1322 7th 24 with Hannah Hauxwell and the Curse of Steptoe at Easter

12.00 The Bach Saint John Passion is being sung in German. The first receipt is for 20 copies of Guardian Newspaper which had printed my article explaining the general reasons why I had prematurely retired from my work, that the creation of generic social workers within social service department had been a major error as well as original way the departments became organised. This arose because so many unqualified men without any experience or ability to manage the child care services had been put in charge and I blame this for much of the criminal violence, physical and sexual which befell children in care between 1971 and 1991. These men did not understand the nature of public child care or the threats to the children within public care as well as within the community and the need for carefully selected dedicated and skilled officers, in practice, staff supervision and management.

It was over a decade before a subsequent a government adopted my recommendation for the recreation of child care departments but under the umbrella of Education Departments and for the social services concerned with adults to be brought under the health services or more closely allied to them.

14.00 Benianimo Gigli was the classical tenor of my childhood adored by my birth and care mothers and whose records were among the first she ever purchased when she was able to afford a wind up gramophone. It is one my regrets that it was sold along with the gramophone when I was a teenager. I managed to find a version of Schubert’s Ave Maria sung by a young chorister for the creation service of my mother, with a few bars for arrival and then a full rendition at the conclusion. I thought of that and of her and my childhood when listening to Gigli version this morning along with Caterine and Torna a Sorrento, where I was to visit and attend the Film Festival in 1965 along with other adventures as part of a tour through Belgium, Germany Austria, the Italy, Switzerland France and home within three weeks in my second car, a Morris Mini estate, the first was the Ford Prefect bought new for my 18th birthday by my care mother from the money she had received from the Industrial Injuries Tribunal, for the loss of an eye at the factory where she worked. There is also the Angus Dei and many other favourites on disk one, I decided on the Brendel before disk 2 as he plays Mozart’s Rondo in A the Sonata in major, in B Flat major and in C Major

14.15. I have completed a seven set first volume of the self employment receipts for 1992 and 1993 after I registered for self employment 9798 9803 and after a coffee commence work on the second.
15.00 A period of silence

17.00 The second volume of self employment records 1992 1993 had been completed 7804-7809 and I place an order for more blue lever arch files at the price of 69 pence plus VAT. There will now be deliveries on Tuesday and Wednesday so I will not be able to go out on either day until the orders have been delivered. I watch a WW2 1951 made film about the use of Frogmen which centres on the relationship between a special operations group who lose their commander officer and the man appointed to replace him, Richard Widmark, and the Chief, played by Dana Andrews, A young Richard Wagner also has a role in the film It is a conventionally told story of the time in which the new leader proves himself and justifies his disciplined and cool approach which puts their mission first but does not ignore the welfare of everyone involved. Afterwards I watch episode 15 of a series on the last six months of World War 2. In this hour long episode Lord Haw Haw is executed by hanging after capture, the battle for Okinawa continues to take it toll on both sides and the Japanese refuse to surrender despite the bombing of cities with the loss of over a quarter million lives of non combatants. The build up towards using the A bomb is also covered, My complaint has always been on the decision to use the bomb on cities and not on unpopulated area first. Before I had studied history, the events which led to First and second World wars and the nature of the regimes in Germany and Russia, I considered the decision to develop the Atomic and then Nuclear weaponry a disaster for humankind, until and then I understood that wanting to know, curiosity, experimentation, testing, problem solving were all inherent parts of the human experience, and that individually and collectively we had to first understand and then learn how to use the forces within the universe constructively and creatively, or perish prematurely by them. There is always no turning back to a different time, but we can and should study past times with the same objectivity and scientific method as we approach the future. Back in 1945 there was an inevitability about what happened, however awful the immediate and long tern consequences. There was no way the Japanese would voluntarily surrender. It was not within their psyche, and it is understandable the Generals and the Politicians feared that to break the Japanese spirit they would have to repeat Iwo Jima and Okinawa inch by inch over its Empire. I now accept that a warning explosion may not have worked, but it should have been tried. That remains my complaint. In its way it was an appropriate film to watch on this day.

19.00. The second meal of the day comprised two Salmon fishcakes of the quality where you can see large flakes of salmon as well as taste with baked beans and a banana.

20.00 The delight of the day was a programme which reminded of the life of Hannah Hauxwell and her present day life in a village in her eighties and with restricted walking ability. I was one of the millions who was first introduced into this simple but remarkable woman who managed a Dales hill farm after her parents died and who at 46 looked much older. In 1972 she was the subject of a documentary Too Long a Winter was designed to show the live of those who worked in the High Pennines. She lived in the house built by her grandfather, without electricity or running water. The impact of the programme was such that the phones of Yorkshire TV were jammed for several days with people making offers of help. A local factory put up the money so that electricity could be brought to the home and she received thousands of letters, from all over the world as the programme was shown. Then twenty years later the original producer Barry Cockcroft and camera man went back for A Winter too many, as she decided it was time to sell up and move into a cottage, but beforehand she was the guest of honour at the Women of the Year Gala. Books about her life were also produced and she was then taken by Cockcroft to Paris, Venice and Sorrento and on holiday to New York. This evening she was shown in her cottage which had become jammed packed with possessions which she admits she is unable to discard. What was evident is that the person who conquered the nation’s hearts several decades before had not changed, and hopefully would enjoy the renewed attention in her life.

21.00 There is a new USA glossy import, a kind of updated Dallas, set in New York. which merit’s no attention, the suicidal daughter who wants to be an actress but cannot act, the son full of angst who is into drugs and gambling, the state attorney general who has national political ambitions but is into his seventh different relationship with a transvestite, the preacher son who won’t recognise in public his illegitimate son, the wife who has tried hide a forty year relationship with the family’s legal adviser and fixer who has recently died in questionable circumstances, and the head of the family, the wealthy influential Man of America who brings in the son of the family Counsellor, now working as a lawyer for the poor and disenfranchised, after the death of his father, (the body is missing from the helicopter whose mechanism appears to have been tampered with). He is married and seduced by the offer of $10 million dollars a year to do his good works, keeping on his practice and staff while he attends to the needs of the family 24/7, and this possibly includes the needs of the daughter, not previously mentioned, who has a torch for the hero, but manages a succession of disastrous relationships with men only after her money and influence of her father. My thought was the he is the son of the family head in this incestuous mish mash designed to appeal to the jaded palettes of the Dallas and Dynasty soap. The hero is an idiot by the way. He seriously proposed that in exchange for becoming the best paid family counsellor fixer in the land he could work office hours, and remain his own master. If it was not Easter I would be inclined to summon a Biblical plague on them. Then at 22,00, the second brilliant find of the evening, a dramatization of the on stage relationship between Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett and of their private lives. Steptoe and Son proved to be an extraordinary successful situation comedy about a Rag and Bone man and his son, watched by 22 million viewers in the UK alone written by Alan Simpson and Ray Galton of Hancock’s Half Hour, What made the programme essential viewing for a third of the nation was the relationship between the two men, touching the fundamentals of all love hate relationships where people have become interdependent but wish they were not. There were eight series of five to eight programmes between 1962 and 1974 plus a final Christmas special making 57 shows, and unusually a radio series followed from the television success, and also two feature films. The on screen relationship reflected something of the lives of the two men, Harry Corbett was born to a military father in Burma, old enough to serve at the end of World War 2, his mother died when he was three and he was raised by an aunt in Manchester. In one telling moment in tonight’s drama documentary the Curse of Steptoe, his first wife, the talented actress Sheila Steafel declares that for a marriage to work at least one of the couple has to be an adult, as their relationship came to an end when he commenced an affair with an actress met in a film which he hoped would enable him to return to serious acting, but where he was pressed into playing someone who had made it from the working class and still retained his roots, a la Michael Caine. From the second marriage he had two children one of whom became an actress. Harry H died of a major heart attack when only 57, 12 years younger than me, frustrated that he was never able to achieve the acting success forecast for him as the British Marlon Brando. While Harry started life with a void, Wilfred Brambell spent the greater part of his life hiding his homosexuality, and finding it difficult to come to terms with this aspect of his life, becoming an alcoholic with the latter affecting his ability to learn lines and keep to schedules. He was in fact only 13 years older than Corbett, but was able to play an older man several decades than his true age appearing in the Quatermass series on 1953 and 1955 and 1984 in between. He was married but separated after his wife had a son by their lodger, Roger,. Even though homosexuality between consenting adults became legalised he avoided the attention and publicity in the UK by becoming an early sex tourist holidaying in Far East, but established a long term relationship to whom he left a substantial sum when he also died within a couple of years of Corbet aged 73. He was given other opportunities including a Broadway Musical which closed after one night. The drama documentary was followed by an episode from the series, the holiday which emphasised the depth of the two acting performances, something which the two actors in the drama documentary did exceptionally well to match but also underlined the exceptional abilities and special interaction of the originals.

01.30 I go to bed concluding it had been a better Good Friday than anticipated, a day which I had become more focussed on the 101.75 work in translating the 200 boxes of material in cupboard store into sets and volumes before the cost of doing so becomes out of my reach.

09.30 For once I have no recollection of getting up during the night but of prolonged dreaming. I know I resisted getting up with light and went back to sleep again, but did I really pass a whole night without needing to rise? If so I will have to examine the ingredients of the day beforehand.

11.00 Just a coffee has helped me to this point. My mobile phone is being difficult and I will get myself up properly, have a brunch and try and find a new replacement phone. My priority of today. And so it was to be and not as I expected.

1310 About Livingston Stanley and Burton and about me

It is rare that what is planned lives up to expectation so I celebrated my birthday yesterday by drinking several glasses of bubbly and enjoying food when it was fancied, and writing until the early hours and delighting in the humiliation of Chelsea, and the Russian who came over here to prove that money can buy anything, forgetting that even if you buy bodies you will never reach souls. We liked Chelsea only with Murinho because he has soul so all who believe in the great game will join me in wishing further humiliations until he takes his money home and we can begin to regain our Premier league. Of course will not happen. I mean it is like Barnsley or Cardiff winning the FA Cup this year?

To day, getting up too late for breakfast and too early for lunch and feeling like neither, I dabbled in this, and that, for half an hour and then checked my expectation that English cricket was to be humiliated just as English Rugby had been, along with Newcastle Football, and then later in the afternoon the Boro.

Sunderland was not humiliated but just bored everyone for the first half in frustrating the more skilled opposition and put up a little show towards the end when it was evidently too late and we were past caring. Me thinks Roy, and the chairman and their financial backers have begun to lose the plot. You have to remember the soul of this club with its history of glorious defeats. I arrived at what has become my usual parking spot in time to walk into the city centre and obtain a book from Smiths about the basics of acrylic, so that although I had commenced to use the medium, I have progressed in my approach and now want to understand before using further. I want, for once, to be able to create what I feel and see, because the concept alone is not enough and getting others to make it real is cheating contemporary or any other form of art. You can do what you feel and think and call it art as long as you do it.

I say obtained the book because I used a gift card so technically someone else bought, as someone else bought, with another gift card at M and S, both from Christmas, a prawn sandwich and a custard tart for lunch followed by some chocolate covered peanuts kept in the car for the next time I went to the pictures and they had only lasted so long because I had forgotten they were there.

Earlier I experienced ghosts of my time and before. They were mostly good ghosts, some exceptional and engaging beings. I discovered that the film of the search in Africa by Henry Stanley for Dr Livingstone, Forbidden Territory, was being shown which along with a BBC film series decades ago, descriptively titled, the Search for the Nile is about the hold which an idea and an objective can have on the lives of human beings. It is all about what captured the imagination of the British public and their homeland was about to create the British Empire. This film is more about Henry Morton Stanley than Doctor Livingstone, and even though I had seen the film before, I had forgotten of its important chords.
Towards the end of the film when Stanley, having been made the heir to Livingstone's missions to find the source of the Nile and help to bring about the de facto end of slavery, he is reportedly shouted down and ridiculed by the men and some women of the Royal Geographical Society over his claims because he was a journalist and not one of them. I know that experience only too well when I was one of three who voted over the immediate amalgamation of the Association of Child Care Officers into the too quickly generic British Association of Social Workers and I still find it difficult to forgive all those who once they saw the disaster of forcing those dedicated to working with children, working with adults and vice versa, the refused or who then denied the extent to which those employed to care for children, committed acts of physical and sexual violence against them, with the BBC still calling what happened in Jersey abuse. I was once given the opportunity to address a fringe meetings of the Labour Party at its annual conference on subject of mental health along with Barbara Castle David Owen and David Ennals, and saw the chasm open in the faces of those sitting in audience, including some who became Ministers, as soon as I had pointed out there was not one reference to child care or welfare among the hundreds of resolutions submitted by constituencies for consideration (Child care was then a specific service covering children in care or being prevented from coming into care or appearing in the juvenile courts, and provided by social workers, and different from child welfare provided by health visitors and the parents and other relatives).

Stanley was born in the days when you were described as a bastard on the birth certificate (1841) and was placed in the workhouse after his grandfather died and after completing elementary education he was employed as pupil teacher in a national school, a similar situation to my mother half a century later. He is said to have been taken in by a local wealthy man assuming his surname and consequently pretended to be an American when the couple died, denying he was a foreigner. He was reluctantly called up to the Confederate Army and taken prisoner by the other side which he then joined, but did not begin fighting and then joined the navy where he quickly deserted. He took up the cause of Native Americans as a journalist had some adventures in the middle East went to jail but talked his way out of the situation. After publishing a book about his adventure he was taken up by the founder of the New York Herald. How much of his story was been checked by contemporaries is not stated.

Following the succession of the son of the founder of the paper Stanley was able to persuade his employers to fund an expedition to find Dr Livingston who had disappeared into the depths of Africa for a period of six years. He landed at Zanzibar hiring 200 porters, with one internet source mistyping this as 2000, and embarked on a 700 mile expedition during which many died from disease and fighting, and one source suggests that he exaggerated his stern treatment of his entourage to prevent desertion because this was favoured Victorian approach, among the reading public, as even Missionaries were known to flog those paid small sums to help them.

It was on November 10th 1871 then he met up with Dr Livingston, although here are disputes about this, and more so if the famous words, Dr Livingstone I presume was said, or just the make up of the paper's editorial, who to day the whole thing would be filmed on through a Satellite transmitting computer to 24/7 live Although the two men failed to establish the source of the Nile they did prove that it was not Lake Tanganyika. He published a book on this expedition which helped to make the image of Livingstone although the fame also brought to attention his own origins which contributed to his view of events being questioned by the 'establishment' until Livingston's family confirmed that the letters brought back by Stanley from Livingstone were authentic.

Three years later Stanley returned leading an expedition involving 356 people, and which traced the river Congo to the sea, after 999 days, with only 114 survivors including himself as the only European. He published Through the Dark Continent. He then embarked on a new expedition financed by the King of Belgium designed to acquired land under the front of scientific and philanthropic work. His later expeditions were also marked with controversy but he survived attacks and late in life he married, adopted a child and became a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament. He was knighted and became a legend. Spencer Tracey and Sir Cedric Hardwicke starred in a film about his meeting with Livingston and their lives in 1939. His great grandson is a South African film maker.

I had known more about David Livingston having acquired a 1974 edition of the Tim Jeal Biography. He was a medical Missionary with the London Missionary Society rather than setting out to be an explorer of the African Continent and was the first European to see the Mosi-oa-0'Tunya which he named the Victoria Falls after his Queen.


In his childhood Livingston became an avid reader, which can be a dangerous occupation for a young person as it brings knowledge, curiosity and fires the imagination. His fundamentalist father attempted to stop this but David continued to examine the relationship between religion and science. His first work was in South Africa where as an abolitionist of the slave trade he hoped legitimate work opportunities would bring about its ending, He was badly mauled by a lion, partially disabling one arm and causing him a lifetime of pain. He married the eldest daughter of a missionary in 1845 who was born in Scotland but lived in Africa from the age of four.

He had little heart for traditional missionary work, quickly coming to understand and respect African cultures and his interest became more one of exploration, but whereas other European expeditions were armed with commercial and territorial ambitions, his were small with few porters and paying their way. He returned to Britain to publish a book about his experiences and approaches and this brought him to public attention. This led to British government sponsored Zambezi expedition which he was ill equipped to lead and where during its six years his wife died of malaria, leaving his children effectively orphaned. He then commenced his search for the source of the Nile following on work of Richard Burton, John Speak and others where their findings that the source was somewhere between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria was roughly correct. Livingston's conclusion turned out to be the Upper Congo River, confirmed by Stanley subsequently.

Throughout his life he was a constant opponent of slavery but had little impact given the commercial and other interests involved in turning an open eye to the trade. However he became well known internationally and his disappearance aroused interest and led to the Stanley search. The disappearance was unintentional as only one of 44 letters reached Zanzibar. While his heart was physically buried in Africa, the rest of his body was carried 1000 miles by his close attendants so that it could he returned to Britain where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Paradoxically his good relations with African leaders helped subsequent colonization. There are innumerable statues and memorials to him throughout Africa, Scotland, in London and Canada and the USA. The most interesting legacy in popular culture occurs in the Get Smart Again film where Max says Dr Hottentot I presume.

The Search for the Nile film led me to Alan Moorehead's book, the White Nile 1972 edition and a particular interest in the extraordinary explorer and man of letters and everything else, Richard Francis Burton where there is general agreement that he achieved success as a translator, linguist, poet and writer, as orientalist and ethnologist, and as a soldier and as hypnotist in addition to his exploring. Some know him more for bringing the Kama Sutra to the attention of Western Europeans and for his unexpurgated translation of the Book of One Thousands Nights and a Night! He is considered to be the first non Muslim European to make the Hajj to Mecca (in disguise) 1853. It was during the subsequent expedition with several British officers that his party was attacked and outnumbered with the consequence that he was impaled in the face with a javelin, one officer was killed and Lieutenant Speke who was to accompany him on subsequent expeditions, was captured and received eleven wounds but managed to escape with a weapon fixed to his head. In 1855 Burton rejoined the army to fight in the Crimea where it is said he was adversely mentioned in relation to the subsequent mutiny.

This did not prevent Royal Geological Society funding an expedition to find the source of the Nile. As with the other explorers of the Day it was only afterwards that the writing of their exploits brought their work to the wider public attention. It was after this expedition that the two men quarrelled and shortly before they were to debate issues at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Speke was killed in a hunting accident, although there is the suggestion that his wounds were self inflicted.

In 1861 Burton married a Catholic but did not adopt her faith and joined the Diplomatic Service serving in Equatorial Guinea, Brazil and Damascus, and after some problems to Trieste (Austria-Hungary) a post which required little work enabling him to write and travel. He was knighted in 1996 and when his travel books were not well received he then made his contributions to the Karma Shastra Society. Much of his work was scandalous and pro Muslim rather pro Jewish and which led claims and counter claims, He died at Trieste in 1890. After his death his wife burned many of his papers to protect his reputation, and action which some subsequently criticised her. Her actions does not surprise given his openness about his interests and reputation for aggressiveness, his drinking, drug taking and general love of shocking people. It could be argue that his placement by the government in a non job in Trieste for twenty years was a splendid way for the British government to try a sideline a problem individual who had become well established in the public eye.

My own interest in Africa and with Missionary work was fired up b the visit of a missionary priest to the John Fisher School which everyone attended around 1953/1954 and led to my requesting to study Latin which had been dropped when I dropped from the A stream to the B for the fifth form year as he had emphasised that before one could go adventuring saving souls, one had to go to university and to study Latin

After all this seriousness I ended my day starting to write by playing chess against the computer, and having some soup at six on return for them match, and then burning to a nice crisp surface a small shoulder of minted lamb with I eat with a glass of red wine, coca cola and a large glass of orange juice, but without vegetables, followed by a small custard tart and strong coffee without sugar. During this I enjoyed the first colour version of The 39 Steps with Kenneth Moore, although the film is inferior to the 1935 Hitchcock Black and White film, subsequently re-shown in a London Theatre (was it the 1980's or 1990's) and which is regarded as one of the great films of British Cinema, but I also liked the 1978 Robert Powell starring edition with John Mills, Timothy West, Eric Porter and David Warner and which is the most faithful to the John Buchan Book.

Yesterday I then became fully engaged with this week's Lewis which was another brilliantly crafted work which takes the relationship between Lewis and his Sergeant to a new and higher level. My only reservation is that as with the villages of Mid Summer's Murders, Oxford is becoming a very dangerous city as the body count from Morse and Lewis accumulates. The episodes concerns four connected deaths by someone who has disappeared and may have committed suicide. However the main focus is with the past of the Sergeant and his knowledge and involvement with those who perish and which brings him into the line of fire with spectacular consequences.

1304 The Common Touch,In the service of teh Country qith Lost and the Peter Green Splinter Group

Sometimes I only write my way into a theme, sometimes I write myself out of one theme into another, but this evening I am as clear as I can ever be about what I want to try and say, sparked by two very different Television programmes experienced at 8 and then 9pm. The first was about the capitalist merging of copy goods with branded goods manufactured in China as this country becomes the economic power of the world. The second was a brilliant episode of Lost which brings the 4th series into a new dimension, explaining much that has gone before and which is to come, or does it?. One programme blurring the nature of what is fake with what is real and one which created a coherent explanation for the ability to believe one is in two different dimension of actual time without any physical transformation.

I had woken early, struggling to break from a dream in order to put the rubbish bin out. The dream involved my mother in her latter days, something which I cannot recall happening before, and a building, a familiar scenario, with the building a college or residential facility which also becomes and office, occasionally department kind of store, or a large house, and while these buildings are familiar or have familiar aspects there are always problems in that I cannot ever get back to where I have been and want to be, exiting some distance away, again in territory with familiar aspects, but sometime distance away from the place I anticipated and always thinking I know how to get back and never being able to do so.
On getting up I redrafted and corrected yesterdays writing. Sometimes my days become more circular than others. It was cold as I pushed the bin out under the half opened garage back door. I boiled the kettle and only then decided on coffee rather than first thought tea, and cheese slices on toast rather than cereal. I thought if I wake up quickly and feel physically alert I will start the house clean cycle once more. What happened to the forecast sleet and snow? Perhaps the radio or TV will tell me. I did not start the house clean and failed to answer my query about the weather forecasting. I heard the bin men come and then later the recycle box run which I had forgotten as my box had not built up over the fortnight, so it did not matter than I have to wait another two weeks. I forgot to bring the bin back in until darkness remembering when taking the evening meal plate into the kitchen.

I had some of the cold chicken as a salad for lunch, another portion will suffice for tomorrow, and a tomato soup around 5 and a ham omelette around 7pm, a banana at lunchtime and too much butterscotch whip around 9 as I was then too tired to prepare some fresh pineapple, followed by strong percolated coffee at 10 to keep me going until the writing is done for the day.
I worked long and hard on my work project during the day in order to meet the new monthly out target of 125 new sets of cards, 3000 in total, my average since the autumn of 2003 when I first got underway. This work included information on the volume about scientific Matter which I quickly decided must commence with scientific creation and the 57 ( after one quick count) non scientific creation belief system from around our planet of which three are Islam, Judaism and Christianity and then the multitude of second and third sub category beliefs system which emerged as individual human being wrestled with the emerging sciences and the extent to which belief was put into practice and was not.

As I worked I first listened to a two hour set of the Peter Green Splinter Group, which I had never heard of before until I realised this was Peter Green, born Peter Greenbaum of Fleetwood Mac, who started with John Mayal's Bluesbreakers, after Eric Clapton's departure. In the beginning there was Adam and Eve, then you and me and we are all connected. He created Fleetwood Mac and with success followed the predicable route of taking drugs, particularly the hallucinatory LSD which a psychiatrist I admired used to take very disturbed adolescents and others, sinking deeper into the criminal and self destructive abyss, on a bad trip into their childhood and the precipitating experience of their subsequent behaviour, but which in his instance may have precipitated his schizophrenia, the self administered LSD trips I mean. With the help of family and friends Peter resurfaced with new music in the late 1970's/early80's and then again in the 1990's with the Splinter Group. Like Clapton he collected guitars having over 100, he should have had 101 which would have been interesting. In 2004 a further tour was planned and cancelled and then with the British Blues All Stars but this was also cancelled because of the difficulty he continued to experience with his problems, in part caused by the medication. His large body of work remains on record and some on film. It is timeless music which will be played long after much of today's output of popular music is forgotten.

In the afternoon as my work momentum flagged I enjoyed the 1941 British Classic film The Common Touch which was a romantic view of a Christian socialist capitalism in which an eighteen year old finds himself inheriting a major company, decides to investigate the effects of a plan cooked up by his chief executive to make personal profit from a deal which will evict the residents of a homeless shelter used by those who have been to prison or fallen on other hard times. He and a friend dress down to live in the shelter until they discover something to thwart the plans and convince his Board to adopt a socialist approach to the planned development. There is a sub plot in this film where a high class singer declines the proposal of marriage from an England Test Match Cricketer, of the Gentlemen public school wing in the days when the Players were the professionals who tried to make a livelihood full time from the game while the Gentlemen had separate interests which provided their income and life style. Bernard Miles had a miniscule role as a steward at Lords.

I then planned to have as background to further work what I thought was to be a World War 2 film, In the service of the country, only to discover it was a Russian language film in which their secret service set out to thwart an Arabic, Muslim, Terrorist group's attempt to launch Armageddon on all non believers commencing with bombings in Moscow, New York and Berlin city shopping centres. The hero of the civil service team is a cross between the leader of the A Team and bionic Superman Ninja, with his sidekick Lara Croft who take on Cat Woman, the brain behind what was is in fact a capitalist heist to strip some of the oil made Arab wealth, 200 million dollars to 14 accounts in Switzerland, letting off a few real bombs to cause some devastation and loss of human life to keep the Muslim extremists content, much like the American Mafia funded the attempted capitalist return to Cuba. I watched the nonsense because I became very tired and at times it was difficult to keep my eyes open to watch the action let alone read the sub titles. It was an interesting Russian perspective, given he 75% popular vote for the replacement of Putin as Prime Minister while he moves into the Presidency, well it could have been 99.99 percent like the good old days. This reminds me to mention that the Clinton succession is running out of steam which means that I hope Obama is now on assassination watch, especially as a new Presidential assassination film opens this weekend and is bound to trigger another political, Mafia. American secret state within a state, capitalist conspiracy, religious extremist, racist assassination attempt, or is their secret service that incompetent to enable a lone individual to get close enough?

It was while I was trying to recover from this prolonged siesta that it looked as if an hour long programme about the extent to which the major international capitalist companies were being shafted by their own greed until they worked out if you cant beat them you should join them. I have no idea when western capitalists first worked out that China would solve all their problems of squeezed profit margins and bonuses because of the accumulative effects in their countries of minimum wage legislation, structured and protected workers rights with good wage levels, good holiday and pension arrangements, and the need for higher taxes to provide social expenditure on top of that required for security. The prospect of unlimited wealth from trading with Russian and China was only identified as possibilities when I attended a senior management course in the mid 1980's, although by then the capitalists understood that one had to internationalise in order to be able to move the enterprises when political, trade union and trading conditions became too difficult to maintain and further profits in any particular country.

The allegation is a confusing film (which appeared to be on the side of capitalist enterprises who have little thought on the impact of their machinations on workers at home or overseas), is that the firms are now, at best, only going through the motions of opposing the copying of brand images, and that they are unofficially cashing in themselves where they can on the parallel manufacturing and trading.
The story in this documentary is that the companies were so keen to get into the emerging Chinese exporting market that they took up with whichever bilingual Chinese fixer that came their way, not realising that in order to maximise the profit potential and therefore speed up the economic growth of their country, the individual, often which official connections, if not outright blessing, would directly or indirectly set up other production units to create copies which would undercut the Brand and also make more profit because they did not have the same chain of profiteers to service. The reason why the Branded goods went to China more than to Russia because they could recreate the slave labour conditions of the industrial revolution, getting volunteers to work 100 hours a week in for coppers or cents, often using adolescents and children.

As with the agricultural workers driven to the Industrial revolution factories in the UK or the theoretically emancipated black and Mexican slave labour in the USA, the earnings were still better than previously, with the prospect of advancement for a few who were able to understand and use the system for their personal gain. The hoot is that many of those exploiting the Brands names by making authentic copies, are principled communists who have worked out that this is a good way to pay back the Western capitalist for their years of trying to break communist power and authority. I just do not understand how western capitalists get away with describing these goods as fake or counterfeit.
Take Burberry for example, who have closed British factories with the consequence that Burberry is now a Chinese made good and made according to Chinese labour conditions. Somewhere in China there are other workers making Burberry like goods sold in China and overseas, at less price. Top Shop in the UK sells look alike fashion goods where the originals cost £1000 for £50. I do not understand the difference. The gripe appears to be who pockets the profits. It is not about the impact of the development on British working conditions, protected through membership of the ECC and which was once hated by socialists and defended by capitalists.

The programme illustrated my point by interviewing one engaging woman who is able to frequent travel the world and who always visit her Bagman friend in Marbella who is able to provide her and her friends with bag look a likes costing a tenth or twentieth of the original where there is usually a waiting list which means that when you get your original it is already out of date. So the original manufacturing brand name must be raking it in within six months of orders making and selling bag ten to twenty to forty and fifty times the actual cost of materials and labour and others are able to also make money from silly women with too much money and just as little social conscience. This reminds me to have a moan about all those creating markets on E Bay for example by giving publicity to the mark up on scare resource items. I have long suspected the complaint was coming from those such as footballers and those associated with football clubs who planned to make money by selling their allocation of tickets to the official resale market, the companies which provide hospitality packages at all the main sporting, theatrical and cultural events. What they not like is ordinary punters getting in on the act as this undercuts the price which celebrity interests can get for their tickets, and the demand for the inflated hospitality packages. You think I am joking? On the news this day the HSBC bank was writing off billions because of its involvement in the sub prime market in the USA, but still announced record overall profits in the billions because of its gains in the Far East. I was also fascinated by a local news programme which is spending the week promoting the new Emirates route from Newcastle airport to Dubai with its links to the Australasia, nice work if you can get and afford it. It is obviously a freebie promoted by the airline and Dubai. However my complaint is not that this is the nature of society, but by the increasingly flimsy pretence of it all as the general population becomes more educated.

Earlier in the day I had planned to spend time reading what Wikipedia has to say on Time but was over taken by this week's brilliant episode of Lost, one of the best of the 70 odd so far. Earlier in the 4th series the ultra realist Sayed had set off with the true love never hath so finer an advocate, Desmond, in the helicopter to the ship, only to fail to keep strictly on its course, and for Time to slip out of Time but with significant consequence Desmond who finds himself switching with increasing rapidity between his time in the British Army (it does not have an British army feel though) and being on the helicopter and the off island moored freighter. The reason why he has been affected in this way is because his previous experience of significant radioactivity and the electro magnetic storm which the helicopter passes through on its way to the freighter. In the past series the whole issue of convergent electro magnetic polarity was explored. In this episode the communications officer on the freighter and a friend have been also affected when they take the ship to shore boat and veer off the only course portal which craft can travel to and from the island. One of the two has already died and the other is shortly to die which emphasises the need for Desmond to find a treatment if one is possible. It is because on the island there is Daniel Faraday the Oxford experimental physicist who has worked out a means of transporting the brain (not the body) into the future and back in which you can experience the realities but not alter it… a device to ensure that those watching the programme cannot conclude that the mystery of the island is about alternate dimensions and realities, especially as in this series there are forward flashes as well as flashbacks. The beauty of this programme is that it provides a coherent explanation for what is happening with a Romeo and Juliet love story

During moments of onboard ship reality Desmond and Sayed are able to communicate with the island by telephone and with Daniel Faraday, the physicist from the freighter who explains that some of those who veer of the narrow sea or air course to the island experience a mental form of time travel in which the individual inhabits their actual physical body and memory in both dimensions and in order to stabilise himself in both and not bring his present to an untimely end he has to connect with a meaningful constant from both times, and which in this instance is Penny, the love of both their lives.

On discovering that Desmond believes the year is 1996, Daniel instructs him that the next time he is back in this reality he must go as quickly as he can to find him at Oxford University where he works and is at the early theoretical and experimental period of his brain travel work. When this happens he reacts that Desmond is a set up by colleagues to who ridicule his work but he has provided in the future a key to ensure that when in the past Daniel recognises that only someone inhabiting the future could know of the detail. He then explains to Desmond that in order to survive he must make contact with someone, a constant, from both moments in time.

The beauty of this story line will not be appreciated by those who do not know the history of Desmond's relationship with Penny and that she is using her family wealth to fund an ongoing search to find out what happened to Desmond and that despite what has happened between them and the years of separation, their love has remained constant, except for the time in 1996 which is where the brain time shift has taken him. To break the chain which is quickly leading to a brain seizure an death he must make contact with Penny in the present, where there is a double complication, he does not have her phone number, and the ship to outside world communication system has been sabotaged. Sayed the communications specialist is able to solve the latter but to get the phone number he has to go back mentally to 1996,find Penny's father and persuades him to given her whereabouts, he gives her address not her phone number, so Desmond visits and persuades Penny to give her number as a means of getting rid of him, and he registers with her that he will ring her on Christmas even eight years from hence, which he is able to do, they express their undying love how ever long it will take for them to be together, if ever, and in do doing he is saved, for now. The episode ends with Faraday going through his master notebooks where eight years before he has made a note, if things go wrong Desmond is my constant. Thus the situation is circular as I believe is time, and that what is imagined or dreamt reality and what is authentic reality is all part of reality, just as what is a fake, and what is a copy, or good representation or reproduction are all valid perspective of one reality.

1812 Crime and Punishment: Criminal Justice, Murder by Numbers , teh 4400he

On every weekday evening last week at 9pm on BBC Channel One there was the showing of the second drama in the series Criminal Justice which I delayed watching until this weekend using the i player. The first series was BAFTA award wining and although this series was a different story with different actors I quickly understood why so much critically acclaim had been given. I have not previously experienced such an intense in depth and complex portrayal of human behaviour relationships over a five hour period. It was at times unwatchable yet I could not, and did not, want to stop doing so.

Throughout the outcome was uncertain although the tone was such that the audience became prepared for something which left one unhappy and angry. While the writers were unequivocally hostile to the male dominated Criminal Justice system where tribal relationships and prejudices dominated, the main target appeared to be a system which parted good parenting mothers from their children. In this respect the programme was fundamentally flawed because too often children have been kept with damaged and dangerous mothers as well as with damaged and dangerous men, accepting that the record of fostering and the residential care system in the UK is also open to serious and justified criticism. However there is a difference between well trained and experienced people making the wrong decisions and situations where incompetence, prejudice and failure to provide appropriate resources prevails.

In this drama an abused and overpowered woman kills her husband in a flash of despair and the whole weight of the criminal justice system turns on her because her husband was a highly regarded prosecutor and she had become isolated without friends or allies. There is no doubt that had not a solicitor with the qualifications to represent in court as junior council to a brilliant young female barrister then the woman would have been convicted of murder and the child removed from her after its birth and placed into care and possibly for adoption. This is the everyday reality and happens with considerable justification rather because of prejudice although resource issues will be an important factor.

In fairness there were two men in the programme who could and eventually did make a difference to the outcome, a police detective inspector who eventually provided information which was crucial to getting the woman to say in public what had been happening to her, although despite having major doubts he was [previously pushed by a junior colleague to lying to the court to protect him and it was the colleague also a police detective, who decided to admit the truth and raise doubts about an important aspect of her husband’s evidence. The senior officer was interesting because he had worked for five years catching paedophiles with a certainty until one case had created doubts that all was not as clear cut as he had believed. He had significant doubts in this case and redeemed himself towards the end.

The other male was the family GP and family friend and someone who had crucial evidence which he failed to come forward not because medical ethics but because doing so threatened his professional future, his marriage and family life. When push comes to shove most people will protect themselves and their interests. For some people only society through its institutions and the employment of good people can provide protection and care and when that fails the society in question is doomed, and rightly so. Fortunately, largely under the influence of his wife he came forward with the truth.

The brilliance of this drama is that is shows that individuals are more complex than usually portrayed, behaviour which can appear reprehensible can arise from good motives and just how difficult it is for outsiders called into domestic tragedies to determine the true nature of what is happening and risks and implications of the different courses of action that are possible,

Early on in the first of the five episodes we learn that the couple live in a white, minimalist, obsessively clean and tidy home, that the husband is a top notch highly regarded criminal prosecutor who is training to run in the London Marathon for charity and that the wife is feeling particularly guilty about a secret outing with the suggestion that she has had a lover. The husband appears to have an unusually close almost conspirator relationship with his teenage daughter and the mother also has a close and warm relationship with her child. Thus what I suspected was a red herring, the possibility that father was sexually assaulting his daughter was introduced. We know that at night the girl listened to audio books when in bed but she also listened and sometimes observed what was happening in the bedroom of her parents and had done so on the evening when her mother left the marital bed and went into the kitchen and selected one of three kitchen knives and admits to having inserted and left the knife in her husband and then left the house wearing a coat, disposing a jar of Vaseline in a street waste bin before sitting on a bench and then going to the hospital where she is apprehended by the police and taken to a police station.

It is the teenage daughter who finds her stabbed father and removes the knife and then attempts to stem the blood flow while talking to 999. This fact understandably governs the attitude of the police when they are immediately required to investigate and determine if a crime was committed and if so who committed it. The debate posed in the series is whether it is also the responsibility of the police is also ask why and if they obtain answers which mitigate the crime, to then provide that information to those employed to protect the interests of the accused of being crime perpetrators. Such programmes usually forget to mention that the prosecuting authorities do have discretion about whether most crimes should come to court. Many offences which could be tried in the criminal courts are never investigated because they are not reported. Is a bank clerk who steals £10000 from his employer more likely to be prosecuted than one who defrauds several millions? The managers of the same bank may take a different view depending on the individual and the circumstances and whether the loss has become or is likely to become public or not.

The police only investigate a proportion of reported offences and they have powers to caution if the offence is admitted in a whole range of situations. The state, the Crown Prosecution service has the power to decide that it is not in the public interest to prosecute and this covers a range of situations and offences. The nature of the charges is also a matter for the police and for the Crown Prosecution service. Then there is question of the decision to remand in custody or bail, including placement in a bail hostel and whether the case is tried at a Magistrates or Crown Court and whether there is a Jury or not. Is the individual represented by a solicitor or barrister in court Obviously in a single drama most of these issues cannot be covered which is where the five episode series has the advantage, especially if shown on a daily basis. The brilliance of the drama is that is made no attempt to simplify and for every position or issue provided different perspectives, explanations and possible outcomes.

I will not attempt to cover all the issues raised or present the chronology of the series but concentrate on some aspects which were of interest to me. The main one as already mentioned was the question of should someone who admits to manslaughter or murder or a crime not directly related to children, be allowed to be with and keep a child born while in custody and during a long period of prison. Is it right for the child which must be the first consideration. If the woman commits a murder in cold blood, has planned and calculated the crime and attempted to cover up, should she ever be allowed to have the care of any children again, especially her own. Even if the murder was calculated was it provoked. There world has become familiar with the case where a man imprisoned his own daughter for sexual reasons for over a decade and then kept the children he had fathered also imprisoned. She may well have known that only by a murderous act could she obtain freedom for her children let alone herself and that this might have taken time and planning? Should this be judged different from an act of the moment, the crime of passion?

In the film the woman was kept in custody throughout most of her pregnancy and the for a time after the birth of the child so there had been plenty of time to bring forward the trial or arrange for the provision of a place in a mother and baby unit within the prison system as well as to investigate the long term position for any baby and any other children. Only in relation to her daughter and newborn child was the situation appropriately investigated and prepared for and something of the background study and collective consideration portrayed on screen. Prejudice and personal inclinations can and probably always do have a part in decisions made by one individual about another but should and are usually countered by appropriate training and supervision and management. The film attempted to show this is so.

The second issue was how the mother was put into the position of making statements and admissions without the presence of a solicitor to protect her interests. She was tricked by a particular police officer, colluding with others with the promise of being able to see her daughter who was also at the police station as rightly the police had to first establish who had knifed the father and it could have been the daughter if she was being sexually assaulted and the mother may have been trying to cover up for her. I was reminded that in the Almodovar film Volver the father is killed by the step daughter resisting rape, and mother then buries the body and the crime is successfully covered up and the issue while precipitating the film story is not the main subject. In this series the male detective wants to ensure someone who he believes committed calculated murder, abandoning her teenage daughter to deal with the situation, a situation where had the daughter left the knife in the body, where in some instances because of legal and social representations a custodial sentence is not given and the individual is allowed to carry on as before there could have been a greater chance of survival, will stretch the position of every police officer and face teh temptation of wanting and being able to bend the rules.. A brilliant aspect of the drama was to show that the killed man had more common with the police detective than the detective was able to see let alone admit to, although this became something which his wife came to recognise.

The third aspect was the behaviour of the Family GP who provided a home for the teenage daughter when the disaster first occurred but then insisted that the girl be allowed to remain in the home long after her presence seriously began to affect their own daughter and their marriage, yet rejected foster caring the baby which he knew was his own son. The acting of the daughter, GP and his wife and their daughter was of a very high quality and the dialogue of the highest order in terms of authenticity and credibility. It was not just that individuals were unwilling to talk about their true thoughts and feelings because of the potential consequences but they were unable to understand or express themselves such is the nature of shock and the trauma, T S Elliot I believe wrote the line in one of his plays that human being cannot stand or cope with too much reality to which he could and probably did add, especially of themselves. Contemporary society needs people to function without continuous analysis and introspection. Faced with helping a friend and patient and then the woman who was bearing his child after an impulsive sexual act which she had initiated he was torn between conflicting emotions and interests. A parallel drama could have been created out of his story and that of his wife and teen daughter and the police and the authorities could have become just as judgemental about his behaviour as they did about the wife who killed her husband. His wife on insisting that he volunteer the truth to the court and the husband in doing so showed great courage which I suspect in practice is not always the position. The consequences would be dramatic and traumatic for all three members of the family and of no less a scale than on the wife and daughter who were the main subjects of the series.

The outcome? It emerged that the husband and used his daughter to help in the control of his wife although there was no attempt to explain why he had behaved in this way and which was a major flaw in the production. Who speaks for this man? The clerk in chambers attempted to do so, a man with his own past whose parents had saved him from holocaust and who had come to love his boys, as he called the barristers in the Chamber and the deceased in particular. There was the hint that the relationship may have had a different basis given that the husband did not appear to want normal intercourse but one object was to emphasise the many possibilities or every action. The defence, understandably seized upon the fact that the clerk had given the barrister a large amount of cash and that the a barrister on his run had stopped to talk to a group of youngsters who were under surveillance of the drug squad and that the barrister had been found with a £20 pound note in his possession from one of the young men. The explanation is that the clerk had drawn the money as sponsorship for the a barrister undertaking the marathon to raise money for a cancer charity of which the Clerk was suffering. The minor drug pusher had given the money as sponsorship having come to know the barrister from his training runs. The police had made sure the defence had the basics of this information in order to mud sling and therefore raise doubts about their defence just as the defence was able to reveal that the detective had lied to the court about the way the confession has been obtained without the presence of a lawyer. So all was not as it seemed. When the mother begins to talk in court about why she did what she did and did not attempt to explain why before and there is a reconciliation with her daughter after the revelation that she had originally intended to kill herself rather than her husband but everything had changed with the pregnancy and the birth of her second child the audience is led to believe that the outcome will be a good one.

Then the judge after the jury had found her not guilty of murder, a verdict with which he agreed, sentenced her to five years in jail towards the maximum of the scale which could have seen her released under supervision in the community. He was not only punishing her but the daughter who needed her mother and the recently born half brother. He limited the earliest day of release to two and half years, a year longer than the time when a mother is allowed to keep a child with her in prison. Although the woman had become a product of her husband’s needs and power, she had nevertheless killed him, she had left the daughter to cope in a situation where unintentionally the action of the daughter had contributed to her father’s death, she had given different answer to different people about the risk of injuring herself which in turn raised concerns for the future of the child The justice of the sentence was open to debate.

In the sixth defined episode of the 40400 hundred I felt the series had come of age and that however derivative its concept it was executed in excellent fashion and had been unpredictable whereas the previous one had. None of the three episodes of the second disk of season, however, came Criminal Justice nor did Sandra Bullock, as a creative disturbed and driven detective controlled by her past in the film Murder by Numbers. This writing could be called three degrees of detection seriousness, two of them criminal.

The third episode of the second disk of the second season of the 4400 (Life Interrupted) stands out because it while it features Tom and his son, Shaun, his young brother and girl friend, their parents, Tom’s ex wife and Homeland security agent Diana, it is not about the 4400 directly. Tom is at the 4400 headquarters for the funeral of Jordan Collier when he is called to the room when the body had been laying in state only to find that it had disappeared. How Jordan Collier came to die was the subject of the previous episode. When Tom returns to the home where he and his son live he is immediately struck by the warmth of his son and when he returns to the office of the 4400 investigation Unit he finds everything normal except the 4400 has not existed and he is welcomed back after being on sick leave after an underground operation where he had been caught, imprisoned and tortured, followed by rescue, a period in hospital and sick leave for recovery. He has little time to work out what has happened when the unit is called to the Collier centre which is the same building but now an arts centre, because of a suspect reported in the building. Jordan Collier is just not dead but the state governor although he does not appear in the episode which one suspects is a clue of some kind. In the chase around the building Tom is separated from his colleagues and thinks he has seen a man enter a room which unlike all the others in the building which have solid wood doors, has a round window through which he looks and cannot enter when he tries to do so. His colleagues enter and apprehend the suspect. The door had become like all the others and room bears no relationship with that Tom had seen although we the audience had only obtained a fleeing glimpse.

When Tom returns home he finds his family and friends have gathered for a return to work party. In addition to his son being the fun loving student, his cousin Shaun is there, his younger brother and his beautiful, intelligent wife, Alana, who we subsequently learn owns an art gallery in the city centre. We learn that Tom is on good relations with his ex wife and her second husband and has a satisfying life as part of a good middle America urban community. When he persists that this is all unreal to him, the same words used by his son when he came out of the coma, his partner Diana traps him into a situation where he is then taken off to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

It is at this point his “wife“ admits that she too is a returnee who has no recollection of him or his life and is just as distressed and perplexed about her present situation which appears to be a parallel reality much explored in the Star Trek and Dr Who series. They agree to cooperate with the medical and other authorities so that Tom can return home and together they can work out what has happened to them. This appears to work and two establish a good relationship which over two years develops into a loving an close one and what had been the charade of their marriage becomes an important reality. At one point Tom returns to the building and enters the room with teh glass window in its door and finds a corpse laying on a medical type table at the centre, in a room reminiscent of the second concert hall at the Sage which is circular with several narrow balconies. However this room is dark and stark and there are showy individuals standing looking down and for some reason I think of The Way to the Stars, although I may have got the film title wrong. Just when he is about to uncover the body on the table the room shatters and he finds himself in the room which existed when he first entered and remained when he had returned. For several days and weeks subsequently he returns to the centre to keep watch on the door hoping the mystery of what had happened has been revealed but as the relationship with his “wife” develops and he has the warmth and strength of his family and work colleagues around him he and his wife accept their situation and the episode jumps eight further years as they renew their marriage vows and go off on a honeymoon with all their friends and family at the ceremony, including his son who has become a doctor. He is set to become the new regional director of the Homeland security unit.

It is at this point he returns to the centre and finds the room and is able to enter and to remove the cover from the face of the body on the table and discovers it is that of his wife. He learns that all that he has experienced over past decade has happened in an instant and was intended to provide him strength for the challenge of coping with the 4400 and their purpose in the years ahead and that the way to break out of the dimension is for both to accept that this is unreality and end what is in effect a prolonged dream. However because they can now control their experience they bring together their family and friends to announce they have decided to extend their trip which is something they had been wanting to do for sometime but wanted to say goodbye and as they do they eliminate the present reality person by person and local community and home. He returns to his office and find it is back to the time of the 4400 and the challenges which they pose. He has just missed a returnee whose form he recognises and runs after her not only to find that it is the woman who has been his wife for eight years in his mind but she knows who he is and they embrace and we believe he is to have the love and support in reality which those who had unlocked the powers of the 4400 said he needed to help fulfil their mission. However I could find no reference to his wife and the actress who played her in the Wikipedia notes on the episode.

This episode contrast with the previous two in which Richard‘s wife Lily turns to her former husband a lawyer, for help when Richard is taken into custody for his failure to register as a 4400 living in the community. This leads him to Jordan Collier who comes a calling, and begs the couple and their child to return. Jordan has revealed that prior to trying to stop Richard and his wife taking the child away from the centre he had been full of personal ambition, power and the wealth of the situation but although the child and threatened his life when he had touched Lily, he had been fundamentally changed and become focussed on the mission. He wanted them to come back and participate in the mission freely and he wanted contact with the child again because he believed his present life would be validated. This turns out to be so and Jordan become a grandfather/uncle in their life and that of the child. Everything continues to go well as the time of great reunion approaches when the returnees will assemble from all parts oft he world.

It is as this point that Maia has a prediction about Jordan who she sees on TV, he is to die. Diana and Tom first persuade their boss that it is important to try and intervene and then persuade Collier that he needs to take greater precautions and allow them to his help protect him and try and prevent what so far has been the inevitability of Maia’s predictions. In this respect they are supported by Shaun who argues that Jordan becoming a martyr would place the Mission in jeopardy and Jordan himself is ambivalent about what to do, agreeing that the unit and Tom and Diana can enter the 4400 complex centre and take control of security. They would still like the reunion postponed

Jordan decides to consult the child of Lily and Richard and while we do not immediately learn the outcome, Jordan believes that he should continue and that everything will work out well. For a time this also appears to be likely outcome as one major suspect is apprehended having come close to achieving the assassination. Then Jordan is shot from a vantage point outside the building where the main reunion ceremony is taking place, a flaw because in the real word this possibility would have been taken into account and he would have been moved to a position in the building where an external shooting could not occur. (Have you not noted the way Parliamentary building chambers are designed, The Houses of Commons and Lords, the Senate and Congress Houses and the UN building in New York. Although Shaun attempts to revive , Jordan, he is declared dead.

I suggest that no one is surprised that the body then disappears leaving the way open for a resurrection, reminding of Bobby Ewing in Dallas, nor is anyone surprised when we learn that the shootist, reminiscent of the shooting of President Kennedy also in Dallas, is none other than Tom’s son. This is not et tu Brutus but Judas.

The son and Shaun’s cousin have become increasingly aggressive towards the 4400, attacking everyone and everything associated with the returnees, especially Jordan and his chief assistant Shaun, with Kyle resentful and afraid of his ability to lose time and find himself transported from one situation into another and without memory of what has occurred in the intervening period.

Shaun also remains troubled as his commitment to the mission of the 4400 grows. He is challenged by a group of young misfits, drugs addicts, petty criminals surviving by voluntary hand outs and prostitution, living in the shadow of the city, in the first upside on teh disk, Suffer the children, a continuing problem in the Sates but which has been largely eliminated in the UK by in effect Government and police action supported by the establishment of refuges by independent bodies funded by voluntary contributions and government funds.

Shaun encounters one of these groups gate crashing a ceremony in which the guests are provided free food and he takes an interest in a young woman of similar age to himself and to her plight and those of her friends, donating food, blankets and medical supplies. Jordan warns against revealing his healing powers because to do so to one and all will seek help and it is not practical for him to heal everyone. However he responds to a call from the girl when her boyfriend appears to be a bad drugs trip and Shaun cures him with the consequence as Jordan predicted all the down and outs want his help. This leads to the girl being disillusioned with Shaun who has become her hero and potential saviour. He persuades her to enter the 4400 which does, we suspect not out of conviction but to get close to him. Unfortunately Jordan has been assassinated and Shaun has to take over the role of leader and becomes too busy with too great responsibilities to have a personal relationship and symbolically the doors to his office are closed to her as she approaches him having progressed within the 4400 process of enlightenment. The scene reminds when Corleone’s son becomes the Godfather.

The main focus of Suffer not Little Children is a returnee teacher accused of child abuse by some parents at her school because some of children have been changed dramatically for the good while others have not. She explains she has been able to recognise the untapped potential in many of the children, some creatively in playing a musical instrument, painting and sculpture with others in more traditional scholastic subjects but not all. One particular father and one pupil becomes very aggressive towards her and getting her removed from the school. When Tom and Diana investigate they are satisfied with the explanation of her power and she is returned to the school with protection but too late to prevent the most disturbed pupil from entering her class with a gun, not to kill in her but to persuade her to change him so his father will be proud The father has become the town failure the teacher explains that not everyone has untapped talent which can be immediately recognised and transformed this does not mean the boy will turn out like his father and does not find contentment through his work and relationships in the future. It is the father who persuades his son to hand the gun over and it is time for the teacher to move to an environment where her abilities will be appreciated and use to their potential.

So much of the second season second disk has been constructive and optimistic but there are warnings. The consequence of first husband assisting in getting Richard out of jail has led to problems with his second wife and to her first daughter overhearing and discovering that her first mother is alive and going in search and making contact. However when she has contact with her half sister there is a discordant note and later when she returns home she becomes seriously ill so the first husband makes contact with her mother when the danger is over for her visit in hospital, Do we detect jealousy and a child who requires the exclusive attention of her parents? There is also pressure on Diana and daughter Maia. The child continues to wrestle with her powers and wish to be normal while discovering that she is having further visionary predictions, Homeland Security subpoenas their employee to surrender the diary. Why did the baby tell Jordan he would be safe if he went ahead with the Reunion? One would like more answer and to know more those returnee who pass by only in one episode

All is revealed and settled in Murder by Numbers which is at times a harrowing film about a police detective played by Sandra Bullock who as the films progresses we learn married at sixteen to a man who became jealous and violent towards and when she decides to stand up to him and tells him she is leaving him for good he stabs her over a dozen times and dumps her body in the countryside alive but dying. Fortunately she is discovered and rescued and survives scarred in body and in mind towards men. She is asked to attend a parole hearing when her husband is being considered for release but her response is to dent the situation and her past. However it dominates her life in other ways, as she engages in casual sex with her male detective colleagues appointed her partners but then falls out with them, picking fights so they reject her and refuse to continue working with her. This is both an emotional and physical response to what happened to her, unwilling to show her scarred body.

This is the background to a horrific murder of a young woman which has the hallmarks of being a random unplanned killing and then the work of the high school janitor who conveniently commits suicide as the police close in. However Sandra is not convinced and suspects the involvement of two student who pretend not to be friends within the school environment but who meet, debate and plot at a disused house on a cliff top.

The first of the two young men is the intellectual with a perverted interest in forensic science so her talks of undertaking the perfect murder in which all clues to the perpetrator are removed and someone else is framed leaving the usual links which killers who commit crimes of the moment will leave of themselves. However he is a loner who thinks but does not act. His conspirator is the doer, the rich kid who has everything including the means to buy what is needed to create a sterile environment to hold and kill the victim, to plant the clues on someone else.

It is not just good enough for the two to commit a crime which remains unsolved. They must be involved with the detection leading to the identification and conviction of the chosen perpetrator. To achieve the this they leave the footprint of a particular expensive designer trainers which the investigatory team are able to trace to the super rich kid student. He demonstrates that it was stolen and has been reported to the college and to the police. The trainers are found in the possession of the janitor who is shown to be the supplier of drugs to the school.

But the first mistake is that at the scene of thee crime the thinker throws up having had a caviar starter at the expensive restaurant in the area, and which the detectives are able to trace that the student had eaten there on a regular basis and on the night in question. Assuming this was practical, the young man given the brilliance and extent of knowledge about forensic science would not have left his throwing up in the vicinity of the site. This is a plot flaw although by then both perpetrators had become emotionally caught up by what they had done.

This young man is helped by a female student in exchange for help with one of her subjects and this leads to inviting her to see his collection fo rare and beautiful flowering plants. She is impressed and they kiss, a kiss observed by ‘the doer’ who then not only seduces the girl but films the experience to reveal to his friend that the girl is not a worthy companion. The two young men are not true friends as such but comrades in the deadly enterprise. The incident with the girl builds a wedge between the two and when they meet up which was against their detailed plan Sandra is there observing with her camera to hand and this reignites the willingness of her latest detective partner and their boss to pursue what had become an open and shut case. Gradually the net closes and the two men fall out, the doer trying to blame the other and then force him into a one sided suicide pact. The thinker works this out in time just as Sandra arrives, having radioed in she has located the pair she pursues them without waiting for her colleagues to arrive. This fits into her personality and leads nearly to her death in a melodramatic last sequence in which she and the doer wrestle on a veranda at the Cliff edge and eventually he does crashed to his doom and she is saved by the thinker who then pleads for his life claiming that the other committed the murder and that he had saved her life should be taken into consideration. She nearly buys this but then in a second dodgy moment she released that the when the doer had tried to strangle her he had left a mark from his signet ring on her neck and the murder victim did not have such a mark. The is unbelievable crass on the assumption that if the audience had gone along with the premise of the plot they would not yell out that given the care taken with the crime he would have removed the ring before strangling the girl. This however enables her to trick the surviving murderer into admitting his guilt and Sandra then observes that whatever one does or does not do in life one should and needs to face the consequences and no one will be able t run away indefinitely. (A very questionable statement indeed) This leads Sandra to accepting she has also to face what happened to her and to attend the parole hearing. She has found the redemption she had been locking for the sense of guilt and horror experienced. It is therefore a fundamentally flawed albeit clever film made above average by the performance of Sandra Bullock.

The film is based on a true story unlike Criminal Justice and the 4400.Nathan Freudenthal Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb were two wealthy Chicago University students who murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks in 1924. The murder was an attempt to commit the perfect crime. One had written to the other A superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from he ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do. The two students 18 and 19 years of age had planned to become lawyers. They were saved from execution by a brilliant lawyers who argued before the judge who heard the case that it was not fair to hand a boy because he had taken seriously the writings of Nietzsche and other philosophers taught to him at University. Only one of then was to survive prison, being released after 33 years, emigrating, marrying and working after having taught himself to speak 27 languages nearly one a year during the prison experience. The other died in prison killed by another prisoner. The true life story has been covered several times in film, with Compulsion the most well known and in literature.

1811 The Politics of the 4400 while David Cameron sets out to change the world at the time of the great Itch

It is doubtful that the Leader of the Conservative Party and likely next Prime Minister next year David Cameron will not have seen an episode of the 4400 or know of the series but yesterday I was struck that both had adopted, however unconsciously, the approach of others.

Yesterday David Cameron made his final play before his Party Conference to appeal via the media to be accepted as more trustworthy the next Prime Minister than Gordon Brown with appeals reminiscent of President John Kennedy... what can you do for your country, and President Obama’s.... Yes we can. His speech and the presentation of the conference was brilliantly packaged to avoid any similarity with the disastrous triumphantalism of Neil Kinnock with respectful phases.... if we are elected and the image of a party and a government appropriate for difficult times now and hard times ahead with not hot a champagne glass in sight or a hoorah Henry‘s and Henrietta’s grasping glasses of champagne, toasting a confident return to power within six months. It was a clever tribute to the achievement of Tony Blair, however much he went on to criticise the outcome of Tony‘s decade in office with something to appease the hard line traditionalist and much to cheer the latest recruit and those sitting on the fence although my impression is that the overwhelming majority have already made up their minds.

Of I was a neutral I would go through the manifesto’s when published of each of the political parties and award 1 point for anything which you like and 2 for anything you feel as great. Taking away 1 point for anything you don’t like and two for anything you hate and then see what the respective final scores come to and then if the winner matches your gut reaction and person or party you will vote for anyway you will; have the consolation of knowing you did your democratic best if the Party does not come to power or remain in power or if it does and your are disillusioned or disappointed.
There was one moment when I did say “yes, you’ve got it,” to the TV screen when Cameron admitted that in reality it does not matter what is in the manifesto or what the policies and programmes are... For regardless of party, the civil service will do their best to draw up legislation which will carry out the final intentions of Parliament and try and ensure there is the appropriate funding, and prepare for the inevitable unexpected consequences and misinterpretation, sometimes deliberate of the subsequent guidelines and implementation requirements required of government national government departments and national agencies, Local Government and their agencies and of you and me more directly, knowing that whatever is done the outcomes are unlikely and rarely match up to the ideals and intentions, and that what is all boils down and adds up to is the calibre of the individual. It is how you cope with the major crisis and the day to day decisions of office which will be the difference as well as the people you appoint into Government office and to your inner circle of trusted advisers

His main pitch was to say I am a man of honour, conviction and integrity and I will not let you down. When faced with a crisis and those day to day decisions I will get it right.

He then admitted that Mr Brown was also such a man but had fouled up where as he David Cameron hoped he would not. But David all such careers end in failure! It is the way of things!

Bush, Blair, Brown and the US financial teams were guilty of trusting the capitalists and capitalist economists and their latest alleged fool proof systems and to be fair anyone holding their respective offices would have done so likewise. It is to Prime Minister’s Brown’s credit (he he) that whatever advice he was being given from across the Atlantic, from his Chancellor, the Treasury Department and the Bank of England he pushed through an immediate solution and subsequent policy which worked to prevent collapse and prevent a major long term regression of the world wide economic progress of the previous decade. We will never know if David Cameron and George Osborn had been in office if the would have done likewise to pursued the approach which they advocated at the time as Opposition/ This would get Mr Brown my vote if one has to sets this against the long list of blunders made since coming into office and the prospect of his being in office for the next five to ten years against the unknown Mr Cameron. We are all now in Mr Brown’s debt) another he he) or more accurately in the country’s growing debt and we must now all suffer in varying degrees. The approach of both parties will intentionally protect the underclass of criminals and social scroungers while the very rich will not be affected.

At the end of the day I like my local Member of Parliament and will vote for him and leave the rest to everyone else. I fear however that if the General Election is held at the same time or after the Local Authority elections, the local controlling Labour party will come close to losing office.

On Thursday morning I decided discontinue the over the counter brands of cream to treat the spreading itchy rash because both boxes suggested the possibility of teh kind of side effects I was experiencing, Later I was contacted by the Health centre and an appointment arranged of Monday which meant three and half days to cope without the crutch of the cream, although given the reaction this might become a blessing in disguise. The discomfort is significantly less than a tooth ache and there many who have to endure much much worse during as well as at the end of their conscious self awareness. It is a foretaste, I fear of what is ahead unless I am lucky, and hopefully some time ahead rather than around the corner.

My next ambition is not to reach 75 or 80 although both would be good the 2012 Olympics and the twenty twenty finals day planned for Durham, as well as completing payments on my present major loan. Then there is the work although there are issues about the ongoing expense at the present time and space with the house until I have reorganised, with in the meantime catching up with the photographing programme. I have heard that another first cousin has died.

I began by suggesting that David Cameron like the writers of the 4400 appeared to have drawn on the work and approach of others to get their message over. The references to previous sci fi and other work are many and I was immediately struck in the two part opener for the second series by the similarity between the feverish activity of inmates and staff in a an institution for the mentally ill with that in Close Encounters of the third kind. There individuals were called to a place on a large hill. In and given the opportunity for a new life in a world within the stars. In Wake Up Call a long term patient suffering from schizophrenia who had been abducted has a compulsion to construct a communications device with the future, having established at the end of the first series that the purpose of the 4400 is to save mankind in the future. This for some reason the authorities object to and an attempt to stop and destroy but are prevented by Tom and Diana with the consequence that the device works and there is an impulse burst which appears to knock everyone off their feet for a few seconds but to have not other consequence. Then a brilliant former scientist who became disturbed in his thirties and has not spoken for years speaks and says that he feels better, The man had been working on the unlocking of areas of the brain which he felt could give human beings the power to predict future events, move objects and develop other abilities which the some of 4400 have commenced to exhibit.

Later I learnt that this concept is based on the work of prolific writer of science fiction horror, poet and scientific commentator P Lovecraft, Necronomician, Herbert West re-animator, At the Mountains of Madness and In the Shadow of our Time. The suggestion in the double first episode of the second series is that the recovered scientist should be in a position to develop his work on which human being in the future has developed from his ideas which had stopped when the illness took hold. This is as far as the main story progresses over the first four episodes of the second series called Wake Up Call 1. And 2. Voices Carry and Weigh of the World. What I do not understand is why those from the future did not adduct the mentally ill scientist in the first place!

In Voices Carry a returnee is a former baseball player abducted just when he was about to break into the major league game. His problem is that he begins to hear what everyone within his vicinity is saying which made playing in a public arena impossible. He returns to quarantine for help where the new head of the unit promised Tom and Diana that the man will be helped to reduce the force of the multiple hearing if he agrees to help find out what Richard is doing at what has become the 4400 centre in having dealing with an international gangster arms dealer and gangster. While he is successful in this project the state renegades on the promise to help him because of his military potential.

There is also a one off story in Weight of the World when a returning salesman who reunites with his now grown up daughter finds that his saliva has the power to cause dramatic overnight drops in weight. The commercial potential of this is quickly realised and major companies enter an auction to sign him up giving up an advance of $1 million dollars as part of a $40 million deal. However the gangster money lender and his wife who accidentally come across this power then find that they are starving and cannot replace the lost calories quicker enough so they starve to death. The company has immediately launched a trial of the instant new product with 100 people and their is a race to find solution for them and to neutralize his power

Meanwhile there is a continuation of the lives of the ongoing chanters so far. Diana has been able to officially adopt Maia, the eight year old who has returned after sixty years with presumably no blood relatives interested or able to be interested in her. It is interesting that of all the agents in the world of homeland security two of those selected for key tasks with the 4400 also have direct links or interests with the returnees which reminds of the X Files where both investigators one a believer and one a cynic also had links in their own lives between what they were investigating which they only gradually discovered as the various series progressed.

In the first four episodes of the second series the adjustment of Maia an the parent child relationship begins. Maia understandably wants to be a normal child and resents the specific and general protection provided by Diana who has not been a parent before and who appears to rely a great deal on the provision of home carers. That she has any free time with the child is amazing and I would not have recommended an adoption in such a circumstance unless she had been prepared to give up her 4400 job and take something where she could have resulted on the parent role being a day to day realtiy, but then times and attitudes have changed and the upper classes in the UK were always able to continue with their social lives and personal interests sending their children off to boarding school and arranging for nanny to care for them while they continue to holiday and party as the opportunity arose. The contrast between her relationship and that between Tom and his son is relevant because Kyle is constantly complaining about his father having to attend to 4400 work at vital moments in their relationship after he has recovered from the three year coma.

Maia like Kyle wants to be normal and insists on going over to a sleep over but returns distressed because of the comments of other children participating, and which appeared to centre on her saying she had a crush on Frank Sinatra. At least the other parent involved is responsible, caring and does not reject. The main issue with Maia is her ability to predict and the trouble this usually creates for her so her response as has been the response of others in this situation, to pretend she has lost the power while writing up what happens in her diary, a diary which she does not attempt to hide and therefore we can presume wants her mother to find. The high point in their relationship is when she refers to Diana as her mother and the low is when she appears to prefer to be in the company of her Diana’s sister who as in the X Files there is a bundle of issues between the two. The sister is spontaneous and life loving, taking the girl out from school to show her the sights and allows her to eat whatever she fancies. She is a tattooist and appears that the purpose of this is to make body art respectable after decades when it was not. The number of new Tattoo shops has dramatically increased but nothing like the tanning parlours the new tobacco industry of teh 21sdt century.

The problem with Kyle is that remnants of the being from the future appear to remain in his body and which causes him to have blank moments one of which leads him to be the suspect in a store trashing a second after he was drinking alcohol at a wild student party. The main development so far is his attempt to see Shaun at the 4400 new headquarters from which he prevented but when he does meet up with Shaun he dos not understand the perspective of his cousin. In general Shaun appears content with his new role as a healer and life within the 4400 centre community although he has considerable reservations about the commercial approach of its leader - Jordan Collier, and his fascination with the very things he denounces about contemporary society. Jordan had written and published a book about his aim of releasing the 4400 in everyone and which connects with the Lovecraft concept that there are unused parts of the brain which could give humans significant new powers if they could be unlocked. There are three aspects of Jordan’s behaviour which concern Shaun. First the naked selling of Shaun’s power to the highest bidders. Secondly his involvement with the international arms dealer and gangster and thirdly his taking up with a mega super star celebrity who was not an abductee but who is welcomed into the centre and its induction programme for other 4400 returnees. Shaun finds that Jordan and the woman are sleeping together. This also has an impact on one of the other returnees and a devoted helper assistant to Jordan who is in love with him and who attempts to commit suicide when she discovers his latest affair. Jordan tries to placate Shawn by saying that he has arranged for the young man to take over from him in the event of anything happening before the mission is accomplished. The Unit are concerned of the development of 4400 as a cult, a following led by someone who has written that he has declared war on the world as it is. The Christ symbolism between Shaun and parts of Jordan are obvious.

This brings us to the child of Richard, the black airman from the Korean War and his young bride who returned to find her husband remarried and a step mother pretending to be the birth mother of her daughter. In the first series the couple escape to a deserted cabin in the countryside to await the birth of what appears to be their child and who is six months of age when they find a flyer at the property condemning the 4400 and seeking the vengeance of God for the those who have been with the devil. Richard then finds that this is not the work of someone who has discovered their identity but a local preacher complete with large hat spitting fire and brimstone and with two gun totting sons prepared to do his bidding. They stay but the problem arises when his wife goes to the local store for supplies and encounters the Preacher who reacts to them and that the baby is mixed racial. The child reacts to this situation and to others which develop. We begin to appreciate that the child appears to have all the powers of others, the ability to know what others are thinking and feeling directly, the power to predict what is going to happen, the ability to intervene in nature as well as move matter and the power over the minds of other human beings. This is first demonstrated when the couple have to flee at night when the preacher and his two sons come calling with their weapons and the vehicles kids off the road into the forest where the couple try and escape via the a river bed back to teh highway. They are hungry and his wife comments it is a pity that the season is wrong for some edible berries and child makes these develop instantly but whereas this power is constructive, when the Preacher and the sons catch up with the couple who have separated, one trying to lead the pursuers from the other, the child intervenes and three men turn the guns on themselves. From Wikipedia I learn that they are able to fun their existence from money Richard has been due from his interrupted military service although if it is mentioned in the films I missed. However they flee before it arrives and taking refuge in a motel when his wife requests another blanket and is refused until she parts with a five dollar bill at the expense of food, the child opens the till for her when the man is called away and she takes not only the five dollars but more for food. This upsets Richard, the dishonesty and his inability to provide for his family. He is also concerned about the power of the child and how it has been used.

They, the Fugitives, always it seems having to move just when they have settled, go for help to another of the returnees who had become a self employed handyman, living in a middle class country style homestead in a part oft he country with great sunsets, climate in general and local accepting community. This is the best of middle America and a good place to settle when Richard is offered in effect a partnership with his friend and they begin to socialise with friends including a young black couple, where the wife is the daughter of a military man who has passed to her his admiration for the original black pilots what they achieved and how they managed to achieve it. Her husband is resentful of this, and jealous, controlling and abuse and picks a fight with Richard who shows that despite his actual and historical age is able to defeat his opponent and warns him to behave in the future, particularly towards his wife. The man retaliates by informing homeland security for the whereabouts of the couple who decide they must take to the road again from fear of the information finding its way to Jordan and his ambitions for the child.