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<title>My RSS Feed</title><link>http://helengray.net/index.html</link><description>Lawrence Gray&#x27;s Blogomania</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><language>en</language><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:rights>2019 Lawrence Gray</dc:rights><dc:date>2026-04-30T17:32:23+01:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Fri, 1 May 2026 14:33:07 +0100</lastBuildDate><item><title>HELEN&#x27;S FIGHT</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2026-04-30T17:32:23+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/41b08dc9a8432010f41a486b1eefac77-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/41b08dc9a8432010f41a486b1eefac77-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It is a term that can sometimes be clinically appropriate, but it can also function as a polite way of saying the doctor does not know what is wrong and, as is all too often with women patients, suspects anxiety. 

...We subsequently learned that early pancreatic cancer is often difficult to detect on CT but at this point, being ignorant, we did not challenge this and accepted that Helen was now labelled diabetic and prescribed insulin.


...It is possible that the tumour had simply progressed to a stage where detection was easier consequently one cannot prove that earlier imaging in the UK would have identified it. 

...Looking back now, the most painful thought is not simply that the disease was aggressive, but that the early signals were diffuse enough to discourage a sense of urgency, where perhaps investigation might have been justified sooner.   Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat even when identified relatively early but early detection is seen as a must if one is to expect any kind of positive outcome.


...Six weeks is a curious unit of time when one has just been told that median survival may not extend far beyond three months. 

...He recommended FOLFIRINOX chemotherapy, a powerful combination therapy often used in pancreatic cancer in the hope that tumour shrinkage might make surgery possible later.


...The information I had was that there was no metastasis and that the reduction of the tumour would improve her chances and could lead to an operable condition. 

...These periods of treatment required us to stay in London where we took an opportunity to go to the theatre, meet friends for dinner, do some shopping and take some photographs. 

...She also busied herself putting together photo books, one of all my ancestors going back over a hundred years, as well as a collection of monthly photographs of ourselves that she had been collecting for the forty-eight years we had been together. 

...This would be yet another eye rolling expense but at the same time it suggested that there was confidence that she would be around in six months&rsquo; time.


...I contacted one of the pancreatic cancer institutions that offered medical advice and they suggested that she could have a milder form of chemotherapy that could at least control the liver cancers. ...  I think the fact that I had mentioned that Cambridge&rsquo;s cancer centre was now using histotripsy made her wonder if there was something in this procedure.


...Despite her declaring that she had taken part in an experiment when she had been professor of pharmacology and discovered this effect, they still believed that morphine was the best treatment for her.


...One night I brought our iPad to the bed and said we should pretend we are in a hotel room doing what we often did when abroad, watch British TV via a VPN on the iPad. 

...But the nurses persuaded us that it would be easier for them if she was in this bed and then departed. 

...Her head rested where it had rested so many mornings, against my shoulder, the position from which we would normally discuss what the day might contain: exercise, breakfast, maybe lunch somewhere, a visit to a garden centre, or maybe something more extravagant, the cinema, the theatre, drinks with friends... 

...I could see they were not certain how to react and then told me that someone would come in the morning.


...I could not escape the feeling that much of the harm we had encountered arose not just from fragmentation but from some malicious intent to harm, or at least use the good intentions of others to cause harm.   It might well be the accumulation of small failures of attention rather than deliberate neglect, though any visit to an A & E department provides you with a punitive environment, designed to discourage anyone but the most desperate, and of course it is the most desperate that get the punishment. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>NOT THAT ANYONE IS READING THIS&#x2026;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2024-03-04T17:22:56+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/8d69abc30565542dedf54f4a0e4cefb3-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/8d69abc30565542dedf54f4a0e4cefb3-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;m sure there&rsquo;s one of those off shore funds that make all the bucks that he could recommend. ...  And it seems that the Labour party has bought into this vision of the economy as well and their MP&rsquo;s would probably hire him as their personal financial adviser. 


...It&rsquo;s an economy of hedge funds, off shore tax havens, money laundering, investment brokers, big deals, billionaire investors, ponzi schemes and a whole slew of ten percenters brokering deals designed to give them ten percent just for taking a massive gamble with other people&rsquo;s money. 

...I have no idea what a night out on the piss with her would be like, other than I am sure kicking a homeless guy hunkered down in a Tesco&rsquo;s doorway would be involved. 

...We live in the one where: the health service is crumbling; the trains are expensive and badly run; the roads are falling apart; the water companies pay themselves dividends from money saved by dumping raw sewage into the rivers; where the power companies&rsquo; smart meters always seem to record more than one expected and make one think FUJITSU! 

...It is an economy where off shore funds illegally acquire freeholds, rack up the ground rent, make the leaseholds worthless and then gather in the default properties to offer up for a sweet deal with the government for housing illegal immigrants while some private company process them for first class tickets to Rwanda.   It is an economy short of funding because billions of public money were handed to the government&rsquo;s cronies for services they were ill fit for providing and proved to be so by not providing anything that worked. 

...Which reminds me how if one wishes to reach for legal redress for things like the fraudulent racking up of &ldquo;Service Charges&rdquo; for apartments, a solicitor&rsquo;s letter can cost a thousand quid and any subsequent court case regardless of the result, if one is ever reached, will burden you with the fraudsters legal costs as well&hellip;. 

...Our economy has nothing to do with The City, it is the one of charity shops, food banks, non-existent policing, indifferent schooling, bleak town centres, obesity inducing food stuffs, and &ldquo;excess deaths&rdquo; as the NHS calls that boost to cardiovascular issues that accompany the Covid booster programmes, which I&rsquo;m sure is an excellent way to reduce the cost of geriatric care and pensions.


...He was a man with negative charisma but without him, I would not have had much of an education at all.   My redbrick excursion was a bewildering affair, full of misplaced expectations I&rsquo;ll grant you that, but the magic it worked was that it opened my eyes to possibilities and brought me head first into the class walls that the privately educated established. 

...If I was on the make in Hong Kong now, I&rsquo;d have to be useful to a whole other cabal of vested interests. ...  I&rsquo;d try make it funny, but I would be made aware of where the money came from and what it needed of me.   I&rsquo;d still make Kung Fu Rwanda about a hapless Chinese journalist from The Wuhan Weekly sent to Brighton to investigate the origins of the mysterious Woke Virus that was introducing pronouns into the Chinese language which had been gloriously unisex for a millennium. 

...But, being a nice sort of chap, even if it was my private wealth, I am sure I would look out of the darkened windows of my Rolls Royce as it bumped over the odd street sleeper and think it is all a bit of an eyesore really, surely the odd billion here and there could tidy things up a tad.   Then I would fly to my mountain top lair and make a few phone calls yelling at my club members that the place was looking like something out of Dickens, marauding knife wielding juvenile pick pocketers included. ...  We&rsquo;d have a good laugh at that and I&rsquo;d book my flight on Elon&rsquo;s one way ticket to Mars.


...The bunch questioning him about democracy at the time were twenty somethings barely out of college so it was probably true but I cannot help feeling that our British rulers think much the same of us.   And it has to be said that, on the evidence of a recent trip through darkest China, at least the Chinese government seems to be running things better there. ...  And I&rsquo;m sure I could find things to bitch about their governments as well, but I would definitely get better dental treatment there.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>TIME FOR A ROLEX</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>fiction</category><category> philosophy</category><dc:date>2024-02-29T15:49:16+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Time%20for%20a%20rolex.html#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Time%20for%20a%20rolex.html#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Ask any passing monk and he will tell you how we all live in our own reality, piecing together our whys, whens and hows, and the past slips into a timeless dream and the future is never now. 

...Our memories are moments of desire seen in retrospect: moments of missed opportunity, moments of misdirected affection, moments of unnecessary embarrassment, moments of tragic annihilation that we never thought we could recover from, but must have otherwise we wouldn&rsquo;t be here to contemplate such things. 

...I am older now than they were then and flatter myself by believing that I am never as confused and befuddled as they seemed to have been at such an age. 

...Perhaps my present disquiet is as much to do with the UK being all too reminiscent of the one I left back in the 1980&rsquo;s, bar the present obsession with tattoos and obesity. ...  Though actually what I would say back in 1980 is put them all up against the wall for, as the song goes, &ldquo;The times, they are a-changing!&rdquo;


...But Einstein said he never found out how to make watches on a moving train tell the same time as the place they passed through, no matter how much corporate money was poured into the project. ...  Everything moves around them, and, I assume, everyone awaits the impact of a universal connection, a connection that subsequent scientists have discovered depends on how you measure it and can be influenced by anywhere in the universe. 

...I am sure that in a muddy field near Glastonbury, in a haze of smoke pulsing to the thud of a distant rock band, many a gap year student has contemplated how even if our watches were synchronised, the longevity of the journey is all our very own.   And if one is in the depths of some great void in space one will never know for sure if one&rsquo;s time is the same as anyone else's. ...  I had no great illusions about the wisdom of the east and recall how I was sure the Buddha would have smiled at the irony of the Dongshan monk who showed us around, wearing a big chunky Rolex. 

...We can all run on our own time if we so desire, though things seem to get organised if one sets it according to what everyone else&rsquo;s watch says.   Few of us manage to pull that off though and I am horribly punctual, thus forever irritated by British plumbers&rsquo; inability to arrive the same day as they told you they would arrive.


...In between the mostly empty pages there were a few blurred discoloured photos taken with a disposable camera: there were some bicycles, a statue, the back of someone&rsquo;s head, an under exposed one of The Pearl River at night, I think. 

...One of the other tourists wanted a drink that was not on the prepaid tour group&rsquo;s menu and I showed off with my Cantonese explaining to the bewildered waitress, that the tourist would pay extra. 

...Let me just recollect a moment at a party with a scratchy LP of The Third Ear Band meandering through its Easternish tones, while I and my hairy pals sat around like sullen mushrooms in the dark, soaking up the vibe. ...  Pills were taken for a different reason back then and conversation turned to such things as how Time is not only mixed up with place, but also with scale! 

...On the small scale, the very small scale, before we hit an infinitely unfathomable barrier, we know that some things take place in several places at once, some things communicate over infinite distances instantaneously, and those Nobel prize winning experiments with photons indicate that effect can precede the cause, giving rise to thoughts of time travel. 

...But the alarm bells are always ringing, and they are big; they start the race and finish it, leaving us no time to dig so far down, no time to avoid, no time to think, no time at all to stop it just hurling what it wills at us. 

...They tell us of events that we once thought we should attend to but would have faded from our memory as other interests emerge.&nbsp; 

...And while I have your attention, why not head over to the Goodness Grays YouTube Channel and check out our vlogs about our return to the UK after thirty years in Asia, not to mention our documentaries about Johor, our trips around Spain, Iceland, Tanzania, Malaysia and much more.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>ID</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2023-12-21T15:30:12+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/f0a1bc89d917bf12ce5f293f6110c6a8-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/f0a1bc89d917bf12ce5f293f6110c6a8-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I was quite pleased when an immigration official called me an &ldquo;immigrant&rdquo;, though back in Blighty such a term seems be taken as synonymous with someone wet and bedraggled climbing out of a dingy in the middle of the night. 

...Similarly,&rdquo;Refugee&rdquo; seems to exclude a mobile phone and a pocket full of credit cards, and yet if there is a dodgy turn of government, your shifting money to an offshore account and grabbing a flight before the airport closes, can make you a refugee just as much as anyone running from a burning hut in a jungle. 

...You could make it more romantic, or at least less needy, and call yourself an exile, with implications of self-importance and dissidence, but unless you are forming a government in exile, I would avoid the term. 

...After 1997 the City State was morphing into, as was warned, &ldquo;just another Chinese city&rsquo; and it became apparent that local politics was not a fight that welcomed &ldquo;gweilo&rdquo; participation, despite my smattering of hard acquired Cantonese that could run into a convincing flow when drunk and talking to a cab driver. 

...And despite Sang Nila Utama&rsquo;s mythical origins being a bit of a positive spin on the Sumatran&rsquo;s murderous acquisition of what was called Temasek, it meant the Singapore Government wanted everyone to know that Singapore sort of existed before the British came. 

...Anyway, I settled in Johor Bahru, just across the Malaysian border, which any Singaporean would tell you is a dangerous crime ridden third world backwater populated only by rogues that Singapore wanted nothing to do with.   That opinion might have been true circa 1960s when it was where Singaporeans snuck off to indulge in gambling and prostitution, but nowadays, by virtue of cheap studio space and Singapore&rsquo;s ambiguity about those involved in the creative arts, it has become a ramshackle lively place with a lot of energetic people making it up as they go along. 

...It may be wonderfully baffling to accompany Lord Murugan for his annual wash in the sea, but if there is one thing one can say about the clash of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, in this country it has produced some of the nicest people there are. 

...Obviously, Malaysian TV is dodgy, and there are even states in Malaysia where cinemas are banned, but there is no end of absorbing activities if you conceive of yourself as an immigrant! ...  And on close examination one did see that Frank Swettenham, an infamous Governor General of Malaya, did an awful lot to create the Bumi Putra policy and harboured a deep distrust of the Chinese, despite some, let us say, interesting business associations with them. 

...I had a ten-year visa and thought it would be easy to extend it, especially given that I once shook the Sultan of Johor&rsquo;s hand and my wife was given a certificate recognizing her contribution to JB by none other than the Sultana herself. 

...The government decided to make it more expensive to recruit a better class of people because those they had now were, as one government minister put it, crooks and criminals. 

...If their visa requirements for aging Brits had been less expensive, and my experience of government&rsquo;s ability to kick you out whenever they felt like it, my retirement pad would have been in Byron Bay. 

...So here I am back in that nation and hoping that it is not the Britain that I left, hoping that it is a foreign country for me to explore and discover a self-created sense of belonging, rather than the three-day week, strike bound, un-employed, Angry Brigade haunted, spy infested train wreck that haunts my imagination.   Given the bizarre twists and turns of post Brexit politics, its zero-growth economy, and bankrupt city councils, I sense that the UK is at least as maddeningly misgoverned as any of my beloved South East Asian states, bar Singapore of course, who just about have a grip on things. ...  I&rsquo;m rather hoping the UK and India open up their borders to each other, though I suspect that smacks of Empire which is not very PC. Or is it? 


...But most of all, the UK is one place where I do not need a visa and it is one place where free speech and tolerance are heralded as a national trait.   Except, of course, when Doctor&rsquo;s are being told they should inform their patients of their preferred pronoun &ndash; I suggest Dr &ndash; and when everyone demands a safe space where they can exclude those they do not like, which smacks of self-righteousness and bigotry disguising themselves as morality and spirituality. 

...Obviously, I am now just some Old White Boomer one rant short of my father&rsquo;s genes kicking in and an angry letter to my MP declaring: &ldquo;This is not my country!&rdquo; 

...And while I have your attention, why not head over to the Goodness Grays YouTube Channel and check out our vlogs about our return to the UK after thirty years in Asia, not to mention our documentaries about Johor, our trips around Spain, Iceland, Tanzania, Malaysia and much more.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>THE UK IN DECLINE</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2023-05-30T16:51:49+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/76f3870e6ee491b411893f5598269c50-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/76f3870e6ee491b411893f5598269c50-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Rubbish piled up on the streets as the country ground to a halt and just when we thought civil war was afoot, along comes Margaret and we got a police force on horseback looking not unlike Cromwell&rsquo;s New Model Army - probably a well thought out design meant to evoke the primacy of Parliament as they charged down the massed ranks of King Scargil&rsquo;s subjects, the striking Miners. 


...Despite having strikes, three days in the office, inflation, wage stagnation, collapsing social services, failed and half-baked infrastructure projects, supply chain collapses, productivity collapse, housing market collapse, massive corruption, and government incompetence, all of which has plunged Britain into a recession making this the poorest rich country whose economy is actually growing less than Russia&rsquo;s&hellip; I&rsquo;m pausing for breath here&hellip; Despite all that, we don&rsquo;t hear about revolution or civil war, but we get a rather soporific groan about &ldquo;Britain in Decline!&rdquo; 

...Interest rates in 2000 were 5.7% whereas now they are 0.5%, which is just as well as government debt is now 80% of GDP rather than the 28% it used to be. 

...Those cameras, phones and TV&rsquo;s now cost 80% less, not that one buys the cheap ones if one wants to use the latest apps, which of course you have to if you wish to use bank accounts and other services such as the health service. 

...The UK was once the globalised nation par excellent, or evil imperialist, depending upon your point of view, then it changed to a role as a fulcrum between Europe and America, then it became a leading exponent of neo-liberalism, and now it can lay claim to being none of those things. 


...Even if one seeks a big picture vision of the future from a magazine like The New Statesmen, their article on the decline of Britain states that we have a political elite that hates the things we are good at, which it lists as the University Sector, a huge strength in professional and technical services such as accountants, financiers etc, and of course our creative industries. ...  All of which still prefers finance over industry and infrastructure investment, in short they ignore the graft that my father said did nobody any harm, unless of course one was the person doing the grafting.


...The older generation believe that the younger will have it harder than them but remarkably the younger think, that they will have it easier, which basically means they aren&rsquo;t even cross despite only 17% thinking that decline is reversible. 

...Which perhaps indicates that this poll did not ask too many members of the Taliban who rather like traditional ways of doing things and a Warlord is a war lord, so needs his wealth and women to compensate for his short life.   Some people just don&rsquo;t get the idea of development and do not want to move away from the village - an attitude that one detects has seeped into Little Old Brexit Voting England as well. 

...Margaret Thatcher opened up the financial markets to the comprehensive school educated greedy for loads of money folks that she correctly guessed lurked beneath the surface of the average university student with their book shelf containing unread copies of Mao&rsquo;s Little Red Books and half read copies of Jean Paul Sartre&rsquo;s La Nausea. 

...Just when his contempt for the lazy privileged hippies had given way to an &ldquo;I told you it&rsquo;ll end in tears,&rdquo; another bunch of idle louts had suddenly got money in their pockets for nothing, as far as he could see, and inflation had wrecked his pension. 

...The Swinging Sixties had been all about UK music, fashion, films, and theatre, and so why not shift some of that dodgy money that was flooding into the City of London into financing the UK&rsquo;s Coolness, only this time fuelled less by the soporific spliffs and hallucinogens, and more by cocaine and amphetamine. 

...It ignored external factors and blamed internal factors and failed to notice that although Britain was less imperial, it was wealthy and as ever would muddle on rather than collapse into whatever countries collapse into when they self-destruct.


...On the one hand this tension brought us to a point where we ruled the waves and were a world power, but it did so more by driving our most energetic out of the island in disgust. ...  In fact something like two to three million went in the 17th century, which out of a population of six million meant a lot of people thought chancing their scalps was preferable to putting up with the nonsense of the English class system. 


...However, if one compares the UK with what it was in the year 2000, rather than 2010, one finds that the sense of our being a wealthy country erodes. 


...H.G.Wells book &ldquo;The Time Machine&rdquo; gave a Victorian spin on this by imagining humans evolving into two breeds, the flower loving Eloi living ignorant lives of plenty served by the bestial Morlocks and their machines, who turn out to be less servants of the Eloi but rather farming them for consumption.&nbsp; 

...Two-thirds of the 5.6 million increase in the UK workforce has been due to immigration, not all of it legal, and curiously not all of it by those impressed by British culture and willing to abide by the &ldquo;live and let live&rdquo; compromise that has long been a trait of these islands.   Even so, the reason for most wanting to come here has been the UK&rsquo;s preference for freedom and tolerance and that is something that appears to be not in decline.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>THE PATIENT</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2023-01-19T18:05:44+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/e813ece2eb49baaca537fed0f7989fcc-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/e813ece2eb49baaca537fed0f7989fcc-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[At least that is what we like to think and there is no doubt that people come in all shapes and sizes, though perhaps not all shapes and sizes. ...  Or for that matter you don&rsquo;t find them sporting several ounces, flapping their wings and twittering, though perhaps there are those that remind us of such creatures. ...  Yet we still think we are individuals because as a rule, a millennium of genetic influences when combined with other things from the environment means our characters are like fingerprints, and thus we are all individual - until you go into hospital. 


...Having recently had the bad luck of ending up in a hospital ward with the feeling that I was just one badly lit corridor from the morgue, I realised that to the nurses I was bed sixteen. 

...I have always had a determination not to turn into a grumpy old man, especially not the grumpy old guy who could not remember why he was grumpy, or why he had to wear trousers, or where the ends of his feet were or what they were called. ...  And if the blood clots in my lungs had decided to be blood clots in my head, then I would be that man, that grumpy old git, that nuisance, though probably most likely dead which would indeed make me grumpier still. 


As it was, I seemed to be the one old man that the nurses had to shake now and then just to see if I was alive. ...  The ward was a cacophony of alarms, so many that I am sure the nurses decided they&rsquo;d ignore the most irritating persons and only tend to the less troublesome ones. ...  The soles of my feet would no doubt be there to greet me, but I was concerned about how irritating it would be to my wife. 


At seventy, one has that nagging sense that the biblical three score years and ten might have some validity, especially when one has the misfortune of being admitted to a ward resembling the old Bedlam lunatic asylum. 

...I recall thinking that a dose of Raquel was the very thing that needed to be injected into me, but I did not think the NHS indulged in such medicine and if I had suggested it, all I would get is a visit from the hospital mental health unit.


As I considered such things I did wonder if any minute now I would join the cast of The Living Dead and be roaming the corridors with my wrinkly arse hanging out of my regulation back to front NHS nightgown. ...  Or I could have become like the one the nurses were constantly asking to return to his bed to let them bring him a urine bottle. ...  And then there was the one that constantly called for the nurse to bring them a drink of water, despite there being a jug of water beside them.   They of course could not reach the water without falling out of bed, but when a fellow patient helped them to the water, ten minutes later they were crying out for a change of sheets. 

...Despite it being obvious that I was not one of those people and that I was not a number but a name, the nurse asked me whether I could walk, dress myself, and what year it was. ...  And I&rsquo;ll have to check my phone to find out which &ndash; all the while I am reminding myself that I am not one of those - those -  those grumpy old men!!! 

...Normally my pulse plods along in the sixties, occasionally dipping into the fifties, hence no doubt why my mind mangled various snippets of medical information with those gleaned from sixties films and TV shows, and here my pulse was pounding out 2023 as I considered how time for me appeared to have become a tad Slaughterhouse Fivish&hellip; Any minute now a crack unit of British Air Force Officers would be dressing as sexy nurses and singing The Gangs All Here!


...Possibly in another ten years I would be giving voice to such fleeting considerations, and thus become one of those old men they put in bed number thirty six where they can be seen from the corridor by the male nurses lounging behind the desk with a bucket and mop ready from bathroom catastrophes. 

...And while I have your attention, why not head over to the Goodness Grays YouTube Channel and check out our vlogs about our return to the UK after thirty years in Asia, not to mention are documentaries about Johor.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Brainwashed and Fancy Free</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2022-06-18T18:22:17+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/6c43a0b696639262a5aadab93fbf7fe3-34.html#unique-entry-id-34</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/6c43a0b696639262a5aadab93fbf7fe3-34.html#unique-entry-id-34</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The real message is that if Hamlet had thought about his options a bit more he could have gone back to university, dismissing ghosts as mere signs of stress, and put faith in rationality, due process, fact checking, and risk assessment, biding his time for when he could make his play for the crown. 

...Tom Cruise is a short arsed, big nosed, white guy who looks unnaturally fit for a sixty year old, and for some reason has never made a film that is less than entertaining. ...  If one removes all the craziness, the good guy as bad guy, bad guy as good guy, and replace it all with one dimensional heroes of the perfect state, nobody wants to go and watch it.


...And the Star War&rsquo;s catch phrase, &ldquo;May the force be with you&rdquo; is not too dissimilar to Tom &ldquo;Maverick&rdquo; Cruise&rsquo;s line, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t think, do.&rdquo; 

...I wrote TV shows in Singapore about the lives and loves of firemen and was always called upon to change the script if the firemen did anything so selfless as rush into a burning building to rescue screaming terrified children without requesting the authority to do so. 

...Now I have to say that our democracies are flawed, some more than others, and a constant drip of half witted politicians, wars and interference in other people&rsquo;s politics does give fuel for this critique. ...  For instance, despite the UK Queen&rsquo;s 70th year as the head of state, and a whole lot of flag waving events before cheering crowds, one could just as easily have stood on the streets singing &ldquo;God Save The Queen, She Aint No Human Being!&rdquo; ...  And on TV we have pundits saying things like, &ldquo;I have nothing against our Queen, but it is about time we didn&rsquo;t have one and instead should vote David Attenborough in as our ceremonial Head of State.&rdquo; 

...The great Chinese nation would happily watch Top Gun despite it being about Americans saving the world from some unspecified evil country building atomic weapons equipped with, for some reason, American F111s, which must have been bought from America&hellip; all of which should alert even the wokist of critics that the politics of Top Gun are nonsense! ...  But despite that, or maybe because of it, it delivers iMax action of a spectacular and exciting kind that makes one take Tom Cruises advice, and not think too much about it and go along for the ride.   The Chinese, if allowed to watch it, would lap this up and apart from booing any sign of a Taiwanese flag on Tom&rsquo;s jacket, would see it all as just fiction. ...  China, that is, the department of censors, might not want to go on Tom Cruise&rsquo;s ride but there will be plenty of pirated editions floating around, some of which will appear on large cinema screens for private viewings. 

...I have to admit that I do watch the odd Chinese movie, especially crazy Hong Kong movies, which are nothing if not morally ambiguous, and I also watch Korea&rsquo;s remarkable output of features and TV soap operas; and then there is Turkey&rsquo;s drama series, &ldquo;Magnificent Century&rdquo;, which managed to grip me through hundreds of sub-titled episodes.   I obviously have nothing better to do with my life, but my point is that I do not really think there is any real difference between the Western Narrative and the Eastern Narrative if one eliminates too much government interference. 


...A good story is essentially much the same whether it is produced by the east or the west, and it has to be said that American movies, especially with English actors and directors, do have a good handle on this.


...Maybe my belief that the east and the west are not that different is because my student days reading &ldquo;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance&rdquo; have exposed me to the state of &ldquo;No Mind&rdquo; and a penchant for oriental cultures, hence all the work on Chinese scripts and Singaporean TV shows. ...  It may be a sure way to get yourself killed but there is a moment in all stories where one has to risk all in order to become a hero.  

...Which brings me back to the English Heresy: Hamlet shows what a disaster it is to give way to this all action machismo which is why a hero is not a hero but a psychopath if he is not a reluctant and unlikely hero.   The call to adventure, as the scriptwriter's story template,  &ldquo;The Hero's Journey&rdquo;, has it, is always turned down before reasons beyond the heroes control force them to undertake their quest, a quest they hate, a quest they struggle against, a quest they constantly question. 

...And while I have your attention, why not head over to the Goodness Grays YouTube Channel and check out our vlogs about our return to the UK after thirty years in Asia, not to mention are documentaries about Johor.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>I don&#x2019;t need a ride&#x2c; I need ammunition</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2022-03-29T18:13:56+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/a50d870275a0caf8cfd51b38aeda06c8-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/a50d870275a0caf8cfd51b38aeda06c8-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I am sure most people here in the UK are rooting for Ukraine, but because the Ukraine has had its fair share of dodgy politicians and corrupt oligarchs, one held one&rsquo;s breath to see if the President would just grab his money and run when he had the chance. ...  The Afghan president had obviously not understood that leadership meant more than dipping one&rsquo;s hand in the public till and so it was every man for himself, and don&rsquo;t bother to lock the door behind you.


Ukraine&rsquo;s president Zelensky was an anti-politician politician who came to power because all the others were either tainted with old soviet ways of doing things or saw democracy as synonymous with kleptocracy. 

...But administratively he was all over the place and if the war had not happened, his reputation would have been for wild gestures with little substance and all too often disastrous consequences.   As it was, his moment came and the British understood that under the circumstances one really did have to be crazy to be Prime Minister and crazy might well be what was needed. 

...And during a war where on the one hand you have a bloated faced hard man threatening nuclear war backed by a bunch of overweight, stony-faced generals, and on the other hand you have an easy going nice chap, it is easy to see who the good guy is. ...  It does indicate that he really does understand the times we live in and that his fight is a battle with a past that his country has no intention of returning to. 

...And one gets a whiff of the liberal Jewish attitudes of New York when he says things like, &ldquo;We will build the country of opportunities, one where all are equal before the law and where all the rules are honest and transparent, the same for everyone. 

...Indeed there are those who see the whole thing as a &ldquo;Wag The Dog&rdquo; conspiracy and think the war, as we in the West see it, is a fake and that the Ukrainians are staging fake battles to show Russians in a bad light. 

...Considering that nobody from the &ldquo;alternative&rdquo; media are actually in Kyiv, one might say that the Main-Stream Western media know a bit more about the reality of the situation than those merely sat in front of their computers.   The argument is that the &ldquo;Main-Stream&rdquo; media shows things that confirm their prejudices and that if they pointed their cameras in the direction that Russia&rsquo;s media did, they would show buildings that have not been bombed and food trucks that helpful Russian soldiers were bringing to Ukrainian refugees fleeing Western oppression. 

...I think I can say without much contradiction that China is a pretty big country into which little Western media content is allowed so the West is not exactly brainwashing them. ...  We in the West, on the other hand, might be, but the wider narrative is also available here, whereas in such as China and Russia, you would be hard pressed to find anything but the official state line.


...Given the large immigrant populations from Africa and Asia that have settled in Western countries one can only imagine that some Chinese Communist Party propaganda department operating from a bunker in Wuhan, thinks Westerners are all, as they say in China, &ldquo;Green eyed, red bearded.&rdquo;  


...Because of my life in Hong Kong, I probably get more Chinese propaganda than most people in the UK, and similarly because of my life in Hong Kong I am perhaps more complacent about the rise of China than most. ...  There is much that the West should adopt and there was a time when there was much to be said for China&rsquo;s authoritarian state and its successful integration into the economy of the world. 

...Instead it encourages a strange liking of Winchester Cathedral for Russian military intelligence officers bearing perfume bottles laced with novichok, and encourages the suicide of the odd General who has discovered that the tank maintenance budget was mislaid, and encourages the odd invasion of a neighbouring country with rather bad memories of Russian control, despite fostering the genius of Nikolai Gogol.   Genius though Putin may be, and a Russian one at that, thus, as Dostoevsky must have said somewhere, embodying the true soul of mankind, he does seem unaware of the AI industry&rsquo;s mantra: &ldquo;Garbage in, garbage out!&rdquo; 


...Those in Russia who crave greater ties with the West are attracted to the West&rsquo;s open societies where one is free to say stupid things, create useless art, and fail to get more likes on Tik Tok. ...  They come to the UK in private jets and in half inflated rubber dinghies on rough seas not for the weather or sun kissed beaches, they come for all the triviality and distractions of the West, along with the technology, scientific thought, the immense scholarship, literature, drama and art, and an endless debate that is determined to be as inclusive as possible. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>UPLOAD ME WHEN I DIE</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Lifestyle</category><dc:date>2022-01-10T12:39:13+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/7edf6fa11ce60dbfa5d901a7a8301ef4-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/7edf6fa11ce60dbfa5d901a7a8301ef4-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Having reached a certain age where one realises that this is the third and final act of one&rsquo;s life, the notion of how to make sure one spends all of one&rsquo;s money before one dies crosses the mind. 

...For those who do not know what this new-fangled contraption is, allow me to explain: the Oculus is a Virtual Reality Headset now financed and distributed by META the company formerly known as FaceBook. 

...If you buy the machine and stick it on your head you will find yourself transported into a computer simulation of the real world. ...  You had better keep your mouth shut for they will sense that you are old enough to be their grandfather and realise that you are having difficulty remembering what button your left hand index finger hovers over and which button allows you to pick up your dropped weapon. 

...As you punch your way through various deadly dodge balls, you can hear the coach yelling, &ldquo;You made the decision to do this, so let's make it count!&rdquo;   You might be itching to find the escape button, but this is so real that you push on hoping not to let yourself or anyone else down, and besides, every time you think you are pressing the time-out switch, you inadvertently increase the level of intensity. 

...Trying to stand still while inadvertently stepping off a Himalayan edge with nothing between you and a long long drop onto a herd of voracious yaks, can be impossible and the dull thud you hear is you dropping to your knees and hitting your head on the coffee table you failed to clear from the play zone. 

...Given how the next stage of development in this technology will be direct brain control, it will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between cyber reality and real reality. ...  Instead of taking a long haul flight, you will put on your head set and take that inspection tour, make that meeting, shake that hand, test drive that prototype, give that presentation, and even have the wildest and safest sex you can imagine. 


...But they will only get better over the next ten years and given that a direct interface with your brain could be part of that development, it is not hard to imagine that one can enhance one&rsquo;s memory with an implant.   Imagine being able to know the directions to your destination at all time with a Google map implant, or have that internal Siri respond to your attempts to recall a name? 

...It is not hard to imagine the ability of these implants to enable one to measure up any space, assess how level any surface is, recognise volumes and shapes and turn into the perfect craftsman. 

...Given my increasing decrepitude, and my loathing for any form of long haul travel that is not business class, I suspect I could easily become dependent upon these tools, and live in this purely digital world. 

...It is without memory for it must exist whether we remember anything or not, and whether the memories we do have are real or not.  

...One might even say, given the vividness of the experience, that stepping into these extraordinary landscapes, just as any new experience, makes us feel more alive.   But it is hard to decide whether consciousness can pass from our biological bodies into the digital sphere and whether that is even necessary, for us to consider ourselves to be uploaded.


Whatever the case it is, if by any chance I graduate from grumpy old geezer into an inert crumpled creature in a chair awaiting the care home nurse to bring me my medication, I rather hope that I will be slipped into the headset and allowed to roam freely among the cyber world. ...  This may be a big dark sleep, or a lucid dream, or me, conscious and wilful, flying through the games and data bases, but any way would be better than sinking into a bored oblivion punctuated with overheard conversation about whether I should be labelled nil by mouth and allowed to starve to death, the currently legal form of euthanasia. 

...If I am aware after the protein components of this cyborg have failed, then what sort of consciousness this existence would be is hard to define, especially if one multi-tasks: one could pursue all of one&rsquo;s interests simultaneously; one could be in many places at once; one could separate and re-join; one could become the best Paint Baller in the arena.; one could punch the sadistic gym instructor in the mouth and suffer no ill effects; one could mingle with others and merge with them.  

...And while I have your attention, why not head over to my YouTube Channel and check out our Round Trip of Malaysia and our documentaries on the founding of Johor Bahru and the History of the Johor Sultans. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>And so hello England&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>British Society</category><dc:date>2021-12-08T18:25:04+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/0ede159a7a5a9a416d078b519b6f5eb8-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/0ede159a7a5a9a416d078b519b6f5eb8-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He is a rather fine writer of amusing newspaper columns, and a great spinner of tall tails and optimistic if batty speeches: a man who can be rather persuasive, especially if you are a young woman with daddy issues and easily impressed by his impressions of Peppa Pig&rsquo;s motor car.   But he is a man of vision rather than practical governance, and his vision, some might say owes a lot to Boys Own Adventure stories and very little to do with anything approaching the planet most of us live on. ...  He&rsquo;s Santa Claus, a nice fantasy that we all want to believe in, but in the end we know it ain&rsquo;t Santa but some grumpy old geezer in a fat suit working to pocket as much corporate entity cash as possible, not to mention help his elves get their hands in the till as well.


...The scandalous purchase of expensive curtains for Boris&rsquo;s apartment in No.10 Downing Street and a rather boozy Christmas party during last year&rsquo;s dismal covid lockdown, seem rather insipid in comparison to a few billion dollars of public funds turning up in the private bank accounts of Najib Razak and the mysterious deaths of people investigating such occurrences. 

...The present Hong Kong government, after an inquiry into a disastrous ferry collision killing thirty-nine people, announced they would not publish the findings citing privacy issues, in other words, to hell with you all, we know best and the less you know the better.


...But even for me it is taking a bit of time to get used to, assuming I will ever want to, but the joys of being free to say and think whatever one wants out loud in public without getting arrested are not to be underestimated.


...What started off as a movement for equal rights for women has morphed into something that can have the most radical feminist university lecturer sacked for creating an &ldquo;unsafe&rdquo; atmosphere for transgender students by suggesting that the &ldquo;wimmin&rdquo; need a safe place where they can be sure that people who merely claim to &ldquo;identify&rdquo; as women do not creep in for nefarious reasons. 


...The Britain one finds in those old British films of the mid-twentieth century was all about muddling through in the face of impending revolutionary change and it is hard not to notice that the place has not changed all that much and is always on the brink but never over the edge, despite said revolutionary change. 

...The upside of contemporary Britain that strikes a person who has lived as a white minority for thirty years in countries that have no qualms about legal and constitutional discrimination against white men, is that Britain has embraced its Asian and African components, though, granted, somewhat haphazardly. ...  Many Asian cultures would consider this &ldquo;contamination&rdquo;, but the English have always enjoyed adopting foreign words, foreign fashions, and foreign ideas and have a love of the exotic and exquisite, as a quick visit to George IVth&rsquo;s Brighton Pavilion or Clive of India&rsquo;s Powys Castle would attest, and of course they love both the outrage and turning it all into a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard of the 1940&rsquo;s and 50&rsquo;s. ...  No official phone call can be made without hours of listening to options and announcements before you can ever get to anyone you can talk to and then of course something is bound to offend you, especially if the government has anything to do with it. 

...The name Britain is derived from a celtic word for tattoos and it seems the ancient British skills in tattooing transferred itself to mosaic making for their Roman overlords and that has probably morphed into a love of pixels, puzzles and just mixing it all up to see what happens.   The subsequent anglo-saxons and Vikings were, as it has been discovered from DNA analyses, less invader, and more just mucked in, shacked up with the locals and then bashed each other about until the Normans knocked everyone&rsquo;s heads together, invented the British class system, and began building in stone again. ...  One can see for oneself at the current Tate Britain exhibition of Hogarth&rsquo;s work, complete with fanciful woke commentaries that seem to forbid you from enjoying the work for its depiction of Black slave boys, then fashionable among the Sugar Barons of the period, and other afro-Caribbean characters that were Londoners in the 18th Century. 

...The fact that there are more races living in London and more languages spoken than in any other place on the planet does suggest that George Bernard Shaw&rsquo;s assessment of London as the Capital of the World, still holds. ...  Where other cultures and nations seem to collapse in the face of an influx of outsiders or powerful rising states, one cannot help feel that the increasing power of Britain&rsquo;s Asian immigrants will somehow drag England with them to whatever destination they have. ...  And a look at the component of the present government and the strong possibility of a Prime Minister from an Asian background, indicates the manner in which the UK just surfs ahead of whatever cultural or immigrant wave that pulses through the ether, or at least bounces over the English Channel in rubber boats braving the icy cold murky waters. 


So here I am after having been there for thirty years, not so much alienated, but seeing the place from a different perspective than I left it with, and itching to explore and understand, for like Sathnam Sanghera who wrote Empireland, cringing at the casual stereotyping of him despite being born and bred in Wolverhampton, I cringed at the assumption that after twenty years in Hong Kong, I was just some fly by night gweilo with no appreciation of things Chinese.   For that matter my six years in Malaysia, a land of three distinct cultures that appear to be pulling away from each other in the face of a current fad for Islamic exclusivity, has made me less critical of the UK which bravely airs all such festering wounds openly, and when I walked down Oxford Street and saw the Christmas lights coming on, I could hear and see a man dressed in traditional muslim clothes, loudspeaker in hand, belting out the evening prayer. 

...In short, I do not know whether it is good to be back, but back I am, and the mad world of the UK just demands a long hard look. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>And so farewell steamy Malaysia...</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Travel</category><dc:date>2021-09-08T03:54:55+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/05b28d83ebb0c5fc6e878f1881029917-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/05b28d83ebb0c5fc6e878f1881029917-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Whenever I mention to any Englishman that after thirty years in Asia I am moving back to England, they always look upon me with great pity and commiserate by saying something like, &ldquo;why the hell are you doing that, this place is a shit hole!&rdquo; ...  Granted that sunstroke, alcohol poisoning, and mosquitoes have had their moments of attraction, most of my time has been spent investigating the history of Malaysia and mingling with a wide range of Malaysian society. 

...While the UK lurched into panic mode with its hospitals filling up, here in Malaysia we smugly shrugged it all off because closing the state borders seemed to keep it out and we all thought the diseased air would blow over without too much stress.  ...  But the miasma just kept on coming and coming and, despite an on going vaccination programme, it seems that many Malays either cannot get vaccinated or do not want to be vaccinated, thus the hospitals are not coping. 

...The UK&rsquo;s vaccination programme in comparison has been impressive and appears to be reducing the illness to little more than another of the many flus and colds that have always plagued the UK, especially during its long winters. ...  The English are naturally suspicious of positivity and I am pretty sure that when I arrive someone in a pub with tell me that the virus was a government conspiracy to stop anti-Brexiters rioting, that bees are dropping dead in droves now that air travel is starting again, and that Boris is a Chinese clone designed to cock everything up and hand over Bradford to the Taliban. 


...Rail services are hideously uncomfortable and contradictorily the government should replace all roads with rails because the roads have too many idiot bicycle lanes, and at the same time not enough facilities for cyclists. ...  They hate the old Empire, think it a woeful display of hypocrisy while being rather proud of the fact that the bunch of dimwit, deadbeat, dredgings from the overcrowded prisons that all colonials no doubt were, managed to walk all over the rest of the world using little more than their desire to better their neighbours.   Certainly when the British took over Malaya it was less an act of conquest and more an act of martyrdom with its officials dropping dead in droves from tropical ailments and rarely making any money out of it. 

...James 1st of England, if you do not know, was James 6th of Scotland and his mother was Mary Queen of Scots, the one executed by Elizabeth 1st. 

...Defoe wrote much on the nature of the English that could well apply today, and is being applied, as one discovers when one dips into the speeches of modern British politicians talking about immigrants. ...  Another right-winger, Pauline Neville-Jones said, &ldquo;We need to rebuild Britishness in ways which allows us to understand the contributions which all traditions whether primarily ethnic or national, have made and are making to our collective identity.&rdquo;   And on the left, sort of, we find Tony Blair saying: &ldquo;This nation has been formed by a particularly rich complex of experiences&hellip; How can we separate out the Celtic, the Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, the Huguenot, the Jewish, the Asian and the Caribbean and all the other nations that have come and settled here? ...  And we get politicians announcing, only half jokingly, that Chicken Tikka Masala, not Fish and Chips, is the British National Dish, though if my teenage nights hitting the pubs are anything to go by, I think a Donner Kebab could just as well fit the bill. 


...Certainly the presence of Muslim mayors, cabinet ministers of Indian ancestry not to mention a Prime Minister of Turkish ancestry and the prospect of a future Indian Prime Minister, all indicates that the English are in fact as they have always been, prone to mingling and I suspect it is its source of creative energy and ultimately the reason Scotland will never quite gain enough momentum to extricate itself from the United Kingdom. ...  Not that it sees itself as a land founded by immigrants, but rather a land that attracts those who are already British, if not actually English, at heart, passport or not. 


...I pick up words, attitudes, and dress sense from my surroundings, and no matter how steeped in Chinese or Malay culture that I have been, I am, curiously even more English in the process. ...  The Englishness I left with has stayed mired in the Englishness of the 1980&rsquo;s and been polished since then by the Asianess of the twenty first century, so on returning to England I shall have to do a bit of catch up.  ...  It was instituted over fear of too many immigrants who do not share British values, though given the history of the British I am sure the bloody minded right to have a good riot, kill kings, and try to blow up parliaments, are values easily assimilated. 

...And I will no doubt take a little bit of Asia with me and maybe discover, as I suspect I will, that the main difference between the UK and the tropics is the weather. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>DAMN&#x21; IT&#x27;S LOCKDOWN AGAIN&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Lockdown</category><category>Documentaries</category><category>Writing life</category><category>Lifestyle</category><category>Travel</category><category>History</category><dc:date>2021-06-02T07:41:44+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Damn!%20It's%20Lockdown%20again..html#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Damn!%20It's%20Lockdown%20again..html#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[That is a lot of work and preparation out of the window and I doubt we will ever be able to shoot it because we are now going to leave Malaysia. ...  Since we cannot do that, and we are of an age where hanging about waiting for something to happen is really not an option, we are moving on to somewhere we can get back into action again.


...It has been thirty years since we lived in the UK and although we have regularly visited the place, we have not engaged with it in any serious way for all those years. 

...I spent a lot of time in pubs complaining about the dismal weather, the iniquities of the world, the pointlessness of the universe and the little public-school educated idiot commissioning editors of Channel 4, wondering why the Government doesn&rsquo;t do anything about any of it and get me a three picture deal in Hollywood.  


...As my friends and I were writers we were trying to knock the old guard - practically anyone over forty - out of their positions and replace them with our progressive, future orientated, liberal open minded selves. 

...We weren&rsquo;t working class oiks whingeing about being dragged away from their brass band culture into a middle class snobocracy by Grammar School scholarships, like Dennis Potter, another one of those writer chappies that nobody talks about anymore, and certainly nobody here in Johor has heard of, we were the Comprehensive School generation empowered by local tertiary education grants. ...  Lawrence&rsquo;s mob might have been about unleashing the libido of the gamekeeper upon the unsuspecting hind quarters of Lady Windermere, but our mob were not in the slightest bit interested in Lady Windermere&rsquo;s fanny, whether she wore nothing but pearls or not when photographed scandalously for The News of The World. 

...We were influenced by a mixture of David Leland, Carol Churchill, Alan Bleasdale, Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, Hanif Kureishi, Joe Orton, Barrie Keeffe, David Mercer, Terry Johnson, the blessed Jack Rosenthal and Ted Whitehead who once said a script of mine was like putting your hands in a draw full of razor blades. 

...I recall Alan Bleasdale&rsquo;s rather miserable phone call explaining how he had nothing positive to say to our writers group as he was turning to write novels so that he didn&rsquo;t have to deal with the misery of working for the BBC. 

...He had just got his Oscar for Rainman and he was bitching about his agent and complaining how he couldn&rsquo;t get funding for a little film he wanted to direct in Australia. 

...And for that matter, when I went pitching to the studios a producer held up his hand to stop my impassioned pitch probably heavily influenced by a confluence of The Vikings, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and Yang P&rsquo;Tang Kipperbang, about a childhood in the fifties obsessed with Vikings and Spaceships, to say, &ldquo;Hey, Larry, we make films about nothing in particular here!&rdquo; 

...The power balances were shifting and suddenly trying to write stuff about working class lads rising above their station, the dying world of the traditional middle class, the death of machismo and the rise of power women, or whatever piece of anger I was looking back at, all seemed trite.


Of course what I did not realise was that by moving to Hong Kong I was giving up a culture steeped in Shakespeare for one steeped in Jacky Chan, but whatever it was, it was a resetting of the mindset and here, writing nothing in particular, was at least doing it somewhere interesting.   And suddenly one was free and whereas I cannot say that it enhanced my literary education, especially as one increasingly began to realise that even the local literati read Harry Potter rather than Samuel Beckett, the whole submersion in a Chinese world took one a long way from the dark broodings over a beer in a London pub. 

...The Book of Lord Shang, says people are selfish and that the task of the ruler is to allow the people to satisfy their desire for glory and riches in a way that will accord with, rather than contradict, the state&rsquo;s needs.   Which probably indicates why writing about nothing in particular is far more likely to satisfy one&rsquo;s desire for glory and riches than anything that does not get with the programme. ...  Lord Shang further explains that people are ruled by reward and punishment, and when there is little to reward them with, punishment has to be harsh which rather explains the dismal Beijing policy towards present day Hong Kong. 

...None of this would have crept into my psyche if I had remained in London beavering away at episodes of some new cop show or medical drama, or whatever soap opera I might have slipped into. ...  But it has motivated me to delve in the histories of places, and discovered a liberating search for narratives that can provide insight into how and who we are and even where we are going. ...  My travels have led to me reading articles on, for instance, the Islamisation of Malay society, along with an immersion in colonial histories as I follow in the footsteps of Great Game adventurers in Central Asia, or delve into the heroic histories of warrior kings creating jungle Empires up slow crocodile infested rivers. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A ROAD TRIP AROUND MALAYSIA</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2021-05-06T07:44:29+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/b31ccd3e79f7fb8fa656f37dec57291e-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/b31ccd3e79f7fb8fa656f37dec57291e-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe width="1120" height="1030" src="https://designrr.page/?  id=83914&token=4158162002&type=FP&h=3724"></iframe>


 In 2020 we went on a road trip around the Malay Peninsular.   Here is a flip book all about the journey and what we found there.   The book contains articles written about each of the place we visited, links to video we made about what we discovered, and links to other blogs containing more photos of the subject.


The book might take a bit of time to download if you have a slow connection.


Looking at how it displays it with the current page design, I think simply downloading the PDF is better.


Download from here.


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</script>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>WHAT ON EARTH IS COOL NOWADAYS?</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Lifestyle</category><category>Cool</category><category>Music</category><category>history</category><category>travel</category><category>Baby boomers</category><category>fifty year old music</category><dc:date>2021-05-05T08:30:47+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/04cb3d951c02d65d1c89cebb85cd8efc-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/04cb3d951c02d65d1c89cebb85cd8efc-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I was just listening to Rick Beato analysing a U2 song, and I thought how I must hunt down my old U2 collection and transfer some of them to my already full to the brim phone. 

...They all started off on LPs, then migrated to CDs and are now a mad melange of tracks buried in the impenetrable mess that iTunes makes of one&rsquo;s music collection.


...I have boxes of videotapes, both mini-tapes and VHS, and CDs and DVDs, all saved for the day when I figure out how to get them onto the latest memory device, or not, because by the time I do that there will not be such a thing as a disk drive. ...  And given that people lose passwords to accounts full of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, I am pretty sure access to Ian Dury&rsquo;s Hit Me With My Rhythm Stick will also suffer the same forgetful fate. 


...I understand Spotify is where the cool kids hang out, but do I really have to delve into the workings of Spotify in order to find a new soundtrack for my life? 

...So, as these films are aimed at young people, this must be cool despite the musicians being, if not dead, then somebody&rsquo;s disreputable grandparent. 

...Although it sounded like old people&rsquo;s stuff to me, at the same time I had to admit I liked that big band sound and then there was all that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers stuff from the black and white films  the BBC used to broadcast on Sunday Afternoons. 

...When it comes to the music of my Grandparents&rsquo; generation I can think of songs like Daisy Daisy, and the sort of Singalong Songs that one caught on the BBC Light Programme. ...  So it amazes me that Thor thundering away to the beat of Led Zeppelin&rsquo;s John Bonham, does not have their youthful audience conjuring up images of flared trousers and unfortunate moustaches.


...And yet, the yoof of today do it, producing tons of stuff that goes into the cloud to collect digital dust, while still listening to those fifty year old tracks I was brought up on. 

...There are celebrity musicians out there who I assume are being presented by the media as &ldquo;cool&rdquo; though I cannot say any of them are cool in the way people of my generation could be cool.   Britney Spears comes to mind, because she was mentioned in the news media not long ago but for the life of me I have no idea what her music sounds like.  

...He was a hot number on the music scene from the First World War through the 1940&rsquo;s and 50&rsquo;s where he had morphed into a purveyor of musical theatre, a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day.   He penned &ldquo;Keep The Home Fires Burning,&rdquo; a song my Grandparents would have known, though whether they would have known he was blowing Siegried Sassoon I shall never find out. ...  Or did you young kids just think him a bit of a card, while really grooving to some cool black saxophonist making noises that your parents thought ungodly? 

...I don&rsquo;t think it is just me either: musicians of various kinds seem to be struggling with forms of the art that have outlived their audience. ...  Given this necrotic environment it would appear that music has faded into nothing more than a thudding backdrop so it doesn't really matter whose it is. ...  I keep thinking I should get myself a games terminal if I really want to be cool, but I have not got the time to sit and play because there is all that TV to watch! 

...Vloggers can give people all the soap opera and adventure you can ask for, and you do not need to schmooze sleazy producers, or make nice with egoistic actors, or find overtime payments for grumpy cameramen, one just points a hand held camera up one&rsquo;s nose and yammers away.   YouTube is the place where a baby boomer can go to lose their marbles and slowly sink into digital Alzheimer&rsquo;s, while still thinking they are cool.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>SMOKING</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Lifestyle</category><category>vice</category><category>smoking</category><category>Cigars</category><category>ageing</category><category>humour</category><dc:date>2021-05-05T08:27:57+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/c580d6f1be3dab55dc5bf6b23553939c-26.html#unique-entry-id-26</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/c580d6f1be3dab55dc5bf6b23553939c-26.html#unique-entry-id-26</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I have reached an age where my life expectancy is less than the amount of time it takes for one&rsquo;s bad habits to catch up with one. ...  Genetically speaking I am on pretty certain ground as my grandparents and parents died in their nineties even though, if my relatives are anything to go by, the last ten years of that could be in a state of frustration and constant doctors&rsquo; appointments. 

...Not that I could not murder a decent burger with blue cheese topping right now but I live in Malaysia where haute cuisine and decent junk food are rare findings. ...  If I had not lived in Asia for thirty years and pretty much eaten every kind of cuisine on the planet, I would doubt my judgement but no.   So despite there being plenty of half decent seafood and Indian restaurants, Gordon Ramsay&rsquo;s well-seasoned oeuvre just does not exist, thus gluttony here would be just about getting fat.


...And every cinema had an ashtray on the back of the seat full to the brim, and one was as fascinated by the smoke rising through the light as one was in Walt Disney&rsquo;s cartoon dwarfs. 


...I still did not care to inhale but I could at least puff on these contractions with no ill effect and with a jug of sangria I became wise, witty and the ever-approachable centre of attention of the bold and the beautiful. 

...Other humans recommend things like meditation as a means of calming the troubled soul, but its woke comatose vibe just sets me off on a tirade against patronising entitled middle class virtue-signalling hypocrisy and I am chewing the carpet again. ...  But the only cigar I had tried had felt like inhaling the contents of an old mill chimney-stack, which was not a pleasant experience. 

...The cigars had a substantial look and feel to them, though smelt somewhat like the contents of a horsebox, which perhaps was meant to be a comforting aroma resplendent of images of stallions frolicking on stud farms. ...  I was supposed to relish the smell and the flavour, savour those chocolaty over tones, those hints of vanilla, a smidgen of hay, and then let the smoke slowly drift out of my nose to gain that sense of nirvana that a good smoke was meant to offer.


...I persevered with the box and tried to convince myself there was a pleasant buzz around about the fifth puff though I could not be certain.   What I could be certain was that a big cigar usually ended with a good clear out of the bowels, which might be a good thing given the enforced sedentary nature of my present lockdown life but it lacked what a vice has to have, Coolness and Style!


...I tried to imagine myself casually walking into a boardroom, lighting up a big one and projecting the sort of power that Lew Grade, cigar chomping British Media Mogul of the last century, must have projected. 

...One can only assume that to appreciate them one really needs a big leather armchair in a Whitehall Club full of ministers of state who&rsquo;s idea of fun is to parade about the moors waiting for some Scotsmen to waft a few grouse before their shotguns. ...  Alas, the corridors of Imperial Power are somewhat closed to me and even if one merely carries an unlit cigar as some sort of badge of authority that might fool people, those days are long gone. 

...Alcohol, it would seem, is the only thing that actually works, though here in Malaysia it appears to be far more disapproved of than any of this dull and deadly puffing. ...  But if they were open, suddenly the image of a grey haired old geezer with a flat cap stuck in a corner with a pint of mild comes to mind rather than that of a man at the centre of something happening. 

...The wisdom of age has highlighted that everything is just a performance, and an actor needs a play, as some of my actor friends now bemoaning the closure of theatres would tell you! ...  But before that I would like to try a double dose of Astro-Zenica, with the additional booster of young blood, otherwise I can see some TV news puff piece about an attention seeking Skydiving ancient looming on the horizon.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>History</category><category>Travel</category><category>Lifestyle</category><category>Parliament</category><category>Politics</category><category>Hansard</category><category>british</category><dc:date>2021-05-05T08:21:16+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Just%20One%20Damned%20Thing%20After%20Another.html#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Just%20One%20Damned%20Thing%20After%20Another.html#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[And as I have always learnt more from dusty archives than Twitter, I licked my lips and opened up the box to see what evil fluttered out. 


...There is nothing duller than studying the passing of the UK&rsquo;s 1867 Adulteration of Food Act, at least for a young lad wishing that British politics was still concerned with the activities of Erik Bloodaxe.   I believe I got a B for an A-Level essay on the whole sorry history of how we persuaded bakers that padding out bread with sawdust was bad for people.


But frankly if you are a vegan, vegetarian, animal rightser, save the planetter, tree hugger, whole fooder, intermittent faster whose body is their temple, one really should delve into the annals of history to put it all in perspective and see the ebb and flow of the debates surrounding such choices.   It might undermine your prejudices, or confirm them, but it will certainly make you aware of means and strategies for fighting your corner.  


By the way, I&rsquo;m all for animal rights, whole food, and as for saving the planet, it strikes me that if one does not, every thing else is something of a moot point. 

...The point is though, knowing the evolution of ideas, institutions, habits, customs and ideologies, not to mention conflicts, really does make the world a much less threatening place, and makes one realise that one is in some great game of paper, scissors, rock and for the Proud-and-Out-Nerd, Spock. 


The winning hand, can be the losing hand, especially if one persists in throwing the same play.   And that&rsquo;s something one learns from history, repeating it can some times win, some times lose, for timing, anticipation and the idiocy of one&rsquo;s opponent all factor into the rich tapestry of existence. 

...A bit of browsing of the debates on slavery over the years lets one see how important a bit of spin is for satisfying morality and venality in order to achieve a clear and moral goal.   Where one cannot countenance the compensation of Slave holders for the loss of their Slaves, one might condone &ldquo;relief&rdquo; for those adversely effected by the destruction of the economy, many of whom did not own slaves but merely lived and worked within that community. ...  The reality was that slave owners were being paid for the demise of their plantations in the West Indies, but labelling it as &ldquo;relief&rdquo; somehow made it acceptable.   Without such spin, slavery would have lasted much longer even if there was a certain amount of twitching moustaches. 


What will surprise you, as you look through the records of British Parliamentary debate is that British parliamentarians were pretty good at discussing all manner of things, sometimes in witty and often in fine anecdotal detail.  

...If one starts checking out discussions on Privacy and Data Protection one can find oneself delving into discussions of the 1361 Justice of the Peace laws, laws that curiously enough still get used and abused. 

...Debates on archaic legislation might not sound terribly exciting but they do add spice to the life of debates in the House of Lords, and give a real sense of a society consulting its accumulated wisdom instead of just throwing together rules and regulations to appease a momentary fashion.


Every so often people grow impatient of these delvings into the right means of moving history forward, and they throw away all this verbiage in favour of strong men of simple words and forceful action. ...  It often takes a lot of words to piece together a creative and dynamic society where many can participate and thrive.   Rule by whim, whimsy, shallow narrow interests, rarely create a range of sensible and conformable laws and one only has to look at societies where debate is miserable, dangerous, or neglected, to find at best a dull mundanity and at worse, an unhappy fear.


So head off to: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard and delve around in there for subjects that you thought were modern obsessions.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>AGE IS BUT A NUMBER&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Age</category><category>birthday</category><category>Wisdom</category><category>Philosophy</category><category>The meaninglessness of it all</category><dc:date>2021-05-05T08:15:36+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/a91722b30bbbea62493759c08908d220-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/a91722b30bbbea62493759c08908d220-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[If history teaches us anything, it teaches that every time new technologies have illuminated the dissatisfactions of a wider range of people, there has been a need for institutional reform. 


...They were born in a horse drawn age and never went on an aeroplane and were retired and out of the game, which is probably my greatest fear.   My childhood wasn't exactly horse drawn, but it was iPhoneless therefore, I too am looking at that "obsolete" label that all too many of my laptop computers now have. 

...As a child I could not believe how anyone could be as old as my Grandparents and although I knew I too would be one day, it was so far away as to be unimaginable. ...  I don't think I appear to be as old as they appeared to me, though perhaps they too thought they were not as old as they appeared to be to me. 


...The three score years and ten of Biblical life, are nearly done and the modern world does not really have much of a role for people of my generation.   Unless I'm up in the mountains with a big white beard, surrounded by my boys and armed to the teeth&hellip; well, as many teeth as the few enclaves of the Patriarchy sport, which has never been many.   But I was in training for it at one point in post war Britain when we thought the Russians, or was it the Red Indians, or The Vikings, were coming.


...I mean, most of my life I have tried to find out what's going on and why I felt so grumpy and dissatisfied about it all and failed miserably but I put it out there. 

...But may I add that being born an Englishman is still something of a privileged position to be in, as there is a cultural perspective and attitude that makes us function rather well as individuals if not as a political entity anymore. ...  And I am not too sure hard work is much of a virtue if a flick of a switch could do it not only easier but better.   But when push comes to shove, who would not rather take their chances with a culture that produced a game that extolled the virtues of "the benefit of the doubt." 

...Now you may say, "oh no, look at all those really old geezers who still run things! 

...The pleasures of schadenfreude for the elderly comes as one sees the younger generation screw up everything, as of course they will if anything that appears on Tik Tok is anything to go by. 

...And of course, I kind of thought that some of the issues of their old age were in someway their own fault and if only they just pulled themselves together!


...I can hear my grandmother and my mother complaining about how they did not want to be a nuisance and of course, becoming a nuisance because of it. 


...Now one laughs at old family stories of such people and we believe nobody need be like that nowadays because we are young forever and 60 is the new 40! 


...A friend of mine who is on the green side of things with a distaste for non-organic foods, has not given up meat because he thinks that too is unnatural, and he believes that as long as the beasts we devour only have one bad day, it is kind of OK; which does seem to be the manner in which I, if nobody else, am trying to approach this ageing thing. 


...But before then there is Netflix, Moet Chandon, Peanut Butter, Yoga Pants&hellip; It's the little things in life, like lacy thongs on nubile over twenties and under forties for instance, that somehow keep things ticking over.   I could go on, and intend to do so even as my head is increasingly choking on the dust shaken up by half faded re-runs of past events&hellip;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PANIC DON&#x27;T PANIC </title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Plague</category><category>covid19</category><category>The Future</category><category>Social Distancing</category><category>Epidemic</category><category>bonkers</category><dc:date>2020-10-31T04:13:09+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/ec6e2fd376dc2355e947aacb33daccb4-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/ec6e2fd376dc2355e947aacb33daccb4-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Old men are on the endangered list and probably should not be allowed out and certainly should not be roaming the planet seeking brandy and biscuits and generally spreading anything that might attach itself to their beards or boots. 


But if we want Christmas, Santa will have to come.   He will be leaving a wake of deadly infections with the presents and will later succumb to the virus and be found face down in the snow being eaten by his half starved reindeer, but even so, it will have been a Merry Christmas!


...I am writing today's blog because of a posting on my FaceBook page about how Masks are useless and actually make you sick and that the scientific experts know nothing.   The posting is provable nonsense though to point to the statistics would have no effect because that sort of proof is dismissed as politically motivated.   There is a tendency for people to dismiss demonstrable facts if it is perceived as undermining political positions they take. 

...There was another little document that popped up on my Twitter feed.   This one told me how The Great Reset was upon us, perpetuated by the New World Order who wanted us all chipped as "inoculated" or not, living dependent on the state, and kept down on the farm so as to allow something or other that was so evil that God could not stop it now that the Deep Church had slipped a Pope into power who agreed with same sex marriages&hellip; I forget the details. ...  Its premise was that the virus was a fake and being used to control us.


...But none of us are immune to wild thoughts regarding the virus. ...  In that rambling account of the various approaches to the virus I examine my own vacillating thoughts: one moment considering its danger exaggerated, the next moment considering my life threatened!   I came to no conclusion other than political leaders now have an impossible situation. 

...So what can I conclude now that we know that Lockdowns are very destructive and that the virus pops up again as soon as one begins booting up the economy?   Given my experience of SARS in Hong Kong I would say masks and disinfectant are about the only things that do help.   Quarantining the sick, tracing their contacts and isolating them, also works in a limited way and only then if actually done well. 

...If I was a politician, I would tell Santa to get good and drunk and get back on that sleigh.   And as I watched the deaths ascribed to the virus rise, hopefully not including my own, I would have the stats double checked, but mostly I would shrug and just say, "That's the way it is because the alternative will impoverish us all!" 


...Though come to think of it, he wouldn't be making profits out of a vaccine either. 


No matter, I'm plumping for Reindeer Dropping Tea, because Global Climate Change will kill us anyway&hellip;


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SJUhlRoBL8M" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BREAKOUT&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>vLOG&#x21;</category><dc:date>2020-06-16T05:02:11+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/40d0e136db6e55824e71d13997b4c917-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/40d0e136db6e55824e71d13997b4c917-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Finally after three months of lockdown, we are allowed out of the house to do more than buy booze and bread flour!   So we decided to head for the Mangrove swamps and brave the crocodiles, marauding goats and pig tailed macaques and frolic in the pirates lair of Penyebong, which apparently means Cock Fighter&hellip; I am sure there is joke there, but it is probably not permissible in this New Victorian Age. 


You can watch and enjoy some wide open spaces and all too many fish eyed close ups of my rather shaggy head over at You Tube. 


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KOyGSsh7-vM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


And for those not wishing to watch the video which would have been much shorter if I had any purpose in mind, and the time to indulge in such purpose.   But as it is, I am quietly writing a massive play with a cast of thousands, all of whom breath over each other and now and then cough and dribble.   I figure that people will tire of social distancing and go bat shit crazy and drool over each other as if it was a sign of something or other.


Whether you watch it or not, please subscribe to the channel.   Not only that, give it a LIKE.   And share!   And since Lock Down is Over, at least in Malaysia, watch out for our grand tour of Malaysia in my Travel Blog/Vlog.


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</script>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>TRANQUILLO&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Plague</category><category>covid19</category><category>Lockdown</category><category>Endoftheworld</category><category>Social Distancing</category><category>Endsocialdistancing</category><category>Endlockdown</category><dc:date>2020-05-22T11:34:39+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/4cc520d677a2b5a632eed87b56558beb-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/4cc520d677a2b5a632eed87b56558beb-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The Plague has been with us since January and China&rsquo;s Wuhan Lock Down, was heralded by the World Health Organisation as a successful means of stopping its spread. 

...At which point I began to notice that deaths were largely of those in the sixty plus age group, and those with hypertension were especially susceptible, giving me a double whammy. 


...And if you show the slightest inclination to sniff, sneeze or cough, stay at home and call in sick &ndash; though that last advice was perhaps more abused than used, but the thought was there. 

...I am in Malaysia where the concept of government has more to do with grabbing access to large amounts of money to hand out to one&rsquo;s loyal supporters, than manage a modern economy. 

...There were breathless recordings of ex-pats trapped in Spain where the &ldquo;real&rdquo; statistics were being hidden and that this disease was racing through old people&rsquo;s homes at an alarming rate. 

...Malaysia&rsquo;s politicians, who are engaged in a serious level of infighting while investigating each other for corruption, sexual perversion and possible murder, decided to give it a rest and let the scientists apply hard logic.   One might question the logic of some of the measures, but in an emergency where nobody knows nothing, it is sometimes best to stop doing whatever you are doing and look around to see what is happening. 

...It seems the current trend of anti-rationalist Governments had thrown up a Hong Kong variety that relished not so much rousing the mob to do its bidding, but rousing it to storm public buildings in protest and spray paint them with FUCK THE POLICE! 


...And where the government response seemed over-reactive, petrol bombs strategically hurled soon stopped the building of &ldquo;quarantine camps&rdquo; probably out of fear that such camps would turn into prison camps for less than healthy usage at a later date. 

...It has to be said that, the NHS were warned a long time ago about how globalisation would bring about pandemics but tight fists and short term thinking by government and its NHS appointees missed the point. 

...It is hard to characterise a man who conquered India and took England into Europe big time, as a little Englander, but a lack of local industrial base for key equipment such as protective clothing for key workers in times of Plague and War, probably has him spinning in his grave. 

...Far be if for me to go all Trumpish on this, one does begin to sense that The Plague has been turned into a political weapon to oust the likes of Boris and Trump. ...  Trump&rsquo;s inarticulate mutterings about imbibing bleach while declaring the death rates in the US as a victory for American health care, has served to spook the planet&rsquo;s populace rather than calm it down.   And now when there are glimmerings of vaccines on the horizon and even signs that maybe that unpronounceable anti-malarial drug might actually have some effect, Trumpery adds fuel to the conspiracy theorists claim that it is all a plan to wipe out the undesirables i.e. black, and useless, i.e. elderly geezers like myself, and make sure the rest pay through their noses for their doses of drugs to keep them alive.   It is tough to think that these peculiar people and their less than rational intuition might not be so far off the mark as they try diminish its seriousness, but there you have it, I have had the terrifying thought.


...Nobody really trusted them because they came out of China, which is not a country known for its free distribution and critical assessment of statistical information about anything.  ...  But as other countries have had a good look at the facts, those odds are pretty much saying that The Plague is not that bad for most people. 


...But as we now know that washing hands, wiping surfaces with disinfectant, and not spitting at each other, is a pretty good way to ensure we do not get it, then I am thinking that Boris&rsquo;s vague &ldquo;Be Alert&rdquo; slogan is probably correct.   And I never thought I would ever say that about a man I consider an amusing writer but basically a bit of a bounder who really should not be the British prime minister.   Give me Nicola Sturgeon any day, except of course she&rsquo;s leader of the Scottish Nationalists, which seems an idiotic position to take when Britain at its greatest, was pretty much run by the Scots! 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>What&#x27;s your plan?</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>The Future</category><category>After covid</category><category>The Plague</category><dc:date>2020-05-12T09:42:05+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/6499d18fe068507cb656bd594a21a282-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/6499d18fe068507cb656bd594a21a282-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[One thing he made clear to us on campus, a little concerned about the imminence of a deadly contagion, was that they reduced the spread of this disease at the hospital instantly by one measure: they made everyone in the hospital wear masks! 

...The message was clear and although a full scale lock down was not to be, the university sprayed and wiped all door handles, all lift buttons, and all surfaces in common use.   The government began taking up the slack and they traced the movements of all the people infected and they quarantined those living in the apartment blocks connected with these individuals. 

...In the face of Bird Flu viruses, they had slaughtered all Chicken in Hong Kong and closed down markets for live poultry.   In the face of the Swine Flu, the rather smelly train full of pigs heading for the various slaughter yards in Hong Kong, was stopped from whizzing through the University Station. ...  The joy of seeing a man in his vest, with a fag dangling from his mouth, swinging a flapping goose around his head by its neck, became a thing of the past.


...This is why Hong Kong, despite being in the direct line of sight from the origins of the virus, has successfully adjusted to the present situation and is creating, as they say, a new normal.


The history of Hong Kong is a history of a society that has made change part of its essential nature. ...  But change has become such an integral part of the culture of Hong Kong that, when all realise they have to change, they do it with passion. 

...The question for Hong Kong at the moment is whether the protests against the government is an atavistic outburst of nostalgia for Colonial Rule, or a revolution for a futuristic, smart phone, 5G, twitter and facebook fed world? 

...One thing is for certain the current Plague has shown us that the new technologies have allowed us to be safe and connected. ...  And we now know that much of what we thought were essential to our lives, is not. ...  We also have seen with our own eyes how quickly pollution subsides once the cars stop, and how quickly nature jumps back into niches that humans had driven them from. 

...There are still plenty of businesses that require people on the spot, but many that have been operating on tight margins will not revive. 

...And given the extreme wealth of some individuals who have ridden the AI trend, if they do not want to face a guillotining by the sans culottes, they are going to have to start taking the initiative in spreading this wealth around. 


...After that the UK cast off its Empire and became a welfare state, giving rise to a massive social shift towards a consumer society with more social mobility than ever.   We can go through the entire world and find societies that jumped onto various bandwagons, some turning into welfare systems, some  turning into tightly controlled planned economies, some into freewheeling robber baron states, and so on. 

...Will the increased access to information be free, or will we all have chips in our heads for constant monitoring? 

...There are an unlimited variety of scenarios to choose from and I am certain the future will be a messy mish mash of many &ldquo;visions&rdquo; but this is the turning point.   From now on, the threat of climate catastrophe, social meltdown, and large scale international wars, filtered through a need to avert dangerous pandemics should focus the mind. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>THE FEUDAL SPIRIT</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>comedy</category><category>P.G.Wodehouse</category><category>Jeeves</category><category>Wooster</category><category>Literature</category><dc:date>2020-04-11T09:18:28+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/90c97b9029b3690dea2e738eb8c87bd1-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/90c97b9029b3690dea2e738eb8c87bd1-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The World of Wodehouse was always a rather peculiar take on the British, honed as much if not more by Wodehouse&rsquo;s earlier success in Broadway comedies than his stint at Dulwich College.  ...  There is a hint of the Marx Brothers in this enterprise, which is probably as close you get to Marxist intensions behind the comedy, but the image he created was part of the British Government&rsquo;s reluctance to hand the man a knighthood until six months before he died. 

...In the modern feudal world, the unwashed are excluded and one can live in one&rsquo;s gated community decrying the creeping chaos of democracy gone mad, as there is nothing so luny or self-destructive as poverty baked zealots with religion and the vote.   Standards may be perpetually slipping, but in the world of the middle class with dreams of ever upwards mobility, one should at least attempt to maintain them; that is, if one knows what standards are. ...  If only every servant and housekeeper could understand the nobility of their calling, and realise their masters were their creations, then the efficacy of cow urine would be cast asunder by Jeeves clearing his throat and quoting appropriately from the Hippocratic oath. 


...But cleverness of plot, sharpness of dialogue, and an in depth knowledge of rhetoric and Aristotelian logic, put to the service of amusement, amorality and a willingness to admit that the great poets are indigestible bores and that far greater poetry could be found in winning a double on The Oaks and The Derby, is as bewildering to the Chinese as anyone basking in the joy of a student of Thucydides letting rip a twenty four gun salute of subordinate clauses. 

...To be amused by a feudal spirit that cuts against the grain of the times, takes far too much effort, or at least too much effort for one to find Wodehouse&rsquo;s books in Chinese bookstores, even amidst the educational English section. ...  A Chinese poet must be drunken and crazy and not concerned with entertaining anyone, least of all themselves, and most certainly not be an affable bald-headed man typing away to pay off the fees for his golf club. ...  Hong Kong movies, unconstrained by Shanghai censors, ventured into similar madness in the form of Chow Sing Chi&rsquo;s movie oeuvre, but as China's imperial reach expands, one suspects po-facedness increases with it and Wodehouse leaves them as cold as a German stand-up comedian with a frozen frankfurter down the front of his trousers. 

...The idle, ignorant and often rather dim-witted rich do little but play, aided and abetted by Jeeves, a servant who is a deep well of arcane cultural knowledge flowing with biblical quotations, Shakespearean epithets, and Classical philosophy. 


...Despite the notoriously humourless Nazis, they too admired his work, maybe because of its satire of the English, and treated him much better than they treated a lot of other people.   But a year in the bunks of a German internment camp would probably have had most of us agreeing to make a few amusing broadcasts from Berlin in exchange for going back to one&rsquo;s French home, wife and dog.   Whereas others faced down firing squads in the name of freedom, the war, for Wodehouse, was mostly an inconvenience, something which did not go down well in a bankrupt post-war Britain, who wanted him arrested, dragged back in shackles, tried and shot for treason.


However, George Orwell pointed out that being in the hands of the Germans and having little to say upon the politics of any time, meant that his broadcasts were not made in the spirit of malice, treachery or anything else for that matter.   He pointed out that far greater hypocrites who had real treacherous intentions to sell out to the Nazis at the beginning of the war, were howling for Wodehouse&rsquo;s blood at its end. ...  Malcolm Muggeridge, then with Military Intelligence and investigating Wodehouse, pointed out that Wodehouse was unsuited to an age of ideological conflict and hated too little, thinking nearly everyone to be decent sorts, thus was easily duped into stepping in some of the smellier dollops of wartime bullshit. ...  It is possibly more the case that in 1940, Plum rather thought of himself as American and they as yet were not in the war.


...Instead, through a complicated plot of misinformation and half-baked knowledge, Bertie would have discovered that the quarantine was all some frightful misunderstanding, and the cat would win the best in show ticket at the local Vicarage Tea Party. 

...Even when venturing into the 1950&rsquo;s, the music is still that of the Charleston and it is jarring to discover references to TVs in a Wodehouse work, but gladly they sit monochromatically in the background sputtering with indifferent reception, miscontrolled by puzzled nitwits. 


...The feudal spirit shall never darken the doors of the British ever again, except of course, we still vote for old Etonians and would feel inclined to swoon at the whiff of The Kensington Royal&rsquo;s customised car freshener. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PANIC NOW&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>The Plague</category><category>Social Distancing</category><category>corvid19</category><category>virus</category><dc:date>2020-03-24T08:20:01+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/019b489dbab3d913ffcbe0759066024d-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/019b489dbab3d913ffcbe0759066024d-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[And if others panic in my presence I shall no doubt discretely remove myself from the situation and go try and work up a decent level of anxiety by contemplating working for DHL and having to make parachute jumps with a delivery of elephants.   Even with my aversion to panic, I encourage you to go for it, much as in the last dregs of extra time a football manager might urge a weary team facing a solid defence that nothing short of a few broken legs and gouged eyes can penetrate.


...Though I was rather hoping to spend these twilight years proving the bastards wrong, and reaping such rewards as might enable a visit to a secret laboratory where a complete body refit could take place and thus enable me the overindulgence and arrogance of the youthful success that I miserably missed.   However short of graduating into the ranks of the illuminati and shape shifting lizards that David Icke warns us about, I did fancy a wintry bout of recognition and the consequent air of contempt for the endless stream of sycophants beating their way to my door to worship at my ancient feet.   I imagine grunting a grizzled appreciation of patronising nursing staff delivering a cake with a hundred and ten candles to my shriveled chair bound self to supply tabloid TV with a filler at the end of the news, just before the sports roundup.


...All this we shall overcome, kumbaya, this too shall pass, chin up, cheerio, we&rsquo;ll meet again nonsense, is dampening the urge to climb into a bunker and take pot shots at anyone venturing nearby failing to spray scalding hot disinfectant on their hazmat suit before delivering the take out vindaloo.   Do you not know that despite the odds of catching the plague being equivalent to getting mowed down by a texting van driver, the death rate is coming out at 1 in 10 and that 1 seems to come out of people who&rsquo;s description is remarkably familiar whenever I am confronted with a mirror, cracked and mildewed or not. 

...One might on reviewing the positive side of things contemplate how in retreat from plague ridden London, Shakespeare wrote one of his most depressing plays, King Lear, except he probably didn&rsquo;t because it was obvious that the theatres were closed and the audience dropping off. ...  There was no streaming services to pick up the slack in his career, which I am sure would have faired better and produced a lot more if the plague was not a constant buzz killer.   Granted that these merry healthy England plays might have been cheap comedies to finance his extravagant life style and penchant for rent boys, for such is the corruption of too much fame and money, but would we all not prefer a trivial life of fun and frivolity than one made profound by that dreadful fellow Death who makes fools of wisemen, cowards of the valiant, and not much better of those whose hearts might be in the right place, but who&rsquo;s grey cells are indifferent to reason?


The truth is that for all of Shakespeare&rsquo;s life, England was given to outbreaks of plague and he barely made it out of Stratford where 25% of the town died the year he was born.   There must have been quite a few little budding Shakespeares who found themselves in lime pits squelched beneath the last audience of Much Ado About Nothing. 


...To think some people say clearing all the shit from the lavatories is a healthy obsession, when it is obvious jvdging by the presence of yon Rats that where there&rsquo;s mvck there&rsquo;s life!   Take off that stvpid mask, yov&rsquo;re frightening the children and it matters not, because most of vs only get a little plagvified, rather than the nasty dose that wipes ovt excessive peasants who keep wage rates down.


...Unless you are selling facemasks and ventilators, then I assume you are phoning up preachers, priests, rabbis, imams and all manner of hully gully chaps to advise how the godless are being much smite and that the godly should gather in great numbers and hug each other. 

...Such supernaturally protected bods probably make up a dangerous proportion of the heroes keeping the sewers clear, the water freely flowing, and a good bandwidth for the Internet transmission of mild amusements and uplifting FaceBook postings.   Which is jolly decent of them, though I fear that as the mildly infected brush it all off as some conspiracy inculcated by whichever b&ecirc;te noire one prefers, one well meaning righteous might blow into the bag as they pack the survival kits for us ancients resting on a pension fund.   We might be happily destroying the environment and surplus to the requirements of the millennials and vegans who find all our attitudes offensive if only in a microscopic way, but all my money is being donated to a Fracking Company if I so much as cough on my way to the off licence let alone the intensive care unit. 

...I would also hate to think how I might be brought down by my wife carelessly forgetting to wipe down the Johnny Walker and Fags that I kicked her out to get from one of the half washed and holy.   Her guilt at having contaminated me through careless soap application, would deeply wound her soul and be faint reward for a life time&rsquo;s devotion to ensuring my idleness and ease. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>THE END OF THE WORD</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Literature</category><category>Philosophy</category><category>covid19</category><category>The virus</category><category>Epidemic</category><category>Endoftheworld</category><dc:date>2020-03-22T10:03:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/b250d514815355f55180193c4d070a3d-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/b250d514815355f55180193c4d070a3d-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[She, who amusingly for me is a born and bred Transylvanian, typed those words because I mentioned that I had been on a trip to the supermarket and that Johor Bahru was like a ghost town. 

...If I was a mushroom connoisseur I would be taking this opportunity to expand my fungus palate and grab buckets of the weird and wonderful that tend to stick in the gaps between the teeth and make one think one is not quite cooking them right. 

...I am pretty confident in my chances, because, despite the alarming rate of attrition, road accidents, seasonal flu, dengue etc etc similarly rage about me with equally alarming statistics and I&rsquo;ve learnt to live with those odds, so why not Covid19 as well? ...  Although I cannot help feeling that somewhere in my thirty years in Asia, I must have had its sister virus ravage me and thus left some smidgeon of immunity. ...  When confronted by alarming health issues I tend to send my mind into odd arenas where I concentrate on such as quantum uncertainty, relativistic time, and how to become a Grandmaster of on line Risk, whilst practicing the art of breathing underwater when the air supply has run out.


...However, M does bring me a writerly transition back to the End of the Word, my apocalyptical nuance of a blog title that distracts me from contemplating too closely what the end of classical civilisation must have been like. ...  If ever you have managed to keep those old Zip Drives you carefully archived your life&rsquo;s work on, it is highly unlikely that they still work, and most certainly will never survive the layers of ash that seem to extinguish ancient civilisations.


...No, the End of the Word, conjures up something else, an end of meaning, a journey into the wordless void where any sound will do and all sounds are misheard and the very act of writing is not just pointless, but impossible; if only because of the constant distractions this firestorm of irrelevancy hurls into our inbox and bleeping lists of notifications while military convoys conveying bodies mysteriously travel along Italian roads and I unload the last toilet roll from the back of the X-trail.


Which brings me to the ex-pat writer that all inhabitants of Malaysia should do well to dip into, nonetheless for the reason his works were once banned here: Anthony Burgess.


He was the orphaned remnant of a family wiped out by the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, and wrote The End of The World News, a title derived from his hankering after the BBC while teaching in Ipoh during the 1950&rsquo;s. 


He interpreted it in an apocalyptic manner, writing a novel that melded three disparate texts, one of which was the libretto of a musical on Trotsky, another a play on Freud and the third a sci fi story about the end of the world.   Alas not the word, to optimistically side-step my subject, because in the plot, the other two texts were the only saved works from Human Culture, i.e. meagre though they were, somehow, holistically, or shamanistic, their words contained all human culture.


...I am sure Anthony Burgess made money out of Third Programme lectures about the Babylonian melange of languages that James Joyce manufactured in order to create a literary representation of Jungian&rsquo;s Collective Unconsciousness in the form of a dream of an Irish publican who may or may not have been a child molester. 

...But given our experience of the mad instawebbook mess of all opinion claiming superiority over all other opinion, and our access to the inner workings of experimental uncertainty that mathematicians and scientists now admit to, coupled with the charm and showmanship of the conspiracy theorists that grab our attention, the magic of the word is nothing positive but more, dare I say it, a virus that aims at controlling us. 

...One just has to love him, even if one would not invite him to the dinner table, not because of contagious possibilities, but rather difficult conversational ones, unless one exchanges notes on hallucinogenic substances.   If one reads Martin Amis on the man, and I am sure you have, one realises that Bill spent an awful lot of time staring at the sky waiting for the odd bird to flutter across it, whereupon he said something interesting, and then rambled incoherently while the empty desert sky failed to do much else than burnish the tone of his speaking voice. 

...Amis was a writer of lively words about characters alarmingly close to my own, such as indy film-maker John Self who got lucky once, and Richard Tull, another writer close to my heart who found not fame and fortune but rather himself speaking at gatherings of writers seeking to rework Jane Austen as a feminist and remove all gender specificity from the English language. 

...But it is in the ramblings discourses on Burroughs scrappy method, where one finds by the simple process of folding the page of a book in two, the alarming discovery that hidden in all texts are secret codes, messages from the lizard gods that are breeding humans to fuel their Orgone Factories.


Thus, just as the sky is blue, we are being programmed to exist in our imaginary world, ignorant of reality, fodder for the feasting gods, something that did not escape the notice of the Wachowski brothers, makers of the film The Matrix. 

...I haven&rsquo;t been totally wasting my time as no doubt the purchaser of a novel of mine, or the viewer of my only feature film, or observer of some background TV noise might just about agree before the food runs out, the water dries up, and then the Internet and then the electricity cuts out. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>BIG WORDS</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Politics</category><category>History</category><dc:date>2020-03-14T11:30:34+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Big%20Words.html#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Big%20Words.html#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It may be 33 degrees centigrade, with low to no breeze, and an environment full of bity things that can give you dengue fever or worse, but compared to lands full of newspapers with screaming apocalyptic headlines about war, fire and mostly nowadays, Pestilence, we are chill.


Not that we do not have a few cases of the plague, but for the most part those are centred around mosques and enclaves of mainland Chinese in their holiday homes. 

...Unless it has to do with how the US released a virus that kills Asians on the world and blamed it on bats, worse still, Chinese Bats.   One would hope that China can avoid confusing facts with propaganda when decision making, but somehow hope has a habit of being forever unrequited. 


Before we start bemoaning typical Malay lack of urgency, one might well consider this: where facts fail to reach, often grand gestures substitute for effective and efficient action.   Which does make one wonder if UK&rsquo;s Boris Johnson is actually correct in not closing the schools, as yet, and not going for dramatic nationwide lockdowns.   There is scientific thought behind this manner of plague management but one suspects that eventually the government will cave and hysteria will demand toilet roll rationing and the execution of &ldquo;virus carriers&rdquo; caught roaming the streets after curfew, vis a vis, the Twitter reputed North Korean option.


One looks at Wuhan and one thinks well, maybe the grand gesture there was justified under the political circumstances of China, i.e. nobody believes a word of the government, and has a bad habit of believing all manner of idiocy because there is no public debate of any sophistication. 

...I&rsquo;m sure yet another generation is making itself less and less comprehendible, and one is even more thankful that Malaysia's government tends to make pronouncements in Malay only, alarming the Malays only.   Except they long ago learnt to ignore the government and for that matter don't really get into much public debate unless it's about the length of trousers, appropriate headgear, and whether the upper lip should be shaved. 

...Such discourse is available where the impossible is debated and the unpopular, the dangerous, the taboo, all can be considered; but mostly it is ignored, lampooned, dismissed as the crackpot considerations of the &ldquo;so-called&rdquo; expert. 

...Well, despite this belief that everything is basically Big Word nonsense, the barminess of some intellectual thought proves to be actually true, and better still, useful and fun. 

...However, modern politics has taken a funny turn since the downing of the Twin Towers, and the grand draconian gesture might well be the only thing one can do to signal that a government is doing something and therefore, panic and social disorder can be avoided.   Once the government then declares the problem over, people are so relieved that restrictions have been removed that they think that the problem really is over, even if, or especially if, it was not there in the first place. 

...Which is not to say that I go along with a Trumpish idea that it is all some grand liberal fake woke news conspiracy to ruin Baby Boomer pension plans, especially mine, though it would appear to be a great opportunity to do so. ...  It is simply a contagious disease that does the likes of me no good at all and is to be avoided as much as possible.


...There is no public transport of any note, thus casual proximity and dodgy hanging straps are not going to pass it on. ...  And as someone pointed out in the Johor Ex-pat Community Facebook site, the preference for eating at Mamak stalls, a cheap and cheerful supplier of Malay cuisine&rsquo;s finest dishes, rather gives one a certain robustness of constitution, or kills you off young.


...Before reaching for a copy of Nevil Shute&rsquo;s On The Beach and a packet of cyanide, I think that simple sum should put things into perspective.   And if I was in government, I would be checking out Hong Kong&rsquo;s experience with SARS, or even Singapore and South Korea's actions, and letting the epidemiologists and their big words, have their way, despite howling press or party political considerations. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Time Gentlemen&#x2c; Please&#x21;</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>#time #science #philosophy #physics #relativity</category><dc:date>2019-11-03T08:35:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/6021405e8b9235dfb968e16ea7491980-11.html#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/6021405e8b9235dfb968e16ea7491980-11.html#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It was then attached to the wrists of people doing bungee jumps to see if that adrenalin fuelled moment of time-stopping terror really did give people time to notice more. 

...However, the energy is lost and as we chop down those rainforests to build condos, entropy increases, the void beckons, and in the greater scheme of things, our order is really chaos. 

...As a scuba diver when suspended in the ocean, with nothing around, nothing above or below, and nobody else in sight I have felt as if I am not moving and time is unimportant.   This sense of stasis, I am told, is even more marked if one sits in a tin-can in space with nothing but emptiness and darkness around. 

...When on board a train we can juggle, we can walk at our own steady pace, and we can take tea at our appointed time, despite racing through the countryside where the farmers are having lunch.   Anyone who has taken the Trans-Siberian Express will know how hard it is to remember to adjust one&rsquo;s watch to the vagaries of the dining car&rsquo;s opening times while racing through various time zones. 


...The flash of two bolts of lightning can be seen as simultaneous from one point of view, but trains travelling towards and away can see the events as separate. 

...In space we are on a spinning orb, racing around a sun that is rushing about a big glob of black holes that are themselves drifting off towards some great attractor as part of a greater cluster of galaxies.   So, how can we have a point of view that is stable, solid, fixed and gives an accurate position from which to judge everything? 

...Looked at from the outside, this turns into a great cartoon world where one can run off the cliff and only fall when one notices.   None of this makes much difference if we all live like The Simpsons, but when trying to control events on vessels that we send off the planet at great speeds these distortions begin to accumulate human scale problems. 


Surely there is something that is incontrovertible, something solid against which we can judge, measure and make a note of in our calendar that everyone agrees on? ...  Newton thought so but what he did not notice was that the clock ticked off a discrete amount of space, something that Einstein became very interested in.


He came up with the idea that as that space squished and squirmed, the speed of a universal clock that we can trust, must be the maximum speed that was possible. ...  No matter which direction you are heading and no matter how fast you are accelerating, the maximum is just that, a speed for which there is no more. 


...And as for the popular characterisation of this as the bending of the warp and the weft of space-time, well, there is no warp and weft, there is no fabric, there are but imagined grid lines!


...The sober, orderly monastic world of Mr Newton, which Einstein did so much to turn into a smoky bohemian caf&eacute;, gives way to the libertine&rsquo;s clattering dice on a gaming table. 

...Which does lead some people to believe that within this barely existing moment there lurks nothing more than a mysterious germ of consciousness. ...  Though whether there is a hierarchy of consciousness where, for instance, mine supersedes yours and you do not exist is not even debatable for I am merely imagining that you have a different opinion. 

...Then the creative potential of creeping chaos sets it in motion once more and the clock is wound up and as it runs down, we set off up the mountain seeking enlightenment, only to return to sip tea with friends, and let it all pass.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>DOGMA</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>#bonkers #animation #stopaction #whimsy</category><dc:date>2019-10-20T09:02:08+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/f68b6e82b1d36f06fafec3ebda1e6063-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/f68b6e82b1d36f06fafec3ebda1e6063-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Even the most serious of us needs to just do something silly&hellip; And so here is a collection of truly bonkers films that my wife and I have made.   Our excuse is that, it is far easier to work with inanimate objects than people.    They take direction.   They do not complaint about the heat, about the incompetence of the Director, the inadequacies of the budget, or the terrible food the caterers have allowed to go stale and cold.   And they work for no more than the cost of their transportation.


FLOPPY DOG's DOGMA CHANNEL


I particularly recommend the Halloween production of MacBeth, as performed by an egotistical Scottish Terrier. 


Head over to the most recent addition:


MACBONE
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>HIDDEN HISTORIES</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>video</category><category>  johor</category><category>Documentaries</category><category>History</category><dc:date>2019-09-03T11:08:46+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Hidden%20Histories.html#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Hidden%20Histories.html#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[After my wife and I completed the documentary on the founding of Johor Bahru we thought our next project should be about the little village on the Johor River side called Old Johor.   The amazing thing about this sleepy backwater was that it was once the centre of a powerful empire that rivalled the Portuguese, Dutch and the British in the region.


...Anyone who wants to understand anything about colonial history, not to mention a lot of contemporary politics, would gain a lot from watching our film.


...We filmed using the latest light weight equipment and were amazed at how convenient it is to operate without a film crew!   We suspect that no crew would have put up with the deprivations of filming in the humid tropical heat with the schedule, and certainly not the budget, that we operated under. 


...Our motto was, never surrender until we had the full story, or at least an alarmingly red face despite copious amounts of sun-lotion.


...You can find out more about the Making of The History of Johor Lama over at Helengray.net


...And have been giving showings of the documentary to various local groups, who I am glad to say laughed at all the right places.   They were also amazed to discover so much about the some time glorious history of this country. 


...It is also a history that even many of the local inhabitants of Johor are unaware.   By taking our broad sweep approach, placing the events humorously in the context of modern attitudes, and exploring the actually places where these events took place, we have brought together a fast paced telling of five hundred years of history from Sang Nila Utama, the man who actually founded Singapore in 1299 to the arrival of the British five hundred years later and the rise of Sultan Abu Bakar in the mid-19th Century


...The price is a mere $2 because we feel that history is important, but to continue with our intentions to explore history and bring it to as many people as possible in an easily digested format, we at least need to cover our expenses.   For a mere $4 you can download the whole documentary and watch at your leisure on the TV, not to mention share it.   Though please don't post it on YouTube, as some people have done with a feature film I made!!!   The documentary is feature length, but it is divided up into short chapters for viewers who do not want to watch it in one sitting.   Though, it has to be said, audiences sat on hard chairs in small venues in steamy Johor Bahru have found it a very easy and entertaining watch. 

...Those of you who have a smart TV can access Vimeo on it, so please search for Vimeo and of course, our film. ...  It is the favoured home of professional film makers who use it as a place to show their work to other professionals. 

...He lived in Hong Kong for 24 years, writing and filming TV and Feature Films in Hong Kong, sometimes shooting in Cantonese, because, well, that's what they speak there! 

...Helen Gray was a Professor of Pharmacology at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and on retiring has taken to blogging about Malaysia and writing Travel books about Malaysia. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>About my parents</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>reminiscence</category><category>Autobiography</category><dc:date>2019-07-22T11:00:24+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/889ba861c109b99e6b4e0cdb1503ca42-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/889ba861c109b99e6b4e0cdb1503ca42-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I had a brief Face-Time conversation with her, though I&rsquo;m not entirely sure she heard much as she was on the hospital bed not looking her best. 

...I was no real help as I pointed to the age of the Malaysian prime minister and of course David Attenborough and then there&rsquo;s Professor James Lovelock who just turned a hundred and was publicising his latest book on I.T.    I tried to put a positive age is but a number spin on things, tried to get her to perhaps socialise a little but all I was doing was avoiding the moment when she had decided enough was enough.


...My mother kept butting in telling him to let me get to bed as it was late in Malaysia and then saying he was just complaining about nothing and that her back was far worse. 

...I think he liked the lack of stress but I don&rsquo;t think he ever adjusted to the lack of excitement and was nostalgic for the days when he drove tanks: a teenager driving a tank, blowing things up and chasing girls! 

...Despite our lives being very different I find that I have much the same taste as my father, though the very few occasions I went off with him in London always left me feeling a bit of a na&iuml;ve weakling fallen among a rough crowd looking for some mischief. 

...One suspects the stresses of being a &ldquo;copper&rsquo;s wife&rdquo; in London was not to her taste and living so far away from her parents&rsquo; home in Bridlington was considered unnatural. 

...She always seemed a bit lost and uncertain about social occasions, though by all accounts the teenage version loved to go dancing, but that was in a world less concerned with being someone.   I think her Yorkshire is a great leveller and I doubt she would ever have left if it had not been for my father looking for some kind of adventure.


For me, a Londoner from the age of 9 months, London was Saturday Morning pictures at the Carlton cinema, playing war amongst the "Bomb Sites", and the social opportunities of hordes of children running all over the front gardens of the Police Accommodation that we lived in. 

...The world of postwar Britain was a long way from the war time world that she grew up in and I sense she never quite approved of it.


...Though my father's writings are about tanks, spies, East End Villains, and dodgy coppers and a sort of fantasy version of himself, where he knows languages, can kill with impunity, has a string of dangerous women seducing him, and has the Queen handing out medals to him. ...  He had been one of the Metropolitan Police sent out to Belfast during the troubles and by all accounts that had proved a far more disturbing experience than anything the Germans had thrown at him. 

...There were moments that one recalls of closeness: my father teaching me to ride a bicycle, for instance, an adult one where I could not reach the seat, but could stand on the pedals. ...  All very true, but somehow, the fact that I actually mastered that bike with my dad running along the road trying to catch me before I hit any real traffic, was a moment where I joined him in his conspiracy against the mundane world. 

...He was a bit of a tearaway as he grew older, a football fan, a man's man as they say, and good enough on a team to go off for trials in Hull. 

...Ironically, Robert, with his new identity is the only Gray with a memorial, in fact, two of them: one in the Flamborough churchyard and another in the centre of the village alongside another memorial to a previous fishing disaster. 

...Then you have left home to head off to somewhere exciting, less mundane, but these people from a different era maintain a mysterious hold over you and define the one place that is home.   And when they are gone one realises that the shocking truth is that one has missed so much of what went on in their life and at the same time, one is just like them, blundering through life in much the same way.


I hasten to add that my mother&rsquo;s temper has by-passed me, though the philosophy it imbued me with has remained: &ldquo;Put it in neutral, restart the engine, engage the clutch, slip it into first&hellip;&rdquo; 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hong Kong Possibilities</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Politics</category><category>Hong Kong</category><category>Extradition Bill</category><category>Umbrella Revolution</category><category>Demonstrations</category><dc:date>2019-06-18T09:06:37+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/Hong%20Kong%20Protests.html#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/Hong%20Kong%20Protests.html#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[But if you understand that Hong Kong is a place full of possibilities then you will enjoy the place. ...  And many turn up in Hong Kong attached to financial institutions where they have been given the opportunity to advance their careers and have higher incomes. 

...And all the assumptions that I had about myself, about the world, about people were of no value in Hong Kong. ...  And whereas one might not change the world, or have any impact at all, Hong Kong does change you, largely for the better.


If you want to be a film star, then well, start acting like one. ...  Until your calendar is packed full and everyone knows you, and knows that you are no trouble, will turn up, and even if your talent is merely the talent to do the job without complaint, you make it happen.   Suddenly you start asking people for money so that you can book them into your schedule otherwise they have to join the end of the queue. ...  might actually find you a ride, even if it is only as an e-sport player, or perhaps a commentator on the Macau Grandprix, and who knows where that might lead! 

...You might never be a great star, but you live the life of one. ...  The Hong Kong dream is that you can finesse trawling the streets collecting cardboard to building up an international recycling business.


...Which brings me to the present situation in Hong Kong: the mass demonstrations are an expression of faith in Hong Kong&rsquo;s possibilities.   They appose those who are seeking to remove those possibilities and reduce them to nice tidy, controllable, but highly limited opportunities that require a specific mind set and well placed connections. 

...For the authorities in Beijing, a good loyal citizen is either cheap labour, or a privileged manager loyal to the plan handed down by those in authority. ...  They might be useful exponents of certain skills, but only if they put them at the service of the state.   Your freedom is the freedom to avoid trouble and be paid for the work you are given or allowed to do. ...  You have to stamp on a lot of little ants to keep those streets clear for the bigger bugs to pass unhindered.


The communist party of China sees Hong Kong as mostly populated by people who are descended from class enemies that fled China, and are in severe need of re-education. ...  Hong Kongers once had hopes for China, but these have been disappointed by the refusal of the communist party to allow Hong Kong to elect its own government.   If they had allowed that, Hong Kongers would not only love China, but might have even voted for the communist party! 


...But now they are for the most part in fear that Hong Kong&rsquo;s possibilities are becoming less and less and the pleasure of living in this unique city will turn to  misery when it becomes something soulless and depressing and the only possibilities are those of saying something that will get you reported to the authorities. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Sultan and I</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Travel</category><category> Johor</category><category>Malaysia</category><dc:date>2019-06-07T04:12:51+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/6190aabcc10dc4c9bd8b2185549a2724-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/6190aabcc10dc4c9bd8b2185549a2724-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Whether you are Muslim or not, it doesn&rsquo;t matter as this is an open house and all are welcome.   Everyone will visit their extended families, but they will also visit their friends and work colleagues, especially the important ones!


People will tell you that they used to visit a dozen households and eat a dozen meals when they were younger.    Now they try to ration themselves to only one Johor Laksa and a token chicken leg.   I, unfortunately, have not quite worked out the routine and so ate three meals thinking it only polite.


...There is no-one more important in Johor than the Sultan! 

...Anyone in Johor can visit his palace, and surprisingly you might actually meet the Sultan because he and his family will make a grand tour shaking hands and chatting with whoever happens to be around when they appear.   Naturally, as honorary Johoreans, we were asked to pop along by our good friend Lekha.


Because my wife and I were rather exotic characters, as soon as we entered the Palace grounds, we were pounced upon by a reporter from The Star, a local newspaper, and asked what we were doing there.   I told the reporter that I had come to shake hands with The Sultan and challenge him to a game of polo. ...  And then I found myself shaking hands with the Sultan.


I had no idea what was going on, other than some rather fierce security guards were pushing people to stand behind a line and get their umbrellas out of the way.   And then I noticed that the Sultan was standing right in front of me looking as bemused by my presence as I was by his. ...  And he then went on to shake hands with others more familiar with protocol.   There&rsquo;s a set of formal greetings and one&rsquo;s head has to be lower than the Sultans, which given his height and how tall I am, would have been a bit of a strain. 


Having managed to blunder into a possible diplomatic incident, I carefully removed myself from the scene and joined my friends. 

...Of course, this is not quite as accidental as it sounds because we were heading to the VIP section.   My wife had been taking promotional photos of some of the work the Red Crescent had been doing promoting eye health.   In the photograph, Opthamologists are on the left, the Red Crescent are on the right, and the Queen, a strong supporter of the work of the Red Crescent, is in the middle.   The grey haired geezer with squinty eyes and a few too many plates of chicken rice under his shirt, is yours truly. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A WET SUNDAY AFTERNOON</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><category>Article on British and Malay cultures.</category><dc:date>2019-05-19T05:58:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/A%20Wet%20Sunday%20Afternoon.html#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/A%20Wet%20Sunday%20Afternoon.html#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In spite of the perpetual 33 degrees of humid heat, and the fact that it was not raining despite the Malaysian weather forecast, it reminded me of provincial England circa 1960 on a wet Sunday afternoon, with everything closed.   Although the town attempted to entertain desperate young families with a few fairy lights and a Ramadan market flogging cheap T-shirts, phone accessories, and fly blown boxes of Ramadan biscuits, it was nevertheless resolutely drab and dreary.  


There are many such moments in the sunny sauna of Malaysia that throw my mind back to grimy coal fired English days when whistling on a Sunday could get you reported to the police. ...  And if one dares to delve into Malay TV, despite the preponderance of beards and tudungs, one recognises that often one is among the Malay equivalent of bad Sunday afternoon 1950&rsquo;s British telly. 


...Over one&rsquo;s beans on toast and Typhoo Tea we were solemnly presented with a very cheap series of shows featuring religious authorities, from Methodist Ban The Bombers to Hang &lsquo;em High Church of England Bishops, discussing moral issues nobody knew existed. ...  And somewhere in all this, ex-communist, ex-British spy, ex-humourist, newly Christianised, Malcolm Muggeridge would preside, followed by some oily character with a soft voice and a harmonium, who would present a congregation of old ladies in hats groaning their way through All Things Bright and Beautiful. 

...As some tone deaf Muezzin calls, I am reminded of a cacophony of Sunday morning bells and my youthful shuddering when entering a chilly room at the back of the local church for &ldquo;Sunday School.&rdquo;   There gawky unnaturally selected prelates with bony adams-apples, oozed aftershave and brylcreem as their nicotine stained thumbs thumbed through the mangy pages of &ldquo;The New Testament For Children&rdquo;, pointing out miracles of healing, satisfaction with widow&rsquo;s mites, and tantrum inducing Sabbath trading, so that we might be sufficiently Christian to get into heaven.   I never trusted young men with la-di-daa voices who liked to sit young boys on their knees, and so when opportunity prevailed, I would slip away to spend my collection money on a sherbet dip at the newsagent. ...  Some government minister was always being caught naked in a Brighton Sex Party, some baroness would be caught bestride a gamekeeper wearing nothing but her pearls, and a council estate&rsquo;s Christmas Savings Club was always surreptitiously ending up paying for a middle-aged Scoutmasters three-way romp with a couple of Wimpy Bar waitresses. 

...I imagine that somewhere in Malaysia a po-faced imam is trying to ingratiate himself with a bunch of baggy clothed boys with stories of Mullah Nasruddin before delving into the mysteries of Koranic Arabic.  ...  And at least one of those boys sneaks out the back door to pass their time hidden in some dark corner sweatily swiping their cracked second hand iPhone screens.   There he gleans the gist of stories about dodgy datuks, Russian brides and Sultans, exploding Mongolian models, sodomite politicians, rooms full of designer handbags full of cash, trials of ex-pms, embezzled billions and parties on luxury yachts.   And he wonders why the most excitement he has is as passenger on his brother&rsquo;s motorbike, seeing how long he dare drag his leg letting the back of his flip flops slap on the ground before they get ripped off by a pot hole in the road.


...With the devil hiding behind every good deed, let alone the bad ones, one&rsquo;s adrenalin could rush by just looking at a pair of underpants in the wrong way.   All I had to do to bring shame upon my family was to ride my bicycle on Sunday, and &ldquo;run wild like some little heathen!&rdquo; 

...When young people began to have a bit of money to spend and the weekend was the only free time to spend it, the deadly Sabbath opened up. 

...Not that the likes of Mary Whitehouse, a blue rinsed, owlishly bespectacled, self-appointed guardian of Britain&rsquo;s morals, did not persist in their campaigns for Christian virtues, respect for authority, and very dull Sundays, but she was seen as a part of a ridiculous grey world where corruption hid behind supposed respectability.


...And there is nothing better to keep poor people in their place than by putting the fear of God, or at least his representatives, into them by giving them sermons on the evils of the devil&rsquo;s music and short skirts. ...  And after all, once you start letting the lower orders with their cheap haircuts, Marks and Spencer&rsquo;s jumpers, and unpolished shoes join in the party, they increase the volume of the music and make it all seem so tawdry. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>My last visit with my mother</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2019-04-14T10:33:05+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/9582e60b64442a2e036862cd45dfaebb-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/9582e60b64442a2e036862cd45dfaebb-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[That&rsquo;s when I thought I would never have to work because robots would do it all. 

...It used to have free range of the flat, with a fondness for perching on your head and trying to fish seeds out of your ears. 

...As you can see, not a lot seems to have changed in the garden, apart from it not being in black and white anymore.   Colour came to this country around 1968 but as you can see by my hair, I&rsquo;ve been slowly turning into a negative. 

...That&rsquo;s me with all the ribs, posing with my sister and random neighbours, none of whom will thank me for showing the world this photograph.They are all drawing their pensions now, which is extremely scary.&nbsp;


...It is only now that I have begun to piece together what produced them and who they were despite them being a regular presence in my life into my forties.


...The only story I heard him tell about the war was how he could never get a pair of long flannel &ldquo;Combs&rdquo; that didn&rsquo;t have one leg two foot shorter than the other.


...It is hard to imagine what Great Adopted Grandfather thought, but here I am looking at this trying to read old minds, trying to grasp whether anything lives on.   My own mind having been turned to such thoughts by a dodgy lymphoma I just had dug out of my hand, followed by an alarming array of tests to see if anything nasty had shortened a life I always thought would last forever.


...It is a sobering thought that all those smiling people are now dead and that one day someone will look at a photograph of me and that is all that will be left of me. 

...This was because before my father went to Kings Cross Station to meet the train bringing us from Bridlingtion, he lit a fire to warm the place and make it as cozy as possible.   London in those days was a bit grey, worn out and smog bound so my father probably thought that given a chance mother would run back home to Bridlington.


...So the lure that pulled us out of Yorkshire was a good pension and an apartment in what has become one of the most desirable locations in London.   In those days though, it was surrounded by bomb sites where adhoc traders would set up shop flogging their loot and I suppose deeply resenting the billeting of a lot of police in the area.


...And as I recall they weren&rsquo;t up to much, but some of them would whistle while you sucked them, which was cool. 

...And when walking around the place it is not surprising that I had a deluge of Edwardian memories wash over me.&nbsp; 

...But hardly anyone had cars, and the cars that did exist had runner boards to help you step up to the seat and all signals were hand signals. 

...And as we walked along the New River Walk, opened not long after I arrived in London, I could check how many steps I had taken and how many calories I had burnt, and check that my pulse was still beating. 

...This century seems to have been born with me and it is struggling to meet my generation&rsquo;s expectations.&nbsp;  Which is probably why Elon Musk is offering my generation chances to hand over our pension funds to his company by dangling the prospect of flying to Mars in rockets like this&hellip; ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The News</title><dc:creator>Lawrence Gray</dc:creator><dc:subject>Blog</dc:subject><dc:date>2019-04-14T10:29:15+01:00</dc:date><link>http://helengray.net/blog/files/262cf01a953b0b43542279ec24fb9490-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://helengray.net/blog/files/262cf01a953b0b43542279ec24fb9490-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[And the entire household would rush to gather around the TV set to watch the six o&rsquo;clock news and later on, if we were good boys and girls, the 9 O&rsquo;clock news.   Even upon waking, the radio would be switched on to broadcast the morning news bulletins, and at lunch time the 12 O&rsquo;clock news would accompany our feeding. 

...Further to that, households in Britain had daily newspapers, often two large ones on Sunday - a posh one and the News of the Screws.   Not only would the great British public have a national paper, but also a local weekly paper and an evening paper picked up to read on the train or bus on the way home from work. ...  There would be well honed articles, editorials, interviews, event coverage, satirical columns, and sometimes absurd columns like the Beachcomber column offering parodies of bad journalism with attention grabbing headlines like: &ldquo;Sixty Horses Stuck In Chimney: report coming soon.&rdquo; 

...They were used to light your fires, to wrap up potato peelings and fish heads, to line drawers, paper over cracks in windows and roofs, and there was not a task that did not require laying newspapers upon the floor so that oil, paint, food, toe clippings, or iron filings would not damage the carpets. 

...Panoramas were constructed, and eminent men, sometimes even women, puffed on a pipe in deep thought and gave their perspective conceived after much unhurried personal experience of the subject in hand.   Pubs would buzz to the chatter expressing whether it was all bollocks or not and often cross-referenced with local subversive rags handed out by angry young men in scarves and duffle coats. 

...The News was as good as a novel, better than a film, and always important as it meant traffic jams could be avoided, trains delayed were no surprise, and jobs, homes, national security, south-westerlies over Cromerty, Everton and Arsenal drawing, and one&rsquo;s possible rise from the ranks could be foretold.   News was not just stuff that happened, it was what was happening, and proffered opportunity and demanded action, when one would ultimately discover how true it had been or whether you had been sold a lie. ...  A good argument about the capabilities of Germany&rsquo;s football team, with references to the war, was just as likely to lead to informed outrage at the latest East German border atrocity, or the rumours that the Prime Minister was a KGB mole and the Mau Mau were decent chaps after all and fit to chair the commonwealth! ...  And if among strangers of tongue-tying indeterminate class,  the great highly informed British, or at least eruditely opinionated, public, hid behind a broadsheet proclaiming who they were and whether they were poser, tosser or worker.


And then came cable TV, the Sound Bite, News Channels, the Internet, Facebook, central heating and plastic sheeting, and some ruling by a faceless European bureaucracy that newspapers cannot be used for wrapping Fish and Chips, thus making them redundant, the Empire defunct and Great Britain&rsquo;s scrotum shriveled.


...And the Likes can be purchased from a bunch of scrawny fag ash spattered Russians who will fake it all for you.   It is enough to set your trousers on fire and bring Beachcomber&rsquo;s Mr Justice Cocklecarrot out in a rash of hula hooped, sugar petticoated, Blue Hawaii, Red-bearded dwarf,  high dudgeon!


Peering over one&rsquo;s Pinz Nez, one looks at this world of re-tweetedness and tut tuts at the inadequacies of the younger generation that have been induced by the passage of the great tradition of News at Noshtime.   The telly may not get as bad as a Sunday Songs of Praise but the world is poorer and crazier because its corporate masters are blinkered by misunderstood narrowly focussed data and up to their necks in gargantuan bonuses while axing workers and automating jobs.   Did Dr. Germaine Greer really spread her alarmingly hairy fanny - both American and British meanings apply - for Oz Magazine while sporting a culturally misappropriated Afro, just so that puritanical worthiness could return in a worthless inarticulate format? 

...Suffice to say that what you don&rsquo;t know, you don&rsquo;t miss and so calm yourself with the thought that my outburst is merely the rant of the cool generation finally throwing their hands up at a belated generation gap. ...  And all people of a certain age are left with, is the smug nod of the head as we acknowledge that the Millennials will rue the day when reality is totally virtual and they have no power to get real because language will be reduced to a bunch of emoji displayed on the peak of a digital cap and there will be no news at all, least of all fake news, because everywhere will be a safe zone and humans just a biological component of a digital network hacked to death by pre-teen data pirates in search of the green lizards that David Icke proclaims to be at the heart of the matrix. ]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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