On My Travels

I haven’t travelled anywhere this year, for one reason or another, but do love to travel, usually local places or places a little further afield.  For me, it isn’t just getting to a destination that I really enjoy but it’s also the actual travel, the getting to the bus or train station, seeing people doing the same thing, and then of course getting on the bus, knowing that I can relax for a few hours, have a sleep if I want, have a snack and drink of coke and most importantly for me, watching all the towns and cities and fields and all kinds of places and houses and businesses pass by and trying to take it all in; it gets too much trying to see it all, but to me it’s very pleasurable and of course the cherry on top is that you are going to somewhere nice, for just a day, or perhaps a couple of days.

 

When I go, wherever I go, I always take my camera, always and I love to take photographs to remind me of the nice places I’ve been, even though when I go to the same places again I take more photographs anyway.  I like to take pictures of beaches, sunsets, castles, little towns and villages, places off the beaten track and just places that are peaceful and, dare-I-say-it, quaint.  Just wanted to add, these two towns, Llandudno and Conwy, are both in North Wales.  You can google them and see them both on google maps too.

 

Been a bit busy this week, with one thing and another, so I’ll cut it short and leave you with a few photographs of my travels.  I hope to write some more about my travels, with plenty more pix, very soon.  I hope you like them?!  If you want to see more detail, just click on a pic.

Llandudno Beach, Great Orme in distance

 

Llandudno Beach, Pier in distance 1

 

Llandudno Beach, Pier in distance 2

Llandudno Beach, Pier in distance 3

 

 

Llandudno Beach, Prom in distance

 

 

Llandudno Beach

 

 

Llandudno Pier

 

 

Llandudno Prom, Great Orme in distance

 

Llandudno Prom

Llandudno Prom at night

Queen Vic Pub, Llandudno

 

Gravestones, St Tudno's Church, Llandudno

Tram, Great Orme, Llandudno

 

 

Here's some photos of Conwy, which is literally up the road and round the corner from Llandudno.

 

 

Conwy Castle

 

Conwy Castle

Conwy Castle grounds

Conwy Castle, American tourists!

Conwy Castle, inside, taken from turret. Talk about vertigo!

 

 

Conwy Castle, looking at river

 

 

Conwy Gift Shop

 

 

Conwy, the smallest house in Great Britain.

Chaos Boy

It seems that life can sometimes be suffering, and what I have found as a Christian is that suffering brings out questions in me, one way or the other.  No one likes to suffer, no one, but it’s a reality that some time or other we will all succumb to some kind of suffering or emotional pain or heartache.  Life is often big themes too; love, lust, success, failure, war, peace, happiness, sadness, hatred, harmony and so much else that makes human life so complex and so interesting but of course what often goes beyond them all is when we suffer for some reason; probably one thing all humans have in common is that we have all experienced suffering in some way for some reason or other.  Our common human experience today as well as historically is that people have suffered, do suffer and will undoubtedly suffer at some point in their lives.  I’m not trying to be miserable here, just basically honest.

I have a lot of emotional baggage, in fact I think most people do, but much of my negative feelings come from past experiences of meeting flaky and not very nice women in pubs and clubs and trying in my own way to be nice and to get to know them only to usually meet with some unpleasant or generally negative response.  I know I have issues with this and am asking God into this each day.  What’s rather curious though is that I have a number of women friends, a good few of them dotted around the world who except in one case I haven’t personally met but who I at the same time consider really good friends who I love as sisters, and one female friend who I see regularly every week and have a good natter with and share all kinds of DVDs with, especially my growing collection of Film Noir movies.  So my negative feelings are already healthily balanced out with this fact.  But, and not to digress, I have felt at times in my life that I was mistreated by women even though most of these women I never knew at all, just in passing.  At times, though only occasionally I feel a bit down about this and I pray Lord that you give me inner peace instead of the inner turmoil I have now.  But God is merciful and He sends me all kinds of decent people, both male and female, who I love and who love and care about me too.  Perhaps my problem is that I am too sensitive, but I just don’t know really.  ‘Unhappy creature, storm-tossed, unpitied, look, I shall lay your stones on agates and your foundations on sapphires. I shall make your battlements rubies, your gateways firestone and your entire wall precious stones. All your children will be taught by Yahweh and great will be your children's prosperity.’  (Isaiah 54:11-13 NJB)  I think that most single men, and single women too, desiring genuinely to meet someone to love, be their best mate, marry and have kids with can take solace in that piece of scripture and I know that all scripture is worth reading because it has value and God does not make idle promises, not now or not ever.

What I have come to understand about love, romance, finding someone to love and all that is that it is not an easy thing at all, and it isn’t all about being fantastic looking or having lots of wealth and a big house with a swimming pool with a £100,000 car in the drive and a few businesses and a holiday home; when people confuse security of some kind or because someone looks great with love I think in the end they make a mistake.  Of course no one wants to be involved with someone who sits around drinking beer all day watching the TV or someone who has no drive or ambition, or would be with someone they didn’t find at all attractive, but there is more to life than perfect looks and a bulging bank account.  And although I am a Christian and try to be modest in the way I approach women, there is an aspect of lust in the purest romance!  If you love someone, you might say in the understated English way ‘she’s alright’ but you might also add in that saucy English way ‘she’s a bit of alright!’ too, which basically means that she looks attractive and sexy!  Whichever way you look at it then, physical attraction has to be part of love, indeed how could it not?  If God created men and women, He created something in us, certainly men at any rate, to find women attractive, to find femininity and sweetness and long hair something that we men can’t really do without.  And perhaps women find us men attractive too; sometimes!    

We all have struggles with the flesh, in one way or another. I hasten to add I’m not running around with wild wanton women, getting drunk and running off into the night; more’s the pity!  Seriously, we all struggle with our feelings, all kinds of feelings, and our feelings often affect the way we are physically to a point.  If we are happy, then generally we feel physically good, and if we are unhappy then this can make us feel run down, or give us headaches or stomach aches or generally make us feel out of sorts.  And many Christians, both men and women, struggle with feelings that God wants us to control, and perhaps many Christians, if they are honest, feel a twinge of jealousy when they see people doing what they want and living lifestyles that perhaps in the end don’t really bring any peace or meaning into their lives.  Before I was a Christian, I was a bit wild, I partied, looked for women and drank a lot of beer!  But, doesn’t everyone get a bit wild sometimes?  Now I drink moderately or often not at all, I rarely go out on the town; and as for women?  Well, I’m working on it!

 

Now I see the value of not living in the past, not living in the future, just trying to live day by day.  If I worry about something in the future, I’ll get all stressed out about it and then when it finally happens, as is usual, I’ll be thinking what did I have to worry about anyway.  I suspect we all do this from time to time.  I am firmly trying to put my life in God’s capable hands and just let Him deal with everything.  And letting go and just letting God work in our lives is the easiest thing to say, and perhaps the hardest thing for Christians to do.  Oh, we’re very good at preaching aren’t we, but not so good at listening to biblical advice and wisdom ourselves?!  ‘So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’  (Matthew 6:34 NJB)

The Irish Experience

In the last few days, the British government has offered to pay compensation to a group of people called collectively Mau Mau’s after an uprising in Kenya against British colonial rule in the 1950’s.  A British government spokesman, William Hague, said that the British government were apologising for its part in the ruthless campaign against these Africans and would be giving compensation to a number of people.  In a British paper I read, the Daily Mirror, the atrocities mentioned that the British used against those who they believed had resisted in any way included rape and castration, apart from those just killed.  And please let me say quickly that both sides committed murders and atrocities against each other.  But the culpability it now seems, admitted by the present British government, lies with the British administration first for its ruthlessness, arrogance, racism and pomposity of the British rulers and their general high-handed attitude to those they ruled.

 

This possibly little-known story, one of many such stories throughout the time of the British Empire shows up empire for what it really was, all empires I may add, and gives the lie to the sometimes fondly fostered myth that British people and Europeans, even rather genteel Middle and Upper class well educated and polite Europeans, were civilised and the rest of the world outside Europe was uncivilised and filled with barbarians.  It’s been a theme used ever since people have conquered and colonised other parts of the world, but it seems that by the 19^th century such ideas like civilised versus savage, superior versus inferior, European culture versus the rest of the world’s lack of culture, where beginning to be promoted and becoming a part of mainstream scientific and intellectual thought, helped along by Darwin’s and other pre-eminent men of letters ideas and thoughts of this nature.  These notions, especially simplistic, easy to understand and highly charged ones like ‘civilised versus savage’ became the backbone of the ideology which blithely allowed British people, of all backgrounds, to conquer, ruthlessly oppress and exploit, grab land and otherwise murder and eliminate people all over the world, people they were calling savages!  Is there not a dreadful irony to it all?  Most people if they’re honest would suggest so.  In the end, such ideologies merely added insult to centuries of injury, and gave justification, if that was really needed anyway, to the greed and selfishness of Europeans in their growing empires around the world.

 

 

Many people seem to think that such racism, such vile and simplistic ideas were directed only against black people or generally non-Europeans, but here is where racism and basically cruelty and unpleasantness take another turn, that of the Anglo-Saxon ‘superiority’ against the perceived ‘inferiority’ of the other Celtic peoples in the British Isles, falling particularly hardest against the Irish, but also culminating in oppression and brutality against the Welsh and the Scots too.  One Englishman, a clergyman called Charles Kingsley, a supposed man of God remarked on the ‘white chimpanzees’ he had seen in Ireland.  Kingsley had been impressed by Darwin’s 'On the Origin of Species’ which fed into the growing ideas of the day and helped them along, ideas that evolution and most perniciously ideas like ‘the Great Chain of Being’ where not theories but actual realities of the way the world had worked and the way the world should be conquered, dominated and colonised by superior white Europeans.  The Irish Famine of the 1840’s, where about a million people starved to death has left an indelible stain on Irish history and popular culture to this day, and whatever the true facts of the case, there is a feeling amongst many Irish people even today, and those of Irish descent too, that those primarily in charge, the English establishment in London, did far too little and acted far too late to actually alleviate any of the suffering than if they had acted earlier.  Some Irish people, although this can’t really be proved or substantiated to any serious degree, believe that the English wanted to clear the poor Irish off the land, one way or the other, so that they could get if for themselves and put pigs and perhaps other livestock on the land, more profitable than poor Irish peasants at any rate.  Whatever the truth of the matter, it seems that a combination of English conquest and interference in Ireland for centuries, neglect by the English who ruled Ireland, a basic lack of consideration for what were seen as just Irish peasants, and basically English racism culminated in the tragedy or helped to make a bad situation into something that still makes Irish people bitter and angry to this day.

I have my own personal story to add to this.  My dad was an Irish orphan, although brought up in England, and my mum has Irish and Welsh ancestry too, with a little touch of Scots for good measure.  On discovering a little about my family’s ancestry, to my knowledge there is no English of any kind in us.  Ironically all over the world, in places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America, many people now speaking English and being seen as part of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world are as much likely to be Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and even Manx as they are to be English.  And in England itself, many people are like me, descended from Celtic ancestors who now might be calling themselves English or just the umbrella term ‘British’.  The racism towards Celtic people was also possibly due to class differences as well; the rather superior English, or some of them at least, seeing that many poor people coming to find work in England from the middle of the 18th century onwards were not particularly educated, may have been poorly dressed and not sophisticated in any way, racism and class prejudice being in this way interlinked as they often are around the world.  The curious thing is, I cannot really define what being English means; it is as much about culture, accents of all kinds and upbringing as it is about any real genetic idea of Englishness.  Perhaps this is where English racism and notions of superiority come from, indeed all racism and notions of superiority come from, ignorance and uncertainty about who you are and what you might be culminating in a growing sense of hatred towards people that might seem to have a more solid ethnic identity like the Irish.  But perhaps that is too simplistic, I just don’t know.

 

Here’s some links you might like to look at:

http://www.eirefirst.com/archive/unit_2.html

http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/was-the-irish-famine-genocide/

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/sadlier/irish/Famine.htm

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/race/Racism.html

 

http://www.sovereignindependentuk.co.uk/2012/07/11/potatoes-and-white-chimpanzees/

Rebel at Heart

Much of what we do in life is based on law, we have to do things often that involve the correct procedures, health and safety, consideration for others and just because doing something wrong will 99 times out of 100 result in an unwanted outcome of some kind.  And for the Christian, being law-abiding isn’t something we choose to do, it is part of our calling from God that we must do.  In saying all this, there is a desire in many people to rebel, to do something that they shouldn’t do, to dye their hair green even; in short, to do something naughty!  Nothing bad to anyone else I mean, or being anti-social to others in the street, I’m going beyond that; I mean doing something that you wouldn’t normally do, taking a bus ride and not worrying where it will end up at, buying a leather jacket that makes you look edgy and cool, doing something out of character and changing your image and even being the person you have always wanted to be.  Not having to worry about what others think about you, being happy, being eccentric, not taking yourself too seriously at all, thinking of a funny joke or witticism and saying it.

 

Ned Kelly was an Irish-Australian outlaw, a rebel and hero to some, a murdering amoral bandit to others, but he is Australia’s Jesse James or their Robin Hood.  If he had been around in the 1940’s he probably would have been an Aussie film star and made it to Hollywood, or if he had been around in the 1960’s he might have been the Aussie Eric Clapton or Jim Morrison, his rebellion and anger expressed in a more positive way, but low born Aussies of Irish descent in the 1880’s in the wilds of the outback didn’t have those options.  Many Australians may feel troubled by knowing they are descended from a British convict and even feel anger towards British people or Britain, but the bigger picture is what’s needed to be seen.  We are all descended for the most part from poor obscure people and most of our ancestors struggled with some terrible reality.  There is a sadness in Ned’s eyes, even behind the anger, a sadness that speaks volumes, a human sadness that we have all felt at times, a sadness that through all the suffering and even horror, there could or should be something more.

In a now mostly forgotten film, called ‘The Petrified Forest’ the character Alan Squier, played by the very English actor Lesley Howard, who is a drifter looking for something or perhaps looking for nothing in particular, gets caught up in a situation where the famed killer Duke Mantee, also played ably and convincingly by Humphrey Bogart takes over the diner they all find themselves in.  At the end of the film, after a little chat, as Duke and his gang want to escape the encroaching police, Alan says of and to Duke ‘…you’re the last great apostle of rugged individualism’ and with that shoots him; not a happy ending for either as Duke and the boys get their comeuppance a little later too.  But in the scene just before Duke goes, there is a sadness in his eyes that almost made me cry; again a sadness that says if only things had turned out better or had been better in the first place.

In the now seminal and legendary 1960 film ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ the very Working class Arthur Seaton is a bloke who works, parties hard and is a womaniser who even messes with other men’s wives.  Arthur is the first real English Working class rebel, on film anyway, an honest earthy portrayal of a real Working class lad with a Working class upbringing in Working class surroundings, where he says honestly : ‘What I'm out for is a good time - all the rest is propaganda!’  In the end, he is settling down with his real girlfriend onto a new housing estate, his rebellion probably disappearing with his growing beer belly, responsibilities and future prospects; oh well, at least he was a rebel! 

Then there is John Lennon, the Liverpool rebel and writer of the song ‘Working Class Hero’; for many people in Liverpool, John represents their wit, intelligence, cheekiness, sassiness, creativity and a general all round individuality and anti-authoritarian tone that many Liverpool people cherish.  Was he Working class or Middle class?  I suspect the jury is still out on that one, but he came from the obscure suburbs of Liverpool to the world’s stage, and nothing was ever the same again.  At the start the Beatles were writing poppy, pleasant ditties, nice enough for the most part but nothing too great, as their career progressed however their creative muscles flexed wildly and their fame then turned to admiration as they led the world of pop music to new heights and took pop music into the world of serious culture, something that was considered art in its own right.  And the driving force behind it all was John.  A sad and fractured childhood, where both his parents effectively abandoned him, left him angry and bitter and with a very sardonic and sarcastic wit, and a desire, as we have seen, to make something of himself.  And so the world gave birth to another erratic genius, another genuine rebel.

 

I listen to a lot of music when I am writing, and now and again I listen Beethoven primarily because his music moves me, sometimes to tears and other times just to know that this man was writing music that he was investing his emotions and his soul into, which is why it stands the test of time.  He was so the story goes famously cantankerous, not easy to get on with, and someone who though supremely gifted was looked on by some in high society as a commoner or upstart; the same old story.  Another rebel without a cause could we say?

 

The ultimate rebel for me is Jesus; a man who decided willingly to go to a painful death when He could like the rest of us would have, done a runner and disappeared to some backwater somewhere.  When the Devil tempted Jesus: ‘Next, taking him to a very high mountain, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.  And he said to him, 'I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.'’  (Matthew 4:8-9 NJB)  But we know Jesus didn’t, and He remained true to His calling.

 

In the Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ they are saying that the Devil was the first real rebel; no he wasn’t!  Jesus was the first real rebel.