MAY 2005
Sitting out the election back home in Norway helped keeping my blood pressure down, but coming back to the UK I'm risking slipping into serious depression. The Dear Leader and the People's Party have been returned with a reduced majority, which is a better result than what we had last time, but still not good enough. I note, however, that the English actually cast more votes for the Opposition, but are now governed by the Celts, as Scottish and Welsh MPs vote on English matters, while the English can't vote on anything concerning Scotland or Wales. Poetic justice in a way, I suppose.
The Stav community has to realize that we are coming under Government scrutiny. If there is any kind of "uniform" connected to Stav it is a hooded top. But as the hood can be pulled over one's head this will help to hide one's features from the everwatching CCTV cameras of Big Brother. This of course is completely unacceptable in Blair's Brave New World. According to the Dear Leader the wearing of hooded tops (and baseball caps) will be legislated against at the earliest possible opportunity.
There's an old Yorkshire saying, stating that "Where there is muck, there is brass" Unfortunately our masters in Whitehall seem to have cottoned on to this. We are now being laboured (pun intended) with a horseshit tax of £500.- a year, though only if you are composting the offending substance, which we incidently have been doing for years at Heimbu. According to D.E.F.R.A. this is on hygenic grounds. Supposedly the horsemuck miraculously becomes disinfected when the money reaches the Chancellor's coffers.
Us old geezers have complained for years that the food doesn't taste of much anymore, only to be told that the sense of taste detoriates as we get older. That may be true, but nipping into a local shop when we were in Norway, Kiyoko came upon a whole section of "traditionally produced vegetables and herbs from the Hafskjold estate." And lo and behold, it seems that the old tastebuds were functioning after all. Unfortunately, though we did stock up as much as we could, we've already run out, and it's back to the usual supermarket pap.
As expected, David Blunkett is back in Government, this time as the Minister for Pensions. He has already stated that we can no longer expect to "hang up our boots at 65" as there soon will be only two people in work for each pensioner, instead of ten when pensions were first introduced. One wonders at the relevance of this. Surely, if you have paid National Insurance and contributed to a pension fond all your working life, you wouldn't be relying on people in work to fund your retirement, would you, unless someone has had their snouts in the trough again? One can see why logic is no longer taught in State schools.
The preparation for the annual Stav Fair is well under way. It will be a lot bigger this year than what it was in 2004, and in case of rain we will have 2 big marquees erected where everyone can seek shelter from the elements. Our only worry at the moment is that some under-employed halfwit in the County Council will take it upon him or herself to put a spanner in the works.
We get reports from daughter Aki up in Scotland that she is having problems with the planning department of her local council. The house on her farm is derelict (which I found out to my cost; plunging through the floor down to the basement), but for some reason they want her to convert the barn instead of either doing up the house or demolish it and build a new one.. They seem to have difficulty in grasping that she needs the barn for lifestock, hay and machinery.
The teacher who got 6 months in one of Her Majesty's establishments for firing an airgun into the sidewalk to frighten off a bunch of yobs that were trashing her son's car, has been let out after serving 7 weeks. However, as she now has a criminal record, she has been told that she can not work as a teacher anymore, and she thus stands to lose her house as she can no longer pay the mortgage. The yobs must be laughing their heads off.
And then there was the local villain who escaped from jail 18 months ago. There was an all-points wanted notice out on him all this time; but to no avail. Until last week when a bright spark in the Humberside force actually knocked on the door of his home adress and found that he had just gone home and been living openly there all the time, even getting a job at a garage, paid his council tax and taken his son to school every morning. Oh, well.
The suggestion by the Home Office Minister, Hazel Blair, that yobs should be forced to wear United States- style orange uniforms while carrying out community service punishments has produced the usual protests from the expected quarters.
One commentator stated that there was no evidence that this would work (obviously there are no evidence that it wouldn't work, either, as it hasn't been tried before), and that it might make the yobs so resentful that they wouldn't turn up for community service. Odd, I didn't know that turning up for community service is optional.
My mother finally decided that she had had enough after a long illness, and is now laid to rest with my father and younger brother. I visited her a week before she died at the nursing home whuich used to belong to my grandmother's family, and where remnants of the formal park with canals and walkways is still excistant. She stated that she wanted to live through one final National Day celebration on the 17th of May, which she did.
There used to be an annual Stav seminar at Heimbu in connection with the Stav-thing, but as there now are a fair amount of qualified teachers spread over several countries, it was deemed no longer neccessary. However, I have had requests for the seminar to be re-introduced, so this year I am proposing for anyone interested to follow the daily routine at Heimbu. This means getting up at 6 in the morning to do the Stav stances, followed by stretching exercises and up to 2.000 cuts and thrusts with various weapons, before breakfast at 8.
This will be followed by work in the garden at Heimbu until lunch, and then the afternoon will be spendt with further training in all aspects of Stav. We will also be going out in the countryside looking for medical plants or hunting with birds of prey. At least one evening will be set aside for a discussion on the philosophical framework of Stav, but all in all it will be a fairly laidback affair.
Tenri-kyo is a branch of Shinto followed by Kiyoko's family. Next month the young daughter of the family priest will arrive at Heimbu to spend June in learning about the Stav way of life before taking over the shrine from her father, who will soon retire. A bit of a reverse from the perception of some people that Stav has been unduly influenced by Japanese thought.
Got this from Terry Saunders:
Windom(AP) : Minnesota's worst air disaster occurred
earlier today when a Cessna 152, a small two seater
plane, crashed into a Norwegian Lutheran cemetery here
early this morning.
Ole and Sven, working as search and rescue
workers, have recovered 826 bodies so far, and expect
that number to climb as digging continues into the
evening
Breathes there a man with a soul so dead
That not once to himself he has said
This - this is my native land
Walther Scott