BACK IN THE DAY

Once upon a time there were FM broadcasts that, if you had one of these, you could record on a cassette with the use of just two fingers. Progress! BBC iPlayer and listen again allows you to - listen again - or for the first time if you missed the live broadcast. But you can't record with the same facility. 


The BBC I remind you is a public service broadcaster fresh stocked with green from our taxes. Like a digitised version of the Mission Impossible briefs, anything you want to 'listen again' to, self-destructs after a fixed elapsed time.
Maybe there are some out there who still have one of these - my dad did for years and accumulated a huge stock of BBC radio drama and informative programmes for his personal use. For all its technical wizardry, iPlayer sets bounds on your listening in an intrinsically mean way. So I say thankyou to the wizzkids out there who, as soon as the BBC stymies downloading by one app, develop another one. The best application of two fingers since the radio-cassette player.


No story this week - too much going on, too many things to think about, all mental energy directed elsewhere and frankly, I can't be arsed.


pip-pip

SUPERSTITION

Blogger down yesterday. So was I, for a while.



friday thirteenth
rain, clouds, cello
banjo sun in the heart still rising


Doesn't get much shorter than Haiku, does it?


pip-pip

ENGLISHNESS

Is there such a thing? If there is, is it definable? Hard to say if your answer to the question "Country of birth?" is England. I don't feel UK, that's for sure. My view on Kingdom was made pretty clear in last week's post. United? In what sense united? A sharing of the mire so many are in? A common mistrust of bankers and politicians? Maybe, but these are unifying globally rather than nationally. Great Britain then? 'Great' strikes me as either aspirational or egotistical and in either case laughable. Britain? Has that been a useful term since the Romans found nothing more in Britannia to interest them? The British Isles, then, who could object to that? What? Check out an Irish view? Oh, I see what you mean. Whilst I'm about it, maybe I should check out a Scots and a Welsh view, maybe a Cornish too. Tell you what, how about "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"? No? No, it doesn't work. You are always drawn back to the dark heart of centuries of strife, war, compromise and conquest.


My intuition tells me you would be hard pushed to find someone who is able to define themselves as English by reference to generations rather than geography and that if you found them, key characteristics might well be large estates and small gene pools. To the best of my knowledge, and with ancestors with little to preserve through accurate record keeping, most of that knowledge is from oral history, I can claim (if that's the right word) English, Irish, Scots, Welsh and a smattering of Dutch ancestry. A bigger gene pool then, but a lost sense of place.


So what is Englishness? I think Calloway has it. Calloway, a further chapter of Cowboy Heart for week 16. Good egg.




pip-pip