"The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen"
-- II Samuel 1: 17, 19–20 (KJV)

Yesterday I sent an email to Richard Aitken-Davies, the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for the constituency where I live, Derby North. I received a reply a few hours later. Both emails are transcribed here.

Dear Mr Aitken-Davies,

I had the pleasure of meeting you briefly in Derby city centre yesterday; you may remember that I promised you my vote in the forthcoming General Election on a 'least worst option' basis!

One of your entourage was good enough to ask if I had a message for the Conservative Party. I mentioned my disappointment over the Conservatives' support for the UK government's participation in Bush's war in Iraq over recent years yesterday, but I'd like to offer a few more thoughts, if I may.

I've voted Conservative all my adult life, still very proud to have cast a winning vote in all of Mrs Thatcher's General Election victories. But, in addition to apparently automatic support for US aggression in the Middle East, I've been dismayed by a few other aspects of recent Conservative policy.

I could perhaps summarise my dismay with the question - why does the Conservative Party feel it needs to backpedal on important principles so often? I'm thinking of devolution and the minimum wage for example - Conservatives opposed both before they were introduced, but apparently, are now all in favour. Quite apart from the fact that, in my view, you were quite right to oppose them in the first place, a lack of consistency on these issues tends to diminish credibility, somewhat.

And shouldn't Conservatives be pledging to maintain tuition fees instead of promising to scrap them, promising to cut public spending rather than increase it?

It's impossible to outflank Blair and New Labour on the right, of course, I admit that - but I think that the Conservative Party is in danger of abandoning some of the values and principles which define it by shifting too far toward the centre.

On an unrelated note, I am personally strongly opposed to hunting with dogs, and would be very disappointed to see the present government's recent legislation repealed.

Anyway, sincere best wishes and good luck.

James

Dear Mr Gibbon

Many thanks for your e-mail and pledge of support.

On devolution, we are planning to hold a referendum on the Welsh Assembly, given the wafer thin majority in favour, as to whether it should be abolished, retained in its present form or given increased powers. As to Scotland, we do not believe that the Scots wish to see a change back and despite our reservations the Scottish Parliament is now an accepted part of the political machinery in Scotland. For England, we are saying that decisions on matters pertaining only to England should be voted on exclusively by MP's from English constituencies. We have to accept that things have moved on and work with the situation we inherit.

Similarly with the National Wage, the genie is out of the bottle and we have no plans to reverse this legislation.

We can certainly argue that these measures were unnecessary and unhelpful but there are now greater priorities which voters have on their agenda and to which we want to respond: crime, immigration, tax, hospitals, schools and Europe.

On tuition fees, we believe we have a better approach than Labour.  This is centred on transfer of student loan books to the universities to create additional income and the opportunity for endowment building. Students will pay marginally more interest on their loans but overall will be better off because they do not have to pay tuition fees. There is no net cost to the taxpayer from this proposed change.

I hope this is of some help.

Many thanks again for taking the trouble to let me have your views and for the good wishes.


Yours sincerely

Richard Aitken-Davies

Conservative Parliamentary Candidate - Derby North

This time, the weather was relatively mild as I walked to Derby's Midland Railway Station in the early hours of Friday, 11th March. I'd started my journey a little earlier than last time, and I arrived at the station with 20 minutes to spare before climbing aboard the 05:40 to Crewe. I listened to the Gang Of Four's classic Entertainment! album on my MP3 stick as the train slid away from the platform; the conductor seemed disconcerted that I was the only person aboard the train, commenting that there were usually four or five passengers from Derby, but I certainly wasn't bothered in the least.

I changed at Crewe, where I had a pleasant breakfast consisting of coffee and a croissant at one of the station's cafes, and 40 minutes later, at Wilmslow where I had to wait for about 15 minutes for the final train to Manchester Airport. Although I wasn't hungry, I was slightly bored, so I ate the four baby potatoes which I had carefully microwaved and wrapped in a sandwich bag a few hours earlier, to provide comfort as a pocketwarmer on the long walk to Derby railway station. They were still slightly warm.

I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. I had an 'electronic' ticket, meaning that I simply had to identify myself with my passport to receive my boarding pass. I did that and went to consume more coffee at one of the airport's numerous coffee shops. I was travelling via Stockholm's Arlanda airport, a two-leg flight. The two flights were uneventful and pleasant enough, although not quite as comfortable as last time - every seat was occupied both times, so I wasn't able to have a row of seats to myself, and the second flight was delayed by an hour. Nice to visit Sweden finally, but of course my Swedish experience was as unrepresentative and limited as it was brief, confined as it was to Arlanda airport - which was not particularly interesting.

I arrived at Helsinki Vantaa Airport in the late afternoon local time, took a bus to the city centre, then a tram to Sari's flat in Munkkiniemi. I got off the tram after the first couple of minutes, however .. I was thrilled to be back in Helsinki, and I wanted to soak up some of the atmosphere by walking for a while. I was wearing winter clothing, including a rather fetching wooly hat, but it was very cold indeed - about -10 degrees, I think - so I climbed back onto a tram after a few minutes.


We spent the next couple of days looking around, walking and shopping; Helsinki's city centre has a nice selection of shops, including an excellent bookshop and a couple of large department stores. I've always felt that I should be able to walk on water, so one particular, surreal highlight for me was a walk on the frozen surface of the sea! The entire surface of Laajalahti Bay, an inlet off the Baltic Sea a few minutes' walk from Sari's flat, was frozen over as far as the eye could see, except for a few small holes which had been drilled by fishermen. Close inspection of one of the holes revealed that the icy surface of the bay was about a foot thick. I'd visited the same place in October last year, when the sea there was in its more familiar, completely liquid state - so it really was a thrill to be able to go out to sea without a boat! A view from the edge of the shore is shown above, with a photograph taken in October for comparison.

It felt very good to acquaint myself with Helsinki again, although it was much colder this time. I wore winter clothing of course, but I don't think my face has ever been exposed to such low temperatures before. But it's a fantastic place, even without such an engaging companion as Sari, so I didn't mind the cold.

On Sunday evening, we went to see Mike Leigh's Vera Drake at a cinema in the centre of Helsinki. I'm not a fan of Mike Leigh in general; he's undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, but there's generally an underlying agenda in his films - he appears to suffer from a quaint notion that the working classes are charming and faultless perpetual victims of the heartless and despicable middle classes, and he obviously wants his audience to suffer from one as well.

And for the first few minutes of Vera Drake, I thought it was going to be another tiresome, romantic homage to the downtrodden angelic working classes. But although there is more than a whiff of that, it's much more than that - Leigh's main target is a legitimate one, the horrible hypocrisy of the time in which it's set. Best of all for me, it radiates the grim, austere zeitgeist of post-war England. I love 'time travel' films, and the Finnish subtitles weren't at all distracting. A very good film indeed.

On Tuesday, we took a train from Helsinki to Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland about 170 miles North of Helsinki, to spend a few days at Sari's parents' home there. Finland's wide railway gauge allows for huge trains, and this one was a very modern, comfortable double-decker! We sat on the upper deck, and I enjoyed the scenery as it sped past the window, mostly consisting of trees. Finland has rather a lot of them.

Sari's parents live in a beautiful house on the edge of a natural, wooded area, in a neighbourhood which, when I was there, was characterised by huge quantities of fallen snow. They couldn't have been more warmly hospitable and friendly, and I was made to feel very much at home there.

We went walking often, usually with the family's dog, Turre, to a nearby frozen lake. Once again the surface was completely solid, firm enough to drive on. Being from a part of the world where frozen water is most often encountered in a refrigerator, I must admit that walking on the frozen surface of a lake or the sea was a fascinating, almost mind-expanding experience. But here, the cold weather reclaims the lakes and inlets every year to turn them into part of the land, and the Finns make full use of nature's gift - every time we visited the lake in Jyväskylä, or Laajalahti Bay at Helsinki, people were walking their dogs there or skiing.

Incidentally, I was amazed to see people propelling themselves around on skis even on level footpaths and roads, as well as the lake - in fact to be perfectly honest, I had thought that a steep downhill slope was necessary for that method of transport! But it appears to be a relatively quick and practical way to get around.

On Wednesday, we walked around the centre of Jyväskylä and climbed the steps to visit the clock tower, a stylish, square building with an excellent view of the city from the top. We visited the top floor and walked around the grounds for a while, then walked back to the snooker hall owned and managed by Sari's parents, and played pool. I hadn't played pool for years, not since I was at university, and I wasn't exactly a talented player even then - but it was a lot of fun nonetheless :D

That evening, Sari's parents treated us to another trip to the cinema, this time to see Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby - another excellent film, fully deserving of the critical acclaim it has received, and as if that wasn't enough, on our final evening in Jyväskylä, Return Of The Fly, the old Vincent Price horror movie from the '50s turned up on TV. Fantastic!:D

We returned to Helsinki at midday on Friday, 18th March, by train. Late that night, we found yet another cinematic treasure, Born To Boogie, the film about Marc Bolan and T Rex directed by Ringo Starr, on one of the TV channels. I hadn't seen it before, but it's right out there, well worth worth watching. I must say Finland really does have excellent TV.

I returned, very reluctantly of course, to England the next day. Not a lot to say about the journey back really .. this time I was travelling via Copenhagen. I was slightly irritated by the occasional efforts of the overweight woman in her early 20s in the seat next to mine to make conversation on the first plane, but she desisted after a while. This was my first visit to Denmark, if I can honour a 40-minute stay at Copenhagen airport with the term, and I spent most of it reading The Independent, waiting to board my plane to Manchester. From the air, leaving Copenhagen, I had an exceptional view of the Øresund Bridge, which joins Sweden and Denmark.  A very distinctive structure; traffic comes off the bridge onto an artificial islet, before diving into a tunnel to complete the journey to Copenhagen beneath the waters of the Øresund strait.

I'm very happy to have seen Finland in Winter. The extreme cold and the omnipresent ice and snow are a defining part of its character, and the frozen scenery is really quite striking; its beauty more than compensates for the occasional discomfort caused by exposure to the low temperature which gives rise to it. And I look great in a wooly hat.

I must confess - I'd never heard of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he got the top job at the Catholic Church on Tuesday. I'm an atheist; one who understands that 'God' is a human invention, certainly a myth. But on hearing the news that a new head Catholic had been elected, I read through his profile on the BBC's website with some interest, and I've come across a couple of fascinating snippets elsewhere, too.


It seems the old boy thinks that homosexuality tends towards 'intrinsic moral evil'. During the US election campaign, he called for politicians in favour of legal abortion to be denied Communion (a Catholic ritual which is apparently important to believers).

In 1996, a mere 26 years after they split up, he denounced the Beatles, and he apparently believes that the rock band AC/DC's name stands for "Anti-Christ, Death to Christ".

In other words, the poor old man is not so much "out of touch", or rather conservative, as I've heard a few people profess in the last day or two, as about one bark short of full-on insanity.

This morning, I listened to a radio phone-in programme in which the appointment of the new Pope was discussed. Quite an assortment of eccentrics called in, eager to express their views on the appointment of Cardinal Ratzinger as their spiritual leader, ranging from the terminally bewildered to the borderline psychotic. Happily, the latter category were fewer in number on this occasion than the former, but it's clear, in my view, that religious belief tends to demean those who suffer from it.

Personally I welcome the appointment of this ultra-reactionary old fruitcake as Pope : surely, the more people who feel disillusioned and alienated enough to turn away from the stupidity of these anachronistic superstitions, the better.

BLiar is, as I type, at Buckingham Palace, seeking the dissolution of Parliament. The British General Election will be held on Thursday, May 5th. Like many people, I've thought about the forthcoming election a lot recently.

I didn't vote in the European elections last year because I didn't feel I could allow any of the parties to infer my support. I'm traditionally a Tory voter, and I'll always remember the debt of gratitude that the British people owe to the Conservative Party for the transformation they brought about in the United Kingdom's fortunes in the 1980s, but their support for BLiar's criminal warmongering in recent years had left me unable to offer them my electoral support. I'm sure many readers will remember that the leadership of the Conservative Party was gagging for war two years ago, couldn't wait to watch bits of Iraq blowing up on the news. It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that they offered support for Phony Tony's historic crime on the basis of intelligence information and legal advice which now appear to have been perverted in the interest of the government's own twisted agenda - but then again, most of us, of course, never fell for that in the first place.

The Lib Dems? A creditable position on Iraq, but otherwise hopeless. They want a local income tax, more welfare giveaways, to punish the wealthy to fund more public spending. There is a faint but unmistakable malodorous whiff of Old Labour about them, a watered down version of the socialist nonsense which made such a wretched mess of our country in the '60s and '70s. Their leader, Charles Kennedy, is an amateur, an embarrassment; cheap, shallow opportunism is his preferred strategy, and he doesn't even do that particularly well. I can't believe that someone of that inferior calibre would be able to aspire to the level of junior minister in either of the two main parties. None of the fringe, single-issue parties appeals to me either.

So normally, I wouldn't feel able to vote. But I've become so sickened, so deeply nauseated by the conduct of New Labour in government recently that I now feel that it's the duty of voters of good conscience to support the party best placed to remove our despicable, dishonourable Prime Minister from power.

I'm disgusted by his deceptions, his all-excusing, sanctimonious, irrational beliefs, his utter lack of principle or judgement, his self-righteous self-dramatisations, his exaggerrated terrors to justify his contempt for the freedoms we have taken for granted for generations. I'm sick of his loathsome cowardice, of seeing him hide behind someone else when he's attacked. And like so many others, I'm sick of the needless, disastrous, bloody, criminal war in Iraq which he cynically and dishonestly manipulated his country into; and especially sick of the United Kingdom's present demeaning role as subservient, obedient poodle of the United States.
 
BLiar himself once pointed out that law and order depends on people who break the rules being punished - and in an ideal world, he'd be facing a war crimes tribunal, or at the very least, criminal charges for distorting the intelligence assessments available to him in order to deceive the public and Parliament. But if that's too much to hope for, the very least we can do is remove him from office by electoral means. Only the Conservative Party can beat BLiar, so, despite my reservations, that's who I'll be voting for this time. I don't think they'll win, but we must try.

It's been a while since I made a substantial entry here and I have a few things to catch up on, so this is a quick interim entry. I spent a fantastic week in Finland in March, with my charming other half - and on the way there and back, visited Sweden and Denmark for the first time (sort of - only airports unfortunately, but I did get some nice views from the plane!). I was in Manchester a couple of days later with a few of my Internet pals for a remarkable evening of time-warped nostalgic entertainment, in which I saw two bands I hadn't seen for 25 and 26 years respectively - Judas Priest and The Scorpions - at Manchester Apollo. I'll definitely write all these things up properly in the next couple of weeks.

NTL upgraded my Internet connection bandwidth from 750K to 2MB, free of charge, a couple of weeks ago, and I've taken advantage of it by starting a discussion forum for European Beatles fans, called Dig It. I like to think of it as a testament to the power and value of free, open source Linux software - the forum and webserver software (YaBB and Apache respectively) were both free downloads, and run on my second PC, under Linux Slackware 10.1, also a free, open source product. I've run the webserver for quite some time now, as an easy way of posting images on the web, here and on other sites, and the YaBB forum software was almost painless to install and has been fun to customise and configure. I registered the site's URL (beatles.dyndns.org) with www.dyndns.org, who provide this service to the Internet community free of charge.

Anyway, if by chance you're a European Beatles fan, by all means come and join in the discussion if you'd like to.



Later!
James