What a wash out summer it has been.
The jet stream has drifted South leaving the UK stuck with a low pressure system.
Two co-op events that I have attended this year have been washed out.
One in New Lanark was a great event but umbrellas were necessary.
The second, held at the Beamish Open Air Museum remained dryish, but the drizzle, the low cloud and the exhibits, rather demonstrated that nostalgia is no longer what it was.
Beamish is a timely reminder not so much of how life used to be but rather how it is becoming under the con-dems.
In the Dentist's Surgery in Beamish I was told that because in the 18th and 19th Centuries the only hope a woman had of financial security was to marry many women invested in improving their chances of catching a man by beautifying themselves, a common way of achieving this was to have their teeth replaced with false teeth as a cosmetic strategy to make themselves more attractive.
With horse manure in the streets of the town being collected for 'the roses', the trams and buses ferrying folk from the sweet shop to pitman's pantry along cobbled streets it was an eerie reminder that life may have changed but has also for many working people remained the same.
The indoor critic and I are going for our annual dental check up tomorrow, it used to be every six months but that has been extended to a year because we are aged persons, albeit with our own teeth, so we will put on our mackintoshes and galoshes and venture out with our cheque book at the ready.
This combination of weather and politics is both prophetic and telling.
Watching the newscasts as people across the country showed how the water had swept into their homes washing away their goods and their hopes.
A young women showing the damage caused by the latest rain storm commented that they had only recently cleared up from the last storm and the insurers had still not settled their previous claim and now they were having to undertake the clearing up once again.
The wider political storms have also been raging.
And as they roar, the vision of the future comes in and goes out of focus.
Whatever Mr Lansley may claim to the contrary,the NHS is being taken over by commercial actors from Serco and Virgin to the NHS itself privatising non urgent interventions.
A NHS free at the point of delivery is being swept away in the storms generated by privatisation.
Security at the Olympics offers another example, as Group4 comes under criticism for tardiness, late delivery of its offered response and an increased sense that the Army will have to take up the slack created by the Private Sector.
The same private sector which is already preparing tenders to take over policing in urban areas.
Shades of Clockwork Orange!
So a publicly accountable Police Force as imagined by Sir John Peel is at risk of being swept away as policing is privatised.
Sitting at a school desk in the pit school in Beamish, I watched the 'teacher' as he sought to control the 'class' his main weapon was the rather fearsome cane that he caressed and 'switched' as he walked about.
The sight brought back memories of my own school days when were caned or 'slippered' not only by teachers but by prefects as well.
Of course the present cabinet despite being younger than me by some years will have their own memories of Eton.
Present changes to the education system, despite using the same descriptive word, Academy, are bizarre, proposals to bring back a more academic exam system suggest a return to a form of selection, which rather than expanding the range of opportunities available, will ensure that for many opportunities will be as limited as they would have been for those youngsters who sat in the desks at Beamish Pit School whose ambitions would have been limited to following their fathers into the pit.
Or in our current society to the dole queue because work and employment is being swept away by the storms of recession and failed monetary policy.
In this Jubilee Year the Education Secretary should actually open and read the Bible he has presented to every school. If he takes up this challenge I would refer him to Paul's letter to the Romans Chapter 8 vv 18 - 23.
Paul is writing about Jubilee and the future that we anticipate with 'eager expectation' as we see God's promise fulfilled that we 'will be liberated from bondage to decay and brought into the the glorious freedom of the children of god' it is a promise we await 'eagerly'.
From 1945 the social context recalled and re-imagined by Beamish has been slowly and painfully improved for working people, children and the elderly. The co-op, the unions, the Labour Party have each in their own way sought to imagine and bring into being a fairer, more just society.
The con-dems are no storm in a tea cup, Beamish is an insight into the future not the past.
Nostalgia is not what it used to be.
The jet stream has drifted South leaving the UK stuck with a low pressure system.
Two co-op events that I have attended this year have been washed out.
One in New Lanark was a great event but umbrellas were necessary.
The second, held at the Beamish Open Air Museum remained dryish, but the drizzle, the low cloud and the exhibits, rather demonstrated that nostalgia is no longer what it was.
Beamish is a timely reminder not so much of how life used to be but rather how it is becoming under the con-dems.
In the Dentist's Surgery in Beamish I was told that because in the 18th and 19th Centuries the only hope a woman had of financial security was to marry many women invested in improving their chances of catching a man by beautifying themselves, a common way of achieving this was to have their teeth replaced with false teeth as a cosmetic strategy to make themselves more attractive.
With horse manure in the streets of the town being collected for 'the roses', the trams and buses ferrying folk from the sweet shop to pitman's pantry along cobbled streets it was an eerie reminder that life may have changed but has also for many working people remained the same.
The indoor critic and I are going for our annual dental check up tomorrow, it used to be every six months but that has been extended to a year because we are aged persons, albeit with our own teeth, so we will put on our mackintoshes and galoshes and venture out with our cheque book at the ready.
This combination of weather and politics is both prophetic and telling.
Watching the newscasts as people across the country showed how the water had swept into their homes washing away their goods and their hopes.
A young women showing the damage caused by the latest rain storm commented that they had only recently cleared up from the last storm and the insurers had still not settled their previous claim and now they were having to undertake the clearing up once again.
The wider political storms have also been raging.
And as they roar, the vision of the future comes in and goes out of focus.
Whatever Mr Lansley may claim to the contrary,the NHS is being taken over by commercial actors from Serco and Virgin to the NHS itself privatising non urgent interventions.
A NHS free at the point of delivery is being swept away in the storms generated by privatisation.
Security at the Olympics offers another example, as Group4 comes under criticism for tardiness, late delivery of its offered response and an increased sense that the Army will have to take up the slack created by the Private Sector.
The same private sector which is already preparing tenders to take over policing in urban areas.
Shades of Clockwork Orange!
So a publicly accountable Police Force as imagined by Sir John Peel is at risk of being swept away as policing is privatised.
Sitting at a school desk in the pit school in Beamish, I watched the 'teacher' as he sought to control the 'class' his main weapon was the rather fearsome cane that he caressed and 'switched' as he walked about.
The sight brought back memories of my own school days when were caned or 'slippered' not only by teachers but by prefects as well.
Of course the present cabinet despite being younger than me by some years will have their own memories of Eton.
Present changes to the education system, despite using the same descriptive word, Academy, are bizarre, proposals to bring back a more academic exam system suggest a return to a form of selection, which rather than expanding the range of opportunities available, will ensure that for many opportunities will be as limited as they would have been for those youngsters who sat in the desks at Beamish Pit School whose ambitions would have been limited to following their fathers into the pit.
Or in our current society to the dole queue because work and employment is being swept away by the storms of recession and failed monetary policy.
In this Jubilee Year the Education Secretary should actually open and read the Bible he has presented to every school. If he takes up this challenge I would refer him to Paul's letter to the Romans Chapter 8 vv 18 - 23.
Paul is writing about Jubilee and the future that we anticipate with 'eager expectation' as we see God's promise fulfilled that we 'will be liberated from bondage to decay and brought into the the glorious freedom of the children of god' it is a promise we await 'eagerly'.
From 1945 the social context recalled and re-imagined by Beamish has been slowly and painfully improved for working people, children and the elderly. The co-op, the unions, the Labour Party have each in their own way sought to imagine and bring into being a fairer, more just society.
The con-dems are no storm in a tea cup, Beamish is an insight into the future not the past.
Nostalgia is not what it used to be.
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