Snow, Ice, Listowel, Crashed Almeras, A Bought 1.9 Skoda Fabia, a Conversion to Hats...ALL Conspire to Delay Unrepentant Communist Postings....

Apologies to all the regular readers of Unrepentant Communist for an absence of posts since my wildly optimistic January posting, ah that wonderful space rocket and that progressive wish list...We embarked upon the hardest winter that we have seen in Ireland for at least 40 years and this had a huge impact upon me. I thoroughly enjoyed the sharpness of the air and the extremity of the weather. Something about those sub zero temperatures were much more ascetic than that kind of drab rainy nothingness we have been experiencing in recent years. We are all encouraged to put this down to 'global warming' but this wonderful hard old fashioned winter has hardened my scepticism about this whole global warming concept. In fact my scepticism about many 'Green' issues have been growing in direct proportion to the length of time that the utterly laughable Irish Green Party, led by the hapless careerist John Gormley, continues to prop up this horrendously incompetent Fianna Fail government. Basically Ireland is governed by a kleptocratic majority party acting in the interests of the very well feather bedded Irish rich, that bunch of Fianna Fáil gangsters, have been loyally supported through thin and thinner by a crowd of carrot crunchers, the 'Green Party', who have sold out any principles they once held for the taste of power and the tasty prospect of the lavish ministerial pensions dished out to all ex-ministers here, Martin Cullen the recently resigned Minister and TD for Waterford, will receive a €140,000 payoff and an annual ministerial pension of €110,000 per annum for life, thats going to buy him an awful lot of Ralgex for the old back pain.
Despite my liking of the winter weather I paid the price for the love affair, writing off the trusty Nissan Almera in a spectacular ice derived overturning in West Limerick. I was rescued by some local neighbours who were the epitome of good grace and hospitality. Martin, the man whose land I crashed onto, not only provided me with tea, but also pulled the car out of the field and kindly transported me back to my home about 17 miles away. Events like this confim in me my belief that fundamentally people are hard wired to be helpful and kind to each other, and that it is only the capitalist system that sustains and nurtures that selfish side we all possess.
The outcome of Nissan destruction day was
a) the purchase of a Skoda Fabia,which delightfully still retains something of the old Lada about it I think...ha ha... Whether that is true or not I must say that the 1.9 Skoda Fabia diesel is a better car than the Nissan 1.4 Almera, it is saving me A FORTUNE in running costs, I would estimate, a pproximately 35% cheaper per month.
b) a delayed reaction in terms of the fact, that although not physically damaged, I think that the whole incident shook me up FAR more than I first thought. Everything became a struggle and I think that I was suffering from a bit of shock. This culminated in a day or two of gloomy and negative thoughts a full week and a half after the accident.
c) A kind of scaling down of activities of all sorts and a period of just kind of hibernating, this involved sadly, a failure to post on the old 'Unrepentant Communist' blog. My belief systems were not altered in the slightest, just I could not summon up the energies to be posting as normal. I hummed the Soviet national anthem a few times in a desultory way and even tried to force motivation by a rousing chorus of Eisler and Brechts Einheitsfrontlied but the energy would not come...
d) last but not least I have discovered that if it is cold, minus 4 and 5 on a regular basis, then ones head gets cold, for this there is an old fashioned and rather pleasingly sartorially distinctive remedy, namely, the wearing of a hat. I find that wearing a hat is now as natural to me as putting on a coat. It is distinctive and above all it keeps your head warm. A further aspect of it, is that once you have grown used to wearing a hat, it is difficult to go out without one, without feeling somewhat exposed and naked...

I suppose the very fact that this post has appeared is self evidence of the fact that I am at last returning to my old form...I hope that we will share many more posts together in 2010, now that we are almost entering something akin to Spring, even though it is still regularly registering minus 4 every night by 8pm in South West Ireland....As for Global Warming???...My John Gormley!

'Tales from Europe' and Das Singende Klingende Baumchen

I was chatting the other day with one of my old school mates from my early years in London, and as people in their forties are wont to do, we started remembering the old TV programmes that were broadcast on childrens TV back in our childhood ....amongst mention of the inevitable Blue Peter vs Magpie divide, we both almost simultaneously remembered that there was something really very weird that British children were served up before their tea's sometime in the early 1970's. That was of course the strangest of times when the BBC seemed to be importing some pretty well made fairy-tale dramatisations mainly from Eastern Europe. We both remembered that the series was called 'Tales from Europe', and we both remembered one of the the Soviet contributions, 'The Snow Queen' below which I recall was pretty scary,



But best of all was when we both exploded in a laughter born of mutual recognition as our memories located the weirdest of them all...'The Singing Ringing Tree' (or to afficionados TSRT) ...or in its original German title Das Singende Klingende Baumchen. This surreal fairy tale came out of the Babelsberg studio in Potsdam and was produced by DEFA films and featured a nasty haughty princess, a handsome prince who is later turned into a bear, an evil dwarf, a magical singing ringing tree, some comic soldiery, and a talking fish (full story here) .

As I remember it everyone of us in our class could not get over how wonderful it was, and as I recall it was repeated a good few times, because I remember watching it at least twice. What made these tales from Europe so watchable was the fact that it transported us to another land, in so many ways, a land of fairy tales and of course the unknown lands of Europe. The fact that they came from behind the Iron Curtain did not either register with us, or if it did it certainly did not matter. Curious I found that my old school mate and I were not alone in remembering with warm affection this whole series, and the Singing Ringing Tree in particular. I listened with some fascination the BBC Radio 4 documentary about the innovative and at times absolutely terrifying fairy tale from the DDR and the USSR . By clicking on the hypertext link you can still listen to that documentary about the cult DDR childrens film
I went on to some discussion boards and discovered that this programme was stuck in other peoples minds as much as mine, one poster described his feelings thus,

"I still have flashbacks in the form of a barely-remembered, glorious,visually sensual,surreal,sinister and to me,somehow erotic dream. The princess was the first woman I ever loved. I remember I may have been about eight or nine years of age at the time and I found this woman utterly bewitching. I would gawp in complete enrapture at her - to me she was the most beautiful, other worldly and exquisite thing I had ever seen! Seeing pictures of her now still makes me feel 'all funny'! Throughout my life I have always had an interest in the unusual,sinister,bizarre and erotic and I would say that TSRT most probably laid the foundations for this, along with other European children's programmes. A huge thankyou to all those individuals responsible for helping us to relive a small part of our innocent childhoods again "

There are literally dozens and dozens of other comments like this about TSRT on

guest book of ‘your Favourite TV memories’

If you want to be a complete anorak about this a full listing of what was on Tales from Europe and when is available here .

Seeing that there is obviously a lot of us who were mesmerised by the whole 'Tales from Europe' experience I have decided that 'Unrepentant Communist' will repeat the role of the socialist countries and provide a little bit of access to some clips from the best loved of these 'Tales from Europe', this is part of a series of 7 TSRT tracks available now on You Tube


but perhaps the visuals will bring back a few memories, apologies to those readers who did not see these in their childhood since you were in other countries, but I hope you will indulge this exercise in blatant nostalgia on this one teeny weeny occasion :) ....