by
Frank Hatton

His name is Morse, or to be precise, Detective Chief Inspector Morse. Nobody knew his Christian name until very recently,...... he is just known as Morse. He is a character in one of our very popular TV programmes. A strange man. Educated at Oxford, and with a penchant for classical music, a wealth of knowledge on things like literature, art, history, and other like subjects. He is quite elderly for a detective, white haired, and knocking on the door of retirement Very irascible, particularly where the correct use of grammar was concerned, and intolerant to the point of rudeness. The success of the programme is his success in thinking his way through a problem with murder, or some other criminal activity. The bit that sparked off this line of thought on my part was an episode where Morse had fallen sick, and was confined to a hospital. bed while various tests were conducted to ascertain his problem. During his enforced inactivity, he was given a book on a famous case of murder which took place in 1850. Two men were hanged for the killing of a young woman who was found dead in a stretch of water where the men were working on a canal boat. By research of various archives, he was able to establish that the men were wrongly hung, and proved who was really responsible for the crime. A fascinating story, which involved flashbacks to the Victorian era, and the type of police work, and courtroom procedure which was utilised in that period. Now,..... the bit that leapt out at me, was the way in which things had changed over the years. The style of thinking, the dogmatic attitude of the people in authority, the class distinction in society,..... all sorts of differences to what we now regard as our normal way of life. Here is where you come into the picture. Dependant on your age, you will either be content with life, and accept things as they are, or, if you are knocking on a bit in years, you will probably be more like me,.... resenting the changes which have occurred over the years, and bemoaning the fact that 'things ain't what they used to be.' For instance, I hate going up to London nowadays. It has changed so much from how I remember it as a young man. It seems to be populated by folk of foreign extraction, it is dirty, there is very little politeness, everything is geared to fast living, and generally, it annoys me that it is no longer the London I knew of yore. The saving grace in all of this, is the fact that our younger folk have never known things to be any different, and accept all of these things that irritate me, as normality. My point being, that when I read that evolution is gradually bringing about things like our slowly losing various chunks of our body, which are no longer useful,.... things like our little toe nearing obsolescence. The loss of our body hair, the changes in our language, and how we are slowly but surely becoming one society throughout the world. The main thing that springs to my mind, is the fact that our way of thinking is the fastest change that is taking place in the human race. Think back to how your parents and grandparents lived,.... their standards of life, their speech patterns, the moral attitudes, even the types of food they cooked and ate. Young people are born into our society, and they grow up with a natural acceptance of everything around them. They have no 'hang ups' on what life used to be like,... they take it for what it is. This is not new of course....... you and I have done exactly the same thing regarding the standards that our parents held dear. We looked at life as it was, and that became our 'yardstick'. As I said earlier, all of this was sparked off by watching this TV story about Victorian life, which after all was only around a hundred years back. Our whole attitude has changed in the way in which we now live. So, this evolution thing, where we are changing bodily in our appearance is like comparing the tortoise and the hare when you consider how quickly our mentality changes in such a short timespan.

Right,.... now it is mental somersault time. When my wife and I moved into our bungalow about six years ago, I laid claim to one of the three bedrooms to use as my own domain. My piano is in there, and I keep all of my filing system there, soooo, it seemed only natural that I had the computor in there also. Now, my good lady has always held a resentment about this, albeit that she never actually showed or voiced it. All it meant was, that when we had visitors to stay over, this room I used would be pressed into service as a third bedroom, by virtue of the fact that the sofa converts to a double bed. It was no big problem, I just did not use the room whilst we had any folk staying over. However, the female outlook caused my wife to look with disdain at my poor old computor and my other bits and pieces sitting quietly in the corner. She saw it as wrong that the bedroom our visitors were using had this claptrap in it. We now move the story onwards a little,...... this year, during the summer, I said to my good lady that I had half a mind to pull down our old garden shed, and build a sort of 'lean to' on the end of the garage. This I said would hold all of the garden tools and sunbeds etc.. This she thought was a great idea, and enthused over the design, and brought me endless cups of tea while I laboured on the construction. There were several things over which we differed, things like the roof and walls, which I felt could be of a simplistic material,..... but nooooo, my dear lady suggested that if we were going to have this 'lean to', it should be done properly. So, to cut the story short, the thing finished up as a sort of room, with double lined walls, great big sun windows, a quarry tiled floor, and to my mind, far too ornate to be used as a tool shed. Yes said my wife, but, just think, we can use it as a sun lounge in the summer, and it will be very pleasant to sit out there when we have visitors. OK said I, and my would be tool shed finished up with pictures on the wall, a couple of bookcases, an armchair, and then came the coup d'etat. "Why don't you put your filing system out there" she said, " It's so comfortable, that I really think your computor would go very nicely in that corner of the new room". Please don't ask me how it all happened, but, I am now sitting in my new room in the garden,.... It is early November,... the rain is making an unearthly beating on the plastic roof, my feet are cold,... and I am tapping away at my computor keyboard, and wondering how I came to lose my nice comfortable room in the bungalow. I can only assume that I am one of life's unfortunates who are easily pushed into whatever direction other folk want me to go.

Whether it is my new location for the computor, or whether it is simply my brain seizing up, I know not,.... but, all thought has suddenly come to a stop, and I find myself sitting here staring at the screen, wondering what else I could write about. One of the many factors with which I find myself blessed, is a tendency to resort to a logical approach to my difficulties in life........ So, I have been back up into the bungalow, poured myself a nice 'comfortable' (make of that what you will) measure of whiskey, and brought myself back to stare once more at the screen, but, this time I have today's newspaper with me.

Now I wish I hadn't done it!!! Each of the pages I have looked at have caused a sort of melancholia to creep over me.... Let me tell you what I mean. Firstly, there is a story of a judge who has ordered a local authority to give a home and welfare payments to a convicted Iranian drug smuggler who is under a deportation order. His home and payments will cost the British taxpayer around $400 a week. The local authority had refused to give him any help, and want him thrown out of the country. In my simplicity, I have always assumed that our judicial system had a reasonable level of wisdom.

The next page produced nothing better!!!! It reports on a nursery school, (kindergarten?) for children of 18 months to five years old, where they turned the poor little mites into a sort of robot by virtue of the strict discipline they used. I will spare you the sordid details of the way the staff treated these poor little souls, but, thankfully the story has now come to light, and the place has been closed. The mothers were paying around $125 a week for this care of their children.

I have honestly looked for something in the reportage of today to cheer us up, but, I regret to no avail. So, on this sad note I will bid you farewell until the next issue, and take my glass of whiskey back into the house and drown my sorrows....... I will leave you to make your own arrangements.

'Til next time,
Frank Hatton

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You can find more articles in the archive under From Over the Pond