We have a project making a film of what is known as the Atom Bomb Game .

When the Enola Gay flew over Japan on their fateful journey of destruction, underneath them & a few miles from Hiroshima a big Go tournament was taking place. They, the participants, assumed that because there were just the three planes that it was just a reconnaissance & the tournament carried on as before.

Go is about 4,000 years old. Originally it was a Chinese game invented to keep the Emperor’s son occupied.

But it has become a Japanese  game, the Japanese game, in Japan, Go players are stars, recognised & admired wherever they go.

Go is a war game but is a game of protocol & manners. After World War II & the cessation of hostilities it became & an instrument of peace. One of the participants took the game abroad. Today the Game Go is played all over the World & is one of the Brain games, together with chess & draughts. But Go is the most complicated.

The story of the Atom Bomb is engrained in the history & culture of modern Japan. It is an amazing story. It is surprising that the story of the Atom Bomb game hasn’t been told before. We at InFactuation, together our friends & mentors Peter & Sheila Wendes are resolved to make this film.

We will need to raise some money for this.

If anyone has ideas about funding or indeed anything else, perhaps they would like to contact  me at Andrew@infactuationproductions.co.uk or andrewwallis2802@hotmail.co.uk or Peter at pwendes@hotmail.com

Ken Livingstone was on a bus last night sitting behind me, reading something,  trying not to be recognised. As I got off, I touched him & said, we want you back, he gave the thumbs up sign & said, Cheers.

I wrote an article about cancer with the intention of having it published in one of the broadsheets

For 2 reasons really. To help publicise our film for the charity Cancer Black Care & because I thought it would help me personally to have something in the broadsheets.

I phoned up the Guardian, Tuesday of last week, the 10th, which was a strange experience because the number for the reception took an age to find & then turned out to be defunct anyway. I went from one person to another in quick success. Then I was told to send it to the culture section which didn’t seem quite right. But anyway, I thought it would be better than nothing. I left all the details they could want. Phone numbers & e-mail addresses etc. But they didn’t get back to me at all. I-emailed again on Friday & eventually received this reply

Dear Andrew
Thank you very much for sending us your article. Laura has taken a look,
but I'm afraid she is not planning to use the piece on the arts pages.
I hope you will be able to place your work with another publication -
thanks once again for thinking of the Guardian.
With best wishes,
Eiluned Jones
Arts Desk Administrator

So I e-mailed someone on the health & lifestyle section but received no reply at all not even an acknowledgement.

I phoned up the Times & (eventually) was given the name of a person, Rosemary Bennett to send it to. I e-mailed her twice but received no reply at all, not even an acknowledgement

Oh well.

It is difficult to say how good or bad it is but I suspect that in fact it is of a lot more interest & better written than much of the stuff than most of the stuff they publish.

This is it. I hope, dear reader, that you like it.

Scares about cancer are manifold. Cancer is all about us. All of us are affected by it both in terms of knowing those who have it & recover from it or die from it & by the dire warning that we ourselves may contract it. There are new scares every day. I heard on the radio recently that (in America) 3 people have died after receiving organ transplants from someone suffering from cancer but in fact misdiagnosed as meningitis. Cancer has a life of its own. It is everywhere.  Apparently one in three (or even one in two) people will at some point be affected by cancer at some point in their lives.

My father, a doctor, died of prostate cancer & a brain tumour, aged 81 & my mother, a nurse, died at the age  87, of breast cancer & finally of stomach cancer. Not bad. People live longer but less. In fact there is not a lot of history of cancer in either of my parents’ families although it is true that my father’s father, my grandfather, died of cancer when he was really quite young. I am not actually sure what kind of cancer it was but cancer is cancer.

Of course people are recovering from cancer all over the place. But it comes back. In a sense it never goes away. We all get cancer every day but our immune system is able to deal with it. I know not from my experience but vicariously through the lives & traumas of others, especially my mother, friends & relatives what a shattering & frightening thing it is to be told that you have cancer.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 1997. It seemed to us, my father my sister & myself like a death sentence. But in some sense she did recover.  She was on the drug Tamoxifen which reputedly didn’t have any side effects. Towards the end of her life in fact, she told me that this certainly wasn’t the case. Though I can’t say what these side effects were.  Of course she may have been ascribing things to drug as side effects which should in all honesty be ascribed to something else. But I think people do know about this sort of thing one way or another.

Both my parents were medical people. My father a doctor & my mother a nurse. Whichever way you look at it they did live to a good age. My father was 81 when he died & my mother 87. Not bad. People live longer but most less.

A lot can be done. By right diet & lifestyle generally (if it is possible) we can do much to avoid cancer.

Personally, I believe in right diet as a prerequisite good health, cancer in particular. Myself, I eat mainly raw vegetables. I am 63 now & lead the life of someone considerably younger. I, inter alia, ride a bicycle through the streets of London & work as a volunteer with the Brixton Prison chaplaincy.

For some reason that has not been fully or finally established cancer, especially amongst the Afro Caribbean community. For whatever reason cancer is a worse blight for black people. A recent report stated that breast cancer tends to affect black women in Britain at an earlier age than white women that is at an average of 46, as opposed to an average is 67.

What we talk about in the film, Food 4 Thought, we have made for the charity Cancer Black Care is the importance of health & diet in preventing & overcoming cancer by right diet & by not smoking or taking drugs. The mantra for the film is eat more fruit & veg. The film follows the story of Raul Price, who diagnosed with prostate cancer, completely changed his lifestyle. He eats sensibly, that is he now eats much fruit & vegetables & seems to have recovered.

The film follows the story of Raul Price, who diagnosed with prostate cancer, completely changed his lifestyle. He referred to himself as going through a cancer journey. Has he completely recovered or not? Can this diet or that completely banish cancer or does it all go away. He now eats much fruit & vegetables & seems to have recovered.

What we want is our DVD encourage is quite simply to encourage healthy living. Right diet, no drugs, no smoking. To show the courage & spirituality of the sufferers we have interviewed. We have interviewed a nutritionist, carers, as well as the sufferers themselves.

The launch for the film Food for Thought an InFactuation Productions DVD is on Thursday 19^th of March at The Board Room, Wembley Centre for Health & Care, 116 Chaplin Road, Wembley HA0 4UZ. Contact Natalie@cancerblackcare.org / 020 89614151

Andrew Wallis of InFactuation Productions is the producer of the Cancer Black Care, DVD, Food 4 Thought.

We at InFactuation Productions have made a film for Cancer Black Care about the connection between diet, lifestyle & cancer. The title of the film is Food 4 Thought. We have an opening event at The Board Room, Wembley Centre for Health & Care, 116 Chaplin Road, Wembley, HA0 4UZ from 1pm to 3pm at which the film will be shown & there will be guest speakers. Anyone who would like to come should e-mail natalie@cancerblackcare.org or phone 020 8961 4151. All are welcome. The nearest tube is Wembley Central.

Go

I have recently started playing the Japanese game of Go. 6,000 years old, I believe, it was invented in China to keep the emperor’s children, but these days, it is more of a Japanese game.

I heard about the game after watching the wonderful film the Go Master (it isn’t everybody’s opinion that the film is so wonderful  - this must be admitted) at the London Film Festival the year before last.

I was wondering about the game itself & did meet one or two people who had played it. But was none the wiser for that. Finally after showing of the film at the ICA 2 or 3 months ago, I did learn. Peter & Sheila Wendes who are officials with the British Go Association

http://www.britgo.org/bga

and who make a living from teaching the game, teach in schools, were giving a demonstration of the game. At first sight the game is nothing, just a big collection of squares with counters. But in fact it is far more complex; bewilderingly so.

I have been playing the game for 2 or 3 months intermittently.

When I play, often, just at the moment I think I am winning & about to take lots of stones from the board, I realise that I am totally lost.

If you look at this link

http://www.alexprach.co.uk/go/

and click on about CLGC

and look at the picture immediately below where it says contacting members, it is me on the right hand side. Since the taking of this photograph I have had my hair shawn but it is me.

This is the wiki entry for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28board_game%29

In Go, the stones (as the pieces are called) never move. It is a war game; a game of territory. Stones do disappear, are taken, but it is territory that is important. At the end of the game, the territory is added up & the player with most amount of territory is the winner.

Dr Wallis was born in Southsea, Hampshire and came from a Naval family. His father was a doctor in the Royal Navy and his paternal grandfather had been a Naval Paymaster Captain. His father died when he was only 4 years old and he grew up with his mother. Early schooling was in Hampshire and in Malta and later at Epsom College where he was keen on rugby and cricket. He maintained his interest in these sports all his life.

Geoffrey qualified in medicine at University College Hospital, London in 1941 and did his house jobs with Sir Thomas Lewis and Dr Andrew Morland. He then joined the Royal Navy as Medical Officer in 1942, specialising in psychiatry, particularly in electroencephalography. He was up-graded as a specialist in 1949 and appointed as a Consultant Psychiatrist to the Royal Navy in 1956. He was Advisor in Psychiatry to the Medical Director-General (Navy) and was the Chairman of the Military Section of the World Psychiatric Association. He received the Gilbert Blane Gold Medal in recognition of his contribution to psychiatry in its application to Naval service. He studied stress as a predictor in schizophrenia, the subject of his MD from London University in 1966. He became a Foundation Fellow at the inception of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1971.

After a successful career in psychiatry in the Royal Navy he decided to retire early in order to start a career in psychiatry in the NHS. After retiring from the Royal Navy in 1972 he was appointed as a consultant psychiatrist in High Royds Hospital, Menston and St James’ University Hospital, Leeds where he served until 1983. Geoffrey served as a Clinical Tutor (he had previously done the same job in the Royal Navy and Royal Army Medical Corps) and he took a keen interest in the activities of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He was a member of the Clinical Tutor Sub-Committee and Executive Committee of the North East Division and had represented the Division as Fellow on the Council of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He had also served on the Public Policy, Programmes and Meetings committee, Library Committee and also in the Liaison Committee between the Royal College of Psychiatry and the College of Occupational Therapists. Although he was heavily committed in day-to-day clinical work, he gave a considerable amount of time to administrative duties, serving as the Chairman of the Division of Psychiatry of Leeds Western District and fulfilling his academic role as a Clinical Lecturer at Leeds University. He was Chairman of Leeds Regional Psychiatric Association and was an active member from 1990 and President, 1995-1997 of the Leeds and West Riding Medico-Legal Society. He was well known by the local solicitors who respected him for his forthright, down-to-earth medico-legal opinion.

Geoffrey met his wife, Molly, when he was a medical student and Molly was working as nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital. They married in 1943 while he was on two days sick leave which in effect became their honeymoon. Geoffrey and Molly were inseparable. They were keen on classical music and were ardent members of Opera North. They were competent water skiers. Together they attended meetings organised under the auspices of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and conferences organised by the World Psychiatric Association and were probably one of the most well travelled couples in any group.

Geoffrey retained considerable interest in clinical research and had publications on alcohol related disorders, stress as a predictor in schizophrenia, comparative assessment of depot neuroleptics and the study of Capgras Syndrome. He was a sound clinician and his opinion was always based upon careful observation and clinical evidence. He was not given to emotional excesses and his manner towards everybody, including his patients was immaculate. It is rightly said that he never retired from his work: just two days before he was admitted to hospital he had travelled a long distance to examine a patient at Rampton Hospital. After he retired from the NHS he continued to work privately and also in locum capacity at a number of psychiatric units in Yorkshire. Work was his life and he was never tired of psychiatry or psychiatric patients.

Geoffrey endured the pain and discomfort of his terminal illness with serene dignity. He died aged 81, on 5 August 1999 and is survived by his wife, Molly and their two children, Andrew and Tricia.

Lots of people came to the funeral, mainly people we had seen before.

Life goes on but we all still miss him.

My friend Dee died just before Christmas. Seeing her in the hospice was a shock. She just didn’t look like the person I remembered.

The first time I went to see her, she didn’t see me. She was asleep all the time. She was surrounded by relatives & friends, some had come down from Manchester to see her.

I went the next day & she was awake. At first she didn’t recognise me. But when her husband told her who I was, she did.

She asked after mutual friends. She drank water. She was dying.  I stayed, not that long.  After about an hour she went back to sleep. I had the intention of going to see her again the following Sunday. But she died on the Saturday.

Even when you know someone is about to die it isn’t easy. It doesn’t get any better.

I am not very good when people I know die. The next day I was so depressed that I stayed in bed all day.

Aggi, was the first person of my friends & acquaintances to die who was younger than me. She died of breast cancer & other complications. She was my manager at Loot. But when she became ill she had to take time off & was replaced in the department. She was more like a friend. After she became ill & had to leave she used to socialise with myself & some of my friends. She came with us to the Wigmore Hall for a concert. Everybody liked her & she seemed really quite well. But when the end came, it came quite quickly. She was a white South African. At her funeral, her brother didn’t come but there a number of black South Africans who made the long journey specially. There was more to her than meets the eye...

At BMRB, my friend & supervisor Gillian Scott, who was younger than myself, had cancer of the breast. She was a particular friend. In fact she didn’t die when I was still working there. I had in the meantime left the company to work for Loot. I used to phone up from time to time to see how she was. And from time to time in fact I used to go along to see her at work to see how she & the others I knew there were. But I can’t have done this all that often because after I decided to leave Loot & looking around for a job I thought I know I will go back to BMRB. I phoned up the company (BMRB) & asked to speak to Gillian but was told that she had died some years before.

She was a particular friend. When I worked there I did 2 jobs, half the week I worked as a dispatch rider, the other half as a market research interviewer with BMRB.

Gillian was an especially beautiful blond woman.  I particularly remember one Saturday morning sitting won working away & she came in through the window (I didn’t know it was a French window) & walking past me. I remember well a particular wave of happiness came over me.

I don’t in particular remember what her lifestyle was like but as far as I remember she didn’t do anything particularly wrong. I don’t she smoked. I seem to remember that she had three children.

RIP.

I had a friend who died (time goes by so quickly that in the end I can’t exactly remember how many years ago it was but it was before my mother died & she died 3 years ago.

When I was a t Loot – as well – a woman named Eileen contracted cancer. It was breast cancer. Of course – almost. Breast cancer for women & prostate cancer for men as so prevalent that they are almost a given.

We were all shocked & sad when she contracted the disease, one always is, but we shouldn’t be because it is so prevalent.

Clive, someone I knew but not that well died about 2 years ago. I didn’t know that much about him, but, I did meet him a few times. I am not sure if he smoked or what he ate. But I do know that he drank voluminous amount of red wine. Once he was diagnosed (I can’t actually remember what kind of cancer it was he died from) it all happened quite quickly. Before he died he married his girlfriend so that she could ‘inherit’ the flat. He was much missed.

One of my uncles died of cancer some months before my father. It turned that when he finally went to the doctor he was riddled with cancer. In fact it was just after the seriousness of my father’s stroke that the seriousness of his condition was discovered.

One of my uncles, died, in 1999, 8 months before my father. Not a blood uncle, the husband of one of my aunts. It seems that he hadn’t gone to the doctor to see what was the matter until far too late. It turned out that when he finally went he was riddled with cancer & only had a few days to live. Presumably he was feeling unwell. He was old but he lived an exceptionally interesting life as a soldier during World War II, a lawyer, deputy head of the coal board under Lord Robens & a clergyman when he retired. He was decorated in the war but refused to talk about it.

Another of my friends Patricia died of cancer several years ago. Someone I knew really quite well. A person who gave up smoking & drinking several times every day. She was good company, permanently starting businesses which duly failed including an art gallery for young artists; there was some really good art there. (I am not an expert on art.) But whatever the rights & wrongs of all that the fact is that the world is a worse place without her.

 You hear about people dying of cancer all the time. You wonder.  Mo Mowlam for example. She was young – in her early fifties. I appreciate that there is no getting away from DNA etc but my motto, what I think is, why die if you don’t need to? What I am saying is this, what was her lifestyle like. Did she at some point smoke a lot of dope?

I have 2 main obsessions. Chess & early music. In fact I have many obsessions. Such is the consequence of having an obsessive personality.

This entry is about early music.

I am not a musician. But I have loved early music for many years. I am 62 now. I think it all started when I was, I suppose 11, although I might have been older, maybe 14, maybe even 16. It is all such a long time ago that in fact I can’t quite remember. My parents gave me the record of Myra Hess playing her transcription of JS Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring - Je­sus bleib­et meine Freude, mein­es Herz­ens Trost und Saft. The seeds of early music & in particular Bach in particular started then. When I was growing up I used, like most people, to listen to pop music; the Beatles, Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, rubbish like that. When I was about 20, I think it was gave up listening to music altogether.

When after about 2 years I started to listen to music again, it was classical music in general. Beethoven, Handel, Bach mainly. But lots of other music, Britten, Stravinsky, Haydn, Vaughn Williams, Wagner.

It was in the middle of 1975 that I heard a programme on radio3 (the music magazine) an item about the composer Orlando Lassus & in particular the Missa Bel Amfrita, in my view, one of best pieces of music ever written. I bought the record of it & went to the concert at St Paul’s Covent Garden.

This was a turning point. After that I didn’t listen to any other music.

Whether it be mediaeval, renaissance or baroque music, I love it all. I listen to music at home, on the radio & on records & CDs. I have been to York, Bruges & Utrecht to listen to the early music festivals there to listen to early music.

Up to recent times, the last century or so, there were 3 functions for music, sacred music, music that is only heard in church & for dancing, the wonderful dancing one sees in period films & so on & music to accompany eating.

By early music, I mean mediaeval music, renaissance music & baroque music, also possibly Mozart if performed on period instruments.

The Stoke Newington early music festival is on at the moment. It is in the small church in Stoke Newington Church Street on the North side of the road, next to Clissold Park. There have been 2 concerts already. But there are 3 left. Tonight, it is Venetian scared music, Thursday Tudor Court music & on Saturday Bach cantatas. The church is crumbling. But acoustics are wonderful & the music is wonderful.  There are some wonderful performers. It has been nobly & wonderfully organized & sustained by Vanessa Coode & her wonderful team. InFactuation is one of the sponsors.

I nearly fell for the Nigerian scam. I had an e-mall purporting to be from one of my friends, an elderly female, in her 70s, saying she was working for a charity in Nigeria concerned with racism HIV/AIDS. She said she had left her money & documents in a taxi.

Personally I am always very careful not to fall for these things but I suppose because I was concerned, worried in fact about her,

She said she had left all her things in a taxi.

There was much odd about the e-mail which I should have spotted. For example, what was doing there by herself? If she was not there by herself the people she was with would have helped her out & she would have gone to the British consulate. There was some odd spelling, in fact American spelling.

I was just about to go home when it came through. If it had come through 10 minutes later, in fact I wouldn’t have seen it until the next day…..

I was going to tell her off for going to a country like Nigeria buy herself. Instead I told her off for giving her password to somebody else. In fact I read on the internet that it is possible to break into an e-mail account without the password. Actually I doubt that. The truth is much more likely to be that people give really rather obvious words as passwords. For example religious people might have love, pope, church, religion, archbishop.

The MP for Kensington North who is called Sarah McCarthy Fry was hit by the same scam on the same day, namely Monday

This is the link

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/7461409.stm

In her case, I suspect that she said to someone something like, oh can you look at my Hotmail, my password is....well I bet it was something like parliament or primeminister or Portsmouth, something not impossible to guess.

Luckily my bank wouldn’t send the money, for which I thank them. Plus I had no credit or debit card because it is late (very late) in coming through; again luckily. I e-mailed a mutual friend asking him to send the money & I would give him a cheque when I was due to see him later on in the week.

I was going to withdraw what cash I could from the bank. I was seriously worried about her. I didn’t notice that the way the e-mail was worded wasn’t like her at all. I did think it was strange & unlike her to go on a trip of any description by herself. She does get around but usually when she goes abroad, it is either to see relatives or with a group of other people on an organised trip.

I phoned up Western Union first thing in the morning to find out how to go about sending money via them & I then went out & looked at my e-mails en route. The mutual friend had e-mailed me saying (I paraphrase) don’t send any money, phone me, this is my phone number. I phoned him & he said (inter alia) that he had seen her on Thursday & she made no mention of any sort of trip abroad & that he knew she was around on the Friday as well & she was fine but had made no mention of any trip abroad. I was almost completely convinced now & then she phoned me & I knew for sure.

They have stolen her e-mail account by changing her password so that she can’t get into it. The people in Nigeria have been sending the same e-mail to everybody in her address book, some of which she has no way of contacting because the e-mail address is the only contact information she has about them. Some of her acquaintances must have sent off some money. What is to be done about this? Are they going to say to her, look I sent this money because you were stupid enough to give away your password, can you please repay me? If I had sent some money, honestly I don’t know....

So Lech was informer was he? It doesn’t sound very likely to me. Secret police archives, do me a favour, why should anybody believe what they say? I bet they planted these allegations in order to smear Lech at some point in the future, which they have done. I know that not all Polish people like him but a prophet is hardly much loved in his own country. Besides, as far I can gather, most people in the socialist bloc, did something or other at some time of which they cannot be proud.

Sweet sounds

Sweet sounds from Classic FM, playing in the background whilst I talk on the phone. Not very often anything very surprising but very often my favourite music, Bach, Handel, lots of my other favourite composers. But yuk, all that vacuous talk, all those appalling advertisements. Turning over to Classic FM 90% of the time, more than 90% of the time, it is talking. The music on Classic FM is crumbs from the rich mans table.

I work with InFactuation Productions We make films on social issues, documentaries, educational films, that sort of thing.

This is the link to our website.

http://www.infactuation.co.uk/

We have a Lech Walesa project. We want to make film about him & to interview him? He is one of my heroes. Almost singlehandedly he brought down the Soviet empire. In 1970, at the time of the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard, it looked as though the Red Army would intervene but it didn’t. Does anyone out there know him? Can anyone help us?

Cricklewood boasts the biggest hall in the country. It looks like a cathedral it is so big. I have never played bingo. I don’t think I would like it. Perhaps I should go inside at least just once. But would I have to play bingo. Perhaps I would, perhaps not. There do seem to be a constant stream of people going in it. Bingo must have some attraction.

If I had the money I would turn it into a cinema.

Cricklewood is a place for passing through. There must have been some accidents there in past because the road is heavily fenced off with steel barriers. It leads into the somewhat more fashionable Kilburn & thence to London itself.

They were digging up the road outside the house the other day. I don’t know what it was all about. One of my friends thought it might be the connected with water pipes.

The house shook. I wondered it would fall down. Seriously I did wonder.

But all that was left was a pile of soil & rubble with some rubbish on top.

It is a strange road. It is more than 90% garage repair shops & workshops. Strange looking men hanging around outside. The police frequently come round, making their presence felt. One morning they were questioning 2 middle aged women.

There is rubbish in the street. Discarded food, food cartons, bits of car parts etc.

When I came out of my house at about 9.45am this morning, there was Ken Livingstone walking down the road with 2 small children on either side of him holding his hand. He walked into Martins newsagent & I crossed the road. I did know he lived in Cricklewood but I had thought it was in Mill Lane which is about a mile away. The 2 children were really very small; I hadn’t realised his children were that small. Maybe they were his grandchildren. Ken was talking away to them. He said “we go this way.”  He was wearing jeans. He looked quite tired. There is a big block of flats at the end of my road. I think he probably lives in one of those.

I have seen him twice before. The first time was in a tube train when Ken was the Mr for Brent East. He was wearing a white suit & reading the Independent. The other time was last October walking down Cricklewood Broadway.

Last week for some reason they were digging up the road by the house. I have no idea what they were doing. But the house shook. What was left when they were finished was a pile of earth & some rubbish on top of it.

 

And today, they were doing it again. There were important looking men walking around while a tipper truck seemed to be filling up the already full hole, creating a mountain. Quite what they are up to God knows.