Why does the Blog get such a bad press? It is a genre which goes back to the very beginnings of the essay as invented by Montaigne. He chose to write about the only subject of which he was the greatest expert, Himself. Which pretty well defines the Blog.
Writing one is a great source of pleasure. The first time in my life I have defied Dr Johnson who claimed that no-one but a blockhead writes, except for money. If you write for money you are limited by what your paymaster wants to read. I wrote a vituperative column on the death of Princess Di when a fever of hypocrisy gripped the world.
The page one splash of the National Enquirer online that morning was all about the secret love life of the randy Princess. By lunchtime it had changed to some slush about the Queen of Hearts and how she was mourned by the world.
The Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post refused to publish my observations.
I get great pleasure from reading the blogs of other people. I particularly enjoy the blog of an “old” chum, Daily Express reporter Mary Duffy(marydloughrea.blogspot.com.). I also enjoy Mary Beard; Revel Barker’s weekly trip into newspaper nostalgia (Gentleman Ranters); Cathy Buckle on the horrors of life in Zimbabwe; the intermittent despatches from a girl in Baghdad; Azelea, a delightful American girl whose Blog title is a quotation from Cicero “To Each His Own is Beautiful”. This week she is worried that she is going to die. I commend to her my good friend Geoff Mather’s Perspective Blog.
Mather, who has an exotic acquaintance we would all covet, was Features Editor of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper. He is both entertaining and erudite. A thoughtful Buddhist, he writes this week of the white light which we are supposed to see at the moment of death. It is a well known Buddhist concept and is the pure mind of Enlightenment. He also quotes the Tibetan Book of the Dead which says we have 49 days before we are reborn.
I received news this week which suggests, in Noel Coward’s words, that “Time’s winged chariot is beginning to goose me”. I have to say that 49 days isn’t very long for R and R before I have to go through the whole tiring business of another life. Possibly on the pavement of some crowded Indian city.
I have lived a life of vast entertainment, enjoyed some success and experienced moments of great happiness. I would not go quite so far as Gilbert Harding who confessed in a television interview that he would be glad when the future is over.
However, I am living in a world where I increasingly feel a stranger. This week on You Tube I watched great comics like Rob Wilton and mourned their surly successors whose idea of fun is to be rude about everyone upon whom they can lay their scrofulous tongues I also heard on You Tube an interview from Radio Birmingham so inept it made me ashamed of my once and only trade.
I have watched the laughter leave the face of once Merry England. Frankly, 49 days is not enough. Not perhaps oblivion but certainly a good lie in.
COOKERY CORNER
A traveller to strike envy into the heart of Marco Polo, the time approaches for the Head Ferret’s Great Expedition. In December she redistributes the nation’s wealth taking costly gifts round her family like some transvestite Magus. In her absence Plas Skidmore goes on a war footing. Plates, nil; spoons, one. Oxtails, two. Eaten from the pan. Despite Christmas, December is my favourite month, gastro-wise.
There was for a while, you may recall, a ban on oxtails but my tradition was not interrupted. Black market connections were established by my policeman father when he joined the wartime crime squad designed to eradicate it. Within weeks, our house was so full of groceries I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer. Since then I have established my own naughty network and contraband tails continued to wag.
Should you be minded to try a carnivore’s Ambrosia, here is the definitive recipe for a ragout. Two oxtails are required. Remember second helpings.
First make five gallons of cider. True, a litre is sufficient for the ragout but, in matters of drink, the wise err on the safe side.
My ancestor Viscount Scudamore brought the first red streak apple to Herefordshire from his Paris Embassy, prompting the poetic tribute in Evelyn’s Pomona: “Of no regard till Skydmore’s courtly hand, taught it its savage nature to subdue.” I use cider in his honour. He also bred the first Hereford cattle; designed by heaven to provide tails that swish with a cry of joy as they leap into the frying pan.
Water can be used; but never by me, except for pre-cooking, soaking and boiling. If water IS used, adding two tablespoonfuls of red wine is essential.
After boiling and draining, put oxtail pieces into a large paper bag with seasoned flour. Shake and transfer to bacon-scattered pan for flash frying in butter. Remove. Replace with onion stuck with cloves, bouquet garni, carrots, seasoning. Flash fry. Mix tomato juice, beef stock, plump garlic and cider with meat and veg. Casserole gently for four hours. Cool. Skim fat.
Add carrots, turnips, leeks, potatoes and - a personal preference - haricot beans. Cook for three quarters of an hour.
Now comes the magic bit. Thirty minutes before serving, add a tablespoon of raisins which have been swollen and two dessert spoons of pine kernels. Just before serving, correct seasoning and sprinkle with bitter chocolate. Attack with spoon. Trust me. It gets better every day.
No Comment!
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. "—Thomas Jefferson, 1802
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Saturday, 27 September 2008
Seeing is Never Believing
.:
" I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."
Czeslaw Milosz (He lived in Warsaw during the German occupation, writing for Polish underground publications and translating T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land.")
If you reach eighty and still think anything in this life is important then you haven’t been paying attention. Set aside that everyone on the planet will be dead in a hundred years, the fact remains that the Horsemen will continue to trample us under their horses’ Apocalyptic hooves. There will always be wars and there will always be famines because they are the most efficient forms of birth control. There will always be dramatic life- ending changes of climate because that is the nature of climate. At best we can only tinker with the engine, like clumsy mechanics.
WE are toy makers. We can divert ourselves with art, delude ourselves with politics, make our stay comfortable with invention and manufacture, prolong it with medicine. The engine will run its pre determined course.
The American Indian says that life is a circle; Marcus Aurelius that it is a river and the only reality is that part of the river which lies at our feet. The river that has still to flow and the river that has flowed past do not exist. The same principle is central to Zen, to Buddhism. You can hear it in Chinese poetry of the classical age. It is implicit in the hedonism of “drink, for tomorrow we die“.
Yet we are what we have been and we carry the seeds of what we will become. How many centuries of musicians lived in Mozart? Why does each of us have skills that seem to come naturally?
The Buddhist denies death. Other religions have invented paradise. I prefer The Way
With great age comes the revelation that Government is like horse riding. You are assumed to be in charge so long as the horse behaves but if it bolts you have no other course than to hang on grimly, pretending the horse is under control. Governments need wars. Not only do they cull the surplus males who might be disruptive. Wars bring prosperity and jobs for all.
The realisation dawns that banks are not good with money. From the South Sea Bubble onwards, every century has its money crisis, which commonsense would have avoided. We are witnessing the collapse of banks who have been constantly lecturing us about prudence and punishing us, illegally, if we misbehave. Yet they have lost billions loaning money to banks they knew were investing in lenders demonstrably unable to repay.
I have a chum who is Lloyd George’s grandson. As a child he met all the world leaders and was surprised how ordinary they were. They pose as supermen and we believe this despite the evidence.
Bad decisions by so-called statesmen at Versailles have managed in less than a century to make enemies of the Muslim world, which once looked up to us as men of honour. Over the same period we have witnessed the end of Merry England and its replacement by a grey and unpleasant land.
We have a drunken evening during a visit to Paris by Mrs Thatcher to thank for the Channel Tunnel, which was closed and blazing brightly as I mulled over this rant. A major factor in the binge drinking which defaces our society is the smoking ban. It was based on faulty research but has driven thousands out of the pubs into the supermarkets and the cheaper booze. Its only achievement has been to kill the English Pub, for centuries the heart of our communities.
Privatising our public utilities has seen them disappear into foreign hands. Now our nuclear industry is owned by the French Government. Privatising hospital cleaning resulted in lower standards of cleanliness and near epidemics.
We look to those most puissant Princes, William and Harry, to restore the monarchy. Yet I remember meeting Prince Charles when he was their age and being so impressed with him I almost wrote to the Queen to congratulate her, on the grounds that all mothers like to hear well of their sons.
I look at him now, wrecked by a lifetime of cosseting, and am reminded of the golden youth of Henry VIII and of many another Royal Head swollen by a glass hat.
A TRIBUTE
I was delighted to see that a bronze statue of my old friend, the lifeboat coxswain Dick Evans who won two lifeboat VCs, now stands on the cliffs at Moelfre, on Anglesey, looking out triumphantly at the sea which tried so hard to take his life.
I wish Wales was as generous to its literary giants. Some weeks ago I wrote of Howard Spring, her greatest novelist. Now I turn to Gwyn Thomas.
Gwyn Thomas was not just a novelist. He was a talker. The Master of the Moving Mouth. He raised talking to an art form. The novels he published were, in reality, a series of brilliant conversations he put into the mouths of his fictional characters.
I treasure my recordings of every broadcast Thomas made. I regret I met him only once. At the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen I was confronted by this face like a gnarled fist, glowering under the worst trilby hat ever made. Yet, compared to the sports jacket it surmounted, the hat was a sartorial triumph. The jacket was to clothing what computer instructions are to the English language. It looked as though it had been knitted from a Welsh Assembly Mission Statement.
Midway between trilby and jacket, there was a muscular mouth, which, at the moment of introduction, was manoeuvring like a wrestler for the best of three falls out of a cigarette.
It seemed the cigarette was winning. It leapt nimbly from side to side of the mouth, until the lips did one of those scissor grips so beloved of that great wrestler of my youth, ‘Angel Face’ Joe Batten, and the cigarette slapped its submission.
Triumphant, Gwyn Thomas dimped the defeated cancer stick and began to talk.
I know about talkers. I have listened to Dylan Thomas spouting like a grubby whale in the bar of the King’s Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea. I have heard Nye Bevan and Lady Violet Bonham Carter woo, in their different ways, an audience of miners. I have been enchanted by Wynford Vaughan Thomas. As a child I was steeped in the wit of Oscar Wilde. I have earned my living for half a century in a trade that used to produce talkers with the tongues of blasphemous angels.
Gwyn Thomas was the best. I have never met a man who used words so readily, so cosily, so wittily, so profoundly. Somewhere in heaven, please God, there is a deeply-cushioned rustic bench, with a tray for drinks, where Alcibiades is ignoring Socrates, Boswell shushing Dr Johnson, Haroun el Rashid giving Scheherazade the elbow. They all want to listen to Gwyn Thomas.
Earthbound, we have one consolation. We have his works, which are valuable beyond price. Not just his novels. Novelists are two a penny. Gwyn’s Gift is rarer. You can hear him in every word he writes.
TAIL WAG
Hospital car parking is free in Wales so a friend was puzzled at the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham when he was asked by a car park attendant to take a ticket from a machine and post it on his windscreen.
He said " I thought parking was free"
"It is," he was told. " But you still have to show a ticket"
" I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."
Czeslaw Milosz (He lived in Warsaw during the German occupation, writing for Polish underground publications and translating T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land.")
If you reach eighty and still think anything in this life is important then you haven’t been paying attention. Set aside that everyone on the planet will be dead in a hundred years, the fact remains that the Horsemen will continue to trample us under their horses’ Apocalyptic hooves. There will always be wars and there will always be famines because they are the most efficient forms of birth control. There will always be dramatic life- ending changes of climate because that is the nature of climate. At best we can only tinker with the engine, like clumsy mechanics.
WE are toy makers. We can divert ourselves with art, delude ourselves with politics, make our stay comfortable with invention and manufacture, prolong it with medicine. The engine will run its pre determined course.
The American Indian says that life is a circle; Marcus Aurelius that it is a river and the only reality is that part of the river which lies at our feet. The river that has still to flow and the river that has flowed past do not exist. The same principle is central to Zen, to Buddhism. You can hear it in Chinese poetry of the classical age. It is implicit in the hedonism of “drink, for tomorrow we die“.
Yet we are what we have been and we carry the seeds of what we will become. How many centuries of musicians lived in Mozart? Why does each of us have skills that seem to come naturally?
The Buddhist denies death. Other religions have invented paradise. I prefer The Way
With great age comes the revelation that Government is like horse riding. You are assumed to be in charge so long as the horse behaves but if it bolts you have no other course than to hang on grimly, pretending the horse is under control. Governments need wars. Not only do they cull the surplus males who might be disruptive. Wars bring prosperity and jobs for all.
The realisation dawns that banks are not good with money. From the South Sea Bubble onwards, every century has its money crisis, which commonsense would have avoided. We are witnessing the collapse of banks who have been constantly lecturing us about prudence and punishing us, illegally, if we misbehave. Yet they have lost billions loaning money to banks they knew were investing in lenders demonstrably unable to repay.
I have a chum who is Lloyd George’s grandson. As a child he met all the world leaders and was surprised how ordinary they were. They pose as supermen and we believe this despite the evidence.
Bad decisions by so-called statesmen at Versailles have managed in less than a century to make enemies of the Muslim world, which once looked up to us as men of honour. Over the same period we have witnessed the end of Merry England and its replacement by a grey and unpleasant land.
We have a drunken evening during a visit to Paris by Mrs Thatcher to thank for the Channel Tunnel, which was closed and blazing brightly as I mulled over this rant. A major factor in the binge drinking which defaces our society is the smoking ban. It was based on faulty research but has driven thousands out of the pubs into the supermarkets and the cheaper booze. Its only achievement has been to kill the English Pub, for centuries the heart of our communities.
Privatising our public utilities has seen them disappear into foreign hands. Now our nuclear industry is owned by the French Government. Privatising hospital cleaning resulted in lower standards of cleanliness and near epidemics.
We look to those most puissant Princes, William and Harry, to restore the monarchy. Yet I remember meeting Prince Charles when he was their age and being so impressed with him I almost wrote to the Queen to congratulate her, on the grounds that all mothers like to hear well of their sons.
I look at him now, wrecked by a lifetime of cosseting, and am reminded of the golden youth of Henry VIII and of many another Royal Head swollen by a glass hat.
A TRIBUTE
I was delighted to see that a bronze statue of my old friend, the lifeboat coxswain Dick Evans who won two lifeboat VCs, now stands on the cliffs at Moelfre, on Anglesey, looking out triumphantly at the sea which tried so hard to take his life.
I wish Wales was as generous to its literary giants. Some weeks ago I wrote of Howard Spring, her greatest novelist. Now I turn to Gwyn Thomas.
Gwyn Thomas was not just a novelist. He was a talker. The Master of the Moving Mouth. He raised talking to an art form. The novels he published were, in reality, a series of brilliant conversations he put into the mouths of his fictional characters.
I treasure my recordings of every broadcast Thomas made. I regret I met him only once. At the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen I was confronted by this face like a gnarled fist, glowering under the worst trilby hat ever made. Yet, compared to the sports jacket it surmounted, the hat was a sartorial triumph. The jacket was to clothing what computer instructions are to the English language. It looked as though it had been knitted from a Welsh Assembly Mission Statement.
Midway between trilby and jacket, there was a muscular mouth, which, at the moment of introduction, was manoeuvring like a wrestler for the best of three falls out of a cigarette.
It seemed the cigarette was winning. It leapt nimbly from side to side of the mouth, until the lips did one of those scissor grips so beloved of that great wrestler of my youth, ‘Angel Face’ Joe Batten, and the cigarette slapped its submission.
Triumphant, Gwyn Thomas dimped the defeated cancer stick and began to talk.
I know about talkers. I have listened to Dylan Thomas spouting like a grubby whale in the bar of the King’s Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea. I have heard Nye Bevan and Lady Violet Bonham Carter woo, in their different ways, an audience of miners. I have been enchanted by Wynford Vaughan Thomas. As a child I was steeped in the wit of Oscar Wilde. I have earned my living for half a century in a trade that used to produce talkers with the tongues of blasphemous angels.
Gwyn Thomas was the best. I have never met a man who used words so readily, so cosily, so wittily, so profoundly. Somewhere in heaven, please God, there is a deeply-cushioned rustic bench, with a tray for drinks, where Alcibiades is ignoring Socrates, Boswell shushing Dr Johnson, Haroun el Rashid giving Scheherazade the elbow. They all want to listen to Gwyn Thomas.
Earthbound, we have one consolation. We have his works, which are valuable beyond price. Not just his novels. Novelists are two a penny. Gwyn’s Gift is rarer. You can hear him in every word he writes.
TAIL WAG
Hospital car parking is free in Wales so a friend was puzzled at the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham when he was asked by a car park attendant to take a ticket from a machine and post it on his windscreen.
He said " I thought parking was free"
"It is," he was told. " But you still have to show a ticket"
Saturday, 20 September 2008
If yer knows of a better 'Ole
Evelyn Waugh founded Friends of the Neutron Bomb when he heard it wiped out people but left buildings and their contents standing. On balance, he thought that a very good thing.
He would have shared my disappointment when the Hadron Collider in the Cern experiment did not, as promised by some, send our planet scuttling down a Black Hole like some White Rabbit in our increasingly Alice in Wonderland times. It would have been ironic if Switzerland, which has assiduously kept out of European wars in order to collect money from both sides, had provided the force that ended it all.
Instead, in Stephen Hawkins’ memorable phrase, the Big Smash was like two mosquitoes colliding.
My understanding of scientific matters is, to say the least, patchy but I thought that the experiment was meant to replicate the Big Bang that created the World.
In which case, how do we know it didn’t?
How do we know that at this moment a parallel world isn’t forming and its inhabitants beginning the long and weary journey to being US?
I hope they do not send out a team of market researchers. I imagine them with Bristol boards and pencils distributed among their eight arms stopping a passer-by and asking him what he is about.
He might be going to one of the few pubs still open after the Government’s draconian smoking ban.
He will explain he is going to a pub
“???????”
“A pub. A building with a wooden divider,” the passer-by will explain. “I stand on one side and a man stands on the other side selling me drink.”
“???????”
“A drink is a liquid. I have to be careful not to drink too much of it because it will make me sick and cause me to do silly things before falling over.”
“You are being punished??????????????????????????”
“No, no. No. It’s a pleasure and it costs me a lot of money.”
“?????????????????????????????”
“Money. Every day I spend eight hours locked in a building staring at a machine and at the end of the week I am given money.”
“??????????????????????????????Which you give to a man who gives you in return a substance which makes you sick and causes you to do silly things until you fall over………………………Is there a Black Hole we can go to, do you know?”
The other day four of the newspapers I read online carried pictures of Victoria Beckham's new hair-do. The Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page - and three more inside - to the "shock pixie cut" and declared that this was "literally the biggest thing to happen to hair since the Moss Fringe of '07". A smaller story disclosed that doctors and most secondary school teachers will no longer be recruited from outside the EU. But there will be exceptions for sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand - and ballet dancers.
Black Hole, here I come*****************************************************
******************* +++++++++++++++ ***********************
For my money there is nothing more frightening at the front door than a builder going, “FFFFFFFFFF”. I am sure you recognise the sound. It is the noise a workman makes when he comes into your house for the first time and sees any bit of work at all that has already been done by another workman. “FFFFFFFFFFFF,” they go. “Who put that in for you? Must have been drunk. That cross-piece there. See. Pulling on the contra-levels of the stays.”
“Could you take it down then?” you ask. And have you noticed how they always repeat what you say. Scornfully.
“Take it down? Take it down? No need. Come down of its own accord before the year’s out.”
I have a friend who is a master plumber. And if there was an Eisteddfod competition for the solo “FFFFFFFF” he’d walk it. Not only does he have a “FFFFFFFF” that is the envy of the Federation of Master Plumbers; he can do it backwards. Straight up. Backwards. I’ve heard him.
“FFFFFFFFFF,” I’ve heard him say, time and again. “I don’t like the look of that universal joint.”
He is a man who only has to be confronted with a universal joint to become instantly racked with doubt.
“Can it be put right?” the more foolhardy would ask.
“FFFFFFFFFF. Put right? You’re joking. You’d have to rebuild the bathroom.”
And, do you know, in forty years of admiring friendship I have never once seen his lips change their conformation.
It’s not only plumbers. Motor mechanics, joiners, plasterers and bricklayers, they all do it. “FFFFFFFFF”. I don’t know why. But “FFFFFFFFFF” they go. And a century of Trades Union solidarity bites the dust. Nothing kindred about trades today. There are those workmen who would rather pour scorn than tea.
He would have shared my disappointment when the Hadron Collider in the Cern experiment did not, as promised by some, send our planet scuttling down a Black Hole like some White Rabbit in our increasingly Alice in Wonderland times. It would have been ironic if Switzerland, which has assiduously kept out of European wars in order to collect money from both sides, had provided the force that ended it all.
Instead, in Stephen Hawkins’ memorable phrase, the Big Smash was like two mosquitoes colliding.
My understanding of scientific matters is, to say the least, patchy but I thought that the experiment was meant to replicate the Big Bang that created the World.
In which case, how do we know it didn’t?
How do we know that at this moment a parallel world isn’t forming and its inhabitants beginning the long and weary journey to being US?
I hope they do not send out a team of market researchers. I imagine them with Bristol boards and pencils distributed among their eight arms stopping a passer-by and asking him what he is about.
He might be going to one of the few pubs still open after the Government’s draconian smoking ban.
He will explain he is going to a pub
“???????”
“A pub. A building with a wooden divider,” the passer-by will explain. “I stand on one side and a man stands on the other side selling me drink.”
“???????”
“A drink is a liquid. I have to be careful not to drink too much of it because it will make me sick and cause me to do silly things before falling over.”
“You are being punished??????????????????????????”
“No, no. No. It’s a pleasure and it costs me a lot of money.”
“?????????????????????????????”
“Money. Every day I spend eight hours locked in a building staring at a machine and at the end of the week I am given money.”
“??????????????????????????????Which you give to a man who gives you in return a substance which makes you sick and causes you to do silly things until you fall over………………………Is there a Black Hole we can go to, do you know?”
The other day four of the newspapers I read online carried pictures of Victoria Beckham's new hair-do. The Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page - and three more inside - to the "shock pixie cut" and declared that this was "literally the biggest thing to happen to hair since the Moss Fringe of '07". A smaller story disclosed that doctors and most secondary school teachers will no longer be recruited from outside the EU. But there will be exceptions for sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand - and ballet dancers.
Black Hole, here I come*****************************************************
******************* +++++++++++++++ ***********************
For my money there is nothing more frightening at the front door than a builder going, “FFFFFFFFFF”. I am sure you recognise the sound. It is the noise a workman makes when he comes into your house for the first time and sees any bit of work at all that has already been done by another workman. “FFFFFFFFFFFF,” they go. “Who put that in for you? Must have been drunk. That cross-piece there. See. Pulling on the contra-levels of the stays.”
“Could you take it down then?” you ask. And have you noticed how they always repeat what you say. Scornfully.
“Take it down? Take it down? No need. Come down of its own accord before the year’s out.”
I have a friend who is a master plumber. And if there was an Eisteddfod competition for the solo “FFFFFFFF” he’d walk it. Not only does he have a “FFFFFFFF” that is the envy of the Federation of Master Plumbers; he can do it backwards. Straight up. Backwards. I’ve heard him.
“FFFFFFFFFF,” I’ve heard him say, time and again. “I don’t like the look of that universal joint.”
He is a man who only has to be confronted with a universal joint to become instantly racked with doubt.
“Can it be put right?” the more foolhardy would ask.
“FFFFFFFFFF. Put right? You’re joking. You’d have to rebuild the bathroom.”
And, do you know, in forty years of admiring friendship I have never once seen his lips change their conformation.
It’s not only plumbers. Motor mechanics, joiners, plasterers and bricklayers, they all do it. “FFFFFFFFF”. I don’t know why. But “FFFFFFFFFF” they go. And a century of Trades Union solidarity bites the dust. Nothing kindred about trades today. There are those workmen who would rather pour scorn than tea.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
A SPRING TOO FAR BEHIND?
For some time now I have been the victim of a particularly vicious TAFFIA dirty tricks campaign.
I will not go into details. I believe with Marcus Aurelius that to mourn a disaster is to repeat it. I am, however, incandescent, and very voluble, when I consider how the Welsh Establishment has treated Welsh geniuses like Ivor Novello, Howard Spring and Gwyn Thomas whilst lauding indifferent talents, it often seems, solely because their owners speak Welsh.
There was a time when the best way into Welsh broadcasting was through the back door of the Manse. The results were usually abysmal. One, producing an arts show which included interviews with myself and Gwen, the widow of the poet Vernon Watkins, insisted we had a rehearsal. Gwen pointed out we were both reasonably intelligent and well able to handle interviews off the cuff.
“Ah,” said this son of the Manse, “if the interviewers don’t know in advance what you are going to say, they have to listen to your answers.”
Until the sixties Howard Spring was Britain’s best selling author. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and three autobiographical memoirs. His novels, which were read the world over, were made into films and television series. His books were used to teach English in Japanese schools. When Churchill met Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter, Spring, who was then working for the Manchester Guardian, was one of only two journalists (the other was H.V. Morton) who were chosen to accompany him on the battleship Prince of Wales.
He was admired by such diverse men as Arnold Bennett, A. E. Russell, Einstein, Kipling and Beaverbrook. Most of his novels are well written, run-of-the-mill family sagas. Two, “Shabby Tiger” and “Rachel Rosing”, were as good as any published at that time.
With “Fame is the Spur” he reached another dimension. I have read countless novels but never a better than “Fame”. In it he is Dickens without the caricatures and the dreadful heroines; Tolstoy without the interminable Masonics; Hardy without the gloom. And the only time Thackeray came near him was in “Vanity Fair”. Like Trollope, he shows the good in the worst and the flaws in the good.
He was incapable of creating a character without falling in love with it, warts and all. His gift was to engage readers with the characters he created. You feel his creations have lives before the book is opened and they go on living after it is closed.
“Fame is the Spur” is about a small boy born in the slums who rises to lead a great political party. Clearly he had Ramsay MacDonald in mind when he created his central character. It is a triumph of the writer’s art: a man capable of greatness but with terrible flaws.
It is also the story of the infant Labour party, started by working class people out of a desire to give a voice to the poor.
Some years ago I interviewed Tom Ellis, a Labour MP who defected to the Social Democrats. I asked him why. “Because Labour has met all the targets it set itself” he said.
We live in a Golden Age which was largely the creation of a Labour party of working class men and women, of which Spring wrote so perceptively.
He knew whereof he wrote.
He was born in unimaginable poverty in two rooms in a slum in Chapel Court off Cathedral Road, Cardiff. One of nine children, his father was a jobbing gardener, an irascible, taciturn man who was surrounded by mystery. He never earned more than a pound a week yet professors from the University of Wales came to the house for long conversations. He loved literature and read the classic books he bought for a few pennies by their only light, a tin lamp with no shade and a reflector of polished tin. He made his children read them aloud and punished any flaws in pronunciation.
They had no cooker. To roast a joint Mrs Spring tied it to one end of a length of string and fastened the other end to a nail hammered into a wooden mantelpiece. The children took turns to twirl the string. The family had one bed on which they all slept head to toe with legs folded.
A.L Rowse said of them: “The family had an absolute passion for knowledge.”
Spring wrote movingly of his elder brother whose thirst for knowledge was so great. “Though of wretched physical condition, he drove at learning with a sustained frenzy. I came home at night to find him asleep at a table with a pile of books and a penny bottle of ink upset at his hand. It killed him in a few years.”
Spring’s father died when he was ten and the boy earned money by chopping and selling firewood, and selling rhubarb he picked in a market garden. Every Saturday he worked as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herring. He lost the job when he took time off to sit for a scholarship.
He only had one holiday. He and his elder brother decided to go to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. Spring was working as a messenger boy on a Cardiff newspaper. They used the newspaper’s free pass for the ferry from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and set out to walk the 20 miles to Bideford carrying the heavy portmanteau of books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they had to use part of the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
Whilst he was working as a messenger boy, Spring bombarded the Western Mail with stories and theatre reviews until they gave him a job as a reporter. From Cardiff he moved to Yorkshire, where he worked for three years on the Yorkshire Observer before joining the Manchester Guardian.
He published first a children’s book and then “Shabby Tiger”. One of the characters Rachel Rosing so fascinated him he made her the heroine of his next book. His third book “My Son, My Son” (first published as “Absalom,Absalom”) was a world-wide best seller.
The inspiration came to him on a train journey. At one station his train took on water from a giant trough. He thought: what a place for a murderer to hide in. On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book. It took him fourteen months to complete
In Wales this incomparable writer is forgotten and unsung. Over the years I have tried to persuade every “major” Welsh publisher to reprint his works or commission a biography. I have failed.
I met him once. We had a mutual friend, a Guardian reporter called Edgar Ridley who introduced us in a Manchester chop house and told him I wanted to be a writer.
When I asked for his advice he said buy a notebook. When you come across a word you do not understand, find out about it and write it down. In that way, he said, you will never forget it.
First editions of Fleming, Tolkien or Rowling will cost thousands. I have just bought a first edition of “Fame is the Spur”, one of the few great novels of the twentieth century, for £2.50.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The most important thing about tradition and ceremonial is its inherent absurdity. If the Ancient Order of Druids parading in Wales round the twelve stones at the Gorsedd of Bards is absurd; if it is risible that the whole pageantry of the Eisteddfod was devised and first presented in London and that the Gorsedd stones represent the twelve tribes of Israel, then what of the Trooping of the Colour, the military form of “Come Dancing”? Or the procession of the Garter Knights at Windsor Castle? A queue of old men with tea cosies on their heads and their supporters’ club badges stitched on their dressing gown pockets. Let he who is without risibility cast the first hoarse laugh.
I’d hate visitors to Wales to go away thinking that it is a dull place, peopled by small, dark men wearing suits made from the covers of old prayer books. Far from it. Wales may be the only country in Europe not to have invented an alcoholic drink, but, as that great life enhancer Rene Cutforth observed: “The Welsh are Mediterraneans in the rain.”
The army is, of course, the guardian of tradition. I was part of a host of national servicemen called back to the colours for an ‘Extras’ fortnight’s training. Our Commanding Officer called a battalion parade to try to instil in us a sense of our regimental tradition. He told us how our fortnight would be an opportunity to meet again men we had fought with across Europe. This puzzled us because, to a man, we had been at school for most of the war. But the colonel was riding a stallion called rhetoric and nothing could check him. Marching across the square to the front rank, he paused dramatically before a minute Glaswegian cut-throat. “For instance,” he said, “I seem to recognise your face.” And the small, bitter Glaswegian looked up at him and said, “I’ve niver seen ye in ma bliddy life, Jock.”
Reading the Greek Anthology I came across this, written probably 3,000 years ago.
Epitaph for a Dog
Stranger, commemorated here
‘Tis but a dog you see.
And yet I beg you do not sneer
My master wept for me.
Wept as the dusty earth
He pressed above my lifeless head,
And wrote where now I lie at rest
The words that you have read.
From the Daily Mail
Sugar gliders - a species of possum native to New Guinea and Australia - are becoming popular as domestic pets.
"With soft brown eyes, fluffy fur and their amusing acrobatics, they are seen as ideal pets."
Perhaps. But for £150 you are lumbered with a creature that needs to be let out at night to glide around (up to 200ft), craves attention (and is prone to depression should they not receive it) and makes a noise "similar to an electric blender".
I will not go into details. I believe with Marcus Aurelius that to mourn a disaster is to repeat it. I am, however, incandescent, and very voluble, when I consider how the Welsh Establishment has treated Welsh geniuses like Ivor Novello, Howard Spring and Gwyn Thomas whilst lauding indifferent talents, it often seems, solely because their owners speak Welsh.
There was a time when the best way into Welsh broadcasting was through the back door of the Manse. The results were usually abysmal. One, producing an arts show which included interviews with myself and Gwen, the widow of the poet Vernon Watkins, insisted we had a rehearsal. Gwen pointed out we were both reasonably intelligent and well able to handle interviews off the cuff.
“Ah,” said this son of the Manse, “if the interviewers don’t know in advance what you are going to say, they have to listen to your answers.”
Until the sixties Howard Spring was Britain’s best selling author. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and three autobiographical memoirs. His novels, which were read the world over, were made into films and television series. His books were used to teach English in Japanese schools. When Churchill met Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter, Spring, who was then working for the Manchester Guardian, was one of only two journalists (the other was H.V. Morton) who were chosen to accompany him on the battleship Prince of Wales.
He was admired by such diverse men as Arnold Bennett, A. E. Russell, Einstein, Kipling and Beaverbrook. Most of his novels are well written, run-of-the-mill family sagas. Two, “Shabby Tiger” and “Rachel Rosing”, were as good as any published at that time.
With “Fame is the Spur” he reached another dimension. I have read countless novels but never a better than “Fame”. In it he is Dickens without the caricatures and the dreadful heroines; Tolstoy without the interminable Masonics; Hardy without the gloom. And the only time Thackeray came near him was in “Vanity Fair”. Like Trollope, he shows the good in the worst and the flaws in the good.
He was incapable of creating a character without falling in love with it, warts and all. His gift was to engage readers with the characters he created. You feel his creations have lives before the book is opened and they go on living after it is closed.
“Fame is the Spur” is about a small boy born in the slums who rises to lead a great political party. Clearly he had Ramsay MacDonald in mind when he created his central character. It is a triumph of the writer’s art: a man capable of greatness but with terrible flaws.
It is also the story of the infant Labour party, started by working class people out of a desire to give a voice to the poor.
Some years ago I interviewed Tom Ellis, a Labour MP who defected to the Social Democrats. I asked him why. “Because Labour has met all the targets it set itself” he said.
We live in a Golden Age which was largely the creation of a Labour party of working class men and women, of which Spring wrote so perceptively.
He knew whereof he wrote.
He was born in unimaginable poverty in two rooms in a slum in Chapel Court off Cathedral Road, Cardiff. One of nine children, his father was a jobbing gardener, an irascible, taciturn man who was surrounded by mystery. He never earned more than a pound a week yet professors from the University of Wales came to the house for long conversations. He loved literature and read the classic books he bought for a few pennies by their only light, a tin lamp with no shade and a reflector of polished tin. He made his children read them aloud and punished any flaws in pronunciation.
They had no cooker. To roast a joint Mrs Spring tied it to one end of a length of string and fastened the other end to a nail hammered into a wooden mantelpiece. The children took turns to twirl the string. The family had one bed on which they all slept head to toe with legs folded.
A.L Rowse said of them: “The family had an absolute passion for knowledge.”
Spring wrote movingly of his elder brother whose thirst for knowledge was so great. “Though of wretched physical condition, he drove at learning with a sustained frenzy. I came home at night to find him asleep at a table with a pile of books and a penny bottle of ink upset at his hand. It killed him in a few years.”
Spring’s father died when he was ten and the boy earned money by chopping and selling firewood, and selling rhubarb he picked in a market garden. Every Saturday he worked as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herring. He lost the job when he took time off to sit for a scholarship.
He only had one holiday. He and his elder brother decided to go to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. Spring was working as a messenger boy on a Cardiff newspaper. They used the newspaper’s free pass for the ferry from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and set out to walk the 20 miles to Bideford carrying the heavy portmanteau of books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they had to use part of the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
Whilst he was working as a messenger boy, Spring bombarded the Western Mail with stories and theatre reviews until they gave him a job as a reporter. From Cardiff he moved to Yorkshire, where he worked for three years on the Yorkshire Observer before joining the Manchester Guardian.
He published first a children’s book and then “Shabby Tiger”. One of the characters Rachel Rosing so fascinated him he made her the heroine of his next book. His third book “My Son, My Son” (first published as “Absalom,Absalom”) was a world-wide best seller.
The inspiration came to him on a train journey. At one station his train took on water from a giant trough. He thought: what a place for a murderer to hide in. On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book. It took him fourteen months to complete
In Wales this incomparable writer is forgotten and unsung. Over the years I have tried to persuade every “major” Welsh publisher to reprint his works or commission a biography. I have failed.
I met him once. We had a mutual friend, a Guardian reporter called Edgar Ridley who introduced us in a Manchester chop house and told him I wanted to be a writer.
When I asked for his advice he said buy a notebook. When you come across a word you do not understand, find out about it and write it down. In that way, he said, you will never forget it.
First editions of Fleming, Tolkien or Rowling will cost thousands. I have just bought a first edition of “Fame is the Spur”, one of the few great novels of the twentieth century, for £2.50.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The most important thing about tradition and ceremonial is its inherent absurdity. If the Ancient Order of Druids parading in Wales round the twelve stones at the Gorsedd of Bards is absurd; if it is risible that the whole pageantry of the Eisteddfod was devised and first presented in London and that the Gorsedd stones represent the twelve tribes of Israel, then what of the Trooping of the Colour, the military form of “Come Dancing”? Or the procession of the Garter Knights at Windsor Castle? A queue of old men with tea cosies on their heads and their supporters’ club badges stitched on their dressing gown pockets. Let he who is without risibility cast the first hoarse laugh.
I’d hate visitors to Wales to go away thinking that it is a dull place, peopled by small, dark men wearing suits made from the covers of old prayer books. Far from it. Wales may be the only country in Europe not to have invented an alcoholic drink, but, as that great life enhancer Rene Cutforth observed: “The Welsh are Mediterraneans in the rain.”
The army is, of course, the guardian of tradition. I was part of a host of national servicemen called back to the colours for an ‘Extras’ fortnight’s training. Our Commanding Officer called a battalion parade to try to instil in us a sense of our regimental tradition. He told us how our fortnight would be an opportunity to meet again men we had fought with across Europe. This puzzled us because, to a man, we had been at school for most of the war. But the colonel was riding a stallion called rhetoric and nothing could check him. Marching across the square to the front rank, he paused dramatically before a minute Glaswegian cut-throat. “For instance,” he said, “I seem to recognise your face.” And the small, bitter Glaswegian looked up at him and said, “I’ve niver seen ye in ma bliddy life, Jock.”
Reading the Greek Anthology I came across this, written probably 3,000 years ago.
Epitaph for a Dog
Stranger, commemorated here
‘Tis but a dog you see.
And yet I beg you do not sneer
My master wept for me.
Wept as the dusty earth
He pressed above my lifeless head,
And wrote where now I lie at rest
The words that you have read.
From the Daily Mail
Sugar gliders - a species of possum native to New Guinea and Australia - are becoming popular as domestic pets.
"With soft brown eyes, fluffy fur and their amusing acrobatics, they are seen as ideal pets."
Perhaps. But for £150 you are lumbered with a creature that needs to be let out at night to glide around (up to 200ft), craves attention (and is prone to depression should they not receive it) and makes a noise "similar to an electric blender".
Saturday, 6 September 2008
The Sound of One Foot Tapping
Life dances to hidden music and I have only rarely caught the sound. The first time was when a very senior officer in the Courts Service explained how the Establishment had massaged the murder statistics in order to justify abandoning the death penalty.
The second time was more pleasant. My eldest daughter took me to a promenade performance of Shakespeare’s “farewell” play The Tempest in the breathtaking Memorial Park in Lancaster. Set on a hill, it is really a series of parks and each scene of the play was performed in a different area of its 50 acres.
As I watched, entranced, on a lovely summer evening, it became clear in this separation of scenes that buried in The Tempest are echoes of the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so many other of his masterpieces.
It became clear that Shakespeare was saying goodbye to his audience with a series of “trailers”, reminders of earlier successes. Shakespeare, the professional writer, recycling his material. If possible, it made me love him even more.
Now I hear the music again. This time it is hard and atonal. It is the sound of a society being driven into obedience.
Councils are seeking volunteers to pry on their neighbours, clerks are being given powers of arrest. It is the overture of the Stasi state in Britain.
At the Buxton Festival some years ago I interviewed one of Mrs Thatcher’s inner cabinet of advisers. Talking of “Yes Minister”, the satirical TV look at Westminster, he admitted that it came very close to the truth about the governance of Britain.
The founder of Welsh Nationalism Gwynfor Evans told me he did not care if a Plaid Cymru MP was never elected so long as he had a cadre of nationalist civil servants.
The rot began, in my view, during the war when the bureaucrats were allowed to bring in all manner of petty legislation whilst their "masters", the MPs, slept. The first post-war Labour government - the only one that thought of the electorate as human beings for whom it had a duty of care - sought control with draconian planning regulations.
Proliferation as policy is the driving force of the bureaucrat. It lives through endless cloning and it has been quick to take advantage of the laziness of our MPs who no longer scrutinise the legislation proposed by Civil Servants.
Another weapon is the manufacture of false fear. Dangerous Dogs legislation has done little or nothing to reduce attack. The Dunblane gun panic succeeded only in closing gun clubs where weapons were handled with respect. A man who altered replica guns to facilitate eight murders will do a year in prison for every life he stole. If I carry a penknife, or sgian dhub in Highland Dress, I risk imprisonment. Our young are slaughtered by the day.
The smoking regulations were supported by spurious research. The World Health Organisation tried for six years to prove there was such a thing as passive smoking but had to admit failure.
We were told there was evidence to prove that more than four units of alcohol were harmful. It later emerged the figure had been plucked from the air.
TWO centres for the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels? Why?
The European parliament exists to control; and its legislation is often harmful. It decrees that each member country must produce a given rate of fuel economy. The foreign owned utilities are offered huge sums to establish wind turbines and farmers paid excessive rents to house them, although it is accepted the entire output of wind farms is less than that of one power station.
We are persuaded there is a vast terrorist army waging war against us. In fact we are suffering from understandable resentments which date from the Crusades. The terrorists are separate entities, like the Afghans who have been fighting us for centuries, the Saudis whose Wahabi beliefs are the product of the self interest of Ibn Saud. Pakistan, that nest of trouble, is an artificial construct that came into being because Ghandi, Nehru and the rest of that self serving crew got tired of fighting for control of a united India. The partition boundaries were decided by a lawyer who did not know the sub-continent and never left his bungalow.
As if being bombed is not bad enough, we are told that our profligate ways are changing the world's climate. Rubbish. Life on the planet has only been possible for 25,000 years, separated by massive natural climate change.
How far are we from emulating the law recently imposed in Japan that requires all adult citizens to have their waists measured? If they repeatedly exceed the allowable limit – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women – they are subjected to "health re-education" and their employers become liable to financial penalties.
Obesity is still almost a crime in our society. But it is also a commercial opportunity. Oxo are large scale manufacturers of slimming aids. When I puzzlingly slimmed on radio, I discovered the firm financed magazines, slimming clubs, even appetite-diminishing toffees.
In The Independent, Dominic Lawson disclosed that an anti-obesity report from Dr Foster Research was funded by Roche, the pharmaceutical company which developed the anti-obesity drug Xenical.
A year ago, Dr Foster issued a report which complained that "around 3 per cent of Primary Care Organizations do not fund the use of drug therapy for obesity, despite the recommendations of organizations such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence."
The most blatant twisting of the truth has been in the climate that produced the Drink and Drive legislation.
In 1985 I wrote a column warning that Orwell’s 1984 had been ominously prescient.
The Central Statistical Office’s “Social Trends Survey” disclosed that year that, despite a vast increase in breath tests from 97,000 in 1971 to 245,000 in 1983, the rate of positive tests had fallen steadily from 58 per cent twelve years earlier to33 per cent in 1983. The overall figures for death and serious injury on the roads had been dropping since 1971.
Prompted by this, I discovered that the statistics for drunken driving included all road deaths in which drink was a factor. Including those of drunken pedestrians who walked into the path of traffic and accidents in which drunken drivers were involved, though not responsible.
More and more laws until at last you have a totally obedient population and it is welcome 1984!
**********************************************
Never mind 1984. Remember 1986 when there was this passion for getting machines to talk? Cars, rubbish bins, bus stops. There were even talking sewing machines.
I believe that machines, like small boys, should be seen and not heard. Or, if heard, should provide an agreeable hum from the kitchen as a background to the rustle of the evening paper and the light, rhythmic snore of the head of the house. Carefully employed by the malevolently-minded, the foot pedal of such a machine could be brought into sharp contact with the lino and, if the timing was right, jolt the head of the house out of the deepest slumber, mewing with fright.
On some sewing machines it was even possible to so operate them that the needle in its downward progress and the rhythmic hum of the motive wheel provided a backing group to that haunting lyric which I am convinced all wives learn as little girls at their mother’s knee. You know the one. It goes something like this: “You use this house like a hotel. You only come in to change your socks.” Or “My mother said to me, I’d rather be carrying you through that front door, feet first, than see you marry that man.”
I just hope that they haven’t been teaching sewing machines to make remarks like that. It will be the end of civilised marriage as we know it.
Then there was the talking bus stop. Funny to think that it’s not all that long ago when a person found listening to a bus stop ran a very real risk of being arrested as drunk and disorderly and being returned home some time later and several shillings the lighter.
But we lived in an age of technical miracles. When you could go to ten phone boxes on the trot and couldn’t get a peep out of any of them. But the bus stops talked your head off.
Have you ever wondered why there are so few odes to objects? It is common enough to laud abstract ideas but objects get pretty short shrift. Keats penned a stave or two to his Greek vase and Rupert Brooke did rather go on about cups and saucers, wet roofs and bread crusts.
The reason more people don’t, in my view, is that at this very moment the damned things are probably writing them themselves. The sewing machine in question, by the way, was Japanese and was called “Brother”, an Orwellian coincidence that has not gone unnoticed in this house.
The second time was more pleasant. My eldest daughter took me to a promenade performance of Shakespeare’s “farewell” play The Tempest in the breathtaking Memorial Park in Lancaster. Set on a hill, it is really a series of parks and each scene of the play was performed in a different area of its 50 acres.
As I watched, entranced, on a lovely summer evening, it became clear in this separation of scenes that buried in The Tempest are echoes of the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so many other of his masterpieces.
It became clear that Shakespeare was saying goodbye to his audience with a series of “trailers”, reminders of earlier successes. Shakespeare, the professional writer, recycling his material. If possible, it made me love him even more.
Now I hear the music again. This time it is hard and atonal. It is the sound of a society being driven into obedience.
Councils are seeking volunteers to pry on their neighbours, clerks are being given powers of arrest. It is the overture of the Stasi state in Britain.
At the Buxton Festival some years ago I interviewed one of Mrs Thatcher’s inner cabinet of advisers. Talking of “Yes Minister”, the satirical TV look at Westminster, he admitted that it came very close to the truth about the governance of Britain.
The founder of Welsh Nationalism Gwynfor Evans told me he did not care if a Plaid Cymru MP was never elected so long as he had a cadre of nationalist civil servants.
The rot began, in my view, during the war when the bureaucrats were allowed to bring in all manner of petty legislation whilst their "masters", the MPs, slept. The first post-war Labour government - the only one that thought of the electorate as human beings for whom it had a duty of care - sought control with draconian planning regulations.
Proliferation as policy is the driving force of the bureaucrat. It lives through endless cloning and it has been quick to take advantage of the laziness of our MPs who no longer scrutinise the legislation proposed by Civil Servants.
Another weapon is the manufacture of false fear. Dangerous Dogs legislation has done little or nothing to reduce attack. The Dunblane gun panic succeeded only in closing gun clubs where weapons were handled with respect. A man who altered replica guns to facilitate eight murders will do a year in prison for every life he stole. If I carry a penknife, or sgian dhub in Highland Dress, I risk imprisonment. Our young are slaughtered by the day.
The smoking regulations were supported by spurious research. The World Health Organisation tried for six years to prove there was such a thing as passive smoking but had to admit failure.
We were told there was evidence to prove that more than four units of alcohol were harmful. It later emerged the figure had been plucked from the air.
TWO centres for the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels? Why?
The European parliament exists to control; and its legislation is often harmful. It decrees that each member country must produce a given rate of fuel economy. The foreign owned utilities are offered huge sums to establish wind turbines and farmers paid excessive rents to house them, although it is accepted the entire output of wind farms is less than that of one power station.
We are persuaded there is a vast terrorist army waging war against us. In fact we are suffering from understandable resentments which date from the Crusades. The terrorists are separate entities, like the Afghans who have been fighting us for centuries, the Saudis whose Wahabi beliefs are the product of the self interest of Ibn Saud. Pakistan, that nest of trouble, is an artificial construct that came into being because Ghandi, Nehru and the rest of that self serving crew got tired of fighting for control of a united India. The partition boundaries were decided by a lawyer who did not know the sub-continent and never left his bungalow.
As if being bombed is not bad enough, we are told that our profligate ways are changing the world's climate. Rubbish. Life on the planet has only been possible for 25,000 years, separated by massive natural climate change.
How far are we from emulating the law recently imposed in Japan that requires all adult citizens to have their waists measured? If they repeatedly exceed the allowable limit – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women – they are subjected to "health re-education" and their employers become liable to financial penalties.
Obesity is still almost a crime in our society. But it is also a commercial opportunity. Oxo are large scale manufacturers of slimming aids. When I puzzlingly slimmed on radio, I discovered the firm financed magazines, slimming clubs, even appetite-diminishing toffees.
In The Independent, Dominic Lawson disclosed that an anti-obesity report from Dr Foster Research was funded by Roche, the pharmaceutical company which developed the anti-obesity drug Xenical.
A year ago, Dr Foster issued a report which complained that "around 3 per cent of Primary Care Organizations do not fund the use of drug therapy for obesity, despite the recommendations of organizations such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence."
The most blatant twisting of the truth has been in the climate that produced the Drink and Drive legislation.
In 1985 I wrote a column warning that Orwell’s 1984 had been ominously prescient.
The Central Statistical Office’s “Social Trends Survey” disclosed that year that, despite a vast increase in breath tests from 97,000 in 1971 to 245,000 in 1983, the rate of positive tests had fallen steadily from 58 per cent twelve years earlier to33 per cent in 1983. The overall figures for death and serious injury on the roads had been dropping since 1971.
Prompted by this, I discovered that the statistics for drunken driving included all road deaths in which drink was a factor. Including those of drunken pedestrians who walked into the path of traffic and accidents in which drunken drivers were involved, though not responsible.
More and more laws until at last you have a totally obedient population and it is welcome 1984!
**********************************************
Never mind 1984. Remember 1986 when there was this passion for getting machines to talk? Cars, rubbish bins, bus stops. There were even talking sewing machines.
I believe that machines, like small boys, should be seen and not heard. Or, if heard, should provide an agreeable hum from the kitchen as a background to the rustle of the evening paper and the light, rhythmic snore of the head of the house. Carefully employed by the malevolently-minded, the foot pedal of such a machine could be brought into sharp contact with the lino and, if the timing was right, jolt the head of the house out of the deepest slumber, mewing with fright.
On some sewing machines it was even possible to so operate them that the needle in its downward progress and the rhythmic hum of the motive wheel provided a backing group to that haunting lyric which I am convinced all wives learn as little girls at their mother’s knee. You know the one. It goes something like this: “You use this house like a hotel. You only come in to change your socks.” Or “My mother said to me, I’d rather be carrying you through that front door, feet first, than see you marry that man.”
I just hope that they haven’t been teaching sewing machines to make remarks like that. It will be the end of civilised marriage as we know it.
Then there was the talking bus stop. Funny to think that it’s not all that long ago when a person found listening to a bus stop ran a very real risk of being arrested as drunk and disorderly and being returned home some time later and several shillings the lighter.
But we lived in an age of technical miracles. When you could go to ten phone boxes on the trot and couldn’t get a peep out of any of them. But the bus stops talked your head off.
Have you ever wondered why there are so few odes to objects? It is common enough to laud abstract ideas but objects get pretty short shrift. Keats penned a stave or two to his Greek vase and Rupert Brooke did rather go on about cups and saucers, wet roofs and bread crusts.
The reason more people don’t, in my view, is that at this very moment the damned things are probably writing them themselves. The sewing machine in question, by the way, was Japanese and was called “Brother”, an Orwellian coincidence that has not gone unnoticed in this house.
Saturday, 30 August 2008
Beware of Greeks Bearing Medals
I blame the Ancient Greeks who invented competition. If only they had thought of something useful like television the world would not be in the mess it is in now and we would be able to afford drugs that prolong life rather than waste money demonstrating that one man can windsurf longer than the next. Heracles invented the Olympic Games to celebrate having mucked out a stable. When I mucked out my good horse Skipper Jack I used to go for a pint. I wish Heracles had.
Rather in the way that most sports are played in shorts and the ultimate accolade is a school cap, there is a sense of repressed childhood in the excessive use of fireworks in Olympic opening ceremonies; and the prominence given to playing with fire and lighting a bonfire has small boy connotations. Indeed the whole occasion seems to be modelled on a school sports day in a recently co-educational establishment.
I do see the Greeks had time on their hands and wanted to avoid the Agora, in the way the fastidious amongst us avoid Hyde Park Corner. No peace there with that infernal nuisance Socrates and his team of market researchers forever asking perfect strangers questions about the nature of love and other private matters. There was also their unfortunate sexual orientation that urged them to ogle naked men. The sin that in our day, whatever Wilde said, dares to shout its name.
But surely there must have been some Athenian equivalent to that dreadful Trinnie and Susanna who are currently persuading light-headed ladies to expose their anuses on TV?
Parenthetically, I am tired of watching TV adverts for constipated, incontinent ladies who have uncomfortable motions; and I don’t see why a naked backside should be used to advertise tooth paste. I preferred it when women were a mystery. I think they do themselves a grave disservice by admitting they are all bowel bound Dorian Grays until they put on anti-wrinkle paste.
I might add that there is something flaky about a government that tells us competition on the sports field is bad for children and then lavishes largesse on some luckless soul so that they can learn to jump further than anyone else. And does the gold Olympic medal remind anyone else of those tacky medallions which proved that Jim could fix it?
My ancestors were knighted for fighting. Difficult to imagine Sir Elton John or Gielgud fulfilling that criterion.
In my youth the champion cyclist was a very charismatic young man, Reg Harris. He was an amateur who used to train on a cinder track at Fallowfield, a suburb of Manchester, and finance himself with a cycle shop and by endorsing cycles.
There were amateurs like Sydney Wooderson, the four minute miler and the greatest athlete of the day who missed the 1938 Empire Games in Sydney because he was taking his solicitor's exams and could not afford time for two long boat journeys. There was no question which occasion was the most important and, indeed, the most useful to society. Men like that could live fulfilled lives and push the boundaries of sport. Why should billions be spent on the dubious pleasure of pedaling faster, windsurfing, horse riding and spear throwing, proficiency at which latter art has limited potential in an age of guided missiles?
Odd too, is it not, that we limit the number of activities in which it is respectable to excel? We laugh at the idea that in the Twenties we competed in endurance ballroom dancing, pie eating and spotting Lobby Ludd on Blackpool Pier. Are they inherently any sillier than pole vaulting?
We can compete in shooting contests but we must train for the event abroad because shooting is illegal in this country. Can we look forward to dog fighting, bear baiting and cock mains in the enlightened future? Are these activities more cruel than coarse fishing, in which the fish is caught by sticking a hook in its mouth, imprisoned in a state of terror in a keepnet and then released traumatized with a ripped jaw.
Before anyone tells me that these are more humane times, I must point out that banning those cruel sports had nothing to do with humanitarian impulses. The legislation was brought in to prevent the gathering of crowds at a time of great civic unrest.
With a bit of luck I will be dead b y the time of the next Olympics so I won’t have to squirm with embarrassment at the Opening Ceremony when Britain, the country of Kathleen Jenkins, Bryn Terfel, Aled Jones, Sarah Brightman, Lesley Garret, a clutch of world renowned actors, even the bath-chair Beatles; some of the finest orchestras, choirs and military bands and the greatest composers, is represented by a rock singer, a failed England soccer captain and a geriatric guitarist.
Why not a pipe band, a Welsh choir, a Lancashire brass band; a last night at the Proms? Pity about the fox hunting laws. Nothing finer or more English than a parade of foxhounds, bloodhounds and beagles. Though a Concourse d’elegance of British vintage cars and horse drawn carriages, with sporting heroes riding shotgun, would be worth watching.
Or a representation of the Thames with Royal Barges, Handel’s Fireworks Music and appropriate bangers and sparklers? After all, the Mayor of London does descend from George 11, which is all I have against him, apart from his ghastly father.
My own favourite would be the public immolation of Paxman and Wark, with fried.Fry as a extra.
************************************************************
There are raincoats and there is the Burberry, a particular make of raincoat which kept the name of its first maker because Edward VII never asked a servant to bring a raincoat; he always specified his “Burberry”. Perhaps when the dreadful dawn of denim is past and students once again wear clothes, a thesis might be written answering the puzzling question why so many of our clothes – Wellingtons, Raglans and Cardigans – are named after generals. But that is another matter. For the moment I should like to sing the praise of the Burberry, which costs the equivalent of a small mortgage but drapes the wearer in the mantle of romance.
The only time I regretted giving up smoking was when I turned up the collar of my Burberry and, in an instant, became Humphrey Bogart, or better yet Anton Walbrook. Who? Anton Walbrook. And kindly tell me who let those young people in on my blog? I believe it is impossible to have reached maturity and not know that film star who only ever played one role. Whatever the storyline, Walbrook ignored it. He only ever played his improbably accented, deeply romantic self and he was always clad in a spiritual Burberry with the collar turned up and, drifting from the corner of his mouth, a trickle of cigarette smoke which you knew without being told came from a Balkan Sobranie, and almost certainly a BLACK Balkan Sobranie at that.
It is impossible to conjure up Walbrook on the wide screen of memory without him appearing in a Burberry. Unless it be a silk dressing gown. Walbrook only ever took off his Burberry to replace it with a silk dressing gown, which he wore for putting a record of “Dangerous Moonlight” on the gramophone. Dangerous what? Would those young people kindly leave the blog. I cannot talk sensibly to anyone who has never heard of that peerless melody. In my day it had an effect on the Long Haired Bandits surpassed only by a small gin slipped surreptitiously into a glass of cider.
I digress. Even Small Stout Persons of Advancing Years feel dashing, romantic - even, regrettably, foreign – in a Burberry with the collar turned up. Especially when worn with a brown trilby over a navy pinstriped suit. And a silver-grey tie. In such an outfit it is difficult not to sound your ‘w’ s as ‘v’ s and behave in every way like an Austrian aristocrat of reduced means.
As a sartorial corrective, I recommend replacing the Burberry with the plus two or knickerbocker. Nothing can be more British. They are as comforting as Bread and Butter Pudding.
Rather in the way that most sports are played in shorts and the ultimate accolade is a school cap, there is a sense of repressed childhood in the excessive use of fireworks in Olympic opening ceremonies; and the prominence given to playing with fire and lighting a bonfire has small boy connotations. Indeed the whole occasion seems to be modelled on a school sports day in a recently co-educational establishment.
I do see the Greeks had time on their hands and wanted to avoid the Agora, in the way the fastidious amongst us avoid Hyde Park Corner. No peace there with that infernal nuisance Socrates and his team of market researchers forever asking perfect strangers questions about the nature of love and other private matters. There was also their unfortunate sexual orientation that urged them to ogle naked men. The sin that in our day, whatever Wilde said, dares to shout its name.
But surely there must have been some Athenian equivalent to that dreadful Trinnie and Susanna who are currently persuading light-headed ladies to expose their anuses on TV?
Parenthetically, I am tired of watching TV adverts for constipated, incontinent ladies who have uncomfortable motions; and I don’t see why a naked backside should be used to advertise tooth paste. I preferred it when women were a mystery. I think they do themselves a grave disservice by admitting they are all bowel bound Dorian Grays until they put on anti-wrinkle paste.
I might add that there is something flaky about a government that tells us competition on the sports field is bad for children and then lavishes largesse on some luckless soul so that they can learn to jump further than anyone else. And does the gold Olympic medal remind anyone else of those tacky medallions which proved that Jim could fix it?
My ancestors were knighted for fighting. Difficult to imagine Sir Elton John or Gielgud fulfilling that criterion.
In my youth the champion cyclist was a very charismatic young man, Reg Harris. He was an amateur who used to train on a cinder track at Fallowfield, a suburb of Manchester, and finance himself with a cycle shop and by endorsing cycles.
There were amateurs like Sydney Wooderson, the four minute miler and the greatest athlete of the day who missed the 1938 Empire Games in Sydney because he was taking his solicitor's exams and could not afford time for two long boat journeys. There was no question which occasion was the most important and, indeed, the most useful to society. Men like that could live fulfilled lives and push the boundaries of sport. Why should billions be spent on the dubious pleasure of pedaling faster, windsurfing, horse riding and spear throwing, proficiency at which latter art has limited potential in an age of guided missiles?
Odd too, is it not, that we limit the number of activities in which it is respectable to excel? We laugh at the idea that in the Twenties we competed in endurance ballroom dancing, pie eating and spotting Lobby Ludd on Blackpool Pier. Are they inherently any sillier than pole vaulting?
We can compete in shooting contests but we must train for the event abroad because shooting is illegal in this country. Can we look forward to dog fighting, bear baiting and cock mains in the enlightened future? Are these activities more cruel than coarse fishing, in which the fish is caught by sticking a hook in its mouth, imprisoned in a state of terror in a keepnet and then released traumatized with a ripped jaw.
Before anyone tells me that these are more humane times, I must point out that banning those cruel sports had nothing to do with humanitarian impulses. The legislation was brought in to prevent the gathering of crowds at a time of great civic unrest.
With a bit of luck I will be dead b y the time of the next Olympics so I won’t have to squirm with embarrassment at the Opening Ceremony when Britain, the country of Kathleen Jenkins, Bryn Terfel, Aled Jones, Sarah Brightman, Lesley Garret, a clutch of world renowned actors, even the bath-chair Beatles; some of the finest orchestras, choirs and military bands and the greatest composers, is represented by a rock singer, a failed England soccer captain and a geriatric guitarist.
Why not a pipe band, a Welsh choir, a Lancashire brass band; a last night at the Proms? Pity about the fox hunting laws. Nothing finer or more English than a parade of foxhounds, bloodhounds and beagles. Though a Concourse d’elegance of British vintage cars and horse drawn carriages, with sporting heroes riding shotgun, would be worth watching.
Or a representation of the Thames with Royal Barges, Handel’s Fireworks Music and appropriate bangers and sparklers? After all, the Mayor of London does descend from George 11, which is all I have against him, apart from his ghastly father.
My own favourite would be the public immolation of Paxman and Wark, with fried.Fry as a extra.
************************************************************
There are raincoats and there is the Burberry, a particular make of raincoat which kept the name of its first maker because Edward VII never asked a servant to bring a raincoat; he always specified his “Burberry”. Perhaps when the dreadful dawn of denim is past and students once again wear clothes, a thesis might be written answering the puzzling question why so many of our clothes – Wellingtons, Raglans and Cardigans – are named after generals. But that is another matter. For the moment I should like to sing the praise of the Burberry, which costs the equivalent of a small mortgage but drapes the wearer in the mantle of romance.
The only time I regretted giving up smoking was when I turned up the collar of my Burberry and, in an instant, became Humphrey Bogart, or better yet Anton Walbrook. Who? Anton Walbrook. And kindly tell me who let those young people in on my blog? I believe it is impossible to have reached maturity and not know that film star who only ever played one role. Whatever the storyline, Walbrook ignored it. He only ever played his improbably accented, deeply romantic self and he was always clad in a spiritual Burberry with the collar turned up and, drifting from the corner of his mouth, a trickle of cigarette smoke which you knew without being told came from a Balkan Sobranie, and almost certainly a BLACK Balkan Sobranie at that.
It is impossible to conjure up Walbrook on the wide screen of memory without him appearing in a Burberry. Unless it be a silk dressing gown. Walbrook only ever took off his Burberry to replace it with a silk dressing gown, which he wore for putting a record of “Dangerous Moonlight” on the gramophone. Dangerous what? Would those young people kindly leave the blog. I cannot talk sensibly to anyone who has never heard of that peerless melody. In my day it had an effect on the Long Haired Bandits surpassed only by a small gin slipped surreptitiously into a glass of cider.
I digress. Even Small Stout Persons of Advancing Years feel dashing, romantic - even, regrettably, foreign – in a Burberry with the collar turned up. Especially when worn with a brown trilby over a navy pinstriped suit. And a silver-grey tie. In such an outfit it is difficult not to sound your ‘w’ s as ‘v’ s and behave in every way like an Austrian aristocrat of reduced means.
As a sartorial corrective, I recommend replacing the Burberry with the plus two or knickerbocker. Nothing can be more British. They are as comforting as Bread and Butter Pudding.
Sunday, 24 August 2008
SLIP ME A DISC
Making lists is one of the joys of being ancient.
Since I have largely retired from the outside world and the boundaries of my planet are my study and library, I probably don’t qualify; but I have always been a little hurt not to be invited on Desert Island Discs. I spent years making my selection.
In truth I would be happy taking only English composers. My favourites, Delius, Elgar, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Tallis would remind me of When It Was England. Conductors like Beecham, and Barbirolli. Kathleen Ferrier at the head of the singers, of course.
Since that would not be allowed - though Moura Lympany once sent me a cassette of her Desert Island programme in which every one of the eight were recordings of her - here are my Desert Island Discs:
1. Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi in La Boheme. My guru in musical matters, David Mellor, surprised me by saying Act 3 was his favourite in all opera. I suppose Act 1, which is the most played, was always mine. But listening to it carefully, I see his point. Listening to Mellor is my last luxury. Because the moment the programme is over I buy most of the CDs he has recommended with the money I have saved from not drinking, A few weeks ago I bought both “Butterfly” and “ La Boheme” sung by Tebaldi and I have just bought that archive recording of Rostropovich playing the Dvorak Cello Concerto on that memorable night at the Proms when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. And a hostile audience was converted by his emotional playing, the most beautiful I have ever heard, during which the tears streamed down his face.
2. Madama Butterfly. The problem I always have with this opera is that swine Pinkerton. Absolute sewer. If ever I met him I would dash him to the ground. Come to think of it, Rodolfo’s treatment of Mimi in Boheme leaves a great deal to be desired. And as for that Georgio Germont,.the way he treats poor Violetta is the reason I would have to leave Traviata. on the mainland A favourite opera, but his interference is not to be borne. And his son isn’t much better. There is bad blood in that family, mark my words, and I hope his sister never got married.
3. Du Pre, Elgar, Cello Concerto. The music which started a long love affair with the composer and led to Vaughan Williams and Butterworth and after a long pause Delius. When one thinks of them and Gilbert and Sullivan foreign music pales.
4. Nigel Kennedy, Elgar, Violin Concerto. I have the recording of his debut performance but I would want to take my video of his recent Prom. The playing was masterly but the rapt expression on his face as he played brought tears to the eye.
5. Then I run into trouble. I put down My Old Dutch, September Song and Bring on the Clowns – then I remember the other Sondheims, Merry Widow. Carmina Burana, Fledermaus and Bryn Terfel’s Marriage of Figaro. Or the puppet version of “Magic Flute” I saw in Vienna. Vienna reminds me of Mahler, particularly his fourth symphony.
I am afraid in a review in his early career I called Terfel Pinocchio.so wooden was his acting but I happily ate my words when I saw Figaro. I would also like to sneak in the Enigma Variations, the music to which I intend to be cremated. But in the end it has to be Mahler, which always seems to be heard for the first time.
6. The Black Bear. That is the march the Pipe Band always played when we were within a mile of the barracks after a route march. I know of no other piece of music which so stiffens the sinews.
7. Walton’s Henry V. All history is here, distilled in fine music.
8. Nutcracker Suite. I have a small collection of Nutcracker DVDs, including Nureyev, and most of them are variations on the original Pepita choreography. My favourite is Peter Wright’s magnificent re-telling.
BOOK (Shakespeare is fine but anything but the Bible. I don’t do fairy stories) This is a problem. I would like to take the Harleian Manuscripts, a collection of documents about Welsh history from ancient times. It includes a Welsh genealogy which traces my ancestry back to a sister of the Virgin Mary, via St David. As ancient Welsh history is, to put it mildly, imaginary, it would provide endless fun.
The essay is my favourite reading. It as near as prose gets to music, the highest art. So an Omnibus of English Essayists - Sterne, Addison, Johnson, Lynd and Lamb - is an alternative if the National Library will not release the Harleian Collection.
I would try to sneak in my favourite novel by my all time favourite writer. the sadly neglected Howard Spring, whose “Fame Is the Spur” is a towering achievement and quite the equal OF ANY OF THE “GREAT” NOVELS.
Mind you, if I were technically literate I would ditch the whole lot, music as well, and take my laptop. Download the books on Gutenberg and the music on any one of many generous donors.
LUXURY My Bedroom, with wardrobe, bathroom and study adjoining.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Fortunately there a few bonny fighters left. My cousin Mary Gregory sent me this gem:
This is a genuine complaint to Devon & Cornwall Police Force from an angry member of the public. ..... Dear Sir/madam/automated telephone answering service,
Having spent the past twenty minutes waiting for someone at Bodmin police station to pick up a telephone, I have decided to abandon the idea and try e-mailing you instead. Perhaps you would be so kind as to pass this message on to your colleagues in Bodmin, by means of smoke signal, carrier pigeon or Ouija board. As I'm writing this e-mail there are eleven failed medical experiments (I think you call them youths) in St Marys Crescent, which is just off St Marys Road in Bodmin. Six of them seem happy enough to play a game which involves kicking a football against an iron gate with the force of a meteorite. This causes an earth shattering CLANG! which rings throughout the entire building. This game is now in its third week and as I am unsure how the scoring system works, I have no idea if it will end any time soon. The remaining five walking abortions are happily rummaging through several bags of rubbish and items of furniture that someone has so thoughtfully dumped beside the wheelie bins. One of them has found a saw and is setting about a discarded chair like a beaver on speed. I fear that it's only a matter of time before they turn their limited attention to the bottle of calor gas that is lying on its side between the two bins. If they could be relied on to only blow their own arms and legs off then I would happily leave them to it. I would even go so far as to lend them the matches. Unfortunately they are far more likely to blow up half the street with them and I've just finished decorating the kitchen. What I suggest is this - after replying to this e-mail with worthless assurances that the matter is being looked into and will be dealt with, why not leave it until the one night of the year (probably bath night) when there are no mutants around then drive up the street in a panda car before doing a three point turn and disappearing again. This will of course serve no other purpose than to remind us what policemen actually look like. I trust that when I take a claw hammer to the skull of one of these throwbacks you'll do me the same courtesy of giving me a four month head start before coming to arrest me. I remain sir, your obedient servant ... --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Mr ??????, I have read your e-mail and understand your frustration at the problems caused by youth playing in the area and the problems you have encountered in trying to contact the police. As the Community Beat Officer for your street I would like to extend an offer of discussing the matter fully with you. Should you wish to discuss the matter, please provide contact details (address / telephone number) and when may be suitable. Regards PC ? Community Beat Officer
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear PC ? First of all I would like to thank you for the speedy response to my original e-mail. 16 hours and 38 minutes must be a personal record for Bodmin Police station, and rest assured that I will forward these details to Norris McWhirter for inclusion in his next book. Secondly I was delighted to hear that our street has its own community beat officer. May I be the first to congratulate you on your covert skills? In the five or so years I have lived in St Marys Crescent I have never seen you. Do you hide up a tree or have you gone deep undercover and infiltrated the gang itself? Are you the one with the acne and the moustache on his forehead or the one with a chin like a wash hand basin? It's surely only a matter of time before you are headhunted by MI5. Whilst I realise that there may be far more serious crimes taking place in Bodmin, such as smoking in a public place or being Muslim without due care and attention, is it too much to ask for a policeman to explain (using words of no more than two syllables at a time) to these twats that they might want to play their strange football game elsewhere. The pitch on Fairpark Road , or the one at Priory Park are both within spitting distance as is the bottom of the Par Dock. Should you wish to discuss these matters further you should feel free to contact me on xxxxx. If after 25 minutes I have still failed to answer, I'll buy you a large one in the Cat and Fiddle Pub. Regards P.S If you think that this is sarcasm, think yourself lucky that you don't work for the cleansing department, with whom I am also in contact!! > >> > >> > >> > >> > > > >
ENDS
Since I have largely retired from the outside world and the boundaries of my planet are my study and library, I probably don’t qualify; but I have always been a little hurt not to be invited on Desert Island Discs. I spent years making my selection.
In truth I would be happy taking only English composers. My favourites, Delius, Elgar, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Tallis would remind me of When It Was England. Conductors like Beecham, and Barbirolli. Kathleen Ferrier at the head of the singers, of course.
Since that would not be allowed - though Moura Lympany once sent me a cassette of her Desert Island programme in which every one of the eight were recordings of her - here are my Desert Island Discs:
1. Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi in La Boheme. My guru in musical matters, David Mellor, surprised me by saying Act 3 was his favourite in all opera. I suppose Act 1, which is the most played, was always mine. But listening to it carefully, I see his point. Listening to Mellor is my last luxury. Because the moment the programme is over I buy most of the CDs he has recommended with the money I have saved from not drinking, A few weeks ago I bought both “Butterfly” and “ La Boheme” sung by Tebaldi and I have just bought that archive recording of Rostropovich playing the Dvorak Cello Concerto on that memorable night at the Proms when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. And a hostile audience was converted by his emotional playing, the most beautiful I have ever heard, during which the tears streamed down his face.
2. Madama Butterfly. The problem I always have with this opera is that swine Pinkerton. Absolute sewer. If ever I met him I would dash him to the ground. Come to think of it, Rodolfo’s treatment of Mimi in Boheme leaves a great deal to be desired. And as for that Georgio Germont,.the way he treats poor Violetta is the reason I would have to leave Traviata. on the mainland A favourite opera, but his interference is not to be borne. And his son isn’t much better. There is bad blood in that family, mark my words, and I hope his sister never got married.
3. Du Pre, Elgar, Cello Concerto. The music which started a long love affair with the composer and led to Vaughan Williams and Butterworth and after a long pause Delius. When one thinks of them and Gilbert and Sullivan foreign music pales.
4. Nigel Kennedy, Elgar, Violin Concerto. I have the recording of his debut performance but I would want to take my video of his recent Prom. The playing was masterly but the rapt expression on his face as he played brought tears to the eye.
5. Then I run into trouble. I put down My Old Dutch, September Song and Bring on the Clowns – then I remember the other Sondheims, Merry Widow. Carmina Burana, Fledermaus and Bryn Terfel’s Marriage of Figaro. Or the puppet version of “Magic Flute” I saw in Vienna. Vienna reminds me of Mahler, particularly his fourth symphony.
I am afraid in a review in his early career I called Terfel Pinocchio.so wooden was his acting but I happily ate my words when I saw Figaro. I would also like to sneak in the Enigma Variations, the music to which I intend to be cremated. But in the end it has to be Mahler, which always seems to be heard for the first time.
6. The Black Bear. That is the march the Pipe Band always played when we were within a mile of the barracks after a route march. I know of no other piece of music which so stiffens the sinews.
7. Walton’s Henry V. All history is here, distilled in fine music.
8. Nutcracker Suite. I have a small collection of Nutcracker DVDs, including Nureyev, and most of them are variations on the original Pepita choreography. My favourite is Peter Wright’s magnificent re-telling.
BOOK (Shakespeare is fine but anything but the Bible. I don’t do fairy stories) This is a problem. I would like to take the Harleian Manuscripts, a collection of documents about Welsh history from ancient times. It includes a Welsh genealogy which traces my ancestry back to a sister of the Virgin Mary, via St David. As ancient Welsh history is, to put it mildly, imaginary, it would provide endless fun.
The essay is my favourite reading. It as near as prose gets to music, the highest art. So an Omnibus of English Essayists - Sterne, Addison, Johnson, Lynd and Lamb - is an alternative if the National Library will not release the Harleian Collection.
I would try to sneak in my favourite novel by my all time favourite writer. the sadly neglected Howard Spring, whose “Fame Is the Spur” is a towering achievement and quite the equal OF ANY OF THE “GREAT” NOVELS.
Mind you, if I were technically literate I would ditch the whole lot, music as well, and take my laptop. Download the books on Gutenberg and the music on any one of many generous donors.
LUXURY My Bedroom, with wardrobe, bathroom and study adjoining.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Fortunately there a few bonny fighters left. My cousin Mary Gregory sent me this gem:
This is a genuine complaint to Devon & Cornwall Police Force from an angry member of the public. ..... Dear Sir/madam/automated telephone answering service,
Having spent the past twenty minutes waiting for someone at Bodmin police station to pick up a telephone, I have decided to abandon the idea and try e-mailing you instead. Perhaps you would be so kind as to pass this message on to your colleagues in Bodmin, by means of smoke signal, carrier pigeon or Ouija board. As I'm writing this e-mail there are eleven failed medical experiments (I think you call them youths) in St Marys Crescent, which is just off St Marys Road in Bodmin. Six of them seem happy enough to play a game which involves kicking a football against an iron gate with the force of a meteorite. This causes an earth shattering CLANG! which rings throughout the entire building. This game is now in its third week and as I am unsure how the scoring system works, I have no idea if it will end any time soon. The remaining five walking abortions are happily rummaging through several bags of rubbish and items of furniture that someone has so thoughtfully dumped beside the wheelie bins. One of them has found a saw and is setting about a discarded chair like a beaver on speed. I fear that it's only a matter of time before they turn their limited attention to the bottle of calor gas that is lying on its side between the two bins. If they could be relied on to only blow their own arms and legs off then I would happily leave them to it. I would even go so far as to lend them the matches. Unfortunately they are far more likely to blow up half the street with them and I've just finished decorating the kitchen. What I suggest is this - after replying to this e-mail with worthless assurances that the matter is being looked into and will be dealt with, why not leave it until the one night of the year (probably bath night) when there are no mutants around then drive up the street in a panda car before doing a three point turn and disappearing again. This will of course serve no other purpose than to remind us what policemen actually look like. I trust that when I take a claw hammer to the skull of one of these throwbacks you'll do me the same courtesy of giving me a four month head start before coming to arrest me. I remain sir, your obedient servant ... --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Mr ??????, I have read your e-mail and understand your frustration at the problems caused by youth playing in the area and the problems you have encountered in trying to contact the police. As the Community Beat Officer for your street I would like to extend an offer of discussing the matter fully with you. Should you wish to discuss the matter, please provide contact details (address / telephone number) and when may be suitable. Regards PC ? Community Beat Officer
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear PC ? First of all I would like to thank you for the speedy response to my original e-mail. 16 hours and 38 minutes must be a personal record for Bodmin Police station, and rest assured that I will forward these details to Norris McWhirter for inclusion in his next book. Secondly I was delighted to hear that our street has its own community beat officer. May I be the first to congratulate you on your covert skills? In the five or so years I have lived in St Marys Crescent I have never seen you. Do you hide up a tree or have you gone deep undercover and infiltrated the gang itself? Are you the one with the acne and the moustache on his forehead or the one with a chin like a wash hand basin? It's surely only a matter of time before you are headhunted by MI5. Whilst I realise that there may be far more serious crimes taking place in Bodmin, such as smoking in a public place or being Muslim without due care and attention, is it too much to ask for a policeman to explain (using words of no more than two syllables at a time) to these twats that they might want to play their strange football game elsewhere. The pitch on Fairpark Road , or the one at Priory Park are both within spitting distance as is the bottom of the Par Dock. Should you wish to discuss these matters further you should feel free to contact me on xxxxx. If after 25 minutes I have still failed to answer, I'll buy you a large one in the Cat and Fiddle Pub. Regards P.S If you think that this is sarcasm, think yourself lucky that you don't work for the cleansing department, with whom I am also in contact!! > >> > >> > >> > >> > > > >
ENDS
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