I Weep For Jamaica
Ocho Rios
The events unfolding in Jamaica are disastrous for the country, its reputation, tourist industry and economy. They give an impression that is completely false. In reality it is a wonderful place, full of kind, warm, generous people. I was astonished on my first visit to find the countryside lush and green, rather like Cornwall or Wales and the people more friendly than anywhere else I have ever been.
I was very privileged to be introduced to Jamaica by a Jamaican. It was no all-inclusive tourist resort for me. There the poor Brits hunker down and never move anywhere. They seem to believe that right outside the gates are a bunch of Uzi-toting crack dealers but it’s simply not true. I’ve been back several times and I love the place. I recommend Ocho Rios on the north coast of the island.
True, the murder rate is one of the highest in the world but it all happens in a very small area of Kingston. The rest of the island is peaceful and probably safer than London. I have been through the Tivoli Gardens and Trench Town districts where all the trouble is. It’s not a good place. You lock the car doors and windows and you don’t stop but it is tiny. According to my memory it’s not much bigger than, say, Regent’s Park so it’s easy to avoid.
My Local
Undoubtedly at the root of these problems is high level corruption and I wouldn’t be surprised if that extended to US officials as well as Jamaican. The cocaine trade is a huge curse on the country but while the world continues with its ludicrous, discredited policy of prohibition it will never solve the problem. Drug laws support and encourage organised crime and corruption. If we stay on our present course things will only get worse.
I weep for Jamaica and its wonderful people. Without radical international action, I have no idea how this problem can be solved.
Theresa May Must Act On Gary McKinnon And Ian Tomlinson
It's Decision Time
After defence there can be no higher priority for any government than justice. The new government’s honeymoon period is over. The cases of Gary McKinnon and Ian Tomlinson need urgent attention from our new Home Secretary.
A Victim Not A Villain
Gary McKinnon’s case raises profound issues. He is in danger of “extradition” to the US but any idea that this is some legitimate process is nonsense. He is actually in danger of illegal rendition or kidnapping which the previous Labour government seemed ready to sanction. Any alleged crime was committed on British soil so there isn’t even any question of “extradition”. If he is to be tried he must be tried where the alleged crime was committed.
There seems though to be no progress at all on the murder of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests. This is a scandal and injustice of the very highest order and those responsible for prevaricating and filibustering over bringing charges are criminals themselves.
Murder
Ian Tomlinson’s family waits helpless while the dilatory DPP, Keir Starmer, and the CPS quibble and procrastinate over facts that the whole country has seen revealed on its TV screens. Obviously they intend to delay long enough so that the case be consigned to history like the murder of Blair Peach by a police officer in 1979. It was only last month that the Metropolitan Police came clean on this, 30 years too late.
There is some nonsense excuse being peddled that there is a problem with obtaining expert medical evidence. This is a dreadful miscarriage of justice. These are issues for a jury to decide. Keir Starmer should be dismissed for gross misconduct and should consider himself lucky if he doesn’t go to jail for perverting the course of justice.
Thug
We have already seen the inexcuseable acquittal of Sergeant Delroy Smellie, the thug who assaulted Nicola Fisher at the G20 protests (see here). This must be one of the lowest points ever in the history of British justice. There can be no other description of this verdict and District Judge Daphne Wickham who made the decision than corrupt. She deserves to be tarred and feathered for what she has done.
What can be higher in priority on Theresa May’s todo list than these matters of great principle and injustice? She should put everything else aside. There can be no more excuses.
Facebook – It’s A Snide, Snide World
I don’t know the name of the geek from Facebook who said that he wanted everyone on the planet to become a member of his website but he follows Adolf, Joseph, Benito, Francisco and other tyrants in having ambitions that must be thwarted at all costs.
Let me be clear, yes, you can find me on Facebook. It’s true, with nearly half a billion members it is difficult to ignore it. I use it to publicise this blog to as wide an audience as possible. You can call me a hypocrite if you want but I don’t and won’t participate in the snide, puerile and thoroughly unhealthy relationships and lifestyle that it promotes.
Is This The Real Life Or Is It Just Fantasy?
If there are nearly a half a billion members on the site there must be at least a billion virtually identical photographs that consist of two or three faces (usually inane blondes at a party) pressed together cheek to cheek with vile grimaces or smiles. If it’s supposed to be about individuals why does everyone look exactly the same, talk exactly the same and behave exactly the same?
There are now an extraordinary number of sad, dysfunctional people who live their life, vicariously and actually, on Facebook. This, I believe, should be of great concern to all of us. More than that, the site encourages behaviour that is dishonest, underhand and snide. It’s not a force for good. It’s a force for evil. It’s a perversion and abuse of the internet, probably mankind’s greatest ever invention.
You know the sort of person who’d rather text than make a phone call? It’s often very dishonest communication, the ideal way for a coward to make excuses, lie or deceive. It’s said that 80% of communication is non-verbal and you certainly get a lot of that extra meaning over the phone. You get none at all by text. It’s just the bare, badly, carelessly or deceptively chosen words. Facebook goes even further, it encourages members to post messages and pictures so that they’re seen by third parties as well. In fact, often the message or picture is posted mainly for their benefit, to embarass or annoy. This is the real wickedness. It’s already led to murders and countless, countless, arguments and disputes which have ended in violence. Of course, it depends on you. You or your friends can behave badly through any medium or face to face. The point is Facebook encourages you to be snide. It’s not nice.
I don’t know what the answer is. I certainly wouldn’t be encouraging children to use it. For many it’s already become a substitute for real life. Its most well known deficiency is the way it makes you collect an ever greater quantity of friends with no regard whatsoever for quality. My sons and all their real world friends have in excess of 1,000 Facebook friends. I have 24 so that must make me – what?
There’s no doubt that there are business opportunities presented by Facebook. With that many members there’s bound to be. In that context it’s not surprising that Cheryl Cole has 1,698,477 friends. Mind you, Paul Macartney only has 11!
So I’ll be staying on Facebook but I won’t be participating in it. I think it should have a big warning flash up on the screen every time you log in: “GET A LIFE”
UEA Offline To Email
Leaks like A Sieve
We all know how indiscreet certain people at the University Of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit were recently. Not only was the content of their emails outrageous, dishonest and reprehensible but their email system was so insecure that it resembled a sort of digital colander.
Now, in a classic, public sector, knee jerk overreaction, it is virtually impossible to get an email through to UEA. My son, Richard, is there doing a law conversion course after graduating in PPE last year. Every email I send him is bounced back to me as “unacceptable content”.
It’s only the sort of correspondence that might pass between any father and son. There’s no cocaine deals, terrorist plots, child porn, not even any attempt to falsify information on which the future of the world might depend. I did send him the latest draft of my novel which I think did have the odd swear word in it. Dear me, I think that must be it! Trouble is I don’t think Amazon or WH Smith accept novels these days without swear words in them.
Fortunately, Richard and I are super-duper, super-sophisticated hackers right at the leading edge of technology. We had a bright idea and used a different email address. Now why didn’t the Climate Change Unit think of that?
Paradise Valley
Heaven On Earth
You can read my latest Paradise Valley story here
…and all the other Paradise Valley and Walking The Dog stories.
Wenlock Mandeville Disaster
Child's Play
The most obvious explanation is that someone at the Olympics Committee has been horizontal jogging with someone at the design company.
What else?
There has to be a rational explanation for one of most ridiculous, badly-judged communications campaigns I have ever seen. The Wenlock and Mandeville mascot idea is third-rate, junior (bad) art school nonsense.
I first worked on ideas like this more than 30 years ago. I stake all my experience on this, I stand by every ounce of this assertion – it is NONSENSE, shocking NONSENSE and I am dismayed to see it. If it gains any traction then it will only be because of the money spent on it. Almost anything else would be better!
Lord Coe and other talented individuals on the Olympics Committee have made a mistake here. This is a serious error of judgement.
The Young Apprentice
"It's not my fault!"
Doesn’t this programme reveal the real truth about “The (Grown Up) Apprentice”?
All those retarded, celebrity-wannabees who would never have lasted five minutes in a real business were children themselves. The very idea that any of them had any idea what they were talking about was just a hugely patronising insult to the viewer. Incidentally, I’m reserving the title “The Adult Apprentice” for a really innovative little idea that’s on my very top shelf.
It’s an indictment of the researchers that work on this sort of lowbrow dross. They chose the idiot contestants on “The (Grown Up) Apprentice” to fail and to indulge in all sorts of puerile angst and confrontation. I prefer “The Young Apprentice”. It’s much more honest, more amusing and entertaining without making the contestants look like idiots. This is the way I would expect children to behave!
I can’t wait for one of the kids to call him Lord Suralan. Seems to me he’d make a perfect chairman for the FA, which is just another load of nonsense for spoilt kids.
Anyway, in “The Adult Apprentice” you won’t get fired but you will be punished.
Nick Clegg – The Boy’s Own Politician
"Is it a bird? Is it a plane?"
It’s a film script, a comicbook cartoon, a dazzling adventure story. It lifts the spirit and refreshes the soul. It’s a politician you can believe in! It’s Nick Clegg!
I hope so. I really, really do. I hope I am living through a huge moment in history when two bright, inspirational leaders take the helm of HMS Great Britain and steer us through the storm to calm waters and the broad sunlit uplands beyond.
Nick Clegg’s speech today was as inspirational as they come. If history views him kindly then this speech will rank with Churchill, Disraeli, Martin Luther King, Obama. He deserves our trust. If he has got it wrong or can’t deliver there will be plenty of time for recriminations and to return to dull cynicism.
For now, let us believe.
The Pacific
Until more than three-quarters of the way through, I was so, so disappointed in “The Pacific”. Of course, it had an awful lot to live up to. “Band Of Brothers”, its forerunner, although produced as a TV series, has to be one of the very best war movies of all time. “The Pacific” doesn’t even come close. That’s not to say that it isn’t excellent in its own right because it is but it isn’t in the same league, battalion or regiment as “Band Of Brothers”.
It’s a ten part series and until epsiode five I was bored. That’s not just because there’s a lack of action – there is – but there’s also very little characterisation or story. In “Band Of Brothers” you feel like you’re part of the platoon yourself. You grow to know and love each individual and you experience fear, grief, tension, terror alongside all of them. It wasn’t until epsiode eight of “The Pacific” when Sergeant Basilone falls in love with Lena, marries her and is then shipped to Iwo Jima that I felt the same searing emotional intensity. I remember when I first watched “Band Of Brothers”, each epsiode was like experiencing an intense personal tragedy. I would feel drained, exhausted and traumatised. It was almost too much but although it finishes well, “The Pacific” is not quite enough. Perhaps the most moving scene of all is in epsiode nine when Eugene comforts a dying Japanese woman. This is magnificent film making.
I think war is the ultimate movie genre. It describes the human condition at the very edge. Like all men, I am fascinated with horror, doubt and uncertainty about how I would behave in combat. I deplore violent films but when the story requires it, realism is essential. A war movie should make you understand the reality in detail, explicitly and make you turn away from violence.
My old friend Bruce won an Emmy and a Golden Globe working as a producer on “Band Of Brothers” and I remember talking to him about the sound of gunfire. He explained the effort involved in achieving a more realistic sound than ever before. You can hear how in every movie thereafter it’s been picked up and enhanced.
“The Pacific” does take realism even further. The spray of blood that bursts from a soldier’s body as he is hit, the red mist that appears around a group of soldiers as shrapnel lacerates them is horrifying. The graphic dismemberment and vile, grotesque injury that nowadays we see soldiers survive is beyond words. At times the cast is wading through a sea of body parts, of arms, legs, hands, feet. I think we now accept the shocking reality of this because today we see the survivors of such injury. At last, in the battle for Iwo Jima, “The Pacific” begins to communicate the deeply distressing heroism, the humbling, horrifying courage that these young men, our forefathers, summoned up to free the world from tyranny and allow us to enjoy the freedom that we do today.
There is a real mistake in some of the earlier episodes when many of the scenes are just too dark. There isn’t even the excuse of it being made for the big screen. It’s just wrong. Also some of the CGI, particularly in wide shots of amphibious landings for instance, doesn’t work. It’s not as convincing as the more primitive, model based effects in “Band Of Brothers”
There is one part of “The Pacific” that deserves the very highest praise. The titles are quite simply one of the most beautiful things I 
have ever seen on television or at the cinema. They consist of extreme close ups of an artist drawing battle scenes with charcoal. As the charcoal disintegrates into dust and splinters on the page it mixes through to become the detritus of battle, the dirt, dust and shrapnel of combat. The backgrounds merge with finely textured, laid paper, with live action, graphics and animation. It really is quite breathtakingly, achingly beautiful. All the more so so because its subject is precisely the opposite. The wonderful, haunting theme music is the same as “Band Of Brothers”. At least that’s the way I hear it. If it isn’t then it’s been composed to be so similar that they might as well have stuck with the original.
All in all, I did, eventually, greatly enjoy “The Pacific”. Most of all though it shows just how bloody marvellous “Band Of Brothers” is.
Unite Against Unite
Punks
Isn’t it wonderful to see the preposterous Unite and its two Marxist agitators, Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson, getting smashed back by the Courts?
This is exactly why we elected a Tory government.
But is it justice?
Peter Reynolds 