I once chaired a discussion at the Hay Literary Festival on the likelihood of the Disestablishment of the Church of England. Among the debaters was Rowan Williams, at that time Bishop of Monmouth.
Some days before, I had been confessing to a chum, Dr Barry Morgan, Bishop of Bangor in North Wales, who incidentally in moments of stress bakes the most delicious gateaux, that I knew nothing about the subject. Barry Bish the Dish, as he was known locally, said rather unkindly, “That has never worried you in the past.”
I said, “But Dr Williams is on the panel and he has got a brain the size of Cardiff.”
“He is a friend of mine,” said Barry. “Tell him if he is unkind to you it is crosiers at dawn.”
In the event he was kindness itself and the voice of sweet reason. In the light of the present row when he made some harmless suggestions in a debate on law, I am sure his intentions were good. The problem is, of course, that he is far too religious to be Archbishop of Canterbury. I am not saying it is a job for an atheist, but there is no doubt that deep beliefs such as he holds make it awfully difficult to do a job, more the chairman of a fractious liberal party, with all the horrors that implies. Politics rather than faith is called for. However, he will not be the first deep believer to be crucified and in debates of this kind it as well to remember the Daily Telegraph Poll which disclosed that only a minority of Anglicans believe in God.
I was much more worried to read the warnings of scientists that transmitting songs into outer space may attract the anger of unfriendly aliens. Heartening though it is to think that our stellar neighbours have a musical ear, it reminds me of something I have been warning about for years.
The bench marks by which people judge behaviour are many and varied. From the old salt’s “I know what the lads on our ship would say”, memorably recalled in the film “Odd Man Out”, to public school and regimental tradition, even reference to biblical sources or that rather wishy-washy “ not quite the thing” of old colonials.
I have a different test, which involves spacemen landing on a market research mission, with Bristol boards and biros in each of their ten arms, stopping passers by and saying something like this: “We have polluted our planet and we are looking for a new home. Before we decide whether to settle here, would you mind answering a few questions?”
Now, if you are faced with a creature with ten arms, three heads and an eye in the centre of each one of them, the chances are you are not going to push him to one side. So when he asks you where you are going, you are going to hold your hands up and enter a plea of guilty.
“I am going to the pub,” you may say.
“Pub? What is pub?” the three heads will chorus, and you will explain it is a building, either draughty and scruffy or luxurious in a naff sort of way. You will explain how there is a thing called a bar and you all line up on one side whilst a man on the other side serves you drinks.
“Drinks?”
“Liquid made from juniper berries or wheat with sugar and things.”
“It tastes good then?”
“Well no, actually. It is a bitter taste and it furs your tongue. Or you can have spirits and they make you feel slightly sick as they go down.”
“So you don’t drink those… spirits?”
“Well, yes, but you put another liquid in them, so you cannot taste the spirits.”
“But you drink them because they have a nice effect?”
“Well, that is not quite true. They can make you fall over, or you might get in a fight with a stranger, and at the best you say silly things. And then the man behind the counter throws you out because you are behaving badly.”
Now at this point you can tell the three heads are puzzled, because they are looking into each other’s one eye and tapping their foreheads with all ten arms.
“This man behind the counter? He gives you this liquid which he knows will make you fall over and when you do fall over he throws you out? Is that entirely fair?”
“Well, no, but anyway he doesn’t give it to you. He sells it to you for money.”
“What is…?”
“Money is bits of paper or round things made of metal and the man behind the counter puts them all in a thing we call a till where a bell rings when money is put in it.”
One of the heads which is quicker on the uptake than the other two says, “I see”. And he explains to the other two heads that this thing called money is a sort of punishment token and is given to people who have misbehaved and they have to take it to this punishment place called a pub where the man behind the counter keeps it to show they have been punished.
And you don’t like to interrupt but you have to put them right.
“You don’t quite understand,” you say. “These are not punishment tokens: they are rewards, and to earn them we have to work.”
“Work?”
“Oh, some people go hundreds of feet down a hole in the ground every day and dig out fossilised trees. It’s very dark down there and filled with a dust which in the end kills you. That is if the roof doesn’t fall in.”
“And what do you do with this fossilised wood you have worked so hard to find?”
“We burn it.”
At which point all three heads and ten arms make a rush for the spaceship crying, “Which way is Uranus?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
When the world was young and I could still keep up with it, I worked in Liverpool for the Daily Dispatch, though I spent most of my time bumming drinks in the Liverpool Press Club.
Sometimes, when we got bored with the club, we would go down to the docks where there was this mine sweeper which never seemed to go to sea. The Daily Herald man “Dicko”, one of our group otherwise known as “Zum Zum” because that was the noise he made when he reached the stage of inebriation where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult, reckoned it was welded to the Dock Wall. But he did have a tendency, when not zum-zumming, to exaggerate.
Anyway, the Press Club enjoyed reciprocal membership with the ship’s wardroom. Well, I say wardroom but it was more of a wardrobe really, because mine sweepers are quite small.
Anyway, this one day we were enjoying rums all in when the Daily Dispatch was bought out by the Daily Mirror and the first I knew about it was when a messenger arrived at the wardroom door and said, “The news editor said don’t hurry with your copy because the paper has closed down.”
I went white and the skipper said, “Whatever is the matter, Skiddy?”
I said, “They’ve closed my paper. I’m out of work again.”
“Didn’t you know it was going to happen?” he said, and I said, “No. Bolt from the blue.”
“Well, I can only say,” he said, “that if their Lordships of the Admiralty took a ship of mine out of commission without due warning, I should send them a pretty snotty signal.”
And I said, “lf I knew the telephone number of our proprietor, Lord Kemsley, I should give him a piece of my mind.”
“It is Mayfair 2326,” said the Daily Mail man Medlicott, thus showing why we called him Harry Slime or the Turd Man.
“You can use the ship to shore radio,” the skipper said.
Ship to shore? The ship was part of the shore. But when I had swallowed a few more rums it suddenly seemed a good idea. So we all went off to the radio room and the wireless operator connected me with Lord Kemsley.
A distant butler said, “Lord Kemsley’s residence” and I said, “You’ll not know me but like you I used to be in the employ of Lord Kemsley until he sold the paper from under my feet.”
The butler said he was extremely sorry to hear that. His Lordship was not at home at the moment but he would be happy to give him a message.
And did I give him a message? It was a corker and I could tell the butler was enjoying it because he was writing it down.
“Run a newspaper?” I ended. “He couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.”
“Or a bunk up in a brothel,” offered the Express man Les Clare, who was listening.
“May I have the phone?” asked the skipper.
“Certainly,” I said, and I passed it over.
“P.S.,” he said. “That goes for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
In “Urgent Fury”, as Washington with unintended irony called The Grenada Caper, the Americans showed up with the aircraft carrier Independence and its associated battle group, a veritable armada comprising naval fighter bombers, air force gun ships. a 1,250-man heavily armed Marine amphibious unit with tanks, and two army Ranger battalions.
On day 2, two battalions of the 82nd airborne Division were sent in to help and on day 3 more troops arrived.
The details of the invasion are still classified after six years. “They have got a lot to hide,” said Edward Luttwak at the Centre of Strategic Studies. While Ronald Reagan hailed the invasion as a victory which left Americans “standing tall”, the reality was a fiasco. The tiny island was invaded by 20,000 troops after a bunch of Marxist thugs (about 20) shot the prime minister and seven others.
At one point the Marines, the Rangers and the 82nd Airborne were all planning to attack the same targets at the same time. There was no intelligence from the island and no maps. The war was waged with tourist maps and a British Admiralty chart dated 1895. The primary purpose was to “rescue” 600 American medical students. The military thought they were in one location. The parents knew they were at another. Nobody asked the parents before the fleet sailed.
When the invasion was launched the navy could not talk to the army and the air force could not talk to the Marines because of a communications screw up. A navy observer on shore got in touch with his ship with a call via Washingtonm from a public call box on the island . The army radios ran out of batteries. They got 700 new ones two days after the war ended.
Carrier jets not only bombed a lunatic asylum killing 17 but also an 82nd airborne command post wounding another 17. The myth of a vast Cuban invasion was not only heavily hyped from Washington but in military planning. Three helicopters crashed in an assault by the Rangers on a Cuban camp that turned out to be empty. When the battle dust settled the only Cubans to be found were 43 middle aged and poorly armed construction workers.
At the end of the day the army handed out 9,802 decorations. There were also dozens of Purple Hearts for wounds in action. Behind the Washington cloak of secrecy there is an uneasy suspicion that the invading forces shot more of their own side than the defenders.
END
If you enjoyed that try; http://www.northtrek.co.uk/
Or; http://www.gentlemenranters.com/
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Saturday, 2 February 2008
A Brush with fame
When I told her that an Art Club wanted to paint me, the Head Ferret said “I hope you are not going to take your clothes off” and I said “It is not that sort of modelling. They are a very respectable group of portrait painters who meet every week and they think I have an interesting face.”
“It is not your face that worries me,” said the Ferret unkindly. “The secretary of the group is Lady President of my Golf Club. Not only that,” continued the Ferret, anxious to show me how serious she was, “she has recently lowered her handicap.
I do not want you lowering the tone by immodest display.”
For once the Ferret was worrying unnecessarily, though I do make a practice of not taking her seriously.
In most things in life I follow the example set by Dean Martin. Urged by Sinatra to be serious, he said he had tried being serious and all he could get was construction work. ”Do you want a hernia at $3.50 an hour?” he asked.
Although, like Martin, I avoid being serious, standing as we are in the deepening twilight of Armageddon, it is time to look at the cultural hysteria which pervades our society. Art Schools which despise drawing and painting; efforts to ban the teaching of history; self regarding authors who are much bought and little read; nations bound together by an indissoluble hysteria, the Diana syndrome.
It was not always so. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance artists were tradesmen who put in tenders and the only art permitted was representation of religious subjects. Any landscapes were purely incidental background. Painters ground or brewed their own paints. It was only very gradually that the landscapes grew until they covered the whole canvas.
Each generation learned from the last and added something to the body of knowledge. As the Welsh artist Sir Kyffin Williams said, they were building a mansion room by room. (Which gives me the opportunity to tell you can get the biography I have written about him “A Figure in a Welsh Landscape” on Amazon any time now.)
In time the notion that art was something special grew. Artists were classed with poets and musicians. The discovery of the spectrum in the porcelain industry, the camera, squeezable paint, the prints and watercolours of the East all added to this body of learning and skill.
Then along came Picasso, the worst thing that has happened to art. He was a genius who mastered art in all its forms and traditions and then threw them aside. He could, and indeed did, make a work of art out of a saddle and handlebars. Because it looked easy he had imitators.
The next enemy was a man called Coldstream. In the 40s and 50s he ruled the world of art in Britain. He was a prey to American culture and sent a very fine colourist Ray Howard Jones and her boyfriend, another Ray, to study methods in American Art schools.
Years later Ray Howard Jones told me they discovered that in America drawing was no longer taught, tradition was despised and free expression was the aim. That was imported by Coldstream and his cohorts and the destruction of representational art followed as their pupils became teachers and curators.
Advertising guru Charles Saatchi has continued the debasement. He picks unknown artists fresh from college, buys their work cheaply and in bulk, publicises them, arranges exhibitions, and then when their prices soar sells their work.
All this dyspeptic ranting was brought upon by reading a quote from Damien Hirst: “I remember a time, and it was not all that long ago, when I could not give my paintings away.”
The Good Old Days?
*******************************************
My great chum Masha (Lady Williams) was an obvious choice for interview in “Times Remembered”, the R4 series I was offered.
She was a genuine Russian Princess, the widow of a titled diplomat. Her family had been forced to flee Russia when the revolution broke out and landed up penniless in London. They used jam jars as cups and orange boxes as furniture.
Things were so bad that her mother ordered her father to get a job.
“A job?” he said. “But I cannot do anything.”
She said, “You could be a servant. We had four hundred serfs, you must have some idea what they did.” He said the only one he had come into contact with was his butler.
“Very well,” said Masha’s mother, and they looked down the adverts for a “butler wanted”.
Beautifully attired, the Prince presented himself at the house which had advertised its need. Naturally, he went to the front door, having no idea there were such things as side doors for tradesmen. The maid who opened the door thought he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
As other guests arrived, he assumed they were also after the job but he chatted amiably to them and was doubly courteous to his host and hostess.
“I do like your Russian friend,” the host told his wife.
“MY Russian friend?” she said. “He is not my friend. I thought he was yours. “
Unobtrusively the host drew the Prince on one side and questioned him. The Prince said he had come about the job as butler.
“Butler?” said the host. “I couldn’t employ you. I would be waiting on you.”
He did a great deal more. He gave the Prince an allowance and paid for the education of the young princesses.
Masha’s London house was on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We sat before a roaring log fire on an autumn afternoon in her L-shaped drawing room, with the producer and recording engineer out of sight in the angle of the L.
Masha had a lovely voice, lightly accented and musical. The room was very hot and I was resting in a winged armed chair, accompanied, as always, by a hangover. It all acted on me like Mogadon and I slept soundly during the entire interview. Not a question or a response of any kind. I woke in the silence at the end of the interview.
Masha hadn’t noticed; the producer had been so carried away she hadn’t noticed and engineers don’t notice anything as long as someone is talking.
So I resolved the keep stumm and wait for the wrath of the Radio 4 Mighty to break over my head. I thought it was the end of my broadcasting career. In the event, it was the best thing I ever did. The BBC was inundated with calls of congratulation from listeners for its brilliance in finding an interviewer who didn‘t interrupt.
I think of Masha every morning as I listen to “Today” and the poor souls who are being interviewed by James Naughtie Of The Interminable Question, trying desperately to get a word in.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
In a story from the Derry Journal, I learned of a Northern Ireland bank official who decided on a spot check on a branch office in the Inishowen area. He found the door locked even though it was half an hour before closing time.
Letting himself in with a pass key, he spotted four members of staff playing cards in a back room and, determined to give them a shock, he rang the burglar alarm.
Immediately, the bar tender from across the street arrived with four bottles of Guinness,
“It is not your face that worries me,” said the Ferret unkindly. “The secretary of the group is Lady President of my Golf Club. Not only that,” continued the Ferret, anxious to show me how serious she was, “she has recently lowered her handicap.
I do not want you lowering the tone by immodest display.”
For once the Ferret was worrying unnecessarily, though I do make a practice of not taking her seriously.
In most things in life I follow the example set by Dean Martin. Urged by Sinatra to be serious, he said he had tried being serious and all he could get was construction work. ”Do you want a hernia at $3.50 an hour?” he asked.
Although, like Martin, I avoid being serious, standing as we are in the deepening twilight of Armageddon, it is time to look at the cultural hysteria which pervades our society. Art Schools which despise drawing and painting; efforts to ban the teaching of history; self regarding authors who are much bought and little read; nations bound together by an indissoluble hysteria, the Diana syndrome.
It was not always so. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance artists were tradesmen who put in tenders and the only art permitted was representation of religious subjects. Any landscapes were purely incidental background. Painters ground or brewed their own paints. It was only very gradually that the landscapes grew until they covered the whole canvas.
Each generation learned from the last and added something to the body of knowledge. As the Welsh artist Sir Kyffin Williams said, they were building a mansion room by room. (Which gives me the opportunity to tell you can get the biography I have written about him “A Figure in a Welsh Landscape” on Amazon any time now.)
In time the notion that art was something special grew. Artists were classed with poets and musicians. The discovery of the spectrum in the porcelain industry, the camera, squeezable paint, the prints and watercolours of the East all added to this body of learning and skill.
Then along came Picasso, the worst thing that has happened to art. He was a genius who mastered art in all its forms and traditions and then threw them aside. He could, and indeed did, make a work of art out of a saddle and handlebars. Because it looked easy he had imitators.
The next enemy was a man called Coldstream. In the 40s and 50s he ruled the world of art in Britain. He was a prey to American culture and sent a very fine colourist Ray Howard Jones and her boyfriend, another Ray, to study methods in American Art schools.
Years later Ray Howard Jones told me they discovered that in America drawing was no longer taught, tradition was despised and free expression was the aim. That was imported by Coldstream and his cohorts and the destruction of representational art followed as their pupils became teachers and curators.
Advertising guru Charles Saatchi has continued the debasement. He picks unknown artists fresh from college, buys their work cheaply and in bulk, publicises them, arranges exhibitions, and then when their prices soar sells their work.
All this dyspeptic ranting was brought upon by reading a quote from Damien Hirst: “I remember a time, and it was not all that long ago, when I could not give my paintings away.”
The Good Old Days?
*******************************************
My great chum Masha (Lady Williams) was an obvious choice for interview in “Times Remembered”, the R4 series I was offered.
She was a genuine Russian Princess, the widow of a titled diplomat. Her family had been forced to flee Russia when the revolution broke out and landed up penniless in London. They used jam jars as cups and orange boxes as furniture.
Things were so bad that her mother ordered her father to get a job.
“A job?” he said. “But I cannot do anything.”
She said, “You could be a servant. We had four hundred serfs, you must have some idea what they did.” He said the only one he had come into contact with was his butler.
“Very well,” said Masha’s mother, and they looked down the adverts for a “butler wanted”.
Beautifully attired, the Prince presented himself at the house which had advertised its need. Naturally, he went to the front door, having no idea there were such things as side doors for tradesmen. The maid who opened the door thought he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
As other guests arrived, he assumed they were also after the job but he chatted amiably to them and was doubly courteous to his host and hostess.
“I do like your Russian friend,” the host told his wife.
“MY Russian friend?” she said. “He is not my friend. I thought he was yours. “
Unobtrusively the host drew the Prince on one side and questioned him. The Prince said he had come about the job as butler.
“Butler?” said the host. “I couldn’t employ you. I would be waiting on you.”
He did a great deal more. He gave the Prince an allowance and paid for the education of the young princesses.
Masha’s London house was on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We sat before a roaring log fire on an autumn afternoon in her L-shaped drawing room, with the producer and recording engineer out of sight in the angle of the L.
Masha had a lovely voice, lightly accented and musical. The room was very hot and I was resting in a winged armed chair, accompanied, as always, by a hangover. It all acted on me like Mogadon and I slept soundly during the entire interview. Not a question or a response of any kind. I woke in the silence at the end of the interview.
Masha hadn’t noticed; the producer had been so carried away she hadn’t noticed and engineers don’t notice anything as long as someone is talking.
So I resolved the keep stumm and wait for the wrath of the Radio 4 Mighty to break over my head. I thought it was the end of my broadcasting career. In the event, it was the best thing I ever did. The BBC was inundated with calls of congratulation from listeners for its brilliance in finding an interviewer who didn‘t interrupt.
I think of Masha every morning as I listen to “Today” and the poor souls who are being interviewed by James Naughtie Of The Interminable Question, trying desperately to get a word in.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
In a story from the Derry Journal, I learned of a Northern Ireland bank official who decided on a spot check on a branch office in the Inishowen area. He found the door locked even though it was half an hour before closing time.
Letting himself in with a pass key, he spotted four members of staff playing cards in a back room and, determined to give them a shock, he rang the burglar alarm.
Immediately, the bar tender from across the street arrived with four bottles of Guinness,
Sunday, 27 January 2008
Ph Dunces
A small group of brainy young Ph Ds sit in the heart of every bank developing its strategy. The size of their bonuses is dictated by the amount of money they make. One group decided to make money by lending money to poor Americans, canvassed by salesmen whose salary depended on how many clients they brought it. Although they must have known their clients would be unable to repay, they bundled up the worthless mortgages into bonds and sold them to Pension Funds and other banks. Another small group of brainy Ph Ds tucked them away without first examining them. Yet another brainy youth lost his bank billions without anyone noticing. That is the reason why the world is in recession.
Among the hardest hit are another group of brilliant young men who emerged forty or so years ago. They were called asset strippers. They bought flourishing companies and some that were less so, sold their assets, threw out their workers and closed down their factories. The financial community treated them with contempt.
They are still with us, but have become very respectable. Despite the fact that they buy up companies about which they know nothing, with money they haven’t got, and have to borrow from banks which now refuse to lend it because they do not trust each other. In a world where trust is an essential ingredient and cannot function without it.
I know so little about mathematics that, having spent all my life on a monthly income, I have been unable to work out how much I earn a week. Even so, given those facts, I think I might have worked out the result. It is not surprising that a mere recital of the causes of the credit crisis gave the satirists Bird and Fortune material for one of their funniest routines,
Perhaps that Incomparable Duo should look at another of the unreliable planks on which we walk unsteadily across the chasm of existence: Time.
Time is a majority verdict. If a thousand clocks said half past three, it would be a bold watch which insisted it was 4 pm. Different parts of our country used to have different times. It was the coming of the railway which united them. Stations are long gone from many communities, but the tyranny of time remains. At its most extreme, shops in Corwen, North Wales, close for lunch an hour early to accommodate the arrival of a train which no longer runs to a station eliminated by Dr Beeching.
Corwen is a town still obsessed with its railway, which now awaits the arrival of the private railway from Llangollen which is recovering the old track. In the graveyard is an epitaph to Owen Owen, a driver who died at 29. It reads:
“His life is over
Death has put on the brake,
His soul has been signalled
Its long journey to make.
When death sounds his whistle
The steam of life fails
And his mortal clay shunted
Till the Last Judgement calls.”
Time is a notional notation. If we travel aboard we quite often arrive before we have left Britain. Doesn’t bother us, but we suffer early darkness for the benefit of a minority of Highland crofters whose preference for light mornings rules us all.
One would have thought that with devolved government might go devolved time keeping. I passionately believe that Scotland should misrule itself in the way the Scots have misruled Britain in recent years and I am happy for them to start the morning in a blaze of sunlight.
My old man reckoned his greatest moment came during the siege of Erskine Street, in Manchester, where a desperate gang of IRA terrorists were trapped in a bedroom, armed with more guns than were passed round at the Alamo.
Whilst his inspector paused, wondering what to do without causing casualties, my old man charged up the stairs firing so wildly that his inspector called out, “Get that bloody gun off Skidmore before he kills us all.”
The IRA gang surrendered to a man, but not before my father was shot in his head. In later years he became convinced it was his inspector who shot him out of self interest.
The IRA men got life but, in the way things are, they were shortly afterwards paroled and went on to a life of luxury. When I came out of the army my old man took me to Eire, where there was no rationing, to buy me a suit of clothes.
In Mooney’s bar in Dublin he reminisced about Erskine Street and the man called Shaugnessy who shot him. He asked the barman what became of him. “As rich as Guinness himself,” the barman said. “He manages the dog track at Phoenix Park.”
At the park we asked for Mr Shaughnessy and the girl behind the office counter asked, “Who shall I say wants him?”
“Tell him it’s the man he shot in the head,“ said my old man.
Minutes later, a man the size of a Connemara Cliff burst into the office and grabbed my old man warmly by both hands. “There was nothing personal,” he said. “It was political and no offence meant.”
“And none taken,“ said my old man magnanimously. “Anyway, it was my inspector that did it.”
After a few moments of surreal conversation, Shaughnessy took my father’s race card and marked a dog in every race. I backed them all and they all obliged - until the one in the last race which went down spectacularly with my evening’s winnings.
My old man, who had not bet on a single dog, had a terrific evening being smug. As we trudged out of the stadium, he said, “I knew that would happen. The last time I met yon bastard he shot me in the heed.”
ends
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“PERFUMED COFFIN STOLEN”
“Thieves stole a coffin at Kiberia Legio Maria Church last Saturdy while mourners were in the church praying.
The incident occurred at Kamera Labu Sama in Nairobi. Followers went berserk when they learned the coffin had been stolen as they prayed.
Pastor Peter Iama said the coffin, which had cost Shs 3,000, contained perfume worth Shs 1,700.
He said: ‘We decided to keep the coffin by the door while we all went in for special prayers. I sent one of our followers to get help in bringing the coffin in but it had already been stolen.’”
Among the hardest hit are another group of brilliant young men who emerged forty or so years ago. They were called asset strippers. They bought flourishing companies and some that were less so, sold their assets, threw out their workers and closed down their factories. The financial community treated them with contempt.
They are still with us, but have become very respectable. Despite the fact that they buy up companies about which they know nothing, with money they haven’t got, and have to borrow from banks which now refuse to lend it because they do not trust each other. In a world where trust is an essential ingredient and cannot function without it.
I know so little about mathematics that, having spent all my life on a monthly income, I have been unable to work out how much I earn a week. Even so, given those facts, I think I might have worked out the result. It is not surprising that a mere recital of the causes of the credit crisis gave the satirists Bird and Fortune material for one of their funniest routines,
Perhaps that Incomparable Duo should look at another of the unreliable planks on which we walk unsteadily across the chasm of existence: Time.
Time is a majority verdict. If a thousand clocks said half past three, it would be a bold watch which insisted it was 4 pm. Different parts of our country used to have different times. It was the coming of the railway which united them. Stations are long gone from many communities, but the tyranny of time remains. At its most extreme, shops in Corwen, North Wales, close for lunch an hour early to accommodate the arrival of a train which no longer runs to a station eliminated by Dr Beeching.
Corwen is a town still obsessed with its railway, which now awaits the arrival of the private railway from Llangollen which is recovering the old track. In the graveyard is an epitaph to Owen Owen, a driver who died at 29. It reads:
“His life is over
Death has put on the brake,
His soul has been signalled
Its long journey to make.
When death sounds his whistle
The steam of life fails
And his mortal clay shunted
Till the Last Judgement calls.”
Time is a notional notation. If we travel aboard we quite often arrive before we have left Britain. Doesn’t bother us, but we suffer early darkness for the benefit of a minority of Highland crofters whose preference for light mornings rules us all.
One would have thought that with devolved government might go devolved time keeping. I passionately believe that Scotland should misrule itself in the way the Scots have misruled Britain in recent years and I am happy for them to start the morning in a blaze of sunlight.
My old man reckoned his greatest moment came during the siege of Erskine Street, in Manchester, where a desperate gang of IRA terrorists were trapped in a bedroom, armed with more guns than were passed round at the Alamo.
Whilst his inspector paused, wondering what to do without causing casualties, my old man charged up the stairs firing so wildly that his inspector called out, “Get that bloody gun off Skidmore before he kills us all.”
The IRA gang surrendered to a man, but not before my father was shot in his head. In later years he became convinced it was his inspector who shot him out of self interest.
The IRA men got life but, in the way things are, they were shortly afterwards paroled and went on to a life of luxury. When I came out of the army my old man took me to Eire, where there was no rationing, to buy me a suit of clothes.
In Mooney’s bar in Dublin he reminisced about Erskine Street and the man called Shaugnessy who shot him. He asked the barman what became of him. “As rich as Guinness himself,” the barman said. “He manages the dog track at Phoenix Park.”
At the park we asked for Mr Shaughnessy and the girl behind the office counter asked, “Who shall I say wants him?”
“Tell him it’s the man he shot in the head,“ said my old man.
Minutes later, a man the size of a Connemara Cliff burst into the office and grabbed my old man warmly by both hands. “There was nothing personal,” he said. “It was political and no offence meant.”
“And none taken,“ said my old man magnanimously. “Anyway, it was my inspector that did it.”
After a few moments of surreal conversation, Shaughnessy took my father’s race card and marked a dog in every race. I backed them all and they all obliged - until the one in the last race which went down spectacularly with my evening’s winnings.
My old man, who had not bet on a single dog, had a terrific evening being smug. As we trudged out of the stadium, he said, “I knew that would happen. The last time I met yon bastard he shot me in the heed.”
ends
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“PERFUMED COFFIN STOLEN”
“Thieves stole a coffin at Kiberia Legio Maria Church last Saturdy while mourners were in the church praying.
The incident occurred at Kamera Labu Sama in Nairobi. Followers went berserk when they learned the coffin had been stolen as they prayed.
Pastor Peter Iama said the coffin, which had cost Shs 3,000, contained perfume worth Shs 1,700.
He said: ‘We decided to keep the coffin by the door while we all went in for special prayers. I sent one of our followers to get help in bringing the coffin in but it had already been stolen.’”
Saturday, 19 January 2008
For F……….’s Sake
Words are important to a writer in precisely the way screws and nails are vital ingredients in the vocabulary of a carpenter. So it follows that I am distressed at efforts to make certain assemblies of innocent letters illegal.
We must not describe what, to many, is unnatural behaviour in brief and vivid words. Equerry is permissible; queer, which is little different, isn’t. Three letters permit its entry into polite society.
At times like this we must remember that we are ruled by an Establishment made for the pen of Dean Swift. With not a trace of humour, our extraordinary Home Secretary has put an end to terrorism. Now, she has ruled, we must call it Anti-Islamic Activity. You can sense the chill that must bring to the hearts of Mad Mullahs everywhere. But I suppose if you cannot govern a country, you can comfort yourself that you are a Canute of the waves of words.
Personally I am offended by obscenities in plays and on radio and TV. Irrational, I know. Copulation in its daily dress describes moments of deep love and heightened sensitivity. More than that, it provides vernacular architecture for people with limited vocabulary.
I had a friend who ascribed to the limited vocabulary of the young the breakdown of so many marriages. On the grounds that once a young swain has said, “Do you come here often?” the only other expression of devotion his vocabulary permits is, “Will you marry me?” A compliment rather than a commitment.
In the workplace, the news room or the barrack room the copulatory verb is probably used more often than “the”. I used to wonder why that was, until I realised what a portmanteau of a word it is. A chameleon, too. The addition of three letters, another verbal trinity, turns it into a noun or an adjective. It can express the extreme of surprise, delight, or revulsion. Preceding a command or any one of a thousand responses it acts like a flourish of trumpets.
I swear in order to add colour to a sentence. Yet I am offended by the use of bad language in newspapers or in the presence of women, even though my wife gave up football because of the foul language of the other lady players.
When I met her, the only swear word my convent-reared wife used was “Horrors” or in extreme cases “Multiple Horrors”. Why not make that assembly of letters illegal?
Wise old Montaigne wondered why when he sneezed people said, ”God Bless you” yet if he expelled air from another part of his body he was shunned. Why should words which describe procreation and pleasure be taboo? Yet massacre and genocide be on everyone’s lips?
Nothing about our government suggests that words are suppressed out of sensitivity. There is no benevolence in the 3,000 or more new laws which have appeared on the Statute Book under New Labour. But they do show in the clearest possible terms that we must do as we are told.
Our freedom, which for centuries defined us as British citizens, is no longer fit for purpose. Restrictions on gun ownership, imposed in the hysteria which followed Dunblane, had no effect on gun crime. Rather the opposite. The “dangerous dogs” laws, which sprang from hysteria following several savagings, have not affected dog behaviour. Hunting was never as popular as it became after the recent legislation.
At one level this restricton of freedom is irritating, but at another it is profoundly worrying. Like the legislation which prohibits smoking and driving on the grounds that if you smoke and drive there is a remote chance of your having an accident. You could, of course, ban the act of driving on the same premise. They are all instruments of control and encourage a mindset which accepts restriction of liberty.
Age has produced in me an increasing tendency to break wind. An American magazine bluntly advertised “Fartypants”, which contain an absorbent charcoal pad.
I hastened to order two pairs. Hearing of it, my friend Geoff Mather, former features editor of the Daily Express, sent this:
” I was told by friends from Mexico that there is a creature known as a garrapata which has an inlet and no outlet. It blows up, they said. Be that as it may, here is a curious explanation of the garrapata, translated from the Spanish:
‘The garrapatas often are in the high grass, where they hope in the end of a leaf to try to enlist to any animal or person that happens. A very common false idea is to think that the garrapata is able to jump off the plant to the guest, but the only method of transmission is the physical contact. The garrapata is ended up loosen of the animal when it fills, but this can take several days. In their mouth, the garrapatas have a structure that allows them to enlist firmly to the place of which they are absorbing blood. To throw off a garrapata to the force can often make that parts of the garrapata are given off and they remain in the mordedura, whole the apparatus buccal, which can produce infection. Between the methods to extract the garrapata without leaving within the skin the head or the mouth, they are for example anestesiar to the garrapata with a substance like the ether.’”
Another friend, John Julius Norwich, produces an anthology every Christmas and I thought this explanation might merit a place. Almost by return, the Earl produced the following gem:
“Though I myself am no mean farter
I'm glad I'm not a garrapata;
As for my apparatus buccal,
It seems a trifle near the knuckle -
And though my movements can't be purer,
I think I'll stick to the mordedura.”
………………………………………………………….
In his delicious “Brief Lives”, John Aubrey recalls the unfortunate Earl of Oxford who was so nervous at being presented to the Tudor Queen Elizabeth that, as he performed his bow, he broke wind. Aubrey says the Earl was so embarrassed he immediately left court and exiled himself abroad.
Years later he returned and once more was presented to Her Majesty. “Ah ,Oxford,” she called out when he entered the Presence Chamber, “we have quite forgot the fart.”
Acker Bilk’s brother David told me of a time when he and his brother were playing in the band at a Hunt Ball. As they queued for supper, David broke wind. “Mr Bilk,” roared the Master, “are you aware that your brother has broken wind before my wife?” “Oh well,” said Acker, “I don’t suppose ‘e knew it were her turn.”
And I cannot resist the story of the young couple who were out riding one day when the man’s horse broke wind. He apologised profusely. “Please do not worry,” said the girl, “I thought it was the horse.”
And that, I am sure, concludes a case for the prosecution.
DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
From Peterborough, Daily Telegraph:
“More humorous animal names have been sent to me. This time a tale of two cats called Castor and Pollux. They belonged to an astronomer who late at night, I am told, found himself unable to call the latter’s name in a deserted suburban street.
“My favourite of the last batch of cats’ names came from a lady in Norwich whose daughter had named her cat Ceremony. Whenever visitors arrived, she warned them not to stand on it.
“A reader in Surrey also tells me of a neighbour who bought a pair of Siamese kittens – one of which was excessively greedy and other addicted to long periods of sleep. They were christened Chew and Lie.”
………………………………………………………………
P.S. Since I may well find myself in durance vile for this blog, why not try for a really good read, Mather’s blog: www.northtrek.co.uk?
We must not describe what, to many, is unnatural behaviour in brief and vivid words. Equerry is permissible; queer, which is little different, isn’t. Three letters permit its entry into polite society.
At times like this we must remember that we are ruled by an Establishment made for the pen of Dean Swift. With not a trace of humour, our extraordinary Home Secretary has put an end to terrorism. Now, she has ruled, we must call it Anti-Islamic Activity. You can sense the chill that must bring to the hearts of Mad Mullahs everywhere. But I suppose if you cannot govern a country, you can comfort yourself that you are a Canute of the waves of words.
Personally I am offended by obscenities in plays and on radio and TV. Irrational, I know. Copulation in its daily dress describes moments of deep love and heightened sensitivity. More than that, it provides vernacular architecture for people with limited vocabulary.
I had a friend who ascribed to the limited vocabulary of the young the breakdown of so many marriages. On the grounds that once a young swain has said, “Do you come here often?” the only other expression of devotion his vocabulary permits is, “Will you marry me?” A compliment rather than a commitment.
In the workplace, the news room or the barrack room the copulatory verb is probably used more often than “the”. I used to wonder why that was, until I realised what a portmanteau of a word it is. A chameleon, too. The addition of three letters, another verbal trinity, turns it into a noun or an adjective. It can express the extreme of surprise, delight, or revulsion. Preceding a command or any one of a thousand responses it acts like a flourish of trumpets.
I swear in order to add colour to a sentence. Yet I am offended by the use of bad language in newspapers or in the presence of women, even though my wife gave up football because of the foul language of the other lady players.
When I met her, the only swear word my convent-reared wife used was “Horrors” or in extreme cases “Multiple Horrors”. Why not make that assembly of letters illegal?
Wise old Montaigne wondered why when he sneezed people said, ”God Bless you” yet if he expelled air from another part of his body he was shunned. Why should words which describe procreation and pleasure be taboo? Yet massacre and genocide be on everyone’s lips?
Nothing about our government suggests that words are suppressed out of sensitivity. There is no benevolence in the 3,000 or more new laws which have appeared on the Statute Book under New Labour. But they do show in the clearest possible terms that we must do as we are told.
Our freedom, which for centuries defined us as British citizens, is no longer fit for purpose. Restrictions on gun ownership, imposed in the hysteria which followed Dunblane, had no effect on gun crime. Rather the opposite. The “dangerous dogs” laws, which sprang from hysteria following several savagings, have not affected dog behaviour. Hunting was never as popular as it became after the recent legislation.
At one level this restricton of freedom is irritating, but at another it is profoundly worrying. Like the legislation which prohibits smoking and driving on the grounds that if you smoke and drive there is a remote chance of your having an accident. You could, of course, ban the act of driving on the same premise. They are all instruments of control and encourage a mindset which accepts restriction of liberty.
Age has produced in me an increasing tendency to break wind. An American magazine bluntly advertised “Fartypants”, which contain an absorbent charcoal pad.
I hastened to order two pairs. Hearing of it, my friend Geoff Mather, former features editor of the Daily Express, sent this:
” I was told by friends from Mexico that there is a creature known as a garrapata which has an inlet and no outlet. It blows up, they said. Be that as it may, here is a curious explanation of the garrapata, translated from the Spanish:
‘The garrapatas often are in the high grass, where they hope in the end of a leaf to try to enlist to any animal or person that happens. A very common false idea is to think that the garrapata is able to jump off the plant to the guest, but the only method of transmission is the physical contact. The garrapata is ended up loosen of the animal when it fills, but this can take several days. In their mouth, the garrapatas have a structure that allows them to enlist firmly to the place of which they are absorbing blood. To throw off a garrapata to the force can often make that parts of the garrapata are given off and they remain in the mordedura, whole the apparatus buccal, which can produce infection. Between the methods to extract the garrapata without leaving within the skin the head or the mouth, they are for example anestesiar to the garrapata with a substance like the ether.’”
Another friend, John Julius Norwich, produces an anthology every Christmas and I thought this explanation might merit a place. Almost by return, the Earl produced the following gem:
“Though I myself am no mean farter
I'm glad I'm not a garrapata;
As for my apparatus buccal,
It seems a trifle near the knuckle -
And though my movements can't be purer,
I think I'll stick to the mordedura.”
………………………………………………………….
In his delicious “Brief Lives”, John Aubrey recalls the unfortunate Earl of Oxford who was so nervous at being presented to the Tudor Queen Elizabeth that, as he performed his bow, he broke wind. Aubrey says the Earl was so embarrassed he immediately left court and exiled himself abroad.
Years later he returned and once more was presented to Her Majesty. “Ah ,Oxford,” she called out when he entered the Presence Chamber, “we have quite forgot the fart.”
Acker Bilk’s brother David told me of a time when he and his brother were playing in the band at a Hunt Ball. As they queued for supper, David broke wind. “Mr Bilk,” roared the Master, “are you aware that your brother has broken wind before my wife?” “Oh well,” said Acker, “I don’t suppose ‘e knew it were her turn.”
And I cannot resist the story of the young couple who were out riding one day when the man’s horse broke wind. He apologised profusely. “Please do not worry,” said the girl, “I thought it was the horse.”
And that, I am sure, concludes a case for the prosecution.
DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
From Peterborough, Daily Telegraph:
“More humorous animal names have been sent to me. This time a tale of two cats called Castor and Pollux. They belonged to an astronomer who late at night, I am told, found himself unable to call the latter’s name in a deserted suburban street.
“My favourite of the last batch of cats’ names came from a lady in Norwich whose daughter had named her cat Ceremony. Whenever visitors arrived, she warned them not to stand on it.
“A reader in Surrey also tells me of a neighbour who bought a pair of Siamese kittens – one of which was excessively greedy and other addicted to long periods of sleep. They were christened Chew and Lie.”
………………………………………………………………
P.S. Since I may well find myself in durance vile for this blog, why not try for a really good read, Mather’s blog: www.northtrek.co.uk?
Saturday, 12 January 2008
Tam Divvy
I did not realise how much I hated work until retirement gave me the precious gift of idleness. Old age has many disadvantages; though to date I have experienced few of them. Only one sedentary pleasure is diminishing. I can no longer obey the advice of the Book of Common Prayer “to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”.
If I open a book, it is not long before the eyelids droop and I fall asleep. If I stay awake, I cannot remember what I have read. This is a great sadness. Although totally uneducated, I believe I may have read more books than most people from my background. It is certainly true that I have come to all life’s activities, from love making to gardening, by way of a book.
My unfashionable fondness for fox hunting is a result of reading the little-known comic novels of Surtees, himself a hunting squire and the creator of a Cockney grocer called Mr Jorrocks who is obsessed with the sport. He gave him the utterance on which I based my life’s modus operandi: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
I took the sport up when I was working on the Daily Mirror, a paper violently opposed to hunting. I did not wear hunting pink, only rat catcher, a black jacket, riding breeches, top boots and a bowler. The season begins with cub hunting; a distasteful activity, no longer practised, which trains the young entry of hounds. Because it must be carried out before the dew lifts, it takes place in the early morning. I worked nights so I changed into my rat catcher in the office lavatory, to the chagrin of the editor. I didn’t have a car so I had to go to the stables on the all-night bus where, in bowler, breeches and top boots, I was the butt of tired humour from other night workers.
Captain Milton, my hunting companion and the manager of the stables, lived off the land. Anyone’s land. He would only eat an egg if it had been poached. He was an enormous snob who at one meet watched the multi-millionaire chairman of Unilever, Lord Leverhulme, tip-tipping by, a tribute to Lobb and Pink, on a thoroughbred that must have cost several thousand. “See Soapy is out,” said Captain Milton dismissively.
He used to take me from the stables to the meet in a horse box and I was so in awe of him that, when the back wheel caught fire as we passed through Altrincham one morning, I didn’t dare tell him until we reached the kennels.
The wife of the Hon. Sec. was even more terrifying. It was claimed that when she returned from one morning’s cubbing, a groom had observed.
“T’owd ‘oss is sweating, Ma’am.”
“So would you be,” she is said to have replied, “if you had been between my legs since six o clock this morning.”
I haven't hunted for half a century and the older I get the less inclined I am to kill anything but...
Most hunts have an inner circle of Toffs; in our pack they formed the Tarporley Hunt Club, to which no one outside their circle was admitted. Only they were invited by the Master to wear pink coats.
The greater part of the Hunt wore rat catcher and was made up of farmers, tradesmen and young girls. It is they who are affected by the recent anti-hunting legislation, not the Toffs.
Tarporley Hunt Club members regularly helicoptered to Ireland, whither their hunters had already been exported the night before to await their arrival. That in itself is cruel because horses cannot vomit and therefore suffer badly in rough weather.
Since helicopters are noisy and would spook the hounds, visiting followers have to land five miles from the meet. So cars were sent from their homes in Cheshire to drive the members from the landing strip to the meet. So they can continue to hunt in the old manner as often as they like.
Little wonder that enthusiasm is not being shown in carrying out the anti- hunting legislation. It is the poorer subscribers who suffer, and the hunt servants - the smiths, the vets and the providers of fodder.
There is a further complication. Hunts collect dead stock. European legislation has made it difficult to dispose of such carcasses. Worse, foxes carry rabies and are increasingly invading urban areas where the pickings are easy. Pet cats and dogs are at risk. A baby has been bitten by one. It is only a question of time before a helpless child is savaged.
Attlee's Government set up an inquiry into fox hunting. It decided that hunting with hounds was the least cruel method of fox disposal. The agony of poisoning was indescribable. The problem with shooting was that you could not be sure of a clean kill. Unlike dogs, a fox's spittle does not have antiseptic qualities. It is unable to cure wounds by licking them and they often become gangrenous.
Hounds are bred to be slower than their quarry; otherwise there would be no chase. It follows that only old and infirm foxes are killed; an accelerated form of natural selection.
Bans on cockfighting, badger and bear baiting were NOT introduced for humane reasons. They were part of legislation passed at a time of industrial unrest to prevent riotous assemblies. Like the present legislation, a political device.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
My friend Curly Beard was always ready to help when a hunt servant had a problem. Inevitable the huntsman of the Cheshire should come to him when the Master complained he was not showing enough sport. Hunt Committees are ruthless in getting rid of huntsmen who don’t show sport. The neighbouring Wynnstay Hunt had a huntsman called Wilkin who had been with them for years. One bad season and he was out. And that meant not only out of a job, but out of a house too.
He should have gone to Curly.
“Cat’s piss, that’s the answer,“ he told the Cheshire huntsman.
“And how am I going to collect that?“ the huntsman wanted to know. “I cannot go behind them with a test tube.”
“Leave it to me,” said Curly. “Next meet is at Huxley. Meet me in the Farmer’s Arms at 8 am.”
Now I don’t know - and there was no way Curly would have told me - whether he had a vet straightened or whether he milked the cats himself. All I do know is that when we met in the car park of the Farmer’s Arms he had a cough mixture bottle which was filled with pungent liquid.
He and the huntsman walked over to the first cover and laid a trail from its centre across the fields, on either bank of a stream, and over several walls. Then we went home for breakfast and were back in the Farmer’s Arms by opening time.
The hounds met at 11 am and, watched by a scowling master, were shepherded off by the hunt staff. They were scarcely in the first field before they started to give tongue, Then they were off like lamplighters, leaving the field to catch up as best they might. Only the thrusters were up with hounds.
“That’ll do me,” said Curly. We had a few pints, then went home and were back at opening time that evening when the huntsman joined us.
“Decent day?” asked Curly.
“Decent? Never had a day like it,” said the huntsman. ”We had a four mile point and it took me all I could muster to keep up with the pack.”
“Never fails,” said Curly. “Cat’s piss.”
“Worth a guinea a gallon,” said the huntsman.
“Cost thee more than that,” said Curly. “Not easy stuff to get hold of.”
“I’ll not begrudge you,” the huntsman assured him. “Master were right chuffed. Bugger swore blind he’d seen a fox.”
ends
* * * * * * * * * * *
A reader from the U.S. of A, emails that I was lucky to have such an epic father. That is as maybe but from the Chief Constable’s point of view he was an epic disaster from the day he joined the force.
He was paraded with the other PCs on night duty, and patrol instructions were read out by the desk sergeant. As he finished, the station door opened and a head popped round. It introduced itself as the dentist from Parkside and begged to speak to the constable whose beat took him past the surgery.
It was my father.
“I’m very troubled with rats,” the dentist told him. “On your beat tonight, if you come across a stray cat, can you lift the lid of my coal cellar and drop it through? There’s a bright shilling for you if you do.”
My old man pocketed the coin and rejoined the other policemen. They asked what the civilian wanted and foolishly my father told them. As a result, the entire night shift went on a cat hunt.
The next night they paraded again. Once again the door opened and once again the dentist popped his head round. My old man was startled to see it was covered in sticking plaster. Once again the dentist asked to speak to him.
“When I opened my cellar door this morning I was knocked flat on my back by dozens of cats,“ he told my old man. “I’m scratched and bitten all over my body. But they killed a dozen rats. So here’s another shilling. However, if you find the bugger who put the dog in, I will make it half a crown.”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Answering a demand to “follow that man”, Mr Jack Jones allowed two policemen to climb into the bucket of his articulated shovel and lumbered them, pointing and shouting, after a suspected thief who was making off along the Swansea foreshore.
Hardly had they reached down and lifted the suspect into the bucket than the excavator began to sink into the sand. Five minutes later it vanished from view - and so had the police. The repair bill will be £6,000.
If I open a book, it is not long before the eyelids droop and I fall asleep. If I stay awake, I cannot remember what I have read. This is a great sadness. Although totally uneducated, I believe I may have read more books than most people from my background. It is certainly true that I have come to all life’s activities, from love making to gardening, by way of a book.
My unfashionable fondness for fox hunting is a result of reading the little-known comic novels of Surtees, himself a hunting squire and the creator of a Cockney grocer called Mr Jorrocks who is obsessed with the sport. He gave him the utterance on which I based my life’s modus operandi: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
I took the sport up when I was working on the Daily Mirror, a paper violently opposed to hunting. I did not wear hunting pink, only rat catcher, a black jacket, riding breeches, top boots and a bowler. The season begins with cub hunting; a distasteful activity, no longer practised, which trains the young entry of hounds. Because it must be carried out before the dew lifts, it takes place in the early morning. I worked nights so I changed into my rat catcher in the office lavatory, to the chagrin of the editor. I didn’t have a car so I had to go to the stables on the all-night bus where, in bowler, breeches and top boots, I was the butt of tired humour from other night workers.
Captain Milton, my hunting companion and the manager of the stables, lived off the land. Anyone’s land. He would only eat an egg if it had been poached. He was an enormous snob who at one meet watched the multi-millionaire chairman of Unilever, Lord Leverhulme, tip-tipping by, a tribute to Lobb and Pink, on a thoroughbred that must have cost several thousand. “See Soapy is out,” said Captain Milton dismissively.
He used to take me from the stables to the meet in a horse box and I was so in awe of him that, when the back wheel caught fire as we passed through Altrincham one morning, I didn’t dare tell him until we reached the kennels.
The wife of the Hon. Sec. was even more terrifying. It was claimed that when she returned from one morning’s cubbing, a groom had observed.
“T’owd ‘oss is sweating, Ma’am.”
“So would you be,” she is said to have replied, “if you had been between my legs since six o clock this morning.”
I haven't hunted for half a century and the older I get the less inclined I am to kill anything but...
Most hunts have an inner circle of Toffs; in our pack they formed the Tarporley Hunt Club, to which no one outside their circle was admitted. Only they were invited by the Master to wear pink coats.
The greater part of the Hunt wore rat catcher and was made up of farmers, tradesmen and young girls. It is they who are affected by the recent anti-hunting legislation, not the Toffs.
Tarporley Hunt Club members regularly helicoptered to Ireland, whither their hunters had already been exported the night before to await their arrival. That in itself is cruel because horses cannot vomit and therefore suffer badly in rough weather.
Since helicopters are noisy and would spook the hounds, visiting followers have to land five miles from the meet. So cars were sent from their homes in Cheshire to drive the members from the landing strip to the meet. So they can continue to hunt in the old manner as often as they like.
Little wonder that enthusiasm is not being shown in carrying out the anti- hunting legislation. It is the poorer subscribers who suffer, and the hunt servants - the smiths, the vets and the providers of fodder.
There is a further complication. Hunts collect dead stock. European legislation has made it difficult to dispose of such carcasses. Worse, foxes carry rabies and are increasingly invading urban areas where the pickings are easy. Pet cats and dogs are at risk. A baby has been bitten by one. It is only a question of time before a helpless child is savaged.
Attlee's Government set up an inquiry into fox hunting. It decided that hunting with hounds was the least cruel method of fox disposal. The agony of poisoning was indescribable. The problem with shooting was that you could not be sure of a clean kill. Unlike dogs, a fox's spittle does not have antiseptic qualities. It is unable to cure wounds by licking them and they often become gangrenous.
Hounds are bred to be slower than their quarry; otherwise there would be no chase. It follows that only old and infirm foxes are killed; an accelerated form of natural selection.
Bans on cockfighting, badger and bear baiting were NOT introduced for humane reasons. They were part of legislation passed at a time of industrial unrest to prevent riotous assemblies. Like the present legislation, a political device.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
My friend Curly Beard was always ready to help when a hunt servant had a problem. Inevitable the huntsman of the Cheshire should come to him when the Master complained he was not showing enough sport. Hunt Committees are ruthless in getting rid of huntsmen who don’t show sport. The neighbouring Wynnstay Hunt had a huntsman called Wilkin who had been with them for years. One bad season and he was out. And that meant not only out of a job, but out of a house too.
He should have gone to Curly.
“Cat’s piss, that’s the answer,“ he told the Cheshire huntsman.
“And how am I going to collect that?“ the huntsman wanted to know. “I cannot go behind them with a test tube.”
“Leave it to me,” said Curly. “Next meet is at Huxley. Meet me in the Farmer’s Arms at 8 am.”
Now I don’t know - and there was no way Curly would have told me - whether he had a vet straightened or whether he milked the cats himself. All I do know is that when we met in the car park of the Farmer’s Arms he had a cough mixture bottle which was filled with pungent liquid.
He and the huntsman walked over to the first cover and laid a trail from its centre across the fields, on either bank of a stream, and over several walls. Then we went home for breakfast and were back in the Farmer’s Arms by opening time.
The hounds met at 11 am and, watched by a scowling master, were shepherded off by the hunt staff. They were scarcely in the first field before they started to give tongue, Then they were off like lamplighters, leaving the field to catch up as best they might. Only the thrusters were up with hounds.
“That’ll do me,” said Curly. We had a few pints, then went home and were back at opening time that evening when the huntsman joined us.
“Decent day?” asked Curly.
“Decent? Never had a day like it,” said the huntsman. ”We had a four mile point and it took me all I could muster to keep up with the pack.”
“Never fails,” said Curly. “Cat’s piss.”
“Worth a guinea a gallon,” said the huntsman.
“Cost thee more than that,” said Curly. “Not easy stuff to get hold of.”
“I’ll not begrudge you,” the huntsman assured him. “Master were right chuffed. Bugger swore blind he’d seen a fox.”
ends
* * * * * * * * * * *
A reader from the U.S. of A, emails that I was lucky to have such an epic father. That is as maybe but from the Chief Constable’s point of view he was an epic disaster from the day he joined the force.
He was paraded with the other PCs on night duty, and patrol instructions were read out by the desk sergeant. As he finished, the station door opened and a head popped round. It introduced itself as the dentist from Parkside and begged to speak to the constable whose beat took him past the surgery.
It was my father.
“I’m very troubled with rats,” the dentist told him. “On your beat tonight, if you come across a stray cat, can you lift the lid of my coal cellar and drop it through? There’s a bright shilling for you if you do.”
My old man pocketed the coin and rejoined the other policemen. They asked what the civilian wanted and foolishly my father told them. As a result, the entire night shift went on a cat hunt.
The next night they paraded again. Once again the door opened and once again the dentist popped his head round. My old man was startled to see it was covered in sticking plaster. Once again the dentist asked to speak to him.
“When I opened my cellar door this morning I was knocked flat on my back by dozens of cats,“ he told my old man. “I’m scratched and bitten all over my body. But they killed a dozen rats. So here’s another shilling. However, if you find the bugger who put the dog in, I will make it half a crown.”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Answering a demand to “follow that man”, Mr Jack Jones allowed two policemen to climb into the bucket of his articulated shovel and lumbered them, pointing and shouting, after a suspected thief who was making off along the Swansea foreshore.
Hardly had they reached down and lifted the suspect into the bucket than the excavator began to sink into the sand. Five minutes later it vanished from view - and so had the police. The repair bill will be £6,000.
Saturday, 5 January 2008
Bobbies aren't always dazzlers
“Our Policemen are Wonderful.”
There was a time when that mantra was on everyone’s lips. Except mine.
My father was a policeman and came a little short in the wonderful line. He had been in the trenches with the Royal Scots at the age of 15 in World War One and the experience had scarred him. He was a drunk, a wife beater, a bully, but a total charmer to the world outside our house. He was as brave as a lion, always went on his own in areas where policemen went in twos for mutual protection, and was shot in the head by the IRA when he stormed a house in which they were besieged. I was still sewing his ripped trousers, the relics of fights, during most of his sixties.
During the war he was the driver in a dedicated unit set up to fight the black market. As a direct result, our house was so full of sides of bacon, eggs, legs of lamb and crates of whisky that I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer.
Trench warfare had freed him of any moral sense. He would steal sweets from Woolworths under the noses of the shop girls. When he was on night duty he would come home with hauls of antiques he swore he had found in dustbins. If he was late for work he would steal a car from his local pub and report it stolen when he arrived at the police station. We used a carving knife at home, not knowing he had taken it from a house where a luckless man had used it to cut his throat.
He certainly did not subscribe to the wonderful policeman syndrome, and how much less he would have supported it now when our policemen will only go on a crime scene when it has been made safe. If one reports a theft or an act of hooliganism one might as well shout it down a wet sock for all the reaction. In this house we have a sophisticated burglar alarm system to which the police will not respond because it is not on their approved list. My cousin apprehended one of a legion of thieves who had stolen eight thousand pounds’ worth of garden statuary by brandishing a golf club at him. When the police arrived they threatened to arrest my cousin for possession of a weapon.
Their own use of deadly weapons has resulted in the deaths of a number of innocent people, for which none has been prosecuted. A Chief Constable retires and draws a handsome pension. He later takes another job as Chief Constable but goes to law to defend his right to keep the pension from his other job. Other senior policemen resign hurriedly to secure their pension against possible future disciplinary action.
An innocent Brazilian is shot by police gunmen. No successful prosecution follows. The Omagh massacre has found no culprit. The only man charged was released amid criticism of the police by the judge. A worrying number of people convicted of murder have later been pardoned because the evidence was faulty. A number of very senior policemen have taken hurried retirement rather than face an inquiry into their behaviour.
When I was reporting on the Richardson Crime Family in the Sixties, the evidence against them was assembled in a rural police station because so many members of the Metropolitan police were in their pockets.
Sir Ian Blair, The Teflon Commissioner, and Richard Brunstrom, the North Wales Chief Constable, dubbed the Mad Mullah by the Daily Mail, a list of whose eccentricities makes entertaining reading on the Association of British Drivers website. Which of the two, I wonder, has done most to make a mockery of the proposition that our policemen are wonderful?
Some years ago, Dr Howard Taylor, an historian at Nottingham University, published the results of a four-year study into policing in the Economic History Review. It showed that the police have been manipulating crime figures to appease politicians, protect their budgets and increase manpower for 140 years, since the days of Jack the Ripper.
Nevertheless, when the police force was denied a promised rise of salary I was on their side. Not because they deserved it, but because I believe government should honour its promises. Indeed I am less sure that it has been earned.
I have known glorious exceptions because I have been lucky enough to live most of my life in villages, and village policemen ARE universally wonderful. Sadly they are a dying breed. Today’s meritocratic Chief Constables would never approve the personal fiefs which village bobbies made of their patrol areas.
The supreme example was my much mourned friend Ken Williams who doubled being a police constable in Bala, North Wales, and Treaddur Bay, on Anglesey, with a career as a TV personality whose HTV wildlife programmes were some of the best I have ever seen.
When Anglesey Aluminium bought a great swathe of the island to build a smelter, the land included a country estate in Ken’s bailiwick, Penrhos, which was teeming with wildlife.
He lay in wait for the managing director of the new project until he caught him speeding. The M.D. asked, as they do, if there was anything he could do to prevent the mark on his licence. Ken said there was, and told him about a plan he had to turn the Penrhos Estate into a wildlife reserve. The M.D. suggested he draw up a plan, no doubt hoping that it would be the last he would hear of the idea.
Ken stayed up all that night drawing it, and presented it to the startled manager before he left for work the next morning.
The M.D. sent it to his bosses, with the result that Ken, who had the tongue of angels, was called to London and so bedazzled the company’s parent Board that they gave him the estate. It is now the most successful wild life centre in Britain and respected throughout the conservation world.
Ken retired after marrying a millionairess and becoming the only serving PC in Wales to have a holiday home staffed with servants in Mombasa.
When they were married I said, “I suppose you will leave the police now you have married into money?”
“And lose my full pension?” he said. “Not on your life.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
You could have given my old man leprosy, just so long as it was free. When I was a toddler there was an outbreak of psittacosis, the parrot disease, and birds were being given away on every corner. So far as I know, my old man was the only person to have accepted one. And since he was on point duty directing traffic at the time, his action should attract extra marks.
When he was offered this great white bird with a beak like Fagin, he immediately deserted his post and marched home with it on his wrist.
We were living with my granny at the time, whose hatred of him reached white heat when he appeared in our lobby with his trophy.
He placed it on the back of the sofa, instructed my mother to feed it and returned to duty.
My granny’s cat had been watching the new arrival with great interest. No sooner had the front door closed on my father than it pounced, and what had once been an imposing bird became a cloud of feathers, fluttering onto the lino.
My mother was terrified of my father.
“What are we going to do? He’ll be furious,” she moaned.
My granny, who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and still beaten him off the table, said: “We’ll tell him it died and we were so afraid of that disease that’s going round we buried it in the back yard.”
Worked like a charm.
“Psittacosis!“ exclaimed my father.
Before he could be stopped, he took all the furniture into the back yard, even the leather bound cover of the Radio Times which was our only concession to gracious living, piled it in a heap and burned it.
At the time I spent most of my days comfortably contemplating the world from a dresser drawer which served as a cot. Though nearly two years old, it had not occurred to me to speak. There were two reasons for this. I could not think of anything witty to say and I was waiting until I encountered a grown up who spoke recognisible English. “Who’s a booful baby, then?” and ticking noises seemed the extent of the vocabulary of the people who bent over me.
However, the last hours had been full of incident and I felt they deserved comment. I spoke for the first time.
“Naughty pussy,“ I said with admirable clarity, “naughty pussy ate the parrot.”
Within two weeks my father had found us a council house and he never spoke another word to my granny to the day she died.
Me? I had seen the power of the spoken word. I could not wait to become a broadcaster.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Mr Ivor White, a road sweeper, found an unwanted extra at the bottom of his rubbish cart... an overweight policeman.
The episode started when two drunken holiday makers stopped Mr White to ask the way to St David’s station in Exeter, Devon. As he gave directions a police car drew up. The driver thought the men were causing trouble and got out of the car.
Mr White said; “We were in a very narrow part of the street. A bus went past. The two men moved to avoid it and the copper was accidentally knocked backwards into the barrow.
“He was a rather chubby chap and he got jammed in with his legs waving. The men, both Welsh, disappeared and try as I might I could not get the policeman out.”
A burly passerby gave a hand, but even with Mr White pulling the policeman’s legs and the helper hauling his arm pits, he was still stuck fast. By then his knees were touching his chin and he was “absolutely helpless” Mr White said.
“Then two youngsters said they could get him out. They lit a match setting fire to the rubbish underneath and promptly ran off. This did the trick. Somehow the policeman got hold of the side of the cart and heaved himself out.
“I have never seen anyone move so fast.”
There was a time when that mantra was on everyone’s lips. Except mine.
My father was a policeman and came a little short in the wonderful line. He had been in the trenches with the Royal Scots at the age of 15 in World War One and the experience had scarred him. He was a drunk, a wife beater, a bully, but a total charmer to the world outside our house. He was as brave as a lion, always went on his own in areas where policemen went in twos for mutual protection, and was shot in the head by the IRA when he stormed a house in which they were besieged. I was still sewing his ripped trousers, the relics of fights, during most of his sixties.
During the war he was the driver in a dedicated unit set up to fight the black market. As a direct result, our house was so full of sides of bacon, eggs, legs of lamb and crates of whisky that I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer.
Trench warfare had freed him of any moral sense. He would steal sweets from Woolworths under the noses of the shop girls. When he was on night duty he would come home with hauls of antiques he swore he had found in dustbins. If he was late for work he would steal a car from his local pub and report it stolen when he arrived at the police station. We used a carving knife at home, not knowing he had taken it from a house where a luckless man had used it to cut his throat.
He certainly did not subscribe to the wonderful policeman syndrome, and how much less he would have supported it now when our policemen will only go on a crime scene when it has been made safe. If one reports a theft or an act of hooliganism one might as well shout it down a wet sock for all the reaction. In this house we have a sophisticated burglar alarm system to which the police will not respond because it is not on their approved list. My cousin apprehended one of a legion of thieves who had stolen eight thousand pounds’ worth of garden statuary by brandishing a golf club at him. When the police arrived they threatened to arrest my cousin for possession of a weapon.
Their own use of deadly weapons has resulted in the deaths of a number of innocent people, for which none has been prosecuted. A Chief Constable retires and draws a handsome pension. He later takes another job as Chief Constable but goes to law to defend his right to keep the pension from his other job. Other senior policemen resign hurriedly to secure their pension against possible future disciplinary action.
An innocent Brazilian is shot by police gunmen. No successful prosecution follows. The Omagh massacre has found no culprit. The only man charged was released amid criticism of the police by the judge. A worrying number of people convicted of murder have later been pardoned because the evidence was faulty. A number of very senior policemen have taken hurried retirement rather than face an inquiry into their behaviour.
When I was reporting on the Richardson Crime Family in the Sixties, the evidence against them was assembled in a rural police station because so many members of the Metropolitan police were in their pockets.
Sir Ian Blair, The Teflon Commissioner, and Richard Brunstrom, the North Wales Chief Constable, dubbed the Mad Mullah by the Daily Mail, a list of whose eccentricities makes entertaining reading on the Association of British Drivers website. Which of the two, I wonder, has done most to make a mockery of the proposition that our policemen are wonderful?
Some years ago, Dr Howard Taylor, an historian at Nottingham University, published the results of a four-year study into policing in the Economic History Review. It showed that the police have been manipulating crime figures to appease politicians, protect their budgets and increase manpower for 140 years, since the days of Jack the Ripper.
Nevertheless, when the police force was denied a promised rise of salary I was on their side. Not because they deserved it, but because I believe government should honour its promises. Indeed I am less sure that it has been earned.
I have known glorious exceptions because I have been lucky enough to live most of my life in villages, and village policemen ARE universally wonderful. Sadly they are a dying breed. Today’s meritocratic Chief Constables would never approve the personal fiefs which village bobbies made of their patrol areas.
The supreme example was my much mourned friend Ken Williams who doubled being a police constable in Bala, North Wales, and Treaddur Bay, on Anglesey, with a career as a TV personality whose HTV wildlife programmes were some of the best I have ever seen.
When Anglesey Aluminium bought a great swathe of the island to build a smelter, the land included a country estate in Ken’s bailiwick, Penrhos, which was teeming with wildlife.
He lay in wait for the managing director of the new project until he caught him speeding. The M.D. asked, as they do, if there was anything he could do to prevent the mark on his licence. Ken said there was, and told him about a plan he had to turn the Penrhos Estate into a wildlife reserve. The M.D. suggested he draw up a plan, no doubt hoping that it would be the last he would hear of the idea.
Ken stayed up all that night drawing it, and presented it to the startled manager before he left for work the next morning.
The M.D. sent it to his bosses, with the result that Ken, who had the tongue of angels, was called to London and so bedazzled the company’s parent Board that they gave him the estate. It is now the most successful wild life centre in Britain and respected throughout the conservation world.
Ken retired after marrying a millionairess and becoming the only serving PC in Wales to have a holiday home staffed with servants in Mombasa.
When they were married I said, “I suppose you will leave the police now you have married into money?”
“And lose my full pension?” he said. “Not on your life.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
You could have given my old man leprosy, just so long as it was free. When I was a toddler there was an outbreak of psittacosis, the parrot disease, and birds were being given away on every corner. So far as I know, my old man was the only person to have accepted one. And since he was on point duty directing traffic at the time, his action should attract extra marks.
When he was offered this great white bird with a beak like Fagin, he immediately deserted his post and marched home with it on his wrist.
We were living with my granny at the time, whose hatred of him reached white heat when he appeared in our lobby with his trophy.
He placed it on the back of the sofa, instructed my mother to feed it and returned to duty.
My granny’s cat had been watching the new arrival with great interest. No sooner had the front door closed on my father than it pounced, and what had once been an imposing bird became a cloud of feathers, fluttering onto the lino.
My mother was terrified of my father.
“What are we going to do? He’ll be furious,” she moaned.
My granny, who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and still beaten him off the table, said: “We’ll tell him it died and we were so afraid of that disease that’s going round we buried it in the back yard.”
Worked like a charm.
“Psittacosis!“ exclaimed my father.
Before he could be stopped, he took all the furniture into the back yard, even the leather bound cover of the Radio Times which was our only concession to gracious living, piled it in a heap and burned it.
At the time I spent most of my days comfortably contemplating the world from a dresser drawer which served as a cot. Though nearly two years old, it had not occurred to me to speak. There were two reasons for this. I could not think of anything witty to say and I was waiting until I encountered a grown up who spoke recognisible English. “Who’s a booful baby, then?” and ticking noises seemed the extent of the vocabulary of the people who bent over me.
However, the last hours had been full of incident and I felt they deserved comment. I spoke for the first time.
“Naughty pussy,“ I said with admirable clarity, “naughty pussy ate the parrot.”
Within two weeks my father had found us a council house and he never spoke another word to my granny to the day she died.
Me? I had seen the power of the spoken word. I could not wait to become a broadcaster.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Mr Ivor White, a road sweeper, found an unwanted extra at the bottom of his rubbish cart... an overweight policeman.
The episode started when two drunken holiday makers stopped Mr White to ask the way to St David’s station in Exeter, Devon. As he gave directions a police car drew up. The driver thought the men were causing trouble and got out of the car.
Mr White said; “We were in a very narrow part of the street. A bus went past. The two men moved to avoid it and the copper was accidentally knocked backwards into the barrow.
“He was a rather chubby chap and he got jammed in with his legs waving. The men, both Welsh, disappeared and try as I might I could not get the policeman out.”
A burly passerby gave a hand, but even with Mr White pulling the policeman’s legs and the helper hauling his arm pits, he was still stuck fast. By then his knees were touching his chin and he was “absolutely helpless” Mr White said.
“Then two youngsters said they could get him out. They lit a match setting fire to the rubbish underneath and promptly ran off. This did the trick. Somehow the policeman got hold of the side of the cart and heaved himself out.
“I have never seen anyone move so fast.”
Sunday, 30 December 2007
A PACKET OF HUMBUG
Merry Xmas was it?
Me?
My ex-SAS doctor, who until this time I had looked on as a friend, put me on antibiotics which ruled out drink. Not only was I dragged back on the wagon. I was tied to the wheels with a grim-visaged Head Ferret driving the team.
I didn’t really mind. Drinking at Xmas is no fun. It is when teetotallers crowd into pubs and get us drunks a bad name. I shudder at the way they follow a sweet sherry with a milk stout, a whisky and ginger and a Tia Maria, then ask their friend, “What was that we had in Majorca, Blod?” and finish up with Sangria and an Alka Seltzer rub down.
I was tempted to ignore the blood pressure problem like my good friend Jimmy Godwin, head waiter at the Blossoms in Chester who was told by his doctor to give up gin and tonic after his first heart attack.
Jimmy did exactly what the doctor ordered. He gave up gin and tonic. Switched to whisky and tonic. He was much relieved after his second heart attack. He told me he had found the common denominator.
“It’s the tonic,“ he said, and not another drop passed his lips.
“Great waiter,” said Lol at his funeral some months later. “Lousy diagnostician.”
Teetotalism comes a bit hard, though I once lasted five years. Came a cropper when the Ferret took me on a coach trip to the Loire Valley. One of the excursions was to a vineyard.
The Ferret said I could drink on French Territory but not at home, which was OK for a bit. Then an American cousin and family historian, Warren Skidmore, discovered that our first ancestor, Ralph, was a Norman who came to this country after the Battle of Hastings.
Norman, I thought? That means I AM French Territory, and it was off at all meetings. Alas, not for the first time, France has been occupied by Fascists.
The Ferret claims that by May the drinking money I save will pay for a holiday in Moscow and St Petersburg, a city for some reason she is desperate to visit. Though she knows I do not do abroad, or even the next town, unless pushed. She reckons that when we have paid for a holiday for two there will even be enough left over to buy the Kremlin. But she always had an exaggerated notion of how much I spend on drink. I doubt if there will be enough to buy Lenin’s Tomb, which, the way things are, will be just the place to hold my 79th birthday party.
But don’t worry about me. Just make sure you have a Happy New Year.
The tenor Stuart Burroughs was a great one for New Year parties. Nice fellow. Never had a singing lesson, just began singing when he was in the RAF and never looked back. I know a story which puts him in a very good light.
Pal of mine’s wife had motor neurone disease. She was a big fan of the tenor who was coming to Bangor, North Wales, to give a concert.
She was too ill to attend a performance but my pal was determined she would be present at the rehearsal. We pulled a few strings and a place was kept for her.
Alas, traffic was heavy, manoeuvring a wheel chair is a slow job, and when they arrived at the venue the rehearsal was ending. As he walked out, Burroughs spotted the wheel chair and came over to have a word with my pal’s wife. She told him how sorry she was to have missed his rehearsal.
“Did you?” he said. “We can’t have that.”
He called back his accompanist and together they did the whole programme, just for her.
I was telling you about my friend George Thomas and his debut in the paddling pool world of light entertainment.
He was fortunate enough to do his air crew training in America. Before visiting New York on leave, he and his pilot were warned not to stare at people. To do so would be to elicit snarls of “Rubberneck”.
George recalled they were on the subway when a Puerto Rican mother settled in their carriage, accompanied by the fattest baby they had ever seen. “It was spherical,” George said, and you could see he was moved. So unusual was its shape that the pilot’s eyes were drawn to it, however hard he tried to look away.
“RUBBER,” snarled the mother.
“Thank God,” said the pilot, “I thought it was real.”
End
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church after Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
Me?
My ex-SAS doctor, who until this time I had looked on as a friend, put me on antibiotics which ruled out drink. Not only was I dragged back on the wagon. I was tied to the wheels with a grim-visaged Head Ferret driving the team.
I didn’t really mind. Drinking at Xmas is no fun. It is when teetotallers crowd into pubs and get us drunks a bad name. I shudder at the way they follow a sweet sherry with a milk stout, a whisky and ginger and a Tia Maria, then ask their friend, “What was that we had in Majorca, Blod?” and finish up with Sangria and an Alka Seltzer rub down.
I was tempted to ignore the blood pressure problem like my good friend Jimmy Godwin, head waiter at the Blossoms in Chester who was told by his doctor to give up gin and tonic after his first heart attack.
Jimmy did exactly what the doctor ordered. He gave up gin and tonic. Switched to whisky and tonic. He was much relieved after his second heart attack. He told me he had found the common denominator.
“It’s the tonic,“ he said, and not another drop passed his lips.
“Great waiter,” said Lol at his funeral some months later. “Lousy diagnostician.”
Teetotalism comes a bit hard, though I once lasted five years. Came a cropper when the Ferret took me on a coach trip to the Loire Valley. One of the excursions was to a vineyard.
The Ferret said I could drink on French Territory but not at home, which was OK for a bit. Then an American cousin and family historian, Warren Skidmore, discovered that our first ancestor, Ralph, was a Norman who came to this country after the Battle of Hastings.
Norman, I thought? That means I AM French Territory, and it was off at all meetings. Alas, not for the first time, France has been occupied by Fascists.
The Ferret claims that by May the drinking money I save will pay for a holiday in Moscow and St Petersburg, a city for some reason she is desperate to visit. Though she knows I do not do abroad, or even the next town, unless pushed. She reckons that when we have paid for a holiday for two there will even be enough left over to buy the Kremlin. But she always had an exaggerated notion of how much I spend on drink. I doubt if there will be enough to buy Lenin’s Tomb, which, the way things are, will be just the place to hold my 79th birthday party.
But don’t worry about me. Just make sure you have a Happy New Year.
The tenor Stuart Burroughs was a great one for New Year parties. Nice fellow. Never had a singing lesson, just began singing when he was in the RAF and never looked back. I know a story which puts him in a very good light.
Pal of mine’s wife had motor neurone disease. She was a big fan of the tenor who was coming to Bangor, North Wales, to give a concert.
She was too ill to attend a performance but my pal was determined she would be present at the rehearsal. We pulled a few strings and a place was kept for her.
Alas, traffic was heavy, manoeuvring a wheel chair is a slow job, and when they arrived at the venue the rehearsal was ending. As he walked out, Burroughs spotted the wheel chair and came over to have a word with my pal’s wife. She told him how sorry she was to have missed his rehearsal.
“Did you?” he said. “We can’t have that.”
He called back his accompanist and together they did the whole programme, just for her.
I was telling you about my friend George Thomas and his debut in the paddling pool world of light entertainment.
He was fortunate enough to do his air crew training in America. Before visiting New York on leave, he and his pilot were warned not to stare at people. To do so would be to elicit snarls of “Rubberneck”.
George recalled they were on the subway when a Puerto Rican mother settled in their carriage, accompanied by the fattest baby they had ever seen. “It was spherical,” George said, and you could see he was moved. So unusual was its shape that the pilot’s eyes were drawn to it, however hard he tried to look away.
“RUBBER,” snarled the mother.
“Thank God,” said the pilot, “I thought it was real.”
End
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church after Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
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