Yes indeed, it has been a while since I posed last. I have been to China and back and am presently adding the finishing touches to the pop CD I have been producing there. The China project has been an amazing experience and some very good musicians have been involved in making the CD. I am looking forward to its release and if all goes well I will be working in that part of the world a great deal in future.

I am in Bangor, Northern Ireland at the moment, my home town. I have started a Phd in composition at Ulster University and am over here to meet up with one of my supervisors. Most people know Northern Ireland as a place that is religiously divided but I can assure you the class divide is just as prominent. As I was growing up it slowly dawned on me that those of us from working class backgrounds would get taken to court and convicted for offenses that our middle class contemporaries would get a “telling off” for. I became convinced that the local police and government had a policy of criminalising the working class youth.

Well, I managed to escape doing time myself and have been fortunate to get into the position where my offspring (should I have any) will get a “telling off” rather than a conviction. This is not the case however for one young man in Bangor this week who has been sentenced to two and a half years for trying to set a petrol station on fire. Apparently he was blitzed and as well as trying to drink the petrol he set a bin on fire. Crazy stuff and extremely dangerous, I suppose that’s why they locked him up for two and a half years. Funny enough though another young man from a more “respectable” background committed the exact same offense in a posher part of town. He didn’t try to drink the petrol though and I wonder if this is the reason he got 120 hours community service instead of two and a half years prison.

120 hours = 4 weeks work 9 to 5. The working class kid has two and half years inside. They both committed the same crime.