.
.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said, "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."
God said: "The angel is Security and outside my remit. But there has obviously been a mistake.
He shouldn't be there till apple picking... "
"I wanted Dobermans,” He continued, “but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive. It's something they picked up from the Competition.
“We are working on garden staffing levels. Research and Development were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity, which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to
create Faraday."
Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”
God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept. Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."
God said: "Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an
entertainment concept and does home nursing.
“R and D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"
God said: "What's in a name, as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man - Woman. Neat,eh?
Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions..."
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to go. I have two days' creating before my rest day..."
And He rang off. It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this Leak from
Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman machine. And Adam was sore afraid.
Meanwhile, a very cross mass of people, 14 million of them, travelled and marked up £25 million on credit cards, spent £14,000 a second in Christmas shopping, tried to see the logic, as they shivered on draughty platforms or icy trains, of BR's boast it had improved its efficiency by cutting its services by a quarter. Nor was there much comfort to millions of land-bound air passengers when the head of BAA refused to take his efficiency bonus. He should have given his salary back.
I am convinced that we are witnessing the final collapse of Western Civilisation and not surprised that, according to The Guardian, things can only get worse.
The report predicts severe disruptions will become common at UK airports, which will become vulnerable to the changing climate. The Met Office could not forecast getting wet in a downpour. Britons might have to get used to power blackouts and disrupted travel plans as the country struggles to cope with the long-term effects of climate change, a report for the government has warned. Consumers will have to learn they cannot expect cheap heating and lighting and to go where or when they want as floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK's road, rail, water and energy networks, it says. If that warning was not sombre enough in a month when air, rail and road travel has been badly hit by the weather, mighty storms and changes in wind direction could threaten some of the country's busiest ports and airports. That would mean the abandonment of coastal docks and increasing pressure for the building of new runways throughout southern Britain.
The transport system has failed; education is a bad joke; the lethal police dismisseth us; parliament is a nest of quarrelsome backbiters and thieves. We fight unnecessary wars; we give millions to other countries whilst denying our own needy all but the necessities of life; we cannot afford to offer our talented young free education. Our culture is an embarrassment: the music has no essence, the paintings are a mockery, poetry is copywriting. It is the bankers not the crooks who wear the black masks, symptoms of a social structure that has collapsed..
What is it we are celebrating between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night? Only twelve per cent of Britons practise Christianity. Christ's Mass? By any reliable computation the man we call Christ was born in September, 4 A.D. Tax collection in an agrarian society in the darkest days of winter when nothing grows would have been counter productive. A wise teacher has been obscured by conjuring tricks and tacky illusions.
There is no room for gods in my life. They are phantasmagorias created by frightened people to defend themselves in the dark which surrounds them. We are our own immortality, there is no death, life is endless. If Christ were to return no doubt he would be accompanied by hobbits and schoolboys with magical powers.
I do not do reverence but I am very strong on awe. I am gripped by it at the thought of the flower crouched in a tiny seed and the magic of creation. According to Freud, Moses was the exiled priest of a disgraced Pharaoh who tried to make the Egyptians abandon their many gods. Heeding his teaching, the Israelis abandoned Jahveh and Baal and worshipped only the sun, the creative spirit made manifest.
Perversely I believe in Christmas as a precious thing. But it is Christmas Past when I wore clean pyjamas, still warm from the iron, on Christmas Eve and woke on Christmas morning to feel a weight on my feet of a pillowcase filled with toys. It is the memory of the Christmas when I crept downstairs to find my father surrounded by my toys, saying tipsily: ”Father Christmas was too drunk to climb the stairs”; of Christmas dinner when he was flown with wine and impertinence.
Those Christmases lie crushed under the weight of a twelve-day sales promotion by the markets. Their symbols are from past advertising campaigns. Twelve days last for two months. In our family we have separate Christmases for two of our children and the in-laws; the third child in Verona we meet by Skype. For the three days of Christmas, my wife, the dog and I close our front door on the world. Christmas begins with fish and chips to the sound of Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Correlli's Christmas music; we watch the Gondoliers performed by an Australian G and S Company, far better than D'Oyly Carte. We listen later to the carols from down the road at King's College, Cambridge. We watch videos of the Nutcracker Ballet, the classic Dickens' films of the Fifties, I take a little wine for my stomach's sake and we have the neighbours in for a drink after Boxing Day. As a special treat this year a TV network called Horse and Hound showed films of Drag Hunts.
Other religions have a rather different view of Christmas. A 'banned Islamic hate group', Islam4UK, planned to put up 'thousands' of billboards around the UK. They claim that Christmas is the reason for rape, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuity, crime, paedophilia, domestic violence (and that is not the complete list). The organizers hope to 'destroy Christmas' with this campaign.
The spirit of Christian Christmas is a little tattered. I cannot believe that my favourite paper, The Daily Telegraph, would send a pair of pretty reporters to encourage Cabinet ministers to badmouth the Government. It is mischief making of the worst kind. Its only effect will be to discourage MPs from talking frankly to their own constituents, almost the only role in which they are any use. There is an even more serious possibility for the journalists concerned and for their newspaper. According to David Howarth, a former shadow solicitor general and Lib Dem MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010, the criminal law Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 makes it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to dishonestly make a false representation with the intention of putting someone at risk of pecuniary loss or with the intention of making a pecuniary gain for another.
RESOLUTION TIME
My wife has a busy social calendar. I have not left the house since the first snowflake fell and will only come out with the snowdrops. Let us hope that this bright New Year I will make only one more resolution. Having heard from the father of a wounded soldier of the lengths Prince Charles and Camilla go to bring comfort to soldiers wounded in Afghanistan (every one of whom gets a bottle of Scotch and several visits from the couple), this column will never again be rude about the Royal Family.
MELLY CHRISTMAS
Among my Christmas gifts this year was a splendid cap made from genuine hallmarked Harris Tweed. Harris is all but impossible to buy in this country since some evil Yorkshireman bought out the crofters, and the only mill on Harris, and standardised their wonderful setts into a few lacklustre designs. The cap was made in China. As was every one of the gifts we were given, including a Kindle reader. Next year I expect that Santa will be wearing Mandarin moustaches and riding a junk pulled by six red-breathed dragons.
Friday, 31 December 2010
Thursday, 23 December 2010
WOULD MAN SPARE THAT TREE ????
In the most definitive study of the perennial real tree versus fake, an environmental consulting firm found that an artificial tree would have to be re-used for more than 20 years to be greener than buying a fresh-cut tree annually. The calculations included greenhouse gas emissions, use of resources and human health impacts.
“The natural tree is a better option,” said Jean-Sebastien Trudel, founder of the firm Ellipsos that released the independent study last year. The annual carbon emissions associated with using a real tree every year were just one-third of those created by an artificial tree.
If only I had known..............
I can never set a foot on the calendular escalator that leads to Christmas without remembering my friend Curly Beard and the free Christmas tree.
Curly was a former champion show jumper for whom I used to ride work in the days when I could be carried by a single horse. He spent much of his retirement drinking in the Sportsman up on the Cheshire/Welsh border at Tattenhall. I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man.
"I will have to go after this,” I said. “Going to buy a Christmas tree from the Delamere forest."
Curly said: "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said: "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said,while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch? By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me £8 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day. We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton. In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses. It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off. Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it was well over fifty quid, seventies prices. To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's spade and went off to dig up the tree. I don't know how we managed to break the spade - which I later replaced at the cost of £10. I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept reminding me of it for years.
I do hope my little contretemps is not the reason the government plans to sell off state-owned forests. And not just the 635,000-acre Forestry Commission forests. This includes many royal forests, state-owned ancient woodlands, sites of special scientific interest, heathland, camp sites, farms and sporting estates.
ON SONG
Our cousin Isabel Suckling is having the merriest of Christmases. Her debut record album “The Choirgirl” was sixth in the Classic FM Top Forty. Beaten only by Andre Rieu, Russell Watson, The Classic album of Stars, Bryn Terfel and Aled Jones. She was 7th in the Official Classic Album Chart and on the Chris Evans Radio 2 programme where she sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” the Archbishop of York said she had a magnificent voice and the assembled choirs who shared billing with her gave her the radio equivalent of a standing ovation.
Not so Montreal MP Justin Trudeau
He is in hot water for sending a card of his family to his constituents. Trudeau, wife Sophie and their two small children were decked out in goose-down parkas, trimmed with coyote fur and draped with a coyote fur blanket. Trudeau's spokesperson said the son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was simply showing support for Canadian companies and had no ulterior motives. But the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called the card "lurid"and "inappropriate”. PETA spokesperson Lucas Soloway said, “I think it was disturbing, especially at this time of year in a greeting card. Where is the cheer in wearing the skins of animals? Coyotes killed for their fur are usually caught in the wild in steel–jaw traps, which have been banned in dozens of countries and often cause coyotes and other animals to gnaw off their own legs in an attempt to escape." Trudeau's aide Alex Lanthier explained the family wore the coats because they wanted to be supportive of Canada Goose - the company that manufactured the parkas. "It’s a good Canadian company,"said Lanthier. "The coats are made from sustainable products."
A RECIPE for the ultimate Christmas cake from my good friend Colin Dunne;
Ingredients:
* 2 cups flour
* 1 stick butter
* 1 cup of water
* 1 tsp baking soda
* 1 cup of sugar
* 1 tsp salt
* 1 cup of brown sugar
* Lemon juice
* 4 large eggs
* Nuts
* 2 bottles wine
* 2 cups of dried fruit
Sample the wine to check quality. Take a large bowl, check the wine again. To be sure it is of the highest quality, pour one level cup and drink. Repeat. Turn on the electric mixer. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add one teaspoon of sugar. Beat again. At this point it's best to make sure the wine is still OK. Try another cup... Just in case. Turn off the mixerer thingy. Break 2 eggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit.
Pick the frigging fruit up off floor. Mix on the turner.. If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaterers just pry it loose with a drewscriver. Sample the wine to check for tonsisticity. Next, sift two cups of salt. Or something. Check the wine. Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add one table. Add a spoon of sugar, or some fink. Whatever you can find. Greash the oven. Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over. Don't forget to beat off the turner. Finally, throw the bowl through the window. Finish the wine and wipe counter with the cat.
Go to Coles and buy cake.
Bingle Jells!
“The natural tree is a better option,” said Jean-Sebastien Trudel, founder of the firm Ellipsos that released the independent study last year. The annual carbon emissions associated with using a real tree every year were just one-third of those created by an artificial tree.
If only I had known..............
I can never set a foot on the calendular escalator that leads to Christmas without remembering my friend Curly Beard and the free Christmas tree.
Curly was a former champion show jumper for whom I used to ride work in the days when I could be carried by a single horse. He spent much of his retirement drinking in the Sportsman up on the Cheshire/Welsh border at Tattenhall. I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man.
"I will have to go after this,” I said. “Going to buy a Christmas tree from the Delamere forest."
Curly said: "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said: "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said,while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch? By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me £8 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day. We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton. In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses. It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off. Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it was well over fifty quid, seventies prices. To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's spade and went off to dig up the tree. I don't know how we managed to break the spade - which I later replaced at the cost of £10. I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept reminding me of it for years.
I do hope my little contretemps is not the reason the government plans to sell off state-owned forests. And not just the 635,000-acre Forestry Commission forests. This includes many royal forests, state-owned ancient woodlands, sites of special scientific interest, heathland, camp sites, farms and sporting estates.
ON SONG
Our cousin Isabel Suckling is having the merriest of Christmases. Her debut record album “The Choirgirl” was sixth in the Classic FM Top Forty. Beaten only by Andre Rieu, Russell Watson, The Classic album of Stars, Bryn Terfel and Aled Jones. She was 7th in the Official Classic Album Chart and on the Chris Evans Radio 2 programme where she sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” the Archbishop of York said she had a magnificent voice and the assembled choirs who shared billing with her gave her the radio equivalent of a standing ovation.
Not so Montreal MP Justin Trudeau
He is in hot water for sending a card of his family to his constituents. Trudeau, wife Sophie and their two small children were decked out in goose-down parkas, trimmed with coyote fur and draped with a coyote fur blanket. Trudeau's spokesperson said the son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was simply showing support for Canadian companies and had no ulterior motives. But the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called the card "lurid"and "inappropriate”. PETA spokesperson Lucas Soloway said, “I think it was disturbing, especially at this time of year in a greeting card. Where is the cheer in wearing the skins of animals? Coyotes killed for their fur are usually caught in the wild in steel–jaw traps, which have been banned in dozens of countries and often cause coyotes and other animals to gnaw off their own legs in an attempt to escape." Trudeau's aide Alex Lanthier explained the family wore the coats because they wanted to be supportive of Canada Goose - the company that manufactured the parkas. "It’s a good Canadian company,"said Lanthier. "The coats are made from sustainable products."
A RECIPE for the ultimate Christmas cake from my good friend Colin Dunne;
Ingredients:
* 2 cups flour
* 1 stick butter
* 1 cup of water
* 1 tsp baking soda
* 1 cup of sugar
* 1 tsp salt
* 1 cup of brown sugar
* Lemon juice
* 4 large eggs
* Nuts
* 2 bottles wine
* 2 cups of dried fruit
Sample the wine to check quality. Take a large bowl, check the wine again. To be sure it is of the highest quality, pour one level cup and drink. Repeat. Turn on the electric mixer. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add one teaspoon of sugar. Beat again. At this point it's best to make sure the wine is still OK. Try another cup... Just in case. Turn off the mixerer thingy. Break 2 eggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit.
Pick the frigging fruit up off floor. Mix on the turner.. If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaterers just pry it loose with a drewscriver. Sample the wine to check for tonsisticity. Next, sift two cups of salt. Or something. Check the wine. Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add one table. Add a spoon of sugar, or some fink. Whatever you can find. Greash the oven. Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over. Don't forget to beat off the turner. Finally, throw the bowl through the window. Finish the wine and wipe counter with the cat.
Go to Coles and buy cake.
Bingle Jells!
Saturday, 18 December 2010
AMIABLE ARTILLERY
I have a Noble Friend who sends me cards most weeks but
never at Christmas. His cousin sends me a glorious Christmas Cracker,
an annual 'uncommonplace' book of literary gems he has
collected.
Another friend is even now taking a bearing on my mantelpiece
for the barrage of the Christmas card artillery he will launch
in ample time for recipients to return his festive fire of Yule
logs and complacent robins.
The sadomasochists who ruin my Christmas are the people
who cunningly time their cards to arrive on Christmas Eve when
the last post has already sounded. Their strategy is an empty
mantelpiece. No doubt they gloat over their Christmas dinner of
broiled sardine at the missing cards.
"We didn't get a card from Skidmore," they say, rubbing their
dry parchment hands.
Christmas card etiquette is as complicated as kissing as a
greeting, same person sex and shaking hands. One is never sure
who does what, when and to whom.
I cannot take it any more. I have called for stretcher bearers
and wait to be carried out of the front drop-me-a-line.
Clearly what I need is Christmas Card counselling.
I want to attack robins, to pour water on Yule logs and take
down the decorations on Christmas Eve rather than Twelfth Night.
Not so odd as you may think. By Julius Caesar's sensible
calendar, Twelfth Night is Christmas Day. Alas, our adoption of
Papist tinkering in the 18th century means that only on the
Isle of Foula is the old calendar still in use; and
celebrated, for a reason which escapes me, by shooting sea birds.
Foula is clearly the spiritual home of the RSPB which has
done its best to wipe out the ruddy duck and the
red grouse.
But I digress.
Bring back the pre-American Christmas; a season which
was not dominated by a red-suited drunk.
Have you ever worked out how many glasses of sideboarded sherry
the old reprobate gets through in your street alone?
A red-suited drunk, incidentally, who began life a century ago as
an advertising stunt for a New York store.
Do not get me wrong. True, I founded the SAS - the Scrooge
Appreciation Society - but that stemmed from a deep loathing of
the Family Cratchet.
Christmas was fine until Dickens went to America, saw how
it had been exploited and then returned to set up the Christmas
industry in this poor benighted land.
HOW TO TAKE THE STING OUT OF SUCH CHRISTMAS TALES
When by Monday my Spectator had not arrived I rang their subscription department to complain. The telephone was answered by a girl on whom much attention had been lavished in childhood.
“How perfectly frightful,” she said, in a voice throbbing with sympathy. “Do you know, you must be the nine hundredth person who has rung me this morning. I think we must have fallen foul of the bad weather. You won't believe it, but I sent a Christmas card last Wednesday - to my brother actually - and it still hasn't arrived. Do you think it might be the Christmas mail?”
I said I thought it might be.
“So awful for you,” she said. “I wonder what we can do? I'll tell you what. Can you bear to wait until Wednesday? If it hasn't arrived by then, do ring me back and I will send you another.”
I rang off feeling better than I had felt all day. There are still good things about being English. If it hasn't arrived by Wednesday I will ring her back ,if only to find out if her brother's card has arrived.
Being English took a knock when the Home Secretary ruled out the use of water cannon against the students who urinate on cenotaphs and occupy other people's offices. She said it was “Un-British”.
I would have thought “flammenwerfer” more equable. Though imposing six months' imprisonment on anyone selling fireworks to the under sixteens borders on the excessive. What really brought back one's customary disdain was the behaviour of the Establishment in fitting up the WikiLeaks man.
I got this from the admirable Word a Day:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous. -William Proxmire, US senator, reformer (1915-2005)
never at Christmas. His cousin sends me a glorious Christmas Cracker,
an annual 'uncommonplace' book of literary gems he has
collected.
Another friend is even now taking a bearing on my mantelpiece
for the barrage of the Christmas card artillery he will launch
in ample time for recipients to return his festive fire of Yule
logs and complacent robins.
The sadomasochists who ruin my Christmas are the people
who cunningly time their cards to arrive on Christmas Eve when
the last post has already sounded. Their strategy is an empty
mantelpiece. No doubt they gloat over their Christmas dinner of
broiled sardine at the missing cards.
"We didn't get a card from Skidmore," they say, rubbing their
dry parchment hands.
Christmas card etiquette is as complicated as kissing as a
greeting, same person sex and shaking hands. One is never sure
who does what, when and to whom.
I cannot take it any more. I have called for stretcher bearers
and wait to be carried out of the front drop-me-a-line.
Clearly what I need is Christmas Card counselling.
I want to attack robins, to pour water on Yule logs and take
down the decorations on Christmas Eve rather than Twelfth Night.
Not so odd as you may think. By Julius Caesar's sensible
calendar, Twelfth Night is Christmas Day. Alas, our adoption of
Papist tinkering in the 18th century means that only on the
Isle of Foula is the old calendar still in use; and
celebrated, for a reason which escapes me, by shooting sea birds.
Foula is clearly the spiritual home of the RSPB which has
done its best to wipe out the ruddy duck and the
red grouse.
But I digress.
Bring back the pre-American Christmas; a season which
was not dominated by a red-suited drunk.
Have you ever worked out how many glasses of sideboarded sherry
the old reprobate gets through in your street alone?
A red-suited drunk, incidentally, who began life a century ago as
an advertising stunt for a New York store.
Do not get me wrong. True, I founded the SAS - the Scrooge
Appreciation Society - but that stemmed from a deep loathing of
the Family Cratchet.
Christmas was fine until Dickens went to America, saw how
it had been exploited and then returned to set up the Christmas
industry in this poor benighted land.
HOW TO TAKE THE STING OUT OF SUCH CHRISTMAS TALES
When by Monday my Spectator had not arrived I rang their subscription department to complain. The telephone was answered by a girl on whom much attention had been lavished in childhood.
“How perfectly frightful,” she said, in a voice throbbing with sympathy. “Do you know, you must be the nine hundredth person who has rung me this morning. I think we must have fallen foul of the bad weather. You won't believe it, but I sent a Christmas card last Wednesday - to my brother actually - and it still hasn't arrived. Do you think it might be the Christmas mail?”
I said I thought it might be.
“So awful for you,” she said. “I wonder what we can do? I'll tell you what. Can you bear to wait until Wednesday? If it hasn't arrived by then, do ring me back and I will send you another.”
I rang off feeling better than I had felt all day. There are still good things about being English. If it hasn't arrived by Wednesday I will ring her back ,if only to find out if her brother's card has arrived.
Being English took a knock when the Home Secretary ruled out the use of water cannon against the students who urinate on cenotaphs and occupy other people's offices. She said it was “Un-British”.
I would have thought “flammenwerfer” more equable. Though imposing six months' imprisonment on anyone selling fireworks to the under sixteens borders on the excessive. What really brought back one's customary disdain was the behaviour of the Establishment in fitting up the WikiLeaks man.
I got this from the admirable Word a Day:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous. -William Proxmire, US senator, reformer (1915-2005)
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Turkey Trotted
T
I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out
of work and this pal of mine said: "Do not suppose you will be
having much of a Christmas?"
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on
H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than
it is in the house. I have promised the kids we will go to
Radio Rentals to watch the Queen's Speech through the window.
Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their
breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its
breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it
closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away.
"Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob and
went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free
scotch and eating vol-au-vent which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have" and grabbed the parcel of
chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.
Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next
guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my
parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed
through with a drop kick.
It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring
across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the
passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre
of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema
particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained
anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I
did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of
eighteen scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I
hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he
said.
It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been
nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a
gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
THE EDITOR WRITES
FOR THE BAH HUMBUG XMAS HAT (given to me by the lady in the chip shop)
Dear
,
Thank you so much for the gift of a magnificent hat which accords with my deeply held resentment of what Xmas has become. I am a Buddhist so it has nothing to do with me and perhaps I ought not to complain. But I do. It is so sad that what in our childhood was such a magical time has become a Festival of Excess. It is, of course, the fault of the Americans who invented Santa Claus in the 1920s as part of an advertising campaign for a department store.
In our day people took it much more seriously. My grannie was fond of telling me how her brother taunted her by telling her there was no such person as Father Xmas. That Xmas morning he woke to find his stocking full of cinders.
I am also anti-Xmas cards which people send far too early, in the hope they will nudge you into sending them one back. I also loathe turkey which may be “bootiful” but has no taste. I would rather have your excellent fish and chips any day.
Many years ago on my BBC programme I invented the S.A.S., The Scrooge Appreciation Society, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of listeners who asked to join.
Alas, this generation is less literate. I wore my humbug hat in March and a small boy thought I was a cough sweet.
Perhaps I may still be permitted to echo the sentiments of that odious Cratchet and wish you a Merry Xmas, enjoyed, of course, with quiet dignity.
SOME THOUGHTS ON EERY EIRE
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE ISN’T EUROSCEPTIC, IF ONLY ON THE GROUNDS THAT ANYTHING HEATH ADMIRED WAS BY DEFINITION FLAWED. AND I MUST SAY I WOULD BE PRETTY PISSED OFF, IF I HAD BEEN BLOWN TO PIECES BY THE IRA, AT THE EASE WITH WHICH THEIR HEIRS, FIANNA FAILURE, HAVE GIVEN THEIR COUNTRY TO THE KRAUTS.
GEOFF MATHER WRITES; (read his weekly essay at www.northtrek.co)
A little oldish fellow trudged down the drive, his feet crunching in
the snow and ice. He looked neither to right nor left. He seemed cold
and full of woe. I would have said hello, but he did not look in my
direction. When he walked off, having put something in the letter box, I
took out the single thing there - a card with a picture of some stars.
The message said: Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
TALE PIECE
Gauteng Police announced discovery of:
An arms cache of 200 semi automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammo,
10 anti-tank missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 2 tonnes of heroin,
R80 million forged South African banknotes and 25 trafficked Nigerian
prostitutes, all in a block of flats behind the Hillbrow Public Library.
Local residents were stunned: "We're shocked. We never knew we had a Library!"
I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out
of work and this pal of mine said: "Do not suppose you will be
having much of a Christmas?"
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on
H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than
it is in the house. I have promised the kids we will go to
Radio Rentals to watch the Queen's Speech through the window.
Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their
breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its
breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it
closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away.
"Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob and
went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free
scotch and eating vol-au-vent which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have" and grabbed the parcel of
chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.
Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next
guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my
parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed
through with a drop kick.
It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring
across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the
passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre
of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema
particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained
anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I
did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of
eighteen scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I
hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he
said.
It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been
nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a
gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
THE EDITOR WRITES
FOR THE BAH HUMBUG XMAS HAT (given to me by the lady in the chip shop)
Dear
,
Thank you so much for the gift of a magnificent hat which accords with my deeply held resentment of what Xmas has become. I am a Buddhist so it has nothing to do with me and perhaps I ought not to complain. But I do. It is so sad that what in our childhood was such a magical time has become a Festival of Excess. It is, of course, the fault of the Americans who invented Santa Claus in the 1920s as part of an advertising campaign for a department store.
In our day people took it much more seriously. My grannie was fond of telling me how her brother taunted her by telling her there was no such person as Father Xmas. That Xmas morning he woke to find his stocking full of cinders.
I am also anti-Xmas cards which people send far too early, in the hope they will nudge you into sending them one back. I also loathe turkey which may be “bootiful” but has no taste. I would rather have your excellent fish and chips any day.
Many years ago on my BBC programme I invented the S.A.S., The Scrooge Appreciation Society, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of listeners who asked to join.
Alas, this generation is less literate. I wore my humbug hat in March and a small boy thought I was a cough sweet.
Perhaps I may still be permitted to echo the sentiments of that odious Cratchet and wish you a Merry Xmas, enjoyed, of course, with quiet dignity.
SOME THOUGHTS ON EERY EIRE
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE ISN’T EUROSCEPTIC, IF ONLY ON THE GROUNDS THAT ANYTHING HEATH ADMIRED WAS BY DEFINITION FLAWED. AND I MUST SAY I WOULD BE PRETTY PISSED OFF, IF I HAD BEEN BLOWN TO PIECES BY THE IRA, AT THE EASE WITH WHICH THEIR HEIRS, FIANNA FAILURE, HAVE GIVEN THEIR COUNTRY TO THE KRAUTS.
GEOFF MATHER WRITES; (read his weekly essay at www.northtrek.co)
A little oldish fellow trudged down the drive, his feet crunching in
the snow and ice. He looked neither to right nor left. He seemed cold
and full of woe. I would have said hello, but he did not look in my
direction. When he walked off, having put something in the letter box, I
took out the single thing there - a card with a picture of some stars.
The message said: Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
TALE PIECE
Gauteng Police announced discovery of:
An arms cache of 200 semi automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammo,
10 anti-tank missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 2 tonnes of heroin,
R80 million forged South African banknotes and 25 trafficked Nigerian
prostitutes, all in a block of flats behind the Hillbrow Public Library.
Local residents were stunned: "We're shocked. We never knew we had a Library!"
Friday, 3 December 2010
BALLETOMANIAC
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle. Unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been guilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result of losing the games. I tried without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle, unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been quilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result. I teied without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle. Unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been guilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result of losing the games. I tried without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle, unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been quilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result. I teied without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Friday, 26 November 2010
PANT O' MINE
Over the centuries the great names in pantomime have included John Rich, David Garrick, Joe Grimaldi, Dan Leno, William Beverley, E.L. Blanchard, Herbert Campbell, Nat Jackley, Florrie Ford, Dorothy Ward, Wyn Calvin, King Charles II, the Emperor Augustus and my Mum who was Second Principal Boy in “Aladdin” at the Theatre Royal, Salford, in 1917.
Augustus played a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in his court entertainments. When the Christians came to power such shows were banned. An act of cultural savagery only paralleled by the Puritans who banned Christmas - and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”, simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform tricks to prevent his master catching them.
That Merrie Monarch Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions: Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy and Harlequin pantomime.
The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. His boss, actor John Rich called it pantomime and introduced magical tricks. He was a brilliant mime artist but could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors the performances were done in dumb show. Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience was told, represented an emotion. Yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even Rich's scenery was inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich’s pantomimes were so successful that tragedian David Garrick was forced against his will to put one on. Garrick was a great actor but a poor mime. His Harlequin had a speaking role.
Rich invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When by 1789 people tired of the Harlequin tales he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. When a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt other tales like Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene, while he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit. Said Smith: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton, changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley. In 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
I am delighted it was a journalist E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. And it was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
Oh yes he did.............................................
A TIMELY REMINDER
Sam Johnson wisely said that no-one but a blockhead writes except for money. Nevertheless, when The Times used an interview with cousin Isabel,- now 7th in Amazon's Pre Order charts and winner of the Yorkshire Young Acheiver in the Arts - to complain at the exploitation of children by record companies it was necessary to send out letters of fire and sword:
Sir,
I am at a loss to see any evidence of the exploitation of children in your story “Isabel the Choirgirl” on the Arts page (24/11). Following the writer's argument is like pursuing a ferret down a dark hole. She seems to suggest that boy trebles were exploited because a record company dropped them when their voices broke. The alternative was to cut a record of a group of boys who could not sing. Tempting as it is to suggest that a similar disadvantage has not harmed the success of our pop stars, it is not quite the same when there are pretensions of harmony. I cannot think such a record would sell many copies.
Speaking as a grandfather, I can assure you that in the present day exploitation of the British young is an oxymoron. Those boys for whom your writer seeks sympathy were the envy of every other teenager in Britain. They had their Warhol moment and will carry the memory with them into old age. It was their own fault that they did not turn that moment into a career like Ernest Lush, or more recently Aled Jones.
When Aled Jones was 16 his voice broke. At the suggestion of his father, I included him in my radio series “Radio Brynsiencyn” on BBC Wales. In very short order he became a proficient interviewer and presenter and went on to music college where he formed a band and experimented with other kinds of singing. After music college he joined a theatre company in Bristol where he learned to act. Those skills assembled, he went on to forge a new and highly successful career on stage, screen and radio. .As Hotspur suggested, nettles are for grasping.
In passing I was sad to see that your reporter should, like Adrian Chiles on Daybreak, make a bitter jibe about Isabel's surname “Suckling”. Half a century ago when I wrote for The Times I would have been expected to know that Suckling is the family name of her ancestor, Lord Nelson's wife.
May I illustrate this with an example of that happier time? Putting over my copy about an exhibition of Icons at the Chester Festival, the copy-taker insisted I had given one of them an over valuation. “Expert, are you?” I sneered. “Perhaps not expert,” he said, “but I have written a book on the subject which has been well received.”
Next time may I suggest you send a copy-taker.
Yours faithfully,
Ian Skidmore
12-year-old Cousin Isabel put the feature writer in her place in fewer words when, gathering her text books, she told her:
“I don't know if this sounds bad, but I'm not expecting anything out of this. Some people expect that because I have a record contract it's going to escalate to something, but it might not. I just take it as it comes along.“
How Isabel's voice matures is unpredictable but she will certainly outgrow the
Choirgirl image. “When I'm 18 I wouldn't like to be photographed at 1am falling out of a bar in the cassock,” she told the interviewer with good humour.
Out of the mouths of Babes and Sucklings................................
S>A>S
Joyce, the lady in the chip shop, has given me a woolly hat emblazoned with “BAH HUMBUG”, the motto of the Scrooge Appreciation Society of which I have the honour to be the founder. Reactions of the outside world have not done much for the reputation of our standards of national literacy. Said a small boy: “Are you a toffee?”
Augustus played a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in his court entertainments. When the Christians came to power such shows were banned. An act of cultural savagery only paralleled by the Puritans who banned Christmas - and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”, simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform tricks to prevent his master catching them.
That Merrie Monarch Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions: Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy and Harlequin pantomime.
The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. His boss, actor John Rich called it pantomime and introduced magical tricks. He was a brilliant mime artist but could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors the performances were done in dumb show. Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience was told, represented an emotion. Yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even Rich's scenery was inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich’s pantomimes were so successful that tragedian David Garrick was forced against his will to put one on. Garrick was a great actor but a poor mime. His Harlequin had a speaking role.
Rich invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When by 1789 people tired of the Harlequin tales he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. When a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt other tales like Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene, while he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit. Said Smith: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton, changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley. In 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
I am delighted it was a journalist E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. And it was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
Oh yes he did.............................................
A TIMELY REMINDER
Sam Johnson wisely said that no-one but a blockhead writes except for money. Nevertheless, when The Times used an interview with cousin Isabel,- now 7th in Amazon's Pre Order charts and winner of the Yorkshire Young Acheiver in the Arts - to complain at the exploitation of children by record companies it was necessary to send out letters of fire and sword:
Sir,
I am at a loss to see any evidence of the exploitation of children in your story “Isabel the Choirgirl” on the Arts page (24/11). Following the writer's argument is like pursuing a ferret down a dark hole. She seems to suggest that boy trebles were exploited because a record company dropped them when their voices broke. The alternative was to cut a record of a group of boys who could not sing. Tempting as it is to suggest that a similar disadvantage has not harmed the success of our pop stars, it is not quite the same when there are pretensions of harmony. I cannot think such a record would sell many copies.
Speaking as a grandfather, I can assure you that in the present day exploitation of the British young is an oxymoron. Those boys for whom your writer seeks sympathy were the envy of every other teenager in Britain. They had their Warhol moment and will carry the memory with them into old age. It was their own fault that they did not turn that moment into a career like Ernest Lush, or more recently Aled Jones.
When Aled Jones was 16 his voice broke. At the suggestion of his father, I included him in my radio series “Radio Brynsiencyn” on BBC Wales. In very short order he became a proficient interviewer and presenter and went on to music college where he formed a band and experimented with other kinds of singing. After music college he joined a theatre company in Bristol where he learned to act. Those skills assembled, he went on to forge a new and highly successful career on stage, screen and radio. .As Hotspur suggested, nettles are for grasping.
In passing I was sad to see that your reporter should, like Adrian Chiles on Daybreak, make a bitter jibe about Isabel's surname “Suckling”. Half a century ago when I wrote for The Times I would have been expected to know that Suckling is the family name of her ancestor, Lord Nelson's wife.
May I illustrate this with an example of that happier time? Putting over my copy about an exhibition of Icons at the Chester Festival, the copy-taker insisted I had given one of them an over valuation. “Expert, are you?” I sneered. “Perhaps not expert,” he said, “but I have written a book on the subject which has been well received.”
Next time may I suggest you send a copy-taker.
Yours faithfully,
Ian Skidmore
12-year-old Cousin Isabel put the feature writer in her place in fewer words when, gathering her text books, she told her:
“I don't know if this sounds bad, but I'm not expecting anything out of this. Some people expect that because I have a record contract it's going to escalate to something, but it might not. I just take it as it comes along.“
How Isabel's voice matures is unpredictable but she will certainly outgrow the
Choirgirl image. “When I'm 18 I wouldn't like to be photographed at 1am falling out of a bar in the cassock,” she told the interviewer with good humour.
Out of the mouths of Babes and Sucklings................................
S>A>S
Joyce, the lady in the chip shop, has given me a woolly hat emblazoned with “BAH HUMBUG”, the motto of the Scrooge Appreciation Society of which I have the honour to be the founder. Reactions of the outside world have not done much for the reputation of our standards of national literacy. Said a small boy: “Are you a toffee?”
Friday, 19 November 2010
LOUSES of PARLIAMENT
See the politicians forming a disorderly queue for the dock in the Old Bailey. Luckier ones escaped a similar fate by paying back the millions they acquired by a parliament-backed fraud. An MP admits he used a house the taxpayer funded as security on a loan. Disgraced MPs are caught on camera offering to subvert their former colleagues in the interests of business. MPs rush to defend one of their fellows who has been kicked out for cruel defamation of a competitor.
Gerry Adams, former IRA terrorist leader, was elected an MP but refused on principle to attend parliament although he took salary and expenses. Now he has decided to resign and will walk away from Westminster with a £41,000 pay off.
Unaccountably the House of Lords seeks to prevent a cut in the number of MPs though we have the most of any EC country. Those that remain share with those who may go another distinction. They have allowed themselves to become lobby fodder to Europe and their own sofa cabinet.
The Government shamelessly admits giving to “terrorists“ from Guantanamo Bay a multi-million pound bribe to drop their claims of British collusion in their torture.
Scoop a netful of the pond life which swims in the waters of Westminster. Ask them why they came into Parliament. With one voice they will utter the mantra, “We wanted to make a difference.”
It would be salutary to examine the DIFFERENCES that politicians have made since Western Civilisation ended in 1914.
We are at war with the Muslim World because of our Janus- faced government. They won the Arab tribes to the Allied side in World War One with promises that after the Ottoman Empire was smashed the Arabs would be given their land back. They were not told that in 1917 under the terms of the Sykes-Picot treaty their land would be shared between England and France.
The reason the Palestinians and Israelis are fighting is another consequence of duplicity. The Balfour Doctrine awarded the Jews a homeland that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. Again they did not tell the Arabs. Its architects, Lloyd George and Balfour, were both Christian Zionists. Lloyd George had another reason for keeping the Israelis sweet. His family firm of solicitors represented the Zionist movement.
The reason the Nazi party came into being and the world war that followed were a direct consequence of the crippling reparations the Germans had to pay after world war one.
Our subsequent invasions of other sovereign countries are too many to mention.
The most recent catastrophic failure of Government was to take us to the verge of bankruptcy by its failure to regulate bankers, whose patron saint is Francis. He, you recall, gave away his father's goods just as they made free with our money and then borrowed money from us. Even when it had walked us down the crooked mile the Government had not finished with us. It imposed drastic cuts on us and immediately spent the £7 billion we would have saved this year by giving it to the Irish Government to save them from the disaster which was the inevitable cost of government by Hire Purchase.
It is a small consolation that compared with the venal Irish government our own merry band of outlaws shines like a good deed. Perhaps the Government should study the history of the ruling party Fianna Fail. It is the child of the IRA, which in 1922 rejected a treaty with Britain and went to war with the Irish Free State, the new government of Eire. Ten years later it wrested power and launched an economic war on the British Empire. After twice almost ruining the economy, in 1970 Fail launched the Provisional IRA with government funds.
With friends like that...............................
REMEMBER THEM
Every Armistice Day for many years I stood in the main road in our village and recited, for the benefit of the British Legion and other veterans, those immortal words: “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.”
Words so beautiful we never examine the thought behind them. Frankly it is an insult to those millions of servicemen whose shades presumably watch over us. Are they supposed to be grateful that they were blown to pieces on the threshold of manhood? Are they relieved that years cannot condemn them to a lifetime of laughter, love, marriage, literature and all the other things which are the gifts of life?
Don't take a vote on it. “Grateful Dead” is an oxymoron. “Growing old?” I will lay odds they wouldn't mind a slice of that. Their frail spirits would no doubt add: “Kindly put my name down for being by the years condemned.”
It would be more to the point to recite Dylan Thomas's “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
There is something demeaning in the howls of protest which greeted the news reader who insisted he would only wear the poppy on Remembrance Day, which not all that long ago everyone did. Just so long as you buy one, when you wear it is unimportant.
I have become sickened by the whole Festival of Remembrance, which every year reeks of show business. This year new depths were plunged by parading the war widows after a heart breaking video interview with one. Isabel the Choirgirl
sang as they marched across the arena. After the rehearsal when she first saw them, immediately after watching the video, she burst into tears. The only way she could get through the performance was by not looking at that sad procession. If I were a dead soldier I would value that child's tears more than a thousand poppies floating down from the roof of the Albert Hall.
Incidentally, I hope someone paid for that mawkish gesture more suited to a scene in a Disney Madame Butterfly.
I found myself wondering what the widows were thinking. Perhaps that the government had rewarded them for their tragic loss by reducing their pensions. Look on the bright side. The money the government grabs from the widows and their mites will help to pay the bribes of the tortured Muslims.
ROYAL FOOTMAN NOTE
Three women have saved the monarchy and all with firmly working class roots: the Queen Mother, Camilla and Miss Middleton.
HUZZAH,THREE TIMES THREE
SO YOU THINK IT IS FUN BEING OLD
My friend Geoff Mather emails:
“I am passing on some vital information that might have escaped your attention as it did mine:
The information comes from Lancashire District Aged Aid Assimilation
project, dedicated to correcting the unfortunate discrepancies in the
lives of senior people like us.
Today is Thursday.
Please let me know if you wish to have daily bulletins from LDAAA.
Subject: What day is it? A primer
You will, for instance, be told immediately when it is Friday.
Monday alone will not be notified week by week in conformity with Mr
Cameron's need to conserve both energy and money.
Gerry Adams, former IRA terrorist leader, was elected an MP but refused on principle to attend parliament although he took salary and expenses. Now he has decided to resign and will walk away from Westminster with a £41,000 pay off.
Unaccountably the House of Lords seeks to prevent a cut in the number of MPs though we have the most of any EC country. Those that remain share with those who may go another distinction. They have allowed themselves to become lobby fodder to Europe and their own sofa cabinet.
The Government shamelessly admits giving to “terrorists“ from Guantanamo Bay a multi-million pound bribe to drop their claims of British collusion in their torture.
Scoop a netful of the pond life which swims in the waters of Westminster. Ask them why they came into Parliament. With one voice they will utter the mantra, “We wanted to make a difference.”
It would be salutary to examine the DIFFERENCES that politicians have made since Western Civilisation ended in 1914.
We are at war with the Muslim World because of our Janus- faced government. They won the Arab tribes to the Allied side in World War One with promises that after the Ottoman Empire was smashed the Arabs would be given their land back. They were not told that in 1917 under the terms of the Sykes-Picot treaty their land would be shared between England and France.
The reason the Palestinians and Israelis are fighting is another consequence of duplicity. The Balfour Doctrine awarded the Jews a homeland that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. Again they did not tell the Arabs. Its architects, Lloyd George and Balfour, were both Christian Zionists. Lloyd George had another reason for keeping the Israelis sweet. His family firm of solicitors represented the Zionist movement.
The reason the Nazi party came into being and the world war that followed were a direct consequence of the crippling reparations the Germans had to pay after world war one.
Our subsequent invasions of other sovereign countries are too many to mention.
The most recent catastrophic failure of Government was to take us to the verge of bankruptcy by its failure to regulate bankers, whose patron saint is Francis. He, you recall, gave away his father's goods just as they made free with our money and then borrowed money from us. Even when it had walked us down the crooked mile the Government had not finished with us. It imposed drastic cuts on us and immediately spent the £7 billion we would have saved this year by giving it to the Irish Government to save them from the disaster which was the inevitable cost of government by Hire Purchase.
It is a small consolation that compared with the venal Irish government our own merry band of outlaws shines like a good deed. Perhaps the Government should study the history of the ruling party Fianna Fail. It is the child of the IRA, which in 1922 rejected a treaty with Britain and went to war with the Irish Free State, the new government of Eire. Ten years later it wrested power and launched an economic war on the British Empire. After twice almost ruining the economy, in 1970 Fail launched the Provisional IRA with government funds.
With friends like that...............................
REMEMBER THEM
Every Armistice Day for many years I stood in the main road in our village and recited, for the benefit of the British Legion and other veterans, those immortal words: “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.”
Words so beautiful we never examine the thought behind them. Frankly it is an insult to those millions of servicemen whose shades presumably watch over us. Are they supposed to be grateful that they were blown to pieces on the threshold of manhood? Are they relieved that years cannot condemn them to a lifetime of laughter, love, marriage, literature and all the other things which are the gifts of life?
Don't take a vote on it. “Grateful Dead” is an oxymoron. “Growing old?” I will lay odds they wouldn't mind a slice of that. Their frail spirits would no doubt add: “Kindly put my name down for being by the years condemned.”
It would be more to the point to recite Dylan Thomas's “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
There is something demeaning in the howls of protest which greeted the news reader who insisted he would only wear the poppy on Remembrance Day, which not all that long ago everyone did. Just so long as you buy one, when you wear it is unimportant.
I have become sickened by the whole Festival of Remembrance, which every year reeks of show business. This year new depths were plunged by parading the war widows after a heart breaking video interview with one. Isabel the Choirgirl
sang as they marched across the arena. After the rehearsal when she first saw them, immediately after watching the video, she burst into tears. The only way she could get through the performance was by not looking at that sad procession. If I were a dead soldier I would value that child's tears more than a thousand poppies floating down from the roof of the Albert Hall.
Incidentally, I hope someone paid for that mawkish gesture more suited to a scene in a Disney Madame Butterfly.
I found myself wondering what the widows were thinking. Perhaps that the government had rewarded them for their tragic loss by reducing their pensions. Look on the bright side. The money the government grabs from the widows and their mites will help to pay the bribes of the tortured Muslims.
ROYAL FOOTMAN NOTE
Three women have saved the monarchy and all with firmly working class roots: the Queen Mother, Camilla and Miss Middleton.
HUZZAH,THREE TIMES THREE
SO YOU THINK IT IS FUN BEING OLD
My friend Geoff Mather emails:
“I am passing on some vital information that might have escaped your attention as it did mine:
The information comes from Lancashire District Aged Aid Assimilation
project, dedicated to correcting the unfortunate discrepancies in the
lives of senior people like us.
Today is Thursday.
Please let me know if you wish to have daily bulletins from LDAAA.
Subject: What day is it? A primer
You will, for instance, be told immediately when it is Friday.
Monday alone will not be notified week by week in conformity with Mr
Cameron's need to conserve both energy and money.
Friday, 12 November 2010
DOWNTOWN ABYSS
The Ferret is away so catering here is back on a wartime footing. One spoon, one knife, to save washing up, and an endless oxtail eaten from the pan for the same reason.
I expect the friend who sent me the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the incomparable Mrs Beeton’s book on household management meant it kindly. But when I've forgotten to put the rubbish out, the dog is sulking in the waste paper basket and the mice are running riot, recipes that begin “First catch your hare” strike quite the wrong note.
Not that Mrs Beeton would have been unsympathetic to my chaos. She was one of twenty-one children and her mother’s idea of getting them out of the way was to send them to live in the grandstand at Ascot racecourse, where their father was Clerk of the Course. On race days they were farmed out. Yet this amazing lady lived through it happily, at the same time amassing the knowledge that enabled her to write one of the great classic books in the English language.
The instructions to a valet might be copied by a greyhound called Taz to advantage....... “of course subject to their master’s every command. They themselves being subject to erring judgement, aggravated by an imperfect education, their duty leads them to wait upon those who from sheer wealth, station and education are more polished and consequently more susceptible to annoyance.”
The valet must warm the young master’s body linen before the fire, shaving him, washing and combing hair, moustache and beard “where such an appendage is encouraged, arranging the whole simply and gracefully according to the age and style of countenance.”
Heady stuff when you have been wearing your socks so long olfactory gifted hounds can find them.
Mrs Beeton will never be a feminist icon. “Men are so well served out of doors,” she writes, “at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that in order to compete with the attraction of these places a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practise of cookery........there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
Labour saving devices include a scullery maid who lights the fire, sweeps and cleans the kitchen, cleans the entrance step, the halls, passages and stairs. Twice a week she washes and scours these places as well as tables, shelves and cupboards. She dresses the nursery and servants’ meals and prepares all meat, poultry and vegetables. You will not wish to hear about the 13-year-old maid of all work in one-servant houses but the recipes are mouth watering.
At Skidmore Prava these tasks are carried out by She Who Must Never Be Obeyed.
Before she left, SWMNBE dropped a domestic bombshell. She announced that she plans to adopt a tiger.
Alas, the dog overheard and I have not known a peaceful moment since. Dogs have a literal mind and the concept of adoption without accommodation is foreign to them. No-one does apprehension like a greyhound.
Belay “Forests of the Night”. So far as Taz is concerned, the “tiger, tiger” is “burning bright” on his sofa in the sitting room which he now enters with great care, rather like the late John Wayne “casing” a saloon. Taz, though his manners are immaculate, though he leaks love which comes off him in warm waves and has two speeds, “Fast” and “Fast Asleep” is not the bravest of dogs. He was traumatised early in life in consequence of being mugged by a robin.
Also he has form where cats are concerned. He largely uses his turn of speed to put the fear of doggy god into the neighbours' cats. Now he is convinced the cats have taken out a contract on him with a giant cat that is going to chase him down the days like the Hound of Heaven .
When he finally plucks up courage and sidles into the sitting room to find an empty sofa, he leaps on it, curls into the smallest conceivable ball, firmly closes his eyes and sinks into a deep sleep. Not undisturbed, it must be said. From time to time he utters little cries as of one pursued by tigers.
Mark my words, no good will come of it.
A NEW ZEALAND CRITIC OF THE PELVIC ORACLE'S CHRONICLE:
“I hesitate to say that Fry, who, alas, did not reach the Olympian heights of playing a grumpy doctor on prime time US television, has his sights fixed on similar pretty pennies. In a way, this is why this book is what was once called a curate's egg: uneven in parts.
When he riffs on his faults - "physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion" - he puts his finger on exactly what is missing here. It is all performance, disarming, rueful, sweet, 'candid' and just the teeniest, weeniest little bit of a fake.”
WEBB SIGHT
A young man with an ego which approaches the Great Fry Up is the newest recruit to “Today” on R4, Justin Webb.
The Great Libby Purves, whom God preserve, has wisely said that reading the news is the easiest job on earth. I have done it and the only job I have had which was easier was sweeping out the R.C. Chapel on Jankers.
Newsreaders get a script, an autocue that unrolls at the speed of their speech and a producer in the ear offering advice. Newsreaders not only get paid far too much: they develop enormous egos in inverse ratio to their ability.
Witness James Naughtie on “Today”. By the time this latter day Harry Lauder has finished a question, and on the rare occasions the interviewee gets a word in, the programme is “Tomorrow”.
Naughtie invariably begins the next question by explaining what the interviewee meant by his answer. “I think what you are saying is this...” There is no greater passion than a Scotchman in love with himself, though Webb proves the feeling passes over frontiers.
In a recent interview he announced that ALTHOUGH THE LISTENERS WOULD HATE IT he proposed in future to interrupt the guests more often.
Thus he demonstrates how unimportant listeners are to him and how his ignorance of the techniques of his trade is boundless.
Older listeners will recall that I once fell asleep whilst interviewing a chum on a Radio 4 series. A Russian princess called Masha.
No one noticed and I wasn't going to tell them. When the programme went out letters arrived from listeners saying, “At last a presenter who isn't for ever interrupting.”
Oh, what a tangled Webb..............................
I expect the friend who sent me the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the incomparable Mrs Beeton’s book on household management meant it kindly. But when I've forgotten to put the rubbish out, the dog is sulking in the waste paper basket and the mice are running riot, recipes that begin “First catch your hare” strike quite the wrong note.
Not that Mrs Beeton would have been unsympathetic to my chaos. She was one of twenty-one children and her mother’s idea of getting them out of the way was to send them to live in the grandstand at Ascot racecourse, where their father was Clerk of the Course. On race days they were farmed out. Yet this amazing lady lived through it happily, at the same time amassing the knowledge that enabled her to write one of the great classic books in the English language.
The instructions to a valet might be copied by a greyhound called Taz to advantage....... “of course subject to their master’s every command. They themselves being subject to erring judgement, aggravated by an imperfect education, their duty leads them to wait upon those who from sheer wealth, station and education are more polished and consequently more susceptible to annoyance.”
The valet must warm the young master’s body linen before the fire, shaving him, washing and combing hair, moustache and beard “where such an appendage is encouraged, arranging the whole simply and gracefully according to the age and style of countenance.”
Heady stuff when you have been wearing your socks so long olfactory gifted hounds can find them.
Mrs Beeton will never be a feminist icon. “Men are so well served out of doors,” she writes, “at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that in order to compete with the attraction of these places a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practise of cookery........there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
Labour saving devices include a scullery maid who lights the fire, sweeps and cleans the kitchen, cleans the entrance step, the halls, passages and stairs. Twice a week she washes and scours these places as well as tables, shelves and cupboards. She dresses the nursery and servants’ meals and prepares all meat, poultry and vegetables. You will not wish to hear about the 13-year-old maid of all work in one-servant houses but the recipes are mouth watering.
At Skidmore Prava these tasks are carried out by She Who Must Never Be Obeyed.
Before she left, SWMNBE dropped a domestic bombshell. She announced that she plans to adopt a tiger.
Alas, the dog overheard and I have not known a peaceful moment since. Dogs have a literal mind and the concept of adoption without accommodation is foreign to them. No-one does apprehension like a greyhound.
Belay “Forests of the Night”. So far as Taz is concerned, the “tiger, tiger” is “burning bright” on his sofa in the sitting room which he now enters with great care, rather like the late John Wayne “casing” a saloon. Taz, though his manners are immaculate, though he leaks love which comes off him in warm waves and has two speeds, “Fast” and “Fast Asleep” is not the bravest of dogs. He was traumatised early in life in consequence of being mugged by a robin.
Also he has form where cats are concerned. He largely uses his turn of speed to put the fear of doggy god into the neighbours' cats. Now he is convinced the cats have taken out a contract on him with a giant cat that is going to chase him down the days like the Hound of Heaven .
When he finally plucks up courage and sidles into the sitting room to find an empty sofa, he leaps on it, curls into the smallest conceivable ball, firmly closes his eyes and sinks into a deep sleep. Not undisturbed, it must be said. From time to time he utters little cries as of one pursued by tigers.
Mark my words, no good will come of it.
A NEW ZEALAND CRITIC OF THE PELVIC ORACLE'S CHRONICLE:
“I hesitate to say that Fry, who, alas, did not reach the Olympian heights of playing a grumpy doctor on prime time US television, has his sights fixed on similar pretty pennies. In a way, this is why this book is what was once called a curate's egg: uneven in parts.
When he riffs on his faults - "physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion" - he puts his finger on exactly what is missing here. It is all performance, disarming, rueful, sweet, 'candid' and just the teeniest, weeniest little bit of a fake.”
WEBB SIGHT
A young man with an ego which approaches the Great Fry Up is the newest recruit to “Today” on R4, Justin Webb.
The Great Libby Purves, whom God preserve, has wisely said that reading the news is the easiest job on earth. I have done it and the only job I have had which was easier was sweeping out the R.C. Chapel on Jankers.
Newsreaders get a script, an autocue that unrolls at the speed of their speech and a producer in the ear offering advice. Newsreaders not only get paid far too much: they develop enormous egos in inverse ratio to their ability.
Witness James Naughtie on “Today”. By the time this latter day Harry Lauder has finished a question, and on the rare occasions the interviewee gets a word in, the programme is “Tomorrow”.
Naughtie invariably begins the next question by explaining what the interviewee meant by his answer. “I think what you are saying is this...” There is no greater passion than a Scotchman in love with himself, though Webb proves the feeling passes over frontiers.
In a recent interview he announced that ALTHOUGH THE LISTENERS WOULD HATE IT he proposed in future to interrupt the guests more often.
Thus he demonstrates how unimportant listeners are to him and how his ignorance of the techniques of his trade is boundless.
Older listeners will recall that I once fell asleep whilst interviewing a chum on a Radio 4 series. A Russian princess called Masha.
No one noticed and I wasn't going to tell them. When the programme went out letters arrived from listeners saying, “At last a presenter who isn't for ever interrupting.”
Oh, what a tangled Webb..............................
Friday, 5 November 2010
MINERS TRAPPED ( exclusive
)
LINES ON THE BRIERLEY HILL COLLIERY INUNDATION THAT OCCURRED MARCH 17th 1869
"A Week in the Jaws of Death"
"A Chat with one who was there"
Business, curiosity, combined with perhaps just a suspicion of thirst, drew an Exprss and Star man the other day into a house of call in Stafford Street, Dudley, kept by one George Skidmore. The landlord, a big brawny fellow of middle age, sat in the tap room conversing with several men, evidently colliers. From the tenour of the conversation it soon became apparent that the host had been at one time a collier himself. Our representative's attention was drawn to a portrait which hung on the wall, depicting about a dozen men and boys in flannel trousers and jackets such as colliers used to wear, and sometimes do still. Noticing that the faces of the individuals in the group looked uncommonly pinched and worn, "What is this," he queried, "a lot just out of hospital?" "Nay," quoth the host, "that's me and my chums after living a week on boot leather." "Well, I can see that the diet suited you bettr than the others." "I did not need much on it." After further questioning the landlord said, "That's a picture of Tom Hunt, Ben Higgs, Jack Holden, Johnnie Handley, Tim Tailor, David Hickman, Steve Page, George Skidmore (that's me), Zackariah Parson and the lads - Timmins, Sankey and Joe Pearson. We was all shut in the Nine Locks pit at Brierley Hill for nearly a week, twenty-seven year come next March. "Ah, the Lock's Lane inundation, I have heard of that." "Never was such a commotion in this part of the country, I can tell you," chimed in one of the company. "There were thousands and thousands on the bank; and when they were gotten out there never were so many visitors in Brierley Hill before nor since." "Never was such a good job neither in the history of mining," continued the landlord. "All on we were saved except one poor chap who wandered off and got down with the damp I expect. He had been in a queer affair just before. There had been two on 'em in the pit and he came up alive and the other was found there dead." "Kinder prayed on his mind," suggested an old miner who sat in a corner. "Ah!" assented Skidmore. "How did you get imprisoned?" "Oh, the Thirteen on we went down on the Tuesday night to work, and when we started to go up in the morning we could not get to the shaft for water." "And what did you do?" "Do? Why we got into the safest place as we could find and it wasn't long before I was asleep." "He slept mostly all the while," interjected the old collier. "He gave his food to the lads," said another. "I had been boozing a lot and didn't need my supper. I had some pork and bread and when the lads began to cry with hunger Timmins and young Joe Pearson had it between them." "But you say you were in a week. From the Tuesday night till the next Monday morning. And how on earth did you exist all that time?" "Well, as he told you, I slept most of the time. The other chaps kept putting bits of coal on the rails to see whether the water was rising or falling. When they got tired on that they huddled down beside me and we kept each other warm that way." But without food. How did they exist?
"I wasn't a bit hungrier than I am now but the other chaps were restless and were clammed. They ate candles and we had no light after that. They chewed the leather of their straps and shoes and bits of coal. It was a terrible wait for them. What feelings they must have had. Ah! that's it, I didn't seem to mind much, though. When we got to the bank, old Dr Walker said as how I could have lived another fourteen days." "Were you all together?" "Oh no, Tom Hunt, Ben Higgs and the lads, Timmins and Pearson, and Johnnie Handley and Jack Sankey and the man what died were on the other side of the mine. Some of them were got out the day before we were." "I suppose you had given up all hope?" He smiled, "Well we could tell as how they were working for us. They had a tank at work as drew two tons and half of water every time and a pump that took 250 gallons every stroke. If it had been with any other firm but the Earl of Dudley it would have been all over with us. Every time the tank dipped, it sent the water up a yard, and back two, and that kept the air circulating. The water was 50 feet up the shaft at first, but at last they got to us with a raft. We were glad enough to see daylight, I can tell you." "Could you tell how the time passed?" "Ah, yes, one of the chaps had a watch and we kept note with that. It was a long week for them. More like a month to them. A day or two after we got out we had our portraits took and the next Sunday we went to Church. Parson took for his subject Jonah in the whale's belly." "You had beat him." "Ah, you're right there. Yet I don't know, having no experience of seafaring. I was working in Yorkshire some time after, and one of our fellows tapped an old working. There was a rush of water, and well, I remembered the Nine Locks. I had on a pair of clogs, but you should have heard them patter up that road. Butty said he would put us in Wakefield Gaol for leaving it. But if yer wanting to know more about that here better than I can remember..." With that he produced a ragged slip of paper...
Alas, my cousin Jean Skidmore who sent me this fascinating dispatch has not yet been able to trace the cutting.
FROM MY POSTBAG
My friends Geoff Mather and Colin Dunne offered:
Geoff's Cranks and Oddities:
Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine. A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking. Dijon vu - the same mustard as before. Practice safe eating - always use condiments. Shotgun wedding - a case of wife or death. A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy. A hangover is the wrath of grapes. Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. Reading while sunbathing makes you well red. When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I. A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.
What's the definition of a will? (It's a dead give away.) Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes. She was engaged to a boyfriend with a wooden leg but broke it off.A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.
The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered. You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it. Local Area Network in Australia - the LAN down under.Every calendar's days are numbered. A lot of money is tainted - taint yours and taint mine. A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat. He had a photographic memory that was never developed. A midget fortune-teller who escapes from prison is a small medium at large. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis. Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses. Acupuncture is a jab well done.
Colin's Puns for Educated Minds
The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian. She was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'
I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'
The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran. A backward poet writes inverse. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'
Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says 'Dam!' Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.' Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
AMERICAN HORROR MOVIE PRESS HAND OUT
from my friend John Edwards
"An oneiric, eroticized homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies reimagined as an avant-garde trance film. A delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire. Drawing its stylized, hyperbolic gestures from the playbooks of Bava, Leone, Argento, and De Palma and taking them into a realm of near-abstraction, Amer has genre in the blood. Its bold wide-screen compositions, super-focused sound, emphatic music (lifted from original giallo soundtracks), and razor-sharp cuts make for an outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip.
Official Section New Directors/New Films Moma Film Society
LINES ON THE BRIERLEY HILL COLLIERY INUNDATION THAT OCCURRED MARCH 17th 1869
"A Week in the Jaws of Death"
"A Chat with one who was there"
Business, curiosity, combined with perhaps just a suspicion of thirst, drew an Exprss and Star man the other day into a house of call in Stafford Street, Dudley, kept by one George Skidmore. The landlord, a big brawny fellow of middle age, sat in the tap room conversing with several men, evidently colliers. From the tenour of the conversation it soon became apparent that the host had been at one time a collier himself. Our representative's attention was drawn to a portrait which hung on the wall, depicting about a dozen men and boys in flannel trousers and jackets such as colliers used to wear, and sometimes do still. Noticing that the faces of the individuals in the group looked uncommonly pinched and worn, "What is this," he queried, "a lot just out of hospital?" "Nay," quoth the host, "that's me and my chums after living a week on boot leather." "Well, I can see that the diet suited you bettr than the others." "I did not need much on it." After further questioning the landlord said, "That's a picture of Tom Hunt, Ben Higgs, Jack Holden, Johnnie Handley, Tim Tailor, David Hickman, Steve Page, George Skidmore (that's me), Zackariah Parson and the lads - Timmins, Sankey and Joe Pearson. We was all shut in the Nine Locks pit at Brierley Hill for nearly a week, twenty-seven year come next March. "Ah, the Lock's Lane inundation, I have heard of that." "Never was such a commotion in this part of the country, I can tell you," chimed in one of the company. "There were thousands and thousands on the bank; and when they were gotten out there never were so many visitors in Brierley Hill before nor since." "Never was such a good job neither in the history of mining," continued the landlord. "All on we were saved except one poor chap who wandered off and got down with the damp I expect. He had been in a queer affair just before. There had been two on 'em in the pit and he came up alive and the other was found there dead." "Kinder prayed on his mind," suggested an old miner who sat in a corner. "Ah!" assented Skidmore. "How did you get imprisoned?" "Oh, the Thirteen on we went down on the Tuesday night to work, and when we started to go up in the morning we could not get to the shaft for water." "And what did you do?" "Do? Why we got into the safest place as we could find and it wasn't long before I was asleep." "He slept mostly all the while," interjected the old collier. "He gave his food to the lads," said another. "I had been boozing a lot and didn't need my supper. I had some pork and bread and when the lads began to cry with hunger Timmins and young Joe Pearson had it between them." "But you say you were in a week. From the Tuesday night till the next Monday morning. And how on earth did you exist all that time?" "Well, as he told you, I slept most of the time. The other chaps kept putting bits of coal on the rails to see whether the water was rising or falling. When they got tired on that they huddled down beside me and we kept each other warm that way." But without food. How did they exist?
"I wasn't a bit hungrier than I am now but the other chaps were restless and were clammed. They ate candles and we had no light after that. They chewed the leather of their straps and shoes and bits of coal. It was a terrible wait for them. What feelings they must have had. Ah! that's it, I didn't seem to mind much, though. When we got to the bank, old Dr Walker said as how I could have lived another fourteen days." "Were you all together?" "Oh no, Tom Hunt, Ben Higgs and the lads, Timmins and Pearson, and Johnnie Handley and Jack Sankey and the man what died were on the other side of the mine. Some of them were got out the day before we were." "I suppose you had given up all hope?" He smiled, "Well we could tell as how they were working for us. They had a tank at work as drew two tons and half of water every time and a pump that took 250 gallons every stroke. If it had been with any other firm but the Earl of Dudley it would have been all over with us. Every time the tank dipped, it sent the water up a yard, and back two, and that kept the air circulating. The water was 50 feet up the shaft at first, but at last they got to us with a raft. We were glad enough to see daylight, I can tell you." "Could you tell how the time passed?" "Ah, yes, one of the chaps had a watch and we kept note with that. It was a long week for them. More like a month to them. A day or two after we got out we had our portraits took and the next Sunday we went to Church. Parson took for his subject Jonah in the whale's belly." "You had beat him." "Ah, you're right there. Yet I don't know, having no experience of seafaring. I was working in Yorkshire some time after, and one of our fellows tapped an old working. There was a rush of water, and well, I remembered the Nine Locks. I had on a pair of clogs, but you should have heard them patter up that road. Butty said he would put us in Wakefield Gaol for leaving it. But if yer wanting to know more about that here better than I can remember..." With that he produced a ragged slip of paper...
Alas, my cousin Jean Skidmore who sent me this fascinating dispatch has not yet been able to trace the cutting.
FROM MY POSTBAG
My friends Geoff Mather and Colin Dunne offered:
Geoff's Cranks and Oddities:
Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine. A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking. Dijon vu - the same mustard as before. Practice safe eating - always use condiments. Shotgun wedding - a case of wife or death. A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy. A hangover is the wrath of grapes. Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. Reading while sunbathing makes you well red. When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I. A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.
What's the definition of a will? (It's a dead give away.) Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes. She was engaged to a boyfriend with a wooden leg but broke it off.A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.
The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered. You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it. Local Area Network in Australia - the LAN down under.Every calendar's days are numbered. A lot of money is tainted - taint yours and taint mine. A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat. He had a photographic memory that was never developed. A midget fortune-teller who escapes from prison is a small medium at large. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis. Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses. Acupuncture is a jab well done.
Colin's Puns for Educated Minds
The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian. She was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'
I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'
The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran. A backward poet writes inverse. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'
Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says 'Dam!' Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.' Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
AMERICAN HORROR MOVIE PRESS HAND OUT
from my friend John Edwards
"An oneiric, eroticized homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies reimagined as an avant-garde trance film. A delirious, enigmatic, almost wordless death-dance of fear and desire. Drawing its stylized, hyperbolic gestures from the playbooks of Bava, Leone, Argento, and De Palma and taking them into a realm of near-abstraction, Amer has genre in the blood. Its bold wide-screen compositions, super-focused sound, emphatic music (lifted from original giallo soundtracks), and razor-sharp cuts make for an outrageous and intoxicating cinematic head-trip.
Official Section New Directors/New Films Moma Film Society
Saturday, 30 October 2010
I AM REVOLTING
Revolutions have lousy timing. By the time they happen the need for them has passed. When the mob stormed the Bastille it contained nine people, eight of whom were having lunch with the Governor. The Germans rushed Lenin across Europe in a special train. The Czar was bringing in reforms at such a rate the Bolsheviks all but missed their cue. There had been several revolutions before theirs but they were squashed with the flick of a cosh.
This week, if I could have found a barricade, I would have leaped up it like an angry chamois. It began badly with the domination of radio and TV by Stephen Fry, the Pelvic Oracle. But you could have ironed trousers with the steam which came from my ears when I read of the latest con trick of the House of Windsor.
"How nice," we all thought, when the Chancellor announced that Her Gracious wanted to suffer with her subjects and so had agreed to freeze the royals' pay packets. It emerged later that in doing so the Royal Family have secured a lucrative deal that will earn them tens of millions of pounds from the massive expansion of offshore wind farms.
They will net up to £37.5 million extra income every year from the drive for green energy because the seabed within Britain’s territorial waters is owned by the Crown Estate. Prince Charles has banned these useless excretions from within sight of his country estate. Elsewhere the Family welcome them with Open Wallets.
They will pocket another £38 million a year from an offshore wind farm on Queen Caroline, Canada's 'Galapagos' island. Although the island houses one of that country's most important bird sanctuaries, the wind farm will use the old-style, three-bladed, prop-style designs; not only inefficient, but infamous bird and bat killers.
ROASTING THE PEASANTS
The fabulously wealthy Grosvenor Estates, which includes large swathes of London's Mayfair and Belgravia, as well as the new 43-acre Liverpool One development, is one of the creditors trying to bankrupt the lowly Portsmouth F.C. The Estates owns a shop in its Festival Place Shopping Centre in Basingstoke. Portsmouth is thought to be the guarantor for the tenant, a retailer who has fallen in to administration and therefore made the football club liable for the costs. So much for the beatiful game of the peasantry.
Ironic.The present Duke, as a child, told me his ambition was to be a professional footballer. He had a trial with Fulham F.C. Now he is one of Britain's richest men but he would have been a pauper except for one of his andestor's peasants, a forestry worker called Ridley who rose to found Grosvenor Estates. He was promoted by the second Duke, incidentally an active supporter of the Right Club, formed "to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry", and of the Peace Aims Group that supported the idea of a negotiated peace settlement with Nazi Germany.
With Ridley's help, he developed Grosvenor Estates into a diversified property empire as it acquired much property in Australia and Annacis Island in British Columbia.
On the second Duke's death in 1953, the estate was clobbered for £20 million in death duties and the family sold Pimlico to meet the liability. The Inland Revenue is said to have created a whole department simply to deal with the matter.
Ridley created a twenty-part trust fund which dispersed the title and the ownership of Grosvenor Estates. The money and the title only came back together on the accession of the current Duke.
When he (the present duke) was a schoolboy I was asked by his father not to publicise his annual birthday party at Chester Zoo. I know how Portsmouth feel. When the fourth duke, a dotty eccentric who was obsessed with chickens, died, Cheshire Police were INSTRUCTED by the Estate to threaten me with arrest if I covered the funeral. The Oblige was well and truly nobbled.
This week, if I could have found a barricade, I would have leaped up it like an angry chamois. It began badly with the domination of radio and TV by Stephen Fry, the Pelvic Oracle. But you could have ironed trousers with the steam which came from my ears when I read of the latest con trick of the House of Windsor.
"How nice," we all thought, when the Chancellor announced that Her Gracious wanted to suffer with her subjects and so had agreed to freeze the royals' pay packets. It emerged later that in doing so the Royal Family have secured a lucrative deal that will earn them tens of millions of pounds from the massive expansion of offshore wind farms.
They will net up to £37.5 million extra income every year from the drive for green energy because the seabed within Britain’s territorial waters is owned by the Crown Estate. Prince Charles has banned these useless excretions from within sight of his country estate. Elsewhere the Family welcome them with Open Wallets.
They will pocket another £38 million a year from an offshore wind farm on Queen Caroline, Canada's 'Galapagos' island. Although the island houses one of that country's most important bird sanctuaries, the wind farm will use the old-style, three-bladed, prop-style designs; not only inefficient, but infamous bird and bat killers.
ROASTING THE PEASANTS
The fabulously wealthy Grosvenor Estates, which includes large swathes of London's Mayfair and Belgravia, as well as the new 43-acre Liverpool One development, is one of the creditors trying to bankrupt the lowly Portsmouth F.C. The Estates owns a shop in its Festival Place Shopping Centre in Basingstoke. Portsmouth is thought to be the guarantor for the tenant, a retailer who has fallen in to administration and therefore made the football club liable for the costs. So much for the beatiful game of the peasantry.
Ironic.The present Duke, as a child, told me his ambition was to be a professional footballer. He had a trial with Fulham F.C. Now he is one of Britain's richest men but he would have been a pauper except for one of his andestor's peasants, a forestry worker called Ridley who rose to found Grosvenor Estates. He was promoted by the second Duke, incidentally an active supporter of the Right Club, formed "to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry", and of the Peace Aims Group that supported the idea of a negotiated peace settlement with Nazi Germany.
With Ridley's help, he developed Grosvenor Estates into a diversified property empire as it acquired much property in Australia and Annacis Island in British Columbia.
On the second Duke's death in 1953, the estate was clobbered for £20 million in death duties and the family sold Pimlico to meet the liability. The Inland Revenue is said to have created a whole department simply to deal with the matter.
Ridley created a twenty-part trust fund which dispersed the title and the ownership of Grosvenor Estates. The money and the title only came back together on the accession of the current Duke.
When he (the present duke) was a schoolboy I was asked by his father not to publicise his annual birthday party at Chester Zoo. I know how Portsmouth feel. When the fourth duke, a dotty eccentric who was obsessed with chickens, died, Cheshire Police were INSTRUCTED by the Estate to threaten me with arrest if I covered the funeral. The Oblige was well and truly nobbled.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
FEN SING
The startling front page headline in our local paper read;
MARCH MAN GAOLED FOR GROPING
This incident which in Italy would have been taken as a compliment did not even happen in March but on some London tube train. In fairness to the newspaper, this is an area where little happens. Even scenery is absent. Civilisation came late to the Fens. Untill the 17th century it was forest and swamp. The Fenmen lived a life free of law on a plentiful diet of fish and game. When the Clearances began the Fen people were bitterly opposed but the Improvers beat them. They imported hundreds of Scottish prisoners from early Jacobite wars. It was a hard life digging the network of canals which were named after the distance dug in a day. The biggest was the 100 ft drain. Many died and were buried in the walls of the ditches they dug.
The Fens are entirely foreground and the discovery of perspective was wasted on them. The bonus is the architecture, both ecclesiastic and vernacular. Even on housing estates they build individually designed dwellings. Cities are few but attractive. Ely is a Georgian joy. Peterborough has a traffic free centre opening on to a tree-lined boulevard like the Ramblas in Barcelona. Its cathedral, where two queens were buried, has the finest facade in Europe. The city approaches might have been gloomy but the most enlightened civic planners in Britain encircled the city with a forest. Both cities are on river banks
All over the Fens there are churches and cathedrals which are treasures. The people make an effort if the landscape doesn't. Wonderful pubs, many with good restaurants. and thatched cottage villages. There is a Straw Bear festival, river festivals, and at Christmas there's a 'Extravaganza' in a village of 400 which attracts 40 busloads of visitors A NIGHT. It is held in a massive barn where there is a collection of vintage hurdy gurdies. It has spectacular scenery and a cast of hundreds picked in auditions in London that start in July.
Chrustmas is in its infancy outside the Fen
The Fenland Christmas is a thing to behold. Every town and large village is ablaze with faery lights, as are many of the houses. The fens have fewer buildings and larger electricity bills than anywhere in the UK.
And glory of glories, there is Mr Hipkin who has worked as a gardener with my wife's family for around forty years. He used, single-handedly, to tend grounds which included rose and kitchen gardens, a vegetable garden and an orchard. When the family downsized, he came with them.
He refuses to take more than a pittance for a full morning's work (he is richer than we are) and my wife feels so tenderly towards him she brings professional gardeners in at enormous cost for any jobs that require a ladder. I don't think Hipkin approves but of course he knows his place and wouldn't quarrel with his employer!!! Like me, he is 81 but gets very moody if I attempt to lift anything and insists I leave it to him.. He tends around twenty old people's gardens as acts of charity and every year he carries off at least twenty prizes in the village flower show, including the four cups he presented to the show over the years. His partner Miss Beart is a sturdy 5ft 4ins, 5ft 3 inches of which is heart. Hipkin bought her a stone dog. A week later he brought it round to us. "She couldn't sleep worriting about it bein' out in all that snow."
Their own dog Bailey is a terrier who lives like a Rothschild. He has never eaten dog food. He has bacon, egg and sausage for breakfast and when Hipkin asks him how many sausages he wants he barks four times.
He is very fond of the cathedral city of Ely. Wherever the three ofthem go they have to come home via Ely because Bailey likes the shops there, and they holiday in Skegness for the same reason.
There may be little to look at in the Fens but that doesn't say we have no wonders.
..........................................................................
People are far more perceptive than politicians give them credit. Amusing the way BBC presenters, lefties to the core, have had little success in finding workers who oppose the cuts. Though the row over a hostile Questiontime deliberately placed in a Labour stroghold shows how hard they try. Unlike politicians and presenters, people are used to the notion that if you are broke you don't buy things; and few would put anyone earning the thick end of £500 a week amongst the world's poor. Though no-one I meet can understand why overseas aid has been ring fenced. Personally, I would add education to that.
Why, I wonder, in this state of the art century, at the very heart of the white heat of education theory, do we keep a rusting relic of the Middle Ages? Universities were founded for a specific purpose. In an age of limited scholarship, any city - Athens, Padua and Paris - that had a celebrated teacher attracted students from all over school-less Europe. Because of the expense and difficulty of travel, the students stayed in lodgings round the teacher's dwelling.
And we keep these relics in an Age when we have an Open University. I wonder why we do not make better use of it?
FULL STOP PRESS
Blessed be the name of Cathy Sutherland who graces a chair in English at Oxford University. She has established that Jane Austen could not spell or punctuate.
That is Austen, Byron, Wordsworth and ME
MARCH MAN GAOLED FOR GROPING
This incident which in Italy would have been taken as a compliment did not even happen in March but on some London tube train. In fairness to the newspaper, this is an area where little happens. Even scenery is absent. Civilisation came late to the Fens. Untill the 17th century it was forest and swamp. The Fenmen lived a life free of law on a plentiful diet of fish and game. When the Clearances began the Fen people were bitterly opposed but the Improvers beat them. They imported hundreds of Scottish prisoners from early Jacobite wars. It was a hard life digging the network of canals which were named after the distance dug in a day. The biggest was the 100 ft drain. Many died and were buried in the walls of the ditches they dug.
The Fens are entirely foreground and the discovery of perspective was wasted on them. The bonus is the architecture, both ecclesiastic and vernacular. Even on housing estates they build individually designed dwellings. Cities are few but attractive. Ely is a Georgian joy. Peterborough has a traffic free centre opening on to a tree-lined boulevard like the Ramblas in Barcelona. Its cathedral, where two queens were buried, has the finest facade in Europe. The city approaches might have been gloomy but the most enlightened civic planners in Britain encircled the city with a forest. Both cities are on river banks
All over the Fens there are churches and cathedrals which are treasures. The people make an effort if the landscape doesn't. Wonderful pubs, many with good restaurants. and thatched cottage villages. There is a Straw Bear festival, river festivals, and at Christmas there's a 'Extravaganza' in a village of 400 which attracts 40 busloads of visitors A NIGHT. It is held in a massive barn where there is a collection of vintage hurdy gurdies. It has spectacular scenery and a cast of hundreds picked in auditions in London that start in July.
Chrustmas is in its infancy outside the Fen
The Fenland Christmas is a thing to behold. Every town and large village is ablaze with faery lights, as are many of the houses. The fens have fewer buildings and larger electricity bills than anywhere in the UK.
And glory of glories, there is Mr Hipkin who has worked as a gardener with my wife's family for around forty years. He used, single-handedly, to tend grounds which included rose and kitchen gardens, a vegetable garden and an orchard. When the family downsized, he came with them.
He refuses to take more than a pittance for a full morning's work (he is richer than we are) and my wife feels so tenderly towards him she brings professional gardeners in at enormous cost for any jobs that require a ladder. I don't think Hipkin approves but of course he knows his place and wouldn't quarrel with his employer!!! Like me, he is 81 but gets very moody if I attempt to lift anything and insists I leave it to him.. He tends around twenty old people's gardens as acts of charity and every year he carries off at least twenty prizes in the village flower show, including the four cups he presented to the show over the years. His partner Miss Beart is a sturdy 5ft 4ins, 5ft 3 inches of which is heart. Hipkin bought her a stone dog. A week later he brought it round to us. "She couldn't sleep worriting about it bein' out in all that snow."
Their own dog Bailey is a terrier who lives like a Rothschild. He has never eaten dog food. He has bacon, egg and sausage for breakfast and when Hipkin asks him how many sausages he wants he barks four times.
He is very fond of the cathedral city of Ely. Wherever the three ofthem go they have to come home via Ely because Bailey likes the shops there, and they holiday in Skegness for the same reason.
There may be little to look at in the Fens but that doesn't say we have no wonders.
..........................................................................
People are far more perceptive than politicians give them credit. Amusing the way BBC presenters, lefties to the core, have had little success in finding workers who oppose the cuts. Though the row over a hostile Questiontime deliberately placed in a Labour stroghold shows how hard they try. Unlike politicians and presenters, people are used to the notion that if you are broke you don't buy things; and few would put anyone earning the thick end of £500 a week amongst the world's poor. Though no-one I meet can understand why overseas aid has been ring fenced. Personally, I would add education to that.
Why, I wonder, in this state of the art century, at the very heart of the white heat of education theory, do we keep a rusting relic of the Middle Ages? Universities were founded for a specific purpose. In an age of limited scholarship, any city - Athens, Padua and Paris - that had a celebrated teacher attracted students from all over school-less Europe. Because of the expense and difficulty of travel, the students stayed in lodgings round the teacher's dwelling.
And we keep these relics in an Age when we have an Open University. I wonder why we do not make better use of it?
FULL STOP PRESS
Blessed be the name of Cathy Sutherland who graces a chair in English at Oxford University. She has established that Jane Austen could not spell or punctuate.
That is Austen, Byron, Wordsworth and ME
Friday, 15 October 2010
BOBBY ON THE BEATUP
Murder Inc, or the Metropolitan Police as it is more generally known, appears to be getting away with murder. The Force has never had the highest reputation, When I was doing the background to the infamous Richardson Brothers who had the unpleasant habit of nailing their victims hands to the floor, so many Met policemen were taking backhanders from the Brothers, the investigation HQ moved to the Home Counties.Now they have shown even more alarming developments. Most recently by using fifty-six marksmen to kill one drunken lawyer with an empty shotgun. Witnesses to this over reaction were unanimous in their belief that he could have been talked into submission but a court has ruled that the posse of gunmen were right in acting as they did. It is curious that marksmen fire tranquilisers at animals who have escaped. If you are carrying a suspicious chairleg, just passing through a crowd of protesters, or indeed going to work on the Tube, a death sentence is mandatory. Small boys with toy guns have often brought out Murder Inc in force. I was taking my life in my hands when I bought plastic highwaymen's pop pistols for my grandchildren at Disneyland in Paris. Fortunately I was not allowed to bring them on the plane.
My father, a world war one veteran who joined the police in 1920, had a propemsity towards violence. Nonetheless, he shared the view of most of his fellow constables that it would be a mistake to arm the police. He was himself armed during the pre- and post-war IRA raids, including a siege in Erskine St in Manchester when he was shot in the head. An IRA man called Shaughnessy got life. I was with him in Dublin when he met Shaugnessy who was anxious to apologise because, "Sure,there was nothing personal."
" Don't feel badly about it," said my father. "It wasn't you who shot me; it was my Inspector."
Mind you, that was a different IRA. As the sainted Kevin Myers wrote in the Irish Independent this week:
"Even the misnamed 'Anglo-Irish War' turns out be much less 'Anglo' and far more 'Irish' than nationalist history allows. In 1930, Charlie Dalton, one of Michael Collins' Squad, described to the Bureau of Military Archives how he had spontaneously opened fire on a British army roadblock in Drumcondra, Dublin. 'Brigadier (Dick) McKee sent for me and asked me what was in my mind in firing on the soldiers. As far as I know, this was the first occasion on which the British military had been fired on since the (1916) Insurrection.'
"This was October 1920, after nearly two years of the so-called 'Anglo-Irish war', and though Dalton's memory was at fault here -- Kevin Barry's unit had shot dead three soldiers a couple of weeks before -- the fact remains that British soldiers were not targets for the IRA. Moreover, within 18 months, the violence was about to become purely Irish, as the conjoined traditions of Fenianism -- one violent and conspiratorial, the other cultural and tribal -- united in opposition to the new Free State."
It is odd how tempting it is to play pretend soldiers. Only the fact that Britain is bankrupt has persuaded the police to get rid of its cavalry, though the horse has long since outlived its role in crowd control.
No indication so far to standing down its Air Force which performs with traffic much the same as the role the horse played with crowds and a single policeman on point duty did perfectly efficiently with cars. The Chief Constables in their faux military silver braided uniforms argue that the helicopter would play a vital role in fighting terrorists. Others might have difficulty explaing why and how. Perhaps we will bomb the next furtive jihadist.
If only our bankers could be made to answer for their crimes. Unthinkable. They are responsible for the coming reductions in everything we hold dear. One wonders why we are being punished whilst they are sharing a billion-pound reward for wrecking the country. It is comparable to giving the train driver twenty years in gaol and dipping into the poor box for the Train Robbers' Benevolent Fund. Don't have much faith in our sincerity to pay off that Deficit either. They rifle Mums' purses for the children's allowance, they cut public services, they reduce the Forces to a level that would make it difficult for them to win a game of Housey Housey. And what do they do with the money? They spend £12 billion on the Olympic Games. That is twelve billion to jump over gates, hurl cannon balls and throw spears........................
One important lesson to learn if you are stealing is,Think Big. In Chester, Grosvenor Estates owned the Grosvenor Hotel on one side of a road in the city centre. On the other side was a commercial property they were anxious to develop into a shopping centre. When building began huge screens blocked off the road between the two properites. Their purpose was to protect passers-by from being injured by falling debris.
When the screens were taken down the street had vanished and a concourse joined the Grosvenor Hotel with the new development. Grosvenor Estates, which was the creation of the fabulously wealthy Dukes of Westminster, had stolen the street.
HOKEY COKEY POLITICS
BRUSSELS — The United States is helping senior Taliban leaders attend initial peace talks with the Afghan government in Kabul because military officials and diplomats want to take advantage of any possibility of political reconciliation, Obama administration and NATO officials said ...NYTimes
Remember the Hokey COKEY DANCE...."In Out, In OUT. Shake it all about......." Now it's official US Foreign Policy. They put the Taliban in, they kicked the Taliban out, and now they are shaking them all about.
FROM MY POSTBAG
My oldest friend, a Daily Mail columnist, writes;
Three cheers for Chile. Wonderful effort. The country has come through this exploding with pride and envy from much of the rest of the world.
I mean, let's face it. If it was in this country they'd all be dead. We don't have the expertise any more and for sure any home manufactured machinery would break down straight away. The greatest threat might have come from the police who would want to interfere and completely screw the entire rescue effort. They do it every time.
Tip: When there is a world event like the mine event try watching on US Fox News TV. It is so good it makes the BBC, SKY and ITV coverage look silly.
Another friend of my youth, a Fleet Street editor agreed:
They'd have insisted on a screen around the cage as it emerged from the earth, and they'd have had the rescued miners, and their loved ones, being re-united in private. The next pictures would have been long-tom shots of a fleet of ambulances taking them to a hospital that had a news black-out, and where police guarded every door. Then a hospital spokesidiot would read, stumbling, and haltingly, a statement saying that they were all undergoing thorough tests.
The only good bit is that we would have been saved from a television cretin asking the rescued: "How do you feel?"
Our friend's views on what would have gone wrong in Britain are dead right. They'd all be dead by now. But did you notice that the Drill Boss (that's his title) who directed the rescue drilling, was an American, trained at the Denver School of Mines, Denver, Colorado? "
It used to be worse. When I was working as a reporter for the BBC every programme sent its own reporter on a story. There would be as many as eight radio reporters AND a TV crew, which, in those Union-led days, could consist of twelve people, since every technician had to have a deputy. All of them had to have a three-course lunch and two hours to eat it in.
My father, a world war one veteran who joined the police in 1920, had a propemsity towards violence. Nonetheless, he shared the view of most of his fellow constables that it would be a mistake to arm the police. He was himself armed during the pre- and post-war IRA raids, including a siege in Erskine St in Manchester when he was shot in the head. An IRA man called Shaughnessy got life. I was with him in Dublin when he met Shaugnessy who was anxious to apologise because, "Sure,there was nothing personal."
" Don't feel badly about it," said my father. "It wasn't you who shot me; it was my Inspector."
Mind you, that was a different IRA. As the sainted Kevin Myers wrote in the Irish Independent this week:
"Even the misnamed 'Anglo-Irish War' turns out be much less 'Anglo' and far more 'Irish' than nationalist history allows. In 1930, Charlie Dalton, one of Michael Collins' Squad, described to the Bureau of Military Archives how he had spontaneously opened fire on a British army roadblock in Drumcondra, Dublin. 'Brigadier (Dick) McKee sent for me and asked me what was in my mind in firing on the soldiers. As far as I know, this was the first occasion on which the British military had been fired on since the (1916) Insurrection.'
"This was October 1920, after nearly two years of the so-called 'Anglo-Irish war', and though Dalton's memory was at fault here -- Kevin Barry's unit had shot dead three soldiers a couple of weeks before -- the fact remains that British soldiers were not targets for the IRA. Moreover, within 18 months, the violence was about to become purely Irish, as the conjoined traditions of Fenianism -- one violent and conspiratorial, the other cultural and tribal -- united in opposition to the new Free State."
It is odd how tempting it is to play pretend soldiers. Only the fact that Britain is bankrupt has persuaded the police to get rid of its cavalry, though the horse has long since outlived its role in crowd control.
No indication so far to standing down its Air Force which performs with traffic much the same as the role the horse played with crowds and a single policeman on point duty did perfectly efficiently with cars. The Chief Constables in their faux military silver braided uniforms argue that the helicopter would play a vital role in fighting terrorists. Others might have difficulty explaing why and how. Perhaps we will bomb the next furtive jihadist.
If only our bankers could be made to answer for their crimes. Unthinkable. They are responsible for the coming reductions in everything we hold dear. One wonders why we are being punished whilst they are sharing a billion-pound reward for wrecking the country. It is comparable to giving the train driver twenty years in gaol and dipping into the poor box for the Train Robbers' Benevolent Fund. Don't have much faith in our sincerity to pay off that Deficit either. They rifle Mums' purses for the children's allowance, they cut public services, they reduce the Forces to a level that would make it difficult for them to win a game of Housey Housey. And what do they do with the money? They spend £12 billion on the Olympic Games. That is twelve billion to jump over gates, hurl cannon balls and throw spears........................
One important lesson to learn if you are stealing is,Think Big. In Chester, Grosvenor Estates owned the Grosvenor Hotel on one side of a road in the city centre. On the other side was a commercial property they were anxious to develop into a shopping centre. When building began huge screens blocked off the road between the two properites. Their purpose was to protect passers-by from being injured by falling debris.
When the screens were taken down the street had vanished and a concourse joined the Grosvenor Hotel with the new development. Grosvenor Estates, which was the creation of the fabulously wealthy Dukes of Westminster, had stolen the street.
HOKEY COKEY POLITICS
BRUSSELS — The United States is helping senior Taliban leaders attend initial peace talks with the Afghan government in Kabul because military officials and diplomats want to take advantage of any possibility of political reconciliation, Obama administration and NATO officials said ...NYTimes
Remember the Hokey COKEY DANCE...."In Out, In OUT. Shake it all about......." Now it's official US Foreign Policy. They put the Taliban in, they kicked the Taliban out, and now they are shaking them all about.
FROM MY POSTBAG
My oldest friend, a Daily Mail columnist, writes;
Three cheers for Chile. Wonderful effort. The country has come through this exploding with pride and envy from much of the rest of the world.
I mean, let's face it. If it was in this country they'd all be dead. We don't have the expertise any more and for sure any home manufactured machinery would break down straight away. The greatest threat might have come from the police who would want to interfere and completely screw the entire rescue effort. They do it every time.
Tip: When there is a world event like the mine event try watching on US Fox News TV. It is so good it makes the BBC, SKY and ITV coverage look silly.
Another friend of my youth, a Fleet Street editor agreed:
They'd have insisted on a screen around the cage as it emerged from the earth, and they'd have had the rescued miners, and their loved ones, being re-united in private. The next pictures would have been long-tom shots of a fleet of ambulances taking them to a hospital that had a news black-out, and where police guarded every door. Then a hospital spokesidiot would read, stumbling, and haltingly, a statement saying that they were all undergoing thorough tests.
The only good bit is that we would have been saved from a television cretin asking the rescued: "How do you feel?"
Our friend's views on what would have gone wrong in Britain are dead right. They'd all be dead by now. But did you notice that the Drill Boss (that's his title) who directed the rescue drilling, was an American, trained at the Denver School of Mines, Denver, Colorado? "
It used to be worse. When I was working as a reporter for the BBC every programme sent its own reporter on a story. There would be as many as eight radio reporters AND a TV crew, which, in those Union-led days, could consist of twelve people, since every technician had to have a deputy. All of them had to have a three-course lunch and two hours to eat it in.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
FREEDOOMED
In my mind I seem to hear the clink of slave chains getting near...............
At first sight it seems absurd that the Coalition Government, of which I approve, should throw out mountains of the useless legislation which Labour introduced every three quarters of an hour, yet pass into law the Equality Act which is the most absurd of all.
There is an explanation. At the heart of government lies a rejection of the principle of liberty,equality and fraternity. Slavery makes government easier.
Take the recent major legislation on smoking. It is admittedly more pleasant to live in a smoke-free area but the freedom comes with a terrible price ticket: closing down one our more pleasant places of refuge over the centuries, the country pub. It is sad to witness the pathetic huddles at pub doors, guiltily sneaking a crafty fag. It is a great benefit, we are told. It isn't. Two eminent scientists of international reputation spent forty years trying to prove that passive smoking is harmful. They failed. The mighty World Health Organisation picked their tattered banner out of the dust and ran with it for a further five years but had to admit in the end there is no evidence that passive smoking is harmful.
The lawmakers needed to prove they could force us to adopt a curtailing of freedom that other generations would have rejected out of hand.
We must spend £50 billion on aircraft carriers. Not because they will be any use but, if we have them, our politicians will be able to sit at a big table, even if no-one takes any notice of us. We must spend a fortune on wind turbines, which we know are useless, and what little energy they produce will be vastly more costly, but we will be doing as the EU wishes.
Global warming. More recent science suggests that far from warming, the earth is cooling.
In the Fifties the government wanted to end capital punishment so they instituted a moratorium on the practice to prove that hanging was not a deterrent. I discovered that an instruction had gone out to judges that all murder trials should be reduced to manslaughter. The murder statistics were not based on violent deaths but on convictions so, inevitably, they proved their case, even though violent deaths had increased. At Chester Assizes it was a rare calendar which held more than one murder charge. During the moratorium there were eight, all reduced to manslaughter.
I am still trying to find out why, in turn, we were told not to eat eggs, bacon ribs, imported cheese, oxtails and porterhouse steaks. I ate all of them the moment they got the black spot.
I also ignored the Government guidelines on the number of units of alcohol I could drink - which was just as well because it later admitted the figures were picked out of a hat, although I notice they are still used.
Surveillance cameras on roads are taken away and the number of accidents drops. The statistics which had us believing drink driving kills are not based on the number of killer drunk drivers. They are calculated on the number of accidents in which drink plays a part; most the fault of drunken pedestrians.
A Labour Party Inquiry in 1949 seeking to ban fox hunting was forced to conclude it was the most humane way to kill foxes. Forty years later it was banned.
Now we have the Jonathon Wild Charter where to grass is greener. If we even overhear a remark which offends us we must report it to our employer. If the employer ignores us he faces a heavy fine. Wild, that old thief taker, would be in his element.
My friend Father Brian had the best "anti" Catholic jokes, my Jewish friends glory in "anti" Jewish jokes. WHY? Because they know they do no harm. Our legislators do not appreciate it but these sorts of jokes are like the remarks we make about the oddities of family and friends. Rough affection. Making fun is also a way of love making. When I was an Englishman in Wales I used to get very exercised at the number of anti- English jokes to which I was forced to listen. Welshmen in England have similar qualms. Yet the fault lies not in our jokes but in ourselves. We are over-sensitive.
Now, alas, I won't be able to say any more that they should rename Anne Robinson's TV quiz "The weakest WINK", so bizarre are the facial contortions with which she ends each programme. .By the same token, Stephen Fry will have to give up his nauseating single entendre rectum references; Jonathan Miller won't be able to say Gilbert and Sullivan operas are drivel.
The bad news is that Les Dawson and the legion of superb comics he represented would be out of a job were they living now. How long before blogging is illegal and we are singing "Screw Britannia, Britannia won't waive the rules, Britons ever, ever shall be slaves."
My only consolation is that I won't live long enough to suffer under another Labour government.
PEACE IN OUR TIME
If you were to ask people when World War One ended, you would most likely receive the answer, "11th November, 1918". While that would be correct - the armistice was famously signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day on the eleventh month - this century-defining conflict reached its conclusion in another sense on this very day. With the arrival of 3rd October 2010, the hefty reparations payments imposed upon Germany after the war have finally finished; the final instalment has been paid and the German people are no longer deep in the debt left over from 92 years ago.
: World War One Ends Today http://www.suite101.com/content/world-war-one-ends-today-a292851#ixzz11NQmh9gz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uaUdPs1fo0&feature=player_embedded
FOOT-IN-MOUTH NOTE
In the row over family allowances we are asked to sympathise with families who will lose their allowances if they earn more than £44,000 a year. I find it difficult to work up sympathy for anyone who earns the thick end of a thousand pounds a week,and I see nothing wrong with the princip-le thar if you annot aford a child, do not hav one
The late Mo Mowlam when she was a Minister of State was having an audience with the Queen. Mowlam's Blackberry rang and, rudely, she answered it. When she had finished and switched off, the Queen, who had waited patiently, said quietly, "Was it anyone important?"
And I will take odds that Mowlam never realised it was a put down.
At first sight it seems absurd that the Coalition Government, of which I approve, should throw out mountains of the useless legislation which Labour introduced every three quarters of an hour, yet pass into law the Equality Act which is the most absurd of all.
There is an explanation. At the heart of government lies a rejection of the principle of liberty,equality and fraternity. Slavery makes government easier.
Take the recent major legislation on smoking. It is admittedly more pleasant to live in a smoke-free area but the freedom comes with a terrible price ticket: closing down one our more pleasant places of refuge over the centuries, the country pub. It is sad to witness the pathetic huddles at pub doors, guiltily sneaking a crafty fag. It is a great benefit, we are told. It isn't. Two eminent scientists of international reputation spent forty years trying to prove that passive smoking is harmful. They failed. The mighty World Health Organisation picked their tattered banner out of the dust and ran with it for a further five years but had to admit in the end there is no evidence that passive smoking is harmful.
The lawmakers needed to prove they could force us to adopt a curtailing of freedom that other generations would have rejected out of hand.
We must spend £50 billion on aircraft carriers. Not because they will be any use but, if we have them, our politicians will be able to sit at a big table, even if no-one takes any notice of us. We must spend a fortune on wind turbines, which we know are useless, and what little energy they produce will be vastly more costly, but we will be doing as the EU wishes.
Global warming. More recent science suggests that far from warming, the earth is cooling.
In the Fifties the government wanted to end capital punishment so they instituted a moratorium on the practice to prove that hanging was not a deterrent. I discovered that an instruction had gone out to judges that all murder trials should be reduced to manslaughter. The murder statistics were not based on violent deaths but on convictions so, inevitably, they proved their case, even though violent deaths had increased. At Chester Assizes it was a rare calendar which held more than one murder charge. During the moratorium there were eight, all reduced to manslaughter.
I am still trying to find out why, in turn, we were told not to eat eggs, bacon ribs, imported cheese, oxtails and porterhouse steaks. I ate all of them the moment they got the black spot.
I also ignored the Government guidelines on the number of units of alcohol I could drink - which was just as well because it later admitted the figures were picked out of a hat, although I notice they are still used.
Surveillance cameras on roads are taken away and the number of accidents drops. The statistics which had us believing drink driving kills are not based on the number of killer drunk drivers. They are calculated on the number of accidents in which drink plays a part; most the fault of drunken pedestrians.
A Labour Party Inquiry in 1949 seeking to ban fox hunting was forced to conclude it was the most humane way to kill foxes. Forty years later it was banned.
Now we have the Jonathon Wild Charter where to grass is greener. If we even overhear a remark which offends us we must report it to our employer. If the employer ignores us he faces a heavy fine. Wild, that old thief taker, would be in his element.
My friend Father Brian had the best "anti" Catholic jokes, my Jewish friends glory in "anti" Jewish jokes. WHY? Because they know they do no harm. Our legislators do not appreciate it but these sorts of jokes are like the remarks we make about the oddities of family and friends. Rough affection. Making fun is also a way of love making. When I was an Englishman in Wales I used to get very exercised at the number of anti- English jokes to which I was forced to listen. Welshmen in England have similar qualms. Yet the fault lies not in our jokes but in ourselves. We are over-sensitive.
Now, alas, I won't be able to say any more that they should rename Anne Robinson's TV quiz "The weakest WINK", so bizarre are the facial contortions with which she ends each programme. .By the same token, Stephen Fry will have to give up his nauseating single entendre rectum references; Jonathan Miller won't be able to say Gilbert and Sullivan operas are drivel.
The bad news is that Les Dawson and the legion of superb comics he represented would be out of a job were they living now. How long before blogging is illegal and we are singing "Screw Britannia, Britannia won't waive the rules, Britons ever, ever shall be slaves."
My only consolation is that I won't live long enough to suffer under another Labour government.
PEACE IN OUR TIME
If you were to ask people when World War One ended, you would most likely receive the answer, "11th November, 1918". While that would be correct - the armistice was famously signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day on the eleventh month - this century-defining conflict reached its conclusion in another sense on this very day. With the arrival of 3rd October 2010, the hefty reparations payments imposed upon Germany after the war have finally finished; the final instalment has been paid and the German people are no longer deep in the debt left over from 92 years ago.
: World War One Ends Today http://www.suite101.com/content/world-war-one-ends-today-a292851#ixzz11NQmh9gz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uaUdPs1fo0&feature=player_embedded
FOOT-IN-MOUTH NOTE
In the row over family allowances we are asked to sympathise with families who will lose their allowances if they earn more than £44,000 a year. I find it difficult to work up sympathy for anyone who earns the thick end of a thousand pounds a week,and I see nothing wrong with the princip-le thar if you annot aford a child, do not hav one
The late Mo Mowlam when she was a Minister of State was having an audience with the Queen. Mowlam's Blackberry rang and, rudely, she answered it. When she had finished and switched off, the Queen, who had waited patiently, said quietly, "Was it anyone important?"
And I will take odds that Mowlam never realised it was a put down.
Monday, 27 September 2010
A VERY OILY CART
I love to watch Gilbert and Sullivan opera but I am very tired of living in one. Our very model of modern major generals live in stately homes, waited on by small armies of servants. IN ORDER TO ENTERTAIN. We do not pay them to entertain. We pay them to kill strangers. If they wish to entertain there are scores of empty civic theatres, built as an indulgence by councils with no funds left to pay for theatre companies.
Another army stands behind the Major Generals. The Ministry of Indefensible has proved time and time again it couldn't minister to a sick hamster. It buys military hardware so complex as to be unusable, with money we have not got. It currently spends thirty seven billion pounds and rising which is not even budgeted for. If I bought things I could not afford with money I had not got I would go to prison. They merely agitate for two new toys, 50 billion on aircraft carriers to fight a war which may not happen.
The frightening truth is that for future wars we won't need any costly equipment, nor warriors either. A real soldier, Richard Williams, who commanded 22 SAS Regiment, warns that the weapons of the future, which ironically are already being used by Al Queda, Somali pirates and Mexican drug cartels, are the lap top, the mobile phone and social networking websites. They are free of military teaching or experience.
"The British miitary," he says, "will always be short of enough equipment and men to be able to dominate its opponents by force alone. It can dominate the information space. It should be able to paralyse the opponents' decision making equipment via cyber attack and physical strike. He who has the best information - and denies the enemy information - wins."
And our major generals, like sheep, may safely graze.
And what of the Board of Directors of Great Britain Inc? Inc standing for Incomprehensible, one assumes. Pure Iolanthe, in which, you recall, we are governed by men who are half fairies. There is no possible doubt whatever that the Labour Party based its leadership election on "The Gondoliers" in which, you may recall, the brothers Palmieri are wrongly elected leaders of Barataria. In the present election only one wrong brother was elected with Peter Hain in the Don Alhambra Grand Inquisitor role. The MPS didn't want Ed - or Deadhead as he will be bound to be known; the constituencies didn't want him and not all that many members of the unions which did elect him are card carrying socialists. He is, it must be said, a gift for the cartoonists and I expect Rory Bremner will be sending them flowers.
Parliament's working hours are based on the Victorian Season with a long break for grouse shooting. In order to function, their Palace must be re-opened every year by an old lady in a glass hat and an evening gown and a long fur cape. She arrives by horse and cart accompanied by her hubby, the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, who by his own efforts became a naval lieutenant and an admiral of the fleet by marriage. So now he is a ruler of the Queen's Navy, an even more bizarre promotion path than polishing the handles of the big front door. Pure Pinafore. They have a son,The Prince of Wails, a commonplace young man, a matter of fact young man. An out of the way young man straight out of "Patience" who talks to plants, interferes in areas where he has no knowledge and runs a holiday home with twelve fulltime gardeners.
Nor are they cheap. They cost each of us two shillings for which we have much better use and on top of that have just presented us with a an eye watering bill.Nearly £100,000 for cleaning chandeliers and £14,000 on a curtain to protect wine bottles in the Buckingham Palace cellars.Refurbishing a staff canteen and games room cost £808,000 while turning a private cinema into a State function room was £458,000Its a fulltime job being Her Genie. She is forever rubbing her lamp.
Alas,this misgovernance by MPs, whose office building groans with bars that are open 24 hours a day which explains some of their decision making which has resulted in half the world hating us. They managed it by their attempts at trickery at what has been called the Peace Conference which passeth all understanding at Versailles in 1919. Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau between them wrecked Germany thus opening the way for Nazism and broke their promises to the Arab world.
UP WITH THIS I HAVE TO PUT
One of my oldest friends is the former Daily Mail columnist John Edwards. In retirement he is still fascinated by words. He sent me this:
This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do We speak UP, and why are the Officers UP for Election and why is time UP and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a Report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the Silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We Lock UP the house and Fix UP the old car.
At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble,
Line UP for Tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one
Thing but to be dressed UP is Special.
And this UP is confusing: A Drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We Open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at Night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!
In a desk-sized Dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about Thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may Wind UP with a hundred or More.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is Clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, the earth soaks it UP. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I'll wrap It UP, for now........my time is UP!
I will shut UP.
Another army stands behind the Major Generals. The Ministry of Indefensible has proved time and time again it couldn't minister to a sick hamster. It buys military hardware so complex as to be unusable, with money we have not got. It currently spends thirty seven billion pounds and rising which is not even budgeted for. If I bought things I could not afford with money I had not got I would go to prison. They merely agitate for two new toys, 50 billion on aircraft carriers to fight a war which may not happen.
The frightening truth is that for future wars we won't need any costly equipment, nor warriors either. A real soldier, Richard Williams, who commanded 22 SAS Regiment, warns that the weapons of the future, which ironically are already being used by Al Queda, Somali pirates and Mexican drug cartels, are the lap top, the mobile phone and social networking websites. They are free of military teaching or experience.
"The British miitary," he says, "will always be short of enough equipment and men to be able to dominate its opponents by force alone. It can dominate the information space. It should be able to paralyse the opponents' decision making equipment via cyber attack and physical strike. He who has the best information - and denies the enemy information - wins."
And our major generals, like sheep, may safely graze.
And what of the Board of Directors of Great Britain Inc? Inc standing for Incomprehensible, one assumes. Pure Iolanthe, in which, you recall, we are governed by men who are half fairies. There is no possible doubt whatever that the Labour Party based its leadership election on "The Gondoliers" in which, you may recall, the brothers Palmieri are wrongly elected leaders of Barataria. In the present election only one wrong brother was elected with Peter Hain in the Don Alhambra Grand Inquisitor role. The MPS didn't want Ed - or Deadhead as he will be bound to be known; the constituencies didn't want him and not all that many members of the unions which did elect him are card carrying socialists. He is, it must be said, a gift for the cartoonists and I expect Rory Bremner will be sending them flowers.
Parliament's working hours are based on the Victorian Season with a long break for grouse shooting. In order to function, their Palace must be re-opened every year by an old lady in a glass hat and an evening gown and a long fur cape. She arrives by horse and cart accompanied by her hubby, the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, who by his own efforts became a naval lieutenant and an admiral of the fleet by marriage. So now he is a ruler of the Queen's Navy, an even more bizarre promotion path than polishing the handles of the big front door. Pure Pinafore. They have a son,The Prince of Wails, a commonplace young man, a matter of fact young man. An out of the way young man straight out of "Patience" who talks to plants, interferes in areas where he has no knowledge and runs a holiday home with twelve fulltime gardeners.
Nor are they cheap. They cost each of us two shillings for which we have much better use and on top of that have just presented us with a an eye watering bill.Nearly £100,000 for cleaning chandeliers and £14,000 on a curtain to protect wine bottles in the Buckingham Palace cellars.Refurbishing a staff canteen and games room cost £808,000 while turning a private cinema into a State function room was £458,000Its a fulltime job being Her Genie. She is forever rubbing her lamp.
Alas,this misgovernance by MPs, whose office building groans with bars that are open 24 hours a day which explains some of their decision making which has resulted in half the world hating us. They managed it by their attempts at trickery at what has been called the Peace Conference which passeth all understanding at Versailles in 1919. Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau between them wrecked Germany thus opening the way for Nazism and broke their promises to the Arab world.
UP WITH THIS I HAVE TO PUT
One of my oldest friends is the former Daily Mail columnist John Edwards. In retirement he is still fascinated by words. He sent me this:
This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do We speak UP, and why are the Officers UP for Election and why is time UP and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a Report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the Silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We Lock UP the house and Fix UP the old car.
At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble,
Line UP for Tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one
Thing but to be dressed UP is Special.
And this UP is confusing: A Drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We Open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at Night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!
In a desk-sized Dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about Thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may Wind UP with a hundred or More.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is Clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, the earth soaks it UP. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I'll wrap It UP, for now........my time is UP!
I will shut UP.
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