Alan Coleman

The BBC’s latest Sunday night offering is a ridiculously camp adaptation of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. As to be expected, all the usual suspects have been wheeled out for a predictable bout of over acting and stereotypical one liners.
It’s awful, but it got me thinking.
Years ago The Albion Band released a musical version called Lark Rise to Candleford: a Country Tapestry. Dad got into it because folk music was his thing, he’d listen to it over and over in his Vauxhall Cavalier on the way to work– metallic blue, spotlights.
One day, he turned up with the book, not just any book mind, it was the heavy weight hard back version bound in a green spotted fabric. What TV adverts for newspaper commemorative editions would describe as “lavishly illustrated”. He’d sit in bed at the weekends running his hands gently form side to side over the cover before carefully opening it and saying things like, “Look at the lovely pictures” or “It’s beautifully laid out, look at the typography and the weight of the paper”.
He loved that book, and would waste no opportunity to pick it up and admire it happily at arms length.
One day, he came home from work and the dog had chewed it up.

It’s always been easy, conservatism.

Not much thought has ever been required to identify with its principles, policies or morality. The way that almost everything can be simplified into channels of right and wrong provides a tempting path for those wishing to easily convince themselves of their fortitude. There’s plenty of company too, family, friends and religion will almost certainly line up and acquiesce, because it’s easy to do so. Safety in numbers, mob culture and the comfort of knowing that if others agree with you, your opinions must be right.

The media also provides for a willing soundboard, often leading the thought process with an intoxicating channel of hysteria. Knee jerk reactions being the easiest headlines, fewer and bigger letters on the page. The ultimate business model, everyone’s a winner. Everyone.
This isn’t party politics I’m talking about here either, for Labour and the Tories each perpetrate their own sub brand of conservatism. As such, conservatism is often wrongly associated with the Conservative Party, twenty years ago this may have been a fair assumption, now it would display simple naivety. Labour or Tory, everyone’s a winner, the reoccurring theme.

The simple fact is when it comes to left wing politics, more thought and brain power is required to reconcile the morality of being a decent person. An example is why practically all comedians have left wing sympathies, that’s unless you’re Jim Davison or Bernard manning of course.