BRANDED – How A Person Becomes A Cipher.

Duck.

A scientific classifier makes an arbitrary judgement as to which individuals with what degree of difference or similarity, become ‘species’, ‘family’, ‘phylum’, or whatever. An  individual instantly becomes not a thing of value in itself, but a symbol or representative of all members of its imposed brand.

A solitary family sheep, pig or chicken clearly has its own personality, its own intelligence, its own aspirations and sense of pain and loss.

A mass of such animals are ‘de-personalised’, not in fact, but in the perception of the onlooker.

Individuals are viewed up close – their complicated concatenations of ideas, beliefs, purposes and so forth. Lump a few of them together and the apparency is that they are easier to understand – peasants, conservatives, Muslims, Chinese, lepers, immigrants, hippies, goths, doctors, journalists, gays, anorexics, scientists, single mothers, politicians, diabetics.

Even – or especially – if enshrined by ‘authority’ or ‘officialdom’, such labels are never more than lazy shorthand designed to dismiss annoying, time-consuminge HHHHH complications.

The material universe is not there to make sense. It neither conceives nor cares for such niceties.

Sense is applied to it by that which does have an interest in so doing – the intellect and consciousness of life.

Not a Duck.

Someone who sees a duck as a representative of all ducks is applying a useful and lazy shorthand to bring order to his or her own life.

Anyone who sees another person merely as a representative of one of the above labelled groups does not see that person at all, but merely categorises him or her to avoid so doing.

Only when you recognise that individuals are not representatives of others – not samples of some mass – can  you begin upon the path of perception and so-called intelligence.

Classification is order imposed by an observer. It does not have an existence in the absence of the intelligence that classified it. The business of understanding derives little benefit from it in the long run. Its convenience falls away as it passes into science or common usage.

The original classifier was observing reality and seeking for a ‘handle’ on it – a starting or entry point to understanding. The student or successor uses it as an axiom upon which to build a science based, regrettably, upon data which, for the purposes of expediency, at best averaged and at worst ignored most of the observable variables to arrive at a conformity convenient to, and personal to, the initial classifier.

No individual is, or becomes, another. The link is not missing; it was never there. The end of the piece of string that will cause the whole edifice of stupid, mechanistic ‘evolution’ to unravel is between the thumb and forefinger of the originator of species.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

WILL THE REAL GOD PLEASE STAND UP?

‘God made Man in his image, and Man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The one thing on the subject of God that both Judæo-Christian-Muslim religions and ‘science’ believe in is that He is, or isn’t, was or wasn’t a geezer like thee and me.

What he appears to be, in both cases, is wishful thinking born of mistranslation.

An enduring mystery for religionists, and a useful justification for career atheists and materialists, is why God would let things go as they have. How could he let the little children suffer if he is all-powerful? Why has his only apparent intervention been to send the occasional prophet or messiah?

Humans have always assigned responsibilities to other entities to keep them from getting the blame for things, or to excuse failures and lapses.

Early Man had wind-gods, water-sprites, lords of chaos, auguries and portents. His modern equivalents have climate change, market economics, selfish genes, Higgs-Boson particles and immigration.

No wonder we are in  a bit of a mess with all these supernatural agencies ranged against us.

What can we poor weak specimens do against the fates that besiege us? We know that we came in to being by a process of divine command or mere accident and mechanical evolution. Only the high priests of God or genetic engineering can change the programme or the will of God.

Those things are beyond us. We need the prophets and the BBC to make it simple for us by constant repetition and neatly packaged parable.

If God made us in his own image, was he a craven, dopey, credulous, racist, monetarist, centrist, leftist, rightist, Darwinist, liberal, pædophile, serial monogamist, climate denying celebrity chef, drone operator, spy and atheist? He’d have to be all these things and more – some of them good.

Or must it be that we are missing a point somewhere?

In the learned texts swept away by the current religion of materialism, God, who purportedly made us in his image, was (is) immortal and invisible…

Science says nothing is immortal and anything which is not visible can be made so by more powerful instruments.

But the human spirit is not a minute particle. It is what has conceived and guided all of the above. It is the elephant in the room: not too small to be detected, but too big to be seen.

We should remind ourselves that ancient works such as the Veda, the Torah and the Old Testament were not part of some sectarian marketing promo. They were efforts to sum up the totality of Man’s understanding of the universe in which he lived. Far from initiatives to swell the faithful, they were simply distillations of what passed in those days for the height of scientific and historical knowledge, laced with quotes from authorities to add the force of peer review to their conclusions, and a bit of practical advice in the form of public health infomercials on food, family and fornication.

There were no specialisms then; those with knowledge, those who studied the world and the life forms around them, did so in a holistic way. They also didn’t represent any faction against another, except that in their small world of influence, they shared their knowledge with those of their own tribe and neighbours.

To that degree, they tried to write down and pass on those understandings that had been gathered and disseminated orally since the dawn of the quest for such.

Without the necessity to impose an alternative world view, they were as honest and embracive as they could be, a proposition reinforced by the experiences and pillars of understanding shared by diverse texts from various remote cultures and regions of the globe. If their dates vary, reports of visitations from outsiders are consistent from the Dogons to the Olmecs to the Israelites, and most people of the Earth have a race record of a great flood.

For thousands of years, observers and thinkers had added to these stores of knowledge. These were not ignorant savages. They represented the vanguard of the human quest to get to the bottom of things. They described their discoveries in the terms of their times; they used metaphor and similes to express the previously unexpressable and they called upon myths to provide working hypotheses.

Like the symbolic Adam and Eve, they were led more than once up the garden path, but they were among the giants upon whose shoulders Newton and the genuine fathers of science were enabled to see beyond the rabbit-proof fence.

Unfortunately, since his time, science has turned from the pure pursuit of knowledge to a dogmatic belief system. Much of Newton’s work was dismissed as not fitting in with the creation myths and anti-God stance that lay at the foundations of the newly institutionalised subject, and the conclusions that had informed and guided human existence from cave-dwelling to civilisation, from dark age to renaissance, were discredited and overruled by those whose gnostic-fascism led them to believe that they alone, of all mankind, were possessed of the requisite degree of godliness to lay down the law about what was right, wrong and even possible; what is normal and what is paranormal; what is real and what is delusion; what existed within the respectability of ‘science’ and what was beyond the newly creosoted pale.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

GOD THE BUILDER – What took him so long?

Raquel Welch, 1,000,000 years BC.

The Old Testament description of building our world in a week is regularly invoked by lazy pundits, and swallowed by lazier listeners, as not only ridiculing the Christian godhead, but as a justification for dispensing entirely with Man’s rich spiritual heritage.

In its own way though, it is no more absurd than any other attempt to explain or rewrite history.

Nowadays it would be told in a different way – by one of those earnest historians who have spent so much time gazing at bygone times that they have loosed their moorings and now speak of the past in the present tense. Accompanied by as many flashes and crashes as can be contrived, and waving their arms frantically to gain our notoriously fickle attention, they would say something to the effect of: ‘So Jehovah is out on his own. Genetics tell us that his father was probably a mason, and his mother a flower-arranger. He’s looking at the empty firmament, and he wants to interact with it; to have a creation event.’

But the author of Genesis and the TV pundit are both imposing their concepts, their mores, and their second-hand ideas in the name of reporting or analysis.

If Jehovah was a god in the terms in which he is described elsewhere, he wouldn’t have needed nearly as long to do the job. He could have said, ‘Let there be whatever’ on the Monday and lo, he could have putteth His feet up for the rest of the week. The time period was put in there to sex up the document; to overwhelm the reader with the sheer number of things brought into being at one celestial throne-sitting.

People always ask creative types: ‘How long did it take you to do that?’ He knew no good would come of telling them it was done in the twinkling of an eye. The time put in is what gives it its value.

And time is at the heart of the dilemma here – the great debate between the creationist and the already-there-ist. If he built the place in a week and put the first people in it by Friday, how do you explain the fact that, between the formation of the Earth and the arrival of Raquel Welch in a rudely fashioned Mesozoic bikini, dinosaurs had been roaming the place for donkey’s years unmolested by anything even vaguely humanoid?

Rather than dismissing it out of hand, there are a number of ways you could come at this. For example, if Jehovah brought time into being when he was doing all that other stuff, then the whole frame of reference changes.

Maybe, on the other hand, the Earth didn’t get up to speed straight away, allowing for much longer days in which he could not only get the work done here but take time off to quote for other jobs. If Adam was on his own for much of that time, it’s not unlikely that the trilobites, dinosaurs and scary-toothed tigers failed to run across him. He might well have cleaved to Raquel, given half a chance, but the fact is that the whole story is being intentionally misinterpreted by both sides for their own ends.

A mere couple of thousand years ago you couldn’t move for gods − plural, specialised, all-powerful and not. Old Jehovah, as his name suggests, was what he was, but he was not what he was later cracked up to be.

Just as the gods on Mount Olympus concerned themselves with the beings and the doings of Rome, so he was the god-in-chief of the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the period under discussion. To the people living therein he was the lord their god, and he never claimed any other wasness.

Then the Jews, the Mohammedans and the Christians went over to the new-fangled idea of a single God in charge of everything and, in the ensuing muddle, Jehovah ceased to was what he was, becoming what he was not, first in his own land and later, thanks to a confection dreamed up in Rome, all over the world. An easy mistake to make since, like Jehovah, the Christian god is what He is, but what He is is not so jealous or bad-tempered as his namesake, but rather more all-seeing, all-knowing and all-forgiving, at least up to a point. It’s likely this case of mistaken identity has had much to do with the disappointment that has caused the falling off in congregations in recent times.

It’s all you can do to get Him to smite anyone, and He lets people get away with murder, while keeping the faithful under uncomfortable and unwarranted surveillance; God the builder become God the chief-constable.

The worldwide dissemination of the New Testament inevitably caused numerous confusions, with or without the tinkering and mistranslations with which it has been plagued. As it was, people set its stories and parables in landscapes of their own experience. But the biggest confusion came from combining the Old and New Testaments together as if the former had any part in Christianity beyond being the foundation from which Jesus Christ was to break away.

He wanted everyone to ‘turn the other cheek’. It was some kind of Middle-Eastern Mr Angry  who demanded an eye for an eye. There’s no conflict until you try to reconcile the non-Christian Old Testament with the more or less entirely Christian New.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

THE LAST OF NEWTON

If worshippers at the shrine of reductionist materialism were in any real sense pursuers of the avowed noble cause of ‘science’, they would feel no need to exclude anything from what purports to be a truthful and all-embracing subject.

Their purview would be infinite, and their practice that of continually observing and re-evaluating the subjects thereof in the light of those observations.

That it does nothing of the kind is due in no small part to the passing on of orthodox dogma by popular priests, such as David Attenborough and Brian Cox. Just about everyone believes in a mish-mash of Darwinian and Dawkinsian evolution because these trusted clergy treat it as a proven given; certainly not because there is any convincing evidence for it. And to make sure they continue to so believe, in a crime against free-thinking redolent of Joe Stalin, tame educators have been forbidden to discuss or examine any other possibility.

Anyone who made it to the end of a BBC documentary on Isaac Newton entitled The Last Magician, in defiance of the epic efforts of the cloth-eared music editor to prevent it, would have made out among the cacophony someone honestly admitting that science still has no idea what constitutes life and is nowhere near having all the answers to anything.

Yet the very title of the documentary spoke volumes about what hamstrings dogmatic science in the twenty-first century. Calling it by that title was apposite in pointing up the arbitrary and semantic nature of what is considered the proper business of science and what isn’t.

Newton would not even get a job in a school science department these days, because his views on science, as those on other religions would be considered heretical. He was no great respecter of persons, and never believed anything he was told even, and perhaps especially, by those claiming some authority. When his work and discoveries were subjected to the system of so-called ‘peer review’, he realised at once that he was without peers.

The programme described him as a magician because he investigated phenomena and relationships which today’s ‘rational’ science simply rejects. The universe is not by nature rational. Rationalising is the effort to impose order upon it. It is almost inevitable that this course of endeavour would tend to reject the apparently disordered and seek a fixed theory that, if it didn’t explain everything, at least had the agreement of other rationalisers.

Creation is an irritation to such people, because it does not conform to the so-called laws of physics. Laws fixed for all time can only introduce entropy to a subject. But, no matter how deep they delve, or how far they reduce matter, they are always going to come up against it.

Creation-denial infers that the Mona Lisa painted itself. It permits the denizens of Cerne’s Hadron Collider to operate on the principle that if you completely stripped down an old Cortina, you would come face to face with Henry Ford.

Creation is not dependent upon religion. Indeed it is not dependent upon anything, because, by definition, it pre-exists everything.

If, as we are expected to believe, the universe was produced from something like a multi-multi-zillion megaton gobstopper, who or what packed everything into the gobstopper? And who put it there – if there was such a thing as a there in those days; that is, if there was such a thing as days?

If the so-called Big Bang happened, it would, in any case, have been a Big Silence if nobody was around to convert the vibrations into a sound effect and be conscious of the result. That aside, what was the difference between the gobstopper and the resulting celestial firmament? Space, is the obvious answer. Though physicists would claim the mass is identical, there is a lot more apparent nothingness in the latter than the former.

Reductionist material science doesn’t notice space; doesn’t know anything much about it – just looks through it at its precious matter. Yet space is not an absence of things; is not empty; is not just a place in which things occur – although without it nothing would. It is the thing (or non-thing) that makes the gobstopper into a universe, that hosts and bounds the vibrations of molecules, atoms and the infinitesimal (by comparison) elements from which they appear to be constituted.

Above matter, beyond it and within it, defining it, permitting its motions and reactions is this intangible ‘nothingness’ that physics can’t bottle, act upon or even measure.

When Newton went beyond laws of matter, he became a magician in the eyes of the faithful. In fact, he was being a true scientist, boldly going into that which was not yet known or dogmatically promulgated. If blinkered materialism provides no answers to the riddles of life, it just may be that what science is looking for is beyond the arbitrary barriers it has itself set up.

Seeking to prevent people looking beyond those barriers does not put science above life and creation, except in the sense that a jailer can keep someone from sunlight and air, but cannot convincingly claim that they do not exist.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

This article originally appeared in THE MENSA MAGAZINE

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘SCIENCE’?

The Venerable Bede.

 In the earliest stages of its development, the word ‘science’ embodied connotations of ‘truth’ and ‘knowing’ – a sense of assimilated understanding and perhaps the application of art or a methodology based thereon.

At that distance, its subject was that which could be perceived or experienced, limited only by the immediate purpose, or angle, of the perceiver. The forerunner of the modern ‘scientist’ viewed the world directly, without specialism, preconception, preselection, ritual or exception. That he did so in a world held to be created and ruled over by a god, or gods, mattered little. It was perfectly possible to study and comprehend the ways of the weather, the pattern of the tides and the harvesting of the soil without coming into conflict with what we now think of as the church.

Indeed, most of the basic processes necessary to life were discovered and formalised before the advent of dogmatism, at a time when it would have been hard to differentiate between science and faith; when ‘faith’ could have been defined as ‘that which the adherent held to be true’. What he held to be true was from his own perception. He had no education or indoctrination. He had no weather forecasters, cook books or gardening manuals; he even had to manage without recourse to the National Curriculum.

Yet, he knew when to sow and when to reap, he knew what was edible, he knew how to combine, how to cook, how to preserve, how to husband (everything from pigs to bees), and he knew how to make ferociously strong and plentiful drink.

He, or at least someone of his acquaintance, knew what to do if he poisoned, burned or otherwise injured himself, if he was stung by his bees, or had one jug of mead too many. Cures and treatments, like other survival knowledge, were the property of all. Anyone who would hope to raise a family would have a passing, if not expert, knowledge of natural remedies.

In essence, most such remedies have remained with us – although, like weather-forecasting and animal husbandry, they have largely been given over to designated ‘authorities’. Some less generalised treatments have also persisted here and there without finding their way on to the recommended list, such as the practice in France’s Sologne region of treating headaches by strapping a dead rabbit to the patient’s head.

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

But all of these conclusions and practices were borne out of the individual’s observations and evaluations in direct contact with those elements upon which his survival and increase depended. He saw the life in everything around him; he came to understand its properties, its own purposes and behaviour; and he learned to respect it and adapt what he learned to his own needs, and those of his fellows.

Recognising the inherent life and will in those things with which he was forced into contact, he saw that some exchange, some payment was called for rather than mere theft of what they had to offer.

So we get the idea of propitiation, of giving something back, that would later be corrupted into worship of deities or ransoms and taxes for rulers, and would ultimately form the basis of the ritual that is now often mistaken for religion itself.

Early man’s science was his religion, and his religion was his science.

What qualifies as a science? That depends on your definition and frame of reference.

If a science is defined as an impulse or research toward the discovery of truths in relation to some aspect of knowledge, it would allow for a wide-ranging qualification. If, however, it is to be a form of writ – an authoritative proclamation that is unchanging and unchangeable, it must be rarer and more esoteric; submissable to more arbitrary tests of agreement with established norms, or simply without connection to the irritating ‘real’ world of variables.

Public perception of the practitioners of science has itself changed dramatically over the years. Right up to the early part of the twentieth century, scientists were considered eccentric – not part of any respected and worthy establishment, but slightly loopy mavericks who ventured where angels feared to tread. Far from setting prevailing opinions, they were in the business of overturning them, or at the very least, testing them to destruction.

Archimedes, The Venerable Bede, Bacon, Newton, Ashmole, Darwin and even Einstein were observers and testers, not of disciplines and theorems, but of the universe itself. Unhampered by the scientific method, or the need to seek approval or funding from monolithic conservative bodies, they followed their own lights and drew their own conclusions.

These ‘fathers of science’ looked outward for those conclusions, and they also looked across the board. No one had yet labelled them as ‘physicists, ‘chemists’ or ‘botanists’. They were permitted to gaze beyond such arbitrary barriers at the whole picture.

The sons and daughters of science look inward, going ever deeper into the data and propositions already extant. Pre-regimented into arbitrary divisions, they are content for those divisions themselves to be proscribed, not only sticking to their own fields but declaring whole areas of knowledge or speculation unworthy of investigation.

Darwin endeavoured to unravel the complexity of life forms that existed before and beyond ‘science’; Dawkins laboured to heap significance and complexity on the work of Darwin: science feeding on itself, investigating itself, trying to prove itself without going back to check the original observations.

Meteorology is a science – the study of atmospheric phenomena and climate; weather forecasting isn’t. At best, it is an interpretive art. As more data is recorded, the odds as to what will happen next might seem to get shorter, but more data also exposes more variables. Repetition of identical conditions is virtually impossible, so you can keep stuffing data into computers ad infinitum without ever doing more than model what went before.

In essence, weather forecasting, no matter how ‘scientific’ it believes itself to be, is the art of predicting the past – which bit of history will repeat itself?

Little wonder then that, despite the ever-increasing conglomeration of impressive hardware and observations, the proclamations of all the weather forecasters on all the radio and TV stations of the world are about as reliable as hanging up a piece of seaweed.

Of course, the whole flim-flam suits both parties – forecasters and forecastees.

The former can go from being earnest isobar-watchers in some backroom to media ‘personalities’, trotting out off-the-peg phrases (‘spits and spots of rain’, ‘cloud bubbling up’) from beyond the blue-screen horizon for a day job and opening fêtes at the weekend.

The latter jumps at the chance to abandon responsibility for knowing anything to a properly constituted authority. He knows the forecast is nearly always wrong, but depends upon it utterly, not so much as a useful tool, more as something to blame when the picnic goes pear-shaped.

When a bear sniffs the air, looks about him and decides to go fishing, explore the woods for honey or batten down the hatches for three or four months, ‘science’ tells us it’s just ‘instinct’.

Maybe they’re right. The bear’s survival depends on it. Lucky for him, perhaps, that his inherent intelligence and perceptions have not been buried under mountains of musty data or vested in some formalised system of cloud-mapping. 

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

GRAND HOTEL (Summer 1968)

When my plan to work away fell through, I returned to find Rick had moved out of Dolphin Crescent to make his way in the world, and had placed his solid experience as a kitchen porter at the service of Torquay’s Grand Hotel.

I met him when his morning shift ended, and we caught up on our respective adventures as we walked into Torquay.

Hardly anyone we knew had ever tasted wine at that time, but suddenly they’d all been on Spanish package holidays and you couldn’t move for it. Regent Wine Stores, Saccone and Speed, off-licences were escaping from the pubs and turning up in high streets all over the country.

We decided we’d better celebrate our reunion by buying a bottle of Spanish plonk with ten bob of Rick’s hard-earned and drinking it on a park bench, in the manner of winos.

Although Rick had often tried to lead me into temptation, as he had succeeded in doing with smoking, I hardly drank in those days. I was more Coca Cola with the occasional Woodpecker cider. So half a bottle of tinto was a bit more than the system was ready for.

Rick guided me to Avenue Road and his room at Maracville, one of Torquay’s substantial Victorian villas that had been guest house, B&B, and was now ‘rooms’. Rick’s room at that time was upstairs overlooking the garden. He opened a window and spoke to his landlady (Hettie?), who was hanging washing out down below. I joined him at the window to make myself known at the precise point that my innards decided to reject the denomenacion de origen. She would not forget me in a hurry.

Rick had landed on his feet at Maracville. His room was a good size, and he had already personalised it with posters and reproductions of paintings. Visitors were greeted with the last words of Erik Satie: ‘Ah, the bastards!’

The 'Velvet Gentleman' - French composer Erik Satie.

The residents all seemed to be interesting and creative people, including and especially Mick Jacques and John Briggs, soon to be guitarist and drummer respectively of local blues group, Sleepy Dog. 

Mick had fetched up in Torquay when he set out from his native Yorkshire on foot with a guitar and lived on his wits. He would go on to great things, graduating from local bands to the London scene and eventually joining the hugely successful Curved Air with Sonja Krystyna and Darrell Way. He now keeps horses somewhere in the Dordogne.

Rick jamming with Mick Jacques at Maracville.

I would be needing work, so the obvious thing was for Rick to recommend me to the Grand Hotel. My dad was working at Battery Maintenance opposite the old school, so was able to drop me into work in the mornings.

The kitchen of the Grand was ruled by a chef known as ‘Mad Louie’. He was a brisk military type with similarities to Fulton McKay’s character in Porridge, especially a sort of supercilious expression and a belief that he was superior to every other life form. He was buoyed up in this by the traditional deferences shown to chefs by those wishing to get on in the catering world. Rick and I had no such wish, so were never likely to be listed among his favourite people

He had always a flock of fawning comis chefs about him to say, ‘yes, chef; no chef,’ etc., and had just finished demonstrating some culinary principle to them when he recognised my existence.

‘Fetch a bucket of water and a brush and clean my table,’ he instructed me.

With the aid of Ernie, the pot-washer, I secured the tools for the job and began dipping the brush in the hot water and scrubbing the wooden table.

‘Not like that,’ shrieked the mad one. ‘none of your namby-pamby arsing about.’ And he took the bucket and poured some of its contents onto the surface of the table, causing a mild flood. ‘Like this, man. Put your back into it.’

I took the bucket from him and hurled the remainder of the contents at the table, soaking him from the knees down in the process.

At lunch, I met Danny Bumper. I never worked out what purpose he served. He wasn’t in the kitchen with us, but it is a big hotel and he must have had his uses. I think he’d been there forever, and that his ‘surname’ came from his white plimsolls. Danny was not entirely right in the head.

A typical lunchtime would start with gentle Ernie imparting some piece of information: ‘I see there was somebody drowned in the River Dart th’other day.

At which, Danny would bang his knife and fork down on the table and declare: ‘I don’t know how you can sit there and tell me such lies!’

Apart from the teams of comis chefs, Ernie the pot washer and Mad Louie, there was what I think was a sous-chef, who was probably Hungarian. Like Louie and all other chefs I’ve worked with he swore like a trooper, but was much funnier. ‘What you have done my fucking pot, fucking asshole idiot?’ And there was David, who was from a disabled workshop. He would patrol around the kitchen, mopping or sweeping as called for. Whenever he put down his mop or broom, somebody would take it and put it somewhere else, so he spent as much time on patrol looking for them as he did performing a useful service.

When the sous-chef finished with a cooking pot, he would indicate to one of us to remove it for washing. As Ernie leaned over his sink, we would come behind him and drop the pot into his washing up water from a great height, soaking him and everything in range.

We didn’t have any direct contact with the customers at the Grand. The orders would come via a tannoy and be delivered to the waiting staff by dumb waiter. The sous-chef would advise the waiting staff when food was ready by switching on the tannoy and making the announcement.

Louie treated us the same way he treated the comis chefs, as the lowest form of animal life. We refused to rise to his rudeness, disparagement and foul language.

As at Addisons, we were prepared to work hard, but things came to a head when we had both had enough of being effed and blinded at by both him and the sous-chef. As they continued to pour out streams of invective, we switched on the tannoy to the public area and prepared to be fired.

(Extract from my forthcoming memoir: GOLDEN PLAYGROUND; Summers of Love on the English Riviera.)

BEING INFANTILE (1953-7)

I look back upon my childish self as a stranger. Young ‘Dai bach’, as my mother liked to call him, although neither party was Welsh, was an ungainly creature in round, skin-coloured National Health glasses, one of whose lenses was rendered useless by a big square of Elastoplast - 1950s technology designed to inspire gumption in what was regarded as a ‘lazy eye’.

Neither the eye nor its possessor was much impressed, any more than by the protracted infliction of rubber underwear that was supposed to encourage nocturnal excursions to the perfectly civilised indoor toilet.

I can recall both parents being gratified when the child beat out the entirety of Eric Coates’ Dam Busters theme on his high chair, but his general combination of fearlessness and attendant tendency to be always broken and bleeding in some manner - especially about the head - was less winning and a clear disappointment to mother who found the more athletic and less frequently damaged children of the neighbours, especially those with ‘dark brown’ voices, to be more in the line of ‘real boys’

.

Bobby Truscott was not without barked shins and knees, but was altogether a more shining example of the breed. He lived in number 62, the lower flat in the next block up from us. His mum was very jolly and Devonian and his dad always seemed to wear a flat hat. Mr Truscott went off to work on a bicycle and was skilled in the art of starting off on the left hand pedal and swinging his starboard leg over the then obligatory ‘top tube’ when already in motion. All proper workmen did that then but it seems to be a vanished art.

The top flat was occupied by the Leadbetters. They both seemed quite old to me by comparison with the other neighbours, though they had a daughter called Susan who was younger than we were.

I joined those from all over the estate of a similar vintage for an introductory day at Foxhole Infants’ School. We were each given a piece of paper and some wax crayons with which to do a drawing. The teacher was full of praise for my colourful representation of an unspecific quadruped all four of whose legs were on the same side. I found it a pleasing sensation at the time, though I now wonder if it wasn’t a marketing technique. Either way, a neighbour from the other end of Hoyles Road, Maurice Beer, took exception to my singling out and scribbled all over it, immediately the teacher had moved on

.

The die was cast, however, and we were all soon trapped into the education system. Some of the boys had little green caps with a fox and a hole on them, but mostly people just wore their best clothes. I remember the girls mainly wearing tartan skirts and cardigans often done up only with the top button. I sported a green zip up jerkin.

We took it in turns to be ‘monitors’. As a milk monitor you were required to hand out the third of a pint glass bottles of free milk or orange juice and wash the silver foil lids in a washbasin at the back of the classroom ‘for the blind’. Another monitor would distribute books marked overnight by the teacher.

Fringed in the golden sunlight of memory, Jaqueline Baker, Ann Rowden, Eric Underwood, James Ravenscroft, David Pottinger, Celia Brown, Heather Coin, Esme Stevens, Graham Elswood, Stephen Raymond, Hilary Richards, Virginia Dunn, Maurice Beer, Jaqueline Maunder, Keith Tonkin, Jane Webber, Margaret Choke, Mike Weed, Barry and Susan Bickle, Pamela Hines, all running and shouting on the tarmac playground and daisy smudged grass during the joyous momentary relief from classroom drudgery.

Music in the mid-fifties took the form of a ‘percussion band’. We were each issued with anything from a xylophone to a triangle by way of castanets, tambourines and cymbals with which to make a god-awful noise to accompany something coaxed from the school piano. More mysteriously when I look back on it now, we also were given a go at conducting the resulting cacophony, actually learning the basics of the art at the age of six.

Somebody told Miss that I had been heard playing our home piano, so she offered me an opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. I launched into a rhythmically and harmonically suspect rendition of Rock Around the Clock to rapturous approval from the other inmates, but was offered no further such opportunities.

At Foxhole, I had my first serious injury when a bench upon which a number of us were sitting collapsed and took the skin off the back of my legs; I observed one of the worst accidents I was ever to see when  the gardener (Mr Towler?) cutting the grass on a bank during playtime slipped over and lost control of the school’s heavy Ransomes motor mower so it ran onto the playground and into the young legs of Pamela Hines; I saw dinner lady, Mrs French, stamp on an enormous misguided locust with her flat slip-on shoed foot; I learned the invaluable one times table, so have always afterward known how many ones make one; I learned how much fun girls could be by pursuing them with my friend Graham Elswood around the back of the prefab classrooms during playtimes; that the farmer had a wife and that along would come a chopper to chop off my head. Miss Buick showed us strange slide shows of Grimm goings on in German forests on her wonderful back projection screen, and I was not the only five year old to wet himself before being dismissed and having to walk home three-quarters of a mile along a muddy track and unpavemented roads in that condition.

The school day, even for five year olds, ended at four o’clock all year round in those days, and after a long afternoon, you were expected to stand for a final prayer and lift your chair onto your desk before being allowed to make a break for freedom.

For some period, a gang led by John Garrett used to wait for me at the top of Smallcombe Road and knock me about. I came to approach the place in terror. We were all five or six years old and our parents just thought this sort of thing toughened us up.

I might have waited until they gave up and went home, but I was even more terrified of Farmer Manicot’s dogs, which would hurtle across the field, slavering and barking, if you were too long in their jurisdiction.

One evening the gang was all in my face, haranguing and shoving, and I lost it finally and punched John squarely on the nose. ‘Now I’ve done it,’ I thought. But, his nose bleeding, his handkerchief (we all had one then) reddening, he put his arm around my shoulder and declared me all right.

It had all been part of some bizarre initiation ceremony. I had passed at last and would not be bothered again.

Not that this made my journey home any quicker.

The top part of Fernicombe Road, above the school entrance, was not surfaced in those days. It was mainly mud, with a certain amount of cinder mixed in. At the top, where it met the King’s Ash Road, was an enormous puddle that we had to edge our way around.

We had noticed that when the puddle overflowed the water took a certain course down the track, and worked out that by digging away with the heels of our expensively provided shiny school shoes we could create our own channels and guide the water wherever we wanted it to go. This engineering exercise with such ill-suited equipment was endlessly fascinating and occupied us for the best part of an hour each evening before we headed for hearth and home.

There was no telly to get back for and no homework. Later, I would be allowed to go round to David Wills’s house near the roundabout to watch children’s television (Whirlybirds, Bengo the pup, Tintin, and Sketch Club with Adrian Hill), but we were still sticking with the radio from Listen with Mother to the Flying Doctor - ‘Hang on to your braces, folks, we’re going down!’ and Journey Into Space.

Sketch Club with Adrian Hill.

As she would with all the many children she benefited during her life, Mother started early teaching me stuff. Walking had taken a while, but talking came easily. Not long before I was sent to Foxhole school, so she told me, I astonished her and my dad by reading the cover flashes from the Radio Times.

I wouldn’t dream of arguing with her a second time, but I’ve looked over some of the covers from that year and find it hard to believe that words like ‘Othello’, ‘Berkeley Square’ or ‘official organ’ tripped from me without an unsupportable quantity of tongue-sticking or face-pulling. I’d have been less challenged with the current issue.

Whatever the veracity of the claim, I had little trouble with Janet or even John, though they were rather priggish and unadventurous. I preferred Rupert, and was able - perhaps bothered is more to the point - to read the rhyming couplets and let someone else read out the prose from the bottom of the page. ‘Rupert’s chums were so perplexed to see the little bear so vexed.’ I also liked Honk & Tonk - a car and a tractor created by that same Reverend Awdry that gave us Thomas the Tank Engine - and the adventures of a pig called Toby Twirl. Richmal Crompton’s Just William came later, along with Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Men and Women, but it seems I missed out on many of the standard children’s favourites - Winnie the Pooh, Roald Dahl, etc., and never really got Anna Sewell or Biggles. Horses were things you fell off when shot, and aeroplanes were and remain a necessity, not nearly as interesting as cars.

My mother was a constant source of amazement. A year after making me go to school, she suddenly announced the impending arrival of a brother. This was information I was very unsure how to respond to. My dad and I were permitted by the matron-at-arms to see Mother in her starched bed at Paignton hospital. Everything was spotless white or that sort of municipal green they only use for hospitals, including and especially Mother, who also looked rather scrubbed.

The baby seemed all right, I suppose.