Optimism Rising!

I'm not given to making New Year resolutions as you know, when each and every day is already an opportunity to be and do better than the ones before. However, I'm conscious of the fact that some of what I've written in the last month or so has been a tad downbeat - albeit a true reflection of the state of the world and the time of the season, I'm sure you'll agree - and consequently I'm making a deliberate attempt to accentuate the positive for a while as we embrace not only a new year but a new decade. (Wish me luck!)

The week's given blog theme is  optimism  so we should be off to a flier...

I was discussing religious belief with a couple of friends at a party the other night. One of them is a devout Christian, the other like me would class herself as spiritual but not religious. I explained my background - father a Methodist missionary and then parish priest - and the fact I got an overload of religion at an early age, so that when I was in a position to choose I opted to step away from anything organised or denominational.

What I do concede quite readily is that historically religious belief has answered to that very real need we all have to feel optimistic about existence - whether by adopting a faith and a moral code that leads us to be kinder, more caring human beings, whether it's as an antidote to the fear that death is the end of us, whether it's a compensation for 'childhood's end' syndrome, the shock of realising that our parents are not omnipotent and cannot always protect us from the trials and tribulations of life.

It was stated by a very famous French philosopher that if God hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for mankind to invent him/her. Well, God doesn't exist and we have created him/her/them - be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Aztec, Sikh, Sun God, Moon God, and on and on; and the fact that there is this plethora of deities ought to be proof enough of the simple anthropological origin of the necessary fiction.

Religious 'myth' enshrines social ethics and symbolises human aspiration. Take as a case in point the annual Hindu festival of Dussehra (or Vijayadashami), essentially a celebration of the victory of Good over Evil, of Vishnu becoming incarnate as Rama, killing and ending the cruel reign of Ravana and establishing Dharma on Earth.

Rama, like a Swiss army knife incarnate, multiple-handedly ensuring the triumph of Good over Evil

My new year/new decade optimism springs from a hope that we, citizens of planet Earth, will prove to have enough of a collective conscience that we will step up to our responsibilities for ensuring the sustained survival not just our own species but of the entire fragile eco-system which is the extraordinary world we live in. Please let it be so - optimism rising!

As an extended appendix, typically in one of my around-year-end blogs I regale you with my critical best-ofs of the departed twelve months; take these plaudits as recommendations or ignore them as you see fit. Here goes for 2019...

In the wild domain of rock 'n' et cetera, what thrilled the house on the strand most was 'Further',  the latest waxing from Richard Hawley, with efforts from the Galileo 7 ('There Is Only Now' ) and newbie Emily Capell ('Combat Frock' ) making it a decent contest... though actually the golden biro for best lyric of the year goes to Fontaines D.C. for the infectious 'Big'  - "Dublin in the rain is mine/ A pregnant city with a catholic mind" and so forth. (Huge fans of the Beat poets are the Fontaines.)

In the cinematic stakes, 'Green Book'  and 'The Goldfinch'  shared the honours, though of course I enjoyed 'Yesterday',  that foolishness based on the premise that 'some global quirk wiped the Beatles from the collective consciousness of everybody except one young musician who then pretended to have written all these great songs'.

As far as new fiction goes, I was most taken with Sally Rooney's 'Normal People',  though credit must go to the brilliant John le Carre who, at 87, has still got what it takes as his 25th novel 'Agent Running In The Field'  amply demonstrates. As for my personal favourite Saturday Blog of the year, since a few of you have asked, I think I would have to nominate 'Love Among The Scatter Cushions'.

But that was then and this is now, optimistic January. I've begun two poems this week: an ode to optimism, The Bright Side, and a lament, All My Favourite Poets Are Dead. Neither of them is close to being ready, not even half-way so; and the latter wouldn't fit the theme anyway.

Therefore, prompted by my admiration for one of those dead poets, the recently departed Tony Hoagland (1953-2018), I offer for your enjoyment the following droll wisdom from his considerable oeuvre:

Self-Improvement
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
an offered his some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tongue tip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passers-by would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, après-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practising

is suffering,
which everybody practises,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.
                  
                                    Tony Hoagland, 1998

Thanks for reading. Stay cool, don't be fooled, make a positive difference, S ;-)

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Jetsam

This week, A Tale of Misery & Lack of Imagination; of enterprise betrayed by incompetence, political expedience, inter-firm and international rivalry and plain divisive skulduggery; of opportunities squandered; of schoolboy heartache and of a world-leading industry and its flagship cynically grounded and rendered jetsam.

This is the sorry saga of TSR-2, its promise, its scandalous cancellation in 1965 and the subsequent fall-out. It is almost a morality play and certainly stands scrutiny as an instructive history lesson on the subject of post-war Britannia, our decline and fall. You are encouraged to read (and weep).

The story began back in 1955 when the then (quaintly named) Ministry of Supply began working with English Electric to develop a specification for an aeroplane to replace the Canberra. Jet fighters and bombers had arrived on the scene in the last year of the Second World War as rival powers sought to gain the edge through hothouse technological innovation. The English Electric Company had earned an enviable reputation (as a late-comer to the industry) for the Canberra, its remarkable jet bomber, successor to the de Havilland Mosquito. From late 1949 onwards it became the pre-eminent high-level bomber and reconnaissance aircraft and over 1,000 were built including 400 under licence in America for the US Air Force. It was a backbone of the RAF and the air forces of Australia, India and several South American countries. But innovation doesn't stand still. Surface to air missiles gave the Russians the ability to bring down planes flying at high altitude and so the Air Ministry in the mid-1950s was already looking for a supersonic tactical/strike/reconnaissance plane (TSR) that could fly very low (under enemy radar) and that would be available to the RAF in the early 1960s (five years being the average development lead time from prototype to entry into service). GOR 339 was the official specification and the design team at EE, fresh from developing the fearsome Lightning fighter/interceptor for the RAF, went to work on devising the most technologically advanced plane yet conceived. What eventually resulted was the prototype TSR-2 (see below) but the tale is a whole lot more complicated than that.

TSR-2 at Boscombe Down in 1964

I mentioned surface-to-air missiles just now and in 1957, in surely one of the most misjudged White Papers of all time, Defence Minister Duncan Sandys declared that the era of manned military combat aircraft was over and done with and henceforth unmanned ballistic missiles would be the order of the day. You can assess for yourself how well that prognostication played out! All new military aircraft projects were forthwith shelved apart from the three that were already under way, the Blackburn Buccaneer, the Hawker Kestrel (vertical take-off-and-landing) and the TSR-2. Everything else was stopped dead on the drawing-board.

The Buccaneer was under development for the Royal Navy's fleet air arm, to be its standard carrier-borne jet. Good though it was, it was small and subsonic, not nearly fast or capable or sophisticated enough for the RAF, though there were many attempts to get the air force to settle for it in lieu of TSR-2. As it happens, Lord Mountbatten, an ambassador for the Navy, even went to Australia to try and persuade the RAAF (who were planning to replace their Canberras with 30 TSR-2s) that they could get five Buccaneers for as much as one TSR-2 would cost them; completely untrue as it turned out, but indicative of the lengths highly placed persons were prepared to go to sabotage the TSR-2 project.

The RAF held firm in its intention to have TSR-2 and so the government imposed two stipulations if the project was to proceed. Firstly, it wouldn't accept that such an ambitious design could be delivered by a single team from a single company and insisted that the risk and the development should be shared jointly between English Electric at Warton in Lancashire and Vickers at Weybridge and Wisley, effectively forcing the formation of the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). Secondly it ruled that the Bristol Olympus engine - still under development - should be used for the aeroplane whereas English Electric favoured an already tried and tested Rolls Royce jet engine. The shotgun wedding between EE and Vickers took time to stabilise, leading to months of delay; and the fact work was carried out across several separate sites (instead of just at Warton) added inefficiencies and cost. But they were nothing compared to the delays resulting from waiting for the new Bristol Olympus engine to be available. Nevertheless, by 1963 the first prototype was nearing completion, the second (of four) was well under construction and production lines were set up at Preston and Weybridge.

The Americans visited these lines, expressing an interest in purchasing TSR-2 but in reality were merely eager to learn what the new plane had to offer. On the one hand they were alarmed at how much superior to their own projected F-111 bomber the English plane appeared to be; on the other they took the opportunity to copy as many of TSR-2's advanced features as they could into the F-111.

1964 turned out to be a pivotal year in so many ways. Labour came to power in a General Election and recognised that the country had been living on borrowed time and needed a big loan from the IMF. The Americans' price for supporting the loan was the cancellation of TSR-2 which they saw as a considerable threat to the dominance of their own aircraft industry. They proposed that their own F-111 would be available sooner and would be cheaper.

TSR-2 had undertaken its maiden flight before the General Election and continued to make a further 24 test flights into early 1965. It exceeded expectations in every department and there was a sense among both EE/Vickers development team and the RAF that this was an exceptional piece of aeronautical engineering, way ahead of anything else the Americans or Russians were working on, a real world-beater.

TSR-2 leading the world on its maiden test flight

The project was cancelled on government orders in the April Budget of 1965, the excuses given being that the projected cost would be too high, the delivery date of 1967 was unacceptable and the Australians had cancelled their order for 30 (after being advised the project was likely to be cancelled). The RAAF opted for the F-111 instead.

The project team and the RAF disagreed with the government's decision. The RAF was told it would get F-111s for lower cost in a similar timeframe. Bizarrely, the order then went out that all the TSR-2s, completed and in process, were to be destroyed along with all the jigs, machine tools and production lines used in their manufacture - as if to ensure there could be no U-turn. The specialised project teams at Warton and Preston, Weybridge and Wisley were disbanded and many of the leading experts went overseas - principally to America - as part of an escalating technology brain-drain.

That decision in 1965 rang the death-knell of an independent British aviation industry at a time when it was leading the world. It still seems a crass, cynical and incompetent decision.

Totally predictably, development of the American F-111 ran way over schedule and way over budget. The Royal Australian Air Force eventually took delivery of their 24 planes in 1973 and the US Air Force deployed squadrons of the plane to its UK airbases the following year. The RAF had long since decided the F-111 was going to be too late and too expensive and had cancelled its order. Instead it invested in the Anglo-French Jaguar which went into service in 1974 and the Anglo/German/Italian Tornado, part built and tested at Warton, which finally delivered on the specification TSR-2 was originally designed to fill. The Tornado went into service in 1979 - one could argue 12 years later than TSR-2 would have done and at many times the cost - and remained on front-line RAF duty for the next quarter of a century.

TSR-2 going supersonic in 1964

I've not written a poem this week. Instead, I'm hoping you will admire and enjoy something by the late Tony Hoagland, it being bang on theme. I always regarded Tony as a kindred spirit. He was American, son of an Army doctor, born in the same year as myself. He was a big fan and follower of the Grateful Dead and a practicing Buddhist as well as a poet. Sadly, he died of pancreatic cancer in October. I reproduce here as an epitaph for Tony one of his most famous poems, from his second poetry collection, 'Donkey Gospel', published in 1998.

Jet
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes on the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

                                                                     Tony Hoagland


Thanks for reading. The rest is silence, S ;-)

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