Right! The time has come, I need to speak out. First and foremost, let me say that in my experience being a soldier is a shit job, done extremely well under even the most trying of conditions. The lads and lasses put their lives on the line and do their duty. I’m not about to knock that. I will start by saying; that is their job, for which they volunteered. Nobody made them enlist. The thing that distinguishes the armed services from any civvy job is that it is in your job description that you will die if so ordered. Tell a copper or fireman to stand firm in the face of certain death and he has the option to quit. It is a soldiers job to die if necessary. They are doing their job, come death or mutilation. That is not heroic, it is for that they are paid. But they are being brave, that makes them heroes! I would argue that the modus operandi of the army is to make you more afraid of your Sergeant than you are of the enemy. You are bullied into being a mindless drone, afraid to not obey an order. In the first world war the Royal Military Police were positioned in the trenches to shoot any man who didn’t go over the top. In the second world war they had conscription with jail and dishonour for anyone who wouldn’t go. I know from personal experience that even the most jaundiced of cynics would prefer the possibility of death than the certainty of a lifetime of shame with the stigma of cowardice. It was proven at the Nuremberg Trials that following orders is not an excuse for committing war crimes. Yet we have recently gone in to illegal wars. Every soldier should have refused. They did not. Nor were they ever likely to. My point is; bravery takes many forms. Killing Johnny Foreigner for his oil may well be the least brave option once you’ve taken the Queen’s Shilling. Then there is a technical point; a hero is someone who goes above and beyond the call of duty. Who does something without thought for personal danger, to serve his unit, and somewhat nebulously, his country. To call everyone in uniform a hero is to devalue the word and dishonour those who have earned the epithet. Clarkson did a piece on some chap who kept going back into battle though they tried to cas-evac him on several occasions, firing a mortar like a bazooka, bleeding from his ears, shot to shit and still fighting. That is a hero. Some desk jockey who happens to wear a uniform is not. Then there is the actual campaign, ‘Help For Heroes’. Started by the Sun. The mouthpiece of the evil Murdock. Why did they start it? To whip up patriotism and support for our boys and to stifle questioning dissent amongst the ‘screw oil concerns, let’s keep our boy’s alive’ lobby. The aim is to have […]
Continue readingAuthor: Buck
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
At work some coffin-dodging bastard has switched to Gold. Allegedly all the best songs from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Actually all rock ‘n’ roll, and a few pop songs from the latter decades. Apparently there was no hippy era, no punk, no new wave British heavy metal, no gothic. Just saccharin 60’s and the odd inoffensive mainstream pop song. Which brings me to my point, spleen vented. They have played Cindy Lauper’s ‘Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun’ a few times. Each time I hear it I feel a bittersweet pain. I am suffused with a nostalgic melancholy for a loss I can’t quite pinpoint. It’s not the song, which I like in an off-hand way. It’s not exactly the time in my life when it was in the charts. I have been thinking about it. O.K., so I was getting drunk but I was still working full time and my standard of living, due to the above, was considerably poorer than now. It seems to be some sort of product of the milieu, the zeitgeist and my own age of innocence. Girls just want to have fun. We were young, all the fun was new and thrilling (not the dependencies they would become) life was innocent and hopeful, and we were all just kids. Trying to live the dream of the day, which was to be totally ‘right-on’, (which later became ‘Politically Correct’ and a stick with which to beat the dream to death.) You weren’t a man, woman, black, white, atheist, Muslim, whatever, you were all people, and it could all work out. I’m getting choked up looking back on that. ‘So young, so dumb’, as a later songstress would say. Sorry about that, I was trying to capture a feeling and explain it. Wendy objects strongly to me writing it, so if it was too much…, well, tough tits, we ain’t in the 80’s no more! …..And, we’re back in the room. Senior moment over with. What has been happening with your quest for a driving job? I hear you cry. Potentially good news, at last! For months every job I’ve seen is either advertised as ‘must have extensive previous experience’ or it turns out to be a prerequisite when I have applied. Out of nowhere, like the proverbial bus, three come along at once that state ‘previous experience preferred, but not essential’. Woo-hoo! I’ve applied for two of them, (the third was 20-50 hours, I need to be sure of more than 20 hours). One of them is for a car transporter driver. Not great in many ways, I’d have to take a pay cut on my basic, might be away from home for a week at a time, and it’s at Ellsmere Port (about 25 miles away, so petrol money would be more). However, when I rang them (turns out it’s an agency fielding the contract) they said that the jobs were full at the mo, ring them back every fortnight on a Friday and […]
Continue readingThe week that was.
Hi, it’s been another weird week. At Kung Fu I had some seasoned veteran of the style doing blocking drills with me. I think he had an agenda, be it bullying the newbies or showing off how ‘well ‘ard’ he was I don’t know. Either way, what should have been a quite painful training exercise turned into a really painful test of endurance. I stuck it for as long as I could, but I was getting worried that I was going to sustain a serious injury. The next day at work, as I got changed to go into the freezer (again!) one of the lads pointed out that I was bruising on my arms. I was OK with it until after my breakfast, then when I returned to work it was suddenly really sore. My right arm had swollen and hurt every time I moved it. The photo’ doesn’t show the swelling very well, and makes the bruising look like slap marks, but believe me it really did smart! That was less than fun to work through. Also at work they’ve started sending me back into the freezer as I mentioned above. My five day reprieve, whilst welcome, was all too temporary. Ho hum. They are processing all the sick note people, still waiting to see if they have the commitment to follow through on the sacking of the unfit. The other event of the week at work was today when I got ready, had an early dinner and all that, made my grub for break, went in, then got told by the lads ‘it’s your day off today’. And it was. Gutted. Came home pretty damn pronto but it ruined my day off. Almost forgot, there was another incident of note at work; some geezer came up to me asking was going to sign a grievance, saying there were too many foreigners at our works! ME! Bloody hell, he’s someone I’ve know and worked with for 18 months, and he assumed I’d sign! I was a bit miffed. Someone coming up to you and saying, ‘seeing as you’re a moronic racist you’ll sign this knee-jerk whine, won’t you?’ Not flattered, me. Nearly parked the mighty Micra into a lamppost two doors down from our house today. That was briefly focusing. We’d only had a half inch of snow and it didn’t seem to be affecting the driving conditions. Until I tried to turn into our close. That would have been a whole world of embarrassment, crashing in front of all the neighbours! To make this brief (Wendy’s gone to bed, so I have to hurry with the typing!) I watched Ip Man today, (the story of the guy who taught Bruce Lee Kung Fu) it’s comically overacted in parts, (in the English subtitles, at least) the dialogue is dire, and the propaganda is rife, but the fight sequences! Wow! I really can’t wait to get back to class. I don’t care if it buggers my arms up, they must […]
Continue readingJust musing.
Hi! I’ve just noticed that I’ve had 1,000 views of my blog! I’m a celebrity! However, this will be my 103rd post, so I’m an unknown. 🙁 If you don’t follow me on Twitter let me tell you I’m loving my Kung Fu class. I’ve got my kit and I’m not afraid to pose in it! It’s a pity the Beth couldn’t keep it up, it’s really spiffy. Don’t know that she’d have loved the last class though, swapping punches so your arm collides in defence/attack with your partner’s. It soon starts hurting and doesn’t stop! Grin and bear it, it’s good for practice and it toughens you up. I’m aching still though. And I’ve got bloody friction burns on my arse from all the sit ups! Again! All good though. My sax lesson has had a positive turn around as well. When I went this week I had a few of the things that I have been struggling with come together. Then he turned the page to a new chapter and it was a checkpoint. Instead of learning something new it is three set pieces supposed to consolidate your learning to date. As usual sax-sensei Pete pointed me at the new stuff and told me to have a go. It was for a complete change, a lot easier than the previous exercises. I didn’t do it perfectly, but for a first time, sight reading as I went along, it wasn’t too shabby. I was quite pleased with myself, then he told me that the pieces were from a grade 4 exam! (Or level 4, I forget.) The point being, these are pieces on which the student would train for months before an exam and I did a reasonable attempt first time out of the bag! Not trying to blow my own trumpet here (if anything, my own sax) just saying how surprised and delighted I was. Then he said now we’re at chapter 17 you can move on to ‘100 best tunes book’ or some such. Learning by playing songs, some of which I will already know, rather than by bending my mind around hideous exercises. If you recall, that was what I said I was going to leave my lessons to do in my last blog. So that it going swimmingly. Here is something I found that seemed to be begging for the title ‘Ships Of The Desert’ Also on the pictures front, here is that Sisters of Mercy/ Merciful Release logo that I want as a tattoo Groovy, or what? Perhaps you have to love the band. I’m currently enjoying a long weekend. I was off Thursday, in Friday, now off Saturday, Sunday and Monday! Bloody lovely. On the subject of work, I have been moaning lately about being sent into the freezer all of the time. The place at which I work has the contract picking and delivering to the Iceland stores, so it’s not too unexpected that I would work in the freezer now and […]
Continue readingQuickie.
Just to say the Beth lasted all of one Kung Fu lesson! She went, loved it, then cried off the next lesson citing lack of money. I’ve told her the offer is still open. I went to the second class and Sifu was having a self-defence lesson, specifically how to deal with knife attacks. You grab the attacking arm, grip the hand that is holding the knife, elbow them in the face, carry it through so the knife cuts their throat, reverse their hand then gut them. Ohhhhhh K. So that was fun. He explained that way you are never losing control of the hand holding the knife and, as an added bonus, never putting finger prints on the knife. If you’ve just cut someone’s throat then lent into them (to stab into their guts) you’re going to be covered in blood anyway, so the finger prints might be superfluous. Technicalities. If someone has just tried to attack you with lethal intent the first priority is stopping them. Legality comes a very distant second. So that was what Beth missed. Good, clean fun. Also, whilst I’m here I should mention an incident from last week. (I mentioned it on Twitter but omitted it from my last blog.) Wendy, her brother (Pete), his wife (Emma) and I(Buck!), went to see Avatar 3D at the local flicks. Which I should mention in passing was rather spiffy, first good 3D I’ve seen. Plot was massively predictable, but really well done. Anywho, it was still in the midst of the snow and ice. I gave Pete and Emma a lift to the flicks. Apparently they really are gay about my driving! All the slipping and sliding, which I thought was fun, was a bit unsettling for them. After I’d dropped them off and they were self medicating with stiff drinks, Wendy and I came home. I was chugging up to the lights on Cromwell ave which were on green, so I put my foot down to make it, then, as I had to do a right turn through the lights, went to brake. Not a bloody sausage. Micra locked up, slithering all over the place. I said to Wendy "We’re going to crash, sorry." Then by some miracle of mighty Micra mastery, I managed to save it! That was a hell of a rush. More so for Wendy, I suspect. I returned to my sax lesson. Hate it. Wish I could just get the basics down so I can quit the lessons for a while and learn by practising all the songs I like. That will be more fun and less pressure. Damn these baby steps I am forced to take! I did a work out at home yesterday, my first for two months, and how it shows! My tendons were a foot shorter! I ended up totally done in, and today my legs are really sore. Then to add to my joy I had another headache. I woke up with a bit of […]
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