Long ago when a small child I began to talk, the language I was speaking was English, my parents’ language was English, we lived in England. Everything was plain sailing, I enjoyed talking and listening, our main entertainment was listening to the radio, although its name at that time was the wireless, which was odd because the connection was a long wire which was plugged into the electrical system. My father liked to talk to me when he came home from work. When I was four years old father stopped coming home from work, he was called up to be a soldier. There was an awful emptiness in the house, my baby brother, my sister, my bereft mother and I missed him dreadfully. Sometimes two aunts, Josie and Vera came to keep us company. We all spoke English, it was the only language we knew. The day of the big adventure came, it was time for me to go to school. We all walked to school on the first day, I went into a very large room full of boys and girls and one big girl who was the teacher.
She asked me my name and put a mark beside it in the register. I sat down at a table and she gave me a piece of orange paper and some crayons and suggested I draw some shapes on the paper. My memory assures me I drew beautiful squares, circles and triangles. I don’t remember being taught to read, or write or count, in some magical way I learnt these new skills and they are still an endless source of delight and pleasure all these many years later. I do remember learning to play the triangle and carefully following those beautiful blue notes, sadly my musical talent came to an early end and I prefer to listen to CDs produced by very skilled musicians.
Books and toys were in very limited supply during those war-time years, the teacher read stories and nursery rhymes, we danced, we sang and we made our own music with drums, castanets and triangles. I found a best friend, a clever girl who lived in the street just across the back lane, Joyce was kind and jolly and happy to be my best’st friend. The worst thing that happened to me was mostly my own fault, I climbed on top of the iron railings in the yard, someone touched my feet and I fell and hit my head on the ground. I was taken home and put to bed. The next day I recovered and returned to school.The classroom was a sanctuary in 1943.
The next adventure was joining the free library, a note from the teacher was required stating that I would take care of any book I took home and I could in fact read. The Kayll Road library was within walking distance but it was on a very busy road tram cars and lorries went up and down, private cars were few in those days. My mother told me I must wait until my sister could go with me, as she was eighteen months younger than me I had to wait for some months before her teacher signed the required permission. At last the day came and we both got on the tram which carried us up the bank and stopped in front of the library door. We walked up the steps, there was a door to go in and another to come out. We gave the librarian our permission tickets and she gave us a small cardboard ticket and showed us the junior library room. All around the room were bookshelves full of hundreds of books and there were a couple of tables piled high with books. I was bewildered how to choose the right book. One of those early books was ‘ Milly, Molly, Mandy’ I think the rhyming words together with the pictures made it very appealing. Most books were not beautifully illustrated picture books of the type that many years later I was able to buy for my son. Some books had a number of pictures in but the story was told in the text. I have no memory of the first book I took home, I simply understood that hundreds of books were available and in time I could read every single one of them. I suppose a very similar feeling to a child of today receiving their first mobile phone, suddenly the whole world seems within reach. Myself I don’t use a mobile phone, technology a step too far, but I do have bookcases at home with books tumbling out of them.
My present passion is a more detached look at the many and varied ways the English language can be used, I’m reading, ” Mother Tongue-The English Language,” by Bill Bryson. Its witty, easy to read and full of anecdotes. Bryson is an American who lives in North Yorkshire, almost a next door neighbour, he informs me that 300 million people speak English. I am just so lucky because its the only language I speak and read, I learnt a little French and Latin at school, only scraps of words remain, “bonjour madame, merci beaucoup, je suis une vieille femme, au revoir”. Latin I know had a huge influence on the English language, the Latin for free is libre, so our word library is a derivation of this word, books can be read for free.
The digital age also means that we can hear other people speaking their own words, we can tune in to people all over the world, we can connect. Books and newspapers are still very important but we can find our own information. The views of a media baron like Rupert Murdoch are not the full story, we can find the rest of the story, the true account. We still must ask ourselves is this fake news or is it an honest, true account of the world in which we live.
Sometimes the internet is wonderful and I love it, at other times it is absolutely infuriating. Beyond my understanding and refusing to do anything I ask it and I have no idea why. My original idea was to be full of praise, the way my words can reach all over the globe and be seen by people I will never meet and never be able to talk to face to face. this makes it the digital technical advance of the twenty-first century most loosely allied to the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. Books were still rare and precious objects but they were able to spread rapidly across the world. At that time it was only a tiny fortunate minority of people who could decipher these black hieroglyphics and read. Many of these people lived in monasteries studying the bible or the administrative class of the governing elite. This makes it the premier advance of the early years of this century. Computers started off as extremely large, hugely expensive machines, now most children in the affluent world can hold a computer in their small hand, that is the iPhone as it were a child’s first reading book.
I certainly don’t understand how the internet may revolutionise the transmission of information, at present the transmission of visual images seems to be the preferred option. The powerful millionaires who control the media have until now exercised a tight control over the access to information which explains to us how our society and societies in general are actually organised. We are entertained with gossip and the scandalous behaviour of celebrities. A limited number of newspapers, for example the Guardian , the Observer and the BBC try to explain the process and the end results of the factual decisions which are made by politicians on behalf of us all but in fact benefit a very small proportion, the 1% to the detriment of the vast majority of the population.
I used to feel that I lived in an open, democratic society where the worst things no longer happened to an innocent, law-abiding citizen, now I think I was mislead. In the last three decades the gap between the fabulously wealthy and the rest of us has grown exponentially. Wages and salaries have remained static and benefits have been drastically reduced, and then there is the catastrophe of the Universal Benefit. Some people will receive no U.B. for the month of December. Is Scrooge a member of the cabinet, can they be serious?
There is a lot of interest at present in the economies of the USA, Britain and most of Europe, a good deal of it sparked off by a book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty. He has also broadcast on many different television stations. He and his associates have collected an enormous amount of data from many countries around the world. Professor Piketty is eager to explain the conclusions we need to draw from this factual data. Big changes have taken place in the world’s biggest economies since the 1970s, put simply the 1% have grown vastly more rich and the rest of us have stood still and the poorest have actually seen a fall in their income, this is called Austerity. Professor Danny Dorling coined the term the 1% and even the 0.01% for those whose wealthy has exploded.
The Canadian economist Chrystia Freeland published in 2014 her study, ” Plutocrats:-The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. ” Many economists are concerned about the static position of the majority and the pauperisation of those at the bottom of society and the effects that this will have on the peace and stability of twenty-first century societies. The period beginning in the late 1940s to the 1980s was a period of rebuilding after the devastation of the Second World War. In most countries as in the UK a Welfare State was developed to alleviate poverty and care for the whole population, the promise of a better future for everyone ‘from the cradle to the grave’. My family was one of those millions; fed, housed, educated and provided for in times of sickness. an improvement to the poverty my parents had grown up in in the 1920s.
The gradual ending of the first industrial age and the movement to globalisation in the 1970s led to an increase in unemployment and further calls on the Welfare State. As we all know the W.S. is paid for out of taxation. The majority of workers pay their income tax without question, it is taken automatically without debate. The 1% have tax experts to point out how deductions and costs can be removed from the total amount legally. No doubt there are some who ignore bonuses and the return on shares with very dubious legality. According to Professor Piketty the right solution is a progressive annual tax on Capital. He goes on to add that if we are to regain control over Capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy, only regional political integration can lead to effective regulation of the globalised patrimonial system of Capitalism of the twenty-first century. Is this the reason we’re leaving the European common market?
Yesterday I watched a programme on BBC 2 ” The Super-Rich and Us it focused on the UK: We have more billionaires per head than any other country in the world: we are the most unequal nation in Europe
The last thirty years the middle class have stood still, the younger generation are becoming renters.
The top 1% pay themselves 780x the average salary.
Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize winning Economist in 2013 has stated, “Growing income and wealth inequality is recognised as the greatest social threat of our times. The renewed greed of the top 1% has had worse effects than even the financial crash of 2008.—–They use the media, much of which they own to promote the view that such greed is justifiable, it leads to the trickle down effect. The trickle down effect is a myth.
veraewatson15 