This morning as I was getting showered and dressed, there was a play on ClassicFM of 'Away in a manger' which is, of course, a very traditional Christmas carol. But it put me in mind of a radio comedy series broadcast in either the 1970's or the 1980's which had a way with Christmas panels. As cinema had developed since the late 1950's a new wide format was introduced into cinemas to aid in the excitement and visual spectacle of films such as 'Ben Hur' (in which the chariot race was, I believe, 20 minutes long) Many cinemas, though, could not get this extra format and so resorted to cutting off a little of the left and the right side of the projected film but one supposes the audience barely noticed. The radio comedians, though, wondered how Christmas would be if they were constantly truncated to right and left in the revised system and so 'Away in a manger' became 'Way in a mange'. Even worse, we got things like 'Hark the herald Angels sing' being truncated to 'Ark the herald Angels sin' and so on. So this has remained one of the more amusing aspects to Christmas as the years roll by.
Yesterday after we had breakfasted, my son and I got various Christmas things handed down from the loft where, fortunately, we had left them in a convenient pile for ease of access. Although the various decorations have been brought down, I am not going to attempt to erect or to dress the Christmas tree until this Friday when our domestic help says she is more than willing to help a hand. I had to do a certain amount of repair work on some of the stands upon which we locate the tree but fortunately I remembered where we had a good stock of Christmas paper left over from previous years so that eased my restoration labours. After this, and as time was a little pressing, I pushed Meg down the hill to pick up our copy of our daily newspaper and I also took the opportunity to buy a packet soup of a flavour which I cannot get in my local supermarket. On our way down the hill, we noticed that one of our church friends was busy spearing large leaves with a long handled fork in her front garden and this was a great opportunity to thank her for a little kindness she had bestowed on us recently. Our friend used to be responsible for all of the flower arranging in our local church before she retired from this position having done it for many years. But she still made Christmas wreaths and generally these had to be ordered well in advance as the other parishioners were always very keen to obtain one. Our friend had enough material left over for one spare wreath and she actually not only made it but came and fastened it into position in our front porch and this must have a period when we were out of the house so we offered her our profuse thanks.
The news coming out of Syria after the fall of the Assad routine is as terrible as you might expect when a dictator has been deposed. The precedents for establishing orderly government after the downfall of a dictator are not good (we have the precedents of Iraq and the Yemen after all) But having said, the rebel leader has been making suitable conciliatory noises since the fall of Damascus so it is possible that the whole of Syria does not descend into anarchy. So far, the rebel leader has not been indicating to the Russians that their naval and airbase are not to be threatened by any emergent regime but the whole world is rather holding its breath at the moment. As soon as Damascus had fallen, the rebels wanted to release the hundreds, if not thousands, of Syrian citizens locked and tortured by the Assad regime and although locating the prison was easy, releasing its inhabitants had not been. In order to avoid recriminations, no doubt, the gaolers seem to have fled evidently not leaving any keys behind. So the rebels had scoured the country to find anybody with the expertise of how to blow open the iron doors which guarded a network of subterranean tunnels in which not only men abut also women and children had been imprisoned.Those held captive could scarcely believe what was happening to them at the point of liberation and I heard an interview with a Syrian refugee living in Manchester explaining that there was scarcely a family in the land who did not have a family relative or friend imprisoned by the former regime. Sky news is reporting that tens of thousands of detainees have so far been freed from Syria's prisons, according to Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syria's prisons were notorious during the Assad rule, highlighted in 2013 by a defector known as Caesar who smuggled out photos showing evidence of torture, disease and starvation. At Sednaya, Amnesty and other groups claim dozens of people were secretly executed every week, estimating up to 13,000 Syrians were killed between 2011 and 2016.
I am getting increasingly irritated by the government's plan to build new houses, a feeling accentuated by the plans of the Labour Government to increase the stock of housing by allowing developers to have much more leeway - an almost automatic green light - so long as their plans conform with the local development plan. Here in Bromsgrove and particularly near here I live, there are two massive developments of about 400-500 houses being erected at breakneck speed. Many local residents are fearful about such developments for the simple reason that firstly they have all of the local disruption necessitated by the new development (for example the installation of a new gas main in the distributor road serving my own street) and then there is the consequent pressure on local services, particularly health services which are not expanded at the same time. In my view, the government ought to be talking about the establishment of new communities rather than houses and these communities ought to have a minimum level of provision (I would suggest a doctor's surgery, a pharmacy, a small local convenience store and a facility for communal use and available for a cheap hire price to make provision, for example, for mother and toddler group) and the houses then be built around them rather than an afterthought, years later (and often, never).
© Mike Hart [2024]