Lexi and I finally got round to watching episodes five and six of the first series of Peaky Blinders last night. Despite a few terrible cases of accent wander, especially from Polly, the series has been great and ended in a real cliffhanger. I am looking forward to watching the second series and so am desperate to avoid any plot spoilers. I have particularly enjoyed the atmosphere of 1919 Birmingham as well as watching interpretations of what returning WW1 fighters may have been like. Plenty of writers have described the horrors of trench and tunnel warfare and the traumas that the survivors brought back with them may well have been as bad as the actual conditions that they experienced first hand. The excellent use of No Man’s Land and mourning clothes in episode six was particularly poignant and was going round my head as I took Rupert off to ….
the service of remembrance this morning at Tugu Negara (the national memorial) close to the centre of KL. He was assisting with handing out the programmes for the service in his capacity as a cub, despite him not being too impressed at a getting up before 6.00am so that he and I could be there by 7.30am. It was a very well attended service with addresses by the British High Commissioner and a representative from the Sikh veterans association. There were also pipe tunes played by Sikh bagpipe players and the hymns were accompanied and led by students from Lexi’s previous school. All of this was set against the large memorial inscribed with the dates of WW1, WW2 and Independence struggles a well as a large inscription reading “Glorious Dead.”
I am pleased that year on year the victims and the dead of wars are remembered but I really do wish that equal attention was given to reflecting on the reasons for the many conflicts that have been enacted during the past 100 years. By reflecting on the mistakes and successes made by previous leaders we should stand a better chance of not letting history, and wars in particular, repeat themselves. I fear greatly as to the eventual outcome of current battles in Iraq and Syria and hope, sooner rather than later, world leaders will talk with regional leaders and those engaged in war-like activities. Killing people who choose to follow a different peace loving religion to your peace loving religion cannot be justified, just like dropping bombs on battle ravaged lands. Leaders need to talk to appreciate their ideological differences before more people end up either dead, destitute or being forced out of the homes. The policy of bombing first and talking later has been the traditional way of conflict resolution and hasn’t always worked. Could our politicians and leaders be persuaded to try a different approach?
As a way of dealing with senseless violence this afternoon the Lawrence Clan went out to watch some senseless violence, in the form of the latest Bond film, Spectre. Despite being a bit all over the place in terms of story (I came out trying to remember what the story had been) it was a great visual treat and full of cool happenings and cheese one liners. A notable contributor to the film was the Malaysian censor. There were at least two removals from the film as shown by really bad editing. The terrible attempt to tidy up Ralph Fienes’ “shit” into “man” was laughable while a whole James and Madeleine scene was cut out despite leaving in a James and some bloke’s wife scene in. Censoring annoys me in that viewers should be in full control of choosing what they watch and thus conducting their own censoring as they see appropriate. What is worse than censoring is inconsistent censoring. I remember watching “Spy” which was full of effing and jeffing all the way through and it was considered perfectly fine by the censors, although the only f-word used in Philomena was dropped on to the Malaysian film cutter’s floor. Ralph Fienes was correct in his summing up of C as a shit, because he was a shit and so the line should have stood so that audience’s could have had their views on the character upheld and validated by the dialogue. Come on censors, give up.