Joe's Jottings–

  • Lonely, alone and the tech bros

    I’m a member of the Church of England and occasionally lead the people in my church in what are called ‘Intercessionary Prayers’ – sometimes also called the ‘Prayers of the people’. These are prayers written and led by church members each week, and cover a variety of topics – prayers for the church, our leaders and governments (OK…I appreciate that can sometimes be difficult), for the health of people, etc. If you’re interested in further details, take a look at what the Church of England itself says about these prayers.

    I find these prayers can often resonate with people, and I might be approached by people after prayers to thank me for some particular part of the prayers that made a lot of difference to them. This happened to me recently, after I’d included the following:

    Where people feel lonely or overlooked, make us attentive and kind.

    A member of the congregation spoke with me at the end of the service and said how much they had needed to hear this at that time. It had clearly been helpful to them, and I felt incredibly humbled. And it started me thinking…

    I was gobsmacked at the extent of loneliness in the UK. Some statistics state that over a quarter of people in the UK experience loneliness at some time, with 7% saying it’s a chronic experience for them. This site – Campaign Against Loneliness – has a lot of valuable information and support on it.

    I do want to make a difference between the experience of being alone and being lonely. I’m an only child and my parents were approaching 40 when they had me in 1961. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be the start of a blues song) I grew up quite used to entertaining myself, never considered myself to be a lonely child and have enjoyed my ‘alone time’ throughout my life. I have spent a lot of time working as a freelancer, will happily socialise but don’t feel the urgent need to always be sociable, and once spent several weeks in Alaska on my own with a tent. (And the local wildlife….)

    My church role means that people will sometimes approach me when they are lonely, and I’ve met quite a few folks over the years who’ve expressed their sense of loneliness to me.

    I guess we often associate loneliness with older people, perhaps those bereaved or separated from loved ones in any way. Many cultures have attempted to ‘fix’ this – through mixed communities where young and old are encouraged to spend more time together, social groups, church and community groups, etc. And they no doubt work to a great degree.

    And then we can always fall back on technology. We might think that things like phones, Zoom, Teams, video calling, online communities, etc. might make an impact on the problem of loneliness. In the last couple of years AIs have given rise to ‘artificial personalities’ that would definitely pass a Turing Test and that have provided a lot of entertainment and even, in some cases, emotional attachment to people. We’ve also heard of the people whose mental health has suffered from involvement with AI chatbots.

    About 25 years ago I envisaged a piece of software that I called ‘Companion’ that would interact in a realistic manner with people. I took a crack at it – but my knowledge and the technology of the day weren’t up to the job. (Anyone interested, I was attempting to do this with AIML in a framework provided by PHP). I guess I was inspired by Robert Browning…

    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what’s a heaven for?

    Obviously, modern LLMs – especially when they use tools to allow access to other resources on the Internet and use speech interaction can go along way to meeting this need.

    So – I started getting hopeful (and still am to some degree) that a communicative, knowledgeable, Companion type simulated intelligence might make a great thing to have around the house.

    But I recently read something that pulled me up short:

    “Technologists want us to focus on loneliness, not depersonalisation. “

    Alison Pugh

    Basically, tech bros feel that they can probably use loneliness as a marketing opportunity to make money by selling artificially simulated humanity to people missing humanity in a world of 8 billion human beings….

    I’m not sure what the answer is – I do think that there is a role for some sort of AI companion in the world, but we also need to start looking at how we can make the world more friendly to people, and create a world in which human interaction is easier to pursue.

    As Fred Rogers said:

    Won’t you please, won’t you please, won’t you be my neighbour?

    Perhaps that’s where we need to start our personal war on loneliness around us, even if we don’t feel lonely ourselves. By making it easier for people who do feel lonely and overlooked to find neighbours in this world.

  • The joys of fishing tackle catalogue porn…

    I’ve recently been watching a TV show featuring Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer called ‘Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing’ . As is often the case with me, I’m late to the game and have found I have about 6 series to watch…

    In each episode our heroes literally go fishing and we share the experience, including the conversations – both funny and profound – and it is a wonderfully relaxing way to spend half an hour. There is a gentleness about the show, and a love between the two men that is wonderful to see in a world where too often we hear of toxic masculinity.

    When I was a teenager, I would occasionally spend mornings or afternoons fishing in the local river. I was never sure whether there were actually fish to catch there, but that wasn’t, to me, the point. I would be spending time on my own in the open air, with an apparent purpose. I remember those days very clearly fifty years down the line. I also did a little see fishing, and also once attempted trout fishing when on a family holiday.

    Watching the program last night (Our heroes pursue, catch, and release two Crucian Carp) I was reminded of my own experiences, and that in turn led me to remember the time I spent looking through a big fishing tackle catalogue as a teenager. There’s a scene in Blackadder Goes Forth where Captain Blackadder talks about his love life:

    I’ve always been a soldier, married to the army. Book of King’s Regulations is my mistress…possibly with a Harrods’ lingerie catalogue tucked discreetly between the pages.

    Well, we didn’t have Harrods lingerie catalogues where I was bought up – the closest would be a Freeman’s Mail Order catalogue, about an inch and a half thick and so impossible to tuck discretely anywhere. But that, as they say, is another story…

    Where I encountered this fishing tackle catalogue I have no idea. I don’t even know who published it – I don’t remember the cover – or whether it even had one – and I certainly don’t have it today. Somewhere in the tidy ups of my teenage years and the moves between home and university, 3 moves whilst at university, and then a few years of moving from place to place just after university – it was lost.

    But I remember spending hours looking through it. The pages I most remember – and I can almost see them laid out in my mind – were the fly fishing ones, where there were several rows of images of fishing flies and short descriptions of them, with details of where they might best be used. I seem to recollect several of them seemed to target Scandinavian waters – so perhaps the catalogue was from a company in that part of the world. But the whole catalogue fascinated me – there was all sorts of technical information about reels, rods, nets, whatever. Stuff that I never bought, would never use, but that just fascinated me.

    I’ve actually just done a Google search and found the image below. This isn’t from the catalogue I had, but is similar.

    They genuinely were little works of art, and whilst I wouldn’t know one fly from another, they’ve always fascinated me. And they show up in my TV watching; Colonel Potter in M*A*S*H showing a wounded soldier how to tie a fly, Christopher Foyle in ‘Foyle’s War’ fly-fishing on the Sussex Downs.

    The catalogue I had was quite thick, I seem to remember. The brief Google search I did just now does seem to suggest that fishing tackle catalogues are quite thick tomes, and still exist in the format that I remember.

    Maybe I should go and seek some ‘vintage porn’…

  • There’s something in my eye…

    AI Generated stock image

    I have always been prone to crying through most of my adult life. I’ve never been one to boast of a stiff upper lip – I can hang on under certain circumstances but I will express my emotions when required. And sometimes – I just like a good cry.

    Music, books, films, TV shows are all likely to trigger strong emotions in me. Oddly enough, I don’t always respond in the same way to the same trigger.

    I recently watched a couple of what might be called ‘Bank Holiday Staples’ on TV. ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Great Escape’ – both directed by John Sturgess and was both of them gave me moments where ‘I had something in my eye’.

    In ‘The Great Escape’ there’s the scene where Ives, tries to climb the fence of the PoW camp after the discovery of the escape tunnel, and is shot. There’s Blythe, the forger, played by Donald Pleasance, who suddenly realises that he’s going blind – and the scene where he is shot within a short distance of freedom.

    In ‘The Magnificent Seven’ there is the scene where Charles Bronson’s character explains to some hero-worshipping boys the true bravery of their fathers, who they consider to be cowards:

    Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and twists them until finally it buries them under the ground . They do this because they love you. I have never had this kind of courage….

    It set me thinking about other films that have this effect on me. I do wonder whether if I look at these triggers I’ll get some sort of insight in to part of my psyche? Some years ago I remember reading about a psychologist who used fiction – films and books – as part of a therapeutic approach. basically see what emotional responses were obtained to see if there was any insights that could be drawn about the person receiving therapy or counselling. Here’s something in Psychology Today from a couple of years ago.

    The first one that comes to mind for me is ‘Field of Dreams’. I have always had some interest in baseball, despite being a Brit, and I was introduced to this film by a dear friend of mine shortly after it was released. Two scenes do it for me; when ‘Moonlight’ Graham, played by Burt Lancaster, leaves the field to help a choking child knowing that he won’t be able to go back, and the scene at the end where Ray meets his long dead father. The latter scene resonated with me more after my father passed away when we had become estranged.

    And then there’s ‘Up’. If you want a love story that will make any man cry buckets, watch the first 15 minutes.

    ‘The Fisher King’ where Jack Lucas watches the TV news and sees how his words triggered a mass shooting.

    ‘Saving Private Ryan’ – the cemetery scene where an elderly Ryan asks his wife whether he’s led a good life. I can rarely watch this film – it really does for me.

    As does ‘The Green Mile’. Bloody hell. There are so, so many more. I guess I’m just a bit of an emotional trainwreck!

    And it’s not a film…but a cartoon. The Futurama episode ‘Jurassic Bark’. I watched it once, cried like a baby, and skip through it when binge watching these days. And the final scene in The Simpsons ‘Do It For Her’ where Homer explains why there are no pictures of Maggie around the house…

    Excuse me…I have something in my eye…again….

  • The long-lost book…

    This isn’t a post about a book that I’ve mislaid, or lent to someone and never got back. This is about a book that I should have written, but didn’t.

    A few months ago I was sorting through some files in my study. Whilst I have a couple of small filing cabinets, they don’t really contain many files. They contain a geiger counter, some stationary, my father’s old stamp collection, a load of network cables…basically, anything BUT files. But, in the back of one drawer, was a little bundle of envelope files, one of which was labelled ‘Night Book’.

    My mind went back nearly 40 years to 1986. To be precise, I remember standing in the garden of my then home here in Sheffield, looking up at Hayley’s Comet, shortly before I fell over a hedgehog snuffling it’s way around the lawn. The hedgehog survived the encounter; my dignity didn’t…. But that was the night when the idea about this book first came to me. I wandered back in to the kitchen, sat down at my desk (in those days I didn’t have a study – I had a desk in the corner of the kitchen with a computer on it – and wrote down some ideas – they appeared on the first page in that envelope file.

    I have always been fascinated by the night. As a child I wasn’t scared of the dark. I loved being out in the garden around dusk, and once I got interested in star-gazing my mother could end up having to call me in like a pet cat… And I’m still convinced that the best amateur radio conditions occur in the darkness of a winter evening. Something just clicked that night – and I thought to myself ‘How about writing something about…night time?

    I’d been writing for publication (and in those long gone days you could actually get paid for writing stuff…) for 3 or 4 years at this point and already had a couple of books and a lot of articles under my belt. So I knew what would be involved from the point of view of the effort. Although my writing to then had been mainly technical stuff – and this would be somewhat different. However…I took a sheet of paper and after a few minutes thought wrote down ‘A natural history of the night’ as a working title. I’m afraid I was clearly a bit pompous in those days…no comments, please…

    After a couple of hours, come coffee and some head scratching I had a rough idea of what I wanted to create. A book that covered everything about the night time – why it happens, a bit of astronomy, a bit of chemistry, meteorology, history, legend and superstition, social history…I had a couple of pages of ideas and even a rough chapter list. I put the pages in a file, and popped the file away.

    I’d like to say that a few weeks later I started on this magnum opus and slogged away at it for years to complete it. Perhaps there’s an alternate universe where that did happen! Last night I was watching the ‘Dr Johnson’ episode of the TV sitcom ‘Blackadder the Third’, where Dr Johnson explains how his life panned out whilst writing his dictionary:

    The one that has taken eighteen hours of every day for the last ten years. My mother died; I hardly noticed. My father cut off his head and fried it in garlic in the hope of attracting my attention; I scarcely looked up from my work. My wife brought armies of lovers to the house, who worked in droves so that she might bring up a huge family of bastards.

    Even now it makes me chuckle having had short periods of my life where writing occupied most of my waking hours! But not on this book. ‘A natural history of the night’ remained unwritten. The file was…filed. My life unfolded; other books were written, every now and again I’d remember that evening and say to myself ‘You need to get on with that….’

    The next thing I knew, in the words of Pink Floyd ‘Ten Years had got behind me’. My life took a bit of a tumble in the mid-1990s and I stopped writing anything until 2000, when I started writing film scripts and some articles. Every now and again I’d see that file and think – ‘Come on…get on with it…’ and never did.

    And then in 2005 the two books pictured at the top of this post were published and just came to my attention by accident. Out of a perverse sense of curiosity, I bought them, and…well….they’re not what I would have written but they are damn good. Annoyingly good. And that was that. I kept seeing the file show up in my drawers every now and again, got a twinge of ‘Bugger…why didn’t I…’ but that was it. I didn’t see any point.

    And then a wee while ago I encountered the file again, and thought…hmmm….20 years since they were published….nearly 40 years since the night in the garden…maybe? Maybe I should get that file out and take a look? Maybe as an older man I can do the subject more justice than I could have ever done in my twenties?

    Unfortunately….after I started writing this post I turned my filing cabinets upside down to get the file and take a picture of the page for inclusion in the post. I cannot find the ‘effing file. I have a horrible feeling that after I found it again a few months ago I did a file purge, and that file was possibly one of the files that went.

    Bugger.

  • Relevance

    “The new year arrived and I realized i lived past my relevance…”

    A few weeks ago I came across the above quotation. Much to my embarrassment I didn’t note where it came from, but I get the feeling that it was the first line of a poem. The second part of this line – ‘…but not my usefulness’ is somewhat more hopeful, but it’s not what I want to talk about here. Be prepared – this is going to be a whiny old man post…

    It resonated with me; I’m now 64 years old and it’s safe to say that my age has somewhat caught up with me in the last year or so, especially in matters of mobility. Nothing says ‘You’re getting old’ louder than the fusillade of cracks and grinding noises that come from my knees when I get up from a seated position!

    A few years ago I realised that I was no longer ‘bleeding edge’ in what I did for work or hobbies. In fat, I wasn’t even cutting edge…in fact, I was as edgy as a wooden spoon. I was behind the trends in technology, and it didn’t even bother me.

    I was always interested in technology – electronics and even home made simple computers – as a kid and a teenager in the 1960s and 1970s. I had a little workshop, a load of science hobbies, and on leaving university in 1982 hit the home computer craze in the 1980s and wrote a lot of articles, did a lot of trade shows, wrote books, was exposed to a lot of real leading edge stuff and generally worked at what I wanted to do. Looking back, pretty much peaked in my professional relevance in the late 1980s / early 1990s. By the time the first dot-com boom came along I was starting to lag behind. By the early 2000s I was working at what paid the bills rather than what ‘floated my boat’, so to say.

    My wider ‘cultural’ life seemed to follow a similar trajectory. More than once I have been heard to grumble in the middle of the night ‘I could have been a contender’.

    And this is how I’ve allowed myself to settle in to life through my 50s and in to my 60s. My spiritual / religious life has stayed strong, but I’ve increasingly felt irrelevant in all other aspects of my life. For several years I allowed myself to think that the reason for this slippage was ‘time’ – I didn’t have enough time to do the stuff that I wanted to do. The COVID pandemic knocked that on the head – I had several months of paid furlough with no expectations from the outside world at all, but still just frittered the time away.

    I’m not even sure that I want to be ‘relevant’ – it does somewhat depend upon your definition of the word, I guess. One definition I came across was:

    the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about. 

    Once I started looking at it in this way, my perceived lack of relevance immediately made me ask the question “Relevant to what?” Am I wanting to be relevant to the times in which I live? My work? Can relevance apply to relationships? Is relevance actually by it’s nature a fleeting thing? Is it actually a natural progression that our ‘relevance’ declines as we age?

    One thing that has always made me reach for my Rosary in my spiritual life is when someone suggests that the Church needs to be more ‘relevant’ to appeal to believers. I’ve always had a ‘gut reaction’ against this – at it’s heart the Christian church deals with issues that are, to me, eternal – the relationship of man to God and of people to each other.

    Having pondered this afresh in recent weeks, I now begin to wonder whether I need to question what I actually MEAN when I use the word relevance in relation to myself.

    I am starting to wonder whether the relevance that I am really worried about is my relevance to my own life. I know this sounds potty. At first glance, how can you become an irrelevancy to yourself?

    Perhaps it’s when you allow your priorities to be set by others?

    I have a soft spot for the old curmudgeon St Paul. In his letter to the Romans, he says:

    “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,”

    Now – stay with me if we’re not religious. Paul states that it is his sinful nature that drives him like this. We might just as well say that it’s our human nature, and that nature is today influenced strongly by so many external influences that it’s surprising that any of us actually end up doing what we want to do, rather than doing what we must, should or ought to do.

    Perhaps we become irrelevant to our own lives when we go through them driven by the needs and desires of others, our mangled dopamine pathways, our addictions, our fear of missing out?

    Maybe the relevance I mourn is THIS relevance – the relevance of myself as an active agent in my own life?

  • Goodbye Facebook, it’s been nice…

    My Facebook header…

    Have you heard of ‘Enshittification’? It’s a concept created by Cory Doctorow, and it’s summed up on Google as:

    …the three-stage decline of online platforms: first attracting users with good service, then prioritizing business customers by degrading user experience, and finally extracting maximum value from everyone for shareholder profit, leading to unusable, value-sapped services like social media or e-commerce sites

    For a couple of years now I’ve pondered this with regard to Facebook and Twitter (still think of it as Twitter…sorry!). A wee while ago I ditched Twitter because of the cess-pool it had become, and have now said farewell to Facebook.

    Here’s what I posted on my way out…

    Well, I’ve downloaded all my Facebook content and was surprised at how much there is! I think I’ve been on here for 15+ years, have enjoyed my time, but have finally decided to leave for the following reasons:

    1. The algorithms are dire – and whilst I appreciate I can filter content the stuff I get thrown at me these days nauseates me.

    2. Too much AI slop in the special interest groups I belong to.

    3. Most importantly – I want to return to being a creator rather than a consumer. I’m 64 years old; I won’t live forever! I want to get back to being the creative / hobby-oriented fellow I was before social media got it’s hooks in me! My dopamine circuits are probably fried! ?

    Trying to moderate my FB time has proven useless, so it’s cold-turkey time.

    As I’ve said – blog is at https://joepritchard.me.uk Email address is

    joepritchardfacebook@gmail.com

    Hopefully see you ‘further down the log’ as we radio amateurs say.

    And thank you all for being a big part of my life for these years. The fact that you’re on my friends list means that you mean a lot to me.

    All the best, with love and hugs,

    I think points 1 and 2 above are probably part of the enshittification process, and point 3 is more to do with my mental health and desire to get back to being a creator rather than a consumer of stuff. I think it’s more important now than ever that we look after ourselves, and try and bring back human creativity before the ‘dead Internet’ finally rules supreme.

    Now, having got several hundred megabytes of assorted Facebook download on my hands, it’s time to write a little program to allow me to actually organise it and see what’s worth salvaging!

  • Waiting for Blog Posts

    OK – another few months have passed….

    John Lennon is reputed to have said ‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans‘. There is also the old saying ‘Man plans, God laughs‘. And then there’s ‘Joe is really an idle, easily distracted procrastinator.‘ You may choose your own reason why I haven’t posted.

    Today, in a valiant effort to make this site look something like my favourite writing environment, I sat down with coffee, chatGPT, the WordPress Twenty Twentyfive theme and a vague idea of ‘Make it look like a yellow pad’. I also thought that doing this might encourage me to get back in to the swing of things!

    I have to say that I managed a lot of what I wanted to do without too much input from the AI, but when I did need it it delivered the goods.

    So….I am rapidly running out of excuses, but not ideas. Wahtch this space…I will publish or this site will be consigned to the dustbin of history!

  • Normal Service Will (Hopefully) Be Resumed…Soon!

    Well… it’s been a while. In fact, it’s been quite a while. The last time I hit ‘Publish’ on here was back in 2018 — which now feels like several lifetimes ago.

    Since then, the world has had a habit of throwing us all a few curveballs (understatement of the century?), and I’ve found myself both full of things to say and yet strangely reluctant to say any of them here. I am probably the only person in the world who has ever blogged but who didn’t comment on COVID, Trump 1, and the the rest of the global craziness that have enveloped us since 2018.

    In that time I’ve experienced bereavement, depression, getting old, failing knees, the passing of my feline friends and the arrival of a new cat at Pritchard Towers. And, despite my comments in Gutterdamerung…. I did, in fact, finally replace the gutters….

    Lately, I’ve been feeling that old itch again — the urge to share thoughts, amusements, frustrations, the odd half-formed rant, and maybe the occasional story about half-forgotten curiosities that no one else seems to care about. In other words… back to normal service.

    I’ve missed the way blogging lets me ramble, reflect, and connect with anyone who happens to stumble in. Over the years, this place has been part soapbox, part notebook, part midnight musings — and I’d like it to be that again.

    So, this is just a little note to say hello if you’re still out there, thank you if you’ve ever read any of this, and brace yourself — because I have no idea where this will go next, but it’s probably going to involve books, films, music, random dreams I feel compelled to jot down, occasional rants about whatever passes for technology these days, and a fair sprinkling of nostalgia. And, as Ben Elton used to say ‘A little bit of politics’

    If you’ve stuck around this long, you’re either wonderfully patient or just forgot to delete the bookmark — either way, I’m glad you’re here.

    Normal Service, whatever that may be, will hopefully be resumed… soon.

  • Warning – Inner work taking place…

    “Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” – John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

    A few weeks ago at Pritchard Towers we had the loft boarded out and a proper loft ladder installed. We’re now sorting the loft – and it’s contents – out, and we’re also sorting out cupboards, drawers, etc. in the rest of the house.

    I wish I’d labelled stuff better. The loft is like a freakin’ emotional minefield. You open a box and see stuff that you’d forgotten about for a damn good reason, but that you tucked away because you couldn’t handle it at the time. Twenty year old tax demands are fun, despite looking scary. Other stuff that looks harmless takes your leg off when the emotional landmine is triggered.

    Yesterday, after some loft sorting, I foolishly did some cupboard sorting and hit a motherload of 35 year old stuff.

    I blubbed like a baby, openly. Previously I’d had the odd ‘lower lip wobble’ but yesterday was intense.

    I’ve realised that the loft and some cupboards are my Jungian ‘shadow’; the bits of my life that I chose to ‘push down’ for whatever reason – good or bad – but that need acknowledgement as they have helped make me, me.

    Stuff is now being chucked; stuff is being labelled; stuff’s being hung on walls; most of all, stuff and memory is being acknowledged and re-integrated in to me.

    Inner work is fucking hard. 

    As LP Hartley said ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ – I sort of wish I had one of those old maps that said ‘Here there be dragons’. 

  • Greater love hath no man…

    The title of this post refers to a very well known line from John’s Gospel:

    “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

    The surrounding lines provide a bit of context – it’s part of a statement made by Jesus, shortly before he goes in to the Garden of Gethsemane where he’ll be betrayed by Judas.

    “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you.”

    The call to selflessness has become culturally associated with the military services, and the phrase is often used with regard to people who have died in the heat of battle, sacrificing themselves for the benefit of others around them.

    But I also associate this line with a fictional story.

    I enjoy the James Cagney gangster movies from the 1930s, particularly the two he did with Humphrey Bogart; ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’.  In the latter, Cagney plays a gangster, Rocky Sullivan, released from jail and owed money by Bogart’s character, Jim Frazier, who collaborated with Sullivan on a bank raid.  Sullivan took the rap, in return for the money to be paid to him after his release.  Sullivan also has a friend in the local Catholic pries, Jerry Connolly.  As boys, both Rocky and Jerry carried out a robbery together but only Rocky was caught, and sent to reform school, where it might be argued his criminal career began.  Jerry was a faster runner, and became a priest.

    Jerry coaches a group of boys playing basketball, who rapidly become impressed with Rocky’s charm and bravado, and his courage and general approach to life. Jerry is concerned that this may lead the boys in to a life of crime.

    To cut to the chase, Frazier double-crosses Rocky, and Rocky ends up in a gun fight in which he kills a policeman, which ultimately leads to Rocky being on death row, awaiting execution.

    The boys are convinced that Rocky will die like he lived – a hero, going to the electric chair with swagger and bravado. Jerry goes to see Rocky and asks him to go to the chair ‘as a coward’, with the hope that the boys will lose all respect for him and not set out on a life of crime as they try to emulate their hero. Rocky refuses.

    However, when he’s taken in to the execution chamber to be executed, he begs and weeps and fights against the guards. His courage and bravado are gone; he goes to his death in an undignified and cowardly manner, pleading for mercy. Jerry, who’s present in the role of Rocky’s priest, prays as the execution takes place.  The boys later read the headlines that Rocky died a coward, and ask Jerry whether it was true.  After a brief pause, he tells them that it was all true. The boys lose respect for Rocky; it’s hoped that they will steer away from crime.

    Whether Rocky was acting the part of a coward, or whether he really did ‘break’ at the end isn’t revealed in the film. In later life, Cagney kept quiet about it as well. I saw this film first time around in my early teens, watching it one Sunday afternoon with my parents, and I couldn’t quite work out myself whether Rocky was acting or not.  I got the feeling that Jerry thought that Rocky had done the right thing, though – that moment of pause when the boys asked whether whether the newspaper story was true seems to suggest he was wondering whether to tell ‘the truth’ or the truth.

    As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to think that Rocky DID do the good thing – he made whatever sacrifice he could at the end to help his friend. His life was already forfeit, so he gave up his character, his dignity, his courage; he gave up the rest of him, so to say.

    As for Jerry, the older I’ve got the more I have to ask ‘Was it too great a thing to ask of Rocky? After all, but for your ability to run faster, you might have followed a similar life. You asked of him to give away the very thing that made Rocky, Rocky, in the eyes of the world. That was a great deal to ask. Was it too much to ask?’

    I’ve not yet got an answer for that one.

    Fiction allows us to explore complex morality at ‘low cost’ – this film has stayed with me for my whole adult life. I occasionally watch it when it’s on TV to see if I can gain some more insights; I know, it sounds daft trying to pick out morality from a film that’s almost 80 years old, but sometimes we need fiction to allow us to answer some of the big questions.

     

    For a fuller description of the plot, take a look here.