Sunny Day

 It is another beautiful day here in the east and I have my washing out in the sunshine.   I have not put my heating on yet and am conserving oil in my tank for the winter months. I light the woodburner in the evenings and am tucked up warm in bed with two duvets - my winter one and the summer one on top - at bedtime.  If it gets too hot on a warm night I can discard the summer one to the floor.   I am snug as a bug in a rug as they say. 

I am catching up on lots of documentaries on Netflix at the moment.  I have been unable to find a good drama to watch but there are plenty of documentaries.  Last night I was watching one on the music career of Eric Clapton.  He kind of developed his career during the time I was growing my non-music career in the late 1960s, early 1970s.  All names were familiar to me and many bands familiar.  Reminders of Duane Allman and Delaney and Bonnie were good stories that I had forgotten.  It got late and I did not finish the documentary as I had watched Aileen the Serial Killer beforehand.  She may have been a victim of rape in instance number one but it begged the question of why carry on prostituting yourself on the highway and end up carrying out six more murders when she had a girlfriend to live with and a happier life?   I felt by some she was misunderstood but the rape did not exonerate her from blame for at least seven murders.

Clapton became a drug addict when he was shunned by Pattie Boyd.  He turned to heroin.  He spent three years away from music.  Then got cured and alcohol became his new drug.   

The way to treat drug gangs and suppliers of drugs which have wrecked this world is to go in hard.  I see the police and military raids in Brazil. These are the drug gangs that originated in prisons in the 1970s.  They may be the wreckers of your sons and your daughters lives 1000s of miles away and if not yours, then the lives of others.   Drugs have been the scourge of our generation, so many suicides, OD's, families wrecked, lives ruined for the sake of a heroin fix, a cocaine fix, a ketamine fix, an ecstacy trip that might or might not  be fun (ask Leah Betts family if you have a good memory in East Anglia), a trip, a fight, a stabbing, contaminated and altered states, deaths, murders, crossfire, mistakes.  All results that have brought or bring misery.  Poverty cases when I worked in Childrens Services for seven years were drug fuelled domestic violence, cannabis and alcohol frequently in the houses of the poor and heroin in the houses where the children were taken into care, fostered and later adopted.    In Siberia deaths were many with homebrew that poisoned, as in Laos and Vietnam, watch out if you don't know where that jug of alcohol came from offered in front of you, cheap and cheerful and possibly about to give you a slow, painful death.   

Activities

It is going to be a lovely day today with clear blue sky and sunshine.  Tomorrow is going to be at least 15C and so we are back to better weather.  What a difference it makes.   

I am out today to the Creative Arts group and we are being entertained by two wonderful young dancers, more like acrobats cum ballet really. They are called the Vanhulle Dance Theatre.   We all love them and they come to our group annually.  The young girl is Belgian and her husband is English.  They choreographed a new routine last year and we helped with input in the form of words which were written down when they gave us a short extract from what they were developing at the time and asked for our help.   It was all in its infancy at the time but they have recently toured Europe including it in there show and now we are to see the finished product ourselves this afternoon.  I am looking forward to it.   The Creative Arts events are held throughout Norfolk during the month and all the activities they put on for our town are always over subscribed and full with waiting lists.  It is wonderful that activites like this are organised for those living outside the city and in the afternoons too.  

I am getting older now and rarely go out at night and am adjusting to going to earlier cinema showings so that I can get home before dark.  Night driving is no longer any fun with the LED headlights blinding me.  It is becoming a very serious problem and car manufacturers are still joyfully advertising their new cars with the LED spec.  Do they not see that these headlights are causing a big problem to drivers?

As we who live alone know, if we want to not be alone all day everyday we must get up and do things, join and organise activities for ourselves.  That is the way to be and to have a purpose in life after work finishes and we are in retirement.  

Yesterday morning I went to the tyre company and had my tyres checked for winter.  That was one way I saw and spoke to someone and of course helped to reassure myself for winter driving.  I have tried at least.   I followed that with shopping and buying ahead to get supplies in in case of bad weather.    I then came home and did an hour on the jigsaw.  I then spoke to my neighbour who was bringing my bin in for me.  We had a long chat because he is just back from Brazil where apart from a lovely wildlife holiday he also suffered a heart attack and cardiac arrest and got flown home on an emergency rescue flight.  He is making a good recovery and will look after my cats when I go away next year.  He was quite upbeat about the experience and said that mostly he cannot remember any of it anyway and he was well cared for in Brazil.  Judging by the speed of recovery he must have been and very lucky to have survived too.  The first heart attack happened in his hotel and the cardiac arrest was in the hospital. 

 After 4 O Clock  I closed the curtains and settled down and then a friend rang me who had missed me at the Lifelong Learning Group course that started last week.  I chatted to her for an hour about why I have left them behind, resigned from the committee and moved on.  This is one group that I no longer want to be part of at least for the time being.  I may go back to them one day.  I have enough going on without them and the masters degree course changed me to want more relaxation than forever going to history talks and adult education tutors etc.   

This feels like a good point to have reached in retirement now that I can actually make choices and have a life where there is enough going on to give me those choices and fluidity.   I don't want to be tied down and after two years of university I am enjoying freedom.  

Sunshine makes an enormous difference.  

Chapters of life

 I was listening to Angela Harding on Desert Island Discs a few weeks ago.  She is an artist, a very successful one.  She explained how growing up she had not been in a very happy household until her mother left and her and her sisters, I believe,  stayed with their father.  Mother moved well away from the family and they rarely saw her.  There was no other man involved, she just went.   They were all much happier after mother left.

This situation is fairly unusual I would say and it was very honest of Angela Harding to speak about it in a forthright, unemotional manner on radio.  She said that after her mother left she rarely saw her and in later life had only seen her once or twice.  Mother was happier without the husband and children and they were happier without her.  This, to me, is a very difficult and unusual situation.  

My father died when he was 52, well over 50 years ago, and I was a teenager.  I have often wondered over the years how different my life would have been if it had been mother who died then and father had lived.  I got on well with him, he was hard-working and kind and didn't have much free time but when he did take some time out if was always for us and we would go out as a family to the beach or cinema or a long drive followed by a picnic or fish and chips.  Mother was in charge of the house and chickens and vegetable growing and most things really and basically ruled and father just took it all in his stride in a very quiet way and got on with the farm and the haulage.   

After father died I left home almost straightaway at 17 going off to London and living in a hostel.  I didn't get on very well with my mother and that was the beginning of my adult life and I never lived at home again.    I have always felt guilty that I was not a good daughter at the time of his death  and she had no hesitation in reminding me of this and my failings as she saw them and rarely, if ever, gave me any support in what I was doing and would regularly talk me down.  I grew up with her knocking my confidence a lot  and I still secretly suffer from lack of confidence.  

If I had grown up with dad I feel that things would have been different as I remember him as a kind person and supportive of me and it was him who said I could stay on at school after 16 if I wanted to and he was happy either way.  As it happened he died very soon after saying this and I never took the option to stay at school after O levels, I left, I learned to type and then left home because I could now support myself. My mother gave me nothing and I set off with £7.10s.00p in my pocket which was my last week's pay as junior office worker in Norwich.    The hostel cost 5 guineas per week, bed, breakfast and evening meal.  (I got work immediately through the Alfred Marks bureau so wasn't without money).

We didn't really mourn father's death, mum was very stiff upper lip British and once he was gone he wasn't talked about and although mum and I would share memories sometimes it was always done in a very cold kind of way by mum without emotion.  He died at a time when it was quite taboo to talk about cancer and mum displayed that she felt shame that he had died from cancer and she would never talk about it.  When he was ill in his last six months she never told anybody that he had cancer.  She hastily arranged a private funeral and hurriedly got it all out of the way.

So this is where I come from and this is where I left home and went away and somehow I think life would have been different if it had been me, dad and the boys who were left.  I doubt very much, for example, that I would have left home in the way I did at 17.   Maybe one day I will come to terms with a lot of things but even at my mature age I am still working my way through it.   It takes a lifetime. 

The Bruce Springsteen biopic

 I went to see the Bruce Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere film yesterday, its release day in Great Britain.

I enjoyed it and the time passed very quickly.  

It is probably a film that will disappoint those who go expecting two hours of Springsteen music, flashes of concerts and all good things of his success.  It is not a film about this part of his life although, of course, we are reminded of his great success and popularity and his music. 

I defy anyone who sees it to not sit watching and be taken back to their own childhood, to reflect on whether they had a dysfunctional childhood, to question and to feel a little bit sad here and there even if they conclude that their childhood was good.  I know I sat watching thinking of my childhood and how much later in life I am still affected by it, good and bad, and for many many people really bad demons  can manifest themselves in mental health issues.  This is how it is for Springsteen.

The demons for Springsteen came around regularly.  

The film title comes from the Nebraska album where the lyrics of the songs were him living out his thoughts around his parents and his troubled childhood, things tearing him apart and going through his head.  We see how he was basically a loner and liked to record on a deck straight on to tapes, alone, not in a studio, and the rawness of the end result was how he wanted it to be.  He had some persuading to do to convince his record company to allow this.  He shunned press and tours. 

As I went to an early showing I had my hour in the café with coffee after rather than before.  I chatted to an elderly gentleman, probably about my age in fact, waiting to go into the next showing. He said how much he liked Springsteen and had all his albums and had been a great fan in the day.  He asked if I enjoyed the film and I said very much.  I didn't want to put any colour on the film for the man before he went in so I left it at that but I had a feeling  as he left the café and went into the screening that he was probably going to come out disappointed that it was not two hours of Springsteen wall to wall music and fun.    Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen and makes a good job of it.   Stephen Graham, known very much now for his part in Adolescence, plays Springsteen's father and gets it spot on.  

All in all, a good film and I will probably go see it again. 

Royalty

 I watched an old documentary on Princess Diana last night and it was very good.  Also one on King George VI with the stutter.  Both extremely enlightening documentaries and I learned a lot.   I was never a fan of Diana but since watching the documentary I can see a little bit more of her side of things that I had not known before.  Looking back at the engagement films that were shown on tv at the time of the announcement it is clear that Charles rarely, if ever, smiled and was really not interested in being engaged to Diana.  He even at one point answered a Press question on love very sarcastically and almost sneeringly saying "whatever that is" without so much as a smile.  He really appeared to mean it.  This was as he sat there with his new 19 year old fiancee on News bulletins going out to the world.   The match was a mistake from the start and it is a wedding that should never have happened.   Diana said that she did not want to go ahead with the wedding but in the end it was too late to stop it and she didn't know what to do so she went ahead.  She was young, had had a very troubled childhood with no great example set to her by her parents on how to behave. For instance, when Diana was a young child her parents divorced and her mother lost custody of all 4 of the children.  Diana was sent off to boarding school.   She also did not know how to behave as a member of the royal family which unfortunately led to her unpopularity with the Queen and others.   It was such an awful time for Diana as I now see it.  She was no saint but she had no proper guidance and no stability of a family in her own right apart from the Royals who knew what to do and never really helped Diana and, of course, a new husband who didn't really want her at all.  

George VI ended up a much loved King during wartime and I learned a lot about him too.  Both documentaries are on Netflix. 

The Charismatic

 Last night I watched the Jimmy Savile documentary.  It has been on Netflix for a long time and I have always given it a miss. Last night in the absence of anything I could find to watch I decided to give it a go.

I never liked Savile when I was a teenager, nor later, and hated it when he hosted Top of the Pops,  and my mother always considered he was a pervert and refused to have him on television in our house if she had anything to do with it.   I didn't know about perverts in the early days of Top of the Pops and later Jim 'll Fix It but my mother certainly felt very strongly about it and made it clear what she thought of him.  She died before it all came out but she would have just said 'told you so'.

It is a strange thing about people that some/many are taken in by certain individuals who have a charismatic influence, something about them that makes people go weak at knees and believe every word they say.    Epstein was another who charmed his way through the world, his world starting out as the world of investment houses to work his way up through the major investment houses and commerce, and even when he stole millions from Wexner, Wexner never pressed charges and kind of just buried it.  Epstein would charm his way into finance jobs, lie about universities and qualifications and somehow pull it off with his charm.  Then it followed that intelligent, high profile people all wanted to be seen with him at his parties and join him in massive weekends of rubbing shoulders with each other, being seen to be seen.  And all the time he was up to no good with under age girls and a total pervert.   Ghislaine Maxwell was bereft after her very flamboyant, crooked father mysteriously died and she got totally taken in by Epstein. She was also short of money.   Who would have thought it?  She must have some genes from her father that account for her willingness to join with Epstein.  It is almost beyond belief that she would join with him with the luring of young girls from high schools  to give massage to Epstein and not see that she was involved in something totally perverted and wrong.  Why did she not leave in total disgust?   But then Ghislaine needed money too and Epstein provided it.   Fergie was another but she did it for money, always needing Epstein to bail her out and send him begging emails, supporting him when he got out of jail the first time 'I love you still, can you lend me $50,000?' (I later note that even one of Peter Mandelson's emails to Epstein also said 'we still love you'  and 'press for early release').   Much of what Epstein did to curry favour was fueled by money that he gave to individuals who couldn't say no and in turn kept Epstein celebrity image intact.  Individuals who were sadly lacking in life and too much time doing nothing but wanted the high life like Andrew.  

Like dictators, Savile, Epstein, find people you can buy are useful.  Stalin called them useful idiots.  Savile's currency was to raise money for charity and become a visible saint who everybody wanted to be seen with.  

Another who charmed his way with falsehoods and lies all done with money is Singaporian Jho Low who defrauded the Malaysian investment fund by siphoning off millions for himself.  He is not being accused of being a pervert and I am not suggesting he has wronged children.  However, he did charm celebrities across Hollywood to attend his elaborate parties and pose as friends to give him the popular playboy image when all the time he was taking billions for himself from the Malaysian 1MDB fund which was intended for investment projects in Malaysia.  He was in a major fraud with the then Prime Minister.  Jho Low actually paid Hollywood stars to attend his parties and they were happy to take the money.  He escaped Singapore.  He is now being hidden by the Chinese in Shanghai under a false name and passport.  It is said that for the Chinese to be willing to help him then there is one hell of a lot of money involved. 

One sees these kind of charismatic people, taking people for a ride, throughout life at all levels.   People believing what is said, the gullible are always there like Ghislaine who was at a low point, just one example.  It happens in every locality in small ways that do not make the headlines like Savile, Epstein, Jho Low did, but fraudulent behaviour whether it be perverts or finance fraud or both or just good liars, there is always an audience, a willing crowd to pat the dog.  There are many who have a dark side which they seem to have the ability to hide for a very long time and fool many people.  I would like to say that eventually they all get caught out but I am not so sure that they do.  

Double Dutch I Suppose

I attended a new group yesterday, the WI in a nearby town.  It was suggested to me by a lady I met at the history of radio talk last month and so I went along.  It was fun and a very large group of ladies.  I have three goes at seeing if I like it before joining but I think I will join when the time comes.   Yesterday was a bit different because they were celebrating the 89th birthday of the WI and were in party mode.  I will see what it is like next time.

I am checking my blood pressure twice a day for the Indian doctor.  It is a beastly chore because once I am up I am in thick layers of clothes and snug and warm and then to take the blood pressure I have to peel off the layers to expose my arm and then I am cold and uncomfortable.  

The storm has done some damage here overnight and I can see I am shut in because a gate I have never touched has blown from its secure fastener and is now shutting me in at the corner of the house.  I have nobody to ask for help as I am surrounded by the elderly and myself, also the elderly.   I was going out but given the strength of the wind at the moment I think it best if I stay in and maybe have a look at the gate later. 

Later in the morning I fixed the gate on a temporary basis.  I think it is time to have it removed. A job for my man when the weather returns to normal.