The PR Blog

I have just watched the funeral of Prince Philip. There was something so different, so sad and so moving that I felt the need to put it into words. To witness the passing of this great Naval Officer and servant of the People was and will become one of those moments in history where, as Shaydee wrote some time ago, we record our snapshots of momentous occasions and our brains realise that something momentous just occurred. 

Today, we watched the passing of the old guard. The handing over of our future to a group of people who have never learned that, without respect for the past,  we will be given a future that none of us could ever have imagined or ever wanted.

It is a future that fills me with dread.

Of all the legends and stories about ANZAC the most enduring one is that of Simpson and his donkey.

I clearly remember being told this story as a very young child when I was in grade 2 in 1941. In those days we were repeatedly told stories about the “last” war; last meaning previous, not end or final.

Recently, one of my commenters said that we had become a society of sex, drugs, mock and troll.  How profound was that? Everything was either lewd, spaced out, or subject to ridicule and abuse.

Doesn't that just about sum up today's world in a nutshell?

It is no longer sex drugs, rock and roll. Our modern society has taken things to a new level.

The Last Post would be familiar to all Australians from an early age. It is played at every ANZAC Day ceremony by a bugler in an army uniform and frequently at funerals of soldiers and veterans.

Does the average civilian attendee understand the significance of this quasi musical interlude? Is it an entertainment piece that everyone expects to hear because it is always part of the programme like the hymn “Oh God our Help in Ages Past”?

The Last Post is one of the most ancient tools used by modern British founded armies and has its roots in the days of the Roman Empire when horns were used to play the hymn of the Goddess Diana and as signals to command troops on the battlefield. Even to this day, the French term for what we call e reveille is La Diana.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it’s one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him… One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.”

~ H. L. Mencken, “Prejudices: Third Series (Le Contrat Social)“. Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.

I just off the phone from talking to my Mum, Redhead. We were talking about how some older neighbours had relocated to another state to be closer to their daughter. While waiting for their house to be ready, they are living with their daughter. It has been months now. 

The conversation turned to how it is nice to have visitors but they, like fish, start to smell after two days. Redhead said that she could never understand why I was so reluctant to move in with her, seeing as she had a big house and lived alone " We get on so well, don't we? " she asked.

"Yes " I replied. " Because we don't live together. "

And so began the conversation and the story of Bombay Gin, getting up at sparrows fart, noodles and The Crooner.