15 July 2017 - Politics vs Power at the Point of a Pike

History was not kind to me when I was younger. Learning dates of battles, kings, queens, significant events etc. and regurgitating them in an exam didn’t always sit well with me. My father’s advice on this problem – ‘the trouble with history is that the longer you leave it, the more there is to learn’. 
Well if history was not kind to me, it has been even crueller to Richard III as I discovered on a recent visit to Bosworth Field and the City of Leicester.
The popular Shakespearian image of Richard is as an ugly hunchback who is ‘rudely stamp'd’, ‘deformed, unfinish'd’, and cannot ‘strut before a wanton ambling nymph.’ From the perspective of Richard’s now growing number of supporters, this is a classic case of history being written by the winners.
Look carefully at Richard’s statue in the now rejuvenated area outside Leicester Cathedral and you’ll find the inscription; ‘a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people’. This begs one of those historical ‘what if’ questions. What would have happened if Richard, king for just two years, had prevailed over Henry Tudor at Bosworth? A very different future for these islands without the son of Henry Tudor for sure.
Both Richard’s and Henry’s standards fly together over Bosworth Field today. The visitor centre is well worth a visit, provoking thoughts on how well or badly we deal with alternative versions of the future and how much we can be influenced by what we read and what we are told.

Standards of Richard III and Henry Tudor flying together today over Bosworth Field remind us how in 1485 competing versions of the future settled their differences. If ever you get fed up with politics and politicians wrangling over their view of our future, try to remember, it’s incredibly important we settle our differences through politics and debate and not at the point of a pike.
All we need is for politicians to keep their standards up.
©Keith Murphy

11 August 2017 - Virtutem Autem Diversitatem - (From Diversity cometh our strength)

We’re all not quite what we think we are. A recent report in The Independent  lifted the lid on a quintessential ‘English’ Cotswold village and discovered that less than half the residents were British and nobody was 100% Anglo Saxon.
A summer vacation to France and a trip to The Bayeux Tapestry gave me some pretty big clues as to why this should be. We all know about 1066 when William the Conqueror came ashore and gave Harold one in the eye. The Tapestry is a classic ‘History by the Winners’ piece of work. It puts forward the very believable proposition that William was promised the kingdom, Harold swore that he wouldn’t take it and when he reneged on the deal, William was obliged to invade to take what was his. This one act changed England and the kingdoms beyond forever and William the Bastard became William the Conqueror. William I bought Norman efficiency and organisation to our lands, something that nowadays we tend to think of as an English trait.
This one act of invasion and subsequent take over on its own is probably reason enough to believe that England was, is and will be a melting pot for different peoples of our world. Trying to protect borders against infiltration will probably be, in the long run, as effective as King Canute was in holding back the waves. 
     Just consider how proud as an island nation we are of our maritime prowess. Where did this come from? It’s pretty well documented that the Anglo Saxon peoples were prey to seaborne invasion from Vikings. Indeed Harold was busy fighting off King Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire just three weeks before William decided to pay a visit. We have to conclude that the Anglo Saxons were just rubbish at the maritime bit.
Take a close look at the Tapestry. Norman boatbuilding looks pretty efficient. It must have been on an epic scale for the time to carry sufficient horses, men and supplies across La Manche in time to beat an admittedly travel worn Anglo Saxon army. With successful Viking integration through numerous sorties and the Norman ability to cross the water with such efficiency, both these ethnic groups had something major to contribute. The success of England and Britain in later centuries relied heavily on seafaring ability. Without the Normans and the Vikings, it’s likely that the peoples of these islands would have been gingerly dipping their toes in the water and saying to themselves: ‘It looks a bit rough today. Let’s stay home’ 
On final thought on how this forced diversity has made us what we are today can be evidence through the development of that most fearsome weapon, the English Longbow. Unexpected spinoffs from adventurous technology can be interesting to look at. I remember growing up being told that Teflon frying pans were a direct result of space exploration technology and wasn’t this is a good thing. Indeed Teflon has changed our lives but how does this relate to the English Longbow?
Well, shipbuilding post William I must have taken off in England if for no other reason than to defend the new kingdom against Scandinavian invasion. A credible deterrent if you will. This intensive use of timber and the greater understanding of how native timbers could be worked likely led one day to someone noticing that English Yew, when hewn from both the sap and heart wood produced extremely springy staves. Absolutely useless they probably were for shipbuilding, but as a weapon of mass medieval destruction, unparalled.
Pretty ironic that some of the greatest and most celebrated victories using this weapon were on French soil.
©Keith Murphy

26 August 2017 - Dunkirk – a Tale of Ties, Tea and Tide

A trip to the cinema these days is a rare thing for me these days but I do enjoy it, the big screen, the immersive sound experience and avoiding the really expensive sweets and popcorn. I went to see Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk and mightily impressed I was too. Perhaps a little sugared on the top for the purposes of the mass entertainment market, but based on an event that can truly be categorised as nation forming.
I grew up in the shadow of World War Two. Although born some 11 years after the end of the carnage, I distinctly recall the playground games based on the war. We all knew who the baddies were and if you drew the top card, you were definitely the Spitfire pilot. Normandy landings on D-Day played a part, but other than a mention I distinctly recall in class of ‘the little boats’, Dunkirk never made an appearance in our childish games. I believe this to be because it’s a complex story, combining victory with defeat is perhaps one of the most difficult to tell.
‘History by the losers’ never gets quite the same air time as ‘history by the winners’.
I asked my father who was aged 16 at the time of Dunkirk, why did men volunteer willingly to fight when the risks were so obvious. His view was that prior to the war and during the early months, the whole nation was being conditioned into the view that this was essential to preserve the nation from the scourge of tyranny. The media at the time was either radio or newspapers and they must have done a pretty good job, if you define good by getting the population to take up arms.
From the viewpoint in the 1970s when my father answered this question, he also told me that ‘the first victim of war was truth’, a quote attributed to Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) - a Progressive Republican senator in California. His actual quote, 'The first casualty, when war comes, is truth', was said during World War 1. Ironically he died on August 6 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 
It’s all the more remarkable when you consider that the population were persuaded to take up arms again just 21 years after the War to end all Wars. 
So Dunkirk was a truly pivotal moment in the history of the Nation. Less than one month after taking office as Prime Minister, Churchill addressed the House of Commons and delivered his famous ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech. He was reputedly heard to have said in private after delivering the oration ;  ‘And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that's bloody well all we've got!’
What the film does so well in my view is illustrate through the focus on three individual stories, how this event was shaped by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The rescue from the beaches by the small boats is perhaps the most astounding example of what can be achieved against astonishing odds if you don’t give up and believe.
From what I read, the ‘Sea’ element of the film looks to be loosely based on a little ship called the Sundowner which was owned by Charles Lightoller, former second officer of the Titanic no less. Lightoller insisted that, if anyone was going to take her to Dunkirk, it would be him and his eldest son, Roger, together with Sea Scout Gerald Ashcroft. The men transported 130 soldiers back to Ramsgate, reportedly packed together like sardines, almost capsizing when they reached the shore. She is now a museum ship at the Ramsgate Maritime Museum.

The film shows the war being fought by men dressed in ties and drinking tea when things got tough, which I am minded to believe as true. Perhaps we should beware of men in ties offering us tea? There may be more to them than meets the eye.
©Keith Murphy

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29 August 2017 - The Brexit Negotiation Mirror

Brexit negotiations are at an interesting stage. They have become like a vast multi-national mirror when anyone can look at them and see reflected back, exactly what they want to.
Anti-Brexit will see the lack of progress merely a reflection of the stupidity and impossibility of the task, Pro-Brexit will see plucky Brits taking the beating for being in the vanguard of an inevitable departure from a dying supra national monster. 
By demanding more flexibility from the EU, David Davies is in the process of constructing an ever more intricate mirror that will distort the reflection we see even more. This may well be a sensible way forward, allowing all parties to see whatever they wish for in the Brexit mirror. After all, everyone has to see something positive in the mirror at the end of the negotiation. On the other hand, rather than get successfully to the end of the negotiation, we may just end up at the end of the pier gazing into those flexible mirrors that make sense at all with nowhere to go, but back to the prom.
There is of course an obvious technical drawback with the common mirror. The image you see is virtual and as such, is not a true image or representation. This leads to the common observation of ‘I look great in the mirror but rubbish in photographs’.  The truth is that you have become used to seeing the image reflected in the mirror and less used to the photograph. Perhaps with the advent of the selfie, we will begin to see less of this debilitating social problem!
 Negotiated European agreements in front of mirrors have a bad press and a bad track record. We have to be as careful interpreting the Brexit negotiations as we do evaluating the face that stares back at us in the mirror. As Terry Wogan said: ‘Nobody really knows what they look like. The mirror shows you only what you want to see’.
©Keith Murphy

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24 August 2018 - Time to call Time on Injury Time?

Selectively using statistics is a dangerous game but not as dangerous it would seem as constructing the infrastructure that is required to stage world sporting events. Statistics are hard to pin down, but the construction fatalities that are being reported now in the build up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar I find truly disturbing.
Whilst the stories of thousands of workers dying under slave like conditions have been with us for some time, FIFA look intent on sticking to the plan. In fact, they appear to be more worried about diplomatic isolation of Qatar and their hostile relations with neighbouring states than they about the terrible human cost of constructing the venues.
The 2018 World cup in Russia is not without its construction death problem. Latest reports put the death toll at 17 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/sports/soccer/human-rights-stadiums-fifa-2018-world-cup-russia.html?mcubz=0) although it’s likely that this figure would be disputed as much as a last gasp penalty awarded in the dying minutes of injury time.
So what are the numbers for Qatar 2022? The International Trade Union Confederation has upped its estimate of Qatar 2022 construction deaths from 4000 to 7000 by the time the first match of the World Cup kicks off in 2022. 
I’m pleased to say that when I contacted FIFA about this issue I did get a response within a few days. They told me that .... and that
So we have a gulf between two numbers I’m afraid. 
Whilst it’s highly probable that the ITUC numbers are overestimates and will certainly include all construction in Qatar, there does appear to something not right with the management of the construction process that will produce the facilities for the 2022 World Cup   
©Keith Murphy

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1 September 2017 - Defacastic Dumping

So how does this happen? Let's take the dog out for a walk up one of the most spectacularly scenic spots in South Wales. We'll collect its poo in a plastic bag because we're good like that and then because of the lack of bins, or pretty much anything else man made for as far as the eye can see, we'll just drop the bag here after tying a neat little knot to keep everything sealed up.
Is this OK? Is this responsible? Is this acceptable?
I'm hoping that most will answer no to all three of these questions.
On the way up to the top of Pen Y Fan, late August 2017, we counted twenty such packages and no, we didn't pick them up as we weren't wearing anything you could remotely describe as protection against possible disease. Unfortunately I suspect that some poor people in the employ of The National Trust are regularly allotted this noxious task of removal.
Without this, these little packages in non biodegradable plastic bags are just going to remain on the hillside for hundreds of years. How ironic it is that Wales was one of the first places in the UK to put a charge on the plastic bag. It doesn't deserve to be treated in this way. 
Lets’ be clear about this, Wales keeps a welcome in its hillsides, it has always done. This is not simply a Welsh problem. I’ve seen it right across the UK with the top prize going to the defacastic dumper who left a couple of bags perched on the roof of a car in a car park wedged in its roof rails. Nice!
I'm not known for my love of dogs, or cats come to that, and this practice of defacastic dumping has to end. If for reasons best known to yourself, you have to have a dog, don’t defacastic dump.
©Keith Murphy

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11 September 2017  - Brexit; Reversing Light

Worried about Brexit? Relax, breathe deeply and take a look at the development of humankind.
In the beginning was the small group living communally and getting by quite nicely developing hunting and gathering skills. This grouping had its internal problems of course, fallouts, infidelity, shallow gene pool and the like, but generations would have passed through life, oblivious to the outside world and not even aware of what a passport looked like.
Suddenly, despite the lack of the Daily Mail or the Internet, they became aware of the world beyond their own. This was principally because their neighbours had strayed into their territory without a by your leave, nicked their hunting grounds and carted off people to expand their particular gene pool. The effect of this, besides much wailing and gnashing of teeth, was to increase allegiance to their village grouping and perhaps who knows, even gave rise to creation of a village flag or symbol. The village had been born with its defensive and offensive instincts and on the lookout for expansion opportunities.
The more successful villages expanded and one by one, the smaller surrounding less successful groupings threw in their lot with the local bigwigs. We perhaps even can begin to see the genesis of town councils take responsibility for those day to day problems of street cleaning, planning and building control although not parking in the town centre for obvious reasons, mainly the lack of the internal combustion engine.
Unfortunately, as the Wild West proved, you can be the fastest gun but only until the next fastest gun comes along. So when you neighbour developed some more impressive weapon or military technique, you faced take over or obliteration. High level, ritualised diplomatic intercourse had not yet truly evolved to the level we can so clearly see today.

So by brute force, but mostly ignorance, geographical regions began to coalesce and form nascent nation states. It was at this point that the study of Geography really took off. Knowing when your physical boundaries were such as seas, lakes, mountains, forests, tax free havens and the like were becoming a pretty important part of establishing your nation.
Despite some pretty impressive geographical barriers, human ingenuity was up to the job and technology was invented to revert back to type and go pay a visit to the neighbouring countries with a view to lifting their resources and tacking them on to your country. If you were an instigator of this process you were fearless warriors, if a victim, well you were just a victim. The rise of sea power gave nations the opportunity to see power and all you needed was a following wind and some heavyweight negotiating team who had a load of papers that nobody really understood or could read, supporting their case. As a backup it was usually best to be seen to have at your beck and call a load of blokes on horseback. Simple really.
Things between nation states got pretty bad in the twentieth century. The race to paint the map whatever colour the geographers had chosen for your particular country was all consuming. It didn’t seem to matter how defenceless the target was, the larger the land mass gabbed the better. By then, it appeared that the world’s victims had just given up and provided the Imperialist nation had a flag, and could physically get it in the relevant piece of ground, that was it really. Job done.
Now some would argue that if all had just been content with their empires, the status quo would have been sustainable but what rocked the world was when the Imperialist powers turned on themselves. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, but the belief was that the old pattern of beat your neighbour still held credence. Truth was, the game had just got too big.
After World War Two, thinking started to change. The game had got too big, too many deaths, too much laid waste and little to gain by the victors. Europe in particular needed to change the dynamic. This change of thinking gave birth to the European Union. A collection of States commited to progess together, rather than domination and takeover by the powerful. This was a dangerously new idea, radically different to what mankind had been used to. Where was the allegiance to your own kind, could you trust you neighbour rather than beating them?
The glue that has previously held all the historic groupings together had been fear of your neighbour. With your neighbours now talking of co-operation and co-ordination, the frame of historic reference had been removed. No wonder for enthusiastic advocates of the nation state into which they happened to have been born, the mere idea of a European Union is an anthema.
So where does this leave Brexit? I would contend it’s a natural reaction based on millennia of experience of what it is to live in successful groupings. Ask the population of a successful nation can you survive on your own, you’ll likely get a yes. Pride, self determination, success by your own efforts, control of your own geographic borders all highly laudable, but ultimately not where mankind is going. It’s where we’ve been.
The next step mankind needs to make is not small, it’s a giant leap, to use a phrase. In the event that we discover that we’re not alone in our clearing in the universe we call the earth, what are we going to do when we discover neighbours who aren’t on the internet and are plainly intent on causing us harm? Consider the more immediate scenario that our own activities are causing our particular clearing to become hostile to us as a species. The gluepot of fear under these conditions should, as it’s done the past, bring us together in a different grouping from that of nation states.
Brexit is where we’ve been. You can’t travel as fast in reverse. All you can say is that you know exactly where you’re going and you know what you’re going to find when you get there. I, for one, do not want to go there.
©Keith Murphy

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16 September 2017 - Liberal with the Democracy Please

I joined the Lib Dems shortly after the European Referendum in 2016. I suppose I could well be accused of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, but you know what, I don’t really care. 
Joining any sort of political party had never held much attraction to me, too busy at work, raising a family and following my other interests. Political parties were hard work and largely just devoted to taking chunks out of each other.
After the disaster for the ‘United’ Kingdom in the Breixt debacle in 2016, I could not rid my mind of a quote my father was rather fond of from Edmund Burke ; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Wow, I had done nothing and although evil is a strong word, Brexit was definitely not good. The first time I voted in 1975 was in the famous Common Market Referendum. No brainer for me. Europe was important, I didn’t want to fight a European war like my father and grandfather before me, I wanted the United Kingdom to be part of Europe.
The Lib Dems clearly were the pro Europe place to go. The 2010 decision to go into coalition with the Tories did astound me at the time. I gave it six months and expected stomach churning turbulence. What we got, ironically, was strong and stable government with attenuation of the far right (but wrong) plans of Cameron’s Tories. This came at a terrible price as the electorate dealt the Lib Dems a near fatal blow in the 2015 General Election.
I was tempted to join in 2015, my inclination had always been to the centre or left of English politics, but domestic parries and thrusts could go on without me. However 2016 was too much for me. The rise of UKIP, xenophobia and isolationism began to hark back to an era that my father lived through when evil truly took centre stage, took many lives and nearly took his. So time to stop doing nothing.
It’s not a lot, but delivering leaflets and signalling what you believe to others is doing something and I can at least say that.
The best thing about being a Lib Dem is discovering that you are not alone. I live in an area where I’m unusual, I don’t own a dog and I don’t vote Tory. It’s a glorious and privileged location but it comes at a cost of political isolation. I’m expert at holding my tongue, editing the local community magazine without a hint of political bias and identifying common ground with my neighbours. It’s hard work but I do it and don’t complain, well not very often leastwise!
To be in a room where thoughts on Europe, Equality and the Economy and not far from yours is a privilege and a pleasure.
So why am I with the Lib Dems - I’m with them because this Brexit thing is bigger than the both of us.
©Keith Murphy

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13 September 2017 - Taking it back

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. (Eagles – Hotel California, 1976)
Let’s face it, nobody likes being locked into anything unless you’re entirely committed to that which locks you in. Simple purchases from shops is just one example where in my lifetime we’ve made great strides to make life easier for the buyer than it once was. I can recall, with perhaps a little embarrassment, accompanying my mother taking back faulty items to a shop and the ensuing arguments which were business stopping, volume escalating and time consuming but I have to say, usually successful. Success in this enterprise came hard won and worn as a badge of honour if you managed to overcome the resistance of the shop assistance. We have plainly changed from a nation of shopkeepers into a nation of consumers.
So this nation of shopkeepers, as categorized by one of our neighbours in Europe in the bad old days, is now busily engaged in overcoming resistance of another sort. Disengaging from the European Union is proving problematic. Before we all jump to the immediate “well we always knew it wouldn’t be easy” reaction, we ought to remember our basic instinct of not wanting to be locked into anything to which we are not fully committed. Whatever we may think about the affair back in June 2016, it did demonstrate that we as a nation state are not fully committed to the membership of the European Union.
In the normal course of events and in our everyday lives, we normally have the power to extract ourselves from a negative situation. We take the goods back, we stop the subscription or we cancel the booking normally with little, or no financial penalty. There are even major life events that can be unwound. Marriage and our birth gender come to mind as situations that can be changed. Putting up with the negative over a long period of time is intensely wearing and not good for you.
So where does this leave us with the European Union? I personally would like to leave us with the European Union but before we argue the rights and wrongs of remain or leave, I think it wise that we just remember that belonging to something you can’t extract yourselves from, EVER, is probably not a desirable place to be. Things can change.
We are currently embroiled in tangible difficulties. We have Separation Costs, Citizens Rights, Legal Jurisdiction, EU/UK land borders and the like. These may or may not prove solvable, but the Leave Lobby know that if these logical issues come to nought and a “no deal” is on the horizon, the emotional argument of not belonging to something you appear not to be able to leave may prove unstoppable. I do sincerely hope that our negotiators do not come back to us at a minute to midnight and proffer this crushing emotional argument.
The consequences of this being the basis on which we leave the EU could be truly catastrophic.
©Keith Murphy

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14 September 2017 - The Magic Roundabout

So Firenze it is. Negotiations are put on hold whilst the city prepares itself for a visit from our Prime Minister to deliver what has been billed as a landmark speech.
Florence is certainly a landmark for the tourists. It has been for me. Many years ago I once had a very early morning visit to the city caused by a less than satisfactory bed and breakfast experience and a hasty exit in the small hours. Florence was unpeopled except for the municipal street cleaners and rubbish collectors and strangely, a number of seagulls possibly also on their holidays from Brighton. Whether it’s a destination for embattled and weakened politicians of the Brexit persuasion remains to be seen.
My second visit more recently was entirely different. Peak season, peak time, peak everything; the city was overflowing with humanity. Quite a renaissance in fact. Not a street cleaner to be seen, or a seagull come to that.
I suffer from a condition known as feriatum cultro which you and I know as holiday overload. It causes me to instantly forget the names of significant locations and features of the places I visited on my holidays. Feriatum cultro can strike even the day after the visit, and its magnitude seems to be directly proportional to the temperature and indirectly proportional to the cost of the local wine. Florence was one of those places where it struck. I had to constantly remind myself that its principal river was the Arno and that pretty bridge, you know, the one with the shopping arcade, was the Ponte Vecchio.
I do hope that our Theresa does not get struck down with a bout of Feriatum cultro, or Ponte Vecchio come to that. We’re embarrassed enough as a nation thank you very much. What she is lining up to say by all accounts is that Brexit means Transition. Not so much abseiling down a cliff edge, more a sedate stroll in the Cotswolds looking at the rolling scenery from sheltered valleys. Enjoying a warm English beer, enveloped by lunchtime chatter and sound of leather on willow accompanied by the distance peal of church bells drifting across the sunlight meadows. Hmm… She may as well say ‘beanz meanz heinz’, although that may be a touch too Germanic for current Brexit taste buds.
Whilst Florence is a truly beautiful city, Brexit is a truly dingy backstreet without the street cleaners but with the seagulls. It feels like our national sat nav has gone wrong. It’s been programmed for one destination and we’ve taken the wrong right turn and ended up in Brexitville, whilst the sat nav has just inexplicable gone mute. Not only has our sat nav broken, our moral compass seems to have come from the same source as Jack Sparrow’s, pointing only to ‘the thing you want most in this world.’
Will Florence put an end to this madness and deliver us from the mess we’re in? Boinggg… and Zebedee said it’s time for bed. Time to get off the Magic Roundabout.
©Keith Murphy

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20 September 2017 - The Great British Egg Sit

Have you ever tried to serve up boiled eggs to your family? It’s actually surprisingly difficult. There always seems to be a wide variety of preferences that you need to cater for. Hard, medium or soft yoke, white or brown bread soldiers, hot or cooled off a bit and just one, or would you like another? With so many expectations, it’s a bit of a nightmare really. Even if you get it right, the end result is a moderate meal, just nice for a change once in a while.
The English language is not a lot of help either. The very fine difference, in cookery terms, between a boiled egg that’s hard, medium or soft could be as little as a few seconds. Whereas we know that a true hardboiled egg is completely different. This has been boiled for ages, within an inch of its life in fact and we seem to have no other name for it other than a hardboiled egg. Yet I seem to insist on asking people, at least to get their preference, if they like their boiled eggs hard or soft. What they actually get served up with is within the lap of the cookery gods.
Now I know there are people out there who have perfected this skill. They may say that you have to get the eggs out of the fridge beforehand; they may say you need to boil the water up beforehand without the egg; they will have a specific saucepan and a specific heat setting. I believe there are special pans and even a machine I saw once that can assist with this task.
What inevitably happens to me is that I sit on the cookery sidelines looking at the ever ticking clock and try and guess when my egg should exit the pan. Until we breed chickens that lay transparent eggs, I guess I will be a sitter and a guesser.
Now before you discount all this as unimportant as those fundamental cream tea questions such as is it s’kone or s’gone, is it cream or jam first and is it milk or tea first, consider where we are with the bubbling question of Brexit. There are as many expectations of the outcome as there are dinner guest sat round the table, it’s impossible to see precisely how the meal is cooking and we seem to be lacking even a basic cookery book. We don’t know if we’re going to get hard, medium or soft Brexit or indeed any Brexit at all. 
What I believe most of us are doing is sitting round waiting for the eggs to cook, looking for evidence that process is either progressing well or bound for disaster and all keeping our eye on the ever ticking clock. Some seem to have unbounded faith that the meal will turn out well with everybody’s egg cooked to perfection, hard or soft as required, with the correct dippers, at precisely the right temperature so the top can be smashed off and we can get on with meal. Others, more used to the difficulties of getting this right, are convinced that all the variables are so difficult to control that our eggs will be completely inedible, boiled within an inch of their life or at best like the curate’s; good in parts.
It seems like I do when serving boiled eggs, that we have asked people their preference and now are completely unable to cook the meal to their requirement.
My solution to this problem has been to decrease my consumption of boiled eggs. It’s just inevitable that the results will be not worth the effort. Oh what a pity we haven’t adopted the same policy towards Brexit yet. Maybe we just need to sit and watch the clock a little longer. Who knows if Mrs. May isn’t planning a dish using our old ‘boiled within an inch of their life’ eggs, to serve up a rather unappetising dish of Eggs Florentine this coming Friday?  
©Keith Murphy

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22 November 2017 - Champagne On Hold

 At 10.03 pm on Thursday 8 June 2017 after embarrassingly dancing round the room, I put a bottle of Tesco’s finest champagne in my fridge. It’s still there. Not because I don’t like champagne, not because there haven’t been any significant occasions since then, not because I’m too mean to open it; although that could be a distinct possibility. It’s because we’re not there yet.
By now you’ve probably worked out that elated, after Mr. Dimbleby announced that the Tory party were not going to have an overall majority, I grabbed hold of said bottle and put it in the fridge for consumption later in the evening or in the wee small hours. Now let’s be clear here, I’m not a neutral observer of the political scene. I’m a paid up member of a political party and it’s not Labour. My elation for a Tory embarrassment will be familiar to football fans that see their auld enemy beaten, by anybody. 
Along with the country in general, my admiration for Mr. Corbyn grew during the election campaign. The man with the wiry beard had a lot more going for him than the woman in the weird shoes. I was never going to see an abandonment of Brexit from either of the main contenders but as Mick Jagger said, ‘ You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you find, you get what you need.’ To follow, I needed some more ‘lyrics’ to make sense of what had just happened. Cue William Blake:

2017 – Round One

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And did those feet, in real weird shoes
Walk upon England’s mountains blue?
And was the ever loving press
To England’s Tory party true?
And did they countenance such loss
Across our lands from top to toe?
Their MPs sacrificed, shot with fear
But saved by Scotland’s Yellow No. 

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Bring on the stage, that man of red!
Bring on the man with beard of wire!
Let him expound! Hear what he said!
Let him ignite his source of fire! 
He will not crash his own campaign
Nor U-turn on his printed view
Till he has built with everyone
A land for many, not the few.

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And that’s not a bad compliment to Jeremy from me. 
Some weeks before the general election, I took a rare train journey into London. Now I have long since given up trying to decipher the multi-coloured graffiti we see trackside. The writers most definitely have a different dictionary from me, but there was one exhibit that stood out. In plain sight, white Arial text on smutty brick wall, 2 foot font in bold capitals, DON’T FORGET TO REGISTER TO VOTE. Even the apostrophe was correct. It was at that point I began to believe my hopes rather than the polls.  
I’m still waiting, like the rest of the country is waiting, for round two. Had Jeremy done just slightly better, we’d still be Brexiting but I doubt the champagne would still be sitting on my fridge shelf.
©Keith Murphy

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1 December 2017 - ‘Someone Has Blundered’

The Crimean War arrived at more or less the same time as newspapers were able to bring the public regular updates on the progress, or otherwise, of the war. This was made possible by the development of the electric telegraph network. As a consequence of the reports he read, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade after reading a newspaper report about the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.
The poem is a keenly felt piece by the then Poet Laureate. Tennyson read in The Times the phrase, ‘someone had blundered’ and this rhythm set him off. It’s reported that within a few minutes the work was completed.
It’s a harrowing piece telling of a frontal assault by mounted light cavalry on the wrong artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. The Light Brigade succeeded in scattering some of the Russian gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately. The assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.
So we have an assault on the wrong target by soldiers with inept leaders. The poem, as many I have read, appealed to me as a prospective Brexit parody. In fact I even had a title pop into my head – The Charge of the Right Brigade. It’s precisely at this point I have to be careful because if I’m not, within a few minutes the parody will be completed. Besides, parody of war poetry I find unappealing.
Having taken a look at the poem in detail, it reads as well today in our Brexit turmoil as it did in 1854 after the noise, smoke and carnage of Balaclava.
One soldier said in a letter home: “When we received the order, not a man could seem to believe it…not a word or a whisper. On – on we went! Oh! If you could have seen the faces of that doomed 800 (sic) men at that moment; every man’s features fixed, his teeth clenched, and as rigid as death, still it was on – on!” He continued, “Clash! And oh God! What a scene! I will not attempt to tell you, as I know it is not to your taste, what we did; but we were Englishmen, and that is enough.”
So in 2017, we have a new ongoing conflict called Brexit and we have the new technology of social media bringing regular updates on progress, or otherwise of the war. Unfortunately we still have inept leaders and we’re still able to report, ‘someone has blundered’. Don’t let Brexit become our Balaclava.
©Keith Murphy

The Charge of the Light Brigade
I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
   Someone had blundered.
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
   Rode the six hundred.

IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
   Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred!

Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809-1892

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