"Pray you undo this button"

King Lear

In my last year at Auckland Grammar School, I was introduced to Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear, by an inspiring teacher, Owen Lewis.

He had a cunning way of immersing us in Shakespeare: we started reading the play on the first day of the year, and studied it all that week, and then wrote an assignment on it. Had there been a film of the play available in 1950, I am sure he would have arranged for us to see it, because he used films in his syllabus at other times. When I became a teacher of sixth form English I regularly used to start the year by taking the pupils to a film and setting an assignment on it on the first day of the year.

I remember him pointing to this line (Pray you undo this button) and commenting that it showed the depth of dependency that the old king had sunk to, immediately before his death. This request appears four or five lines before the final curtain.

Owen Lewis was in his mid-twenties at that stage, having just returned from service in the Air Force during the war. So he was only about ten years older than us students. Neither he nor we had any idea of what old age was like when you were experiencing it.

In practice, getting older is a case of slowing down. Lots of little tasks become slower or harder or both. Dressing and undressing are among the most frustrating. So "Pray you undo this button" comes to my mind often at such times, although it is doing the buttons up that causes the greatest frustration. No wonder clothing for really ancient people is all held together with velcro!

So was Lear just old, or was he also suffering from dementia, brought on by the deadly feud within his family, between his two older daughters and their youngest sister? He certainly has trouble remembering who his old friends were when they appear. 

Both the slowing of old age, and the extra handicaps of dementia, cause one's world to become gradually narrower and narrower; because ordinary daily life tasks take so much longer, one cannot attend to a lot of wider interests, no matter how involved one may have been at earlier times, and no matter how much one may want to.

And I find myself becoming less and less comfortable about shifting my attention from one absorbing task and moving on to another. If the shift is caused by other people intruding, that is OK, but it is having the initiative to move my own attention from this work I am doing now over to something else, leaving the first unfinished, when I know it is time!

And King Lear's world has shrunk. He suggests to his remaining daughter that they will live "like birds in the cage".

Hang on to your outgoing life as long as you can!

Inequality Again

Another Subject that won't go away!

The news today is telling us again that the richest 1% now have as much wealth as the rest of the world put together, according to Oxfam.

For months now I have been seeing and passing on articles by Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Bryan Gould, all talking about the great and growing inequalities in wealth and income across our countries. And some of the "1%", like Gareth Morgan, have been commenting on how ridiculous they see the position too: one billionaire admitted he pays 11% of his income in tax.

So the politicians of this group want to improve the effectiveness of the wealth-equalisation tax systems in their countries.

But an even greater problem, as I see it, is the disparities in wealth across the world. More and more every day the world is being thrown together in one big heap! With cheap travel, fast internet, and frequent sporting links for a start, we are all being forced to realise we are all in this boat together; there is no Planet B.

So we need to start thinking about a system to equalise wealth and income across the world, not just within the boundaries of our artificial nations. Something like a world tax which skims a cent or two off each transaction and enables the poorest nations to use a much larger share of the resulting funds for development projects that improve their long-term conditions. Something at arms length from existing governments and run by widely-representative councils.

Of course such a system needs protection by good quality transparent legal and administrative support, and so on and on. But surely with plenty of computer power it should not be impossible!

What do you think?

Sketching Again

On one of my walks to town and back, I stopped for a rest at the corner of Devon Street and Eliot Street, where there is a comfortable seat among garden plots and a few trees. This is what I could see looking up Eliot Street, with the Boys High Hill on the left, and the building that houses Jenko computers on the right.

Another day I walked in a different direction and passed the site of the planned Gull Service Station which will bring cheaper petrol to New Plymouth.

Last Friday week our sketching group of U3A met for the new year's work at East End Beach, where we had morning tea and a discussion and some sketching at Paris Plage.

Here is my first sketch, from which you can see that they have made an effort to bring a hint of Montmartre with the bright yellow umbrellas.

The cafe itself is in a couple of old containers, and the almond croissants are to die for.

The proprietors have provided lots of toys for the children, plenty of seats of a variety of styles, occasional live entertainment. There weren't many people there as you can see above, but later it filled up more.

In the weekends they serve pizza in the evenings. As you can imagine in the good weather we've been having for the last six weeks or so the place has been very popular.

Tomorrow we have another get-together at the same place, but I'll find a different subject this time.