Advent #1

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, The C-Word

That Was The Year That Was (if you’ll excuse me going a bit Millicent Martin-y just for a moment). An unsettling one, full of uncertainty, dominated, like 2020, by Brexit and by Coronavirus. I have to admit I’m not really sure of the current state of either (although I know you can’t get a jab against Brexit).

Less globally, it was the year I turned fifty, my Dad turned eighty, and my Aunt turned… er, turned out, um, also to have a milestone birthday. (Phew.)

Not that 2021 is all done with yet, we’re only eleven-twelfths of the way through (or 91.67% if you’re not vulgar enough for fractions). This time last week we seemed to be heading towards a ‘normal’ Christmas – and then suddenly, out of nowhere, up pops a new Covid variant!

I’m sure there are perfectly valid scientific reasons for naming it after one of the Transformers but frankly, whatever you call it it’s put a bit of a damper on things. If nothing else it shows that, even this close to Christmas and as last year made very clear, there’s still plenty of time for the Government to channel the spirit of Margo Leadbetter and declare that Christmas is Cancelled.

Unless or until that happens though, I guess we stick to plan A and even I, unprepared and humbuggy as I am, felt a little tingle of excitement when I turned over the calendar this morning to discover, as indeed I had suspected, that it is December 1st again. So here we are, and here we go, Christmas is on the way…

…which will, of course, be my fifty-first Christmas, my Dad’s eighty-first, and my Aunt’s… er… and my Aunt’s, um… and my Aunt’s probably looking forward to it as well!!

The (Wrong) Shape of Things to Come

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1980s

10        RUN BLOG

Sir Clive Sinclair has died.

For a long time he was simply ‘the computer guy’.  I once caught sight of a ZX80, and when I started secondary school in 1982 the computer room (clearly a hastily-converted stationary cupboard) boasted a ZX81 – but it was with the Spectrum that Sinclair really struck gold.

My brother got one for Christmas 1983. I hasten to add he paid a lot of it himself, but whether it was funded by bruv, by Mum & Dad, or by Santa (or by a mix of all four) what it demonstrates is that the Spectrum made computers affordable.

True, its infamous rubber keys didn’t become the industry standard (they were the subject of much derision even at the time) but suddenly computers weren’t huge air-controlled caverns inhabited by white-coated technicians wielding punch cards and examining tickertape – nor even the sleeker-but-still-bulky tape-spool cabinets so beloved of 1970s telefantasy shows. Now a computer was a small, self-contained plastic box that you could carry with one hand, no longer exclusive to heavily-financed government organisations and multinational conglomerates, but available to have in your sitting room.

Part of its genius, and presumably part of its affordability, was that the screen was your TV and you loaded games with a bog-standard cassette recorder. No heavily-priced monitor screens or separately-purchased disc drives, you just bought the computer and you were good to go.

There was no internet then of course, not even a spreadsheet package (I love a spreadsheet) and despite claims of it being suited to all sorts of worthy educational purposes it’s entirely possibly even the manufacturer thought it would only be used for playing games – but even so, with one invention a whole generation was suddenly introduced to the concepts of home computing and gaming. One small step…

That would have been quite the legacy – and for a long time, as business boomed, as share prices rose, as the Knighthood was awarded, Sir Clive’s place in history seemed assured.

20        GOTO 1985

Maybe it was ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. Maybe when people keep telling you how visionary you are, you begin to believe it. I once read an interview with David Nobbs who said that, after a huge success you can get anything commissioned. That’s how he followed up the incredibly popular, fondly-remembered, oft-repeated classic The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-1979) with the totally-forgotten The Sun Trap (1980). Similarly, post-Spectrum I expect Sir Clive found it very easy to get investment for his next exciting project.

That next project, of course, was the C5…

We look at it, and laugh, and see instantly that nobody would ever want to be sat 12 inches off the road, in the gutter, with traffic whizzing past. It looks uncomfortable, and dangerous, and impractical.

And yet for all the scorn heaped on the C5, both at the time and whenever it’s been mentioned ever since, I can’t help but see it as coming from a need to reduce traffic flow, and a belief that electric vehicles were the way forward. Nowadays, those two ideas are generally accepted – albeit we still don’t see the C5 as being the solution.

So Sir Clive gave us the home computer, affordable and practical, but too soon to be used for anything but games; and the C5, to tackle issues with congestion and motoring. Maybe he wasn’t just ahead of his time, he was crucially TOO far ahead – especially with the poor C5, which at the time was the wrong answer to a question nobody was asking anyway.

For all that, I never saw him pop up on an 80s nostalgia show to bitterly complain about his lot – and I was pleased to see that his obituary reported that he was still inventing right up to the end. I very much like the image of a man not striving for fame and fortune, but simply driven by the need to invent, the urge to improve and innovate – a man who could “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”

RIP Sir Clive

30        END

Match of the Day

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, 1980s

To heavily paraphrase Douglas Adams’ philosophers, football may OR MAY NOT be coming home.

I’m not a football fan (don’t turn away in disgust if you are, there’s a “but” coming). It’s not due to any childhood trauma, I certainly wasn’t scarred for life by being picked last in PE. Quite the reverse. When you’re picked last, as long as you end the lesson upright and without having injured yourself, you’ve done all that was expected of you – whereas if you’re picked first, I’m assuming there’s huge pressure to actually score some goals or something.

The first major football event I can recall is the 1978 World Cup, but only because it was the first time Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on TV (presumably up against some big match on ‘the other side’). The BBC coverage that year had a catchy theme tune which was available, in a general sense, at all good record stockists; and available, in a much more specific sense, at my grandparents’ house where my brother and I proceeded to play the life out of it one holiday.

The 1982 World Cup holds only the memory of getting a free sticker album (love a sticker album); and I think the same was true of 1986, although the main thing I remember is feeling so ill one evening that I was unable to summon up the energy to get off the sofa, and sat (or rather, lay) through an entire match in which the French team, in yellow and blue, ran rings around… well, whoever they were playing.

Having established my woeful credentials, then, and to recap, I’m not a football fan.

BUT (!) I accept that it does unquestionably have a unifying effect. Yes of course there are some idiots – just as soccer in the 1980s threatened to be terminally tarred with the hooligan brush because of a tiny minority who were in it for the violence, so now there’s a tiny minority booing other teams and clearly just in it for the cowardly and anonymous xenophobia.

Away from that idiot faction though, it brings people together in some inexplicable way, uniting vastly disparate people in a common cause. Maybe if you’re a ‘proper’, ‘breathe it, sleep it, live it’ sort of fan, you may not be so pleased about that? Do they resent the sudden influx of new, ‘fairweather’ fans?

I hope it’s not like that – I like to think any new converts are welcomed with open arms, in a ‘the more the merrier’ sort of spirit. And it delights me that it’s still possible for our old friend television to get twenty-three million people watching and experiencing the same thing at the same time.

On the other hand, what really annoys me are the people who don’t like it but who feel the need to moan about it. Whenever the Olympics or the World Cup or any major event takes up a huge amount of airtime, there are always people who seem surprised that it’s happening, and object to it being on their TVs. I can’t abide people so determined to ruin the enjoyment of others, just because they don’t like something. Hopefully, on this occasion, even ‘that sort’ might accept, just this once, that England being in the final is a little bit special.

And, again hopefully it’ll be a good game. Some matches have a good result but are very dull; while others, regardless of the outcome, make for a satisfying and entertaining watch. I’ve never really thought about it until now but I guess if you’re a real football fanatic you’ll happily rewatch old games, even when you’ve seen them before. Personally I think that’s a bit silly (says he, sitting down to watch 1967’s Tomb of the Cybermen for a sixth time) but if that’s what you’re into, I hope this final meets that expectation, of being not just exciting tomorrow but a thrill to relive for years to come.

After all, that’s what it’s all about really isn’t it, playing a good game. It’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part.

Although… it would be nice to win, wouldn’t it!

Browser History

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Confused

As Feargal Sharkey once said (well, almost) a good book these days is hard to find.

No, on second thoughts let me immediately retract that, it’s not. (Yeah, get a grip Sharkey!). There are plenty of good books out there. My problem isn’t the books. It’s the finding.

I’m not (and this doesn’t just apply to books) a natural shopper. I shop like the SAS. That is to say I get in, get the job done, and get out again as soon as possible; I don’t mean I break in through the window. So, for example, I find it very difficult to go into a bookshop and simply amble around browsing. Like going to a restaurant and being handed a menu the size of a telephone directory, it’s too much choice. Just where do you start?!

Obviously it’s easier if you’re really into a specific author, or a particular series of books. As a kid I’m certain I read a lot of Famous Fives and Secret Sevens (although I can’t remember a thing about any of them now) and also a lot of books about a character called ‘Doctor Who’ which were so popular in my childhood I’m often surprised nobody has thought of adapting them for the small screen.

As an adult, however, much more difficult. I’ve only ever bought two books ‘on impulse’ – The Colour of Magic (which probably lured me in with some sort of ‘the next big thing after Hitch-Hikers Guide’ blurb on the cover); and They Came from SW19, which I bought entirely on the strength of the title.

But, those two exceptions-that-prove-the-rule notwithstanding, and to recap, I’m no good at browsing… which has presented a problem now that I’ve come to the end of what has for a very long time been a very large ‘To Read’ pile. The penultimate entry was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which, although it has rather too many chapters where characters with strange names sit around telling us about all the exciting things that are happening just ‘off screen’ nevertheless builds to a really compelling climax. And the very last of the pile is Wiped! It’s a book all about the lost episodes of Doctor Who (turns out somebody made a TV show of it after all, who knew) so in other words a bit of a weepy. Especially when the last surviving copies of The Massacre and The Myth Makers are blown up in the late-nineties.

In talking about books, of course, there’s an expectation to be aware of the underlying themes, on what the story has to say about the human condition, on what (and sometimes in apparent defiance of the title or the blurb) on what the book is actually about; but I don’t think I ever pick up on that stuff. I mean, it’s possible that Wiped! has something to say about nihilism and the ineffable resilience of the human spirit, but if so it’s entirely passed me by.

This probably accounts for my lack of browsing confidence, in other words I feel dreadfully underqualified; and is in turn probably a niggling echo from my A-Level English course. One of the books there was a play called Translations which the entire class unanimously pronounced as by far the dullest and least inspiring of the texts on offer. But our lecturer, who I think it only fair to say was in a better position to judge than we were, considered it one of the very best of the bunch – and it struck me then that perhaps I was naively falling into the laypersons’ trap of judging the text based on the actual words.

Amateur psychology aside though, and whether we’re talking about the stuff between the lines or just the lines themselves, I have found myself running out of things to read. There have been several helpful suggestions from Facebook, and the crisis has for the moment been averted – I’ve borrowed The Thursday Murder Club from Mum and Dad (which, as a hugely-successful debut novel, serves both as an inspiration and an irritation to any would-be author.)

After that… maybe it’s time for a new chapter.

Although don’t read too much into that!

The A-Z of Star Wars

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in TV

Stop me if you’ve heard this one but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

I’ve been watching the Star Wars films. Or re-watching rather, since I’ve seen them all before. Especially the first one. By 1982, even in the pre-video era I’d managed to see it half a dozen times – although I will admit that all these years later (and at the risk of going a bit Barbara Dickson) I don’t recall the dates and places of the six occasions.

I’ve casually referred to “the first one” but that can be open to interpretation. Just as everybody knows (s)he’s not actually called Doctor Who even if they’re never watched a single episode, everyone seems to knows there’s something odd about the numbering of the Star Wars films. Should they be watched in the same order in which they were made, starting with 1977’s Chapter IV? Or in chapter order, beginning with the 1999-2005 trilogy, and then going back to the seventies…?

It’s such a knotty problem that this time around I’ve abandoned numbers altogether, in favour of alphabetical order. And the resulting sequence, I have to say, is pleasingly neat. Granted it only works if you refer to the original film as A New Hope, which naturally I’ve spent forty years stubbornly refusing to do – but with that sacrifice made, the result is three sets of three films, each of which consists of one each from the original, prequel, and sequel trilogies. If you see what I mean.

OK, this is what I mean:

Attack of the Clones (prequel)

Empire Strikes Back, The (original)

Force Awakens, The (sequel)

Followed by:-

Last Jedi, The (sequel)

New Hope, A (Original, The)

Phantom Menace, The (prequel)

And rounding things off nicely, the last batch contains the final film from each trilogy AND in release order. Namely:

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Rise of Skywalker, The (2019)

It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe the Star Wars movie series as one hugely enjoyable film followed by an even better sequel followed by seven failed attempts to be that good again. More charitably (or maybe I’m just easily pleased) there’s only two stinkers in my book, the worst of which is Attack of the Clones – so it’s quite good to have got that one out of the way first, after which there are six whole films before the other turkey waddles into view.

Revenge of the Sith (the aforementioned (other) turkey) is fairly awful but has the edge over Attack of the Clones, which commits the even worse sin of being, in large part, dull. True, that’s damning Revenge with faint praise but frankly it’s no more than it deserves.

Which is a shame, because somewhere there’s a much better version of that film. With the evil Galactic Empire and the iconic Darth Vader of the original trilogy being born, it’s crying out to be a nerve-wracking, heart-wrenching, “the lamps are going out all over Europe” sort of a movie.

Then there’s Padme, female lead of the two previous films, who gets to do little more than look upset and die in childbirth. Surely it would have given her more agency, and the film some much-needed tension, to have her fleeing with her children, desperate to escape the gathering evil before the borders close. (I realise suddenly that I’m basically suggesting George Lucas should have ripped off the last half-hour of The Sound of Music.)

Even the semi-mythical fight beside a volcano between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which we’d been imagining since the late-seventies, is presented as a ludicrous, cartoony sequence that goes on way too long and provides nothing more substantial than some employment for a team of CGI artists.

But never mind about all that. At the moment I’m five films in, and luxuriating in the afterglow of Star W— of A New Hope. So there’s another couple of belters yet before I need to worry about Revenge of the Sith. That’s in the future.

Or at least, as much in the future as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” can be…

The Royal Rumble

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Little Bit Of Politics

Quick disclaimer: it’s NOT about the Wrestling Event.

Although… Over-hyped, American, trash-talking, a couple of knockout blows …

I refer, of course, to “The Interview” from last Sunday (America), last Monday (UK), and every day this past week (the papers, the news, the Jeremy Vine show, etc).

To be honest I don’t have a problem with the Sussexes, even if it is a bit odd to withdraw from public life, only for virtually your first action to be a sensational and very public ‘tell-all’ (but not really) interview. Perhaps it’s the understandable appeal, if you think you’ve been wronged or mistreated, of wanting to get out your side of the story.

At the same time, and Harry especially would know this, it’s slightly unfair when you know that ‘the other side’ is not in a position to respond in kind. The Royals rarely, and the Monarch almost never, give candid and detailed interviews – so Oprah could have produced any number of scoops and allegations and wild claims (“…and at least two of the Queen’s ladies in waiting are vampires…”) with the certainty that there was no real mechanism for a right of reply.

OK, there were about sixty words issued from t’Palace, but I don’t view that as a rebuttal or a detailed counter. (If the defence counsel at my trial only submitted sixty words against the prosecution, I’d be cursing my lawyers all the way to the electric chair). We were clearly never going to get Prince Charles on Tuesday morning’s Today program, or the Queen Zoom-ing in to speak to Emily Maitlis on Newsnight.

So, although on the one hand they are murky waters to dip your toe into (I guess that should have been, on the one foot), on the other hand/foot it’s very easy to make claims of racism – because, even where there is a right of reply, any defence always sounds over-defensive, in a “no smoke without fire” kind of way.

Of course social media, never inclined to a balanced and considered debate of a topic when a polarising, ludicrous over-reaction is available, was very quick to point out that the entire fabric of English society is founded on racism, slavery, empire, colonialism, etc.

All of which is almost certainly true, but at the risk of sounding heartless, long enough ago now that it doesn’t actually impact in any actual way on anybody’s actual life. I mean, go back far enough and the Romans invaded England, but I don’t spend any time cursing the Italians for inflicting sanitation, cheese, and a Monty Python routine on us.

Besides, if we’re really going to tear down anything with a (to modern eyes) unacceptable history, let’s start with the oldest cases and work forwards. When the campaign to get those slave-built pyramids demolished has succeeded, let me know and then we’ll talk.

Slightly more worrying, in a niggling, tickly kind of way, are the cries to abolish the Monarchy. It’s often followed by pointing out the cost of the Royals – but while I agree that the civil list contains rather too many people (arguably the only thing the Queen got wrong was having four children – sticking with just the obligatory H & S would have avoided A LOT of problems) chucking the baby out with the bathwater is not the solution.

When (brace yourselves, I’m going to say it) when the Queen dies, it would only take some Farage-type chancer to stir things up, so that suddenly (despite 99% of the population never spending any time worrying about it) we’re all obliged to have an opinion. If you thought Brexit was bad, can you imagine the Monarchy Referendum…?

Many countries replace their Royals with a President, so an elected rather than a hereditary seat of power alongside the Prime Minister. For some time now, finding a suitable candidate for Prime Minister has proven a tall order – just imagine having to find a President too!

So maybe the best argument for the Monarchy is ‘better the Devil you know.’ At least with the Royals we know what we’re getting.

And for that matter, with the next three successions, who!

The “Greats” of TV

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in TV

So far this year, my wife and I have done it every Sunday night.

It lasts about an hour, there’s a lot of intense, hands-on action, often a few tears, and when things get really hot, bits can suddenly snap right off.

It’s into its fourth season now, so it can’t be just the two of us who are avid viewers of The Great Pottery Throw Down. If you’ve NOT seen it, it’s basically, and admittedly with a sense of diminishing returns, yet another answer (after “what about sewing?”) to the question, “What else can we do with the Great British Bake Off format?”

I don’t have the actual stat’s to hand, but I’d guess the UK has more home bakers than it does home potters; which probably explain why, whereas new seasons of Bake Off are hyped up weeks in advance, the fourth batch of potters slipped quietly onto our January screens with barely a mention.

Mind you, and at the risk of sounding like an Adam Ant song, I don’t bake, don’t sew, don’t pot – but what I do do, is I enjoy watching the Bake Off, the Sewing Bee and (to bring us back to where we started) the Pottery Throw Down.

There aren’t many things Mrs C and I watch together, due to our wildly differing tastes. She likes things that are too scary and too sweary for me; and I like things that have too many cute robots in them for her – but the Baking ‘n’ Sewing ‘n’ Pottery competitions are one show (erm, three shows) that we both enjoy.

The things they come up with are often impressive, and for Mrs C the Sewing Bee has an  additional frisson in that she regularly drools over arty tracking shots of upmarket sewing machines. But, you know, I don’t think the main draw of these shows is seeing a scale model of the Eiffel tower made entirely out of three different sorts of éclair/an old duvet cover/twenty kilos of terracotta. The real appeal is the people themselves.

I was going to say contestants, which of course they are, but that doesn’t seem quite the right word. We very quickly get to know them, and as each series rolls on, and the numbers dwindle, we genuinely care. So when, for example, this year’s first ‘potter of the week’ was chosen she was visibly moved. Evidently she knew her stuff, and without wishing to be rude she looked old enough that she may have been ‘at it’ for thirty plus years – but still, this was probably the first time a professional had said, point blank, you’ve done something really impressive there.

Just as Bake Off has its Hollywood Handshake, so there’s an unofficial badge of honour in the pottery too. Here it’s judge Keith Brymer Jones, who is regularly moved to tears by what he sees. Not in a “what the hell have you done with that lovely clay, get your hands off my kiln” sort of way – but by his almost tangible passion for ceramics, combined with suddenly seeing something unexpected. Sometimes it’s a clearly outstanding piece of work, but just as often it’s somebody’s wholehearted commitment to trying something new or ambitious, and with neither shame or embarrassment he’s in tears, the ‘trickle down’ effect meaning that it moves the contestant too (and on occasion even this stone-hearted audience).

Bake Off (without which…) can be a life-changing experience for the winner, or at the very least an experience that comes with a book deal and a TV slot. There isn’t the same sort of ‘knock-on effect’ for the home potters, unless TV nostalgia becomes so potent that they bring back the Interlude, so these people really are just doing it for the love.

Whether it’s a better show for that, it’s hard to say, but I do feel a bit sorry for it tucked away at the ass end of the weekend schedule. All these shows have something to recommend them, and Bake Off and Sewing Bee and Pottery Throw Down have all done very well.

But, of course, there can one be one winner. And that winner is…

Forming a Disorderly Queue

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Brexit, Little Bit Of Politics, The C-Word

I wouldn’t normally feel moved to stick up for a feckless, disingenuous chancer. But…

Having unexpectedly found myself in support of Mr Trump last time (well sort of) this week I feel moved to compliment Boris Johnson (well sort of). Not for anything he’s done, things haven’t taken quite as extraordinary a turn as that – but for something he hasn’t done.

That is to say, where we might have expected a misjudged, misplaced, “good old UK/hurrah for Brexit” bit of bragging, he hasn’t made any comment on the EU vaccine row which has variously grumbled, outraged and shocked its way through this week’s news.

I for one can’t remember having as many conversations about drugs as I have this week, not since Zammo’s fall from grace in the mid-80s, but what’s I’ve found especially maddening is the attempt, maybe by the media, maybe by the EU itself filtered through the media, to spin the ‘AstraZeneca EU under-delivery’ debacle into a ‘UK versus EU’ story instead.

At least based on the news reports, you’d be forgiven for thinking Boris had personally blockaded UK shipments headed for the continent. Whereas in fact it’s a business, making a business decision, and deciding NOT to use UK-produced vaccines to top up the lower-than-hoped supply levels from its various plants within the EU. A decision entirely made by AstraZeneca, about an agreement solely with the EU, and so by definition nothing to do with the UK government whatsoever.

Which ought to have been it, really. Until (in a bizarre example of just the sort of arrogant heavy-handedness which ardent Brexiteers used to claim happened all the time (but never actually did)) the EU proceeded to make claim after claim that supplies must be diverted from the UK, that EU requirements must be first priority, and even that they had a contract explicitly saying this must be so.

Fired up with their own indignation, the EU then went too far, when health commissioner Stella Kyriakides rejected ‘first come, first served’ as an acceptable business practice – instantly uniting Brexiteers and Remainers, because if there’s one thing the people of the UK can agree on it’s that we all absolutely respect the principle of the queue.

At the same time, the commissioner seemed to be asserting that ‘might has right’ is acceptable, on the grounds that the EU is 27 countries, and is therefore bigger and more important. Given the choice between that and ‘first come, first served’ I know which feels the less morally dubious.

The EU followed up this public relations triumph by confidently publishing their watertight advanced purchase agreement… which unfortunately demonstrated (despite the bold, but misguided, description of the clause as “crystal clear” by President von der Leyen) that it didn’t actually say what they had been telling us all week it did.

Most shocking of all perhaps (allowing for the fact that I’ve put my bargepole aside so am not even going near the whole Northern Ireland contretemps) is that, with no ill-advised gloating from Boris, and with other ministers making conciliatory comments, it has made our lot look (temporarily I’m sure) like actual grown-ups, with ethics and integrity. (Even, though it pains me to say so, even Michael Gove.)

What’s slipped through the cracks though, amidst all the arguing over who has and hasn’t got how much of which vaccine yet, is that it doesn’t really matter. If by ‘getting back to normal’ we mean an end to restrictions; being able to travel; being able to welcome overseas tourists back to the UK – if we mean getting back to (awkward phrase in the circumstances) free movement, that depends on everyone being vaccinated everywhere.

Of course every government wants to get its own population done as soon as possible (that is, to be fair, sort of their job); but they must know that to genuinely return to where we were, it requires all countries to do the same. So other than getting a headline or two, being the first country to be ‘fully vaccinated’ (whatever that might actually turn out to mean) is a slightly empty achievement.

Tired old phrase, but we are all in it together. Still.

An Uncomfortable Silence

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Little Bit Of Politics, Trump

I wouldn’t normally feel moved to stick up for an arrogant, misogynistic, would-be dictator. But…

Originally I had a few thoughts to vent on poor, hard done by Ming the Merciless, of Flash (A-Ah!) fame, who’s recently been made the subject of a ‘warning’ to anybody watching the film. But once again our old friend Mr Trump, around who events always move so quickly, has overtaken me – although, serendipitously, I was able to leave my above opening sentence untouched.

I wouldn’t want anybody to panic, considering Mr Trump’s extraordinary behaviour in recent weeks – this is absolutely not a case of, to misquote, “I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.” (For anybody keeping score, that’s now three would-be dictators I’ve got in before the 150 word mark, three).

In regard to that, I suspect that when/if it comes to any actual legal proceedings, it will be impossible to prove a direct causal link between Trump’s comments and demonstrators storming the Capitol. Nevertheless, although he’s well-practiced at doing the faux-innocent “it wasn’t me!”/plausible denial kind of thing, clearly there is a connection; and even if he didn’t quite envisage how it would play out, or the extent to which it would escalate, he doesn’t seem to have been unduly bothered. Still maintaining his absurd “stolen election” line, he is perfectly happy to throw America’s constitution, electoral system, and global reputation under a bus if it gets him what he wants.

Regardless of that, though, where I find myself unexpectedly troubled, and unexpectedly agreeing with Angela Merkel, is in Mr Trump’s being banned from Twitter (which, given how much use he made of it, and how energised and active a tool it was for him, is sort of like getting him neutered).

By all means highlight factual inaccuracies; certainly, have some kind of ‘time out’ policy. I wouldn’t mind if they want to put him on the naughty step for a week to think about what he’s done. (Although to be fair, he’d probably spend the whole week thinking how brilliantly he’s done, and what a great guy he is.) But to permanently ban him, that sets a dangerous precedent (even if he is a dangerous President (I’m sorry)).

To my mind, letting (or forcing) Twitter, and its big brother Facebook, and all the rest, decide this stuff is absolutely the wrong way around. It’s like David Cameron complaining about Jimmy Carr, whose wily accountant had helped him avoid tax. Surely, rather than complain about the person exploiting the loophole, Cameron should have been complaining about the loophole? (Or even, given that he was, you know, Prime Minister, closing the loophole!)

Similarly, if “we” think there are things that should not be (allowed) on social media, make an actual law against it. Don’t have Twitter police it, leave that to, erm, the police.

It probably doesn’t seem that important given that it’s Trump – many of us won’t miss his distinctive brand of egocentric SHOUTY offensiveness. But as ever he’s an unnuanced example of something that’s in fact much less black & white.

I’m not suggesting Joe Biden is going to be as controversial as Trump, goodness knows that would take some doing. But, for example, during the 1980s there was some sympathy towards the IRA in the USA, certainly far more than on the UK mainland. It’s a stretch to picture Mrs Thatcher on Twitter, but if she had been, one can easily imagine very hard, uncompromising posts from her about the IRA. Would Twitter, a US-based organisation, have banned her because of them?

Freedom of Speech is a luxury we all enjoy, often treating it as an automatic thing, if we even bother to think about it at all. But it comes with the flipside that people have to be free to say things we don’t like. We have to (a) accept that; but (b) given that in every day experience most people seem to be mostly good most of the time, hope that anything truly ‘unacceptable’ will be scorned and objected to BY other people. NOT by Twitter, etc slapping it down and deeming it so.

Although obviously, that’s just my opinion. You’re free to disagree.

Advent #24

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas

In the early-90s, during our “hilarious flatshare comedy” period, the tradition on the last working day before Christmas, was that I would pick up my brother from Launceston (well, from the Westgate Inn).
And there every year we’d meet the husband of bruv’s secretary (whose name my memory is failing to provide, although I’m sure my brother could). It became a ritual marking the arrival of Christmas, to share a drink with him, to shake hands and wish each other a Merry Christmas.
Every element of that, three households in one car, a pub serving drinks, meeting strangers, brief physical contact, is out this year. What a lot of us will miss probably isn’t the chance to show off a perfectly-cooked dinner or a militarily-polished house, but simple interaction with people, from almost-strangers in the street, to friends and family.
In looking back I’m reassured that, as they say, this too will pass. My Grandparents, for example, probably didn’t relish 1977’s first Christmas away from home and family – but they got through it. For that matter, Christmas 1976, up in t’frozen North, was possibly tough on Dad and Mum, and (older) brother too.
I was 5 so the only trauma I suffered from ‘The Big Move’ to Carlisle was not being able to immediately find where the Ready Brek had been packed – but that was August, by December I probably couldn’t remember ever having lived anywhere else. Bruv, on the other hand, based on the photos of him pedalling his blue truck around St Keverne, may have recalled bigger and busier Christmasses. But they got through that too.
Hopefully, 12 months from now, we’ll all be able to look back and think, blimey Christmas 2020 was rough.
I remain oddly hopeful that we’ll get through it.