hang my galloway high

In his fine poem “The
Maimed Debauchee”, Lord Rochester wrote. "So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
Past joys have more than paid what I endure "

Thank goodness he didn’t have to endure this maladjusted Establishment that plunges us into one unnecessary war after another, an Establishment which, no doubt, has poor Polonius –“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – spinning in his grave; yet presumes to tell us how much we should drink and smoke.
Fifteen years ago my income plunged to a couple of hundred a week but
it didn’t stop my craving for drink. I brewed a very decent beer for tuppence a
pint and found a source for bootleg gin at a fiver a bottle.
The feral young of today won’t be put off by an increase of two quid on half a bottle of vodka. They only drink on Fridays and Saturdays and that won’t change when the only place you can buy cheap booze is in the bars of the Palace of Westminster. Homemade beer kits will produce a drinkable,strong beer; and there are enough illicit stills springing up in our immigrantcolonies which provide vodka at a shilling a tot. In Wisbech, near here, there are lorries making weekly deliveries.
The Establishment says the success of the smoking ban proves that their regulations work. The smoking ban in pubs has dramatically improved health, it boasts. As
Christopher Booker has pointed out, one study after another has shown that
health risks from passive smoking are non-existent. One 1998 study concluded
that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to
smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk
of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant". Yet
if you look on the WHO website they now warn that passive smoking is a health
risk.
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and
published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a
"higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners
were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most
conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to
have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the
epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
Some years ago the Establishment warned us not to drink more than four units of
alcohol. Since then, one of the members of the Royal College of Physicians' original working party has admitted the figures were "plucked out of the air" in the
absence of any clear evidence about how much alcohol constitutes a risk to
health.
Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the College's working party on alcohol, recalled that the committee could find "no decent
data" on the subject, but felt obliged to make a recommendation nonetheless.
He said: "They weren't really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
Yet last week all this hard evidence was happily swept aside by the Gadarene rush
of the self-righteous. It didn’t prevent the Government telling how few units
will wreck our health. It also warned us that if we drink three glasses of wine
a day we have a fifty per cent chance of developing breast cancer. Its advice is, presumably,based on those discredited recommendations of yesteryear.
Columnist Dominic Lawson perceptively points out that the disgraceful brawling in the House of Commons bars has not been linked to the cut price booze offered there. Gooses, Ganders and sauce spring to mind.
The R4 programme “More or Less” discovered the number of units of alcohol consumed by the average British adult has dropped by 20 per cent over the past five years.

Why is the Establishment so gloomy? From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat. My advice? Eat, drink eat and be merry.
Rochester put it so much better:
“I will such heat inspire,
As to important mischief shall incline.
I'll make them long some ancient church to fire,
And fear no lewdness they're called to by wine.
Thus statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
And safe from danger valiantly advise,
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows,
And being good for nothing else, be wise..
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
\Vhen fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.

Nor let the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:

*****************************
MINISTRY OF Doohhh

The navy’s newest ship, the offshore support vessel Skandi Bergen, cannot be sent
to war. The civilian crew is not insured for battle.

UNFIT FOR PURPOSE
We are contemplating war with the Falklands, nuclear war between Israel and the
Arabs; the UK has an underclass which has little chance of escape from poverty
and an underground army of feral looters; massive changes are underway to a Welfare
State we have never been able to afford. And what is concerning Her Majesty’s
Opposition? How many members of the cabinet are millionaires; whether the Prime Minister hacked out on a policehorse; whether Cornish pasties should attract VAT; dinners for donors and whereand when the PM last ate a pasty. And the Government? They are advising us to store highly inflammable petrol in our garages and provoking panic over a strike by tanker drivers which may never happen. Now it looks as though it’s all down to George Galloway, a teetotaler, alas, but someone who can talk
brilliantly and walk about at the same time.

Of one thing we can be sure. None of the three major parties is fit to govern us.
They should pay us to get as drunk as they often are.

LIFTING THE VEIL

A Muslim juror refuses to remove her veil and a judge allows her to stand down. This is a clear case of contempt of court. Why isn't she in prison?
My objection to immigrants has nothing to do with race. My family were Norman for a thousand years. In the last fifty years they have added, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Saxon,Cambodian, Italian and German. I am a Buddhist. I was born in Lancashire of Scottish stock. I lived briefly in Liverpool, in Wales for thirty years,Yorkshire for ten. Now I live in the Fens which has become Mittel Europa.
What I object to is the refusal of many immigrants to integrate. If they come to Britain presumably they are attracted to our way of life. So why do they try so hard to change it?
That is not true of all immigrants. The Royal Regiment of Scotland is kept up to strength by blacks. In my own regiment they prove themselves again and again. In Afghanistan they were called out to rescue the SAS.
Twenty SAS men and 30 Afghan troops on a special mission had become pinned down after their Chinook was crippled by a fault. Alpha Company of the 3rd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland (Black Watch) drove back the Taliban, who swarmed from surrounding mountains to attack the out-numbered SAS.
Former head of the Army General Sir Mike Jackson stressed last night that five of the soldiers from Alpha Company's No 1 Platoon were black - showing BNP racists who have tried to hijack Britain's military heritage are out of touch. - M.O.D despatch.
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, the Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
I am not a nationalist. Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates
of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family.You may recall my Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish
Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,
ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the
Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but
always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day
early to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night whisky had washed away any
seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm naked hostility had replaced it, my
father invariably igniting it by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist
principles enflamed at the sight of such a capitalist
accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every
year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the
most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born
during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy and Matty
and Alec who tried to join the row, were rebuffed by Uncle
Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy and Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the
wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their
conversation.Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?"
The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the
brothers had their arms round each other and were singing
Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that anymore. Or Auntie
Jeannies.

A LOAD OF BULL

I have reviewed books, theatres and restaurants, and a very glamorous life it has been. Baskets of free books, no bills for a mountain of meals that Red Rum couldn’t jump over and no charge for the best seats at ballets, operas, musicals and plays.

My new task, reviewing colostomy bags, is something of a come down. As a subject shit does not call for lyrical prose. Even writing the word is an effort. I owe my pension to the royalties of Winnie the Pooh but I still think that generous bear is ill named.

Why does that inoffensive word summon up feelings of such distaste? Google it and it must be the only subject which does not return a single response. As a pictogram it is a pleasing arrangement of curves, vertical and horizontal brush strokes. By any other name - manure night soil, meadow muffins, compost - it is pleasantly rural.

It is nothing more than the detritus of good food and drink which as fertiliser will provide our future feasts. Indeed it is the stuff of life. Yet in the dictionary this unhappy word is given a terrible name.

The best poetry anthology is a dictionary. Dr Johnson illuminated entries in his delightful work by providing a verse or piece of prose, usually from his own well stocked mind, to illustrate his definition.

“Shittlecock”, he insists, is a real noun. It describes the game we know under a slightly different name. He provides this explanation: “It is called cock because of its feathers. Perhaps it is properly shuttle cork, a cork driven to and fro, as the instrument in weaving, and softened by frequent and rapid utterance from cork to cock.”

He offers this quotation from Collier:

“You need not discharge a cannon to break the chain of his thought, the pat of a shittlecock or the creaking of a jack, will do his business.”

Lesser dictionaries are less inventive, if more scathing

“Something disgusting, of poor quality or otherwise totally unacceptable. It’s a narcotic, foolish deceitful language, insolent talk; small or worthless; to treat with anger or disrespect. It’s an expression of anger, surprise or an expression of displeasure...”

Yet the same innocent letters are part of history. They are all of them ‘this’ and part of ‘that’, the larger part of ‘thirst’, and we could not wear a ‘shirt’ without them.

Worries about words launched Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s first best seller.

His friend William Clerk drew Scott's attention to racial tensions in post-Norman Conquest England. Clerk noted how our names for livestock generally have Anglo-Saxon origins (e.g. sheep, pig, cow) which are exchanged for Anglo-French terms once they are prepared for the table (e.g. mutton, pork, beef). This illustration of the subservience of labouring Saxon to land-owning Norman was subsequently inserted in Ivanhoe and became the novel’s theme.

“...........swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow

when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels,

like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swine-herd.

"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I

think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in

the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a

Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to

feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurtha?"

"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy

fool's pate."

"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old

Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the

charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery

French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are

destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau

in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a

Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."

We handle words so carelessly and yet they are more dangerous than nuclear fission. I think a British market town is the ultimate civilised community yet when the Queen wishes to confer great honour she allows a town to call itself a city. No big deal, according to Cobbett to whom London was the Great Wen (a skin eruption). Historically a city is any town which contains a cathedral. There are 21 cathedral cities in Britain but only one cathedral town - St Asaph. I have never met anyone in that town who doesn’t insist it too is a city. So why the jubilation, when, to mark Her Diamond Jubilee, Our Gracious waves her wand and a city it becomes? As the French say, more musically, Merde!

.

IT’S BEING SO CHEERFUL...........

Doomsday theorists are alarmed that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ Calendar, as it is known, appears to end abruptly on a date they recorded as 13.0.0.0. On the Gregorian calendar, which we use today, this corresponds to December 21, 2012.

The only clue as to what the Mayans thought might happen on that day comes from an ancient stone tablet, discovered during road works in Mexico back in the Sixties. Carved upon it are hieroglyphics that refer to the year 2012 and an event that will involve Bolon Yokte, the Mayan god of war and creation.

Weathering and a crack in the stone have made the last part of the inscription illegible, but Mexican archaeologists have interpreted it as saying: ‘He will descend from the sky.’

There is no mention of reindeer but I still don’t like the notion of a sky crowded with a Mayan God, the Norse God Thor driving his wild herd and drunken old Santa, afire with seven million glasses of sherry, in charge of six rebellious reindeer with red noses that also hint at sherry servings.

PS: TRY MY COMIC NOVEL ISLAND FLING

.http://www.bewritebooks.com/mb/IslandFling/IslandFling.html#/1/

NO NUDES IS GOOD NEWS

There are days when unclothed women seem to dominate the curious world that is Emailia. Alas, I have reached an age when my interest in so many acres of naked flesh is philosophical. Increasingly it is the comic aspect which dominates and the sad truth is that women look much better with their clothes on. I expect it was a dawning aesthetic sense which prompted the cave dwellers to rush from the hearth to do unequal battle with the bear and the wolf, so desperate were they to hide the more comic aspects of Creation.

I used to make fun of the Creator as designer. Now I am more indulgent. I believe after creating creatures as beautiful as the tiger, the humming bird or the antelope It felt entitled to a little light relief. The general outline of Homo Sapiens on which It decided is pleasing enough. It is the appendages that are so risible.

I have suggested that arms one could unscrew at night would be a blessing since I seem to devote a great deal of sleeping time to deciding on where to put my arms. Few will argue that waste disposal arrangements could have been better managed. My colostomy bag might have been copied to advantage,

Surprisingly, I have the support of the early Christian church which inveighed against the act of birth, which it unpleasantly described as occurring between the urine and the fundament. The Church used it as an argument against women; probably why there are no women bishops and in Catholicism no women in authority at all.

I am probably extreme in viewing all religions as fairy tales for grownups but in a limited way that view is shared by religions. Only other people’s religions, of course; always viewed as mythology. Nevertheless they share with Christians a distaste for the birthing process on which the Creator has settled.

In Greek mythology various gods have been born out of the head of Zeus; other religions chose the side. Less dramatically, the Christian view merely dispenses with a father and so ensures the pain without the pleasure, which is par for the course. Gore Vidal pointed out that Christianity is the only religion which has a corpse and an instrument of torture as its most sacred symbol.

I would never consciously offend a believer but I find it impossible to take religion seriously. Nevertheless, one of the most moving books I have read is Aldous Huxley’s anthology “The Perennial Philosophy”, a collection of the writings of the Great Mystics, East and West. The Perennial Philosophy, which is thousands of years old, demonstrates what they called the Divine Reality, the Highest Common Factor which is found in every one of the major religions.

I was delighted by an excerpt from a Hindu Apanished in which a father explains the invisible presence of God by dissolving salt in water. When the salt dissolved it was invisible but when he gave it to his son to drink the water tasted salty.

He says: “In this body of yours you do not perceive the True, but there in fact it is.”

As a Buddhist I don’t believe in death or gods. The Buddha was a man and I am part of him, as I am of all sensate creatures.

I have no difficulty, like the Hindu, in believing in an unknowable Creator. But if all religions are variants of the same belief and everyone is praying to the same God, then why is religion the basis of so many wars?

**************************

More gems from Michael Quinion’s must-read blog Worldwide Words:

Michael Hocken submitted a casting call spotted by an actor friend: “We are making a short 3 minute comedy/drama about God coming down to earth to enter into competitions and film festivals throughout the UK.”

Leo Boivin writes: “The lead sentence of an editorial in the Washington Post on 26 February read, “One day this month four murders occurred in the space of 72 hours in Prince George’s County.”

A report on the CBC News site startled James Helbig. “A woman has been found frozen to death at Apex Mountain Resort, confirm RCMP. ... Police believe cold weather was a factor in her death.”

On Oscar night, Grant Cribb tells us, the red-carpet correspondent for BBC TV news was speculating about Meryl Streep’s chances. He concluded: “You might think that she’s won a whole brace of Oscars over the years. In fact, she’s only won two.”

Michael Robertson e-mailed, “In the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, the entry for Clark Gable concludes: ‘In The Misfits — his last film, made shortly after his death — he played a tough, aging cowboy.”

*************88**********

My favourite restaurant in the universe is Brown’s opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It is a lofty-ceilinged room, French in a Belle Epoque way, noisy with lively conversation, friendly but respectful waiters and good traditional food. Lunching there with Chinese friends I admitted to the husband, retired from a Chair in Statistics, that I had followed all the debate by economists about the Crash without understanding a single word.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the economists don’t understand what they are talking about either. It’s not a question of understanding them but translating. Quantative Easing, for example. That means the issue of worthless bank notes.”

“That’s forgery,“ I said.

“Exactly,“ he said. “There are lies, damned lies and economists.” We returned to our beef steak pie cooked in beer with quiet satisfaction.

******************************

Bailey, our gardener Hipkin’s Wonderdog who has reached 17 on a diet of sausages, beef burgers, chicken and a full Sunday luncheon, has caught a nasty cough. Naturally Hipkin doses him with child strength cough mixture. He went to replenish his supplies at Tesco’s.

“It were one o’ they till girls,” he told me. ‘How old’s the baby then?’ she says. Well, says I, it ain’t a baby, not at all. It’s a dog. ‘A dog,’ says she. ‘Well I ain’t a-gooin to sell you none. Not for a dog.’ So I went savage. You knows what you can do with your mixture, I says, and I walks out.”

Poor Hipkin’s troubles have come not as single spies but in battalions. “All the geraniums have died in my neighbour’s conservative,” he told me.

LAND OF HELPLESS TORIES

Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham are becoming 'no-go areas' because of drugs gangs... just like Mexico and Brazil, says the UNITED NATIONS

Primary school where just 26 out of 700 pupils speak English as their first language

Don't bother getting a good degree: Now PC brigade says bosses shouldn't just hire best students as it 'discriminates against average graduates'

Daily Mail Headlines, Tuesday 28 Feb 2012

Was it those news items or disclosures of the recurring venality of our MPS, frauds by the bankers, the corruption of the Metropolitan police that made me realise that I, who was born in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, have lived to witness the end game, the collapse of the United Kingdom?

Actually it was none of those. It watching a documentary on the dispute between the English Defence League and another ragtag bunch, the Militant Muslims, in Luton. Not a big thing in itself. A battle really between a street corner thug and a fundamentalist accountant. In the more sensible past it would not have been worth an airing. But it was enough to make me realise it was all over. The giants I knew in my youth have been supplanted by petulant pigmies.

It was not always so. Next weekend I will be attending a very special 100th birthday party.

Geoffrey Rowley-Conwy, 9th Baron Langford, has been my best friend for 63 years. He is a man from another age. A good landlord, an amateur jockey, a breeder and driver of trotting horses, but, above all, a brave professional soldier. When Singapore Island fell to the Japanese in 1942, many officers became separated from their units. Not so the young Rowley Conwy He commandeered a Chinese junk and evacuated his entire RA battery. A civilian rubber planter Douglas Fraser joined them. In defiance of army convention, the Colonel (then still a major) recruited him into the army and “commissioned“ him. The two men brought the battery through the Thousand Isles, where Rowkley Conwy was ordered to take command of a log-burning steamer ferrying escaping soldiers down the Irrawaddy to Padang on the West coast and did two trips in it to islands east of Sumatra .

The tourist route, as the river-lift across Sumatra became known, was the inspiration of another chum, Lt Col Alan “Cocky” Ferguson Warren, Royal Marines, Commander, Special Operations Executive Orient. Appalled that no evacuation plan had been made, Warren borrowed, bought or stole a fleet of river boats and set up a mini Dunkirk which saved thousands of lives. When Singapore fell only 800 were left behind.

He gave the young Rowley Conwy command of a diesel-engined, 66 ton launch and a map torn from a school exercise book, his only chart, which had Rangoon and Sydney on the same page. Dodging Japanese bombers, running his craft ashore so often the pumps were in constant use, he later took over a second launch, the Plover, in which he made one trip before the route was closed down.

Reporting to Warren, he was told the plan had been to give him charge of all Allied troops in Padang but at 29 he was too young and too junior and so he was told to await orders.

Warren bought a Malay pirhau to make his own escape and that of his small staff from Padang but, ashamed at the behaviour of senior British and Australian officers, he gave his place instead to Rowley Conwy.. He remained, appointing himself Commander British Troops and bringing the abandoned soldiery back into units, so that a senior and experienced officer would be present to surrender when inevitably the Japanese reached Padang. This led to three years of captivity in the River Kwai death camps. Had his role in the SOE been discovered it would have meant instant death at the hands of the Japanese Secret Police. Warren's action was one of the most cold-blooded and bravest decisions of the war.

Rowley Conwy joined an elite group of Warren’s SOE staff who sailed the leaky Sederhana Djohanis, with paper-thin and patched sails, across the Bay of Bengal from Padang to Bombay. The 1,500-mile voyage, during which they were strafed by an enemy fighter and almost inadvertently sailed through a Japanese fleet, took 37 days. They were finally picked up a mile off the Ceylon coast by the merchant ship Anglo Canadian.

The son of an officer killed at Gallipol, he too joined the army. As a young officer he was forced to live on his pay but typically found ways to run a horse and a Bentley motor car. In India he rode as a jockey for local millionaires.

He is a bon viveur with a boundless gift for friendship. His mottoes are “The Best is Barely Good Enough” and “It only costs a Little More to travel First Class.”

He has always been ready for battle. When he had his shirt collars replaced with material from the tail of his shirts he was incandescent when Customs attempted to charge him duty. The resulting correspondence was worthy of Wodehouse. When the Customs ended a letter, “We have the honour to be your Lordship’s Most Obedient Servant”, he wrote back, “Then act like one.”

As a youth he was confronted in Fortnum & Mason’s by a formidable floor walker in a frock coat.

“And who might you be?” he demanded.

“I am in charge of this floor,” was the reply.

“Then get it swept. It’s filthy.”

He owns the Junction Pool of the Rivers Clwyd and Elwy, a fine holding pool for sea trout. He fought a running battle with Flintshire’s Lord Lieutenant Hugh Mainwaring who refused to allow him costs when he took a poacher to court. In reprisal, he took to fining poachers on the spot and sending the money to service charities. When one refused to pay, he followed him home and sat in his front garden until he got his money. He was only once beaten. A disgruntled poacher introduced a seal to the river.

I was his PR sergeant on the Berlin Airlift. We met when I took up residence in an empty aircraft engine packing case next to his office and we have been firm friends from that day to this. His wife Susan was “best man” at my wedding.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Michael Gove yesterday denied being guilty of 'Cymru-phobia' after using the term 'welshed' in Parliament.

The Education Secretary used the verb, meaning to fail to honour a deal or pay a gambling debt, as he faced MPs at Commons' questions.

Some Welsh people find the term offensive, claiming it implies they cannot be trusted.

Mr Gove, a Scotsman, was rebuked by Speaker John Bercow, who urged him to choose another word.

I suppose it would be asking too much to expect The Speaker to know anything about history.

When Edward I built his castles in Wales the writ of English Law ran only in the towns in which they were built. All the country beyond was governed by Welsh law (the term survives in towns like Welsh Frankton). Any trader who escaped his debts by going into the ‘Welshery’ was said to have ‘welshed’.

MPs do it all the time.

And finally

A Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge? This was an entry

for the 32nd annual Bookseller Diagram prize for the oddest book

title of the year. Other titles are: Estonian Sock Patterns All

Around The World, A Century Of Sand Dredging In The Bristol Channel

(Volume Two), A Taxonomy of Office Chairs (which is described as "an

exhaustive overview"), and The Mushroom In Christian Art.

I DON'T GIVE AN MP FOR A FIG

I’ve said it once and I will go on saying it until I am, non-politically speaking of course, blue in the face. The answer to our problems is to sack all the MPs and let their precious fig trees run the country.

No, I am serious. We are paying employees of the Ministry of Defence a £40 million bonus as a reward for incompetence so massive that front line soldiers are being rewarded with redundancy and we have a bath tub Navy and an Air Force which has been grounded into the dust. Croesus football clubs owe countless millions in unpaid tax which they will avoid paying by going into administration. Yet libraries and public lavatories are being closed and cripples are suffering benefit cuts.

If you look over the past two centuries, our international problems were all caused by the death of Palmerston. His successors, to put it mildly, couldn’t organise a drink fest in a brewery.

In Palmerston’s day Britons were the pin ups of the Arabian world. Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence were only two of the Westerners whose word was law among the sheiks of Araby. The Balfour Declaration and The Sykes Picot treaty between Britain and France to share between us the Ottoman Empire, at the same time as we were promising Arabs Home Rule, were not the height of diplomatic achievement. When the Arabs found out what the Allies planned for them, Hussein and Ibn Saud started their own kingdoms, Arab nationalism was founded in a literary club run by American missionaries in Beirut and Saud enlisted the fanatical Wahabi tribe to help him launch Saudi Arabia. The India Mutiny and today’s terrorists are Wahabi inspired.

The Second World War was made inevitable by the Versailles Peace Treaty which imposed crippling financial reparations on Germany that in turn allowed the rise of fascism. The atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima AFTER the Japanese had offered to surrender unconditionally to frighten the Russians but the Cold War which crippled both East and West was based on faulty intelligence. Stalin had neither the intention nor the means to make war.

So let’s leave it to the trees. We just have to find some way to teach them to read. Not lots of books. Just “The Last Mughal” by William Dalrymple, ”Indian Summer” by Alex von Tunzleman, “Alliance” by Jonathon Tenby, “Europe’s Last Summer” and “A Peace to End All Peace” by David Fromkin, “The Peace Makers” by Margaret MacMillan, and “The Balfour Doctrine” by Jonathan Schneer in which he reveals that Britain’s support for Zionism was not the result of an inevitable process. In fact, shortly after Balfour’s promise to the Jews, the British government offered the Ottoman Empire the opportunity to keep Palestine and to continue to fly the Turkish flag over it.

Add to these “Hero”, Alexander Korda’s biography of Lawrence of Arabia, “Desert Queen”, Jane Wallach’s biography of Gertrude Bell and “Arabia Deserta”, Charles Doughty’s curious tour of Arabia, and finally “America and the Imperialism of Ignorance” by Andrew Alexander.

This is the most recent of the above publications, in which Alexander writes: “If the world came close to nuclear Armageddon on half a dozen occasions, and expended so much blood and treasure for 40 years against a threat that was never real, this raises serious doubt about the integrity and basic intelligence of a whole succession of Western governments and the political institutions for which they make such high claims.

Alexander argues that communism never posed an existential threat to the security of the West. Stalin’s primary aim was the preservation of his regime, and his only objective in Eastern Europe was to create a defensive buffer against any German advance. Not only did he lack the resources, the plans or the will to conquer Western Europe: he actively opposed communist revolutions around the world. If Western Europe was safe from Soviet attack, the United States — thousands of miles further away — was even safer.

Also on my booklist is “Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt,War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream”

by Gregg Jones.

A review in the New York Times reads:

President William McKinley insisted that it was the Filipinos’ “liberty and not our power, their welfare and not our gain, we are seeking to enhance.” The American people, however, flush with victory, had started to dream of expansion, even empire, and pressure mounted on McKinley not just to free Spanish colonies but also to lay claim to them. By 1900, an election year, McKinley had begun to give in, arguing that “territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause.” Addressing a campaign crowd in Nebraska, he asked, “Shall we deny to ourselves what the rest of the world so freely and justly accords to us?” The answer, as he knew it would be, was an instantaneous and uproarious “No!”

On nearly every page, there is a scene that feels as if it could have taken place during the Bush and Obama administrations rather than those of McKinley and Roosevelt. American troops are greeted on foreign soil as saviors and then quickly despised as occupiers. The United States triumphantly declares a victorious end to the war, even as bitter fighting continues. Allegations of torture fill the newspapers, horrifying and transfixing the country.

To force information from a Filipino mayor believed to have been covertly helping insurgents, American soldiers resort to what they call the “water cure.” After tying the mayor’s hands behind his back and forcing him to lie beneath a large water tank, they pry his mouth open, hold it in place with a stick and then turn on the spigot. When his stomach is full to bursting, the soldiers begin pounding on it with their fists, stopping only after the water, now mixed with gastric juices, has poured from his mouth and nose.

The problem about politicians is that they mean well. Cameron presenting a policy reminds me of my hound Taz who will offer me a toy, stand back, look at me intently and then if I don’t accept, take it away and bring another toy for me to accept.

Cameron, like Taz, is at his most winning when he is taking care of us. He insists on revolutionising the NHS though the professionals don’t want the bill and 85 per cent of patients think the NHS is marvellous. More recently he is going to cure public drunkenness by going round cities, collecting all the fighting drunks and putting them in a room until they sober up. One room per drunk. But there will be more drunks than cells. They will fight each other because that is what fighting drunks do. Or perhaps he plans it as a means of raising revenue by having bets on survivors? I just hope enough survive to clean the blood off the wall. Believe me, I’ve known drunks who play the Eton Wall Game using people as balls.

From valued blog reader Sarah Thomas comes this proof that ours isn’t the only asylum run by its inmates.

Toys cannot hold protest because they are not citizens of Russia, officials rule

Siberian authorities ban protest by 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars

There hadn't been many – indeed any – rallies like it before in Russia.Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice.

At the time, Russian authorities in Barnaul declared the protest "an unsanctioned public event".

Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be "citizens of Russia".

The Guardian

Rupert Murdoch letter to News International staff 'full of legal errors'

submitted by blog reader Alastair McQueen:

Rupert Murdoch is not legally obliged to hand over evidence of wrongdoing in his newspapers to the police, contrary to claims he made in a letter to News International staff, a leading human rights lawyer has said.

Geoffrey Robertson, QC, has said that Murdoch's letter in relation to this issue "is full of errors, both of law and history".

He added that the media baron was "ill-advisedly and unethically throwing away the shield that parliament gave to journalists in 1984 so they could protect their sources".

"On the contrary, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act defines confidential journalistic material as 'excluded material', which police cannot seize at all, other than in a few cases such as official secrets, when they have to get an order from a circuit judge."

The Guardian

Muslims Declare Jihad on Dogs in Europe

A Dutch Muslim politician has called for a ban on dogs in The Hague, the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Islamic legal tradition holds that dogs are "unclean" animals, and some say the call to ban them in Holland and elsewhere represents an attempted encroachment of Islamic Sharia law in Europe.

Happily we take a different view.

Dolphins are so intelligent that they should be thought of as ‘non-human persons’ and given their own bill of rights, it is claimed.

A coalition of scientists, philosophers and animal welfare groups have come up with a declaration of dolphin rights which they hope will one day be enshrined in law.

This would stop them being kept in zoos and water parks, and being attacked by fishermen.

Whales would also be elevated above other animals by the list of rules, leading to whalers being classed as murderers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference heard in Vancouver.

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

We should have kept India and given away the UK.

For the first time in 83 years I have been head hunted...Well, not exactly head. Amtex have recruited me to test pilot new products. Colostomy bags. I wish there was some part of my life that wasn’t pure farce.

Marie Colvin was a fine reporter and a serial heroine. She volunteered for death and took her life in her hands on a daily basis.

Rami al Sayed was the eye of the Syrian Revolution. He used his camera phone to film the appalling genocide in Homs. In doing so he founded the Syrian Pioneer, online streaming coverage of the revolution.

He and Colvin were both killed on the same day, doing their job. Colvin dominated the Media for days: al Sayed merited two paragraphs in my paper.

AN ENGLISHMAN'S ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE........HIS CASTLE

Broadly speaking I am in favour of euthanasia, which is just as well because any day now it’s going to be compulsory. A boy genius called David Halpern who heads the “Nudge Unit” at Number 10 (that is the Behavioural Insight Team which no prime minister can afford to be without) has found out what is wrong with society.

It is us, the Artful Dodderers who insist on living in the houses we have slaved all our lives to pay for; who retire at 65 when we could go on working until our dotage, or, better yet, death. Dave points out there are 25 million empty bedrooms in Britain and they could more usefully be used as squats for the feral young.

Dave....DAVE........DAVE. Hold your foot up......

It’s a marvellous idea but there are just two tiny flaws. Bigger houses cost more than small ones so it’s unlikely the young people will be able to afford them, especially if old people hang on to their jobs. Twenty per cent of the young are unemployed at the moment. It will be far greater if the job market is clogged by Ancient Persons. So the money you will save by this bold initiative will be swallowed up by the increase in the job seekers’ allowance.

Oh, and Dave whilst I have your attention... you are worrying whether to send ammunition and weapons to the Syrians because you cling to the foolish belief that the Arab Spring is a good idea. It isn’t. Have you noticed what has happened in Tunisia where dawn first broke? Sharia law in all its unpleasantness. The Muslim Brotherhood is poised to take over Egypt and the rest of liberated Arabia. In Libya the new dawn is shining on the torturers and terrorists...

What’s that you are saying? ... Yes, I know the Brotherhood are all excellent chaps, devoted to cricket and acts of kindness to minorities. That is the argument which landed London with Ken Livingstone and Liverpool with Derek “Degsy” Hatton. Both cities elected good chaps to run them but they were soon kicked out when their parties won power.

Beyond our glad desert horizon is a very nasty tribe call the Wahabis, who already rule Saudi Arabia, the country you may have noticed that is bank-rolling the Arab Spring; nurtured bin Laden and inspired the Mad Mullahs who are corrupting British Muslims.

NEWS VIEWS

Nothing bothers Hipkin but Paul, our other gardener, is upset that his daughters teachers are telling them that if Cameron does not support the Euro, war in Europe is inevitable. My own concern is that schools are employing teachers with such boundless ignorance of the world around them. Germany doesn’t need a war to run Europe; Italy, Spain or Greece could not afford a war; and Eastern Europe is united in its willingness to be occupied. It must also be said that none of the above has proved adept at winning wars in the past. Britain? Ask Obama

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Angela Ripoff is concerned that football commentators are paid forty times more than she is. My own concern is that she is paid anything at all. But surely the argument should not be that women broadcasters are paid too little but that ALL broadcasters are paid far too much. I speak from thirty years experience when I claim that broadcasting is easy. Don’t just take my word for it. One of the finest broadcasters today, Libby Purves, made the same point in her autobiography. She claims that if you can read and speak you can broadcast. If there is another talent it is the ability to disguise the fact that you are reading a script or an autocue. Those brilliant off- the-cuff half hour programmes by dazzling wits usually take at least two hours to record and the “off-the-cuff” witticisms are responses to questions they have known about for days. The chairman’s witty comments are all scripted.

I used to get £1,000 a week for broadcasting to 25 million people, largely unscripted, and for around twenty years I took part in a weekly quiz in which no one knew the answers. Since I worked for less than a day a week I have always thought I was vastly overpaid.

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The F.A., an acronym which aptly describes it, is insistent that it would prefer a Briton to manage the English team. Wouldn’t he feel lonely in a sport where so many of the participants hail from distant shores?

A number of Sun journalists have been charged with bribing policemen, never a very difficult thing to do in my newspaper days. They have been arrested on the back of information provided by the Sun. Presumably the evidence is documentary and likely to be expense claims. If those claims did not name the recipient it would be very strange. How come then that no policemen have been arrested?

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A Belgian Court has ruled that “Tin Tin in the Congo” did not breach anti-race laws and a children’s commissioner has insisted that boys should be allowed to wear skirts at school in the interests of equality. He said ‘gender variant issues’ contravene the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That will come as a relief to my doctor’s public school in Perth where the kilt is part of the uniform. Oddly enough, it is the ruling of Tam Bailey, the Children’s Commissioner for Scotland.

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MPs have spent nearly half a million renting a dozen fig trees to brighten their offices. The Health Minister tells us the NHS needs virtually rebuilding but 84 per cent of patients (including me) think he is wrong and rate their experience as excellent and very good.

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The West bankrupted us all building up defences against Russia, Recently published documents, says commentator Andrew Alexander in his new book “America, and the Imperialism of Ignorance” prove that Stalin had no intention of invading anywhere beyond the countries which gave Russia a buffer against Germany. Perhaps it would be wiser to keep the fig trees and get rid of the wooden tops.

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Once again I am indebted to my chum Dai Woosnam for drawing my attention to this obituary in the Economist.

NOBODY who met Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema could doubt his self- belief. It hit you as forcefully as his rocky good looks, his patriotism and his prickliness. But who was the self he believed in?

Was it Jonathan, the rather spoilt single child from Poughkeepsie, fond of fast cars and prone to collecting speeding tickets, who was inspired by John Wayne in “The Green Berets” to join the American special forces? Was it Keith, the ex-soldier who went into business selling paintball equipment and then military clothing, before being convicted of defrauding 59 companies and sentenced to six years in prison? Was it Jack, the tough guy who rocked out to Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11th attacks to do humanitarian stuff, capture Osama bin Laden and work undercover, he said, for the Pentagon? Or was it Black Jack, the swashbuckling captain of a tour boat in Mexico who, before he succumbed to AIDS, saw himself as Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, flew a pirate flag from a minaret, held constant orgies and liked to play the score of “Apocalypse Now” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

No doubt it was all these selves, and others too, for Mr Idema was a man of many parts, and his lack of self-doubt helped him both to ignore setbacks and to gain the confidence of those who should have seen through him. The real and the imaginary were as one to him, just as right and wrong were. And he moved in a world peopled by others with as many fantasies, as few scruples and plenty of motives for inventing tall stories.

Some of the stories made Mr Idema seem almost lovably heroic. He preserved genetic material from his dog, for example, so that he could later be cloned. Sarge was, after all, no ordinary dog but a Tibetan shepherd that would jump out of aircraft with his soldier master and help sniff out bombs (when not scuba diving). Other tales cast Mr Idema in a more Bond-like guise. Thus in 1991 he told the FBI that among the detritus of the Soviet Union he had discovered a Russian mafia gang bent on smuggling suitcase-sized nuclear weapons out of Lithuania; no details could be revealed, though, because the FBI was riddled with KGB agents.

He could be a victim, too. Was he not the object of a vendetta by the FBI? And had his story not been stolen by Steven Spielberg for George Clooney in “The Peacemaker”? He sued Mr Spielberg, and others who had crossed him: journalists, an aid worker, a colonel, even his father.

Then there was his discovery of an al-Qaeda plot to kill Bill Clinton at a summit in Malaysia (the president wisely stayed away) and two other planned assassinations in Afghanistan. He claimed, too, to have fought with the Northern Alliance, America’s anti-Taliban allies in Operation Enduring Freedom. He had also secured a video of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists undergoing training, which he sold to CBS and several other broadcasters.

Oh, what a lovely war

Journalists were not alone in being conned by Mr Idema, especially after he formed Task Force Sabre 7, a freelance group of American and Afghan vigilantes-cum-fortune-hunters who operated with impunity for a while after the Americans had ousted the Taliban in 2001. Afghanistan at this time was an adventure playground for thuggish American ex-servicemen employed or masquerading as security guards. They hung around the Mustafa hotel, wearing wraparound sunglasses and camouflage fatigues, drove about in big Toyotas and carried a small arsenal of weapons. They were not so much the dogs of war as the coyotes, dingoes and hyenas. Mr Idema was one of them.

Some of these people operated with the complSome of these people operated with the complicity of the American authorities, who had contracted out so many of the tasks once performed by soldiers. No wonder that on three occasions in 2004 Mr Idema found it easy to con the NATO force into providing him with support for raids on compounds. He even conned the Americans into taking into custody a captured Afghan alleged to be a Taliban loyalist. He was nothing of the kind.

Far more serious was the private prison run by Mr Idema and his friends. When it was discovered, complete with torture chamber and eight captives, bound and hooded, some hanging by their feet, the Afghans said Mr Idema was trying to extract information that would lead to bounties. He said it had all been okayed by the Pentagon, even by Donald Rumsfeld. But he was tried nonetheless and given ten years. After three, spent in extraordinarily comfortable conditions in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi jail, he was inexplicably pardoned by President Hamid Karzai.

By this time, though, Mr Idema was beginning to look less plausible, his luck less inexhaustible. His loyal wife, Viktoria Runningwolf, had been abandoned, along with the Ultimate Pet Resort that he had helped her set up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And his past, including 36 arrests (though no convictions) in the 1980s and 1990s, had come to light. He was still wanted in North Carolina for impersonating a policeman and, despite claims to “superblood”, he was to contract AIDS. His life ended in a haze of vodka and cocaine, the self-belief perhaps slightly dented, the self-delusion as strong as ever.