Tuesday, December 03, 2013
Waiting on my bicycle at Rainham Station level crossing this morning, I pointed out to white-van-man the sign that asks "Please switch off your engine while waiting at the crossing, to help reduce air pollution".
He appeared not to understand, so I made a hand-gesture indicating switching off the ignition.
He made a hand gesture indicating "Fuck off".
I then mimed a sarcastic round of applause and he mimed a further "Fuck off".
Had I not been 66 years old, and had I not only this morning taken my industrial-strength cycle lock-and-chain out of my pannier to reduce weight, I might have taken the matter further, but as it was I had to content myself with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and an attempt to convey my contempt using only facial gestures and a well-timed spit in his general direction.
Sadly, the van was bare of any company name, so I couldn't even report the ignorant bastard to his employer.
This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) that I've experienced this sort of reaction. Many motorists (and I, of course, am also a motorist, as well as a pedestrian and a cyclist) seem to take it as a personal affront to be asked to switch off their engine. By a small margin, the majority are happy to comply once the sign is pointed out to them.
My concern is not merely air pollution, although that in itself is a good enough reason to be concerned. I'm asthmatic, and on cold, still mornings like this morning, with no breeze or air movement, exhaust fumes just hang around and start my chest tightening up. I often think that if I could swap places for a few minutes with some of the inconsiderate swine that won't switch off their engines, they'd perhaps understand why those of us who are not safely cocooned in little metal boxes with air filters and air-con get a bit tetchy about being swallowed up by vast clouds of crap.
Another good argument in favour of arming pensioners.....
He appeared not to understand, so I made a hand-gesture indicating switching off the ignition.
He made a hand gesture indicating "Fuck off".
I then mimed a sarcastic round of applause and he mimed a further "Fuck off".
Had I not been 66 years old, and had I not only this morning taken my industrial-strength cycle lock-and-chain out of my pannier to reduce weight, I might have taken the matter further, but as it was I had to content myself with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and an attempt to convey my contempt using only facial gestures and a well-timed spit in his general direction.
Sadly, the van was bare of any company name, so I couldn't even report the ignorant bastard to his employer.
This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) that I've experienced this sort of reaction. Many motorists (and I, of course, am also a motorist, as well as a pedestrian and a cyclist) seem to take it as a personal affront to be asked to switch off their engine. By a small margin, the majority are happy to comply once the sign is pointed out to them.
My concern is not merely air pollution, although that in itself is a good enough reason to be concerned. I'm asthmatic, and on cold, still mornings like this morning, with no breeze or air movement, exhaust fumes just hang around and start my chest tightening up. I often think that if I could swap places for a few minutes with some of the inconsiderate swine that won't switch off their engines, they'd perhaps understand why those of us who are not safely cocooned in little metal boxes with air filters and air-con get a bit tetchy about being swallowed up by vast clouds of crap.
Another good argument in favour of arming pensioners.....
Sunday, November 04, 2012
I was given a leaflet today which had details of a poetry competition, and specifically asked for poems about Rainham. Poems are restricted to 25 lines in total, including blank lines, and a total of 160 words. That's tough and seems to me to dictate the use of the Limerick format, of which I have some prior experience.
As to my topic, I'm still thinking about the old Rainham Police Station, sitting there unloved and empty, with its forlorn "For Sale" sign.
Watch this space...
As to my topic, I'm still thinking about the old Rainham Police Station, sitting there unloved and empty, with its forlorn "For Sale" sign.
Watch this space...
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Mr Shifty (again)
We organised a Dinner the other week for the Gillingham & Rainham Constituency Labour Party. When I say "we", I mean principally Paul Clark, our former MP for 13 years until he lost his seat in 2010, and yours truly, assisted by Mary Keane.
We'd had a date in our social calendar for quite a while, but the person that we wanted to be our Guest of Honour, Ed Balls, MP for Morley and Outwood, and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a hard man to pin down. Paul Clark was his PPS at the Department for Children, Schools & Families from 2007 to 2008. Eventually, February 4th, Mary's birthday, we got a date, 10th March, 2011. We immediately set about finding a venue.
The one that "ticked all the boxes" was the Mid Kent College's new Medway Campus, in Medway Road, Gillingham. It was in the constituency, Paul Clark had been heavily involved in its inception and funding, and Ed Balls had been at the opening ceremony. A high-profile event there would be good for the college, its students and staff, and the local Labour Party, showing we were supporting the local community, giving the students a chance to show off their skills and carry off a high-profile, prestige event. So, I made the call, only to be told "Sorry, that's the night of our Grand Opening, with our new patron, the celebrity chef." Oh, dear.
So, I then went the rounds of other suitable venues for a fairly upmarket dinner for up to 150 people. It narrowed down to two places that had the capacity, the facilities and the availability - Lordswood Leisure Centre and the Bredhurst Nursery Restaurant. Drawbacks to both were that they were both outside the Gillingham and Rainham Constituency. The Bredhurst Nursery Restaurant was ahead in the running, mainly due to the willingness of the proprietor, Michelle, to do everything in her power to make the event happen.
Enter Paul Clark, wearing his Superman T-shirt. Since he knows just about everybody in the Medway Towns, it was a matter of moments for him to find the right people at the College to inveigle into changing the date of their grand opening and, instead, to host our Dinner. Sorted, problem solved.
The Dinner itself was amazing. Pauline Harrison and Tracey Fitzpatrick from the College's Catering and Hospitality branch were consummate professionals and dealt with everything in a calm, relaxed and reassuring manner. It was me that looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, but they made sure that everything went perfectly. The students under their supervision were brilliant, from the the Frontline staff who did the meeting and greeting, to the waiters and waitresses who served the food and kept everybody from dying of thirst. Needless to say, the food was superb. I'd said when I saw the menu that was proposed that it was "a bit cheffy", by which I meant it was very upmarket and high-class; it was also very, very, very, well-presented and amazingly tasty. The students excelled themselves and everyone that attended thought it was first-class. Apart from giving around 100 people a hell of a good night, it must have boosted their confidence to be able to mount a high-profile event, with the overall College Principal and the head of the Medway Campus in attendance, that went off without a hitch despite our last-minute changes of timing due to the exigencies of Ed Balls' timetable.
Ed Balls was "good value", in that he he helped sell an incredible number of raffle tickets (thereby demonstrating Labour's ability to deal responsibly with the economy!) and delivered an inspiring speech. a good time was had by all.
So, a week or so later, my good lady comes in with an advance copy of the dreaded "Kent on Sunday", containing an article about Ed Balls and Baroness Warsi going head-to-head about which party loves Medway more. In the article (and now, you see, this is where your patience will pay off and you see why I titled this piece the way I did) they quoted Mr Shifty. He branded Ed Balls' appearance at our Dinner as a "cynical marketing ploy".
My response was to write to the "Kent on Sunday", as follows:
Sir,
We'd had a date in our social calendar for quite a while, but the person that we wanted to be our Guest of Honour, Ed Balls, MP for Morley and Outwood, and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a hard man to pin down. Paul Clark was his PPS at the Department for Children, Schools & Families from 2007 to 2008. Eventually, February 4th, Mary's birthday, we got a date, 10th March, 2011. We immediately set about finding a venue.
The one that "ticked all the boxes" was the Mid Kent College's new Medway Campus, in Medway Road, Gillingham. It was in the constituency, Paul Clark had been heavily involved in its inception and funding, and Ed Balls had been at the opening ceremony. A high-profile event there would be good for the college, its students and staff, and the local Labour Party, showing we were supporting the local community, giving the students a chance to show off their skills and carry off a high-profile, prestige event. So, I made the call, only to be told "Sorry, that's the night of our Grand Opening, with our new patron, the celebrity chef." Oh, dear.
So, I then went the rounds of other suitable venues for a fairly upmarket dinner for up to 150 people. It narrowed down to two places that had the capacity, the facilities and the availability - Lordswood Leisure Centre and the Bredhurst Nursery Restaurant. Drawbacks to both were that they were both outside the Gillingham and Rainham Constituency. The Bredhurst Nursery Restaurant was ahead in the running, mainly due to the willingness of the proprietor, Michelle, to do everything in her power to make the event happen.
Enter Paul Clark, wearing his Superman T-shirt. Since he knows just about everybody in the Medway Towns, it was a matter of moments for him to find the right people at the College to inveigle into changing the date of their grand opening and, instead, to host our Dinner. Sorted, problem solved.
The Dinner itself was amazing. Pauline Harrison and Tracey Fitzpatrick from the College's Catering and Hospitality branch were consummate professionals and dealt with everything in a calm, relaxed and reassuring manner. It was me that looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, but they made sure that everything went perfectly. The students under their supervision were brilliant, from the the Frontline staff who did the meeting and greeting, to the waiters and waitresses who served the food and kept everybody from dying of thirst. Needless to say, the food was superb. I'd said when I saw the menu that was proposed that it was "a bit cheffy", by which I meant it was very upmarket and high-class; it was also very, very, very, well-presented and amazingly tasty. The students excelled themselves and everyone that attended thought it was first-class. Apart from giving around 100 people a hell of a good night, it must have boosted their confidence to be able to mount a high-profile event, with the overall College Principal and the head of the Medway Campus in attendance, that went off without a hitch despite our last-minute changes of timing due to the exigencies of Ed Balls' timetable.
Ed Balls was "good value", in that he he helped sell an incredible number of raffle tickets (thereby demonstrating Labour's ability to deal responsibly with the economy!) and delivered an inspiring speech. a good time was had by all.
So, a week or so later, my good lady comes in with an advance copy of the dreaded "Kent on Sunday", containing an article about Ed Balls and Baroness Warsi going head-to-head about which party loves Medway more. In the article (and now, you see, this is where your patience will pay off and you see why I titled this piece the way I did) they quoted Mr Shifty. He branded Ed Balls' appearance at our Dinner as a "cynical marketing ploy".
My response was to write to the "Kent on Sunday", as follows:
Sir,
I was surprised to read the comments made by my former Labour Party colleague, Rehman Chishti, about the visit of Ed Balls to Mid Kent College's Medway Campus. It wasn't so long ago that Mr Chishti would have been first in the queue to shake the hand of a Labour front-bencher, and doubtless be photographed doing so. As to Mr Balls' visit being a "marketing ploy", it certainly was - it gave the hard-working Catering and Hospitality staff and students of Mid Kent College the chance to show off their skills and prove that they can put on a prestige event to rank with the best. The food and service were first-class and were greatly appreciated by all who attended. The Pavilion Restaurant of the College, which is open to the public at lunchtimes, and on Thursday evenings for fine dining, gives the students a fantastic opportunity to expand their training and to work in a demanding and professional environment.
If Mr Chishti is so proud of Medway, perhaps he might have taken the opportunity to applaud the fact that the Labour Government, which only a few years ago he was so eager to join, invested £89 million to build Mid Kent College's Medway Campus, in order to help with the regeneration of Medway and to provide first-class facilities for our young people. Perhaps he might show the extent of his concern for the area in which he lives by asking his own Government why they are stopping the Education Maintenance Allowance and increasing higher education fees to £9,000 per year, both measures which will make it harder for Medway's youngsters to obtain the skills and qualifications they need for the future. He might also ask why they stopped the Building Schools for the Future programme - how long before we see a return to the conditions that my son, among many thousands of others, endured back in the days of the Thatcher government of the 1980's, when half of the portable "temporary" classrooms at his school were out of action every time it rained?
Mr. Chishti trots out his new friends' tired old cliche about the country being on the "brink of bankruptcy" because of the last Labour Government. Along with his principles, Mr. Chishti seems to have forgotten that most of Europe, and the USA, were affected by the near-meltdown of the global banking and financial services system. In any event, Britain is still a rich country and our level of debt as a proportion of GDP is perfectly manageable. What isn't manageable is the degree to which the ideologically-driven cuts in public expenditure will hurt ordinary working people and the vulnerable members of society, whose cause Mr Chishti so passionately espoused when he was a member of the Labour Party. Still, who cares about principles when you have a shot at power, eh, Mr. Chishti?
I very much doubt whether the "Kent on Sunday" will print my letter, as they are well-known for being a Tory propaganda-sheet. We shall see. I feel better for having written it, although not as good as I would feel were I to learn that Mr Shifty had been abducted by aliens or eaten by a tiger. One can only hope, eh?
Monday, January 24, 2011
Family history again
Following on from my last post, there are still many things that I don't understand about my family history. If I had been less reticent, less afraid of upsetting my mother, I could have asked more questions, and perhaps learned more. My grandmother, aunt and uncle, all of whom could perhaps have helped fill in the gaps, were always careful to deflect my questions and tell me I should ask my mother. My mother, when questioned about aspects of her years in Ireland, would talk for hours about the dances she went to, the friends she made, the wonderful times they all enjoyed, but would shy away of talking about her husband, my father. Often she would burst into tears, saying it was all too upsetting to go over unhappy memories, and leave the room. When you're a child, you catch on quickly and learn not to make your mother cry, so I stopped asking. For years, I was never interested and it didn't matter.
In my teens, I became interested in girls and started smoking. Both of these things encouraged a certain degree of secretiveness on my part; the smoking because I was only 14 and the girls because my mother was excessively prim and prissy about sex and was also a snob - she would not have approved of several of my choices of girlfriend (or girls who I aspired to make my girlfriend - strangely, my chat-up lines didn't always work) and, although we ourselves lived in a Council flat, was dead against me going out with girls who lived in Council flats.
In my teens, I became interested in girls and started smoking. Both of these things encouraged a certain degree of secretiveness on my part; the smoking because I was only 14 and the girls because my mother was excessively prim and prissy about sex and was also a snob - she would not have approved of several of my choices of girlfriend (or girls who I aspired to make my girlfriend - strangely, my chat-up lines didn't always work) and, although we ourselves lived in a Council flat, was dead against me going out with girls who lived in Council flats.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Christmas Books and where that leads to...
All the family know that I'm an avid reader. I'm not so bad now - when I was younger and the children were small, there were days when I'd very selfishly shut myself away in an invisibly-walled cubicle containing me, my armchair and a book. Ironically, now I'm retired and in theory have all the time in the world, I seem to spend less time reading. Possibly that's because I now have the internet (I don't mean I've just got Internet access, I've been using t'Internet since 1990, but it wasn't so exciting then) and I find that it suits me more to go online and do stuff, none of which is of any great importance and can be broken off and resumed after the inevitable interruptions have gone away, than to try and create that soundproof bubble necessary to concentrated reading.
I am circumlocuting again. I got some really nice books at Christmas. My tastes in SF are fairly well-known to my family, and current publishing trends do not deliver hard SF of the type I relish in sufficient quantities to keep me satisfied, so the choice of Christmas books is often limited to those at the fantasy end of the spectrum that I can stomach. As it turns out, this isn't many. Discount the dungeons-and-dragons type novels, the crude Tolkien imitations, the faux-Harry Potter epics, and there isn't much that I would bother with. Enter Stephen Donaldson, author of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever". I started reading his first (and at the time, as we thought, only) trilogy in the early 1980's. It transpired that the story didn't end with book three, and there followed years in which we hung on the appearance of books four, five and six. The "we" in this case were us and our good friends from our Chelmsford days, who moved to Cheshire a little while after we moved to Kent, and with whom we kept in close touch for many years. We swapped the books back and forth and discussed them at length. To be honest, by the end of book six, we'd have cheerfully grabbed Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, by the throat and shouted at him "For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!" We were all disappointed that Donaldson had still not provided a satisfying conclusion to the epic at the end of book six, and by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement we moved on, determined not to let the obviously long-term-planned financial targets of a canny American literature graduate spoil our enjoyment of the genre any further.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I got yet another Thomas Covenant tome at Christmas. And I was genuinely surprised at how pleased I was to get it. I'd gone years thinking that I wouldn't ever read another Donaldson novel, because I felt he was just manipulating the readership into buying yet another book, just like Dickens did all those years ago with his part-works. And yet, here I was on Christmas morning, in Spain, amidst the grand-children and Lego and wrapping paper, with a silly grin on my face and a genuine sense of delight, like finding an old friend in an unfamiliar place.
Needless to say, the feeling didn't last. I've just read, in another biography, of which perhaps more later, of a man and woman who drifted apart in their late teens and then met again in their thirties, each hopeful that the feelings that they'd had for each other as teenagers could be re-kindled into proper adult emotions and lasting feelings. Nah, it was never going to work. So it was with me and Donaldson; he betrayed my trust when I was younger and I thought it was worth giving him another chance after all these years, but it just wasn't to be. I got about 40 pages in when I was gripped with the overwhelming desire to grab Thomas Covenant by the throat and, once again, scream at him ""For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!"
Thus it was that I put aside the umpteenth Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, and turned to the other books I had been given. There was Terry Wogan's 2001 autobiography "Is it me?", Valerie Grove's 2007 biography of John Mortimer, and a biography of Barack Obama.
Wogan was pure candy-floss, but very diverting and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and ended up wishing I'd paid more attention to him when he was on the radio and TV a lot more than he is now. Like a lot of people, I think I'd got a bit blase about him and felt that he was always on, so I never bothered to watch/listen.
So, then - Obama next, or Mortimer. Mortimer, I think, on the basis that I liked a lot of his columns in the papers years ago, I'm naturally a small-L lefty-liberal (not the Nick Clegg-style Tory-disguised-as-LibDem Liberal, thank you very much!), verging towards Socialist/Communist, and I'd admired his advocacy on behalf of stuff like the Oz Schoolkids case and various other censorship cases back in the '70's and '80's. Part way through, enjoying the description of some of the antics of his ancestors, I had a sudden hankering to resume my search for my ancestors. This coincided, oddly enough, with a notice in the Births, Marriages & Deaths columns of "The Times" of the death of a distant relative on the Irish side, the 6th Baronet Keane, from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. He was 102, which I found very encouraging....
That evening I went on to the Irish Government Health Department website (I know, it's contrary, since they have a General Registers Office, with a website, but you can't look up stuff on there and you can't order copy certificates either!) and started another search for my father's records. Before you think "We were right all those years - he IS a bastard!", let me tell you that I know my father's name. It's on my birth certificate. However, everything that I was told about him when I was young doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of someone who spent a career as a cynical, suspicious, disbelieving toe-rag of an Internal Auditor. And the sad thing is, there's no-one around now to ask, to find out the truth.
I was told that my father was the illegitimate son of a member of the wealthy, titled and well-regarded Keane family, who owned a bacon factory in Cappoquin, near Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. His mother, a servant, was supposed to have enjoyed a dalliance with a member of the family and got in the family way. She was shuttled off to somewhere else to have the child, possibly at a place called Ennistmon, and may have been involved in his upbringing; in any event, in the version of the story I was told, she was never mentioned again. The child, my father, was granted an allowance and eventually lived in England, in Chingford, where he met my mother, Ethel Osborn, a seamstress, sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's. My aunt told my wife, in an apparently unguarded moment, that he'd had a very thick Irish accent and was much older than my mother. I was always told that he died in 1947, the year of my birth, at the age of 47, meaning that he was born in 1900. My searches in 2005 led me to the conclusion that the only person who could possibly have been my father, the only man called Terence Francis Keane, was born in 1890 in Ennistmon. This would have made him 21 years older than my mother, rather than 10 years older, as I had always been told. Maybe my mother, already smarting under the disapproval of her sister and parents, tried to minimise the difference in their ages, who knows? As for his dying in 1947, when I paid the Irish GRO to search for his death certificate they came up blank.
It was this that prompted Mary and me go to Ireland in 2005, for a brief stay in Dublin to access the records at the GRO research room. This was where we found the Ennistmon-born Terence Francis Keane, the only one we could find with a birth within 30 years of the date we sought. More intriguingly, the only death we found for the same name was in 1972, two years after our marriage and just after the birth of our son. Could my mother have told me less than the truth? Yes, without a doubt.
Our searches for a Marriage Certificate for Terence Francis Keane drew a blank in Ireland, as they did for Ethel Teresa Osborn. Ok, so they must have married in England. Odd, though, because my aunt had hinted that no-one had gone to the wedding - surely, if they met in Chingford, just a few miles from where my mother lived with my grand-parents in Tottenham, if they hadn't married in Ireland wouldn't they have married locally? And, if they married locally, why did no-one go to the wedding? So, back in England, we went to the Family Records Centre, in Middleton Street, Islington, to look for a record of marriage. Again, no luck. Very odd.
My mother always told me that she came back to England in 1947 after the death of my father and, after living with my grandmother, now widowed (my grandfather, Harry Osborn, died two days before I was born, which was why I was named after him), met up with Patrick (Paddy) Attridge, an ex-serviceman whose family had lived near the Keane's in Ireland in the 1930's and 1040's. My mother and Paddy married and moved into a flat above a wet fish shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham.
Much later, I found, among my mother's effects, a Catholic prayer book in which was inscribed, inside the front cover, the Latin tag "Omnia Vincit Amor", meaning "Love Conquers All". This was dated 1942, many years before my mother was supposed to have re-met Paddy.
Paddy's story was equally interesting - he was born in 1908, one of 22 (TWENTY-TWO!!!!) children, some of whom were "Irish twins", in other words they were two children born in the same year but not at the same time, just ten or eleven months apart. He was born in 1908 and in 1929, when he would have been 21, he went to the USA. He worked at various jobs, including bar work during Prohibition, and at one point in the late 1930's was approached to act as Fred Astaire's camera double - he did bear a striking resemblance - but he turned this down. In 1939 he decided to return to England to enlist in the British Army, a strange decision for an Irishman living in America, and embarked on the "SS Georgic" (I can still remember the suitcase, with its stickers, being in the back of the big wardrobe) back to England. He was sent to the Isle of Wight and was a crucial element of the island's defences, marching up and down with a broom handle over his shoulder in imitation of a rifle. He eventually was attached to the Royal Artillery and joined 8th Army ("The Desert Rats") in North Africa, on a 25-pounder unit, with which he remained for most of the war. He fought at El Alamein, was invalided back to Alexandria with pneumonia, then rejoined his unit (minus most of his possessions and trophies which had been stolen by the Egyptian medical orderlies) for the campaign that ended up on the Italian mainland. He fought at Monte Cassino, which he only ever once talked about as being "hellish", and ended up in Greece as part of the occupying force at the end of the war. When the War ended, the Greek Communists, who had provided most of the impetus to resist the German/Italian occupation, decided that things were not to be the same as they had been before hostilities, led a well-armed campaign to decide on the form of the next government. British troops were used to keep the peace between warring factions, and were then obviously targets for both sides. Paddy always bore the scar of a bullet that nicked the bridge of his nose on its way to fatally enter the head of his his patrol partner, with whom he had thus far survived the war. I've never known the name of this man, but from Paddy's occasional mentions of this part of his war experiences (and there were very few of those) I feel that he had a great attachment to him.
He had an abiding respect for the Ghurkas, who he said had saved his life and that of his comrades many times. In the North African Desert the Ghurkas were employed as perimeter sentries (among other things) and they used to eschew the usual static guarding duties, preferring to roam about in the dark. Paddy said that they used to creep up on sentries and feel their ankles - so softly that the sentry never knew they were even within a hundred yards - and then if the sentry was wearing British Army webbing gaiters they would move on. If, on the other hand, they were wearing German Afrika Corps leather-suede boots,or officer issue leather full boots, the Ghurka kukri would slash their throat and they would bleed their life out on the sand. Any German encroachement into the British lines would be met with similar treatment.
When we went as a family to the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) in about 1981, on an Open Day, I watched an unarmed combat display by a unit of the Ghurka Rifles. It brought tears to my eyes as I remembered Paddy's tales of the Ghurkas alongside whom he'd fought.
I am circumlocuting again. I got some really nice books at Christmas. My tastes in SF are fairly well-known to my family, and current publishing trends do not deliver hard SF of the type I relish in sufficient quantities to keep me satisfied, so the choice of Christmas books is often limited to those at the fantasy end of the spectrum that I can stomach. As it turns out, this isn't many. Discount the dungeons-and-dragons type novels, the crude Tolkien imitations, the faux-Harry Potter epics, and there isn't much that I would bother with. Enter Stephen Donaldson, author of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever". I started reading his first (and at the time, as we thought, only) trilogy in the early 1980's. It transpired that the story didn't end with book three, and there followed years in which we hung on the appearance of books four, five and six. The "we" in this case were us and our good friends from our Chelmsford days, who moved to Cheshire a little while after we moved to Kent, and with whom we kept in close touch for many years. We swapped the books back and forth and discussed them at length. To be honest, by the end of book six, we'd have cheerfully grabbed Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, by the throat and shouted at him "For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!" We were all disappointed that Donaldson had still not provided a satisfying conclusion to the epic at the end of book six, and by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement we moved on, determined not to let the obviously long-term-planned financial targets of a canny American literature graduate spoil our enjoyment of the genre any further.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I got yet another Thomas Covenant tome at Christmas. And I was genuinely surprised at how pleased I was to get it. I'd gone years thinking that I wouldn't ever read another Donaldson novel, because I felt he was just manipulating the readership into buying yet another book, just like Dickens did all those years ago with his part-works. And yet, here I was on Christmas morning, in Spain, amidst the grand-children and Lego and wrapping paper, with a silly grin on my face and a genuine sense of delight, like finding an old friend in an unfamiliar place.
Needless to say, the feeling didn't last. I've just read, in another biography, of which perhaps more later, of a man and woman who drifted apart in their late teens and then met again in their thirties, each hopeful that the feelings that they'd had for each other as teenagers could be re-kindled into proper adult emotions and lasting feelings. Nah, it was never going to work. So it was with me and Donaldson; he betrayed my trust when I was younger and I thought it was worth giving him another chance after all these years, but it just wasn't to be. I got about 40 pages in when I was gripped with the overwhelming desire to grab Thomas Covenant by the throat and, once again, scream at him ""For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!"
Thus it was that I put aside the umpteenth Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, and turned to the other books I had been given. There was Terry Wogan's 2001 autobiography "Is it me?", Valerie Grove's 2007 biography of John Mortimer, and a biography of Barack Obama.
Wogan was pure candy-floss, but very diverting and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and ended up wishing I'd paid more attention to him when he was on the radio and TV a lot more than he is now. Like a lot of people, I think I'd got a bit blase about him and felt that he was always on, so I never bothered to watch/listen.
So, then - Obama next, or Mortimer. Mortimer, I think, on the basis that I liked a lot of his columns in the papers years ago, I'm naturally a small-L lefty-liberal (not the Nick Clegg-style Tory-disguised-as-LibDem Liberal, thank you very much!), verging towards Socialist/Communist, and I'd admired his advocacy on behalf of stuff like the Oz Schoolkids case and various other censorship cases back in the '70's and '80's. Part way through, enjoying the description of some of the antics of his ancestors, I had a sudden hankering to resume my search for my ancestors. This coincided, oddly enough, with a notice in the Births, Marriages & Deaths columns of "The Times" of the death of a distant relative on the Irish side, the 6th Baronet Keane, from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. He was 102, which I found very encouraging....
That evening I went on to the Irish Government Health Department website (I know, it's contrary, since they have a General Registers Office, with a website, but you can't look up stuff on there and you can't order copy certificates either!) and started another search for my father's records. Before you think "We were right all those years - he IS a bastard!", let me tell you that I know my father's name. It's on my birth certificate. However, everything that I was told about him when I was young doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of someone who spent a career as a cynical, suspicious, disbelieving toe-rag of an Internal Auditor. And the sad thing is, there's no-one around now to ask, to find out the truth.
I was told that my father was the illegitimate son of a member of the wealthy, titled and well-regarded Keane family, who owned a bacon factory in Cappoquin, near Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. His mother, a servant, was supposed to have enjoyed a dalliance with a member of the family and got in the family way. She was shuttled off to somewhere else to have the child, possibly at a place called Ennistmon, and may have been involved in his upbringing; in any event, in the version of the story I was told, she was never mentioned again. The child, my father, was granted an allowance and eventually lived in England, in Chingford, where he met my mother, Ethel Osborn, a seamstress, sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's. My aunt told my wife, in an apparently unguarded moment, that he'd had a very thick Irish accent and was much older than my mother. I was always told that he died in 1947, the year of my birth, at the age of 47, meaning that he was born in 1900. My searches in 2005 led me to the conclusion that the only person who could possibly have been my father, the only man called Terence Francis Keane, was born in 1890 in Ennistmon. This would have made him 21 years older than my mother, rather than 10 years older, as I had always been told. Maybe my mother, already smarting under the disapproval of her sister and parents, tried to minimise the difference in their ages, who knows? As for his dying in 1947, when I paid the Irish GRO to search for his death certificate they came up blank.
It was this that prompted Mary and me go to Ireland in 2005, for a brief stay in Dublin to access the records at the GRO research room. This was where we found the Ennistmon-born Terence Francis Keane, the only one we could find with a birth within 30 years of the date we sought. More intriguingly, the only death we found for the same name was in 1972, two years after our marriage and just after the birth of our son. Could my mother have told me less than the truth? Yes, without a doubt.
Our searches for a Marriage Certificate for Terence Francis Keane drew a blank in Ireland, as they did for Ethel Teresa Osborn. Ok, so they must have married in England. Odd, though, because my aunt had hinted that no-one had gone to the wedding - surely, if they met in Chingford, just a few miles from where my mother lived with my grand-parents in Tottenham, if they hadn't married in Ireland wouldn't they have married locally? And, if they married locally, why did no-one go to the wedding? So, back in England, we went to the Family Records Centre, in Middleton Street, Islington, to look for a record of marriage. Again, no luck. Very odd.
My mother always told me that she came back to England in 1947 after the death of my father and, after living with my grandmother, now widowed (my grandfather, Harry Osborn, died two days before I was born, which was why I was named after him), met up with Patrick (Paddy) Attridge, an ex-serviceman whose family had lived near the Keane's in Ireland in the 1930's and 1040's. My mother and Paddy married and moved into a flat above a wet fish shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham.
Much later, I found, among my mother's effects, a Catholic prayer book in which was inscribed, inside the front cover, the Latin tag "Omnia Vincit Amor", meaning "Love Conquers All". This was dated 1942, many years before my mother was supposed to have re-met Paddy.
Paddy's story was equally interesting - he was born in 1908, one of 22 (TWENTY-TWO!!!!) children, some of whom were "Irish twins", in other words they were two children born in the same year but not at the same time, just ten or eleven months apart. He was born in 1908 and in 1929, when he would have been 21, he went to the USA. He worked at various jobs, including bar work during Prohibition, and at one point in the late 1930's was approached to act as Fred Astaire's camera double - he did bear a striking resemblance - but he turned this down. In 1939 he decided to return to England to enlist in the British Army, a strange decision for an Irishman living in America, and embarked on the "SS Georgic" (I can still remember the suitcase, with its stickers, being in the back of the big wardrobe) back to England. He was sent to the Isle of Wight and was a crucial element of the island's defences, marching up and down with a broom handle over his shoulder in imitation of a rifle. He eventually was attached to the Royal Artillery and joined 8th Army ("The Desert Rats") in North Africa, on a 25-pounder unit, with which he remained for most of the war. He fought at El Alamein, was invalided back to Alexandria with pneumonia, then rejoined his unit (minus most of his possessions and trophies which had been stolen by the Egyptian medical orderlies) for the campaign that ended up on the Italian mainland. He fought at Monte Cassino, which he only ever once talked about as being "hellish", and ended up in Greece as part of the occupying force at the end of the war. When the War ended, the Greek Communists, who had provided most of the impetus to resist the German/Italian occupation, decided that things were not to be the same as they had been before hostilities, led a well-armed campaign to decide on the form of the next government. British troops were used to keep the peace between warring factions, and were then obviously targets for both sides. Paddy always bore the scar of a bullet that nicked the bridge of his nose on its way to fatally enter the head of his his patrol partner, with whom he had thus far survived the war. I've never known the name of this man, but from Paddy's occasional mentions of this part of his war experiences (and there were very few of those) I feel that he had a great attachment to him.
He had an abiding respect for the Ghurkas, who he said had saved his life and that of his comrades many times. In the North African Desert the Ghurkas were employed as perimeter sentries (among other things) and they used to eschew the usual static guarding duties, preferring to roam about in the dark. Paddy said that they used to creep up on sentries and feel their ankles - so softly that the sentry never knew they were even within a hundred yards - and then if the sentry was wearing British Army webbing gaiters they would move on. If, on the other hand, they were wearing German Afrika Corps leather-suede boots,or officer issue leather full boots, the Ghurka kukri would slash their throat and they would bleed their life out on the sand. Any German encroachement into the British lines would be met with similar treatment.
When we went as a family to the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) in about 1981, on an Open Day, I watched an unarmed combat display by a unit of the Ghurka Rifles. It brought tears to my eyes as I remembered Paddy's tales of the Ghurkas alongside whom he'd fought.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Swimming charges
Medway Council have announced that the free swimming programme, funded by the last Labour government, is to cease on July 31st. Just in nice time for the school summer holidays!
The new charge is going to be £4 per child per swim. How many families will be able to find the money to send their children as often as they used to? Maybe a few will, but the vast majority will not. Where will those children go who would otherwise be enjoying themselves at the pool? Who knows. Perhaps they'll all be in the library, or staying at home watching television or playing computer games. I don't suppose any of them will be wandering the streets getting into mischief, so there's nothing to worry about there.
One of the strange comments reported by the local paper was that of "a young lifeguard", who declined to be named, who felt that the introduction of the charge would be a good thing, as it would mean more income to the Council to spend on improvements to the facilities. Sad, isn't it? The free-swim programme was funded by Government. The Council got from the government the money they would otherwise have expected to get over the counter from customers. That money has stopped. If the customers, now having to fork out £4 per child per visit, decide they can't afford it, the Council's income will reduce. What chance, then, of improvements, or even of our "young lifeguard" having a job this time next year?
The new charge is going to be £4 per child per swim. How many families will be able to find the money to send their children as often as they used to? Maybe a few will, but the vast majority will not. Where will those children go who would otherwise be enjoying themselves at the pool? Who knows. Perhaps they'll all be in the library, or staying at home watching television or playing computer games. I don't suppose any of them will be wandering the streets getting into mischief, so there's nothing to worry about there.
One of the strange comments reported by the local paper was that of "a young lifeguard", who declined to be named, who felt that the introduction of the charge would be a good thing, as it would mean more income to the Council to spend on improvements to the facilities. Sad, isn't it? The free-swim programme was funded by Government. The Council got from the government the money they would otherwise have expected to get over the counter from customers. That money has stopped. If the customers, now having to fork out £4 per child per visit, decide they can't afford it, the Council's income will reduce. What chance, then, of improvements, or even of our "young lifeguard" having a job this time next year?
Monday, May 31, 2010
Now the dust has settled...
The General Election is long over, the ConDem-nation is now in being, the coalition has suffered it's first significant casualty (thanks, "Daily Telegraph", that's another timely demonstration that only the media wield real power) and we in the local Labour Party have to reconcile ourselves that we've lost the best MP that Gillingham and Rainham ever had.
It's hard to come to terms with the Tories holding this seat, especially when the new incumbent is a former Labour Party colleague, who happily regurgitates the Tory line which, a few short years ago, would have been poison to his lips. How times change, eh, Mr. Shifty? I just hope you're happy now, having switched sides for personal advantage and preferment - I wonder if it will feel as satisfying in a few years' time when you're out on your arse and neither side wants you? Because there'll be no coming back to Labour, not now. The Tories won't give you anything until you've managed to hang on to the seat for 20 years (and you won't!) because they won't trust you, and no-one else will trust you either, so you're in for a lonely and frustrating time. Serves you right.
As for Labour, we'll come back, stronger and better, and we'll take the seat back again. Maybe next time there won't be Ashcroft's millions to help with getting the leaflets out, maybe next time the electorate will realise, after the years of Tory cuts and misery that they've apparently voted for, that you can't trust the Tories (and now, it seems, the LibDems as well) to do what they promise - you can only rely on them to make life harder for ordinary working people and take away the props of what should be a decent, caring society.
All the talk of the deficit is a smoke-screen to allow the Tories to do what they've always tried to do - keep working people in their "rightful place". They'll try and destroy the unions, they'll engineer job losses and engender a climate of fear for their jobs among working people, to keep them quiet and powerless to resist. Today the ConDem-nation has announced they're reviewing the school-building programme and re-examining contracts for new school buildings entered into since January 1st this year. So, give it a few years and we'll be back to leaky school roofs, portacabins in the playground and, no doubt, further sales of school playing fields and any other assets they can get rid of to raise a few quid to pay for the unemployment benefit of the millions that they plan to throw out of work.
The debt that was raised in the 1940's to pay for essential armaments, and the subsequent re-construction of our bombed cities, was only paid off a few years ago. Nobody even noticed that we were still paying it off. We are still a very wealthy country and we can sustain a high level of debt without everybody getting into a panic. All the talk about the level of our debt "making the financial markets jittery" is a nonsense - the "financial markets" are nothing more than estate agents in different (and much more expensive) clothes, they are spivs and back-street bookies who gamble with other peoples' money and never, ever, no matter how crap their results, lose any of their own money or forego their excessive bonuses. Why should we care what the "financial markets" think? We own, via the bank bail-outs, a substantial chunk of the financial institutions of this country, and we should be able to exert enought influence to prevent these pikeys-in-suits manipulating the situtation to their advantage and acting against the national interest.
It's hard to come to terms with the Tories holding this seat, especially when the new incumbent is a former Labour Party colleague, who happily regurgitates the Tory line which, a few short years ago, would have been poison to his lips. How times change, eh, Mr. Shifty? I just hope you're happy now, having switched sides for personal advantage and preferment - I wonder if it will feel as satisfying in a few years' time when you're out on your arse and neither side wants you? Because there'll be no coming back to Labour, not now. The Tories won't give you anything until you've managed to hang on to the seat for 20 years (and you won't!) because they won't trust you, and no-one else will trust you either, so you're in for a lonely and frustrating time. Serves you right.
As for Labour, we'll come back, stronger and better, and we'll take the seat back again. Maybe next time there won't be Ashcroft's millions to help with getting the leaflets out, maybe next time the electorate will realise, after the years of Tory cuts and misery that they've apparently voted for, that you can't trust the Tories (and now, it seems, the LibDems as well) to do what they promise - you can only rely on them to make life harder for ordinary working people and take away the props of what should be a decent, caring society.
All the talk of the deficit is a smoke-screen to allow the Tories to do what they've always tried to do - keep working people in their "rightful place". They'll try and destroy the unions, they'll engineer job losses and engender a climate of fear for their jobs among working people, to keep them quiet and powerless to resist. Today the ConDem-nation has announced they're reviewing the school-building programme and re-examining contracts for new school buildings entered into since January 1st this year. So, give it a few years and we'll be back to leaky school roofs, portacabins in the playground and, no doubt, further sales of school playing fields and any other assets they can get rid of to raise a few quid to pay for the unemployment benefit of the millions that they plan to throw out of work.
The debt that was raised in the 1940's to pay for essential armaments, and the subsequent re-construction of our bombed cities, was only paid off a few years ago. Nobody even noticed that we were still paying it off. We are still a very wealthy country and we can sustain a high level of debt without everybody getting into a panic. All the talk about the level of our debt "making the financial markets jittery" is a nonsense - the "financial markets" are nothing more than estate agents in different (and much more expensive) clothes, they are spivs and back-street bookies who gamble with other peoples' money and never, ever, no matter how crap their results, lose any of their own money or forego their excessive bonuses. Why should we care what the "financial markets" think? We own, via the bank bail-outs, a substantial chunk of the financial institutions of this country, and we should be able to exert enought influence to prevent these pikeys-in-suits manipulating the situtation to their advantage and acting against the national interest.
Labels: Chishti, Gillingham, Labour, Paul Clark, Rainham, Tories
