Page 12 - Phonebox Magazine February 2014

Happy 100th Birthday
Telegram from the Queen
Barbara ‘Joan’ Jones (nee Tomlinson) was born in Creswell, a mining village in Derbyshire, the youngest of a family of nine. On leaving school she worked as
an usherette in her local cinema.
She met her husband George when he came from native Wales to Creswell to work on the railway. They married in 1939 and moved to Collingham, near Newark, where both she and George worked together on the railway during the war.
They later moved to Windermere, near Nottingham, and Joan worked for a period at Woolworths in Nottingham. Their final “railway” move was to Fenny Stratford near Bletchley, where after a few years they bought their retirement bungalow in Bletchley. They enjoyed their annual visits to Italy, staying in Pesaro, and they did this for about 30 years, always travelling by train.
Joan was an avid seamstress, she would make occasional day excursions to London, window shop to see the latest fashions, then purchase material, go home and reproduce
Combined Churches
Freedom is one of our highest values in Western society, and we define our freedom in a very specific way. We define it in terms of the individual against the structures and institutions of society. In other words, we define freedom as the ability to do whatever we want regardless of what any other authority may want to impose on us. We can easily justify this as we perceive authority to be inherently corrupt and irrelevant, and therefore disqualified from interfering with our choices.
At this point we catch a faint whiff of selfishness. This is hardly surprising, as we’ve just defined ourselves as God. So we add an ethical clause: ‘As long as it doesn’t harm anyone else’. Of course, we see this clause as self-evident and of minimal inconvenience. We press on without further thought. Further thought would, of course, confront us with the uncomfortable reality that the culture which presented us with this definition of freedom is built upon the exploitation of the developing world. If we were to apply our ethical clause, we would have to deconstruct the very society that makes possible our definition of freedom. So our definition of freedom is freedom to do whatever we want and our ethical clause is more to make us feel good about ourselves rather than something we intend to apply in any rigorous way. But what if our definition of freedom is actually the invisible chain that keeps us bound? That would be extremely ironic, the conspiracy of conspiracies.
12 Phonebox Magazine
an identical garment, which she would wear with pride. Joan loved her yoga classes and attended well into her eighties.
After the death of her husband George in 2002, Joan managed to cope on her own for approximately three years before moving to Westlands, where she has lived ever since. Joan is a character and is loved by everyone at Westlands, she continues to enjoy her clothing and jewellery and reminiscing about her life. Joan celebrated her 100th birthday at Westlands with her friends, and her nephew and his wife visited from Yorkshire. She
The move that blind-sides us is this: we believe that our desires define us. I’ve been taught that my expression of my desires is what makes me me. But this is a trap. My desires are not half as much me as I think they are. My desires are a weird mix of hormones, good intensions, insecurities, hopes, lusts, beliefs and ideas I’ve picked up, mostly unconsciously, from the people and culture around me. My desires are incessantly being trained and seduced by companies through the media to make me more susceptible to buy their products. They ruthlessly exploit my hopes, fears and insecurities in order to incline me to spend money. Thus their most effective marketing strategy becomes my desires. If we equate our freedom with the ability to express our desires, it should make us more than a little suspicious that so many people seem to want to spend over £500 on an iphone. Since our desires are so often the plaything of forces that we rarely recognise, true freedom must transcend our desires and requires both awareness and discipline. To maintain our freedom requires us to be free to say no to our desires where we recognise that our desires are in fact leading us into slavery. This is not high philosophy. Any alcoholic knows exactly what this means. Since so many of our desires are either undisciplined impulses or the product of hopes, fears and insecurities manipulated by the media, true freedom requires character. True freedom requires
received her telegram from the Queen, and the railway sent her a gift in honour of her 100th year. Bonapart’s Retreat came to play the violin and guitar; they finished off playing happy birthday which everyone sang along to. A buffet was laid on by the home, and the birthday cake was also made and decorated by staff at the home, especially for Joan to enjoy with her friends and family. Joan is a very special lady and we are honoured to be part of her life.
Cheers, Joan, Happy 100th – You are one
in a million!!
Salina.
us to become people of love, freed from the blind slavery of our own selfish desires and instead serving others.
However, it’s difficult to answer the classic postmodern response to this: If that is true freedom, I think I’m quite happy with slavery. If we’re happy with the illusion of freedom rather than the reality then this