Bryan Islip's Blog, page 21

Yes we can (control ourselves)

Headline news the other day: NEW BABY BOOM - big population increase. This was portrayed almost unanimously by the media as something to be marvelled at for all the right reasons. I am a member of the orgainisation Population Matters.  This is my snail-mailed letter today. You never know, water can wear out the stronest stone ...Inhcidentally I do recommend http://populationmatters.org



The message may not be the easiest you've ever encountered but then, as my letter points out, neither was the drive against slavery, smoking cigarettes or the employment of children in mines. All solutions begin with the recognition of the problem.












Bryan Islip: 
       Kirkhill House  Aultbea 
Ross-shire  IV22 2HU


                                 01445 731322

                                www.bryanislip.com







Fiona Hyslop MSP

Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs

T3.26

The Scottish Parliament

Edinburgh

EH99 1SP




12 August 2013







Dear




Even though I do have four much loved children and thirteen
grandchildren I am a member of Population
Matters. I also used to smoke cigarettes and once believed that ‘a woman’s
place is in the home’. But times have changed and now is now and I have read
your comments on Scotland’s
population increase aspirations, which is why I am addressing you.
The Government will pay you £20.30 per week for your first offspring and
£13.40 per each additional child. There are in addition many kinds of payment
by the government in respect of your childcare. According to GovUK.com these include ‘vouchers, tax
credits, Sure Start, Discretionary Learner Support, Childcare Grant, Care to
Learn’, and more. Of course these are only a part of it. Unemployment pay and
housing benefits are the nation’s principal gifts, should you be for instance a
young lady contemplating the fulfilment of her nature and her ongoing life
options.

The message seems clear enough. Have
as many children as you like. Your nation needs them and therefore you will
be amply paid by the nation to look after them. More children equals more money
for you, equals less incentive to do anything for the community at large. Oh,
and by the way you don’t need any male partner. You will be comfortable enough
without one - other than, naturally, for the possible pleasure of his company
and the actual act/s of conception.

The result is a baby boom unequalled in modern times and an economy
staggering quite alarmingly along the edge of the precipice. The result is also
a public morality disintegrating in the face of advertised materialism / greed
. Yes, I am well aware that, should you be the CEO of a major employer /
producer of foods, cars, loans, power or fizzy drinks the more the merrier in
terms of consumers / consumption, but surely the elected government of the
State has a duty to look beyond? To seek and find the greater good?

What, exactly,do we see as the social state of play when ‘looking beyond’,
assuming eyes wide open and mind unclouded? Do we see less hunger, less
unhappiness, less misery of indebtedness (of the State, as of its citizenry),
less degradation of that marvellously conceived NHS, less despoilation of the
land and, equally important, of the surrounding sea? Do we see world population
ten billions and climbing with love and happiness all around? Do we see, when
looking beyond, the diminution, even the banishment of plague, pestilence,
criminality, cruelty and wars?

Perhaps not. Perhaps we should be looking at and facing up to the opposite.
Perhaps we should be concerned or at least afraid for those who come next.
Perhaps we should take some action. Two actions?


1.      Recognising
that, in the same way as a 100,000 tonne oil tanker captain has to begin
slowing or turning many sea miles ahead of the desired end result, the State
can perhaps begin to use its apparatus to stop lauding population growth and
start some discreet public questioning, even sow some legitimate doubt about
the benefits of population growth. As Scottish Government external affairs
secretary you recently said the population rise continues “in the right
direction”.  Conservative finance
spokesman Gavin Brown said:  ‘A country
like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and
increase the tax base – that is absolutely essential for the economy. Oh, Fiona
and Gavin! Some looking beyond is clearly called for!

2.      Very
simple, this one;  increase child support
for a first born / eldest child by up to 100% and cut out all other support
including any support at all for further children. It could be done  over time without political loss - in
conjunction with (1) above - in the same way as the UK government once moved against
cigarette smoking or slavery or the employment of children in our mines - and
against so many other perceived social / public aberrations and threats.
Present
and future over-population is to me quite obviously far more threatening  than any danger to humanity that has gone
before or conceivably could come after us. I remain in hope that our elected
government will look beyond and will take action now.

With
best wishes

Yours
sincerely



Bryan
Islip

A personal Shakespearean biography

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.




I’m told there were long moments
after I first saw light of day when all concerned really were concerned. I was
to all intents, purposes and appearances one stillborn baby boy. But I’m told
that, after being swung by the ankles I ‘came alive’ - and did much more than
my fair share of ‘mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms’. I remember little
else until sitting with my family around the radio as the Prime Minister
announced his famous ‘… no such assurances have been received and therefore we
are at was with Germany.’
.





And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.




Oh, how I hated it!  Having moved out of our London
suburb at the outbreak of WW2, now living in Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire,
on my first day at school I absented myself, ran home. Loathe to return and subsequently slow,
very slow to learn, one of my earliest memories is of my interview as a five or
six years old with an imposing headmaster. Referring to my materrnal
grandfather’s status as General of the Salvation Army I was accused of ‘letting
my family down.’ Shameful indeed. Tears public and private.




                                                And
then the lover,

Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow.




I see her still: Jacqueline. I’m a
boarder at Abingdon
School and I’ve climbed a
forbidden apple tree, am looking over the kitchen garden wall at a ‘crocodile’
of equally young girls from Our Ladies Convent. They’re en route to their
hockey field. Some of the girls have seen me, redfaced amongst the leafy
branches. They’re giggling. One of them, the prettiest one, isn’t giggling and
I’m in love. ‘Oh, Jacqueline!’ says another. I know her name! The next day I
write her a note and throw it over the wall as the crocodile passes. Don’t know
if she got it or read it. Never saw her again. That’s life.




                                                Then
a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth.




Doing my National Service I was
nicknamed Fritz for my short haircut and belligerant attitude. ‘Whoever took my
bike is in big trouble’, I announced to all and sundry at RAF Full Sutton, Yorkshire. It was Saturday night and I had a date with
Joan, twelve miles away in York
but no way of getting there other than on foot. So I walked. Well, Sunday
morning came and word came back. Glaswegian Ingles in the cookhouse had my
bike. Ingles was a ‘teddy boy’ when not in uniform, given to long draped jacket,
velvet collar rolled around a bicycle chain. A fair crowed had assembled,
awaiting the carnage as I faced him down. “You took my bike, Ingles?” I asked,
hoping for some face-saving excuse from him. “Yeah,” said he, po-faced. (He was
an ugly bugger, Ingles.) Courage failed me. “Don’t do it again,” was my only
rejoinder. Shakespeare would have understood that discretion is often the
better part of valour. (He coined the phrase, so he should!)

.

                                                And
then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;




Marriage, family, mortgage and
moderation in all things. But happy enough as I climbed my career ladder:
salesman, area manager, sales manager, company director, company owner. Of
course in imagination I would rather have been writing and painting in some
garret but we can’t all be Hemingway or Picasso and the money was good. And so
I hired and fired and made speeches filled with ‘wise saws and modern instances
and developed the statutory fair round belly in the process. As I grew older it
seems to me, looking back, that I actually grew more happy.




And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.




‘Happy’ or merely ‘contented’?
Whatever, we are as we are. And yes, we are indeed ‘as dreams are made on’. The
older I get the more I see the truth of it. I would dispute Shakespear’s ‘lean
and slippered pantaloon (don’t know what a pantaloon is, anyway), but I am
spectacled and my manly voice is definitely developing that harsh whistle of
old age. That’s no problem as they say today. And I am not done yet with all
those youthful dreams.




                                                Last
scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.




Of course! Not nice, but whatever
will be will be, and one day not all that far distant I shall proceed - or
should that be progress? - from one dream to another as do all things living,
all that have lived.




The seven ages of a man are from the preface to Shakespeare’s
As You Like It. I’ll end this brief
personal commentary with another quotation, this time from The Scottish Play. King
Macbeth has just lost his Lady wife …




She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.




I’ve heard that Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robin Island
with other anti-Government protesters, was allowed a single book. He chose to
take with him The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare. At some point during the long years that followed he
sent his copy around to the other prisoners, asking each of them to mark the
passage that meant the most. Mandela himself apparently marked the foregoing beginning
with; ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow …’




For me the wonderful words are partially contradicted by
themselves; at least in the case of our Bard.

Fast Water (3)

So here's the third and last Fast Water. It's an oil on 700x700cm canvas ...













... and here are all three together...

Fast water (2)

Afew days ago I blogged my latest oil painting and wrote that ... "I call this painting Fast Water (1) Why the (1)? Becaise I became
fascinated by the power and movement, by the interplay of light and
colour on falling water. I want to do more of it - to make more of its limitless variation. Fast Water (2) is already well underway."





So here is Fast Water (2) ... canvas size 60 x 60 cm.



Fast water (3) is well underway, as is the poem that will accompany all three.

Afew days ago I blogged my latest oil painting and wr...

Afew days ago I blogged my latest oil painting and wrote that ... "I call this painting Fast Water (1) Why the (1)? Becaise I became
fascinated by the power and movement, by the interplay of light and
colour on falling water. I want to do more of it - to make more of its limitless variation. Fast Water (2) is already well underway."





So here is Fast Water (2) ... canvas size 60 x 60 cm.



Fast water (3) is well underway, as is the poem that will accompany all three.

Beauty and the electrical beast

After a more thanusually trying visit to Raigmore Hospital we were driving back across the Highlands yesterday. We had been busily slandering the people who think it right to erect giant electricity pylons across the 'wilderness' when we came across this...





We had heard about the pair of ospreys that had chosen these several years past to build their nest in this most unlikely of positions. We parked the motor, got a sight of the nest through a belt of trees. Looking though binoculars we could see the man-made wooden platform atop the steel structure. More than this we could see two handsome, fully feathered dark and white birds sitting up and taking notice. Wonderful!



And then came the icing on the cake. First came another osprey, flying in presumably with food for his or her offspring, then another one, ditto!Four of the beautiful birds at one and the same time.



Suddenly the pylons were not so awful any more. Neither were the electricity generating employees responsible for the safe nesting site. Another version of Beauty and the Beast, I guess.



Sorry about the quality of my photo. Distance and the lack of a telescopic lens. But we watched the parent birds come in and we watched them go back to hunt for fish on the nearby loch. They seemed the epitome of grace and they made our day.

Fast water (1)

Over this weekend I set out to try to capture in oils on a 70 x 70cm canvas the extreme natural testing of a salmon running upstream to his or her 'redd' (shallow, gravelly breeding place). This is as far as I got...



... an abstract of rushing water. I called in Dee to ask her the question; "With or without the leaping salmon?"

"Without," she pronounced. "It's beautiful as it is."



I call this painting Fast Water (1) Why the (1)? Becaise I became fascinated by the power and movement, by the interplay of light and colour on falling water. I want to do more of it - to make more of its limitless variation. Fast Water (2) is already well underway.



There's no shortage of subject matter in the fast moving rivers and burns of these Scottish Highlands. I'm beginning to think about a whole calendar of twelve Fast Waters ... Would enough folk be interested enough to buy and hang such a thing on their wall? I'll hang this picturte in Mary Thompson's Exhibition & Craft Fair, Aultbea Village Hall, 7, 8 and 9 August. Canvassing opinion, literally!



Water, after all, is the stuff of life, whether that (missing) salmon's life or my own life or yours. It is from whence came all of life this millenia since. Some of our science now tells us that the world will not end in any Biblical flood. Quite the opposite. Extreme shortage of drinking water will be the cause.



Whatever, right now the power and the glory are there for all to see.

Shakespeare and Burns - chapter five

Scene five or Chapter five

in which our poets re-explore the element from which
came all of life on earth



There is this mighty, wondrous orchestra. Down on the seabed all sounds echo
whether emanating from sources nearby or from far, far away. Great whales communicate,
booming, although a thousand sea miles apart. You can hear them alongside the
clicks and squeaks of shrimps, the small sucking of a million limpets, the
trumpeting of codfish, the sibilance of rock-bound conger eels, etcetera,
etcetera. All sea-creatures great and small thus add their voices to the Song
of the Sea, the Song of the Sea naturally being a direct descendant of the Music
of the Spheres.  Our literary heroes are wandering
down below, full fathom five.



WS: It is from the oceans that we came. It is to the
oceans that our kind at last returned.



RB: But oh, what might have been: There is a tide in the affairs of men, /
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of
their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. / etcetera.



WS: Brutus; my dangerous Roman. But that applied to the
whole of humankind as much as to each his own. In the actuality there were seven
of those big Spring tides of human behaviour across the millennia that
followed our migrations forth from the Great Rift valley.
Seven chances for glorious sweetness, indeed for heaven itself. Shakes
his head, disturbing the host of minute fishes who’d taken shelter in his hair.



RB: And none, not one of those tides taken at the
flood. All of them denied, hence all of our earthly miseries.



They sit upon a rock, the better to see and be a part of everything. A group
of sleek, graceful spiny dogfish approaches, shark-tails waving idly side to
side, pectoral fins spread wide, gliding slow through gin clear water. One of
them speaks. Her voice is as the yelp of her dryland canine namesake; Gentlemen, we watched you. Our kind was a
million of your years ahead of you - then a mere thousand more after
you finally extinguished yourselves and so many others - and mortally wounded our
planet in the process.



WS: Sorry: we were at the close so very sorry.



Dogfish leader: ‘so sorry’, yes of
course; but for your kind alone, I would suggest. Suddenly she
accelerates, turning in a tight circle low on the seabed, clouds of sand
arising behind her. Let us remind ourselves
of the seven things that brought you so low as to destroy yourselves and then in time
all else …




Dogfish
one: A proud look. The time of the
Persians. Shoots upwards to break surface then splashes down and descends
to rejoin the group.

Dogfish
two: A lying tongue. The time of the Greeks.
Swoops and takes in his power-razor jaws a crab then sets him back down, but gently.
Good day, Mister Cancer, she adds.

Dogfish
three: Hands that shed innocent blood.
The time of the Romans. She circles like the leader but high in the water
column and at breakneck speed.

Dogfish
four: A heart that devises wicked plots.
The time of the European Crusaders. Slithers undulating across the sandy
bottom in imitation of an itinerant conger eel.

Dogfish
five: Feet that are swift to run into
mischief. The time of British and Spanish colonisation. Slow-rolls over, his
creamy belly gleaming in the light from above.

Dogfish
six: A deceitful witness that uttereth
lies. The time of American media. He stands vertically, his head just touching
on a rock, motionless save for the water currents created by the movement of the
others.

Dogfish
seven: Him that soweth discord among
brethren. The time of the Islamists and the Jews. She dives to the seabed, burrows into
the sand, disappears from sight.
Dogfish leader: King Soloman told you
those things. Dammit, Shakespeare and Burns, I’ll add another: you could have
stopped your eternal seeking after The Meaning of Life and The Meaning of
Everything. You could have been
content with your natural state and the state of all things. She swims
closer, yet closer, touches each of them lightly, rubber lips to their lips. But all is now well. Come on, my friends. They
swim (or fly) off, disappear over the lip of a precipice, go down, down into
the abyss. The leader’s voice comes back to them, faint from far away. So sad. For there were so, so many things
about Man’s earthly doings of which you may be justly proud. Oh, the glory that
might have been! ‘And if the while I think on thee, dear friends, / All losses
are restored and sorrow ends’.



RB: Speaks up; Pride?
We do not here do such a thing as pride, dogfish!



WS: Speaks
soft;  Who made the heart, 'tis He alone / Decidedly
can try us; / He knows each chord, its various tone, /  Each spring, its various bias: / Then at the
balance let's be mute, / We never can adjust it; / What's done we partly may
compute, /  Yet know not what's resisted.
Rob, your Address To The Rigidly Righteous, final stanza. 

RB: Above The Music of the Seas now sounds the tinkle of bells. Six tiny girls
and one female teenager, bigger but still small, gossamer winged Ah, here she is; my own fair favourite. Your spritely little
Ariel. Ariel swim-dances around a human skeleton clad in rotted,
tattered remnants. She speaks, her tiny voice as the midnight song of the
nightingale: Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral
made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But
doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. / Sea-nymphs hourly
ring his knell: / Hark! now I hear them, - Ding-dong, bell. Yes something rich and strange indeed, William.



WS:
Robert, those bones are what remains of John Shakespeare, my father and one
time Alderman, leather worker, dealer in wool; perennial, perennial tryer. I
loved him, Rob. I did love my father.



RB:
He died so sad, fleeing like his son although from creditors rather than from the
distaff, his ship driven ashore and drowning with all other hands. You knew
this when you wrote The Tempest?



WS:
No, not then.




RB: Something subliminal, perhaps … I too loved my father, though all
too often he loved me not. I tried to please him with the assiduity of my studies
or my work upon the land or at the flax or later on with the Revenue. Sighs. But it was for my work in the bawdy houses and with the
ladies for which he loved me not. I wonder, Will, what purpose had the urge that blotted out all else that there
might be, that drained the male mind of all except a certain she?

WS: Questions like your shadow always
leapt ahead across your way. Answers always swirled round; no black, no white, just
in chaotic shades of grey.
The two chant
in unison: our fathers which art in heaven. They get down off their
rock. Shakespeare plucks a brightly coloured seaweed, places it with care upon
his father’s grinning skull. The two of them stroll over to the edge of the
deep, look down. They are saying nothing. Then …



WS:
It is as well that we can summon and commune with no person from our own family
- nor, indeed, with any person alive during our own times on Earth.



RB:
Such contact could be good but would be vexacious.



WS:
Certainly: Rob, should we follow our fishy friends down there, think you?



RB:
Down there strange creatures carry within themselves their own lights and warm
eruptions mutate life forms, change mineral salts into bacteria and bacteria
into life somewhat as we knew it. Go down? I think perhaps not now. Let’s sally
forth from all this salty origin into the purest of our early, earthly air.



WS:
So very pleasing. I know a bank where the wild
thyme blows: / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; / Quite over-canopied
with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine ...



RB:
Continues
… There sleeps
Titania, sometime of the night. / Lulled in these flowers with dances and
delight.



The two
friends saunter together up the seabed slope, reciting one to the other the
other one’s lines. Their heads break surface, dry haired. They walk on, leaving
the water without a ripple, yet footmarks in the sand as they traverse the
beach. Soon they are within a forest, although not a forest as the one before.
This is a forest of massive mangroves unknown in their own times. Great leaves
blot out the light and roots rise, writhing, from the sodden ground. A giant
brontosaurus lumbers by, huge feet sucking from the mud. They have no trouble
making their way. Soon enough they come upon their dry-earth flowery clearing, there
to sleep unbothered by the warmth, the strangest of insects large and small,
the foetid smell of creation, the grunts and calls of prehistoric life both
near and far. They sleep because they want to sleep but they do need it not.



RB: Murmurs: Sleep that knits up the
revell’d sleave of care /  The death of
each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s
second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)



WS:
Murmurs
in response: Thou giv'st the word: Thy creature, man, / Is
to existence brought; / Again Thou say'st, "Ye sons of men, / Return ye
into nought!" / Thou layest them, with all their cares, / In everlasting
sleep; / As with a flood Thou tak'st them off / With overwhelming sweep.(Burns’
Ninetieth Psalm Versified.)

There was a tide.

I've just watched a documentary film on TV, title: The Spirit of '45' . I would highly recommend it, not only for its clear and apolitical objectivity but because it could have a direct bearing on what is happening right here, right now.



The narrative began with the background, i.e. the years leading up to WW2 when the UK was rife with post-WW1 /  post-depression poverty and the inevitable social unrest. How close we in the UK came to taking the Hitlerian pathway! The movie then focussed on the six years of wartime shortages and other hardships. All the courage, political and military, but alongside that the spirit of civilian and uniformed joie de vivre that I so well remember. How could people be - or at least appear to be - so relaxed and happy when the daily news was of death and destruction, losing as well as winning, extreme racism (not only German), the rationing of pretty well everything, families split asunder etc etc?



Be that as it may these were the years through which I grew up. I remember being on holiday from my boarding school, at home in Pimlico, central London, watching unguided missiles everyone called buzz bombs descending on the capital, then the even more dreaded V2 rockets. I remember hunting for shrapnel and playing in the ruins of bombed out houses and before that, at home up in Lancashire, waving roadside union jacks at giagantic convoys of American soldiers; 'overpaid, over-sexed and over here' as the saying went. You learned pretty early all about the birds and the bees when you lived close to a wartime American base! I remember asking my mother what could the newspapers possibly be full of when there was no war? I mean after we've won, I added. "Oh, Bryan, they write about royalty and stocks and shares and football and so forth," she responded, which seemed to me like very dull fare. I was eleven years old at the end of World War Two. I guess like so many others I had no idea about what was to come next, although for some reason I had it in my head that we victorious Brits would then be declaring war on the USA! (Presumably Britain, after defeating America would then be a kind of world champion!)



Actually, nobody in Britain could have guessed what was to come next. Men and women who had spent five long years in uniform came home to a nation on its knees financially and morally, a nation that was to remain on ration cards for the next five years, a nation living in various degrees of poverty on international bankers' credit - actually, right up to this very day.. At the same time cinema newsreels covered the unspeakable 'discoveries' at Belsen and Auschwitz but did not until much later cover the aftermath of  the R.A.F. bombing of Dresden. Incidentally I was a big fan of Richmel Crompton's fictional hero 'Biggles' and his friend 'Ginger' - WW1 fighter pilots both. So, skipping forward, In 1951 I was to enter National Service in the R.A.F. and apply for aircrew. Early morning of my first day I was standing at attention in rank in a huge empty hanger at RAF Cardington. Enter the Group-Captain with walking stick - legacy of the Battle of Britain, it was said. He stood in front on his dais, looked us over for a silent moment, then; "Step forward any man who does not wish to kill the enemy of this country," he said. Nobody moved a muscle. None of us had thought about killing, only flying.like Biggles, but in Meteor jet fighters. (Oh those Meteors! Known as 'meat boxes' for obvious reasons of fatal unreliabilty.).



Back to 'Tthe Spirit of '45'.  Against all expectations the nation threw out the Conservatives under its wartime leader Winston Churchill in favour of a group of dry and dusty academics, or so at the time they seemed  to me, going under the flag of 'Labour'. Academics they may have been but dry and dusty? Oh no! They seized the opportunity to take into public ownership and/or consolidate all the central public services oif the UK: coal, rail, gas, electricity, water, telephones - and above all, health. This was a peaceful revolution if ever there was one. Out with the exploitative, profit driven, upper class toffs and in with the age of the help-each-other, classless Common Man. Wow, communism without tears! Anyway The Spirit of '45 documented the theoretical logic behind Labour government thinking. So simple: peace, dignity and equal shares for all! Valhalla! Wonderful! Ah yes, where had we heard that before?



Rubbish of course. The UK had simply exchanged exploitative capitalism for exploitative labour. Over the years to follow the film showed how, whichever cadre managed to lever itself into a control position, greed would very soon come to the surface. Greed for money and 'property' and greed for power over others,   Exactly the same, in other words, as happened in post revolutionary Russia. Men put in charge or putting themselves in charge start out with high ideals but almost always end up in positions beyond their capabilities and all too often with their noses in the trough. Nationalisation clearly could only work if managed by saints or extra terrestials.Pretty thin on the ground in post WW2 Britain.



Then much later came a woman called Thatcher who, seeing how it had all gone wrong, reversed the nation back into the privatisation of public services, sparing only the iconic National Health Service. Ownership by and dividends to the smartass few rather than the dullard many and their pesky Unions. Same old or similarly poor management of course. How easy is management when you are managing a State protected monopoly. And how profitable to the managers and the ownership.



As we have seen even a Margaret Thatcher would not date to touch the NHS, so what has happened / is happening to that? Well, should you be a general practitioner of medicine earning (or rather having been awarded) twice as much as your Member of Parliament and six times the national average despite having working hours reduced to those of a civil servant you will probably be quite pleased with it. But if you are a patient looking for health services you will very likely have increasingly strong reservations about it. And if you are a UK citizen bothering to look at what it is costing you, past, present and future, well, you will be panicking right now. Or should be.



So, The spirit of '45? William Shakespeare and his 16/17th century generation were of the belief that ... There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken
at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is
bound in shallows and in miseries ... They believed that time for Mankind came and went with the ancient Greeks. Me, I think the flood tide came in 1945. You may, and I do, have a sense that it was not taken. Will there be another chance? Yes. Whilst our much maligned Earth rotates there will be tides. But taking it will not be easy. It will not be a comfortable thing. Change; dramatic change never could be.

Christmas is coming!

This Winter world
around Loch Ewe lies, still,

and glorious the
sky these north lights bring

then you can feel
the ages in these hills,

the birth, the
re-birth of all living things.

so you just know
this earth is living, too.

she breathes;
each breath a turning season long;

although in ways
unknown to me and you

she hears and
shares the rhythm of life's song.

but yet how
strong, how long north winds can blow,

(whilst winter
snows cloak those old Torridons,)

and sometimes
raging seas down sea lochs flow

through long dark
nights when little comfort comes.




It matters not!
how perfect our world is,

how sweet her
blessing, soft her bedtime kiss.







Extracted from ‘Northern Lights’

Oil painting 70 x 50mm and verse by

Bryan Islip (e-m bryan@bryanislip.com)

www.pictures and poems.co.uk

... and in my 'Unique Picturebook Calendar 2014' @ £8.50 ...