SATURDAY ESSAY: Online Shopping, by JD

What could be easier? Sit in the comfort of your own home, browse at your leisure the things you want/desire/need, a few clicks of your mouse and the goods of your choice are swiftly despatched to your door. No problem, no venturing out in the rain, no trudging from shop to shop only to find the shops do not stock what you are looking for, no travelling and, of course, no 'worn out feeling' after you return home. Shop online and all your dreams will be fulfilled!

Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different.

Last week I checked, via Royal Mail 'track and trace' web page, the progress of an item I had ordered using this online shopping 'experience' (why is using the internet now described as an experience?) The Royal Mail site told me that my package had arrived at my local Delivery Office at 08:05 that morning and just as an aside, when and why did the sorting office become a delivery office? So I waited for delivery knowing that the sorting office is no more than half a mile from my house. And I waited. And then I waited some more. Where on earth was it? Eventually the van arrived with my package some time after 4pm. More than eight hours to travel half a mile! We have all heard of snail mail but that must be some sort of record; eight hours, half a mile, one sixteenth of a mile per hour: one hour for each half furlong. (For any dumbed own young people reading, half a furlong is 110yards or the length of five cricket pitches.)

When I mentioned the tale to a taxi driver he said "Aye well, ye know what the traffic is like these days!" Clearly he has the same sense of humour that I have.

Couple of days later I was sitting waiting once more for two more packages. I had emails from the suppliers telling me that my packages were despatched on the 20th and 22nd. Royal Mail website tells me that "in these 'difficult' times blah blah deliveries may take longer than usual blah blah" One of these packages has a tracking reference but the message was 'despatched' followed by '..we will let you know.'

Based on past experience that means they will let me know after it has been delivered!

Trying to find how to contact Royal Mail is impossible. The web page is a madhouse designed to misdirect customers into a labyrinth of choices and options all of which lead astray into further obfuscations of frequently asked questions, none of which offer any actual help. The telephone 'help' line is the usual 'press button one for...' etc and none of the buttons leads to an actual human voice.
Their web page is a wonderful demonstration of Hutber's Law ('improvement means deterioration') at its best. The law so beloved of web designers and bureaucrats everywhere. It is the law which underpins the Bible Of Bureaucratic Obfuscation or Bobo for short which is appropriate - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/spanish-english/bobo

Just to add insult to injury, the opening hours of the sorting office have been changed and it is now open between 7am and 9am only. (It used to be open until noon.) So if I do miss a delivery I must then get up in the middle of the night to catch those opening hours which are inconveniently outside the hours during which my pensioner bus pass is valid!

The two errant packages eventually arrived on the 31st; after eleven days and nine days respectively. The Postie said the sorting office was 'chaos' with an above average number of packages and parcels; with everyone now frightened to go shopping they are all shopping online. Added to that are the staff shortages for either illness or the Government's generous 'furlough' scheme. Royal Mail is erratic at the best of times so this 'crisis' has geven them the perfect alibi for their poor service.

Before online shopping gets to the delivery stage there is the obstacle course of filling in the order form. Some are well designed and easy to use but some are bafflingly complex to my tired old brain. And sometimes they just do not work! Their are occasions when the order form flags up a message telling me my card is 'invalid' but a quick(?) phone call to the card company tells me that the card is valid and there is no block on it or what i am buying is well within the credit limit. There are times when I go round in circles trying to resolve things if the contact phone number, if any, is well hidden and so I just give up. If I do find a contact number, usually smaller companies and not the big names, there will be a cheerful and helpful voice on the other end. I will then place the order over the phone which is much quicker and easier than filling in the online order form. The person on the other end of the phone will have my failed order on screen which helps the process and the despatch is usually the same day.

I have not bought anything from Amazon for a long time. Not since they changed the way they operate which now seems to be as a reseller or agent for third party suppliers. But I have noticed that the name of the supplier is displayed, not very prominently, somewhere on the screen. I have found that by going to the supplier's web page the item is available directly from them. Very often it is the same price shown on Amazon's page and occasionally it may be cheaper. If it is non specific or one of a range, there will be alternative choices not shown at Amazon. I would recommend buying direct if possible. Why help a foreign inavader to dodge its share of tax liabilities?

Irony of ironies is that Amazon has been accused of helping to destroy the high street but they have recently announced they will be moving into the high street with lots of Amazon Shops!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8585211/Amazon-giant-plans-chain-UK-book-shops-cashless-convenience-stores.html

Cashless shops which automatically bill you when you take something from the shelves? I don't like the sound of that but the story prompted this perfect riposte in the comments from Billy M - "I'm a professional shoplifter. How the hell am I supposed to make a living if I sneak out with goods stuffed into my Y Fronts and then getting billed for them before I get home? This profession is stressful enough without added pressures."

Finally, a word about online grocery shopping. I am getting old and weary so buying some of the heavier items online made sense, it would save carrying it home. I rely on the bus these days having given up driving years ago. I did a tour of the Morrisons web pages, adding things to the 'basket' but when it came to checkout time I couldn't find the checkout. More spinning round in circles until eventually everything disappeared and a sign in the corner of the screen indicated that my 'basket' was empty. So I sent an email to Morrisinghs and a reply dawdled in a few days later. I don't think I am fit for the modern world because I didn't understand a word of the explanation of 'how to shop.' I did go back to their pages to have another try but I couldn't be bothered to spend ages going clickety click. It takes ages to go through all the choices. But I did notice that they now had a very prominent checkout sign in the top right corner.

I have since then been informed that their delivery service is less than perfect, with items missing or wrong items etc so I don't think I shall trouble them further. Come to think of it, I have not seen any of their vans. I have seen Asda vans and Iceland vans and the occasional Tesco van but Morrisons? No sign of one.

Internet shopping? Not a pleasant experience so far but it might be that it becomes unavoidable in the future. I think I need to advertise for a personal shopper who could also act as archivist for my vast collection of unsold and abandoned artworks. Any and all offers will be considered. I am not saying that the pay will be much but the experience and the entertainment value will be priceless!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, by JD

Born and raised in an Italian-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Guiseppe [Joe] Venuti (1903-1978) met guitarist Eddie Lang when he was ten years old. The two soon became fast friends and musical collaborators. After falling in love with jazz, Venuti and Lang started a band while in high school, and pioneered the use of the violin and guitar as jazz instruments while playing in the clubs and dance halls of Philadelphia.

"In addition to being the first great jazz violinist, Joe Venuti was something of a prankster. In perhaps his most famous prank, Venuti called twenty-six tuba players in Hollywood and told them he had a gig lined up. There was no gig. (Tommy Dorsey said 37 to meet at Hollywood and Vine) He just wanted to see what would happen when they all arrived at the same time. Unfortunately, for Venuti, the musician's union made him pay compensation to each musician who showed up for the event. Venuti was also famous for having pushed a piano out a window, and filling up Bix Biederbecke's bathtub with Jello. What may have started out as one of his pranks became one of his musical innovations. To play chords on the violin, Venuti tied his bow around his instrument to bring it into contact with all four strings, and thus enabled him to play rich chordal passages of music." (from the notes to the second video here)













This is the only live performance by the duo that I can find. Pity it is so short but they look like natty dressers - I love those 'custard cream' jackets!

Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang - Wild Cat (1930) "King Of Jazz" 7:07

Remembering Hiroshima

A version of the post below also appears on The Conservative Woman today:
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/
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Father John A. Simes was starting his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August 1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml . He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse . This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.

The British people’s reaction to the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238 The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over 300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but ‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us; a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man… The end is near – perhaps some years only.’

Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch. Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What, however, did they make of the Bomb?

There are three books that taken together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977 , is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’ he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.

The second, John Masters’ ‘The Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/ , is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.

‘I believed with instant conviction that there could be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin Himalayan air, and I was happy.

‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’

1992 saw the appearance of ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932 , George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued; possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would never have been born:

‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or grandparents.’

Here we are now, with these horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the triumphant, the bleak pessimist?

How can we get rid of such dark toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.
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Suggested further reading:

John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now

Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/

Planning Permission: Bulldozing the Opposition, by Wiggia

This government has made great play about building houses to fill a need for people desperate to get a home. Various schemes, Home Start and the like have been introduced to ‘help’ people get on the housing ladder. Housebuilders give incentives like discounts - that aren’t really; part exchange; deferred mortgage payments; contributions to removal costs and other add-ons all to get mainly young couples into their badly built rabbit hutches.

It has been going on for years: ever smaller homes on ever smaller plots which only maximises the builder's profits, the granting of planning on more and more green belt as it is cheaper to build on that than in urban areas and the willingness of councils to allow every small green space including back gardens to be marked for building; and the undoubted acceptance of brown envelopes from builders to get that permission - not an urban myth, a fact of which I could quote two examples that I know.

An extra large image of tiny houses

These are ‘Tiny Houses’, an idea that has been used in the States and the Continent as a way of providing temporary? or cheap one-person houses at an affordable price. Naturally the land they are built on decides the price, but don’t give the house builders ideas: they would like nothing more than  to build, I resist using the word 'homes', these things no different from a seaside beach huts - at inflated prices.

Having gone this far, the government could always take the route that in many countries provides a roof over people's heads - and they have to a degree already done it by turning a blind eye to many areas with high immigrant populations, where garden sheds and garages are turned illegally into accommodation: why not go the whole hog and allow favelas?

Over all the years this has been going on one thing above all else has been missing: the infrastructure to support all these estates. Our road system is chaotic and  in this crowded island the same roads are expected to carry ever more traffic - never do you see new roads, only feeder roads onto existing ones. The provision of new schools, doctors' surgeries (not that we have the doctors to man them now), shops etc mean existing providers are inundated with extra clients they cannot look after properly in regards to health and education.

But in the last few years there has been a significant shift in the Conservative Party towards a free-for-all as regards planning: a couple of easements in regards to what you can extend without planning (and bugger the neighbour who loses light and privacy!) as examples, and a loosening of the green belt laws - as we all know, brownfield sites are too expensive for our builders to consider without considerable help from councils with easings, and as in the recent case of a certain Mr Desmond in Tower Hamlets, quite a bit more than that:

“Marxist doe”: The money at the heart of the Robert Jenrick planning row

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/06/robert-jenrick-richard-desmond-money-marxist-doe-billionaire-tower-hamlets

I saw a good example of how the public is conned, the council keeps schtum and builders gain when I lived not far from Stansted airport near Great Dunmow, Essex. This was when (in the late Eighties / early Nineties) Stansted was expanding at a rate and as usual ‘workers’ needed places nearby to live. Our beneficent building sector were glad to step in and help: a total of 1500 homes were planned on two sites, one of a thousand units and one of five hundred; the thousand-unit site would incorporate a school, shopping centre and doctor's surgery and community centre.

The objections to this came in thick and fast: too much, unnecessary, blah blah, from the protest groups. After much to and froing the council said the thousand unit section would be halved and the five hundred unit one would be scrapped. The builders sat on their hands during all this as they had no obligation to provide for the five hundred units the extra infrastructure they would have had to provide for the thousand. Of course this was never revealed at the protest meetings by any party.
So the five hundred were built, retrospective planning was submitted for the other five hundred and passed and probably another couple of thousand units have gone up since, all without infrastructure of any worthwhile sort provided by the builders (I no longer live in the area so cannot be sure of the facts of later development but would take a fair bet I am not far wrong as it is a pattern repeated nationwide.)

We have all seen the individual who makes the DM front pages with his illegal building hidden behind straw bales and the like, and take great pleasure in seeing it rightly demolished as it had no planning permission; but little is said about the reverse - now why would that be, when for example (also in Essex) a traveller commandeered a lay-by, hooked up to an electricity pole and fought for the right to stay. He won. The address, and I kid you not, is 'No1 The Lay-by'; paid not a cent for it and it is now a legal building.

That was a long time ago but the precedent stands, and we all saw what happened after spending millions of taxpayers' money at Dale Farm, another travellers' site turned legal by refusal of the authorities to do anything about it at the onset. They are extreme examples of a particular type of the flaunting of planning regs but nonetheless the illegals prevailed at a cost to the local community on many fronts.

What is being proposed here -

New homes to get 'automatic' permission in England planning shake-up

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53625960

- is nothing more than the total subversion of all planning laws, inadequate and perverted over time as they have been. Where I live now a privately-owned large field sloping down to a picturesque river and including a part flood plain and water meadow was subjected to a planning application by the absent owner. It took a lot of effort by local people who resisted this application, including raising money for environmental, legal and non-suitability-for-building reports by professional independent assessors to get this application thrown out and rightly so, but an appeal was made and the planning inspector came down in favour of the objectors.

An aside to this was the cost: it turns out the applicant had an agreement with Taylor Wimpey that they would fund the legal costs on their side win or lose, as the land had in effect been sold to them in the event of the planning being granted. It is expensive and difficult to fight big builders in cases like this. What hope is there for that land now, seemingly having won the fight only less than two years ago?

Do we really need all these houses? Well yes, if you allow immigration to boom as it has for years now, that of course is a separate argument but a valid one as we decide (or rather, our Tory government decides for us) this is the way forward. This is a relatively small island; there has to be a limit or we end up as a giant version of Hong Kong and the ridiculous proposal we should decant three million Chinese here is perhaps an indication that that is what the Government wants !

As a nation we have been governed appallingly by successive administrations. This is just another off -loading of responsibility of government to local authority and having seen local authorities tread water, avoid issues and take their ill-gotten salaries and pensions from the ever-increasing local taxes which never seem to give anything back to us in return, I for one would not trust them to run the proverbial whelk stall. Their track record in this area proves it. You only have to look at Milton Keynes: I had no idea you could bulk buy roundabouts but Milton Keynes planners thought it a good idea to buy them all and foist them on the motorist, with absolutely no one at all having responsibility.*

With planning all local councils are interested in is the extra council tax take, no less, no more; their actions prove it. Like the NHS patient, the resident has become a hindrance, so by-pass him.

What is being proposed is the usual 'get out of jail' card being played, rather than having a meaningful appraisal of the convoluted planning laws and streamlining them to avoid the endless bottlenecks. It is much easier to grease the road ahead for those Tory donors, isn’t it, and to blight for ever many areas that until now have escaped the new-build horrors.

I expect this new proposal will escape scrutiny as we are obsessed with the latest non-deaths with the Covid virus - they can and have kept that going long enough to slip several pieces of legislation through unnoticed, it’s what governments do.

For the first time in my life I did not vote at the last election as I felt there was no one to vote for worth my vote. I did have some reservations about that but the events and handling since have vindicated my decision and as the late George Carlin said:

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*Sackerson adds: this article on the development of Milton Keynes is interesting if not enraging:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/03/struggle-for-the-soul-of-milton-keynes - sample:

'Milton Keynes also defied 1970s austerity because it was built using a mechanism that some urban planners say could be used to solve the current housing crisis. It was a state-funded city. The government loaned the corporation money, and the corporation could (eventually) return its investment because it was entitled, under the New Towns Act, to buy land at agricultural prices. As soon as this land was developed, it became far more valuable: this uplift paid for MK’s infrastructure.'

40 years on and Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy seems more relevant than ever:



P.S. It looks as though Exeter, Devon is for it, after some skirmishes:
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/greater-exeter-strategic-plan-next-4380102

- as previously Totnes, Ivybridge, Dartington etc., further west. And as for the planning blight in Cornwall, the ring roads with their hypermarkets, the withering of town centres and the social decay, let those who have seen St Austell (for example) bear witness.

US justice on trial

UPDATE (April 2021): All charges dropped, no retrial. At last, at long, long last:

https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article250441866.html

___________________________________________________________

This post is reproduced from The Polynesian Times:
https://polynesiantimes.blogspot.com/2020/08/palau-us-justice-on-trial.html
_____________________

A Palauan man and his wife are to be re-tried more than 10 years after being found guilty of the murder of their newborn child, McKenzy. Their original trial and their first unsuccessful appeal raise questions about the quality of the justice system and its preparedness to address its own possible errors.

Born in hospital on 29 May 2008, the baby was taken home May 31 and died early the morning after. The couple, Albert and Ashley Debelbot, were convicted of malice murder in 2009, but eventually had their appeal heard in 2017, in which they claimed that their respective attorneys had not defended them effectively.

There are concerns about the conduct not only of the original trial but also of the appeal, which was denied. A further appeal to Georgia's Supreme Court succeeded and the convictions were 'vacated' on 28 February 2020 and a new trial ordered.
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html

'Their conviction was based on a testimony of the State assistant medical examiner whose opinion is based on an autopsy report.  The State gave no evidence tying the couple to their daughter’s death and the couple’s lawyer did not offer any alternative explanation or evidence or witnesses on how the baby died,' reports the Island Times. The defence attorneys at the original trial had offered no alternative explanation of the child's injuries, even though the hospital had recorded the birth as a 'rough, atypical delivery.' 
https://islandtimes.org/palauan-man-imprisoned-unjustly-for-12-years-in-us/

At the 2017 appeal four medical experts giving evidence for the defence 'opined that the trauma of the birthing process caused the additional and more acute fracturing to the left side of McKenzy’s skull, and denied that post-birth trauma caused McKenzy’s injuries' but 'the court concluded in one  sentence that all the Debelbots’witnesses, expert and otherwise, were not credible' and went on further to rule out their evidence as not legally admissible.
https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/2019/she defence18a1073.html

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the 2009 trial was the way that the Assistant District Attorney chose to define the 'reasonable doubt' in the presumption of innocence that a jury should extend to defendants:

   In explaining the concept of “reasonable doubt,” which in a juror’s mind would justify a vote to acquit, Assistant District Attorney Sadhana Dailey said it “does not mean beyond all doubt,” and added:
   “It does not mean to a mathematical certainty. Which means we don’t have to prove that 90 percent. You don’t have to be 90 percent sure. You don’t have to be 80 percent sure. You don’t have to be 51 percent sure.”
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html

It seems reasonable to interpret that last sentence as implying that if it's down to tossing a coin, it's okay to find the defendant guilty. As the Supreme Court said, 'We cannot conceive of any good reason that a competent criminal defense attorney could have to fail to object to such an egregious misstatement of the law.'

The Island Times article cited above says '.. the DA for Muscogee County has announced that she will retry the case despite Georgia Supreme Court saying the government evidence is very thin. Debelbot will be represented in the new trial pro bono by the top rated Civil Defense and Criminal Defense New York Attorney Earl Ward.'

If that Ward is the 'Earl S. Ward' described here, the prosecution will have a fight on its hands; and if Ward succeeds, his pro bono work may be followed by a big compensation fight - he 'secured a $6.7 million settlement for the widow of Israel Vasquez, who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for more than 12 years for a 1995 homicide he did not commit.' Twelve years: the same period Debelbot has spent in jail, so far; twelve of his wife's child-bearing years, of their potential family life together.
https://ecbawm.com/our-people/earl-s-ward/

Let's turn our eyes away from money and consider a legal system that negligently sics a jury onto the defendants with a wildly wrong definition of reasonable doubt, lets them be found guilty of murder on the basis of an autopsy and accompanying assertions of a single expert (that did not directly connect the alleged offence with the defendants), and brushes away expert witnesses for the defence at appeal.

Not everyone would expect to receive such sub-standard service from the justice system. Is money, or the lack of it, a factor? Any other factors?

SATURDAY ESSAY: A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, by Wiggia

It was once said that ‘clothes make the man,’ a quote attributed to many including Mark Twain, one of the more recent, who himself was a snappy dresser.

Fashion in men's clothes can be seen in various civilisations through time, from the austere outfits worn by Cromwell’s protestant followers to the garish over the top spectacle of Louis XIV the Sun King, yet most of these clothes were worn by the upper classes; nothing so grand for those below them. Only in the twentieth century in the western world have we seen the rise of fashion for the working man/woman. With affluence being attained by more of the population, more disposable income filtered down for dressing up in something a bit better; no longer was it Sundays and high days, it was Saturdays too, and then the rest of the week.

Looking through old family photographs you can see the change happening, from those of grandparents posing in their Sunday best for the photographer in late Edwardian dresses that had not moved on much from Victorian times, to the Thirties and our mums in those flapper outfits up till
the Sixties when the shackles of postwar Britain were thrown off and full employment and relatively burgeoning pay packets saw the fashion explosion take off and spread across the world.

But in many ways the Sixties was also the start in a decline in fashion. The various trends from mods to rockers and the Carnaby Street tat that was flower power meant there was no obvious coherent way forward. Fashion fragmented and smart casual became casual, then in many cases non-fashion a sort of 'anything goes but none of it good.' We have regressed bigly as they say; it seems People of Walmart have come to stay:

This - and more - at:
https://www.peopleofwalmart.com/category/featured-creature/page/2/?gdsr_sort=rating&gdsr_order=desc

Our generation had some good examples in our screen idols for dress sense. There was of course little else in the way of images to sway us, nonetheless the examples below did know how make a splash and carry the whole thing off in style:

Errol Flynn

Fred Astaire

Just two from a galaxy of stars who had style or had style thrust on them.

The Sixties were somewhat different. People in all walks of life could be seen who had style and dress sense; the gentleman below I saw stopping in the Edgware Road and getting out of his customised and chauffeured London taxi to shop for cigars in a specialist store next to Edgware Road tube station, he always had style:

Nubar Gulbenkian, the Armenian magnate who also organised a repatriation line
for RAF personnel during the war from France.

Tom Wolfe, the author, was another who in the Sixties made a grand entrance when dressed like this:

In many ways it epitomised the ‘mod’ style of dress, a sort of throwback to the Great Gatsby era, if you could wear it! Marcello Mastroianni famously wore one in Fellinni’s '8 ½' and despite not being in an English language film became an icon of style.

Beau Brummel in a much earlier era demonstrated that style over substance had a niche and has been remembered for it ever since, and again it had some influence in the Sixties as people sought the way forward with an array of styles not seen before:

Beau Brummell Esquire and his Noblemen

And young Marc Bolan (Mark Feld before his music days) was a front runner in the mod style with his little gang; a sub note is that he lived near us in those days and went to the same primary school as myself but at a later date:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/fashion/marc-bolan-london-fashion-week.html

As for myself it was suits for going out and expensive ones from Morrie Diamond in Shaftesbury Avenue and those Swiss voile shirts that my mother cursed when ironing, Cecil Gee among others for ties, silk Italian and black highly polished Chelsea boots from Ravels the go-to shoe store in that part of the East End. Shoes were all polished highly, a left over from conscription and the war probably, just a habit but not a bad one - as my father used to quote, 'You can tell a man by the state of his shoes.'

For casual wear I suppose it was the start of ‘smart casual.’ The late Fifties had been the jeans period, the Americanisation of pop at the time provided the images and we all followed. You could almost stand up the good jeans of the period on their own after washing, such was the quality of the denim then; something else that has fallen by the wayside.

Yet smart casual was just that then: the Italian influence and imported tops to go with the Italian hairstyles and Chinos and the first quality casual shoes or loafers. In the East End where I lived most of this was standard wear through the decade, even local icons were as they say quite tidy... in a slightly more formal way…

The ties only came off when posing or beating the shit out of someone, you have to have standards...

On the other side of the Atlantic the showmen of the time were also up to the mark in the fashion stakes. As here, suits and good suits made the man, especially if you could wear one like this trio did:

So where did it all go down hill? Too much of everything in that period did not help, the kids went from one style to the other overnight, no style really reigned, well not for men, there was no equivalent to the min skirt, which is just as well!

I blame flower power: thousand of people in fields wearing the Sixties equivalent of pound shop Primark, rubbish creased trousers and floral shirts you wouldn’t use for wiping the floor, or that’s how it appeared to us at the time; and sandals for God's sake, what are they? As my Jewish friends would say, they look schlocky.

I think it has gone downhill since the Sixties. Casual has become a synonym for slovenly. To a degree, fashion has always  been a statement; now there is just the statement. As usual, there are exceptions it would be churlish to say otherwise:

Christopher Walken

As never before the outrageous and the downright awful get equal billing in the fashion stakes. Today's man about town is no longer the white male I grew up knowing, we live for better or worse in a more diverse world that has added some new trends in men's clothes, some good, much not so, and the emergence of the gay community who have come out as never before has also had an effect on style, as here for example:

Billy Porter at the Oscars - nah, beards and a dress ?

Anyway, as with most things it has all been done better before, nothing is new:

Louis XIV dressed for a masquerade

FRIDAY MUSIC: Alison Krauss, by JD

Music this week comes from Alison Krauss, one of Bluegrass music's finest ambassadors. But she does not confine herself to Bluegrass as can be seen from the random selection featured below (I have omitted her duets with Robert Plant as they were featured here a couple of weeks ago)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Krauss
https://alisonkrauss.com/