Here’s a pistol for the fish, here’s a pistol for the limpet, here’s a pistol for the sparrer…
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…me neither, although a dear friend Jeremy (died of pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago) was the embodiment of Toady, both in stature and in demeanour. Jerry had a heart of gold, and despite his toady-ness, had a genuine love and repect of his fellow man and would give you the world if he could, something I find totally missing in #45.
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cheers, joe. That’s a big help 
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I get very irked by the presentation of the staff who do the actual work as “brave heroes”, when much of the reason for their having to be brave in the first place is not the inevitable way of things in a dangerous job but simple skimping by the people who pay the bills (both in numbers of staff and in equipment for each).
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Members of the armed forces tend to wince if they are called a hero, and say things about “doing my job”. (They are shorted too: someone in uniform should not have to buy his or her own boots to replace issue ones which are simply not up to the job, for instance.)
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It was ever thus with the boots, Fishy
Not that that makes it right
Sigh
Carinthia.xx
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Ooh, I haven’t yet mentioned Acts of God in this thread. It’s a book by Ted Steinberg originally written in 2000, about the history of “natural disaster” in the USA – and specifically the way that the known consequences of deliberate human decisions are passed off as “that’s just what happens if you live near the river” (or whatever).
I have the 2003 edition. Note that date; two years before Hurricane Katrina. It predicts in detail what will be done and not done when, inevitably, New Orleans is flooded; and who will be blamed; and who will be left bankrupted if they even live through it.
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Yeah, and calling nurses ‘angels’ fosters a belief among enough of the public that they all have a vocation and do it for love rather than money to make it politically acceptable to underpay and exploit them. That one’s been going for decades.
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I realised this with teachers a while ago: anyone who does it is
- sufficiently keen on the job that they’ll put up with all sorts of horrors to be allowed to do it; or
- unable to afford the dislocations needed to get a less-horrible job; or
- unable to get any other job.
Of course, some of them may be all three.
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It it, naturally, the holiday that gets sent off to war while the others stay safely at home.
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Some bunting/flags etc. Some neighbours sallied forth at 21.00 to deliver ‘Whale Meat Again’ only to be told by one in the know that Her Maj was talking. Ah, well.
Soo xx
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Bunting & Balloons around the nearby duckpond, & a few sitting in Fambly groups on the pavement outside their houses further down the road - neighbours who might normally spend the evening having a drink together in the garden.
No singing, &, in my bit of the road, no clapping on Thursdays either.
Carinthia.xx
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Will the BTB stop with the “we won a big war once, you know – well not us but people who lived in this country as well as all over the world, and we hadn’t actually been born yet, but let’s not talk about that” stuff when the last person who was born during or before 1945 has died?
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No.
(Mind you, I feel the same way about “we won the cup/Olympics/whatever” - no you didn’t, some very highly-trained athletes did, and they happen to live here at the moment. You had no say in their selection or training.)
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I think that the 75th Anniversary has become the passing of memory into history
So Whale meat again and such like will just be allowed to fade into memory and museum libraries
VJ day next
Then the joys of the Korean war to come
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“So it’s been a pretty good year for the war buffs…”
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Better start writing the folk songs for the next one now.
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Or possibly not. There are those who would dearly love to see the May bank holiday (a.k.a.International Workers’ Day) done away with. Add in the rise of jingoistic populism stirred up by ****** (it’s all too easy to shift “in Europe” to “over Europe”) and I could envisage the change being permanent.
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