Monthly Archives: December 2021

THE TURNING OF THE YEAR

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As the days and hours slip away from another year, another significant milestone, there is just a hint, the merest of hints, that it is not just the year that is turning but attitudes too.  The seemingly impenetrable edifice constructed, no doubt in great care, over the past two years, shows signs of crumbling. Cracks are appearing and there is a growing sense that those who championed the worldwide Covid narrative, who confidently rode the wave over governments, media and people’s lives might find themselves on the wrong side of history. The very place they had consigned their adversaries.  Inevitably, a house built on falsehood and half-truths will fall.

The signs can be seen in the media where journalist who have taken the king’s shilling, sense the reckoning is coming and are creeping out from under the woodwork to find a safe place on the right side. We now know the story and maybe it’s time, as some have suggested, to start clapping for the conspiracy theorists. Turns out they were right all along and we were wrong. If it looks like a conspiracy and smells like a conspiracy, it probably is a conspiracy and all of that will spill in time, when and if one honest journalist can ferret it out.

The main players the global predators will already be looking for a safe sanctuary somewhere, leaving all the middle people and useful idiots to face the anger of the mob. For anger there certainly will be, once those who have paid the price of the folly realise how they have been deceived. Those who feel that their trust has been betrayed. The people who have suffered, who lost relatives without the comfort of saying goodbye those whose children lost a year of learning and socialising, those who lost their jobs, businesses and livelihoods without compensation, those who have missed out on critical treatment, who died for lack of early interventions, those whose lives were unnecessarily mucked about having to follow idiotic instructions which made no sense and those whose delicate mental health was callously ignored… and for what? …for what? The anger is building; it may morph into rage. The threatening tones can already be heard and this is what worries me.

I fear that many will be looking for blood. When a government, a system has been overthrown it most often becomes ugly and bloody. The Ceaușescus’ Ghaddafi’s, and Saddam’s’ demise was not pretty. These examples are pretty extreme, of course, nevertheless the possibility of a terrible backlash is very real and it would be wise to do what we can to ameliorate it and avoid the situation descending into chaos   It will need something more than just another lengthy and expensive public enquiry. A Truth and Justice Commission might be more the kind of thing, where the people involved can feel free to tell the whole truth without fear of prosecution.

People need to know. They need to know: why their relatives were sent to care homes to die, why isolating the population in lock-down restrictions was the only intervention considered, why previous plans for a pandemic were abandoned, why the advice of so many scientists and public health experts for focused protection and natural immunity were ignored, why the politicians and those making the rules didn’t themselves believe there was any danger, why fear was weaponised, why drug companies were given immunity from prosecution, as well as what actually was going on in Wuhan. People do need to know and there can never be any resolution until they do.

My hope and my prayer for 2022 is that this can be done peacefully, honestly and transparently and that people of character and integrity can rise to the occasion, step into the breach and show the way, out of, what could otherwise be, a great and historic tragedy.  

GET BACK

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When ever I hear “She loves you” it gives me goose pimples, lifts the wee hairs in the back of my neck and I am right back there: walking up the corridor from the Gym hall after lunch break in the Island school of my teens, taking in the sharp breeze blowing up from the loch and the tang of malt and peat from the distillery, down at the pier with the boys trying to sink a bottle with stones, the sloping football pitch, the bus journeys home and the girls, especially the girls.  It was the birth of Beatlemania, but being one of the perverse sort, I decided to actively dislike them and even wrote and presented a piece of prose for the English class dismissing their music as childish and shallow. The sporting teacher offered me an armed escort when I left.

It didn’t take long, however, before that changed. There was “All my loving” with its brisk chug-a-chug guitar coming in on the minor and the simplicity and freshness of the whole thing. And then there was “ I feel fine” with the deliberate feedback from John’s Rickenbaker. I knew then that this was something special it was no flash in the pan. The other Mersey beaters came and went but the Beatles moved onward and forward changed and surprised yet still kept that wonderful tightness that all bands aspire to.  There was “Help” “Yesterday” and “We can work it out” in 1965 with its driving tempo and the change to the waltz at the end of  the middle eight. A year later it was “Paper back writer” with the exciting harmonies and the Long section on a single chord before finding release on the sub dominant.  Then there was “Eleanor Rigby” of course, “For no-one”  “Here there and everywhere” and all the way to Sergeant Pepper and “A Day in a Life” with that crazy climactic ending. It could only be downhill from there. Nothing could eclipse that moment. True there were some good songs that followed, and the bands performance on the roof, but it was clear the show was over.

Peter Jackson’s documentary “Get Back” tells the story of their demise and takes the mountain of recordings from the original sessions at Twickenham, Apple studios and the Savile Road roof concert to make a film which is just about as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I imagine it would bore the pants off all except the most passionate of fans, as there seems hours and hours of irrelevant chat and mucking about where nothing actually happens. It could be watching paint dry. For me, however, having played in bands and worked with musicians and spent hours in recording studios, it was fascinating to see how they worked.  What was very revealing was how ordinary and unexceptional they seemed. The musicianship, the melodies, the harmonies and the lyrics of themselves seem very mundane. When I think of the skill of some of the guys, I have had the privilege of working with, who were willing to play my material and all with busy day time jobs, John, Paul, George and Ringo seemed quite unremarkable in comparison.

Something happened of course when they finally got going. They were so much greater than the sum of their parts.  There was the acid and alkali reaction, the cheery melody and the biting sarcasm between McCartney and Lennon, the underlaying and decoration by Harrison and, what I hadn’t realised before, the pivotal role that Starr had on the sound. Starr was left-handed and had to learn on a right-hand drum kit. This meant that he had to stretch awkwardly arm over arm to hit the Tom-Toms and the result was a fraction late in the beat. This meant the others were a fraction ahead which gave the whole its distinctive tension. And when you create tension in the listener’s ear you have them in the palm of your hand. Beatlemania was all about that.

Looking back, it seemed that they lit up and super charged the grey decades of the sixties, with excitement and colour and life to reach tremendous heights of ingenuity and creativity and then, as quickly, dim and fade. In some ways they speak of the tragic transitory nature of life. “A day in a life” for me, their finest achievement, epitomises that with the final chord saying “That’s all folks”. Out of the bag there was no way to get back to where they once belonged.

CROSSING THE RIVER

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I had the second but not the third. I drew a line. It has to be drawn somewhere. Where you draw yours is up to you but I had to make up my own mind. When the idea that an unprecedented measure is held out to you as being temporary for a specific purpose in an unparalleled emergency, but it slyly slips into something that looks permanent, you have to decide how much you will take, for who knows where it will end?

Austria and now Germany, with the EU to follow, gives us a clue. You wonder if they teach 20c history in schools anymore or is it simply collective amnesia? Diversity and inclusion will now have to be redefined.  The unvaxed are the great unclean, who must be shunned and separated from the rest and those who refuse will face the full force of the law, be fined for each passing month until they are ruined. This is no conspiracy theory. This is what the leaders of these nations are actually saying – “vaccinated, recovered or dead”.

But up here, we are not like them. We have our own bungling clownish ways of doing things: arguing about parties, who can kiss who, checking that our granny has certification before including her in the invite, ordering every visitor to our home to take a test beforehand, testing and testing before we go anywhere and all the usual idiocies of terrifying our children with masks and fear of strangers. Its beyond embarrassing, but it is also evil (and I have chosen that word carefully). It is the slimiest stasi-like trick in the book. Get the people to enforce your will. Get them to call out and shame the dissidents. Frame the narrative in black and white terms: good and bad, caring and selfish, compassionate and venal and you have enrolled half or more of the population who can work across communities and families to coerce and enforce it. There is no need to appeal to fact or reason, logic has gone AWOL. There is no need to argue about whether the vaccines can stop the spread. There isn’t one. We know they don’t.

“It’s your civic duty” they will say, but it’s not mine. I can take the names. Stick and stones will break my bones and words can hurt but I don’t need to let them.  They have crossed the river and launched a civil war. You would think they knew what they were doing but, I guess, if you have forgotten what happened 80+ years back you are unlikely to remember 49BC.