Country Driving: (Pt.1)

The bank holiday over, things have calmed down on the traffic front. Not so long ago some joked about a passing vehicle being the rush hour, but it is much busier now, especially at holiday times. Some of our visitors get a bit nervous as they enter the network of narrow lanes to visit us. This is not unjustified as many drivers on country roads can make one dangerous assumption. That there wont be anyone about.

This might explain why some drivers on the wider roads drive in the middle, even round bends, or go too fast round blind bends. The second assumption is that normal urban speeds can apply. To do even 30 mph on our lane is very hazardous because someone else coming in the other direction might think that there will be no one else about and not even realise that they are doing 40mph or more. After all, the national limit of 60 mph applies! Perhaps current moves to lower speed limits might eventually filter through to us, but whether ‘twenty is plenty’ will be applied to country lanes generally, seems unlikely. A 30 mph limit might be good for starters as an improvement for the amenity of visitors and locals alike. A 50 mph limit on the B road in the valley would be a good idea for both safety and fuel saving reasons Unfortunately the bikers who have discovered the joys of cruising border roads won’t observe it nor the Hay Festival speedsters.

Dacier

Community and No Man is an Island ( See John Donne and Treasure Island)

I have realised I have contradictory feelings about where we live. I like being ‘away from it all’ but I get irritated when we are told we live in an isolated area. ‘Isolated’ in my book is living somewhere with neighbours at least a 100 miles away, not a few yards up the lane. That is why I found a small property feature sent to me by a friend entitled, ‘This Weeks Wreck’, rather annoying. It is in our village, apparently 60 years out of date and , ‘wildly isolated’. Where had this idiot been all its life? Had it never seen a film about the Outback, the Alaskan Forests or even the Western Isles. Looks like an urbanite who doesn’t know the meaning of any of the above terms. And the wreck, incidentally, had until recently been inhabited by a respected member of the community who lived a simple life into her nineties

In fact the property is set in beautiful countryside not far from a medieval church which is in regular use, a Victorian church and hall (ditto) and is part of a string of dwellings set at regular intervals along the lane escaped the author. It even has a neighbouring house a few yards away. Should the new occupier need reassurance that there are other humans in the area the travelling library passes nearby, the postman calls everyday and the various farms all have humans tending the crops and animals. Should he need reassurance that none of this is a mirage descending on a demented ‘Ben Gun’, every so often the Church bell will ring to summon anyone who wishes to attend a service to meet up as members of the community, and the various notice boards and posters on trees will summon the occupant to all manner of secular events. The bells and the notice boards toll for everyone.

For the first 18 years of my life I couldn’t have lived more in the centre of a town, right on the cross roads of two major routes; one being the old coaching road to Dover. The idea of neighbours was something I did not experience until we moved, since Lipton’s, the Home and Colonial, the Fifty Shilling Tailors, and Burtons were pretty useless as neighbours after 5.30pm, and not much better during the day. In fact the distance to our nearest neighbours then was not much different to our nearest neighbours now.

Once a visitors opening comment to us was, ‘Oh!, couldn’t live here, its too isolated’. This was both amusing and irritating . I said she ought to be here after dark and she will see all the pin pricks of light dotted around all over the place, much easier here as we don’t have the street lighting. It was amusing because it came from a person who I new would avoid community events and in the meantime have little to do with any of the neighbours she was surrounded by.I still can’t understand those who never put in an appearance at anything. Many will have complicated and demanding lives but too many people fail to realise that privacy will eventually become their prison. Privacy is comfortable but I fear that many people are losing the knack of living together in a community. If we lose the skill of tolerance and mucking in completely then we will be in trouble. As Billy Bragg sings, ‘Sweet toleration, pride of our nation, desert us not, we are between the wars.’

Dacier

Hard Times Waltz

At long last here are the lyrics. Music is now available. Please leave a comment should you want it sent to you. All rights reserved, see earlier blog for terms and video of the first and last performance. Lets hope this song has a short shelf life. Judging by the lack of any responses to date it looks as though this will be the case.


Hard times they have come to old England
Hard times they have come round again
We are told that it’s going to get better
But we know that they do not know when.

Now those banks that were once built of marble
With a cash point at every door
Have run out of loans of our money
And alls quiet on the factory floor
And those vaults that were once filled with silver
Have been swapped for derivative bets
But the bookies have all done a runner
Leaving us with the gift of their debts
Now we all should have seen what was coming
But our jobs seemed quite safe at the time
And we are now being robbed of our warm homes
But no ones been charged with a crime

Chorus

Now our nation is said to be wealthy
Second homes second cars plastic yachts
But the bailiffs came round, did a clear out
Now my life being sold in three lots
Now those banks that were all kept oh! so shiny
Are now owned by you and by me
But they still won’t lend us our money
Or tell us our banking is free
So who has got all of our money?
And where have those bankers all gone?
Perhaps they are hiding and hoping
That no one joins in with this song

Chorus

Is the spirit of Albion sleeping?
Is it time to strike up on Drakes Drum?
Do you think that King Arthur will hear us?
To rise from his slumbers and come
Will the monkeys still stay on Gibraltar?
And the ravens not fly from the tower?
Will Nelson set sail to our rescue?
To control those great levers of power
Will some heroes stand for election?
Will they know what they really must do?
Will they keep to their word, and surprise us
And pull poor old Albion through?

Chorus

But we mustn’t get sad and downhearted
We must pick ourselves up from the floor
Keep an eye on those banks of fake marble
And the man with the key to the door.
Yes, the boom has gone bust and the bust has gone boom
And the profits have melted away
And it’s now we must join together
And win back a bright shiny day
Because the people who have all the answers
With the power to make dreams come true
Are here with us standing together
Yes, the people of BRITAIN it’s you!

The Hard Times Waltz

First public performance of the Hard Times Waltz ( C) 2009

The video and the link to you tube you will see below is our first outing with our recession song at our Community Concert. We hope the topicality of these present words will soon be lost but updated versions will be written in due course as the national predicament changes.

As the banjo player I confess to fouling up some chords and losing track of the tune every so often. The best achievement was getting the audience to join in with the chorus. Getting the words right would help as well. Sian Bach Sean ( tamborine and vocals) on the other hand kept to the words and most of the melody in spite of having a cold and losing her voice somewhere around 800 feet above sea level before the descent into the valley for the performance. She also remembered to wear her hat while I was so verbose in the intro I forgot to make the final joke about my hat ( a black fedora), and then forgot to put it on. The joke was that I was aiming for the anarchist spiv look, so perhaps this alleged joke was best left out.

We hope you enjoy our efforts. Copyright for the words and music remains with the composers but if you want to use it let us know via a comment with your e-mail address and we will get back to you. As we sing to raise money for good causes we will happily give permission if you sing for charity. However, in the unlikely event of commercial exploitation for profit the usual copyright laws will apply as we have many good causes that we would like to give money to should this little effort be taken up by professional musicians or singers. These include feeding the hungry, educating the disadvantaged and trying to prolong the life of this poorly planet. We know this all seems rather presumptuous but we might as well ‘hedge or bets’ so to speak, and make sure any commercial exploitation is put to some good. Stranger things have happened. The words and music will be available when we have tidied them up. It is hoped that we will be able to write appropriately modified lyrics for other parts of the UK such as Wales and Cornwall. In the meantime more rehearsals are needed

The Community Concert raised £250 for the Acorns Children’s Hospice and£250 for the Village Hall Fund.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Gtvoutfrg

The Hard Tmes Waltz

Hard Times Waltz

As promised here is the recording of the world premiere of the Hard Times Waltz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Gtvoutfrg

The Black side of the White Stuff

I was making a list of the perils which our local farmers have to face. Foot and mouth, bovine TB, blue tongue, brucellosis, the weather, market fluctuations and the bank manager are just a few.. The latter is particularly important when jus one of these threats strike. This is not to mention the rising cost of water ( already £1000 a month for many, even with their own private supply), diesel, interest rates, rodent control, feed merchants, fertilizer costs, rent and vets bills. This is by no means a full list. All this has to be taken on in the hope you will have something to sell to someone who wants to buy it.

This week some dairy farmers had to take a bashing. Dairy Farmers Great Britain (DFB) went bust on Thursday. This farmer’s co-op produced 10% of our milk requirements but had been having difficulties for some time. This led to a restructuring, with members having to put up more of an investment if they wanted to stay in the organisation. Apart from contractual obligations trying to find another buyer for your milk is by no means easy so the co-op managed to keep going. Unfortunately the members then found that the price they were getting was. It is now becoming a common complaint from dairy farmers that they are selling for less than the cost of production. While this was happening the Co-operative Society, your local store, put its milk contract out to tender in January. Since they were a major purchaser from DFB the final blow came when the new contract went to Wiseman, Dairy Crest and Yeo Valley.

The receivers have guaranteed to take the members milk for another two weeks and to pay for it. This would seem only fair but it is little consolation because members have lost all their investment in the co-op plus last months milk cheque and the first 2 days of June. The current guess at the average loss for May is £14,000 per member. This will vary according to the size of farm. This means that a major cash flow problem has arisen within the industry and a rush by dairy farmers to find a new purchaser. Their bargaining position will not be strong and the big buyers will drive a hard bargain. There will also be some smaller producers, especially those in remote areas, who will not be seen as good bets due to the costs of collection. As though this is depressing enough, some farmers will have seen the last of up to £90,000 of their investment in DFB. Various reasons are being circulated as to where it all went wrong and we will have to await the receiver’s findings in the autumn. In the meantime we should expect more to leave the industry and imports of milk to increase.

The retailers say they don’t make much profit on milk. This might have something to do milk being used as a lost leader, presumably with the loss being borne by the farmer. They also say that their alleged 50% mark up on hard cheese is not supported by the evidence. Unfortunately the evidence seems to suggest that more upland farmers will be leaving the industry, never to be replaced. In the meantime the consumer should realise that more milk will be imported while home grown milk will come from cows who never see a blade of grass and are fed on imported feed stuff harvested from cleared tropical forest areas. The end losers will of course be all of us as the environment goes down hil and food security becomes a thing of the past.
Dacier

Dear Roy and Clare: we are moving on

Last week I caught Roy Hattersley on Newsnight dismissing the possibility of more independents in Parliament as a waste of time because we would finish up with a load of single cause campaigners who could decide nothing. Party politics was what was needed, not celebrities. In similar vein Clare short had a go at Lynn Faulds Wood on Womans Hour. She in effect dismissed Lynn’s possible candidacy to stand for Parliament as naive, by asking whether she was right or left wing? This is all arrogant nonsense from yesterday’s people.

Thinking that only political parties have the answer is misguided. With the richer getting richer and the poorer getting poorer and the world going to hell in a sieve, I don’t think they do. Why should political dogmas derived from the 19th century, whether from Marx or Adam Smith still be thought to hold the solution to our growing problems. If they do, they seem to be taking a long time about it.

Traditional politicians think that the move to have independent people in the political fight would achieve little. Political parties are no more than structures for organising a list of objectives which individual candidates must adopt when presenting themselves for election. In fact it is from within this idea that the contradiction arises. What or for whom is the voter voting? In practice it will always turn out to be the alleged wish list from which the leadership will draw from when forming a government. It is a convenient way of both organising and funding the bid for power by those who have rallied round the manifesto. Unfortunately the individual within this group is seen as a threat.

Those who might now seek a place in Parliament might think that their judgement will be better than many of the present members. Let’s face it; some of them seem to have no judgement at all as to morals or even political sensitivity. A new intake would have to work hard to adopt worse judgements than those who took us into a war on the incompetent reading of so called intelligence, all in the face of the largest demonstration against government policy in the history of political action in these islands.
Dacier

Wanted: Honest people to Join the Elected Legislature

Due to a large number of early retirements the Legislature would welcome applications for a number of vacancies which will arise during the next twelve months.

Successful applicants will present themselves for election in a constituency at a General Election and if successful will be required to exercise there judgement on behalf of their constituents in the formulation and enactment of legislation. You should be aware that the number of seats in the legislative chamber is likely to be reduced during the next Parliament. Although the details of employment are under review applicants should assume that the following job description includes the basic terms and conditions:

You will have a salary of £64,000 per annum (pay rise pending, to include London weighting) and your travel costs to and from your constituency when attending Parliamentary sessions, will be reimbursed. While in London, accommodation will be paid for on your behalf for three nights stay in an approved B&B while the House is sitting or when attending other proceedings of Parliament.

As a backbench member you will be provided with an office and staff including telephone, internet link and stationery. Staff selections will be subject to consultation with the sitting member. Arrangements for the payment of salaries will be dealt with by standard terms and condition for the employment of parliamentary staff. These arrangements replace the previous allowances for administration.

Members will be expected to return to their constituency at weekends and to hold a constituency surgery. Newspapers throughout the week will be delivered as part of your conditions of service.

You should not expect the taxpayer to help you pay to keep your present home on. If you want to keep it, then you should have weekend accommodation in your constituency or move to your job, like everyone else has to.

You should not expect the taxpayer to help you pay to keep your present home on. If you want to keep it, then you should be prepared to have weekend accommodation in your constituency or move to the constituency.

Standard terms and conditions will apply to pensions and retirements and in the event of a member failing to be re-selected or elected. Standard regulations and a Code of Practice for Members will apply to external employment, vacations, and minimum hours of attendance in the House and grievance procedures.

In the event of 51% of the electors in your constituency being dissatisfied with your conduct the Speaker of the House of Commons must order a bye-election. Should you be promoted to a Government post you will be provided with further regulations ensuring that you will not have any conflict on interest between your public duty and your private interests. The number Government posts is due for reduction.
Dacier