Category: Musings

The New Year’s Day walk

A walk in two continents.

For many years it’s been traditional for me and the family to take a walk on New Year’s Day.  But this time, without me, my wife and family back in the UK decided to go to Stonehenge for a walk, on a cold crisp day.

Why ‘back in the UK’? Because I was in Sharjah, one of the seven emirates in the UAE.

When here I always stay in one of the original hotels of the country, built on the edge of the corniche.  As the day was warm and bright I decided to vary my walk.

Instead of going some 5kms round the lagoon, I made my way towards the area where the shops are mostly run by Indian people. For many years their influence has been very strong, indeed the rupee was used as currency until not long ago.

Arab dhow

It didn’t take long to leave the main area that is regularly seen and head down towards the old port where the Dhows are moored. There is an ancient feel to this area, and the water front is full of activity.

There was one man who had been unloading coal from his boat onto the quay side. You could hardly see his features until he smiled. All along there were people onboard their various craft, none of which really looked seaworthy, but which obviously make a regular and long journey to India.

The pathway was broken, and the occasional cat appeared from a rubbish bin. I made my way past the open market where animals are sold. Nothing is hidden here ! It was prayer time, and from many different minarets came the sound of the chanting. There was a lot of dirt and rubbish, uneven walk areas, and tatty shops. All with quite an East African feel. I passed a selection of tents where many plants and flowers were for sale; no garden centre as we have come to expect in England.

I finally worked my way down to the fish market, and was amazed at the white covering to the broken pathway, which turned out to be made up entirely of fish scales.

The next part of the walk was back towards the lagoon where directly in front of me was the Burj Dubai, which has taken

The Burj Dubai

just over 5 years to build, and measures 2684 feet. It is due to open this week, and if you want some office space, the cost is $4000 per square foot. The contrast from such back street filth to the glitter of the world’s tallest building separated by only a few miles brought home the stark contrast of what for most people is reality, and the unreal.

Sadly the amount of rubbish in all its forms is a huge problem, but I did smile when I saw one fisherman improvising, for instead of a float on the end of his line he was using the upturned remains of an old plastic bottle, but it did work!

Nobody bothered me, and I was quite happy taking in the sights and smells, and lost in my own thoughts, amazed that if you smiled and caught somebody’s gaze they would likely wish you Happy New Year.

By Bob Derham

Before we forget …

that Christmas for young children is a wondrous place.

Here we are on the verge of the first full week of the New Year and soon busy lives will engage with all that 2010 is bringing.  So I wanted to share with you something truly magical that happened early on Christmas morning in the Derham house.

Our little four year old woke us at 4 o’clock Christmas morning crying.

“Father Christmas hasn’t come”, he struggled to tell us through his tears.

Then he saw his stocking.

“Oh He Did Come “

“I have been a good boy after all!”

And with that he settled back to sleep.

Joy ……

By Bob Derham

A Perfect Neighborhood

The best place to live?  It’s all down to your neighbors!

No offense to anyone else, but I live in the perfect neighborhood.

My neighborhood is not big; it consists of only one street, a circle; where you enter the street is the same place you exit.  There are only about 30 homes on my street.  None of them are very fancy or very big. Most of the houses are older.  Some need repair.  One or two are empty now.  No, it isn’t the size of the neighborhood or the grandeur of the houses.

I live close to the University where I work.  I could walk to work if I needed to.  But I haven’t needed to, except for the one time, when the Presidential debate was held on campus and security closed it down to all but pedestrian traffic.  Although it is certainly convenient, proximity to work is not the reason my neighborhood is perfect.

My girls are unlikely to agree just yet with my assessment of our neighborhood.  But they are still young, and there are no kids their age on our street.  One neighbor does have grandchildren their age who visit sometimes, but that doesn’t really count, they tell me.  Off and on, they complain and say they want to move.  My 15-year-old wants to live in a city, the bigger the better, the more people the better; my 13-year-old wants to live on a horse farm, the bigger the better, the more horses the better.

But I tell them that some day, when they are married and have children and are busy with life, they will look back on this time in our neighborhood, and will understand what I meant when I told them how very lucky we are to live here.

Because we have neighbors; real neighbors!

They welcome new families with home-baked bread; take in your mail when you are away; call to check on you when you are sick; give you a ride to get your car out of the shop; lend you their extra tall ladder.  All without hesitation and without expecting anything in return.  And they let me do what I can for them.  There’s genuine warmth and support between neighbors on my street. It’s like an extended family.

Maybe even a little better!  Why? Because they do all of this without pushing, without invading your privacy, without crossing into your personal space.  They are supportive without being nosy.  How totally wonderful:  to have support when you need it but, as important, perhaps more important, you also have your privacy.  I can’t imagine a better combination.  I can’t imagine feeling safer.   I can’t imagine a more wonderful neighborhood.   I can’t imagine a better home. My neighbors are the best.

By Sherry Jarrell

Ode to a Church Organ

What comes around goes around!

A few years ago I saw an advert for a small piano sized electric organ in our local shop window.

Great I thought, that will be a good way to introduce some music into the home, and see if I can add pedals to the idea of playing the piano.

It didn’t take long to track down the owner, but unfortunately the organ was in a back room, down two sets of stairs, round a corner, in a house which was isolated and difficult to find. Whereas I should have gone along with a team of

Typical electric organ

people, there were only three of us to move the instrument, but we eventually managed to move the thing out of the house, and into a trailer which we used to transport it to our house.

My wife thought I was mad, but I really liked it because it only had the sound of an organ, not a choice of sounds. It even had stops, not buttons to choose the different pipes you wanted to use.

Actually we were undertaking a great deal of building work at the time thus when our local church’s organ came to the end of it’s life, it seemed a good idea to offer them the chance to have this piece. It was ten times better than the original and sounded wonderful: job done!

However, last year some kind soul left money to the church and it was decided that the churcch could afford a new organ.

It duly arrived and our old one was moved to an alcove at the back of the church: I was asked to remove it.

Where was I going to put it? By chance we had acquired an almost new one ourselves and nobody seemed to want this old but wonderful piece.

We tried Ebay – no luck. Adverts – again no interest. The pressure started to grow.

People were asking me to move that old organ of mine. Letters started to arrive. Could I please take it away – I became the bad guy.

Eventually, I made contact with a man in London who would be happy to take it away for free, but he wanted to hear it play. Whoops!  It was already loaded on my trailer!

But I managed to position trailer and load near an electric socket and in broad daylight, with the aid of the mobile phone, I stood and played a range of music!  Our customer was happy.

He agreed to come at about eight o’clock one Saturday morning, but actually arrived two hours ahead of time at six in the morning!

A church in Ghana

The man brought his wife, dressed in her national dress, explaining that they wanted the organ for a church in their village back in Ghana. They had never ventured outside London, so this visit to the country was a major event. They joined us for breakfast and we showed our children a map depicting where the organ would eventually go.

The man was built like an ox and he and his wife together were quite happy to lift the instrument and put it in the back of their vehicle.

Funny old life!

By Bob Derham

What Jesus means to me.

I was recently asked this question:

“If you don’t believe in God, why will you be celebrating the birth of his son on 25th December?”

This was my answer:

Christmas was, I believe, celebrated long before Christ appeared. But quite apart from that, the story of Christ is totally and absolutely wonderful and inspirational. He is a sublime role model. He encapsulates all that is most pure and admirable about the human spirit.

Role model

He understood our frailty and did not condemn us for it but tried to show us a better way through his own example. He shied not from difficult questions, but always spoke what I take to be “the truth”, and he taught it with astonishing examples, in particular through his own actions and relations with others, friends or strangers.

He was not greedy or selfish in any way; he truly loved people and treated them all as his beloved brothers.

Personally, I love Jesus and I am more than happy to celebrate his life, to remember how remarkable he was, to get once more inspiration from his selflessness, purity and love for his fellow men. I celebrate his life also for his ability to inspire others to to write such wonderful stories, even if all are not totally true (who knows?).

Sadly, it’s just the extra-terrestrial bit that is a problem. But I can celebrate his life without that, can’t I?

I wish there were a God, that he’d sort the mess out, that he’d end our pain, that he’d speak to me. I wish this quite deeply. But that doesn’t mean I should invent him if he isn’t there, does it?

What IS completely clear to me is that if we could all follow Jesus’ example, (which can be summed up in the sublime message “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”) then we would indeed enjoy “Heaven on Earth”. That would be more than enough to be going on with ….

Does that answer your question?

By Chris Snuggs

The Singular Importance of Good Writing

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.” ~Mark Twain

It is a bit intimidating to try to write a piece on the importance of good writing.  I feel self-conscious about my writing as I write about good writing.  After all, a post on good writing should be written especially well. Then again, maybe a poorly written post will do even more to illustrate the importance of good writing. I will have to leave that up to you, the reader.

I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate students for over twenty years now. I have read and graded thousands of papers and essays during that time. I can count on two hands the number that were exceptionally well written.  In each case, I sought out the students to compliment their writing, and to encourage them to keep honing their writing skills.

I doubt my words of encouragement had much effect.  This, I know from personal experience.

Years ago, in my third year of graduate school, I got a paper back from a professor with the words “You write well” written in the margin.  I was crushed.  I had worked so hard on that paper: reviewing the existing literature, developing the research design, and trying to make a substantive contribution to my field.  I yearned to hear something tangible about the quality of the research, the cleverness of the method, or the importance of the findings.  Instead, I got “you write well.” I honestly thought that the professor had said that because he couldn’t think of anything positive to say about the content of the paper.

Years later, something happened that made me realize how wrong I was.  I had taken a teaching job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, even though I had yet to defend my doctoral thesis; it’s called “ABD,” or “all but

Merton Miller

dissertation.”  I had traveled to Chicago to meet with Merton Miller, my thesis chairman, about polishing up my dissertation and scheduling the defense.  As I waited outside his office door, I couldn’t help but notice how distracted Professor Miller seemed. He had always stood at a tall wooden lectern to write, but this day he paced to and from that lectern, rubbing his head, adjusting his shirt sleeves, writing, erasing, then erasing some more.

He was at the lectern when I entered his office for our meeting. I congratulated him again for winning the first Nobel Prize in financial economics and asked him about the upcoming trip to Stockholm.  He was taking his wife and daughters on the trip, who were very excited. He, on the other hand, was not ready for the trip.  He was worried, he said, because he was not going to have sufficient time to revise his acceptance speech.   He had only edited it seven times thus far, and his magic number was eight.  Not six, not seven, but eight rewrites were what he needed to be satisfied with his writing.

Professor Miller was known as one of the most gifted writers in all of economics.  His writing was disarmingly simple and clear. It flowed like a piece of music. It seemed effortless.  Everyone, myself included, assumed that he was just a naturally talented writer, lucky to have been blessed with that skill. Everyone was wrong.  I learned that day that Professor Miller worked hard at writing well.  He was well into his 60’s, had written hundreds of articles and had won the Nobel Prize, but he was still working at writing well.

Then I remembered the comment that a teacher had written in the margin of my paper years earlier. The teacher was Merton Miller.  And now I knew how much it really meant, coming from him.   So now when I see the rare student who writes really well, I make it a point to tell them.  Not that it means as much coming from me as it did coming from Professor Miller.  But it still means something, because good writing is very important, and it’s worth working for.

By Sherry Jarrell

“Don’t worry, it’s only an old man!”

A passer by invokes a lesson for us all.

.

Recently while busy in the garden our two dogs started barking. This in itself is not unusual because they sit at the front gate waiting for passers by to stop and talk to them. It can be a horse, or cyclist that sometimes causes them to bark, and our children have grown to show the same awareness as the dogs in who is passing.  I didn’t see the cause this time but our young daughter did.

“Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s only an old man!”

Stephanie is only 8 years old, but without meaning any harm had given sufficient information to explain the risk to us and paint a quick picture in a few words as to why the dogs were barking.

Of late for some reason I have been more aware of people who are ageing. This generation do not normally stand around telling stories, this is left to the young who always seem to have something to shout about.

However all older people will have many interesting tales, often almost unbelievable, yet true. They have lived through war, happy, sad, interesting, and hard times. Each has learnt about life through experience that we can not buy.

Recently my ex Mother-in-law passed away. I thought I knew her very well, but it wasn’t until family stories started coming out that we all found out there had been much more in the life of this modest lady.

How it should be.

Christmas is coming and probably there will be family gatherings. This year I am going to try and turn the attention to the older generation, and see if they will open up and give us an insight into their childhood days and memories so that we can give them the respect they deserve, ask them to read stories to the children, ask them to tell their own tales.

Oh and the old man? Yes I did see him again, in church at a Remembrance service, and he had some medals under his coat, so did have a story to tell!

By Bob Derham

Crimes and accidents: the extent of responsibility

How bad can a car accident be?

On 28 February 2001 a vehicle came off the M62 motorway at Great Heck, near Selby, [North Yorkshire, England. Ed] ran down the railway embankment and onto the East Coast Main Line, where it was struck by a passenger train. The passenger train was derailed and then struck by a freight train travelling in the opposite direction. 6 passengers and 4 staff on the trains were killed. The driver of the vehicle was found guilty of causing the deaths of 10 people by dangerous driving.

So begins the report “Managing the accidental obstruction of the railway by road vehicles” from the UK Department for Transport (DfT).

If you were aware of this incident at the time, you might remember that it attracted considerable discussion and press coverage, here are  some examples.

At the time,  a variety of causes were cited for the accident and for the failure of various mechanisms to prevent the accident.

“Whose fault was it?”

Most of the discussion seemed to be based on trying to find someone to blame for everything that happened and the main target was the driver of the vehicle who was alleged to have been driving while unfit to drive due to lack of sleep, and to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

However, I thought that the public response to the incident was a matter of considerable concern; and I continue to think so.

Clearly people can expect to be held responsible for their actions. When their action or lack of action causes damage, they can expect to be held responsible for that damage. However, there are surely limits to that responsibility.

Also, it is interesting that this incident was described at the beginning of the DfT report which was otherwise entirely about ways of reducing incursion of road vehicles onto railways. So, if it is accepted that insufficient fences, banks, ditches or other obstructions had been provided, the implication is that the motorist could expect some protection to exist and is therefore not wholly responsible for the consequences of it not existing.

Level of responsibility

If, as alleged, the driver was unfit to drive then he can expect to be held responsible for his actions. But, in much of the discussion about this incident, there was very little importance attached to the issue that the probability was infinitesimally small that he would fall asleep at exactly the location which resulted in his vehicle entering a railway line, and at the time when not one but two trains were about to pass that point. I would hazard a guess that he could not have planned it so accurately if he had intended to cause the incident!

Having, by extremely bad lack, ended up on a railway line and before the railway collision occurred, he was aware of the danger of collision and was already using this mobile phone to attempt to warn the authorities of the situation. But even if he had been injured and unable to warn anyone, to what extent was he responsible for the full range of consequences of this extremely unlikely incident?

According to one of the press reports:

The HSE report described the accident as ‘wholly exceptional’ and concluded: ‘There was nothing the railway industry could reasonably have done to prevent the collisions.’

Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman said: ‘It’s clear that the chain of events that led to this catastrophe were determined by sheer chance.’

The DfT report, and the fact that the work to generate it was instigated, suggests that the Department for Transport did not agree with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) that there ‘There was nothing the railway industry could reasonably have done to prevent the collisions.’

Distinguishing the criminal from the accident elements

How do we distinguish crimes from accidents? In particular, in complex incidents such as this, how do we distinguish the criminal elements from the accidental elements of an incident?

In my opinion, there is no benefit in penalising, or even reprimanding, people for actions which led to consequences which either they were completely unable to foresee or which were so improbable as to be bordering on fantasy. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to learn more about the consequences of one’s actions; this can be a positive process of extending one’s understanding, rather than a negative process of “not doing that again”.

In particular, in cases like the Selby incident, clearly someone should be penalised if it is determined that they were driving dangerously; but it seems to me that the severity of the penalty should be based on the severity of crime, which relates to the severity of the likely consequences of their actions and, presumably, whether this is a recurrence of this or other offences.

It also seems to me that the severity of crime is largely independent of the actual consequences of the incident. In other words, someone should expect to be penalised just as severely when there were no consequences as when there were.

I understand that many people would like to find someone to blame for all damage which occurs. But is this reasonable? There are, after all, such things as accidents!

Our blame culture

My view is not that held by the authorities, at least not in the UK. The sentencing guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service in cases of dangerous driving take the view that the consequences are relevant.

As is probably apparent, I respectfully disagree. This blame culture does not, in my view, serve any purpose and may even reduce safety. Safety experts in the aviation industry seem to take a completely different view from that in the motoring world and reap the long term benefits of improved safety as a consequence.

You may take a different view!

By John Lewis

News on a Sunday

A round up of this strange world that we all live in.

[In fact Chris wrote this on Sunday, 13th but due to the backlog of LfD posts to be published, it has been held until today, the 20th. The points are still as valid. Ed.]

BRITISH LABOUR PARTY WASTE ON FRIPPERY:

From the UK newspaper, The Daily Mail.

Judges in charge of Britain’s controversial new Supreme Court have been provided with robes they will hardly ever wear at a cost of £137,956 to the taxpayer.

The hand-crafted black brocade robes – embroidered with real gold thread – will not be worn by the 12 Supreme Court Justices in normal session.

They will be donned only perhaps twice a year for ceremonies such as the State Opening of Parliament or the beginning of the legal year. The rest of the time, the judges will wear everyday suits.

A snip at £140,000 ($224,000) Photographer – Ron Coello

It’s only money …. plenty more where that came from…

BRITISH POLITICS: Few things are more pathetic than the Liberals‘ current poll rating of 17%, with Labour on 26% That the worst government in the history of the world is still way ahead of the Liberals is of course a tribute to the lunacy of Labour voters, who seem not to understand the terrible damage this govt has done. Still, some of them have done very well under Labour: doctors, judges, high-ranking civil servants, consultants …. all more or less bribed with the people’s money.

Lib-Dems must be very depressed; if you can’t get a decent poll-rating when up against this motley bunch of venal, pompous, pretentious and incompetent misfits then you wonder really what the point of their party is.

Democracy?

Still, you get the government you deserve, so they say. Except that the British voting system is hopelessly undemocratic. In the next election a vote for the Lib-Dems is probably going to be wasted, risking the danger of letting Brown sneak in despite everything.

As for UKIP, it is a perfectly tenable position to want to get out of the EU. I’d guess that 30% of the electorate would want this, and that’s a very conservative estimate. Yet they have NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER of getting ANY representation in parliament.

This is not democracy, but of course it suits the two dinosaur parties very well indeed.

TIGER WOODS: what a pathetic, sordid saga this is. Not his bedroom antics, but the media obsession with it. People are dying all over the world of treatable diseases, of inhuman treatment at the hands of the North Koreans or others. Democracy is destroyed by religious nutters in Iran, millions more tons of ice melt, while politicians bleat uselessly (and expensively) in Copenhagen (I note they didn’t choose Scunthorpe! Might not have got such a good turnout!)

OIL: Oh, and on the climate front and the importance of reducing emissions I note that the Iraqi government is predicting oil output to rise to 12 million barrels a day within a few years – the same as Saudi Arabia.

That IS good news!!!!! … the British Labour government will hit us with every stealth and non-stealth tax you can imagine “to save carbon” and pay for yet more consultants and managers while the rest of the world greedily sups up billions more tons of oil.

Apparently, this has been a bumper year for oil discoveries …. you couldn’t make it up! An extra-terrestrial observer must be scratching his head wondering how the universe could have spawned up such a bizarre species.

Yet the press is full of Woods ….. and because he is good at golf … hitting a ball into a hole, a skill of such nanoscopically-sized irrelevance to the world’s problems. What sort of mentality is it that is even interested in yet another, crass, boring superstar who has failed to resist the temptations that money brings?

JFK was the great hero who would save the world but turned out to be just another, faithless, lying philanderer. Who can have any illusions since the days of Marilyn Monroe and the extinguished candle?

OBAMA PEACE PRIZE: The surreality of this obsession with over-sexed but hyper-boring celebrities is matched only by that involved in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. What exactly has Obama actually DONE?

Nobel prize winner

Crucially, there is practically NO change in the Middle East (except the major change for the good brought by the reviled George Bush and Tony Blair! the world is nothing if not full of irony); the USA still cravenly supports Israel, which CONTINUES to build and/or enlarge settlements, which denies any possibility of ever putting right some of the wrongs of the past (Palestinian exiles, appropriation of their land, stealing of their capital and so on – even the West Bank roadblocks are mostly still in place.)

Yet even in the pathetic there can be humour, as when he said that to bring peace the USA had to make war, or words to that effect.

Yes, he is of course right, but it was still funny. I wonder what Mother Theresa would have said? And Nelson Mandela? He had to sweat out decades in prison preaching non-violence to earn his NPP, while Obama only had to get elected to get his. Truly the triumph of hope over reality.

Perhaps hope is all there is left. I nearly said “we have left”, but then I realized that I haven’t actually got much myself.

By Chris Snuggs

Forwards to bygone times!

Sign of the times?

Woodstove

We have been looking for ways of cutting down our energy requirements and coupled with trying to grow as many of our own veggies as possible, 2 small flocks of chickens for eggs, we have now acquired a reconditioned, wood-burning cooker.

It arrived last Wednesday and weighs in at just under a third of a ton. It was manoeuvred into place by 2 men, some planks of wood and a few rollers made from off-cut, scaffolding poles.

Our youngest son and I fitted the flue and fired it up on Thursday evening. What a transformation!

The quality of heat and ambience it creates in the kitchen/dining room is amazing. It is like being transported back to a bygone era where everything seemed less stressed and slower. Whoever gets up in the morning lights it first and it seems to be able to rise from cold to a useful temperature in 20 minutes. It uses a very small amount of wood to keep it in all day and we have switched off all the heating in the adjoining rooms. We cooked a roast dinner in it on Sunday and a load of mince pies plus bread over the weekend.

It’s not instant and it has its own foibles but we love it – a bit like most of us, I expect!

By Jon Lavin