanna Mason who are there to join forces
It is only then that one of new arrivals, Wires discovers the arena is designed like a clock and every hour a specific attack occurs in its designated section. Having worked this out Snow and his game organisers start to rotate the clock in such a way as the tm cannot work out which sector is to become the focus of an attack.
He dies and another of the newcomers works out away to electrocute the two remaining tributes outside the alliance, District 2's Brutus and Endbrain, using wire and a tree that is struck by lightning each noon and midnight. Johanna and Katniss lay the wire while Finnick and Peeta guard Beetle as he wraps the tree. When the wire snaps, Johanna attacks Katniss, cutting the tracker out of her arm. Katniss tries to find Peeta at the tree. Unable to, she attaches the remaining wire to an arrow and shoots it at the force field during a lightning strike, destroying the arena and causing a power failure
.
Katniss awakens in an aircraft with an unconscious Beetee. Entering the cockpit she finds Haymitch, Finnick and Plutarch Heavensbee, the head gamemaker, revealed to be a rebel against Snow. Learning she is on her way to District 13, though Johanna and Peeta were taken away by the Capitol, she attempts to attack Haymitch for not fulfilling his promise of saving Peeta. Plutarch sedates her and she awakens days later with Gale by her side, who informs her that her family is safe but District 12 has been destroyed.
The film can be appreciated at several levels. It an engaging adventure with excellent acting. It can also be regarded as logical extension of the current enthusiasm for televised reality show with the latest series about surviving in the wilds of Australia Get me out of Here, recently completed. It is also about divide and rule, bread and circuses and length which ruthless dictators and those who gain from operating a regime going to any lengths to preserve their position. It was the right film at the right time I was also impressed with the performance of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss.
On Metro stations and platforms Hebburn is described a as place on earth and not to do with heaven I have very mixed feelings about this series now its second season and featuring the community in South Tyneside closest to Gateshead. The main industries of shipbuilding and Switch get manufacturer Reyrolle have gone with the largely Irish and Catholic origin a strong and dominating one with the equally strongly Labour party dominating with its posh club compared to the seedy Unionist club long the main room. The town largely made up of uniform council housing with gardens replacing the former terrace back to back streets, While the town had a modern civic centre which includes a modern swimming pool with facilities for all the family there was a lack of shopping facilities with families wanting to make major purchases of furniture, clothing and other goods having to go to Newcastle or South Shields within the centre of neighbouring Jarrow there was significant better. It only over the past two decades that there has been the growth of Supermarkets with three major and several smaller units in South Shields, one major an substantial in Jarrow, a huge superstore in Bolden but none until last few years in Hebburn where life revolved the working man’s club and entertainment pub.
Despite the involvement of the local established and highly regarded actress Gina Mckee I did not know what to make of he series or how townsfolk would react to the portrayal of its people especially its lasses as moron and sex crazed where social activities comprised shopping when the cash was available for cloths and make up and hairdressing into Newcastle for a club and otherwise the local social club pub. Having exploited the East End of London, Liverpool, Yorkshire and more recently Glasgow for situational comedies about the working, or non working underclass, it was probably to bring out all the clichés and stereotypes about somewhere in the North East It would be OK if it as funny especially as there was no audience with many scenes shot to show the ton as it is. It was amusing because of my knowledge often area and essential viewing because of this but in terms previous series in the same vein I was disappointed, disappointed that is until the second series which became funnier in kind way and culminating in a moving an authentic episode this week which I believe has talent the series onto a different level.
Gina Mckee plays the proud mum who wont let anyone use her best room unless the occasion demands who this season has tried her hand at selling housing although the establishment colleagues ensure that had was allocated only the worst properties to get rid off,, and where she has now branched out in making cup cakes He typical North husband with an enthusiasms for football, beer , fish and chips and pies has had a stroke and is in rebellion at the added control with his wife and mother now have over him. There at home daughter tried hard to ape Geordie Shore and the Essex girls with her friend who is significantly more of a slapper and her club singer whose school son by a previous relationship has become a skilled thief. The mother in law has organised her fellow residents of a home for the elderly but has returned home complete with stair lift after being left a house which she sold for coppers to the son and daughter in law to ensure she continues to get her full wacky of the social, especially as the main bread winner is now on the permanent disabled sick.
The series has revolved around the arrival back home of h on ho unknown to his family has married a girl from lower middle class home in a drunken moment in Las Vegas. who mother has pretensions and a retiring hen pecked husband. The young man has been working as a journalist, giving up his job to become a writer only for this to fall through. His wife had been a bright student and finds her temporary stay become permanent as her husband takes a low paid post as editor of the local free newspaper. Their predicament in a wafer thin wall bedroom, when his wife is the butt for his sister and her best mate who the son once dated becomes even greater when she becomes pregnant as does the girl friend of the club singer, but her relationship becomes challenged with the arrival of a former male friend while the sister takes a course at the former Hebburn Tec.
The day to day week by week storylines came to a head last night when the daughter in law gives birth several weeks prematurely coinciding with the publication in the magazine of a national newspaper of the diary her husband has kept and which the paper has edited out all the complimentary leading the picture a high emotional and unliveable wife in pregnancy. There are two episodes to go as the residents of six flats at renovated Westmorland Court were evacuated following a fire at one, the second incident at the Court within three months according to the local authority area Newspaper the Shields Gazette.
As I passed Newcastle Station yesterday on my way home I wondered on the progressed made to the outside and what I assume is to be the new ticket office and customer service centre, something was not mentioned to date in the excellent Sky Channel One series All Aboard East Coast Train and which later in the day featured Derby Day between Newcastle and visitors Sunderland and where the home side lost 3.0 always an event likely to cause trouble. Had the side lost then supporters would have been inclined to leave early and get away as quickly as possible while the Newcastle crowd remained in the ground celebrating to into town to do likewise. However with a lost there was an element, some of who would not have been in ground but in surrounding pubs and bars showing the game or would have waited for the news just to take the opportunity to have a punch up with the visiting supporters. Several staff cars were badly damaged as the scum attempted to get to the visiting supports by using the cars to get onto a roof giving access to thee station. The visiting fans were penned in a narrow yard ending the arrival of three special trains travelling from Sunderland to the station. Others would have come on the Metro route travelling incognito among the home supporters, by bus and by car.
The edition feature the female station manager and the organisation of the departure of several thousands students from Durham University as they made their way home with trains at half hourly intervals. Extra staff were n hand to put luggage at speed in the special luggage van so as to avoid the train being leaving the station in over the 90 second turn around time, after which the East Coast Train paid a penalty to rail track.
Previous editions have featured the team in the restaurant car travelling early and providing breakfasts especially to he first class passengers who now have a meal at their table provided as part of their ticket. Another episode feature the work of Trolley ladies and counter which has a target of making a certain amount each journey to balance the books. Newcastle has been a regular featured station which included those who see the trains depart and the weekend stag and her do’s both arriving in Newcastle or visiting the cities. Football was also the subject of trains arriving and departing from Kings Cross one Saturday and the insistence of no alcohol trains which result in any alcohol being confiscated and those who attempt to smuggle and drink when onboard at risk of prosecution. This applies to anyone travelling although alcohol packed away in luggage is not checked.
The training is centred at York where the HQ for the line with its 19 stations and 155 trains a day is located and a driver and the supervision as well as the retirement of someone leaving after a lifetime of service at York. The series mirrors a similar one covering the West Coast line from Euston to Liverpool and Glasgow on a different channel..
I would have been prepared for what happened after three young men got on the train at Gateshead although I was able to drum my social work skills to defuse what could have become a nasty situation,
Before this I had sat opposite a young woman in early twenties at the aisle and with the departure of two people she had moved to the window seat while stayed in position so we had plenty of keg room. Before I could adjust the situation one of the young men sat at the window next to me and the other opposite with the third standing and helping the one opposite who appeared to have been in a fight with a cut above the time. He appeared to have been a boxer at one point. I did not get the impression they were drunk but high as the best way to describe the subsequent situation is that they were rowdy with little motor control making the position of the young woman and myself physically uncomfortable as well as that of other passenger. I tried ignoring the situation but when looked as if they were continuing all the way to South Shields I intervened and made it clear of they did not behave I would have to stop the train for help. This calmed then down with the help of the one who had stood but now a seat across the aisle from me. The most troublesome who appeared disturbed got out at a station to return to Newcastle where it appeared he had some kind of curfew at 7,30 attempting to get out on the wrong side of the train at one point,
A woman who got out told the one who appeared more in control that she would ensure he was not service him in future and he referred to being banned for life from the new Tesco superstore that has opened. He gave her a mouthful of abuse as she left which continue so I told him and in fairness he apologised saying that he never used methadone. I decided to engage the two in conversation learning that they were both Catholic and one a traveller from Hull. They departed at Chichester which was a relief concerned at the situation on arrival at the terminus at South Shields. We shook hands I urged them to keep out of trouble and gained the appreciation of other passengers for my efforts.
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