Practical Thoughts

Dear Reader, Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide; When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me. Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away; Change and decay in all around I see— O Thou who changest not, abide with me. This is a week where anger seems to have been raising its ugly head more than ever in recent decades. My wife and I have directly experienced the sharp end of that unsavoury instrument this week from a neighbour, and in all the main topics that form the main news of the day, anger is often the underlying principle. Anger - by its very nature - is directed outwards, the person or persons venting their frustration against something they perceive to be the cause of their frustration. But the secret is that all too often what anger is expressed is against a reflection of their own choice or of their own belief system or of some aspect of...

Dear Reader, Well, it seems that the sale of electric cars has gone up quite a bit over the last year or two, but still not (of course) in huge numbers. At a price of at least £35,000 (and usually a lot more), they are out of the reach of most ordinary drivers. But the cost will come down over time. Their introduction reminds me of a time -  when I was aged between 8 and 11    - when I accompanied my father  in school holidays  to his employers, a bakery company called Scribbans, for whom he was a roundsman. I'm sure that a child would these days not be allowed to do so - more the pity in my view. His delivery vehicle was usually an electric van (exactly like the Morrison vehicle depicted on the left (below)) and so part of his job was to plug in his vehicle at the end of the day, leaving it overnight to be re-charged.  So, I got to know about the re-charging of electric vehicles nearly 70 years ago. However, when Dad and I got to his employers'...

Dear Reader, Democracy is the worst system, except for all the other systems - Winston Churchill With my apologies for digressing before I have barely started this artice, have you ever experienced really big coincidences, or synchronicity? You must have, or perhaps you've not stopped to notice them. Particularly since I started writing regularly about 10 years ago, I've noticed great coincidences appearing on an increasingly regular basis. One of these coincidences concerned research and subsequent article I did 2 or 3 years back about a pioneering pre-WW1 aviator from Birmingham - an aviator that no-one else had heard of - or so I thought. I published my article in Carl Chinn's Brummagem magazine, only to find - only 2 months later - another, parallel, article about the very same person in another magazine published down south. The other writer (not even a Brummie!) knew a bit more than I in a certain area about that aviator, and, likewise, I knew a bit more t...

Dear Reader, Matters are moving-apace are they not? This past week has seen headlines on matters of concern, whether it's Greta Thunberg and the UN on Climate Change, or Trump being trumped or the face-up between Khan and Modi at the UN over Kashmir, or Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court on Boris's attempt at breaking Constitutional Law.  And in their return to Parliament on Wednesday, we witnessed the worst of what our Parliamentarians can produce while under the full spotlight of people around the world who were interested to tune in, probably in anticipation of a riveting debate at the highest level. All they saw and heard were the worst - almost marketplace - accusations and counter-accusations, with only the SNP (as always) providing a speech of any calm maturity. Macho has no charm. Britain has gone down another notch as far as the rest of the world is concerned. The "home of all parliaments" showed itself to be a wasteland of conceit and party warfare an...

Dear Reader, To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And Eternity in an hour. - William Blake. Well, it may depend on which kind of sand granule. This week we have had, of course, the world-wide demonstration by schoolchildren and others against the slow-shoe-shuffle performance of the Establishment in getting its act together about Climate Change. But the call to action by those who are to inherit the Earth has not come early enough; it should really have been voiced 10 or more years ago to trigger a strong change of thinking and action then , not now at the 11th hour. To those involved in the front-line, it was perfectly clear back then what was evolving, and also to those that had (even as onlookers) studied the situation over the preceding 50 years. But world governments had long mastered the art of keeping people away from the truth, and people don't like to change their habits, nor ...

Dear Reader, Despite having lived away from my birthplace (Birmingham, UK) for half of my 75 years, I still have a strong sense of the history and development of the place. In fact, my interest in it has increased in the decade and more since I returned here, mainly because I have had a lot more time to research Birmingham's history more thoroughly. I have to say, though, that over 60 years I have had the privilege and enjoyment of utilising three generations' worth of Birmingham Central Library facilities, now called the Library of Birmingham. Our forefathers deserve a huge "thank you" for their foresight in caring to provide this magnificent free facility over 150 years ago. It has only got better as time has passed. On the matter of care, one of the most important points that I discovered  more recently is  that whereas the north of England - particularly Manchester - became famed for the virtual enslavement of its workers during the 19th century following th...

Dear Reader, When conflict occurs - even the worst kind - there is always to be found a silver rainbow: some individuals or groups appear, sometimes from nowhere, to create a counter-balance to the evil being perpetrated. We have heard many stories of rank bravery in the World Wars as well as in western civilian disasters such as 9/11 and 7/7. And many other occasions. For my part, I remember also the attack on the Taj hotel at Mumbai in 2008, which is not often talked about in the West. The following is a rendition of some of what happened there, in 2008. On November 26, terrorists launched a series of simultaneous attacks on various places at Mumbai including the prestigious Taj hotel. The exemplary courage and dedication that so many showcased in those fateful days is now a Harvard Business School (HBS) case study. The multimedia case study ‘Terror at the Taj Bombay: Customer-Centric Leadership’ by HBS professor Rohit Deshpande documents “the bravery and resourcefulness show...

Dear Reader, It is more than 10 years since people were being alerted to the phenomenon called the end of the Mayan calendar - 21st December 2012. People popularly thought that this was another "End Of The World" hoax, but its meaning was a lot more profound. Since then it has fast disappeared from our consciousness. Should we still be concerned about it? This article discusses why it is still relevant. An alert to the 2012 event was made manifest as a crop circle in 2008. The picture below shows this in the form of a diagram of our solar system. The place and the date of a crop circle is shown, but the most interesting thing is that from the positions of the planets in this crop circle it was possible to calculate a date that corresponded quite accurately to the planetary positions that would occur on the aforementioned 21st December 2012.  Significantly on this date, our Sun and the Earth crossed the Milky Way galactic plane –  an event that only occurs approx...