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ring manageress now a cynic might say that he was an experienced expert in small talk but they would be wrong it wasn t small talk it was big talk it was shared talk it was spiritually uplifting talk and i ll tell you why of course munby had an intellect the size of a small planet of course he had a wisdom from years of experience of dealing with one of the most complex areas of the law but he was also bloody ordinary he was a man from the clapham omnibus one of his famous quotes he also had a twinkle in a peter ustinov way that came directly from his heart but it was his ordinariness that was the most compelling people asked me afterwards if i had been intimidated by him and to my astonishment my answer was no for those fifteen minutes in the vestibule we were just two blokes having a chat i used to have a running joke on twitter with some legal bods about releasing a cd of munby s greatest quotes under the title now that s what i call munby track one would be his quote what is the good of making someone safer if it merely makes them miserable i also like his reference to a local authority being the servant and not the master there are loads of his words enough for an entire collection of now cds i just feel very blessed and grateful that i can add a couple of personal ones from those two very brief encounters rip sir james and thank you posted in uncategorized aretha had it right november 12 2025 november 12 2025 markneary 1 comment george julian posted an interesting blog this morning slightly different from the usual important reports that she writes today s post came about following the unexpected abandonment of the inquest george is currently reporting on in the post george ponders the wider experience of the past week in court and focuses on how respect or not is played out by the various witnesses and systems at the end of the post she invites readers to add their thoughts on the matter the timing of this invitation is interesting for me i have been wrestling with my new book for the last few months at its most basic the fundamental premise of the book is a love letter to things people values that have gone respect is one of the values that i have been trying to address in the book it s only been in the last couple of weeks that i ve managed to get over the two very large hurdles that i had positioned in my way at 66 i don t want the material to be dismissed as the ramblings of an old fart of course i am an old fart and like every old fart that has come before me i am at that dinosaur stage where so much of the modern world bewilders me but natural evolution aside i arrogantly believe that there are many things that we need to be reflecting on right now if we re going to jetison an old value what do we have to take its place the other hurdle is that i don t want to appear as judgmental of the younger generations it s not a question of me being right and them being wrong it s about an inevitable difference for the world to progress the young has to reject much of what their elders hold dear this doesn t have to mean that you are being critical every person who grew up between the 1960s and 1990s will have experienced this through music the first time my dad saw sparks on top of the pops his wiring system went all to pot i loved them so in the book i want to look at lots of things that all played a part of my growing up and ponder whether these things are just old fashioned artefacts consigned to history as the world moves forward i wrote a blog at the weekend and whilst doing so i went off on a tangent that i hadn t planned i wanted to mark remembrance sunday and repeated the stories i have told before about my uncles all army or navy at our family parties i mentioned that many of their stories petered out and i suspect that many stories weren t even told a chum of uncle bob who had been a decent non league footballer had his leg blown off it was many years later that i discovered that the friend survived the war but spent years in a lunatic asylum afterwards before finally taking his own life in the early 1970s when he was discharged and returned from the war his wife was in her early 20s and they had three very young kids they were all at one point or another on the front line of the fighting lost limbs made their way into their stories death seldom did of course it would be easy to dismiss this lack of stories as being indicative of men of their generation not being able to open up about their feelings they witnessed some appalling things and if they were talked about they were narrated very matter of factly or the emphasis would be on the humour of military life yes my uncles were part of the stiff british upper lip generation but i believe something else was at play here another reason for the silence was respect a respect for those mates who had been killed a respect for the families that were left behind a respect that came with an instinctive knowledge that the listener was a guest to these lives and a guest who couldn t possibly imagine the full extent of the horror no matter how much we wanted to empathise the story of uncle bob s mate was truncated to protect him and out of respect for his wife and family sometimes being silent is the perfect way to honour someone s memory someone s pain we ve gone a very long way in the opposite direction now people film themselves sobbing uncontrolably for a two minute tiktok video over experiences that aren t quite so vivid as watching your friend s head being blown off this morning i was deep into a chapter where i wonder what has happened to all the various youth culture groups that came and went from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century the teddy boys the mods the punks the goths these groups came and went at a rapid pace just during my teenage years me and my contempories could have gone from glam rockers to soul boys to punks to mods to new romantics whichever group you belonged to you saw yourself as a rebel spitting at the staid people who came before you in her post george talked about how some of the witnesses were dressed for their moment in the witness box it made me think about my mum s funeral in 1976 i had just started to dip my adolescent toe into punk waters nothing too heavy i d carefully ripped a couple of t shirts and inserted a safety pin into the hole i had stood for ages outside edgars outfitters looking at the pvc bondage trousers in the window not quite brave enough to buy a pair yet but something was stirring it wouldn t have occured to me in a month of sundays to attend the funeral in my new wardrobe i wouldn t have been allowed but i had already built a few foundation stones about respect i didn t own a suit at the time and had to wear one of my dad s spare summer jackets brown and white nylon jacket and a pair of brown crimplene slacks my ensemble couldn t have been further from the image i was trying to cultivate but on that day of all days it didn t matter a jot respect is just one of many values from my childhood that manifested itself in many different ways but has become laughably old fashioned my friend and i have a recurring theme where we mourn the loss of gratitude duty is another value that is important to me but it barely registers in the big stories anymore i could go on for hours and i probably will but suffice to say that so many of my core values have gone the same way as crossroads and the hostess trolley i had hoped that becoming a southall fc supporter again would help me bridge the gap between the old and the new needless to say life is a bit more complicated than bridging gaps on the one hand i notice that i ve become my dad he used to go spare when usually in th 70s italian footballers would roll about the pitch as if they ve been mortally wounded nowadays everyone does that it s not seen as gamesmanship it s seen as a prefectly acceptable way of gaining an advantage i cringe at this behaviour several times each match but i m in the minority the play on the pitch is different to what i remember from the 70s and 80s i may not fully understand the emphasis on the press but it doesn t raise any hackles unfortunately as far as my social experiment goes the vast majority of southall supporters are my age or upwards although we now carry sticks as a mobility aid and not as a weapon our behaviour hasn t really changed the chants are comfortingly familiar and the linesman still gets more than his fair share of belittling all in all my groundbreaking report into non league football support in 2025 is a bit thin on the ground the only pronouncements that i can make with any certainty is that the under 40 years old supporters tend to have a pre match coffee rather than a beer in the clubhouse and the player s wives girlfriends tend to have had much more facial work done than their 1970s counterparts a couple of months ago i read an article that blew my mind the young writer was making the case that post war britain didn t end in the mind 1960s as is so often presented he made the argument that we are only now beginning to witness the beginning of the end of post war britain this made total sense to me there s a whole new world with new beliefs new values new ways of relating and communicating that is chomping at the bit to really get going but it can t yet the adults from the immediate post war britain have all long gone but their children like me are still around we absorbed a lot of our parent s values and the new ones seems alien to us we re not deliberatly obstructing the new order we just can t do something that feels so odd it s uncomfortable to be wearing the wrong sized clothes my clients who are over 40 often talk about the existential anxiety they feel when they realise that all their anchors have disappeared the problem is compunded because they re not rejecting the new anchors they simply don t recognise them as anchors and probably never will it may take another 20 years and the deaths of all my generation for the new order to go full pelt respect as a concept might still exist and it might not and if it doesn t that will probably be okay at least there won t be any bloggers writing about the proper respectful atire for funerals and inquests george s blog that inspired this one is here coronial respect posted in uncategorized remembering the cigars november 9 2025 november 9 2025 markneary leave a comment i wasn t particularly thinking about remembrance day yesterday but there was a segment in last night s dream where i was sitting outside a rural railway station and got into conversation with a soldier returning home on leave from the war from the setting and our clothes it wasn t a modern war it was the 2nd world war as we walked from the station the soldier told me some real tales of horror but his narration had a casual almost flippant edge that was so familiar to me it had the same feel as the stories i heard from my uncles when i was a child of course being men of their generation they didn t frame their tales as stories of heroism quite the opposite there was an underplaying of their experiences in modern terms one might almost use the word banter to describe their storytelling misfortune was presented with mirth it was only when they reached the point of the story where a mate had been killed that the tone changed the words stopped and i started to read the silences as code that some awful fate had happened to private gilbert there was always a point during our family parties of the 1960s and 1970s where the men would retire to the back room the women and the kids would stay in the front room that was only used for occassions like this and carry on bopping to the love affair or the sweet once settled in the back room the men would discard their beers and get out the whiskey bottle all of my uncles were non smokers weirdly it was the women who all smoked but one of them would produce a box of cigars after ten minutes of silent swigging and puffing the stories would start and this is where one of my lifelong sadnesses comes in as a small boy and then as a teenager i was more interested in singing along to everlasting love with my cousin hazel in the other room so i frequently took my leave just at the point that the men got into full storytelling steam i think i also picked up on my dad s awkwardness during these cigar sessions both he and my mum were the youngest in their familes so were still at school during the war i think my dad left school and was working for the last two years of the war he had a story he was working with a friend of his dad and they were doing some sort of business on a roof in spencer street i m not sure what they were doing repointing the brickwork clearing the guttering anyway dad s boss had more important jobs to do the white lion was on the corner of spencer street so he probably went off to wet his whistle and left dad to work on the roof dad s story was slightly secondhand the action happened offstage it was a two day job and on the second day dad returned at 7 o clock in the morning to find that the house had been bombed overnight and the entire family had been killed i recall mum getting frustrated at dad s account of this story she was interested in the make up of the deceased family but for dad the story was about the roof and his hard work going up in smoke i m not sure he even knew who the family were i liked this story i still do but it doesn t have the gravitas as the stories that the uncles shared in the back parlour dad knew this too and was left stuck in the room not having the youthful excuse of wanting to hear blockbuster as a reason to take his leave there were five uncles in attendance my mum s two brothers charlie and albert and the husbands of three of her sisters bob and another charlie and another albert to avoid confusion the brothers charlie and albert were known as whacker and nobblers respectively brothers in law bob and charlie were just bob and charlie but for some reason the other albert was always refered to by surname farwell so that was the cast i m not sure they wanted an audience but they put up with me perched on the poufee i feel ashamed to admit this but i remember so few of the stories i m probably making this up but there seemed to be a hierarchy and the army men whacker nobblers and farwell held a slightly higher status than the navy men i don t think it had anything to do with rank but more about actual proximity to the fighting action the army stories often entailed limbs that had been blown off whilst the navy histories tended to be geographical nobody lost a leg on uncle bob s ship and if they did it was relegated in the storytelling below the delights of a cream tea in the markets of singapore one story that never made these party jackanory sessions was the terrible story of what befell uncle albert farwell s family whilst he was away at war i only discovered this story about five years ago and checked with all my cousins wh...