Parking up on the side of a Intergalactic Super Highway

Zaphod Beeblebrox entered the foyer. He strode up to the insect receptionist.
"OK," he said, "Where's Zarniwoop? Get me Zarniwoop."
"Excuse me, sir?" said the insect icily. It did not care to be addressed in this manner.
"Zarniwoop. Get him, right? Get him now."
"Well, sir," snapped the fragile little creature, "if you could be a little cool about it ..."
"Look," said Zaphod, "I'm up to here with cool, OK? I'm so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat inside me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis. Now will you move before you blow it?"
"Well, if you'd let me explain, sir," said the insect tapping the most petulant of all the tentacles at its disposal, "I'm afraid that isn't possible right now as Mr Zarniwoop is on an intergalactic cruise."
Hell, thought Zaphod.
"When he's going to be back?" he said.
"Back sir? He's in his office."
Zaphod paused while he tried to sort this particular thought out in his mind. He didn't succeed.

From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe chapter 7.

I'm hoping this post will help you all to sort out your own particular thought.

There has of course been rather a lot going on in my life over recent weeks, in will culminate in two weeks time when I will have left the employ of the company I have worked in for over nine years. I'll be taking on a short fix term role with a set end date. Scarily there is also a clause in my contract that something that has yet to happen, if it fails to happen, will immediately initiate a very short notice period for me and my colleagues.

Why take such a risk? Because the job is for something I really believe in, bringing about fairer votes. It is something that is happening in a place where there are a factors that are important to me right now, people who will look out for me in a transition, people who will help me relax (especially two who are not yet 10) and it is a step that I have been trying to make for a number of years but somehow never quite found the way to do so.

However, as all this is happening there is something else that I feel with have to happen in this little quarter of sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha*. I have already said that blogging here will be light, I'm going further today. This blog is being parked on the side of this vast highway that is life. Over the past week to 10 days I have caught myself on at times. There are things I wanted to blog, comments on Facebook I wanted to rebutt, Tweets I wished to make. However, I've come to realise that I can't do that an keep my focus unto the one message that I am charged to deliver over the next five and a half months.

If I were to do this on this blog it would become boring and mundane for you dear reader, as quite often it would be referring you to the Yes to Fairer Votes website or page that is relevant to the story in question. One thing I will continue to do is write however, though it may not be publically available, it is one of the things that I have always done to help me relax, unwind, recharge or indeed decharge. So no doubt there will be writing going on, I'm just not sure in what format that will take outside of the work productivity that I will be doing.

However, I do love blogging and the fact that I am parking this blog does not mean that I am never going to do it here ever again, I'll be chomping at the bit no doubt on very many days. But key people kow that they are to bind my hands, lock me in a store room without a laptop, or just glare at me (which will most likely work) if when there is something that is crying out to be said, it need not come from me. Other friends may be getting ideas for stories that I really want to write, indeed this has already started to happen. It does all feel a little bit like I'm entering a Bloggers Anonymous meeting. There is one thing though, I know that I will take up the keyboard once more and write here at some point on May 6th, and it won't be considered falling off the wagon, but merely as steering it once again.

There is one blog post that will appear between now and May 5th and that is my New Years Eve post rounding up the year of 2010. As you can imagine this will be far from a boring read. In the meantime I leave you with the opening lines of the book Mostly Harmless again by Douglas Adams.

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

I'll add may not happen in the chronological order that you yourself may have set out, but when it happens cease the day.

So like Zarniwoop the editor of this blog is going to be on an intergalactic cruise, I may well be in my office, I may well not get outside of Northern Ireland, but you know what I mean. See you all in May.

*Yes this is a popular cultural reference that Michael wouldn't get #PCRMWG. I'm hoping at some point in our friendship's future that I will be able to enlighten him.

Children in Need Tonight

It is Children in Need tonight on BBC1 and BBC2. There was one year I recall not actually watching the programme, the reason was a valid one I was at the old BBC Scotland headquarters on Queen Margaret Road, Glasgow and my partner at the time had volunteered to help out behind the scenes.

However, to get us in the mode for this years what better way that last year's official single, which in the best tradition of charity singles brought together a whole gumult of stars, in this case plasticine, or celluloid or computer animations. Well done to Peter Kay for coming up with the concept.

It's Friday so....Allison Jannay

Happy Birthday today to Allison Jannay probably best known to all my readers as Claudia Jean "C.J." Cregg the Whitehouse Press Secretary who becomes Chief of Staff in the Bartlett administration on The West Wing.

So every birthday needs a song, or at least a little lip-synch. What do you mean you haven't seen C.J. do the Jackal.



She also played herself in Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip as Allison Jannay star of the West Wing. Many of the stars of the new show made comment on her being C.J. which is especially funny when it comes from Timothy Busfield (Cal Shanley S60 - Danny Concannon WW) , Bradley Whitford (Danny Tripp S60 - Josh Lyman WW) or Matthew Perry (Matt Albie S60 - Joe Quincey WW).



Of course there was a lot of poker playing scenes in The West Wing so what happens when the stars actually play on TV, for real. Well Richard Schiff has an Allison Jannay shaped space on his charm bracelet.

Who We're Remembering

Map courtesy of the BBC

Earlier Lib Dem Voice pointed us towards the above map on the BBC website, it reminds us that not just in the two World Wars but many other conflicts there are those that we are remembering.

It lists the conflicts and the casualties:

• Palestine 1922-48 233 fatalities
• Malaya 1948-60 340 fatalities
• Yangtze River Incident 1949 46 fatalities
• Korean War 1950-53 765 fatalities
• The Canal Zone Emergency: Egypt 1951-3 54 fatalities
• Kenya 1952-60 12 fatalities
• Cyprus 1955-59 105 fatalities
• Suez Crisis 1956 22 fatalities
• Oman and Dhofar 1962-75 24 fatalities
• Borneo 1962-66 126 fatalities
• Aden Emergency 1963-67 68 fatalities
• Northern Ireland 1969-98 763 fatalities
• Falkland Islands 1982 255 fatalities
• Gulf War I 1990-91 47 fatalities
• The Balkans 1992-2001 48 fatalities
• Sierra Leonne 2000 1 fatality
• Afghanistan 2001-present 343 fatalities
• Iraq 2003-09 179 fatalities

Not a year has gone by that our forces haven't been engaged in active duty in a conflict that some have lost their lifes since the end of the second world war. There are memorials to some of these other conflicts around Northern Ireland, or specific to Northern Ireland, that will have held services at or near them today.

Such as this on to the Royal Ulster Rifles Korean War dead, now outside Belfast City Hall.

There is also the iconic Ulster Tower at Thiepval remembering the 5,000 men of the 36th (Ulster) Division who feel on 1 July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme. Almost a half of the strength of the Division.

The memorial to the police and soldiers who gave their lives right here in Northern Ireland, during my own lifetime.

Our War Dead are just a generation that are dying they are my generation and indeed the one after me. Those who are suffering the effects of war are alive and around us today.

We will remember them, because they are still here, as well as those that have gone before.

Leanfaımıd oraınn cuıṁneaṁ orṫu - We Will Remember Them

War Memorial Ward Park, Bangor

The 8th November 1987 was Remembrance Sunday, on that day I was laying a wreath on behalf of 4th Bangor Boys Brigade Company when at the other end of the Province a bomb had gone off at Enniskillen. Eleven people died that day and I know there are some in Ireland who find it hard to move on from those days of troubles.

However, as my friend Keith has pointed out on his blog attitudes have been changing in the Nationalist community. As I've mentioned here before there are 49,400 reasons from the First World War why all of Ireland should be remembering the lives given up from all communities. Earlier I've used an English and Irish (courtesy of Google Translate) version of the most famous verse of Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen, my friend Michael has also used it and put into another script (used below).

Unlike some of those who cannot forgive for the sake of Ireland (North and South) and our childrens' future we have to move on, we have to inhabit a shared future, actually we have to establish a shared here and now in the present.

I therefore without shame use both once again as we remember those who gave their lives, or are currently risking their lives, in the service of our nation.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.  

Tug fás ní ḃeıḋ d’aoıs, mar atá fágṫa agaınn go ḃfuıl fás d'aoıs;
Ní ḃeıḋ feıḋm ag aoıs bonn dóıḃ, ná na blıanta Cáıneann.
Ag dul síos na gréıne agus ar maıdın
Leanfaımıd oraınn cuıṁneaṁ orṫu.

Prayers for Bobby - My Reaction to Its Viewing

Stills from the film Prayers for Bobby (TVM 2009)

Earlier this evening I was at a screening of Prayers for Bobby at All Souls Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in Belfast as part of the Outburst Festival. In the light of the number of teen suicides over recent months the showing of this film and the discussion afterwards couldn't be more timely.

The change of Bobby Griffith;s mother Mary played by Sigourney Weaver to harrowingly in this film came too late for her own son, but this bio-pic based on her families story and journey should be essential viewing in every church; not just in Northern Ireland but also the states and many other places.

Bobby is driven to his own death by the failure of his family to accept him and his homosexuality, a sorry sadly true of many young people still today. In Bobby's case the eulogy at his own funeral also showed how often the churches themselves can fail to act pastorally to those in their midst. Many more are driven to death by the people around them at school or college bullying them, to a point that they cannot cope anymore.

All three can of course combine, if not in actuality at least in the mind of the young person who feels the pressure of all three. At fifteen I very nearly took the route that Bobby took in the film, so you can imagine there were tears as I sat there and watched it.

However, it came to the discussion time after the film, and one question was posed; "Are attitudes changing?" Now people who know, know I'm not averse to speaking publicly but even I welled up as I stood to say what I needed to say in response to that*. I basically got up to say that attitudes would change if every Christian took the attitude of my father, when 15 years after I contemplated taking my own life that time, I told him who I was sexually.

His response was, "Thank you for your honesty" and that really strikes me. Too often the church and Christians look at the 'sin' of sleeping with those of the same sex, ignoring that one of the ten commandments is "You shall not lie". They expect Christians who identify as LGBT to live in denial of who they are and therefore "bear false witness". They make out is easier to brush it under the carpet ignoring the ninth commandment than face up to fact of who some of us are.

Tomorrow's film For the Bible Tells Me So is one I have seen before and goes into the lives of many more church families and their experiences of coming along their journey with a gay family member. It is at 5pm at the same venue and well worth a viewing (again I think it should be spread far and wide).

Many more people still need to go on the journey that Mary Griffiths has travelled as shown below.


If everyone could have that attitude, we wouldn't have to tell the LGBT youth of today that It Gets Better because it already will be.

* Scottish Lib Dems may recall by very personal speech on the Blood Ban debate in 2009 for reference.

We Will Remember Them

Poppy Field by Steve Thoms

At this time of this morning I will be standing at my desk, to attention and in silence. There will this year be nobody else around but at this time of year every year I will always be somewhere where I can pay respects to the men and women who down the years have given their lives and their health to defend our nation in times of war.

We will remember them.

As I posted earlier in the month here are some famous words by which we think of them. I've added a few more languages Irish, Polish and French.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Tug fás ní bheidh d'aois, mar atá fágtha againn go bhfuil fás d'aois;Ní bheidh feidhm ag aois bonn dóibh, ná na blianta Cáineann.Ag dul síos na gréine agus ar maidinLeanfaimid orainn cuimhneamh orthu.

 

Są one nie rosną stare, jak my, które są pozostawione zestarzeje;Wiek nie zmęczony nimi, ani w latach potępienia.Na zejście słońce, a ranoBędziemy o nich pamiętać.

 

Ils ne vieilliront pas comme nous, qui nous laisse vieillir;

Âge ne se lassera pas eux, ni le poids des années.Au coucher du soleil et le matinNous nous souviendrons d'eux.