DRINK TO ME ONLY WITH THY SICK NOTE

The visit to the surgery was following its usual course. The Ferret had just finished telling the doctor what was wrong with me when I said I know what is wrong with me: I am gagging for a drink.

AND THE DOCTOR SAID: “WHY DON'T YOU HAVE ONE, THEN?”

The Head Ferret said: “I don't want him to be ill.”

AND THE DOCTOR SAID HE UNDERSTOOD THAT BUT added: “AT 84 ANY HARM HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE. AND LET'S FACE IT, THERE IS NOT MUCH ELSE HE CAN DO.”

I should explain that during these meetings both of them talk as though I am not there. But the point is I am drinking under doctor's orders. Not a lot, mind you. I have spilt more down my shirt than I'm currently allowed.

Five a day precludes organising orgies, even assuming, as I have, that he meant doubles. And what to drink? Something celebratory? Kir Royal, a mixture of champagne and a cube of sugar soaked in crème de Cassis, is celebratory but a fellow member of a dining club insisted the perfect drink is when the man drinks green chartreuse the woman yellow chartreuse and they kiss.The Head Ferret might judge that as liberty taking. A great favourite of my youth was Black Velvet, a mixture of Guinness and champagne which Count Otto von Bismarck invented and which was always drunk at the Grand National Winner's dinner at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. In the days when it was still a hotel.

All excellent aperitifs but there was something missing. Ritual. Non-drinkers do not realise that as important as the drinking is the preparation thereof. A pink gin, for example, when a drop of Angostura bitters is poured in and around the glass and then poured away before the gin is introduced.

Purely in the interest of historical research, I have collected over the years the signature drinks of many celebrities and famous watering holes, like the Cinnamon Club which was famous for its Rum Pomme, a delicious assembly of cooking apple purée, cinnamon tea bags and half a pint of golden rum. At Simpson's in the Strand the barman's Glogg was a mixture of red wine, brown sugar and golden rum.

When the Queen of Sheba asked the all-wise King Solomon for a motto which would apply in every mood and circumstance, he told her: “This too shall pass.” That is what I was looking for in liquid form. I have the recipes for Hemingway's daiquiri and David Niven's Bloody Mary. Both delicious but a touch too exotic for daily throat sprays.

What I was looking for was a drink for all seasons. I found it in a Dry Martini, which by wild coincidence is my signature drink. It fulfils all the requirements of ritual. I have the glass, generous in size, frivolous in shape. I have the shaker, the mixing spoon. It was the work of a moment to find Bombay Sapphire gin and I have friends who have studied the Martini at home and abroad. My oldest friend John Edwards, the Daily Mail columnist, has met everyone in the world. From his good friend Fred Astaire's daughter Ava he got the recipe for that great man's very dry Martini: 

Generous shot of gin or vodka. Tip up a bottle of Vermouth, then right it again, unscrew the cap and drip the contents in the gin (a little Astaire joke because there ain't any Vermouth in the cap). Shake or stir in a cocktail shaker with cube ice, not shaved, and drain into a frosted glass. Add a twist of lemon or an olive.

John, no slouch in these matters, suggests the best way to frost a glass is first to warm it, then put it in a fridge. Condensation quickly frosts. 

The legendary reporter Brian Hitchen has a million friends, including the late Johnny di Lustro, Capo di Tutti Capi of the New York Gambino family. A formidable ex-paratrooper who masterminded the hunt for train robber Biggs, I assume it was the Capo from whom Brian's muscular Martini originates. Use vodka not gin. Place four ice cubes in a frosted whisky glass, pour vodka to the slow count of ten and add two of the tiniest drops of the driest Vermouth. Slice a two inch long piece of lemon peel, twist to release the oil and drop it in the glass. Stir with your biro.

Three of either of the above before the main meal of the day, plus a large glass of 'The Singleton' single malt from Speyside as a nightcap - and welcome to Heaven.

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

Reader Brian Gesty writes apropos of my police car story last week:

The story of the coming together with the police car caused me to recall an old friend`s tale of when he crashed his Honda Prelude into a Morris 1000.

All the correspondence with the Insurance Company was ,apparently, headed  "Prelude in D Minor ".

A SOBERING THOUGHT

In 1899 the Hague Congress on Peace outlawed throwing bombs out of balloons on the grounds that it was inhuman.

In 1942 Bomber Command's role in the war was defined by the RAF thus: “The purpose of Bomber Command is to destroy the morale of the civilian population.”

In Tokyo in 1945 80,000 civilians living in paper houses were burned alive in fire bomb raids. In all, 350,000 Japanese civilians were killed.To improve the killing potential, tests were done on specially built paper houses and the quality of nitrogen refined so that it burned bodies more fiercely and when quenched on skin it reignited... In 1945 the Japanese sent an offer of near unconditional surrender via Moscow. They made only one condition. They asked to keep their Emperor. Truman and the Allied High Command refused. After the refusal they dropped the atom bomb, massacring Japanese civilians merely to frighten the Russians who were our allies at the time, according to historian A.C Grayling in “Among the Death Cities”.

It is OK for governments to be generous with agonising death. However, a patrol of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders is under investigation as I write. In the first Iraqi War they were ambushed and in the heat of a day-long battle which followed it is claimed they killed four Iraqi civilians. Three Royal Marines face trial for a similar offence.

Parenthetically, in our decadent society where crimes against children are endemic one wonders whether Cupid and his troop of cherubim are fitting symbols of innocent love. By the same token it would be interesting to count the number of endless TV detective dramas which involve the violent deaths of children. This week there were three.

A PORN THING BUT MINE OWN

They are gone the days of Daimler Jags and Lagondas, of Land Rovers and MG TDs. In their place is a walking stick. These days we are a tripod.

The odd thing is I prefer it. I never felt at ease with the combustion engine. For one thing they rarely combusted on command. Show me a blasted heath or a lonesome grott and I will show you the scene of a grotty me, kicking the wheel of a sulky saloon. Silent and not only on a Peak in Darien. At least the MG always broke down within walking distance of a pub.

The LG6 Lagonda was the worst. At the funeral of an old chum called Mike Quy it broke down when filled to the chrome rims with grieving newspapermen, than whom no-one is easier to drive to noisy scorn. What was worse it gave up its particularly showy ghost just as I was being beckoned into motion by a policeman on point duty. His first summons was slow and stately, not untinged with respect for a classic car. When it seemed the classic car was pointedly ignoring him the stately beckon was transformed into a shaking fist. 

"Watch him!” came a voice of a so-called friend. “Any moment now he is going to rip off his helmet, dash it to the ground and dance on it. Just like Charlie Chaplin.” "It wasn't Charlie Chaplin, it was Andy Clyde,“ offered a pedantic sub editor. “Rob Wilton,” suggested another and an argument ensued.

Can you believe the only car I ever owned which never let me down was a Lada I bought for transporting bloodhounds? It failed in its purpose by being so noisy the hounds refused to climb in. Forced, they howled piteously at passing vehicles and nothing does piteous better than a bloodhound in extremis.  Nary a car passed without a reproachful driver. 

Stepping into a motor car was like suddenly getting a starring role in a nightmare. It did not even have to be my motor car. A friend who owned a Citroen, once the property of the Paris police, wanted me to share its power so he took me to the Grand National. Heavily refreshed, we were driving home when for reasons unknown the car decided rather than go round a roundabout to jump over it. Jumped like a stag. Had it not been for the police car it hit on the other side I reckon it would have been a contender for best jump of the day.

Fair do's the policeman driver trapped well. He was out of the car like Mick the Miller, notebook at the High Port. He opened our door and invited the occupant of the front seat to step outside and tell him what he had drunk before getting in. It took a quarter of an hour and filled four pages of the policeman's notebook. At the death he asked: “And after all that drink, do you think you're fit to drive?" My friend was shocked. "Drive?” he said. “Certainly not. I am a passenger. The car is a left hand drive.”

With a walking stick you know where you are. It has gravitas. A comic character in the novels of a hunting squire of the early nineteenth century played a part in the creation of our greatest novelist. He whittled sticks carved with the heads of great statesmen which would make the fortunes of his descendants. R.S. Surtees also created one of the great comic characters of any age. John Jorrocks was a fox hunting grocer whose cry at table was “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.“

Lord Scampersdale: “You think because I am a lord and may not swear you may do what you will with me.”

Surtees' publishers wanted him to add comic captions to the drawings of a fashionable artist called Seymour. Surtees refused so the publisher hired an unknown lobby reporter called Dickens. The result was “Pickwick Papers”, which is not without hints of plagiarism.

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

The time has come to reveal that when I was a young and rather pretty provost sergeant I was chased naked from the showers and round the sergeants' ablution block in HQ 7th Armoured Division, Rhine Army, by a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Irish Guards, his moustache twitching with desire. I easily outdistanced him and reached the safety of my room. Some days later I was caught with little effort by a NAAFI manageress called appropriately Mrs Horne who rewarded me with 200 cigarettes. Several months later, she was charged with the theft of 50,000 cigarettes.

My Commanding Officer in a PR unit in Bad Oyenhausen transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps because the black beret brought out the blue in his eyes, causing him to be severely talked about.

As a small boy I came within an ace of suffering severe mental imbalance when I discovered I was the only child in the class who had not been fondled by our popular teacher Mr Harrison, long gone to interfere with the cherubim in the skies.

I mention these incidents in the light of recent disclosures, just in case there is any compensation floating about.

Even later in the Fornicating Fifties and Sexy Sixties I covered the early concerts by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and all Brian Epstein's stable of pop stars. The audiences were largely female teenagers and to get through the crowds of young girls who stormed the dressing rooms offering themselves to the stars was not a happy experience

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

Our trade paper Press Gazette got involved in a minor disagreement with the Sri Lankan High Commission over its reporting of an assassination attempt on a British journalist. The Commissioner questioned 'British'.

He insisted: "The fact that one is also British and is a reporter does not make him a British reporter. The unfortunate shooting had nothing to do with his being British. A woman and child is not the same thing as a woman with child.”

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

The Nineties were 'Naughty', the eighteenth century was the 'Enlightenment'. Whatever word is chosen to sum up the present I fear it is not 'Caring'. How about 'Massacre'? We may not have invented it but, by golly, we introduced massacre by mass production. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did their best to wipe out the Native American, the Aborigine and the Maori but they lacked not only our expertise - they just didn’t have the technogology.
In the nineteenth century we invented the flame gun;  in the twentieth, the atom bomb, germ warfare, bombing defenceless women and children from the air, and we set the tone for the twenty-first...........Oh we are the devil’s golden boys.
There was no sense of race discrimination about us. We slaughtered Jews, Chinese and Russian peasants by the millions, street children in South America, anyone we could lay our hands on in the Balkans. Blacks almost anywhere. We weren’t fussy. If there were no outsiders handy we slaughtered each other. We invented the death camp, the blazing necklace of a rubber tyre. When our soldiers were reluctant to shoot that stranger, the enemy, we shot them instead. In the First World War when a sergeant in my regiment disobeyed an order not to reprise a Christmas football match with the Germans, he was sent for a morning stroll with a firing squad.
In the fifteenth century a woman called Christine the Pisan wrote a book called The Art of War. It was an instant best-seller. No prince planned a campaign without it. In it she pleaded with them not to harm the peasants. She wrote:
“They would full gladly always live in good peace and they seek no more. So ought they then, as it seems to me, be free thereof....because their estate is not to meddle in war...and have no other office but, poor innocents, go to plough and work on the land and keep the beasts.”
Fugh. We will have no truck with that sort of rubbish in these enlightened times. “Bring me your hungry and your homeless......and I will wipe them out.”
No, 'Massacre' is my nap selection, with anything to come on 'Just Plain Evil'.
BEST BOOK IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS.
Since Hilary Mantel, who looks like a badly painted plastic doll, was so rude about the Duchess of Cambridge I have discovered yet another reason for banning literary prizes. It confers on nonentities the right to make pronouncements on subjects for which nature has failed to qualify them.
If there was a best novel in the past twenty years I must have missed it. It certainly wasn't Mantel's turgid accounts of one of histories dullest politicans. A frequent winner of such prizes  is Eco's Name of the Rose. A  good enough read, I grant you; dripping with meaning, though basically about a search for dirty books in a monastery. All gloom and, in the inevitable film, a spectacularly  unshaven Sean Connery. Bond in bondage, desperate for flagellation. All shadows and sweaty monks. Monks and mayhem. A sort of Brother Cadfael in a Bolognese sauce.  I was happier about the choice of biography in the same awards. Juang Chang’s merciless Wild Swans was much more successful than Eco in showing how evil man can be if he really puts his mind to it. Mandela’s biography came second.
 I have to say I think  it would have come second even if no-one had written it. Nothing I have read this week about the South Africa he founded has redounded to the honour of the highest paid statesman in the world.
Ackroyd’s Dickens came third. I would have put it first, though, as Ackroyd justly remarked, Dickens’ best biography was in his novels. I thought the prologue the best thing ever written about him, though I seem to remember being embarrassed at Ackroyd’s conversations with his subject. And I certainly won’t quarrel with the Book Guide’s choice of Ellerman’s Oscar Wilde.
I prefer biography to fiction. Biography, indeed life, can be fanciful in ways that fiction wouldn’t dare.
John Julius Norwich’s account of murderous Byzantium, the bad empress Theodora, and chapter headings like “The Emperor who lost his nose”alone would entitle his three volumes on that empire to a place at the top of the history list. Though I would also include The History of the Cavalry, which was the work of his cousin the Marquess of Anglesey and won him the Chesney Gold Medal, the highest accolade of a military historian.
But there I go making lists.
If I were to make one of obsessions, Railways would come high. My railway notes last week provoked much interest.
Chum Revel Barker offers this:
"You correctly (of course) refer to variant village times "before the railways came", but do you know how they did it?
"They created Railway Time.
"So if the first train of the day was due at your local station at, say, 0730, when the train drew in to the station the station master set his watch... and the platform clock, at 0730. Even if the train (probably less likely in those days than in these) was 10 minutes late.
"The thinking was that if the first train of the day ran (say) 10 minutes late, so would the rest of them, throughout the day.
"And the trains with which your local one connected would have to wait... so they would be 10 minutes late, too, and the time would be adjusted all the way down the line.
"The other (slightly) interesting factoid about railway time is that if the clock at Moscow Central station shows (say) 8am, so does the station clock at Vladivostock -- although the local time there would be 3pm (7 hours ahead). This is because Russian trains run on Moscow time... otherwise, with so many time zones in the Soviet Union, they'd be having trains arriving in some places before they left the last one. And the timetable would be crazy.
"Of course, in the days before BR, people actually trusted (and relied on) GWR, LNER, LMS, etc to get things right, more or less.
"And, more or less, so they did.
"Oh... the station master's watch was a large shiny metal thing kept in the breast pocket of his jacket with the 12 on the face at the top where the winder, and the leather strap, was. So it was the right way up when he pulled it out. A gentleman's vest (or waistcoat) pocket watch was much smaller and came out sideways, so the winder was at 3 on the dial. My dad, former railwayman, had one of the former, I still have one of the latter.
"Oh... I used to go to school by train. The child's day return fare was three-ha'pence.The station near my old school (like the school) no longer exists.However the child's day return fare to the next stop is now 13 quid (10 pounds, single)."
A surprising number of readers have been kind enough to enquire whether I am dying. What is happening now, whatever it is, certainly ain't living. Indeed as I climb onto my eighty-fifth year dying has come with the territory. But, subject to what the doctor might find on Tuesday, it certainly is not imminent.
A dear friend, the geologist Margret Wood, one of the team that investigated Moondust, defended God's timetable for Creation.  She wrote:
"Just live life to the full - as much as you can. None of us is immortal and we know not when or where. So cheers and hope it is a long time yet before anything else gives out.
"Incidentally my father who could speak Hebrew said the 'days' translation was wrong and it actually should be translated as 'periods' of time not days."
Sorry, God.

So that is it. ?

Cancer, diabetes, kidney failure, depression, sarcoids, alcoholism and now heart failure. I cannot make up my mind whether there is Someone Up There who doesn’t like me or Someone Up There who likes me so much He cannot wait to issue me with harps one, angels for the use of, and a few brisk words on Commandment abuse.

Anyway, as I wait for Sinatra’s final curtain there is one thing of which I am certain. I think He was out of order boasting that He made the world in six days. We have two gardeners, Hipkin for conversation and Paul, and it takes them four hours every Monday to keep our tiny plot in good heart, aided and advised by the Head Ferret. I expect He, like them, has a touch of Gardener’s Fancy where effort expended bears little resemblance to effort reported.

I don’t know why He bothered. After all, He invented Time. In His place I would have gone for Natural Selection. Much more plausible.

This six day nonsense is terribly inconvenient for others who have Creation Moments. Of late, I have wakened ever morning just after 6 am with a complete Answer to the Mysteries of the Universe. Laid out before me. The trouble is…by the time I have got my teeth in I have forgotten what it was.

Very puzzling thing this business of Time. Remember how we celebrated the Millennium in the wrong year? On any reading of the form book it was  unlikely to occur during 2001 A.D.

We do not have “0” birthdays. Our first birthday arrives when we are one. It follows that those of us who live that long, amongst whom I profoundly wish not to be numbered, will be one hundred years old in 101 years after our first birthday. Otherwise we would have celebrated our 21st birthday when we were 20.

The structure of our calendar was first determined in the 6th century by a monk called Dennis the Short. Dennis began by dating countable years from the foundation of Rome and then again from Christ’s birth, which he wrongly set on December 25. His year restarted on January 1st, the feast of Christ’s circumcision, but not, alas, the New Year’s Day of Roman and Latin Christian calendars.

Dennis was wrong. Herod died in the year 750 (from the foundation of Rome, that is). For Herod and Christ to coincide, Christ must have been born four years earlier than Dennis claims - in 4 B.C. in fact. Not even Camerloon could successfully juggle those figures.

There is a further complication. In 1582, a sixteenth century (note that) pedant decided to drop the Julian calendar and replace it with the more mathematically exact Gregorian calendar. Wisely Great Britain, as it was then, ignored this until 1752. Now, like the rest of the world, we celebrate the original Christmas Day on Twelfth Night. Well, not all the world. In Jerusalem, Eastern and Western Christian sects celebrate Christmas on different days.

Time juggling is not an easy obsession to break. In days before the railways came each town followed its own time. You could leave town “A” at noon and it would still be noon when you reached town “B”.

The Millennium was mostly down to Lord Mandelson. His grandfather, the monumentally dreadful and universally hated Herbert Morrison, inspired and figure-headed the 1951 Festival of Britain – which, like the Millennium exercise, also went massively over budget and into debt.  

It was difficult to see the point of the Festival of Britain, except as a tourist attraction. But at least Britain existed.

The 2000 A.D. Millennium didn’t. Biblical scholars agree the birth of Christ, which it commemorates, happened - if it happened at all - in 4 B.C. So we missed the Millennium which was in 1994 - or five. Because you start counting from one and not nought.

The first cancer scare I had turned out to be sarcoids. When I asked the surgeon what that was, he confessed no one knew. “Very rare?” I suggested. “Very,” he said.

In those far-off days I used to fish with an acerbic Scots vet.

“I’ve got a touch of sarcoids,” I told him with quiet pride. ”Very rare, so the surgeon said.”

“Haud yer whist,“ he sneered in his impenetrable Scottish way (only Scots can sneer and be impenetrable at the same time). “It’s no rare. Bliddy dogs get it.”

Just my luck. Can’t wait to get Fowl Pest. 

STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF

Come death and welcome before sweet Camerloon makes homosexuality compulsory. Pink is not my colour so just show me a mortal coil and I’ll shuffle off it with alacrity.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not mind other people taking the veil and handbag route. When I was younger I was even more in favour because it reduced the competition for girls. I was never a participant, though when I was a pretty boy soldier in a skirt I had some narrow escapes. Thankfully the secret gardens where one hears the rustle of lustful springers are still terror incognita to me. Like Mrs Patrick Campbell, I don’t mind what others get up to, just so they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Goodness knows what she would say about the new all-in marriage vowers introduced by the House of Commons this week. I know not whether the Camerloons are coming but when he talks of fairness and equality I remember that when he first dipped a toe into the murky puddle of politics it was as a PR man.

There are between thirty and sixty unannounced gay members of the UK parliament, according to the Independent on Sunday.  

The ex-MP and brilliant columnist Mathew Parris is the 49th most influential gay person in the United Kingdom. I was surprised when he outed Lord Mandelson on Newsnight. Light dawned when subsequently I read in the Sunday Times Review that he and the naughty Lord had met to work out a strategy to make homosexuality respectable. Looking back, their success has been astonishing.

In August 2006 Parris entered into a civil partnership with  Julian Glover, special adviser to the government. He had been Camerloon’s chief speech writer but  lost that job when the prime minister was upstaged during the Olympic Games by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. It is believed to have been Glover who put the section claiming that gay marriage was Conservative policy into Camerloon's leadership speech to the Party Conference.

Much of the Parris-Mandleson achievement has been praiseworthy. In my lifetime one could have gone to prison for life for an act which now has government blessing.

On the other hand I live in dread of going to hospital. For 3,000 invalids it carried the death penalty.We can no longer send children into care for fear they will be abused. Our soldiers carry redundancy notices among the kit they take to war; we cannot afford aircraft for the carriers on which we have lavished billions; home care for the old and sick has been savagely cut; Michael Gove’s plan to scrap GCSEs has been dramatically shelved because of significant opposition from the Liberal Democrats. Has it been worth it? The inherited debt that brought us to our knees which the Government promised to wipe clean is increasing year by year.

Camerloon is proud of his success as a war leader, though members of his government point out that Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are sliding into anarchy.

At least we can leave Afghanistan having trounced the Taliban, though they may look on the millions of pounds worth of weaponry we are leaving behind as a consolation prize. The poppy harvest is blooming.

“The cost of corruption in Afghanistan rose sharply last year to 3.9bn US dollars, and half of all Afghans bribed public officials for services,” the UN said this week.The findings came despite repeated promises by President Hamid Karzai to clean up his government.

The report goes on "The international community has long expressed concern about corruption in Afghanistan because it reduces confidence in the Western-backed government. Donor nations also fear aid money could be diverted by corrupt officials or mismanaged."

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21364557

But according to a survey by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan’s anti-corruption unit showed only slight improvement in curbing the common practice of paying bribes for public services in the country.

Major General Jonathan Shaw was Chief of Staff of UK Land Forces between 2007 and 2008. He joined the Parachute Regiment in 1981 and went on to serve in the Falklands, Kosovo and Iraq before joining the MoD. He wrote recently in the Independent:

“Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows.This Jacobean plea for stability should be ringing in our ears as we watch the latest manifestation of instability in the Middle East/North Africa (Mena), this time in Algeria. And while much of the Arab Spring was self-generated, current troubles in the Sahel owe a great deal to the Nato 'triumph' in assisting in the downfall of Gaddafi.

“In autumn 2010 I visited Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt before my post in International Security Policy at the MoD was scrapped as 'nothing ever happens in the Mena region' (I then moved  to a newly formed cyber security post).

“As I had found in a previous trip to Sudan, the greatest threat in the region came from the changing manifestation of Islamic observance, from locally attuned or Sufi to Salafism/Wahhabism. The cause was the spread of madrasahs built, staffed and indoctrinated by Saudi money and theology, a spread evident across Muslim North Africa and down the Indian Ocean coast from Somalia through Kenya to Tanzania.”

Generals are a great deal brighter than politicians nowadays.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/algeria-hostage-crisis-grim-news-that-can-be-traced-to-the-triumphant-removal-of-gaddafi-8456521.html?origin=internalSearch

Swings and roundabouts…At least it's going to be a great year for wedding cake bakers.

BROAD THOUGHTS FROM A HOME

Broadly speaking, they are fortunate who live in warm climes

and are not prey to the British inter-family winter sport

of "Pass the Cough."

I caught my current dose in a running pass before, with a neat kick, I transferred possession, as the sports writers say, to my wife,the Head Ferret.

I had hoped as a former captain of hockey she could have retained possession and managed the short run to the touchline without further help. Not so. Using the hook that made her the terror of the Remove, she passed it back and now we both lie a-nights, side by side on our sleeping platform, baying in unison.

We are not a pretty sound. She is more your last act of La Boheme; with the long pause between reverberations and what in the night watches seems an unnecessarily prolonged sigh. I incline to the peremptory bark, drawing attention to unlawful possession of the duvet.

Arguing by cough is an infant art but we have worked out some meaningful exchanges. Whilst her tiny hand is frozen reaching out for the medicaments, I do a very neat line in "wake up at the back there" if I suspect for a moment she has

sneaked off to sleep. At such times Mimi is the last thing I think of calling her. It had not occured to me until this recent illness what a self-satisfied way wives have of sleeping whilst husbands lie awake, prey to a sobbing cough

which would have brought the house down in any decent production of "I Pagliacci": "On with the mogadon, the pastilles and the soothers......".

What is deeply annoying is the way one only coughs at night when, to say the least, the claque on the other pillow is less than sympathetic; never during the day when a certain amount of emotional capital could be earned..."Well, thank you very kindly, perhaps just a tiny tot of something soothing. The throat, you know, not a wink of sleep these three nights past..."

No. What I get is the dog with its paws in its ears and the sort of look that only cats can give when for the third time they have been wakened by the sort of cough explosions that would have peace movements picketing the bedside. A sort

of Greenham Common cold.

You get no sympathy with a cold, but you do get sovereign cures. All different and all an assault on the sensitive palate.I am the prey of the Missing Linctus, awash with the sort of drug drenched syrup I swear is smuggled ashore at

night on deserted beaches. I have a collection of Premier Cru cough mixtures, donated by friends, would make your eyes water. One dear lady even made a special journey to purchase what I take to be the distilled essence of the instep of an elderly Cossack.

But, by golly, it worked. For twelve terrifying hours I was afraid to cough in case the duvet caught fire. Two teaspoons of that on your breath and you could empty an airport. Somewhere an illicit drug factory is bottling that dragon-breath and marketing it through the National Ill-health Service. I am afraid to close my eyes lest St George the dragon slayer should come galloping up the stairs and pin me to the pillow with his lance. Though I would be open to

negotiation re the removal of the damsel in distress from the distaff pillow. Coughing to be enjoyed should be a solo performance of bravura and suffering nobly born. To turn it into a duet, a sort of catarrhal counterpoint, is to make a mockery of misery.

 OH MY GOD

What a thing of vanity is man who believes himself the image of God. With his manifest talent as a designer why would God, who made the tiger, used a forked radish as a maquette?

I forget which German philosopher said that you could not make anything straight from the twisted timber of mankind but I reckon he was on the money. The problem is that we look on Him with Stone Age Eyes as an explanation for the weather. Thunder and lightning, God  angered; Sunshine, God fruitful; Darkness, God sleeping.

I agree with Randolph Churchill: He has been created by people who did not like Him.  When Randolph read the bible for the first time in middle age he told Evelyn Waugh, “God is a complete shit.” If you pay any attention to the bible no other explanation is possible. Ask gullible Abraham. And when you think what God did to His own son…….

I have shopped around a bit over the past eight decades. Now as I paw with growing impatience on the Pearly Gates I am thinking of advising Him to reposition Himself in the market. Change his image into something that gives off vibes of benevolence, loyalty and love. Something on the lines of Winnie The Pooh.

As an only child my Teddy was my first and only constant companion. We discovered the world together and mutually reassured ourselves when we found what dodginess was on offer. He was always ready to fall in with my plans. He would fight me, console me and watch over me when I slept. My mother used to claim there were four angels round my bed: one to guard, one to pray and two to carry my soul away. What did she know? Teddy and I would fight any angel of equal weight and reach.

Teddy had been around. He knew that a bear gets tubby without exercise. As A.A. Milne discovered, he gets what exercise he can, by falling off the ottoman. As all scholars know, the group noun for Teddy Bears is a Hug.When my great grandson was born I sent him a platoon of my Teddy’s successors, highly trained in all aspects of child watching. There were plenty to choose from here at Bear Command. Over the years the Ferret and I have marked happy moments by recruiting bears. Our recent wedding anniversary was marked by bear bride and groom; at Christmas a festive bear greets guests. There is a Cambridge, bear capped and gowned, in memory of a jolly lunch; a Mountie bear and a fox hunter in a livery of hunting pink, an archbishop bear and monk bears. A Mohammed bear marks the fuss Muslims made that time when a teacher gave his  name to the class bear. There are Guardsman bears, a giant Paddington bear my mother made for my sixtieth birthday, Pooh bears with attendant piglets and Eeyore. They sleep in drawers,waiting like King Arthur's knights, for a call to arms.

On duty still is a Cadre of Fighting Bears from my Regimental Charity, Help the Heroes. The Last Bear from Woolworth's is there and a stylish bear, a present from the painter Maria Saxe Ledger, a descendant of a medieaval saint whose embalmed body greets communicants in St Gallen in Switzerland. In her youth Maria had been the loveliest aristocrat in Europe and at 89, exiled to a valley in Wales, still painted her patent leather knee boots with clear nail polish and flew the Swiss flag in her garden so that the local Nationalists would not mistake her for a Sais. We lunched in a barn in the garden she had turned into a baronial hall with huge silver candle sticks, tapestries and a nude painting of her at twenty. The Bears and I contribute to several bear charities. We were a little shocked when one of them, Saving Moon Bears, sent us an invitation to a fund raising evening - of belly dancing. The belly is quite excited but I have told it that it is not an invitation to a belly ball.

THE THICK EAR OF IT

I had to give up writing satirical novels. However outré the situation I imagined, life created one infinitely more outré. Under the Camerloons it is difficult to know whether you are watching “In the Thick of It” on BBC2 or the Parliament Channel.

Currently our greatest fear is a forthcoming Balkan invasion. Over the horizon an army musters, dancing on its knees, drinking Tokay by the gallon, expelling clouds of Balkan Sobranie and nibbling on goulash the while. It is as well to recall Hungarian film maker Alexander Korda saying the recipe for a Balkan omelette is "First steal a dozen eggs....." Those of us who make a habit of falling over in public are all in favour of immigrnts: others less so. Ever alert, the Government is planning to ask the public whether we want to be part of Europe - but not for another four years or so. In the meantime we have made a film telling foreigners what a terrible place Britain is and warning them to give it a wide berth. At the same time millions are to be spent by the Tourist Board making other films beguiling holidaymakers with a whiff of kipper and loving long shots of empty beaches. What do we care? We are spending 48 billion to cut an hour off rail trips from London to Birmingham.

THE CAMERLOONS ARE COMING.............

Now that the Devil has retired, his work on earth accomplished, who are we to blame when things are still going wrong by the hour?

The smart money seems to be on Lady T. True, she behaved like a prime minister, a mistake made by few called to that high office. I suppose it was her Falklands Moment that made me doubt her. You may recall, she sent ill-equipped troops, in borrowed troop ships, to an unnecessary war, defending the right to be British of islanders from whom British passports had been withdrawn. We were to recapture a land owned by British Coalite, fighting an enemy led by officers trained in Sandhurst and using armaments largely bought from us. The error was compounded when we celebrated our victory by immediately putting Goose Green up for sale.

Three centuries ago, wiser views prevailed. In the 18^th century Dr Johnson said of the Falklands:

“A bleak and gloomy solitude, an island, thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island, which not even the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional.”

Alas, Lady T started a fashion, irresistible to those who succeeded her. Blair, and now Camerloon, saw her transformed from Alan Clarke’s erotic dream into a victorious Nelson, empty blouse sleeve pinned to her bosom, metaphoric eye shield and all.

So they both had to have a Thatcher Moment. In Blair’s case, two; whereas The Camerloon is taking on the whole of Africa in days when he has reduced the size of the army to platoon strength. He has form. He did the same in Afghanistan. To go for the treble he will have to send the Lone Ranger. Though I suppose there is still the Army Cadet Force. It is coming to something when I have to admit the only branch of the Establishment left to admire is the Royal Family, though even there Prince Hal is in trouble for killing the enemy. The first, and clearly identical, Prince Hal was written about by Shakespeare. This brave successor’s chronicle appears in discredited tabloids.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.”

-      Thomas Paine. Common Sense

MY GRANDSON SAM WARNS ON SNIFTERS

The Vaportini website refers to blood alcohol tests still detecting the alcohol but doesn't mention breathalysers. I performed a little more research and it seems that the breathalyser test works because the blood stream through the lungs is so close to the surface of the lungs (for oxygenation purposes) that it acts to increase the amount of alcohol in the air in your lungs. In short, that which you blow into the tube is a strong indicator of your blood alcohol content. The Vaportini won't circumvent (vent - geddit?) this. However the alcohol taken in via a Vaportini does get into your blood more quickly and maybe it can be processed by one's organs more quickly. It's almost certain that the time between first imbibing and passing a test is shorter with a Vaportini, however the time between finishing your drinking and passing your test may not be. I think the best way to test this theory is empirically. 

“If only I applied myself to banking in the same way I do to theoretical and practical application of alcohol theory maybe we wouldn't all be stony broke.” 

Blocks and chips spring to mind. In the army when we were down to our last shilling to finance a night out we would spend it on a pint of beer, empty a box of matches on the floor, drink the beer, bottoms up, then bend down and pick up the matches one by one. Worked every time. The more rich and fastidious would empty a glass of whisky, roll the emptied glass in their warm hands releasing the film of whisky on the wall of the glass in sufficient quantity to pour into the beer.

One group in my regiment went further. Detailed to guard a flying bomb site, they drank the flying bomb fuel. Chewing Duraglit and drinking Brasso was widely practised. God, I could do with a snatch of Duraglit now. 

HITLER: THE LAST CONSPIRACY

Definitely the read of the week.

The year is 1967.

Charles Ritter is an ordinary journalist, filing everyday stories. On an assignment in Ireland, an elderly German doctor helps him with his migraines.

But Doctor Theodore Morell is not what he appears. He is a man with a past - and a man with a secret. He was Hitler's personal physician during the last days of the war. From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler masterminded one final conspiracy. And Ritter is about to find out how World War Two really ended. But as he gets closer to the shattering truth, the intelligence agencies of three great powers are alerted to his pursuit of the story.
So far as they are concerned, Hitler met his death in 1945. And anyone who thinks otherwise must be eliminated. 

'Hitler: The Last Conspiracy' is a blockbuster thriller that is meticulously researched and brilliantly told. It is perfect for fans of Frederick Forsyth, Robert Harris and Robert Ludlum.

'A ripping yarn.' -- Sunderland Echo. 'An entertaining yarn, filled with vivid characters. And the finale is intriguing.'  Yorkshire Post. 'Most thought-provoking novel of the year. Truly sensational.' - Northern Echo. 

The author Revel Barker started writing for newspapers while still at school and joined the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds before becoming the youngest reporter ever employed by the Daily Mirror. As a reporter, defence correspondent, foreign editor, and managing editor he travelled the world, gaining first-hand experience of many of the situations and meeting many of the people described in 'Hitler: The Last Conspiracy'.

He now lives on an island in the Mediterranean, and is also the author of the best-selling 'The Mayor of Montebello'. ‘Hitler’ is published by Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher.

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PRAT OF THE WEEK of the Week.

Michael George Bichard, Baron Bichard, KGB,A former benefits chief  sits on a quango looking at demographic changes and their impact on public services.He has said that retired people should do community work or face losing part of their pension so as not to be a burden on the state.Pensioners have paid in for their pensions in good faith, having been told that National Insurance would give them a good pension. People have contributed for their pensions and it is their pension. It is not for the government to use as a carrot or a stick. During good times, the government should have built up a pension reserve rather than used pension funds for funding vanity projects like the millennium dome so that state pensions were not the giant Ponzi scheme they are now.

Lord Bichard also needs reminding that community service is a judicial sanction judges can give criminals. Is being a pensioner therefore, going to be a criminal act in his brave new world?His lordship is setting a perfect example At the ripe old age of 54 he retired from the Civil Service in May 2001 with a pension of £120,000 p.a.! (Index Linked)