The Olympic Flame for the London games was round our way yesterday, so I decided to down tools, so to speak, and go out and meet it. I would never have the opportunity to do this again in my lifetime and so I convinced myself that it was worth the effort. Certainly the hot sunny weather left me with no excuse not to do it, unless of course I were to make a case for it being too hot and therefore too exhausting! Well I didn't.

I headed out of the house, using Shank's pony,  just after 3pm, at a leisurely pace, crossing the park nearby and making for the high street. Half way there  I regretted not having taken any water with me, as the walk and the exposure to the sun was already making me thirsty. But never mind, it was all in a good cause. What cause, do I hear you whisper? Why, my cause of course! The cause of my seeing the Olympic Flame, as I've said at the start of this piece.



On reaching the high street I merged into the flow of people that were making their way to the road through which the Flame was expected to pass. Within minutes I was there and milling about in the crowd already lining the road on both sides. As was to be expected, there was an overwhelming preponderance of mothers and their darling little sprogs and after spending a little time on one side of the road, I decided to cross over to the other side where, I judged, I would be in a better position to follow the Flame.

Big mistake! I came out of the shade on one side of the road and entered the other shadeless side where the sun shone on us relentlessly. However, I was now there and couldn't be bothered to go back. Soon the advertising lorries were parading past, and our eyes were regaled with the sight of Coca-Cola, Samsung and Lloyd's TSB, among others, a truly unforgettable sight! Aboard them were young people smiling and waving to us. So I waved back. As one does. 

The next moment someone on a loud-haler informed us that the Olympic Torch would be arriving in five minutes, at which point a loud cry went up from the crowd in anticipation, though my mouth remained resolutely shut, which helped to conserve body moisture, or so the theory goes. We all waited expectantly as the sun beat down on us. Because of the bend in the road, it was not possible to see far ahead, so we could only go by what our ears reported to us.

Then, as I was beginning to wonder where the flippin' flame was, I heard  loud cheers and clapping from the crowds just ahead and I realised that the the Olympic Torch was about to make its appearance. I whipped my camera out in readiness and took a few pics of the assembled throng and then waited for the 'apparition' I had come to witness. The next moment I espied police outriders gliding along and then, yes, there it was, held aloft in the hand of a runner who was coming towards us. Click, click, click, went the countless cameras, while other cameras, cellphones and camcorders recorded it all silently.

No sooner had the Torch appeared than it was passing us by and in one body we surged forward after it, still snapping and filming. I held the camera aloft as I went, trying to avoid heads that rose above me, and take pics of the flame instead. Tall people have a definite advantage here. On reaching the road junction, the runner stopped and another runner took over with his own torch, and then they were off again. And so were we! 

Round the corner we went and along the next road, where all traffic had been halted to let the runner go by. I followed part of the way but owing to the crowding and the distancing of the runner (whom it was difficult to follow at the same pace through the throng of people) I gave up further pursuit and turned back. After all, I had done what I came to do, namely to see the Olympic Flame and take a few pics of it. I was now tired and thirsty and a bit sweaty and it was time to go back home.

On the way, feeling in a bit of a celebratory mood, I availed myself of the local patisserie to get myself some honey-balls. And that was that, folks! I could at least say in years to come that I had been to see the Olympic Flame 'in the flesh'. Sounds much more exciting than it was but that's not my fault. I made sure I was there. The rest was not in my hands. 

“Give me a child until he is seven..."

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

This Jesuit motto is the mantra of a television series in thee UK that has filmed a group of individuals every seven years from the age of seven in 1964 till the present day at the age of 56 and it looks likely to continue, which means that we will eventually face the prospect of the participants dying off one by one as they go into old age, including the producer, Michael Apted, and that’s when questions may well be asked as to whether it ought to go on. Whatever happens then, I do hope it will go on a bit further and accompany the chosen subjects well into their sixties. And if any pass away in the process, I suppose we could be there at their funeral, or at least speak with their friends and family about their lives. Having said that, your humble blogger is no spring chicken and may pop his clogs before any of the series participants do and not witness any of the attrition that will occur one day. This is real life, not a scripted tv drama.

For me it has been a fascinating and revealing series so far, witnessing every seven years both the visible physical changes in the subjects and the no-less obvious and natural changes in their mental development, but also, and just as fascinating, the changes taking place in the world around them. We start from a first black-and-white episode showing a truly suffocating dark and dismal environment and progress in subsequent episodes to a world of greater colour and light and growing optimism. The series develops in a very natural way as we follow the participants through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and on to what may now be termed their later years. Admittedly it is all in the form of brief snapshots, but it is nevertheless a potent window into the growing-up process, evolving society and a rapidly changing world.

Although the programme focused on a specific group of children, it is in a way about each and every one of us. Though the course of our own lives may differ somewhat from that of those individuals, the process is the same and the successive stages are the same and we see ourselves in those children as they pass through the various ages and stages of man. We have many common points with them and we recognise many of their experiences in our own. We witness their joys and sorrows, their successes and failures, their triumphs and defeats. The older we are, the more nostalgic we are about the early years, the years of our childhood, our youth, and the younger we are, the more we are intrigued to see how life is faced at an older age. We look back or we look forward and in both cases their life is a reflection of ours and ours of theirs.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” But is this really so? It sounds good, has a good mystical ring to it, but if the series demonstrates one thing it is that this is so often not the case after all. Several of the participants have gone on to lead lives that we could not have imagined from seeing them at age seven. Some have had better and some worse lives as adults than we might have imagined. And some have been a real revelation. But all have been a slice of human lives at various stages and moments, divided into 7-year intervals, and I for one have been spurred to think long and hard about life and our journey from the cradle to the grave. We can do nothing about the one or the other, but we may do a great deal about the in-between. And that is what really matters in the end.

So now the seven-year-old children of 1964 are the fifty-six-year-old adults of 2012 and, if we are fortunate enough, we may hope to revisit them in another seven years’ time when they are sixty-three. By definition it is a process that cannot go on forever and it is already nearer to its end than its beginning, given the average human age-span, but so far it has been an intriguing and moving journey and for the moment it continues. I personally have learnt a lot from it in ways which are more to do with attitude, perception, approach and acceptance than any concrete practical skill or aptitude or technique. Being older than them by a few years, I have seen myself in them and recognised the grey grim world they were born into.

Seven Up has, as I've said, taken us through a large part of the cycle of life in seven-year leaps and by so doing it has set before us the reality or realities of life and an ever-changing world. It has shown us the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a representative group of individuals, and the many things that life throws at us all along the way. There is joy and sorrow there, happiness and sadness, triumph and tragedy, goodness and badness, and we can all identify with that and recognise ourselves in them and the scheme of things. If I am still around to see the next episode in 2019, I will do so… if only to say: "Their journey through life has reflected my own and the challenges they have encountered along the way have also been my own." The differences are only really in the detail.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”  I’m not so sure about this, but whatever the truth of it, the contrast between us as children and us as adults, as poignantly witnessed in the Seven-Up series, is such a huge one that it is difficult to believe that we are the same individuals. And therein lies the fascination in the series. We see the child become the man, mentally and physically, and we are transfixed by the transformation. We note with astonishment the power of the years to transform us into something wholly different from what we were when we came into the world. The inexorable passage from cradle to grave - a journey that we all must make, in a life that may be short or long, happy or sad - is a truly gripping experience and must be the core reason why this documentary series has been so successful. It is I suppose a concrete witnessing of the flame of life that eventually and ineluctably weakens, falters and goes out and we thus pass into history. Sic transit gloria vitae.

Night Fright!

Do you ever wake in the middle of the night with an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness or anxiety, even downright anguish, a sort of 'existential angst', and, try as you might, you cannot get off to sleep again? Do black thoughts flood into your head and torment you in the blackness of night, in one form or another, effectively banishing further sleep? If this "nocturnal numbness" never happens to you, you're one of the fortunate few, of which alas I am not, in which case you need not read on. But if you're a fellow sufferer, then perhaps the following is more or less familiar to you.

Where am I?

The other night I awoke just after three in the morning in a somewhat confused and anxious state and, try as I might, I could not get back to sleep. It seems I had been having a rather heavy dreamlike experience, not exactly a nightmare, but one that I'd rather have done without and which must have instilled a certain uneasiness and disquiet in my subconscious that looks to have been the reason for my waking up all of a sudden in a state of some anxiety. I had a strange sense of being ethereal, disconnected from the world and out of touch with everyone, as though unable to retrieve my past and re-connect with people and events that had been part of my life.

So there I was, awake, nervous and apprehensive, with a deep sense of abandonment and aloneness (rather than loneliness) that precluded sleep but which demanded stimulation, both visual and auditory if I was to get over it. So what would most people do in such a situation? Turn to drink? Gulp down a few pills? Try and get themselves sexually aroused?Well, I did none of those: I just turned the telly on to good old BBC 24-hour news and sat back to absorb some of the world's goings-on to take me out of myself. And it was the usual merry mixture of civil unrest, terrorist attacks, state-sponsored massacres, natural disasters, gruesome murders, all-consuming arsons, high-level fraud, political scandal, economic chaos, drug wars, widespread deceit and deception and the like. Have I missed anything out? You can fill in the gaps for me. All in all it made a great way for me to forget my own sleep-induced desolation and despair.

Yes, all this misery and mayhem in the world managed to take my mind off my own less tangible fears and envelop me in a general feeling of revulsion at the state of the world which is never free of upheaval and unrest. Half way through my viewing or revulsion, if you prefer, I got up, went down to the kitchen, found some strawberries in the fridge and washed them down with pure orange-juice whilst listening to something silly on the radio. Back upstairs I siphoned the python, as they say (well some of us still do), and so with belly assuaged and bladder emptied, I got back down to calming the mind and the spirit, an enterprise not so easily achieved. It was back to the world news and a further serving of calamities and conflicts, followed by a review of the day's major international sports events. That's where I drew the line and turned the tv set off.

Where am I?

Having set the television screen on a red mood light that allowed me to faintly perceive my surroundings once the main light was off, I settled back down to re-enter the world of sleep. It was now more than an hour later, around 4.30 am, and being summer, it was already beginning to lighten outside and the dawn chorus had struck up: an ideal backdrop for me to drift off. I hate the dead silence and darkness of the night, and the faint glimmer of light and chirping of the birds were a welcome sight and sounds. 

Within a few short minutes I was in the arms of Morpheus, transported back to the land of Nod. With my night fright dispelled and my spirit calmed, I slept soundly, though I knew that it was not an isolated occurrence and was bound to recur soon enough. Fortunately, I had devised an effective means of combating it (thank God for BBC 24-hr news!) and having the remedy made me less frightened of the malady. 

When is a Drought Not a Drought?

That is the question that is exercising my mind at this moment: When is a drought NOT a drought? And the answer? When it's been raining nearly every day for three weeks! At least it's not what we normally understand by the term 'drought'.

Rainy drought conditions!

You see, my friends, ever since the "drought" was made official and a water hosepipe ban was put in place, as well as other restrictions on the use of water, heaven's sluice-gates have opened up and it has rained on us almost every day to some degree or other, which is just as well, really, as our gardens get watered at least during this extreme spell of dry weather!

And believe me, there's nothing worse than a wet drought! A dry drought I know how to deal with, but a wet drought... now that's a different thing altogether and the "rule-book" says nothing about that. How does one begin to tackle a wet drought? The Authorities tell you one thing and your senses witness another. Is the weather just being bloody-minded to wrong-foot meteorologists and hoodwink the rest of us or are we seeing contradiction where there is none?

As rainy conditions stop us from going into the garden to deal with the drought by chucking a few buckets of water over our more precious plants, we see all the vegetation really taking off with all this dry rain falling on us and before we know it we have a jungle to cut down!. What are we to do? Brave the rain to counter the drought or weather the drought and let the rain do its worst? Either way, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't! 

Could this be the future?

And to make matters worse, my confounded brolly gave up the ghost the other day before a sudden powerful gust when I was out and I was left helpless before a possible imminent downpour of drought-induced rain. Fortunately the drought held off till I was back home before unleashing its stores of rain. Now I'm brolly-less and can't find a shop that sells them. Cue to go online at Amazon and get one from there together with a pair of garden secateurs and perhaps a revamped mackintosh and some sort of cat repeller to stop cats pooping in my garden every day!



09.05.2012
It is three days later and the drought continues with more rain every day. Wet boggy ground and mud patches in gardens and parks are visual testimony to the cumulative effects of a watery drought. The hosepipe has become irrelevant as Nature is being kind to us and supplying in abundance what we may not obtain from the water companies. But the special drought restrictions continue and there's no sign yet of their ending. With dry weather like this, umbrella sellers will be doing a rip-roaring trade.

Should a period of real dry weather, not to say drought, come upon us one day soon, we'll need a new word to define it, given that drought now conjures up visions of constant wet and rainy weather! The only viable terms that come to mind at the moment are 'real-drought' or, 'drought-for-real' or better still 'dry-drought'. Yes, the last of these has a certain pleasant alliterative ring to it. We will have 'droughts' that are wet and then 'dry-droughts' that are true periods of dry weather. Bingo! Problem solved! And the English language is the richer for it.

I rest my case and spare the reader's patience.