Whatever the American Songbook may say it is not Georgia I have on MY mind. It is Bethesda. What Mandalay was to Kipling, the rose red city Petra to the Rev John William Burgon, Xanadu to Coleridge, Samarkand to Flecker...
So to me is Bethesda, Gwynedd.
If I were a stranger on my way to Snowdon I doubt if I would get past the Brittania Inn on the far frontier of that magic town, where, long after decimalization, you paid for your beer in pounds, shilling and pence.
It was an inn whose landlord and lady produced one of the truly great child organ playing prodigies of our day. Where shopkeepers met weekly to discuss philosophy, under the chairmanship of a cobbler. The only cobbler I have ever come across, I may say, who had a classical bookshop in the rooms above his last.
A town with one main street and two secondhand bookshops is unusual, even in this land of scholars. Bethesda had two. The Morrises, who ran the other one, are probably the only antiquarian book dealers who also ran a top West End drinking club for gangsters. They were certainly the only council tax payers in Bethesda who retired there from a Mediterranean villa.
What other small town has had a scholar of international repute and an Oxbridge Emeritus professor of Celtic Studies (Idris Foster and Rachel Bromwich) living in the same terrace of houses?
Where else are all the pubs on the same side of the street because the man who owned the other side was a teetotaller?
Bethesda is not beautiful. It is the colour of slate, living proof of the notion that in Wales beauty is received through the ear and not the eye. A sad symphony in stucco, the Welsh teracotta. Yet it is the home of that great painter of mountains David Woodford, the only artist to sell more than a hundred paintings in an exhibition. One of the few men to scale the Snowdon peaks in a Robin Reliant.
Readers of a literary bent will recall that in David Copperfield there is a character Uncle Dick. Whatever he starts to write about he always ends up writing about the head of King Charles the Martyr.
My King Charles's head is Bethesda. It is another example of a national topography inspired by fundamental Christianity and its child, Christian Zionism. Many towns and villages are named from the Old Testament.
The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is partly responsible for the mess the world is in today, was a fervent Zionist.
Journalist Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes, co-author of the disastrous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916), noted in his “Studies in Virtue” that Lloyd George’s political advisers were unable to train his mind on the map of Palestine during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles. He was schooled by fundamentalist Christian parents in churches named by the geography of ancient Israel. Lloyd George admitted that he was far more familiar with the cities and regions of Biblical Israel than with the geography of his native Wales. His family's firm of solicitors had among their farmer clients the Christian Zionists.
Imperial designs were the primary political motivation in drawing influential British politicians to support the Zionist project. Yet they were predisposed to Zionism.
Balfour’s famous speech of 1919 makes the point: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
MY KINGDOM FOR A STAGE........................................................
I am puzzled that the newly formed National Theatre of Wales should complain it has no theatre building and produces a running repertory in miners' institutes. In North Wales alone in my day there were six civic theatres and I would have thought either the expensive theatre complex in Mold or the other one in Llandudno would have been perfect.
In Llandudno especially the auditorium acoustics are fine. You can see one of the biggest stages in Europe from every seat in the house. The décor, admittedly, is brutalist. Battleship grey with state of the art lighting, it so vividly resembles a warship one is irrestibly drawn on entering to salute the quarter deck. But that is fine too.The only thing wrong with it is the name. It should be called the David Sandbach Theatre.
It is over two decades since I stood in his shop amongst his delicious handmade sweets and shared David's dream of a theatre fit for the Welsh National Opera. He worked incessantly to make that dream come true. He conceived an Arts Festival which enjoyed great success. Writing to tell me about theatre weekends he and his wife had organised, he added a cheerful postcript that he was going into hospital but would see me at the first opera production. He saw the theatre, thank God. But I looked for him in vain at the first opera. I only learned from a review that he had died before that opera returned to the town. He never really recovered from a savage mugging outside his shop, a poor reward for his efforts for Llandudno.
It is even poorer reward that his name was not commemorated in the theatre. Happily, after I had campaigned noisily, a plaque appeared on the foyer wall.
After all, the opera house was really his.
UNREPORTED FACT
In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
The comments came during a "virtual town hall" with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the "escalation of force" problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which "we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it."
In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.
Every two weeks, McChrystal participates in what he calls "a virtual town hall" meeting in which soldiers in Afghanistan submit questions that he answers over streaming audio.
HE IS SO SENSIBLE YOU WONDER HOW HE GOT THE JOB
“President Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.” …....New York Times
Saturday, 10 April 2010
Friday, 2 April 2010
ODE TO THE decline and FALLEN
Henceforth The Sunday Times will be known is this kigdom of the blog as “The Decline and
Fall”. Anyone who doubts that Britain is a busted flush finds support in its pages. “Generals forced to Travel Second Class”, “The Most Corrupt Parliament in History”, “The Special Relationship is Over”, “More MPs For Hire”, “Schools and NHS Savage Cuts”. The only obvious good news is that John Prescott has been overruled and Pauline is to be made a Lady.
In that at least The Decline and Fall is in error. Nature made Pauline a Lady: the Crown is merely about to confirm her status. Mrs Prescott was a hairdresser at Quaintways when I was freelancing in Chester. Alas, I did not know her. Looking back, it is fascinating to recall exactly how ladylike the Quaintways girls were. And how glamorous.
I have a lot of time for Prescott who has achieved much from that start in steerage. He is very bright and a bruiser. However, I would keep him off TV. I believe he won the last election by thumping the Rhyl egg thrower but has helped in the loss of this one by his “Giovanni moments”, recurring attempts to shout down and interrupt his opponents in Newsnight debates. In fairness, the way politicians speak and shout over each other on radio and TV, breaking the first law of radio, shows them for the shoddy lot they are. Prescott's “hatred” of the Lords is a pose. Remember the documentary where he lunched with a foul-mouthed lord, with obvious delight? And indeed behaved better than his host.
Like Gibbon before it, our Decline and Fall is given to sensationalism. For example, generals are NOT being forced. Their expenses demand that they be conveyed from A to B by the most economical means. There is nothing to stop them paying the difference for comfort and privacy.That goes for MPs who can equally afford it. Rank should not demand privilege.
“The Most Corrupt Parliament” can only have been written by a sub-editor with no knowledge of history. Parliament has always been corrupt from at least the days of the venal Walpole. Nor can the sub-editor who wrote about the special relationship have any knowledge of politics. There has never been a special relationship. True, we fought on the same side in the war but hardly as allies. At their conferences both Truman and Roosevelt favoured Stalin above Churchill. The “special relationship” was based on the fact that Churchill was half American. His American mother was an even bigger tart than his daughter-in-law who flitted from Senatorial beds like a sex-mad moth. With such mothers is history conceived - and I use the word advisedly. I knew a doctor on Anglesey who fathered a number of aristocratic cuckoos.
The truth is that America was an empire in waiting and could only come to power over the corpse of the British Empire. Nothing shameful. That is how we did it with the Mugul and many other smaller empires. Empire building is a deadly game for dishonourable gain. Why else did Truman insist on immediate reparation of war debts which is where our present bankruptcy began?
The cuts in building new hospitals? We do not need new hospitals. There are closed wards in existing buildings and a chain of well maintained and woefully under-used cottage hospitals the length and breadth of the kingdom. The NHS bureaucracy is vastly overmanned.
We don't desperately need new schools either. We need teachers who can teach, to replace the many incompetents who are turning out feral ignoramuses. A gang in school blazers stabbing a boy on a tube station? In my day school teachers controlled classes, which were all above forty pupils in number.
Great Britain never was. It was just a better place to live in. Not a place where a grandmother would be fined £1,000, tagged and placed on curfew for selling a goldfish to boy under the age of 16 (a sting engineered by Trading Standards snoopers). In the same week, a convicted rapist who threw his victim on a rubbish dump had his deportation revoked bcause he married.
We should surrender our top seat in the UN to China, where, according to the NYT, “The Hongzhou company, at Hainan in the South China Sea, with its gleaming Times Coast condominium development by the marina, is in the vanguard of Hainan’s transformation. The yacht club already boasts more than 80 members who have each paid $92,000 for the privilege of parking their boats here for 23 years.
“'In China, Sanya will be the leader in luxury leisure,' Wang Dafu, the owner of Hongzhou, said one afternoon while cruising the bay in his 72-foot Pershing yacht.
“He puffed on a Cohiba cigar. 'The reason you earn money,' he said, 'is to spend it.'
“On the west side of the yacht marina, there is a neighborhood where more than 1,000 fishermen and family members live in cramped alleyways.
“The families have lived here for generations, but local officials and the real estate company that owns the yacht club, Hongzhou Group, are trying to persuade them to move off the land. Four women sitting outside one home said the Hongzhou Group was offering less than $20 a square foot as compensation.”...The joys of Communism.
And what of the Land of the Free?
On Wednesday these were the headlines in Tina Brown's net newspaper “The Daily Beast”:
Bill Clinton's $20 Million Breakup
by Kim Masters
A money feud has busted up first friends Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle,
sources tell The Daily Beast. Kim Masters on the alleged $20 million
"stiffing" the tycoon gave the ex-president.
The GOP's Dirty Sexy Money
by Conor Friedersdorf
Wooing donors at a strip club: It's just the latest Republican National
Committee scandal that could cost Michael Steele his job.
Stepping Out in Stripper Shoes
by Rebecca Dana
$1,600 for shoes that make you look like a high-class tramp? From Lucite
platforms to S&M detailing, this season's crop of must-have heels are
fit for a lady of the night.
FRIGHTENING
14-Year-Old Charged in D.C. Shooting
A 14-year-old has been charged with killing four people and wounding
five in what was the worst shooting in Washington, D.C. in 16 years.He drove a minivan towards a crowd and opened fire. The police then gave chase. The group had just returned from the funeral of a recent shooting victim. Among the victims were six men and three women.
IN FULL CRY FOR MY HOUNDS
I won't bore you with the tale of the death threat I received in my own drawing room; how an armed terrorist followed me down the hall; how I warned him that Druid, my bloodhound, was asleep behind a door and how my putative assassin asked anxiously, "It won't bite me, will it?"
Bite? Druid didn't even wake as we stepped over him.
In his defence, dogs are good at sleeping. My wife has a long dog which has two speeds. Fast and Fast Asleep. I minded him last weekend. No problem. He only moves to change beds, to eat and to relieve himself.
I should say that Druid was deaf, blind in one eye and had an indifferent sense of smell. In consequence, it was important when you took him for a walk to keep very close to his good eye and his single active nostril. Otherwise you ceased to exist for him and he thought he had been abandoned on a deserted planet. This led him to sit down and howl so piteously that I was twice reported to the RSPCA by passers-by.
Nevertheless, bloodhounds are an addiction with me. At my happiest I was mainlining on two.
Minnie and Amy were the only bloodhounds in Gwynedd. They joined me when they were five months old and tipping the scales at five stone. Imagine Dame Edith Evans with a tail and a face apparently carved out of Mount Rushmore.Thick with it. In an intelligence test of 76 breeds, bloodhounds came seventy-fifth because, where other dogs have brains, bloodhounds have hearts.
I prefer it that way because I thrive on being loved immoderately. But life with bloodhounds is not easy. It took two days to explain to them the relationship between the mouth and the vitamin pill.
"Sit" was easy because mostly they are doing that anyway. "Stay"? No problem. It is "Move" they have trouble with. Or did until the day I took them to the gate at the bottom of the drive to get them accustomed to traffic. Picture us, an uncertain menage a trois at each end of a T shaped lead. At either tip of the crosspiece a bloodhound, Fonteyning briskly. At the far end of the downstroke what is laughingly called the handler.
When we reached the gate they sat instantly, having exhausted themselves on the 400-yard journey from the house doing spirited Pas de Bras to the admiration of passing motorists unused to hounds who do Scottish Country dancing. I reckon if it had not been for the JCB we would have been home and dry.
What happened when this motorised pterodactyl roared by was a choreographed knitting pattern. I would never have believed there was room between my legs for two five stone bloodhounds to pass each other - and going in opposite directions at that.
The hounds didn't believe it either, which, I suppose, explains why they repeated the move several times until I was flat on my back, in fetching leather puttees cunningly fashioned from a T-shaped dog lead, with a far from hushed puppy on either foot.
A HERO WRITES.............................
From Gordon Chesters, purveyor of the funniest emails, this, his first serious call:
Hi All,
I've received the following message from Bronco Lane about a cycle ride/climbing challenge in which he's participating to raise money for the Help 4 Heroes fund. For those of you who don't know Bronco, he's a retired SAS man who reached the summit of Everest with the Army's first expedition back in 1976, losing all his toes and half his fingers through frost-bite for his trouble. He went on to complete a very active SAS career and took part in several further climbing and polar ventures. I'm also quite proud to say he is a country member of the Grumpy Old Gits of the Northumbrian Piper.
Cheers, Gordon.
Greetings Everyone!
I've been asked by Archie Scott an ex-SAS colleague and climbing friend to act as 'goffer' whilst he and another mate, Charlie Cook, cycle UK's End to End. On-route we will all ascend Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis. Our time frame is 30th July to 10 August.
I'm the van driver, spare hand and will act as reserve rider should either Archie or Charlie be injured or become ill.
It's all in aid of the UK charity "Help 4 Heroes" and I have opened a page at www.bmycharity.com/BroncoLane for anyone who can afford to donate towards our target of raising £5000.
Best wishes,
Bronco
Fall”. Anyone who doubts that Britain is a busted flush finds support in its pages. “Generals forced to Travel Second Class”, “The Most Corrupt Parliament in History”, “The Special Relationship is Over”, “More MPs For Hire”, “Schools and NHS Savage Cuts”. The only obvious good news is that John Prescott has been overruled and Pauline is to be made a Lady.
In that at least The Decline and Fall is in error. Nature made Pauline a Lady: the Crown is merely about to confirm her status. Mrs Prescott was a hairdresser at Quaintways when I was freelancing in Chester. Alas, I did not know her. Looking back, it is fascinating to recall exactly how ladylike the Quaintways girls were. And how glamorous.
I have a lot of time for Prescott who has achieved much from that start in steerage. He is very bright and a bruiser. However, I would keep him off TV. I believe he won the last election by thumping the Rhyl egg thrower but has helped in the loss of this one by his “Giovanni moments”, recurring attempts to shout down and interrupt his opponents in Newsnight debates. In fairness, the way politicians speak and shout over each other on radio and TV, breaking the first law of radio, shows them for the shoddy lot they are. Prescott's “hatred” of the Lords is a pose. Remember the documentary where he lunched with a foul-mouthed lord, with obvious delight? And indeed behaved better than his host.
Like Gibbon before it, our Decline and Fall is given to sensationalism. For example, generals are NOT being forced. Their expenses demand that they be conveyed from A to B by the most economical means. There is nothing to stop them paying the difference for comfort and privacy.That goes for MPs who can equally afford it. Rank should not demand privilege.
“The Most Corrupt Parliament” can only have been written by a sub-editor with no knowledge of history. Parliament has always been corrupt from at least the days of the venal Walpole. Nor can the sub-editor who wrote about the special relationship have any knowledge of politics. There has never been a special relationship. True, we fought on the same side in the war but hardly as allies. At their conferences both Truman and Roosevelt favoured Stalin above Churchill. The “special relationship” was based on the fact that Churchill was half American. His American mother was an even bigger tart than his daughter-in-law who flitted from Senatorial beds like a sex-mad moth. With such mothers is history conceived - and I use the word advisedly. I knew a doctor on Anglesey who fathered a number of aristocratic cuckoos.
The truth is that America was an empire in waiting and could only come to power over the corpse of the British Empire. Nothing shameful. That is how we did it with the Mugul and many other smaller empires. Empire building is a deadly game for dishonourable gain. Why else did Truman insist on immediate reparation of war debts which is where our present bankruptcy began?
The cuts in building new hospitals? We do not need new hospitals. There are closed wards in existing buildings and a chain of well maintained and woefully under-used cottage hospitals the length and breadth of the kingdom. The NHS bureaucracy is vastly overmanned.
We don't desperately need new schools either. We need teachers who can teach, to replace the many incompetents who are turning out feral ignoramuses. A gang in school blazers stabbing a boy on a tube station? In my day school teachers controlled classes, which were all above forty pupils in number.
Great Britain never was. It was just a better place to live in. Not a place where a grandmother would be fined £1,000, tagged and placed on curfew for selling a goldfish to boy under the age of 16 (a sting engineered by Trading Standards snoopers). In the same week, a convicted rapist who threw his victim on a rubbish dump had his deportation revoked bcause he married.
We should surrender our top seat in the UN to China, where, according to the NYT, “The Hongzhou company, at Hainan in the South China Sea, with its gleaming Times Coast condominium development by the marina, is in the vanguard of Hainan’s transformation. The yacht club already boasts more than 80 members who have each paid $92,000 for the privilege of parking their boats here for 23 years.
“'In China, Sanya will be the leader in luxury leisure,' Wang Dafu, the owner of Hongzhou, said one afternoon while cruising the bay in his 72-foot Pershing yacht.
“He puffed on a Cohiba cigar. 'The reason you earn money,' he said, 'is to spend it.'
“On the west side of the yacht marina, there is a neighborhood where more than 1,000 fishermen and family members live in cramped alleyways.
“The families have lived here for generations, but local officials and the real estate company that owns the yacht club, Hongzhou Group, are trying to persuade them to move off the land. Four women sitting outside one home said the Hongzhou Group was offering less than $20 a square foot as compensation.”...The joys of Communism.
And what of the Land of the Free?
On Wednesday these were the headlines in Tina Brown's net newspaper “The Daily Beast”:
Bill Clinton's $20 Million Breakup
by Kim Masters
A money feud has busted up first friends Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle,
sources tell The Daily Beast. Kim Masters on the alleged $20 million
"stiffing" the tycoon gave the ex-president.
The GOP's Dirty Sexy Money
by Conor Friedersdorf
Wooing donors at a strip club: It's just the latest Republican National
Committee scandal that could cost Michael Steele his job.
Stepping Out in Stripper Shoes
by Rebecca Dana
$1,600 for shoes that make you look like a high-class tramp? From Lucite
platforms to S&M detailing, this season's crop of must-have heels are
fit for a lady of the night.
FRIGHTENING
14-Year-Old Charged in D.C. Shooting
A 14-year-old has been charged with killing four people and wounding
five in what was the worst shooting in Washington, D.C. in 16 years.He drove a minivan towards a crowd and opened fire. The police then gave chase. The group had just returned from the funeral of a recent shooting victim. Among the victims were six men and three women.
IN FULL CRY FOR MY HOUNDS
I won't bore you with the tale of the death threat I received in my own drawing room; how an armed terrorist followed me down the hall; how I warned him that Druid, my bloodhound, was asleep behind a door and how my putative assassin asked anxiously, "It won't bite me, will it?"
Bite? Druid didn't even wake as we stepped over him.
In his defence, dogs are good at sleeping. My wife has a long dog which has two speeds. Fast and Fast Asleep. I minded him last weekend. No problem. He only moves to change beds, to eat and to relieve himself.
I should say that Druid was deaf, blind in one eye and had an indifferent sense of smell. In consequence, it was important when you took him for a walk to keep very close to his good eye and his single active nostril. Otherwise you ceased to exist for him and he thought he had been abandoned on a deserted planet. This led him to sit down and howl so piteously that I was twice reported to the RSPCA by passers-by.
Nevertheless, bloodhounds are an addiction with me. At my happiest I was mainlining on two.
Minnie and Amy were the only bloodhounds in Gwynedd. They joined me when they were five months old and tipping the scales at five stone. Imagine Dame Edith Evans with a tail and a face apparently carved out of Mount Rushmore.Thick with it. In an intelligence test of 76 breeds, bloodhounds came seventy-fifth because, where other dogs have brains, bloodhounds have hearts.
I prefer it that way because I thrive on being loved immoderately. But life with bloodhounds is not easy. It took two days to explain to them the relationship between the mouth and the vitamin pill.
"Sit" was easy because mostly they are doing that anyway. "Stay"? No problem. It is "Move" they have trouble with. Or did until the day I took them to the gate at the bottom of the drive to get them accustomed to traffic. Picture us, an uncertain menage a trois at each end of a T shaped lead. At either tip of the crosspiece a bloodhound, Fonteyning briskly. At the far end of the downstroke what is laughingly called the handler.
When we reached the gate they sat instantly, having exhausted themselves on the 400-yard journey from the house doing spirited Pas de Bras to the admiration of passing motorists unused to hounds who do Scottish Country dancing. I reckon if it had not been for the JCB we would have been home and dry.
What happened when this motorised pterodactyl roared by was a choreographed knitting pattern. I would never have believed there was room between my legs for two five stone bloodhounds to pass each other - and going in opposite directions at that.
The hounds didn't believe it either, which, I suppose, explains why they repeated the move several times until I was flat on my back, in fetching leather puttees cunningly fashioned from a T-shaped dog lead, with a far from hushed puppy on either foot.
A HERO WRITES.............................
From Gordon Chesters, purveyor of the funniest emails, this, his first serious call:
Hi All,
I've received the following message from Bronco Lane about a cycle ride/climbing challenge in which he's participating to raise money for the Help 4 Heroes fund. For those of you who don't know Bronco, he's a retired SAS man who reached the summit of Everest with the Army's first expedition back in 1976, losing all his toes and half his fingers through frost-bite for his trouble. He went on to complete a very active SAS career and took part in several further climbing and polar ventures. I'm also quite proud to say he is a country member of the Grumpy Old Gits of the Northumbrian Piper.
Cheers, Gordon.
Greetings Everyone!
I've been asked by Archie Scott an ex-SAS colleague and climbing friend to act as 'goffer' whilst he and another mate, Charlie Cook, cycle UK's End to End. On-route we will all ascend Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis. Our time frame is 30th July to 10 August.
I'm the van driver, spare hand and will act as reserve rider should either Archie or Charlie be injured or become ill.
It's all in aid of the UK charity "Help 4 Heroes" and I have opened a page at www.bmycharity.com/BroncoLane for anyone who can afford to donate towards our target of raising £5000.
Best wishes,
Bronco
Saturday, 27 March 2010
The Glorious Secret
People thought it odd that Norman Barnes, a 90-year-old ex-teacher and a brilliant painter, had never exhibited his work. Mr Barnes, in his remote cottage in the mountains above Betws-y-Coed, North Wales, surrounded by those of his 20,000 stunning paintings he had not given away, thought the oddity was thinking it odd.
“I paint for pleasure,” he explained to me with diffident courtesy. “I have never felt it necessary to exhibit. I am a quietist and I was very happy working on my own.”
Thanks to two formidable women, he was persuaded at last to have an exhibition at a tiny gallery on Anglesey. But he wasn't happy about it. He told me at the time: “I am not sure I am doing the right thing.”
His wife Kay, another teacher who would have walked away with the role of Miss Chips if anyone wrote it, was quite sure he was. I remember her telling me: “I want his work to be recognised. I think it absurd it should not be. He is a marvellous painter. He is not so pleased because he is a very retiring man.”
Mr Barnes would have continued his retiring if a remarkable lady called Joan Smith of Llangaffo, Anglesey, had not gone to his cottage to repair a grandfather clock. She should have been more famous in her own right. When they were buildng the 50-mile motorway which now links Chester with Holyhead, they ran into a snag. There is only a narow strip of land between the sea and the mountains in North Wales. The new motorway had to share the limited space at the crossing of the river Conwy with two earlier bridges, both listed architectural gems. The townspeople of Conwy to a man blocked the notion of a third. There was deadlock. Then Miss Smith wrote to the North Wales Weeekly News.
“Why not build a tunnel under the river?” she asked.
Unbelievably, the engineers had not thought of that. I always think it churlish that they did not name the fine tunnel they built after Miss Smith of Llangaffo on Anglesey.
She deserved even greater recognition for her discovery of Mr Barnes's genius. She said afterwards: “I couldn’t believe my eyes.The walls were covered with the most marvellous paintings which had never been seen by outsiders. I thought, this is nonsense, and I took an armful round the galleries. I heard a couple of young artists had opened a small gallery. They took one look and booked an exhibition on the spot.”
The young couple were Marc Heaton and Madeleine O’Brien.
Mark said: “We couldnt believe it when Miss Smith brought the paintings in. It is inconceivable that Mr Barnes has been turning out such accomplished paintings for so long and remained unknown.”
Madeleine said: “He clearly hasn’t been influenced by anyone. The quickness and the quality of the line, the freshness of his vision are simply staggering. He captures a moment and through it shows his enjoyment of the landscape.”
Veteran artist David Chambers, then exhibiting in Theatr Gwynedd, Bangor, was in the gallery when Miss Smith brought the paintingns in. “They moved me to tears,” he confessed. “I think he is a fine draughtsman. His cats rival Tunnicliffe's. Unbelievablethat a chap who has painted about 20,000 pictures should remain unrecognised.”
Until 1969 when he retired to a mountain cottage in North Wales with his wife Kay, Mr Barnes was a senior lecturer in Modern Languages at Salford Royal Technical College. Because of his teaching commitments, he could only attend Salford Art School at nights. When he was a child, money was short in his family and an art career seemed perilous. So he became a teacher. During the war he served with the Intelligence Corps all over Europe, painting all the time. He became a code breaker at Bletchley Park.
Mr Barnes served a term of evening classes at the Manchester College of Art but he wasn’t impressed by the teacher so he gave them up and learned from books, from copying the great painters and from nature.
Not even a stroke at the age of eighty fazed him. The stroke paralysed the left side of his body. Happily there were windows on three sides of his studio l, each one framing ever changing mountain views. So he just moved round the room, painting the view outside. Alas, he died four years after our meeting. But I have always remembered his house where happiness was so palpable, its inhabitants so obviously devoted and their conversation so stimulating.
We talked about the bad behaviour of pupils - in the 1920s, would you believe? About the reason there are no shadows in Renaissance paintings, why Bletchley Park, the centre of our intelligence war, had no Air Raid wardens and how a film about Mr Barnes's colleague Alan Turing, who invented the computer, was wrong because it showed windows protected against bomb blast.
A BEAUTIFUL PEA GREEN ….......PUMPKIN?
I spend a lot of time remembering those happy days in North Wales, a place populated by the most remarkable people. There used to be a column in the Reader's Digest, “The Most Remarkable People I Have Met”. I could have filled it every month.
A paragraph in the Sunday Times sent me spinning down the years. It was about my neighbour in Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll, Medwyn Williams, who was then a group engineer in Gwynedd County Council's Maintenance Department. Med is famous now for his giant vegetables - six foot parsnips, would you believe, he grew at the back of his bungalow ? He has won every conceivable prize and is chairman of the National Vegetable Society.
He is still growing giant veg. At the moment it is a 1,600lb pumpkin. When it is fully grown he will fit it with a seat and an outboard motor and - at the age of 67 - sail it to the Isle of Man. He is doing it to raise money for the Help the Heroes charity. He has already qualified for the Owl and the Pussy Cat Club because he has done test runs with smaller pumpkins.
“I am totally confident this can be done. We shall call her HMV (Her Majesty's vegetable) Cinderella.”
There has always been a fairytale quality to Med's life. My wife interviewed him when he was heading a £100,000 campaign against Japanese Knotweed, a weed whose accelerated growth rivals the beanstalk.
He told her: “It will grow through tarmacadam and it has taken over roadside verges and railway embankments, parks, gardens and farmlands. It coud rip up highways, destroy footpaths. Even bring apartment blocks crashing to the ground.”
Goodness knows what the Brothers Grimm would have made of it.
THE DRIVER'S TALE
This frail bark of blog sails in many seas. Its readers include editors, columnists, teachers, publishers, special service toughs, even a small clutch of multi-millionaires. It goes to Trinidad. To the States and to Australia - and Pentrefoelas. I am especially pleased about that. I wrote recently about Alan Hughes, a driving instructor who has opened the secrets of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Alan reads the blog and has sent me a book he has just published.
It is called “Chaucer's Signs and Circumstances”, and as well as being a fascinating piece of literary detection, it is very impressive scholarship, though Alan confesses it is meeting academic opposition.
“Many of the academic comments have been hostile to my way of reading Chaucer's work: eg., 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'; 'How come a driving instructor from Pentrefoelas when the best minds of Oxford and Cambridge have failed to find any allegories?' Ann Dobyns, writing in the Medieval Review considers that my work 'represents the kind of over-arguing often found in undergraduate papers'.
He refuses to be put off
“I have now gathered enough material to put together three books: the one posted to you, one on Chaucer's remaining larger works and his lyrics; another on the allegories detected in works written around that time. For example, I understand the complex allegory of the Testament of Love and, without any doubt, I can prove that William Thynne was correct in presenting it to King Henry VIII as being Chaucer's work.
I believe that this same crowd will never accept my allegorical theories.”
I know how he feels. Like most people who are self taught Iwas no stranger to bitter critics so I put together a Writer's Mantra
Our friends the reviewers
Those chippers and hewers
Are judges of mortal stone,sir
But of meet and unmeet
In a fabric complete
I''ll boldly proclaim they are none,sir
Cannot remember who said that but it was the 18th century Angelesy antiquarian Rev Henry Rowlands who wrote;
“Criticism is an undefined thing under no settled rule, often governed by prejudice and passion,humour or fancy which makes it very frequently that what is agreeable to one is displeasing to another. To please all is impossible, to have faults is unavoidable”
Plini the Second wrote “ Every man's witty labour takes not-except the matter,subject, occasion and some commending favourite happen to it”
Judge for yourself. The book is available from Aslan at £9.95 plus postage from Alania, Tan y Gaer, Pentrefoelas, LL24 OLE (emaill ohughes@tiscali.co.uk
“I paint for pleasure,” he explained to me with diffident courtesy. “I have never felt it necessary to exhibit. I am a quietist and I was very happy working on my own.”
Thanks to two formidable women, he was persuaded at last to have an exhibition at a tiny gallery on Anglesey. But he wasn't happy about it. He told me at the time: “I am not sure I am doing the right thing.”
His wife Kay, another teacher who would have walked away with the role of Miss Chips if anyone wrote it, was quite sure he was. I remember her telling me: “I want his work to be recognised. I think it absurd it should not be. He is a marvellous painter. He is not so pleased because he is a very retiring man.”
Mr Barnes would have continued his retiring if a remarkable lady called Joan Smith of Llangaffo, Anglesey, had not gone to his cottage to repair a grandfather clock. She should have been more famous in her own right. When they were buildng the 50-mile motorway which now links Chester with Holyhead, they ran into a snag. There is only a narow strip of land between the sea and the mountains in North Wales. The new motorway had to share the limited space at the crossing of the river Conwy with two earlier bridges, both listed architectural gems. The townspeople of Conwy to a man blocked the notion of a third. There was deadlock. Then Miss Smith wrote to the North Wales Weeekly News.
“Why not build a tunnel under the river?” she asked.
Unbelievably, the engineers had not thought of that. I always think it churlish that they did not name the fine tunnel they built after Miss Smith of Llangaffo on Anglesey.
She deserved even greater recognition for her discovery of Mr Barnes's genius. She said afterwards: “I couldn’t believe my eyes.The walls were covered with the most marvellous paintings which had never been seen by outsiders. I thought, this is nonsense, and I took an armful round the galleries. I heard a couple of young artists had opened a small gallery. They took one look and booked an exhibition on the spot.”
The young couple were Marc Heaton and Madeleine O’Brien.
Mark said: “We couldnt believe it when Miss Smith brought the paintings in. It is inconceivable that Mr Barnes has been turning out such accomplished paintings for so long and remained unknown.”
Madeleine said: “He clearly hasn’t been influenced by anyone. The quickness and the quality of the line, the freshness of his vision are simply staggering. He captures a moment and through it shows his enjoyment of the landscape.”
Veteran artist David Chambers, then exhibiting in Theatr Gwynedd, Bangor, was in the gallery when Miss Smith brought the paintingns in. “They moved me to tears,” he confessed. “I think he is a fine draughtsman. His cats rival Tunnicliffe's. Unbelievablethat a chap who has painted about 20,000 pictures should remain unrecognised.”
Until 1969 when he retired to a mountain cottage in North Wales with his wife Kay, Mr Barnes was a senior lecturer in Modern Languages at Salford Royal Technical College. Because of his teaching commitments, he could only attend Salford Art School at nights. When he was a child, money was short in his family and an art career seemed perilous. So he became a teacher. During the war he served with the Intelligence Corps all over Europe, painting all the time. He became a code breaker at Bletchley Park.
Mr Barnes served a term of evening classes at the Manchester College of Art but he wasn’t impressed by the teacher so he gave them up and learned from books, from copying the great painters and from nature.
Not even a stroke at the age of eighty fazed him. The stroke paralysed the left side of his body. Happily there were windows on three sides of his studio l, each one framing ever changing mountain views. So he just moved round the room, painting the view outside. Alas, he died four years after our meeting. But I have always remembered his house where happiness was so palpable, its inhabitants so obviously devoted and their conversation so stimulating.
We talked about the bad behaviour of pupils - in the 1920s, would you believe? About the reason there are no shadows in Renaissance paintings, why Bletchley Park, the centre of our intelligence war, had no Air Raid wardens and how a film about Mr Barnes's colleague Alan Turing, who invented the computer, was wrong because it showed windows protected against bomb blast.
A BEAUTIFUL PEA GREEN ….......PUMPKIN?
I spend a lot of time remembering those happy days in North Wales, a place populated by the most remarkable people. There used to be a column in the Reader's Digest, “The Most Remarkable People I Have Met”. I could have filled it every month.
A paragraph in the Sunday Times sent me spinning down the years. It was about my neighbour in Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll, Medwyn Williams, who was then a group engineer in Gwynedd County Council's Maintenance Department. Med is famous now for his giant vegetables - six foot parsnips, would you believe, he grew at the back of his bungalow ? He has won every conceivable prize and is chairman of the National Vegetable Society.
He is still growing giant veg. At the moment it is a 1,600lb pumpkin. When it is fully grown he will fit it with a seat and an outboard motor and - at the age of 67 - sail it to the Isle of Man. He is doing it to raise money for the Help the Heroes charity. He has already qualified for the Owl and the Pussy Cat Club because he has done test runs with smaller pumpkins.
“I am totally confident this can be done. We shall call her HMV (Her Majesty's vegetable) Cinderella.”
There has always been a fairytale quality to Med's life. My wife interviewed him when he was heading a £100,000 campaign against Japanese Knotweed, a weed whose accelerated growth rivals the beanstalk.
He told her: “It will grow through tarmacadam and it has taken over roadside verges and railway embankments, parks, gardens and farmlands. It coud rip up highways, destroy footpaths. Even bring apartment blocks crashing to the ground.”
Goodness knows what the Brothers Grimm would have made of it.
THE DRIVER'S TALE
This frail bark of blog sails in many seas. Its readers include editors, columnists, teachers, publishers, special service toughs, even a small clutch of multi-millionaires. It goes to Trinidad. To the States and to Australia - and Pentrefoelas. I am especially pleased about that. I wrote recently about Alan Hughes, a driving instructor who has opened the secrets of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Alan reads the blog and has sent me a book he has just published.
It is called “Chaucer's Signs and Circumstances”, and as well as being a fascinating piece of literary detection, it is very impressive scholarship, though Alan confesses it is meeting academic opposition.
“Many of the academic comments have been hostile to my way of reading Chaucer's work: eg., 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'; 'How come a driving instructor from Pentrefoelas when the best minds of Oxford and Cambridge have failed to find any allegories?' Ann Dobyns, writing in the Medieval Review considers that my work 'represents the kind of over-arguing often found in undergraduate papers'.
He refuses to be put off
“I have now gathered enough material to put together three books: the one posted to you, one on Chaucer's remaining larger works and his lyrics; another on the allegories detected in works written around that time. For example, I understand the complex allegory of the Testament of Love and, without any doubt, I can prove that William Thynne was correct in presenting it to King Henry VIII as being Chaucer's work.
I believe that this same crowd will never accept my allegorical theories.”
I know how he feels. Like most people who are self taught Iwas no stranger to bitter critics so I put together a Writer's Mantra
Our friends the reviewers
Those chippers and hewers
Are judges of mortal stone,sir
But of meet and unmeet
In a fabric complete
I''ll boldly proclaim they are none,sir
Cannot remember who said that but it was the 18th century Angelesy antiquarian Rev Henry Rowlands who wrote;
“Criticism is an undefined thing under no settled rule, often governed by prejudice and passion,humour or fancy which makes it very frequently that what is agreeable to one is displeasing to another. To please all is impossible, to have faults is unavoidable”
Plini the Second wrote “ Every man's witty labour takes not-except the matter,subject, occasion and some commending favourite happen to it”
Judge for yourself. The book is available from Aslan at £9.95 plus postage from Alania, Tan y Gaer, Pentrefoelas, LL24 OLE (emaill ohughes@tiscali.co.uk
Saturday, 20 March 2010
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SUCKLINGS.........................
Looking through an old drawer, I came across this column I wrote on my 65th birthday.
Reading it again at 80 when I am so bored I can find nothing better to do than rootle in old files, I can only say. “Hear hear ...” to that
To: Peter Hollinson
Editor
WALES ON SUNDAY
From: Ian Skidmore
(who has no faith in fax machines. Could I be rung if it
arrives?)
Since I started work as a 14-year-old printer's devil, I have only ever had one ambition: to retire.
Over the years I have chucked in a boss's job, turned down Fleet Street and a foreign correspondency, and declined to twinkle as a minor star on Radio 4. Have written so many columns like this I am known in the trade as the Parthenon Kid.
Always with the eye fixed on the alpaca jacket, the walking stick and the rose garden.
I've got the jacket, the stick and a three-acre-garden like you wouldn't believe. And here I am still grafting.
Sixty-five. All my own hair, someone else's teeth and it is still, "Have word processor, will grovel."
If I have to work, I could hardly find better jobs. I get paid for arguing on his radio News Quiz with Vincent Kane - which most people would do free; for listening to the radio to compile a weekly programme of my favourite moments on Radio Wales; for interviewing interesting Welsh people on the same station; and for reading the newspapers so I can do weekly broadcasts to Welsh servicemen, and to Australia and sundry other parts of the globe where I am a sort of Alistair Cookaburra.
Don't get paid a lot but at least I can do it from home.
Look at it this way. I may be Wales's lowest paid broadcaster but I am the highest paid gardener.
But RETIRE to the Roses? No chance.
Why am I still at it?
It is this part-time vocational work I do as a stress counsellor to the bank. How it works is, I sign a cheque and the bank manager rings me up in a shocking state. So I have to write him long, soothing letters to calm him down. I cash so many cheques in my Anglesey local he thinks I am being blackmailed by Bass Charrington.
My good friend the Bishop of Bangor relieves stress by making chocolate gateaux the gastronomic equivalent of a choir of angels. Takes his mind off worries like the refusal of the Church in Wales to ordain women.
Time to rewrite the rule book?
I sent him this and he said it cheered him up. (He is Archbishop of Wales now and prayed for me when I had cancer.)
.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said: "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? From the orchard, I can't hear the bell. Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."
And God spoke and He said: "Give it a rest. I am paying for this call. Put an extension bell in the orchard, dummy.
“The angel is Security and outside my remit. Obviously been a mistake. He shouldn't be there till apple picking..."
Adam said: "A blazing sword? A Theme Park we're building? A Kebab House already?"
And God spoke and he said: "I wanted Dobermans but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive.
It's something they picked up from the Competition.
“About the garden staffing levels. We are working on that.
Originally, Research and Development favoured stage automation. We were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to create Faraday."
Adam said: " Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”
And God spoke and He said: "That is the reason I called. R & D have come up with this new concept. I thought I would just run it up that apple tree for you and see if it flaps."
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."
And God spoke and He said: " Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it is an
entertainment concept and it does home nursing. Runs on the same stuff you eat, would you believe?
“R & D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. The modem will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"
And God spoke and He said: "What's in a name? as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man. Woman. Neat, eh?
“Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions."
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? Have to go. Only two days before my day off."
And He rang off.
It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this Leak from Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about the woman machine.
And Adam was sore afraid.
ends......................
Meanwhile back in March, Cambs in March 20/10
UNDERNEATH THE ARCHERS
I would do almost anything to avoid listening to the Archers. Even, as I did this week, watch a programme on the ”Wonders of the Star System”, a subject which misses me by wide margin. I have enough to do worrying about my own planet and little inclination towards far off stars which look to have been covered in cold porridge.
The presenter of this programme is a professor who looks about fourteen and is alive with the joy of his subject. Few things are more attractive in TV that a presenter who is more interested in his subject than himself. Professor Brian Cox joins the pantheon of presenters who enthuse rather than irritate and in an instant I was on his team.
His subject was the sun and he spoke of it in the language of the King James Bible. So strong was this impression I found myself thinking that, had our cave man ancestors used commonsense to describe nature rather than imagination, science would be our religion. Both end in Judgement Day. The Religious version is pure Walt Disney. Science, on the other hand, threatens us with a celestial vacuum cleaner which is even now hoovering up great swathes of the universe.
So Messianic was Cox's praise of the risen sun, he reminded me of the 14th century Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep 1V who banished Egypt's tribe of gods and ordered that only Aton, the religion of the Sun, could be worshipped, which, since the Sun creates, makes a lot more sense as a symbol than a petulant old man worrying about status.
Admittedly, it got the Pharoah in terrible trouble and the moment he died the old gods came flooding back.
Six hundred years later Sigmund Freud also got into terrible trouble suggesting that Moses was an Egyptian priest of the Sun God and the Monotheism he taught the Jews in the desert, in place of their old volcanic god, Jahve, was worship of the Sun.
It was an act of great bravery on Freud's part. He was trapped in Nazi Vienna. The Zionist movement was planning to get him out but it was so incensed by this blasphemy it was on the point of abandoning him to Auschwitz.
I went to a Faith school under false pretences. From an early age, I have thought the bible a collection of VERY Grimm tales. The only miracle, in my opinion, is music. All other miracles are legerdemain. Like the character in Moliere who was amazed to discover he had been talking prose all his life without realising it, I was a Buddhist for years before discovering it.
I came acrosss a quotation by Hermes the Thrice Great in Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religion of a Medical Man'”: “God is a Circle, the centre of which is nowhere and the circumference everywhere.”
The Buddhist belief, as I later discovered, is that we are all part of God. Sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind besides which nothing exists.
Thought thinks, claims The Lord Buddha, and so does Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.”
Later still, I came across Aldous Huxley's 'The Perennial Philosophy', which argues there is something in the soul that is identical with Divine Reality; not only in all primitive religions but in every one of the higher religions. No need for Bells and Smells and celestial conjuring tricks. He has been there under my shirt all the time.
There is a lot to be said for not listening to the Archers.
.
A TRIBUTE
China's Rogue Blogger
China's top blogger, a young novelist who drives race cars on the side and whose good looks have made him a sex symbol, has been clashing with the country's censorship policies. At 300 million hits to his blog, The New York Times suggests Han Han might be "the most popular living writer in the world.,” but not all of his posts stay up long—the government has been known to take down offending material overly critical of the government. A wry satirist, one recent post by Han criticizing China's eviction of residents for new developments suggested replacing housing projects with prisons so dissenters could more conveniently be locked up in their homes after they object. His latest project, a new magazine entitled "A Chorus of Solos," is being held up by the government over its content.
Read it at The New York Times
Posted at 7:28 AM, Mar 13, 2010
You couldn't (possibly) make it up...
My friend Revel Baker, sometime Head Honcho to Cap'n Bob Maxwell, sends the following cuttings from newspapers:
TO all you hunters who kill animals for food, Shame on you. You ought to go to the store and buy the meat that is made there and no animal harmed.
Dog attack- Lower Duck Pond. Lithia Park. Ashland. Police responded to a report of two dogs running loose and attacking ducks at about 11.20 am on Sunday. The officer cited a resident for the loose dogs. The ducks refused medical trearment and left the area.
Reading it again at 80 when I am so bored I can find nothing better to do than rootle in old files, I can only say. “Hear hear ...” to that
To: Peter Hollinson
Editor
WALES ON SUNDAY
From: Ian Skidmore
(who has no faith in fax machines. Could I be rung if it
arrives?)
Since I started work as a 14-year-old printer's devil, I have only ever had one ambition: to retire.
Over the years I have chucked in a boss's job, turned down Fleet Street and a foreign correspondency, and declined to twinkle as a minor star on Radio 4. Have written so many columns like this I am known in the trade as the Parthenon Kid.
Always with the eye fixed on the alpaca jacket, the walking stick and the rose garden.
I've got the jacket, the stick and a three-acre-garden like you wouldn't believe. And here I am still grafting.
Sixty-five. All my own hair, someone else's teeth and it is still, "Have word processor, will grovel."
If I have to work, I could hardly find better jobs. I get paid for arguing on his radio News Quiz with Vincent Kane - which most people would do free; for listening to the radio to compile a weekly programme of my favourite moments on Radio Wales; for interviewing interesting Welsh people on the same station; and for reading the newspapers so I can do weekly broadcasts to Welsh servicemen, and to Australia and sundry other parts of the globe where I am a sort of Alistair Cookaburra.
Don't get paid a lot but at least I can do it from home.
Look at it this way. I may be Wales's lowest paid broadcaster but I am the highest paid gardener.
But RETIRE to the Roses? No chance.
Why am I still at it?
It is this part-time vocational work I do as a stress counsellor to the bank. How it works is, I sign a cheque and the bank manager rings me up in a shocking state. So I have to write him long, soothing letters to calm him down. I cash so many cheques in my Anglesey local he thinks I am being blackmailed by Bass Charrington.
My good friend the Bishop of Bangor relieves stress by making chocolate gateaux the gastronomic equivalent of a choir of angels. Takes his mind off worries like the refusal of the Church in Wales to ordain women.
Time to rewrite the rule book?
I sent him this and he said it cheered him up. (He is Archbishop of Wales now and prayed for me when I had cancer.)
.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said: "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? From the orchard, I can't hear the bell. Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."
And God spoke and He said: "Give it a rest. I am paying for this call. Put an extension bell in the orchard, dummy.
“The angel is Security and outside my remit. Obviously been a mistake. He shouldn't be there till apple picking..."
Adam said: "A blazing sword? A Theme Park we're building? A Kebab House already?"
And God spoke and he said: "I wanted Dobermans but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive.
It's something they picked up from the Competition.
“About the garden staffing levels. We are working on that.
Originally, Research and Development favoured stage automation. We were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to create Faraday."
Adam said: " Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”
And God spoke and He said: "That is the reason I called. R & D have come up with this new concept. I thought I would just run it up that apple tree for you and see if it flaps."
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."
And God spoke and He said: " Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it is an
entertainment concept and it does home nursing. Runs on the same stuff you eat, would you believe?
“R & D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. The modem will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"
And God spoke and He said: "What's in a name? as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man. Woman. Neat, eh?
“Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions."
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? Have to go. Only two days before my day off."
And He rang off.
It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this Leak from Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about the woman machine.
And Adam was sore afraid.
ends......................
Meanwhile back in March, Cambs in March 20/10
UNDERNEATH THE ARCHERS
I would do almost anything to avoid listening to the Archers. Even, as I did this week, watch a programme on the ”Wonders of the Star System”, a subject which misses me by wide margin. I have enough to do worrying about my own planet and little inclination towards far off stars which look to have been covered in cold porridge.
The presenter of this programme is a professor who looks about fourteen and is alive with the joy of his subject. Few things are more attractive in TV that a presenter who is more interested in his subject than himself. Professor Brian Cox joins the pantheon of presenters who enthuse rather than irritate and in an instant I was on his team.
His subject was the sun and he spoke of it in the language of the King James Bible. So strong was this impression I found myself thinking that, had our cave man ancestors used commonsense to describe nature rather than imagination, science would be our religion. Both end in Judgement Day. The Religious version is pure Walt Disney. Science, on the other hand, threatens us with a celestial vacuum cleaner which is even now hoovering up great swathes of the universe.
So Messianic was Cox's praise of the risen sun, he reminded me of the 14th century Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep 1V who banished Egypt's tribe of gods and ordered that only Aton, the religion of the Sun, could be worshipped, which, since the Sun creates, makes a lot more sense as a symbol than a petulant old man worrying about status.
Admittedly, it got the Pharoah in terrible trouble and the moment he died the old gods came flooding back.
Six hundred years later Sigmund Freud also got into terrible trouble suggesting that Moses was an Egyptian priest of the Sun God and the Monotheism he taught the Jews in the desert, in place of their old volcanic god, Jahve, was worship of the Sun.
It was an act of great bravery on Freud's part. He was trapped in Nazi Vienna. The Zionist movement was planning to get him out but it was so incensed by this blasphemy it was on the point of abandoning him to Auschwitz.
I went to a Faith school under false pretences. From an early age, I have thought the bible a collection of VERY Grimm tales. The only miracle, in my opinion, is music. All other miracles are legerdemain. Like the character in Moliere who was amazed to discover he had been talking prose all his life without realising it, I was a Buddhist for years before discovering it.
I came acrosss a quotation by Hermes the Thrice Great in Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religion of a Medical Man'”: “God is a Circle, the centre of which is nowhere and the circumference everywhere.”
The Buddhist belief, as I later discovered, is that we are all part of God. Sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind besides which nothing exists.
Thought thinks, claims The Lord Buddha, and so does Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.”
Later still, I came across Aldous Huxley's 'The Perennial Philosophy', which argues there is something in the soul that is identical with Divine Reality; not only in all primitive religions but in every one of the higher religions. No need for Bells and Smells and celestial conjuring tricks. He has been there under my shirt all the time.
There is a lot to be said for not listening to the Archers.
.
A TRIBUTE
China's Rogue Blogger
China's top blogger, a young novelist who drives race cars on the side and whose good looks have made him a sex symbol, has been clashing with the country's censorship policies. At 300 million hits to his blog, The New York Times suggests Han Han might be "the most popular living writer in the world.,” but not all of his posts stay up long—the government has been known to take down offending material overly critical of the government. A wry satirist, one recent post by Han criticizing China's eviction of residents for new developments suggested replacing housing projects with prisons so dissenters could more conveniently be locked up in their homes after they object. His latest project, a new magazine entitled "A Chorus of Solos," is being held up by the government over its content.
Read it at The New York Times
Posted at 7:28 AM, Mar 13, 2010
You couldn't (possibly) make it up...
My friend Revel Baker, sometime Head Honcho to Cap'n Bob Maxwell, sends the following cuttings from newspapers:
TO all you hunters who kill animals for food, Shame on you. You ought to go to the store and buy the meat that is made there and no animal harmed.
Dog attack- Lower Duck Pond. Lithia Park. Ashland. Police responded to a report of two dogs running loose and attacking ducks at about 11.20 am on Sunday. The officer cited a resident for the loose dogs. The ducks refused medical trearment and left the area.
Friday, 12 March 2010
It ONLY COSTS A LITTLE MORE TO BUY YOUR OWN FIRST CLASS TICKET
I was not surprised that Sir Ian Kennedy's s proposal that MPs should only be allowed to travel first class in "exceptional circumstances" – such as a journey of more than two and a half hours – met with particularly strong opposition from parliamentarians.
Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP for Maidstone and the Weald, accused him of being guided by media "spite" rather than value to the taxpayer, and pointed out she had written two books while travelling first class.
She said: "If I travel first class, I can plug in my computer, not a facility that is universally available in second class. I can therefore work throughout the journey.”
(The argument for 1st class travel is that MPs work on the train. What is Miss Widdecombe doing writing books when she should be working?)
She goes on: "The 'at seat' service means that I do not have to interrupt the work to go and queue in the train's buffet bar. Second class being more of a thoroughfare, interruption and engagement in conversation is a great deal more frequent."
Those nasty constituents should know their place.
Tom Levitt, the Labour backbencher for High Peak, said: "I invariably work on the train, something I can only do in a first class carriage for three reasons: that I have a table, space and privacy to work there; that I have a seat (as the standard class carriages between Manchester and London are often standing room only); and that (as I am over six feet tall) I have the leg room for comfort."
Three excellent reasons for BUYING a first class seat.
MPs are currently worrying over the possibility that few of us will be bothering to vote. They should look no further than their own demands.
I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE HATED
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, The Welsh Language Society, The Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family. My Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law, Jackie, who looked after the boats of a sheik in Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Sheik in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service. Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day early
to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night, whisky had washed away any seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm, naked hostility had replaced it. My father invariably ignited things by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist principles inflamed at the sight of such a capitalist accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy, Matty and Alec, who tried to join the row were rebuffed by Uncle Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy, Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their conversation.
Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?" The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the brothers had their arms round each other and were singing Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that any more. Or Auntie Jeannies.
COOKERY NOOK
The perfect Yorkshire Pudding is that made by the chefs of Simpson's in the Strand. This is their recipe.
The fat must be smoky hot when the batter is poured in. The batter is made from 1 egg, 4 oz plain flour and half a pint of milk. Once it is made, it is electrically whisked at full speed whilst a splash of hot water is added. The batter must be left in the fridge for at least an hour but no longer than 12 hours.
Beef dripping is then heated in individual moulds. When it shows a haze and sizzles, the batter is poured in and it is returned to the oven for about 30 minutes or until the puddings are well risen or golden brown. It can be eaten BEFORE the main course. Its original purpose was to diminish the appetite for the beef which followed, a Yorkshire precaution. In Lancashire it was traditionally sprinkled with sugar and served as a final course.
AND THIS FROM THE GUARDIAN:
....for the perfect British sausage experience, choose a banger with a fair proportion of fat to meat, and a few breadcrumbs too. Do not prod. Leave it intact, and fry it ever so gently in a pan for 40 minutes while you go off and do something else, like walking the bulldog, enjoying an cask-conditioned ale or visiting a red telephone box.
Oh, and roast partridge stuffed with a pear or a peach is ambrosial.
Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP for Maidstone and the Weald, accused him of being guided by media "spite" rather than value to the taxpayer, and pointed out she had written two books while travelling first class.
She said: "If I travel first class, I can plug in my computer, not a facility that is universally available in second class. I can therefore work throughout the journey.”
(The argument for 1st class travel is that MPs work on the train. What is Miss Widdecombe doing writing books when she should be working?)
She goes on: "The 'at seat' service means that I do not have to interrupt the work to go and queue in the train's buffet bar. Second class being more of a thoroughfare, interruption and engagement in conversation is a great deal more frequent."
Those nasty constituents should know their place.
Tom Levitt, the Labour backbencher for High Peak, said: "I invariably work on the train, something I can only do in a first class carriage for three reasons: that I have a table, space and privacy to work there; that I have a seat (as the standard class carriages between Manchester and London are often standing room only); and that (as I am over six feet tall) I have the leg room for comfort."
Three excellent reasons for BUYING a first class seat.
MPs are currently worrying over the possibility that few of us will be bothering to vote. They should look no further than their own demands.
I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE HATED
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, The Welsh Language Society, The Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family. My Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law, Jackie, who looked after the boats of a sheik in Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Sheik in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service. Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day early
to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night, whisky had washed away any seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm, naked hostility had replaced it. My father invariably ignited things by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist principles inflamed at the sight of such a capitalist accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy, Matty and Alec, who tried to join the row were rebuffed by Uncle Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy, Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their conversation.
Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?" The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the brothers had their arms round each other and were singing Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that any more. Or Auntie Jeannies.
COOKERY NOOK
The perfect Yorkshire Pudding is that made by the chefs of Simpson's in the Strand. This is their recipe.
The fat must be smoky hot when the batter is poured in. The batter is made from 1 egg, 4 oz plain flour and half a pint of milk. Once it is made, it is electrically whisked at full speed whilst a splash of hot water is added. The batter must be left in the fridge for at least an hour but no longer than 12 hours.
Beef dripping is then heated in individual moulds. When it shows a haze and sizzles, the batter is poured in and it is returned to the oven for about 30 minutes or until the puddings are well risen or golden brown. It can be eaten BEFORE the main course. Its original purpose was to diminish the appetite for the beef which followed, a Yorkshire precaution. In Lancashire it was traditionally sprinkled with sugar and served as a final course.
AND THIS FROM THE GUARDIAN:
....for the perfect British sausage experience, choose a banger with a fair proportion of fat to meat, and a few breadcrumbs too. Do not prod. Leave it intact, and fry it ever so gently in a pan for 40 minutes while you go off and do something else, like walking the bulldog, enjoying an cask-conditioned ale or visiting a red telephone box.
Oh, and roast partridge stuffed with a pear or a peach is ambrosial.
Saturday, 6 March 2010
OH TO KNOW A PILGRIM
Alan Hughes, a driving instructor I knew in Pentrefoelas, was a driven man and the road he chose had more potholes than smooth surfaces. From a poor family and suffering from TB, he was in a sanatorium until he was ten. With little schooling he worked as a semi-literate farmhand. His only asset was an ability to drive. Gradually, from helping his fellow farmhands to drive, he became an instructor and discovered a second gift. He was a natural teacher.
To improve his role as a driving instructor, he took a course in teaching for a City and Guilds Certificate. Spotting his eagerness to learn, one of his instructors helped him apply for a two-year course in General Studies at Harlech College.
Hughes told me: “There was a very good grant but it was still hard to make ends meet. Luckily I had very good parents and they helped. Harlech was brilliant. The instructors cared about you and the diploma the college awarded was the back door to the University of Wales.”
He did a three-year course in English Language and Literature and a year's post graduate course to qualify as a teacher. He was awarded a BA and an M Phil on Allegory in Medieval Literature. All would have been well if he hadn't met Geoffrey Chaucer. Reading Henry 1V, he recognised a couplet by the father of our literature.
“I wondered why Shakespeare used a fictional tale to help him write an historical play. Perhaps there was more fact in Chaucer than I had thought.”
In David Copperfield Dickens wrote of Uncle Dick's obsession with King Charles's head. With Hughes, it was a crowd of pilgrims.
He realised it would be unfair on the children he would teach if most of his mind was filled with his search for the histories hidden in Chaucer. So he went back to instructing learner drivers. The study occupied the next sixteen years. A chance discovery of an article by an American scholar Leslie Hotson which discussed the allegorical content of the Nun's Priest's Tale was his only encouragement. In the story of the pursuit by flattery of a sexy cock by a sycophantic fox, Hotson suggested the fox was the future Henry 1V, the cock was Richard 11 and the hen, after whom he lusted, Queen Isabel.
Scraping together the fare, Hughes flew to the States and cold called Hotson shortly before he died. Hotson encouraged him to go on with his research.
I met Hughes twenty years ago and much of the detail he told me in support of his theory has been lost. But it made sense that the whole purpose of the Tales was to warn Richard that he was damaging the Crown because of his obsession with Isabel, the seven-year-old daughter of the king of France.
He explained: “First I read everything Chaucer had read to try to get into his mind. Then I read his works to unravel the allegory. Only then did I turn to the histories of the period. Had I read the histories first I might have been tempted to bend the explanation to fit the facts.”
This is where the Victorian Prime Minister Gladstone entered the fray.
One of the glories of Wales in my day was the collection of his books. Gladstone, who owned the finest library in Europe, left his books to St Deiniol's library in Hawarden, which he also endowed. Genuine scholars could live in the library whilst they researched their chosen subject. I stayed there whilst researching my “Owain Glyndwr”. It was run like an Oxford College. There was even a High Table for the librarian and his staff of two. It was as near heaven as one can get without wings and a harp.
At the time I met Hughes a team of Chaucerian scholars was feeding 300,000 words from 58 manuscripts into computers using techniques from evolutionary biology in order to prove that the Wife of Bath wasn't the old boot we all thought she was.
I suggested to Hughes that he should contact them with his own research. He already had. He told me: “Although some important scholars support me, my theory has been the object of academic derision.”
In Academe, as everywhere else in life, it's not what you know..................................
HANG PARLIAMENT. SUCH A GOOD IDEA!!!!
Bully Brown reassures us that Britain is not a broken society but he fears we may have a hung parliament. My own view is that hanging is far too good for many of our MPs. We ARE a broken society and our only chance of a safe future would be a coalition. Coalitions are summoned in wartime and we are presently fighting for our lives.
And losing...
The Emperor Elagabalus raised the ire of Gibbon by unsettling the Roman economy in popularising the effeminate wearing of silk by men. His coronation “the richest wines, the most extraordinary victims and the rarest aromatics.” His reign...”the confused multitude of women, the studied variety of attitudes and sauces served to revive his languid appetites.”
How much worse would have been his reputation if, having bankrupted the Roman Empire, he had spent millions of borrowed money on an international games which involved building a stadium twice the size of Imperial Rome.
The reluctant Lord Ashcroft apart, we do not know the identity of other members of the House of Lords who make our laws but do not pay tax on the bulk of their considerable fortunes. Ashcroft obfuscated for ten years to remain anonymous. Ten years, during which he accepted a peerage and the vice chairmanship of his political party. Unelected himself, the thirty pieces of silver he has hurled at marginal constituencies could well affect the next General Election. He provides an aeroplane and a staff for overseas jaunts by cabinet members whom he accompanies on visits to world leaders.
Disgraced MPs are consoled with a rise of £1000 a year and life membership of the Houses of Parliament with its subsidised bars and restaurants,improving their chances of jobs with high paying Lobby Groups. Thus, disgraced MPs not fit to sit in parliament are being helped into jobs where they can alter laws, plead special cases and do many other things that would not be legal in any decently run legislation.
We hold the all Europe record for pregnant schoolgirls, our armed forces are giving their lives to support a corrupt government in Afghanistan and those who survive return to rat infested crumbling accommodation that shames us all. Charities pay for equipment that is the right of the wounded,yet every employee of the Ministry of Defence will take home bonuses. As will the bankers filling their pockets with the money we gave them to get themselves out of the mess their incompetence brought about. The Government are frightened by their threat that if we don't bribe them they will go abroad. We should be paying their fares
Defence Chiefs are sanguine about our casualties in the most recent putsch, yet deeply worried about injured Afghans. They complain that the Prime Minister was disengenuous when he claimed they had all the funds they needed for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is they were underfunded. Yet the Generals still sent our inadequately funded teen agers to their deaths. Not a single general resigned.
Children are leaving school , barely able to read or write. Those few that can are unlikely to get into universities because the Govt cannot afford the fees There has been a flood of immigrants, the direct result of secret and wildly anti-social government policy. In fact this has been our saviour because highly qualified immigrants are happy to take on lowly jobs our own highly benefited workers scorn to do.Which, perhaps, is what the Government had in mind when it create its race f Helots
We used to sing about a Britain “That always shall be free” Now we live in a country where a new law is passed – without proper parliamentary scrutiny- every quarter of an hour. The only feet in modern times that walk over England's pleasant mountains green belong to erectors of giant turbines that will make very little difference to our power supply but assist Global Warming Gore and his gory chums to make even more than the 7 billion he has already made from investment in the global warming heist.
Our police force is a joke,our judiciary a disgrace. One of Britain's top policemen is serving four years in gaol. The secret service is accused of benefiting from torture.
Perhaps worst of all. The greed of Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles End All Peace Treaty has stirred up the Muslim world against us. Nor do I think the Chinese who will presently own both us and the USA have particularly good memories of the time our soldiers looted and destroyed the legendary miles of landscaped Magic Gardens of Yuan Min Yang near Peking with its countless palaces,pavilions and covered walks between man made mountans. An observer described “The whole incomprehensible glory of nature and of the wonderland built in it by th hand of man”
It took only a few days to destroy what it has taken many centuries to create. In assisting the Emperor to crush the Taiping rebellion we contributed to the death or made homeless six million Chinese. We fight to destroy the poppy fields of the Afghan. Our troops were in China who quelled the rebellion in the 19th century to force the Emperor to allow the import of opium from British India.
The cause of this rant? It is the small things that irritate most.That give the final proof of decline In this case a few paragraphs in the Daily Mail telling how a security officer at Heathrow ordered a former Royal Marine Commando to cover a tattoo of his regimental dagger crest
Because?
“It will offend other passengers” he was told
From the Greek Anthology
Thou who passest on this path,
If haply thou dost mark this monument,
Laugh not, I pray thee, though it is a dog's grave.
Tears fell for me, and the dust was heaped above me
By a master's hand.
To improve his role as a driving instructor, he took a course in teaching for a City and Guilds Certificate. Spotting his eagerness to learn, one of his instructors helped him apply for a two-year course in General Studies at Harlech College.
Hughes told me: “There was a very good grant but it was still hard to make ends meet. Luckily I had very good parents and they helped. Harlech was brilliant. The instructors cared about you and the diploma the college awarded was the back door to the University of Wales.”
He did a three-year course in English Language and Literature and a year's post graduate course to qualify as a teacher. He was awarded a BA and an M Phil on Allegory in Medieval Literature. All would have been well if he hadn't met Geoffrey Chaucer. Reading Henry 1V, he recognised a couplet by the father of our literature.
“I wondered why Shakespeare used a fictional tale to help him write an historical play. Perhaps there was more fact in Chaucer than I had thought.”
In David Copperfield Dickens wrote of Uncle Dick's obsession with King Charles's head. With Hughes, it was a crowd of pilgrims.
He realised it would be unfair on the children he would teach if most of his mind was filled with his search for the histories hidden in Chaucer. So he went back to instructing learner drivers. The study occupied the next sixteen years. A chance discovery of an article by an American scholar Leslie Hotson which discussed the allegorical content of the Nun's Priest's Tale was his only encouragement. In the story of the pursuit by flattery of a sexy cock by a sycophantic fox, Hotson suggested the fox was the future Henry 1V, the cock was Richard 11 and the hen, after whom he lusted, Queen Isabel.
Scraping together the fare, Hughes flew to the States and cold called Hotson shortly before he died. Hotson encouraged him to go on with his research.
I met Hughes twenty years ago and much of the detail he told me in support of his theory has been lost. But it made sense that the whole purpose of the Tales was to warn Richard that he was damaging the Crown because of his obsession with Isabel, the seven-year-old daughter of the king of France.
He explained: “First I read everything Chaucer had read to try to get into his mind. Then I read his works to unravel the allegory. Only then did I turn to the histories of the period. Had I read the histories first I might have been tempted to bend the explanation to fit the facts.”
This is where the Victorian Prime Minister Gladstone entered the fray.
One of the glories of Wales in my day was the collection of his books. Gladstone, who owned the finest library in Europe, left his books to St Deiniol's library in Hawarden, which he also endowed. Genuine scholars could live in the library whilst they researched their chosen subject. I stayed there whilst researching my “Owain Glyndwr”. It was run like an Oxford College. There was even a High Table for the librarian and his staff of two. It was as near heaven as one can get without wings and a harp.
At the time I met Hughes a team of Chaucerian scholars was feeding 300,000 words from 58 manuscripts into computers using techniques from evolutionary biology in order to prove that the Wife of Bath wasn't the old boot we all thought she was.
I suggested to Hughes that he should contact them with his own research. He already had. He told me: “Although some important scholars support me, my theory has been the object of academic derision.”
In Academe, as everywhere else in life, it's not what you know..................................
HANG PARLIAMENT. SUCH A GOOD IDEA!!!!
Bully Brown reassures us that Britain is not a broken society but he fears we may have a hung parliament. My own view is that hanging is far too good for many of our MPs. We ARE a broken society and our only chance of a safe future would be a coalition. Coalitions are summoned in wartime and we are presently fighting for our lives.
And losing...
The Emperor Elagabalus raised the ire of Gibbon by unsettling the Roman economy in popularising the effeminate wearing of silk by men. His coronation “the richest wines, the most extraordinary victims and the rarest aromatics.” His reign...”the confused multitude of women, the studied variety of attitudes and sauces served to revive his languid appetites.”
How much worse would have been his reputation if, having bankrupted the Roman Empire, he had spent millions of borrowed money on an international games which involved building a stadium twice the size of Imperial Rome.
The reluctant Lord Ashcroft apart, we do not know the identity of other members of the House of Lords who make our laws but do not pay tax on the bulk of their considerable fortunes. Ashcroft obfuscated for ten years to remain anonymous. Ten years, during which he accepted a peerage and the vice chairmanship of his political party. Unelected himself, the thirty pieces of silver he has hurled at marginal constituencies could well affect the next General Election. He provides an aeroplane and a staff for overseas jaunts by cabinet members whom he accompanies on visits to world leaders.
Disgraced MPs are consoled with a rise of £1000 a year and life membership of the Houses of Parliament with its subsidised bars and restaurants,improving their chances of jobs with high paying Lobby Groups. Thus, disgraced MPs not fit to sit in parliament are being helped into jobs where they can alter laws, plead special cases and do many other things that would not be legal in any decently run legislation.
We hold the all Europe record for pregnant schoolgirls, our armed forces are giving their lives to support a corrupt government in Afghanistan and those who survive return to rat infested crumbling accommodation that shames us all. Charities pay for equipment that is the right of the wounded,yet every employee of the Ministry of Defence will take home bonuses. As will the bankers filling their pockets with the money we gave them to get themselves out of the mess their incompetence brought about. The Government are frightened by their threat that if we don't bribe them they will go abroad. We should be paying their fares
Defence Chiefs are sanguine about our casualties in the most recent putsch, yet deeply worried about injured Afghans. They complain that the Prime Minister was disengenuous when he claimed they had all the funds they needed for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is they were underfunded. Yet the Generals still sent our inadequately funded teen agers to their deaths. Not a single general resigned.
Children are leaving school , barely able to read or write. Those few that can are unlikely to get into universities because the Govt cannot afford the fees There has been a flood of immigrants, the direct result of secret and wildly anti-social government policy. In fact this has been our saviour because highly qualified immigrants are happy to take on lowly jobs our own highly benefited workers scorn to do.Which, perhaps, is what the Government had in mind when it create its race f Helots
We used to sing about a Britain “That always shall be free” Now we live in a country where a new law is passed – without proper parliamentary scrutiny- every quarter of an hour. The only feet in modern times that walk over England's pleasant mountains green belong to erectors of giant turbines that will make very little difference to our power supply but assist Global Warming Gore and his gory chums to make even more than the 7 billion he has already made from investment in the global warming heist.
Our police force is a joke,our judiciary a disgrace. One of Britain's top policemen is serving four years in gaol. The secret service is accused of benefiting from torture.
Perhaps worst of all. The greed of Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles End All Peace Treaty has stirred up the Muslim world against us. Nor do I think the Chinese who will presently own both us and the USA have particularly good memories of the time our soldiers looted and destroyed the legendary miles of landscaped Magic Gardens of Yuan Min Yang near Peking with its countless palaces,pavilions and covered walks between man made mountans. An observer described “The whole incomprehensible glory of nature and of the wonderland built in it by th hand of man”
It took only a few days to destroy what it has taken many centuries to create. In assisting the Emperor to crush the Taiping rebellion we contributed to the death or made homeless six million Chinese. We fight to destroy the poppy fields of the Afghan. Our troops were in China who quelled the rebellion in the 19th century to force the Emperor to allow the import of opium from British India.
The cause of this rant? It is the small things that irritate most.That give the final proof of decline In this case a few paragraphs in the Daily Mail telling how a security officer at Heathrow ordered a former Royal Marine Commando to cover a tattoo of his regimental dagger crest
Because?
“It will offend other passengers” he was told
From the Greek Anthology
Thou who passest on this path,
If haply thou dost mark this monument,
Laugh not, I pray thee, though it is a dog's grave.
Tears fell for me, and the dust was heaped above me
By a master's hand.
Friday, 26 February 2010
The Shpherd and the Flying Flock
My friend Ernest Naish was probably the only shepherd in history who in his spare time set up an RAF Guided Missile station commanding a staff of a hundred and numbering 15 jet fighters.
He would do the morning milking, fly down to the Air Show in Farnborough and be back in time for the evening milking.
There were difficulties. The Air Ministry asked him to fly to Woomera in Australia to report on a new invention, a pilotless plane the Ministry was thinking of buying. On the way to the airport he saw an advert in The Guardian for a 500-acre sheep farm on Cwm Pennant with five cottages and a fine Victorian villa.
Ernie ordered his driver to take them past the farm so he could look at it from he road, stopped at the next phone box, bought it for £4,000 and flew to Australia where he reported the plane was not worth the money. The farm, as it turned out, was.
Cwm Pennant is a place of legendary beauty, of which a bard sang “Why, Lord, did you make Cwm Pennant so lovely and the life of a shepherd so short?”
Ernie agreed: “I am part of this land, just like the pigs and sheep. Mine is the worst land on the Cwm, a foot of peat on rock. It is a lovely place to live but a hard place to make a living. But my heart is here.”
He was 88 and had lived there forty years when I met him but had spent only four nights away.
Ernie had form when it came to hasty purchase. He came to shepherding by a wavy route.
Being a genius helped. When he joined the pre-war Navy as a youth he was immediately listed as a dagger man. That was the sign by his name in the Navy List which marked him for accelerated promotion. He made light of it.
“My only distinction is that I had a Navy record for going on courses. Ten years. Alas, the day I joined my first ship I went for my typhoid injection and was jabbed with a dirty needle and became seriously ill.”
Back ashore, he was given command of a unit which inspected submarines on maiden voyages. He was about to board one when he was taken ill again. The submarine was HMS Thetis which went on its trial and sank. He told me: “My successor is buried at Holyhead. That is something that is with me all the time.”
Invalided out of the Navy, Ernie bought his first sheep farm, which came with a weaving mill. He knew nothing of either trade. “I just asked my neighbours what to do next.”
His neighbours must have been good teachers. He became an international authority on sheep rearing and wove tweed of such beauty it was taken up by fashion houses in London and Paris. The war intervened. Ernie went back in the Navy and when he was demobbed in 1945 the tweed market had been wiped out by an 80 per cent purchase tax.
Over the years he bought three farms which were about fifty miles apart and which he worked diligently. I met him when he had just retired. He told me that when he arrived at a farm he was too tired to work.
His idea of retirement was not as other men's. By general account Sir Kyffin Williams was Wales's greatest artist. As a boy he was taught to paint by Ernie. Later in life Sir Kyffin arranged an exhibition of Ernie's landscapes. He priced them at £500 each to deter buyers. Didn't work. He sold two the day the exhibition opened. He was furious. He never exhibited again. Yet he gave me a painting.
He explained: “I am a non-profit making water-colourist because, frankly, I don't need the money. I paint purely for my own pleasure. I get a idea by walking round the farm and looking at things, then I come back and ruin a lot of old envelopes sketching on them. I cannot start on a picture until I have it firmly in my head. I start in one corner and work across the paper. Never had a lesson in my life and I have no idea why I paint. It is very exacting work and I can only manage twenty minutes at a time.”
Over the years that followed I visited him often. He was never still. He designed a water-powered Aga in which the electric power came from a generator he built and was fed from a stream. He spent a long time failing to make me understand how a machine he built extracted heat from cold air. “It's nothing really. Just reverse the principle of the fridge.”
He always insisted he was just an ordinary bloke: his sister, a research chemist, was the brainy one in the family. At seventy, a pharmaceutical firm gave her a million pounds to do research of her choice.
Ordinary? If Ernie Naish was ordinary, I am the Queen of Romania.
GLOBAL WARNING
Alexander Buchan (1829 - 1907) was the secretary of the Scottish Meteorology Society.
He listed six recurrent cold periods: 7-10 February; 11-14 April; 9-14 May; 25 June to 4 July; 6-11 August; 6-12 November.
Rather fewer warm periods: 12-15 July; 12-15 August.
No sillier than recent global forecasts.
COMMONS SENSE
You can tell what God thinks about common sense by the few MPs that possess it. I work it out at one per party. Vince Cable for the Illiberal Democrats, William Hague, the sole representative for the Conservatives, and the Dark Lord Mandelson alone among Labour members to possess that essential seasoning. In the climate change debate Cable and Hague are listed as moderates and Mandelson is perceived as so lukewarm as to get green paint thrown over him.
I confess it has long puzzled me the way governments hurl themselves into changing the climate and only cool off when it seems likely they may be asked to do something positive to 'Canute' the climate.
Governments only appear to be stupid. When they seek to change society, as in the restriction of freedom, they move quietly and subtly. I was struck by an article by Matthew Paris in a Sunday paper when he boasted how he and Mandelson plotted to bring homosexuality into public acceptance. One of the more obvious moves was for Paris to 'accidentally' out Mandelson on Newsnight.
Given this centuries-old honing of cunning, why did the Government announce the most wide reaching programme of climate fighting, sewing the seas and defacing the landscape with turbines they know to be inadequate? At the same time they were hinting at another Falklands war over a newly discovered oil source and Putin was calling a meeting of oil company executives to advise on the exploitation of a massive oil find in Siberia.
And then the Good Lord Mandelson rode up on his charger to save the steelworkers of Corus. How? By announcing a £170 million deal to build a nuclear manufacturing facility on Teesside. A consortium of Sheffield Forge-masters and Westinghouse are to build a 15,000-ton press that will be used to make pressure vessels and casings for nuclear reactors. At present these are only made by a handful of specialised facilities in Japan.
So far there has been very little protest by the very voluble anti-nuclear lobby.
Hoist by their own Retard?
Three TV documentaries made me doubt my thesis. Their subjects were the great offices of state, the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the Home Office. It was revelatory. The three offices had one thing in common. They were not very good at their jobs and all demonstrated in their civil servants a towering and wholly unjustified self confidence.
Another fine crop of revelations came in the series on the Bible and on Christianity, in which a professor of theology made it obvious what is wrong with religion. They were wrong to insist that God created man in His own image when it is patently obvious that it is the other way round. The Judeo-Christian God, on the evidence of the bible, is unforgiving, vain, violent and petulant. Somehow it is right that He should be defended by the strident Anne Widdecombe, a woman whose apparent certainty does not go as far as to decide what colour hair she wants, and Gerry Adams who was given £10,000 to search for Jesus. Money that would have been well spent had he shown any sign in his lifetime that he would recognise the Christly virtues if he tripped over them.
Inevitably Stephen Fry was called in to demonstrate the silliness of religion in a way that reminded me of what someone said of him: Stephen Fry is what stupid people think is an intelligent man.
EVERY DAY HAS ITS DOG ….and most have cats too.
It's not only bad-mannered cattle that contribute to global warming. According to the New Scientist, cats, through their numerous emissions, are also contributors.
In Europe we spend £40 million a year on cat litter and much of the £500 million a year that we spend on vets' bills goes on our 25 million cats.
Be very afraid. A new study by the University of Bristol shows the number of cats doubles every 22 seconds.
Cat psychologist Peter Neville listed a number of case histories of his feline patients in his book "DO CATS NEED SHRINKS?”
"Cats have rarely been much use. Aside from the often overstated mouse and rat catcher role, cats have not followed the pathway of domestication based on training to task like the horse and the dog.“
Neville tells of a bachelor's cat who lay in wait for his new girlfriend and attacked her as she ran naked to the bathroom. The owner acted with despatch. He changed his girlfriend. Another owner wrote: "Thumper, my neutered tom has fallen in love with Jasmine, my eight-year-old dachshund and follows her everywhere, yowling and sniffing and trying to mount her."
Cats may need shrinks but................. Why don't they go to Specsavers?
He would do the morning milking, fly down to the Air Show in Farnborough and be back in time for the evening milking.
There were difficulties. The Air Ministry asked him to fly to Woomera in Australia to report on a new invention, a pilotless plane the Ministry was thinking of buying. On the way to the airport he saw an advert in The Guardian for a 500-acre sheep farm on Cwm Pennant with five cottages and a fine Victorian villa.
Ernie ordered his driver to take them past the farm so he could look at it from he road, stopped at the next phone box, bought it for £4,000 and flew to Australia where he reported the plane was not worth the money. The farm, as it turned out, was.
Cwm Pennant is a place of legendary beauty, of which a bard sang “Why, Lord, did you make Cwm Pennant so lovely and the life of a shepherd so short?”
Ernie agreed: “I am part of this land, just like the pigs and sheep. Mine is the worst land on the Cwm, a foot of peat on rock. It is a lovely place to live but a hard place to make a living. But my heart is here.”
He was 88 and had lived there forty years when I met him but had spent only four nights away.
Ernie had form when it came to hasty purchase. He came to shepherding by a wavy route.
Being a genius helped. When he joined the pre-war Navy as a youth he was immediately listed as a dagger man. That was the sign by his name in the Navy List which marked him for accelerated promotion. He made light of it.
“My only distinction is that I had a Navy record for going on courses. Ten years. Alas, the day I joined my first ship I went for my typhoid injection and was jabbed with a dirty needle and became seriously ill.”
Back ashore, he was given command of a unit which inspected submarines on maiden voyages. He was about to board one when he was taken ill again. The submarine was HMS Thetis which went on its trial and sank. He told me: “My successor is buried at Holyhead. That is something that is with me all the time.”
Invalided out of the Navy, Ernie bought his first sheep farm, which came with a weaving mill. He knew nothing of either trade. “I just asked my neighbours what to do next.”
His neighbours must have been good teachers. He became an international authority on sheep rearing and wove tweed of such beauty it was taken up by fashion houses in London and Paris. The war intervened. Ernie went back in the Navy and when he was demobbed in 1945 the tweed market had been wiped out by an 80 per cent purchase tax.
Over the years he bought three farms which were about fifty miles apart and which he worked diligently. I met him when he had just retired. He told me that when he arrived at a farm he was too tired to work.
His idea of retirement was not as other men's. By general account Sir Kyffin Williams was Wales's greatest artist. As a boy he was taught to paint by Ernie. Later in life Sir Kyffin arranged an exhibition of Ernie's landscapes. He priced them at £500 each to deter buyers. Didn't work. He sold two the day the exhibition opened. He was furious. He never exhibited again. Yet he gave me a painting.
He explained: “I am a non-profit making water-colourist because, frankly, I don't need the money. I paint purely for my own pleasure. I get a idea by walking round the farm and looking at things, then I come back and ruin a lot of old envelopes sketching on them. I cannot start on a picture until I have it firmly in my head. I start in one corner and work across the paper. Never had a lesson in my life and I have no idea why I paint. It is very exacting work and I can only manage twenty minutes at a time.”
Over the years that followed I visited him often. He was never still. He designed a water-powered Aga in which the electric power came from a generator he built and was fed from a stream. He spent a long time failing to make me understand how a machine he built extracted heat from cold air. “It's nothing really. Just reverse the principle of the fridge.”
He always insisted he was just an ordinary bloke: his sister, a research chemist, was the brainy one in the family. At seventy, a pharmaceutical firm gave her a million pounds to do research of her choice.
Ordinary? If Ernie Naish was ordinary, I am the Queen of Romania.
GLOBAL WARNING
Alexander Buchan (1829 - 1907) was the secretary of the Scottish Meteorology Society.
He listed six recurrent cold periods: 7-10 February; 11-14 April; 9-14 May; 25 June to 4 July; 6-11 August; 6-12 November.
Rather fewer warm periods: 12-15 July; 12-15 August.
No sillier than recent global forecasts.
COMMONS SENSE
You can tell what God thinks about common sense by the few MPs that possess it. I work it out at one per party. Vince Cable for the Illiberal Democrats, William Hague, the sole representative for the Conservatives, and the Dark Lord Mandelson alone among Labour members to possess that essential seasoning. In the climate change debate Cable and Hague are listed as moderates and Mandelson is perceived as so lukewarm as to get green paint thrown over him.
I confess it has long puzzled me the way governments hurl themselves into changing the climate and only cool off when it seems likely they may be asked to do something positive to 'Canute' the climate.
Governments only appear to be stupid. When they seek to change society, as in the restriction of freedom, they move quietly and subtly. I was struck by an article by Matthew Paris in a Sunday paper when he boasted how he and Mandelson plotted to bring homosexuality into public acceptance. One of the more obvious moves was for Paris to 'accidentally' out Mandelson on Newsnight.
Given this centuries-old honing of cunning, why did the Government announce the most wide reaching programme of climate fighting, sewing the seas and defacing the landscape with turbines they know to be inadequate? At the same time they were hinting at another Falklands war over a newly discovered oil source and Putin was calling a meeting of oil company executives to advise on the exploitation of a massive oil find in Siberia.
And then the Good Lord Mandelson rode up on his charger to save the steelworkers of Corus. How? By announcing a £170 million deal to build a nuclear manufacturing facility on Teesside. A consortium of Sheffield Forge-masters and Westinghouse are to build a 15,000-ton press that will be used to make pressure vessels and casings for nuclear reactors. At present these are only made by a handful of specialised facilities in Japan.
So far there has been very little protest by the very voluble anti-nuclear lobby.
Hoist by their own Retard?
Three TV documentaries made me doubt my thesis. Their subjects were the great offices of state, the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the Home Office. It was revelatory. The three offices had one thing in common. They were not very good at their jobs and all demonstrated in their civil servants a towering and wholly unjustified self confidence.
Another fine crop of revelations came in the series on the Bible and on Christianity, in which a professor of theology made it obvious what is wrong with religion. They were wrong to insist that God created man in His own image when it is patently obvious that it is the other way round. The Judeo-Christian God, on the evidence of the bible, is unforgiving, vain, violent and petulant. Somehow it is right that He should be defended by the strident Anne Widdecombe, a woman whose apparent certainty does not go as far as to decide what colour hair she wants, and Gerry Adams who was given £10,000 to search for Jesus. Money that would have been well spent had he shown any sign in his lifetime that he would recognise the Christly virtues if he tripped over them.
Inevitably Stephen Fry was called in to demonstrate the silliness of religion in a way that reminded me of what someone said of him: Stephen Fry is what stupid people think is an intelligent man.
EVERY DAY HAS ITS DOG ….and most have cats too.
It's not only bad-mannered cattle that contribute to global warming. According to the New Scientist, cats, through their numerous emissions, are also contributors.
In Europe we spend £40 million a year on cat litter and much of the £500 million a year that we spend on vets' bills goes on our 25 million cats.
Be very afraid. A new study by the University of Bristol shows the number of cats doubles every 22 seconds.
Cat psychologist Peter Neville listed a number of case histories of his feline patients in his book "DO CATS NEED SHRINKS?”
"Cats have rarely been much use. Aside from the often overstated mouse and rat catcher role, cats have not followed the pathway of domestication based on training to task like the horse and the dog.“
Neville tells of a bachelor's cat who lay in wait for his new girlfriend and attacked her as she ran naked to the bathroom. The owner acted with despatch. He changed his girlfriend. Another owner wrote: "Thumper, my neutered tom has fallen in love with Jasmine, my eight-year-old dachshund and follows her everywhere, yowling and sniffing and trying to mount her."
Cats may need shrinks but................. Why don't they go to Specsavers?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)