Two ambulance workers are sending their thanks to the person who left them a heartwarming message on their vehicle after they attended a 999 call.
Ambulance technician Gary Turley and volunteer Carol Lewis were attending an emergency call in Faversham, Kent, which left them no option to block a few driveways in order to attend to the person who lived in a house on the small street.
‘It was a busy and emotional day’ Turley noticed a note attached to the dashboard after they attended the call on Saturday, and feared the worst.
“When we arrived on scene of this particular call, Carol, a volunteer from the local Community First Responder Scheme had already arrived and was providing treatment to the patient.”
“The road was quite small so we had no choice but to block some driveways. We were just going to leave scene to go to hospital when I noticed a note on the windscreen with a £10 note.”
The note, which was placed on top of the vehicle, read: “You’re blocking our drive… no worries, buy a coffee when you can xxx”.
“R2652 [the vehicle] booked on for 8 hours today and attended 2 of the highest category calls we get,” she wrote in a post.
“But here is a note that a member of the public in Faversham left on the Ambulance. Shows appreciation, thank you so much xx.”
“It really lifted our spirits and the hot drink helped us through the rest of the shift. I’d like to thank the person who left it for us.”
Two medics last month found a rude note tacked to their car after they had to block a driveway when they were attending to an emergency call.
Peter Kerr had a lengthy professional career appearing in top league football with three different Edinburgh teams. He joined Hibernian in 1910 following the unfortunate death of Jimmy Main and spent sixteen years at Easter Road at half back, appearing in three Scottish Cup finals, all of them lost, in 1914, 1923 and 1924. In the summer of 1926 he moved across the city to Hearts and even after five ye
George made his first Scotland appearance in a B squad match against Northern Ireland in May 2009, scoring in a 3-0 win.
The winger received his first senior call-up when Gordon Strachan included him in his squad for the FIFA World Cup 2014 qualifying double-header against Wales and Serbia.
It is a pity Incident at Loch Ness remains unavailable on DVD in the UK. Not only is it a scampish take on the methods and mythology of director Werner Herzog (who acts in and co-wrote the script, but doesn’t in this instance direct), it is also perhaps the closest Herzog will ever come to working in Scotland. Characteristically, his films’ settings are more extreme. The looming green hell of the Peruvian rainforest in Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo; the alien beauty of the desert in Fata Morgana; infernal oil fields blazing across post-Gulf War Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness; and now, in his latest film, which bears the almost parodically Herzogian title of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the caverns of Chauvet where he finds in their 32,000-years-old cave paintings ‘the awakening of the human soul’.
This Palaeolithic-era art was discovered in 1994 in the south of France, in a limestone cave sealed off for 20,000 years. The charcoal sketches of horses, bison, and mammoths are twice as old as examples of primitive art found before Chauvet’s discovery. While filming posed technical challenges – the crew couldn’t depart from a narrow metal walkway lest they damage the floor – Cave of Forgotten Dreams must have been a relatively easy shoot to complete compared to the nightmare productions that made Herzog’s name famous and infamous.
There isn’t another film director alive to whom so many legends have attached themselves, and Incident at Loch Ness nods towards many of them, from the tale of how he directed a mutinous Klaus Kinski while pointing a gun at him from behind the camera (false) to pulling a 320-tonne steamship over an Andean mountain (true). (Three steamers were used, with the first – ‘one of the leading characters’ according to Herzog – built in Glasgow in 1902).
The eccentricity that marks Herzog’s more memorable films is largely absent in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Unlike Even Dwarves Started Small, his all-midget send-up of Sixties revolutionary politics, or his remake of art-house schlocker Bad Lieutenant, you can imagine Cave of Forgotten Dreams being played in schools, which is indeed what will happen in France, its government having part-funded the documentary. The chill of tastefulness means it’s a little dull when compared with Herzog’s more idiosyncratic fare, although the subject itself fascinates, and his decision to film Chauvet in 3D – the stone age artists used the contours of the rocks as an effect in their drawings – is ingenious.
The film poses the question: does Chauvet’s art give contemporary man a way to understand ‘human beings who are, in a way, us, and yet [who are] separated by an abyss of time’? For Herzog, the answer is a partial yes. According to his thesis, art was a way for our tribal ancestors to begin to understand themselves and others as individuals. In addition to paintings, this period also saw homo sapiens create musical instruments, body adornments, and a primitive spear-thrower. By contrast, Neanderthals, who also lived in the Chauvet valley in the same period, don’t appear to have developed a similar culture of art or tools; their extinction, although not explicitly mentioned in the film, hangs in the air.
Herzog has linked man’s survival and art before when explaining his greed for new images. ‘The images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution… If we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.’ Or Neanderthals.
This need to record experiences and tableaux never captured before has led Herzog on occasion to resemble one of his own protagonists, men motivated by sense-spurning quests. In Aguirre, Wrath of God, Aguirre loses his mind and sanity hunting for El Dorado. Fitzcarraldo plans to build an opera house in the jungle. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, wanted to befriend wild bears, perhaps even thought of himself in some sense as a bear. He spent over a decade in an Alaskan nature reserve filming and getting close to grizzlies. His mission ended when one ate him.
Despite Herzog’s faith in his search for new cinematic visions, his films often sound an equivocal note about the power of art. Art, as in Fitzcarraldo where it takes the form of opera, embodies the values of civilisation, as dubious a project for Herzog as it is for his literary hero Joseph Conrad. ‘I am fascinated by the idea that our civilisation is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness,’ Herzog says in the interview-book Herzog on Herzog.
Art, civilisation, the entire project of human striving, is shown again and again in Herzog’s films to be futile in the face of ancient and elemental forces. Music motivates Fitzcarraldo to conquer his mountain, and his gramophone pacifies a tribe of Amerindians who threaten him. But when his steamship tips into rapids (this sequence was filmed on actual rapids, the fiercest in Peru), destroying his mission, music can’t save his dream, it can merely console.
In other Herzog films, music can’t even provide solace. The music that accompanies gliding aerial shots of Kuwait’s murdered landscape in Lessons of Darkness sets up a tragic counterpoint between the summit of civilisation’s achievements – the work of Grieg, Mahler, Verdi – and its nadir: a desert strewn with charred human bones. At the end of Stroszek, the eponymous protagonist, who has emigrated to America only to find it as cruel as the Germany he has fled, encounters in an amusement arcade a chicken ‘dancing’ round and round upon a revolving record, as perfect an image of futility as has ever been filmed. Ian Curtis may have thought so: in 1980, on the eve of his first American tour, Joy Division’s singer hung himself hours after watching the film.
So often in Herzog’s films people appear small, secondary things compared to the true protagonist, the landscape. The chaos of the jungle disorders the mind of Aguirre as he hacks his way through it. These landscapes possess those who challenge them. ‘These are not just literal landscapes you are looking at,’ Herzog says, ‘but landscapes of the mind too.’
In Fata Morgana, there is no character other than the Sahara. This film was inspired by one of the director’s typically quixotic quests: he wanted to film a mirage. As if shocked by the desert’s endlessness, the camera spools out equally unending tracking shots of the scorched sands, empty of people. When the camera comes to rest, we see rotting, abandoned machinery, the dregs of a retreating civilisation. Herzog had travelled to the Sahara to film footage for a science-fiction film. He abandoned that project yet Fata Morgana still brings to mind a ruined future-world, specifically one of J.G. Ballard’s terminal landscapes. The mise-en-scène could be a backdrop in an adaptation of Ballard’s The Drought or his short story ‘The Cage of Sand’: ‘To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow on the sand as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years… An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence.’
Ballard and Herzog share a belief that civilisation is a façade, a consequence perhaps of formative experiences during World War Two. Ballard, the elder of the pair, was a boy when he was interned in Lunghua, in a Japanese POW camp. Although his parents were also prisoners, he ran with a pack of semi-feral kids, the adults’ authority undermined by their status as captives. Herzog, who was born in 1942 in Munich, had in some respects a similar childhood. His father was absent and after the war he played in bombed-out ruins. ‘It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch’
Herzog denies any link between his work and Nazi Germany. Aguirre, for example, is not a cipher for Hitler. And yet, during a discussion of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the cannibalistic dictator who terrorised the Central African Republic between 1966 and 1979, and who is the subject of Herzog’s documentary Echoes of a Sombre Empire, the director said, ‘Maybe we are above such things now, but people like Bokassa show us that cannibalism is still something that can resurface. Look, for example, at the Nazis in Germany. The Germans were a dignified people, the greatest philosophers, composers, writers and mathematicians. And in the space of only ten years, they created a barbarism more terrible than had ever been seen before.’
Remembering Fata Morgana, perhaps the true mirage Herzog has spent his career filming is civilisation itself. This is the message encoded in the extreme landscapes Herzog’s imagination has nested itself within. And what of Chauvet? The director’s lust for new, unexploited imagery has brought him into contact with the oldest to be found in the world. The film ends not in the cave but in a synthetic ‘tropical zone’ created with hot water from a nuclear power station near Chauvet. Here, crocodiles, unchanged biologically since the age of the dinosaurs (like the Loch Ness monster?), have given birth to albino off-spring. Her-zog’s voice-over asks whether modern man understands the Chauvet images anymore than the mutant crocodiles would. ‘Are we truly the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time?’ he asks.
In a typically Herzogian twist, he recently admitted he invented the ‘tropical zone’ and that the crocodiles are in fact alligators. His question remains though, supplemented by the lesson of his films. How can we hope to understand the deep past when we fail so often to read the true significance of the present?
Men's hockey: Goaltending is SJU's biggest question 3 are vying for playing time after graduation of 4-year starter Saxton Soley Check out this story on sctimes.com: https://www.sctimes.com/story/sports/college/2016/10/27/mens-hockey-goaltending-sjus-biggest-question/92792886/
Cathedral grad Mitch Fritz had 15 points in 14 games and was named to MIAC All-Rookie Team in '15-16.
In the last four seasons, if you would have wagered that Saxton Soley was in goal for the St. John's hockey team, you would have won some money.
Soley played in 25 of the Johnnies' 27 games last season and in 90 games over four seasons before finishing his eligibility. St. John's opens its 2016-17 season with a game against Gustavus in the MIAC Showcase at 7 p.m. Friday at Schwan Super Rink in Blaine.
"He played the large majority of games for us and that's a lot to replace," St. John's coach Doug Schueller said.
Soley won 11 games and had a .918 save percentage and 2.45 goals-against average. "He was an All-American as a freshman and all-conference every year after that, so it's a huge gap," Schueller said.
The returning goalie with varsity experience is Tyler Nelson (2-0-0, .938, 1.89), a senior from Champlin. Tanner Elmore (sophomore, Brentwood, Tennessee) and Andrew Lindgren (Fr., Minneapolis) are the other two goalies vying for time. Lindgren is the brother of former St. Cloud State All-American goalie Charlie Lindgren, who is playing in the Montreal Canadiens organization.
"Tyler Nelson had a very good save percentage in the games he played in last year and, respect-wise, he deserves the opportunity to come in as our No. 1 goalie and it's his job to keep," said Schueller, who is 92-93-22 going into his ninth season as head coach. "With that said, we're not going to be in a situation where one goalie is going to play 90 percent of the games. All three guys will get some game time this year."
"Our depth at forward is going to be really good," Schueller said. "We have five lines that can play and there's not a weak spot at forward. We're going to be sitting four good forwards every night and we have four lines that can produce any given night."
Fritz, a Cathedral High School graduate, and sophomore defenseman Grady Ewing, a St. Cloud Apollo graduate, are the two area players on the roster.
Fritz missed the first 10 games of last season with a broken thumb, but averaged more than a point-per-game last season and was named to the MIAC's All-Rookie Team.
"He's really smart, has great hockey instincts and is always around the net," Schueller said of Fritz. "He's going to be put in situations where he can be very successful ... We're looking for a big year out of Mitch."
"Grady is still young compared to the rest of the team and he's got a lot of development yet to do, but he started the process last season," Schueller said. "He's put on strength and weight this year and he's going to keep pushing guys for time. He's very skilled."
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