a pint of view

I am a product of the pub; the sum of perhaps a dozen cosy inns in England, Wales and Dublin. I was called to the bar to be educated in them, taught manners and the meaning of friendship. They have been my workplace, my university, and for much of my early manhood the nearest thing I had to a home.

 

My generation learned the etiquette of drinking from fathers who took us for a pre-lunch pint on Sundays. The central rule was that getting drunk was a sign of immaturity. The ability to hold drink was prized. There was no swearing in the presence of women. If you were bought a drink, you bought one back. There was no need for bouncers. Discipline was maintained by the customers themselves. The proper rate for drink consumption was a pint every fifteen minutes and the usual “session” lasted an hour. Anyone who drank from the bottle was to be avoided.

 

I was trained in the Red Lion and The Grove in Manchester, the Wellington in Doncaster, The Kings Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea, The Pearl Lounge in Dublin, The Bulls Head on Anglesey, The Bear and Billet, The Boot, The Beehive, The Swan in Chester - and a number of other public houses scattered about the country.

 

None in Scotland where drinking is a serious business, like so much else in that unhappy country, the New Puritania.

 

Why are wet blankets woven in bright tartan?

 

 Not content with creating a near dictatorship at home, Scotland has exported some of the worst politicians in history. To its own corrupt Establishment we owe the ban on hunting with hounds, the death of smoking in pubs. Now that Maelstrom of Misery is howling round the “Wee Hauf”. Or even more bizarre, a tax on chocolate drops.

 

The sad truth is that we are the product of our genes and the genes of the Celt are a rich harvest of melancholic addiction. My Scottish blood has made of me, as it has my son, my father, my grandfather and most of my uncles, a drunk. Even now when drink is no longer attractive I am still by nature a drunk. It ruined a career, a marriage and goodness knows how many friendships. For all that, I remember my roaring days with pleasure and no little regret. I still get incensed when, despite the fact the Government admitted that its “safe units” measurement of alcohol was bogus, it continues to trot out the same fictional warning.

 

My old drinking chum Bill Hagerty, Eisenhower’s spin doctor, reviewing a Michael Frayne book, loved this quote: “There is no-one (like a journalist of the old school) with that astonishing ability to drink until the floor tips and still write a thousand words on the shocking decline in standards of behaviour”

Pubs are not necessarily bad influences. I was reminded recently of that moment when they are at their best in this from The Long Goodbye. Terry Lennox tells Marlowe:

"I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar."

 

Alas, like England, the pub which nurtured me no longer exists. In its place I have The Computer which opens its welcoming Arms and offers many of the joys of the pub. Many rude things are said about this Wonder of Our Age. Like the local of yore, it has disadvantages which it shares with the pub.. Far too many jokes, the ever present danger of stumbling on a bore; though it must be said that, as in the pub, so on the screen: arcane knowledge is there for the searching

 

Like the pub, there is always someone ready to sell you something, to enlist you in lost causes and to provoke bright anger. There are programmes one would hesitate to enter as there were pubs. There are others, like You Tube, which provide the best of entertainment: Ella, Sinatra, Garland, Durante and all the jazz greats on the same programme.

 

A great joy of the pub was the conversation of like minds. Now I get a much higher quality via E-Mails. Surely the most intelligent form of communication yet devised. Made for those of us who think of the right thing to say several minutes after it is no longer possible to say it.

 

At the luxury end, pubs had copies of the daily papers. Every morning I have my cup of tea in bed, riffling through facsimile issues of The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent. Brought to my laptop among a thousand other English language titles by Pressdisplay.com.

 

Goodness knows how many trees I save.

 

I do most of my shopping at my desk. I have CDs of the great paintings of the world and a library of music.

 

My heart will always be leaning on a bar somewhere but my brain is more at home at my computer desk.

 

 

Seven weeks is more than enough time to waste on cancer and to find the same answer as Damon Runyon to the question of “Why Me?” It is “Why not?”

 

Yesterday the pump finished its healing work, the umbilical cord has been disconnected and I no longer feel like a heavily anchored Bionic Man, though I will always carry my own Ty Bach, the little house that used to stand at the end of every Welsh garden, though in winter the seat was kept in the kitchen fireplace for purposes of central heating.

 

 Next week I go for my final interview with the surgeon, who will no doubt tell me again that further operations are out of the question, even if I have lost four stone from my top weight. Since I celebrate eighty years of ducking and diving in May, it is not news that concerns me greatly. If cancer is a hell of a way to lose weight, there is no better indicator of where your loving friends are.

 

Thank you.

ACCENTUATING THE POSITIVE

 

There was probably no time in history when there were more books on quotations pouring from the publishers or fewer people who use them in ordinary conversation.

 

This may be because people are less well read now than they used to be or it may be that schools don’t insist on children memorising memorable remarks, speeches from Shakespeare or acres of poetry. Which I think is a pity.

 

Ruskin, if I may quote him, said that a room without pictures was a house without windows. I think much the same is true of quotations.

 

Quotations are the pictures we hang on the walls of conversation. At their best they say in a few words what would take the rest of us whole sentences to explain; in the way that a good picture encompasses far more than the room it takes.

 

However, quotations of a sort still play a major part in our lives. Difficult to think of a pop song which is much more than a list of quotable remarks. The Beatles, it seems to me, were particularly gifted in this direction. I believe in yesterday sums up my whole attitude to life.

 

So little of television is memorable that I cannot think of a single catchphrase from that medium; but radio used to provide them in handfuls. In the days of ITMA you could hold an entire conversation with lines from the show, such as “Don’t forget the diver”, “Can I do you now, sir?” and “I don’t mind if I do”.

 

The ability to do them in the right voice was a plus.

 

I met a girl called Elizabeth Knowles who was  the managing editor of a large team at the Oxford Press which has produced surely the first Dictionary of Literary Quotations. to begin with Ancient Egyptian aphorisms and end on the Internet. Four thousand entries in all.

 

It had a reading team of five people and I wonder; does their reading consist of other books of quotations or do they go the pit face? I ask because, with the possible exception of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary and Geoffrey Madden’s Notebooks, the same quotations seem to crop up again and again.

 

My favourite quotation in the whole book comes from Alan Bennett when he reported that looking in a diary for the birthdays of contemporary figures, he finds, on his own birthday, merely a notice it was the day the first launderette opened.

 

Celebrity comes in for a hammering too. See John Updike’s brilliant observation that it is a mask that eats the face.

 

Their view of themselves is revealing. Barbara Cartland believed that she was dictated to by God.

 

But other authors they think less of. Vidal on Hemingway: “No other culture could have produced him and not seen the joke“ isn’t even a good joke. It certainly wasn’t Cyril Connolly’s view. He credited Hemingway with the death of what he called Mandarin writing

Next to quotations, I love ghost stories. My favourite comes in John Evelyn’s seventeenth century diary. He says that when a ghost who appeared was asked if it was a good spirit or a bad spirit ”it disappeared with a most melodious twang”.

 

Aubrey’s friend was the theologian Sir Thomas Browne. He went so far as to say that if you didn’t believe in spirits you must be an atheist; because, after all, angels were spirits.

 

Goldie Hawn is no atheist. I read that she decided to marry her live-in lover when the ghost of her mother appeared in the bathroom and said it was high time they got married.

 

My mother was given different advice. On hr wedding day my grandmother told her: "I would rather be carrying you out feet first than see you marry that man."

 

The house I lived in Wales was haunted by a blacksmith in a top hat. And by a piper. A Scottish regiment, the Lovat Scouts, was stationed in the house during the war. Alas, I neither saw nor heard either.

 

But I did see the previous tenant of a cottage we had. He was a deceased rabbit catcher called Bob. And I saw him quite clearly just before breakfast one morning. I subsequently heard him quite often bumping into things. I found it comforting to have evidence that Heaven is licensed to purvey intoxicating liquors.

 

Few quotations are more apt that the one which inists that when an Englishman speaks another Engliushman holds hi in contempt. Not only the English

 

In Edinburgh my Morningside aunt used to shudder whenever she heard a Glaswegian accent; and Dubliners can be pretty scornful of people from the West of Ireland

 

It’s not just received pronunciation that sets people apart. It is smart to speak Estuary English, which is a semi cockney in which no word keeps its final letter and ‘H’ is non-existent.

 

In the Fifties I couldn’t get a job on the BBC in Manchester because of my Lancashire accent. Over the years, whisky and marrying above myself have refined it - only to find myself in a world where you can hardly hope for a job in broadcasting if you haven’t got a regional accent.

 

I do not know enough about America to know whether Americans have similar problems of class structure based on pronunciation, but I doubt it. I am sure, though, that even there some regional accents are more acceptable than others. They certainly are in other parts of the UK. In Wales this doesn’t apply because now there is a snob culture in language itself.

 

But I have been reading about an England where Brummie, Belfast and Glaswegian are socially unacceptable but Estuary English, Yorkshire, Received Pronunciation and refined Scots, Welsh and Irish are in.

I remember as a young man being in a smart rowing club at Kingston on Thames and being laughed at -literally -because I said I was going for a bath, rather than a ‘barth’. With hindsight, I suspect it was evidence of a tribe protecting itself from foreigners.

 

 

GULLIBLE TRAVAILS

 

It was a concept more suited to the pen of Jonathon Swift, the great 18^th century fantasist and inventor of societies.

 

The commentators (and oh for the days when newspapers stuck to the facts) warn that we face an invasion of the angry unemployed from Eastern Europe now we are closing down the factories we so magnanimously opened there to welcome them into the Greater Europe.

 

The notion that, after thousands of years of fighting each other and grabbing chunks of each other’s kingdoms, politicians, the most power crazed of communities, would settle down into one harmonious whole, hurling gold coins at each other and proffering the products of each country’s industry to grateful neighbours, is ludicrous.

 

There was just an indication of flaw in the plan when, rather than succour the world’s poor, the Community preferred to create vast wine lakes and mountains of cereals. One might have been warned when, consistently, year after year, the audit commission it had itself set up refused to pass the Community’s accounts. Scandal followed scandal. At one time or another most of the Heads of Departments have been caught with sticky fingers. The ruined face of the planet, bombed and shelled back into the Stone Age, did little for the Community’s reputation as a peacemaker. More money was wasted building two headquarters in adjoining countries, to end the squabbles about where it should be sited.

 

There were many advantages to the Community. Chiefly those enjoyed by the Community servants.

 

Since the purpose of bureaucracy is to increase power, the Community welcomed to its heart other communities, recent enemies made poor by the doctrines of Communism.

 

By this time most sensible people had begun to look on the EU as we do the weather. It’s a damned nuisance but there is nothing we can do about it.

 

The recent failure of the Capitalist system, through the incompetence and corruption of governments and financial communities, could have been the EU’s shining hour. Now was the time for the richer or wiser kingdoms to help its most recent lame followers.

 

The result: Gordon Brown, the Tartan |Messiah, proposed more vast sums be doled out to Latvia, Hungary and Romania, but flew off to America without saying where the money was to come from.

 

An EU Summit of 27 bad tempered leaders in Brussels meanwhile observed the collapse of the so called tiger economies but rejected a resolution to give an immediate hand-out of £170 billion.

It became obvious that the Western EU countries would rather prop up their own economies by feather bedding their own industries and closing down the outposts they had established beyond a suddenly restored Iron Curtain.

 

Feren Gyurcscany, the Hungarian leader, warned that “a significant crisis in Eastern Europe would trigger political tensions and immigration pressures’. He even quoted figures.

 

“There is a central European and Eastern European population of 350 million, of which 100 million are in the EU. A 10 per cent increase in unemployment would lead to at least five million people unemployed within the EU.”

 

It’s enough to make the Statue of Liberty blow out her lamp. Although, in fairness, most ordinary people would have warned that get-togethers only work in fine weather.

 

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a word from the unwise

A week of disclosures in which it has become obvious that the royal family, the banking industry, the House of Commons and the House of Lords , ankle deep in corruption, are only interested in aassing hordes of cash and have nothing but contempt for the ordinary people.

 

So what else is new?

 

A TV documentary claimed that the Royal Family does not disclose travel expenses below £10.000, leaving itself free to use £6.000 an hour helicopters. Thus following the fine tradition of The House of Hanover from which it sprang.

 

In the midst of this collapsing society I am a great deal more worried about the collapsing me.

 

I have been reading with great pleasure the letters of Rupert Hart Davies and Humph’s father George Lyttleton. He quotes Bishop Creighton’s admirable dictum “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the complete unimportance of everything.”

 

A friend and I worked out the one essential possession. Mine was a brewery; his, more modestly, was a fountain pen that worked.

 

When I have looked back on that discussion half a century ago, I have always been amazed at the useless things I have collected as hobby succeeded hobby. Guns, rods, LPs of every Shakespeare play, four desks and a library that filled three rooms. From time to time I have tried to whittle down my needs. Now that I have washed up on the sad shores of temperance a distillery seems out of the question. The last time I tried I found the essentials in my life were my garden and my gum boots

I was particularly fond of my gum boots and surprised that no one had written a sonnet about them. They were the most comfortable items of footwear in my wardrobe. I could stomp about in them for hours like some overweight Paddington Bear. In their own clumsy way they evoke the 18^th century and the great Duke of Wellington who made them fashionable. Worn as I wore them, with knee breeches, they were pleasantly reminiscent of that great literary hero of mine Mr Jorrocks, the hunting grocer. His creator Surtees embodied him best in a single quote as he slid under the dinner table: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”

 

Not only did our sentiments chime; we were of the same generous proportions of width with minimum height. As broad as I was long, I embodied the all round reporter. Mr Five by Five was me to a T.

 

Whilst wearing gum boots was an unalloyed joy, getting them on without outside aid was out of the question. Goodness knows, socks are bad enough but at least they are malleable . When the Princess finally comes round with a crystal gum boot seeking the hand of the foot that fits it, I hope the Ferret is at home. Otherwise the pumpkin carriage remains a dream.

 

There was a time when I could not reach my ankle. Now the calf is Terra Incognita. My belly is the last unconquered summit. The arm cannot climb over it and God, whose design abilities you may recall I do not admire, has so constructed that luckless limb that it is just too short to go round it. It may be his idea of a celestial joke but the only way to grip the gum boot is to stand on one leg with the other at the high port. This involves much spirited hopping and is deeply undignified.

 

Of course even this is no longer true. I discovered this morning that in an act of supreme carelessness I have just lost two stone. Yet it has been nearly a month since I have been able to get into gum boots at all. Largely bedridden, I have been attached for the last three weeks to an electric pump which, according to the flotilla of district nurses who visit me every day, is healing my operation scar. Thus I not only have The Bag: I also have The Pump which is constantly at my side, grumbling quietly. I am a sort of human Pompidou building. All my works are on the outside and I shit from the hip, like some topsy turvey Wyatt Earp.

NOT ALL ABROAD IS BLOODY

Near bedfast as I am, neverthless, as spring approaches, it takes all my native cunning to talk the Head Ferret out of going abroad for a holiday.  The exceptions I would be prepared to allow if The Bag permitted  are Vienna and Bruges.  My favourite is Bruges.

 

The cuisine in Bruges beats Paris; its canals are more romantic - and a good deal more sanitary - than those of Venice; its fiacres are cheaper than Viennese ones; its bier houses as good as Amsterdam.  Its “primitives” are preferable to Italian religious paintings or the overworked Impressionists of France.

 

On our holidays there I have never had better service.  A notice in our room claimed the hotel would put any problem right in fifteen minutes.  When I mentioned the breakfast bar had run out of croissants, a porter rushed to a baker and returned with bags full of the delicious items, piping hot.

 

Romantics arriving at the railway station, or ‘t Zand, where the coaches stop, will be disappointed.  Savour the moment.  It is the only disappointment you will experience.

 

Walk up the Zuidzandstraat which runs off ‘t Zand.  You soon reach the medieval heart, overshadowed by the 13th century, 250-foot bell tower.  The True Love could not wait to bound up the 366 steps to be bats in the belfry.  I did not join her.  The tower has a three-foot lean.

 

Opposite are 16th century guild houses, now restaurants.  We chose Pannier d’Or (the golden bread basket), lunched on mussels in its heated pavement café and later dined superbly on game by a roaring fire in a panelled dining room.

 

On our first visit we were so charmed by this square, the shops, canals and cafes, that we did not discover the Burg, without question the loveliest square in Europe.  Burg is dominated by the 14th century Town Hall, a Gothic masterpiece where the Great Hall glows with murals and the Aldermen’s Room is dominated by a massive 15th century fireplace.  Next door is the Chapel of the Holy Blood.  Its reliquary, containing The Blood, has been paraded round the city every Ascension Day since the second Crusade.

 

An unmissable bistro is the chic canalside ‘t Traptje in the Wollestraat.  Glamorous, fashionably dressed. Carla has sat at the bar for twenty years.  Could not take my eyes off her, even when I was told she was wax.  Why? No one likes to come into an empty bar, we were told.

 

For less expensive mussel mountains, rib steaks, stewed eel in chervil sauce eaten to the sound of classical music, try the candlelit Chagall in St Amandsstraat.

 

There are three ways to discover Old Bruges.  Walk round it, drive through it in horse-drawn fiacre or float on the romantic canals which encircle it.  We chose all three.  In the Walplaats, seeking lace workers, we saw, outside a cafe, a tiny dog bar with a drinking bowl and a tariff which read “dogs free. Photos 5 francs.“

 

Another walk brought us to the Church of Our Lady with its 400 ft tower, a lighthouse when Bruges was a port.  The port itself has been transformed into a great lake, the Minnewater (the lake of love).  Emperor Maximilian ordered swans must always be kept there in memory of the murder of one of his courtiers.

 

The glory of the church is Michelangelo’s incomparable Mother and Child, the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy in his lifetime.

 

Nearby, the Groeninge Museum shows van Eyck’s breath-taking Madonna, one of the world’s great paintings, and Bosch’s nightmare Last Judgement.  The Memling Museum is devoted to the six surviving masterpieces of the Flemish master Hans Memling.

 

One of Bruges’s pubs has a hundred varieties of beer.  Need I say more?

 

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THE FINAL FAREWELL TO EMPIRE

 

Reading newspapers on my sick bed gives some ide of how Gibbon must have felt that afternoon when he decided to write about the Fall of the Roman Empire. It is quite clear that what we are seeing are the death throes of the British Empire, which was conceived in greed but managed for many years to stay the blood letting instincts of the native politicians over whom it had a measure of control.

Africa is in a state of collapse and enough time has passed for us to be able to see the Opera Bouffe which was the Last Days of the Raj in India.

Gibbon would have much fun with first: the notion of planting  a giant hedge which cut India in half; abandoning that in favour of setting up a man, a civil servant who had never been to India before, in a bungalow with a book of maps and tasking him with drawing the Line of Partition. He might have glanced at the wisdom of creating a Royal Oaf like MountbattenViceroy in  place of a scholar like Wavell who knew and loved the continent. A Royal Oaf whose twin obsessions was keeping his wife out of the bed of his coloured opponents and getting g everything sorted in time for him to scurry home and join the Festivities which sprang from the adoption of the nephew of his choice into the House of Windsor.

Gibbon, I fancy, would have  been diverted by the jointly held opinion of the native proponents of Partition, that by the time it came to deciding, they were all too tired to think clearly.

Gibbon would have a fine time with the British Empire, the symptoms of whose fall are all around us. I fancy he would point out that, like the rest of the so-called developed world, we operated under a  financial system which spectacularly broke down ever century or so, providing material for both Dickens and Trollope, and required regular wars to stroke it into life.

 

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AND SO TO BED

 

 

 

My eldest daughter sleeps in the same brass bedstead in which, but for a welcome turn of speed on the part of a midwife, she would have been born.  A bed I, in turn, had inherited from a deceased parent.

 

I am all for ancient beds.  The best sleep I have ever had was in 1941 in Bonsall in Derbyshire, immersed, for no other word can describe its welcome, in the flock mattress of a lady called Grannie Gerrard after the bombing of Manchester had driven us from our home.

 

You would have liked Grannie Gerrard.  Whenever German bombers flew overhead she would scuttle nimbly out of her cottage, switch on her torch and train the beam skywards.  It was said in the village that she harboured Nazi sympathies and the local policeman was sent to investigate.  Not so, she told him.  She was shining the light in the pilots’ eyes to dazzle them so they wouldn’t be able to see her cottage.  I remember thinking at the time that anything which protected  my flock mattress was a good thing and I only wish I had it today.

 

All columns have a reason and the reason for this one is a pronoucement by a Tourist Board spokesman.

 

“The fundamental reason for going to a hotel is to sleep.  And no one can have a comfortable night in a bed that is more than ten years old.”

 

Only foreigners stay in hotels.  British gentlemen and their ladies stay in guest houses or pubs which are ‘omes from ‘ome.  One of the charms of ‘omes from ‘ome is the variety of furniture which is encountered in them.  Most of it picked up for a song in the auction room.

 

The truth is that a bed needs bottle age and lineage.  A mattress, like a woman, is only interesting in middle age.  You can always tell when you are in a bed that has enshrined a happy marriage.  A recumbent body on the outer rim of the mattress finds itself rolling inexorably towards the centre.  Beds with a three-in-one gradient from the middle out are mute witnesses to domestic disharmony.

 

There is, of course, a secret bed code which a friend of mine accidentally broke.  He had the usual bachelor’s dilemma.  He was at that happy stage in life when a double bed would have been a thoughtless extravagance and a single bed too narrow for the passing guest.

 

He took the problem to a superior furniture store in Kensington.

 

“What sir wants, “ the assistant informed him, “is a gentleman’s occasional.”

 

ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAT A TONIC

 

 

There are cats that will be reincarnated as hearth rugs and we need not detain ourselves with them.  There are cats that shrink at the sight of you and then bolt in a fear, it is reasonable to suspect, is assumed.  Then there is another kind of cat.

 

This kind of cat is usually ginger and always a Tom.  This kind of cat leaps out at you from behind sofas and sideboards and anywhere he can lay in wait.  When you go for a walk he accompanies you until he is distracted by a passing dandelion clock or the prospect of a mouse.  He bullies your dogs and leaps onto your morning paper when you spread it on the breakfast table.  He hears your car in the drive and rushes to meet you and welcome you home.

 

He kills birds and scatters their feathers over your best carpet; leaves the indigestible organs of mice just where you are about to put your bare feet.  This is the kind of cat T.S. Elliot wrote about.  It is the cat called Jeoffrey that the drunken and mad poet Christopher Smart recalled in his 18th century Bedlam:

 

“For he keeps the lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

“For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.“

 

He is the cat who swam the Thames and crawled down a chimney of the Tower of London in the reign of Elizabeth I to console his master Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, the boyfriend of Shakespeare, who was imprisoned there.

 

He is the cat who, according to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is the Sun God Ra himself.  He is Bast, the cat-headed god of Bubastis.  He is Pangur Ban, the pet of an anonymous eighth century monk who wrote in the margin of his illuminated manuscript:

 

“’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,

“Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

“’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

“All my little wisdom try.”

 

He is the cat that, with “Memory“, made a musician out of Andrew Lloyd Webber.. He is the cat of whom the 16th century essayist Montaigne asked: “When my cat and I entertain each other with mutual apish tricks, as playing with a garter, who knows but that I make my cat more sport than she makes me.”

 

He is one of several ginger cats we had.  Pudding, who died after being run over by a car and  left a hole in our lives many times larger than the tiny space he occupied in life.

 

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

 

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases.  As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.  And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heat waves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as one winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages.  The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands.  But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago?  While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change is: “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?”  It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming.  While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped.  The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That leveling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do.  After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high, but roughly level, state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun become hyper-active again.

 

 

 

I see where the Home Secretary is entitled to charge £116,000 for a second home in London, although she lodges in her sister’s house.

 

It is perfectly legal, she insists.

 

Of course it is.  She is one of the law makers.  How much trouble would have been saved if the Great Train Robbers had sat in Parliament and defended their right to pillage mail trains.

 

Bankers are allowed to increase their bonuses by taking unnecessary risks in the certain knowledge, that if the risks come unstuck, the losses will be made up by the tax payer.  Off hand I cannot remember how many MPs take profitable directorships with banks when they leave office.

 

GOOD MANNERS MAYKITH YTOUBLE

A distressed friend seeks my advice.

 

“Flown with wine and impertinence, I behaved very badly at a recent party.  How can I extricate myself and regain social goodwill?”

Lie, little friend.  Whatever you say, your hosts are not going to alter their opinion, because people try to think badly of each other if they possibly can.  Personally, I favour lies so totally improbable they might just be true.

I once behaved so badly at the 100th birthday party of a very aristocratic lady that my attempt to kiss a lady governor of the BBC went largely unremarked.  The next day I wrote to my host:

“I understand that a person posing as me attended your mother’s birthday party yesterday and behaved badly.

“It is not the first time this has happened and the police are on the look out for him. Unfortunately, the likeness between us is so exact I have myself been cautioned by them for behaviour of his.

“He is a cunning fellow and I still cannot think how he managed to sneak into my home and borrow my suit, returning it in the early hours in a disgusting condition.  But that will give you some idea what the police are up against.

“I will of course make good any damage done by him.”

Now that I am virtually bone dry, I can look back on these follies with indulgence, though I am still not to be entirely trusted with whisky-flavoured ice cream.  Of course, there is always that delicious moment when you fall off the wagon and then anything can happen.

The most embarrassing moment of all was not really my fault.  A delicious girl I met in Bad Hartsburg at the end of the war invited me to meet her father, a Junker Baron, warning me he hated the English.

 

She did not warn me that he hated Scots.  Otherwise I would not have dressed in full fig - kilt, white spats, belt, and hair sporran.

He was waiting for me in the entrance hall of his apartment, seated at a table on which was a decanter of colourless fluid and two glasses.

He poured drinks, barked “Prosit” and downed his in one.  I swear it was rocket fuel. Mine would not go past my epiglottis.  The next one lay on top of it and the merciless third, on which he insisted with mounting malevolence, stirred the others into action.

I rushed to the bathroom.  No time to reach the lavatory.  My pink tribute flowed into the bath.  Reaching for the tap to ease its passage down the drain, I mistakenly turned on the shower and was drenched.

At the frosty dinner which followed no one mentioned my soaking condition, though steam rose from me in billowing clouds, rivers of white Blanco ran down my kilt and small pools of water from the sporran that looked like a drowned  badger formed at my feet.

But you could see the Baron felt some consolation for losing the war.

 

 

As spring approaches it takes all my native cunning to talk the Head Ferret out of going abroad for a holiday.  The exceptions are Vienna and Bruges.  But my favourite is Bruges.

 

The cuisine in Bruges beats Paris; its canals are more romantic - and a good deal more sanitary - than those of Venice; its fiacres are cheaper than Viennese ones; its bier houses as good as Amsterdam.  Its “primitives” are preferable to Italian religious paintings or the overworked Impressionists of France.

 

On our holidays there I have never had better service.  A notice in our room claimed the hotel would put any problem right in fifteen minutes.  When I mentioned the breakfast bar had run out of croissants, a porter rushed to a baker and returned with bags full of the delicious items, piping hot.

 

Romantics arriving at the railway station, or ‘t Zand, where the coaches stop, will be disappointed.  Savour the moment.  It is the only disappointment you will experience.

 

Walk up the Zuidzandstraat which runs off ‘t Zand.  You soon reach the medieval heart, overshadowed by the 13th century, 250-foot bell tower.  The True Love could not wait to bound up the 366 steps to be bats in the belfry.  I did not join her.  The tower has a three-foot lean.

 

Opposite are 16th century guild houses, now restaurants.  We chose Pannier d’Or (the golden bread basket), lunched on mussels in its heated pavement café and later dined superbly on game by a roaring fire in a panelled dining room.

 

On our first visit we were so charmed by this square, the shops, canals and cafes, that we did not discover the Burg, without question the loveliest square in Europe.  Burg is dominated by the 14th century Town Hall, a Gothic masterpiece where the Great Hall glows with murals and the Aldermen’s Room is dominated by a massive 15th century fireplace.  Next door is the Chapel of the Holy Blood.  Its reliquary, containing The Blood, has been paraded round the city every Ascension Day since the second Crusade.

 

An unmissable bistro is the chic canalside ‘t Traptje in the Wollestraat.  Glamorous, fashionably dressed. Carla has sat at the bar for twenty years.  Could not take my eyes off her, even when I was told she was wax.

 

For less expensive mussel mountains, rib steaks, stewed eel in chervil sauce eaten to the sound of classical music, try the candlelit Chagall in St Amandsstraat.

 

There are three ways to discover Old Bruges.  Walk round it, drive through it in horse-drawn fiacre or float on the romantic canals which encircle it.  We chose all three.  In the Walplaats, seeking lace workers, we saw, outside a cafe, a tiny dog bar with a drinking bowl and a tariff which read “dogs free. Photos 5 francs.“

 

Another walk brought us to the Church of Our Lady with its 400 ft tower, a lighthouse when Bruges was a port.  The port itself has been transformed into a great lake, the Minnewater (the lake of love).  Emperor Maximilian ordered swans must always be kept there in memory of the murder of one of his courtiers.

 

The glory of the church is Michelangelo’s incomparable Mother and Child, the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy in his lifetime.

 

Nearby, the Groeninge Museum shows van Eyck’s breath-taking Madonna, one of the world’s great paintings, and Bosch’s nightmare Last Judgement.  The Memling Museum is devoted to the six surviving masterpieces of the Flemish master Hans Memling.

 

One of Bruges’s pubs has a hundred varieties of beer.  Need I say more?

Too witless to view

And so we say farewell to the Protestant Work Ethic. The last frontier has been breached and the generations of Methodists who are embalmed in my genes shrivel like vampires touched by the sun.

 

I have had a TV set erected in my bedroom.

 

Gone are the days I would not watch TV of any kind during daylight hours. Now I am the unwilling prey of those bumptious young men of little wit and absolutely no presence, those haughty beauties being clumsily and self-consciously coy, who are the presenters of morning programmes of alleged news.

 

At 3 am one morning I caught myself watching yet again ”Hill Street Blues”.and reflecting that Hell would be being trapped in a police car with one of those caring homespun policemen forever worrying about daddies who, quite understandably, don’t love them. There is worse. Not only do they repeat classic shows like “Minder” to the point where one begins to dislike them: the latest development is to remake old series with a different cast. Presumably they are blind to the fact that “Minder” owed much of its genius to the casting of Waterman and Cole.

 

In my early days as a freelance reporter I had many friends in the rainbow world of ducking and diving that exists on the edge of the dull world we all inhabit. So accurate was the portrayal of Terry and Arthur they could have slipped seamlessly into the rainbow.

In this age of mediocrity I should expect little else from almost everything I examine. It is not a political statement, merely an observation to say that we are badly governed. Manacled, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, in chains of unworkable legislation.

 

The brave new worlds of extra terrestrial TV are merely the homes of aged repeats and what little original TV we see is shamed by the quality of our past.

 

The banking industry has brought Western Civilisation to its knees because, frankly, it is not very good at banking and does not seem to grasp the first law. DO NOT LEND MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO CANNOT PAY YOU BACK. I notice that banks are reluctant to lend money to each other which suggests certain shortcomings. If a bank cannot borrow from a bank should we leave our money with it?

 

The second rule is not to get involved in things you don’t understand. When greedy bankers moved into property development and building societies, crocodile tears at bonus times were inevitable.

 

The third rule is to watch the overheads. A professional gambler of my acquaintance put it at its most succinct: “Exes ruin all games and do not place a bet before you have studied the form book.” Poor Lol, he could have saved Western Civilisation with those simple words.

 

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I ws going to spend my convalescence trying to find something worth reading in the newspapers. I fear I have failed. There were nuggets, of course, but what used to be a newspaper is now a forum on which a number of people of whom one has never heard  lecture on the government, the drama, literature, schools and any other subject that occurs to their ready pen.

 

So far as I can discover, few of them have any qualifications in the subjects they seek to dominate.

 

Radio, which I love above all things, is in a sad state. Would poor Carol Thatcher have been sacked for an innocent remark in the Green Room had she been anyone but the daughter of the Prime Minister the BBC hates above all?

 

I am frequently called a Teddy Bear and I fail to see why Golliwog should be thought to be a term of abuse since both refer to the cuddly toys we enjoyed in childhood when a Teddy and a Golly served me, an only one, as brothers.

 

What one should say about transport and education systems that collapse under the weight of a snowflake, I do not know. This news item from the Times did not help. It said that children who threw snowballs in public places were warned they could be arrested or fined for antisocial behaviour.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

A distressed friend seeks my advice.

 

“Flown with wine and impertinence, I behaved very badly at a recent party.  How can I extricate myself and regain social goodwill?”

Lie, little friend.  Whatever you say, your hosts are not going to alter their opinion, because people try to think badly of each other if they possibly can.  Personally, I favour lies so totally improbable they might just be true.

I once behaved so badly at the 100th birthday party of a very aristocratic lady that my attempt to kiss a lady governor of the BBC went largely unremarked.  The next day I wrote to my host:

“I understand that a person posing as me attended your mother’s birthday party yesterday and behaved badly.

“It is not the first time this has happened and the police are on the look out for him. Unfortunately, the likeness between us is so exact I have myself been cautioned by them for behaviour of his.

“He is a cunning fellow and I still cannot think how he managed to sneak into my home and borrow my suit, returning it in the early hours in a disgusting condition.  But that will give you some idea what the police are up against.

“I will of course make good any damage done by him.”

Now that I am virtually bone dry, I can look back on these follies with indulgence, though I am still not to be entirely trusted with whisky-flavoured ice cream.  Of course, there is always that delicious moment when you fall off the wagon and then anything can happen.

The most embarrassing moment of all was not really my fault.  A delicious girl I met in Bad Hartsburg at the end of the war invited me to meet her father, a Junker Baron, warning me he hated the English.

 

She did not warn me that he hated Scots.  Otherwise I would not have dressed in full fig - kilt, white spats, belt, and hair sporran.

He was waiting for me in the entrance hall of his apartment, seated at a table on which was a decanter of colourless fluid and two glasses.

He poured drinks, barked “Prosit” and downed his in one.  I swear it was rocket fuel. Mine would not go past my epiglottis.  The next one lay on top of it and the merciless third, on which he insisted with mounting malevolence, stirred the others into action.

I rushed to the bathroom.  No time to reach the lavatory.  My pink tribute flowed into the bath.  Reaching for the tap to ease its passage down the drain, I mistakenly turned on the shower and was drenched.

At the frosty dinner which followed no one mentioned my soaking condition, though steam rose from me in billowing clouds, rivers of white Blanco ran down my kilt and small pools of water from the sporran that looked like a drowned  badger formed at my feet.

But you could see the Baron felt some consolation for losing the war.

 

 

SIC TRANSIT JESSE MATTHEWS……………………….

 

A reader, Sarah Thomas, writes:

 

I don't know much about Jesse Matthews. Googled to deal with my ignorance and am not any the wiser: I got, along with much else, a reference to the national Scrabble championship, a notice of appeal, dated 2008, by someone in the state of Tennessee who has been convicted of assault and battery, and a poster dating from 1936 which must be the relevant Jesse but it didn't enlighten me.

 

Sarah: - Miss Matthews was a Soubrette, star of pre-war theatre and films who lived on to become Mrs Dale in that famous Diary on the Home Service, now known as Radio 4.