Two more books.

 

This has been a good start to the year for my reading. My “To Read” pile grew by half a dozen titles that I had as Christmas gifts. There is the usual selection that represent my interests: some novels, a travel book or two, and an interesting looking history volume. The pile now stands at a round dozen. So I’ve kicked off with two books that could hardly be more different.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I bought The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk at least two years ago, maybe three, and have been picking it up and putting it down ever since.  I’ve read a couple of other books by the Polish Nobel Prize for Literature winner – Flights and Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead – and thoroughly enjoyed both.  Her writing is funny and thoughtful, and the themes explored wide ranging and grounded in her and her country’s history and culture.  Having lived here for more than twenty years I find they have helped broaden my understanding and respect for both, too.  She also has a superb, prize winning translator to the English language.  Her Nobel was awarded for her body of work after ...Jacob was published and the blurb on my copy describes it as “her masterpiece”.  I wouldn’t dispute either the citation or the award.

It’s a huge book, nearly a thousand pages, and the table of contents alone runs to 23 pages, covering the seven Books... in question.  They in turn comprise in total some thirty one sections, and 253 (yes, two hundred and fifty three!) chapters.  OK, some of them are less than a page long, but they are still distinct parts of the narrative, separate pieces of creativity that go into the whole work. Now, that I hadn’t realized until I bought the thing, got it home and studied it with a little more attention than I had done in the shop.  Then I saw another piece of creativity: the page numbering runs backwards (from eight hundred and whatever at the start down to eleven at the finish).  This is a reflection of its subject matter (briefly, 18th century Jewry) – books in Hebrew are always read from right to left (i.e. back to front).  Gimmicky? Perhaps – but then, does it matter?  When reading a book it’s not normal practice to read the page number, so as long as the narrative is logical and flows, I don’t think it does.  Certainly after the first hour or so’s reading I no longer noticed, and it certainly didn’t spoil the experience.

I say that, because reading The Books of Jacob is not so much an enjoyment (as any good book must be) but something to immerse yourself in.  It’s taken me since Christmas to get through it, reading a little every day – and often a good bit more.  Other books of similar size – The Lord of the Rings springs to mind – have taken me equally as long to get through, but have proved (at least to me) well worth the effort.

...Jacob is a historical novel about an 18th century Jew who establishes, in essence, a new religion in an attempt to prove he is the new Messiah.  He attracts an ever growing number of disciples, they intermarry, have big families, and indulge in a catalogue of strange rituals (many of them involving nudity and what would today be termed orgies) in order to cement their love and allegiance to Jacob Frank (the titular character of the book).  They roam from place to place around present day Poland, Ukraine, Czechia, Hungary, Austria and Germany, where having lived to a ripe old age Jacob dies and his entourage drifts apart as they too relocate and pass away.  The End.  It’s an extraordinary work of research as much as anything else: while reading it I popped in and out of Wikipedia when the names and details of the lives of the main characters sounded familiar or an extraordinary action attributed to them – and they were all there.  Frank existed, as did his group of followers, and they followed the course described in the book.  The fiction clearly falls in the dialogue and personal interactions between them all – and all of that is believable.

Yes, The Books of Jacob was and is a difficult read, the subject matter complex and in places unbelievable – even though based around historical fact.  There’s a lot to absorb, not least the long list of characters, and this is not helped by them having to change their names from Jewish to Polish halfway through the book (it’s a condition imposed on them by the Catholic Church in Poland in order to secure baptism into the church).  From that part of the book the names are used interchangeably, although usually with a clarification (for instance “...Moshe, now Marcin….”).  It could detract from the story, but Tokarczuk manages to do it without spoiling its narrative.

In summary: if you like historical fiction, and if you’re not afraid of a big complex yarn that will take a lot of effort to read and digest – a true reading challenge - then I thoroughly recommend The Books of Jacob.  If not then steer clear!

I loved it.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Lewis Baston’s Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders  could not present a bigger contrast to Tokarczuk’s epic.  It does exactly what it says on the tin, in an entertaining and detailed way.  Baston is a political historian I had never come across before, and as an Englishman (and, dare I say it, a europhile) I found the topic of great interest.  I spent the last 20 years of my working life living in Poland and travelling around the world from project to project, much of it within the EU bloc.  My home is still in Warsaw, and hence within the EU and Schengen Zone.  Ten years ago, I voted in favour of Britain Remaining in the Union – because nothing I heard during the rushed and poorly conducted national conversation in the lead up to the Referendum vote from the Leave campaign convinced me that the country (and hence my immediate and extended family) would be better off outside. Better the devil you know, as my sister put it.   Which is not to say the dull and garbled messages from the Remain campaigners (in particular PM Cameron and Chancellor Osborne) made a strong case for the status quo – it didn’t, and in my view they never actually took the issue seriously until it was far too late.  Their conduct in the immediate aftermath, essentially walking away from the clear mess they had contributed much to creating while blaming everybody else, was despicable.

None of this is dwelt  upon at any length or detail in Borderlines, and this is very much to the author’s credit.  A handful of passages suggest he is of a like mind, but his focus is on going back much farther than the Referendum and its fallout, and his net is cast across the entire European Continent: Britain is no more than a quite minor cast member.  Instead, the book is an account of a lifetime spent rambling around Europe and digging into the histories of all the countries he visits and the way the ever changing border areas between them have been affected by decisions that, typically, were made by a cast of national leaders (and their political opponents), some competent, some barely literate, but very few of whom gave much thought to the effects of their decisions on “their” subjects and countrymen.

There are some fascinating stories here: my favourite is perhaps that of a small town on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium called Baarle, where the border between the two countries meanders around constantly, in such a way that one side of residential streets could be in the Netherlands and the other Belgium.  Even an individual house is divided in this way: it belonged to an elderly lady who insisted that she had “always been Belgian” and would under no circumstances enter the house from The Netherlands or consider herself Dutch.  Pragmatically, the local council switched the front door and its adjoining hall window around so that the door itself was left in Belgium and the hall window (never used) in The Netherlands. There is a nice picture (all the book's illustrations were taken by the author on his travels) showing a before and after picture of the white dotted borderline's position. She was perfectly happy with this, as was everyone else. One day I must visit the place.

The book also recounts stories that show clearly that minority groups are invariably treated unfairly when borders are moved, no matter the reason (usually as a result of conflict resolution), and the practice of forced relocation – ethnic cleansing, if you prefer – is neither new nor restricted to Palestinian Arabs, Jews or anybody else.  It has happened time after time across Europe, from its earliest days, through the Polish Partition at the end of the 18th century, and especially in the aftermath of both World War 1 (with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), World War 2 (with the defeat of the Third Reich) and the Fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Warsaw Pact alliance.  Huge numbers of people, mostly refugees, were moved around from place to place in a bid to even up populations and territory and appease despots like Uncle Joe Stalin – and a high proportion of the refugees were not at all pleased with the outcome.  I was surprised to learn that Britain, too, has done its share of this: when the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland was initially drawn in the 1920s, and again as a result of the Troubles and its solution in the 1990s, numbers of Catholics and Protestants were “exchanged” as part of the plans and nation building.

The overall message of the book is that the people who live and work in these border areas generally just get on with it, and live and work together as they always have done.  The growth and influence of the EU, the Schengen Zone and the euro currency has made this much easier to do, with no border controls and visa requirements needed across the majority of the Continent.  The village of Schengen itself is a model: it lies at the confluence of the borders of Luxembourg, Germany and France (the exact point where the borders meet is smack in the middle of the river Moselle) and while notionally in Luxembourg people live and work in their neighbouring countries and hence commute quite freely across the borders multiple times every day – and speak each others’ languages (and English) happily and interchangeably.  The area is wine country: a network of foot and cycle paths spreads out across the countryside that provides a little advertised tourist attraction – another place I need to visit.

With travel and history being passions of mine, I’ve read many books and articles over the years on the subject of the changes to our Continent, and I thought I had a pretty good knowledge.  But Borderlines, in approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, has added to that knowledge, and given me a lot of reading pleasure.  Baston’s writing is clear and concise and the book is beautifully written.  It’s a worthy addition to the genre and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Three Books.

 

As ever, my Christmas presents included a couple of books, and I bought more on my trip to London over the New Year.  And, as ever, the choices are eclectic, not limited to a single genre - the perils of a butteffly mind, probably, flitting from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason.  A glance at my unread pile (built up over the past year or so) reveals it includes a Nevile Shute classic (A Town like Alice); three Orwells in a collection of all his long fiction that I bought years ago but haven't got around to finishing yet; Moby Dick; David Copperfield; a history book about the break up of Eastern Europe, how and why it came about and its aftermath; and a thousand-odd pages of Olga Tokarczuk's epic The Books of Jacob (again, bought a year ago but still not started). So plenty to keep me going for the rest of this year, I think - and my Three Reads in a Month achieved  in January - the first time for years I've managed that! - unlikely to be repeated any time soon. 

So without further ado, let's review my January read.  Three different books, and all highly enjoyable (at least to me) and thoroughly recomended.  Of course, that's all subjective, but what the hell.

---------------------------------------------------------------

First up: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies by Terry Deary.  I've seen his stuff in bookshops before but passed them by: primarily, he's a writer of history with a target audience of teenage schoolkids - his Horrible Histories series is very popular.  I actually enjoyed it very much: there were few things I hadn't come across before, except for some particularly unpleasant Viking torture and execution practices, but the book is very well written with plenty of humour.  The usual suspects are included in the list of enemies - the Vikings, the Romans, The Spanish Arrmada, the French and of course the Germans - as well as the Irish, who I had never really thought of as enemies (despite The Troubles), and the Americans, who are supposed to enjoy a Special Realtionship with us.  The Epilogue, how the past has led to the present British character, is in itself worth the book's cost in my view.   A fun read.

Salman Rushdie is a bit of a Marmite writer - love him or hate him, with no middle ground, an acquired taste - and one that thankfully I've acquired.  I've read his Booker Prize and Booker of Bookers winning Midnight's Children (well deserved on both counts) and the controversial Satanic Verses that left him in fear of his life and under protection for a decade - and I still can't understand quite why it upset the Muslim community as much as it clearly did. They are extraordinary books, mixing satire and fantasy, life and love and laughter, both Eastern and Western cultures. His short stories are similar.  I also read a collection of essays and speeches he has made about his craft, called Languages of Truth: 2001 - 2020 that was a fascinating glimpse into his inspirations and his beliefs. So when Victory City came out a couple of years ago it went straight onto my Must Buy list.  It was well worth the wait.  It's another fantastical story, set in India in the Middle Ages, and chronicles the magical founding of a city and empire, its rise, stagnation and eventual collapse, through a mythical epic poem written by the city's founder: a young girl acquired (for want of a better term) by a goddess who inhabits her body, leading to two hundred and fifty years of life.  It sounds weird, and it is, but Rushdie's quite extraordinary imagination and use of language brings it to life with a mix of humour and brutality.  Best book I've read for ages and I thorougly recommend it.

And last but not least, LBC journalist and presenter James O'Brien's critique of all things Brexit, How They Broke Britain. I freely admit I am biased, and nothing will ever convince me that the Referendum was a Good Idea and its result anything but a catastrophic error of judgement.  But the book is not only about that.  It details how a surprisingly small number of people, press barons, journalists and politicians, over an extended period of time used the tools of their trades to change (even pollute) the entire media and political landscape to satisfy their own beliefs and designs, largely for personal political and financial ends, with the entire electorate no more than pawns (or, in the Russian expression, "useful idiots") to achieve it.  The usual suspects are there, the likes of Cameron and Farage, Johnson and Murdoch, and the conclusion in each case, meticulously researched and presented with apparently unrelated incidents and stories linked together to present a coherent picture, perhaps for the first time,  explains the mess Britain now finds itself in. I expected to come away from the book angry and disgusted but I didn't: I was simply saddened that the system (I can't think of a better word) has been so devalued and broken by these individuals that it will take a generation or more to clean up the mess, while the perpetrators will get away, by and large, unpunished, their bank accounts both on and offshore swollen obscenely, while the NHS crumbles and the food banks proliferate as the economy crumbles and stagnates.  It is nothing less than a national tragedy.  Read the book and weep.

---------------------------------------------------------------

And on that cheery note, I shall make myself a cup of coffee, and get back to this month's first read, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities - a more readable and accessible book than most of his stuff in my view.

Happy days.

On writing

 

So here we are.  New year, new goals, as I've written elsewhere.  And it's started pretty well. all things considered.  Spending the New Year break flat and cat sitting in London for my son helped: the solitude (not to mention a week indoors with a streaming cold) meant I could crack on and try to write something and read more than I usually can at home surrounded by kids and animals and other distractions.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The writing was easier than it has been for a while, and led to a rage against social media in general and Facebook in particular that perhaps went on a bit too long (but what the hell - I was happy with it and it made the points I wanted to make) and a travelogue about the area of  London I was staying in.  Both went live on my blogs during January, together with a 2024 review/2025 plan that I wrote and published at the end of December. Very different subjects.... 

I had a comment from a friend who had read them asking me how I did it - and I really haven't a clue.  I think that's true of all writers - an idea presents itself and you run with it and see what comes out.  For me at least, there is no real planning, and sometimes little detailed research: I just have this fixed idea and start bashing away at the keyboard, and stop when it's finished. Ideas, points of view, words and complete sentences spew out faster than I can get them down (as a two fingered typist I'm not the fastest...), I review and re-write as I go along.  Add at least one picture that is (more or less) perinent to the subject matter as a header, and voila!  Job done. 

Stories are the same.  An idea arrives and I try to do something.  It's weird and I don't understand it at all.  The first book I wrote, way back in the early 90s, came about because I was bored at work.  It came to me fully formed while I was sitting at my desk, 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, my day's work essentially finished, the papers read, and little prospect of anything else coming to me that day.  How staring blankly at the office wall (no windows in our room) triggered my sub-conscious into thinking about an incident that had taken place in my life fifteen years before, then embellished it with a few more incidents, gave me a full list of characters and locations and even dialogue, is totally beyond my comprehension, but I got up from my desk, slung my jacket on and headed to Ryman's the stationers round the corner (it's closed now, but the office is still there with different tennants: my employer went bust a year later) , bought a couple of 100-page notebooks, went to my desk, and started writing.

It took me a month.  At the end of it, one book was full, the other half so, but the story was there in my scrawled hand-writing.  As ever, it had changed a bit as I went along, but it was complete.  And there it stayed, for years, gathering dust. When the company went bust, I decided to try and write some more, in between applying for jobs and getting rejected, simply to fill my days, and had a similar experience.  It was another memory trigger, of a little fishing village in Cornwall I had holidayed in several times during the 80s, the entire drive down there, beaches, even a specific flat we had rented.  I thought about my work life, the investment banking environment I had spent twenty odd years of my life in - how to mix them?  I started writing, a nightime drive across Bodmin Moor in a sports car - bang.  Again the idea came more or less fully formed and I went with it.  Not a book this time, but a short story, kind of a murder mystery-cum-ghost yarn.  I needed to do a little research about one location I used but that was 10 minutes on Google Maps (when I typed a revision several years later) but there it was: complete in a week or so concentrated scribbling in another notebook.  It went into the drawer of my desk with the book, and like that one didn't see the light of day for several years.  

It's the recurring theme. Another half a dozen shorts have poured out over the years, usually when I've been either unemployed or else addressing some kind of mental crisis (at least one, perhaps two, helped me get through a bout of post-COVID depression by exorcising some ghosts in my psyche).  Nowadays I write straight to the LibreOffice suite on my Beast, since that is now just as quick and easy as writing longhand in exercise books and then copying over (my handwriting is depressingly poor nowadays since the advent of emails and MS Office and I can hardly read it).  They are all gathered together in a single document on my hard driive.  The book is also now laboriously copied over, revised and revised again, and a third time, and exists as a separate document and PDF file.  I'm working on a memoir (and have been for at least 7 years) and tried to re-hash ten years and more of travel blogs into a travel book-cum-memoir but it was approaching a thousand pages and still growing when I realised that much of it was completely out of date and gave it up as a bad job and deleted it.  The source blogs are still there in the archive of my The World According to Travellin' Bob blog where they make more sense as a series of specific date/time experiences than collected into anything even vaguely narrative.

--------------------------------------------------------------

And so it goes.  I can spend ages without a single word or thought popping out, then with no rhyme or reason a torrent pours out from some nether region of my brain.  I've tried disciplining myself to writing so many words a day, as a prompt, but it doesn't make a difference at all. I can't force it.  It just comes and goes, like good weather or indigestion.  Which is why, like it or not, I'll never be a professional writer (much as I would like that).  The lack of a publisher is another reason - and that, as much as anything, is down to my laziness or lack of confidence.  It's so hard to get any kind of a deal nowadays, publishing - at least the traditional variety - is so much a closed shop these days, no-one willing to take a punt on a first timer like me, and actually preparing a manuscript and punting it around publishers large and small and agencies reputable or otherwise, simply to get a pile of rejection slips simply doesn't seem worth the effort somehow. Self-publishing via Amazon/Kindle or similar is an alternative, but that has its own trials and tribulations, not least in the realms of publicity and marketing (neither of which I have a clue about).

So why do I do it?  What's the point?  Simply put, it's something I need to do.  It's scratching this mental itch that I can't ignore..  I enjoy doing it.  I enjoy reading the final result, and feel a staisfaction of a job well done.  It keeps me occupied when there is nothing watchable on the telly (all too often the case) or the weather is bad (ditto).  It keeps my aging brain active in a good and productive way that no amount of shopping or gardening or dog-walking ever will, It''s not about money - never has been and I know never will be..  And I'm fine with that.  I honestly believe my writing is better now, now readable, and I have certainly read stuff, some of it well rewarded and well liked, that in my opinion isn't as good - but of course, that's just my opinion.  The few people who have read my stuff are generally complimentary (but honest and critical too, when needed) but I know I'll never have a mass audience.

Am I wasting my time then? No, not as far as I'm concerned.  When you boil it all down to the basics, I honestly think most writers write for the same reasons as me - for themselves, and because they have a story to tell, something to say, a point to make - and only a very fortunate few make any money from doing so.  I'm not one of that number.

And I'm fine with that.  Money isn't the most important thing in my life, and never will be.

----------------------------------------------------------

This, like all my writing, Is a living document and I rarely know where it's going and how it will all end when I start - this post is a perfect case in point.  The entire thing was meant to be a reminder of what I published and announced on Facebook and Skype in January and a brief review of each of the three books I read during the month (and I have no idea the last time I did that!), but My Muse had other ideas and dumped this lot out onto the page instead). She's a capricious bitch not to be trusted, but it's ok.  I like the piece, and it gives me the chance to add another later with the book reviews.  Happy days.

AI: for good or ill?

 

 

This is a very good book.  It's a collection of short stories and essays set in a possible (probable?) future just 17 years away where AI and related technologies are reaching maturity and playing an increasingly important role in the world - and hence in all our lives.  

The stories are all written by Chen Quifan, a Chinese science-fiction writer who, after university, worked for Baidu and Google in various senior positions related to AI development before turning successfully to writing.  Each story delas with one specific aspect (or prediction) of how the techincnology can - and no doubt will -be used in the near future, whether in education, in healthcare, in warfare or employment (amongst others).  There is a lot of thought provoking stuff in there.  

The essays, meanwhile, one for each story, are written by Kai-Fu Lee, another Chinese authority on this developing technology, and elaborate in detail the specific aspects covered, their histories, easy-to-understand technical descriptions, and how they may develop further - and. perhaps crucially, their downsides (including regulatory and ethicsl problems).  He too has a solid grounding in AI, having held senior positions in AI devlopment with Apple, Microsot and Google.

Their joint knowledge and easy writing styles combine to make an incredibly complex, even esoteric, subject clear and understandable.  I learned a lot from the book....though I confess that the doubts I've had about the sudden proliferation of the technology have not been completely erased - but very much eased.  It's very clear that huge changes to the way we do most things are just around the corner, and I still worry that the massive change in mind-set that I believe is fundamentally needed, by all of us, to gain the biggest benefit is showing little sign of happening any time soon (except perhaps in the younger generations for whom VR gaming and related technologies - including AI itself - are increasingly commonplace) and I wonder how that will play out.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Throughout the stories there is a common thread, and a couple of them deal specifically with one aspect of human activity that we are all completely familiar with, one way of another: the workplace.  Making a living.  

Let me give some caveats here. I am not an expert in AI; my knowledge of the workplace in this post-COVID hybrid workplace day and age is sketchy and based largely on anecdotal evidence, since I had retired a year or so before the Pandemic hit; and my hands-on knowledge of the recruitment process of today even more outdated, as I'm more comfortable with the pre-LinkedIn (hell, the pre-internet!) days when written CV's, magazine and newspaper ads, the postal service and the telephone ruled us all. I preferred it then, to be honest.....far simpler, and personal relationships were more important than algorithms.

None of which stops me from having feelings about what we as a work community are facing in the coming months and years.

In truth, I have been an AI agnostic since its early days, despite a family connection to its development (someone dear to me worked for DeepMind in its infancy, transitioned with it to Google and hence knows personally many of the main players). To me it was always a staple of the science fiction books I devoured in my younger days (and many of them also pre-dated the computer age, never mind the internet) or something to fear as a recipe for Armageddon (think the Terminator series of movies) - nothing more than that. The concept of a computer being able to play and win a couple of dozen simultaneous chess matches against Grand Masters, or trouncing the best Go! player in the world struck me as being an interesting news story to tuck away on an inside page of the newspapers on a slow news day, but of no real practical use. I think many people, particularly in my age group (at that time my 60s, now 70s and older), were of the same view.

How wrong we were! The development of the technology has happened at breakneck speed, and new applications for it seem to surface every couple of weeks. Many of them are riffs on earlier ideas, some completely new and esoteric - and the vast majority of them quite beyond me. In many ways I'm happy about that: I have enough to worry about as it is - like my health, getting old, the well-being of my kids and grand-kids, money (or the lack of it): simple, everyday things - without needing to concern myself with the stuff of dreams. 

Global warming is simple enough (I only need to look at the news or out of my window to be concerned about that, and understand that, whatever the sceptics may say, it's real, we as a species are major contributors to the problem, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better (if at all). It's a tangible reality, whereas AI is something that happens in the background, out of sight and mind, managed directly by a miniscule portion of the 8billion humans that inhabit this Planet Earth, understood properly by a not much bigger portion, but affecting directly and indirectly everybody else. I would argue that before many more moons have passed it will affect every living thing - not just humans, but plants and animals, fish and insects, even the invisible germs and microbes and bacteria that we host - directly. For good or ill.

I see evidence of AI every day. For instance, when I open my laptop I know that every browser is using AI in its Search functionality - some more than others. CoPilot is there on Edge, glaring at me from the Search Bar on the Home Page for instance: I don't use Chrome, but I'm sure it does something similar. The only browser I know of that has a publicised policy of NOT embedding AI tools is Vivaldi (which is my default, my daily driiver...).  Even Firefox, that beacon of independence and FOSSin the browser space,, is developing its own AI tools (or so I read recently). Every search engine likewise uses AI tools to refine its search algorithm (even another proud FOSS leader that I use on a daily basis, DuckDuckGo).

Many individual websites have also introduced AI tools - LinkedIn, for instance, invites me to use AI to compose every Post or Comment or Article I write, including this one (an abbreviated version, sans book review, was posted there last week). But since I can string words together in a lucid and (I hope!) entertaining and relevant way I don't use it, and never will - and it annoys the hell out of me every time I see that prompt!   Apple and Samsung and the other leading mobile phone companies are embedding their own versions of AI assistants into their flagship models, thereby increasing dramatically the cost of buying the things - which seems to this Old Age Pensioner as compelling a reason as any to revert to my old style Nokia handsets, with limited functionality but replaceable batteries that last about a week on a full charge. Dumb-phones? Not to me! I don't need NASA c.1969 computing power in my pocket, thanks very much.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

So I've done a bit of research, read a lot of articles via Vivaldi, conversed with techies in the user community, taken soundings from my dear-to-me Google employee.....and it's clear to me now that being an AI agnostic is not going to work or make a scrap of difference to my life, now or in the future. Pandora's Box is well and truly wide open, and as everyone knows once that happens its contents can never be returned and the Box resealed. It's HERE, and like it or not always will be (a bit like COVID-19 and its variants, only - please God! - better for us). So, like everyone else, I have to learn to live with it.

But how, exactly? Well in my case it seems easy enough. The most exciting and potentially quickest to mature AI technologies are likely to be in health care and automated vehicle technology. I'm getting older, and therefore likely to need increasing amounts of medical assistance of one kind or another (which is not to say I'm ailing or at death's door: I'm far from that and God willing will remain so for some years). But if AI realises its potential and speeds up the development of medicines and drug treatments, and helps the doctors make more accurate diagnoses quicker, and crucially helps the identification and administration of the best personalised treatments and cures, then I will be delighted to accept the prolonged life that I will enjoy. Yes, I know it's inevitable that at some point I'll pop off, but I'm in no hurry and if AI means I can prolong it further - well, I can live with that.

Similarly, if AI and other technical developments mean that self-driving buses and cabs and trains, 100% safe, can speed me from A to B at a lower cost then what's not to like? I'll happily take that, too. Improved crop yields and food distribution to help with my diet and grocery bills? Yes, please. More renewable energy sources at lower cost to the benefit of we consumers and counter the climate crisis? Damned right, bring it on! Automated weapons systems and robotic troops, both offensive and defensive, to reduce the numbers of casualties in conflicts (or, preferably, obviate the need for conflicts at all - and yes, I know: human nature and all that make that highly unlikely!) - well, less so.

There are loads and loads of other exciting possibilities on offer, some better and more attractive than others, but I will leave you to do your own research on them, and along with the few I'm mentioned decide for yourselves how you feel about them all.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Which brings us to the elephant in the room. If we accept that advances in AI and robotics are going to reach every part of our human existence, for good or ill, there will come a time - probably sooner rather than later - when work itself, that most basic of human needs (just after eating and sex) will be affected. Seriously so. If AI and robots of one kind or another, are doing most of the work, then what the hell are the rest of us going to be doing? If we accept the premise that once your education is finished right up until you retire 50 or so years later, you need to work to earn as much money as you can, to provide a home and food and clothes and education and all the rest of it for your family, and AI and robots are now doing all that so your job has disappeared - then a) WHO is going to pay for all of those needs and b) WHAT are you going to be doing with yourself?

And it's happening already. Take Amazon: I understand the company is now employing fewer workers in its distribution centres because state-of-the-art robotics and, increasingly, AI means humans are no longer required. The same is probably true of similar on-line retailers. Another example: in the auto industry, the introduction of the assembly line reduced the need for workers 70 or 80 years ago, and increased use of robotics has decreased the need for skilled workers even more over the past 25 years or so. Even bigger vehicles, like buses and trucks, even train and aircraft manufacture, are going the same way. Perhaps it's a coincidence that unemployment numbers have, by and large, risen as a percentage of the working age population in the same time period (although I don't think so: not all of the workers who were sidelined by technology will have been able to re-train and find new jobs).

AI in particular is going to start eating into white collar work too, if it hasn't already done so, as systems are developed using it to take over the more manual office tasks. I'm given to understand that in recruitment the task of initial screening is now being done increasingly using AI - I think I see examples of it every day on LinkedIn as I get pestered to apply for this or that job based on a search of my User Profile for a variety of keywords (ignoring the fact that the Profile also states that I am retired and not interested in any position). There are, again, hundreds of examples of AI taking over what companies may see as mundane, but surely no less important, tasks. No doubt the cost/benefit analysis has suggested that this will save a decent chunk of money that can otherwise be spent on, say, management bonuses or shareholder dividends. And hopefully some of it will also be invested into staff re-training rather than redundancy pay-off's....

It seems to me that we are heading into an era of mass unemployment that will dwarf anything that has ever gone before it, and not a single area of paid human activity will escape it. Jobs will disappear, as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and not all of them will offer an alternative. How are we going to manage this transition from a human based economy and work structure to one dominated by machines? How is it all going to be funded? What are we going to do with the legions of men and women who no longer have a financially rewarding occupation? And perhaps most important of all, what are we going to do for future generations, born into a world where work is dominated by AI and robotics, without any prospect themselves of working for a living?

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Being unemployed takes a very different mindset - I know this from personal experience. In my 50 year career in stockbroking, investment banking and IT consultancy I experienced a number of spells out of work. Employers went out of business, or for whatever reason decided I was no longer needed. Sometimes the "rest" only lasted a couple of weeks, sometimes longer - the worst was just under a year. I got through it every time, and generally moved to a position that was better than the previous one, so I did ok. But I found that, eventually, the accumulated stress and uncertainties had not left me at all: they were locked away in my subconscious and eventually killed any enjoyment or desire I had for work. That was when I retired - and found a further (and unexpected) consequence of these "career breaks". My pensions were reduced. Call it naivety or stupidity, but it came as a bit of shock and one I can neither challenge nor do anything about now.

But ignoring that financial impact, being unemployed was difficult. Every time it knocked my self confidence. Every time it made life difficult for my family - they still needed support, food, clothes, all that normal stuff, and it was all much harder for me to provide. We were looked down upon by our neighbours as the company car was replaced by the old banger. I spent hours on the phone, making phone calls for every job that was even halfway suitable, lost count of the rejections, and had to will myself every day to get up and battle on.

------------------------------------------------------------

It's tough, but I'm sure you all know that anyway. My personal experience is probably different from anyone else's, of course - but there are also a lot of similarities to what all of us have experienced. I have never, in all my 71 years and counting, met a single person happy to be unemployed. Now imagine a world where the majority of people are unemployed, facing those kinds of issues.

How in God's name are we going to manage that?

My space - at last!

 

Today is a good day.

The sun shines brightly and warm in a cloudless blue sky. Not as hot as in other parts of Europe in this blistering heatwave, for sure, but a pleasant 25C nonetheless. Certainly hot enough for me.

Outside, there is peace and tranquility. Butterflies flutter aimlessly past the door, bees flit clumsily from bloom to bloom - not too many in this place, not yet, but it's coming. The grass is green in patches, bare in others, and freshly cut this past weekend: I need to get some lawn feed and nourish it. All in good time.

In the distance, I can hear the constant thrum of traffic on the Warsaw by-pass, the A2 that leads away westward to Pozńan and beyond (unless you branch off a couple of kilometres from here and head southerly through Wrocław to the Czech border, and on through Austria to Croatia and the warm and clear Adriatic deamlands. Or an hour's drive further, and branch off north towards Gdańsk and the Baltic coast). Eastward, beyond Warsaw, the road heads off to Lublin and Białystok to the conflict lands of Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus.

But here, where I sit typing on my battered old Lenovo ThinkPad, the traffic noise is no real distraction: it's simply background, like the dog occassionally barking nearby, or the roar of another LOT Dreamliner blasting off for Chicago or Seoul from the main runway of nearby Okęcie airport. There goes one now.......would that I were onboard!

Instead, I have the beautiful sounds of The Nutcracker Suite from my Music Library on my laptop to soothe me as I write this piece. When it finishes, perhaps I'll switch to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, or maybe Frank Zappa. I'll see how I feel.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I am at my działka.

I've written of it previously, how much I enjoy it - an oasis of green peace and tranquility away from the hot and sticky and polluted city centre. Away from the confines of our apartment, where the only greenery is on the balcony planting boxes and the courtyard garden four floors down, overlooked by all my neighbours and I.

Much as I love it there, here there is more space. I am surrounded by trees: many pines in neighbouring plots, and fruit trees - apples and pears, mostly - and on my own plot, towering over the roof of my cottage, a productive walnut tree, with the green cases growing fat and juicy now, to drop in October and provide an ample supply of nuts for Christmas for family and friends.

The front and back boundary hedges have grown tall and thick, almost overgrown - certainly in need of a good cut-back: my job for the weekend. The tall yellow sunflowers are everywhere, here and next door, and the roses, planted by the gate last autumn, are beginning to bloom nicely. The rhododendrons by the cottage door are some way from bloom - probably next season now, they are relatively new plantings - as are the freshly planted lavender in the corner. Next summer will be beautiful.

It's a good sized plot, I can't remember the square metreage - but enough for me to handle anyway. Unlike my late father, I'm not much of a gardener, no green fingers, me. But it is all we need. There is a nice cottage here with a good brick patio before the doors, all built and installed new last summer, and wintered in nicely. This spring and summer we've done much work to improve the flower beds and get the place how we want it, and we're pretty much there.

It's an oasis we can come to at weekends, potter around pruning and weeding and watering the plants and mowing the grass, or relaxing over a good barbecue and cold beer and a good book. Or just sitting and enjoying the sun. A place to escape to. And the bike ride, a 16km round trip, does me good too.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

My music has moved on to Swan Lake now - Tchaikovsky was a wonderful composer: the music matches perfectly the gentle surroundings here. Perhaps I should move to Beethoven's Pastoral next instead......

It's clouded over a little now, but that is ok. I'm not here to work in the garden, nor to sunbathe (though I could do both quite happily). Instead, I'm finally - after three or fours years' good intentions unrealised - using the cottage how I've always planned to use it. As my creative space.

I have a pair of glass-fronted bookcases overflowing with the best part of 20 years' worth of purchases to read and re-read, and hopefully inspire me. I have a fridge with food and drink (note to self: must get some beer, there is none). I have a comfortable settee I can sprawl out on if the Muse deserts me and I need a break from writing.

I have a solid wooden table to work at, and an old office chair that makes this as close to an office space or library or study (all the terms can apply) as I'm ever likely to get, now. It's fine. I can do my thing here, with minimal interruption: for a start, I do NOT have an internet connection here (unless I use my phone as a mobile hot-spot, which I am avoiding....).

It's what I've wanted, yearned for really, through these depressing Covid years. Somewhere to get all these ideas and thoughts banging around inside my skull into something resembling coherence. Work on my memoir - which means thinking about sixty odd years and events and people, crises and triumphs, good times and bad, and putting it all down so that, before I croak, I can give it to my kids and say, "there you go, this was me...". Re-write the novel (again) and maybe publish it one day. The same for the short story collection (that I need to add to).

Or simply sit here, and watch the world go by, planning where to go next when money allows, or just letting my mind go blank (something I've been told frequently is close anyway) and let time drift.

I'll take all of that, thank you very much.

WHY I write. And HOW....

 

I'm currently reading a book by acclaimed author Salman Rushdie called Languages of Truth.  It's a collection of essays and speeches he has written or made between 2003-2020, rather than the novels he is more well  known for, and I have to say I'm enjoying it more than the novels I've read (his two most famous: the Booker Prize winning Midnight's Children and the Muslim upsetting Satanic Verses - and I enjoyed both of them very much).  The essays cover a wide range of topics, from appreciations and criticisms of different authors, both old and new(er), a section on what Rushdie terms "WonderTales" - the age old myths and legends from Greece and elsewhere, and in particular his native India, that led him to become a writer, their influence on his work, and what it actually means to be a writer, its trials and tribulations and triumphs.  It's a fascinating portrait of a renowned author at the top of his game, and for anyone interested in the craft I give it a strong Recommend.

It's also made me look again at my own attempts at scribbling stuff - I wouldn't call myself an author by any stretch of the imagination, not yet! - and what it means to me.  I thought I'd share it with you, my handful of loyal readers.  Because - why not?

--------------------------------------------------------

First: let me explain the WHY?  What makes me sit down at a desk or table with my laptop and attempt to write something? 

I write.  I always have done, since I was a kid.  I've written stories, short ones and longer ones, almost novella length.  Poetry.  A novel.  Currently, I'm battling through penning a memoir as well.  For 10 years or more - actually, now I think of it, it's 12 years - I've been writing this Blog and its two predecessors..  For most of my working life, I've had to write a wide variety of documents, factual things like procedure manuals, training guides and system requirements, as well as slideshows and presentations of varying complexity and then deliver them to audiences from a couple of people to a dozen or more learners in a proper training room.  So the written word, and creating it, has been a huge part of my life.

It's always been challenging, and sometimes an absolute pain, and now and again I've found myself completely stopped in my tracks - the fabled Writer's Block that everyone who does this for a living (or otherwise) has experienced.  But still I carry on. It's like an itch, somewhere in the middle of my head, that compels me to do this, and there is little rhyme or reason to it.  It's just there and I must scratch it.....

It's not as if I've made any money from it.....well, discounting the professional stuff, the procedures and training guides and presentations, but they were just a part (albeit an important part) of my day job, for which I received compensation of varying quantity.  But the personal stuff, the stories and the book and so on - no.

Well, apart from one thing.  When I was I think 12 (so nearly 60 ago now, for God's sake!) I entered a story into a competition run by the Surrey Mirror newspaper to write a Christmas story.  I can't remember the terms and conditions of the competition, nor much in the way of detail about the little yarn I sent in - it was, I recall, about a bloke hitchhiking home for Christmas from Northern Alaska to I'm not sure where, so I guess it featured snowmobiles and big lumbering timber trucks, maybe a train and airplane or two: I really can't remember.  But Our Hero made it, and walked through his front door at 5 to midnight on Christmas Eve, to the delight of his family.  To my surprise, and that of mum and dad, the paper printed it in their Christmas edition, along with several others, and what's more paid me £5 for it.  My dad bought several copies of the paper and my mum cut the story out and posted it off to friends and family scattered all over the country and indeed the world, and insisted that I would one day earn my living from my pen. Which, I suppose, I did, although not in the way she meant.

And that is the sole direct payment I've receivcd for all the hundreds of thousands of words I've written since, in my poetry and my stories and my books and my Blogs.  Not a single word has been published (apart from the several hundred Blog posts I've written and published via this Blogger platform or LinkedIn, which I left when I retired four years ago).  

Partly this has been because, for whatever reason (and I still can't quite get my head around why) my AdSense settings on Google have never generated any income (and now seem to have stopped working altogether), so the Blog is simply an exercise in creativity, a hobby, with an audience that has never really grown beyond a handful of views per post, and try as I might I haven't found a way of growing it via social media, word of mouth or whatever.  I put it down to most people having way more important things to do than to read the demented witterings of an ageing retiree ex-pat.  Or perhaps the writing simply isn't as good or interesting as I think it is....  It's a question I've posed a few times in previous posts, but never yet had any answer, which is, shall we say, frustrating!

So - the big question here I suppose is this: If I never make any money from all this, WHY do I still do it?  Simply: because I need to.  I have to scratch that itch.  And I always try to finish what I started.  And because, who knows, one day I might figure out how this Amazon Publishing thing works and actually do something with it all.

And there's a bit more to it even than that.  Over the past couple of years, because of the well known pitfalls of finding a new direction and purpose after retiring, and of course that bloody Pandemic, and a couple of relatively minor accidents that led to hospitalisation, I plunged into some nasty mental issues.  They're largely gone now, or at least under control, but still linger in the back of my mind and make the odd comeback when least expected.  I've written in more detail about them recently, but the essential point is this.  My writing has helped, and continues to help, with the healing process.  It gives me something to get out of bed for in the morning (besides walking the dog and getting my Beloved off to work and the kids off to school) and something to focus on besides what a mess the world is in right now.  If I can make my mind focus on the creative process, even if not every day, then it keeps it from wandering off into darker places I really don't want to visit.  

It's been therapeutic too, in that a couple of the stories I've written have, quite by chance and totally unplanned, directly addressed some of the problems that caused the Depression, and trying to marshal all my distant memories into a cohesive and hopefully entertaining narrative in the memoir have helped me realise that, despite the problems I've faced over the years - and like everyone else continue to face - it's actually been a good life, one I can be proud of with more ups than downs, and not the disaster area that mental problems can often suggest.

But, mostly, I write because I love doing it.

-----------------------------------------------------

So that's the WHY.  Now: what about the HOW? Where do the ideas come from and what do I do to convert them into something that makes sense and is even vaguely readable?

Without wishing to sound pretentious, this is where the magic happens, but since I'm not Gandalf I can't really answer very clearly how or why.  For the Blog, most of the ideas that drive content are in turn driven by the daily news cycle - and, let's face it, there is an awful lot of stuff going on to write about now.  What with the War in Ukraine; incompetent and possibly corrupt government in a number of countries including both my birth and adopted homelands; global warming; the food crisis; rampant inflation across much of Europe; extreme weather events causing chaos globally; no end to senseless gun violence in a divided USA; the football season including the first winter World Cup (happening in November); a Covid pandemic that is still roaring on.......the list is endless.  I'm spoilt for choice - as is every other journalist, blogger or YouTube vlogger on the planet.  So the difficulty is to somehow make my stuff different from everyone else's - and that is incredibly difficult, and possibly (even probably...) not something I've succeeded in doing well enough.  

Re-hashing someone else's ideas or points of view is a pointless exercise, so I have to spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about stuff and searching for a personal angle or viewpoint that I can build a piece around.  Then more time, from a few hours to a couple of days, writing and reviewing the piece before hitting the Publish button - by which time, as often as not, it's no longer News.  It's also, because of the news cycle driven nature of the content, in constant danger of becoming repetitive: it's one thing being paid, as a journalist, by a paper or news website, to specialise on a specific subject, follow it and immerse yourself deeply in it, and write pieces every day to keep people informed, and something altogether different to express a personal opinion in an entertaining way independently.  

Do I try to write a short piece on something every day, specifically to cover a "story" (for want of a better word), or do I take more time, produce longer pieces but less frequently, that are not only driven by the news cycle, but also personal, things that I care about?  Right now, I tend to fall between the two - there is newsy stuff here when something jumps out and bites me (the sudden death of a favourite sportsman, for instance, or a Prime Ministerial resignation, or another US mass shooting atrocity), but also plenty of personal stuff too: book reviews, pieces about trips made to Switzerland or the seaside, and some deeply personal things covering my own struggles with both Covid and Depression (they have even crept into this essay).  

But when I sit down to write, I typically have little in mind but a very very general idea about what I want to say.  I stare at a blank page, type a handful of words, and see what happens.  Sometimes it flows, and the thoughts burst out of my fingers and fill the page, almost without a conscious effort. Those are good times....  Other times, those few words are all that comes and after a few hours of angst and increasing panic it's scrapped.  Read, review, take a break, then read review again.  Maybe again. However many times it takes to polish it to my satisfaction.  Then Publish (or less often Delete).  Tougher, for sure, but somehow even more rewarding.

With longer pieces, the book and the memoir and the stories, it's not so very different.  I am not a planner: there are no wallposters with timelines, maps, cast lists, key events or anything like that.  Very rarely are there even any notes to refer to - it's all in my head.  The closest I've come to that was The Match, my sex booze and football novel, where I started the original draft with a couple of pages, mocked up like the Teams page in a football program, that listed all the characters, major and minor, that would appear.  That exercise took perhaps an hour, then I made myself a coffee and started writing.  Somehow - I have absolutely no clue how it happened! - in the time it took to brew the coffee the very nebulous idea I had had that started the creative process solidified in my mind, and when the pen tip hit the paper, the entire story poured out in a single collosal brain dump.  Every setting, the timetable and events, individual incidents in the football match that is central to the yarn, even dialogue was there, complete.  It took me perhaps three weeks to finish my dump and commit it all to paper, in a couple of Ryman Jumbo exercise books, and it was done.  Extraordinary, mysterious and frankly unexplainable......  Since then the book's been reviewed and edited many times, but the finished story, the one sitting as a pdf waiting for me to do something on Amazon or whatever, is not significantly different to the version scribbled out by Ball Pentel all those years ago.

And that is how I write..  Ideas come to me, at odd hours, and I try to remember them (not always possible: the lingering effects of my two brushes with Covid include increased fatigue and a lack of focus and concentration - the so-called brainfog) but sometimes the ideas drift away as fast as they appear.  But if the idea comes back, it seems to come back in a bit more detail and that gives me my start.  And off I go to another blank page and start bashing keys again, to see where that leads. Now and then it's a dead end, but often, eventually, the result is a completed yarn.  

And because I've not planned anything, it grows and changes and develops as I go along, and often in unexpected ways.  I wrote something recently, a longish short story that came as an initial idea of a guy going for a solo swim in a warm sea somewhere, and is eaten by a shark - I dismissed that out of hand: way too depressing.  But it kept nagging away, and eventually, after a couple of weeks, it grew into a story about a bereaved husband dealing with his loss and the guilt around it, coming to terms with it and moving on.....kind of.  From the outset I could see a couple of possible conclusions, and more came to me as I wrote, but I had no idea which one to use - until I got to the last few paragraphs, when my subconscious mind settled on one and somehow, to my suprise, it works and makes sense......but in an odd, open ended way that actually allows the reader to perceive a couple of the choices and settle on whichever conclusion seems right - to that reader.  Weird?  Well, yes, I guess it is. And (spoiler alert) with no sign of a shark - unless summoned by the reader.

So: it's all for want of a better term, ad-hoc creation, words coming to me on the fly and hitting the page for a period of time that may be a few hours or a few minutes.  While I'm typing, I'll often go back over a couple of paragraphs, correcting typos and punctuation, and most importantly reminding myself where I'm going and keeping things on some kind of track.  Then at the end of that writing day or period or story section I'll go back through it again and correct it.  When the whole thing - be it a blog post, a story or another section in the memoir - is I think complete I'll go through it all a couple more times and polish it.  Only then will I move on and Publish (the blog) or take a break and seek a new idea for the other stuff.  It's undoubtedly an unprofessional way of working, but it works for me, and in any case it's, to an extent, the only option I have because I don't have the luxury of a dedicated work environment, no place where I can shut myself away from distractions and get my head down to at least try and focus for an extended time.  As things are now, and likely to remain for the foreseeable future, I have to continue with the Wing And A Prayer method of writing, whenever and wherever I can.

So I will.

Tony Blair and me: A change of heart....

 

I bought this tome at a second hand book shop in Warsaw, it cost me PLN10 - which is a little over a quid in today's money.  It's taken a while to get through, such is the level of detail, but I'm glad I did.  It's made me re-assess him, as both a man and a leader.

-------------------------------------------------------

I admit to having a soft spot for the bloke: we're the same vintage (he's about 6 weeks younger than me), he's apparently a football fan (Newcastle United his well published loyalty) and has similar tastes in music.  I remember him moving into Downing Street with a Fender Stratocaster guitar and amp, which seemed pretty cool to me at the time, and frankly still does.  On the debit side, he went to a minor public school, Fettes, rather than a state school like mine, and thence to St. John's College, Oxford to study Law and then on to the Inns of Court School for Law and a position in chambers, while I left school at 17 with four O-Levels and a CSE without taking my A-levels, and went straight to work as a filing clerk at one of the biggest stockbrokers in the City.  There I earned the princely sum of £675 a year - it took me four years' graft and my 21st birthday to crack the grand a year barrier.  No expensive education and well-paid legal eagle job for this council house kid, I'm afraid - or, perhaps on reflection, glad - to say.

I remember when Blair swanned into No.10 with the gurning missus and kids in tow, waving from the doorstep in the traditional manner of new PMs, and he seemed to me a breath of fresh air.  I had grown up with a succession of both Blue and Red but always grey old men running the show - McMillan, Home, Wilson, Calaghan, Heath, Foot, even John Major, with an interlude of bossy schoolma'am Thatcher, so the sight of someone my own age, with young kids, looking smooth and (sorry about this, but I can't think of another word....) dynamic taking over was exactly what the country needed.  I empathised with what he proclaimed he was going to deliver - a change for the better, a Third Way, New Labour, government for all not just the rich, and all the other spin - using the kind of middle management buzz-words and Cityspeak I heard every day at work, as I had been for ten years or more.  I was suckered in like so many other people who voted in that Labour landslide.....  It was not Labour as I knew it, it actually sounded vaguely Tory - which as someone who had voted twice for Thatcher was fine by me, but I was prepared to give New Labour a chance: God knows a country that seemed to me stagnating under a succession on nonentities was ready for a change.  And besides, his Deputy was the aging unreconstructed Old Labour activist and shop steward John Prescott, who seemed more than capable of rubbing off the media gloss and reminding us what, traditionally, the Party had stood for - which is to say working class values, which coming from the stock I did meant something. 

---------------------------------------------------------

Briefly: my mum and dad were archetypal working class, meeting "in service" (her a chambermaid, he a gardener) at Chiddingstone Castle before World War Two, and voted Labour all their lives.  They worked hard after the longtime War separation, lived all their lives in a council house as tennants, never owned a car (though dad had a motor bike he rarely rode).  He had a succession of manual jobs - stoker, coalman, removal man, mill operator - that eventually killed him at a ridiculously young 56, from cancer.  Mum stayed at home, raising me and my two sisters, then worked in a tobacconists and newsagents in my home town, as well as moonlighting as a cleaner in a hotel and the local Nat West Bank.  She lived for another twenty odd years after dad passed away before a cancer took her too.  They were never politically active and seemed to complain about whichever Party governed, but their own upbringings always made them tick the box for the Labour candidate come Polling Day - living in a staunchly Conservative constituency it was always a token protest vote, but to them important.    

I broke the mould.  I passed my 11 Plus and went to a Technical High School (not quite good enough for a Grammar), then went to work in the City - the first person in my family to achieve such elevation, as they saw it: an important job for life, then a decent pension and a gold watch or carriage clock on retirement in due course.  Their pride knew no bounds - but their aspirations turned out to be way off the mark (but that's a different story, one for the memoir I've been beavering away at for the last few years....).  By the time I got the vote, at 21 (just before voting age was reduced to 18), my years at the venerable old stockbroker influenced me to vote Tory, for Ted Heath.  Cue the miner's strike, the three-day week, working by candlelight in a dark and dingy old fashioned Dickensian office, the postal strike....  I voted Labour next time, true to my roots.  Thereafter I vaccilated each election from party to party, trying to find one that I thought best served my needs and those of my own family.  

This resulted in votes for both Labour and the Liberal Party and even the Social Democrats (before the Liberals swallowed them up and morphed into the LibDems) before returning to the Tory fold for the election of Thatcher.  There followed my boom years, as well as the country's.  The City opened up and became one of the biggest and most influential in the world, and I was swept along with it.  I bought property, jumping from a two bed mid terrace semi-slum, through a three bed end-terrace in a very nice neighbourhood, to a brand new three bed semi in a new town.  I bought shares in the privatisations and duly took my profits (typically to buy more stuff, have holidays or pay off credit cards), passed my driving test and went from a Fiesta to an Allegro (no, honestly!), to a Maestro, to a Montego Estate, then a brand new Montego Estate company car (so top of the range, power everything) as my family grew and my career advanced.  Then it hit the buffers, soon after the three-bed semi was replaced by a big 4 bed detached with a big garden, so the company (and the car) went, replaced by a third hand Montego saloon bought at auction, that part exchanged for an old Volvo Estate, and finally a Renault Savannah estate, through a succession of temp jobs, until I settled again in a German bank and my career got back onto some kind of track.  At which point: Blair's election in '97 and we're back on track.......sorry for the diversion!

---------------------------------------------------

I was very busy during that first term.  Settling into a new job, moving between different positions in the organisation, getting heavily involved in an IT rebuild project (my first experience of such a thing, and it turned out to point up a new career direction), plus the needs of a growing family meant that I didn't really take too much notice of what Blair and his government were doing, or how it performed.  I remember very little, to be honest, except for the way he seemed to step up to the plate after Princess Diana died: I remember his eulogy, sppsrently off the cuff but in retrospect carefully scripted, when coming out of his local church that day and being impressed by his words and his performance, and I felt he handled the aftermath through to the funeral very well.  But beyond that: the changes he had promised seemed to have receded and we faced the same old slog.  Neither the country nor my life changed significanlty throughout those early years, let alone the overnight we had perhaps been led to expect.  But ok, I thought, it will take time: carry on, Tone.

Come election time and I happily ticked the Labour box again (although of course the Tory, as usual for my constituency got in by a big - but reduced -  majority).  Another landslide, and the New Labour Project continued.  But I had noticed that Blair seemed to spend more time travelling to summits all over the place, and welcoming leaders and Oasis to Downing Street, and pontificating on every subject under the sun rather than engaging in the daily Commons rough-and-tumble.  But then he'd already had a tendency to do that anyway.  It seemed all very Presidential, the kind of stuff Bill Clinton was doing, so I figured this must be one of Blair's promised "changes".   The constant rows he was having with trades unions, and with some people within his own party, notably grumpy Gordon Brown, all seemed a bit petty, but I figured it was all part and parcel of political life (and rivalry).

I changed jobs again, then again, just in time for the Millenium and chuckled at the uncomfortable expression on the Queen's face next to Blair at the New Year Celebration in the Dome: clearly she wasn't fully in tune with the New Labour administration.  And then I started zooming off all over the place in my new IT project career that lasted in one guise or another for the rest of my working life.  So a lot of the ills that were still evident, and not being fixed, receded because I wasn't there.  By the end of 2000, my personal circumstances had changed and, through work, I was what today is termed a digital nomad, no longer living in Britain and working pretty much remotely via the internet and new fangled mobile phones.  I saw no prospect of that changing, all of my property, cars and stuff, was sold or on the market, the kids had left (or about leave) home to start their own lives. so naively and selfishly I stopped really taking much notice of what was going on at home, in Britain.  I was too wrapped up in my own new life....

----------------------------------------------------

9/11 happened, the day before I was due to travel home for a weekend visit, and shocked me just as much as it shocked everyone else.  I got into my flat, after work ground to a halt early, and switched on the tv, just in time to see the two Towers fall, and felt sick.  Later, when the shock had worn off a little, I called BA and confirmed my flight the next day was still happening, and despite pleas from various people not to do so, headed off to the airport after breakfast, convinced air travel would be the safest form of transport for the foreseeable future......   I expected security to be a lot tighter, but wasn't expecting the tank on the approach road to the terminal, or the armed soldiers in combat gear roaming around inside.

The aftermath of that atrocity has changed international travel, especially by plane, for ever.  The tanks and the troops may have gone (at least in most places), but the security lines and x-ray machines and bag searches that resulted are still with us, and probably always will be.  Blair's premiership was also changed forever, as he immediately pledged the country's support to George Bush whatever happened in the future, as the American launched his War On Terror - and the two remained in lock-step for the remainder of their terms in office.

As part of that campaign came the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that there were no Iraqis involved in the 9/11 attack: the majority of the funding, planning and execution was carried out by Saudis, including all but two of the suicide bombers (the remaining pair were from the UAE).  But somehow, Rumsfeld and Cheney convinced Bush that Saddam's Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (iit didn't) and had to be stopped at all costs: the link between that reasoning and 9/11 remains obscure to me 20 years later.

For the rest of that second term and into his third, Blair's attention wandered far from the NHS, from education, the cost of living, and all the other concerns British people had.  Even defence spending (or the lack of it) was parked, despite it being quite obviously crucial to the armed forces that he had pledged to aid Bush being hampered by the lack of equipment.  Blair became messianic about getting rid of Saddam, for the security of humanity, and as a leader of special brutality (which he was) and a sponsor and leader of Radical Islam (which he wasn't).  Saddam had to go.  The war was short and not sweet, but America and Britain got their way, and Saddam was toppled, went on the run, was eventually captured, went on trial in an Iraqi court, found guilty and promptly executed.  The tragedy remains that neither Blair nor Bush had any plan to deal with the power vacuum and civil war that the fall of Saddam inevitably triggered.  Blair left it to Bush, who wasn't interested because he wanted to turn next to Afghanistan, the next target in his War On Terror......and of course Blair went along with it.

That didn't end well either.  The campaign in Afghanistan dragged on until last year and ended inconclusively with the Taliban regaining control and turning the clock back several hundred years.  British and American casualties numbered in the thousands, in both deaths and life-changing injuries, the cost to civilians even higher.  Militant Islam has not been destroyed, the War On Terror a failure.  Bush has shuffled off into retirement and made a decent sum from publishing his memoir, Decision Points.  Blair, meanwhile, eventually abdicated in favour of Gordon Brown, who didn't last long, so that in some form or fashion Conservatives have remained in power since 2010.  New Labour has long gone.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Blair has done pretty well out of it all, at least financially.  He too published a memoir, called rather grandly A Journey that made him several million quid.  I read it, and it's a well written but self serving whitewash in which he paints himself as a great leader let down by his weak and unruly lieutenants and unfairly villified by his opponents and the public at large.  Of particular frustration to him is the poor picture painted of his conduct in the lead up to Iraq, with accusations that he misled Parliament (or lied if you prefer the word, hence the derogatory Tony Bliar nickname) thus taking us into an illegal war without the required UN Resolution.  As a result of the casualty list, especially amongst British citizens serving in the Armed Forces (Iraq's far higher number of civilian victims usually left out of the charges) he is widely considered to be a War Criminal......whatever that is: I'm not going to discuss it here since I'm not qualified to do so (not being an international lawyer).  What I will say, as a purely personal view, is that if the same criteria had been used historically, then pretty much any leader that takes his (or her) country deliberately into conflict is a war criminal - be it Thatcher, Eden, Chamberlain, Asquith or Blair himself.  Or Churchill, for that matter, thinking of some of the awful decisions he made during World War 2.  It seems to me a slippery definition.  But on the major points of dicussion, I noticed that his views and conclusions matched very closely those of Bush's.....collusion?  Who knows?

I also read the two volume biography written by Anthony Seldon, which is very good and covers in  detail Blair's early life and pre-political career, plus a lot of detail of the key events during his premiership, but does not cover what happened next since the first volume came out in 2004, while he was still in office, and the second in 2007, shortly after handing over to Brown.  There is thus no mention of the Chilcot Report from which much of the animosity came to the fore and was given justification, nor Blair's role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives, nor his highly lucrative public speaking career (for example, when asked to fulfil one engagement of a 20 minute speech he demanded a fee of £250,000 plus first class hotel and travel expenses and a private plane; when offered £25,000 flat he refused the gig: a rarity apparently).  Similarly there is no mention of Tony Blair Associates, his consultancy firm selling his influence and political know-how to banana republics world wide and its affiliate Faith Foundation (performing a similar service but wrapped up as a religious charity), nor of the multi-million pound property portfolio - all of this controlled through a complex network of shell companies and offshore accounts.  All of this is discussed in great detail in the book that heads this piece.

None of it is really a surprise, I suppose: he is not the first former PM to make a fortune from publishing memoirs and engaging in various consultancy positions with international banks and manufacturing businesses, nor will he be the last.  It's one of the (unwritten) perks of the job, and as far as I'm comcerned provided it's all done after leaving politics and does not peddle any state secrets or in any other way damage the country, then it's a perfectly acceptable way of earning a living and of course benefiting the country's economy by paying taxes.  The concerns only come, rightly, when that doesn't happen, at least in my view.

What did surprise me was how poor Tony Blair was at doing the job of Prime Minister, how little respect he had for his Ministers (and, frequently, they for him).  I hadn't realised quite how poor many of his Cabinet choices were, how totally unsuited and downright incompetent they were, and in certain cases how downright mendacious they were.  His reshuffles were rarely thought through, his appointments seemingly pulled out of thin air.  He had little or no concept of the details of how, say, the NHS worked, or why the armed forces needed more finance, or why no matter how much money was thrown at education schools and pupils continued to underperform.  Worse, he wasn't that interested.

He was primarily an ideas man, and surrounded himself with a handful of special advisors whom he trusted to come up with the policy detail which he then signed off (typically without reading or really understanding).  But he had a charisma and skill as a public speaker (not unusual in a barrister used to performing in a court of law) and was able to use that skill to sell the "policy" to his Party and, at least initially, adoring public.  His Cabinet meetings typically lasted less than an hour, senior civil servants from the various government departments ignored, and even the daily grind of debating in Patliament shunned wherever possible.  

Incredibly, in the run up to Iraq and Afghanistan he did not appoint a War Cabinet (the first Prime Minister in history to go to war without doing so), preferring instead to consult with a handful of intelligence chiefs and armed forces commanders who always had competing agendas and advice and often disliked one another, plus his two key aides, Jonathon Powell and Alistair Campbell (who had absolutely no military experience whatever), to plan the campaign.  Even the Secretaries of State for Defence and the Foreign Office were excluded from these discussions, along with their senior Civil Servants.  Experts in the Middle East and Arab politics and religion were completely ignored too. 

---------------------------------------------------------

There is much else in Tom Bower's book, but the above points are my key takeaways.  Most of the content has been taken from several hundred detailed interviews with the surviving key participants and thousands of official documents and other resources, and the entire sorry tale presented in more or less chronological order, and the focus is solely on the premiership and Blair's life since then.  And that's quite enough.

If there is any truth in even half of the revelations - and as many were hinted at it in Seldon's version of events it suggests that is indeed the case - then my contemporary was very very VERY far from the man I gave him credit for.  I've defended him and his (apparent) legacy in the past, because much of it was created while I was elsewhere in the world and thus relied on news reports and after-the-event accounts, and not formed as a front row spectator.  I regret that now: jumping to conclusions is never the right thing to do, but often the easiest.  My mistake.

But what I am sure of is that, perhaps unwittingly, Blair changed the way Prime Ministers operate.  Cabinet decision making seems to be rarer now.  Of Blair's successors, Gordon Brown didn't last long.  Cameron took over as Prime Minister, forming a Tory-LibDem coalition that in my view was a tad dysfunctional with the LibDem part of it largely marginalised and in minor roles, to be followed by a Tory majority government.  Cameron was another slick ex-public schoolboy (Eton of course) so undoubtedly knew better than anyone else what was needed (says the cynic in me), and employed similar snake-oil salesman oratory to Blair.  He then lost an uneccesary Referendum on EU memberhip and within hours took the cowardly route of resignation.  His replacement Theresa May tried to administer Cabinet government again, but was hamstrung by Brexiteers in key positions (and infesting the back benches) and was replaced by serial liar and another Old Etonian contemporary of Cameron, Boris Johnson, who continues to go his own way, leading with the reward of an overwhelming Commons majority from a grateful ex-EU British public that allows him to do pretty much as he wants. And that, frankly, he cares not too hoots about. 

But all of them, every single one, failed and continue to fail to govern by consensus, master their briefs or listen to what the electorate, the British people, actually think or want or, most importantly, need.  To that extent, they are Tony Blair Lite.  In it for themselves, not public servants, lining their own pockets and planning for a wealthy post-Westminster career.  In fairness, Theresa May does seem to be an exception, continuing to work dilligently from the back benches on behalf of her constituents and trying to act as the voice of reason against the government's excesses.

Blair wanted his legacy to be a New Way in British politics.  In that, he seems to have succeeded.  But it's the wrong way.

The country suffers as a result.