It's all about me (Trump and his ilk)

A few year back I did some work for a company in South Africa. The boss was British, an ex military man and cast from the same psychological mould as Donald Trump. 

Despite working in an industry where he was surrounded by well qualified graduates, he himself got by with three fake degrees purchased from the fictional Middleham University (Leeds). Of course, I'd spotted the forgeries because I know that Middleham is a small market town in North Yorkshire with a fine tradition of training race horses, a wonderful old castle but nothing at all corresponding to a University. 

But by talking to him you could tell that he wasn't at all embarrassed by his relative lack of formal education and that he regarded the rest of us as fools for not working out that it was just the piece of paper that mattered (and why waste potential money making time studying when you could just buy one off the shelf). In Trumpian terms he was the winner and we, by definition, were losers.

Like Trump, his only interest in other people was in what they could do for him and, like Trump, there was a huge turnover of workers as people worked out what was going on and fell from favour. Like Trump, he covered up his lack of real knowledge with anecdotal bluster. If anyone had ever tried to get him to explain the concept of energy, or distinguish a kW from a kWh, I've no doubt that he would have done what he always did and gone off an extended personal anecdote. An anecdote designed not only to cover up his lack of real knowledge, and take up the time where this lack might be exposed, but also to big up his own prior "achievements". 

At one stage a glossy brochure was produced to promote the company. A full page spread showed a picture of him with the quote "Doing nothing is not an option" he couldn't help but put his own name to it. Just like Donald Trump he had an obsession with self promotion.

So, when Donald Trump says "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated" it's because he couldn't bring himself to say "I never knew health care was so complicated". To do so would have admitted his own ignorance. When he tells the family of a dead American soldier that "He knew what he was getting into" it's the Donald's way of reminding himself, and the rest of us, that he was too smart to get drafted.

Finally, like Trump, he was a sexual predator. Indeed, when I did expose him to the relevant authorities (in his case the UNFCCC), the thing that made me jump rather sooner than I probably should have done were the tales told to me, in confidence, about how he'd harassed women in the company.

This is an account of our last days working together. He still owns the company but it's now base in India not South Africa. 

Cartoon with thanks to Steve Bell (The Guardian 20/10/2017)

Bicycles and the Cinder Track (it's a matter of scale)

Short version

Getting someone out of a car and onto a bicycle is good for their health and good for everyone's environment. 

The Cinder Track connects places 3, 5, 15 miles apart. A bit long for a walk but fine on a bicycle. 

The biggest reasons people in the UK don't ride bicycles are fear of traffic and worries about hills. The Cinder Track is traffic free and only goes up when it has to. 

So, should we make the Cinder Track wide enough for a person on a bike to go past two people walking side by side? 

Should we make it smooth enough for buggies, wheelchairs and the fragile wrists of the elderly.? 

Yes and yes....

Friends of the Old Railway

Long version ?

I'll do one if anyone asks. 

Alternatively, you could search on "cycling, physical activity, health" or on "cycling, active transport, pollution" and write something yourself. 

+ While no sensible plan to encourage cycling in Scarborough would leave the Cinder Track as it is, what else would need to happen to get more people on bikes?

Comrades in ink

In May of this year my father was taken seriously ill and given hours or days, not weeks, to live. After 10 days at his bedside, with all of us getting used to the idea that any breath might be his last, he began to recover. It seems that sometimes, when you stop all of someone's existing medication and just give them pain relief, their body can just get on with getting better. The word a palliative care doctor used was poly-pharmacy ....

By the middle of June he was well enough to be discharged into a care home. Stuck down the end of a blind corridor in a rambling old building this clearly wasn't the best place for him to be, but it was close enough to home for my elderly mother to be able to get in to see him.

Looking around for alternatives we found two other homes that looked much better and that would be able to cope when, as we knew it would, his condition deteriorated. The first was an expensive, purpose built home on the edge of town. We got most of the way through an application and were just waiting for the company that ran it to have a board meeting where they'd decide if we had enough money to admit him. I suspected that we didn't, but the *******s didn't even give me the pleasure of listening to them explain that we weren't rich enough; they just kept it to themselves and never got back.

Meanwhile, we'd also applied to Lister House in Ripon. Run by the British Legion, entry is restricted to people who've served in the British military or their families. Now my father was hardly what you'd call a military man but he did do his National Service after the Second World War, was therefore eligible and, once we'd got over a few bureaucratic hurdles, was admitted to their nursing wing at the start of August. 

None of us can think of anywhere better for him to have been. The care was exemplary and extended to us, his family, as well. All in all, a dignified place to spend the last days of your life.

Shortly after he was admitted I was approached by the editor of his local parish magazine and asked if I could provide a few words to go with an article in the next edition. There's an awful lot that could be said about his life but I simply wrote a few words about his brief military experience .....

"After a period of severe illness Roy Sharp, a long term resident of Galphay, has just been admitted to Lister House in Ripon (a nursing and retirement home for ex-military personnel and their families). Not a natural military man, Roy probably wasn't to be trusted with a gun, for his own safety as much as others, but even then he had a handy way with words and found himself part of a Public Relations team in post-war Germany."

Roy Sharp, on the left, and his comrades in ink in post war Berlin

He finally died in the early hours of the 1st of September and I have to admit that my main feeling was one of relief. For four months he'd made it very clear that he didn't want to be here, was annoyed that they couldn't just give him a pill to take his life away, and was frustrated that the words no longer came to him as once they had. Besides, he'd got to "two fat ladies" (88) and that was as old as anyone else in his immediate family including his mother, a keen bingo player.

Postscript. Although he'd had humble beginnings, living with his entire family in a one roomed basement flat in West London, he was evacuated as a child to the West Country. For a few years he stayed with a wealthy family where he learnt the important lesson, in class ridden England, that just because you were posh didn't mean you were clever. After those few years he was joined by the rest of his family when his father's engineering firm was also evacuated from London down to Bridgwater in Somerset. There he attended the local School of Navigation but left at 14 to work in a local printing works (it turns out that his father took him out of school because he feared that at 16 he'd be conscripted into the Navy) Well spoken, having learnt from the posh folk, he was initially considered for officer training. However, in one exercise they were obliged to stab a straw dummy with a bayonet whilst shouting "we will kill all enemy, we will take no prisoners". At which request he turned to the commanding officer and said "But surely that's against the Geneva Convention Sir"  You can guess the rest...