Are we becoming a nation of angst prone, nail biting, whiny worriers? On the face of it a poll conducted by the Mental Health Foundation suggests we might be.

"Three-quarters of its respondents agreed that the world is scarier today than it was ten years ago, and that people are more frightened and anxious."

Jesus wept! This is not the nation that stood alone against the tyranny of Hitler, shrugging off the Blitz as if it were a minor irritant. The article does identify part of the problem though:

"...people are responding to the effects of an emotional arms race. Modern media-savvy governments realise that, with so many messages competing for the public’s attention—about benefit fraud, climate change, crime, drunkenness, obesity and terrorism—ramping up the fright factor is the easiest way to make sure individual messages get through. She compares a famous second world war poster that exhorted people to “keep calm and carry on” with modern warnings about smoking or junk food expressly designed to be as terrifying as possible."

That all echoes very strongly the thoughts of Frank Furedi in his book Invitation To Terrorexamines the rhetorical framework used by governments and opinion formers in the debate around the threat of terrorism. His argument is that the entire conceptual structure that arises from the language we use fuels a state of perpetual fear and anxiety.

At the same time, think-tank Demos is launching its Resilient Nation initiative this week. It looks into how prepared we are as a nation to deal with major incidents and has been foreshadowed in the press by a couple of articles, one in the Telegraph here and one in the Times here.

The study, Resilient Nation, calls on individuals to become more self resilient and prepared for disasters or emergencies and less reliant on the state although it stops short of advising the public "stockpile" reserves.

The report goes on to talk about how the majority of people live in concentrated urban areas where reliance on services and infrastructure is entrenched and disruption leaves people with no contingency. The report focuses on the impact of examples like the inclement weather we have had in recent years and our poor state of preparation for such events.

The report in the Times looks at the formation of volunteer force that would swing into action alongside emergency services when faced with such disasters, but also makes recommendations about how new social media and networking technology could be utilised to keep the public up to date in a crisis.

Second, all of us – departments, agencies, citizens, communities – need to learn how to harness the power of social networking sites. Twitter, for instance, may be seen by some as a pointless gossip forum, but it could in fact be an incredibly effective emergency management tool.

In America, the internet has already proved invaluable. The Los Angeles fire department has a blog that invites people to provide information on fires and other emergencies across the city. The fire teams also use Google to monitor key words such as “LA” and “fire”, which helps them to get instant reports on flare-ups and wind directions from tweeters. These reports from the ground are then relayed to the services.

As a result, the Los Angeles fire department has an army of citizens on whom it can call for support.

Interesting recommendations and I wholeheartedly support the need to look at this area more closely by the government, but also by citizens, who both share the same myopic view when it comes to crisis; we never even think about the ramifications of such crisis, as proven by the problems we had with the last set of floods which had such major knock on impacts, like the power outstation threatened down in the South West, or the reservoir that almost cracked and burst in South Yorkshire. There is so little contingency allowed for in the way we live these days and with increasingly integrated infrastructure means that when a crisis strikes, it has a ripple effect outwards into other areas. Look at how the countries traffic was almost brought to a halt a few years back by a handful of hauliers blockading the fuel depots for example.

These days you cannot seem to get away from articles and blog posts about Twitter. Some endorsing it, some saying it is a complete waste of time, but perhaps now it really has arrived: Oprah is using it now.

In the last 6 months there has been a steady trickle of celebrities to Twitter, and although the UK have an irrepressible advocate for the technology in Stephen Fry, surely Oprah is biggest coup yet; as the article points out, she is one of 'Middle America's most influential tastemakers' and her reach, should she get behind the technology, should not be underestimated. This is no mere sports celebrity or has been pop starlet, this is a woman with influence beyond a small niche of over zealous fans. Ignore the fact that politicians have been trying to hook into the technology for a while [see here and here], but you know a technology really is making headway when it starts to attract celebs.

There has been some evidence of what I would call Twitter creep though recently; the inexorable rise of it, something akin to when Facebook started to see its own popularity explosion. Previously used to cover dreary tech conferences, I think Twitter's watershed moment came with the recent G20 summit in London, where is was used by police and protesters alike to keep track on activities. The ubiquity of mobile phone cameras allows people to upload images and video to the web and link to it from Twitter, so people following the event on Twitter have a greater sense of what is happening on the ground. Here is the BBC article on Twitter use at the G20.

"For many, Twitter was a way to find out about and get to the independent media reports from people caught up in the protests. One of the messages most regularly re-tweeted was a link to video footage of the police breaking up the Climate Camp."

Hashtags, Twitter's recent of 'trending topics' and sites like Twitterfall and Monitter, that allow realtime tracking of tweets with particular topics, have become an invaluable way of not only following opinion on the selected topics, but also seeing what material people are linking to. The weekly parliamentary slot for Prime Ministers Questions for example, has the associated #pmqs, so has you watch, you can see what others are saying about it and, if you wish, contribute yourself.

Utilising Twitter for organisational purposes is really very much in its infancy, but as this article in the Telegraph suggests, it can certainly leveraged, even if one puts aside the hyperbole of the article. Or consider this story of the student that 'tweeted himself out of an Eygptian jail'. Twitter is becoming an invaluable tool for sharing information on civil protest or government clamp downs and civil rights abuses. Bloggers have long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments and Twitter adds to their armory, providing a medium with more immediacy.

Another way to know you have arrived? When mainstream media technology journos start declaring your death of course. Here's the Independent's David Randall doing just that.

The websites with real permanence are those, such as eBay, which have locked users into business relationships. Or ones like Amazon.com, which have, with their stock and warehouses, raised the barriers of entry for anyone wanting to start an online bookshop to almost high-street levels. The sites which can't do that are vulnerable. They have no means of stopping a slightly smarter version, one that has the cachet of newness, replacing them.

He ends his article by pointing out not even Google is safe in the long term. In a sense it is immaterial whether Twitter continues to thrive and exist, and I happen to believe it will, but the point is that the concepts of microblogging and real time information exchange have started to become embedded in the public's mind. It may not be Twitter, but the demand for that type of service is not going to go away, and as with Google and Facebook, an early frontrunner that can crossover from the tech geek citadels and into the mainstream stands an excellent chance of maintaining its attraction to users.

I have started to make some tentative investigations towards getting out of renting at Andy's for the rest of my life, however attractive that prospect might be from a financial perspective, and buying a place of my own. I have set up a separate blog to track my progress and solicit requests for advice here. Please add it into your RSS reader or pop back to see updates at regular intervals.

Of the main British soaps I have only really followed 'Enders with any regularity; this involves dipping in every now and then and seeing whether there are any decent storylines that take my fancy. Recently I did begin to lose interest, but I was gripped by the story of Danielle, Ronnie Mitchell and Archie Mitchell, which culminated this week, in true soap style, at a wedding reception.

For those of you not acquainted a brief synopsis of the story is required here. When Ronnie Mitchell was 14 she got pregnant and was coerced into the giving up her baby by her father (Archie). She was later told by Archie that her baby had died. Of course, she had not in fact died and the baby girl, some 19 years later, comes to London to find her mother as the shy Danielle. Of course this is Eastenders so this has to be strung out over months, so Danielle spend several months trying to build up the courage to tell her mother, getting pregnant from a one night stand in the process, and having her mother accompany her to the abortion clinic still not knowing this was her daughter and the foetus about to be aborted was her grandchild.

Even before this weeks climax then there had been an emotional rollercoaster. Recently, Danielle had told Archie, a sinister control freak of a guy, who she really was, and he trying his utmost to keep the truth from coming out, knowing if it did, his lie abouth the baby dying would be revealed and he would Ronnie would be back to hating him (they has just started to get on again).

Danielle was a true underdog character; shy, timid, emotionally needy and at times rather annoying, but one could not help liking her and wanting her innocence to triumph over the control freakery of Archie.

This week then it all came out in explosive fashion, initial Ronnie is persuaded by he Dad that this girl is a nutcase, but later realises that she had been telling the truth and that Danielle was indeed her daughter. She goes running after seeing her walking away down the street; they stare at one another and a moment passes between them where Danielle knows Ronnie has finally realised this is he daughter, the one she has never forgotten about, or forgiven herself for giving up. Then, just when you think it is all going to be OK, as Danielle steps out to go and embrace her mother - BAM! - fucking Janine Butcher comes careering around the corner and runs her down. Danielle crumples and dies in her Mum's arms, choking out a hoarse 'Mommy' before expiring.

It was very well done I have to say, but did they have to make it so crushing there at the end. Couldn't she have made it to hospital and been touch and go on life support before pulling through? Is it to much to ask that with all this doom and gloom around us with the economic situation, that a soap could just provide an optimistic chink of light, a smidgen of hopeful escapism? No, no, this is Eastenders and they make a point of being depressing bastards. Tragedy is their modus operandi. The only other programme to be so systematically cruel to well-loved characters is The Wire, which is even more callous in the way life is snatched so easily from characters you have several seasons of love for.

This is of course not the first time that we have had people bouncing off bonnets outside of the Vic. Looking at the stretch of road where Danielle was run down, I was almost minded to ask BBC to explain how someone could have built up the necessary speed to run someone down, as it looked like a cul-de-sac, but given the previous accidents, I might have to settle for launching a petition to get some speed bumps installed.

I have a bad habit of continually ordering books and just stacking them unread in various precarious piles around my bedroom. With Christmas and my birthday now behind me this has now increased this stock of undiscovered worlds and interesting facts waiting to discover. To that end I am trying to do a around a hours reading a night, otherwise I just spend it watching TV or pissing around on the internet.

My plan is to have on the go one fiction and one non-fiction book at any one time. I have started to collate my mini library on the internet site Shelfari. See my profile here.

In the non-fiction corner we have the weighty tome that is David Marquand's political history, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy. I am only a quarter of the way into it so far, but it is an enjoyable and elegant book, in which Marquand identifies four broad ideologies that have influenced the development of British democracy since 1918.

On the fiction side of things I am reading a book I got for my birthday called The Island At The End of the World. I have only read the first few chapters so far, but it is an intriguing start; a man living with his three children on an island after a Great Flood, apparently instigated by God has washed the Earth clean of sinners. He is keen to keep his children from 'knowing the truth', but the book opens with him spotting signs on the horizon of someone else approaching in a boat, a prospect that has him gripped with fear.

Found this article quite interesting as it referred to something that had recently happened to Andy on Facebook.

And I always assumed that any pictures taken of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe from Google's tentacles.

That was until Caroline, a high-school friend's little sister, joined Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late '80s and early '90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them—identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook, announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been uploaded.

The author goes on to talk about how violated he felt by this and how in some ways, for people of his age (i.e. my age) it represented a clash of spheres: the last decade of the digitial, and our previous life, captured in fading photo albums gathering dusts in peoples attics. This is what makes the sense of violation all the more palpable; one does not expect to be confronted with scanned pictures of the various horrendous haircut and fashion disasters on ones youth, especially not when all your current set of digital and real life friends you are linked to on Facebook get alerted to its presence as well.

I think Andy's pic was some embarrassing one from his youth. I think he was resolved to find some equally embarrassing pic of the person who tagged him, to hunker down for some major league tag wars. Surely though, there should be something within Facebook that allows you has the person being tagged to 'approve' that tag before all of your network get to see it. No wonder I don't use it. Although I do of course get away with posting more contemporary pics of Andy, but then, hardly anybody visits this little backwater of the internet compared to his 100+ friends on Facebook.

This post related to the 2004 German film Downfall and the recent BBC2 drama, Margaret - mild spoilers ahead.

I watched the rather wonderful German film Downfall earlier this week; it is set in the final days of the Third Reich, as the Russians encircle Berlin, Hitler, played brilliantly by Bruno Ganz, spends the last days of the war in the strange alternative reality of the Fuhrerbunker.

The film was based on a combination of contemporary sources, including the memoirs of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, who decided to stay in the bunker until the bitter end. Junge is played in the film by the rather eye catching Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara.





Enough shallowness, for now at least, and on with a few more reflections on the movie. I did find it interesting as a piece of history, although I have done no research into its historical authenticity, what is striking is even though Berlin is almost in enemy hands and the German armies finished, Hitler is stuck in delusion that the situation can still be retrieved. He slips from raging against those that have failed him to ridiculous flights of fantasy, prodding a map and ordering his generals to mobilise armies that only exist in his head. Even then, right at the end, his generals who already knew the game was up, had difficulty saying anything to the volatile Fuhrer. I wondered if this was where the phrase silo mentality came from.

Added to that there is the strange almost manic, smiling hyper Eva Braun. There is a moment where she organises a party and there is dancing whilst shells fall, until it is cut short by a shell landing too close.

The end is chilling as the Russians close around the centre of Berlin, Hitler dictates his last political testimony and finally the realisation that it is over sinks in. Then slowly arrangements are made for the suicides; a doctor arrives to talk Hitler through administering the poison and how long he will have to pull the trigger once he takes the poison; you see his beloved dog put down and then the closing of the door and a gunshot rings out.

Even more chilling are the deaths of the six children of Joseph Goebbels (Propaganda Minister), who were given a sedative and then whilst they slept were administered cyanide by their mother, Magda Goebbels. It is all the more sad considering that Magda had an offer to get her and her children out of Berlin, but concluded that with no Third Reich there would be no point in her or her children living.

This evening I watched Margaret, the BBC2 drama broadcast last week about the events that led to the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. I certainly have no love for Maggie, but she was portrayed in such a way by actress Lindsay Duncan, that you did have a certain amount of sympathy with her at the end when the thing that gave purpose to her life is taken from her.



What struck me though, and at the risk of invoking some for of Godwin's Law here, were the broad similarities between these two downfalls. I am talking about similarities in the thought processes here, obviously the circumstances of Hitler's final downfall were more dramatic, and no matter what you might think of Thatcher, she is thankfully a million miles away from the evil that embodied Hitler. I did start to wonder whether similar traits do settle as the end looms inevitably into view, is their a similar pathology of collapse, similar to the collapse of civilisations for example? If so, what are the common threads and should we expect to see any in Gordon Brown's government?

Well judging by the two downfall examples above, I would say the common threads would be:

A leader that believes they are some misunderstood saviour. Check!
A leader that is completely out of touch with reality, who believes things can still come good, if only we believe and fight hard enough. Check!
An embattled leader surrounded by traitors, some imagined, but some certainly real. Check!
A leader that will eventually be forced to face reality, a brutal and sudden realisation at the last minute that the end has arrived. Check!

Brown's done; he just does not realise it yet.


As a final parting gift, a small amount of humour; one of the things that Downfall has become famous for is the YouTube spoofs. The majority of them are of the key scenes where Hitler completely loses it with his generals, with the subtitles removed and replaced with peoples more humourous text substituted in. Here is one that I found where Hitler let's loose about Twitter.

...the heroes of your childhood start dying. Who's next? Johnny Ball? I used to love watching Morph and The Gallery on Take Hart and Hartbeat. Classic childrens TV.



Rest in peace Tony.

In years past New Years Day not only ushered in the optimism of the next 365 day cycle and soon to be abandoned resolutions, but it was also my maternal grandmother's birthday. She was born on January 1st 1919, so today would have been her 89th birthday. Lee has already posted a blog entry remembering her visit to Brighton for her great grandson's welcome party; given her frailty and her nervousness about traveling, it was with some determination, and no small amount of help from Mum and Ralph that she made it down for what were a wonderful couple of days.

Memories are frustratingly slippy, and I am sure I have forgotten more great memories of Grandma than I actually recall, but I do remember some small but precious times from her life. During her latter years she became very frail and when Grandad died it was like part of her spirit went with him. Sometimes going to see her was depressing, such was her morbidity and loneliness now her life companion was gone, indeed at times one wished she would let it go. We don't often think about what grandparents, or even parents, actually mean to one another, how deep the bond of love and affection can run, and it was not until towards the end of her life and with Grandad gone that I fully appreciated it.

Grandad may have playfully mocked her as a fanciful fantasist when it came to her recollections of the past, but she could spin a yarn, and what I came to realise as I went to see her and sat with her during her twilight years was how little I knew about her history, how her and Grandad at met, about her family and so on; I feel sad that I will not hear some of those stories again, no matter how fantastical they might be, as I am sure there was alot more family and personal history locked in there.

Russian author, Vladamir Nabakov, wrote the following:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

It is a humble hope that we spend our "brief crack of light" having a positive impact on the lives of others and leave the world a better place than when we arrived in it. As an atheist, I do not believe in an afterlife, but I can sustain the memories of Grandma and choose to remember the happiness she brought to people, even in the small things she did; I will recall smiling at her banter with Grandad, I will recall sharing ketchup covered chips with her watching the evenings entertainment in a Benidorm hotel and I shall recall her face light up when she first saw Oliver. I will remember like this - all laughter and smiles.




Lillian Mantle (1919 - 2007)

Went by in a flash didn't it? I wish it could have been longer, especially as I am now working for the next couple of days and feel disinclined to do so. Can't say that I did much, other than eat, drink and be merry with the family, but then what else can one ask for from Christmas? Kudos and thanks to Mum and Ralph for housing and feeding me once more, and to Dad and Sandra for providing Christmas dinner - all of it was much appreciated.

Normally, Christmas would also involve a fair bit of TV watching; catching those depressing as hell soap storylines, watching films that I saw on Sky or DVD two years ago and guffawing at the Christmas editions of the numerous panel quiz shows. This year though I barely saw any TV, not even managing to be one of the 14.3 million viewers that watched the much vaunted new Wallace and Gromit outing. We did however watch Wall-E on DVD (Oliver's present technically, but he fell asleep after 15 mins), which did strike an appropriately heartwarming note of robo-love lost and found; not to mention of course the irony of watching a film which is underpinned by a dark warning of human over consumption at just the point in the year when we do such a good job of it.

The telly barely made it on due to a certain someone playing with his noisy remote control train whilst simultaneously watching Ivor the Engine on DVD and listening to the Polar Express Soundtrack. Think this person might like trains? Who could it be?



Here he is at the head of the table, wearing his crown and dining what all monarchs of his age feast on: fishfingers, chips and peas.





I did not take that many photos, but those that I did can be found here. Lee took a few more, which can be viewed on his Flickr here.