h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

ps: I had considered darting out into the traffic (slow moving - there were major traffic lights ahead) but I was across the other side and there was a high metal barrier dividing the two sides (of about two to three lanes each) requiring pole vaulting abilities to navigate, and the allocated crossing points were too far away.

Hi Stone Aart

Your pigeon experience put me in mind of a piece written by Virginia Woolf and published by her husband as part of a collection of unpubolished work after her suicide- the whole volume taking its title from that first piece "The Death of a Moth"..

Life is all about navigating the borders between life and death, and, as for intervening into 'pigeon reality'- perhaps I should not openly admit to having dealt out death to a pigeon many years ago when we lived at Tulse Hill. Our downstairs neighbour had a cat that was accustomed to bringing half-dead mice home as a kind of present or trophy. This time I heard real screaming from her and went to help. There was a half-dead pigeon on her bedroom floor which I took outside and, on examination I could see that its rib-cage had been opened up with its beating heart visible. My judgement was that nobody would even try to save what a famous Tulse Hill old-boy later called 'rats with wings', and that the kindest thing to do was to kill it. So I beheaded it. After all Dr. Guillotine had informed the revolutionary authorities in France that his process would deliver instant and painless death.

Some years later some pupils brought me a sick pigeon which I carefully took to the RSPCA office in Tulse Hill. They pointed out that it was crawling with insects which were a symptom of its inevitable and terminal decline: and they took it away to be "processed" to death..

Actually this all seems rather typical of the sickness of the modern age in which we are all being encouraged to inhabit an interior "safe zone" as if we were all more or less like sheep to be 'penned in' whilst we are asked to leave the actual processes of dealing with the realities of Life and Death to "experts" and "specialists"- whose expertise is actually in "the appliance of Science" and that fundamental idea that "Natural reality" is fundamentally neither Good nor Evil it is merely indifferent.

Yes. They say that hospitals are the most dangerous places. Far more dangerous than roads, building sites, steelworks etc. Studies reveal that more people die in hospitals than anywhere else.

In the past and in more "primitive" societies death is far more visible.

How do you kill a kitten/ young cat dieing of cat flu. I couldn't and I tried to comfort it while it screamed through the night eventually dieing in what appeared to be the most awful agony. This was part of my adventure whilst working in Crete.

Hi Stone Aart

Re the concentration of death, sickness and disease in Hospitals:

A fundamental part of my questionning of the ongoing "Age of Revolution"- which our 'Civilization of Science and Technology' seeks to turn into a "permanent revolution"- is my belief that in many ways its founding architects were Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham.

Both men produced seminal works in 1776 the first great "Year of Revolution".. Adam Smith contributed the idea that life should be centred around wealth creation, maximized through Specialization and the Economies of Large Scale that specialization made possible.. Jeremy Bentham brought his ideas of the test of Utility and of developing superior and more functional mechanisms that would take advantage of a new appreciation of the Laws of Nature and the way that they could be exploited.. Thus the great central thrust of revolutionary change became the great "Panopticon"- Bentham's prison design that he worked out for a brother who was charged with running a prison in Russia as cheaply as possible.

As Steven Watson pointed out in his excellent volume in the Oxford History of England series, both Smith and Bentham believed in a Creator-God who had made the universe as a great piece of 'clockwork' and believed therefore that their ideas were in keeping with God's will and intention so their application would involve working with God's plan and not against it.

In the Panopticon (and Strangeways I think is one of the prisons that used the prison design) one warder placed at the hub of radiating cell blocks could keep an eye on hundreds of prison cells. And subsequently the principle of large-scale, centralized, specialized and scientific ( and therefore inhuman) organization of human life became fundamental to what Kenneth Clarke called "Heroic Materialism".

The "monitorial system", for example, attributed to Lancaster and Bell was invented in order that their two rival missionary societies might efficiently undertake the education of the hundreds of millions of people in Moghul India. The teacher would teach a lesson to a handfull of selected pupils until they could reliably recite it parrot fashion, and then each "monitor" would teach it to another group. In this way one teacher could "teach" more than a hundred pupils- "teaching" in fact almost like the level of the one prison guard who was supposed to be supervising a hundred prison cells.. Such things are more a matter of form and appearance of doing something rather than actually achieving very much- rather like modern centralized politics and government, which is ever ready with a self-justifying mantra- the list of all the things that has been done- as David Cameron regularly insists in Prime Minister's Questions.

By the 1830s the huge 'populous districts" of the Industrial North that are described in the lurid documents about "The Horrors of the Industrial Revolution" show that- as Mary Shelley had foreseen in her novel about Dr. Frankenstein's hope to be hailed as a universal benefactor of humankind once he had created a new and superior larger-than-Human creature- the actual increase in Scale produced problems that had not been foreseen- especially problems of pollution and the overloading of Natural ecosystems- eg. the Victorian graveyard and sewerage problems and the chronic problems of Public Health with new plagues like Cholera, typhoid, TB and polio, not to mention the increasing "drug culture" with the widespread use of opiates among the affluent, while the "opium of the masses" was a combination of alcohol, tobacco for the working males and tea, sugar and chocolate for the women and children.

But, of course, such large scale problems did create business opportunities that had not existed before. Great cities had learned across the centuries to develop smaller scale solutions based on scavenging and recycling, including the "Night Soil" that had often been a prized resource that enriched and fertilized the food-growing belts that surrounded and supplied the cities. But now with such suddenly mushrooming cities the amount of sewage merely killed off the natural ecosystem, especially as increasingly it was contaminated by industrial effluent as the role of natural, biodegradable and renewable goods and commodities diminished in the face of materials wrested from the bowels of the Earth or from the heights of Chemical expertise. By the late Victorian era towns and cities in these islands had taken to building sewage systems that pumped raw sewage out into the sea usually below the tidal line.

While away in our "rural retreat" for a month I read among other things the Brandt Report "North and South" (1980) which blithely talks about the inevitable process of urbanization across the world, and the progressive destruction of the family and established patterns of social life with them all being replaced by the money system- even though it accepts that urban life costs at least five times as much as rural life - and often 20 times as much because of the very scale of the problems that can no longer be tackled in a spirit of humanity.

Cass

Hi Peanut..Hope you are staying dry amidst all this wet weather-not to mention windy..Hope you and hiccup and all your dear ones have had a good Xmas..And that 2014 will be kind to us all.

Cheers

Cass

Hey Cass

Thank you for your thoughts of us

We have had a very peaceful holiday so far, weather is wild but we are fortunate relatively unaffected by the weather. Being at home and having no actual travel plans always helps.

In between storms it has been a lovely couple of winter days here

Wishing you and yours well in 2014

that kindness might prevail, for all

and don't forget your

Peanut