MakemineVanilla

Not particularly but my brother and sister are and they like tell me about the 'good old days'.

David Willetts wrote a book on what a fantastic life the Baby Boomers have had but being determined not to line the wicked old Tory's pockets by buying a copy, I don't know what his claims are, but it is impossible for me to think of why the present generations are to be considered hard done by. The (some) baby boomers are retiring on final salary schemes, which were intended to be be paid out for the 10 to 15 years of the average retirement before death, but who are now living for 30 years instead. They were all also able to buy houses at decent rates, and have sold them at sky high prices, which usually means they have a nice comfortable pension, a fully paid off smaller home and a lump sum in the bank. Today's younger generations will have to work until they're 70 at least probably, can't get on the property ladder and will have to put much larger amounts away for a much smaller pension. And the jammy bastards got to live through the 60s. And they didn't have X Factor or Downton friggin' Abbey. I don't know - kids of today, they don't know they are born. Send 'em back to the 1950's and 60's that's what I say. They will soon know the meaning of austerity. What with the rationing and those bug infested houses. Let them try living in Summer Lane, breathing in the coal smoke and having to take their frozen piss down to the communal bogs every morning and wait in the queue. Let them get all romantic about polio, TB and diphtheria. Let them sit at their mother's table and tell them what they fancy for tea, when there's just that big pot of stew bubbling on the stove, like yesterday and last week. Let them crave rock'n roll music and play them 'She Wears Red Feathers and a Huly-Huly Skirt', followed by 'How Much Is That Doggy In The Window'. Let them see how hip it all was. Let them dream all year about what clothes they might get when the Provident cheque finally came through. Let them try out the 60's when a refrigerator was a luxury and they would get sterilised milk in their tea and 'fuel poverty' was a way of life, not the sign of victimhood. Let them save for a bicycle out of the 14s 6d they get from their paper-round. Let them go to a secondary modern school and hear the teachers chuckle when they tell them they want to go to university. Let them play their collection of six 45s and 2 LPs on their second-hand Dansette record-players and find how indulged they feel. Let them go and operate a power-press for a tenner a week, or do a bit of labouring for a lot less and let them feel how rich they are. Let them come home stinking of suds and cutting oil. Let them lose a finger on a machine. Let them go deaf from the noise at work. Let them swap their Suburus for a three-speed Ford Prefect, they can see the road through the rust holes in the foot-well. Yes, let them pay into a final salary pension for ten years and let them cash it in to survive the unemployment of the 1970's and 80's. Let them watch the skills they were promised would give them security for life go out of date and become unwanted. Let them listen to the the younger generation complain about how hard done by they are because they can't have their own house in their twenties, as well as all that stuff they need, like two cars and a foreign holiday every year, and how lucky the baby boomers are for having been trained by attrition to live on a pittance. Let them get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket to give them a enough to live on because they gave their savings away, so their kids could have the life-style they believe is their right. Then perhaps they might have a better idea of which generation has got it made or not.

David Willetts wrote a book on what a fantastic life the Baby Boomers have had but being determined not to line the wicked old Tory's pockets by buying a copy, I don't know what his claims are, but it is impossible for me to think of why the present generations are to be considered hard done by.

This looks like the start of a promising rant. Could you supply the whole thing?

That's good enough reason to read The Rings of Saturn. What you might call a great chill-out book. Sebald really creates a great atmosphere of Zen-like stillness and wonder. I think it captures what Freud meant by 'oceanic feeling'. Very memorable but not for everyone.

There is no reason to read The Rings of Saturn. All you have to do is travel to Norfolk on a still day and look east for a few hours, contemplating the three thousand miles of flat featureless land between yourself and the Urals. Internalise that melancholy. Come home again. Job done.

Truth and beauty seem like pretty ineffable things to be articulated by music. I would say that although the Sceptics' school of philosophy would say that we can never grasp the truth, I think it is likely that we can get nearer to knowing truth on a human scale than understanding the scale and the forces active in the universe. That is until they actually build the Total Perspective Vortex.

Really good until the music started. Music like religion tries to articulate the ineffable, which can't be done.

Emigration is only viable for the guilt-free. People who belong to manipulative families where every birthday and Christmas is a guilt-fest, should probably not bother.

For me there are those which are sad by association (Nat King Cole singing Stardust) and those which just wreck me from sheer truth and beauty (the opening to Sibelius's symphony number 2). But the results are just the same.

People always forget that there are some fantastic places to live in the UK and get stuck with the idea that the choice is only between where they live now and somewhere very different and very far away. So anyone who decides to move to Melbourne Australia can at the very least be accused of a massive deficit in imagination because it is not even the best place to live in Australia. I would never blame anyone for wanting to leave Birmingham or even the UK but they certainly should do a reasonable amount of research before they decide. Such an unimaginative choice as Melbourne suggests that someone wants to leave where they are more than they want to be specifically somewhere else.

Thanks for that! Looks well worth remembering.

Did you know that the only German phrase Top Gear's James May knows is: Aber ja, natürlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall?

Is it worth it? A new winter coat and shoes for the wife and a bicycle on the boy's birthday... Does anyone believe that the decision to end ship-building in Portsmouth and continue it in Govan, was entirely a commercial decision?

Now you've got me started. I think we can see where Liverpool got the idea for their Cup Final suits from.

Ella singing Cole Porter; is there anything better?

It is a bold statement but I think Al Bowlly was better than Crosby.

It has to be pointed out that the Institute of Directors are not quite so sanguine about the UK's membership of the EU as the CBI. 57% agree with Cameron's renegotiation and 15% want to leave entirely. They, as might be expected, want further deregulation of employment law and corporate governance. I am not sure why any hourly-paid employee would want that, though.

The most striking thing about Japan is that its social conventions seem to defy most of the social expectations we in the West tend to assume are normal. I think if you wanted evidence that romantic love is an artificial social-construct which was invented you would just look at how different it is in Japan, where you will see the sexes living very separate lives and where both courting couples and married partners don't see much of each other, while often spending their leisure time completely separately. The idea of a life-partner being expected to supply all a person's, emotional, sexual, spiritual and intellectual needs, would seem very alien to a lot of Japanese people. Attitudes to marriage are very often entirely pragmatic and not necessarily based on the values we assume in the West. Japan is a country where arranged marriages are still not unusual, although force is not used. So it seems very unlikely that it is possible to make predictions for our own society from what is going on in Japan. What it perhaps does illustrate is the certainty that there may be forces in our own society which raise fecundity. Japan is a much more equal society than our own and the resulting poverty in the UK may be important in driving fertility rates. The one group which ensures that the UK birthrate just about reaches replacement level is young unmarried mothers, there may be a connection between this and poverty. The factor in Japan which is missing from the article, is just how busy the Japanese are: they never seem to stop.

There is when his missus is banging the ceiling and calling him to his tea!

Watched the BBC News item on the benefits of immigration or not. Opened with the positive story, which I expected, and then put the report which qualified the assertion on at the end. So obviously they chose one emphasis over the other by choosing which one to favour and then tagged on the other report at the end, which allowed them to claim balance. The truth seems to be that not all immigrants are the same and should not be lumped together. Immigrants from Europe contribute more than they receive, immigrants from countries outside Europe receive more than they contribute. Conflating the two groups into one is wrong and amounts to disinformation.

Choosing what part of the conclusion(s) to emphasise is where the politics start. Yeah, ideologies and agendas over facts and reason. I am just waiting for the BBC news to start. I am pretty certain what their ideology and agenda will be.

You'll soon find out because the belts tend to perish and motors don't. But belts are still available. Don't chuck the Fostex - that would be murder. When they appear on Youtube there is always someone who wants to buy because they have archives etc. PS Didn't Springsteen record Nebraska on a Tascam? Here's what Joey did on his Fostex.