Pies & Memories…. Whales & Dolphins….Hebridean Bones……Help Tibet…..
by Bernie Bell - 09:31 on 24 September 2022
Pies & Memories
I’m going to plug Ian Marchant’s Pie Appeal for Macmillan again because it’s A GOOD THNG, and because I never knew that about the founder of the Macmillan cancer charity. Never knew what? Have a look….
https://ianmarchant.com/2022/09/second-qualifying-round-report/
And while I’m on the subject of the man called Marchant…….his book ‘A Hero for High Times’ ….http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=15909 triggered all kinds of memories….
1) The bit about losing yourself in a place which is familiar, and then re-finding. What happened to me & Mike isn’t quite the same as what Ian writes of – we went to a city which was very familiar to both of us and got completely lost as huge areas of it had been flattened and re-built with a completely different lay-out. We decided to just follow a road until we came to something familiar and take it from there, which is what we did, and it worked for us. Here’s the tale… https://theorkneynews.scot/2019/08/26/solastalgia/
2) Ian quotes Bob as saying “ A lot of the thing is, as soon as you put on uniform, you are offered absolution, that’s the deal. If you kill people we tell you to, you won’t get into trouble.”
And I remembered…when I lived in Wales I knew some people who were putting on a play about a German Concentration Camp. There was one lad who in ‘real life’ was a little jobby – one of those shivery people – scared of his own shadow. When he put on the uniform of a German soldier he not only played the part, but was the part and I thought…..’Yes, that’s how it was, that’s what happened back then – jobbies putting on uniforms’.
I don’t think he was a particularly good actor, he was just enjoying the absolution.
3) Writing of different times….”Because by the time Bob was back in London, the music he had been listening to was about to change for ever.”
And I remembered a friend who graduated in 1976, worked for a time, sold his motor-bike and hit the hippie trail through India. By the time he returned to England Punk had happened and all those cheese-cloth shirts and other hippie accoutrement he’d brought back with him were simply not being worn by anyone with any aspirations to being fashionable. Not only music, but just about every aspect of popular culture had utterly and completely changed.
Though now I look at the Joe Brown’s catalogue and ...it’s 1974 again!
4) Ian writes…”For me and Perry and Chris and many of our generation, ‘International Times’ mattered, even if it was hard to get in Newhaven, or Amesbury, or Bradford.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Times
Aged 13, in 1968, in Bradford, in hospital with a perforated eardrum from sneezing too hard (honest!) my big brother Tony came to see me and brought me a copy of the IT (initials which have a whole other meaning now). This might seem like a strange publication to take your kid sister in hospital – but Tony also introduced me to the music of Woody Guthrie, Julie Felix and Joan Baez.
And…he bought me a copy of ‘Six Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm’ illustrated by David Hockney …. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/06/david-hockney-brothers-grimm/ It was supposed to be my Christmas present, but he decided to keep it for himself. I got to read it though, and to discover a very different form of art-work.
Aaaannnd…he had the album cover for Tyrannosaurus Rex - ‘My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair ….’ stuck up on the wall in his room.
A good big brother to have. Marchant might be interested to know that he was a football fanatic. An interesting mixture of a man, and a brother.
Past tense as he died, aged 34. Heart Attack. So it goes.
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Whales & Dolphins….
This link looks a bit huge….
.... as long as it gets the message across…..
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The Hebrides….aaaahhhh…the Hebrides…..
V. interesting seminar….
https://archaeologyorkney.com/2022/09/23/seminar-heart-of-beyond/
V. good holiday……
https://theorkneynews.scot/?s=The+Western+Isles+Bernie+bell
And here's a video of the seminar..... https://archaeologyorkney.com/2022/10/03/video-in-the-heart-of-beyond/
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Please Help Tibet……
In just two weeks over 6,500 people have signed Free Tibet’s petition demanding that the G7 governments publicly denounce and call for an end to China's boarding school system. https://freetibet.org/
Under the information blackout in Tibet, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a massive colonial boarding school system. Over 900,000 Tibetan children, as young as four years old, are deliberately subjected to Chinese Communist Party political indoctrination to erase their very identity.
"Our teachers drove us to hate our heritage, our elders, even our parents… We felt ashamed of our cultural background" - Former boarding school student.
This kind of forced ‘education‘ has happened before – in many times and places……
https://theorkneynews.scot/2022/05/20/language-domination-or-one-way-to-squash-a-culture/
https://theorkneynews.scot/2021/06/10/we-be-of-one-blood-thou-and-i-the-jungle-book-rudyard-kipling/
Please…help the people of Tibet.
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Here’s one I made earlier…… https://theorkneynews.scot/2018/07/30/playing-with-scale-shapes-and-nightswimming-in-stromness/
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