Category: Historic/Factual

Once Upon a Christmas Time

21/12/2018

Once, when I was very small, I remember Father Christmas flying past our house in Trecynon, Aberdare. Later on, my big brother attempted to convince me that the sleigh and reindeer had been mounted on the back of an open-backed truck, but I know what I saw, there was no truck, just Santa Claus waving at all the children as he flew by! No memory remains more powerfully lodged in my mind than this one which has helped to build the magic of Christmas ever since. Of course, in Wales in the late fifties, Christmas celebrations revolved around our chapel life, singing carols, the Christmas party in the vestry with jelly and sandwiches and lemonade pop, with games and prizes to follow. But it wasn’t all laughs! Christmas came at that time of year when us kids were forced against our will to wear hand-knitted itchy balaclavas, and worse, mittens attached along each arm and secured beneath our coats by elastic strips with enough durability to power a mediaeval siege engine.

Christmas was a time when the air itself was infused with exotic smells, chocolate and cinammon and the citrusy smell of tangerines. I remember assisting my Dad on Christmas Eve, charged with the important task of taking our turkey to the local bakehouse, then excitedly returning after dark to collect it once it was cooked and being allowed to pick and eat a steaming morsel of meat from its wing. Everything seemed to add to the excitement and magic of Christmas. Television consisted for us of just the one BBC channel, and I recall how they used to show each year a stop-frame animation about how Rudolph the Reindeer saved Christmas - a sort of animated bio-pic for mesmerised children.

There were of course our family traditions, like unpacking and re-hanging the brightly coloured paper decorations which concertinaed across our living room, which had undoubtedly been bought at Woolworths along with our small artificial tree. The tree was gaudily decked out with tinsel and coloured lights, which invariably proved to be a trial for my Dad; I think the bulbs themselves must have belonged to a powerful trade-union because if one blew they all went out and it was merry hell to find the culprit! A few years back I took that threadbare old tree to the tip when my mother, unable to look after herself any longer, went into sheltered accommodation and the task of dismantling our family home fell to me - it was a time of many emotional highs and lows, causing me to relive a host of sad and happy memories, the merry-go-round of this bitter/sweet experience we call life.

There were always amazing presents, I remember, and best of all one early Christmas was a doctor’s kit furnished with precision medical instuments made out of chunky plastic, probably bought from stalls in Aberdare market or the aforementioned Woolworths: there was a thing for peering into ears with, a lamp for the forehead to inspect a patient’s tonsils, a hammer to test reflexes, a stethoscope, some plasters and bandages, and a card that identified me, Martin Johnson, as a trained medical practitioner. Mam, driven to be imaginative and practical because of a shortage of money, had arranged the kit in a white metal lunch box with a red cross attached to the lid to delineate purpose made with sticking plaster and red ink! But I almost forgot, there was also a blue plastic clock for checking a patient’s pulse - after I’d outgrown my doctor’s kit this clock became a Christmas decoration and still hangs on our tree to this day.

But the very best thing of all that I remember about Christmas, and I don’t know if this is a Welsh Valleys thing, or something initiated by my Dad, I’ve certainly not come across it anywhere else - about half of the content of our Christmas stockings as children were booby prizes (Father Christmas had a very funny sense of humour we were told!) - people tend to look at me like I’m daft when I mention it! In our stockings eagerly left at the bottom of our beds and filled by Father Christmas as we slept were to be found all manner of things which we opened with glee. The bounty had been stuffed down into an old rugby sock, all carefully wrapped in newspaper with little cryptic messages attached, there were chocolate coins, toy soldiers, tangerines wrapped in silver paper, nuts, toy cars, plastic magnifying glasses, gob-stoppers and usually a practical joke like a blood stained bandage that you could slip over your finger that had a large nail protruding from either side. Dad’s booby prizes were generally introduced with a label like “You’ll definitely love this!” or “Very useful item” - these could be anything from a candlestick off our mantlepiece to a carrot or potato. Father Christmas undoubtedly adored all the children in the world but he definitely enjoyed teasing them too! When I reflect on all those past Christmasses it is this memory of our Christmas stockings that fills me with warmth and brings a little moisture to the eye. It was the attention to detail of my folks, and that unfakeable sense of being held and embraced within the family fold.

In a few days time, I shall relive many of these feelings again by observing the joy Christmas brings to my wonderful little granddaughters. Yet, despite it being a family occasion, we are reminded that Christmas is a time for wishing peace and goodwill to all mankind, so as we settle down to a feast amongst our families, please spare a thought for those who are less fortunate. We share a planet with thousands of other species and we so often tend to take it all for granted, but it isn’t money or power that makes Christmas special, it is simply love made manifest. Be kind to each other and have a lovely Christmas.

1 Comment

The Plot Thickens - Niedermayer & Hart

23/3/2018

1 Comment

I seem to have been telling my readers for ages that the follow-on story to Niedermayer & Hart was almost ready. I wasn’t fibbing, honest! I started the proofing and fact-checking process well over a year ago, but a lot has been happening for me and my family (in the most part, I’m pleased to say, good things) which has somehow managed to slow everything in the Odd Dog Press publishing department down to almost a standstill at times.

However, we did recently manage to produce a newly updated version of my wife Judith Johnson’s book Southborough War Memorial, which lists the two-hundred and fifty-five names on our local war memorial. The original book was printed in 2009 and has been out of print for a number of years, although we did produce a Kindle version in 2012. The revised book contains some photographs and information not previously seen, as several names have been added to the memorial since 2009. Naturally, being a local history book, it was never expected to appeal widely or to sell in vast numbers, yet it continues to sell steadily, and not just in our local community but also within its far wider diaspora. This book took Judith seven years to research in her spare moments and remains, in my view, a very fine achievement. So, hooray for Southborough War Memorial I say!

To return to the subject of Niedermayer & Hart; the second book in the trilogy is at its final proofing stage. Actually, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever mentioned a trilogy. I concluded N & H with the words The End because I didn’t want to promise a trilogy at the time (although it was always my intention), just in case the book didn’t go down very well. Fortunately, most of its readers seem to approve. A reviewer said this about N & H last week on Amazon UK:
“A real rip snorter of a page turner. I don't normally read anything other than Stephen King (I'm a bit of a King snob and generally find other Sci fi / horror authors don't quite meet the grade) but Johnson has written what I love to read. Looking forward to reading more of his books.”

The cover artwork for the new title (soon to be announced) is being prepared at the moment. I’ve seen the rough drawings and find it suitably unsettling. Like Niedermayer & Hart and my psychological thriller Roadrage, the new book will not only appear in a printed format but also as an ebook. Actually, we’re also planning to bring out a new printed version of Niedermayer & Hart, if not simultaneously, then shortly afterwards. This is mainly because stocks of the original are running low and it’ll be good to have both titles conforming to the same style. An actor friend recently commented that they thought N & H would make a highly compelling film or TV series. If that ever happened, it would of course be terrific, but in the meantime, I’ll just keep on writing! Meanwhile, if you do happen to have an original copy, hang onto it, as the first edition will most probably go out of print sometime this year.

Oooh yes, almost forgot! I’m planning to do a series of promotions/giveways etc. over the coming weeks, so WATCH THIS SPACE, as they say!

1 Comment

Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

1/3/2018

3 Comments

This book, widely considered to be a classic, fully deserves this accolade in my view. However, it is difficult to use terms like classic or to write with any great enthusiasm about a book whose subject matter I wholly detest. Incidentally, it is possibly the only book, certainly the only book I recall, that I had to stop reading at bedtime, generally my main time for this daily practice, because it was giving me nightmares. I have little doubt that the author herself had the same reservations as the reader when she approached the subject matter, so it is with respect and admiration that I pen these words.

The facts about what the Nazis did, all of which can be obtained elsewhere, are not what makes reading this book so essential, nor is it some kind of horrific fascination in learning of the psychological profile of a man who oversaw the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,200,000 almost exclusively Jewish people (chilling when you think the estimated death toll - horrific whichever number is correct - might be out by nearly half a million!). Sereny doesn’t seem to be solely interested in Stangl’s psychology; I believe she was actually attempting to give us a glimpse, some insight, into the man’s soul. He initially trained as a weaver before joining the police force in his native Austria. There is some argument about whether as a policeman, Stangl was an ‘illegal Nazi’ - he himself always denied it, but his wife and colleagues seem to believe he was very likely a Nazi member before the Anschluss. There seems to have existed a powerful drive in Stangl, not only to be good and efficient at his job, but also to ‘be someone’. Were these the character traits the Nazis looked for when they sought to enlist the ‘right’ man, at first to be an administrator at Hartheim where the Nazis began killing those who were physically and mentally impaired, then Sobibor extermination camp, and finally to run what was essentially a human abbatoir at Treblinka? There is nothing to suggest that Stangl was a sadistic monster; there were a number of such types at Treblinka, as testified to by the very few slave prisoners who survived the camp, but there is no evidence to implicate Stangl in personal acts of cruelty; he was it seems a loyal husband and loving father. Yet, he was also the man in charge of this highly-efficient conveyor-belt that delivered death on a previously unprecedented scale.

It is hard to imagine the efficiency of the extermination programme. Every morning trains would roll into Treblinka station, which had been mocked-up to look like a real train station with flower boxes and a fake painted station clock with hands that never moved (Stangl’s idea) to lull the new arrivals into a sense of calm - they probably imagined upon seeing it, that nothing bad was going to happen to them, that they were simply going to be processed and then assigned some work. They were divided according to gender, asked to strip naked but told to keep their valuables and papers with them (again creating a false sense of security), they were then led into the ‘shower block’, where they were subsequently gassed with monoxide provided by diesel engines. The elderly and infirm were taken to the hospital - an entirely fake building complete with a red cross. Here they were ordered to strip, told to sit on a wall above a constantly burning pit, and shot. Two hours, and every single human being who had arrived on the morning transports was dead. Generally, by midday, all the killing was done, the remainder of the day was then dedicated to the disposal of corpses in open-air crematoria known as ‘roasts’. At least, this was the scenario for days delivering only western Jews to Treblinka; those arriving from the east in cattle trucks were herded viciously by sadistic guards who beat and whipped them into hysteria and ferociously drove them like animals through their final terror-stricken hours. One can only assume this difference in treatment was part of some sick Nazi ideology, whereby German Jews had, at the very least, been subjected to the improving influence of western civilisation, and were therefore far superior to those from the uncivilised east.

Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka, was, I believe, the only Nazi in charge of such an institution to be interviewed in this way. It therefore stands as a unique record. Sereny interviewed him for a total of seventy hours between April 2 and June 27, 1971, in Dusseldorf prison. He died only nineteen hours after her final interview. To the very last Stangl maintained, “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself ... I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself.”

Sereny however, who was, after all, there in the room with Stangl, suggests that something had fundamentally changed in him during the course of the interviews:

For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “In reality I share the guilt ... my guilt ... only now in these talks ... now that I have talked about it all for the first time ...” he stopped.

He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.

After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”

Whilst I was reading this book, I attended the funeral of a friend, and couldn’t help imagining, as I looked at the fifty-odd people standing there at the graveside, that every morning at Treblinka, at least a hundred times that number had perished. The effort involved in disposing of that many corpses simply stuns my mental faculties. Yet, for me, it is not good enough to consign this episode to the past and to label those who took part as evil men with a heavy line drawn underneath; if we fail to let the mistakes of the past guide us, we shall forever be in danger of repeating them. When politicians start to whip up division and hatred; when corporate employees allow themselves to carry out the wishes of their boards of directors at the expense, life and livelihood of the poor and disenfranchised, or allow misinformation to masquerade as the truth; then we must all be very careful. Moral integrity, it seems, can so easily be compromised

3 Comments

First Post 2017

4/1/2017

1 Comment

The Bullshiteers (with a nod to Hans Holbein) - limited edition print by Tom Johnson

A friend sent me an email recently enquiring if I was okay because he noticed I hadn’t updated this blog in a while. The truth is that since 23 June, 2016, I’ve been feeling pretty discouraged, and for the first time in my life probably, I began to feel uncomfortable about my British identity. I had always enjoyed the feeling of connectedness to our friends in mainland Europe that EU membership brought us, along with the longest period of peace and cooperation between nation states in European history. The xenophobes and far-right may view the Battle of the Somme or the Battle of Britain (perhaps backed by the Dam Busters’ theme) as our finest examples of British nationhood; personally, whilst I don’t gainsay the brave sacrifice of those men and women, I ‘d personally opt for the abolition of slavery, the creation of the welfare state and the NHS.

I don’t think the EU is perfect, but then, what political model is? The European Court of Human Rights is something to be admired, and we may well lose some of our workers’ rights by leaving. Of course, the right wing press has whinged on for years about Brussels red-tape, but it’s always easy to find fault. I certainly don’t share the UKIP leader’s disgust for the EU passport; in fact, I’m fairly sure I share none of Nigel Farage’s Little-England views. I find it extraordinary that this man, the product of a private education at Dulwich College, an ex commodities dealer, and proclaimed worshipper at the shrine of Margaret Thatcher, has somehow promoted himself as the crusading hero at the forefront of an anti-elitist battle to reassert the rights of the ordinary man (sorry, I should have inserted the word ‘decent’ - ‘ordinary, decent, man’ - which in the lexicon of the right wing seems to mean ‘xenophobic reactionary’). Farage is a man who has regularly demonstrated his utter contempt for the intellectual lightweightedness of his fellow UKIPers, so I am incredulous that he can actually embrace ‘ordinary people’ - at arms length perhaps, whilst wearing latex gloves and a nose-peg. But Farage didn’t pull off Brexit alone, although he’d like us to think he did; let’s give credit where credit is due, Boris Johnson was actually the campaign’s figurehead with Michael Gove at his right hand. When I consider this opportunistic pair, I can’t help thinking of Jabba the Hutt and his sidekick Salacious Crumb from Return of the Jedi. This unattractive twosome, so deserving of each other (as demonstrated by Gove’s subsequent stabbing of the Johnson back), once guaranteed their loyalty to David Cameron, now a former tenant of 10 Downing Street as a result of trusting them. They seemed prepared to sink to any level of vulgar populism during the debacle that was the referendum debate.

Shortly before standing down as Prime Minister, David Cameron claimed that he didn't regret holding the referendum because he was so completely committed to democracy. He blamed EU rules on immigration as the reason he lost - nothing whatever to do with any of his domestic policies, like his party’s failure to build enough decent homes for our people or the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Apparently, he’d once joked at a meeting with EU leaders, when some had voiced caution about holding a referendum in the first place, “Don't worry, I'm a winner”. So, this pain we're all suffering could be seen as stemming from one man's arrogance. I daresay the Murdoch press or one or other of the big publishing houses will see him alright with a million or two as an advance on his memoirs. I now hear that our failed Prime Minister is being tipped for the top job at NATO. Mmmmm ...
2016 was a very odd year indeed. Does anyone recall the public vote In March called by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to suggest names for their new research ship? Overwhelming numbers voted for ‘Boaty McBoatface’ - 124,000 votes with its nearest rival polling just 34,000. However, it seems that ‘the will of the British people’ a phrase so often quoted at us by our politicians post-Brexit, could in this particular case be waived in favour of upholding our national dignity - the ship was subsequently named RRS David Attenborough (phew!). Yet, when it came to the most important referendum there has ever been (whose remit was always stated as advisory), less than 38% of the eligible voting population was enough to stand for the overwhelming will of the British people.

The thing that upset me most about Brexit was the lack of intelligent debate during the campaign, especially, if not solely, from its victors. However, the Leave camp did plumb depths which I personally have never witnessed before in a British electoral campaign. The Leave politicians all seem to have recently distanced themselves from their much-paraded claim “We send the EU 350 million a week - Let’s fund the NHS instead - Let’s take back control”. And no politician with any decency could have stood before that poster, as Farage did, of (brownish-skinned) migrants streaming across the Slovenian(?) border with the caption “Breaking Point - The EU has failed us all - we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” Or what about Michael Gove’s derogatory remarks about the considered opinions of experts on the bad effects of leaving the EU?

It’s hard to gauge the Brexit referendum’s impact on that other big election of 2016, the US Presidential election of Donald Trump in November (or, is that the Precedential Election, Donald?); it was a double-whammy for Remain voters like myself. The victorious campaigns had many similarities: they were shockingly light on fact-based argument, didn’t shy away from making outlandish statements, were quick to berate the press as biased whenever it criticised them, and both campaigns were remarkably swift to identify, claim and draw to their hearts the large numbers of disenchanted voters on both sides of the pond who found themselves hurting and seeking someone to blame for their ills. What came to light shortly after the US election was the influence that the (presumably self-named) Alt-Right Breitbart News organisation exercised over both events. I had never even heard of Breitbart or of its executive chairman Stephen Bannon before; he’s the man now destined to become Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist at the White House. Yikes!

We are being told on both sides of the Atlantic that our real enemy is a global liberal elite. Across the water, Donald Trump’s cunning plan to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington insiders is to backslide on a number of promises he made to his electors during his campaign and fill his White House team with lobbyists and insiders of the very worst kind. What strikes me as particularly scary is Trump and the Alt-Right’s lack of respect for democracy. One of the greatest vulnerabilities in democracy is a requirement on the part of those who partake in elections to conduct themselves with a certain level of decorum, honesty and fair-mindedness. Do you think Vladimir Putin (who may, or may not, have authorised a few computers to be hacked in order to help Donald win) really admires him, or does he think he’s a moron, like the three million majority of Americans who voted against him?

The first book I completed in 2017, which I sincerely hope doesn’t demonstrate any kind of prescience on my part, was The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans. It charts the forces at work in Germany from the end of the Bismarck era, through the Wilhelmine period which led up to the end of WWI, then on through the years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis from fringe group to power. I always believed Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor by popular vote. This wasn’t the case; he was installed as Chancellor through a deal with some right-wing politicians who were under the woeful misapprehension that they would easily be able to control him. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. The Nazis, who possessed no respect for democracy whatever, never won an election by fair means, and once they’d achieved power, they quickly suppressed (often by killing) any opposition. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the way they seized and held onto power is the speed with which they managed to silence any opposition - within just weeks of assuming power they had established the notorious Dachau concentration camp along with several others to detain their political opponents. This is the first book in a trilogy by Evans about the Third Reich which was clearly written with the layman in mind. It is beautifully accessible in its writing and Evans’ scholarship gives a superb overview of this terrible period in European history.

In light of our Brexit referendum and the US elections, the banal rhetoric, the racist slurs, blatant lies, these words seemed even more chilling words whilst reading The Coming of the Third Reich:

"All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be ... The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but the power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."

Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (Mein Kampf)

Can’t allow Hitler the final word on my blog.

I wish all lovers of freedom and democracy, however they may have chosen to vote, a happy, healthy and prosperous 2017!

1 Comment

The Wettest Holiday Ever!

9/6/2016

2 Comments

In 1960 we looked like this

Holiday time approacheth ...

Memories of childhood are notoriously imprecise, but certain things, whether entirely accurate or not, somehow lodge themselves in the brain and refuse to budge. One such recollection is a family holiday to the Welsh seaside town of Porthcawl during what must have been the summer of 1960, when I was five/six. Porthcawl was considered the holiday mecca for us Valleys folk; in fact, it was impossible to visit the place without bumping into someone you knew from home - no place then to fly off to for an illicit weekend liaison, not that such thoughts would have had any place in my innocent mind back then; any fantasies I entertained were wholly confined to fighting injustice and righting wrongs like my heroes the Lone Ranger and his ever-faithful Indian companion Tonto.

Wales, a mountainous place with a large coastline, is famed for its rain. I’ve heard it rumoured that some of our sheep, if not a few of the locals in some rural parts, are web-footed. Back in the Porthcawl summer of 1960 a natural proclivity for an amphibious lifestyle would have come in useful. I wouldn’t entirely trust my own memory here; my parents however always maintained that over a two-week holiday we did experience fourteen days of almost non-stop rain. The first week we boarded with a lovely lady called Mrs Jones (the names of both saints and sinners were always faithfully recorded by my late mother); the second week, we suffered the misfortune of lodging with a Mrs Martin. Mrs Martin was a widowed lady who quite evidently detested children, which naturally didn’t bode too well for my brother and me. Even my father, normally big-hearted, found his good nature put to the test by this woman; Mrs Martin was more strict Victorian governess than welcoming hostess, and to top it all, she was a rotten cook to boot - this is probably what riled Dad the most! I think Dad regarded a bad cook as a work of the Devil (well, not far off!). I recall him, after one of numerous inedible meals, gruffly muttering to my mother that perhaps the late Mr Martin had gone to his heavenly reward after consuming one of his wife’s dinners.

Mrs Martin’s guest house truly was cold and unwelcoming. In those days, families like us who lived on modest incomes purchased their own food and had it cooked for them by their hostess. I’ve no idea what this practice was called, eventually it was of course succeeded by B&B and half-board. I have a feeling it may have been called something a bit misleading like ”All found”. So, our domestic situation only made matters worse; outside it continued to rain and inside the guest house we were subjected to Mrs M’s culinary abuse and sneering dislike of children. One evening, shortly before the evening meal, Mrs Martin accused my brother and myself of vomiting over her bathroom and leaving it in a terrible mess. She was very condemnatory and quite scary in her manner I recall. My mother, like all good mothers, would not stand for her ‘chicks’ to be maligned thus, “I can assure you, Mrs Martin, that It wasn’t either of my boys!” she protested. “Who on earth was it, then?” sneered the awful Mrs M, “I don’t know,” replied Mam on the verge of tears, “But it wasn’t either of my boys!” At the same moment as Mrs Martin scoffed scornfully at this, a plaintive voice called down from the landing upstairs, “It was me!” a frail male voice called out. The Joneses were a kindly, elderly couple from the Rhondda who were the only other paying guests in the house. “I’m very sorry, it wasn’t the boys, I was taken ill and I was about to clean up the mess!” Mrs Martin looked appropriately shamefaced as she shuffled away from my mother who was standing guard over her boys, proud and victorious. As far as my brother Ian (seven years older than myself) was concerned, the confrontation was the final straw. The next morning he caught the bus back to my grandparents’ house. I don’t recall him coming on a family holiday again - Mrs Martin had been the line in the sand for him!

I don’t think I gave my swimming trunks an airing at any time over that holiday, but I did manage a few paddles in the odd rock pool between cloudbursts. One evening we went to see the variety show at The Grand Pavilion. I remember Dad particularly enjoyed the comedian, and was still telling a joke he heard that night about a family of rabbits thirty years later. The local cinema had only one offering as I recall, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the 1958 Hammer version of Dracula. It had an X certificate (i.e. eighteen and over!) so no good for me, in fact I recall my hair standing on end just looking at the black and white stills that were displayed in a glass case outside the cinema. The large shelter on the promenade with its multiple rows of benches was filled to capacity every day. Each day we did the same circuit of shops around the town - Woolworths was by far the best, of course, and hours were spent browsing its aisles. Every day we’d have a Fulgoni’s ice-cream cone or two; we’d generally escape the rain mid-morning and mid-afternoon by going to a cafe to have cups of tea for the grown ups and a glass of pop or a milk shake for us. Sometimes, to avoid Mrs Martin’s meals we’d have faggots and peas from the stall in Coney Beach (to allay the concerns of American readers here, faggots are a ball of minced lamb and offal, traditionally served with mushy peas) or Mam’s lifelong favourite, fish and chips. I think the putting green, a traditional holiday pursuit, and still surviving in Porthcawl to this day, was waterlogged and closed up those weeks, I certainly don’t recall us playing. But not all was lost, on the last night of the holiday I was taken to the fair and allowed to go on half a dozen rides and to spend any pocket money my grandparents had pressed into my hand before leaving.

One of the best things I remember was going out one evening after dark when it was high tide and dodging the waves that surged into the air like a blowing whale and left its spume washing across the promenade.

Here is Another Porthcawl story

2 Comments

Gilgamesh

2/6/2016

0 Comments

Driving to work one morning my wife almost ran over a book. Yes, a hardback book, strange but true. Just imagine what this meant for a book fanatic like Judith - books materialising out of nowhere and suddenly appearing on her path?

She naturally pulled into the side of the road to try and see if she could help. Its cover was slightly bent and Judith did what any book-lover is duty-bound to do - brought it home so it could be treated for shock and duly nurtured. The gentle reader will be delighted to learn that the aforementioned book has since found happiness and fulfilment amongst others of its species upon our bookshelves.

The book was Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell.

“That’s the oldest story ever written down,” I exclaimed when she brought it home.

“I know,” she said, “I found it in the middle of the road.”

“Wow,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to read it.”

“Here’s your chance,” she said, passing me the book.

It’s pretty ridiculous to rate a book that is actually older than The Bible by a system of stars, one to five! The poetic text in English by Stephen Mitchell is far easier to regard objectively and review. For my money he has done an excellent job of bringing together literal translations of the surviving fragments of Sumerian,Babylonian and Akkadian texts and working them into an agreeable epic poem by adopting a certain amount of artifice, which he freely admits to in his introduction.

This is a morality tale about the tragedy of human existence. When we first meet Gilgamesh we are told of his tyranny and how he oppresses the people in his kingdom, the walled city of Uruk. The people petition the Gods to temper their king’s abuses, and the responsive Gods duly send Enkidu, a kind of wild man, who is very nearly Gilgamesh’s physical equal, to restore balance to the world. It is interesting that as the story proceeds, and after they’ve become friends, they develop the attributes of each other - a bit like people are said to do in a marriage, and the text most certainly has a homo-erotic quality.

Gilgamesh is later forced to suffer bereavement and loss when his friend Enkidu is chosen by the Gods to die as a punishment for Gilgamesh’s wanton destruction of Humbaba, a monster entrusted by the Gods with the task of guarding the Cedar Forest and for killing the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh is so heart-broken after the loss of Enkidu that he wanders the world in despair. Eventually, he perks up a little and goes on a highly perilous journey to find Utnapishtim to see if he can learn the secret of eternal life. Utnapishtim tells him about the great flood (Noah’s Ark but predating the biblical version) and assures him that eternal life is impossible and its secret belongs to the Gods alone. Finally, he returns home to the walled city of Uruk as its rightful king. He has acquired some wisdom and perhaps the knowledge, known to the mystics and sages througout the ages, that man’s life can only be lived in the present.

What this poem tells me is that almost five thousand years ago, when the earliest of these tales were first conceived and written, human beings were largely concerned with the same issues as they are now.

A very successful roadside rescue indeed, I think.

0 Comments

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Some Other Thoughts

12/5/2016

2 Comments

I am sometimes appalled to hear educators declare that teaching the classics of English literature in our schools should be abandoned because they hold no relevance for modern children. I firmly believe that anyone who truly wishes to understand the development of language and writing needs to possess a firm grasp of of our literary heritage. The famous quotation from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke acknowledging his indebtedness to others, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” can be applied to any discipline just as easily as science. There would be no detective/thriller genre if Wilkie Collins hadn’t created books like The Woman in White and The Moonstone (just imagine what prime-time TV would ever have done then, even more reality and game shows perhaps?), without H Rider Haggard there would be no Lost World genre (Tarzan would still be apeing about in the jungle and there would be no Jurassic Park!). If John Polidori’s The Vampyre hadn’t influenced Bram Stoker, then there may never have been a Dracula, and Stephen King wouldn’t have written Salem’s Lot. The whole Fantasy genre basically stems from the pen of one man, J R R Tolkien, who had himself been inspired by the Norse myths. On a personal note, I most definitely couldn’t have written Niedermayer & Hart or Roadrage without following the bright trails that lead back to their many rich sources. Anyone who claims total originality is I think deluding themselves. However, there is a big difference between following themes or traditions and direct, deliberate plagiarism.

I’ve just read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus, for the first time (published 1818 - and acknowledging its debt to Greek mythology in the title). It is of course the original mad scientist scenario that has since become a stalwart of just about every form of popular culture. The story, then not a hundred years old, first made it to the cinema screens as far back as 1910 - we just love to be horrified! The book might be loosely classified as science fiction too, and its influence on art and literature has been incredibly far-reaching. As a novel it most certainly deserves its classic status. The book’s basic premise of man taking on the role of God has cross-bred with other genres: combine a mad scientist and lost world theme and you get Jurassic Park, mix mad science that creates computers who themselves create horrific human-like machines and you have the Terminator series, perhaps even Tolkien had something of the book in mind when he has Saruman create the Uruk-Hai.

Mary Shelley was born Mary Godwin in 1797, the daughter of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and writer and journalist William Godwin. Her mother died soon after she was born, and Mary received no formal education and doesn’t seem to have taken very well to her step-mother. She began an affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when still a teenager and eloped with him to the (then war-torn) Continent. She began writing Frankenstein in 1816 whilst holidaying on Lake Geneva ; by this time she had lost her first baby and had given birth to a son (sadly not to survive either). They were assailed by weeks of rain, and their chum Lord Byron suggested to the group of friends present, that they each compose a horror story to pass the time. The rest is, as they say, history.

The story is well written and has withstood the test of time. The monster of her tale undertakes to do many cruel and vindictive acts in revenge upon his creator Frankenstein; yet it is the monster who is given the last word in the novel by Shelley, and it is for him that we feel the deepest sympathy. Frankenstein never acknowledges his responsibility as creator, and simply abandons his creation which he finds too abhorrent to even gaze upon. The monster subsequently wanders the world like a lost child receiving only cruelty, unkindness and hatred from mankind who he yearns in his heart to join. Is the monster in this story the creature, or the human ego?

We stand at a point in time where such matters are no longer far-fetched. Whilst our governments can attempt to reassure us that any genetic experiments are only carried out with the utmost care and with every attention paid to what is both morally and ethically right ... we know too that once the genie is out of the bottle ...

I wrote a blog some time back that was based on the National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein.

And on a lighter note - one of my favourite comedy films, Young Frankenstein.

2 Comments

Happy 2016!

1/1/2016

0 Comments

I stopped making New Year resolutions many years ago. I admit that I’ve had a number of bad habits in the past that were regularly marked down, destined to become ‘has beens’ in the forthcoming New Year - sometimes my iron resolve lasted days, weeks even, but generally I was lucky if I made it til midday on 1st Jan. So much for those determined declarations of intent!

On reflection, my most destructive habits (e.g. smoking) are now happily consigned to the past. Even so, I still cautiously avoid getting physically too close while anyone’s actively smoking and even find myself holding my breath as I walk past them. I would hate to become ‘hooked’ again and know full well that it would only require me to listen to the delusion that ‘one little cigarette would do me no harm’ to be led astray. I always feel sad to see young people smoking, but understand that they wouldn’t appreciate me pointing out the dangers of smoking to them.

So, no specific New Year resolutions. However, I do have a number of wishes I’d love to see come to fruition:

I’d like to live in a more equal society where the gap between the richest and the poorest people in my own country and on this planet is dramatically reduced. I don’t think the answer to this is quite as simple as just taking all their money off the rich - a truly fair and just world requires all of us to play a part.

I’d like to see some genuine consensus between our leaders on environmental issues. So far we’ve only witnessed lip-service and a good deal of hot air - we live together on one planet, and it behoves us all to take more care of it. Our politicians are all too often vain, complacent and slippery and must be held to account, which demands more effort from individuals like you and me - politicians will only pay attention if we make them listen.

I’d like to live in a world where peace prevails and where differences are aired around a table. Most human conflict ultimately concludes in this way, so what a shame we find the inevitable solution so unthinkable at the beginning. The cost of intransigence is invariably great suffering and too often means the loss of many innocent lives. I’d dearly love to see the world’s arms dealers go out of business. Harry Patch (1898 - 2009), last surviving British soldier who fought in World War One, put it very powerfully when he asked: “Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?”

Unless every human being on this planet has a profound change of heart, it’s hard to imagine these wishes coming true in 2016, in my lifetime, or even within the lifetime of my beautiful new grand-daughter - or even that of her own grand-daughter. Yet, these remain my wishes for this and for every New Year.

And I do truly believe that change begins with me.

In 1987 my wife and I moved out of London to a village in Sussex. I told the man who owned our little grocery store that the reason we didn’t buy his eggs was because they weren’t free-range. The following week he got some in for a try-out. Guess what? His egg sales actually increased. Thirty years on it’s hard to imagine a time when free-range eggs were not widely available. Likewise, when Mrs Thatcher refused to impose sanctions upon the South African Government and its loathsome apartheid system, thousands and thousands of people in Britain and Ireland boycotted South African products e.g. fruit. I believe this action on the part of many individuals made a real difference; justice finally prevailed, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the rest is history. One young woman in Ireland and her union colleagues spent two and a half years on strike pay after refusing to sell Outspan grapefruit at her checkout.

Like I said, I believe change begins with me. The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead put it like this: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Let’s all do our best to make it a healthy, peaceful and happy 2016 for all!

Links:
Irish anti-apartheid movement:
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/an-boks-amach-the-irish-anti-apartheid-movement/

0 Comments

Brainy Stuff!

7/6/2015

0 Comments

I’ve recently read The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, which is about the cutting-edge science of ‘neuroplasticity’ and the ability of the brain to rewire itself. I’m not a natural target for books on science subjects - there isn’t a shelf of books anywhere in my house labelled ‘brain books’! So far, I’ve always been (and probably always will be!) an eclectic reader; for instance, I’ve now finished with brains and moved on ( yee hah!) to The Giant Book of the Western. I suppose I’ll read anything that satisfies my current mood and fulfills its own remit ie I wouldn’t expect a Jo Nesbo crime thriller to be a meditation on the human being’s place in the universe - I’d re-read Hermann Hesse if I fancied a bit of that.

I actually came across this book after my ninety-one year old mother-in-law read it in a couple of sittings and described it as ‘fascinating’. It was given her to read by my wife Judith who found it in a charity shop and seems to possess an unerring eye for choosing the right book for the right person. I often go to her when nothing on my TBR pile appeals and I’m not sure which book to pick up next. It’s a bit like consulting a ‘book oracle’; believe me the woman has uncanny powers when it comes to books and I never doubt her infallibility to cast her eye into her crystal ball, tea leaves, entrails or whatever - “What is it you seek, O gentle reader?”- and then select the right book (please don’t tell her I mentioned she has strange arcane powers - I’ve always worried about being turned into a frog).

Anyway, The Brain That Changes Itself is a psychology/science book that is easily approached by any layman like myself. It is written in bite-sized segments and I certainly found it an enjoyable and fascinating read. The basic premise of the book is that the brain is ‘plastic’ rather than (as scientists believed for many generations) irrevocably hard-wired. Doidge presents us with a number of jaw-dropping case histories to back up his theories and the book has quite a large ‘wow’ factor. I read with great fascination how an academic after suffering a most devastating stroke which destoyed a large part of his brain, leaving him with very little speech and partly paralysed, was able to make a complete recovery by ‘rewiring’ his brain, literally by-passing the damaged part. Or how the girl born with only a right hemisphere to her brain had been able to seemingly do the impossible and operate fairly normally.

These are inspiring stories, yet I can’t help feeling there’s something missing here. I’m not accusing Norman Doidge MD of being a snake-oil salesman, however, this book often reminded me of one of those best-selling self-help books that has you cheering but ultimately leaves you feeling a little unconvinced and dissatisfied. Just like the writers of self-help books are apt to do, the author here relies mostly on individual case-histories and he gives very few scientifically backed up facts or statistics. The section on psychoanalysis again makes the kinds of leaps and jumps that might be acceptable in a pacy thriller but I kept asking myself ‘Hang on just a minute there! Just because Mr X lost his mum at the age of three and has always had problems showing his wife affection, this all seems a little bit too much like a tit-bit style magazine when a psychiatrist comes along and puts two and two together, after which the patient has a few significant dreams and in the final scene Mr X goes off happily restored, a devoted family man again.’

In the early part of the book a number of neuroplasticity experiments are dispassionately quoted, and I have to say, when monkeys had nerves in their hands or arms severed and probes inserted into their brains, or kittens were deliberately blinded by sewing up an eyelid, I did feel a little queasy. I found the section on addiction, particularly the part on sex addiction, sado-masochism etc really quite shocking too. However, I’m not entirely sure whether the startling conclusions the author comes to in support of neuroplasticity are always quite as clear-cut as the author would have me believe. I think what I’m saying (as someone who is a completely non-scientific person) that I’m really not certain this book is good science. The Brain That Changes Itself is an enjoyable read and I’m sure there is much more to learn about neuroplasticity, but I’m not sure I can fully endorse all the claims put forward in this book.

I’m currently really enjoying my book of Western short stories (personally recommended by the ‘book oracle’). And as for brains, Steve Martin’s The Man with Two Brains literally made me fall off the sofa laughing when I first watched it on TV!

0 Comments

We Are Many

25/5/2015

0 Comments

We rarely make visits to the cinema to watch documentaries, we tend to catch up with these on the small screen. However, we made an exception for We Are Many, a film by Amir Amirani, a respected London-based journalist/film-maker of Iranian origin. His film, which has received very little publicity, is about the protest marches that took place right around the world on 15 February 2003 in opposition to the furious scramble for war being driven by the government of George W Bush in the US and heavily supported by our British Government led by Tony Blair.

The London protest, which we took part in, was reputed to have been somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people strong - the official figure halved this figure of course! However, I have no difficulty believing that we were nearer the number quoted by the march organisers. We came out of Charing Cross Station on the morning of 15 February and immediately found ourselves amongst people we knew from the Sussex village where we’d formerly lived for ten years. We shuffled off along the Strand with them, then went down to and along the Embankment taking us through Westminster, and along a route through central London that eventually brought us to Hyde Park. Our progress was at a snail’s pace, and it took more than five hours to reach our destination. The march in London was only one among roughly eight hundred similar protests taking place in cities right around the world on that day and it has been estimated that something in the region of 30 million people mobilised themselves. What was remarkable about the London march was the sheer diversity of the people who took part in it, people from literally every walk of life and background. I remember feeling incensed by the rush to go to war, with Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to prove conclusively that the Weapons of Mass Destruction for which they were searching did not exist.

On the day of the March I remember thinking to myself how it was inconceivable that a British Labour Government could ignore the voices of so many raised in peaceful protest. How wrong I was! The true civilian death toll from the Iraq War has never been published; the number is estimated to be somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million. The cost of the Iraq War was about £10 billion to UK taxpayers and somewhere in the region of $2.2 trillion dollars to US taxpayers. All the coalition forces lost far too many of their sons and daughters there - for a cause that has since been shown to be totally erroneous. The Middle East is certainly not a safer place for this intervention and the toppling of the indisputably wicked Saddam Hussein and his foul regime has not made life in Iraq better, in fact it has been shown that simply containing him would have led to far far fewer deaths. It has always struck me as a very bad joke that Tony Blair, shortly after he stood down as UK Prime Minister, was appointed Middle Eastern Peace Envoy working on behalf of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.

This film is anything but sensationalist, however it is truly disturbing. It doesn’t have any big financial backing so distribution is patchy, but I hope you’ll find a venue and get a chance to watch We Are Many. I highly recommend seeing it.

0 Comments

<<Previous

Once Upon a Christmas Time

The Plot Thickens - Niedermayer & Hart

Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

First Post 2017

The Wettest Holiday Ever!

Gilgamesh

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Some Other Thoughts

Happy 2016!

Brainy Stuff!

We Are Many

M J Johnson

Categories

Archives