When I was a stage struck child writing musicals, making puppets and doing a song and dance act for them, my parents said I was good enough to be on Ralph Reader's Gang Show, a talent contest in which, if memory serves, Mr Reader dressed as a boy scout. Unfortunately during a brief career with 42 Parrs Wood Road Scouts I had water poured up my sleeve for swearing in camp. Fearing this might affect my prospects, I eshewed Mr Reader and his toggle and set my sights on Big Jim Campbell and his Cowboy talent show. A little later I might have tried Carrol Leavis Discoveries, or Hughie Green, or any one of a number of shrewd entertainers, themselves without a discernable talent, who toured the country with talent shows in which they were the only ones getting paid. When Butlins opened, entertainment was centred on talent shows. I cannot remember a time when there wasn't a child prodigy, an elderly baritone and whole companies of ventriloquists giving their miniscule all on a stage near you. So why, I wondered, has Simon Cowell been given a BAFTA award for his "innovative contribution to show business"?
What was innovative about his entertainments?
According to John Willis, chairman of the Bafta TV committee: "Over the past few years he has not only helped change the entertainment landscape but has re-invented Saturday night family entertainment. His shows enable exciting new talent to shine and are the most talked-about programmes on British television. He is quite simply one of the most brilliant entertainment producers of our time."
Cowell, I read, became a TV mogul after rising to prominence as a judge on Pop Idol, later creating The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, which finished this weekend, as well as becoming a big name in the US with American Idol. He has helped to make Susan Boyle a neurotic worldwide success and the 'Got Talent' format is now screened in more than 40 countries. He has also acquired a stable of money-making entertainers which allows him to live like one of the Mogul Emperors. I would have thought an award for industry would be more appropriate.
Young TV viewers in my family are besotted by vampires. Channel 4's "True Blood" is the latest in a long line of sexually explicit, violent and vulgar programmes. It is a shocking tale of depravity, explicit sexuality (bordering on pornography) and vile language. Even before the opening credits in the first episode, we see a young woman pleasuring a young man while driving her car. The programme is full of characters with fantastical powers. A telepathic waitress, Sookie, and a ‘shapeshifter’; ‘Fang-bangers’ - humans who like having sex with vampires - and the drug dealers. There’s oral sex, overt discussion of genitalia, graphic sex scenes bordering on the deviant, and foul language. We see a man having sex with a woman while watching a video of the same woman having sex with a vampire. It’s animalistic, violent, corrupt and scary.
Surpringly, there is no move to ban it. That is reserved for the most innocent of entertainment: the Circus.
The self righteous "assassins" of this ancient art have the statuary long hair, lupine features and that air of deep, throbbing self-satisfaction that is the hallmark of the apostle of the single issue.
The kids in circus queues have eyes that dance with expectation and the animals who entertain them crackle with the joy animals always exhibit when they are about to show off to the humans who supply them with food and protect them from danger. The "assassins" seek to persuade Councils to deny a resting place to circuses which employ animals to entertain human beings.
I have been a circus fan all my life. I cannot think of one which employs cruelty to train animals because that never works. When I've been furious with my dogs they have ignored me. When I offer them treats they blindly obey my commands.
The love that circus keepers have for their animals nearly got me the sack from the Daily Mirror in the days when it was still a newspaper. For reasons which we need not got into here, I persuaded Billy Smart’s Circus to put on a show in the grounds of Southport Infirmary. Afterwards I marched down Lord Street at the head of a procession which included Whimsical Walker and his troupe of Clowns, a bevy of beauties on horseback and a small Arab on a camel. We stopped at a pub called The Bold and I bought a drink for all present to thank them for their services. I noticed the Arab, who had taken a small lemon juice, looked unhappy and asked Brian Cartney, Billy Smart’s PRO, why.
He said: “You haven’t bought a drink for his camel.” I said I thought camels only drank every three days and he said, “This is the third day.”
I bought the camel a bucket of water. The barmaid charged me half a crown, so I put on my expenses: “To bucket of water for camel: half a crown."
The accountants who were just beginning to rule newspapers thought I was making a joke at the expense of money, which was blasphemous, and demanded I be sacked.
In a world where the accountant is king, the long-haired assassin will no doubt get his way. In Africa kids are starving and animal cruelty is endemic. Harmful TV programmes abound and will contiue to flourish. The clown will be broken-hearted as the animals who aren't shot will spend their lives pacing mindlessly in zoo cages.
IT'S THE RICH AS HAS THE PLEASURE
The mention of starving Africans inevitably summons the vision of thousands of empty-bellied, slum-dwelling South Africans trumpeting with joy at a series of tedious games that have cost them millions. Yet on every face the default gesture is a smile. They live in the Murder Capital of the World. What have they got to smile about?
We who live cosseted lives are sour-faced and glum because our leaders warn us that things are going to be tough. So what else is new?
The simple truth is that although life anywhere in Britain has not a lot going for you it is a lot better than it is in a Third Country. Forbye, even here it is not too good if you are poor - and even less if you are old and poor. I had an old friend who lived in Liverpool. Nothing would induce him to go out at night, his doctor treated him like scum and the police set up an observation post in his spare room to keep an eye on the pistol-toting gangsters who use the pub next door as a headquarters.
Life, he told me, was much more expensive for the poor. The rich pay cash and can do a deal for almost anything. The poor buy on hire purchase with an added interest charge. But they are in a minority. The rest of us have much to smile about.
My wife and I are lucky to be living in the Fens - and not just because we have a sub-tropical micro climate. We live in a market town in walking distance of two vets, two medical practices, three supermarkets, two dentists, an optician - and a pawn shop.
On Anglesey, where we last lived, our village shops closed down until the nearest shop to my home was two miles away. The bus service did not operate at night. Fine for me because I could jump in my car. Not so good for the older, non-car-owning ladies who lived next door. Not all that good for me, really, because petrol is more expensive in the countryside than it is in the cities. Car tax and insurance have gone up in a comic effort to relieve traffic - in inner cities. In my rural paradise we paid extra community tax to fund profligate city councils.
Rural post offices closed and the business transferred to banks and supermarkets, which killed local shops. The nearest bank to our village was four miles away. Local farmers lived on £5,000 a year and went bust in battalions.
Here too, the eyes of the schoolchildren sparkled, their young bodies galvanised with high spirits. See the same children as they sprawled listlessly on a bench a month after they left school. Their eyes were dead. The few jobs they were offered , the bus fares took up most of the wage.The future may be grim. For an awful lot of us the past wasn't all that to boast about but compared to the South Africans we are millionaires.
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Friday, 4 June 2010
WHA DAUR MEDDLE WE US
Twice kicked out of The Black Watch (RHR) as an "undesirable" and a lifelong anarchist, it was fairly clear if the Army had to choose between me and the Wehrmacht I would have come a close second. I loved every moment of my army life; even the bits in durance vile. Alas, my love was not returned. So why my brief membership of the Black Johns should remain the apogee of my life and "Johnny the One" the only saint I would light a candle for is beyond rational explanation.
My most treasured possession is a diced glengarry, picked up on the beach in Dunkirk, given to me by the sailor who found it, so I looked forward to the raft of programmes celebrating that defeat; though I have never understood why it is celebrated. The French do not celebrate Agincourt,Crecy or Waterloo.. Indeed with some justice they see Dunkirk as a betrayal. The TV coverage is a second betrayal
The 51st Highland Division fought on in France after the main part of the BEF had been evacuated from Dunkirk on 4th June. On Churchill's orders they defended the seaside town of St.Valery-en-Caux. It was a useless gesture made to dupe the French into believing the BEF wasn't running for home. The Highlanders were mostly TA part-time soldiers and not fully trained. Some only had five rounds of ammuntion and had hardly eaten for three weeks.
Neverthless an attack on the town was repulsed in the late afternoon, although it was later surrounded. Final plans were made for the evacuation, beaches allotted and orders given but these did not reach the 2nd Seaforths cut off in Le Tot.
To their dismay the 51st were placed under French Command On the morning of June 12 the French flew a white flag from a church 150 yards from the HD HQ, The Divisonal Commander Victor Fortune was furious and ordered an officer to climb the steeple and take it down. Told the surrender had been ordered by his superior the French commander he said the HD would fight on.. When the order came from the British High Command to carry out the evacuation it was too late. The Division arrived in the harbour to find there were no ships waiting to take them off. The Navy had withdrawn on the 11th and after coming under air attack pulled further out to sea. A combination of fog obscuring the coast, the loss of several boats and the fact that the enemy occupied the cliffs overlooking the town made evacuation impossible.
Various local demands for surrender, specifically to 2nd Seaforths and Ist Gordons, were robustly rebuffed. Preparations were made for a last resistance. Meanwhile the French capitulated at 0800hrs on the morning of 12th June. In St Valery another fierce battle developed and the 2nd and 4th Seaforth Highlanders, 4th Cameron Highlanders, 1st and 5th Gordon Highlanders and the 4th Black Watch fought determinedly until completely surrounded, out of ammunition and supplies.. General Fortune considered all the options; a counter attack, further resistance, retaking the town. Against this, there was no possibility of support, the men were exhausted and virtually out of ammunition, with no artillery ammunition at all.There was no opportunity for evacuation. Shortly before 1000hrs on 12th June General Fortune took the most difficult of decisions - to surrender. In view of their bravery Rommel allowed his men to march into captivity carrying arms. Some 10,000 were taken prisoner. At the end of the war, after five years of starvation and forced labour, they were forced to march from Stalag XX-A at Turig 450 miles to another camp on the Luneburg Heath. As a final indignity they were straffed on the way by the American air force. In the war the HD had 19,.524 casualties. St Valéry-en-Caux is a Battle Honour.
Under the circumstances it was odd that St Valery was hardly mentioned in any of the TV prorammes. It was left to a very fine historian Saul David on R4 to interview HD survivors who have still not forgiven Churchill..
They might take comfort from the fact that Churchill, the Mandelson of his day whose contribution to winning the war was inventing Spin, has not escaped censure. The historian Noble Frankland put it on record that the PM thought air support on a battlefield would add complication without advantage, that the Germans would not be able to break the French on the Western Front, that the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would be invulnerable. He thought neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat. He sent the battleships " Prince of Wales" and the" Repulse" to Singapore without air cover, where both ships were sunk.The Repulse was comanded by the officer who from the beaches had organised Dunkirk. Churchill thought kites a better defence than Radar. At the end of the war when we were broke and exhausted he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to make a battle plan for invading Russia. Despite his pretension as a historian, he ignored the fate suffered by Napoleon and Hitler when they tried to capture Moscow.
Churchill's "battle honours" included St Valery, the bombing of Dresden, the failed invasions of Norway and Crete. In an earlier war he masterminded the Gallipoli disaster.Earlier, having persuaded the Cabinet to rebuff the offer of alliance with the Ottoman Empire, he drove them into arms of the Kaiser by hijacking two ships they were having built in British yards.
Some chicken. Some brass neck.
HAPPY RETURNS TO THE DAY
On my birthday last month I mused that I only have19 years to wait for my letter from Her Gracious. I wasn't looking forward to the celebrations. The older one gets, the less exciting the prospect of celebration, because you realise the next one could be a wake. I suppose the wisest thing to do is to celebrate past birthdays. This gloomy thought came as a result of leafing through an old diary and finding this entry for my 66th birthday:
"I was 66 today, more of a Bingo Call than a birthday. The house is filled with friends, neighbours and those of the Welsh glitterati who are both neighbours and friends, all enjoying themselves at a champagne lunch. Kyffin Williams who paints in Welsh,Aled Jones, Tom Firbank who wrote "I Bought a Mountain", June and Ronnie Knox Mawer who between them wrote everything else, and Rosie Swale who lives her adventure books before she writes them. And my landlord the Marquess of Anglesey.
"All celebrating.my birthday? Not on your life. The dog is a hundred today and my wife has launched her newest prize- seeking missile, "The Terrible Tale of Tiggy Two". I said, couldn't you put a PS on the invitations, just mentioning your elderly husband is clickety click? Presents graciously received?
"Not a chance. 'You had one last year,' she said. I have one every year but I am not surprised she hasn't noticed. Too busy counting the prize money.
"Jealousy, of course. Doesn't like it that Kyffin and I were both born on Ascension Day, so we are entitled to
two birthdays every year, just like the Queen. In our case, Ascension Day and the day of our birth. Though I wish to place it on record I didn't have a party on either of them.
"Did have a lovely dinner, mark you, at which I was allowed to have my favourite things. So we had white Bordeaux
with the whitebait, Burgundy with the steak and kidney pie, Muscat de Rivesaltes with the trifle and Warres Warrior port with the Stilton.
"Next time maybe she will let me join her party. It would be a lot cheaper."
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Not all diary memories are happy ones. I also read in that diary that fifty years ago, out of unhappiness and sheer boredom, I took an aspirin butty. Rushed to the City Hospital in Chester where a Chinese nurse saved my life in ways too disgusting too enumerate.When I woke up, the first thing I saw was her anxious face peering down at me. I thought it must be heaven because they have Chinese restaurants. Wondered if you could get ducks' feet in abalone sauce? On earth, as aficionados will tell you, the dish is only obtainable by Chinese nationals.
The point was, that at butty tasting time, I was a rapidly failing newspaperman with a mountain of debt and a broken marriage. The only thing I had going for me was a drink problem. Since then I have had careers as a broadcaster, TV presenter, author, reluctant after dinner speaker, and occasional columnist, restaurant,book and theatre critic. Also I have met a wife I adore, despite her terrible penchant for winning literary prizes.
Happily the drink problem is alive and well and living at weekends and birthdays (oh that that was still true.. Ed).
At least I do not have the drinker's knighthood which the doctors had tipped as their nap selection. You know the one? Arise Sir Hossis?
Better on the whole to be than not to have been.
THE BREAKING OF LAWS
One is reminded of hippos dancing, watching parliament extricate itself from the folly of its aptly named members.
Danny Alexander was scarcely in his new seat in the Treasury before the Telegraph disclosed he too had quickly picked up the principles of creative accounting.In his case senior accountants likened his buying a South London flat to Hazel Blears, the former Labour minister. Miss Blears was forced to repay money to HM Revenue and Customs after selling a property designated as her second home for parliamentary purposes, without paying CGT.
There is no suggestion that Alexander has broken any tax laws. He bought the flat in south London in 1999. It is not known how much he paid for the property. Around the time he bought it, flats in the same row of terrace houses were sold for between £144,000 and £235,000, meaning he is likely to have made tens of thousands of pounds of profit. An admirable qualification for a Treasury official. Especially one who according to his expenses as revealed in the Telegraph spent years in perpetual first class motion between Westminster and his highland home
Mr Laws,too, is a man universally acknowledged to be a financial expert, chairman of a bank at 22 and a millionaire to boot. He insists, nonetheless, he did not realise it was unwise to pay a fortune out of the public purse to his companion.. His purpose, he says, was to hide the fact that they were lovers..The relationship was known and accepted by most of their parliamentary colleagues.. Fellow Westminster cottagers have made no secret of their perfectly legal proclivities. Homosexuality is so popular I am surprised it isn't compulsory,so I do not understand why he had to resign.. It was within the rules that he should pay rent for shared accomodation. The rules merely say that such money should not be paid to a relative or partner. Surely to become a partner within the meaning of the Act you should go through that unofficial marriage ceremony which is so popular wih his fellow parliamentarians. The damage to the housing market would be catastrophic if you couldn't buy anything from a person in parliament with whom you have had sex.
Something that does bother me. The same coalition contains Clarke and Cable, two giants of the Treasury, so why was Laws' successor a man with no financial background? It suggests that Alexander was there as a seat warmer whilst prim politics is placated.
The country is broke and the luckless Laws and Alexander have already demonstrated the financial dexterity needed ability to rescue us.
They have paid back the money, done nothing illegal .LET THE GET ON WITH THE JOB.
.................................
My most treasured possession is a diced glengarry, picked up on the beach in Dunkirk, given to me by the sailor who found it, so I looked forward to the raft of programmes celebrating that defeat; though I have never understood why it is celebrated. The French do not celebrate Agincourt,Crecy or Waterloo.. Indeed with some justice they see Dunkirk as a betrayal. The TV coverage is a second betrayal
The 51st Highland Division fought on in France after the main part of the BEF had been evacuated from Dunkirk on 4th June. On Churchill's orders they defended the seaside town of St.Valery-en-Caux. It was a useless gesture made to dupe the French into believing the BEF wasn't running for home. The Highlanders were mostly TA part-time soldiers and not fully trained. Some only had five rounds of ammuntion and had hardly eaten for three weeks.
Neverthless an attack on the town was repulsed in the late afternoon, although it was later surrounded. Final plans were made for the evacuation, beaches allotted and orders given but these did not reach the 2nd Seaforths cut off in Le Tot.
To their dismay the 51st were placed under French Command On the morning of June 12 the French flew a white flag from a church 150 yards from the HD HQ, The Divisonal Commander Victor Fortune was furious and ordered an officer to climb the steeple and take it down. Told the surrender had been ordered by his superior the French commander he said the HD would fight on.. When the order came from the British High Command to carry out the evacuation it was too late. The Division arrived in the harbour to find there were no ships waiting to take them off. The Navy had withdrawn on the 11th and after coming under air attack pulled further out to sea. A combination of fog obscuring the coast, the loss of several boats and the fact that the enemy occupied the cliffs overlooking the town made evacuation impossible.
Various local demands for surrender, specifically to 2nd Seaforths and Ist Gordons, were robustly rebuffed. Preparations were made for a last resistance. Meanwhile the French capitulated at 0800hrs on the morning of 12th June. In St Valery another fierce battle developed and the 2nd and 4th Seaforth Highlanders, 4th Cameron Highlanders, 1st and 5th Gordon Highlanders and the 4th Black Watch fought determinedly until completely surrounded, out of ammunition and supplies.. General Fortune considered all the options; a counter attack, further resistance, retaking the town. Against this, there was no possibility of support, the men were exhausted and virtually out of ammunition, with no artillery ammunition at all.There was no opportunity for evacuation. Shortly before 1000hrs on 12th June General Fortune took the most difficult of decisions - to surrender. In view of their bravery Rommel allowed his men to march into captivity carrying arms. Some 10,000 were taken prisoner. At the end of the war, after five years of starvation and forced labour, they were forced to march from Stalag XX-A at Turig 450 miles to another camp on the Luneburg Heath. As a final indignity they were straffed on the way by the American air force. In the war the HD had 19,.524 casualties. St Valéry-en-Caux is a Battle Honour.
Under the circumstances it was odd that St Valery was hardly mentioned in any of the TV prorammes. It was left to a very fine historian Saul David on R4 to interview HD survivors who have still not forgiven Churchill..
They might take comfort from the fact that Churchill, the Mandelson of his day whose contribution to winning the war was inventing Spin, has not escaped censure. The historian Noble Frankland put it on record that the PM thought air support on a battlefield would add complication without advantage, that the Germans would not be able to break the French on the Western Front, that the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would be invulnerable. He thought neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat. He sent the battleships " Prince of Wales" and the" Repulse" to Singapore without air cover, where both ships were sunk.The Repulse was comanded by the officer who from the beaches had organised Dunkirk. Churchill thought kites a better defence than Radar. At the end of the war when we were broke and exhausted he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to make a battle plan for invading Russia. Despite his pretension as a historian, he ignored the fate suffered by Napoleon and Hitler when they tried to capture Moscow.
Churchill's "battle honours" included St Valery, the bombing of Dresden, the failed invasions of Norway and Crete. In an earlier war he masterminded the Gallipoli disaster.Earlier, having persuaded the Cabinet to rebuff the offer of alliance with the Ottoman Empire, he drove them into arms of the Kaiser by hijacking two ships they were having built in British yards.
Some chicken. Some brass neck.
HAPPY RETURNS TO THE DAY
On my birthday last month I mused that I only have19 years to wait for my letter from Her Gracious. I wasn't looking forward to the celebrations. The older one gets, the less exciting the prospect of celebration, because you realise the next one could be a wake. I suppose the wisest thing to do is to celebrate past birthdays. This gloomy thought came as a result of leafing through an old diary and finding this entry for my 66th birthday:
"I was 66 today, more of a Bingo Call than a birthday. The house is filled with friends, neighbours and those of the Welsh glitterati who are both neighbours and friends, all enjoying themselves at a champagne lunch. Kyffin Williams who paints in Welsh,Aled Jones, Tom Firbank who wrote "I Bought a Mountain", June and Ronnie Knox Mawer who between them wrote everything else, and Rosie Swale who lives her adventure books before she writes them. And my landlord the Marquess of Anglesey.
"All celebrating.my birthday? Not on your life. The dog is a hundred today and my wife has launched her newest prize- seeking missile, "The Terrible Tale of Tiggy Two". I said, couldn't you put a PS on the invitations, just mentioning your elderly husband is clickety click? Presents graciously received?
"Not a chance. 'You had one last year,' she said. I have one every year but I am not surprised she hasn't noticed. Too busy counting the prize money.
"Jealousy, of course. Doesn't like it that Kyffin and I were both born on Ascension Day, so we are entitled to
two birthdays every year, just like the Queen. In our case, Ascension Day and the day of our birth. Though I wish to place it on record I didn't have a party on either of them.
"Did have a lovely dinner, mark you, at which I was allowed to have my favourite things. So we had white Bordeaux
with the whitebait, Burgundy with the steak and kidney pie, Muscat de Rivesaltes with the trifle and Warres Warrior port with the Stilton.
"Next time maybe she will let me join her party. It would be a lot cheaper."
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Not all diary memories are happy ones. I also read in that diary that fifty years ago, out of unhappiness and sheer boredom, I took an aspirin butty. Rushed to the City Hospital in Chester where a Chinese nurse saved my life in ways too disgusting too enumerate.When I woke up, the first thing I saw was her anxious face peering down at me. I thought it must be heaven because they have Chinese restaurants. Wondered if you could get ducks' feet in abalone sauce? On earth, as aficionados will tell you, the dish is only obtainable by Chinese nationals.
The point was, that at butty tasting time, I was a rapidly failing newspaperman with a mountain of debt and a broken marriage. The only thing I had going for me was a drink problem. Since then I have had careers as a broadcaster, TV presenter, author, reluctant after dinner speaker, and occasional columnist, restaurant,book and theatre critic. Also I have met a wife I adore, despite her terrible penchant for winning literary prizes.
Happily the drink problem is alive and well and living at weekends and birthdays (oh that that was still true.. Ed).
At least I do not have the drinker's knighthood which the doctors had tipped as their nap selection. You know the one? Arise Sir Hossis?
Better on the whole to be than not to have been.
THE BREAKING OF LAWS
One is reminded of hippos dancing, watching parliament extricate itself from the folly of its aptly named members.
Danny Alexander was scarcely in his new seat in the Treasury before the Telegraph disclosed he too had quickly picked up the principles of creative accounting.In his case senior accountants likened his buying a South London flat to Hazel Blears, the former Labour minister. Miss Blears was forced to repay money to HM Revenue and Customs after selling a property designated as her second home for parliamentary purposes, without paying CGT.
There is no suggestion that Alexander has broken any tax laws. He bought the flat in south London in 1999. It is not known how much he paid for the property. Around the time he bought it, flats in the same row of terrace houses were sold for between £144,000 and £235,000, meaning he is likely to have made tens of thousands of pounds of profit. An admirable qualification for a Treasury official. Especially one who according to his expenses as revealed in the Telegraph spent years in perpetual first class motion between Westminster and his highland home
Mr Laws,too, is a man universally acknowledged to be a financial expert, chairman of a bank at 22 and a millionaire to boot. He insists, nonetheless, he did not realise it was unwise to pay a fortune out of the public purse to his companion.. His purpose, he says, was to hide the fact that they were lovers..The relationship was known and accepted by most of their parliamentary colleagues.. Fellow Westminster cottagers have made no secret of their perfectly legal proclivities. Homosexuality is so popular I am surprised it isn't compulsory,so I do not understand why he had to resign.. It was within the rules that he should pay rent for shared accomodation. The rules merely say that such money should not be paid to a relative or partner. Surely to become a partner within the meaning of the Act you should go through that unofficial marriage ceremony which is so popular wih his fellow parliamentarians. The damage to the housing market would be catastrophic if you couldn't buy anything from a person in parliament with whom you have had sex.
Something that does bother me. The same coalition contains Clarke and Cable, two giants of the Treasury, so why was Laws' successor a man with no financial background? It suggests that Alexander was there as a seat warmer whilst prim politics is placated.
The country is broke and the luckless Laws and Alexander have already demonstrated the financial dexterity needed ability to rescue us.
They have paid back the money, done nothing illegal .LET THE GET ON WITH THE JOB.
.................................
Friday, 28 May 2010
far from grim fairy tales
There was the girl for whom we bought fifty tickets on the Liverpool ferry and then photographed plying across the Mersey to New Brighton and back. The story we sold our news editors was that her doctor had ordered her to take a cruise for health reasons: the ferry trip was the only one she could afford.
Then there was the dog we tied to the railings of the police Bridewell, a note attached to its collar "My daddy threatens to shoot my dog. Please Mr Policeman would you hide him somewhere safe?" Which we signed "Simon 11" after cleverly misspelling "threaten".
Both stories were page leads in our newspapers and aroused much comment. Animal stories always caused comment. I almost lost my job by suggesting The Daily Mirror motto should be "Every Day Has Its Dog". In my defence I pointed out that the day before we had run two stories. One on page one told how stray dogs were moved from cages each day at the RSPCA kennels until they reached the one labelled "Tuesday". When a dog reached the "Tuesday" cage it was put down. The day that "Tuesday's Dog" appeared, the paper was snowed under with cheques and postal orders to pay for its continued life; our phone lines jammed with calls. One caller offered a thousand pounds to have the dog brought out to Italy and a life of luxury. In the same issue I wrote a story of some limbless ex-servicemen who after superhuman efforts got themselves a workshop to make things to sell. They were a month behind with their rent and their landlord threatened to evict them. Only five readers rang up about that story and not enough cheques arrived to meet the arrears.
Liverpool district reporters on National newspapers in those days would have got a "first" on any Creative Writing Course. Nor were we without help. We had to find a story a week for our sister Sunday papers. Bert Balmer, the city's Assistant Chief Constable and a Press Club member, used to make them up for us on request, over a convivial glass in the club bar.
So it might seem a bit odd that I have cancelled my subscription to Daily Mail newspapers in disgust at its treatment of Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association. I think little of the FA and when I saw the photograph of the Lord and his lady (?) Melissa Jacobs I thought of the judgement of a commanding officer on one of his subalterns: "One would hesitate to breed from this officer." But love is allowable, even among the unsightly. What is not allowable was for her to pass on an innocent remark he made about his fear of bribery of referees to the Mail on Sunday and for that paper to give her £75,000.
I wasn't sorry to see the paper go. I had been reading the facsimile edition on line and, though in bribery the Mail group is second to none, it has yet to turn out readable facsimilies. I see The Times is offering a similar service. I will try it without hope.
Certainly it is time our newspapers caught up with the computer world. As I sat at my news desk surrounded by the most modern gadgets, I used to reflect on the expense and labour involved in gathering, illustrating, printing and publishing the day's news. Yet all depended on a small boy on a bicycle. If he slept in or forgot to deliver the morning paper, the whole costly process collapsed.
Now that news has been largely supplanted by the vapourings of celebrities one wonders whether mytrade deserves to survive. Interviewed in The Sunday Times, the 61-year-old actor Jeremy Irons
speculated that disease or war could become Nature’s way of halving the population.
Irons, who owns several cars and six houses, including a pink castle in County Cork, Ireland, nevertheless dismissed the idea that a recovery in consumption would help Britain out of recession: “How many clothes do people need? People must drop their standard of living so the wealth can be spread about."
He rightly suggests there are too many of us yet this father of two says: “I don’t think you can tell people not to have children."
The grimmer alternative, says Irons, is to continue to inflate the richer western economies to bursting point at the expense of poorer nations: “We would have to ringfence those who are starving and fighting over water, keeping everybody out. We’d live in a sort of fortress world, with an area which is fine, with its guarded oil pipe coming from Afghanistan or wherever, but I can’t see that working.”....Thus spake the fecund owner of six cars and a pink painted castle on an Irish Lough.
Reading that last comment I am uncomfortably aware of pots calling kettles pink. My personsal Ship of Fools is swift approaching the rocky channel of overdraft times. This week my late cousin's library went up for sale. It occured to me it would have been nice to own a small collection of his books to remind me of the many happy hours I have passed in that room of wonders. I chose first editions of the "Hound of the Baskervilles"," Johnson's Lives of the Poets" and the Surtees' Jorrocks collection. I noticed in time the bid I was making would carry me into the overdraft shallows and equalled the amount I have promised to pay my charities for the rest of the year. One of these is Help for Heroes and, as it happens, one of those heroes was interviewed on radio. He was a Lance Corporal who had lost three limbs. His esprit was shaming. I tore up the cheque for the auction.
Then there was the dog we tied to the railings of the police Bridewell, a note attached to its collar "My daddy threatens to shoot my dog. Please Mr Policeman would you hide him somewhere safe?" Which we signed "Simon 11" after cleverly misspelling "threaten".
Both stories were page leads in our newspapers and aroused much comment. Animal stories always caused comment. I almost lost my job by suggesting The Daily Mirror motto should be "Every Day Has Its Dog". In my defence I pointed out that the day before we had run two stories. One on page one told how stray dogs were moved from cages each day at the RSPCA kennels until they reached the one labelled "Tuesday". When a dog reached the "Tuesday" cage it was put down. The day that "Tuesday's Dog" appeared, the paper was snowed under with cheques and postal orders to pay for its continued life; our phone lines jammed with calls. One caller offered a thousand pounds to have the dog brought out to Italy and a life of luxury. In the same issue I wrote a story of some limbless ex-servicemen who after superhuman efforts got themselves a workshop to make things to sell. They were a month behind with their rent and their landlord threatened to evict them. Only five readers rang up about that story and not enough cheques arrived to meet the arrears.
Liverpool district reporters on National newspapers in those days would have got a "first" on any Creative Writing Course. Nor were we without help. We had to find a story a week for our sister Sunday papers. Bert Balmer, the city's Assistant Chief Constable and a Press Club member, used to make them up for us on request, over a convivial glass in the club bar.
So it might seem a bit odd that I have cancelled my subscription to Daily Mail newspapers in disgust at its treatment of Lord Triesman, the chairman of the Football Association. I think little of the FA and when I saw the photograph of the Lord and his lady (?) Melissa Jacobs I thought of the judgement of a commanding officer on one of his subalterns: "One would hesitate to breed from this officer." But love is allowable, even among the unsightly. What is not allowable was for her to pass on an innocent remark he made about his fear of bribery of referees to the Mail on Sunday and for that paper to give her £75,000.
I wasn't sorry to see the paper go. I had been reading the facsimile edition on line and, though in bribery the Mail group is second to none, it has yet to turn out readable facsimilies. I see The Times is offering a similar service. I will try it without hope.
Certainly it is time our newspapers caught up with the computer world. As I sat at my news desk surrounded by the most modern gadgets, I used to reflect on the expense and labour involved in gathering, illustrating, printing and publishing the day's news. Yet all depended on a small boy on a bicycle. If he slept in or forgot to deliver the morning paper, the whole costly process collapsed.
Now that news has been largely supplanted by the vapourings of celebrities one wonders whether mytrade deserves to survive. Interviewed in The Sunday Times, the 61-year-old actor Jeremy Irons
speculated that disease or war could become Nature’s way of halving the population.
Irons, who owns several cars and six houses, including a pink castle in County Cork, Ireland, nevertheless dismissed the idea that a recovery in consumption would help Britain out of recession: “How many clothes do people need? People must drop their standard of living so the wealth can be spread about."
He rightly suggests there are too many of us yet this father of two says: “I don’t think you can tell people not to have children."
The grimmer alternative, says Irons, is to continue to inflate the richer western economies to bursting point at the expense of poorer nations: “We would have to ringfence those who are starving and fighting over water, keeping everybody out. We’d live in a sort of fortress world, with an area which is fine, with its guarded oil pipe coming from Afghanistan or wherever, but I can’t see that working.”....Thus spake the fecund owner of six cars and a pink painted castle on an Irish Lough.
Reading that last comment I am uncomfortably aware of pots calling kettles pink. My personsal Ship of Fools is swift approaching the rocky channel of overdraft times. This week my late cousin's library went up for sale. It occured to me it would have been nice to own a small collection of his books to remind me of the many happy hours I have passed in that room of wonders. I chose first editions of the "Hound of the Baskervilles"," Johnson's Lives of the Poets" and the Surtees' Jorrocks collection. I noticed in time the bid I was making would carry me into the overdraft shallows and equalled the amount I have promised to pay my charities for the rest of the year. One of these is Help for Heroes and, as it happens, one of those heroes was interviewed on radio. He was a Lance Corporal who had lost three limbs. His esprit was shaming. I tore up the cheque for the auction.
Friday, 21 May 2010
DON'T ASK WHERE I LIVED
I once lived in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. When I said it English listeners found my command of language impressive. Welsh speaking listeners shuddered.
That was my problem. I lived in a place I could not pronounce.
The Welsh can do things with their curious assemblies of letters that in other cultures can only be achieved by musical notation. Welsh is not just a language: it is performance art. "Bechod" is pity carried almost to the point of tears and no girl, surely, can resist the sweet blandishment of "cariad"; against which sweetheart sounds like a lump of toffee.
In Wales, pronounciation is the key to acceptance. It is phonetic freemasonry and it is planetary.
I used to broadcast every week to Australia a newsletter about life in Britain. I was a sort of Alistair Coookaburra.
Because - as it sometimes seems - the entire population of Australia is either Welsh or from Liverpool, which is much
the same thing, my producer insisted that I call it "A Letter from Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-
llantysiliogogogoch".
I tried not to because whenever I did an irate Welsh Australian telephoned me from Brisbane to complain. His
telephone bill must have been longer than my address. Not only can I not PRONOUNCE Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogoch; nor even act it. I cannot write it down except with great difficulty. Mail order purchase, the mad lottery of the glossy magazine bargain offer, was forever closed to me. There was never room on the coupon for my address.
An abbreviation? There was once.LlanfairPG. But there is a Welsh phrase for political correctness too. LlanfairPG is an invitation to the curled lip. The only acceptable PC alternative to PG is Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll. You cannot go
very far with an abbreviation that is twenty letters long. Nor can you easily get credit. I was refused credit for the purchase of a word processor. The credit regulatory office was in Leeds. And the Yorkshire computer would not accept that an island called Anglesey existed.
To live in a fictional island, in a village you cannot pronounce, is to know despair.
I once had a letter from Wiltshire. It was sent air mail.
To be strictly ecumenical, I have had some pretty bizarre postal experiences in England. When we used to live on the
City Walls in Chester I worked under the window in the drawing room - I will write in a future column about bitter
injustice and how whenever we move my wife gets a study and I write on the corner of a table. Through the window I could watch the postman coming, a mixed blessing when you owe as much as I did in those halcyon days of determined debauchery.
One day a month I looked forward to his visits. That was the day he brought my selection from Records With Pleasure,
recordings of potted versions of Shakespearean plays put out by the Daily Express. On this occasion I hurried to the door to take the precious recording from his hands. Too late. He had already folded it neatly in half and posted it through the box.
There was a certain cachet in having the only crescent-shaped production of Macbeth on record, but playing was not easy. No sooner had the warrior tones of Macbeth boomed questions at the three witches than Birnam Wood was galloping to Dunsinane as the needles slipped down the inner slope of the crescent like demented skiers.
The man the Post Office sent to process my complaint was dressed to intimidate.Why else should a man who arrived
on a red bicycle wear a crash helmet and black leather gauntlet gloves? He clearly did not believe my story. Indeed
he seemed convinced I was the Mr Big of an international ring of record benders. Finally he conceded my complaint. But he was not done. As he left he uttered a sentence that has lodged itself in my mind: "Do not dispose of the record without permission," he warned. "It is now the property of the Post Office and we may need to call it in."
For God's sake, tell me. Does the Post Office run to crescent-shaped gramophones?
A VALUABLE SOCIAL LESSON....
A pity if you missed the chance to read this week's 'Ranters' blog. Ranters is a weekly meander round the newspapers of their youth by old stagers and is the inspiration of my chum Revel Barker, sometime Consiglieri to Cap'n Bob Maxwell of the Mirror. A regular contributor is William Greaves, who this week offered a useful piece of etiquette, which, in keeping with another hallowed tradition of our trade - stealing another chap's bright ideas - I "lift" without shame.
If you are not already on its journalists’ mailing list, and want to be reminded when the site is updated each week, send your name and email address to: rantersreader@gmail.com
Short arms, deep pockets
By William Greaves
There is one familiar expression in the English language which appears in no international phrase book – for the simple reason that foreigners would be able to make neither head nor tail of it.
The phrase is: ‘It’s my round.’ It has a number of variations: the assertive ‘No, no, it’s definitely my round’, the quizzically aggrieved ‘Whose round is it?’ and even the faintly aggressive ‘It can’t be my round again, surely.’
When two or more people assemble to quench their thirst in a public place anywhere east of Dover or west of the Scillies, a bill is pushed under the saucer each time a new batch of drinks arrives. Or a beer mat is marked, slate chalked or spike spiked. Upon departure, the final tally is then added up and divided among all present. Fair – but unsporting.
No nation which invented cricket could seriously be expected to comply with a code of conduct so morosely bereft of complication that all the niceties of lifemanship and etiquette are swamped by simple arithmetic. So the difference between the British pub and every other kind of alien bar is that, here, we pay before we sip. Correction: one person pays before everyone sips.
So the British pub – and the atmosphere which prevails within – is unique in so much as every new order is a personal gift by one patron to all his or her friends or colleagues.
But who is that one patron? Here is the nub around which the very British game of ‘pubbing’ revolves. For not only is the ‘round’ (defined in my Collins Concise as ‘a number of drinks bought at one time for a number of people’) deeply engrained in the national ethos, it is also deliciously ill-defined in the matter of whose turn it is to dig deep.
There was a time, before bitter gave way to Budweiser, when such a question would never have had to be asked. Tyro drinkers would be so overawed by their surroundings – and the dangers that lurked within – that they would nervously ape their experienced elders. In other words, they would learn by natural instinct when it was their turn to put hand in pocket.
Some years ago, in the days when newspapers lived in Fleet Street and the round often assumed titanic dimensions, I became aware that standards were falling. Appalling laxities like tossing a coin or engaging in a game of spoof in order to determine who should pay were creeping in to replace the proper order of things. Some players even sank to the unpardonable depths of ‘round avoidance,’ arriving late, enjoying several drinks and then, in the nick of time, spotting someone across the room with whom they ‘must just grab a word.’
It was not entirely the young students’ fault. A new and impetuous generation may well have sprung, improperly dressed, upon the scene – but who can learn when the teachers have forgotten how to teach? In those darkest hours, I realised that The Word had to be spread before a glorious national heritage was allowed to wither on the vine.
The result of this initiative became known throughout the pubs in that street of shame as Greaves’s Rules. Under their auspices not only were rounds ordered but tribunals commissioned and even sentences passed. Once-respected men today walk shoeless down Oxford Street for having transgressed against them.
It was a fragile claim to eponymous immortality – and certainly not one I sought to patent in documentary form – but this website has now invited me to publish those same edicts as a reminder that nothing in our history is so sacred that it cannot be forgotten.
And so, for whom it might concern, here are Greaves’s Rules. Pin them up above or near the bar counter. Then even foreign visitors might stumble across some thinly understood enlightenment.
GREAVES’ RULES
1.When two or more enter the pub together, one - usually the first through the door - will begin proceedings with the words "Now then, what are we having?" He or she will then order and pay. This purchase is known as "the first round".
2.This player, or "opener", will remain "in the chair" while other friends or colleagues come through the door to join the round. He will remain in this benefactory role until either (a) his own glass sinks to beneath the half way mark or (b) another drinker finds himself almost bereft of his original refreshment and volunteers to "start a new round".
3.In the absence of new arrivals, any player other than the opener may at any time inquire whether it is "the same again?" On receiving his instructions, he will then order and pay for "the second round". (N.B. The second round is the last one to be specifically numbered. Beyond that point, nobody wishes to be reminded how many they have had and, anyway, no-one should be counting.)
4.The round acknowledges no discrimination. All players, regardless of sex, age or social status, are expected to "stand their corner". (Pedants might like to note that we are talking here of the only "round" in the English language that also contains a "corner".
5.Any new entrant, joining the session after its inception, is not expected to "buy himself in" but should be invited to join the round by whoever is in the chair (see Rule 2). If, however, he is greeted by silence he may either (a) buy a drink just for himself or (b) attempt to buy a round for all present. If (a) or, worse still, (b) is not acceptable to the congregation then the new entrant has been snubbed and should in future seek out more appreciative company. There is one important exception...
6.For reasons of haste or poverty, a new arrival may insist on buying his own with the words "Thanks, but I'm only popping in for one". If he is then seen to buy more than three drinks, he will be deemed a skinflint, neither broke nor in a hurry to get home, and will be penalised for his duplicity by being ordered to buy the next round.
7.Although everyone in the group is normally required to buy at least one round before leaving, the advent of either drunkenness or closing time sometimes renders this ideal unattainable. In such circumstances, any non-paying participant will (a) have "got away with it" and (b) appoint himself "opener" at the next forgathering. However, any player who notices on arrival that the round has "got out of hand" and has no chance of reaching his turn before "the last bell", may start a "breakaway round" by buying a drink for himself and all subsequent arrivals. This stratagem breaks the round in two, keeps the cost within manageable proportions and is the only acceptable alternative to Rule 5.
8.When a pressing engagement elsewhere precludes further involvement, it is wholly unacceptable for any player who has not yet been in the chair to buy a round in which he cannot himself be included. In such circumstances Rule 7 (a) and (b) therefore apply.
9.In the event of any one glass becoming empty, a new round must be called immediately. This should not necessarily be called by the owner of the empty glass, however, because this place the slower drinker at an unfair fund-saving advantage. (N.B. Whereas it is permissible for any member of the round to decrease the capacity of his individual order - "just a half for me, please" - the opposite does not hold good. A large whisky, for instance, may be offered by the chair but never demanded of it.)
10.Regional variations. In various parts of the country, a particular establishment will impose its own individual codicil. In one Yorkshire pub, for example, the landlord's Jack Russell terrier expects to be included in every round. Where such amendments exist, and are properly advertised, they must be piously observed. We are, after all, talking about a religion.
END NOTE FROM NEW YORK TIMES
"Marriage is like water. You have to drink it. Swinging is like wine. Some people feel it’s delicious the first time they try it, so they keep drinking. Some people try it and think it tastes bad, so they never drink it again."
MA YAOHAI, whom a Chinese court sentenced to prison for “crowd licentiousness".
Crowd licentiousness?
That was my problem. I lived in a place I could not pronounce.
The Welsh can do things with their curious assemblies of letters that in other cultures can only be achieved by musical notation. Welsh is not just a language: it is performance art. "Bechod" is pity carried almost to the point of tears and no girl, surely, can resist the sweet blandishment of "cariad"; against which sweetheart sounds like a lump of toffee.
In Wales, pronounciation is the key to acceptance. It is phonetic freemasonry and it is planetary.
I used to broadcast every week to Australia a newsletter about life in Britain. I was a sort of Alistair Coookaburra.
Because - as it sometimes seems - the entire population of Australia is either Welsh or from Liverpool, which is much
the same thing, my producer insisted that I call it "A Letter from Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-
llantysiliogogogoch".
I tried not to because whenever I did an irate Welsh Australian telephoned me from Brisbane to complain. His
telephone bill must have been longer than my address. Not only can I not PRONOUNCE Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogoch; nor even act it. I cannot write it down except with great difficulty. Mail order purchase, the mad lottery of the glossy magazine bargain offer, was forever closed to me. There was never room on the coupon for my address.
An abbreviation? There was once.LlanfairPG. But there is a Welsh phrase for political correctness too. LlanfairPG is an invitation to the curled lip. The only acceptable PC alternative to PG is Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll. You cannot go
very far with an abbreviation that is twenty letters long. Nor can you easily get credit. I was refused credit for the purchase of a word processor. The credit regulatory office was in Leeds. And the Yorkshire computer would not accept that an island called Anglesey existed.
To live in a fictional island, in a village you cannot pronounce, is to know despair.
I once had a letter from Wiltshire. It was sent air mail.
To be strictly ecumenical, I have had some pretty bizarre postal experiences in England. When we used to live on the
City Walls in Chester I worked under the window in the drawing room - I will write in a future column about bitter
injustice and how whenever we move my wife gets a study and I write on the corner of a table. Through the window I could watch the postman coming, a mixed blessing when you owe as much as I did in those halcyon days of determined debauchery.
One day a month I looked forward to his visits. That was the day he brought my selection from Records With Pleasure,
recordings of potted versions of Shakespearean plays put out by the Daily Express. On this occasion I hurried to the door to take the precious recording from his hands. Too late. He had already folded it neatly in half and posted it through the box.
There was a certain cachet in having the only crescent-shaped production of Macbeth on record, but playing was not easy. No sooner had the warrior tones of Macbeth boomed questions at the three witches than Birnam Wood was galloping to Dunsinane as the needles slipped down the inner slope of the crescent like demented skiers.
The man the Post Office sent to process my complaint was dressed to intimidate.Why else should a man who arrived
on a red bicycle wear a crash helmet and black leather gauntlet gloves? He clearly did not believe my story. Indeed
he seemed convinced I was the Mr Big of an international ring of record benders. Finally he conceded my complaint. But he was not done. As he left he uttered a sentence that has lodged itself in my mind: "Do not dispose of the record without permission," he warned. "It is now the property of the Post Office and we may need to call it in."
For God's sake, tell me. Does the Post Office run to crescent-shaped gramophones?
A VALUABLE SOCIAL LESSON....
A pity if you missed the chance to read this week's 'Ranters' blog. Ranters is a weekly meander round the newspapers of their youth by old stagers and is the inspiration of my chum Revel Barker, sometime Consiglieri to Cap'n Bob Maxwell of the Mirror. A regular contributor is William Greaves, who this week offered a useful piece of etiquette, which, in keeping with another hallowed tradition of our trade - stealing another chap's bright ideas - I "lift" without shame.
If you are not already on its journalists’ mailing list, and want to be reminded when the site is updated each week, send your name and email address to: rantersreader@gmail.com
Short arms, deep pockets
By William Greaves
There is one familiar expression in the English language which appears in no international phrase book – for the simple reason that foreigners would be able to make neither head nor tail of it.
The phrase is: ‘It’s my round.’ It has a number of variations: the assertive ‘No, no, it’s definitely my round’, the quizzically aggrieved ‘Whose round is it?’ and even the faintly aggressive ‘It can’t be my round again, surely.’
When two or more people assemble to quench their thirst in a public place anywhere east of Dover or west of the Scillies, a bill is pushed under the saucer each time a new batch of drinks arrives. Or a beer mat is marked, slate chalked or spike spiked. Upon departure, the final tally is then added up and divided among all present. Fair – but unsporting.
No nation which invented cricket could seriously be expected to comply with a code of conduct so morosely bereft of complication that all the niceties of lifemanship and etiquette are swamped by simple arithmetic. So the difference between the British pub and every other kind of alien bar is that, here, we pay before we sip. Correction: one person pays before everyone sips.
So the British pub – and the atmosphere which prevails within – is unique in so much as every new order is a personal gift by one patron to all his or her friends or colleagues.
But who is that one patron? Here is the nub around which the very British game of ‘pubbing’ revolves. For not only is the ‘round’ (defined in my Collins Concise as ‘a number of drinks bought at one time for a number of people’) deeply engrained in the national ethos, it is also deliciously ill-defined in the matter of whose turn it is to dig deep.
There was a time, before bitter gave way to Budweiser, when such a question would never have had to be asked. Tyro drinkers would be so overawed by their surroundings – and the dangers that lurked within – that they would nervously ape their experienced elders. In other words, they would learn by natural instinct when it was their turn to put hand in pocket.
Some years ago, in the days when newspapers lived in Fleet Street and the round often assumed titanic dimensions, I became aware that standards were falling. Appalling laxities like tossing a coin or engaging in a game of spoof in order to determine who should pay were creeping in to replace the proper order of things. Some players even sank to the unpardonable depths of ‘round avoidance,’ arriving late, enjoying several drinks and then, in the nick of time, spotting someone across the room with whom they ‘must just grab a word.’
It was not entirely the young students’ fault. A new and impetuous generation may well have sprung, improperly dressed, upon the scene – but who can learn when the teachers have forgotten how to teach? In those darkest hours, I realised that The Word had to be spread before a glorious national heritage was allowed to wither on the vine.
The result of this initiative became known throughout the pubs in that street of shame as Greaves’s Rules. Under their auspices not only were rounds ordered but tribunals commissioned and even sentences passed. Once-respected men today walk shoeless down Oxford Street for having transgressed against them.
It was a fragile claim to eponymous immortality – and certainly not one I sought to patent in documentary form – but this website has now invited me to publish those same edicts as a reminder that nothing in our history is so sacred that it cannot be forgotten.
And so, for whom it might concern, here are Greaves’s Rules. Pin them up above or near the bar counter. Then even foreign visitors might stumble across some thinly understood enlightenment.
GREAVES’ RULES
1.When two or more enter the pub together, one - usually the first through the door - will begin proceedings with the words "Now then, what are we having?" He or she will then order and pay. This purchase is known as "the first round".
2.This player, or "opener", will remain "in the chair" while other friends or colleagues come through the door to join the round. He will remain in this benefactory role until either (a) his own glass sinks to beneath the half way mark or (b) another drinker finds himself almost bereft of his original refreshment and volunteers to "start a new round".
3.In the absence of new arrivals, any player other than the opener may at any time inquire whether it is "the same again?" On receiving his instructions, he will then order and pay for "the second round". (N.B. The second round is the last one to be specifically numbered. Beyond that point, nobody wishes to be reminded how many they have had and, anyway, no-one should be counting.)
4.The round acknowledges no discrimination. All players, regardless of sex, age or social status, are expected to "stand their corner". (Pedants might like to note that we are talking here of the only "round" in the English language that also contains a "corner".
5.Any new entrant, joining the session after its inception, is not expected to "buy himself in" but should be invited to join the round by whoever is in the chair (see Rule 2). If, however, he is greeted by silence he may either (a) buy a drink just for himself or (b) attempt to buy a round for all present. If (a) or, worse still, (b) is not acceptable to the congregation then the new entrant has been snubbed and should in future seek out more appreciative company. There is one important exception...
6.For reasons of haste or poverty, a new arrival may insist on buying his own with the words "Thanks, but I'm only popping in for one". If he is then seen to buy more than three drinks, he will be deemed a skinflint, neither broke nor in a hurry to get home, and will be penalised for his duplicity by being ordered to buy the next round.
7.Although everyone in the group is normally required to buy at least one round before leaving, the advent of either drunkenness or closing time sometimes renders this ideal unattainable. In such circumstances, any non-paying participant will (a) have "got away with it" and (b) appoint himself "opener" at the next forgathering. However, any player who notices on arrival that the round has "got out of hand" and has no chance of reaching his turn before "the last bell", may start a "breakaway round" by buying a drink for himself and all subsequent arrivals. This stratagem breaks the round in two, keeps the cost within manageable proportions and is the only acceptable alternative to Rule 5.
8.When a pressing engagement elsewhere precludes further involvement, it is wholly unacceptable for any player who has not yet been in the chair to buy a round in which he cannot himself be included. In such circumstances Rule 7 (a) and (b) therefore apply.
9.In the event of any one glass becoming empty, a new round must be called immediately. This should not necessarily be called by the owner of the empty glass, however, because this place the slower drinker at an unfair fund-saving advantage. (N.B. Whereas it is permissible for any member of the round to decrease the capacity of his individual order - "just a half for me, please" - the opposite does not hold good. A large whisky, for instance, may be offered by the chair but never demanded of it.)
10.Regional variations. In various parts of the country, a particular establishment will impose its own individual codicil. In one Yorkshire pub, for example, the landlord's Jack Russell terrier expects to be included in every round. Where such amendments exist, and are properly advertised, they must be piously observed. We are, after all, talking about a religion.
END NOTE FROM NEW YORK TIMES
"Marriage is like water. You have to drink it. Swinging is like wine. Some people feel it’s delicious the first time they try it, so they keep drinking. Some people try it and think it tastes bad, so they never drink it again."
MA YAOHAI, whom a Chinese court sentenced to prison for “crowd licentiousness".
Crowd licentiousness?
Saturday, 15 May 2010
BAGS OF COALITION
It has taken Germany over a century to win the war. Bismarck failed, the Kaiser failed, Hitler failed, but a mousy little woman called Mrs Merkel has pulled it off without so much as a blow. Right Mark!!!!... and into the heart of Brussels for the second time.
This time they achieved victory by buying Europe rather than bombing it and by happy coincidence it has happened as Britain created the first coalition government since the last war.
This is a parliament I have been longing for all my adult life. I am Coalition Man. One party government means you only get a third of the talent available. Heath, Blair and Brown wrecked this septic isle.
By the same token I was desperately afraid the Liberals were going to join the exhausted Labour party. That would have meant England had lost the other war it has been fighting for a millennium with the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots.
The Saxon dog would have been wagged by a tartan tail shaped like a leek and reeking of whisky. I have more Welsh friends than I have English and I am a quarter Scots. Nevertheless when I lived in Wales I was violently opposed to devolution. Now I live in England I am in favour of Home Rule for both Wales and Scotland. If only to get rid of James Naughtie and all those Kirsties.
In Celtic countries nepotism rules and deviousness is an art form. A Welsh proverb exults: "I'll never starve: I've got a cousin on the council."
We had a neighbour on Anglesey who wanted to buy outright the drive she shared with the farm behind her cottage.The farmer refused for years. When one day one of his pigs ate her window sill she saw her chance.
She told us: "I put a stamp on a piece of paper and went round to the farm. I said, 'Your pig has eaten my window' and Jones farmer he said, 'Duw, that's going to cost me.' So I says, ' Not as much as it's going to cost you to fill in all those potholes in the lane.' 'Duw,' he said again, and I see he was worried at the thought of spending money. So I whipped out my bit o' paper and got him to sign over the stamp a bill of sale for the drive."
That sort of devious mind you don't mess with.
I spent forty years writing stories for the dailies and the national Sundays about corruption in Welsh local government at operatic levels. Anglesey, in my thirty years there, was investigated four times by the Fraud Squad. Limitations on the number of caravans per site did not seem to apply to a Chief Clerk of the Council, now deceased, who owned a sprawling site the size of a small town. Owners of a failing hotel applied several times in vain for planning permission to turn it into a block of flats. Sold at the bottom of the market, it was bought by an estate agent heading a syndicate made up of councillors. Within a month the hotel became a block of flats. The agent went on to take a plum job in the council.
The headmaster of a Welsh school had praise and rewards heaped on him until he left to take over a school owned by English RAF families. Overnight, planning permissions for extra classrooms were routinely denied and every obstacle imaginable put in his path.
We simple Saxons have had a narrow escape.
A TRIBUTE TO THE FIRST BLOGGER
Five hundred years ago the Mayor of Bordeaux gave up his day job, went home and invented the essay, the progenitor of the newspaper column and the blog. In doing so he opened the way for Addison, Steele, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and the great Dr Johnson. The newspapers we read today grew out of the pamphlets they wrote.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote like an angel. Stefen Zweig said of him: "Here is a 'you' in which my 'I' is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead."
He leaped from the page and sat at your side. I have shared that feeling since I was ten and took his Essays out of Withington library in the belief they were a text book and would help me in English lessons. They have been on my shelves ever since. Now, thanks to E-Book, the best present I have ever had, I can carry them about with me in a magic wallet and still have room for Gibbon, Herodotus and Homer. I am armed against every vicissitude. There is still room for Shakespeare and an anthology of verse and it would be the work of a moment to download, at half price, the current bestseller. Not to mention the several million out of print books which are free on the internet. The E-Book is the most important contribution to literature since Montaigne wrote that first essay and every bit as important as the creation of movable type. It is one of the joys of living in the Space Age that you can carry your home about with you. The library, the radiogram and a combined telephone and camera all fit snugly in a pocket.
What would Montaigne have made of the E-Book? He would certainly have written about it. As it was he had no difficuty finding a subject. He chose the one on which he was the greatest living expert. He chose to write about himself. He explained it by saying: "If my mind could gain a firm footing I would not make essays, I would make decisions, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial."
He wrote about little things. Like the custom of wearing clothes, drunkenness, lust and fear; how we cry and laugh at the same thing; of cowardice, of letting business wait for the morrow; of smells and age; of anger and of not to counterfeit sickness. He wrote of cannibals, of whom he rather approved. He said, "Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice" and so much more. He wrote about great things like friendship. His essay on the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie is one of the most moving tributes I have read. He also wrote: "The sage lives as long as he should, not as long as he can."
If he was odd, his father was odder. As soon as Michel was born his father had him taken to a peasant's hut where he stayed until the age of eleven. Thus he would know when he took over the family estate, that peasants were not chattels, they were people and must be cared for. He learned to appreciate their rough humour. He told of commiserating with a woman who had been raped by six soldiers. She told him there was no need for sorrow. "It is the first time I have been pleasured without sin."
When he at last came back to the manor, the family and the servants spoke to him only in Latin so that he would be fluent at a time when fluency in Latin attracted the best jobs at court.
He wrote so well that when, in the 20th century, an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal wrote an "Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne" he explained the apparent oxymoron by using Montaigne's own words from his essays and letters. He may have been concerned by Montaigne's threat: "I will gladly come back from the other world to give the lie to anyone who will shape me other than, even to honour me." The result was a dazzling piece of scholarship. I have had three copies over the years. Two were mislaid, the third I pursued all over the world before tracking it down in New York. My most treasured possession is the two volume Nonesuch edition of Sir John Florio's translation of Montaigne, the gift nearly half a century ago from a much loved and missed father in law with which he welcomed me into his family.
If I can manage to stay alive overnight, I will be 81 tomorrow. To mark the day I have bought myself the most recent attempt to pin this dazzling butterfly to paper. Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" is a gift to be treasured. It is the first full life in fifty years. It tells the story of his youthful career, sexual adventures, friendships and love for his adopted daughter. The story hangs on the most important question he asked "How to Live" and the commonsense answers he gave. "Don't worry about death"; "Pay attention"; "Be born"; "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow witted"; "Survive love and loss"; "Use little tricks"; "Question everything"; and finally "Let life be its own answer".
I think if I had been given such a book and Lin Yutang's "Importance of Living" I would have needed no others.
This time they achieved victory by buying Europe rather than bombing it and by happy coincidence it has happened as Britain created the first coalition government since the last war.
This is a parliament I have been longing for all my adult life. I am Coalition Man. One party government means you only get a third of the talent available. Heath, Blair and Brown wrecked this septic isle.
By the same token I was desperately afraid the Liberals were going to join the exhausted Labour party. That would have meant England had lost the other war it has been fighting for a millennium with the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots.
The Saxon dog would have been wagged by a tartan tail shaped like a leek and reeking of whisky. I have more Welsh friends than I have English and I am a quarter Scots. Nevertheless when I lived in Wales I was violently opposed to devolution. Now I live in England I am in favour of Home Rule for both Wales and Scotland. If only to get rid of James Naughtie and all those Kirsties.
In Celtic countries nepotism rules and deviousness is an art form. A Welsh proverb exults: "I'll never starve: I've got a cousin on the council."
We had a neighbour on Anglesey who wanted to buy outright the drive she shared with the farm behind her cottage.The farmer refused for years. When one day one of his pigs ate her window sill she saw her chance.
She told us: "I put a stamp on a piece of paper and went round to the farm. I said, 'Your pig has eaten my window' and Jones farmer he said, 'Duw, that's going to cost me.' So I says, ' Not as much as it's going to cost you to fill in all those potholes in the lane.' 'Duw,' he said again, and I see he was worried at the thought of spending money. So I whipped out my bit o' paper and got him to sign over the stamp a bill of sale for the drive."
That sort of devious mind you don't mess with.
I spent forty years writing stories for the dailies and the national Sundays about corruption in Welsh local government at operatic levels. Anglesey, in my thirty years there, was investigated four times by the Fraud Squad. Limitations on the number of caravans per site did not seem to apply to a Chief Clerk of the Council, now deceased, who owned a sprawling site the size of a small town. Owners of a failing hotel applied several times in vain for planning permission to turn it into a block of flats. Sold at the bottom of the market, it was bought by an estate agent heading a syndicate made up of councillors. Within a month the hotel became a block of flats. The agent went on to take a plum job in the council.
The headmaster of a Welsh school had praise and rewards heaped on him until he left to take over a school owned by English RAF families. Overnight, planning permissions for extra classrooms were routinely denied and every obstacle imaginable put in his path.
We simple Saxons have had a narrow escape.
A TRIBUTE TO THE FIRST BLOGGER
Five hundred years ago the Mayor of Bordeaux gave up his day job, went home and invented the essay, the progenitor of the newspaper column and the blog. In doing so he opened the way for Addison, Steele, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and the great Dr Johnson. The newspapers we read today grew out of the pamphlets they wrote.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote like an angel. Stefen Zweig said of him: "Here is a 'you' in which my 'I' is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead."
He leaped from the page and sat at your side. I have shared that feeling since I was ten and took his Essays out of Withington library in the belief they were a text book and would help me in English lessons. They have been on my shelves ever since. Now, thanks to E-Book, the best present I have ever had, I can carry them about with me in a magic wallet and still have room for Gibbon, Herodotus and Homer. I am armed against every vicissitude. There is still room for Shakespeare and an anthology of verse and it would be the work of a moment to download, at half price, the current bestseller. Not to mention the several million out of print books which are free on the internet. The E-Book is the most important contribution to literature since Montaigne wrote that first essay and every bit as important as the creation of movable type. It is one of the joys of living in the Space Age that you can carry your home about with you. The library, the radiogram and a combined telephone and camera all fit snugly in a pocket.
What would Montaigne have made of the E-Book? He would certainly have written about it. As it was he had no difficuty finding a subject. He chose the one on which he was the greatest living expert. He chose to write about himself. He explained it by saying: "If my mind could gain a firm footing I would not make essays, I would make decisions, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial."
He wrote about little things. Like the custom of wearing clothes, drunkenness, lust and fear; how we cry and laugh at the same thing; of cowardice, of letting business wait for the morrow; of smells and age; of anger and of not to counterfeit sickness. He wrote of cannibals, of whom he rather approved. He said, "Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice" and so much more. He wrote about great things like friendship. His essay on the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie is one of the most moving tributes I have read. He also wrote: "The sage lives as long as he should, not as long as he can."
If he was odd, his father was odder. As soon as Michel was born his father had him taken to a peasant's hut where he stayed until the age of eleven. Thus he would know when he took over the family estate, that peasants were not chattels, they were people and must be cared for. He learned to appreciate their rough humour. He told of commiserating with a woman who had been raped by six soldiers. She told him there was no need for sorrow. "It is the first time I have been pleasured without sin."
When he at last came back to the manor, the family and the servants spoke to him only in Latin so that he would be fluent at a time when fluency in Latin attracted the best jobs at court.
He wrote so well that when, in the 20th century, an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal wrote an "Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne" he explained the apparent oxymoron by using Montaigne's own words from his essays and letters. He may have been concerned by Montaigne's threat: "I will gladly come back from the other world to give the lie to anyone who will shape me other than, even to honour me." The result was a dazzling piece of scholarship. I have had three copies over the years. Two were mislaid, the third I pursued all over the world before tracking it down in New York. My most treasured possession is the two volume Nonesuch edition of Sir John Florio's translation of Montaigne, the gift nearly half a century ago from a much loved and missed father in law with which he welcomed me into his family.
If I can manage to stay alive overnight, I will be 81 tomorrow. To mark the day I have bought myself the most recent attempt to pin this dazzling butterfly to paper. Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" is a gift to be treasured. It is the first full life in fifty years. It tells the story of his youthful career, sexual adventures, friendships and love for his adopted daughter. The story hangs on the most important question he asked "How to Live" and the commonsense answers he gave. "Don't worry about death"; "Pay attention"; "Be born"; "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow witted"; "Survive love and loss"; "Use little tricks"; "Question everything"; and finally "Let life be its own answer".
I think if I had been given such a book and Lin Yutang's "Importance of Living" I would have needed no others.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
VICTORY FOR THE GREEN (HUGHIE) PARTY
Whatever happens after Thursday's debacle it is not my fault. For the first time in half a century I did not vote. Mainly because "Che sera sera", the future is not up to me.
I came to instant indecision watching the "X Factor" in which three second-rate minds auditioned to become chief of the tribe but I decided not to intervene for another reason. A party of civil servants, anxious to set up the machinery of a hung parliament, decided to examine the system at work.
Five countries are prospering under balanced government. Our next door neighbour Scotland is an excellent example. Our mandarins with a glad cry set off for the sunny climes of New Zealand. It was hardly the shortest distance between two points. On arrival they were presented with a manual explaining how to build your own Balanced Parliament. Why didn't they have one sent in the post? Or indeed "tak' the High Road"? We are promised a new super clean parliament but it is patently too early to sell the trough.
In the event, it was the election everybody lost. Clegg committed Hari Kiri when he offered an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Neither of the other parties discussed the prospect of national bankruptcy, brought even nearer when the Dow Jones Index dropped a thousand points on Election Day. Not that it matters that nobody won. Whatever party is elected it will inevitably transmute into a Conservative government. I was tempted to vote Liberal but could not support a party desperate to take us into Europe with indecent haste and which believes in the discredited Euro. After a referendum, of course. I have leaned not to trust promises of referendums.
The most overworked image of the election was the Elephant in the Room. So many crowded into the electoral room I looked vain for Sabu, the Elephant Boy. I wouldn't have been surprised to find his merry little face. Among the experts who were lined up to be interviewed were Bruce Forsyth, Joan Collins, Piers Morgan, a drunken and aimless Amis and others too innumerate to mention. For intelligent comment and criticism there was only Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
Cameron's spectacular vote loser was the admission to Paxman that there would be major cuts in Nothern Ireland and the North East of England. The least offensive policies were those of the Labour party. Brown, a son of the Manse, may be an honest and caring man. He claims to be at every opportunity. His trouble is that he is unlucky and we know what Napoleon thought of unlucky generals. Blair beat him to the succession; when he scrambled into power we were immediately visited with foot and mouth disease (which may or may not be God reprising his trick with the Plagues of Egypt); he sold our Gold Reserves at the bottom of the market and laid the trail for our current problems. His continuing history is a sorry one. The gaff in Rochdale was unimportant. Everyone makes them and the voting public should have been warned when we learned Murdoch's Sun had offered the spurned widow £25,000 to put her name to rude remarks which were to be written for her by Sun employees.
I was at a St Leger dinner in Doncaster Guidhall when the chairman of the race committe Alderman Cammidge proferred Elizabeth II a tureen of vegetables with the words "Have some cabbage, Queen. It's good for the complexion."
Alas I was not present when the very regal Queen Mary rushed from the Royal Train on a visit to Peterloo to examine the royal convenience. As she emerged, a Mayor said sympathetically, "Your Majesty'll feel better for that."
That was never reported. Nor did I report the obscene language with which Prince Philip answered my polite query about his score in a Polo match in Little Budworth. And it would not have occured to me to report my exchanges with Aneurin Bevan.
After Brown's gaffe much was made of his efforts to find out who had included the bigoted widow in the people to whom he talked. The greater gaffe was the admission that the so-called random meetings politicians have are orchestrated by minions who pick the people who will shake hands days before a visit.
A noble friend of mine who is high in the Masonic Hierachy was loaned a Royal car to take him to a function where he was acting for an absent Royal. The car arrived at his house the day before and did a trial run of the entire journey, including comfort stops, lunch and tea breaks. When Princess Margaret subsequently stayed overnight with him he was even told the brand of lavaory tissue she preferred. Only a man as unlucky as Brown would find a woman who had not been vetted and rehearsed by his staff.
Personally I think the party which lost the most was the BBC. For tribal reaons I watched their coverage and was appalled. Millions of people watch Talent Spotting Contests: therefore, said the Suits, we must replace the election coverage with a General Entertainment. Rehearsed, of course, and worked from an agreed script. Unfortunately they got the timing wrong. The whole embarrassing performance began an hour early, long before the first result. The action was set in a studio dressed to represent the Star Ship Enterprise. Only Dr Spock and the delectable Lieutenant Uhuru were missing. For a very long hour the only bone they had to worry was a hypothetical poll. The studio toys would have been more at home in a Christmas store grotto. There was a virtual parliament with Alice in Wonderland dominoes and a swingometer which seemed to baffle its luckless operator. No point in criticising the Dimblebys: like the poorly talented they are always with us. They are there by virtue of being Dimblebys.
By any professional standard, the two "lions" Humphrys and Paxman and their cub Evan Davies were abysmal. They had no interviewing technique to speak of. They are so besotted with the game of politics they have become contestants themselves. The only subject which interested them was the prospect of an unbalanced parliament when the only balance the listeners wanted to hear about was balancing the books.
Byron's epitaph for his dog, Boatswain. Sent by reader Sarah Thomas, for which much thanks
"Near this spot Are deposited the Remains of one Who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery If inscribed over human ashes, Is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog, Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803, And died at Newstead Abbey, Nov. 18, 1808."
When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen
Not what he was but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is all his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on - it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
SO SIMPLE THAT IT'S BRILLIANT!
Here's a solution from a concerned friend to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports. A booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you.
It would be a win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this argument about racial profiling. This method would eliminate a long and expensive trial. Justice would be quick and swift. Case closed!
That from reader Brian Hitchen. This from reader Chris Sheridan:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled.
Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. The assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero - 55 BC. What have we learned in 2,065 years?
I came to instant indecision watching the "X Factor" in which three second-rate minds auditioned to become chief of the tribe but I decided not to intervene for another reason. A party of civil servants, anxious to set up the machinery of a hung parliament, decided to examine the system at work.
Five countries are prospering under balanced government. Our next door neighbour Scotland is an excellent example. Our mandarins with a glad cry set off for the sunny climes of New Zealand. It was hardly the shortest distance between two points. On arrival they were presented with a manual explaining how to build your own Balanced Parliament. Why didn't they have one sent in the post? Or indeed "tak' the High Road"? We are promised a new super clean parliament but it is patently too early to sell the trough.
In the event, it was the election everybody lost. Clegg committed Hari Kiri when he offered an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Neither of the other parties discussed the prospect of national bankruptcy, brought even nearer when the Dow Jones Index dropped a thousand points on Election Day. Not that it matters that nobody won. Whatever party is elected it will inevitably transmute into a Conservative government. I was tempted to vote Liberal but could not support a party desperate to take us into Europe with indecent haste and which believes in the discredited Euro. After a referendum, of course. I have leaned not to trust promises of referendums.
The most overworked image of the election was the Elephant in the Room. So many crowded into the electoral room I looked vain for Sabu, the Elephant Boy. I wouldn't have been surprised to find his merry little face. Among the experts who were lined up to be interviewed were Bruce Forsyth, Joan Collins, Piers Morgan, a drunken and aimless Amis and others too innumerate to mention. For intelligent comment and criticism there was only Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
Cameron's spectacular vote loser was the admission to Paxman that there would be major cuts in Nothern Ireland and the North East of England. The least offensive policies were those of the Labour party. Brown, a son of the Manse, may be an honest and caring man. He claims to be at every opportunity. His trouble is that he is unlucky and we know what Napoleon thought of unlucky generals. Blair beat him to the succession; when he scrambled into power we were immediately visited with foot and mouth disease (which may or may not be God reprising his trick with the Plagues of Egypt); he sold our Gold Reserves at the bottom of the market and laid the trail for our current problems. His continuing history is a sorry one. The gaff in Rochdale was unimportant. Everyone makes them and the voting public should have been warned when we learned Murdoch's Sun had offered the spurned widow £25,000 to put her name to rude remarks which were to be written for her by Sun employees.
I was at a St Leger dinner in Doncaster Guidhall when the chairman of the race committe Alderman Cammidge proferred Elizabeth II a tureen of vegetables with the words "Have some cabbage, Queen. It's good for the complexion."
Alas I was not present when the very regal Queen Mary rushed from the Royal Train on a visit to Peterloo to examine the royal convenience. As she emerged, a Mayor said sympathetically, "Your Majesty'll feel better for that."
That was never reported. Nor did I report the obscene language with which Prince Philip answered my polite query about his score in a Polo match in Little Budworth. And it would not have occured to me to report my exchanges with Aneurin Bevan.
After Brown's gaffe much was made of his efforts to find out who had included the bigoted widow in the people to whom he talked. The greater gaffe was the admission that the so-called random meetings politicians have are orchestrated by minions who pick the people who will shake hands days before a visit.
A noble friend of mine who is high in the Masonic Hierachy was loaned a Royal car to take him to a function where he was acting for an absent Royal. The car arrived at his house the day before and did a trial run of the entire journey, including comfort stops, lunch and tea breaks. When Princess Margaret subsequently stayed overnight with him he was even told the brand of lavaory tissue she preferred. Only a man as unlucky as Brown would find a woman who had not been vetted and rehearsed by his staff.
Personally I think the party which lost the most was the BBC. For tribal reaons I watched their coverage and was appalled. Millions of people watch Talent Spotting Contests: therefore, said the Suits, we must replace the election coverage with a General Entertainment. Rehearsed, of course, and worked from an agreed script. Unfortunately they got the timing wrong. The whole embarrassing performance began an hour early, long before the first result. The action was set in a studio dressed to represent the Star Ship Enterprise. Only Dr Spock and the delectable Lieutenant Uhuru were missing. For a very long hour the only bone they had to worry was a hypothetical poll. The studio toys would have been more at home in a Christmas store grotto. There was a virtual parliament with Alice in Wonderland dominoes and a swingometer which seemed to baffle its luckless operator. No point in criticising the Dimblebys: like the poorly talented they are always with us. They are there by virtue of being Dimblebys.
By any professional standard, the two "lions" Humphrys and Paxman and their cub Evan Davies were abysmal. They had no interviewing technique to speak of. They are so besotted with the game of politics they have become contestants themselves. The only subject which interested them was the prospect of an unbalanced parliament when the only balance the listeners wanted to hear about was balancing the books.
Byron's epitaph for his dog, Boatswain. Sent by reader Sarah Thomas, for which much thanks
"Near this spot Are deposited the Remains of one Who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery If inscribed over human ashes, Is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog, Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803, And died at Newstead Abbey, Nov. 18, 1808."
When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen
Not what he was but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is all his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on - it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
SO SIMPLE THAT IT'S BRILLIANT!
Here's a solution from a concerned friend to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports. A booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you.
It would be a win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this argument about racial profiling. This method would eliminate a long and expensive trial. Justice would be quick and swift. Case closed!
That from reader Brian Hitchen. This from reader Chris Sheridan:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled.
Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. The assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero - 55 BC. What have we learned in 2,065 years?
Saturday, 1 May 2010
The White Man Burdened
A Muslim who defaced a war memorial with the words “Islam Will Rule the World” walks free. The internet overflows with warnings that the Western World will be up to its gunwales in Muslims. Might my dream in last week's blog, our invasion by an innumerate Amazonian tribe, come true?
The internet warnings are intended to frighten. And they do. No one can view with equanimity the loss of our tribal customs, can they? Towns, even cities, drowned in an alien cultural tsunami must upset us, must it not?
Well, no. Not really. I do not feel any of that.
At my age I do not even have to worry which party wins the next election.The coming bankruptcy of Britain is of no concern. I am not even worried at having to suffer another Christmas. Whatever age one lives to, one dies at 78. After 78 nothing matters beyond personal comfort and selfish gratification. One is armoured against disappointment, untroubled by hope. On TV I will watch anything, or equally happily miss anything. Only three thing matter. Breakfast, lunch and supper. Diets? Let those who will carry the coffin worry about my weight. Breakfast for me now is Overfull English; lunch, substantial; supper, a pint of home made soup.
Many years ago I lived in an isolated manor house, Picton Hall, alone save for a housekeeper and miles from any shops. I was dismayed that no newsagent would undertake the daily safari. In consequence, I was forced to get my newspapers by post, a day late. In those days we seemed to have daily crises.They all missed me. By the time my paper arrived they were over.
So let the muezzin ring. Bring on Sharia law. I will take as little notice of it as I have over the past 80 years of the Western variety.
I remember how envious I was in his last days of Frank Sinatra. Whilst, in his house, his unattractive family squabbled over his riches, he sat by his pool, unconcerned, happily eating endless ice cream. In my case, substitute the ice cream with my Sony E Book and visualise a rather smaller pool. You will find me in sparkling mid-season form. Even secretly amused that the West has been hoist by its own petard. Do as you would be done by? In a mad craving for land and riches, we not only wiped out the tribal customs and faiths of the lands we invaded: we wiped out the tribes.
I have been led down these interesting by-ways by two books. The first, a novel “Manta Yo”, an account of a year in the life of a Dakotah Sioux tribe written by an American scholar, Ruth Beebe Hill. To make it authentic she asked a Dakotah-born academic to translate it into archaic Dakotah and then back into English with no loss of tribal idiom. The result is a haunting book which tells the story of a benign and ordered nomad society where the power is structured from the grandfathers to a council drawn from elected tribal members. Boys leave their mothers at the age of ten, to be instructed in manhood by their fathers. Even hunting the buffalo is controlled so that the herds are never depleted. It was an ancient society which US Government policy, aided by preachers, destroyed in one man's lifetime. Britain invaded China expressly to flood that country with opium. No wonder someone said “The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that you cannot trust the British in the dark.”
In India the destroyer was the East India Company. William Dalrymple's book “The Last Mughal” shows that company at its worst. The last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar 11 was a serious mystical poet, a calligrapher and a creator of gardens. He presided over a society of cultured poets, painters and musicians. His ancestors had ruled most of India but by the time he came to the throne most of it was annexed by the Company and his kingdom was reduced to the city of Delhi. After the Indian mutiny, which he had headed unwillingly after his city was occupied by the mutineers, Delhi was flattened, its inhabitants made homeless. The Royal Family was wiped out like an eastern Lidice. Emperor Zafar spent the rest of his short life in prison, known only as Prisoner Number One. The glory that was the Mughal Empire ended in an unmarked grave.
Though we tried hard in Africa, no other Western power could equal the monstrous rule of Leopold of the Belgians who treated the Congo as his private estate. He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people. Children and adults had right hands hacked off by his agents.The agents kept the hands to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.
Add our betrayal of the entire Arab race when we stole their country at Versailles and remember Edmund Burke. He said that those who failed to profit by history ended up repeating it, or, as Justin Timberlake sings, “What goes around comes around”.
PRINCESS WHO DRANK FROM JAM JARS
Most people agree it would be a waste of money to buy a new Trident. But come to think of it, so was buying the old one. My chum Lady Williams said Russians talk a good war but they are too lazy to start one and usually win by fighting as little as possible, leaving the Russian winter as a killing machine. It certainly worked with Napoleon and Hitler.
Masha Williams was a Russian princess. One of her ancestors started a revolution in Russia in the 19th century which meant that though her family fled to Britain in 1916 in fear of their lives, she was given the Soviet equivalent of a red carpet on frequent returns to that country. At the end of the war she was appointed Chief Interpreter to Red Army High Command in Vienna when it was run by the Four Powers. She always said that the Cold War was largely the resut of the snobbish way the British treated the Russians.
Masha's family had lived in abject poverty when they arrived in Britain. From owning estates which stretched from horizon to horizon they found themselves drinking from jam jars, seated on orange boxes. Her mother told her father he would have to get a job.
“A job? I cannot do anything except be a prince."
“You can be a servant. We have had enough; you must know what they do.”
A neighbour told them where to look for jobs and in the newspaper he loaned them
they saw a vacancy for a butler.
Masha's father went round to the house. To the front door, of course, because the concept of a tradesman's entrance was foreign to him. The maid who answered the door assumed he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
He assumed this was the way the British interviewed servants and set out to charm everyone in sight. He succeeded so brilliantly that no one liked to ask who he was.
Over coffee, Masha's dad thought it time he asked about the job.
The family was shocked. "We couldn't employ YOU," his host said when he learned the prince's story. "We aren't grand enough. But I would be honoured to be your friend."
It was the end of their poverty. The luncheon host gave the family an allowance and paid for the education of the children at public schools. Masha won an Oxford scholarship, married an ambassador and lived happily ever after. In her retirement she wrote three books about her life in Vienna and subsequent ambassadorial postings. They are at my bedside as I write.
The internet warnings are intended to frighten. And they do. No one can view with equanimity the loss of our tribal customs, can they? Towns, even cities, drowned in an alien cultural tsunami must upset us, must it not?
Well, no. Not really. I do not feel any of that.
At my age I do not even have to worry which party wins the next election.The coming bankruptcy of Britain is of no concern. I am not even worried at having to suffer another Christmas. Whatever age one lives to, one dies at 78. After 78 nothing matters beyond personal comfort and selfish gratification. One is armoured against disappointment, untroubled by hope. On TV I will watch anything, or equally happily miss anything. Only three thing matter. Breakfast, lunch and supper. Diets? Let those who will carry the coffin worry about my weight. Breakfast for me now is Overfull English; lunch, substantial; supper, a pint of home made soup.
Many years ago I lived in an isolated manor house, Picton Hall, alone save for a housekeeper and miles from any shops. I was dismayed that no newsagent would undertake the daily safari. In consequence, I was forced to get my newspapers by post, a day late. In those days we seemed to have daily crises.They all missed me. By the time my paper arrived they were over.
So let the muezzin ring. Bring on Sharia law. I will take as little notice of it as I have over the past 80 years of the Western variety.
I remember how envious I was in his last days of Frank Sinatra. Whilst, in his house, his unattractive family squabbled over his riches, he sat by his pool, unconcerned, happily eating endless ice cream. In my case, substitute the ice cream with my Sony E Book and visualise a rather smaller pool. You will find me in sparkling mid-season form. Even secretly amused that the West has been hoist by its own petard. Do as you would be done by? In a mad craving for land and riches, we not only wiped out the tribal customs and faiths of the lands we invaded: we wiped out the tribes.
I have been led down these interesting by-ways by two books. The first, a novel “Manta Yo”, an account of a year in the life of a Dakotah Sioux tribe written by an American scholar, Ruth Beebe Hill. To make it authentic she asked a Dakotah-born academic to translate it into archaic Dakotah and then back into English with no loss of tribal idiom. The result is a haunting book which tells the story of a benign and ordered nomad society where the power is structured from the grandfathers to a council drawn from elected tribal members. Boys leave their mothers at the age of ten, to be instructed in manhood by their fathers. Even hunting the buffalo is controlled so that the herds are never depleted. It was an ancient society which US Government policy, aided by preachers, destroyed in one man's lifetime. Britain invaded China expressly to flood that country with opium. No wonder someone said “The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that you cannot trust the British in the dark.”
In India the destroyer was the East India Company. William Dalrymple's book “The Last Mughal” shows that company at its worst. The last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar 11 was a serious mystical poet, a calligrapher and a creator of gardens. He presided over a society of cultured poets, painters and musicians. His ancestors had ruled most of India but by the time he came to the throne most of it was annexed by the Company and his kingdom was reduced to the city of Delhi. After the Indian mutiny, which he had headed unwillingly after his city was occupied by the mutineers, Delhi was flattened, its inhabitants made homeless. The Royal Family was wiped out like an eastern Lidice. Emperor Zafar spent the rest of his short life in prison, known only as Prisoner Number One. The glory that was the Mughal Empire ended in an unmarked grave.
Though we tried hard in Africa, no other Western power could equal the monstrous rule of Leopold of the Belgians who treated the Congo as his private estate. He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people. Children and adults had right hands hacked off by his agents.The agents kept the hands to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.
Add our betrayal of the entire Arab race when we stole their country at Versailles and remember Edmund Burke. He said that those who failed to profit by history ended up repeating it, or, as Justin Timberlake sings, “What goes around comes around”.
PRINCESS WHO DRANK FROM JAM JARS
Most people agree it would be a waste of money to buy a new Trident. But come to think of it, so was buying the old one. My chum Lady Williams said Russians talk a good war but they are too lazy to start one and usually win by fighting as little as possible, leaving the Russian winter as a killing machine. It certainly worked with Napoleon and Hitler.
Masha Williams was a Russian princess. One of her ancestors started a revolution in Russia in the 19th century which meant that though her family fled to Britain in 1916 in fear of their lives, she was given the Soviet equivalent of a red carpet on frequent returns to that country. At the end of the war she was appointed Chief Interpreter to Red Army High Command in Vienna when it was run by the Four Powers. She always said that the Cold War was largely the resut of the snobbish way the British treated the Russians.
Masha's family had lived in abject poverty when they arrived in Britain. From owning estates which stretched from horizon to horizon they found themselves drinking from jam jars, seated on orange boxes. Her mother told her father he would have to get a job.
“A job? I cannot do anything except be a prince."
“You can be a servant. We have had enough; you must know what they do.”
A neighbour told them where to look for jobs and in the newspaper he loaned them
they saw a vacancy for a butler.
Masha's father went round to the house. To the front door, of course, because the concept of a tradesman's entrance was foreign to him. The maid who answered the door assumed he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
He assumed this was the way the British interviewed servants and set out to charm everyone in sight. He succeeded so brilliantly that no one liked to ask who he was.
Over coffee, Masha's dad thought it time he asked about the job.
The family was shocked. "We couldn't employ YOU," his host said when he learned the prince's story. "We aren't grand enough. But I would be honoured to be your friend."
It was the end of their poverty. The luncheon host gave the family an allowance and paid for the education of the children at public schools. Masha won an Oxford scholarship, married an ambassador and lived happily ever after. In her retirement she wrote three books about her life in Vienna and subsequent ambassadorial postings. They are at my bedside as I write.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)