Moor Larkin

Every time I go through they do. I had a full beard on my last photo and there is no way they 'recognise' me from the picture. Possession of the valid passport and being the correct sex will pretty much do it. Wasn't there some guy who left the country dressed as a woman not so long ago? 'She' was wearing a burkha and nobody pursued the matter at the time.

I'm amazed that, whilst tolerating the masking of women, we should also pretend they do it cos they love it. The mentality that men cannot look at a woman without lusting after her, and therefore dishonouring her, is insulting to men. So far as women being hidden, it's been going on since time began. You only have to look at the Edwardian footage of Mitchell & Kenyon to see northern women coming out of the factories in shawls and scarves, very akin to shrouded 'muslim' women, barely a hundred years ago in Britain. Women can be brainwashed just like anyone else but the idea that they should live inside a little tent is more a sign of a sickness of philosophy than a recommendation of free choice. It's just the opposite end of the spectrum that mini-skirted women get assaulted because they're wearing mini-skirts.

It's noticeable that political women like Benazir Bhutto compromised with a 'modest' head-scarf but the chances of a woman in a burkha achieving any political power in a muslim country, or anywhere else, seem pretty remote.

There is a problem in the meantime though where a woman has decided she wants to wear a burkha. There should be a better solution than holding her in contempt of court or whatever, and it shouldn't be beyond the wit of the court to find a female to accompany her into a side-room and 'lift the veil' and then speak on her behalf. if nothing else it would demonstrate the utter stupidity of the whole idea.

Steve Crook

They are trained

So it was reported in the newspapers (i.e. we have no idea if it is true)

See my post above where I asked Mark B:
Have you asked any Muslim women what they think of it? Many cover up by choice, not because they are forced to.

It does seem strange to us but remember that much of this attitude is due to cultural conditioning. Not so much to do with Islam as with the culture in countries where Islam happens to be prevalent.

And what about the machismo and "family honour" prevalent in many places in the Mediterranean region? If your sister ran away with and married someone that your family didn't like, would you track him down and kill him? It happens in a lot of places in this world, many of them strongly Christian. As does the tradition of women wearing shawls or other head covering when outside.

Steve

penfold

Another change then...You remember the office block that crosses the Gloucester Road at the bottom of Stokes Croft?? Now luxury apartments...the tall block by the Bus Station?? Now a Holiday Inn....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Moor Larkin

I seem to recall cctv footage being broadcast to accompany the story on TV news items..... but I may be wrong.
You answer your own point quite eloquently. Thank you.

When as a Catholic boy in the 1950/60's I went to church, all the females had to cover their heads whilst in church. Nuns were/are effectively in burkhas. Women still cannot be catholic priests. It's nothing new to me, to see women in this way. I'm conditioned enough to be uncomfortable with the idea of a woman being a vicar to this day.........

Fury as Indian women urged to drop veil - Times Online

Veiled is beautiful, say Egypt's feminists and fashionistas - Independent Online Edition > Africa

Father Brown did try and warn me that the first effect of not believing in God was that I would lose my common sense..........

TimR

Well, from an outsider's perspective, Britain is more often presented on the BBC as all Mad Max, and the popular crime shows from Britain that are now shown here in the US portray a Britain that makes Look Back in Anger seem like a cheerful comedy. The most common images of Britain on American television outside the news are Helen Mirren grimly solving yet another ghastly crime followed by Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer in As Time Goes By - two opposite poles.

From my own experience, I don't think that the grime-and-gloom version is any more or less representative of Britain than the world of Genevieve or a rose garden. I did see both worlds in Britain. There are urban areas in Britain that are as depressing as anything I have seen, and I do know that crime is worse than it used to be. But the beauty of Kent is incomparable - unless you consider Somerset and Devon, which are in close competition; the cathderal towns are gems, and London is magnificent. (Yes - I am an outsider and it is no doubt many other things besides magnificent - but magnificent it undoubtedly is! ) There is still more civility and decency and humor (humour?) among the people in Britain than anywhere else - even though there may not be as much as in the past.

And I am well aware that I have seen only part of England - and I still have Scotland and Wales to explore.

There are times when I read yet another world-weary piece from a British writer in the London Times or even in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and no one is as good at world-weary, patronizing sarcasm as a sardonic Brit! - you make the French look wide-eyed and innocent) about how difficult it all is in Britain these days, and "We're all done for!" that I want to grab the whining writer and shake some sense into him/her - and say:

"You don't know what you have! So stop whining!"

TimR

I have ordered a book called Arrows of Desire, about Michael Powell. Seeing A Canterbury Tale has made me curious as to how it was made.


Yes - TCM has been showing a whole series of films that I have not even heard of, let alone seen. Thanks for the tip - and to Penfold as well - regarding Something Always Happens. I have to work out the taping ahead of time as work and family keep me from watching most of these films when they are on - so it helps to know which to focus on.

Steve Crook

That's a great book and I think you said you'd already got Paul Tritton's book about the film.

The other great books for a lot of the background are Michael Powell's two part autobiography A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie. The first one especially isn't just Powell telling his own story but telling the story of how British films grew from humble beginnings to their peak - and back to the humble state they're in at the moment. Unlike most autobiographers it's not just a list of who he met and the successes he had, there are quite a few asides describing significant events and he's not at all afraid to detail his failures either.

But although Powell is full of praise for Emeric Pressburger and freely admits that he couldn't have made his greatest films without Emeric, people still tend to forget about Emeric. So Emeric's grandson Kevin Macdonald (Oscar winning film-maker in his own right) wrote Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter.

For details of these and many other P&P related books, have a look at the book list on the P&P site

Steve

David Brent

Did he also warn you of the chances of going blind and/or hair growing on the palm of your hand?

Dave.

David Brent

British PM Gordon Brown has vowed to crack down on knife crime in the UK.

Almost 9,000 knife carrying thugs were let off by police with cautions in the last year.
Police say that Britain is going through a knife crime epidemic with knife wielding crimes on the increase.
The highest knife crime areas are reported to be London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham.

Dave.

Steve Crook

Strange, the press release from the police doesn't seem to mention the number of cautions.

Whoever it is reporting this is probably counting all the knives carried by chefs, boy scouts and others

Steve

samkydd

All the things we thought were best 35 years or so ago have now come back to haunt us. Demolishing urban Victorian terraced houses and building concrete tower blocks on soul less estates left the inner city for concrete multi-storey car parks, shopping centres, motorway spurs and offices and after 6pm when all commercial life had gone home it was a barren concrete wasteland where only ne’er-do-wells cared to venture. In a twilight world of vandalism, street crime and burglary, decent honest folk would not dare tread into these areas and so they became a playground for the scankers to do as they pleased.

In the mid 70s onwards we were all encouraged to move to out of town housing developments with fast motorway links to get into work, and it proved so popular that we all started doing it and in no time at all the fast motorway links became slow motorway links, then extremely slow motorway links, then gridlock. As an alternative some of us went by train, and then the prices went up, the carriages became intolerably overcrowded, the services unreliable and the excuses for poor or non-existent track and signal maintenance became very lame indeed. So we went back on the roads again, but not the motorways again, no, far better to drive like the devil down A and B road through once picturesque villages frightening children and old folks in our oversized Germanic diesels and 4WDs, hell bent on getting through before the school run mayhem ensues!

With single-parent families becoming all too common in the 70s, it was inevitable that parental discipline and structure would disappear, especially when young mothers didn’t even have the discipline themselves to keep their virtue intact by letting any Tom or Harry’s dick fill her full of beans and produce unwanted offspring that the father either wasn’t interested in, or knew nothing about! The mothers' are then rewarded with free flats, benefits and a reserved seat in McDonalds plus the opportunity to earn money on the side tax free.

Added to that the zero discipline in schools, some children grow up with no frame of reference and not only do they not know where the line is that they must not cross, they’re not even aware that such a line exists! A whole generation of horrible gits is then left to roam around in packs like stray lurchers, preying on anybody or anything that they come across.

When Mrs Thatcher relaxed credit controls in the early 1980s we all suddenly became middle-class; houses, new cars, VCR, holidays all on the drip. Industrial action by unions also disappeared because we were so far in debt that to go on strike and lose overtime as well as normal pay would have resulted in repossessed houses, cars and VCRs in their thousands so we were effectively castrated by dependency on the debt system of owning things.

The introduction of the CPS seemed to devalue many crimes that were once considered serious, by not prosecuting Messrs Hall and Sundry unless there was a 99.9% chance of conviction. I don’t know why but Magistrates Courts seemed to think that “youthful high spirits” is the real criminal possessing the mind and body of whatever horrible spotty-faced bastard is stood in the dock, and stealing a car was no longer “stealing a car” it suddenly became “joy riding”.

Even credit card theft and deception seemed to carry a lenient sentence, especially if the culprit was a young mother with two or three children living off The State, even though she had been openly recruited by an organised crime to earn extra money by using stolen cards for illegal purchasing goods which are then passed on to the ring-leaders to sell on.

Drug dependency also became an excuse a few years ago, but I’d have thought that “cold turkey” whilst enjoying a lengthy stay at Her Majesty’s Pleasure would benefit the criminal so that when released, he/she would be eternally grateful for having kicked the habit and no longer needed to house-break, mug or shoplift to feed a craving that was no longer applicable. But no, Prison Warders supplement their meagre salaries by supplying more drugs to the inmates than they can shake a stick at, so they leave their paradise even more drug dependent than they were when they were sentenced and immediately return to crime again!

So it’s really nobody else’s fault but ours!

Steve Crook

Or you can be pessimistic

All those things that you say "we" did. I didn't do any of them. Did you?

Steve

samkydd

I didn't either, but then we had Masters at school who taught us not to be conned by the governemnt or the marketing/media machines and to view anything that may seem attractive on the outside as a con!

As Tom Waits once sang "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away!"

samkydd

I didn't either, but then we had Masters at school who taught us not to be conned by the government or the marketing/media machines and to view anything that may seem attractive on the outside as a con!

As Tom Waits once sang "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away!"

As for commuting, I just get up very early in the morning to get to work in plenty of time and if I oversleep, tough, I just have to grin and bear it. The train was an option once but it was too unreliable and expensive, but often a very sociable place to be sat in the buffet car putting the world to rights with fellow passengers.

People in life can be con-artists, and that awful, shallow, lying ex-PM Blair has proved it by accepting a "meet and greet" job with J P Morgan for $5,000,000 a year, when in any decent society he'd be in prison!

BristolUK

Both of those happened shortly before I moved. I used to go through that little pathway under the block at lunchtimes.

I know the bus station changed....or at least I recall reading about proposed changes.

I had a good laugh the other day at a report about a cable car from Temple Meads to Clifton. Yeah, as if that's going to happen.