I gave up writing satirical novels when no sooner had I thought of an absurdity than real life capped it with ease. I wrote of uniformed bobbies invading a mutinous Welsh island and within months the metropolitan police invaded an island in the Caribbean.
Since childhood I have had a sense that Britain as a society was collapsing round my ears. The maps in my school days were predominantly red to denote our empire. Nowadays, the red signifies embarrassment. Africa is in a state of collapse, Pakistan was apparently created to give the natives on the Indian sub-continent a good reason for killing each other. Marriage was discouraged by our government, discipline was a punishable offence, parent power spluttered and died. Ours is the century of universal education? In a pig's ear. Our universities are open to all? Rather like student demonstrations.
I am not clear why they are demonstrating. If they weren't, the mass unemployed would take to the streets in violent action. There was no time when the state could afford free education - and is paying for it so bad? Top weight it will cost a student £27,000 which he can borrow on no interest terms. A student will not be called upon to pay it back until he is earning £21,000 a year. Not a bad investment when after 14 months you are in profit.
Why when we have such excellent classes on the Open University do we need buildings of learning anyway? It is a medieval concept that went out with the Victorian penny. At least two thirds of degree courses were created as job opportunities for lecturers.
It looks as though we are going to lose our free libraries. Is that such a bad thing? When I was young I was educated by library ticket. Go into any library now and you will find little worth reading. Librarians combed their shelves for any book that was remotely literary and sold it. On the internet there are several sites offering a million books free. The public libraries are internet cafes that don't sell coffee.
Although we know it is wrong, we bow down to Europe and give murderers, thieves, paedophiles and fraudsters the right to vote and determine the society which they have abused. Two of my friends are furious. They have never had the vote in their adult lives. Peers of the Realm are barred.
Our prime minister's visits to America look more and more like a summons to the headmaster's study. Our Houses of Parliament have become houses of ill repute. When I was a boy, peace and fairness in our avenue was maintained by an unofficial coalition of fathers. Later on, irresponsible unions ran the country and ruined our industry.
The Speaker's chattel is photographed dressed only in a bed sheet; the new editor of The Lady, inevitably one of the ubiquitous Johnsons, feels obliged to announce to her genteel readership that her teenage daughter has shaved her pubic hair. There was a time when I felt the kingdom was a tragedy: I did not know it would become a farce.
I expect the reason the oak tree is joining the elm in oblivion is that it no longer wishes to symbolise the heap of rubbish that was once a country worth loving, even dying for. I can hardly wait to join them.
Which reminds me - my late chum Stanley Blenkinsop, once news editor of the Daily Express and the last man I knew to wear a monocle, has ordered his ashes to be scattered between the Express building and Yates's Wine Lodge.
Our lethal police force wouldn't have anyone saying, as foreigners were wont to say, “I think your policemen are wonderful”. Indeed they are Dixons more often in the dock than on the green. I have always thought there was something vaguely comic about the Peelers' hats. Pointed for the other ranks; and for the officers, peaked caps, dripping with silver lace like seagoing chauffeurs. Puzzling how our lethal police are so dexterous with automatic rifles, yet after five years of investigating they are still having difficulty with phones. They are quick to advise on the law: crime-ridden householders have been warned by them not to put wire over shed windows. The helpful police point out a burglar might injure himself breaking the windows AND WOULD SUE.
Understandable under the circumstances that a number of chief constables have put their heads together to write a 21-page manual on how to ride a bike, which also includes handy hints on how to eat lemon curd to boost energy levels, avoid swarming insects and cure chapped lips and sore bottoms.
After explaining the use of hand signals, they advise riders to judge the time each signal should last by saying “one elephants, two elephants, three elephants”, as was done in the 1981 film “Gregory's Girl”. Were seven pages necessary to explain how to get off a cycle - bring your cycle to a halt before getting off, when cycling downhill do not put your feet down to slow down?- But how wise it was to warn them not to pursue suspects until they passed the advanced cycling course. And surely three pages on what to eat whilst cycling is excessive?
But you can see why I have given up writing satirical fiction.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Friday, 4 February 2011
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young in World War 2 was very heaven. Living like Mr Mole in underground air raid shelters, bombed every night like little Ernest Hemingways. Best of all, a Huckleberry Finn life of no school, which meant I could devote more time to books.
By the time I was four I had learned to read and could see no other point in education. At 82, I am still reading and it is the nearest I have ever come to spirited activity. I read as a schoolboy, as a printer's devil, as a soldier, in an army prison, through half a century as a reporter and a broadcaster. I read my way through two marriages, richer and poorer, and through cancer. I have sold books, bought books, stolen books, been a book critic and written twenty-seven of my own. I grew a Jimmy Edwards moustache to thank him for introducing me to Mr Jorrocks and his noble sentiment: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
Like Jorrocks, I took up marathon wine drinking. It didn't matter that my stories ended up wrapping fish and chips. It gave me something to read as I ate my suppers. When my father banished books from the dining room, I read the labels on sauce bottles. Broadcasting was to give a third dimension to the printed word.
Ah, the printed word! When the bubonic plague knocked the bottom out of his business making mirrors for pilgrims, Gutenberg invented the book by turning a borrowed wine press into a printing flatbed. Learning that moveable type was invented by a Chinese blacksmith sent me scurrying to Su Tung-po, the bibulous poet of the 11th century.
My family clubbed together to buy me an E Book-reader for my eightieth birthday and I was able to carry a library in my pocket. It was the first major change in the history of book-making and I couldn't wait to be part of it.
Now I am part of the automatic text-to-speak computer world. My autobiography “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” is winging out of cyberspace, never to yellow or disappear. I'm among the first to latch onto high tech communication, even though I started the job hardly able to change my own typewriter ribbons. I am a journalist from the hot metal Golden Age. Speaking with a new breed of Evian-drinking, brown-bagging desk-huggers who feel nothing farther than a screen away is a waste of time.
Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it.
For the first time in its long history this column welcomes a guest adornment. Neil Marr, co-founder of Bewrite Books who has put my book in E-land writes:
BRAND NEW LITERARY GENRE ... WITH WHISKERS ON IT!
Neil Marr
Journalists have been writing for the chap on the bus to work and the lord who pours over the carefully ironed pages of The Times in his study ever since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenburger (Gutenberg to thee and me) was just a messy thing in his pram and then a struggling young feller with a bright idea, knocking an old wine press into a primitive, hand-cranked printing engine, away from prying eyes in his cellar ... the written word’s first best-cellar?
I opened BeWrite Books ten years ago as a publishing venture. It’s been growing stronger ever since, with 2010 as a kind of watershed year for us. We always have at least 120 exclusive titles in our catalogue. Part of the reason it’s working is that we were among the first in the world to run ebooks alongside our paperback treebooks a decade ago. We’re well ahead of the digital game – and they say it might even turn a buck when it stops raining.
The first ebook title up, ‘Forgive Us Our Press Passes’ by Ian Skidmore, is released in all digital formats today and is available right now for instant download in all formats from all international major and minor ebook retailers and our own website at www.bewrite.net. A big bonus is cover price – little more than the cost of a couple of pints in tap-room currency.
Why kick off with Skiddy’s hilarious memoire? It was the first Revel Barker Publishing title, and Skiddy was the first of Revel’s authors to agree to give ebooks a fair crack o’ the whip. In fact, Skiddy, who has always been an avid reader of anything with words on it, turned to using a Sony ebook-dedicated reading device for recreational reading years ago. He has just opened a second library with a Kindle. Impresses me, does that. Mind you, where Skiddy’s concerned, I’ve always been impressed.
It took ebooks nearly six centuries to revolutionise Gutenberg’s wonderful basic model; all we have seen over subsequent centuries has been mere superficial refinement of the prototype. A book’s a book and, as Skiddy says, content is king. Story rules.
Now you can read Skiddy’s yarn – and soon many other RBP hack-lits – in beautifully prepared new digital editions, word-faithful to their print equivalent, on electronic platforms from PCs and laptops, through the entire range of new ebook-dedicated reading thingies and tablets, to iPods and ubiquitous Blackberries and smartphones. You can even read them on your TV screen if you know how. Somebody will, no doubt, be reading Skiddy whilst kicking his heels waiting for his train on the Tokyo subway tomorrow.
A reminder: even if you don’t have a Kindle and sadly found no other fancy new digital gizmo under the Christmas tree, you can read all BeWrite Books ebooks – so all ‘coming soon’ hack-lit – in PDF on your old-fashioned PC, laptop or netbook. Kindle Mobi editions can be read on your home computers and laptops by free download of the Kindle-for-PC app (www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311) and ePub can be read using free Calibre Library software (www.calibre-ebook.com). Just be sure when you want to buy or ask for a review copy to choose the digital format that’s best for you. Any questions or calls for help, simply email Revel or me (ntmarr@bewrite.net).
ALREADY AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. IF YOU BUY IT, OR EVEN IF YOU DON'T ,PLEASE WRITE A FAVOURABLE REVIEW. LYING IS PERMISSIBLE - xxxx skiddy
By the time I was four I had learned to read and could see no other point in education. At 82, I am still reading and it is the nearest I have ever come to spirited activity. I read as a schoolboy, as a printer's devil, as a soldier, in an army prison, through half a century as a reporter and a broadcaster. I read my way through two marriages, richer and poorer, and through cancer. I have sold books, bought books, stolen books, been a book critic and written twenty-seven of my own. I grew a Jimmy Edwards moustache to thank him for introducing me to Mr Jorrocks and his noble sentiment: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
Like Jorrocks, I took up marathon wine drinking. It didn't matter that my stories ended up wrapping fish and chips. It gave me something to read as I ate my suppers. When my father banished books from the dining room, I read the labels on sauce bottles. Broadcasting was to give a third dimension to the printed word.
Ah, the printed word! When the bubonic plague knocked the bottom out of his business making mirrors for pilgrims, Gutenberg invented the book by turning a borrowed wine press into a printing flatbed. Learning that moveable type was invented by a Chinese blacksmith sent me scurrying to Su Tung-po, the bibulous poet of the 11th century.
My family clubbed together to buy me an E Book-reader for my eightieth birthday and I was able to carry a library in my pocket. It was the first major change in the history of book-making and I couldn't wait to be part of it.
Now I am part of the automatic text-to-speak computer world. My autobiography “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” is winging out of cyberspace, never to yellow or disappear. I'm among the first to latch onto high tech communication, even though I started the job hardly able to change my own typewriter ribbons. I am a journalist from the hot metal Golden Age. Speaking with a new breed of Evian-drinking, brown-bagging desk-huggers who feel nothing farther than a screen away is a waste of time.
Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it.
For the first time in its long history this column welcomes a guest adornment. Neil Marr, co-founder of Bewrite Books who has put my book in E-land writes:
BRAND NEW LITERARY GENRE ... WITH WHISKERS ON IT!
Neil Marr
Journalists have been writing for the chap on the bus to work and the lord who pours over the carefully ironed pages of The Times in his study ever since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenburger (Gutenberg to thee and me) was just a messy thing in his pram and then a struggling young feller with a bright idea, knocking an old wine press into a primitive, hand-cranked printing engine, away from prying eyes in his cellar ... the written word’s first best-cellar?
I opened BeWrite Books ten years ago as a publishing venture. It’s been growing stronger ever since, with 2010 as a kind of watershed year for us. We always have at least 120 exclusive titles in our catalogue. Part of the reason it’s working is that we were among the first in the world to run ebooks alongside our paperback treebooks a decade ago. We’re well ahead of the digital game – and they say it might even turn a buck when it stops raining.
The first ebook title up, ‘Forgive Us Our Press Passes’ by Ian Skidmore, is released in all digital formats today and is available right now for instant download in all formats from all international major and minor ebook retailers and our own website at www.bewrite.net. A big bonus is cover price – little more than the cost of a couple of pints in tap-room currency.
Why kick off with Skiddy’s hilarious memoire? It was the first Revel Barker Publishing title, and Skiddy was the first of Revel’s authors to agree to give ebooks a fair crack o’ the whip. In fact, Skiddy, who has always been an avid reader of anything with words on it, turned to using a Sony ebook-dedicated reading device for recreational reading years ago. He has just opened a second library with a Kindle. Impresses me, does that. Mind you, where Skiddy’s concerned, I’ve always been impressed.
It took ebooks nearly six centuries to revolutionise Gutenberg’s wonderful basic model; all we have seen over subsequent centuries has been mere superficial refinement of the prototype. A book’s a book and, as Skiddy says, content is king. Story rules.
Now you can read Skiddy’s yarn – and soon many other RBP hack-lits – in beautifully prepared new digital editions, word-faithful to their print equivalent, on electronic platforms from PCs and laptops, through the entire range of new ebook-dedicated reading thingies and tablets, to iPods and ubiquitous Blackberries and smartphones. You can even read them on your TV screen if you know how. Somebody will, no doubt, be reading Skiddy whilst kicking his heels waiting for his train on the Tokyo subway tomorrow.
A reminder: even if you don’t have a Kindle and sadly found no other fancy new digital gizmo under the Christmas tree, you can read all BeWrite Books ebooks – so all ‘coming soon’ hack-lit – in PDF on your old-fashioned PC, laptop or netbook. Kindle Mobi editions can be read on your home computers and laptops by free download of the Kindle-for-PC app (www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311) and ePub can be read using free Calibre Library software (www.calibre-ebook.com). Just be sure when you want to buy or ask for a review copy to choose the digital format that’s best for you. Any questions or calls for help, simply email Revel or me (ntmarr@bewrite.net).
ALREADY AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. IF YOU BUY IT, OR EVEN IF YOU DON'T ,PLEASE WRITE A FAVOURABLE REVIEW. LYING IS PERMISSIBLE - xxxx skiddy
Saturday, 29 January 2011
HEAVENLY PAVILIONS
I stand within batting range of my century, but as I survey from my octogenarian crease the players who surround me, the temptation to declare and scurry back to the Celestial Pavilion is intense.
In a week when its economies have cost the World Service three million listeners, the BBC announces that it is spending £1billion on a refurbishment of Broadcasting House in central London, including a £1.6million “sculpture” that will function as a pavement. It has been created by the Canadian artist Mark Pimlott, and is incorporated into the piazza in the middle of the newly-finished building. The sculpture is broadly horizontal and will be used principally for walking on. Mr Pimlott’s website says that his “discrete interventions are intended to reveal the essential characteristics of place.
”
The BBC seems obsessed with pavements. It has been criticised for hiring 30 dogs and their owners to foul a street in Preston for a documentary designed to show what Britain will be like when the cuts in local government spending bite. The council could turn a nice profit. Letting dogs foul streets is an offence punishable with a heavy fine.
Even more distressing is Sky Television's sacking of two sports reporters for saying rude things about a referee. I can see little point in commenting on a spectacle in a medium for which the main attraction is that the audience can see what is going on for themselves.Yet, commentators, would you believe, are paid £1 million a year for saying things which few spectators agree with. To be honest, I cannot see why anyone would want to watch twenty-two men in short trousers kicking a ball round a lawn. Having said that, I have always assumed that saying rude things about the referee is a major part of the entertainment.
The deeper you examine this episode the more curious it becomes. The exchange between Andy Gray and Richard Keys happened in a private conversation which took place off camera after the game was over. The feisty assistant referee Sian Massey, the butt of it, did not answer the phone when Keys rang to apologise. She told The Guardian: "Perhaps Richard thought I was too busy making the tea and washing up to take his call. West Ham's future in the Olympic Stadium is of far more significance to me than his future. It is most unfortunate that he has chosen to add insult to injury today by suggesting that this incident has done me a favour by getting West Ham out of the press, as, after all, I did not ask to be part of his sexist tirade. This is not about an apology to me, but about an apology to all women. Richard represents views that myself and those who work in the business of football find totally dinosaur."
In the event both loud mouths quickly moved into new jobs but their victim the refereee was barred from officiating at a match. Earlier in the week what started as a suspension escalated to the sack for Andy Gray and the forced resignation of Keys for earlier misogynisms. Keys had made inappropriate remarks about ”fancying” another player's girlfriend. As my lady barber said, any right thinking lady would take that as a compliment. Gray's sacking was the result of something much worse. He asked his fellow presenter Charlotte Jackson, again off camera, to tuck his microphone lead into his trousers. Miss Jackson, who has made no complaint, is a model who regularly posed for sexy photographs to bolster her bid to be a sexy presenter on Sky.
Curiously, these two incidents happened some time ago and one wonders which of their colleagues posted the incidents on You Tube, having presumably hoarded them for months awaiting an opportunity when they would do most harm.
For Gray, according to The Daily Mail, it was the culmination of a career of unremitting misogyny. Behaviour which might have led to the sack over a number of years. Key hinted that “dark forces” were responsible. It is true that Gray is amongst those mini-celebrities who are suing The News of the World - like Sky, owned by Rupert “Stinker” Murdoch - for tapping their mobile phones. Rupert Murdoch is at present campaigning to be allowed to buy the few remaining shares in Sky which other people owned.
Opposition to the bid has already cost a cabinet minister his career. It is pure coincidence that Murdoch recently dined with the Prime Minister. Just as it is public spirit which is leading him to grass on his editorial staff, alleged to be among the phone tappers. The investigation has been going on for five years without a hint of intervention..
This curious behaviour is not confined to Murdoch. Tabloid newspapers blame the Metropolitan Police for the delay. The Met is dragging its feet, it is claimed, because The News of the World has them in its pay. In my day there were two certain ways to get information from the police. Either join the Masons or pay for it in cash or kind.
When I was appointed Night News Editor, another executive phoned me. “I had no idea you were a Mason,” he said. “I'm not, “ I said. “Then how did you get the job?” he wanted to know.
Might there not be another reason for the delay?
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A fellow broadcaster, Mike Flynn delving into the past, told me about a listener, Harry Harthill, a traffic warden from Tonyrefail, who wrote daily to him and Terry Wogan. “I must have had thousands of letters from him over the decade at Radio Wales but one stuck out in particular and I am sure will strike a chord with you.
Harry said, 'When an old person dies it is like a library going up in flames!'”
DANGER.MEN AT SHIRK
Police Officers are being told not to go into the new £1million park in Wisbech, down the road-from here - for health and safety reasons. The park has been plagued by yobs who have already caused £5,000 worth of damage. Instead of ensuring the children get a telling off, Inspector Andy Sullivan has banned officers from the park in Wisbech, Cambs. He told the local council that the new adventure playground was too dangerous after 8 pm.
In a week when its economies have cost the World Service three million listeners, the BBC announces that it is spending £1billion on a refurbishment of Broadcasting House in central London, including a £1.6million “sculpture” that will function as a pavement. It has been created by the Canadian artist Mark Pimlott, and is incorporated into the piazza in the middle of the newly-finished building. The sculpture is broadly horizontal and will be used principally for walking on. Mr Pimlott’s website says that his “discrete interventions are intended to reveal the essential characteristics of place.
”
The BBC seems obsessed with pavements. It has been criticised for hiring 30 dogs and their owners to foul a street in Preston for a documentary designed to show what Britain will be like when the cuts in local government spending bite. The council could turn a nice profit. Letting dogs foul streets is an offence punishable with a heavy fine.
Even more distressing is Sky Television's sacking of two sports reporters for saying rude things about a referee. I can see little point in commenting on a spectacle in a medium for which the main attraction is that the audience can see what is going on for themselves.Yet, commentators, would you believe, are paid £1 million a year for saying things which few spectators agree with. To be honest, I cannot see why anyone would want to watch twenty-two men in short trousers kicking a ball round a lawn. Having said that, I have always assumed that saying rude things about the referee is a major part of the entertainment.
The deeper you examine this episode the more curious it becomes. The exchange between Andy Gray and Richard Keys happened in a private conversation which took place off camera after the game was over. The feisty assistant referee Sian Massey, the butt of it, did not answer the phone when Keys rang to apologise. She told The Guardian: "Perhaps Richard thought I was too busy making the tea and washing up to take his call. West Ham's future in the Olympic Stadium is of far more significance to me than his future. It is most unfortunate that he has chosen to add insult to injury today by suggesting that this incident has done me a favour by getting West Ham out of the press, as, after all, I did not ask to be part of his sexist tirade. This is not about an apology to me, but about an apology to all women. Richard represents views that myself and those who work in the business of football find totally dinosaur."
In the event both loud mouths quickly moved into new jobs but their victim the refereee was barred from officiating at a match. Earlier in the week what started as a suspension escalated to the sack for Andy Gray and the forced resignation of Keys for earlier misogynisms. Keys had made inappropriate remarks about ”fancying” another player's girlfriend. As my lady barber said, any right thinking lady would take that as a compliment. Gray's sacking was the result of something much worse. He asked his fellow presenter Charlotte Jackson, again off camera, to tuck his microphone lead into his trousers. Miss Jackson, who has made no complaint, is a model who regularly posed for sexy photographs to bolster her bid to be a sexy presenter on Sky.
Curiously, these two incidents happened some time ago and one wonders which of their colleagues posted the incidents on You Tube, having presumably hoarded them for months awaiting an opportunity when they would do most harm.
For Gray, according to The Daily Mail, it was the culmination of a career of unremitting misogyny. Behaviour which might have led to the sack over a number of years. Key hinted that “dark forces” were responsible. It is true that Gray is amongst those mini-celebrities who are suing The News of the World - like Sky, owned by Rupert “Stinker” Murdoch - for tapping their mobile phones. Rupert Murdoch is at present campaigning to be allowed to buy the few remaining shares in Sky which other people owned.
Opposition to the bid has already cost a cabinet minister his career. It is pure coincidence that Murdoch recently dined with the Prime Minister. Just as it is public spirit which is leading him to grass on his editorial staff, alleged to be among the phone tappers. The investigation has been going on for five years without a hint of intervention..
This curious behaviour is not confined to Murdoch. Tabloid newspapers blame the Metropolitan Police for the delay. The Met is dragging its feet, it is claimed, because The News of the World has them in its pay. In my day there were two certain ways to get information from the police. Either join the Masons or pay for it in cash or kind.
When I was appointed Night News Editor, another executive phoned me. “I had no idea you were a Mason,” he said. “I'm not, “ I said. “Then how did you get the job?” he wanted to know.
Might there not be another reason for the delay?
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A fellow broadcaster, Mike Flynn delving into the past, told me about a listener, Harry Harthill, a traffic warden from Tonyrefail, who wrote daily to him and Terry Wogan. “I must have had thousands of letters from him over the decade at Radio Wales but one stuck out in particular and I am sure will strike a chord with you.
Harry said, 'When an old person dies it is like a library going up in flames!'”
DANGER.MEN AT SHIRK
Police Officers are being told not to go into the new £1million park in Wisbech, down the road-from here - for health and safety reasons. The park has been plagued by yobs who have already caused £5,000 worth of damage. Instead of ensuring the children get a telling off, Inspector Andy Sullivan has banned officers from the park in Wisbech, Cambs. He told the local council that the new adventure playground was too dangerous after 8 pm.
Saturday, 22 January 2011
THE PAST IS MY FAVOURITE COUNTRY
A millionaire friend who flies his own autographed aeroplane and winters in Thailand counsels me against nostalgia. What can I do? The past is my planet and they do things better there. I am only attached to the 21st century for rations and accommodation, and my idea of hell would be to live in Thailand and have the responsibility of running an aeroplane. It was bad enough owning a boat. The past has a beginning and an end but the present has only a beginning, which merges into the future, and that is somewhere I have no wish to go. Indeed, I often wonder if it will exist. Life comes without guarantees. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot murdered and enslaved millions but it was the kindly Allies who fire bombed Tokyo and Dresden and dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
Life was more fun in the past. Now our entertainment veers from the coarseness of Connolly to the disaffected graduates who dispense the humour of dissatisfaction. I have been reading a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee. Author Karen Abbot recalled old vaudeville acts:
“The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called 'The Human Fish' ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had a 'cat piano,' an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri's Miserere when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself).
"Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt - miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and performed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice's outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents - their own animals weren't quite so obedient - until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.
It is in the past that the explanation of the present lies. I have often wondered why the sensitive Americans I know, cultured, kindly and generous, should be so badly led. Gore Vidal exposed the criminal leadership which was endemic.
Even the avuncular Franklin Delano Roosevelt was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.
James Bradley, in his book “The Imperial Cruise”, paints a terrible picture:
"Franklin's grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around [China's] Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opium chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs - long, sleek, heavily armed crafts - rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano's floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.
"The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England's great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale's famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all - the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.
"The list goes on and on: Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America's first commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties."
The past warns us of future dangers. Fifty years ago, Eisenhower warned the nation that a ballooning military-industrial complex could not co-exist “with the peaceful intentions of our nation”.
Thomas Jefferson went further. He said: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Do not knock the past. It was the nursery of the present.
Life was more fun in the past. Now our entertainment veers from the coarseness of Connolly to the disaffected graduates who dispense the humour of dissatisfaction. I have been reading a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee. Author Karen Abbot recalled old vaudeville acts:
“The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called 'The Human Fish' ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had a 'cat piano,' an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri's Miserere when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself).
"Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt - miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and performed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice's outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents - their own animals weren't quite so obedient - until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.
It is in the past that the explanation of the present lies. I have often wondered why the sensitive Americans I know, cultured, kindly and generous, should be so badly led. Gore Vidal exposed the criminal leadership which was endemic.
Even the avuncular Franklin Delano Roosevelt was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.
James Bradley, in his book “The Imperial Cruise”, paints a terrible picture:
"Franklin's grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around [China's] Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opium chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs - long, sleek, heavily armed crafts - rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano's floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.
"The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England's great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale's famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all - the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.
"The list goes on and on: Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America's first commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties."
The past warns us of future dangers. Fifty years ago, Eisenhower warned the nation that a ballooning military-industrial complex could not co-exist “with the peaceful intentions of our nation”.
Thomas Jefferson went further. He said: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Do not knock the past. It was the nursery of the present.
Saturday, 15 January 2011
THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD...........
This has been deja vu week. An MP faces prison because he fiddled his expenses. Fifty years ago when I was a reporter on the Daily Mirror I lost count of the times when at the end of a successful story the news desk told me: “The editor says well done and stick an extra fifty miles on your petrol expenses.” When I became night news editor I was told I would get a guaranteed fiver a week on expenses because I was already getting paid at night news editor level.
We all loved it when the Telegraph exposed the false expenses that were being fiddled by the MPs. They protested in vain that they had been told to inflate their expenses because the voters would not countenance pay rises. Yet it seems to me that a party leader who encourages false accounting is just as guilty as the person who makes the claim.
As if feeling sorry for MPs were not enough, I even feel sorry for bankers. I spent a lifetime fighting bank managers. A Midland Bank manager told me: “Hamlet was Shakespeare's greatest tragedy as you are the Midland Bank's.” Nonetheless, I do not see why the banks should not be allowed to spend their own money in ANY way they wish. Bonuses are paid to investment bankers out of the many millions of pounds of business they bring to this country. They are paid with money on which tax has been paid by the bank. The bankers who receive bonuses also pay tax on them and go on to spend the money on things which carry 20 per cent VAT.
I feel it isn't fair that I don't get a massive bonus too. I am all for giving bankers a thrashing. But why does no one complain about the exorbitant wages of footballers?
Or indeed editors. Not heard much criticism of greedy journalists from the Daily Mail at the news that its editor-in-chief Paul Dacre cemented his position as the UK’s top paid national newspaper editor by taking home a total of £2.8m for the year ending the beginning of October. Dacre was rewarded with a 70 per cent pay increase as Associated's Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday titles achieved record profits and new highs in terms of market share over the previous year.
The total of £2.8m comes from fees and salary totalling £1.6m; £127,000 in cash allowances; £25,000 in benefits in kind; and a £1m bonus paid in cash and shares. Do I see a glasshouse looming high?
Things could be worse. We could be living in southern Ireland. Gerry Kerrigan wrote in the Irish Independent: ”We accept as normal things that once we would have denounced as outrageous. Last Wednesday, for example, our EU 'partners' borrowed €5bn on our behalf. At an interest rate of 2.59 per cent. And next Tuesday, they will pass the money to our Mr Lenihan. And they'll charge us interest at 5.515 per cent.
“Our 'partners' will make a profit of almost 3 per cent on the €5bn (and all the other billions they'll borrow to lend to us). In fact, they'll make more from the deal than the moneylenders from whom the €5bn is coming. This is called a 'bailout'. Gee, thanks, 'partners'. Every hard-working citizen paying income tax, every unemployed citizen paying VAT on a pair of socks or a sliced pan, will pay for this 'bailout' right into the next generation and beyond.“
The victory this week of Miriam O'Reilly, the Countrywide presenter, brought back the worst time in my life. I was sacked by BBC Wales two weeks after I had been awarded a golden microphone for my services to broadcasting. I took BBC Wales to a race tribunal. I claimed I was sacked because I was English, though there were undercurrents of ageism. A new editor had vowed he ”wasn’t going to have those old bastards working on Radio Wales”. It was small consolation that both the editor and the Controller lost their jobs a matter of weeks after the Corporation settled out of court.
I was born to broadcast. As an 18-year-old soldier I wrote news bulletins and made programmes on the British Forces Network with Cliff Michelmore and Raymond Baxter. They went on to dazzling BBC stardom.
It took me rather longer but I made it in the end and when I sat for the first time in an unattended studio I knew I had come home. In a funny sort of way that was the day my life began. The moment before you go on air the quality of silence in your earphones changes and becomes more intense. That is when what is wrongly assumed to be panic sets in. It is an adrenalin rush marshalling your body to be ready. In that moment I came alive for the first time.
Broadcasting is like drinking champagne. The blood races, the spirits soar. Concentration is honed, wit polished. Your nerves scream but with your first words comes a feeling of peace and content. I imagine pilots get the same feeling as they climb above the clouds. You discover a country of which you are king.
The adrenalin stays in you. When I was broadcasting I had an audience worldwide of 26 million and out of the studio I wrote books and newspaper columns, restaurant and book reviews. I was a theatre critic and an after dinner speaker.
When it ended on February 1, 1999, my creative life ended with it. I became a zombie. I loved my home on Anglesey but when the opportunity came I left without a moment's regret. Nothing seemed to matter any more. There were no highs or lows. The tragedy is that it still doesn't. Miss O'Reilly will be offered the choice of a huge sum in compensation or a return to broadcasting. I hope she chooses broadcasting.
ONCE BITTEN BY A CARROT...
Looking into the relationship between skin hue and perceived attractiveness, researchers at St. Andrew’s and Bristol universities found that people with a yellow hue to their skin were judged healthier and more attractive. They also found that carotenoids (yellow pigments) found in some fruits and vegetables are responsible for producing the yellow hue of people’s skin. (News item)
I will stay ugly and pale-faced. When I was young the Government claimed that eating carrots made our night fighter pilots able to see in the dark. I ate a bagful of carrots after black-out, opened the back door, went out into the night and bumped into the dustbin. Turned out there was a glut of carrots but I never forgave Churchill.
We all loved it when the Telegraph exposed the false expenses that were being fiddled by the MPs. They protested in vain that they had been told to inflate their expenses because the voters would not countenance pay rises. Yet it seems to me that a party leader who encourages false accounting is just as guilty as the person who makes the claim.
As if feeling sorry for MPs were not enough, I even feel sorry for bankers. I spent a lifetime fighting bank managers. A Midland Bank manager told me: “Hamlet was Shakespeare's greatest tragedy as you are the Midland Bank's.” Nonetheless, I do not see why the banks should not be allowed to spend their own money in ANY way they wish. Bonuses are paid to investment bankers out of the many millions of pounds of business they bring to this country. They are paid with money on which tax has been paid by the bank. The bankers who receive bonuses also pay tax on them and go on to spend the money on things which carry 20 per cent VAT.
I feel it isn't fair that I don't get a massive bonus too. I am all for giving bankers a thrashing. But why does no one complain about the exorbitant wages of footballers?
Or indeed editors. Not heard much criticism of greedy journalists from the Daily Mail at the news that its editor-in-chief Paul Dacre cemented his position as the UK’s top paid national newspaper editor by taking home a total of £2.8m for the year ending the beginning of October. Dacre was rewarded with a 70 per cent pay increase as Associated's Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday titles achieved record profits and new highs in terms of market share over the previous year.
The total of £2.8m comes from fees and salary totalling £1.6m; £127,000 in cash allowances; £25,000 in benefits in kind; and a £1m bonus paid in cash and shares. Do I see a glasshouse looming high?
Things could be worse. We could be living in southern Ireland. Gerry Kerrigan wrote in the Irish Independent: ”We accept as normal things that once we would have denounced as outrageous. Last Wednesday, for example, our EU 'partners' borrowed €5bn on our behalf. At an interest rate of 2.59 per cent. And next Tuesday, they will pass the money to our Mr Lenihan. And they'll charge us interest at 5.515 per cent.
“Our 'partners' will make a profit of almost 3 per cent on the €5bn (and all the other billions they'll borrow to lend to us). In fact, they'll make more from the deal than the moneylenders from whom the €5bn is coming. This is called a 'bailout'. Gee, thanks, 'partners'. Every hard-working citizen paying income tax, every unemployed citizen paying VAT on a pair of socks or a sliced pan, will pay for this 'bailout' right into the next generation and beyond.“
The victory this week of Miriam O'Reilly, the Countrywide presenter, brought back the worst time in my life. I was sacked by BBC Wales two weeks after I had been awarded a golden microphone for my services to broadcasting. I took BBC Wales to a race tribunal. I claimed I was sacked because I was English, though there were undercurrents of ageism. A new editor had vowed he ”wasn’t going to have those old bastards working on Radio Wales”. It was small consolation that both the editor and the Controller lost their jobs a matter of weeks after the Corporation settled out of court.
I was born to broadcast. As an 18-year-old soldier I wrote news bulletins and made programmes on the British Forces Network with Cliff Michelmore and Raymond Baxter. They went on to dazzling BBC stardom.
It took me rather longer but I made it in the end and when I sat for the first time in an unattended studio I knew I had come home. In a funny sort of way that was the day my life began. The moment before you go on air the quality of silence in your earphones changes and becomes more intense. That is when what is wrongly assumed to be panic sets in. It is an adrenalin rush marshalling your body to be ready. In that moment I came alive for the first time.
Broadcasting is like drinking champagne. The blood races, the spirits soar. Concentration is honed, wit polished. Your nerves scream but with your first words comes a feeling of peace and content. I imagine pilots get the same feeling as they climb above the clouds. You discover a country of which you are king.
The adrenalin stays in you. When I was broadcasting I had an audience worldwide of 26 million and out of the studio I wrote books and newspaper columns, restaurant and book reviews. I was a theatre critic and an after dinner speaker.
When it ended on February 1, 1999, my creative life ended with it. I became a zombie. I loved my home on Anglesey but when the opportunity came I left without a moment's regret. Nothing seemed to matter any more. There were no highs or lows. The tragedy is that it still doesn't. Miss O'Reilly will be offered the choice of a huge sum in compensation or a return to broadcasting. I hope she chooses broadcasting.
ONCE BITTEN BY A CARROT...
Looking into the relationship between skin hue and perceived attractiveness, researchers at St. Andrew’s and Bristol universities found that people with a yellow hue to their skin were judged healthier and more attractive. They also found that carotenoids (yellow pigments) found in some fruits and vegetables are responsible for producing the yellow hue of people’s skin. (News item)
I will stay ugly and pale-faced. When I was young the Government claimed that eating carrots made our night fighter pilots able to see in the dark. I ate a bagful of carrots after black-out, opened the back door, went out into the night and bumped into the dustbin. Turned out there was a glut of carrots but I never forgave Churchill.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
DOLLADRUMS
Commons speaker John Berscow welcomed our new year of restraint by throwing a champagne party for MPs on the terrace of the House of Commons. With their guests Lesley Garrett, Ross Kemp and singer-songwriter Duffy, they danced to a rock band and watched a £35,000-a-minute firework display. Could have been worse. The organisers saved £70,000 by cutting two minutes off the show.
The firework display was followed on New Year's Day by a Grand March of 10,000 musicians. According to London's deputy mayor Richard Barnes, it was “a good bang for your buck”.
Sadly some MPs missed it. An all party group, the British Swiss Parliamentary Group, left for Switzerland to take part in a skiing competition against Swiss Mps.
The taxpayer has not been forgotten. The Government has arranged for us to win £50 of rice and frozen green beans. It will cost £256 million, underwritten by industry food giants who presumably have gluts of beans and rice and will welcome a reduction in their tax bill. In turn, that will be £256 million that won't reduce our national debt.
BBC Wales spent £149.94 on chocolate biscuits. In excessive spending habits, however, we have much to learn from the Americans. According to the New York Times, the United States spends almost as much on the military as every other country in the world combined.
Although America leads the world in the money it has borrowed from China, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that America spends more than six times as much as that country. China is the country with the next highest budget.
The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its employ.
The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than it spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. Among its new lethal toys is a rifle that seeks its target and has a range of 2,300 feet, making it possible to hit targets which are well out of the reach of conventional rifles.
All this in a country where 42% of American children live in low-income homes and a fifth of those children live in poverty. And what about unemployment numbers and the plight of the homeless in the US of A, a number that keeps rising?
Other institutions are more careful with their bawbees. I have been corrected over my story of the Prince of Wales last week. It is not every wounded soldier who enjoys a bottle of royal Scotch from him. He only sends letters and Scotch to casualties in the nine regiments under his command. The Royal family's escape from the Civil List into more rewarding pastures will make the Prince the richest king in history. Perhaps he might extend his kindness to the 1,500 who were wounded last year. Cost a lot less than his domestic staff of 150. Oh dear, I said I wasn't going to be rude.
Sometimes it DOES take a Rocket Scientist!!
Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically to launch standard
4 pound dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets
and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is
to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to
test the strength of the windshields.
British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the
windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made,
and a gun was sent to the British engineers. When the gun was fired,
the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurled out of the barrel,
crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens,
blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer's back-rest
in two, and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin, like an
arrow shot from a bow.
The horrified Brits sent NASA the disastrous results of the
experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the US
scientists for suggestions.NASA responded with a one-line memo -- DEFROST THE CHICKENN
SPORTS>>>>WRITERS?
An oxymoron, surely. The Guardian's Mike Selvey gets carried away...
“Thrillingly, as the shadows began to lengthen across the Sydney Cricket Ground, and Australia began to falter, it was Jimmy Anderson, brilliant Jimmy Anderson, indisputably the bowler of the series with daylight second, who plunged the knife into what life was left in the twitching carcass of the Australian cricket team. The old ball reversed, as it always seems to do for England – the same England, said the sages here in the pre-series propaganda war, that would not know how to use a second hand Kookaburra - and not for Australia. But Anderson did not just use it, he had it talking, gabbling away, a ball with verbal diarrhoea.”
The firework display was followed on New Year's Day by a Grand March of 10,000 musicians. According to London's deputy mayor Richard Barnes, it was “a good bang for your buck”.
Sadly some MPs missed it. An all party group, the British Swiss Parliamentary Group, left for Switzerland to take part in a skiing competition against Swiss Mps.
The taxpayer has not been forgotten. The Government has arranged for us to win £50 of rice and frozen green beans. It will cost £256 million, underwritten by industry food giants who presumably have gluts of beans and rice and will welcome a reduction in their tax bill. In turn, that will be £256 million that won't reduce our national debt.
BBC Wales spent £149.94 on chocolate biscuits. In excessive spending habits, however, we have much to learn from the Americans. According to the New York Times, the United States spends almost as much on the military as every other country in the world combined.
Although America leads the world in the money it has borrowed from China, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that America spends more than six times as much as that country. China is the country with the next highest budget.
The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its employ.
The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than it spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. Among its new lethal toys is a rifle that seeks its target and has a range of 2,300 feet, making it possible to hit targets which are well out of the reach of conventional rifles.
All this in a country where 42% of American children live in low-income homes and a fifth of those children live in poverty. And what about unemployment numbers and the plight of the homeless in the US of A, a number that keeps rising?
Other institutions are more careful with their bawbees. I have been corrected over my story of the Prince of Wales last week. It is not every wounded soldier who enjoys a bottle of royal Scotch from him. He only sends letters and Scotch to casualties in the nine regiments under his command. The Royal family's escape from the Civil List into more rewarding pastures will make the Prince the richest king in history. Perhaps he might extend his kindness to the 1,500 who were wounded last year. Cost a lot less than his domestic staff of 150. Oh dear, I said I wasn't going to be rude.
Sometimes it DOES take a Rocket Scientist!!
Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically to launch standard
4 pound dead chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets
and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea is
to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to
test the strength of the windshields.
British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the
windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made,
and a gun was sent to the British engineers. When the gun was fired,
the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurled out of the barrel,
crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens,
blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer's back-rest
in two, and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin, like an
arrow shot from a bow.
The horrified Brits sent NASA the disastrous results of the
experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the US
scientists for suggestions.NASA responded with a one-line memo -- DEFROST THE CHICKENN
SPORTS>>>>WRITERS?
An oxymoron, surely. The Guardian's Mike Selvey gets carried away...
“Thrillingly, as the shadows began to lengthen across the Sydney Cricket Ground, and Australia began to falter, it was Jimmy Anderson, brilliant Jimmy Anderson, indisputably the bowler of the series with daylight second, who plunged the knife into what life was left in the twitching carcass of the Australian cricket team. The old ball reversed, as it always seems to do for England – the same England, said the sages here in the pre-series propaganda war, that would not know how to use a second hand Kookaburra - and not for Australia. But Anderson did not just use it, he had it talking, gabbling away, a ball with verbal diarrhoea.”
Friday, 31 December 2010
A TOUCH OF THE OLD ADAM
.
.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said, "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."
God said: "The angel is Security and outside my remit. But there has obviously been a mistake.
He shouldn't be there till apple picking... "
"I wanted Dobermans,” He continued, “but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive. It's something they picked up from the Competition.
“We are working on garden staffing levels. Research and Development were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity, which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to
create Faraday."
Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”
God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept. Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."
God said: "Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an
entertainment concept and does home nursing.
“R and D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"
God said: "What's in a name, as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man - Woman. Neat,eh?
Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions..."
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to go. I have two days' creating before my rest day..."
And He rang off. It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this Leak from
Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman machine. And Adam was sore afraid.
Meanwhile, a very cross mass of people, 14 million of them, travelled and marked up £25 million on credit cards, spent £14,000 a second in Christmas shopping, tried to see the logic, as they shivered on draughty platforms or icy trains, of BR's boast it had improved its efficiency by cutting its services by a quarter. Nor was there much comfort to millions of land-bound air passengers when the head of BAA refused to take his efficiency bonus. He should have given his salary back.
I am convinced that we are witnessing the final collapse of Western Civilisation and not surprised that, according to The Guardian, things can only get worse.
The report predicts severe disruptions will become common at UK airports, which will become vulnerable to the changing climate. The Met Office could not forecast getting wet in a downpour. Britons might have to get used to power blackouts and disrupted travel plans as the country struggles to cope with the long-term effects of climate change, a report for the government has warned. Consumers will have to learn they cannot expect cheap heating and lighting and to go where or when they want as floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK's road, rail, water and energy networks, it says. If that warning was not sombre enough in a month when air, rail and road travel has been badly hit by the weather, mighty storms and changes in wind direction could threaten some of the country's busiest ports and airports. That would mean the abandonment of coastal docks and increasing pressure for the building of new runways throughout southern Britain.
The transport system has failed; education is a bad joke; the lethal police dismisseth us; parliament is a nest of quarrelsome backbiters and thieves. We fight unnecessary wars; we give millions to other countries whilst denying our own needy all but the necessities of life; we cannot afford to offer our talented young free education. Our culture is an embarrassment: the music has no essence, the paintings are a mockery, poetry is copywriting. It is the bankers not the crooks who wear the black masks, symptoms of a social structure that has collapsed..
What is it we are celebrating between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night? Only twelve per cent of Britons practise Christianity. Christ's Mass? By any reliable computation the man we call Christ was born in September, 4 A.D. Tax collection in an agrarian society in the darkest days of winter when nothing grows would have been counter productive. A wise teacher has been obscured by conjuring tricks and tacky illusions.
There is no room for gods in my life. They are phantasmagorias created by frightened people to defend themselves in the dark which surrounds them. We are our own immortality, there is no death, life is endless. If Christ were to return no doubt he would be accompanied by hobbits and schoolboys with magical powers.
I do not do reverence but I am very strong on awe. I am gripped by it at the thought of the flower crouched in a tiny seed and the magic of creation. According to Freud, Moses was the exiled priest of a disgraced Pharaoh who tried to make the Egyptians abandon their many gods. Heeding his teaching, the Israelis abandoned Jahveh and Baal and worshipped only the sun, the creative spirit made manifest.
Perversely I believe in Christmas as a precious thing. But it is Christmas Past when I wore clean pyjamas, still warm from the iron, on Christmas Eve and woke on Christmas morning to feel a weight on my feet of a pillowcase filled with toys. It is the memory of the Christmas when I crept downstairs to find my father surrounded by my toys, saying tipsily: ”Father Christmas was too drunk to climb the stairs”; of Christmas dinner when he was flown with wine and impertinence.
Those Christmases lie crushed under the weight of a twelve-day sales promotion by the markets. Their symbols are from past advertising campaigns. Twelve days last for two months. In our family we have separate Christmases for two of our children and the in-laws; the third child in Verona we meet by Skype. For the three days of Christmas, my wife, the dog and I close our front door on the world. Christmas begins with fish and chips to the sound of Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Correlli's Christmas music; we watch the Gondoliers performed by an Australian G and S Company, far better than D'Oyly Carte. We listen later to the carols from down the road at King's College, Cambridge. We watch videos of the Nutcracker Ballet, the classic Dickens' films of the Fifties, I take a little wine for my stomach's sake and we have the neighbours in for a drink after Boxing Day. As a special treat this year a TV network called Horse and Hound showed films of Drag Hunts.
Other religions have a rather different view of Christmas. A 'banned Islamic hate group', Islam4UK, planned to put up 'thousands' of billboards around the UK. They claim that Christmas is the reason for rape, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuity, crime, paedophilia, domestic violence (and that is not the complete list). The organizers hope to 'destroy Christmas' with this campaign.
The spirit of Christian Christmas is a little tattered. I cannot believe that my favourite paper, The Daily Telegraph, would send a pair of pretty reporters to encourage Cabinet ministers to badmouth the Government. It is mischief making of the worst kind. Its only effect will be to discourage MPs from talking frankly to their own constituents, almost the only role in which they are any use. There is an even more serious possibility for the journalists concerned and for their newspaper. According to David Howarth, a former shadow solicitor general and Lib Dem MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010, the criminal law Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 makes it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to dishonestly make a false representation with the intention of putting someone at risk of pecuniary loss or with the intention of making a pecuniary gain for another.
RESOLUTION TIME
My wife has a busy social calendar. I have not left the house since the first snowflake fell and will only come out with the snowdrops. Let us hope that this bright New Year I will make only one more resolution. Having heard from the father of a wounded soldier of the lengths Prince Charles and Camilla go to bring comfort to soldiers wounded in Afghanistan (every one of whom gets a bottle of Scotch and several visits from the couple), this column will never again be rude about the Royal Family.
MELLY CHRISTMAS
Among my Christmas gifts this year was a splendid cap made from genuine hallmarked Harris Tweed. Harris is all but impossible to buy in this country since some evil Yorkshireman bought out the crofters, and the only mill on Harris, and standardised their wonderful setts into a few lacklustre designs. The cap was made in China. As was every one of the gifts we were given, including a Kindle reader. Next year I expect that Santa will be wearing Mandarin moustaches and riding a junk pulled by six red-breathed dragons.
.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said, "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."
God said: "The angel is Security and outside my remit. But there has obviously been a mistake.
He shouldn't be there till apple picking... "
"I wanted Dobermans,” He continued, “but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive. It's something they picked up from the Competition.
“We are working on garden staffing levels. Research and Development were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity, which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to
create Faraday."
Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”
God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept. Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."
God said: "Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an
entertainment concept and does home nursing.
“R and D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"
God said: "What's in a name, as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man - Woman. Neat,eh?
Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions..."
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to go. I have two days' creating before my rest day..."
And He rang off. It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this Leak from
Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman machine. And Adam was sore afraid.
Meanwhile, a very cross mass of people, 14 million of them, travelled and marked up £25 million on credit cards, spent £14,000 a second in Christmas shopping, tried to see the logic, as they shivered on draughty platforms or icy trains, of BR's boast it had improved its efficiency by cutting its services by a quarter. Nor was there much comfort to millions of land-bound air passengers when the head of BAA refused to take his efficiency bonus. He should have given his salary back.
I am convinced that we are witnessing the final collapse of Western Civilisation and not surprised that, according to The Guardian, things can only get worse.
The report predicts severe disruptions will become common at UK airports, which will become vulnerable to the changing climate. The Met Office could not forecast getting wet in a downpour. Britons might have to get used to power blackouts and disrupted travel plans as the country struggles to cope with the long-term effects of climate change, a report for the government has warned. Consumers will have to learn they cannot expect cheap heating and lighting and to go where or when they want as floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK's road, rail, water and energy networks, it says. If that warning was not sombre enough in a month when air, rail and road travel has been badly hit by the weather, mighty storms and changes in wind direction could threaten some of the country's busiest ports and airports. That would mean the abandonment of coastal docks and increasing pressure for the building of new runways throughout southern Britain.
The transport system has failed; education is a bad joke; the lethal police dismisseth us; parliament is a nest of quarrelsome backbiters and thieves. We fight unnecessary wars; we give millions to other countries whilst denying our own needy all but the necessities of life; we cannot afford to offer our talented young free education. Our culture is an embarrassment: the music has no essence, the paintings are a mockery, poetry is copywriting. It is the bankers not the crooks who wear the black masks, symptoms of a social structure that has collapsed..
What is it we are celebrating between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night? Only twelve per cent of Britons practise Christianity. Christ's Mass? By any reliable computation the man we call Christ was born in September, 4 A.D. Tax collection in an agrarian society in the darkest days of winter when nothing grows would have been counter productive. A wise teacher has been obscured by conjuring tricks and tacky illusions.
There is no room for gods in my life. They are phantasmagorias created by frightened people to defend themselves in the dark which surrounds them. We are our own immortality, there is no death, life is endless. If Christ were to return no doubt he would be accompanied by hobbits and schoolboys with magical powers.
I do not do reverence but I am very strong on awe. I am gripped by it at the thought of the flower crouched in a tiny seed and the magic of creation. According to Freud, Moses was the exiled priest of a disgraced Pharaoh who tried to make the Egyptians abandon their many gods. Heeding his teaching, the Israelis abandoned Jahveh and Baal and worshipped only the sun, the creative spirit made manifest.
Perversely I believe in Christmas as a precious thing. But it is Christmas Past when I wore clean pyjamas, still warm from the iron, on Christmas Eve and woke on Christmas morning to feel a weight on my feet of a pillowcase filled with toys. It is the memory of the Christmas when I crept downstairs to find my father surrounded by my toys, saying tipsily: ”Father Christmas was too drunk to climb the stairs”; of Christmas dinner when he was flown with wine and impertinence.
Those Christmases lie crushed under the weight of a twelve-day sales promotion by the markets. Their symbols are from past advertising campaigns. Twelve days last for two months. In our family we have separate Christmases for two of our children and the in-laws; the third child in Verona we meet by Skype. For the three days of Christmas, my wife, the dog and I close our front door on the world. Christmas begins with fish and chips to the sound of Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Correlli's Christmas music; we watch the Gondoliers performed by an Australian G and S Company, far better than D'Oyly Carte. We listen later to the carols from down the road at King's College, Cambridge. We watch videos of the Nutcracker Ballet, the classic Dickens' films of the Fifties, I take a little wine for my stomach's sake and we have the neighbours in for a drink after Boxing Day. As a special treat this year a TV network called Horse and Hound showed films of Drag Hunts.
Other religions have a rather different view of Christmas. A 'banned Islamic hate group', Islam4UK, planned to put up 'thousands' of billboards around the UK. They claim that Christmas is the reason for rape, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuity, crime, paedophilia, domestic violence (and that is not the complete list). The organizers hope to 'destroy Christmas' with this campaign.
The spirit of Christian Christmas is a little tattered. I cannot believe that my favourite paper, The Daily Telegraph, would send a pair of pretty reporters to encourage Cabinet ministers to badmouth the Government. It is mischief making of the worst kind. Its only effect will be to discourage MPs from talking frankly to their own constituents, almost the only role in which they are any use. There is an even more serious possibility for the journalists concerned and for their newspaper. According to David Howarth, a former shadow solicitor general and Lib Dem MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010, the criminal law Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 makes it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to dishonestly make a false representation with the intention of putting someone at risk of pecuniary loss or with the intention of making a pecuniary gain for another.
RESOLUTION TIME
My wife has a busy social calendar. I have not left the house since the first snowflake fell and will only come out with the snowdrops. Let us hope that this bright New Year I will make only one more resolution. Having heard from the father of a wounded soldier of the lengths Prince Charles and Camilla go to bring comfort to soldiers wounded in Afghanistan (every one of whom gets a bottle of Scotch and several visits from the couple), this column will never again be rude about the Royal Family.
MELLY CHRISTMAS
Among my Christmas gifts this year was a splendid cap made from genuine hallmarked Harris Tweed. Harris is all but impossible to buy in this country since some evil Yorkshireman bought out the crofters, and the only mill on Harris, and standardised their wonderful setts into a few lacklustre designs. The cap was made in China. As was every one of the gifts we were given, including a Kindle reader. Next year I expect that Santa will be wearing Mandarin moustaches and riding a junk pulled by six red-breathed dragons.
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