The Unorthodox Website Blog

Father’s Day is not something I’ve ever thought about or celebrated. My father was a virtual stranger to me, a foreigner who I hardly remember being part of our family. We lived together till I was 6, when my parents separated and later divorced. However even in those first 6 years my father was hardly ever around. He slept till midday or so and was out half the night.

I and my brother never learnt his language, Greek, because he was seldom around to teach us. One day he asked why his boys didn’t speak Greek, and my mother said he should be at home more to teach us. My father replied that it was the woman’s job to teach children the language. This was ridiculous as my mother is English and didn’t speak Greek herself! However that’s chauvinistic Greek-Cypriot logic for you. I have 1,001 tales like that about my father. ‘In Cyprus we have a saying: women and dogs stay in the house!’ (This was when my mother asked why they seldom went out together.) He was questioned by my mother as to why he slept around, didn’t he love her anymore?  His reply was: ‘Yes, I also love baked beans, but I don’t want them every night!’ More Greek-Cypriot male logic.

We never celebrated his birthday either, nor he ours. My brother and I in later years did get a Christmas check (cheque) from him every year. Once as children we tried to give him a present for either Christmas or his birthday, and he gave it straight back to us. A very difficult man to understand. We had diametrically opposite views on almost everything, so until the day he died (when I was 53) every time we met he’d give me a lecture on everything I’d done wrong in my life, and my brother got similar lectures. We should have our own businesses, we should speak Greek, we should have married, preferably to a Greek or Greek-Cypriot woman, and had children. I am gay, and my brother’s married to a Yorkshire women and they never had any children, didn’t want them. He tried to arrange a marriage to a girl cousin once. She sat next to me and said my father thought she would make a good wife and give me lots of Greek babies – I was having nothing to do with it naturally. Sounded to me like Hell on Earth, a woman and a load of screaming brats! So we were both failures in my father’s eyes, failures who knew little about Greek-Cypriot culture and didn’t even speak his language.

He was living in England for decades, since before the Second World War (he came here to escape an arranged marriage, his brother had to marry the woman because she had a large dowry) and only went back to Cyprus to live some 40 or 50 years later, I can’t remember now exactly when. In all those decades, like many of my Greek-Cypriot cousins, he never learnt to speak English properly, always with a heavy Greek-Cypriot accent in broken English.  On the occasions we met up he invariably took us to Greek friends/relations and they talked in Greek all the time, my brother and I sat there bored stiff and not understanding a word. People would say to him: ‘we should speak English so your boys understand and can join in the conversation’ and my father would reply it was our fault for not learning Greek. We did try once, when we were in our teens, but I found it a ridiculous language with a crazy alphabet, not used or spoken widely in any country but Greece and part of Cyprus. I got on with French and German better, and at least they use our alphabet and are spoken in more than one and a half countries.

However in 1977 my father took me to Cyprus for the first time, and I got to know him a little better, and met my paternal grandmother for the first and only time. An emotional meeting, she died a few months later, but due to the language barrier we couldn’t communicate, only by sign language. (My brother was taken to Cyprus in 1966 and also met our paternal grandfather, who’d died by the time I got there. I couldn’t go with them in 1966 as I was on my first trip abroad, by train, from London to the Soviet Union. My father disapproved of this, not revealing he had traveled to the USSR on probably more than one occasion.)

In my later years I realize, although we had quite different lifestyles and diametrically opposed political and other views, we are very similar in many ways. My father was very opinionated, and I too hold firmly to my opinions which many people find quite extreme. When I went to Cyprus I discovered, although he was never very helpful financially to my mother when she was bringing up my brother and myself, he was extremely generous to people in his village in Cyprus. So generous, in fact, that they erected a monument to him in the form of his name in metal letters on a wall before he even passed to Spirit. When he died his funeral was on the local Paphos news, he was such an important man in the area. A benefactor of Paphos and the surrounding area, including his home village.

I also realize in retrospect, that having escaped an arranged marriage in Cyprus, he later felt trapped into the marriage with my mother. Witnessed by the fact, recently disclosed by my mother, that on their wedding day he failed to turn up at the Register Office, and had to be physically dragged there by my two uncles (who were policemen) from my father’s place of work. He’d just gone into work, not intending to turn up at the Register Office at all. My mother should have been warned when he bought her a cheap wedding ring (more like a curtain ring) and then bought himself an expensive watch in the same jewelry store.

My father remains something of an enigma. He seemed to have extreme rightwing views politically, whereas I was always on the extreme Left of politics. However after he died and I got his photo albums, I discovered he had been to Moscow in what was then the USSR. He may have paid more than one visit, as the photos were in color so of a later period, but he also had the Soviet Calendar from 1947 to celebrate 30 years of Soviet power. This is a large book with color portraits of Joseph Stalin, and I can’t imagine how or why my father got hold of such a book praising Stalinism.

Was my father a secret agent of some sort? I strongly suspect he knew much more than he admitted about certain things, including the British military bases in Cyprus and the Greek invasion of Cyprus in July 1974 (yes you read that right, the Greek invasion, which preceded the Turkish liberation!  See, I told you our political views were diametrically opposed. Apparently.)

The fascist military junta in Athens organized a coup against the Greek-Cypriot government in July 1974, and the Presidential Palace in Nicosia was bombed. The fascist Nicos Sampson was put in power with the objective of annexing the whole of Cyprus to fascist Greece, presumably ethnically cleansing the poor Turkish-Cypriots. However the plan failed when Archbishop Makarios, the President of Cyprus, escaped and turned up in New York to tell the UN General Assembly that Greece had invaded Cyprus (a speech now conveniently forgotten by all but the Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot  authorities.)  Britain with two huge military bases in Cyprus and thousands of soldiers, supposedly there to guarantee Cypriot independence, refused to restore the legitimate Cypriot government. Turkey was left with no option but to intervene to provide a safe haven for the Turkish-Cypriots in the Northern part of the island. It has been blamed by the world ever since for ‘invading Cyprus’, but clearly, in view of the British complicity in doing nothing to defeat the Sampson coup, this was a NATO plot to get rid of Makarios, which failed when he survived. However he very conveniently died 3 years later in 1977. Make of that what you will.

What I do know for certain is that my father, who had a picture of rightwing EOKA-B terrorist George Grivas on one side of his mantelpiece in Hampstead and a picture of Archbishop Makarios on the other side, was in Cyprus at the time of the Sampson coup engineered by fascist Greece. He came back to England and removed the picture of Makarios from his mantelpiece, saying the Archbishop was a ‘Communist’.  I wouldn’t be surprised if my father knew a lot more about the coup and the reason for it. Maybe a NATO conspiracy because they feared Makarios was going to give the Soviet Union’s ships access to the Mediterranean via Cypriot ports, maybe even a base in Cyprus.

My father also seemed to know a lot about the British bases. We were driving thru one of them one day (these two bases are more like British zones of occupation. Public roads run thru them, but any Greek-Cypriots arrested for any offense in these areas are tried by British courts under British law.)  There was a big artificial hill inside one of the military compounds, and my father said something about nuclear weapons being stored there. I said I didn’t think there were any nuclear weapons in Cyprus, and he remarked that there were a lot of things I didn’t know (which he presumably did.)

I do, however, now see many similarities between myself and my father. Not just a facial resemblance, but in many other ways too. He was not all bad, witnessed by how he helped people in his village. He always said it was important to make money in order to help people.

He was an avowed atheist, yet donated money to the Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Church, giving money for a Church youth club in his home village. In London he was on the church committee in Camden Town. When we visited a church in Cyprus connected to a monastery, he kissed all the icons and made the sign of the Cross, criticizing me for not doing the same, saying my brother and I were like heathens treating the church just like tourists. In private, however, he’d point to all the land the Church owned in Cyprus, remarking some of it should be given to him to compensate for land lost in the North. He then ranted about religion being ‘fairytales for women and children’ promising immortality, saying when you’re dead you’re dead. Obviously, the Church being so powerful in Cyprus, paying lip-service to it was as necessary as paying lip-service to the ruling Marxist-Leninist Party in the former Socialist countries. You didn’t have to believe in it, but you had to appear to do so.

My being gay was another thing which greatly upset my father. Cyprus is an extremely homophobic country, and gays are simply not accepted, despite their membership of the European Union. My father said a neighbor in his village was that way inclined, so they arranged a marriage to a woman for him and forced him to go thru with it. A Greek-Cypriot cousin of mine who is also gay now lives with his partner in Italy, apparently because the Greek-Cypriot community in England and Cyprus would not accept such a relationship. My father told me never to bring my own life-partner to Cyprus, which made it obvious he had told everyone in his village of the nature or our relationship. However, in his defense, when my brother’s wife-to-be, who also appears to be homophobic, said my life-partner was not welcome at their wedding, my father got on the phone to my brother and told him I could bring whoever I liked to their wedding. Double standards from my father yet again, but there you go. The fact that my brother and I never went into business, as my father hoped, was largely down to my father. He never made any attempt to bring us into his restaurant in Swiss Cottage when we left college or university, or into any of his subsequent businesses (except one time when he had a belt factory and wanted me to fiddle the accounts to fool the taxman, and I refused!) Cousins, however, were brought into the restaraunt as waiters, etc.

One last story which illustrates that my father was wrong about there being no afterlife, and that he is learning certain lessons a little later than I did. He once visited my mother’s flat in Camden Town in the very late 1960s/early 1970s and she took him up to see my bedroom (I was out) because she was so worried about me. The room was a shrine to Communism, with Soviet and Maoist posters on the walls, an atheistic altar to Communism draped in the Soviet red hammer and sickle flag with the Collected Works of V. I. Lenin in place of The Bible and a statuette of Lenin in place of the Cross, and Maoist tapestries of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin on the bedroom door. My mother said my father went beserk, raving about going to his son’s room and seeing murderers on the walls. When my mother told me about this rant, I calmly replied it was a bit rich coming from him, as he had a portrait of the murdering rightwing terrorist George Grivas on his mantelpiece.

I eventually left the British Communist Party and the pictures of Lenin and Stalin were taken down. However the picture of Grivas remained on my father’s mantelpiece, and when he went to live in Cyprus, the wretched picture went with him and had pride of place in a frame on the wall of his lounge. After his funeral in 1998 we were sitting in this lounge for just about an hour, and that picture fell from its frame. I then knew that, on the Other Side, my father was clearly demonstrating that he had now at last taken down his picture of a murderer.

One other thing, my father was a joker. Never knew when to take him seriously. Not too long before he died, I was visiting Cyprus with two friends. We were invited to a meal at my father’s house. His common-law wife was of course not allowed to sit at the table with the men, but had to behave like the servant women were expected to be in that country. While she was rushing in and out serving the men, a friend of my father’s remarked that my dad was now an old man. My father agreed that he was, and that he would die soon. Then he said something which shocked/perplexed my two English friends. He pointed to a rifle hanging on the wall, which he used to go hunting with, and said to his friend: ‘But before I die I take that gun and go up to the village and shoot all my enemies there, then I take it to England and shoot all my enemies there’. Clearly he meant his sister and relations in the village (they were not on speaking terms when he died), and probably me, my brother and my mother (among others possibly) in London. This was evidently a joke, a form of black humor. Glad to say the threat was never carried out, obviously.

Well, we never celebrated Father’s Day when he was alive on Earth, but I hope he has a good one. We should regret nothing we do while here on Earth as it is all experience. We are here to learn from our mistakes and from other people we relate to in order to progress Spiritually. I know I have learnt a lot from my mistakes and from other people, and the Grivas picture falling from its frame at such a crucial time shows me my father too has learnt lessons and moved on.

Heaven knows I’ve moved home enough times in the past. In fact I worked out that both I and my mother have moved so many times about 5 years is the average we’ve ever lived in one place, even though I’ve been in my present flat for 29 years and my mother in hers for 12 years. This is the 13th home I’ve lived in, and I’m now 68.

I have recently been toying with the idea of looking at ground floor, one-bedroom flats with a garden on my estate, and went so far as to email the local council about looking at a one-bedroom flat to see the possibilities. They over-reacted and sent an application form for moving, which I have filed away and have no intention whatsoever of filling out and sending off in the foreseeable future at least.

The more I think about it the more traumatic it would be to move. First off, because I was in a gay partnership before such things were officially recognized, long before civil partnerships or gay marriage, we were allocated a two-bedroom council flat in a tower block in 1978 under the then Labour council’s policy of moving childless couples into such places and families with children out. We were automatically awarded a two-bedroom flat being two adults of the same sex who required a bedroom each. We in fact never used the second bedroom as such except for visitors. When the block was decamped and sold off as luxury flats, we were moved to my present first-floor flat (we were on the 18th floor before), and again were allocated two bedrooms, gay couples still not being officially recognized.

Now, of course, that my partner has passed on the council considers I am over-occupying. We were always over-occupying because of the council’s policy as we always had a spare bedroom, nothing has changed.

Of course over the past 29 years since we moved into this present flat, and in the 6 years before in the previous two-bedroom council flat, we, and now I, have expanded to fill the available space. To move into a smaller flat would involve getting rid of a lot of furniture and possessions, which is why I asked to view a one-bedroom flat to assess the size of the rooms, hallway, etc.

In addition to the problems of a much smaller flat. I have maintained for the last 22 years the wonderful collages my life-partner created in two rooms and one of the store-cupboards. It would break my heart to dismantle them, and also this last home we made together has many emotional and nostalgic memories, so if I moved I might always regret it.

I have the flat much as I want it now. Apart from his collages, I have a memorial banner or quilt for my life-partner displayed in the long hallway, along with some pictures, etc. My bedroom I have also decorated with collages of my own. All the rooms have been decorated to my taste.

In addition to all this, the very thought of packing up and moving, involving getting rid of loads of stuff, is just too mind-boggling. At my age I just can’t face it. My suite probably wouldn’t fit, nor my computer desk, or my sizeable vinyl record collection.

So I’ve decided to stay put as long as I can. I recognize that if I eventually become unable to negotiate the stairs up to my flat I might have to reconsider, but at the moment and for the foreseeable future I will stay here. I admit the garden was the main attraction of moving. I have an allotment plot but it is too big, too far away and too unmanagable for me. I will probably give it up this Autumn when the rent for the next year becomes due.

A Community Garden project was started in the area behind my block of flats, and although this seems to have run out of steam, I’m sure I could plant a few flowers, etc. there, which would be quite enough for me and I could tend to it every day, whereas the allotment I can’t get to more than once a week, if that.

Moving itself is traumatic at any time, but at my age and involving a drastic downsizing and getting rid of loads of stuff just is far too daunting.

So far this has, for myself and friends/relatives, been a year of many people transiting to Spirit. For myself, I attended three funerals in as many weeks earlier this year – that of two uncles and a friend on the Roots Music scene, Tony Wilkinson. Also a close friend’s mother passed to Spirit just a few weeks ago.

Of course all these people who passed to Spirit were of an age where this happens more often. Tony was the youngest of the four mentioned above, being only 69. The others were in their 80s or older.

However I have, like many others, had to get used to people departing suddenly from this world at all stages of my life. Apart from two friends who as a child I called ‘aunties’ who passed when I was very young, a girl in my class and my best friend both passed to Spirit in their early teens. My grandparents transited, and now all my uncles and aunts save a couple in a Care Home in Cyprus on my father’s side of the family, which I hardly keep in touch with, the language barrier being part of the problem. My life-partner transited in his 40s nearly 22 years ago.

Several of these people have communicated with me in various ways. Quite recently an aunt, sister of my mother, came thru a medium with some advice for me.

I was reminded by a friend yesterday, as though I needed reminding, that as she will be 99 in September the time when my own mother passes to Spirit cannot be that far off. On the other hand, I myself am 68 and men do tend to transit at an earlier age than women, so although I seem to be fairly healthy, one never knows what is round the corner.

What is certain, at my stage of life, is that there are far more close friends and relatives on the Other Side than here on Earth now. When my mother transits I will be on my own here apart from a brother I rarely see, distant relatives I also rarely see and a few friends.

Is it any wonder, as we reach an advanced age, those who know there is indeed an afterlife start looking forward to reunions when they transit. I will meet my life-partner and others, just as my two uncles would have met their wives who transited years ago.

One hopes a few friends and relatives will stick around till the end of 2013 – we’d like a few to attend my mother’s 100th birthday party in September 2014 if she, and I, make it ourselves.

The two British Prime Ministers who were given big funerals are Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. A full State funeral for Winnie, and a big ceremonial funeral (one step down from a State funeral at her own wish) for Maggie. Ironically, these are two of the most controversial Prime Ministers of the 20th Century.

Winston Churchill once suggested machine gunning striking miners during the General Strike, he was in favor of letting Mahatma Gandhi die when he went on hunger strike for Indian independence, Churchill praised Mussolini’s fascism and even went so far as to call the Italian dictator a ‘Roman genius’, and he was the wartime Prime Minister who authorized the terror bombing of Axis cities killing many totally innocent civilians. In other words, he was a war criminal.

In the closing stages of the Second World War, which Britain got involved in after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Churchill sat with Stalin and the American President and between them they carved up Europe, handing Poland, Czechoslovakia and a number of other Central and Eastern countries over to the Soviet sphere of influence, thus betraying the Poles by allowing them to exchange the foreign dictator Hitler for the foreign dictator Stalin. He also agreed boundary changes for Poland which was regarded as a betrayal. By contrast countries like Finland and later Austria (the latter being Hitler’s birthplace and annexed by Germany) were granted neutrality. No such attempt was made to guarantee neutrality for countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Thatcher has similar credentials. Devastating mining communities by closing the pits, taking on the striking miners and greatly weakening the trade union movement, selling off social housing, introducing the controversial Community Charge (Poll Tax), ordering the sinking of the Argentinean ship the ‘Belgrano’ with great loss of life as it was sailing away from the ‘exclusion zone’ during the Falklands/Malvinas war (Tam Dalyell, the former Scottish MP, called her a ‘murderess’ for this war crime), calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist while praising the fascist dictator General Pinochet as the savior of ‘democracy’ in Chile, and as Ken Livingstone has remarked, basically causing all the problems we face in Britain today including the banking crisis, the horrors and chaos of privatization of our utilities and transport systems, and the acute housing shortage, especially in social housing.

Two extreme rightwing politicians who at one stage praised fascist dictators, who were responsible for war crimes, who attacked the poor and and those striking for their livelihoods, and who were hypocritical about their stance on Communism.

Both claiming to be anti-Communist, Winston Churchill crying crocodile tears over the ‘Iron Curtain’ which had descended over many Central and Eastern European capitals – a thing he agreed to at the end-of-the-war conferences between the Allies. Maggie Thatcher opposing the reunification of Germany after the Wall was torn down and preferring East Germany to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Like all of us, these two politicians will learn the effect of their actions and policies in the afterlife and hopefully eventually learn from them.

However, why huge, expensive funerals for such controversial Prime Ministers? Many other former PMs have had private or much less elaborate funerals. Maggie’s huge, expensive affair will surely incite counter-demonstrations.

The fact is all political figures are controversial to some extent, and this includes the Queen and royal family. So any expensive State or ceremonial funerals around such figures will be controversial. No doubt this is unavoidable in some cases, such as when the Head of State dies. But to single out two of the most controversial Prime Ministers for very expensive, elaborate funerals seems, to me, quite unnecessary and a backlash is to be expected.

I’m referring here to the mediums who go around concert halls giving readings to packed houses, and who may also do a few private readings. Some have been featured on TV programs, in Britain with the legal requirement to describe these shows as ‘for entertainment only’.

Hard-line debunkers, describing themselves  as ‘skeptics’, say there is no such thing as an afterlife, and that all these mediums are doing ‘cold reading’, or resort to some sort of trickery such as plants in the audience, or somehow research their subject beforehand.

Of course there are good and bad mediums, as in all professions, but most at the top of their profession are extremely accurate and their knowledge cannot be dismissed as ‘cold reading’. Only mediums who give very general readings could be accused of this, or who say things which are quite obvious. For instance, it is a good bet that anyone elderly will have a father, mother, father-in-law or mother-in-law in Spirit, and the fall-back if all these fail is to say ‘well it’s a mother vibration’ or a ‘father vibration’ and say it must be a grandmother or grandfather.

This is all bad mediumship, as is the constant recital of common names like John or Mary which everyone must identify with, or to just say ‘A name beginning with J’.

On the other hand, there are some excellent mediums who are so accurate much of the time it could not possibly be ‘cold reading’. Mediums like Colin Fry, Tony Stockwell and Sally Morgan.

There are few mediums, past and present, who have not been accused of fraud at some time. Many have been investigated by scientists in the past and found to have real powers. It is true that some physical mediums (those who work with materializations, Direct Voice and ectoplasm or some other form of Spirit energy) have resorted to trickery when their powers fail them. One particular physical medium in the past said to investigators to watch her carefully or she would cheat. Both Colin Fry (when he worked as ‘Lincoln’) and Sally Morgan have been accused of cheating. Colin has given an explanation of what happened in an early display of physical mediumship, blaming the deception on a mischievous spirit while he was in a deep trance. Sally Morgan’s accusers had a story which just didn’t stand up, that she was fed information through headphones. First of all, no medium would do this and risk the message through the headphones being overheard by the audience, and secondly it doesn’t explain how the person supposedly relaying this information would have got it in the first place.

If it were possible to research people in the audience before a show with hundreds of thousands in the audience, then the medium would memorize the facts, not have them relayed over headphones. In most cases the accurate information given could not possibly be researched beforehand.

The possibility of ‘plants’ in the audience is also a non-starter. These people would have to be paid to do this deception, and there would have to be a lot of them. It is perfectly obvious they could get a lot more money by selling their story of this deception to the Press than by continually going to psychic shows and getting money in dribs and drabs as ‘plants’.

The fact is there are many very accurate real afterlife communications which come from great mental mediums. This is the term used for those who relay messages from the dead using clairaudience, clairvoyance or clairsensitivity rather than physical mediums who usually work in the dark and using ectoplasm and other Spirit energy are able to manifest voices and complete or partial materializations of the departed.

There is obviously more scope for trickery in any form of mediumship which takes place in the dark, but these too have been thoroughly investigated by some fo the most famous scientists like Sir William Crookes and others, including the lengthy Scole experiments of the 1990s which produced remarkable physical phenomena, testified as genuine by many scientists and even a magician who investigated them and said no trickery could possibly have been involved.

I personally received a very accurate message from Colin Fry in a packed Fairfield Hall in Croydon some years ago. He gave my grandmother’s first name, that she was in good health and of advanced age till an accident accelerated the aging process and she passed to Spirit, then went on to describe how my mother’s kitchen had been badly renovated with cheap materials, and how I had stood a hot pan on the working surface and damaged it. He then went on to say that the damage had been covered up with something and that it was on the left as you entered the kitchen. I defy anyone to say this detailed information could have been ‘cold reading’, and as none of it had been written down at the time, it could not have been researched beforehand.

The  afterlife is real, and there is communication with Spirits in the afterlife dimensions. Get over it! Quite apart from all forms of mediumship, NDEs (Near Death Experiences) are conclusive evidence that we survive death, especially when so many accurately describe everything that went on around them while clinically dead.

A real skeptic is one who keeps an open mind, and distinguises fraudsters from the real thing. Those who debunk all evidence of the afterlife by being very selective with the evidence are not skeptics at all, they are hard-nosed debunkers who ignore or dismiss all evidence which doesn’t support their materialist views.

There are some extremely controversial and offensive theories going around what some would describe as ‘New Age’ religions. This came to prominence recently when William Roache made an insensitive remark which was to do with karma inherited from past lives. Bill Roache is an actor I much admire for his Spiritual beliefs as well as his portrayal of Ken Barlow for over 52 years in the soap ‘Coronation Street’, but he is not alone in voicing views which, though well-meaning, are very insensitive.

I recently joined a debate on the Internet about Adolf Hitler and whether or not he would have ended up in one of the unpleasant lower astral planes after he passed over to Spirit. One suggestion was that he might have been on a special mission to teach the world a lesson, and there are theories in these New Age/Spiritualist circles that murderers and victims agree before their births to play out the roles they do.

All these theories are, in my view, ill-informed, deeply offensive, insensitive and actually nonsensical. To even suggest that people starving of famine in the underdeveloped countries, murder and torture victims, including all those who died in the Nazi concentration camps, were either paying karmic debts for misdeeds in past lives, or that they voluntarily agreed to be victimized to ‘teach the world a lesson’ is as offensive as suggesting Hitler was some sort of saintly figure who played Devil’s Advocate to encourage the world not to repeat his crimes.

I have studied the after-life for quite some time now, and while there are a lot of mysteries and even Spirits on the Other Side don’t know everything, we can piece together a reasonable picture of what actually must happen.

Firstly, we all have free will. So if we were pre-programmed, albeit with our consent, before birth to act out certain roles with no freedom of choice, then we would just be robots. What would be the point of life on Earth at all, which is supposed to be a learning experience for all of us?

Yes, there are teachers like Jesus and the Buddha, some would include people like Mahatma Gandhi and atheists like Sir Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx, who in their own ways tried to teach us better ways to live. Some of these, notably Jesus and Karl Marx, had their teachings twisted and misused to justify things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Stalin purges and the Pol Pot massacres.

However even these people had free will, they were not pre-programmed robots. We may all have basic life plans, in the sense that before birth we set out to achieve certain objectives, learn certain lessons, but we have free will in what choices and decisions we make and so these life plans are not always fulfilled.

As I have come to understand it we, as individuals, do not lead endless lives on Earth in a process of reincarnation. We have a Higher or Greater Soul which encompasses many aspects, sometimes likened to facets of a diamond. Contained within this Higher or Greater Soul and linked to it are many different personalities.

It seems the Higher Soul creates personalities which then incarnate to learn lessons, and evolve. Also to help others and teach them lessons, usually by example.  These individual personalities, once created, remain as separate individuals even after death. Indeed I’ve read one account of a woman who actually met a previous incarnation of herself in the afterlife.

All these different individual personalities in the Greater Soul share the lessons and experiences of their various lives, but you as the individual you are now will normally only live one life on Earth. That individual will continue to exist indefinitely after death, though will evolve. Eventually it may merge with other personalities in the Greater or Higher Soul, but not immediately. Only when it is ready to ascend to even higher Spiritual levels. We simply don’t know if there are cases where individual personalities volunteer to reincarnate. Maybe in some Eastern cultures, or in the cases of some who die very young as children. However there are many more cases, the vast majority, where children and even stillborn babies grow to adulthood in the Spirit world.

It may well be that before birth on Earth a new personality of the Greater Soul discusses with guides what the objectives of that life will be, but always there is a degree of free will. Take the case of a murderer for instance. It might be pointed out before birth that this could be something that could happen, but when actually living their life it would be their free choice whether to commit murder or not. If they do, then they will surely have to accept the karmic consequences in the sense that everything we do, good or bad, reflects back on us eventually. This is because of the law of cause and effect and the fact that we are all connected, ultimately we are all one.

Just one example: in the Life Review which occurs in Near Death Experiences and when we actually pass over to the Other Side, we re-live every action and thought of our life outside of time and space. We feel the effects of these actions and thoughts on others as well, whether positive or negative. The negative ones we then feel impelled to put right by regretting them and learning never to repeat them. Hopefully any new personality created by the Higher Soul of that individual will not repeat the same mistakes.

You cannot assume, however, that people who suffer in any way have either brought it on themselves due to actions in past lives by other personalities within their Greater Soul; that they are paying karmic debts, or that they volunteered to be victimized in this life. If they suffer at the hands of others, then they are victims of the free choice of those other people which could not be foreseen with any certainty in advance. If it could, then it wouldn’t be free will.

Life and Death take on a different aspect once we are in the Spirit world. Since our brief lives on Earth are but a tiny part of our greater existence to look at them in isolation is like just looking at the very tip of an iceberg. If you look at the whole picture, you’ll get a very different impression. I suspect all of us have come thru the plant and animal kingdom in some form or other and in these and our various human lives, linked in our Greater Soul, we have both suffered and experienced much enjoyment. Not as the individuals we are today, but sharing these experiences in the Greater Soul.

So going back to the Hitler argument, he had a choice. So too did those who drew up the Treaty of Versailles after WWI which treated Germany so unfairly it permitted the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Once Hitler and others had made their choice, then they would have to feel the effects of their actions on others eventually, and pay the karmic consequences. It does not follow that Hitler’s victims all had karmic debts to pay or that they had volunteered this role. They could well be totally innocent, and the most that can be said is that before birth the possibility of what might happen due to the actions of others could have been put to them. Since nothing is written in stone, it would only have been a possibility, just as a husband who might or might not murder his wife would have had these possibilities put to them. In that sense they could be said to have volunteered the roles, but not the outcome.

To use the analogy of actors in a film. Various plots are written and the actors are given the different plots and scripts to read, but not told which one will be used in the final cut. This is left to be decided later, by the actors themselves. So nobody knows for sure in advance how the film will end.

That, to me, is the only thing which makes sense. Otherwise we are pre-programmed robots who can learn nothing and cannot evolve. Without freedom to make our own decisions, without human free will, there is no point to anything.

What we can say, with scientific certainty, is that this life and this material world we live in is a virtual reality. Nothing, for instance, is really solid, and quantum physics suggests everything is created by Mind or Consciousness. This also applies to the Spirit planes which are similar to Earth. The only ultimate reality is Mind, Spirit or Consciousness itself, for ultimately, we are just One Spirit. Thought Energy and Consciousness is what creates everything else, and everything we experience.

Yesterday was my 68th birthday, and my mother (aged 98) kept saying we should be doing something special. We had some drinks, cakes and chocolates, plus a meal. I don’t see what else we could have done really. Her lift is out of order for the next few weeks, so going out would have meant manhandling her wheelchair down 6 flights of stairs and up again, and her negotiating 6 temporary stair lifts.

My partner and I used to have parties occasionally, sometimes at New Year. They were enjoyable, but although I’ve had a few parties more recently I couldn’t cope with any in my flat. The last ones I had were in a pub.

The people who used to come to our old parties are no longer around. My life-partner, George,  passed on in 1991, and others have also died: Roy, Marion, Brian, Noel, Lenny, Sheila, Freddie (who always entertained us with a cabaret. George and I also did a sketch.) Others I have lost touch with and may well be dead: Bob, Stanley, Patricia. Of the old gang only Tom remains and another friend named Ernie who came to a few parties, plus Lenny’s partner Frank who never came to them anyway.

I may have a party for my 70th but it will have to be in a pub function room, and the only people I can think of to invite are the Woodies Roots Music and social group, though they too are not getting any younger and some have already passed away, others are more or less housebound.  I guess I could invite Tom and Ernie as well, and Tom’s friend Mark.

We will have, if not a party, a family get together for my mother’s 100th next year if she makes it. My cousin Bruce in Canada and his wife have promised to come and there are various other cousins and also my brother, but all my aunts and uncles have now passed on, apart from two in a Care Home in Cyprus.

So as one gets older there are less people to invite to parties, you feel less able to cope with them, and do you really wish to celebrate being one year older when you reach your 60s and 70s? Perhaps just when it’s a special number like a round figure, or the big 100.

If I ever reach 100 I don’t want a card (no longer a telegram) from one of the monarch’s flunkies. A message from the President of the European Union would be nice, or from our own President if, by then, we have got rid of the outdated monarchy and become a republic.

So no, I don’t really celebrate birthdays any more. Even Christmas hasn’t been the same since 1970, the last one when the family got together when my grandparents were still alive. Now it’s much like any other day except my mother and I are usually invited to the annual Rotary Club Christmas Party in Battersea Park. If it wasn’t for that, it would be very much like any other day of the year.

Well they didn’t fool me or millions of others. In fact they didn’t fool French or German Intelligence, or British or American Intelligence. The program made clear that the decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime had been made and so-called ‘intelligence’ was made to fit the facts.  Flaky intelligence from unreliable sources was used to justify the war, whilst other intelligence saying there were no weapons of mass destruction was ignored.

Why I wasn’t fooled was because when Colin Powell spoke at the UN General Assembly shortly before the war started he had diagrams (not photographs) of supposed mobile chemical and biological weapons facilities on trucks, some loaded on rails. This was clearly false intelligence even to me as American spy satellites and spy planes, constantly overflying Iraq, would have spotted these things. They would have had actual photographs, not drawings.

The Panorama program revealed that UN weapons inspectors also visited the site in question where these trucks/mobile facilities were supposed to be located, and which was supposedly a chemical and biological weapons factory, and confirmed before the war started that no chemical or biological weapons had ever been manufactured there, and the factory in any case was derelict and hadn’t been used for anything in years.

It was also known, from spy satellites, that a 6 foot wall ran thru the site making it absolutely impossible for trucks of the size reported to negotiate the area. The UN weapons inspectors confirmed, before the war started, that this wall was still in place.

American and British intelligence were told that the Iraqi dissendents and opposition sources who gave this false information were unreliable and probably fabricators.

As always suspected, President Bush wanted to topple Hussein by invading Iraq and Tony Blair promised to support him. Intelligence was then selectively used to justify this preconceived decision to go to war. Reliable intelligence was ignored from high Iraqi officials recruited by the CIA, and unreliable intelligence by taxi drivers, opposition groups and Iraqi asylum seekers were used to justify the war.

It can be argued that both the high level Iraqi officials and the dissident sources could have been spreading false propaganda to further their cause or, in the case of dissident asylum seekers, to try to gain residence in America.

However this does not explain why the intelligence from the dissident sources was not confirmed by the UN weapons inspectors, by satellite and spy plane surveillance, and other reliable intelligence sources. On the contrary, all this reliable independent intelligence supported the Iraqi officials who said Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

The only conclusion is that Bush and Blair knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but proceeded with the war anyway against massive public opinion because they had already come to a decision, for whatever motives, to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. A regime, it must be added which, like Osama Bin Laden, they once armed and supported.

We once had a simple, universal three-tier system of government in the UK: national government at Westminster (except that Northern Ireland also had Stormont), county councils and local government such as boroughs, urban districts and rural authorities. Now it is much more complicated. As well as national assemblies/parliaments in Scotland and Wales, though not in England, most big cities are not in counties at all.

I looked for a map on the Net to include with this blog, but there are so many different ideas as to what constitutes a county and what doesn’t I gave up. It seems there are the old ceremonial counties, but they exist only on paper and have no actual authority in many of the cities once in those counties.

Some of the bigger urban areas are administered by many authorities, such as the West Midlands, Greater Liverpool, Greater Manchester and the various cities in what used to be Yorkshire.

The counties tend to exclude the big cities and urban areas, and these counties themselves have changed a lot over the years since the 1950s. New ones have appeared, such as the Isle of Wight which was formerly in Hampshire, some have come and gone like Avon, and others have been split up like Sussex and Yorkshire. Others have amalgamated, like Cumbria (once Cumberland and Westmorland). Borders have changed – the Home Counties around London lost areas to the Greater London Council, now replaced by the Greater London Authority. Middlesex disappeared altogether, though the name is kept alive by people in West/Northwest London who still include it, quite unnecessarily now we have postcodes, in their address. Whole towns and cities have jumped across borders, so Bournemouth once in Hampshire jumped into Dorset, but now like neighboring Poole claims not to be in either county since they are both local authorities in their own right.

There are also parts of England which have nationalist aspirations, such as Cornwall and the Isle of Wight (Vectian nationalism). The British Isles themselves include the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the various Channel Islands. The UK only covers the mainland, Isle of Wight and the other islands around Britain. Great Britain, incidentally does not include Northern Ireland, hence the official title of the country ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. More a mouthful than ‘Turkish Republic of North Cyprus’ or ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’. All these are better known by their initials or pseudonyms, i.e. UK or Britain (wrongly used to include Northern Ireland), TRNC/North Cyprus, DPRK/North Korea.

A map of the local authorities in the UK (which I have on my kitchen door) is a very complicated mess. This is not the case in the United States, for instance, where big cities and metropolitan areas, while having their own local authorities, still come under the juristiction of the various states (and the District of Columbia) where they are actually situated. For York to be shown as no longer in the county it gave its name to, or rather ‘North Yorkshire’ as that part is now known, is just the most obvious example.

I wish this map could be tidied up so counties covered the whole of the UK, and metropolitan/urban areas like the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater Liverpool and the various former Yorkshire conurbations each had their own single metropolitan authority like the Greater London Authority. England should have a national assembly or parliament to bring it into line with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But then consistency was never a strong point in these islands.

Perhaps that’s why we can never decide whether we’re in the European Union or not, giving the impression we have one leg in and one half out, opting out of the Eurozone and demanding refunds for our contributions to the EU budget.

The residents of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands have just voted in a referendum on whether they want to continue to come under British jurisdiction. Unsurprisingly 99.8 % voted ‘Yes’ to remaining a British Overseas Territory.

As with all votes of around 98 or 99 percent, this makes the whole consultation process highly suspicious. In the former Socialist (Communist) countries percentages of this nature were regularly achieved in general elections voting in the ruling Party or coalition. In those cases it was because there was only the opportunity to vote for a single Party/Coalition list without attracting the attention of the authorities. They were not secret ballots, as to vote against the official list you had to go into a voting booth and strike thru all the names. To vote for the official list you just had to put your ballot paper unmarked in a ballot box. So anyone going into a voting booth was noted as a dissident and would have trouble with finding suitable work, would come under constant surveillance, etc.

This is not the case in the Falklands vote, but in this and similar cases it is the question asked in the referenda and who is allowed to vote which determines the outcome. All referenda which ask whether a territory wishes to come under the juristiction of a larger country are unfair if the result is predictable because whole populations are disenfranchised.

Take places like the Falklands/Malvinas, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Of course if you ask the residents in a referendum there will be a majority vote in the first three places to remain British (though in Northern Ireland the republican population is growing faster than the ‘loyalist’ population). In the case of the Republic of Cyprus the majority Greek-Cypriot population would vote for Enosis or union with Greece. All such votes are, I would argue, invalid as whole electorates have not been consulted.

In all these cases you need three referenda. One in the territory concerned and one each in the countries which claim juristiction. So in the case of the Falklands/Malvinas you need referenda in the islands themselves, in Britain and in Argentina. The results in the islands and Argentina are predictable, and would cancel themselves out. The islanders would vote to remain British and the Argentineans would vote for the Malvinas to come under their country’s juristiction. The result in Britain would probably favor the islanders, but not necessarily in view of the high cost of maintaining their link with Britain in the face of Argentine opposition.

Similarly in Gibraltar and Northern Ireland. To get a true test of public opinion referenda on whether to remain under British juristiction should be held in the two territories, in Britain itself (which does not include Northern Ireland, hence the official title United Kingdom of Great Britain AND Northern Ireland), and in the other countries which claim juristiction, namely Spain and the Republic of Ireland. In the case of the Republic of Cyprus referenda would need to be held in the Republic of Cyprus, in Greece, but also in Turkey and in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus in order to obtain a true test of public opinion.

If all these referenda were held, the results would be fairly predictable and would hardly lead to a solution on the question of sovereignty. The trouble is the question itself. No referendum should, in my opinion, ask whether a certain territory should come under the juristiction of a larger country. The question should be about independence.

So in all these cases the referendum should ask whether the territories, i.e. Falklands/Malvinas, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Cyprus, wish to go for independence. This would mean no other country has juristiction over the territory though as independent states they could seek links and assistance from whoever they wished.

There are, however, additional problems in these territories due to ethnic cleansing and electorate gerrymandering. For instance, despite their proximity to Argentina no Argentines to my knowledge are actually allowed to live on the islands. It is as though Argentina claimed the Isle of Wight, expelled the local British population and put Argentine immigrants on the island, then held a referendum on whether the Isle of Wight wished to come under Argentine juristiction.

In the case of the Republic of Cyprus, since the events of 1974 and earlier, the transference of populations due to ethnic cleansing, etc. has meant most of the Turkish-Cypriot population have fled to the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus or abroad altogether, whilst most of the Greek-Cypriot population still on the island live in the Republic of Cyprus. In the case of Northern Ireland, the Irish province of Ulster includes 9 counties, but only the 6 with a majority loyalist/Protestant population were included in Northern Ireland when the island was divided by the British. So gerrymandering insured a permanent loyalist majority at that time.

So even a vote for full independence in all these territories would be less than satisfactory or decisive if it was suspected that those voting in these territories were not representative of the true indigenous population due to ethnic cleansing or gerrymandering.

In all these cases a vote for full independence would be more legitimate than a vote to be tied to a larger country, but like in Israel with the expelled Palestinians, the question would remain as to what the expelled population or those excluded from the vote (such as those in the Turkish Republic of Cyprus and in the three Ulster counties in the Republic of Ireland) would have voted.

However there is a limit as to how far back in history it is reasonable to go in order to get a true vote on independence. After a certain period of time the current population of a territory has to be taken as the indigenous population. Otherwise the native Americans in the USA, Canada and Latin America, and the Aboriginal/Maori populations in Australia and New Zealand could vote to expel all the generations of European immigrants, which would be totally impractical.

So I would say that the referendum in the Falklands/Malvinas should have been on whether to go for full independence, and if that vote was ‘Yes’ this should be respected by both Argentina and Britain. This would remove the indignity for Argentina of having a British Overseas Territory on its doorstep. As for the newly independent Falklands/Malvinas, they would then have the freedom to forge links with whatever countries they wished, hopefully including Argentina which is so much closer to the islands than Britain thousands of miles away.

In the last resort the question of whether you wish to remain British or not surely is answered by where you choose to live. If this is outside Britain, then you are an ex-pat living abroad. You then come under the juristiction of the country or territory you are living in. The very idea of a British Overseas Territory smacks of outdated empire-building and colonialism, and should be discarded once and for all.