The Unorthodox Website Blog

Monday I went to Seven Sisters Tube station with a friend, and found myself in Tottenham High Road outside my old college. I was last a student there nearly 47 years ago – I left in mid-1961. Of course Seven Sisters Tube wasn’t there then – the Victoria Line hadn’t been built. It was only a little while before that the trolleybuses had been replaced by Routemasters, as I well remember going to college on the 233 (now W3 bus) then changing to a trolleybus at Wood Green.

It was a very strange feeling being outside the college and remembering my classmates, teachers, etc. nearly half a century ago. The outside had changed very little, though they have now built something on one end of the building which includes the new main entrance.

I went in there, hoping to to have a look around my old alma mater, but alas the security was like Fort Knox.

These were the headlines last weekend, but unfortunately they were not talking about a sudden return en masse of the ‘bobby on the beat’. These were off duty policemen and policewomen demanding more pay.

Normally you will rarely see a policeman or policewoman on the streets, though go abroad and they are everywhere. No wonder there is so much gang warfare and crime on our streets. Dashing around in police cars is no good – the police have to be seen continuously patrolling our streets, armed when and if necessary.

What we have instead are ‘plastic police’, community service officers who have no power of arrest, and just stand and watch crimes being committed whilst they phone for the real police to come. Of course any member of the public could do this, or even make a citizen’s arrest.  By the time the real police arrive, the crime has been committed and the culprits may well have escaped.

When it comes to things ‘paranormal’ it is wise to maintain a ‘healthy skepticism’, by which I mean not to be too gullible, but at the same time to keep an open mind about the possibilities, indeed likelihood, of the existence of many things which our science cannot yet fully explain.

Whether it is ghosts and hauntings, UFOs, mythical creatures such as the Yeti, near-death and out-of-the-body experiences, mediumship messages, materializations,  etc. I try to weigh up the evidence for and against. In the case of mediums, such as those seen on TV or who write books on the subject of ‘life after death’, their credibility is a major factor.

I have seen mediums who are very credible indeed, I’ve seen some who I am not sure about, and I’ve also read books by some which seem totally unbelievable. One such author writes in such detail with highly unlikely descriptions of an after-life which read just like science fiction novels.

‘How bona to vada your dolly old eek!’

Is it any wonder I and my mother, when watching TV, can’t understand much of what’s going on when the younger generation speak another language from us over 60s?

Watching a TV program with a friend still in his 40s, everyone in the audience seemed to know what ‘dogging’ was, and there were hoots of laughter as people admitted to doing it. I don’t see what’s funny about walking the dog, but my 40-something friend explained that it means having sex in public. Why ‘dogging’ I don’t know – because dogs do it in public? In that case it could just as easily mean lifting one’s leg and pissing up against a lamp-post.

Graham Norton in his trendy show once asked the audience to turn on something or other on their mobile phones, and again everyone (all under 30) seemed to know what the Hell he was talking about.

Last night they showed on TV the German film ‘Goodbye Lenin’ which I saw at the cinema when it first came out in 2003. It is about a Berlin woman happily living in the capital of the GDR (German Democratic Republic – East Germany). She knows everything is not perfect in her Socialist fatherland, but is constantly trying to improve it. She does not follow her cosmonaut husband to the West, but decides to stay with her children and help build a better Socialist society in the East.

Around the 40th anniversary of the GDR in October 1989 the woman suffers a heart attack then falls into a coma. When she awakes in hospital the Wall has fallen, and Germany is about to be reunited.

Fearing his mother  will suffer a fatal second heart attack if she learns that everything she believed in has been swept away overnight, the son, his family and friends stage an increasingly elaborate ruse involving repackaging Western goods in old GDR packaging and faking GDR TV news programs on videotape to make her believe her homeland is not about to be absorbed into capitalist West Germany.

This relates to a past-life regression session I had under hypnosis way back in 1993. I’d not done anything similar before, and haven’t done so since.

I have no idea whether what I came up with whilst under hypnosis were real memories of past lives of mine, or whether they all came from my imagination, or from stories I’d read.

I seemed to be fully awake, and the whole interview, for that’s what it was like, was taped. The hypnotist had told me I would be unaware of any noises or sounds outside the room as he put me under. The only reason I know I must have been hypnotized was that on the tape I could clearly hear a dog barking outside the window somewhere, but when under hypnosis I didn’t hear the dog.

The hypnotist took me back before I was born to three supposedly past lives.

Answer: when it’s part of, or joined up to, a major metropolis. At least in my book.

It annoys me intensely to see and hear, for instance, London boroughs and shopping centers in these boroughs referred to constantly as ‘towns’ or ‘town centers’. Thus the signs at Clapham Junction station, for instance, which used to indicate the main exit to Clapham Junction ’shopping center’ now say ‘Town center’. Which town? I was not aware Clapham Junction, or Battersea, was a ‘town’. OK we once had a ‘town hall’ in Battersea, now it has moved to the center of Wandsworth, but neither are ‘towns’ anymore, they are inner London suburbs. In the case of Wandsworth, one of the 32 London boroughs.

I have always accepted place names like Camden Town, Canning Town, etc. but never regarded these as real towns either.

 Q: What’s the link between all the pictures in the article below? Answer at the end. Click on the pictures to enlarge most of them.

I feel in need of some light relief in the midst of a depressing time of the year when all sorts of things seem to be getting me down. I’ve had no heating/hot water for over a week, but they are supposed to be coming to fix it over the next two days.  In under 3 months I have been sent no less than 7 notices of tax codes from two different tax offices, all of them incorrect, by their own admission after I queried them. And other things that are sent to try us – such as a music magazine I write to/subscribe to and which also sponsors gigs and other events managing, over the last few months, to annoy the Irish, Muslims/Arabs and which has now signed up someone who thinks Dave Copeland did a good job at the Admiral Duncan gay pub in Soho.

There has been a heated argument on a music forum I belong to which all boiled down to the differing ages of consent in different parts of the world, at different times.

For instance, Jerry Lee Lewis and his two sisters were all married before they reached 16, and these were all apparently perfectly legal in Louisiana at that time (1950s or earlier). A lot of people will remember the fuss over Jerry’s third wife, Myra, who was a distant cousin, and only 13 when he married her. But this was quite common in that part of the States at the time – Elvis was dating Priscilla when she was a schoolgirl of 14, for instance.

In Spain, the legal age of consent is apparently still 14. In England for years the age of consent without parents’ permission was 21, the ‘coming of age’ birthday at the time.

There’s just as much bunk talked about each New Year as there is about Christmas. Both are entirely arbitary dates picked out of a hat. Why we should proclaim yesterday as the first day of a new year – January 1st, 2008 – is a complete mystery, buried somewhere in the secret deliberations of the early Christian church. We do know, for certain, that the founder of the Christian religion was NOT born on December 31st, 0000, or January 1st, 0001 come to that.

But although most people in the world are not Christians, and whilst other religions have different calendars and celebrate different ‘New Year’ dates, the world at large has accepted for convenience that we are now living in the year 2008, whether you refer to it as AD or the current era, or whatever.

What amazes me is the excitement and optimism which greets every New Year. Why should another period of 12 months be any better than previous ones?