Journal Entries
Wainwright, the man who loved the lakes.
Posted Jul 20, 2007
Just saw at BBC2 the documentary about a man called "Alfred Wainwright". I did not know the man and neither his books.
For the rest, I got frightened, because his weird, unhappy way of living came very close by. A continuous suffocating loneliness within his marriage that could only become worse every day of their lives.
At least the same can be said for his extremely loyal wife who even made notes for him so he could take care for his own while she had left the house after rumors about a new woman he was meeting.
It is my conviction, that in most cases, both parties/persons have about the same weaknesses, but is often shown clearly by just one to the outside world. I agree with our Dutch choreographer in modern dance, Hans van Maanen, that it’s very, very often a fifty-fifty situation.
Alfred Wainwright (1907–1991) was a British hill walker and wrote a guidebook in many, many chapters about the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955 and 1966. The books - beside many others - were and still are a great success.
While copying it at my video, I many times halted. Things were irritating and really frightening for me. Soon I discovered why.
His suffocating loneliness in an even more suffocating marriage, in a time and culture where men and women were not educated by examples in society who speak their minds openly ,let alone their emotions and not to speak about neurotic feelings and obsessive thoughts.
So to me, his wife had any better life. I estimate her suffering was even more, because she had no status and above all, she could not escape by following an obsessive goal, as far as I know.
As I wrote, some moments in this TV program frightened me, to imagine the sheer hell of silence in their house, in them, without ever been able to reach out just one inch to each others. I recognize that from my early childhood. Silence, almost as a killer.
Alfred Wainwright worked since 1941 at the Borough Treasurer's office in Kendal and every weekend he went to the lake district and walked in search for peace of mind by feeling the wind, seeing the clouds and enjoying the views.
Everything in his life was going according to his extremely detailed plan, as if their was a war going on, and to me, there was a war going on.
Because of his incapability to do something about it with his wife and only son, he turned a new born passion for the mountains in the Lake District into a complete obsession to walk and describe and publish any detail of what he'd done and seen in the lake District. A German clerk could not have done it better, just now looking at the bureaucratic aspect of it all.
His obsession became his survival, as nothing disturbed his plan for fifteen years ahead (!) while his writings were even all being published.
I hate to say it, because it feels almost like a camp in the Second World War, but all went according to his 15 year-plan, while he was finally finished writing one week ahead of his own 15 years-timetable.
I just got sick to hear that. Not as a statement, but as a reaction.
I did and do recognize a lot; the marriage, ultimate loneliness, forceful neurotic behavior, almost autistic personality and the first sunshine in his life by seeing the mountains in the Lake District.
I guess, he experienced for the first time in his life a feeling of
connection, of alliance and that sensation became the key for his emotional survival route in a life he experienced as close to death.
It made me more relaxed to see him in the end of the program in some family movie pictures rather relaxed with his second wife who was fifteen years younger and was also interviewed in this TV program some time ago. Yes, in those latter days he became more open towards the world and love around him.
I hope his first wife had the same kind of final destination. I did not hear anything about her anymore in the program, but it was a program about him and not about their marriage.
Yes, a moving experience for me, that I want to leave behind by writing about it here in my Journal.
Alfredo, July 2007
(I hope the editors won’t delete it, as too often happens)
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Latest reply: Jul 20, 2007
Gypsies in Europe 2007
Posted Jul 16, 2007
News extract, July 2007, by me
UN calls for EU help on Roma children in Europe
Roma children in south-eastern Europe are facing serious discrimination, social exclusion and disproportional poverty, according to a new UN report. UNICEF calls on the EU to help improve the situation. Roma, Sinti and traveller's children in south-eastern Europe are facing "human rights abuses on a large scale".
The children "remain invisible" because they do not have birth certificates and therefore they cannot get basic health-care and education, etc.
As many as one million Roma children in south-eastern Europe are unaccounted for in official statistics, according to UNICEF.
Later in life, they will not be able to vote, make use of the social services nor register their own children.
UNICEF called on the EU to use its leverage to raise accountability. "If you look at new member states, their problems have not been solved; in fact, they are getting worse," he said.
UNICEF presented the report at the German parliament together with the report on Roma in Germany.
That study found there are some 50,000 Roma from the former Yugoslavia living in Germany on refugee status who are not eligible for integration and language courses because they don't have official papers.
"Roma children should be given the chance to break up the vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination and prejudices," said Reinhart Schlagintweit, head of UNICEF Germany in a statement on Monday.
He warned of the "dramatic consequences" when "hundreds of thousands of children around the world grow up in ghettoes, without educational perspectives in the heart of Europe."
I believe we Europeans are hiding in the jungle of bureaucratic papers, because we do not wish to know how to brake up that tough vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination, criminality , isolation and prejudices,"
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Latest reply: Jul 16, 2007
Srebrenica Remembered. Juli 11, 2007-07-11
Posted Jul 11, 2007
Most of us know of the massacre of hundreds of Muslim men inside the U.N. “safe haven” that will say; a designated United Nations Safe Area.
General Mladic and his soldiers (Serbia) stood at the gate of the official U.N. declared “safe haven” in Srebrenica at July 11 in 1995.
It was a common feeling in the Western world, that an official declaration by the United Nations about seven safe havens in former Yugoslavia, would be enough to keep Bosnian people safe, who suddenly had to live with only Servian peoples around their village, during a civil war.
Well, the Serves had their own standards in this war and entered the save haven of Srebrenica, because they appeared to totally ignore the status of any “U.N. safe havens”.
The U.N. military in that safe has asked for air strike by U.N. and NATO, for the whole area of that haven, but they did not get it.
Furthermore, the U.N. soldiers were heavily undermanned and under armed, because, as I said, the U.N. believed that the status of that area would be enough to protect these people.
All these facts became parts of a chain of disasters with its horrible results.
These people did flee and seek safety in the U.N military compound in Srebrenica, hoping that there they would be safe at last.
So there they stood at the Gate of the U.N. compound within a safe haven and they were permitted to enter the compound. All of them.
Well, the Serves had their own violent goals and told the U.N. soldiers to push these people from their compound.
And they did.
Yes, they did.
Even the military translator was handed over to the Serves.
All refugees were executed within an hour.Total of eight thousand men and boys !!
There have been some incidental brave actions by a handful of U.N. soldiers, but for the main part; they just let the Serves do what they wanted; murder civilians because of their ethnic identity.
We did not even protest, neither even symbolically.
Who is “we”?
U.N. soldiers.
Dutch soldiers.
The U.N. colonel was so emotionally bullied by the Serbian general Mladic, that this colonel accepted a gift and had a drink with him and asking him if the gift was for his wife or for himself.
Apparently we were more concerned about the safety of our own soldiers than about the safety of those we were sent by the U.N. and NATO.
In the Netherlands we never came really in terms with the drama and so we never fully anticipated the sadness of family members.
A couples of years ago there was also a remembrance at Srebrenica,
But our prime minister did stay at home, “because the Serves are fully to blame the massacre and not the soldiers in the compound, and as far as our soldiers is concerned, they were U.N. soldiers under U.N. command.
Well, I believe one thing very, very surely.
If these U.N. Military were really concerned about the fate of these people, these soldiers – in one way or another – at least would have behaved very differently as they did at that day.
Even delivering the U.N. translator...
It’s a say with some truth in it; “when the war is over, the Dutch come in”.
P.S.
I admit that we show now these days in 2007 a different behaviour in Afghanistan. NATO as well as our militairy did learn from the U.N. safe haven formula.
And it’s also very true, that every etnic group in former Yougoslavia committed the same crimes as the Serves did.
http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details.php?content=2005-06-23-01&page=1&menupage=
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Latest reply: Jul 11, 2007
Does God Play Dice ?
Posted Jun 26, 2007
I did read an article at the internet today from Mr. Stephan Hawking, that is named; "does god play dice". Written in 2006.
This was my reply but first I post what Mr.Hawking summed up at the end of his lecture.(don't give up, don't give in, it doesn't matter)
Quote, Mr Hawking, at the end of his lecture;"does god play dice?"
"To sum up, what I have been talking about, is whether the universe evolves in an arbitrary way, or whether it is deterministic.
The classical view, put forward by Laplace, was that the future motion of particles was completely determined, if one knew their positions and speeds at one time.
This view had to be modified, when Heisenberg put forward his Uncertainty Principle, which said that one could not know both the position, and the speed, accurately.
However, it was still possible to predict one combination of position and speed. But even this limited predictability disappeared, when the effects of black holes were taken into account.
The loss of particles and information down black holes meant that the particles that came out were random. One could calculate probabilities, but one could not make any definite predictions.
Thus, the future of the universe is not completely determined by the laws of science, and its present state, as Laplace thought. God still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
That is all I have to say for the moment. Thank you for listening"
End quote.
My own reply;
"I admit that I almost do have one “dogma” about life and that’s, that I think/feel I hardly ever will be able to be certain about anything.
It frightens me, this uncertainty, but that’s the price I got to pay for existing at this wonderful globe.
I appreciate and enjoy the lectures of Mr. Hawking very much.
My delight grows with the speed of light by his explanations I cannot grasp, because in the presence of his lecture my failure to grasp doesn’t frighten me that much, as it would have done otherwise.
I’m a bit of a wanderer and somehow my intuition translates his scientific information for me. And it can be trustworthy for me. That’s the highest certainty I have reached so far 
Example;
I do love cold war spy movies, but don’t ask me after five minutes who does what, let alone names, but somehow I can exactly join the flow of the movie.
In that way I do anticipate his lectures and as long Mr. Hawking also shares his sense of humor, I can predict I’ll stay a bit longer at this confusing world.
I love the man and his work.
Greetings from Amsterdam, Alfredo."
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Latest reply: Jun 26, 2007
Royal academy of arts summer exhibition Royal Art 2007
Posted Jun 22, 2007
Quote BBC ;
"Top 20 vote
Here are the Top 20 artworks shortlisted by the Royal Academy for the Newcomer's Prize. To see a larger representation of the artwork click on 'Enlarge Image' and to vote for your favourite click on 'Vote for Artwork'. You will be taken to a page where you will need to fill in a form before submitting your vote. Please consider your choice carefully as you can only vote once. The artworks are arranged in alphabetical order according to the artists' names.
End quote.
If you want to vote; this is the link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/summerexhibition/vote/
At this very moment there is still a program about it at BBC 2
Alfredo, Amsterdam
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Latest reply: Jun 22, 2007
Alfredo
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