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Greetings!

'A gaping silken dragon,/Puffed by the wind, suffices us for God./We, not the City, are the Empire's soul:/A rotten tree lives only in its rind.'

Monday 3 June 2013

Closing time...

... 'Time, Gentlemen, please!'.  It's a long time since I was in the pub at closing time to hear the last orders bell, then the increasingly exasperated shout of ... 'Time, Gentlemen, please!'. Of course, pubs in England used to stop serving at 10.30 pm - which was a hangover from the licensing hours introduced during the Great War. The previously liberal laws were proving, under the pressure of inflated wartime industrial wage rates a bit too tempting for those Englishmen still at home, in war industries. The concern was that hung-over workers weren't pitching up for work, and were, in the later parlance of economists, choosing leisure over enhanced income. Now pubs are open at all hours, more or less (though not in my sleepy market town), thanks to the last Labour government - always the friend of big business profit, and the 'fat man, the very fat man who waters the worker's beer'. But what has this to do with anything kit bashing, toy soldier, wargames? Not a lot, except that I made the smallest of advances on my Arado this evening, and the fuselage is ready to be closed up:



Geddit? 'Closed up', closing time? It's the way my random brain works. The photo above is a rather harsh image of what my Revell 1/72 Arado looks like. In reality, the contrasts are not nearly as harsh. Nonetheless, I have to admit that I do make the shading effects strong simply because in this scale, and through a cockpit cover, it is difficult to see much. Well, that's my excuse.

But if I haven't been sticking plastic together, painting little soldiers, or moving them around on the table top, just what have I been up to? Good old gardening and allotmenting. The Spring took a long time turning up here in Angles-Land, but it has, and we are glad. After a disappointing bulbs show, things have taken off in my tiny garden:


The view from the shed end of my patch - aaaaah, all good things. To sit here makes me feel thankful. To whom, or what,  I don't know, but I am thankful. The yellow stuff hanging down at the top of the photograph is:


A marvellous old laburnum tree. When I took this garden over ten years ago, it was pretty barren - a dog's toilet crossed with a decking and sleepers mess. But there was this old laburnum. I'm not sure, but I suspect that this may have been planted by the first occupants of my home, in the 1930s. The tree was in fashion then  (gardening is even more fashion driven than the catwalks of Milan), and it is old, with a couple of dead trunks, as well as the existing main trunk. So this tree might well have presided over the house for 80 years. At the moment it is very noisy, as hundreds of bees feast themselves on its blossom - 'time, gentlemen, please' only when the blossom dies.

Below my various trees - lilac, apple, rowan - are a variety of plants, including these shade lovers:


Hostas - beautiful, endlessly variable in colour, and, for me, reminiscent of my grandfather, George Jackson (1880-1973), ship's joiner, soldier (1915-1919), dog breeder, bird keeper, gardener, Home Guard (Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Home Guard), Englishman. He had hostas in his little terrace house backyard, in a street that also seemed to me, as a small child, to be full of other plants I have an affection for - elephants' ears, lilac, geranium, privet in boxes (the only way)... And the black steam trains ran behind the houses and alleys, fireboxes glowing in the dark, guard's vans streaming sparks from their stove pipes, while Canadian ships docked a few streets away with timber for the old country. All gone now. It's just a small bit of wasteland, there are no more goods trains for the marshalling yards, and the Roman Catholic church of St. James has its main doors nailed shut, and I have to carry my memory of lighting candles (despite my Protestantism) for my grandmother, who with her Welsh looks and the name of Rachel was taken for a Jewess by the tiny community of Jews that included her best friend who was wedded, in an arranged marriage, to a man 40 years older than her in the last years of the nineteenth century. 'Rachel, thou Jewish maid, you are wanted', said the tailor as Rachel's friend called to her in the street. All gone. England as an industrial country, with hard lives before modern (post-1945) medicine, but with proud men and women, stalwart and independent.

Meanwhile, the EU continues its dangerous habits. Not so long ago the UK Prime Minister made great play of a 'reduction' in the EU budget. Only it wasn't. It was a reduction in the intended increase that was still an increase on the previous EU tax raid on the nations of Europe. Notwithstanding this, the EU 'Parliament' (should it really be called a 'parlement'? - something different) began to think about a secret vote on (i.e., against) this 'reduction'. Uh? A parliament having a secret vote? I don't know what has/is happening with that, but I see that a committee of the EU parliament has had a secret vote that is expected to be rubber stamped by the full parliament. This one is to remove the parliamentary immunity from prosecution of the French MEP, Marine Le Pen so that she can be prosecuted for 'race hate' crimes for saying, in 2011, that the then frequent sight of Muslims praying in the street in France was similar to the Nazi occupation of France. Now that seems to me to be an odd thing to say, but, then, I'm not French. But, irrespective of what I, or anyone else, thinks of Marine Le Pen, the fact that a 'parliament' in a supposedly democratic system sees secret votes as being acceptable is quite horrifying. In fact, WTF!!

7 comments:

  1. We live in frightening times, the threat of a dreadful dictatorship looms and I don,t know what ordinary normal working people can do about it. It started some years ago, and now it seems to become a deluge of do this, don,t do that, think like this or else.....

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    1. I agree. It is scary. The sense that we have so little influence, and the phenomenal growth in laws that appear to be designed to restrict and control quite legitimate, democratic, activity. The way the Labour governments entered so enthusiastically into wars, then clamped down on free speech (e.g., criminalising protest in Parliament Square), and planned to bring in ID cards, supposedly to tackle the very issue (Islamic terrorism) that they had done so much (through illegitimate war and mass immigration) to create. Or the way in which the horror in Woolwich has become the excuse for the 'snooper's charter'. All against the backdrop of the dreadful Golem that is the EU. Bugger.

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  2. I don't know. The Party discipline has gotten so strict over here that members are reluctant to even express an opinion other than what they've been told and certainly don't dare vote against their party. Once an election is done if one party has managed to squeak out a majority, which can be done with about 40% of the vote thanks to multiple parties and 1st past the poll, well, you might as well shut down Parliament because there is one man rule till the next one. At least if there were secret ballots, if they really were secret, perhaps some members could still vote with their conscience or to serve their riding.

    But back to the garden, they are such soothing places aren't they? Lovely pictures!

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    1. I see where you are coming from, Ross. But secret votes by a Parliament?? We in the UK (for UK elections, but not for Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish or EU elections) also suffer from the tyranny of 'first past the post'. The last time a UK government won a majority of votes cast was in 1935 !! No wonder bigger and bigger slices of the population opt not to vote.

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    2. No I suppose not but the current government has found something worse, secret legislation, for practical purposes at least. Omnibus bills affecting dozens if not scores of laws, inc budgets, all stacked together with closure invoked to limit debate. Democracy?

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  3. Lovely garden, lovely tree. I don't know it this will be of interest, but: http://stephengill.com/news/category/new-constitutionalism

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    1. Ah, now that does look interesting - my thanks. I shall read when less full of port!

      What the hell are we going to do, I wonder?

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