JOHN LENNON, THE ORIGNATOR OF THE BEATLES

John and Yoko soon after they got married

John Lennon has finally become a grandfather - more than forty five years after his death. He was shot at his home in the Dakota Building in New York. The man who shot him, Mark Chapmen, is still in jail. He would normally have been released on parole but Yoke Ono, who evidently has a vindictive streak, has always opposed his release and so he continues to rot in jail until she changes her mind or dies. She is ninety now so the latter is more probable.

 The Beatles stayed together until she came into John’s life so she is often blamed for breaking the group up. In fact, they had been having problems before that, as George Harrison has said. He was the one was probably most hemmed in the group and spread his wings when they split up, so he may nave an agenda of his own, but what he said had a grain of truth in it. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was running out of steam.

 

Paul was always my favourite Beatle and had had a successful solo career after the band broke up in 1970. John had always said that the group would only last so long and he retreated into a post-Beatles life with Yoko and, eventually, their son Sean who he spent a lot of time with, possibly to make up for his failure with Julian, his son with his first wife Cynthia. Julian, who is named after John;s mother Julia, has not had children.

 

It is Sean, who at the age of fifty has finally become a father, with his partner who is thirty nine. I can imagine John as a parent but not as an indulgent grandparent so it is probably just as well that he did not live to see his only grandson grow up. He would probably dismiss grandparenting as the ultimate sell-out but maybe he would take to it, We shall never know.

 

Yoko, who had a daughter she was estranged from for a time but was eventually reconciled with, has become a grandma (again) at ninety. She was married for a time to Anthony Cox but the relationship with John got in the way of that marriage and motherhood and she left them for John, who took to her and stayed loyal despite his well-documented infidelities during the infamous ‘lost weekend’ period when he left her to search for his adolescence.

 

They were eventually reconciled and settled into domesticity with Sean in the Dakota building where John bought up flats to keep his fur coats. When asked why he did this, Yoko said simply that ‘John had never had a home of his own’. His post Beatles life of about ten years, was almost as eventful as his time in the group. Paul, for whom composing was as natural as breathing, was pursuing a solo career while John was baking bread in the Dakota.

 

Paul tried to renew the song-writing partnership with John, which had been sealed with a handshake years earlier, but felt rebuffed when John said that it was not Liverpool now but New York and Paul could not simply show up at the door of his house to compose together. That house, incidentally, was Mendips, a middle-class home that John’s Aunt Mimi (who he phoned every week) was very proud of.

 

John remained in New York for the rest of his days, He does not have a grave but is remembered in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields memorial. Strawberry Fields is the children’s home near Mendips which Mimi was always telling him to stay away from and which he sang about in Strawberry Fields Forever, while Paul was more jauntily singing about Penny Lane where the group met in their early days.

 

Nowhere is the contrast between John and Paul more marked than in the songs they wrote about their early days in Liverpool at Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. Somebody (I think it was Coleridge or Thackeray) said the job of the poet was to make the new familiar and the familiar new.  John does the first in Strawberry Fields Forever while Paul does the second in Penny Lane. Together they had a brilliant combination but eventually, inevitably, they fell out.

 

Paul became the dominant Beatle in the later years and continued to pour out songs, composing continuously. John was the founder and unofficial leader of the group from their days as the Quarrymen to the later years when Paul increasingly took over. It was Paul’s desire to go back on the road that finally killed the band. Eventually they all performed live again but with their separate groups. The magic was gone and they never reformed.

 

I was glad that they did not because they could easily have become their own tribute band – which would have been a shame. Their music lives on and John’s songs, especially from A Hard Day’s Night when he was it his strongest, remain as fresh as ever. A Hard Day’s Night, by the way, is the first album I owned and is the only Beatles one to consist entirely of songs written by Lennon and McCartney.

 

The more liberal gun laws in the USA led to John’s death in 1980. He found a king of peace there – although he was pursued by the authorities for his admitted drug use – and he lived in the Dakota building until Chapman ended his life. No-one knows why he did so and his motives will be forever shrouded in mystery. Somehow, I cannot imagine anyone gunning down Pail McCartney in similar fashion.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

THE GRADUAL REVERSALOF BREXIT

Europe - the future of the United Kingdom? 

It was Damon Albarn, the lead singer with the pop-group Blur, who said that Britain was just a bolshy island off the coast of Europe. It was a shrewd and unexpected comment from someone not normally known for his political analysis and summed up what a lot of supposedly more sophisticated thinkers have said – that the Brits have a fundamental mistrust of foreigners and this affects the way we vote. This was confirmed for me wen someone in Dover referred ro the French 'playing solo bugger' at the border, It was all their fault - the well-publicised problems when crossing the Channel - and we were better off without them.

Brexit has been described as a disaster and a mistake by those who opposed it and (a good image this) as like when you are taking off on plane and it takes a while to steady the ship while you are climbing and before you start cruising comfortably at height and you wonder what all the fuss was about as you settle back in your seats. In other words, it will all be ok once we get used to and adjust to the new way of doing things.

 

Whatever you think of Brexit, it is clear that a certain amount of co-operation is needed with our European neighbours. To give a small example, we can only feed ourselves up to early August until we rely on imported food. There is nothing sinister about this, We have a large population in a limited space and we do not devote enough land to farming to feed the number of people who live here. This is going up while the land mass remains the same.

 

I feel sorry for those trying to export to Europe who have lost their single market advantages and have to fill in a huge number of forms to continue in business. An undoubted downside of leaving the European Union is the effect on manufacturers who are now burdened with the sort of barriers that, to be fair, existed before we joined Europe and the single market existed. It is back to the bad old/good old days for them.

 

As someone who – putting my cards on the table here – voted against leaving the EU (we lost) and for Labour in the last election (we won), I have been disappointed but not surprised at how the government has listened to the people who voted in favour of leaving.  Call them the bolshies if you like, many of them are natural supporters of Labour who do not want to feel betrayed by a government which thinks it knows best what to do and feels happy about reversing the Brexit vote. The Brexit vote must be respected at all costs.

 

While I understand this, I do not share the view, and would like to rejoin Europe as soon as possible. In fact, when there was talk of having a ‘second’ referendum a while ago I was tempted to point out that it would actually be a third referendum. I am old enough to have voted in the first referendum on Europe when we voted to remain in the Common Market (as it was called then) by two to one. At each referendum I have voted to remain European and I am fairly certain that, given the chance, I would do so again.

 

The government seems to be taking a softly-softly approach to rejoining Europe, gradually dismantling the worst excesses of Brexit without ignoring the (actually pretty narrow) victory of the leavers in the referendum. So we have had a weakening of the boycott of scientists in Europe and a partial reversal of the idea that you have to have a full passport if you come to Britain, even if you are a student or school age pupil. As though a student would join the illegal immigrants who come over here in hard to stop numbers. This, incidentally, has affected people in my own business of tourist guiding.

Although I always vote in them, I am not a big fan of referendums (or referenda, if you prefer). We vote every five years or so for a government and we should leave them to govern before returning them or throwing them out. Part of me hopes for another referendum so that we can reverse the damage done by Brexit. Part of me wants to be shot of the whole idea of them so we can continue with arms-length government.    

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com

Edwin Lerner

 

WEATHER AND CLIMATE

Clouds over Mexico (photograph from Wikimedia)

They are rwo separate things, sayCLIMATE CHANGE campaigners. Weather is temporary, what you experience when you walk out the door. Climate, on the other hand, is more permanent, and affects us all, As Britain is engulfed by one heat wave after another and both France and Spain are experiencing devastating wildfires “‘the worst crisis that France has experienced since the second world war” according to Emmanuel Macron, the French President.

Even allowing for the usual politician’s tendency to exaggerate, it is surely undeniable that there is a relationship between the two. Surely we cannot deny that our climate is changing and we are facing the consequences of human activity in a planet that feels increasingly heated. As a matter of fact, I do not use the words ‘climate crisis’ to describe it. A crisis is something that affects you immediately and urgently. Global warming is more gradual/

 

That does not mean it is not happening and should be ignored, as conservative leaders seem increasingly to suggest. President Trump, that arch climate-change denier, describes global warming as “the biggest con people have been subjected to in history”. That is not an exact quotation but there s no doubt that Trump does not believe in the idea. Just look at the evidence, I say, and stop turning away from the evidence.

 

The trouble with global warming is that there is little the individual can do about it on his or her own. I realise that, by joining the tourist business, I have been encouraging people to dig into the ground, find some black stuff – coal or oil, usually – and start burning it to make their travel plans easier to realise. It is too late to change now and I support attempts to move away from petrol, diesel and other forms of fuel that come out of the ground.

 

The problem is making a living, to put it bluntly. A man and a woman’s primary responsibility is to support his or her family and failure to do so (ie relying on benefits and other hand-outs) does not cut the mustard, a phrase originating in late nineteenth century America, apparently, and popularised by the now-neglected writer of short stories O Henry.  How can you support a family and not contribute to global warming is the dilemma facing many of us.

 

Of course, there is work going on that convinces is that net-zero is the way forward both economically and socially. Making climate friendly progress is all very well, however, but in practice it means deciding, ‘Can we afford an electric car, now?’ In fact, dumping your gas-guzzler and going for a new electric car may not be such a good idea as it uses a lot of carbon dioxide to produce a new car, so changing it frequently may not be a good idea.   

 

What people need is a list of ‘things to do to combat climate change’ instead of  a lot of hand-wringing about how awful things are. Short, sharp practical advice on what an ordinary person with a living to earn and a family to support can do to help the situation and try at least to make a difference. First, of course, we have to convince the doubters that something has to be done. Which may be more difficult than we imagine.

 

You should never underestimate the power of self-delusion. People like the idea that they can see a happy ending at the end of the story. This, incidentally, is why film producers insist on happy endings – they want people to leave the cinema with the feeling that everything will be alright in the end, even if that means a miraculous escape from seemingly fatal wounds. It also explains why bad guys can never shoot straight

 

People don’t like bad news and will do anything to avoid it, including blocking their ears. They respond to people like Donald Trump, who swamp them with good news, and tell them that jobs in traditional heat-producing industries are safe and they had better be ready to work their socks off because people will always want electricity, right? The message of the need to work hard is actually quite welcome because people like to be employed.

 

They may buy tickets to the lottery to avoid work but given the choice between working and being unemployed the majority of people will choose work. The problem is ensuring they have jobs but that these jobs do not contribute to global warming. Some hope. The health of the planet is usually well down the list of things that affect the decision of whether to take a job or not. People theoretically think that it is important. In practice, they just want a job.

 

Is making a living automatically a way of heating the planet some more? Not necessarily but it often is. There is a role for government here, who can bring a more long term view of the situation into play. Capitalism cannot be expected to take a long-term view. It is concerned solely with the bottom line, ie making a profit, and the long-term future is something that others can worry about.

 

Those ‘others’ are, of course, our politicians. They may be widely despised but they are voted in every five years or so to take a longer-term view than the bottom-liners. We get the politicians we deserve when we vote. Some of them are in politics to look after themselves and some of them are in because of their conscience. All of them hold our long-term future in their hands, however. The question is, can they act fast enough to save us?

Edwin Lerner (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com)

 

 

ON BECOMING AN EARLY RISER

Swift identified the curse of living forever
(Picture from Wikimedia)

It is partly the heat which gets me out of bed early now. I used to be a late sleeper (if I could) but these days the lower temperatures early in the morning get me out of bed at six – or sometimes earlier. I start to get tired at about ten o’clock at night, so I am not spending less time in bed or asleep but, instead of going to bed between eleven and midnight and getting up at seven, I tend to go to bed between ten and eleven and get up at six.

It is not much of a change, admittedly, just an hour or so, but it makes me like an early riser with that rather irritating smugness which goes with the condition, even if the change is practical rather than moral. Nevertheless, my alarm goes off at six every day and I start the day with my exercises. (I have dodgy knees so I need to do them.) Admittedly I do sometimes go back to sleep afterwards, so I usually get around eight hours in bed - with a few loo breaks.

 

I have always said that you have no right to work in the tourist business if you are a duvet addict. It is often necessary to get up early to go to the airport or catch a train to meet a cruise ship at Tilbury or some other port. It is a matter of pride to me that, if I say I will be at a certain place at a requested time, I will be there come what may. In the past, on the says I was not working, I would often take the opportunity to sleep longer – but not anymore.

 

I am not quite sure why I am writing about my sleeping habits, but such things seem important now. Going around in my head is a postcard I saw long ago with the saying on it:

 

“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!”

 

I am not sure it does but there is no escaping the smugness of the early rising proselytisers. It is both a sexist (note the ‘man’ in the saying) and work-oriented, promoting the virtues of earning a buck in a world where early-rising is seen as advantageous. 

 

The world of entertainment, where you stay up late to look after your clients is a long way from this, one of go-getting and money-making. It is taken as read that such activities are best conducted in daylight hours before the sun goes down and you are (briefly) allowed to enjoy yourself before you go back to work. In fact, you can make money just as well at night time but somehow it is the days that count when it comes to making a penny or a pound.

 

Anyway, I have somewhat belatedly joined the early risers in my old age. I am at the stage now where an early night is preferable to a lie-in in the morning. I suppose it comes with age along with declungung physical and sexual powers, needing to get up to pee in the middle of the night. It is curious that, although I have no trouble peeing (yet) I suffer from consultation and find it harder as I grew older to bring to put the other way.

Anyway, enough of my declining body and physical powers. At least my mind is nor going, so thank heaven for small mercies. As I said in my last post on this site, I want my body to go before my mind.We hear sometimes of the possibility of extending life almost indefinitely but I remain sceptical and always remember Jonathan Swift, in one of the less well known parts of Gulliver's Travels, finding that those who live forever were regarded as cursed not blessed.

It may seem strange, with fewer people (including me) not believing in an afterlife, to decide not to cheat death but the struldbuggs, who Gulliver came across in Laputa, were generally pitied as being condemned to a friendless, old age in which they could not even enjoy their food and were not immune from the savages of old age like dementia but were simply unable to die. Swift lived a long life, almost reaching eighty, but he was probably as relieved as anyone when it ended.

The memory of the struldbuggs stayed with me and remembering them and the curse of the mark on the forehead which meant that they could never die meant that I was more prepared to accept my imminent death. I do not know when it will come - and am not in any hurry - but I have more of my life behind me than ahead of me now and I am busy getting ready for my imminent demise. If I know nothing else I know it will come eventually,

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

BODY AND SOUL

A human skull (Wikimedia)

I have always said that I want my body to go before my mind does. Having seen Alzheimer’s at home – or dementia as we used to call it – I was determined that I would not suffer from it. I even responded to an advert on Facebook from Bill Gates, whose own father suffered from dementia towards the end. I bought some tablets that he said would ward off senility.  If Bill Gates promises it, I have no good reason to doubt their efficacy. He does need the money.

That does not mean they are guaranteed to work. I have always thought that the best hedge against dementia was to keep active and involved in what is around you. So, I have not (yet) given up work – although I do take on fewer jobs than before. I stay in touch with jobs on the internet but am usually too slow to respond and someone else gets what is offered. I have enough work and some guides, with bigger bills to pay, do not and need what is going more. 

 

Anyway the jury on out on the efficacy of the anti-dementia pills. They are based on the diet that people live on in areas that have low rates of Alzheimer’s and I suppose it is impossible to tell if the pills are working or not. You are enjoying a reasonably coherent form of life. Maybe the pills really are warding off Alzheimer’s – or maybe your active lifestyle is protecting you and the pills are worthless. I will finish the pills I have and then come to a decision.

 

The anti-Alzheimer’s pills (as I shall call them from now) join a series I take every day – statins, pills for diabetes, even anti-constipation powders, which I take only when I feel they are needed. Every time I visit the doctor I seem to have another pill to take. I used to show people the pills that the average person took in their life at the British Museum, often reflecting that I did not need to take as many myself. Those days now are sadly gone.

 

One pill I would not mind taking is one that would make me see straight. I got knocked over by a car a couple of years ago and it has affected my eyesight ever since. I read more slowly than before and my eyes often get tired by seeing double. Even writing these monthly essays is becoming an effort as a result so, if one does not appear in a future month, you will know why. However, at present I intend to keep with my self-imposed timetable of one every month.

 

And, although I go to church sometimes, I find it impossible to believe in any form of afterlife. Apart from anything else, I would find it fairly dull. Being confined to a life without a body and only a soul does not strike me as very exciting or satisfying and I am forced to agree with those who think of it as a reward for leading a good life on this earth, which is probably shorthand for knowing your place and not rocking the boat too hard.

 

There is nothing like the promise of reward in the next world as a prize for behaving yourself in this one. In that, I am probably not that different from most others in this modern society where you are able to lead a well-rewarded life in this world without thinking of the next too much. Although, I am fairly sure of this, I sometimes wonder if my point of view is just a reflection of my background as a late twentieth/early twenty-first century sceptic.

 

We think that we know it all in our society but maybe we are just a product of that society as much as believers in salvation in the afterlife were products of a pious society in the past. What if we were just as blinkered as we think people in the past were? Food for thought in a sceptical age certainly. It might upset a few Dawkins-like atheists but I am not such a dedicated modern atheist that I would mourn this if it turned out to be true.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

RELYING ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT

A Transport for London Routemaster bus

I take a lot of pride on being on time for work. If I say I will be at a certain place at a certain time it is a matter of professional pride that I fulfil that commitment. I have always said that reliability is a more important factor in finding work than brilliance. If the person at the end of the line can rely on your appearing when you say you will, that is the major factor in his booking you for the job. No matter that you will be brilliant, you just have to be there,  

 

For this reason, I got up early to catch the first train to Victoria from Brixton tube station during April when I was going for a job in Newhaven – only to find that the early trains had been cancelled by British Rail. You can take a lot of trains and taxis for the cost of running a car but you are at the mercy of public transport if you do. Since my beloved Jaguar (which was starting to cost me a lot money) had died I have relied on trains and buses.

 

The story of the death of my Jag may be worth a paragraph or two. In what was turning out to be a wet rather than a white Christmas, I drove through a puddle, which runed out to be a pool, To be more accurate, I was able to drive in but not out. Since then Wexford Council (for we were there) has prevented a pool forming in the road – but it was too late for us, we had to rely on the kindly Irish to help us out of the jam we found ourselves in.

 

It was my fault entirely. Maybe not entirely, but I had driven into the pool thinking that, because I had driven through others, this would not be a problem for the car. Big mistake – as we saw (and felt) the water entering it with us unable to do anything. The car was a write-off and we were grateful to a salvage man who rescued us (not charging anything extra for working on Christmas day) and to some firemen who moved the car to safety. 

 

Say what you like about the Irish. but they will always come to your assistance and rarely charge you much for it. We knocked on the door of some strangers who took us home and would not accept any of the money we tried to force on them. This was while the car was being taken to the garage, I have noticed how friendly they are – certainly compared to the English who are much more reserved and distant,

 

Anyway, since that fateful Christmas I have been a pedestrian and public transport user. I can still drive but never do so in London, which is not a car-friendly city but has a good public transport system that I use when I am working, I even have spare Oyster cards that I give to people I am showing around, charging the tour operator for their cost. I like travelling on busses where you can see things and the tube trains which move you around quickly.

 

However, the unions are all powerful on public transport and, if they do not like the way that British Rail or Transport for London )the new name for London Transport) operate, they have little hesitation is downing tools. To make matters more complicated, there are multiple unions that train drivers and other employees can join so, if one is unhappy with the management, it affects your ability to get around easily.

 

The train cancellations were actually caused (according to the information we were given) by a faulty signal. However, I suspect that British Rail cancels the first trains in the morning, often because the drivers have not showed up, preferring a warm duvet to a cold journey to work. Maybe I am being overly cynical but is it coincidence that it is always the early train that are cancelled? 

 

Anyway, to cut along story short, I was unable to reach the ship in Newhaven Harbour on time (which I hate doing) and had to change three times at Gatwick, Brighton and somewhere else to reach Newhaven, Then I had to find the ship, which also proved difficult, and relied on a local guide who drove me there. It would – as I later said to the person organising the tour 0 to have given me a hotel room to be safe,

   

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com

Edwin Lerner

NOT REPRESENTATIONAL ART IS ALL VERY WELL, BUT ...

Scrubs from a free, small exhibition at the NG.

It does enhance your knowledge of the world around you, Most western art has the effect of ‘making the familiar new or the new familiar’, which Doctor Johnson said was the main purpose of art. I always think, incidentally, that this is the difference between Lennon and McCartney. John was always escaping into new areas making them familiar to us, while Paul relied on close observation of the everyday world and bringing it into new life.

I have been thinking about this having just come back from Istanbul which, being the capital of a Moslem country, does not allow representational art, which is banned in Islamic art. The effect of this is to make buildings like mosques sometimes jaw-droppingly impressive from the outside but rather disappointing inside. The blue mosque in the centre of the city is undoubtedly memorable when seen from the outside but the interior is a but ‘samey’.

 

Before we went to Turkey, I popped into the National Gallery to see a small exhibition of paintings by the artist George Stubbs, who revolutionised the painting of horses by spending about eighteen months locked away with them in a barn. His most famous painting is of Whistlejacket, which is not only on of the gallery’s most viewed works but also the first time a horse without a rider was the main focus of a painting in this (or any other) country.

 

Whistlejacket is still in its original position and the exhibition focuses on another prize-winning horse called Scrubs (above) who Stubbs was commissioned to portray by its owner the wealthy second Earl of Rockingham. Stubbs was not sentimental about horses and was quite prepared to sacrifice them in order to understand their anatomy better, Whistlejacket probably died of natural causes but other horses were not so fortunate.

 

I have long had a preference for representation art over the kind which fills almost every available space with what are essentially pretty patterns on tiles. Likewise, I do not care much for abstract art, although I can see that the works of abstract artists fulfils the making the new familiar part of the art definition while representational works make the familiar new by helping us to look at again at what we thought we already knew.

 

I is probably why I like representational art - ie paintings that show you something you know (or think you know) nut make you look at it afresh. It occurs to me that societies that are religious in nature often prefer non-representational work because they have confidence in a benevolent God and do not need to look at his creations again, while secular and doubting societies that have doubts about God want to examine nature more closely.

 

Of course, this us a broad generalisation, possibly so broad that it has little value. Medieval art in Europe and Britain was both religious and representational – offering views of the annunciation (the announcement to Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus); Christ himself and scenes from his life from his birth and later baptism by John the Baptist to his death at the cross in the crucifixion and to scenes from the lives of his followers.

The Baptism of Christ by Fra Angelico
- another favourite of mine at the NG

What I like about paintings like Fra Angelico’s Baptism of Christ, however, are the faces obviously from life, of the everyday observers of scenes that are holy in nature but in which the artists could not resist putting in literally down to earth details that make the painting come to life. As someone wryly observed in The New Yorker, the problem with paradise is that it might be a bit dull – being stuck in the afterlife forever with nothing much to do.

 

Let us concentrate on what is around us and not worry too much about eternal things. ‘God is good,’ say pious people even after a natural disaster that has claimed dozens of innocent lives. Perhaps but we will never know until it is too late for most of us. Give me the everyday and eternity can look after itself. That is why I orefer art that represents the world around us – and not something more abstract.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

The National Gallery Stubbs exhibition is open until the 31st May.R

TRUMPISM AND TOURISM

Donald and Melania Trump (from Wikipedia) 

The last time politics affected the tourist industry was back in the days when American tourists were attacked in a random fashion by terrorists while at airports around the world and people from the states stopped flying to Europe on planes because they were afraid they might be subjected to the same treatment. 

 

Never mind that they had more chance of slipping in the bath than being shot at by terrorists, they booked a holiday to feel safe and they were not reassured but frightened by pictures of armed police at airports in Britain where bobbies on the beat rely on truncheons to apprehend villains (or ‘bad guys’ as the Americans call them).

 

Nowadays it is the other way around and an article in the paper on Saturday described how bookings from around the world have gone down since Trump came to office. So keen is he to give almost unchecked powers to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers that people are scared of being arrested if set foot in America.

 

We have all heard about the virtual execution of people who do not do exactly as the ICE officers tell them and are quick to lock up anybody – often in horrendous conditions – who have outstayed their visas or have the wrong sort of paperwork. Saturday’s Guardian had a story of an inoffensive grandmother whose husband (and her) were imprisoned like this.

 

We simply feel that we will wait until Trump is replaced (possibly by someone who shares his views) in a few years before taking that trip to the USA. I have been a few times but have no inclination to return, certainly not while he is in power. I usually avoid politics in my tours. People do not want to hear my views and, after all, they are paying me for my services.

  

What concerns me more is that many Americans are feeling unloved when they come here. Trump may not last five minutes in British politics but he likes Britain. The feeling, however, is not mutual. Even if one person in Ireland (where I am writing this) said that it is not Americans we dislike, just one of them. It was a good answer but lacking in one aspect.

 

Because a majority of people in the states voted for him, so they have to take a small amount of responsibility for what he has done, which is virtually to gut the American incoming tourist business and to have knock on effect over here. Bookings are down and I think t is is partly because of Trump’s isolationism.

 

We live in an interconnected world and the tourist business is very much a part of that. If people do not feel safe and welcomed when they travel, they will stay at home for their vacation. It is up to tourist guides and others who work in incoming tourism to fight this by making all our visitors, particularly those from the USA, feel welcome when they come here.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSPORT

My much-loved Jaguar, sadly not running now

It all went back to Christmas a couple of years ago. I was driving my much-loved Jaguar to some friends on what proved to be a very wet (not a white) Christmas. I drove into a puddle and, to cut a long and painful story short, found my car being flooded. It was a write off and I never got to drive it again. Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that someone local gave us a lift back to our cottage and another man turned up to rescue us and did not charge extra for working on Christmas day. Would he have done that in Britain? I doubt it.

Anyway, we became a one-car couple after that. I paid something towards our Toyota which Leena uses mostly. She chose it and is driving it to the stables as I write. Meanwhile, I rely on public transport to get around. It takes about two and a half hours to get to London door to door by train so I do not go early in the morning, but travel the night before and stay in my house in Brixton if I do. It is little too far to commute, although I sometimes go back in the afternoon

if I am doing a half-day tour. I usually enjoy going to London for work on the train.

 

However, sometimes the vagaries of public transport let me down both in and outside the capital. Recently, a points failure meant that the Victoria line was out and I had to take a roundabout journey to get back to Brixton. More seriously, a journey to London involved a roundabout trip via Brighton because of – you guessed it – a points failure. Instead of taking a couple of hours it required a whole morning. Fortunately, at neither time was in a hurry. I am all in favour of train travel but it does require the proper functioning of equipment.

 

I am worried that one day I will have to make an apologetic phone call to an operator saying that I cannot be where I am supposed to be at the appointed time. In fact, now I think about it, I had to do that once a year or so ago. The delay was actually caused by a car breaking down in the tunnel towards Heathrow and, although I had left a couple of hours to get to the airport hotel I was due at, I was running late. Fortunately, so was everyone else and the reason for the delay was accepted by the operator and hardly noticed by the clients.

 

I always leave plenty of time to get to the hotel/airport I am expected at as I factor in possible delays in the public transport system. If they do not occur, I arrive early but I do not mind being early and it is better to be early rather than late, If I have to wait at the lobby of the hotel, there are worse places to read the paper as I do so. Being very early is probably a bit naff, not to say naïve, but I have never quite been able to take a colleague seriously who I felt was cutting her arrival at the hotel too fine – a little close for comfort.

 

In an ideal world we would all take public transpor to get around and people would leave their cars at home. I never take my car into central London these days and rely on buses and the underground system. (Actually two thirds of it is above ground but that is a different story to be told another day.) However, we do not live in an ideal world and, frankly, will never will. It was the attempt to do so that caused communism to fail so dramatically. People preferred the occasional and admitted failures of capitalism to the unadmitted failures of communism in the end.

 

An essential part of building a successful society is learning from your mistakes and that means admitting to them in the first place. One thing I most remember from the film The Death of Stalin is the belief, expressed early in the film, that plane crashes never occur in Russia because socialism has made a perfect society where mistakes never happen. Dream on comrades. We all make mistakes and it is important in learning from them to first of all acknowledge them. Lots of fortunes were made by people who slipped up first.

 

Henry Ford is a name that springs to mind here, He had several false starts before he started he successfully started making cars. Ford, by the way, was a notorious antisemite and a far from admirable man but he had a certain knack. He is reported to have said that you can have any colour you want as long as its black. In fact, he later produced cars in several colours, reasoning that his customers would want more of a choice, but in the early days of mass-production black was both the cheapest and quickest drying type of paint available.

 

The fact is that any free society has to draw a balance between public provision and private choice. You have to wait for public transport but can drive your car whenever you want. However, you have to pay for it, both in parking, which is both difficult and expensive in central London, and because of the congestion charge imposed on car drivers or a combination of the two. The mayor of London might have introduced the congestion charge but he would never have done so without government approval.

 

As a result, as I tell clients, I never take the car into central London. This is partly because  I sometimes end a tour at a different place to where I have begun and it would be a pain to go back to collect the car; partly because it is expensive and difficult to park; and partly because I am now old enough to travel for free on public transport with my freedom pass. Maybe, by the way, we give older people too easy a ride but old people tend to vote and no politician wants to upset them – as good an argument for voting as I have ever heard. 

 

Public transport is socialism in practice, private driving is capitalistic. However, allowing or encouraging everyone to drive cars would not only cause much worse air pollution but clog up the roads more than they are already. Making everyone take public transport may seem fairer but it would always have a hint of ‘we know best’ about it and the chaos caused by the inevitable failure of the system on occasions would never work in a free society where disgruntled people could vote four or five years.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

LOOKING BACK ON 2025

First woman Archbishop of Canterbury,
the former nurse Dame Sarah Mullally

I was going to write about the aches and pains that come with old age, but I thought that people would not want to hear about my ailments and have decided to write about the advance of women in our society. I have touched on this topic in diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com - my other blog on what I do for a living. I publish it every Monday, the first day of the week, while I post this blog on the last day of the month. It is about what I think rather than what I do.

As the photo above shows, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman. So too is the Mayor of the City of London. She is not the first to have taken not his role but the third. However, she is the first to have assumed the title of Lady Mayoress instead of Lady Lord Mayor. It seems like a minor change but it probably reflects the growth of feminism in our society. Although the late Bridget Bardot said that 'feminism is not her thing' it has had an effect on what goes on.

You don't have to describe yourself as a feminist to be affected by the movement and what it stands for. The militant outlook often affect others who do not follow the fmeinist movement. No-one publicly argues in favour of automatically lower pay for women and for restricting their opportunities in order to allow men to 'support their families' or some similar trope. People generally accept the principles of gender equality these days.

Do they also accept the practice? In my business, tourist guiding, the question hardly arises because gender equality is more or less ignored rather than fought over. You work as  a tourist guide and get paid and never has it been said that because you are a woman should you be paid less. IN extended tours, the personal skew more to men, while tourist guiding (in which you work on a daily rather than weekly or two-week basis) the workforce is predominantly female.

While writing this piece, I have been half-listening to a conversation on feminism in which John Hunt was taking part. He was a racing commentator whose wife and two of his three daughters was killed by the former partner of one of these daughters. This is where male dominance of women is still prevalent - in the most old-fashioned way, in simple violence towards the female gender. Men are for the most part simply stronger than women and can inflict violence.

This has led to the growth in misogyny against women. No-one publicly supports misogyny but a few people follow the habits of it in private. Men are conditioned more to violence than women and often take out their fury on the female gender in violent ways, which if they gave themselves time to think about it, they would probably not countenance. Time to think.Men often commit atrocious acts of violence (sexual and physical) without thinking.

They often have a lifetime behind bars to regret their impulsiveness. It may have seemed satisfying to take out your violence by one act but it defines you for the rest of your life and I often wonder how many of these locked up behind bars for life would repeat their actions if they had a chance to reconsider them. Most would not, I am sure but it is too late to think again. Once the act is done, a life is lost or changed forever, and the perpetrator has to live with it.

Although I have no doubt that, If I was born a woman, I would be a feminist, speaking as a man, I have reservations about the movement and I would not wear 'I am a feminist' t-shirt. Why not? I suppose I have to think about my personal life here, I was involved in the break-up of my family some years ago and I was more or less forced out of the family home. Although I remained in touch with my children and my relationship with them is good, I feel that I missed out somehow.

There is still the assumption that the man will move out when a relationship ends, even if there are children from it and it is not his 'fault' that it has ended. I put that world in inverted commas because we now have no-fault divorce and the idea of blaming one person for a break-up has been consigned to history. However, my conscience is clear and I cannot help thinking that if he has been willing we could have made it work.

But she was not willing, so I was made to live apart from the children. I suppose she was a perfectionist and I am far from perfect, so she is on her own and I am in another relationship (and quite happy) while she is by herself (and probably also fairly happy). Things have worked out ok in my life. The kids are ok and I have come to terms with separation and family break-up but I still won't wear the t-shirt. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

    

 

MEN ARE CAR PROUD - WOMEN ARE HOUSE PROUD

My much missed but now defunct Jaguar

There is a reason broadcasts of football matches on Sky are sponsored by car companies. They know that the games are watched by men so they target their advertising at them. Of course, women are not forbidden from turning on the television if a football game is being broadcast, just as men are not obliged to. Some men are not interested in football while some women are. Advertisers aim at broad markets and they assume that it is mostly men who watch games.

As I have always said, there is a difference between a generalisation and an assumption. The title of this post  is a generalisation but it is accurate enough to provide the advertising exec with a fair assumption that the audience for a football game will be mostly male. In the same way, golf games broadcast on tv are where conservative advertising is most often seen. The audience is successful and skews to conservatism, so the advertising follows.

 

Advertisers probably spend a lot of time and research finding out about these audience make-ups and figure that, although it is not against the law for golf lovers to be socialist or otherwise left-wing, it is fairly unlikely so they can concentrate certain types of advertising at them in the hope that they will find a receptive audience. I do not pretend to be an expert on the advertising business but certain things are obvious.

 

In the same way, nothing obliges the male part of the human species to be prouder of their cars than their homes, but they usually are. Men are built for movement, while women are nest-builders. This is a ‘by and large’ observation. I am probably slightly untypical because I am writing this under a ceiling that is going to be prepared (soon I hope) in a house that has frankly been more important to me than any car I have owned.

 

I no longer own one but share a car with my partner, who uses it almost every day when she is not working while I am happy enough using public transport to get around. I still remember when my last car died, however. It was on Christmas day and we were in Ireland where Leena had been doing a bit of nest-building. We had visited friends and I – wrongly, as it turned out – assumed that the puddles we were driving through would not cripple it.

 

To cut a long story short, the racing green Jaguar (of which I was very proud) drove into a deeper puddle than we had previously encountered and I soon had to say, ‘Goodbye, Jag’. I have not owned another car since that Christmas Day and, although I miss the Jaguar, I have managed fine since then. The taxi drivers hate him but our mayor in London is encouraging the use of public transport and bicycles to get around.

 

I have noticed the younger generation is more concerned with getting a mortgage than a car these days and often do not even bother to learn to drive until that is sorted. I have a niece who is learning to drive but is not bothered with learning to do so in a manual car and is quite happy to do so in an automatic, even if it gives her a restricted licence. Her reckoning is that most cars these days are autos so why bother with a licence for a manual change car?

 

In the USA, they do not even have a distinction between licences as most cars are autos and ‘stick shift’ cars are in the minority. Those who want to drive ‘stick’ have to learn how to do so and are not tested on their competence. You hear horror stories about Americans, used to autos at home, who cannot adjust to driving manuals. Personally, I always liked driving a car with a gearstick but drive an auto now without complaint.

 

It gives me an illusion of control, and makes me feel that I am more in charge of the car than it is of me. Women probably do not bother with such considerations and happily drive automatics if they are available. Yet, they are less likely to tolerate a badly maintained house than they are a car. It is a rite of passage to own your own home that usually comes after marriage. 

 

That is another thing. A man is often expected to provide for his wife and this will often mean buying a house which she will turn into a home. In these days of increasing divorce, a man may move out of this home if the marriage ends (as I had to do). He may end up in a flat with a car, the car taking up a large part of his income while the former wife and children stay in the house. The man is still expected to move out, even if he did not desire a break-up.

 

This has always seemed unjust to me. Another thing I say is that there are basically only three things you can give your children. These are time, money and love. Love – we take that for granted. Money – well. That is what the CSA was set up to supervise. What people forget about is time spent with your children. In many ways, this is the most important thing. Like it or not kids judge their parents on how much time they spend with them.

 

All too often a disappearing dad rides off into the sunset and does not see his children again. This admittedly happens less often these days but it still happens too much for comfort. Virtually any child will tell you that, even if they are not together, they would like to have a relationship with both parents. They may also want the couple to bury their differences and stay together - but that is another story.

 

We are getting worse at marriage but better at divorce these days. (We have had plenty of practice.) Yet, the man is still expected to move out and the children to stay with their mother. This may be the result of previous arrangements but it probably reflects a deeper habit in which men tend to move, while women stay still. Even if they have not ended the relationship, men are expected to move on and out when it does so.

 

That does not alter the fundamental truth in our society – houses start increasing in price as soon as you get the keys to the front door. Cars, on the other hand, tend to go down in value once you get your hands on the keys. That, curiously, does not affect how much men love their cars. No matter how smart they are with money, a good car is somehow seen as the mark of a successful man.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

SPEAKING VERSUS SINGING

Bow ties are usually worn by men at Wexford Opera

As I have previously said, I like to go to see a play and a performance every week. By performance I mean a live event of some kind – a play, an opera, even a football match. This week I have been going to the Wexford opera festival every night so I have been seeing plenty of performances. I have not seen many films, apart from on Netflix, and many of these have been of variable quality.

 

The operas have been of a high standard. As far as I can tell (which is not very far) the singing has been up to scratch and the stagings have been adventurous and original. I was not entirely convinced y how the Spanish civil war roped into Verdi’s Il Trouvere, which is the original Italian version of Il Troubadore and took place long before the war had begun. Verdi rewrote the opera for a French audience and had died before the war in Spain had begun.

 

Yesterday we went to Deidamia, Handel’s take of the start of the Trojan war with Achilles in a Mediterranean island where, disguised as a woman, where he falls in love with the princess there. I was so used to the Achilles-Patroclus story that I found it difficult to adjust to a new trans version, but it gave the legend a new slant at least. He is later uncovered as a man by Odysseus when he chooses some weapons instead of female trinkets.

 

Handel wrote quite a few operas in Italian, having been trained in it before he became a naturalised British citizen in 1717. In those days we welcomed people like Marx and Handel who were unwelcome or could not make a living in their native Germany. (Sadly, no longer.) We think of him as a composer of religious works like his Messiah or Water Music but he had written a lot of operas before he turned his hand to more sacred subjects.

 

Wexford has a tradition of reviving ‘lost’ operas, so we see a lot of works that we would not in otherwise more traditional settings. I admire them for it and, mainly because my partner loves opera, we make a point of going there in late October when the tourist season has ended and they have their annual opera festival. They even encourage (but do not enforce) the wearing of bow ties and dinner jackets for men attending the main theatre.  

 

I have kept my house in London, which is the centre of the British tourist business and, when I am not working, often enjoy the theatre in the capital. London is one of the great cities in the world for theatre and I usually go to see a spoken word production, just occasionally an operatic one. Put simply, I prefer plays to operas, the spoken word to the sung aria. It is not something I am particularly proud of – it is just my preference.

 

Part of this is related to price. Opera tickets are expensive, whereas I manage to get a theatre seat of about £20-30, by using such things as the TodayTix app and restricting myself to the cheaper seats. I even make my decision occasionally based onprice, not going to The Lady from the Sea, but instead to Clarkston, a gay love story of dubious quality simply because the seats were cheper. (I may revise this decision when I get back to London.)

 

I sometimes go simply because I am curious about the theatre. I went to a matinee of Ragdoll, a play inspired by – bit not officially about - the Patty Hearst story, where she became a participant in robbing banks with the Symbionise Liberation Army, who had kidnapped and raped her. I learned that many of the followers of Charles Manson came from privileged backgrounds and been seduced by the certainty to ‘liberators’ like Manson.

 

Both Clarkston and Ragdoll were short plays without intervals, as was Mary Page Marlowe, about a fictitious American woman which was written by the actor Tracey Letts and starred Susan Sarandon and Andrea Risborough as the woman at different stages of her life. I will not deny that it was the star power of the actors and writer that drew me to the play. I am, when all is said and done, as much a star-fucker as anyone else.

 

I could not name many figures in the world of opera – a few singers like Willard White and Maria Callas, who are as much stars as their theatrical counterparts. Many opera goers will be as aware of the abilities of the performers and the intricacies of the plots as their theatre going equivalents, if not more so. Opera is almost made for the anorak tendency of some fans to get to know the ins and outs of the performers.

 

Going to the theatre, however, is probably a more results-based experience than the opera, where the high price of tickets coupled with the sense of occasion it generates, is more likely to result in a better reception for a traditional version than it possibly merits. For all the reputation of opera goers for expressing their disapproval, lots of this must come from the breaking of tradition at the opera, which is probably less tolerated than at the theatre.

 

Reinterpretation of, for example, Shakespeare is almost compulsory these days, leading to some eccentricities on the part of directors keen to reinterpret the bard in their own way. In the conservative world of the opera, you mess with tradition at your peril, as some directors have found out to their cost. Going to the theatre is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, while going to the opera is related to the occasion. This is why I prefer theatre to opera.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspt.com

TAKING PILLS EVERY DAY

Just some of my daily pills intake

What is the difference between youth and old age? I had been happy enough to consider myself middle-aged until a recent visit to the doctor who had given me a series of pills I had to take very day. These are statins and Metformin, tablets for diabetes, which both my mother and grandmother suffered from and so it is hardly a surprise that I have it too. Every night and morning I have to remember to take my pills.

No longer can I point out the tablets that the average male and female take over the course of a lifetime with that mixture of scorn and dismissal as I now have to take daily pills. I can no longer pty the man I overheard who had to get up every two hours in the night to pee. I have to do the same thing myself these days as my bladder is no longer strong enough to survive a night in bed without a visit to the loo. No wonder people want a private bathroom when they book a hotel room. Walking across the corridor does not seem that like a minor inconvenience when you have to do it in the middle of the night.

 

Add to the daily tablets I have to take the occasional course of antibiotics for a bladder infection and you have quite a few pills that have to be taken every day. This, I have belatedly discovered, is the real difference between youth and old age: your body is slowly but surely declining in its ability to ward off disease.

 

Leonardo di Caprio has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, although he has not settled down to start a family yet and is still going out with younger women, these days half his age. He says that he still feels like he is thirty rather than fifty. God luck to him but sooner or later old age will catch up with him and he will have to get up in the night (if he does not do so already) and start taking the tablets to ward off the effects of old age.

What did Mark Twain say? Only two things in life are inevitable – death and taxes. There is no point in trying to avoid either of them, the first because it comes to us all and the second because sooner or later the Inland Revenue (what Americans call the IRS) will catch up with you eventually. Better to pay your share and have a good moan. Almost everyone moans about taxes because we take the result for granted but disparage the means of collection.

 

Still, I am able to work, to walk and to drive – three of the most important things to me. I rarely use the car and am certainly not going to return to driving guiding, which is simply too much hard work and expense for the reward. I often take people around on public transport and hardly ever bring the car into central London, the cost of parking and congestion charge being too high. I also get free public transport so why not take advantage of it?

 

I am blessed in finding my work enjoyable and interesting and have managed to adapt my career gradually to my aging and failing body. My mind, however, remains sharp. Although I forget names of people and words occasionally, they usually come back to me, so I have decided to continue to work until, as I said to a colleague only the other day, “I drop”. Not that I have any plans to do so anytime soon. That is one decision that is out of my hands. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com