A question that mysteriously rattles and bothers them whenever I ask.
The canvassing circus is rolling here in Bexhill-On-Sea and we seem to have a choice of ‘Independent’ candidates. Various separate but ‘independent’ groups have formed and taken different ‘independent’ corners to pitch for our votes … (And they say Party Politics is Tribal?!)
In the May 2019 District Council elections the ‘Independents’ did very well, capitalising on the tired public’s disdain and distrust of the major political parties. Pinning the ‘independent’ rosette onto your lapel is one thing, but what are your true colours?
I ask one simple question of each group and each individual candidate …
“Who did you vote for in recent General Elections?“
You see, to me (and i’m sure most voters if they stop to think), this is a very valid and important question.
I’m assuming that all ‘Independents’ believe in democracy? (despite just 1,710 of the 45,000 residents voting in favour of a Town/Parish Council in 2020) … therefore you ‘DO’ vote and not abstain? One must assume, yes?!
So, who do you ‘independents’ vote for?
This surely is a fair question to ask those who hold, or hope to hold an important position in public office. Transparency is vital for public confidence and councillors have to declare all sorts of vested interests.
The residents of Rother know what they are dealing with when it comes to; Conservatives (Far Right Fascist blue National Front), Labour (Red Tories), LibDems (Yellow Tories) and Green (LibDems on Bicycles) etc, councillors who knock on or post blurb through their doors.
But what true colour are their “independent” candidates and councillors?
Will any of you step forward and declare your national political loyalties?
It matters – It matters now more than at the last election. The pandemic has demonstrated and displayed the work of government like never before.
Update April 16 2021: Behold! We have another so called “independent” group, the ‘Democratic Network‘ … will their 7 candidates tell us who they voted for in December 2019? … I won’t hold my breath.
Stop insulting the intelligence of the people you are canvassing to solicit votes.
Nobody is Independent!
You know that, we know that, it’s time to come clean and tell us where you’re pitched on the Political Compass.
Update April 2023 – True Colours – Not very independent at all it seems: I’m sure all those voters who made the effort to go to the polling stations and exercise their democratic right to vote for the ‘Independent’ candidate they had chosen … will be chuffed ¡¡
Today, 10th March is the sad anniversary of a hero of mine. As teenagers, we all have heroes I suspect. From the age of 15 I became interested in motorbikes. I’d not been at all interested before, in fact I was more interested in cars, primarily due to my fascination with ‘Suck-Squash-Bang-Blow’ which is the subject of another blog post.
Barry Sheene 1950 – 2003
But at age 15 I had secured a job as an engineering apprentice. The first year of which was to be spent at college, some six miles or so away from home, I needed transport. So my father, a long time motorcyclist himself, suggested a Motorbike.
Sheene with his Father Frank
At fifteen I could only ride a 50cc moped by law, but at that time 1976, there was a moped called a ‘FIZZY’ actually an Yamaha FS1E. These little mopeds were in fact little motorcycles with clutch, gears and controls laid out exactly like the big bikes. So the proud owner of a Fizzy I became, and there began my love affair with motorbikes.
During that long hot summer of 1976 after leaving school and waiting until the start date of my job, I tinkered with the 2nd hand Fizzy, and of course learned (somewhat illegally) to ride on the huge field that backed onto garages, one of which was my fathers and where my beloved Fizzy was kept.
Once I started work and my commute to college, the feeling of absolute freedom and independence the bike gave me was addictive. Petrol was £0.45p per Gallon, yes GALLON! I soon got in with the other students who were bikers and of course the older lads had bigger bikes. Tea and lunch breaks were spent at the bike sheds talking, tinkering and basically loving bikes. We’d swap rides and even get a go on a mates bigger bike, a 125cc of 250cc. This is where the bug really took hold. Probably the bug was there genetically, inherited from my father? But it became an obsession, even a way of life during that first year at engineering college.
So bikes are about freedom, exhilaration and of course speed. I don’t know any genuine motorcyclist who isn’t interested in racing motorbikes. And in the UK in 1976-77 when I was being absorbed by the bug, there was just one name: Barry Sheene. He was our hero. I was lucky enough to see him race at Brands Hatch. My best friend Keith was absolutely obsessed. He would only ride a Suzuki like his hero Sheene.
Fast forward to 1979 and I’d progressed to a 500cc Honda. My pride and joy and the bike I came to grief on in August of that year (See Blog Posts – Conscious Throughout & In A Split Second).
Barry Sheene took on a different role model focus for me from that point. He inspired me in my recovery from my accident as he too had recovered from devastating injuries received in accidents on the track. His stoic ‘get on with it’ attitude was my guide to get over my own injuries. Yes, on the track he was a star, a character, a legend and genuine working class hero. But to me and others recovering from serious injury, he was ‘the man’. He’d been there too. He’d felt that pain and he’d pushed himself through the agonies of recovery to come back and ride again.
Barry Sheene died at 52 he was diagnosed with cancer and and dead within six months. By all accounts a horrible death at the end.
It will always be sad when your hero dies. I have his date of death set on my electronic calendar. The reminder popped up today and I immediately searched on twitter. Many more like me remembered and posted pictures and tributes. That was heart warming to see. There are so many talentless ‘celebrities’ celebrated everywhere you look on the main stream media. It is good to see that a genuine and along with George Best & James Hunt original sports superstar has got a loyal following out there still all over the world.
For me, Sheene will forever be the inspiration to get over my injuries and get through the recovery and get on with life. And for that I will be forever grateful.
You are gone Way Too Soon Barry, we will always miss you.
Remember that? Used to be a thing. People advocated it as a solution to climate change (with dubious ‘national security’ benefits) but then things kept melting down, and costs kept going up compared to zero-waste alternatives, and everyone went off the idea.
New Nuclear Power is Madness. The Eternal Toxic Nightmare!
Well, that’s not exactly what happened. China, for starters, is still massively investing in atomic energy. China said in its 2021-2025 five-year plan released on Friday that it would raise total nuclear capacity to 70 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2025, Reuters reports. Capacity reached 51 GW at the end of last year, falling short of its 58 GW target.
And there are calls for it to go much further from senior members of the country’s parliament who are also linked to the industry. To the east, in Japan, there is also a conversation about bringing Nuclear back from the cold.
A government advisory group set up to discuss how the country can cut emissions has – apparently – started to veer towards a massive restart of nuclear energy.
“Since Japan pledged in October to become carbon neutral by 2050, many among the advisory group have reached the same conclusion. To meet its global climate commitments, the country will need to restart almost every nuclear reactor it shuttered in the aftermath of the 2011 meltdowns, and then build more,” Bloomberg reports.
Indeed the Economist has noted something is happening in the ‘global conversation on climate change’ and has a special take on it, arguing that it is “an essential weapon in the fight against climate change”. Obviously, many of the assumptions behind this renewed interest in expensive, volatile, waste-factories are debatable and other factors complicate the discussion. Building nuclear power plants is very good at job creation, for example. However, it is, once again, a conversation that’s happening.
New Nuclear Power is Madness. The Eternal Toxic Nightmare!
In a split second your life can change. From young fit & healthy to fighting for your life, dying and if you survive forever disabled.
That happened to me at the age of 18. Within a few hours of leaving home on a very nice warm sunny but otherwise ordinary day I was fighting for my life. On the tarmac of a busy road, bleeding to death from a severed artery, pieces of my own bone and flesh detached & scattered around me.
Our wonderful NHS was there to save me. Unconditionally. No questions as to how I would pay. The NHS went on to repair me & set me on the road to recovery.
This was there (still is as I write) for all, regardless of who you are or your means to pay, however many months or years that takes.
You would be recognised as disabled and helped to live your life with a very modest but vital financial safety net.
Some seem to despise the NHS. They will continually quote and exaggerate the mistakes that have occurred. I can only assume that these people have never been in the situation I describe above. What private healthcare company scrapes you up from the road and saves your life, there and then? No plush consulting room and small talk niceties. Just basic gory blood & guts urgency.
So maybe it’s me. But I have to speak out when I see folk knocking the NHS. I would not wish my experience at 18 on anybody. I hope those who hate the NHS so much never need it as I did. But those traffic bulletins that warn of ‘long delays due to an accident’, someone may be fighting for their life through no fault of their own on that road. So be patient and be thankful for the NHS who will (hopefully) be there for us all.
“The pandemic hides a far greater threat. If this $1.2 Trillion Nuclear Weapons plan goes ahead, it could be our final mistake.”
“Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.” ~ Albert Einstein
Is there anything in politics more important? I feel this is of paramount importance, possibly above all other issues but is rarely considered or discussed it seems!
Update: 10th March 2021 – ‘Cold war-era weapon‘: $100bn US plan to build new nuclear missile sparks concern.
From the archives [ Originally published September 9th 2014 ] Please bear with me as I migrate these old posts from the now defunct Google Blogger
So, recently I had an MRI Scan on my lumbar spine. This is my 3rd such scan and I have an irrational fear of the things!
For anyone who doesn’t know, an MRI scanner is a machine where the patient lies within the noisy Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), the diagnostic imaging device that uses huge magnets that whirl around a person’s body as they lay within the machine. The MRI offers a precise image of any part or internal organ, tissues & skeleton. But it is recognised that it is an ordeal for many people, some of whom panic at being trapped inside the monstrous machine. It is precisely that ‘Panic’ which is my own fear, and I do feel this to be irrational and quite frankly embarrassing.
The confined ‘Tube of Horror’ or Not
My first scan was in 2000, Blackheath, London at a private hospital. I didn’t like that one at all. MRI scans are not painful, there is no physical discomfort at all. It is all psychological. You are placed onto a narrow bed which is at the opening to the entrance of a tube. To me it resembles the torpedo tube of those old WWII submarine films where the torpedo is loaded onto ‘a bed’ at the opening of a long tube!
So you lie down with your head closest to the tube opening, your head is supported in a ‘U’ shaped block and from that moment you cannot move your head from side-to-side. Today I was handed soft ear plugs to place in each ear, I have previously been handed headphone type ear defenders. You are also handed a button to hold in one hand in case of emergency, however what that emergency might be I was not advised, though i strongly suspect ‘claustrophobic panic’ is the most common!
The narrow bed is then mechanically raised to align with the torpedo tube opening. On this most recent MRI I was asked to close my eyes while I was ‘positioned’. Now, this was good advice, and on my previous two spinal MRI scans I was not given this advice. Because you see (this is where the ‘irrational fear’ part comes in). When you are being ‘positioned’ you are being mechanically slid into the tube. In the case of my 3 lumbar spine MRI’s all the way in! I guess for other parts of the body maybe you don’t go so far inside the tube.
Maybe? But I digress, it is this moving into the tube and seeing your available space disappear which is in my case the most difficult to deal with. Despite having my hands across my chest & flat down I felt my elbows being pushed even closer to my sides by the walls of the tube. As I opened my eyes the top of the tube was less than a wedding fingers distance from my nose. It is not dark but dim. It was cool but started to get warm. There was a noticeable jet of cool air felt on the way in but now that was absent.
OK, so on MRI #1 in 2000 I didn’t panic but didn’t like the feeling of claustrophobia at all.
On MRI #2 in 2013 at this stage in the proceedings I wanted to scream like a little girl and say “get me out of here”! I’d never been so close to a full on screaming panic attack! So, why the fuss? It’s just lying in a small dim tube having been mechanically inserted on a narrow bed. What’s not to like?
Well, I’m probably your classic ‘Over-thinker’. I am also an engineer and put those together and you get a torrent of imagined but maybe possible things that might go wrong. Being an engineer and a realist the first thing that comes to mind is a power cut. Now there might be some amazing back up system so efficient that I wouldn’t even know anything had gone wrong. But if not then in my imagined over thought scenario everything would go dark. The fresh air that I believe is being pumped into the tube would stop. Any cooling of the huge magnet in which I am now lying might fail, so it would get hotter. Does the bed on which I am lying have a manual override? Can it be pulled out by hand by the scanner people just outside or is it dependent upon machinery & geared to a now useless & immovable motor somewhere? How could I get out? There is absolutely no room to use my arms, hands legs to try and propel myself out, especially if the mechanical bed is jammed by its gearing.
So that little scenario above is what nearly got the better of me last time. Also of course, there is the little matter of this amazing machine finding something really awful growing inside me that is the real cause of the pain!
This time I was determined to ‘Man Up’ and just deal with it! And I did. Thankfully, and I think it was down to Meditation. One thing I have been reading up on since MRI #2 and this latest one is meditation. I’ve dabbled with the subject before having used it myself, by accident in 2000, after major spinal surgery. I say accident because at that point I had no idea what meditation was, but in awful pain despite being at my maximum dose of pumped intravenous morphine, I needed to find another way of coping. And i did, somehow, and i now believe i used a form of meditation as a coping mechanism, which thankfully worked. That is another whole story that I may well elaborate on at some time.
Anyway, having read a little on meditation since then, it was my intention this time, during MRI #3 to attempt to remove myself from the actual experience and take myself somewhere else, somewhere more pleasant, natural and preferable. It worked for me. Despite being in that confined, dim, hot and very noisy small space for 45 minutes or so it was no ordeal at all. My body was there but my mind was with my family, my kids particularly, seeing their faces & smiles, hearing their laughter and feeling their hugs. It was surprisingly easy to do. I intend to develop my meditation skills further, I am no expert but what I do know and what I have achieved so far is thanks to a book by Matthieu Ricard, it’s called ‘Happiness , a guide to developing life’s most important skill‘. And I go back to it often, it is always to hand. There are exercises in meditation, it is great, I think.
So, despite the noise, the keeping still for ages, the claustrophobia, I was simply not there, in fact when the loud hammer like banging stopped for the last time I was almost disappointed at the jerk as the electric bed started to remove me from the ‘tube’. I was in such a nice place. I have also used this when dealing with Chronic Pain, and I continue to work on that.
Part of my meditation during MRI #3 was just to marvel at the wonderful engineering and technology which was mapping my spine with pinpoint accuracy, a truly amazing machine that science has given us and our children if ever they should need it.
“The British government says, ‘We’re going to lead Cop26 in Glasgow, we really care about climate change. But, by the way, we won’t override the council in Cumbria, and we’ll have a new coalmine.’ Absolutely ridiculous!” Watson said. “You get these wonderful statements by governments and then they have an action that goes completely against it.”
The underground mine would be the UK’s first in 30 years. Critics, including the government’s official climate advisers, say it seriously undermines Johnson’s ability to lead a successful UN summit, which is seen as vital in averting the worst impacts of global heating. Ministers have repeatedly said the decision on the mine is a local one.
Update 16th October, 2021 – So, it appears that the private lab which wrongly gave out 43,000 PCR negative results was Immensa, a company with no experience of PCR tested awarded a £119 million contract after only being in existence for 4 months. Corruption costs lives.
The High Court has ruled “The Secretary of State acted unlawfully by failing to comply with the Transparency Policy” and that “there is now no dispute that, in a substantial number of cases, the Secretary of State breached his legal obligation to publish Contract Award Notices within 30 days of the award of contracts.” We have won the judicial review we brought alongside Debbie Abrahams MP, Caroline Lucas MP, and Layla Moran MP.
In handing down the judgment, Judge Chamberlain brought into sharp focus why this case was so important. “The Secretary of State spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements during 2020. The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.”
Clean electricity generation from wind and solar has been and is continuing to be spectacularly successful. Wind will keep pumping out the gigawatts at night when the demand is low, and solar will produce excess electricity during the summer daylight hours, again when demand is relatively low, domestically at least.
Production of ‘Green Hydrogen’ is very energy intensive so it seems logical to me to use the wind, solar, hydro surplus to produce and store hydrogen.
Ok, so this will only appeal to old bikers of a certain age. The road going ‘Superbikes’ of 1978, totally stock, competing in a 6 hour endurance race. I didn’t even know this happened at the time! I would have been 17 or 18 and about to come to grief on a motorcycle myself.
All my dream bikes of that era, stock. Amazing! And real old school riders with balls! No 6 axis ABS on those monsters 😉
If you remember those bikes, if like me you lusted over owning a Honda CBX 1000 Six, or a Suzuki GS1000, I think you’ll like the highlights of this classic motorcycle race … Enjoy
Baffled Ape 