Going back to the topic of Liverpool as the cultural capital (of Ireland?). I have been trying to get some material on this from my brother. Unfortunately all he's been able to send me are some sonnets he recently had performed to music in Leipzig and some acrimonious reminisences about our childhood. It might help to know that the person reffered to as Mrs Gibson was our mother.
Huddled and cold on the city's bleak damp earth, I watched grey-locked man limp away from my derelict site.
His laugh is as harsh as the North Wind, yet to me sings the redemtion of beauty as it echoes against the crumbling brick at my back.
Thanks for your offer of Liverpool slot but I think I’ll pass. Things that go through my mind are :
A)Filling up the yellow consul with its white wall tyres driven by Billy Fury's brother. He always paid in silver shillings because he emptied the gas meters.
B) Your first record I think was Tony Orlando “Bless You”. Was the Lonnie Donegan your first LP?
C) Your red and grey Eumig transistor radio, radio luxembourg and the Bulmer’s cider show.
D) The vono iron beds in the front bedroom and the anthology of horror stories compiled by the unlikely named Herbert van Thal.
E) The idea that you looked like Dave Clark
F) You making out with your girlfriend Pauline by the Colston Dishwashing machine. Why on earth did we have a dishwashing machine! Mrs. Gibson’s foibles.
G) Another of Mrs. Gibson’s foibles: the serving hatch put into the back room to the kitchen and our father insisting on eating in the front room!
H) Our father making all your women friends take their shoes off in the back room to save the carpet when you had a party.
I) Miss Gibson exuding over the card game Canasta! The middle classes at play!
J) Mrs Lewis as the first charity shop: always having to wear Mrs. Gibson’s hand me downs. Yet Mrs. Lewis’ son Arthur was a War Hero with his VC. But Oakfield Road was not West Derby.
K) You getting your Harry Quinn aluminium framed bicycle and father having a go. Did not Harry Quinn’s wife get controversially killed by her washing machine? I seem to remember father wanting to take Mrs. Gibson to Lancashire Lamp after that to make some purchases.
You could call the above “Pym Street Blues”!
No. I think I’ll pass thank you.
Now here is my tip for the UK economics. A sort of new paradigm
1) The currency will fall.
2) The prices will in the main remain the same
3) Unemployment will rise
4) Wage rates at the lower and middle end will decline
5) The social differences will increase
6) There will be social unrest
There will be social unrest across Europe. Over the long term power always evens out. The East will rise, the West will Fall. And then it starts all over again. We have enjoyed the Golden Age, brother. Count your blessings. This is what it probably felt like in Rome at the start of the Barbarian Invasions.
As regards humanity the trick has been to fill in the time between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner. It is just that this fill-in is different at different stages of technology. In the Roman times you went to the Coliseum, in the Middle Ages you went to grand Church Services, today we have TV. But the real prize, the one we have all been aiming for and which is programmed into us from the start is the brain in the bottle scenario. We are biological entities built to expend the least physical or mental effort (and the latter is any event physical) for the maximum pleasure. Thus the virtual reality wet suit will be followed by the electronic implant linked to the brain, followed by the final dispensing with the body altogether. The body will become the ultimate phantom limb.
Of course there will be attempts to get people to work in the interim equivalent to the Spartan cancelling of all debts to try and promote competition into a moribund populace.
But in the end we shall become brains in bottles!
Mines a tequila, bro! I just aim to be ahead of the pickled pack!
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