Handwriting

When was the last time you received in the post a handwritten letter from another person? Or when did you last write a handwritten letter to anyone else? With the advent of digital communication, emails, texts, electronic messages etc, there is now little need or requirement to do so.

I do receive one handwritten letter about 4 times a year. This is from a friend who is a Luddite and refuses to have the internet or engage in any form of digital communication. He is also fairly deaf, so speaking via a landline is tricky. His only means of regular communication with me, therefore, is to hand write a letter. I respond by mail, but always type mine, as my handwriting is not the easiest to read.

Will handwriting thus become a thing of the past, if it hasn’t done already?  I hear via teacher relatives and friends and have seen from my own involvement in schools over the years, that some children find it far easier to use their fingers and thumbs to handle and control electronic devices than they do to use a pen or a pencil.

If handwriting is uncommon today, then obviously in the past, it was the main way of communication. I buy and sell antiquarian books and I love thumbing through books and seeing inside different notes and writings from people. It can be a shopping list, a diary piece, a love note, a comment on the book, or just someone’s thoughts on life or their day.

The writing is often beautifully crafted and neatly expressed. Handwriting in years past was an art in itself, with copperplate style and pen and ink.

Handwriting can have more personal or sentimental links too.  In our family, we do not have  many photographs and so written memories are very important reminders of who a person was. I have a diary of a relative’s journey through the Lake District in the early 1900’s, which makes fascinating reading and gives a thoughtful insight into their lives at that time.

The main memory I have of my father is due to his handwritten talks and notes that he left and to which I sometimes refer when I give talks of my own, or when I am drawn to thinking about him.

Handwriting has and always will have an important place in my life, but I wonder what place it has in yours and whether it will have any place in future generations?

In honour of the theme of writing I am including a favourite poem by Seamus Heaney:


Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Thank you for reading, David.

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After The Gold Rush

This Digging blog has undergone more revisions in just three days than that more famous blog by the infamous Dominic Cummings (hereinafter referred to as the Dominator). At least I made all my changes before I pressed the 'publish' button and not afterwards. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll enlighten you later.

 

In my last few posts, I've steered clear of the overtly political stuff in recognition that these are sensitive times. Some several of you have subsequently urged me to tell it like I see it and so today I shall - but in as reasoned and objective a way as I can. It's an informed summary of what I've been hearing, seeing, thinking about Britain in the pandemic over the last few weeks.

 

If you're a regular reader of these Saturday splurges, you'll know I have scant - correction, make that - no respect for Boris Johnson. Educated at Eton (he left with a chip on his shoulder because they didn't consider him worthy to be Head of School) and Oxford (another chip or two because his brother and sister both got better degrees, being brighter than BoJo), Johnson went into journalism like so many toffs of his generation (Michael Gove is another) before throwing his oversized hat into the political arena - his eye on the ultimate prize, 10 Downing Street. David Cameron, for whom I have no great liking either, tried to block Johnson's progression by routing him into a role as Mayor of London . There BoJo bathed in the success of the 2012 Olympics, although all the real work had been done by his predecessor. His more lasting legacy, Boris bikes and the tax burden of that Garden Bridge vanity project which cost Londoners £300 million paid to crony consultants of the Mayor with nothing to show for it at the end of the day. (More recently he mooted a bridge linking the UK mainland with Northern Ireland - an idea which civil engineers soon debunked as technically infeasible).

 

His first bid for the PM job failed when he and Gove stabbed each other in the proverbial back in their clamour, allowing Theresa May to sweep in from the cornfields. She, too, tried to keep BoJo quiet by giving him the job of Foreign Secretary - where he proved quite the worst one in living memory, according to insiders who tired of his lack of gravitas, poor attention to detail and disastrous gaffes - as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (still in an Iranian jail because of his blunder) will attest. The problem with Boris is that he's an opportunist with no real convictions except for an overweening belief that he deserves the top job. When his senior civil servant at the Foreign Office was asked about what the consequences of Johnson ever getting to No. 10 might be he replied: "If he was not expected to run anything, it could work." Heaven help us! 

 

BoJo's complete lack of integrity, coupled with his eagerness to reach the top just for the kudos of being there, was shown when he switched his natural allegiance from being pro-Remain (natural because of his German and Turkish ancestry before his grandparents came to the UK) to staunch Brexiteer almost overnight in 2016.  Dominic Cummings, sorry, the Dominator, who had spent some years grooming Michael Gove and shaping his political career as Education Secretary (and what a scourge of the profession that turned out to be) was looking for another soft touch to further his own power agenda - much more on that shortly. He seized on Johnson, laying out before BoJo the plan by which he could rise to power on a populist surge if he would only front the Leave campaign. Johnson signed his Faustian pact with the Dominator and the latter master-minded the rest, including snappy slogans like that lie on the side of the big red bus (about how Britain sends £350 a week to the EU which could be spent on the NHS) or the 'Get Brexit Done' mantra - simple slogans to con the common man and woman, working this in tandem with the stealthy political annihilation over time of key opponents within the Tory party (Ken Clarke and Theresa May, obviously, more recently Sajid Javid).

 

As for the Dominator himself, he took the arrogant view that politicians were a bunch of monkeys and the political system was a cumbersome and failing mechanism ripe for a makeover, not in the interests of democracy and the social fabric, you understand, but in the interests of the ruling elite. (He's a big fan of Otto von Bismarck is the Dominator.)  It was his ambition to "run Number 10 one day" as he expressed it to colleagues; and since December's Tory landslide victory he's been doing just that as puppet-master to the Bloviator. That, by the way, is my word of the week thanks to Susie Dent. A bloviator is: a speaker of empty rhetoric and blower of hot air; someone who talks a lot but says very little. So there you have it, the Bloviator and his Dominator. Via the Brexit Referendum and the most recent general election, we the British people have wittingly or otherwise set this bunch of  rainbow dung beetles up on top of the shit pile and they were all set to go digging for the pot of gold - when along came Covid-19. It hasn't stopped them, merely given them a whole new set of opportunities.

 

Rainbow Dung Beetle Looking For The Pot Of Gold

What a hash the UK government has made of our response to the pandemic. I know some of you who read this blog are football fans. I was amused by this football analogy précis from Jeremy Warner (in the Daily Telegraph; yes, I keep an eye on the right-wing press as well): "In the UK, we seem to have approached the crisis with the nonchalant arrogance of the gifted amateur who turns up late for the match, has to borrow his boots from the coach, and in his delusion still expects to score the winning goal."

 

Yet even that jibe paints a dangerously false picture, one of well-intentioned, albeit bumbling, incompetence. As one digs for the truth, it turns out to be a whole lot more sinister and calculated than that!

 

Back in late 2018, the Global Health Security Index ranked the UK second best in the world (behind the USA) in terms of countries being ready with systems in place to face a possible pandemic. So what went wrong this year?

 

Simply this - the leaders (governments) of both the US and the UK chose not to implement those systems. Why? It was partly a combination of arrogance and incompetence (as suggested above) but also naked economic strategy. Remember Johnson's (and Trump's) bluster about it being just like flu, about the need to build up 'herd immunity', those media moments of BoJo walking around hospital wards shaking hands with Covid-19 patients? The government claimed to be watching what happened in Italy and Spain and to be deferring to scientific advice. Only when it suited them, it seems.

 

If the UK's lockdown had been put in place even ten days earlier than it was, it is calculated that the number of deaths would have been reduced by 30,000! As it was, the UK delayed acting and the prime minister himself was dragged allegedly to death's door by the invisible foe. Now that nearly was "project last gasp", as BoJo so insensitively named the scramble to build ventilators! Even after lockdown became policy, there were further cynical decisions made: to send old people with Covid-19 back to their care homes, which for the most part were equally unprepared to cope with the problem; to not pursue an aggressive track and trace agenda.

 

As a consequence, as it stands today the UK currently has the second highest Covid-19 death toll in the world (38,000 'officially tested' - though the real figure is over 60,000) with the US way out in front and Brazil - another country badly run by an arrogant populist - coming up fast in third place.

 

Along the way there have been constant complaints that frontline health workers didn't have the right or enough personal protective equipment, that testing was insufficient, that track and trace had  not been implemented. Behind the scenes, some of the facts are these:

 

1) that the government had been undermining the UK's 'pandemic readiness' rating by deliberately running down stocks of PPE over many months, migrating to a 'just in time' system with monopoly contracts put out to favoured private companies  - a purely economic decision that was to have a dire knock-on effects, including huge waste of money on PPE that wasn't up to spec and thousands of doctors, nurses and care workers having to struggle on with insufficient protection.

 

2) that the UK's sample testing capability was also in the throes of being privatised - another economic decision favouring companies whose owners and directors were no strangers to the high and mighty in the Tory party - and those labs proved not up to the task.

 

3) that the provision of the testing kits themselves suffered the same logistical issues - all out to private tender, companies being awarded contracts for which they were not geared up, sub-contracting et cetera et cetera and struggling with a fragmented supply chain. We never did make the 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. It was all misinformation.

 

As for track and trace, eventually the sense of doing this was conceded and apparently it's finally live now - but hundreds of people who are meant to be manning it don't know what they're supposed to be doing, can't access the system reliably and it will probably be July before it's working as intended.

 

That this bat shit week began with BoJo's special advisor holding a press conference in the rose garden of Number 10 - an unelected government advisor addressing the nation from the Prime Minister's residence no less - was simply one more unprecedented first in these unprecedented times. He subjected us to a rambling and dubious spiel which included the complaint that "all the press are giving misinformation about my whereabouts."

 

The Dominator was there because he'd been found out breaking his own lockdown rules, by driving his wife and son from London to Durham. (This was after his wife had said she had symptoms and yet Cummings still went in to work!) His wife (Mary Wakefield) had written a column in the Spectator about how they were all 'self-isolating' - she just omitted to mention that it was 260 miles north of the capital in their second home (that's right, Cummings is on the title deeds of North Lodge). Also, Mary's father is a baronet and her parents live in a castle in Northumberland. Oh, and that Cummings farm near Durham has received over £250,000 in EU farming subsidies. 

 

Then there was the whole Barnard Castle fiasco on his wife's birthday and the fact that on his return to London, the Dominator then updated a blog from last year to insert his prediction about and concern over a possible coronavirus pandemic - a deliberate re-writing of history that he chose to use in his rose garden defence submission. He's been caught out talking shit and it was embarrassing to see the apologists squirming at the rostrum and on twitter in his defence. He refused to resign, though others similarly compromised had been forced to do so recently. Worse than that, perhaps, he refused to apologise or concede he had done anything wrong. It was the height of arrogance and a 20/20 crystal clear demonstration of his elitist attitude and cynical contempt for the rest of us.



After The Gold Rush

Of course BoJo came under pressure to sack his special advisor. Of course he resisted. Without the Dominator he has no plan and no clue what to do for the best. It's also no coincidence that Michael Gove also leapt to Cummings' defence over 'eyesight worries'. As for BoJo's comment about himself needing glasses in the wake of Covid-19, that's just more subterfuge - he's been using them for years when not in the public eye.

All of these actions have been pursued in the name of an agenda that seeks to remove the traditional barriers/ checks/ balances between government (which is supposed to act in the will of the people) and the corrupting power of money. It is an agenda that is permitting privatisation and profiteering, not just in health and social care but across the spectrum, to an unprecedented degree. It is the gold rush agenda, the Dominator's master plan with lovable, shambling BoJo as its cheer-leader.

Even now, on the week-end before restrictions are eased, expert medical opinion is that lockdown is being lifted too soon and that a second wave of infections is inevitable. The release is being made for economic reasons and while I have huge sympathy with the ordinary businesses that are suffering, one thing is for sure - there are private companies in the pharma, testing and software sectors that are making a great fortune via government contracts right now out of our collective misfortune, all as a result of deliberate Tory economic policy over the last few years. That's the gold rush underway in the dung heap, and Brexit means the profiteers will not be impacted by new tax laws the EU has in the pipeline. The rich will go on getting even richer. The NHS (pride of the nation) will likely suffer the effects of further privatisation as the US squeezes it in return for a trade deal. And the poor will go on getting poorer - or die. So far, no one has mentioned the cost saving of allowing the old to go to the wall, but I wouldn't be surprised if  it's in someone's financial spread-sheet somewhere.

 

Finally, we had Sir Alan Sugar, beating on about how we should all be pulling together, bulldog spirit et cetera and as for "these journalists - it is time you all changed your negative and political rhetoric for the health of this nation and start supporting our government" instead of digging the dirt. My riposte to his appeal is a straight forward one. I think he misunderstands or deliberately misrepresents both the nature of the mess we're in, the reason for us being in it and the legitimate role of "these journalists" in reporting and commenting upon the situation. If that was his calculated bid to become Lord Amstrad, then I'm sorry Alan Sugar - you're fired!

As one very witty placard put it this week: "First they came for the journalists. Then we didn't know what was happening anymore." Beware!

We should not let these cynical and manipulative people get away with what they are doing. There's a very bad smell there. They are in the process of making themselves unaccountable as well as criminally wealthy. This is the rise of the oligarchs. I just hope the British public can finally see them for what they are. The pity of it is that they were ever considered delectable in the first instance.

As you're still with me on this one, here's my Rose Garden poem, the latest from the imaginarium, with a nod both to Wiley Publishing and Arthur Lee...

Ventriloquism For Dummies
The roses wait, damask pink, blood red, pale yellow.
He's late for his own shit show, modern Machiavelli.

When he protests his innocence with a hint of a sneer,
says his hands are clean, we know where they've been.

He's the one who's driving this runaway train with an arm
up the Clown Prince and both feet squarely in the gravy.

He took us for fools, this orchestrator of mummery,
whose pillow-book is Ventriloquism for Dummies.

But he's pissed up his own script this time, overstepped
as arrogance will, a transgression we should not forgive

nor forget:  one rule for his kind, another for the herd.
Let us pray his best days are surely behind him now.

As he walks off, petals drift to the ground like tears
from floribunda and hybrid tea and one can almost hear

him calling "Look out BoJo, I'm falling, no one cares
for me, cares for me, signed D.C."  And the ghosts

of sixty thousand dead audibly sigh in the rose garden,
willing us to harden our hearts against such calumny.

Okay, I've told it like I see it. What, then, after the gold rush? We can take rainbow hope from two things - one, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, that every shit-storm eventually runs out of shit; and two - that the Labour Party once again has an electable leader.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week. Stay safe, Steve ;-)

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Digging - Squirrel Nutkin

A Little Squirrel (Fun Poem) - Poem by David Harris

All summer long he collected his nuts

Burying them here and there

When it came to dig them up

He couldn’t remember where

He hid his treasure store

The moral of this tale

Be sure, there is one indeed

If you want to bury your treasures

And you ain’t that smart

Draw a little map, that will help for a start

The fattest squirrel I’ve ever seen lives in our neighbourhood.  It favours the back gardens of half a dozen houses of which ours is one. It runs along the tops of the fence panels that separate us from next door, the narrow alleyway and adjacent properties. I’ve watched it climb our buddleia to reach the fence of the garden opposite. It moves fast, it is cute and although it’s grey, my grandson and I call it Nutkin, after the Beatrix Potter character. This one still has a complete tail. Its main occupation is eating and digging. Nuts are buried only to be dug up again.

Most of our garden was removed a couple of years ago. Neither of us are able-bodied enough to  do much digging or maintenance and it had become overgrown and neglected. Birds were responsible for the planting of unwanted sycamore trees.  The holly which used to look so pretty ‘in berry’ had died on one side. The dark magenta berberis was beautiful but too prickly to deal with.  Weeds were knee high and everything was woven together with brambles and some sticky grass our dog had collected from walks on the nearby field.  It had become a messy, unusable area. We needed a practical, easy-care courtyard, somewhere pleasant to sit out and safe for the grandchildren to play. We found the right person for the job, no, not Alan Titchmarsh, but someone with equal expertise and vision, and he was happy to carry on in our absence – we took off to Scotland. It is a good idea to escape the noise of home improvement tools, particularly mechanical diggers, chainsaws and lump hammers.

When we returned there had been much digging, much removing and now there was much sunlight reaching previously inaccessible places. Not a thorn or prickle remained, it looked wonderful, and that’s before it was finished. We had two small garden areas, easy to plant and look after, needing nothing more than a trowel and a kneeling mat, and lots of space for children to run about. Planters and flower pots placed randomly could be moved about as required. The end result was and is perfect, just right for us non-gardeners.

The other day I decided to re-pot a worn out houseplant and see how it faired outside. It was either that or bin it. (This activity could be listed under ‘Things to do in Lockdown.) As I prepared an outside flower pot by removing something that didn’t matter to create space, I kept finding buried monkey nuts. Squirrel Nutkin. I left them out for him / her.

Seamus Heaney’s famous Digging

 Digging

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)

 Thanks for reading. Stay safe and enjoy the sunshine, Pam x

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Key facts and the passing of a great.

So the devil is in the detail, isn't it.
We have been born as an age of analysts, critical thinkers, quantum philosophers and forensic detectives. A vast age of improvement, always learning from what has been before us. In such a time, you'd think we would relish the little details more.
This week, we mark the passing of Seamus Heaney- the poet most famous for 'Digging'- taught across the land to teenagers clutching for an understanding.
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."
Those are the opening lines to Heaney's legacy- from his own poem that both teaches us to relish the lessons of our ancestors whilst voicing our quest to at least follow up their footsteps.
With that in mind, we should cast our thoughts to World War I. Remember how the assasination of a little known Archduke Indie Band led to carnage as old allegiances stood their ground? From that 'great' and bloody war came Wilfred Owen's "shrill, demented choirs or wailing shells" (Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917). The lessons had to be learned.
Move forwards a generation- and in a post war age the former bad guys aren't allowed any weapons. Or navy. Or most things, in fact. They got them, with mainstream car manufacturers of today even producing tanks in the process.
In the second world war that followed, millions of people perished at the hands of a tyrant with no qualms about chemical weapons. Never mind mustard gas. Never mind international outrage. How he got them and why appeasement ever allowed things to get that far was a lesson that had to be learned. No amount of theorising can bring those people back and the world was supposed to have grown.
Why then, in such an age of 'terror' and 'vigilance' are we still allowing this to happen. Is there a different value on a Jewish life to a Kurdish life; a Palestinian life; a Syrian life?
Of course, war is not something that should ever be rushed into and after recent brushes with weapons intelligence, it is as important as ever to have the key facts straight before charging in. What is unacceptable, however, is the politicising and deliberating over immediate intervention. Currently, a man with a recent record of using chemical weapons against his own people is accused of again doing just that.
Inspectors will have no further certainty in three weeks when the report comes than they already have, though. There will be no way of proving who launched these attacks- hidden by a legion of winks and signals by a cowardly puppet master, the hard evidence cleared on the wind- but in a room full of bodies with gunshot wounds, you'd arrest the man with the gun, wouldn't you?
There must be an intervention because enough is enough. There needs to be no other reason in my eyes- everybody knows the rules and so any violation towards defenceless men, women and children must be reprehended by humanity itself.
If it does come to war- and I sincerely hope that in a world again allied-up and hankering at a change it doesn't come to that- it must be remembered what exactly the purpose is. We all have belief systems- whether based on Gods, morality or ancient rules long since considered compulsory- but whatever spurs those on, it comes down to simply whether you can have any force for good or not.
I'm not much of a fighter. I'm not much of a killer either, being a vegan, but since I read 'Digging', I write.
It is important in an age of mis-information that as a society we record the facts- the key details from the ground in whatever walk of life. From the diaries of Anne Frank through to Heaney's sectarian detail we learn that history does not have to be written only by the winners and we all have a part to play in recording the nitty gritty, the key issues that affect us.
As I said, I'm not much of a fighter but "between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it".

Thanks for reading,
S.

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