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| Westland Lysander only has a walk-on role below |
I am watching a YouTube video of someone flying a Westland Lysander, an odd WW2 high-level wings plane used for reconnaissance and for night-landing secret agents into France. No Spitfire glamour here, yet this plane is quite complex for its time, supporting very short take-off and landing distances, sometimes on mountain sides.
I have known the Lysander since age eight. Having read material supplied to my father, a member of the Royal Observer Corps during WW2, identifying planes passing near my home town, Bradford.
Some of the video corresponds with what I already know about the Lysander and this pleases me. In the 78 years between then and now my interest in this arcane subject has developed, if only in a minor way. More important, is the general fact of this continuing development.
Very important, in fact. Unsustained by any belief in a supernatural after-life I reflect instead on whether I’ve “improved” on what I was born with. Seeing it as a secular justification for being handed out a life (now nearing its end) in the first place. True I’ve nourished my knowledge of WW2 aviation but what about more serious, more demanding matters?
I’m better at expressing myself, even if – sure as eggs are eggs – what I am saying here will, almost certainly, be misunderstood. I note I didn’t respond well to the transition into parenthood, although this has improved somewhat over the last decade. Learning to sing has – amazingly! – taught me to analyse music. I became a better skier and a better crawl swimmer. I am, I think, less selfish though others would have to confirm this. My views, once grossly nationalistic, are now international. Born shy, I now revel in conversation.
Was it a life worth living? Hmm.
It seems you have mastered the ability to grow and change. What influenced you to change your views from nationalistic to international?
ReplyDeleteColette: Looking back I sense that my "nationalistic" phase was an aberration. Very much influenced by my parents who were both Tory believers, albeit more centre-right than the present-day extremists, many of whom are closer to fascism. My parents took The Daily Mail, a conservative newspaper; I read it and, being too young to have formed views of my own, I took on its views. This was a period of great social change in the UK; there was a Labour government which had managed to introduce the Welfare State and - thank goodness - the NHS (National Health Service). It was fashionable to sneer at the Labour Party politicians, many of whom had working-class backgrounds and I - knowing no better - went along with this.
DeleteMy first step leftwards - and thus towards internationalism - occurred when I started to take my membership of the National Union of Journalists more seriously. This had meant very little when I worked on newspapers and where the concept of "them and us" hadn't much traction. I was more conscious of bosses - often knowing them by name - when I worked on magazines. I attended union meetings and was mildly appalled by the rhetoric of our Fathers of The Chapel (ie, local leaders) who were openly Trotskyist. The extreme left offered no more temptation than the extreme right but at least I was more politically informed than I had been. Problems arose when I became an editor with powers of hire and fire and needed to discipline a member of the union I belonged to.
But underneath all this was a growing interest in the way other countries managed themselves.This led to two larger steps: engineering myself journalistic work in the USA where I stayed for six years. Later, and rather more wealthy, I bought a holiday house in France which I sold after ten years. Both these moves caused me to consider the UK more objectively than when I lacked real experience for comparison.
Brexit was an awful experience. So many lies; so many truths that are now making themselves felt. Basically an act of cowardice which enables our politicians to behave in any way they want, without suffering direct comparisons with neighbour states. Two of my English friends now have dual citizenship with France as a result of Brexit. Were I younger I might have been tempted.
What's happening in Ukraine just adds to the pathos of Little Britain, a country that fell apart when it lost its empire.
Interestingly I have been contemplating lately how very little I have changed from my young, shy, reclusive self. I have tried a bit to be more social, but I just really don't do it well. Is it a life worth living? Yes. You have learned to sing, and I have learned to love our earth/sky atmospheric beauty.
ReplyDeleteNewRobin13; I have to say your still maintained "young, shy, reclusive self" seems at odds with your appearance, revealed a couple of weeks ago in a rare front-facing photograph. Surely that shoulder-length white hair is hardly the style of someone who has difficulties with social inter-action. If I had to guess it looks like a symbol of freedom, even of assertiveness.
DeleteBut I shouldn't tease. If you don't get on "in company" (as my Grannie used to say) you shouldn't think of it as any sort of defect. In any case social inter-action is not the only measurement that counts. Once you were single, then you got married. I refuse to accept that marriage didn't introduce some form of change.
My mother was so relieved I hadn't followed some pig-headed, ultra-male impulse in choosing a bride she took VR aside and warned her she might find me "a bit difficult". It occurs to me I still haven't asked VR whether this was the case. Perhaps because I can guess the answer.
I want to elaborate on the Lysander, but first off, and in order to avoid being shot down in flames (a likely demise for the Lysander) I will try to refrain from commenting on what you admit is the obscure point of your post. Strangely you admit to being obscure then go on to be precisely that.
ReplyDeleteI too have always been fascinated by the debatable ugliness, but then unique design of the Lysander and its romance of landing agents in the dark in occupied France. On my return to scale modelling aircraft during Lockdown one of the first kits I bought was the Lysander - it was an advanced kit with loads of photoetch parts and difficult construction and complicated painting issues ad I baulked at bending flat pieces of wafer thin metal about four mm. square into three dimensional cube shapes and the like. I think many initial enthusiasms are fraught with the danger of over ambition. You may have wanted to start your singing pursuits with O Du Mein Holder Abendstern (Song to the Evening Star) from Wagner’s Tannhauser. I gather that is one of the most difficult arias there is to sing, but we are tantalised by the carrot.
The Lysander remains un-boxed awaiting my considered opinion that I have reached the required standard or possibly its placement on E-bay.
Sir Hugh: I didn't say what I intended was obscure but that it was likely to be misundertood. Were you really baffled by my list? I despair
ReplyDeleteI was not baffled by your list. Just to express what I meant in revised words, you first of all said that you were now better at expressing yourself then deliberately continued with the statement that what you were writing here would likely be misunderstood. With your skills you should be able to make it capable of being understood, but your hint at difficulty left me wondering if I had missed some subtle point.
DeleteI don't see why one should need to justify having being handed out a life, an event over which you had no control or choice, that is unless you are thanking or attempting to please an omnipotent being which you indicate is not the case. Ok, you may feel some kind of personal moral need to reflect in that way.
Allowed to live? Who would give you permission? Do we need to improve? And if so, for what? I assume that we all go through one form or another of "education", maybe even learning, be it skills, languages, cultures, only to possibly forget it all in the twilight years of our existence. And most of us will recall the odd eureka moment when a penny or two dropped.
ReplyDeleteI was raised with that ethics background of always striving to do good, be useful, think of others etc. and realised only late in my teens that my elders were excellent in preaching it - and in rewarding/punishing - but seemed to feel that they had done their bit and that my generation must take on the task.
Instead, I enjoy the thought that we are just farts in the wind, whether we can sing or not. But I think singing is nice. Better than collecting model airplanes.
Sir Hugh/Sabine: We are born with the ability to think and - even more important - to ask questions. It is obvious many people do not take advantage of these abilities and, as a result, merely accept their existence, doing no more than curse when unpleasantness occurs.
ReplyDeleteOthers think to some extent and it leaves them uncertain. At three in the morning they need some form of reassurance but are unable to find it in the material world. They turn to the supernatural world, comforted by the fact that although their imagined ghosties cannot be proved to be right, they also cannot be proved to be wrong. They clothe themselves in ritual (which can also include singing, I fear) and - if I am to believe them - they find some sort of peace. I cannot share this illusion but I nevertheless wish them well, provided they don't insist I become part of their illusion.
For me, I am the world. Since I cannot control the outside world I seek to at least understand myself. And where possible exercise a mite of control over what I find. Along the way, through the practice of personal honesty (much harder than most imagine) I identify certain qualities I have and others I lack. Because understanding oneself can be shockingly difficult the first step may be to formulate deceptively simple questions. The most popular is: Why am I here? The immediate answer is: I am the result of certain physiological structures, biological functions and emotional impulses between two humans which society identifies as my parents.
True, but not much help. Let's modify that question somewhat. That act could have released a new version of The Yorkshire Ripper, Albert Einstein or someone who is childishly satisfied to become a newspaper journalist. Is there any percentage in dwelling on those possibilities: are they random or might they have purpose? Too hard for me.
Let' start again. I was born, that's inarguable. What happened next offered a wide range of possibilities but this range was narrowed by the things I consciously "did" to myself. Some beneficial (ie, improvement, if only by my standards) some perverse. Let's examine them.
You're both capable of thinking. Hence you could have arrived at this full stop.
The Lysander - new to me but clearly an early version of what have for years been called "bush planes" and more recently STOL planes - the acronym for Short Take-Off and Landing. These craft (as you well know, why am I writing this?) are designed to fly at lower speeds than general aviation craft - the key word being "fly". Flying involves maintaining enough airspeed to keep aerodynamic pressures "lifting" the wing. As airspeed drops, the point of aerodynamic failure (to fly) looms closer. This point of failure is called a stall (just pronounce the acronym, eh?), and flirting with stall is what these STOL, bush and no doubt Lysander pilots train to do. Trouble with stall is it precipitates an abrupt loss of altitude - manageable at higher altitudes, but generally fatal at altitudes between 100' and 1500' or higher. What these pilots try to do is slow the plane down while descending to the landing site so that they begin to stall at (or slightly prior to) landing. Stall it early and you'll likely die, land too fast and you'll no doubt lose the STOL competition or (in the case of the Lysander, run out of landing strip and encounter trees). As for the rest, I think that (some)meaning in life can be ascertained by measuring ones impact on others. Of course it's subjective, but - we're concerned with the Subject here, right? You know you're a curmudgeon and I know I'm one, so we've put down some history that might have made better reading. But we think about it, we try to change to "make up for it"(?). One of my biggest regrets is years spent hunting for sport. Sure, it runs in the blood and I was well trained by my father. Later in life my father gave up (and I believe regretted) his bloody practices, so I guess that regret runs in the blood too. I try to go easy on the animals now - I've "learned" something (though I'm not vegetarian yet, because vegetable my have feelings too) "Farts in the wind"? I can buy into that. My model airplanes (there were many) all met the same fate - crashing and often burning in model combat disaster experiences.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: I thought you might be interested in this extract from my second novel, Out Of Arizona, published in 2014. Great minds, it seems, think alike. OofA was a pure joy to write; I did a huge amount of aviation research but I think I can truthfully say it appears as well-digested.
DeleteFlying slowly, but not too slowly, deliberately sacrificing the plane’s aerodynamics – these things created their own dangers, required their own judgements. By now Jana’s ears were attuned to the engine note of a 60 knots landing speed and her whole body anticipated the audacity of slowing the plane to a 87 kph stall as a means of lowering it that final metre on to the tarmac. And there it was: a good stress-free professional landing at Montauban, the sort of thing she was paid to do.
As a magazine editor I obviously influenced those I hired and whom I caused to write in the style I preferred. But frank statements about such influence are hard to come by. The only one I remember came - rather unexpectedly - from another editor who worked for the same publishing company.
It was a time of hyper inflation and the trade union I belonged to - the National Union of Journalists - had just turned down a 32% wage increase offer (Just imagine that!) from our employer and was holding out for 35%. Our negotiators - almost all red-hot Trotskyists - had called a meeting of our members to gauge their reaction. As an editor, with powers of hire and fire, I often found myself at odds with the aims of the NUJ but on this occasion I decided to speak out, reommending acceptance.
A year later I was talking to the editor of a much more important (ie more profitable) magazine than mine. We'd always got on and I admired his professionalism. He was reflecting: "I'll always remember what you said at that NUJ meeting: '(in wage negotiations) there's only one thing worse than a pyrrhic victory, and that's a pyrrhic defeat. It's always stuck with me."
I suppose what pleased me was he'd quoted my exact words.
I read OofA - perhaps six or seven years ago - possibly my first exposure to STOL. Maybe I caught the bug then, and my comment was a case of subconscious paraphrasing. And yes, the pyrrhic line - a good one. I'll close this without a typo, just for a change.
ReplyDelete