The people I miss most from my time in Wales are the scholars. Not the academics who ring fenced the culture with an artificial Welsh language, incomprehensible to the average Welshman, which served to protect their jobs from non-Welsh competition.
My scholars were were the auto-didacts obsessed with a theory, usually bizarre, on which they spent their lives. A singularly unpleasant Welsh peer of my acquaintance amassed considerable evidence to prove he was the rightful king of France. An accountant friend Kathryn Pritchard Gibson bought Pen y Bryn, a chicken farm in Gwynedd. She became convinced it had been a royal palace. Experts scoffed at her years of research but she was proved right. Her turreted manor house was built from the ruins of the lost palace of Llywellyn the Great. Another chum, a quarryman's son, the Rev Aelwyn Roberts, vicar of Llandegai, exorcist to the bishop of Bangor, was the author of a best selling book on ghosts, founder of a publishing firm and a world authority on the Ty Bach (Welsh for outside privy). He wrote two books tracing that noble edifice back to the chamber pot of the Emperor Diocletian.
He also catalogued its etymology. To the Saxons it was the Gongfermor (gong, a privy; fermor, to cleanse). To the Welsh it is a Ty Bach (little house); Ty Cefyn (back quarters – of a house); Ty Cyffredin (House of Commons) and, most puzzling of all, Y Lle Chwech (The Sixpenny Place). He did solve the problem of the house with two outside privies at Chapel House in Amlwch. One was roomy and very posh, the other utilitarian. The posh one was for the exclusive use of visiting ministers, the plainer one for the tenants.
As yet no one has substantiated his greatest obsession. Aelwyn believed Shakespeare was the pen name of a committee headed by a Welshman, John Williams. A 17th century archbishop of York, Williams was buried in Llandegai church. The theory started with an itinerant tax collector called George Winchcombe, who, with his brother Bernard, published a bizarre book “Shakespeare's Ghost Writers” in the 1960s. Aelwyn believed the theory was corroborated by an inscription in Latin on Williams's tomb which acknowledges “his outstanding eminence in the world of letters for which he was showered with honours by two kings.”
As Aelwyn pointed out, the Archbishop's only published work was a tract on the Communion Table.
But he certainly had the intellectual capacity to write the plays. He spoke nine languages, was a brilliant scholar, well versed in law, theology and the classics. He spent most of his life in Court and was a privy councillor, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor. When he was bishop of Lincoln, he was fined and his chaplain put in the stocks for producing “A Midsummer Night's Dream” in his palace. He was a friend of Squire John Salisbury of Denbigh, to whom Shakespeare dedicated a poem. Tom Roberts, an antiquarian bookseller of that town, discovered an unknown poem of Shakespeare's, together with evidence that the Bard spent the plague years as a guest of Sir John.
In the matter of obsessions, an old sea captain I knew, Richard Turner, was the king. His great love was a nun called Gwenllian who had been safely dead for 700 years. She was the daughter of Llywellyn, the last Prince of Wales, who was 'defeated' by the English – or, as another friend of mine assured me, assassinated by the Welsh. Gwenllian was kidnapped and sent to a nunnery at Sempringham Priory.
When, in his late sixties, Captain Turner heard that the bishop of Peterborough was to dedicate a plaque to St Gilbert, the Priory's founder, he knew exactly what was due. Watched in astonishment by several dozen dignitaries, he staggered up the Priory path carrying a heavy tombstone in Gwenllian's memory. He had it made by a Caernarfon blacksmith with the inscription “Died at Sempringham, 7.6.1337, having been held a prisoner for 54 years”. He put it in the boot of his car and drove nearly 300 miles to deliver it. He had not sought permission from the Crown, who owned the land, or the Diocese who owned the Priory. Bishop Bill Ind was in a quandary. But he was an amiable man. He couldn't put the stone in the ruin but he gave permission for it be erected in the grounds.
When I went to interview him, Captain Turner was in the middle of an even more ambitious plot. He had read that a fragment of the True Cross, which had been part of Llywellyn's regalia, had been cemented in the roof of the new St George's Chapel in Windsor. The Captain wanted to borrow a ladder and steal it back. Alas, he knew no one in Caernarfon who had a hundred foot ladder.
I knew a house builder, Emrys Jones, who built 60 of the 120 houses in his village Llanrhaedr, Denbighshire, a restaurant, a garage and a village museum which he stocked and curated. In his spare time he painted the most exquisite miniatures. Lacking anywhere to show them, he decided to build an art gallery. Alas, he got carried away and, by the time he had finished, the gallery was so big the miniatures would have been lost in it. When I last met him he was searching desperately for an artist to take it off his hands.
Another builder pal of mine, Clement Beretta, built his wife a house and painted murals on every available surface. She moved in but Beretta had run out of walls. So he built her another house next door. In all she moved sixteen times. She refused to move to the seventeenth: Beretta planned to build it underground..
The murals are great selling points. In his youth, Beretta had been introduced to the painter Rex Whistler, who had been commissioned by the 6th Marquess of Anglesey to paint murals in his dining room. When Whistler saw Beretta's work, he recruited him to paint the trompe l'oeil coffered Italian ceilings and a series of fluted pilasters. It took him six months and so far no one has been able to tell where Beretta's work ends and Whistler's begins.
The 7th Marquess was my landlord and is a great friend. He is not an auto-didact but is very scathing about his school, Eton. “Outdoor earth closets and no fires before 4.30 in the afternoon.” He was learning the cello but his housemaster said he must give it up because he was so bad at maths. “Now,” he told me ruefully, “I cannot play the cello and I am no good at maths.”
He is too modest. William Mathias, the composer, said he could earn his living as a professional musician; our neighbour Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, insisted he could paint to a professional standard. He has also been awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal for his multi volume History of the Cavalry. He served in the Royal Horse Guards, which his ancestor, Wellington's Cavalry Commander at Waterloo, commanded. But he hates horses.
In 1940, when he was 16, he got a job in the drawing office at a Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory near Chester. He said: “We worked 17 or 18 hours a day with every third Sunday off and there wasn't a moment that wasn't absolutely wonderful, exciting, thrilling, getting on with it. Nothing mattered at all except to thrash Hitler. It was fun because there were all sorts of things that needed new drawings and I can claim that two or three improvements in Wellington bombers were due to me. I was also asked to build a ramp up to the canteen that is there to this day.”
I ONLY ASKED.........................................
Reading a history of Haiti in the terrible days of Papa Doc makes one wonder even more why the U.S. was so keen to topple Saddam Hussein but allowed the more evil Papa Doc to flourish in Haiti, which, as they have demonstrated this week, they can invade with ease. They even helped his equally evil son escape into exile with the Haitian treasury.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Saturday, 16 January 2010
ARMCHERISHED
We met across a crowded room at a jolly lunch party given by neighbours. For the Armchair and I it was love at first sight.
It was the size of Surrey and welcomed me with open arms of such substance that, had they circled Constantinople, they would have protected that city from sacking by unsavoury Crusaders in the pay of the Venetian Empire. It was stuffed with the feathers of a thousand good tempered geese and I sank into its embrace like a lost soul come home to a safe haven.
We were so obviously meant for each other that Jeannie and Philip, my generous hosts, brought it over on Twelfth Night, the old Christmas Day in the Julian calendar, and gave me the finest gift in the history of that noble day.
We celebrated The Arrival with a magical dinner of pheasant, stuffed with apple, black pudding, breadcrumbs, thyme, parsley and brandy. Alas, a temptress lay in wait. A genuine Martini glass with the narrow stem of a Gibson Girl and an Ella Fitzgerald lip that was wide and welcoming. We found it in a curious Factory Shop where we always find something to buy but never the item we were looking for.
I had been searching for just such a glass since another friend, Brian Hitchen, passed on to me the recipe for a Mafia Martini, which, when he worked in New York, he had acquired from a great friend who was a Mafia Capo di Capo.
Alas, the Martini proved such excellent company that I had several, fell asleep in the armchair and had to have the pheasant again the next day to discover what it tasted like.
I am now besotted with the armchair and bought it, as a welcome home present, a loose cover so costly it is almost certainly cloth of gold.
Being stationary suits me. When we lived in Wales, I needed Quells to cross the Menai Bridge. Yet the voice travelled far and wide. Until I retired, I broadcast a weekly letter from Anglesey for the World Service, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Forces Broadcasting Service. Mine was a household voice in Hobart, a cult in Calcutta, very big in Belize and in Orange, New South Wales, they talked of little else.
The voice was a world traveller but the rest of me stayed at home and did a weekly radio interview “Skidmore's Armchair” and a programme based on our street called “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which involved the minimum of moving about.
Lethargy was brought to my christening by an insistent fairy and another brought the love of the world of books. I never missed a day at the public library. The discovery that there was a building in the village filled with books which grown ups were desperate to lend you was the defining moment in my life.
There was no need to leave your home in order to travel. Over the centuries this strange breed, The Author, has been eager to do your travelling for you. You could sit back in your armchair and enjoy the best bits whilst The Author got bitten by mosquitoes.
With no one to guide me, my reading followed no pattern. I took Herodotus home because I thought it was in some way connected with the Daily Herald and I had ambitions to get a job there. I could not have chosen a better guide to travelling in ancient Greece and Egypt. He wrote in vivid language and - in translation by de Selincourt - used the sort of short words which we used in everyday conversation. He was a great traveller but, as with most reporters, no one believed what he said. He described how the pyramids were built after interviewing Egyptian priests. For centuries scholars insisted his explanation was rubbish. Years later on “Skidmore's Armchair” I interviewed the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. He told me that scholars were coming round to believing that Herodotus was telling the truth.
Never mind, every dog has its day.
In today's tabloids every day has its dog story.
So with Herodotus. He knew his readers liked stories about lovable animals. So he told the story of a breed of sheep which was prized for its fat tails. Tails which were so fat and so heavy that the shepherd made little carts that the sheep dragged carrying their tails behind them.
Herodotus knew that a tabloid story must have sex, crime, royalty or scandal. In the story of the building of the treasury to house Pharaoh Ramphsinitus’s vast fortune he managed to combine all four. Herodotus tells how the tradesman who built the treasury contrived a secret way in, which, on his death bed, he told his sons so that they could steal the Pharaoh's hoard . He wrote:
“They came by night to the palace, found the stone in the treasury wall and took it out. The king on his next visit to the treasury was surprised to see that some of the vessels in which his treasure was stored were no longer full though the seals were not broken. He ordered traps to be set near the money jars.
“The next time the thieves came one of them made his way to the treasure chamber; but as soon as he approached the money jar he was after, the trap got him. Realising his plight, he at once called to his brother and begged him to come as quickly as he could and cut off his head. Less the recognition of his dead body should involve both of them in ruin. The brother, seeing the sense of this request,acted upon it without delay. Then, having fitted the stone back into place, went home taking the severed head with him. Next morning the king visited the treasury, and what was his astonishment when he saw in the trap the headless body of the thief. Much perplexed, he decided to have the thief’s body hung up outside the walls and a guard set with orders to arrest anybody they might see thereabouts in tears or showing signs of mourning.
“The thieves' mother was much distressed by this treatment of her dead son’s body and begged her other son to do all he could to think of some way of getting it back. At last he thought of a way out of the difficulty. He filled some skins with wine and loaded them on donkeys, which he drove past the guard. Arriving there, he undid the fastenings of three of the skins. The wine poured out and he roared and banged his fist. The soldiers, seeing the wine flow down the road, seized their pots and ran to catch it.
“Such a quantity of wine was too much for the guards. Very drunk and drowsy, they stretched themselves out at full length and fell asleep at the spot. It was now well after dark and the thief took down his brother’s body. Then he put the body on the donkey and returned home.
“The king was very angry when he learned the thief’s body had been stolen. And determined at any cost to catch the man who had been clever enough to bring off such a coup.
“I find it hard to believe, says Herodotus, the priests’ account of the means he employed but here it is:
“He sent his own daughter to a brothel with instructions to admit all comers. And to compel each applicant to tell her what the cleverest and wickedest thing was they had done; and if anyone told the story of the corpse she was to get hold of him, scream for the guards and not allow him to escape until they arrived.
“The girl obeyed her father’s orders and the thief, when he came to know what she was doing, could not resist the temptation to go one better than the king in ingenuity. He cut the hand and arm of the body of a man who had just died; and putting them under his cloak went to visit the king’s daughter. When she asked him the question she had asked all others, he replied the wickedest deed he had done was to cut off his brother’s head when he was caught in a trap in the king’s treasury; and the cleverest was to make the guards drunk so that he could steal away his brother’s body. The girl immediately clutched at him. But under cover of darkness the thief pushed towards her the hand of the corpse, which she seized and held tight in the belief it was his own. Then leaving it in her grasp he made his escape through the door.......”
A very sporting Pharaoh as it turned out. He was so impressed he offered the thief not only a pardon, but the hand of his daughter.......I only hope it was HER hand.
It was the size of Surrey and welcomed me with open arms of such substance that, had they circled Constantinople, they would have protected that city from sacking by unsavoury Crusaders in the pay of the Venetian Empire. It was stuffed with the feathers of a thousand good tempered geese and I sank into its embrace like a lost soul come home to a safe haven.
We were so obviously meant for each other that Jeannie and Philip, my generous hosts, brought it over on Twelfth Night, the old Christmas Day in the Julian calendar, and gave me the finest gift in the history of that noble day.
We celebrated The Arrival with a magical dinner of pheasant, stuffed with apple, black pudding, breadcrumbs, thyme, parsley and brandy. Alas, a temptress lay in wait. A genuine Martini glass with the narrow stem of a Gibson Girl and an Ella Fitzgerald lip that was wide and welcoming. We found it in a curious Factory Shop where we always find something to buy but never the item we were looking for.
I had been searching for just such a glass since another friend, Brian Hitchen, passed on to me the recipe for a Mafia Martini, which, when he worked in New York, he had acquired from a great friend who was a Mafia Capo di Capo.
Alas, the Martini proved such excellent company that I had several, fell asleep in the armchair and had to have the pheasant again the next day to discover what it tasted like.
I am now besotted with the armchair and bought it, as a welcome home present, a loose cover so costly it is almost certainly cloth of gold.
Being stationary suits me. When we lived in Wales, I needed Quells to cross the Menai Bridge. Yet the voice travelled far and wide. Until I retired, I broadcast a weekly letter from Anglesey for the World Service, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Forces Broadcasting Service. Mine was a household voice in Hobart, a cult in Calcutta, very big in Belize and in Orange, New South Wales, they talked of little else.
The voice was a world traveller but the rest of me stayed at home and did a weekly radio interview “Skidmore's Armchair” and a programme based on our street called “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which involved the minimum of moving about.
Lethargy was brought to my christening by an insistent fairy and another brought the love of the world of books. I never missed a day at the public library. The discovery that there was a building in the village filled with books which grown ups were desperate to lend you was the defining moment in my life.
There was no need to leave your home in order to travel. Over the centuries this strange breed, The Author, has been eager to do your travelling for you. You could sit back in your armchair and enjoy the best bits whilst The Author got bitten by mosquitoes.
With no one to guide me, my reading followed no pattern. I took Herodotus home because I thought it was in some way connected with the Daily Herald and I had ambitions to get a job there. I could not have chosen a better guide to travelling in ancient Greece and Egypt. He wrote in vivid language and - in translation by de Selincourt - used the sort of short words which we used in everyday conversation. He was a great traveller but, as with most reporters, no one believed what he said. He described how the pyramids were built after interviewing Egyptian priests. For centuries scholars insisted his explanation was rubbish. Years later on “Skidmore's Armchair” I interviewed the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. He told me that scholars were coming round to believing that Herodotus was telling the truth.
Never mind, every dog has its day.
In today's tabloids every day has its dog story.
So with Herodotus. He knew his readers liked stories about lovable animals. So he told the story of a breed of sheep which was prized for its fat tails. Tails which were so fat and so heavy that the shepherd made little carts that the sheep dragged carrying their tails behind them.
Herodotus knew that a tabloid story must have sex, crime, royalty or scandal. In the story of the building of the treasury to house Pharaoh Ramphsinitus’s vast fortune he managed to combine all four. Herodotus tells how the tradesman who built the treasury contrived a secret way in, which, on his death bed, he told his sons so that they could steal the Pharaoh's hoard . He wrote:
“They came by night to the palace, found the stone in the treasury wall and took it out. The king on his next visit to the treasury was surprised to see that some of the vessels in which his treasure was stored were no longer full though the seals were not broken. He ordered traps to be set near the money jars.
“The next time the thieves came one of them made his way to the treasure chamber; but as soon as he approached the money jar he was after, the trap got him. Realising his plight, he at once called to his brother and begged him to come as quickly as he could and cut off his head. Less the recognition of his dead body should involve both of them in ruin. The brother, seeing the sense of this request,acted upon it without delay. Then, having fitted the stone back into place, went home taking the severed head with him. Next morning the king visited the treasury, and what was his astonishment when he saw in the trap the headless body of the thief. Much perplexed, he decided to have the thief’s body hung up outside the walls and a guard set with orders to arrest anybody they might see thereabouts in tears or showing signs of mourning.
“The thieves' mother was much distressed by this treatment of her dead son’s body and begged her other son to do all he could to think of some way of getting it back. At last he thought of a way out of the difficulty. He filled some skins with wine and loaded them on donkeys, which he drove past the guard. Arriving there, he undid the fastenings of three of the skins. The wine poured out and he roared and banged his fist. The soldiers, seeing the wine flow down the road, seized their pots and ran to catch it.
“Such a quantity of wine was too much for the guards. Very drunk and drowsy, they stretched themselves out at full length and fell asleep at the spot. It was now well after dark and the thief took down his brother’s body. Then he put the body on the donkey and returned home.
“The king was very angry when he learned the thief’s body had been stolen. And determined at any cost to catch the man who had been clever enough to bring off such a coup.
“I find it hard to believe, says Herodotus, the priests’ account of the means he employed but here it is:
“He sent his own daughter to a brothel with instructions to admit all comers. And to compel each applicant to tell her what the cleverest and wickedest thing was they had done; and if anyone told the story of the corpse she was to get hold of him, scream for the guards and not allow him to escape until they arrived.
“The girl obeyed her father’s orders and the thief, when he came to know what she was doing, could not resist the temptation to go one better than the king in ingenuity. He cut the hand and arm of the body of a man who had just died; and putting them under his cloak went to visit the king’s daughter. When she asked him the question she had asked all others, he replied the wickedest deed he had done was to cut off his brother’s head when he was caught in a trap in the king’s treasury; and the cleverest was to make the guards drunk so that he could steal away his brother’s body. The girl immediately clutched at him. But under cover of darkness the thief pushed towards her the hand of the corpse, which she seized and held tight in the belief it was his own. Then leaving it in her grasp he made his escape through the door.......”
A very sporting Pharaoh as it turned out. He was so impressed he offered the thief not only a pardon, but the hand of his daughter.......I only hope it was HER hand.
Friday, 8 January 2010
SO FAR NO FATHER
Looking back over a lifetime which has sparkled with unlikely friendships, the most gleeful was the one my wife and I enjoyed with two other writers, a retired judge called Ronnie Knox Mawer and his wife June, the most talented broadcaster I have ever met who in retirement turned out best sellers with provoking ease.
The apogee of Ronnie's career - and the subject of his hilarious books - was his appointment as Chief Justice of the South Seas in a bizarre career as a Colonial Judge in the days of Empire. He had been many things. An author, broadcaster, lorry-driving soldier, barrister, circuit judge and stipendiary magistrate. In retirement he toured the grand hotels scrounging unguents and blankets for the needy who crowded the St Vincent de Paul Society hostel near Victoria. He explained he was the Archbishop of Westminster's Arthur Daley.
Ronnie's guardian angel was an impish creature constantly devising comic situations which Ronnie relished. Going to war must have been light relief. Sent up a windmill in Holland to watch for V2s, he slipped gently out of his unit’s collective memory. So completely they forgot to tell him when the war ended and he was only recalled when his name was missed on the demobilisation list.
His time as a colonial judge in the South Seas ought to have been the subject of an Ealing Comedy. Ronnie, who would have had to put on weight to be spectral, spent his 35th birthday in full judicial robes partnering a 20-stone King of the Savage Islands in a dance of welcome. On circuit, his judge’s lodgings were a tree house which he shared with a colony of flying foxes. His predecessor had made history by adjourning a murder trial when the defendant's family ate the jury.
Back in this country and appointed a London stipendiary magistrate, his spectral appearance caused chaos in his court at Bow Street when a cleaner mistook him for the Ghost of the Clerkenwell strangler.
Back home he wore two overcoats. Not so much for warmth as to become visible to the naked eye.
Ronnie was 26 when he first put on the black cap and sentenced a man to death. He subsequently handed down more death sentences than most people have had last breakfasts.
The Knox Mawers spent their winters in a smart flat in Park Lane, Mayfair, and the summer in a row of cottages they had converted at the end of a vertiginous lane in the Eliseg Crags above Llangollen. The last time we dined together we had been bidden to celebrate the massacre of a colony of wasps who had turned a corner of his garden into Helmand Province.
I am standing over the nest with the insecticide and my friend is saying to the wasps within, “Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say.....”
I was puzzled to know why I had been lured seventy miles by the prospect of a hearty dinner to kill wasps. Then I recall my friend has a fine legal sense of precedent and my family has had a long connection with executioners. A gentle man, inevitably he went to grant the wasps a pardon, abandoning that section of his garden.
His father was a well known Wrexham chemist. A terrifying tyrant, he ruled his family in a gaunt, Victorian villa from which evacuees fled. In his book ”Are You Coming or Going?”, Ronnie turned him into a clown. As a precaution against gas attacks in 1939 Ronnie and his three sisters were all ordered to wear their masks wherever possible. Father set an example by wearing not only his gas mask to prune his cherished damson tree: he also wore a black steel helmet captured by an uncle from the Austrian army in 1914.
Ronnie wrote:“Father looked startlingly like the scientist in the horror movie ‘The Fly'........
.......our neighbour Mrs Hurford Jenkins was peacefully weeding her bed of African marigolds. Her shriek of terror rang down the entire road as she was helped into the house. Inevitably her husband hurried round to complain. ‘Are you trying to win your own war of Nerves, Knox Mawer?’ he demanded. Since father’s voice was muffled behind his mask, the major received no satisfactory reply............”
My father was the official driver to Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous public hangman. He did not mind his macabre role. It was a rest from his other job in the wartime police which was running a black market cartel. Though he did find it a touch strange the way Albert, who had a fine baritone voice, liked to lead a singsong in pubs on the way home from work.
Albert had a pub himself near Blackpool called “Help the Poor Struggler”, which even my old man thought was not in the best of taste. Though the coachloads of trippers who called there every day thought it a great joke and all wanted their photographs taken standing under the sign with Albert.
Another hangman I knew called Wade had a cafe in Yorkshire called “Rest Weary Pilgrim” so maybe a macabre sense of humour went with the job. Though a third chum, hangman Harry Allen, kept a pub called The Junction so it wasn't universal.
In the days of which I speak even bars on the road to Blackpool not run by hangmen did a roaring trade .Gin and orange was the staple drink and stood ready poured in rows on the bar top waiting for a charabanc to arrive. Unscrupulous landlords filled the glasses with orange juice and wiped a gin stained finger round the rim. No one ever noticed. Another scam after a punter had drunk three genuine gin and tonics was to serve him plain tonic for subsequent orders. The punter would still taste gin. It works. Try it.
My father was a wit, a bon viveur, the jovial heart of every merry company. A street fighter, a womaniser. And from the age of eleven I hated him. I had plenty of reason. He beat my grannie, my mother and he beat me.
When I was younger we were inseparable. When he wasn't drinking he would spend hours teaching me to draw or reading me Westerns or adventure stories about an improbable man called McClusky. He also read Dickens and Thorne Smith, a now forgotten humorous writer. He risked lung cancer to get a collection of English classic novels by smoking enough Kensitas Black Cat cigarettes to qualify for the gift.
My father was a thwarted student. At 15 he was fighting in the front line in World War One with the 1st Royal Scots. His war medals chronicled his dizzy climb to lance corporal and rapid return to private soldier. He claimed to be one of the last men to be given Field Punishment Number One, which was being lashed to the wheel of a field gun and birched. It was the only part of his service he talked about. War stories were verboten. Too painful to be recalled. Gassed and given up for dead, he recovered working on a fruit farm and became fit enough to join the police force in Manchester where he was shot in the head by the IRA, although he claimed the shot was fired by his inspector who disliked him.
Long after they were both dead, I realised that, unintentionally I was the cause of their misery. I learned my mother had declined conjugal relations since 1928 when I was conceived. She became pregnant before they were married. He had done what used to be called “the honourable thing” but they lived the rest of their lives in a bitterly unhappy marriage. Under the circumstances, his adulteries and his furies were surely understandable.
What I have since come to realise was that, had we not been father and son, we would have got on like a house on fire. He was born for trouble. On his first night as a policeman, a dentist had asked him, if he came across a stray cat, to put it in the dentist's cellar to clear an infestation of mice. Unfortunately, my father told the other policemen what he had done. All but one of them put a cat in the cellar. It was the one who put the dog in that got my father on a disciplinary charge.
His weakness was his willingness to accept gratuities. You could have given my father leprosy as long as it was free. In the early thirties there was an outbreak of psittacosis, a deadly disease transmitted by parrots. As a result, parrots were given away on every street corner. My father was the only person I heard of who accepted one. He was on duty at the time, but he brought the parrot home, then went back on his beat. Within minutes, the parrot had been killed by the cat.
We were living with my granny at the time, a lady who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and beaten him. When my father came home and demanded to know what had happened to his parrot, she told him it had just dropped dead. “Good God,” he said,”psittacosis!”
Before he could be stopped, he piled all our furniture into a heap in the backyard and burned it.
According to my mother, I had watched the incident intently. I did not speak until the fire burned down, when I said, “Naughty pussy ate the parrot”. It began a lifelong enmity between my father and his mother-in-law.
If the Bible has got it right,which I doubt, I should be meeting him soon. I hope so. As I say, I will be glad of the chance to apologise.
THE WORLD SPINS ROUND AND ROUND...........................
John Major and Lady Williams are two politicians of principle I have always found it possible to admire. On Radio this week they agreed that the worst thing that had entered politics in their lifetime was Spin and that the surest way to regain public respect for parliament was to sack all the spin doctors.
I am surprised they thought it a recent phenomenon. Spin is as old as humanity. It was evident in the cave paintings of animals and hunters which persuaded our ancestors that by making them they would achieve success in the field.
When I was a reporter so many people told me things about themselves I would have hesitated to tell my best friend that I decided the driving force of our sorry species was a desire to escape from anonymity. It isn't. What drives us is spin.
One of the great speeches in the Classical world was Pericles's funeral oration to the Athenians. Ostensibly, it celebrated the glorious dead in the first Peloponesian War. In fact it was an eulogy of the way of life to which he aspired for the Athenians. An appeal, like the later speeches of Churchill, another fine war leader and a master of spin, to sentimental patriotism. Cicero swayed the Senate with his oratory to achieve his ends.
I have only made two minor discoveries about Shakespeare. The first was that his play “The Tempest” contains echoes of most of the plays which preceded it, reminding those playgoers who saw it of the smash hits he had written in the past. The other is that the great battle speeches were not entirely the products of his soaring imagination. A source book he used was “Halle's Chronicles” which can now be read free on Gutenberg and Google. In them you will read the speeches of Henry V before Shrewsbury and Agincourt, which were the skeletons on which Shakespeare put flesh and were designed to put heart into the worn out soaking soldiers .
Today the ultimate spin is Warmgate.The principal spinners and doom sayers are the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, now derided, and the Met Office who cannot even get the weather right for the weekend but nevertheless presume to give forecasts for the next century. You remember Mr Fish's Tornado blip and the barbecue summer? In September they forecast that this was going to be the warmest winter for years. I read that in fact it has never been as cold for a quarter of a century. Now they excuse themselves by saying that climate (which affects global warming) is different from weather which doesn't. So we are committed to 6,000 wind farms in the sea round our septic isle.
Poor President Obama is a highly intelligent lawyer, clearly a man of principle untainted by the corrupt backcloth which has overshadowed his office for so many years. He wants to bring peace; he tried to provide every American with health care. Taken all in all, he was a man. But he has been spinned as a godlike figure who would solve all mankind's problems. He hasn't, and is being pillories because he has feet of flesh and blood.
The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect home owners from foreclosure was hailed as a Good Thing. A year later it has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.. The program has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Homes Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.
The apogee of Ronnie's career - and the subject of his hilarious books - was his appointment as Chief Justice of the South Seas in a bizarre career as a Colonial Judge in the days of Empire. He had been many things. An author, broadcaster, lorry-driving soldier, barrister, circuit judge and stipendiary magistrate. In retirement he toured the grand hotels scrounging unguents and blankets for the needy who crowded the St Vincent de Paul Society hostel near Victoria. He explained he was the Archbishop of Westminster's Arthur Daley.
Ronnie's guardian angel was an impish creature constantly devising comic situations which Ronnie relished. Going to war must have been light relief. Sent up a windmill in Holland to watch for V2s, he slipped gently out of his unit’s collective memory. So completely they forgot to tell him when the war ended and he was only recalled when his name was missed on the demobilisation list.
His time as a colonial judge in the South Seas ought to have been the subject of an Ealing Comedy. Ronnie, who would have had to put on weight to be spectral, spent his 35th birthday in full judicial robes partnering a 20-stone King of the Savage Islands in a dance of welcome. On circuit, his judge’s lodgings were a tree house which he shared with a colony of flying foxes. His predecessor had made history by adjourning a murder trial when the defendant's family ate the jury.
Back in this country and appointed a London stipendiary magistrate, his spectral appearance caused chaos in his court at Bow Street when a cleaner mistook him for the Ghost of the Clerkenwell strangler.
Back home he wore two overcoats. Not so much for warmth as to become visible to the naked eye.
Ronnie was 26 when he first put on the black cap and sentenced a man to death. He subsequently handed down more death sentences than most people have had last breakfasts.
The Knox Mawers spent their winters in a smart flat in Park Lane, Mayfair, and the summer in a row of cottages they had converted at the end of a vertiginous lane in the Eliseg Crags above Llangollen. The last time we dined together we had been bidden to celebrate the massacre of a colony of wasps who had turned a corner of his garden into Helmand Province.
I am standing over the nest with the insecticide and my friend is saying to the wasps within, “Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say.....”
I was puzzled to know why I had been lured seventy miles by the prospect of a hearty dinner to kill wasps. Then I recall my friend has a fine legal sense of precedent and my family has had a long connection with executioners. A gentle man, inevitably he went to grant the wasps a pardon, abandoning that section of his garden.
His father was a well known Wrexham chemist. A terrifying tyrant, he ruled his family in a gaunt, Victorian villa from which evacuees fled. In his book ”Are You Coming or Going?”, Ronnie turned him into a clown. As a precaution against gas attacks in 1939 Ronnie and his three sisters were all ordered to wear their masks wherever possible. Father set an example by wearing not only his gas mask to prune his cherished damson tree: he also wore a black steel helmet captured by an uncle from the Austrian army in 1914.
Ronnie wrote:“Father looked startlingly like the scientist in the horror movie ‘The Fly'........
.......our neighbour Mrs Hurford Jenkins was peacefully weeding her bed of African marigolds. Her shriek of terror rang down the entire road as she was helped into the house. Inevitably her husband hurried round to complain. ‘Are you trying to win your own war of Nerves, Knox Mawer?’ he demanded. Since father’s voice was muffled behind his mask, the major received no satisfactory reply............”
My father was the official driver to Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous public hangman. He did not mind his macabre role. It was a rest from his other job in the wartime police which was running a black market cartel. Though he did find it a touch strange the way Albert, who had a fine baritone voice, liked to lead a singsong in pubs on the way home from work.
Albert had a pub himself near Blackpool called “Help the Poor Struggler”, which even my old man thought was not in the best of taste. Though the coachloads of trippers who called there every day thought it a great joke and all wanted their photographs taken standing under the sign with Albert.
Another hangman I knew called Wade had a cafe in Yorkshire called “Rest Weary Pilgrim” so maybe a macabre sense of humour went with the job. Though a third chum, hangman Harry Allen, kept a pub called The Junction so it wasn't universal.
In the days of which I speak even bars on the road to Blackpool not run by hangmen did a roaring trade .Gin and orange was the staple drink and stood ready poured in rows on the bar top waiting for a charabanc to arrive. Unscrupulous landlords filled the glasses with orange juice and wiped a gin stained finger round the rim. No one ever noticed. Another scam after a punter had drunk three genuine gin and tonics was to serve him plain tonic for subsequent orders. The punter would still taste gin. It works. Try it.
My father was a wit, a bon viveur, the jovial heart of every merry company. A street fighter, a womaniser. And from the age of eleven I hated him. I had plenty of reason. He beat my grannie, my mother and he beat me.
When I was younger we were inseparable. When he wasn't drinking he would spend hours teaching me to draw or reading me Westerns or adventure stories about an improbable man called McClusky. He also read Dickens and Thorne Smith, a now forgotten humorous writer. He risked lung cancer to get a collection of English classic novels by smoking enough Kensitas Black Cat cigarettes to qualify for the gift.
My father was a thwarted student. At 15 he was fighting in the front line in World War One with the 1st Royal Scots. His war medals chronicled his dizzy climb to lance corporal and rapid return to private soldier. He claimed to be one of the last men to be given Field Punishment Number One, which was being lashed to the wheel of a field gun and birched. It was the only part of his service he talked about. War stories were verboten. Too painful to be recalled. Gassed and given up for dead, he recovered working on a fruit farm and became fit enough to join the police force in Manchester where he was shot in the head by the IRA, although he claimed the shot was fired by his inspector who disliked him.
Long after they were both dead, I realised that, unintentionally I was the cause of their misery. I learned my mother had declined conjugal relations since 1928 when I was conceived. She became pregnant before they were married. He had done what used to be called “the honourable thing” but they lived the rest of their lives in a bitterly unhappy marriage. Under the circumstances, his adulteries and his furies were surely understandable.
What I have since come to realise was that, had we not been father and son, we would have got on like a house on fire. He was born for trouble. On his first night as a policeman, a dentist had asked him, if he came across a stray cat, to put it in the dentist's cellar to clear an infestation of mice. Unfortunately, my father told the other policemen what he had done. All but one of them put a cat in the cellar. It was the one who put the dog in that got my father on a disciplinary charge.
His weakness was his willingness to accept gratuities. You could have given my father leprosy as long as it was free. In the early thirties there was an outbreak of psittacosis, a deadly disease transmitted by parrots. As a result, parrots were given away on every street corner. My father was the only person I heard of who accepted one. He was on duty at the time, but he brought the parrot home, then went back on his beat. Within minutes, the parrot had been killed by the cat.
We were living with my granny at the time, a lady who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and beaten him. When my father came home and demanded to know what had happened to his parrot, she told him it had just dropped dead. “Good God,” he said,”psittacosis!”
Before he could be stopped, he piled all our furniture into a heap in the backyard and burned it.
According to my mother, I had watched the incident intently. I did not speak until the fire burned down, when I said, “Naughty pussy ate the parrot”. It began a lifelong enmity between my father and his mother-in-law.
If the Bible has got it right,which I doubt, I should be meeting him soon. I hope so. As I say, I will be glad of the chance to apologise.
THE WORLD SPINS ROUND AND ROUND...........................
John Major and Lady Williams are two politicians of principle I have always found it possible to admire. On Radio this week they agreed that the worst thing that had entered politics in their lifetime was Spin and that the surest way to regain public respect for parliament was to sack all the spin doctors.
I am surprised they thought it a recent phenomenon. Spin is as old as humanity. It was evident in the cave paintings of animals and hunters which persuaded our ancestors that by making them they would achieve success in the field.
When I was a reporter so many people told me things about themselves I would have hesitated to tell my best friend that I decided the driving force of our sorry species was a desire to escape from anonymity. It isn't. What drives us is spin.
One of the great speeches in the Classical world was Pericles's funeral oration to the Athenians. Ostensibly, it celebrated the glorious dead in the first Peloponesian War. In fact it was an eulogy of the way of life to which he aspired for the Athenians. An appeal, like the later speeches of Churchill, another fine war leader and a master of spin, to sentimental patriotism. Cicero swayed the Senate with his oratory to achieve his ends.
I have only made two minor discoveries about Shakespeare. The first was that his play “The Tempest” contains echoes of most of the plays which preceded it, reminding those playgoers who saw it of the smash hits he had written in the past. The other is that the great battle speeches were not entirely the products of his soaring imagination. A source book he used was “Halle's Chronicles” which can now be read free on Gutenberg and Google. In them you will read the speeches of Henry V before Shrewsbury and Agincourt, which were the skeletons on which Shakespeare put flesh and were designed to put heart into the worn out soaking soldiers .
Today the ultimate spin is Warmgate.The principal spinners and doom sayers are the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, now derided, and the Met Office who cannot even get the weather right for the weekend but nevertheless presume to give forecasts for the next century. You remember Mr Fish's Tornado blip and the barbecue summer? In September they forecast that this was going to be the warmest winter for years. I read that in fact it has never been as cold for a quarter of a century. Now they excuse themselves by saying that climate (which affects global warming) is different from weather which doesn't. So we are committed to 6,000 wind farms in the sea round our septic isle.
Poor President Obama is a highly intelligent lawyer, clearly a man of principle untainted by the corrupt backcloth which has overshadowed his office for so many years. He wants to bring peace; he tried to provide every American with health care. Taken all in all, he was a man. But he has been spinned as a godlike figure who would solve all mankind's problems. He hasn't, and is being pillories because he has feet of flesh and blood.
The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect home owners from foreclosure was hailed as a Good Thing. A year later it has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.. The program has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Homes Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.
Thursday, 31 December 2009
OUT, OUT, BRIEF CELEBRITY
Brian May is a pop star, a member of Queen and an astro-physicist of international repute. On radio the other day he admitted he did not approve of celebrity. Billy Bragg is a highly intelligent pop star and thinker. He admitted on radio that he too reckoned nothing to celebrity.
I only suffered a brief moment of celebrity when I appeared on TV but I know exactly why they are concerned. On radio I broadcast every week to about 26 million listeners worldwide and no one had a clue who I was. Just a disembodied voice that was remembered only by the most eagle-eared.
When the first two programmes of a TV series “Home Brew”, which I co-presented with a folk singer called Frank Hennessey, went out, I became a marked man. The first intimation of fame is that one thinks one's flies are undone. This is because wherever you go people give you a double take. The second glance is because the first one leaves them with a niggling feeling they have seen the glancee somewhere before. It always produced in me a hasty examination of my flies.
Even worse is the bolder spirit who is not going to let you get away with eluding his memory. He stops you in mid-tread and says, “I know that face. Don't tell me...” You have no intention of telling him, even if you knew what he didn't want to know.
“I'll have you a minute,” said this one guy in Cardiff. “On the tip of my tongue. Never forget a face.” A pause before illumination dawned. “Got you,” he said. “You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells.”
I thought I ought to have some visual clue that would fix me in the minds of such people. So when I was invited to present the Welsh Sheepdog Championships I wore a different coloured waistcoat
for each programme. Worked like a charm. Fellow stopped me in Llandudno.
“Saw you on TV last night. Fantastic!” “Oh, you like sheepdogs then?” “Cannot stand them, yapping b.....s.” “It's not the sheep, surely?” “Course it's not.” “ Oh, so you liked me? Thank.........”
“You? You were crap. You gabbled.” “So what was so marvellous?” “The waistcoats. Bloody fantastic, man.”
I spent the rest of that brief career in the limelight convinced I could have sent the waistcoats on jobs whilst remaining comfortably at home.
Sometimes the voice is memorable.
I had a comedy programme called “Radio Brynsiencyn”. There was no budget so I had to use the people round me as characters. The singer Aled Jones's dad asked me to teach the boy soprano interviewing. Didn't charge me when I made him my junior reporter.
One of the most important women in my life was called Rose Roberts. She came to us as a cleaner but soon took complete charge of us, the animals and the house. She had a voice that would strip paint. I recruited her as the station cleaner and called her Attila the Hoover. She had a camp friend with a lovely Welsh accent. I re-created him as Goronwy Generator, who pedalled the bike that powered the generator that beamed the programmes. The entire Welsh nation is formed of actors. They read the scripts I wrote for them like real pros. Aled, who takes work more seriously than anyone I have ever met - he did his school homework in the dressing room of the Hollywood Bowl whilst waiting to stun a capacity audience - was soon a very professional interviewer. He was a quick learner.
His dad told me about the time he went to Lloyd Webber's flat to record “Memories”. Lloyd Webber asked him if he would like to do a run through. Aled said he would rather go straight ahead with the recording. The first tape was perfect. A stunned Lloyd Webber said: “It took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.”
Aled's dad told me: “I didn't like to tell him the lad was anxious not to miss Match of the Day.”
.
Rose and Goronwy were avid theatregoers and never missed a West End opening. They were in the queue at the London Palladium when Rose gave voice, briefly. It was enough.
“Blimey,” said a man in the queue, “it's Attila the Hoover!”
Now that IS celebrity.
BLOW.BLOW THOU GLOBAL WARMING
It hardly ever snows heavily in the Fens. This week we have had blizzards. As I contemplated the snowy wastes from my window I remembered 1974 when Global Cooling was all the rage. A high-priority government report warned of climate change that would lead to floods and starvation.
It further stated that ‘leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’.
The report was called ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974.
Many of the terms bandied about 35 years ago are still being employed by today’s fear-mongers - about the very opposite phenomenon.
The usual disasters were projected: the ‘new climatic era’ was said to be bringing famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena. The Sahara would expand. World grain reserves, already at less than a month’s supply, would be depleted. A list of past civilisations brought down by ‘major and minor’ cooling episodes was given, which included the Indus, Hittite, Mycenaean, and the Mali empire of Africa. Any possible benefits to climate change were barely mentioned.
More parallels can be drawn. According to the CIA report, in 1974 climate science was developing ‘a successful climatic prediction model’, as indeed it still is. Government intervention had brought together eminent scientists who had previously been at odds with each other, then had established a ‘scientific consensus’ on ‘global climate change’.
The scientists claimed this pattern of cooling would cause ‘major economic problems around the world’. Dealing with this would, of course, require the creation of several new government agencies. The media at the time seized on all of this, just as it is doing now. Newsweek and the New York Times described the global cooling threat.
How is it that the parallels between that 1970s panic and today’s have been so little remarked upon? There have even been recent attempts to label the ‘global cooling consensus’ a ‘myth’, most notably in a well-publicised article by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, published by the American Meteorological Society in September 2008.
Predictably, the CIA recommended massive funding of the new field of research, climatology.
Thirty years later they once again join forces to warn us of the dangers of global warming. The world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact . Yet in February, The Telegraph reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades. According to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, the earth's warmest period was during the Holocene epoch. This period is dated from about 5,000to 3,000 BC. During this time average global temperatures were 1 to 2°celsius warmer than they are today. We survived.
All we can be sure of is that the climate is changing and something must be done. My modest proposal for saving the world is that we nationalise Skidmore's Island. Instead of fighting climate change we adapt to it. Let us redesign the United Kingdom. The first ten miles of the coastal area will be designated as a nature reserve and no building of any kind permitted on it. The next island band will be high carbon producing factories, office buildings etc. Within that will be a band of hospitals, old people's colonies and leisure centres. Residential accommodation will be limited to the high ground in the centre of the island, far away from the dangers of flooding .
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YIN AND A
I only suffered a brief moment of celebrity when I appeared on TV but I know exactly why they are concerned. On radio I broadcast every week to about 26 million listeners worldwide and no one had a clue who I was. Just a disembodied voice that was remembered only by the most eagle-eared.
When the first two programmes of a TV series “Home Brew”, which I co-presented with a folk singer called Frank Hennessey, went out, I became a marked man. The first intimation of fame is that one thinks one's flies are undone. This is because wherever you go people give you a double take. The second glance is because the first one leaves them with a niggling feeling they have seen the glancee somewhere before. It always produced in me a hasty examination of my flies.
Even worse is the bolder spirit who is not going to let you get away with eluding his memory. He stops you in mid-tread and says, “I know that face. Don't tell me...” You have no intention of telling him, even if you knew what he didn't want to know.
“I'll have you a minute,” said this one guy in Cardiff. “On the tip of my tongue. Never forget a face.” A pause before illumination dawned. “Got you,” he said. “You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells.”
I thought I ought to have some visual clue that would fix me in the minds of such people. So when I was invited to present the Welsh Sheepdog Championships I wore a different coloured waistcoat
for each programme. Worked like a charm. Fellow stopped me in Llandudno.
“Saw you on TV last night. Fantastic!” “Oh, you like sheepdogs then?” “Cannot stand them, yapping b.....s.” “It's not the sheep, surely?” “Course it's not.” “ Oh, so you liked me? Thank.........”
“You? You were crap. You gabbled.” “So what was so marvellous?” “The waistcoats. Bloody fantastic, man.”
I spent the rest of that brief career in the limelight convinced I could have sent the waistcoats on jobs whilst remaining comfortably at home.
Sometimes the voice is memorable.
I had a comedy programme called “Radio Brynsiencyn”. There was no budget so I had to use the people round me as characters. The singer Aled Jones's dad asked me to teach the boy soprano interviewing. Didn't charge me when I made him my junior reporter.
One of the most important women in my life was called Rose Roberts. She came to us as a cleaner but soon took complete charge of us, the animals and the house. She had a voice that would strip paint. I recruited her as the station cleaner and called her Attila the Hoover. She had a camp friend with a lovely Welsh accent. I re-created him as Goronwy Generator, who pedalled the bike that powered the generator that beamed the programmes. The entire Welsh nation is formed of actors. They read the scripts I wrote for them like real pros. Aled, who takes work more seriously than anyone I have ever met - he did his school homework in the dressing room of the Hollywood Bowl whilst waiting to stun a capacity audience - was soon a very professional interviewer. He was a quick learner.
His dad told me about the time he went to Lloyd Webber's flat to record “Memories”. Lloyd Webber asked him if he would like to do a run through. Aled said he would rather go straight ahead with the recording. The first tape was perfect. A stunned Lloyd Webber said: “It took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.”
Aled's dad told me: “I didn't like to tell him the lad was anxious not to miss Match of the Day.”
.
Rose and Goronwy were avid theatregoers and never missed a West End opening. They were in the queue at the London Palladium when Rose gave voice, briefly. It was enough.
“Blimey,” said a man in the queue, “it's Attila the Hoover!”
Now that IS celebrity.
BLOW.BLOW THOU GLOBAL WARMING
It hardly ever snows heavily in the Fens. This week we have had blizzards. As I contemplated the snowy wastes from my window I remembered 1974 when Global Cooling was all the rage. A high-priority government report warned of climate change that would lead to floods and starvation.
It further stated that ‘leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’.
The report was called ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974.
Many of the terms bandied about 35 years ago are still being employed by today’s fear-mongers - about the very opposite phenomenon.
The usual disasters were projected: the ‘new climatic era’ was said to be bringing famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena. The Sahara would expand. World grain reserves, already at less than a month’s supply, would be depleted. A list of past civilisations brought down by ‘major and minor’ cooling episodes was given, which included the Indus, Hittite, Mycenaean, and the Mali empire of Africa. Any possible benefits to climate change were barely mentioned.
More parallels can be drawn. According to the CIA report, in 1974 climate science was developing ‘a successful climatic prediction model’, as indeed it still is. Government intervention had brought together eminent scientists who had previously been at odds with each other, then had established a ‘scientific consensus’ on ‘global climate change’.
The scientists claimed this pattern of cooling would cause ‘major economic problems around the world’. Dealing with this would, of course, require the creation of several new government agencies. The media at the time seized on all of this, just as it is doing now. Newsweek and the New York Times described the global cooling threat.
How is it that the parallels between that 1970s panic and today’s have been so little remarked upon? There have even been recent attempts to label the ‘global cooling consensus’ a ‘myth’, most notably in a well-publicised article by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, published by the American Meteorological Society in September 2008.
Predictably, the CIA recommended massive funding of the new field of research, climatology.
Thirty years later they once again join forces to warn us of the dangers of global warming. The world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact . Yet in February, The Telegraph reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades. According to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, the earth's warmest period was during the Holocene epoch. This period is dated from about 5,000to 3,000 BC. During this time average global temperatures were 1 to 2°celsius warmer than they are today. We survived.
All we can be sure of is that the climate is changing and something must be done. My modest proposal for saving the world is that we nationalise Skidmore's Island. Instead of fighting climate change we adapt to it. Let us redesign the United Kingdom. The first ten miles of the coastal area will be designated as a nature reserve and no building of any kind permitted on it. The next island band will be high carbon producing factories, office buildings etc. Within that will be a band of hospitals, old people's colonies and leisure centres. Residential accommodation will be limited to the high ground in the centre of the island, far away from the dangers of flooding .
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YIN AND A
Thursday, 24 December 2009
THE TURKEY THAT TROTTED
I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out of work and this pal of mine said: "Don't suppose you'll be having much of a Christmas?"
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than it is in the house and I have promised the kids we will go to Curry's to watch the Queen's Speech through the window. Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away. Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob note and went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free scotch and eating vol-au-vents which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have," and grabbed the parcel of chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm. Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed through with a drop kick. It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of another eight Scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death, the manager came up and gave me a parcel."I hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he said.
It was a twelve pound turkey.
Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
FROM “FORGIVE US MORE PRESS PASSES”, published by Revel Barker, available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA. Or on order from any decent bookshop.
..
Health & Safety checklist for carol singers..
> The Rocking Carol
>
> Little Jesus, sweetly sleep, do not stir;
> We will lend a coat of fur,
> We will rock you, rock you, rock you,
> We will rock you, rock you, rock you:
>
> Fur is no longer appropriate wear for small infants, both
> due to risk of allergy to animal fur, and for ethical
> reasons. Therefore faux fur, a nice cellular blanket or
> perhaps micro-fleece material should be considered a
> suitable alternative.
>
> Please note, only persons who have been subject to a
> Criminal Records Bureau check and have enhanced clearance
> will be permitted to rock baby Jesus. Persons must carry
> their CRB disclosure with them at all times and be prepared
> to provide three forms of identification before rocking
> commences.
>
> Jingle Bells
>
> Dashing through the snow
> In a one horse open sleigh
> O'er the fields we go
> Laughing all the way
>
> A risk assessment must be submitted before an open sleigh is
> considered safe for members of the public to travel on. The
> risk assessment must also consider whether it is appropriate
> to use only one horse for such a venture, particularly if
> passengers are of larger proportions. Please note,
> permission must be gained from landowners before entering
> their fields. To avoid offending those not participating in
> celebrations, we would request that laughter is moderate
> only and not loud enough to be considered a noise nuisance.
>
> While Shepherds Watched
>
> While shepherds watched
> Their flocks by night
> All seated on the ground,
> The angel of the Lord came down
> And glory shone around
>
> The Union of Shepherds has complained that it breaches
> health and safety regulations to insist that shepherds watch
> their flocks without appropriate seating arrangements being
> provided, therefore benches, stools and orthopaedic chairs
> are now available. Shepherds have also requested that due to
> the inclement weather conditions at this time of year that
> they should watch their flocks via cctv cameras from
> centrally heated shepherd observation huts. Please note,
> the Angel of the Lord is reminded that before shining his /
> her glory all around she / he must ascertain that all
> shepherds have been issued with glasses capable of filtering
> out the harmful effects of UVA, UVB and the overwhelming
> effects of Glory.
>
> Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer
>
> Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer
> had a very shiny nose.
> And if you ever saw him,
> you would even say it glows.
>
> You are advised that under the Equal Opportunities for All
> Policy, it is inappropriate for persons to make comment with
> regard to the ruddiness of any part of Mr. R. Reindeer.
> Further to this, exclusion of Mr R Reindeer from the
> Reindeer Games will be considered discriminatory and
> disciplinary action will be taken against those found guilty
> of this offence. A full investigation will be implemented
> and sanctions - including suspension on full pay - will be
> considered whilst this investigation takes place.
>
> Little Donkey
>
> Little donkey, little donkey on the dusty road
> Got to keep on plodding onwards with your precious load
>
> The RSPCA have issued strict guidelines with regard to how
> heavy a load that a donkey of small stature is permitted to
> carry, also included in the guidelines is guidance regarding
> how often to feed the donkey and how many rest breaks are
> required over a four hour plodding period. Please note that
> due to the increased risk of pollution from the dusty road,
> Mary and Joseph are required to wear face masks to prevent
> inhalation of any airborne particles. The donkey has
> expressed his discomfort at being labeled 'little' and would
> prefer just to be simply referred to as Mr. Donkey. To
> comment upon his height or lack thereof may be considered an
> infringement of his equine rights.
>
> We Three Kings
>
> We three kings of Orient are
> Bearing gifts we traverse afar
> Field and fountain, moor and mountain
> Following yonder star
>
> Whilst the gift of gold is still considered acceptable - as
> it may be redeemed at a later date through such
> organisations as 'Cash for Gold' etc, gifts of frankincense
> and myrrh are not appropriate due to the potential risk of
> oils and fragrances causing allergic reactions. A suggested
> gift alternative would be to make a donation to a worthy
> cause in the recipients name or perhaps give a gift voucher.
> We would not advise that the traversing kings rely on
> navigation by stars in order to reach their destinations and
> suggest the use of RAC Routefinder or satellite navigation,
> which will provide the quickest route and advice regarding
> fuel consumption. Please note as per the guidelines from the
> RSPCA for Mr Donkey, the camels carrying the three kings of
> Orient will require regular food and rest breaks. Facemasks
> for the three kings are also advisable due to the likelihood
> of dust from the camel feet.
>
> Away in a Manger No Crib for a bed - This is definitely one
> for Social services
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than it is in the house and I have promised the kids we will go to Curry's to watch the Queen's Speech through the window. Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away. Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob note and went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free scotch and eating vol-au-vents which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have," and grabbed the parcel of chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm. Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed through with a drop kick. It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of another eight Scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death, the manager came up and gave me a parcel."I hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he said.
It was a twelve pound turkey.
Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
FROM “FORGIVE US MORE PRESS PASSES”, published by Revel Barker, available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA. Or on order from any decent bookshop.
..
Health & Safety checklist for carol singers..
> The Rocking Carol
>
> Little Jesus, sweetly sleep, do not stir;
> We will lend a coat of fur,
> We will rock you, rock you, rock you,
> We will rock you, rock you, rock you:
>
> Fur is no longer appropriate wear for small infants, both
> due to risk of allergy to animal fur, and for ethical
> reasons. Therefore faux fur, a nice cellular blanket or
> perhaps micro-fleece material should be considered a
> suitable alternative.
>
> Please note, only persons who have been subject to a
> Criminal Records Bureau check and have enhanced clearance
> will be permitted to rock baby Jesus. Persons must carry
> their CRB disclosure with them at all times and be prepared
> to provide three forms of identification before rocking
> commences.
>
> Jingle Bells
>
> Dashing through the snow
> In a one horse open sleigh
> O'er the fields we go
> Laughing all the way
>
> A risk assessment must be submitted before an open sleigh is
> considered safe for members of the public to travel on. The
> risk assessment must also consider whether it is appropriate
> to use only one horse for such a venture, particularly if
> passengers are of larger proportions. Please note,
> permission must be gained from landowners before entering
> their fields. To avoid offending those not participating in
> celebrations, we would request that laughter is moderate
> only and not loud enough to be considered a noise nuisance.
>
> While Shepherds Watched
>
> While shepherds watched
> Their flocks by night
> All seated on the ground,
> The angel of the Lord came down
> And glory shone around
>
> The Union of Shepherds has complained that it breaches
> health and safety regulations to insist that shepherds watch
> their flocks without appropriate seating arrangements being
> provided, therefore benches, stools and orthopaedic chairs
> are now available. Shepherds have also requested that due to
> the inclement weather conditions at this time of year that
> they should watch their flocks via cctv cameras from
> centrally heated shepherd observation huts. Please note,
> the Angel of the Lord is reminded that before shining his /
> her glory all around she / he must ascertain that all
> shepherds have been issued with glasses capable of filtering
> out the harmful effects of UVA, UVB and the overwhelming
> effects of Glory.
>
> Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer
>
> Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer
> had a very shiny nose.
> And if you ever saw him,
> you would even say it glows.
>
> You are advised that under the Equal Opportunities for All
> Policy, it is inappropriate for persons to make comment with
> regard to the ruddiness of any part of Mr. R. Reindeer.
> Further to this, exclusion of Mr R Reindeer from the
> Reindeer Games will be considered discriminatory and
> disciplinary action will be taken against those found guilty
> of this offence. A full investigation will be implemented
> and sanctions - including suspension on full pay - will be
> considered whilst this investigation takes place.
>
> Little Donkey
>
> Little donkey, little donkey on the dusty road
> Got to keep on plodding onwards with your precious load
>
> The RSPCA have issued strict guidelines with regard to how
> heavy a load that a donkey of small stature is permitted to
> carry, also included in the guidelines is guidance regarding
> how often to feed the donkey and how many rest breaks are
> required over a four hour plodding period. Please note that
> due to the increased risk of pollution from the dusty road,
> Mary and Joseph are required to wear face masks to prevent
> inhalation of any airborne particles. The donkey has
> expressed his discomfort at being labeled 'little' and would
> prefer just to be simply referred to as Mr. Donkey. To
> comment upon his height or lack thereof may be considered an
> infringement of his equine rights.
>
> We Three Kings
>
> We three kings of Orient are
> Bearing gifts we traverse afar
> Field and fountain, moor and mountain
> Following yonder star
>
> Whilst the gift of gold is still considered acceptable - as
> it may be redeemed at a later date through such
> organisations as 'Cash for Gold' etc, gifts of frankincense
> and myrrh are not appropriate due to the potential risk of
> oils and fragrances causing allergic reactions. A suggested
> gift alternative would be to make a donation to a worthy
> cause in the recipients name or perhaps give a gift voucher.
> We would not advise that the traversing kings rely on
> navigation by stars in order to reach their destinations and
> suggest the use of RAC Routefinder or satellite navigation,
> which will provide the quickest route and advice regarding
> fuel consumption. Please note as per the guidelines from the
> RSPCA for Mr Donkey, the camels carrying the three kings of
> Orient will require regular food and rest breaks. Facemasks
> for the three kings are also advisable due to the likelihood
> of dust from the camel feet.
>
> Away in a Manger No Crib for a bed - This is definitely one
> for Social services
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Saturday, 19 December 2009
THE TENSE PRESENT
I can never set a foot on the calendular escalator that leads to
Christmas without remembering my friend Curly Beard and the
free Christmas tree.
Curly was a former champion show jumper for whom I used to ride
work in the days when I could be carried by a single horse.
He spent much of his retirement drinking in the Sportsman, up on
the Cheshire/ Welsh border at Tattenhall.
I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man.
I said: "I will have to go after this. Going to buy a
Christmas tree from the Clocaenog forest."
Curly said: "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one
free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said: "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said,
while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch?
By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me
£4 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had
cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging
up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day.
We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree
from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the
Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton.
In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case
barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port
and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses.
It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off.
Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable
expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost
count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it
was well over fifty quid, '60s prices.
To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's
spade and went off to dig up the tree. I do not know how we
managed to break the spade, which I later replaced at the cost
of £11.50.
I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And
even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept
reminding me of it for years.
From “Forgive Us Our Press Passes.” Revel Barker Publishing.
Available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA. Or on order from any decent bookshop.
Talking of books, one of the best I have read these many months comes from the pen of Geoffrey Seed, a former reporter and producer of World in Action and Panorama. To call it a thriller is to diminish it. It is a finely written novel and I look forward to his next one. It, too, is published by Revel Barker. For once I agree with a publisher. Barker told me: “He has emerged as a gifted novelist and in the book he switches -- without your really noticing -- from a William Boot sort of countryman, describing the birds and the trees in the woods around his godparents' house, to a crime man covering mysterious deaths. It has a good kick-start, then the narrative begins with a few cleverly stitched flashbacks... and all (or most of it) is based on fact that he couldn't stand up quite well enough to publish as news or documentary. Good stuff.”
A Place of Strangers
A TV journalist is invited to his ageing step family’s beautiful but decaying country house for one last Christmas. Beyond the gates, terrorist bombs and industrial unrest threaten the government of Margaret Thatcher. This political chaos mirrors the unravelling lives of those within - a retired British diplomat and his once glamorous wife, each burdened by past sins, suppressed guilt and approaching death. Their stepson’s idealised picture of them is revealed as a sham. He uncovers a tantalising Russian doll of a story, secrets locked in secrets in a conspiracy of murder and revenge across Europe and North America, all rooted in history’s greatest crime – the Holocaust.
Also available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA.
Or on order from any decent bookshop.
ISBN: 978-0956368614
OH DEAR, OUR FRIEND JUDITH ELLIOT APPEARS TO HAVE STARTED SOMETHING...
From Revel Barker:
“As for the movie clip of the Angolan scaffolder...,” he began, but left the sentence hanging in the air.
To get round the Jesus blasphemy, how about:
“I don't understand why people who say they love me wear a crucifix around their necks,” said Jesus crossly.
---- -----
From Geoff Mather:
“It must be swine fever,” the doctor grunted.
“Nice piece on sausages,” he said, as we reached a fork in the road.
(and if you get this twice, it's the driver's fault)
Alas, all disqualified because they did not use the correct form: - “SAID TOM......”
SO YOU THINK WE EAT RICH FOOD AT XMAS?
“Heliogobalus whose favourite dishes are said to have been the tongues of nightingales and peacocks, or Sept.Geta, who, according to Jul Capitolanus, was so curious, so whimsical, as to order the dishes at his dinners to consist of things which all began with the same letters.
“Sardanapulus, again as we have it in Athenaeus, gave a premium to anyone that invented and served him with novel cate; and Sergia Orata built a house at the entrance of the Lucrine Lake purposely for the pleasure and convenience of eating oysters perfectly fresh”
from “The Forme of Cury”
NEW YORK TIMES: Judges and lawyers in Florida can no longer be Facebook friends.
In a recent opinion, the state’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee decided it was time to set limits on judicial behavior online. When judges “friend” lawyers who may appear before them, the committee said, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it “reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer ‘friends’ are in a special position to influence the judge.”
A READER WRITES:
From the Desk of Ed Rawlinson:
This morning I listened to a clip on the wireless of the Band and Bugles of The Rifles playing "Love Farewell". Although only a clip, it sounded a magnificent lament sung by folk singer John Tams. The song was originally written for servicemen going to war against Napoleon and the money raised from this recording will go to the Help for Heroes charity for those affected by the present war in Afghanistan.
Editor notes: you can download for £1 or buy the CD for £4 from Help the Heroes website.
Christmas without remembering my friend Curly Beard and the
free Christmas tree.
Curly was a former champion show jumper for whom I used to ride
work in the days when I could be carried by a single horse.
He spent much of his retirement drinking in the Sportsman, up on
the Cheshire/ Welsh border at Tattenhall.
I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man.
I said: "I will have to go after this. Going to buy a
Christmas tree from the Clocaenog forest."
Curly said: "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one
free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said: "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said,
while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch?
By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me
£4 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had
cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging
up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day.
We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree
from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the
Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton.
In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case
barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port
and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses.
It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off.
Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable
expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost
count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it
was well over fifty quid, '60s prices.
To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's
spade and went off to dig up the tree. I do not know how we
managed to break the spade, which I later replaced at the cost
of £11.50.
I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And
even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept
reminding me of it for years.
From “Forgive Us Our Press Passes.” Revel Barker Publishing.
Available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA. Or on order from any decent bookshop.
Talking of books, one of the best I have read these many months comes from the pen of Geoffrey Seed, a former reporter and producer of World in Action and Panorama. To call it a thriller is to diminish it. It is a finely written novel and I look forward to his next one. It, too, is published by Revel Barker. For once I agree with a publisher. Barker told me: “He has emerged as a gifted novelist and in the book he switches -- without your really noticing -- from a William Boot sort of countryman, describing the birds and the trees in the woods around his godparents' house, to a crime man covering mysterious deaths. It has a good kick-start, then the narrative begins with a few cleverly stitched flashbacks... and all (or most of it) is based on fact that he couldn't stand up quite well enough to publish as news or documentary. Good stuff.”
A Place of Strangers
A TV journalist is invited to his ageing step family’s beautiful but decaying country house for one last Christmas. Beyond the gates, terrorist bombs and industrial unrest threaten the government of Margaret Thatcher. This political chaos mirrors the unravelling lives of those within - a retired British diplomat and his once glamorous wife, each burdened by past sins, suppressed guilt and approaching death. Their stepson’s idealised picture of them is revealed as a sham. He uncovers a tantalising Russian doll of a story, secrets locked in secrets in a conspiracy of murder and revenge across Europe and North America, all rooted in history’s greatest crime – the Holocaust.
Also available at Waterstones and the Book Depository (free delivery, worldwide), and at Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the USA.
Or on order from any decent bookshop.
ISBN: 978-0956368614
OH DEAR, OUR FRIEND JUDITH ELLIOT APPEARS TO HAVE STARTED SOMETHING...
From Revel Barker:
“As for the movie clip of the Angolan scaffolder...,” he began, but left the sentence hanging in the air.
To get round the Jesus blasphemy, how about:
“I don't understand why people who say they love me wear a crucifix around their necks,” said Jesus crossly.
---- -----
From Geoff Mather:
“It must be swine fever,” the doctor grunted.
“Nice piece on sausages,” he said, as we reached a fork in the road.
(and if you get this twice, it's the driver's fault)
Alas, all disqualified because they did not use the correct form: - “SAID TOM......”
SO YOU THINK WE EAT RICH FOOD AT XMAS?
“Heliogobalus whose favourite dishes are said to have been the tongues of nightingales and peacocks, or Sept.Geta, who, according to Jul Capitolanus, was so curious, so whimsical, as to order the dishes at his dinners to consist of things which all began with the same letters.
“Sardanapulus, again as we have it in Athenaeus, gave a premium to anyone that invented and served him with novel cate; and Sergia Orata built a house at the entrance of the Lucrine Lake purposely for the pleasure and convenience of eating oysters perfectly fresh”
from “The Forme of Cury”
NEW YORK TIMES: Judges and lawyers in Florida can no longer be Facebook friends.
In a recent opinion, the state’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee decided it was time to set limits on judicial behavior online. When judges “friend” lawyers who may appear before them, the committee said, it creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, since it “reasonably conveys to others the impression that these lawyer ‘friends’ are in a special position to influence the judge.”
A READER WRITES:
From the Desk of Ed Rawlinson:
This morning I listened to a clip on the wireless of the Band and Bugles of The Rifles playing "Love Farewell". Although only a clip, it sounded a magnificent lament sung by folk singer John Tams. The song was originally written for servicemen going to war against Napoleon and the money raised from this recording will go to the Help for Heroes charity for those affected by the present war in Afghanistan.
Editor notes: you can download for £1 or buy the CD for £4 from Help the Heroes website.
Friday, 11 December 2009
KICK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH WEEK
I am worried what I am going to find in my Christmas stocking
this year. I have discovered a gift catalogue the Head
Ferret has hidden in the polystyrene Iron Maiden she keeps to
enforce family discipline.
I was particularly unnerved by the Whirley Dickey Bird
Feeder, the perch of which whirls around when an unsuspecting
bird lands on it. I cannot see that getting the Good
Nest Builder seal of approval.
The dog Taz will, I know, oppose the introduction of a key
ring which responds when you whistle, on the grounds that
if key rings are going to behave like that, it won't be long
before similar responses are expected from long dogs.
I can also do without the "Snap On Vinyl Cover Up" which
catches falling hair; a bisque ceramic Wise Old Owl which
turns pink and hoots in fine weather. I am also a bit worried
what the Law will make of a device for syphoning
petrol, which I have no doubt is sold with a gift-wrapped stiff
sentence. It is said to be useful for bailing boats. I should
have thought bailing out anyone who possessed one would be more
useful.
I pass over Nudie Ice Cubes with a wellbred shudder,
offering the same response to Zany Nudey Party Glasses in the
shape of a human body and made - in the coy language of the
catalogue - "each with the details that make the
difference. Four and a half inches high."
It may be that I have misunderstood the copy writer.
But if, as I assume, the difference is only four
and a half inches high, I cannot for the life of me see what
they are making all the fuss about.
I quarrel with the claim that no breakfast table
can be complete without an Egg Topper. "22 fine blades sever
the top of a boiled egg, lifting it off neatly leaving no
shell chips."
My breakfast table is quite complete without an instrument
more appropriate to the Place Vendome during the French
Revolution. Given the the evil temper of most family members at
breakfast time, the introduction of 22 blades would be an
invitation for a replay of that event.
Talking of families, their festive presence means we have no
use for the bottle drainer about which the catalogue speaks
so enthusiastically. For the same reason, we won't need the
foldaway drink rack which prevents spills in the car. I have
relatives who are deeply opposed to drinking and driving in
case they spill anything when they change gear.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
The Copenhagen Summit will cost £130 million. It will produce as much CO-2 (41,000 tons) as an African country. It will cost £6.375 million to fly 15,000 delegates to the conference and 140 aeroplanes will be used to fly world leaders. In salaries, the conference will cost £54.5 million. Nine hundred miles of computer cable will be laid - and taken up 12 days later. But look on the bright side. One thousand, four hundred prostitutes will get laid free of charge by anyone wearing a conference badge.
Fancy a drink? Take care! The police are aiming this year to beat last year's breathalyser total of 183,397. Why? Britain and Sweden have the lowest road casualty rate in the world. Dropped from 3,508 in 2003 to 2,538 last year. That is less than five per cent of the casualty rate that occurred when drivers were over the limit. The figures include not only drunken motorists, but drunken pedestrians too.
On a personal note, the breathalyser used in Britain was invented by a friend of mine. At a party his wife unwittingly let slip a way to beat it. Alas, I go so drunk I forgot what she told me.
THE NEW YORK TIMES reports: Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, toured a prince’s vineyard and castle in Liechtenstein and spent an afternoon at a ski resort in the Alps — all at the expense of a group of European companies. Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, got the dignitary treatment when a big donor flew him to Inner Mongolia to lobby for a new medical supplies factory in rural China.
And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, on another privately sponsored trip, stayed at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem and attended a gala party near the Western Wall as part of a weeklong conference that lobbyists and executives paid as much as $18,500 to attend.
Despite changes intended to curb Congressional junkets, some lawmakers and even their families continue to take trips hosted by private groups and companies that revel in their access to Washington power brokers.
According to the Daily Mail,RYLANDS LIBRARY has “discovered” a lost 14th century cook-book, “The Forme of Cury”.
By coincidence, I have also lost my Penguin paperback of the book. However, I have replaced it on Amazon. I now learn you can read it free on www.forgottenbooks.org where it is one of hundreds on offer. So, if you are looking for lost books in the future, I would advise trying them. You were apparently having trouble with the porpoise recipe. I see why. According to my copy: “Make as thou madest Noumbles of Flesh with oynouns.”
this year. I have discovered a gift catalogue the Head
Ferret has hidden in the polystyrene Iron Maiden she keeps to
enforce family discipline.
I was particularly unnerved by the Whirley Dickey Bird
Feeder, the perch of which whirls around when an unsuspecting
bird lands on it. I cannot see that getting the Good
Nest Builder seal of approval.
The dog Taz will, I know, oppose the introduction of a key
ring which responds when you whistle, on the grounds that
if key rings are going to behave like that, it won't be long
before similar responses are expected from long dogs.
I can also do without the "Snap On Vinyl Cover Up" which
catches falling hair; a bisque ceramic Wise Old Owl which
turns pink and hoots in fine weather. I am also a bit worried
what the Law will make of a device for syphoning
petrol, which I have no doubt is sold with a gift-wrapped stiff
sentence. It is said to be useful for bailing boats. I should
have thought bailing out anyone who possessed one would be more
useful.
I pass over Nudie Ice Cubes with a wellbred shudder,
offering the same response to Zany Nudey Party Glasses in the
shape of a human body and made - in the coy language of the
catalogue - "each with the details that make the
difference. Four and a half inches high."
It may be that I have misunderstood the copy writer.
But if, as I assume, the difference is only four
and a half inches high, I cannot for the life of me see what
they are making all the fuss about.
I quarrel with the claim that no breakfast table
can be complete without an Egg Topper. "22 fine blades sever
the top of a boiled egg, lifting it off neatly leaving no
shell chips."
My breakfast table is quite complete without an instrument
more appropriate to the Place Vendome during the French
Revolution. Given the the evil temper of most family members at
breakfast time, the introduction of 22 blades would be an
invitation for a replay of that event.
Talking of families, their festive presence means we have no
use for the bottle drainer about which the catalogue speaks
so enthusiastically. For the same reason, we won't need the
foldaway drink rack which prevents spills in the car. I have
relatives who are deeply opposed to drinking and driving in
case they spill anything when they change gear.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
The Copenhagen Summit will cost £130 million. It will produce as much CO-2 (41,000 tons) as an African country. It will cost £6.375 million to fly 15,000 delegates to the conference and 140 aeroplanes will be used to fly world leaders. In salaries, the conference will cost £54.5 million. Nine hundred miles of computer cable will be laid - and taken up 12 days later. But look on the bright side. One thousand, four hundred prostitutes will get laid free of charge by anyone wearing a conference badge.
Fancy a drink? Take care! The police are aiming this year to beat last year's breathalyser total of 183,397. Why? Britain and Sweden have the lowest road casualty rate in the world. Dropped from 3,508 in 2003 to 2,538 last year. That is less than five per cent of the casualty rate that occurred when drivers were over the limit. The figures include not only drunken motorists, but drunken pedestrians too.
On a personal note, the breathalyser used in Britain was invented by a friend of mine. At a party his wife unwittingly let slip a way to beat it. Alas, I go so drunk I forgot what she told me.
THE NEW YORK TIMES reports: Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, toured a prince’s vineyard and castle in Liechtenstein and spent an afternoon at a ski resort in the Alps — all at the expense of a group of European companies. Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, got the dignitary treatment when a big donor flew him to Inner Mongolia to lobby for a new medical supplies factory in rural China.
And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, on another privately sponsored trip, stayed at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem and attended a gala party near the Western Wall as part of a weeklong conference that lobbyists and executives paid as much as $18,500 to attend.
Despite changes intended to curb Congressional junkets, some lawmakers and even their families continue to take trips hosted by private groups and companies that revel in their access to Washington power brokers.
According to the Daily Mail,RYLANDS LIBRARY has “discovered” a lost 14th century cook-book, “The Forme of Cury”.
By coincidence, I have also lost my Penguin paperback of the book. However, I have replaced it on Amazon. I now learn you can read it free on www.forgottenbooks.org where it is one of hundreds on offer. So, if you are looking for lost books in the future, I would advise trying them. You were apparently having trouble with the porpoise recipe. I see why. According to my copy: “Make as thou madest Noumbles of Flesh with oynouns.”
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