Number crunchers
Monday 25th January 2021:
Good Morning:
A question: Why is it when our NHS is working at capacity plus with doctors, nurses and all staff doing shifts of fourteen hours the bean counters only work minimum shifts Monday to Friday ? I am obliged to wonder how much a bean counter gets paid over and above a doctor, a nurse, an ambulance driver, a porter ?
Yesterday’s figures as put out by the media are another 30,004 new cases and 610 deaths. It could be we are seeing a down turn in the epidemic but NO the media adds a caveat that this is the week-end so not all data has been processed yet. The bean counters are at home metaphorically putting their feet up ! Come today’s figures they will be higher.
Not only is this disrespecting the REAL people within the figures it makes the whole system something people take with a pinch of salt. Strange how the government is waving vaccination figures under our noses and the bean counters can publish those over a week-end !
PLEASE pause now for a moment and blow a kiss of love to every family represented in the TRUE unpublished figures.
SMILE OF THE DAY: I’ve never met a strong person with an easy past….. be proud of your scars and that you are still standing.
FOUR AM MOMENT: I really appreciate my 4am moment as I gently awake and the ideas that burst into my head but when I get a SUPER 4am moment and just have to get out of bed and come to my laptop that knackers me for the rest of the day. Today has been a super four am moment. OH HECK !
13th January 2021 I published on Amazon an e-book designed to be used on a Smart Phone (YES, I hate smart phones but that is another story) JUKEBOX JURY. Check it out if you like, don’t bother if you don’t like. This morning I came up with an idea for another e-book in a similar vein MILTON KEYNES A DISCO FOR A NEW CITY. Around music centred on Milton Keynes I want to invite people to dance through the HERITAGE (Note I do not use the word history) of MK.
Great, super fantastic BUT I already have two bits of writing I am working on simultaneously – early days yet but I have THE SECRET DIARY OF A SILLY OLD MAN AGED THIRTEEN AND THREE-QUARTERS. I have already shared the introduction but let me do so again:
I have been a very good boy this year, or should that read I have been a very good old boy ? Anyway good is what I have been so can I please have a time machine so I can travel back and be a very good boy next year.
Thank you Santa, I will make sure a mince pie and a glass of sherry are left for you.
Max (The Good Old Boy)
Christmas Day dawned and Santa, or at least his agent, had been and left presents. Neither Doctor Who nor Marty McFly had sent me anything, not even a Christmas Card. Boring time lords ! My wife, on the other hand, gave me a beautiful pillow case which had a scene of a sunset printed upon it. I gave her a kiss the opened a second present. She had given me a copy of Sue Townshend’s book The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen And Three Quarters. I opened the cover and found she had written that in the year 1982.
1982 ? Now at the age of three score years and ten I thought back to the year, the year when I was thirty-two years old. Hell, I am double that now plus six ! Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters, when was I that age ? A quick bit of mental calculation and I can tell you that was in the summer of 1964. Oh to be aged thirteen and three quarters again.
Writing is a hobby of mine, it has been since I was indeed thirteen and three quarters and believe it or not my first book was published in 1982 although it did not sell one percent the number that Sue Townshend and Adrian Mole did. Perhaps I will read it again. Thank You Father Christmas.
There is a story I wrote which on the face of it is a book for children but it is not, I always say that it is an adult’s view on a child’s life. That I think is also a fair description of Adrian Mole. Perhaps I can make it my bedtime reading before I lay my head on that beautiful pillow case.
And yesterday I began writing BEHIND THE NOOSE OR NOT. Here’s the introduction for this bit of scribble:
You will be taken from this
place to the place from whence you came and from there to a place of lawful
execution where you will be hung from the neck until you are dead and may God
have mercy on your soul.
Those were the prescribed
words, the only words a judge could you, for sentencing someone who was found
guilty in a court, guilty of the crime of murder. As the judge spoke them he
had placed on his head by his clerk, a square of black cloth known as the black
cap.
After sentence the condemned
man had to wait for three Sundays until his execution, three Sundays where the
condemned man could pray for his soul.
In Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad Of Reading Gaol he talks about how the executed man was buried naked in quick lime so his body would be burned away in the soil. Graves of executed prisoners were always within the prison walls and always unmarked.
The death penalty was abolished
by The Murder (Abolition of Death
Penalty) Act 1965 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Royal
ascent was given on 8th November 1956, just five days after my
fifteenth birthday. As I grew up the death penalty was just there and as a
teenager with no legal status or right to vote I just accepted it.
Lonnie
Donegan in 1958 had a hit record with Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley. He and
another couple of pop artists had hits with the song. Tom Dooley was a real person. Laura
Foster was his lover. In May of 1866 she was murdered and Tom Dooley was executed
for her death. Unlike the unmarked graves of Great Britain, The Tom Dooley Cemetery
is located a mile from the intersections of Highway 268 and Tom Dula
Road.
Hang down your
head Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Poor boy you're bound to die
At the time of this song
hitting the charts there was a convicted man by the name of Pedolo who was
sentenced to hang. I used to walk around, as a seven year old, singing:
Hang down your
head Pedolo
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Pedolo
Poor boy you're bound to die
My mother thought my behaviour
was disrespectful and something I should not be doing. She banned my singing.
Great
Britain may have abolished the death penalty fifty-five years ago but The USA,
Tom Dooley was American, retains the death penalty with, as of January 2021
when I am writing these words, fifty-three on death row. Five people were executed
in the run up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, breaking with a one hundred and thirty year old precedent of
pausing executions amid a presidential transition. They make Donald Trump the
country's most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing
the executions of thirteen death row inmates between July 2020 and January 2021.
Under Margaret Thatcher’s prime
ministership it was debated that the death penalty could be brought back. A
free vote in parliament maintained the abolition, if there had been a referendum
it is certain the vote would have been in favour. I would have voted for its
return.
Teaching English in Leon School Milton Keynes I ran an extended essay project for students where we looked at the way the death penalty worked within the justice system and made some case studies, studies of serial killers and the execution of innocent people. The students then had to decide if there was a referendum and they were old enough to vote how they would vote. In this book I am going to repeat and extend the exercise and invite you to decide how you would vote in a referendum should there ever be one.
So can I do three things at once ? Yesterday I only wrote 2,235 words as I spent most of my day providing supporting evidence as to copyright for my book POET’S CORNER. Hopefully today Amazon can sort that and get it published. This book does not actually work as an e-book so it is the paperback edition that matters. I strongly suspect my writing output will be limited again today as I sort all this out and convince people that as William Shakespeare is dead his writing is in the public domain and not subject to copyright.
Also waiting in the wings is my detective story
BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS which Amazon’s robot has rejected. I suspect it is
having issues with the font I have used in parts so I have a few hours work to
sort that out. Tomorrow I think.
Tomorrow ?
Today ! What was happening ON
THIS DAY ?
25th January 1961: President John
F Kennedy delivers the first live presidential news conference. I wonder what
he would have made of Twitter !!!!!
Also on 25th January 1961: 101 Dalmatians
from Walt Disney was released. Good film that.
25th January 1971 Charles Manson
found guilty of murder. In a sad and negative way the horrific killings of
Manson inspired Ramon Polanski to produce what I consider to be the very best
version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth yet.
25th January 1980: Mother Theresa
of Calcutta was honoured with India’s highest civilian award. What a beautiful
lady she was.
Why is it every day I download a vast list
from Wikipedia of people born on this day and none of them I have ever hear of.
Same difference today.
25th January 1990: Actress Ava Gardner who was born in 1922 left us.
Tomorrow we will see what happens tomorrow.
TODAY – it’s now 5,54am. I guess it’s time to get dressed. I want to drop off this week’s SMILE envelopes to Dreamsai for their food boxes to be distributed this week-end to vulnerable people.
Speak again tomorrow.
Dave
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