Historically some lawyers and many members of parliament have an unsavoury reputation which this week the parliamentarians have shown themselves anxious to retain.
It is interesting that the most venal trade of all, the veterinary surgeon, has escaped opprobrium.
I think I know the reason.
In my view only the atom bomb has been a greater threat to civilisation than TV. Thanks to that devilish invention, violence has become endemic. Our feral young have been encouraged to slaughter each other and aspiration has been replaced by insistence. If we see it we must have it.
The medium affects our judgment in many ways or industry would not spend millions on TV advertising nor would products vanish from shelves after a TV appearance.
Some years ago an amiable Yorkshire vet who looked after my wife’s family’s pets, published a series of moderately successful anecdotes. Anxious to bring out a collected edition, his London publisher hunted round for a title and eventually settled on “All Creatures Great and Small”
It proved a gold mine.
The publishing industry to a man, or more correctly a woman, scratched its hennaed head for biblical titles. I was writing my book on Ken Williams, the policeman naturalist, and I was solemnly assured that it would a best seller if I could establish a biblical connection.
I couldn’t and it wasn’t. However, an ecstatic review in the Police Gazette was read by a Yorkshire policeman who was encouraged to publish his own memoir. That became the TV series “Heartbeat” and I believe he is now a millionaire. It was par for the course in our family. My wife’s book “Prisoners of Santo Tomas” was the acknowledged inspiration for the TV series “Tenko”, though in admitting it, the TV company declined to pay a royalty on the grounds it was “in the public domain”.
The vet’s stories were also made into a TV series that depicted vets as lovable eccentrics who spent their lives with their arms up a cow’s uterus with never a thought about money. It is not sour grapes to say that Herriot had an enviable command of the cliché. The aristocratic eccentric, the wayward charmer, the try harder do gooder and the lovable servant. Surround them with a cast of thousands of well meaning rebel peasants, all speaking impenetrable treacle toffee. Place them in an enviable landscape of empty roads, free of caravans, EC lorries and mechanical diggers. Follow that with interminable series about earnest and often beautiful young people learning how to castrate a newt. The result?
A national perception that all Vets are Good Eggs, and probably Scottish.
Porridge eating philanthropists to a man.
How quickly the perception fades when one of them demands £40 to tell you the cause of death of a five shilling goldfish, as happened to me last week. Or when a pensioner neighbour finds a stray cat which is obviously ill, takes it to the Vet and is charged £218.
“Ah,” you will say, “vets were kinder in my day.”
Rubbish. I have a friend, a vet of the old school, an admirable man who would give you his right arm, and did in fact give me a C C de France split cane game rod. Often sought my advice on books to read and matters of literary style. Yet if I asked him the most innocent question about dog behaviour an iron shutter came down.
TV is at it worst in documentaries. Last week I watched one in which the presenter claimed that Dr Crippen was innocent of his wife’s murder and based it on “ truths” that he claimed to have discovered about the remains found in Crippen’s cellar, which were those of a man and not Crippen’s wife. He also claimed, as a matter for astonishment, that the Scotland Yard man, Inspector True, was corrupt.
I have no doubt Crippen was innocent. A significant number of murderers brought to book by Scotland Yard have proved to be innocent. In fact it was known at Crippen’s trial the remains were those of a man: the judge mentioned it in his summing up.
As to the revelation that True was corrupt, some years ago Dr Howard Taylor, a historian from Nottingham University, conducted a four-year research programme which showed that since the days of Jack the Ripper police forces have been fraudulently massaging crime figures. Until the First World War police efficiency was judged by the LOW number of detections and prosecutions. In consequence crime figures were kept below 90,000 a year and any crimes above that figure were “lost”. From 1880 to 1966 the Director of Public Prosecutions “rationed” murders at a fixed rate of 150 a year, with the connivance of the police.
In 1919 the Government sought for reasons to cut police numbers and budgets. Overnight the crime figures trebled.
Dr Taylor concluded: “It is clear that crime rates have been supply led, rather than demand led, and have little reflection of reality.”
Even traffic deaths, he found, had been manipulated so that they rose precisely in line with the number of extra policemen required.
“All the police did was claim that one sixth of the force was needed each year for traffic duties and the accident rate rose accordingly.”
When I was “doing crime” for The People” scarcely a week seemed to pass without a senior officer going to prison on corruption charges. During the investigation in to the Richardson Brothers’ crime syndicate I was given a tip off that one of the gang, a man called Duval, had kept a diary of his time with the gang,. and I was sent to find him.
I was told on no account to ring the Metropolitan police. So many of them were in the pay of London gangs that the Richardson investigation was being conducted from a rural police station in the Home Counties.
Some years later I was hired by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a celebrated lawyer of the day, to check the alibi of Hanratty who had been hanged for the A6 murder, despite insisting he was in Rhyl at the time.
Hanratty had described the room in a boarding house in Kimnel Street where he had slept. He said it had green shiny wallpaper. The police could not find such a room. When I went with Russell, the landlady, after some pretty impressive questioning by him, suddenly said: “There is a room with shiny green wallpaper. The bathroom. And if I am full I let it out to visitors.”
As Deputy Judge Advocate General to the British Army of the Rhine, Lord Russell was one of the chief legal advisers during the Nuremberg war crime trials held after the end of the Second World War. After our investigation, he was adamant that Hanratty was innocent.
Massaging crime figures? I have told here how the Lord Chancellor’s office at the time of the moratorium on death sentences instructed judges that murder charges were to be reduced, Because there were apparently fewer murders, there was no argument for the retention of the death penalty.
************************************************************
I hear the young shun the black pudding.
No one has less respect for the young than I do. But can this be true? Has the Last Pudding Post been sounded on that tastiest of snacks, the Dracula Butty?
Snack, do I say? Feast, rather. Begin the day with black pudding and you will be a stranger to the shiver. It suffuses the body with the thermal equivalent of a three-bar electric fire.
Summon up its sinew, let loose its blood of warmth, preferably with a back-up team of fried egg and riot shields of genuine Staffordshire oat cake. You are as ten men. Buttressed against the winter blast.
One does not wish to be chauvanist, but the ultimate black pudding is sold on Bury Market in Lancashire. I used to work with a Jewish photographer, who, though heavily disguised in case his Rabbi saw him, never objected to a detour via the pudding stall. He said watching Goyem queueing for a Vampire takeaway did much to strengthen his Zionism.
Distance is nothing. Melton Mowbray is the home of remarkable puddings; a Corwen butcher produced puddings worthy of a day’s march, though their shape upset traditionalists. Afficionados prefer them like pneumatic horseshoes. The Corwen pudding was flat like a Yorkshire pudding.
Amateur eaters might be surprised at the distances over the shopping Savannah the Black pudding Shikari ranges. Those who have signed professional forms with the Pudding Club - if you will forgive the expression - will understand. They would go to the ends of the plate for those delicious islands of marbled fat in the wine-dark sea of blood.
The only controversy is in the cooking. Some maintain puddings are best when lightly boiled. Others argue passionately for slicing and frying on the backs of bacon rashers, already themselves frying in the pan. They insist the heat striking through the bacon achieves the precise temperature to ensure the pudding is cooked as the bacon is turned. Others argue that plunging unprotected puddings into hot fat invites the hard shell, the sign of a careless cook. Still others boil and grill.
Wonderful dish for slimmers. Look at Christopher Lee, the definitive Dracula. Not an ounce of spare fat.
DANGEROUS CUTTING.
POLICE dispatched to a 999 emergency reporting a “bright stationary object” above a caller’s house soon solved the mystery The recording runs as follows.
Control Room: “South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”
Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”
Control room: “Right.”
Caller: “If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”
Control: “It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”
Caller: “It’s in the air.”
Control: “I will send someone up there now to check it out.”
Caller: “OK.”
A few minutes later, all became clear in the following exchange between the control room and the police officer sent to the scene.
Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”
Officer: “Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Saturday, 5 July 2008
YOU WERE MY SUNSHINE......................
Forced as I am, like that wicked old Cavalier Lord Rochester, from the pleasing billows of debauch on to the dull shore of lazy temperance, there is no point in dining out any more. Except at Chinese New Year, which we celebrated every year when we lived in Wales at the Sunshine restaurant, Menai Bridge, guests of chef/proprietor Louie Tong and Diana Leung.
Chinese food is better eaten with tea than wine. Its names are celebratory enough. Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); my favourite, Wun Tun, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living”, the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Traditionally, Louie Tong is Daai See Fooh, Grand Master of the Culinary Arts “combining the talents of a connoisseur, knowledge of a herb doctor, sensitiveness of a mother-in-law and the benevolence of a clucking hen.”
New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days in Wales, we all wore our finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. Happily there was never anyone there from the HSBC, so I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts.
Talking of which, I was never quite clear why we were invited to share this feast until I discovered I was a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
Mind you, the belly helped at the banquet, which included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”
One year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.
MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it was a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre. It is a very distinguished genre. Before I downsized my library I had a twenty volume set of British columnists which included Addison and Steele and the great Sam Johnson. His thundering rhetoric on the folly of defending the Falkland Isles was a great comfort during that foolish adventure by Mrs Thatcher to defend a land owned by British Coalite; a war, in which brave men died to save the right to be British of islanders we had just deprived of their passports, fighting an enemy whose officers had been trained at Sandhurst, with the RAF and in the Royal Navy,; an enemy armed with weapons we had sold them. A war for which we were so unprepared and all but lost that we had to hire civilian shipping to ferry our troops. A war the Royal Navy was desperate to fight in the face of proposed cuts in its strength.
In their book.” The Battle for the Falklands” Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins told how Admiral Sir Henry Leach in full Admiral’s regalia storme into a cabinet meeting and insisted the Navy could send a task force.
With a bitter irony the guns had scarcely been silenced before Goose Green ws put up for sale.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Connor, Mulchrone Ian Mackay and Robert Lynd (who founded their school in the Daily Dispatch) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the real Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls., through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Collins, only the detective novel has followed “as the night the day” a discernible succession.
Mulchrone , Connor, Mackay and Lind obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the four writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra, in which he correctly saw a love match
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place.”
And later:
“They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back (As it was his first wedding in the Abbey he probably welcomed the opportunity) ANYWAY IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have had to see Archbishop Ramsay and his profile of a prophet. I would also include Mulchrone’s most famous line “Two rivers flowed…….” But he denied authorship. About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect on the minutiae of life. His was the definitive description of a hangover: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was my favourite food writer. A garden writer par excellence writing “Boots Boots Boots” or boasting about his sunflowers. A truly Great Word War Wager, his invective darkened the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…….”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
Robert Lynd, perhaps the most elegant writer of them all is new to me. He comes recommended by another chum from Daily Mirror days, Colin Dunne, who has earned his own place in this Pantheon
Now Cassandra and Mulchrone stand side by side in brand new suits at my bedside, published by Barker. Only Lynd and Mackay are missing. Though not even Revel with his creative genius can match the first edition of Mackay, which gossips happily with first editions of Connor and Mulchrone in my garden library and contains an actual typescript column.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that, if my house caught fire, the first thing I would save would be her recording with Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Lynd, Cassandra and Mulchrone, and especially Mackay because of that original of one of his columns. I would give a King’s Ransom to own Lynd, Mulchrone and Cassandra originals.
You can get the books from Revelbarker@gmail.com or on any decent online bookshop.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
THE BIGGER THEY ARE…………………………………
Internal Revenue Service
Post Office Box 447
Bensalem, PA 19255
Dear Sir or Madam:
For over a year now I have been trying to get a payment of £60, a royalty owed me by Random House. They tell me they cannot pay me until I get an Individual Identification Number from your office.
I have made several attempts to disgorge such a number from you without success. I have sent you my driving licence and my passport, which you have returned with admirable promptitude together with a letter telling me that you cannot accept them, although they were unquestionably issued to me. I have offered you my NUJ life membership card, my BBC pass and my Fenland Fare Concessionary identity card. None has met with your approval.
Now you tell me you cannot issue a number because my passport is out of date. My passport is out of date, as I have explained, because I am 79 and have no desire to re-visit even those few remaining corners of the planet which your country’s foreign policy has not destroyed. A second reason I am not renewing it is that at my age I will not be able to get the insurance to which it would bind me because that would cost me more than the £60 America owes me.
Since the US is already bankrupt and deeply in hock (5 trillion dollars) to China and Japan, amongst other unfriendly countries, hasn’t paid its UN dues for years and owes millions in the East and Europe, I do see there is a national disinclination to pay your debts.
Fear not, I am not going to sue you for my £60.
Things could have been much worse. I could have been writing from New Orleans. As it is, I have an explanation for your administration’s incompetence in its “efforts” to rescue the luckless blacks. I only hope if they get out despite your efforts none of them needs an Individual Identification Number.
Sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
Creditor
DANGEROUS CUTTING………………
(from reader Chris Sheridan who says, No - of course it's not funny. But I did enjoy the community order sentencing)
Ian Noll, 39, rigged up a gas canister in a car to drive to a beauty
spot to kill himself. A court yesterday (mon) heard he had a change of heart but forgot to turn off the canister filling the car with explosive gas. Noll of Garth Villas, Merthyr Tydfil, lit a cigarette and then the car exploded in a ball of flame. He suffered severe burns to his hands and face. At Newport Magistrates Court he, admitted taking his brother's car without consent for his suicide attempt. He also admitted arson
Noll was given a 12 months community order and was ordered to
complete an enhanced thinking skills course. His licence was endorsed
for taking a vehicle without consent.
Chinese food is better eaten with tea than wine. Its names are celebratory enough. Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); my favourite, Wun Tun, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living”, the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Traditionally, Louie Tong is Daai See Fooh, Grand Master of the Culinary Arts “combining the talents of a connoisseur, knowledge of a herb doctor, sensitiveness of a mother-in-law and the benevolence of a clucking hen.”
New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days in Wales, we all wore our finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. Happily there was never anyone there from the HSBC, so I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts.
Talking of which, I was never quite clear why we were invited to share this feast until I discovered I was a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
Mind you, the belly helped at the banquet, which included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”
One year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.
MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it was a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre. It is a very distinguished genre. Before I downsized my library I had a twenty volume set of British columnists which included Addison and Steele and the great Sam Johnson. His thundering rhetoric on the folly of defending the Falkland Isles was a great comfort during that foolish adventure by Mrs Thatcher to defend a land owned by British Coalite; a war, in which brave men died to save the right to be British of islanders we had just deprived of their passports, fighting an enemy whose officers had been trained at Sandhurst, with the RAF and in the Royal Navy,; an enemy armed with weapons we had sold them. A war for which we were so unprepared and all but lost that we had to hire civilian shipping to ferry our troops. A war the Royal Navy was desperate to fight in the face of proposed cuts in its strength.
In their book.” The Battle for the Falklands” Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins told how Admiral Sir Henry Leach in full Admiral’s regalia storme into a cabinet meeting and insisted the Navy could send a task force.
With a bitter irony the guns had scarcely been silenced before Goose Green ws put up for sale.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Connor, Mulchrone Ian Mackay and Robert Lynd (who founded their school in the Daily Dispatch) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the real Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls., through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Collins, only the detective novel has followed “as the night the day” a discernible succession.
Mulchrone , Connor, Mackay and Lind obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the four writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra, in which he correctly saw a love match
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place.”
And later:
“They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back (As it was his first wedding in the Abbey he probably welcomed the opportunity) ANYWAY IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have had to see Archbishop Ramsay and his profile of a prophet. I would also include Mulchrone’s most famous line “Two rivers flowed…….” But he denied authorship. About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect on the minutiae of life. His was the definitive description of a hangover: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was my favourite food writer. A garden writer par excellence writing “Boots Boots Boots” or boasting about his sunflowers. A truly Great Word War Wager, his invective darkened the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…….”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
Robert Lynd, perhaps the most elegant writer of them all is new to me. He comes recommended by another chum from Daily Mirror days, Colin Dunne, who has earned his own place in this Pantheon
Now Cassandra and Mulchrone stand side by side in brand new suits at my bedside, published by Barker. Only Lynd and Mackay are missing. Though not even Revel with his creative genius can match the first edition of Mackay, which gossips happily with first editions of Connor and Mulchrone in my garden library and contains an actual typescript column.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that, if my house caught fire, the first thing I would save would be her recording with Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Lynd, Cassandra and Mulchrone, and especially Mackay because of that original of one of his columns. I would give a King’s Ransom to own Lynd, Mulchrone and Cassandra originals.
You can get the books from Revelbarker@gmail.com or on any decent online bookshop.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
THE BIGGER THEY ARE…………………………………
Internal Revenue Service
Post Office Box 447
Bensalem, PA 19255
Dear Sir or Madam:
For over a year now I have been trying to get a payment of £60, a royalty owed me by Random House. They tell me they cannot pay me until I get an Individual Identification Number from your office.
I have made several attempts to disgorge such a number from you without success. I have sent you my driving licence and my passport, which you have returned with admirable promptitude together with a letter telling me that you cannot accept them, although they were unquestionably issued to me. I have offered you my NUJ life membership card, my BBC pass and my Fenland Fare Concessionary identity card. None has met with your approval.
Now you tell me you cannot issue a number because my passport is out of date. My passport is out of date, as I have explained, because I am 79 and have no desire to re-visit even those few remaining corners of the planet which your country’s foreign policy has not destroyed. A second reason I am not renewing it is that at my age I will not be able to get the insurance to which it would bind me because that would cost me more than the £60 America owes me.
Since the US is already bankrupt and deeply in hock (5 trillion dollars) to China and Japan, amongst other unfriendly countries, hasn’t paid its UN dues for years and owes millions in the East and Europe, I do see there is a national disinclination to pay your debts.
Fear not, I am not going to sue you for my £60.
Things could have been much worse. I could have been writing from New Orleans. As it is, I have an explanation for your administration’s incompetence in its “efforts” to rescue the luckless blacks. I only hope if they get out despite your efforts none of them needs an Individual Identification Number.
Sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
Creditor
DANGEROUS CUTTING………………
(from reader Chris Sheridan who says, No - of course it's not funny. But I did enjoy the community order sentencing)
Ian Noll, 39, rigged up a gas canister in a car to drive to a beauty
spot to kill himself. A court yesterday (mon) heard he had a change of heart but forgot to turn off the canister filling the car with explosive gas. Noll of Garth Villas, Merthyr Tydfil, lit a cigarette and then the car exploded in a ball of flame. He suffered severe burns to his hands and face. At Newport Magistrates Court he, admitted taking his brother's car without consent for his suicide attempt. He also admitted arson
Noll was given a 12 months community order and was ordered to
complete an enhanced thinking skills course. His licence was endorsed
for taking a vehicle without consent.
Saturday, 28 June 2008
THERE'S A HALO IN MY BUCKET
I covered 48 annual International Eisteddfods at Llangollen. This magnificent festival began immediately after the war when a reporter on the Daily Post called Harold Tudor, at that time working for the British Council, heard a milkman in the town singing in perfect pitch as he delivered his bottles. Tudor thought what a wonderful idea it would be to hold a concert where all the nations in Europe could come to sing and dance and end their difficulties.
It was a bold concept. Tudor invited to the first Eisteddfod a German choir from Lubeck. There was much head shaking over the reception this recent enemy would get in competitions against their former victims from all over Europe.
Their arrival was a disaster. The conductor was robbed of his wallet in which he was carrying all the funds for the choir’s stay. Bravely they decided to sing anyway. As they assembled on the stage, the compere announced their loss and told the audience that ushers bearing buckets would pass among them and would accept any contributions. Within ten minutes the buckets were filled by performers from Britain, France, Holland and Belgium, whose countries had only recently been occupied by the German army.
It was not all goodwill. During the Cold War the performers from the Eastern Bloc were accompanied by grim faced minders; party members who forbade them to have any contact with the other performers.
I first came by train from Manchester to Llangollen. Change at Wrexham. My children were babies then; now they are middle-aged and even my grandchildren are grown ups. The only trains from Llangollen are privately owned and you can travel to the terminus and back in the time it takes to eat a gourmet dinner. The marquee that held the stage and was as hot as a gypsy's oven has long ago been folded away. In its place there is a three and a half million pound surrealist pavilion, opened in 1976 by the Queen, her second visit in only forty-three years. Like most recent public buildings in Wales, it is odd of aspect. It looks like a giant spaceman emerging from the soil.
I used to think fondly of the International as two tenors singing under an umbrella.
I began my first broadcast from the field likening its miracle to those Mickey Rooney musicals where someone says: "Why don't we put the show on right here in our own backyard?" Now who remembers Mickey Rooney, let alone the musicals?
In those early days national newspapers ran special Eisteddfod editions and sent at least four staff men to cover every cough. To the young committee we were as strange and exotic as an Andalusian Clog Dancer; but nowhere near as welcome. The first musical director W.S. Williams loathed us. He couldn't understand why we wrote about the competitors in bigger type than we wrote about the competitions.
There were some marvellous stories, though. Another choir of German children arrived with a song that had been written for them. It was an instant hit. Indeed “The Happy Wanderer” went on to break records all over the world.
There was shock at the news that a team of nubile Zulu maidens would dance bare-breasted. When it emerged they were all married to the lead dancer the non-conformist committee was appalled.
The fortunate husband was puzzled at the fuss. “In my country we have many wives and no girlfriends, You English have one wife and twenty girlfriends. Who is most dishonourable?”
A young Italian singer making his first wide-eyed visit abroad competed with his father’s choir in one of the first Eisteddfods I covered. His name was Pavarotti. Other international stars are honoured to appear at celebrity concerts and the standard of the competitions is awesome.
In the early days the choirs and dance troupes partied all night. You could see the fires of their barbecues dotting the hills which surround this little goose pie of a town. This greatest advert for Welsh hospitality is more formal now. The Llangollen Elders were shocked that people should enjoy themselves and the impromptu street concerts have disappeared. The police presence is heavier. I remember diving out of the back door of a pub and hiding in the shrubbery when a team of policemen arrived at a riverside pub after closing time. I thought it was a raid but when they emerged wiping their mouths after a brief period, one stopped by the shrubbery and said, “You can go back in now, Skiddy. We only called for a pint.”
Bored at one party, I crept out into the street in the early morning with a hunting horn. I intended to wake the town but no sound came. A policeman loomed out of the shadows, grabbed the horn, blew a triumphant “Gone home“, and handed it back. “Trouble with you bloody English,” he said,” no sense of music at all.”
I met Celia, my future widow at Llangollen. She was a Daily Mail reporter, newly arrived from London and had been sent to cover a visit by the eccentric explorer Tony Blashford Snell who was about to mount an expedition to discover the source of the Blue Nile. He had brought his team to Llangollen to train in white water rafting in the Horseshoe Falls there. Part of the training was to shoot handguns in the water to deter the fearsome Nile crocodiles before they holed their canoes.
Below the falls was a chain bridge and at its side a pub run by Charlie Charlott, a friend of mine, Every morning he considerately laid a table in the centre of the bridge with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. I always drank champagne in the mornings on the advice of Anne, Duchess of Westminster, who told me it was much quieter than Alka Seltzer. From the bridge I could watch the training in comfort.
Celia arrived just as a waiter uncorked my champagne, so of course I sent the waiter for an extra glass. As I poured our drink, Blashford Snell and his team swept into view round a bend in the river, firing into the current. At the same time a holidaymaker was crossing the bridge. She was terrified.
“What they doin? “ she screamed.
“It’s perfectly all right, madam,” I assured her, “they are only shooting crocodiles.”
Her husband rushed to join her. “Bloody heck, our Bella, what they doing, for God’s sake?”
“He says they’re shooting flaming alligators,” his wife told him.
“Crocodiles, “Celia corrected her.” There are no alligators in the River Dee at Llangollen. “
Celia and I have been married for the thick end of forty years and I still have not managed to have the last word.
DON’T CATCH MY PHRASE
I was angry to hear the phrase “carry the can“ used in connection with the presidential shenanigans in the USA. “Carry the can” is the property of my family, coined by my Great Uncle Jeremy, for thirty years the Earl of Dudley’s principal mining engineer, and the phrase may only be exported under licence.
Uncle Jeremy was called to give evidence in a court case at Stourbridge, Worcestershire. A lady was prosecuted for selling beer without a licence after a boy was seen carrying beer away from her premises. Her defence was that she brewed it for her son, the charter-master at a neighbouring pit who gave a daily allowance of beer to his men. Uncle Jeremy confirmed the boy was carrying cans of beer because it was the practice of employers to give every miner in South Staffordshire a quart of beer a day.
It was usually the youngest boy who had the job of “carrying the can”. Older boys ambushed the younger ones and drank from the cans which resulted in can boys getting their ears cuffed by the miners who got short measure. “Carrying the can“ became synonymous with punishment.
The Birmingham Post of 9 November 1889 poured scorn on the notion of pit beer:
“Are we to believe,“ it demanded, “that day after day, at the same hour, the spirit of loving kindness swells the breast of every coal master and contractor in the district and fills him with the same spontaneous desire to give a quart of beer to every man he employs? Preposterous!“
From the sixteenth century onwards there were so many Skidmores round Stourbridge they were identified in the Welsh way. There are those who might envy my ancestor Ben Skidmore o’ the Bonk. Unnecessary. In this case Bonk is the dialect form of bank.
So many Skidmores that they became the stuff of legend. It was said the devil started out with a big bag of Skidmores intending to drop one here and there as he jogged along. St Kenelm saw him and pursued him with a bottle of holy water. When he saw the saint was gaining, the devil dropped his bag near Stourbridge and all the Skidmores wriggled out. Nice to be so well thought of by one’s neighbours.
Another ancestor invented the phrase “Scotch Mist.” - but more of that anon.
DANGEROUS CUTTING (book review in the New York Times)
LET’S say you and your spouse haven’t had sex in so long that you can’t remember the last time you did. Not the day. Not the month. Maybe not even the season. Would you look for gratification elsewhere? Would you file for divorce? Or would you turn to your mate and say, “Honey, you know, I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we do it for the next 365 days in a row?”
That’s more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex.
Both couples document their exploits in books published this month.
Charla apparently had no intention of writing about “the gift,” as she euphemistically refers to it. She was simply a homemaker and marketing consultant, who in 2006 wanted to give her husband a special 40th birthday present. “I thought we don’t have anything else going on,” Annie said in an interview. “It might kick-start our marriage.”
TURNED OUT NICE AGAIN:
Alexander Buchan (1829 - 1907) was the secretary of the Scottish Meteorology Society.
He listed six recurrent cold periods 7.10 Feb 11-14 April 9-14 May 25th June 4th July 6.11 August 6.12 Nov
Rather fewer warm periods I am afraid 12-15 July 12-15 August
end.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
It was a bold concept. Tudor invited to the first Eisteddfod a German choir from Lubeck. There was much head shaking over the reception this recent enemy would get in competitions against their former victims from all over Europe.
Their arrival was a disaster. The conductor was robbed of his wallet in which he was carrying all the funds for the choir’s stay. Bravely they decided to sing anyway. As they assembled on the stage, the compere announced their loss and told the audience that ushers bearing buckets would pass among them and would accept any contributions. Within ten minutes the buckets were filled by performers from Britain, France, Holland and Belgium, whose countries had only recently been occupied by the German army.
It was not all goodwill. During the Cold War the performers from the Eastern Bloc were accompanied by grim faced minders; party members who forbade them to have any contact with the other performers.
I first came by train from Manchester to Llangollen. Change at Wrexham. My children were babies then; now they are middle-aged and even my grandchildren are grown ups. The only trains from Llangollen are privately owned and you can travel to the terminus and back in the time it takes to eat a gourmet dinner. The marquee that held the stage and was as hot as a gypsy's oven has long ago been folded away. In its place there is a three and a half million pound surrealist pavilion, opened in 1976 by the Queen, her second visit in only forty-three years. Like most recent public buildings in Wales, it is odd of aspect. It looks like a giant spaceman emerging from the soil.
I used to think fondly of the International as two tenors singing under an umbrella.
I began my first broadcast from the field likening its miracle to those Mickey Rooney musicals where someone says: "Why don't we put the show on right here in our own backyard?" Now who remembers Mickey Rooney, let alone the musicals?
In those early days national newspapers ran special Eisteddfod editions and sent at least four staff men to cover every cough. To the young committee we were as strange and exotic as an Andalusian Clog Dancer; but nowhere near as welcome. The first musical director W.S. Williams loathed us. He couldn't understand why we wrote about the competitors in bigger type than we wrote about the competitions.
There were some marvellous stories, though. Another choir of German children arrived with a song that had been written for them. It was an instant hit. Indeed “The Happy Wanderer” went on to break records all over the world.
There was shock at the news that a team of nubile Zulu maidens would dance bare-breasted. When it emerged they were all married to the lead dancer the non-conformist committee was appalled.
The fortunate husband was puzzled at the fuss. “In my country we have many wives and no girlfriends, You English have one wife and twenty girlfriends. Who is most dishonourable?”
A young Italian singer making his first wide-eyed visit abroad competed with his father’s choir in one of the first Eisteddfods I covered. His name was Pavarotti. Other international stars are honoured to appear at celebrity concerts and the standard of the competitions is awesome.
In the early days the choirs and dance troupes partied all night. You could see the fires of their barbecues dotting the hills which surround this little goose pie of a town. This greatest advert for Welsh hospitality is more formal now. The Llangollen Elders were shocked that people should enjoy themselves and the impromptu street concerts have disappeared. The police presence is heavier. I remember diving out of the back door of a pub and hiding in the shrubbery when a team of policemen arrived at a riverside pub after closing time. I thought it was a raid but when they emerged wiping their mouths after a brief period, one stopped by the shrubbery and said, “You can go back in now, Skiddy. We only called for a pint.”
Bored at one party, I crept out into the street in the early morning with a hunting horn. I intended to wake the town but no sound came. A policeman loomed out of the shadows, grabbed the horn, blew a triumphant “Gone home“, and handed it back. “Trouble with you bloody English,” he said,” no sense of music at all.”
I met Celia, my future widow at Llangollen. She was a Daily Mail reporter, newly arrived from London and had been sent to cover a visit by the eccentric explorer Tony Blashford Snell who was about to mount an expedition to discover the source of the Blue Nile. He had brought his team to Llangollen to train in white water rafting in the Horseshoe Falls there. Part of the training was to shoot handguns in the water to deter the fearsome Nile crocodiles before they holed their canoes.
Below the falls was a chain bridge and at its side a pub run by Charlie Charlott, a friend of mine, Every morning he considerately laid a table in the centre of the bridge with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. I always drank champagne in the mornings on the advice of Anne, Duchess of Westminster, who told me it was much quieter than Alka Seltzer. From the bridge I could watch the training in comfort.
Celia arrived just as a waiter uncorked my champagne, so of course I sent the waiter for an extra glass. As I poured our drink, Blashford Snell and his team swept into view round a bend in the river, firing into the current. At the same time a holidaymaker was crossing the bridge. She was terrified.
“What they doin? “ she screamed.
“It’s perfectly all right, madam,” I assured her, “they are only shooting crocodiles.”
Her husband rushed to join her. “Bloody heck, our Bella, what they doing, for God’s sake?”
“He says they’re shooting flaming alligators,” his wife told him.
“Crocodiles, “Celia corrected her.” There are no alligators in the River Dee at Llangollen. “
Celia and I have been married for the thick end of forty years and I still have not managed to have the last word.
DON’T CATCH MY PHRASE
I was angry to hear the phrase “carry the can“ used in connection with the presidential shenanigans in the USA. “Carry the can” is the property of my family, coined by my Great Uncle Jeremy, for thirty years the Earl of Dudley’s principal mining engineer, and the phrase may only be exported under licence.
Uncle Jeremy was called to give evidence in a court case at Stourbridge, Worcestershire. A lady was prosecuted for selling beer without a licence after a boy was seen carrying beer away from her premises. Her defence was that she brewed it for her son, the charter-master at a neighbouring pit who gave a daily allowance of beer to his men. Uncle Jeremy confirmed the boy was carrying cans of beer because it was the practice of employers to give every miner in South Staffordshire a quart of beer a day.
It was usually the youngest boy who had the job of “carrying the can”. Older boys ambushed the younger ones and drank from the cans which resulted in can boys getting their ears cuffed by the miners who got short measure. “Carrying the can“ became synonymous with punishment.
The Birmingham Post of 9 November 1889 poured scorn on the notion of pit beer:
“Are we to believe,“ it demanded, “that day after day, at the same hour, the spirit of loving kindness swells the breast of every coal master and contractor in the district and fills him with the same spontaneous desire to give a quart of beer to every man he employs? Preposterous!“
From the sixteenth century onwards there were so many Skidmores round Stourbridge they were identified in the Welsh way. There are those who might envy my ancestor Ben Skidmore o’ the Bonk. Unnecessary. In this case Bonk is the dialect form of bank.
So many Skidmores that they became the stuff of legend. It was said the devil started out with a big bag of Skidmores intending to drop one here and there as he jogged along. St Kenelm saw him and pursued him with a bottle of holy water. When he saw the saint was gaining, the devil dropped his bag near Stourbridge and all the Skidmores wriggled out. Nice to be so well thought of by one’s neighbours.
Another ancestor invented the phrase “Scotch Mist.” - but more of that anon.
DANGEROUS CUTTING (book review in the New York Times)
LET’S say you and your spouse haven’t had sex in so long that you can’t remember the last time you did. Not the day. Not the month. Maybe not even the season. Would you look for gratification elsewhere? Would you file for divorce? Or would you turn to your mate and say, “Honey, you know, I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we do it for the next 365 days in a row?”
That’s more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex.
Both couples document their exploits in books published this month.
Charla apparently had no intention of writing about “the gift,” as she euphemistically refers to it. She was simply a homemaker and marketing consultant, who in 2006 wanted to give her husband a special 40th birthday present. “I thought we don’t have anything else going on,” Annie said in an interview. “It might kick-start our marriage.”
TURNED OUT NICE AGAIN:
Alexander Buchan (1829 - 1907) was the secretary of the Scottish Meteorology Society.
He listed six recurrent cold periods 7.10 Feb 11-14 April 9-14 May 25th June 4th July 6.11 August 6.12 Nov
Rather fewer warm periods I am afraid 12-15 July 12-15 August
end.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Thursday, 19 June 2008
LAND OF THE USED TO BE FREE
I am not anti American. Indeed when I served with the 8th United States Air Force on the Berlin Airlift some of my best friends were Americans; though of course I would not like some of them to have married my daughters.
The Yanks - as they liked to be called- were warm, witty and loyal; pathologically generous, though sadly sexually obsessed ....which I find the defining American characteristic. This is after all the country that gave us the pin up, the knickerless film heroine and Frank Sinatra. Not to mention AIDS and during World War 2 a rapid increase in the incidence of social diseases.
What I am against is the Hollywoodisation of not only British culture, but their own. America is a country where everyone seems to want to be reborn as John Wayne; that draft dodging icon who sold his colleagues down the Red River during the McCarthy period.
Where New Labour is not aping generations of conservatives it is recreating the White House in our green and increasingly unpleasant land and aping that Land of the Unfree.
From America we have imported the tribal rhythms of Chubby Checkers and improved on them, if that is the word I want.
Yet this is also the land that gave us the world’s finest entertainers, the moving picture - at its height, in my view, in the animated cartoon and the spectacular musical; who gave us in Hemingway, an author who changed the language of literature and journalism; the great wits of the thirties, and so much else.,
Without American scholarship we wouldn’t have Boswell’s journals, a library at Yale devoted to Walpole. There are more of our literary artefacts stateside than there are here. But it’s a notoriously long winded scholarship and it has swamped our publishing industry. That can’t be good.
We seem ashamed of our own culture. There was a lot of good in our Empire; the D’Oyly Carte was a unique British tradition, abandoned by the Arts Council. Pageantry is going; blimey, even beef eating was illegal.
What is the attraction of American culture? Copeland, the Algonquin wits, Norman Rockwell the American musical film, Disney?. But they are all pre 1950
What is to be admired now about a culture that is symbolised by an unwashed hippie with flowers and lice vying for possession of his hair, riding a Harley Davidson to the music of Chubby Checkers? Ought we not to take a leaf out of the French book and enact laws to preserve the British way of life ?
The political press in this country was pretty united in criticising David Davis. It was obvious the inhabitants of the Westminster village could not understand why anyone would give up the privileges which abound in the neighbourhood on a mere matter of principle. That is when I realised we really are in a bad way and are yet again clutching to our bosom the worst aspects of America
TEN COMMANDMENTS
At the non-mystical level at which I can appreciate them, the Ten Commandments seem to me nothing more than bye-laws. We would only have to adhere to them to live civilised and happy lives. Or at least the last six.
I believe in a single creator because nothing else makes sense; but sculpture, swearing and keeping the Sabbath are all, it seems to me, matters of personal decision.
However, if we did no murder, adultery, false witness bearing or coveting other men’s wives, life, though a great deal duller, would at least be peaceful.
Are the commandments still as relevant to our times as they were to the desert tribes?
One of them contravenes race relations legislation. If someone took Moses to a tribunal for insisting there was only one god he would lose. The graven image ban would close all the art galleries and how could you swear an oath without taking the name in vain?
Are we to believe that the Commandments were handed down from heaven or was that a device for making them binding on primitive desert tribes?
Perhaps religion itself is old-fashioned? I heard a Rabbi on R4 dismiss the notion that God answers prayers and calling them superstitious juju.
CADS
Gladstone claimed he had known eleven prime ministers and nine of them were adulterers.
But can you imagine Mrs Gladstone being forced to go public on her pious husband’s nightly street patrols to save fallen women? “Save one for me!“ was the popular cry.
For my money the so-called Clinton scandals were the non-stories of the year, Entirely manufactured by the American Press with our uncreative media joining in the barking like starving street curs. Believe me, as a member of that media for half a century our eagerness to commit adultery would make Clinton appear monk like.
The British have their own Cads Cartel which began with Palmerston, included Wellington and is at present enthusiastically indulged in by much of the House of Commons.
Surely, as the home life of our own dear Lloyd George demonstrates, powerful men have powerful urges.
Jefferson’s daughter brought a teenage slave girl to the White House. And it wasn’t long before she was Jefferson’s. Palmerston harnessed naked women in silken reins and drove them round the drawing room; Wellington gave his name to a number of old boots. Didn’t make any of them less able. Disraeli said that if people found out that in old age Palmerston had fathered a child they would never get him out of Downing Street.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
Calling it a conflict of interests is putting it lightly. The Los Angeles Times reports that a closely watched obscenity trial in a Los Angeles federal court was suspended after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski said in an interview with the paper that he had posted sexual content on his site.
"Among the images were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as 'funny' but conceded that other postings were inappropriate," the LA Times reports with a very straight face.
HOW LONG BEFORE IT HAPPENS HERE AND I BECOME AN OUTSIZE OUTLAW?
Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.
Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.
The campaign started a couple of years ago when the Health Ministry began beating the drums for a medical condition that few Japanese had ever heard of — metabolic syndrome — a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol. In no time, the scary-sounding condition was popularly shortened to the funny-sounding metabo, and it has become the nation’s shorthand for overweight.
The mayor of one town in Mie, a prefecture near here, became so wrapped up in the anti-metabo campaign that he and six other town officials formed a weight-loss group called “The Seven Metabo Samurai.” That campaign ended abruptly after a 47-year-old member with a 39-inch waistline died of a heart attack while jogging.
Still, at a city gym in Amagasaki recently, dozens of residents — few of whom appeared overweight — danced to the city’s anti-metabo song, which warned against trouser buttons popping and flying away, “pyun-pyun-pyun!”
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
NY Times
end
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
The Yanks - as they liked to be called- were warm, witty and loyal; pathologically generous, though sadly sexually obsessed ....which I find the defining American characteristic. This is after all the country that gave us the pin up, the knickerless film heroine and Frank Sinatra. Not to mention AIDS and during World War 2 a rapid increase in the incidence of social diseases.
What I am against is the Hollywoodisation of not only British culture, but their own. America is a country where everyone seems to want to be reborn as John Wayne; that draft dodging icon who sold his colleagues down the Red River during the McCarthy period.
Where New Labour is not aping generations of conservatives it is recreating the White House in our green and increasingly unpleasant land and aping that Land of the Unfree.
From America we have imported the tribal rhythms of Chubby Checkers and improved on them, if that is the word I want.
Yet this is also the land that gave us the world’s finest entertainers, the moving picture - at its height, in my view, in the animated cartoon and the spectacular musical; who gave us in Hemingway, an author who changed the language of literature and journalism; the great wits of the thirties, and so much else.,
Without American scholarship we wouldn’t have Boswell’s journals, a library at Yale devoted to Walpole. There are more of our literary artefacts stateside than there are here. But it’s a notoriously long winded scholarship and it has swamped our publishing industry. That can’t be good.
We seem ashamed of our own culture. There was a lot of good in our Empire; the D’Oyly Carte was a unique British tradition, abandoned by the Arts Council. Pageantry is going; blimey, even beef eating was illegal.
What is the attraction of American culture? Copeland, the Algonquin wits, Norman Rockwell the American musical film, Disney?. But they are all pre 1950
What is to be admired now about a culture that is symbolised by an unwashed hippie with flowers and lice vying for possession of his hair, riding a Harley Davidson to the music of Chubby Checkers? Ought we not to take a leaf out of the French book and enact laws to preserve the British way of life ?
The political press in this country was pretty united in criticising David Davis. It was obvious the inhabitants of the Westminster village could not understand why anyone would give up the privileges which abound in the neighbourhood on a mere matter of principle. That is when I realised we really are in a bad way and are yet again clutching to our bosom the worst aspects of America
TEN COMMANDMENTS
At the non-mystical level at which I can appreciate them, the Ten Commandments seem to me nothing more than bye-laws. We would only have to adhere to them to live civilised and happy lives. Or at least the last six.
I believe in a single creator because nothing else makes sense; but sculpture, swearing and keeping the Sabbath are all, it seems to me, matters of personal decision.
However, if we did no murder, adultery, false witness bearing or coveting other men’s wives, life, though a great deal duller, would at least be peaceful.
Are the commandments still as relevant to our times as they were to the desert tribes?
One of them contravenes race relations legislation. If someone took Moses to a tribunal for insisting there was only one god he would lose. The graven image ban would close all the art galleries and how could you swear an oath without taking the name in vain?
Are we to believe that the Commandments were handed down from heaven or was that a device for making them binding on primitive desert tribes?
Perhaps religion itself is old-fashioned? I heard a Rabbi on R4 dismiss the notion that God answers prayers and calling them superstitious juju.
CADS
Gladstone claimed he had known eleven prime ministers and nine of them were adulterers.
But can you imagine Mrs Gladstone being forced to go public on her pious husband’s nightly street patrols to save fallen women? “Save one for me!“ was the popular cry.
For my money the so-called Clinton scandals were the non-stories of the year, Entirely manufactured by the American Press with our uncreative media joining in the barking like starving street curs. Believe me, as a member of that media for half a century our eagerness to commit adultery would make Clinton appear monk like.
The British have their own Cads Cartel which began with Palmerston, included Wellington and is at present enthusiastically indulged in by much of the House of Commons.
Surely, as the home life of our own dear Lloyd George demonstrates, powerful men have powerful urges.
Jefferson’s daughter brought a teenage slave girl to the White House. And it wasn’t long before she was Jefferson’s. Palmerston harnessed naked women in silken reins and drove them round the drawing room; Wellington gave his name to a number of old boots. Didn’t make any of them less able. Disraeli said that if people found out that in old age Palmerston had fathered a child they would never get him out of Downing Street.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
Calling it a conflict of interests is putting it lightly. The Los Angeles Times reports that a closely watched obscenity trial in a Los Angeles federal court was suspended after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski said in an interview with the paper that he had posted sexual content on his site.
"Among the images were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as 'funny' but conceded that other postings were inappropriate," the LA Times reports with a very straight face.
HOW LONG BEFORE IT HAPPENS HERE AND I BECOME AN OUTSIZE OUTLAW?
Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.
Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.
The campaign started a couple of years ago when the Health Ministry began beating the drums for a medical condition that few Japanese had ever heard of — metabolic syndrome — a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol. In no time, the scary-sounding condition was popularly shortened to the funny-sounding metabo, and it has become the nation’s shorthand for overweight.
The mayor of one town in Mie, a prefecture near here, became so wrapped up in the anti-metabo campaign that he and six other town officials formed a weight-loss group called “The Seven Metabo Samurai.” That campaign ended abruptly after a 47-year-old member with a 39-inch waistline died of a heart attack while jogging.
Still, at a city gym in Amagasaki recently, dozens of residents — few of whom appeared overweight — danced to the city’s anti-metabo song, which warned against trouser buttons popping and flying away, “pyun-pyun-pyun!”
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
NY Times
end
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Saturday, 14 June 2008
A.D of SEA
I read that famines have brought down civilisations all the way back to the Natufians of Syria 14,000 years ago. How come it is still happening to us in the 21st century? Surely there has been time enough to find an answer?
Aeons ago a soothsayer in a Paris estaminet, made of animal skin no doubt, warned his fellow customers about climate change. “Mark my words,” he would have said, “the time will come when walking to Leeds will be out of the question. There will be water from Calais to Dover. So much of it we will call it Sea because we won’t be able to take our eyes off it.“
No doubt he persuaded them to hold back the future by human sacrifice.
Nothing changes. The soothsayer exercised his power by pretending he could control his surroundings and was prepared to shed blood to maintain power. The British Government is always ready to lay on really spectacular human sacrifices, which are now called wars, for no other reason than to “sit at the top table among nations”.
The Queen famously did not accept the crown to preside over a break up of the United Kingdom. True it was several monarchs ago that Royal Families started wars to maintain power. But as her great-grandfather George V demonstrated when he refused to rescue his cousin the Czar from the Bolsheviks, abandoning the Russian Royals to rape and death, a little human sacrifice within the family is permissible if it gives job security.
I will go further and bet the other punters in that estaminet all those aeons ago rushed to press packets of mastodon chops on the soothsayer to finance his research into the cause of climate change. But it would be a little chap in the corner, planning a Wakes week in Blackpool, who said, “Why don’t we invent boats?”
Back to the cowry shells for the soothsayer. But he won’t give up easily. When he is running out of mastodon chops he will make another announcement: “The time will come when there are neither mastodons left, nor dinosaurs, and the only pterodactyls will be in Zoos. Then the world will starve.”
Once more he will be showered with mastodon chops until one of Eve’s kids remembers how her mother used to tell her how nice an apple was and what interesting people you met when you ate one.
Think of me as the chap in the cap because I know what will make this world a much more peaceful and gentle planet to inhabit.
Uninvent TV, which teaches us violence, greed and what fun it is humiliating people.
In my non-violent childhood we took our lessons in life from the Saturday matinee and walks with Romany. I learned my gentlemanly ways by a passionate study of George Sanders. The “goodies” in our Westerns wore white hats; the “baddies” wore black ones and were always defeated. If people of opposing sexes got into bed together, they had to keep a foot on the floor.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
You need a license to wear a sporran. Under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland people wearing any part of a protected animal need to obtain a licence. The laws have been drawn up to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers. Scotland News
A COLUMNAR SALUTE
To David Davis, that unique being, an MP of principle.
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DIET
More in wonder than in anger, a doctor I once had in Wales looked at my latest health tests and said, “I don’t know how with your life style you are so well.” And the nurse said, “That is easy, he bribes the lab staff.”
The doctor said I was a racing certainty for a heart attack. He was wrong there, as I discovered last week, but at the time I said I thought it a nice respectable way to go but I was worried that some interfering jackanapes would bring me back.
Should I, I mused, have DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattooed on my chest, provided I could find a tattooist who could spell resuscitate?
“What chest?” the nurse asked. And the doctor said, “I am never sure whether that is your stomach or a hernia.”
The nurse said, “Have it tattooed on your stomach, then you can have it in really big letters.” To which I replied that if she was at my death bed I would have no chance of getting a last word in.
Anyway, they told me about this scheme called a Living Will where in certain cases no one strives officiously to keep you alive. The doctor said the only snag was that you might collapse in the street and be leaped upon by someone who had just done a first aid course and was too polite to look in your wallet.
That really hit me where it hurt. I have this recurring nightmare that I find this diary and am just taking it to a police station when I am knocked over. A super efficient paramedic looks in the diary and pumps me full of Rhesus negative because that is what it says under personal memoranda in the diary I have just picked up.
That would be terrible, the doctor agreed. They would have killed the wrong man. I sometimes wondered if he had Irish blood. He certainly had a bitter turn of Gaelic wit, that doctor. "Don't sit down," he once said, “I don't want you dying in the surgery. Bad for the image.”
“Is it as bad as that?” I asked.
“Bad? Diabetic and eight stone overweight? I couldn't get better than evens on you getting home upright...."
He was he one who put on my records: “Growing old, disgracefully.”
ends
Aeons ago a soothsayer in a Paris estaminet, made of animal skin no doubt, warned his fellow customers about climate change. “Mark my words,” he would have said, “the time will come when walking to Leeds will be out of the question. There will be water from Calais to Dover. So much of it we will call it Sea because we won’t be able to take our eyes off it.“
No doubt he persuaded them to hold back the future by human sacrifice.
Nothing changes. The soothsayer exercised his power by pretending he could control his surroundings and was prepared to shed blood to maintain power. The British Government is always ready to lay on really spectacular human sacrifices, which are now called wars, for no other reason than to “sit at the top table among nations”.
The Queen famously did not accept the crown to preside over a break up of the United Kingdom. True it was several monarchs ago that Royal Families started wars to maintain power. But as her great-grandfather George V demonstrated when he refused to rescue his cousin the Czar from the Bolsheviks, abandoning the Russian Royals to rape and death, a little human sacrifice within the family is permissible if it gives job security.
I will go further and bet the other punters in that estaminet all those aeons ago rushed to press packets of mastodon chops on the soothsayer to finance his research into the cause of climate change. But it would be a little chap in the corner, planning a Wakes week in Blackpool, who said, “Why don’t we invent boats?”
Back to the cowry shells for the soothsayer. But he won’t give up easily. When he is running out of mastodon chops he will make another announcement: “The time will come when there are neither mastodons left, nor dinosaurs, and the only pterodactyls will be in Zoos. Then the world will starve.”
Once more he will be showered with mastodon chops until one of Eve’s kids remembers how her mother used to tell her how nice an apple was and what interesting people you met when you ate one.
Think of me as the chap in the cap because I know what will make this world a much more peaceful and gentle planet to inhabit.
Uninvent TV, which teaches us violence, greed and what fun it is humiliating people.
In my non-violent childhood we took our lessons in life from the Saturday matinee and walks with Romany. I learned my gentlemanly ways by a passionate study of George Sanders. The “goodies” in our Westerns wore white hats; the “baddies” wore black ones and were always defeated. If people of opposing sexes got into bed together, they had to keep a foot on the floor.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
You need a license to wear a sporran. Under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland people wearing any part of a protected animal need to obtain a licence. The laws have been drawn up to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers. Scotland News
A COLUMNAR SALUTE
To David Davis, that unique being, an MP of principle.
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DIET
More in wonder than in anger, a doctor I once had in Wales looked at my latest health tests and said, “I don’t know how with your life style you are so well.” And the nurse said, “That is easy, he bribes the lab staff.”
The doctor said I was a racing certainty for a heart attack. He was wrong there, as I discovered last week, but at the time I said I thought it a nice respectable way to go but I was worried that some interfering jackanapes would bring me back.
Should I, I mused, have DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattooed on my chest, provided I could find a tattooist who could spell resuscitate?
“What chest?” the nurse asked. And the doctor said, “I am never sure whether that is your stomach or a hernia.”
The nurse said, “Have it tattooed on your stomach, then you can have it in really big letters.” To which I replied that if she was at my death bed I would have no chance of getting a last word in.
Anyway, they told me about this scheme called a Living Will where in certain cases no one strives officiously to keep you alive. The doctor said the only snag was that you might collapse in the street and be leaped upon by someone who had just done a first aid course and was too polite to look in your wallet.
That really hit me where it hurt. I have this recurring nightmare that I find this diary and am just taking it to a police station when I am knocked over. A super efficient paramedic looks in the diary and pumps me full of Rhesus negative because that is what it says under personal memoranda in the diary I have just picked up.
That would be terrible, the doctor agreed. They would have killed the wrong man. I sometimes wondered if he had Irish blood. He certainly had a bitter turn of Gaelic wit, that doctor. "Don't sit down," he once said, “I don't want you dying in the surgery. Bad for the image.”
“Is it as bad as that?” I asked.
“Bad? Diabetic and eight stone overweight? I couldn't get better than evens on you getting home upright...."
He was he one who put on my records: “Growing old, disgracefully.”
ends
Saturday, 7 June 2008
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO GAIN BUT YOUR CHAINS
The Fens is a land of endless horizons and clouds down to the floor. To make any impression on this blank canvas man has created soaring cathedrals, housing estates where every house is different, enchanting streetscapes, magical gardens, fine restaurants and intriguing palaces. Nowhere in the country celebrates Christmas with such a blaze of civic lights and it seems that every village has its festival. Man has created a new art form called ‘Landescape’.
Molly Dancing was practised by farm hands who took a plough round villages to dance for the landowners. If they were not given money they would plough up the landowner’s garden. They blacked up their faces so that the landowners would not recognise them when they later came round seeking work.
Funded by a £125,000 lottery grant, the Cambridge Roots Project exists to revive such folk events. This year it is the turn of the Molly Dance, which is to be revived by primary school children.
There will be one omission.
The children will not be allowed to black up.
Gordon Phillips, who coordinates the project explained:
“They wanted to blacken their faces but they will only be allowed two black dots. We know its not racist BUT SOMEONE MIGHT PERCEIVE IT THAT WAY.”
I ws heartened by the much under rated John Major’s plea for personal liberty in The Times on Friday. Central to Government thinking since the Seventies when our Rulers felt society was breaking down, has been the subtle enslavement of the populace. Since Blair swept into power, proving the British always vote conservative as long as it has a different name, until last June, when I stopped counting, 2,685 new laws had been created. A new law every three and three-quarter hours, or seven laws a day. That did not include the 2,100 laws introduced by Brussels. Worse: according to a report by legal information providers Sewers and Maxwell, 98 per cent of the new laws were introduced by statutory instrument which does not require debate.
By definition, only law abiding people obey the law so the new laws which had not been sought by parliament served no practical purpose.
The way this monstrous mountain of legislation has been accepted is just one more example of the eagerness with which the British public is leaping into servitude. Political correctness, which began as a bad joke, is not only enforced by a swarm of laws: punishment also fits the perception of crime where no crime exists.
Existing laws are both draconian and absurd. It is against the law to stand in a first class carriage, there is legislation governing the importing of bed linen and the availability of free runs for poultry. It is going to be illegal for an adult to teach offspring to drive.
The RSPCA has warned schools they can no longer keep pets. The children might be too noisy, the lighting could be wrong and the care pets receive during school holidays may be variable.
If my children drink in the street, I will be fined. If I drink in the street, I won’t. If my son carries a knife, he could be imprisoned for four years. If the knife folds, he will walk free. Seventy years ago as a nine-year-old, I and most small boys had sets of three throwing knives which we carried in a sheath in our socks in imitation of the Saint, a fictional hero of the time. When I was 11, I was one of thousands of boys who wore a sheath knife as part of my Scout uniform. We also had bowie knives, knives with accessories for taking stones out of horses’ hooves and faux Commando daggers. As a teenager in a Highland Regiment, I carried a dagger tucked into my sock.
In all those years I did not attack, was not attacked, and did not know anyone who had been attacked with a knife.
Our behaviour was conditioned by a fear of authority. But in those days fear was considered an appropriate emotion and quite manly. Not, as it is now, “a bad thing”.
Parliament has removed all restrictions to juvenile behaviour. So what is surprising about juveniles behaving badly?
In our safer society I will be summonsed if my dog chases a rabbit. Possession of an air gun on the street is an offence, yet buying a gun has never been easier. In truth, it is not the armed stranger we must fear. So trigger happy is our police force that hourly I expect a motorist to be shot for speeding.
Thanks to European legislation, people are being fined large sums if their dustbin lids aren’t closed - and the waste disposal system is breaking down. This week the Government has hinted it would like to make it illegal to display cigarettes, which are themselves legal, or sell them in packs of ten.
Does that mean the greater the quantity you sell, the more legal it becomes? What good news to drug importers. How can selling ten cigarettes be illegal when selling twenty is not? How can it be illegal to advertise the legal contents of anything on the package it contains? And how can it not be illegal to profit by millions on the sale of a killer drug, when it is illegal to profit from the sale of other killer drugs?
There was an interesting letter in this week’s Spectator:
"Please let's not miss the nellie in the room, which in this case is EU Directive 2001/37 (“This Directive concerns the manufacture, *presentation and sale* of tobacco products in the Member States of the EU, in particular the use of warnings on packets, the prohibition of descriptions such as ‘mild’ or ‘light’, the maximum tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields”). The EU - as with so much else - is behind this latest nannying. Ministers are merely presenting Brussels' legislation as their own.
It is the dishonesty which appals. The Government cannot be honest even about the danger nicotine imposes. I have told here how statistics were managed to support the abolition of hanging, against the wishes of a vast majority of the electorate. The decision to ban smoking in public places must rate as one of the greatest victories ever for mass-hysteria. We were told this would save thousands of lives; how the evidence for the damage done by passive smoking is overwhelming; how, since bans were imposed elsewhere, as in Ireland, pub trade has been booming.
One study after another showed that health risks from passive smoking were nonexistent. One 1998 study concluded that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant".
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a "higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
A study by Insight Research showed that 67 per cent of Irish pubs have lost trade following the ban, and that for two thirds the losses have been significant. The only pubs bucking the trend are those which have created outdoor "smoking areas", such as heated patios.
With uncharacteristic honesty, the Government did admit that the number of units of alcohol which it claimed were harmful were figures plucked out of the air, with no basis in truth. Yet last week saw the launch of a massive and costly campaign warning us of the number of units which will kill us on the spot.
We are told the figures for drunken driving deaths are appalling. They are not. The statistics which are designed to make our flesh creep include the number of road deaths in which drink is a factor. That includes the number of drunken pedestrians who walk in front of a car; accidents where the victim, not the driver who caused it, had been drinking.
The latest flesh creeper is global warning. A cursory study of history demonstrates that climate change is cyclical. There have only been 25,000 years since the beginning of time when life could survive on the planet. Our coasts have more drowned villages than lighthouses.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this is that the lawmakers believe themselves to be above the law. People have gone to prison for less serious expenses frauds than our MPs commit with impunity. Yet they demand a £23,000 annual bribe to conform. This week yet another MP resigned because of “confusion” over his £500,000 expenses. He was the one whose job it was to seek out expense frauds. The Speaker of the House, whose own expenses have been questioned, led the costly court fight to keep MPs’ expenses sub rosa. The MP charged with overseeing MP's expenses used hers to pay her nanny's wages, two more Euro MPs paid huge sumns into firms in whuch they had an interest
Local Government refuses to return the millions it has made from illegal parking signs. A spokesman for London Councils told a BBC News reporter that to return the money stolen would be “an improper use of public money”. A defence for the Great Train Robbers?
When we train a dog we get it do all sorts of things which have no real purpose, to instil a habit of obedience. Clearly, it works with people too.
******************************************************
"The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons. They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you."
MAHMOUD ABU DUMOUR, A former detainee, on the thousands of American detainees who are set to be turned over to the Iraqi government.
INCH BY INCH I AM DISAPPEARING
Yet you will scarcely credit it, but she is still banging on about my weight. Who? The Head Ferret, who else?
“It is your cooking, bewitching minx,” I said, hoping to turn the attack. No use.
“It’s all that booze,” she insisted.
“Come, come,” I said. “I only graze in public once a week and take a modest slurp for the joy of having my fellow man around me.”
“The camel only goes to the watering hole every three months,” she countered with bitter cruelty, “but he can still put away enough liquid at one visit to last till his next.” “I often think,” mused the Moon of My Delight, “you display some of the characteristics of the camel.“
It was at this point I began to pout. Prettily, of course. Any hint at humps sends me off. Most pear-shaped chaps are the same. We cannot help feeling that if our humps had been on our backs and not fastened to our waists no one would dream of mentioning them. Much less patting them as though they owned them. Try patting them back, these indiscriminate patterers. If you don’t get landed with a sexual harassment charge, at least you get a dirty look.
As if being patted isn’t bad enough, it comes with the same weary witticisms. “Bet this cost you a fortune,” they say.
There is really only one reply to that and I offer it to come to the aid of all stout parties. You fix the patterers with a beady eye and you say: “If your parents had spent on your education what it cost me to achieve this contour, you would know that it is very rude to draw attention to other peoples’ appearances.”
Of course, the truth is that it is the burden of being an endomorph - round, soft and cuddly - as psychologists have perceptively defined us.
Better than being a squat, muscular mesomorph like Mussolini or a lean, bony ectomorph like Hitler.
Endomorphs of the world unite! Look who marches in our ranks: Sam Johnson, John Falstaff, Winston Churchill, Peter Ustinov, the glorious beer-stained G K Chesterton. During the First World War a woman demanded, “Why aren’t you out at the front?” “Madam,“ said Chesterton, “if I turn sideways you would see that I am.”
Our list is endless, but who have the ectomorphs got? I’ll tell you. Twiggy. Mesomorphs? Rambo. Rambo? Sounds like a dog food.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
The Sultan of Oman’s two Pipe Bands are a magnificent sight. They play their bagpipes in white uniforms on the backs of bedecked and braided camels.
They look spectacular until they open their mouths. None of them have any front teeth – the consequence of their mounts lurching unexpectedly and thrusting 18 inches of hardwood chanter into the pipers' mouths.
MacCallum Bagpipes, pipe makers from Kilmarnock, have come up with a chanter that flexes as the animals sway.
Stuart MacCallum from the company explained: “It’s a flexible plastic tube that bends as the camel moves and can be adjusted in length depending on the height of the piper. There is a padded bit on the tip for added comfort.”
Mr MacCallum has offered the improved pipes to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, a Scottish group which plays rock tunes and dances about on the stage, incurring occasional mouth injuries.
From ‘The Times’ (rapidly becoming the last of the real newspapers and I don’t care who owns it. He can be no worse than Beaverbrook, King or Kemsley. Monsters all.)And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Molly Dancing was practised by farm hands who took a plough round villages to dance for the landowners. If they were not given money they would plough up the landowner’s garden. They blacked up their faces so that the landowners would not recognise them when they later came round seeking work.
Funded by a £125,000 lottery grant, the Cambridge Roots Project exists to revive such folk events. This year it is the turn of the Molly Dance, which is to be revived by primary school children.
There will be one omission.
The children will not be allowed to black up.
Gordon Phillips, who coordinates the project explained:
“They wanted to blacken their faces but they will only be allowed two black dots. We know its not racist BUT SOMEONE MIGHT PERCEIVE IT THAT WAY.”
I ws heartened by the much under rated John Major’s plea for personal liberty in The Times on Friday. Central to Government thinking since the Seventies when our Rulers felt society was breaking down, has been the subtle enslavement of the populace. Since Blair swept into power, proving the British always vote conservative as long as it has a different name, until last June, when I stopped counting, 2,685 new laws had been created. A new law every three and three-quarter hours, or seven laws a day. That did not include the 2,100 laws introduced by Brussels. Worse: according to a report by legal information providers Sewers and Maxwell, 98 per cent of the new laws were introduced by statutory instrument which does not require debate.
By definition, only law abiding people obey the law so the new laws which had not been sought by parliament served no practical purpose.
The way this monstrous mountain of legislation has been accepted is just one more example of the eagerness with which the British public is leaping into servitude. Political correctness, which began as a bad joke, is not only enforced by a swarm of laws: punishment also fits the perception of crime where no crime exists.
Existing laws are both draconian and absurd. It is against the law to stand in a first class carriage, there is legislation governing the importing of bed linen and the availability of free runs for poultry. It is going to be illegal for an adult to teach offspring to drive.
The RSPCA has warned schools they can no longer keep pets. The children might be too noisy, the lighting could be wrong and the care pets receive during school holidays may be variable.
If my children drink in the street, I will be fined. If I drink in the street, I won’t. If my son carries a knife, he could be imprisoned for four years. If the knife folds, he will walk free. Seventy years ago as a nine-year-old, I and most small boys had sets of three throwing knives which we carried in a sheath in our socks in imitation of the Saint, a fictional hero of the time. When I was 11, I was one of thousands of boys who wore a sheath knife as part of my Scout uniform. We also had bowie knives, knives with accessories for taking stones out of horses’ hooves and faux Commando daggers. As a teenager in a Highland Regiment, I carried a dagger tucked into my sock.
In all those years I did not attack, was not attacked, and did not know anyone who had been attacked with a knife.
Our behaviour was conditioned by a fear of authority. But in those days fear was considered an appropriate emotion and quite manly. Not, as it is now, “a bad thing”.
Parliament has removed all restrictions to juvenile behaviour. So what is surprising about juveniles behaving badly?
In our safer society I will be summonsed if my dog chases a rabbit. Possession of an air gun on the street is an offence, yet buying a gun has never been easier. In truth, it is not the armed stranger we must fear. So trigger happy is our police force that hourly I expect a motorist to be shot for speeding.
Thanks to European legislation, people are being fined large sums if their dustbin lids aren’t closed - and the waste disposal system is breaking down. This week the Government has hinted it would like to make it illegal to display cigarettes, which are themselves legal, or sell them in packs of ten.
Does that mean the greater the quantity you sell, the more legal it becomes? What good news to drug importers. How can selling ten cigarettes be illegal when selling twenty is not? How can it be illegal to advertise the legal contents of anything on the package it contains? And how can it not be illegal to profit by millions on the sale of a killer drug, when it is illegal to profit from the sale of other killer drugs?
There was an interesting letter in this week’s Spectator:
"Please let's not miss the nellie in the room, which in this case is EU Directive 2001/37 (“This Directive concerns the manufacture, *presentation and sale* of tobacco products in the Member States of the EU, in particular the use of warnings on packets, the prohibition of descriptions such as ‘mild’ or ‘light’, the maximum tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields”). The EU - as with so much else - is behind this latest nannying. Ministers are merely presenting Brussels' legislation as their own.
It is the dishonesty which appals. The Government cannot be honest even about the danger nicotine imposes. I have told here how statistics were managed to support the abolition of hanging, against the wishes of a vast majority of the electorate. The decision to ban smoking in public places must rate as one of the greatest victories ever for mass-hysteria. We were told this would save thousands of lives; how the evidence for the damage done by passive smoking is overwhelming; how, since bans were imposed elsewhere, as in Ireland, pub trade has been booming.
One study after another showed that health risks from passive smoking were nonexistent. One 1998 study concluded that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant".
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a "higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
A study by Insight Research showed that 67 per cent of Irish pubs have lost trade following the ban, and that for two thirds the losses have been significant. The only pubs bucking the trend are those which have created outdoor "smoking areas", such as heated patios.
With uncharacteristic honesty, the Government did admit that the number of units of alcohol which it claimed were harmful were figures plucked out of the air, with no basis in truth. Yet last week saw the launch of a massive and costly campaign warning us of the number of units which will kill us on the spot.
We are told the figures for drunken driving deaths are appalling. They are not. The statistics which are designed to make our flesh creep include the number of road deaths in which drink is a factor. That includes the number of drunken pedestrians who walk in front of a car; accidents where the victim, not the driver who caused it, had been drinking.
The latest flesh creeper is global warning. A cursory study of history demonstrates that climate change is cyclical. There have only been 25,000 years since the beginning of time when life could survive on the planet. Our coasts have more drowned villages than lighthouses.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this is that the lawmakers believe themselves to be above the law. People have gone to prison for less serious expenses frauds than our MPs commit with impunity. Yet they demand a £23,000 annual bribe to conform. This week yet another MP resigned because of “confusion” over his £500,000 expenses. He was the one whose job it was to seek out expense frauds. The Speaker of the House, whose own expenses have been questioned, led the costly court fight to keep MPs’ expenses sub rosa. The MP charged with overseeing MP's expenses used hers to pay her nanny's wages, two more Euro MPs paid huge sumns into firms in whuch they had an interest
Local Government refuses to return the millions it has made from illegal parking signs. A spokesman for London Councils told a BBC News reporter that to return the money stolen would be “an improper use of public money”. A defence for the Great Train Robbers?
When we train a dog we get it do all sorts of things which have no real purpose, to instil a habit of obedience. Clearly, it works with people too.
******************************************************
"The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons. They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you."
MAHMOUD ABU DUMOUR, A former detainee, on the thousands of American detainees who are set to be turned over to the Iraqi government.
INCH BY INCH I AM DISAPPEARING
Yet you will scarcely credit it, but she is still banging on about my weight. Who? The Head Ferret, who else?
“It is your cooking, bewitching minx,” I said, hoping to turn the attack. No use.
“It’s all that booze,” she insisted.
“Come, come,” I said. “I only graze in public once a week and take a modest slurp for the joy of having my fellow man around me.”
“The camel only goes to the watering hole every three months,” she countered with bitter cruelty, “but he can still put away enough liquid at one visit to last till his next.” “I often think,” mused the Moon of My Delight, “you display some of the characteristics of the camel.“
It was at this point I began to pout. Prettily, of course. Any hint at humps sends me off. Most pear-shaped chaps are the same. We cannot help feeling that if our humps had been on our backs and not fastened to our waists no one would dream of mentioning them. Much less patting them as though they owned them. Try patting them back, these indiscriminate patterers. If you don’t get landed with a sexual harassment charge, at least you get a dirty look.
As if being patted isn’t bad enough, it comes with the same weary witticisms. “Bet this cost you a fortune,” they say.
There is really only one reply to that and I offer it to come to the aid of all stout parties. You fix the patterers with a beady eye and you say: “If your parents had spent on your education what it cost me to achieve this contour, you would know that it is very rude to draw attention to other peoples’ appearances.”
Of course, the truth is that it is the burden of being an endomorph - round, soft and cuddly - as psychologists have perceptively defined us.
Better than being a squat, muscular mesomorph like Mussolini or a lean, bony ectomorph like Hitler.
Endomorphs of the world unite! Look who marches in our ranks: Sam Johnson, John Falstaff, Winston Churchill, Peter Ustinov, the glorious beer-stained G K Chesterton. During the First World War a woman demanded, “Why aren’t you out at the front?” “Madam,“ said Chesterton, “if I turn sideways you would see that I am.”
Our list is endless, but who have the ectomorphs got? I’ll tell you. Twiggy. Mesomorphs? Rambo. Rambo? Sounds like a dog food.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
The Sultan of Oman’s two Pipe Bands are a magnificent sight. They play their bagpipes in white uniforms on the backs of bedecked and braided camels.
They look spectacular until they open their mouths. None of them have any front teeth – the consequence of their mounts lurching unexpectedly and thrusting 18 inches of hardwood chanter into the pipers' mouths.
MacCallum Bagpipes, pipe makers from Kilmarnock, have come up with a chanter that flexes as the animals sway.
Stuart MacCallum from the company explained: “It’s a flexible plastic tube that bends as the camel moves and can be adjusted in length depending on the height of the piper. There is a padded bit on the tip for added comfort.”
Mr MacCallum has offered the improved pipes to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, a Scottish group which plays rock tunes and dances about on the stage, incurring occasional mouth injuries.
From ‘The Times’ (rapidly becoming the last of the real newspapers and I don’t care who owns it. He can be no worse than Beaverbrook, King or Kemsley. Monsters all.)And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Friday, 30 May 2008
The Wages of Gin........................."May I play through, my husband is dying?"
If you are going to be ill it is important to pick the most convenient place. So I came over all queer in my local clinic, surrounded by the nurses who, three times a week, dress my Henry VIII ulcerous legs. They produced an oxygen cylinder and a doctor, took my house keys and rang a neighbour - because Celia, the Head Ferret was, of course, playing golf near Cambridge in the lovely Gog Magog hills.
The doctor was followed by a paramedic in green battle dress, festooned with stay-alive kit. A large man, who, in my confused state, I took to be the Jolly Green Giant. He was immediately joined by an ambulance crew, two delightful ladies still a little startled because the last patient they had gone to pick up had told them to F…. off.
These poor girls began the paperwork on my case as the ambulance left the surgery and had just completed it as we drew into Peterborough District Hospital half an hour later.
My neighbours meanwhile were slightly put out because, having gone to enormous trouble to find out where the Head Ferret was playing, they rang the club house to break the bad news and were told: “Could you ring back in ten minutes, she is just on the last hole?”
Peterborough District Hospital was a revelation. It shone with cleanliness and on every wall there was a hygienic hand spray with a notice to medical staff: “Do not pass this”. On the ward, constant hand washing. It was like kibitzing on a convention of Uriah Heeps but very comforting since I have lost two friends to MRSA.
I was disconcerted by a notice on the lift which said: “If you are not well, do not enter this ward.” I pointed out to the ambulance crew that this pretty well ruled me out but they said not to worry, it was for visitors, not patients. Incredibly, suffering from infectious diseases does not suggest to some visitors that their visit is unwise.
I had not been tucked up in bed long when the Head Ferret arrived, with the observation that it would have been much more convenient if I had gone to Addenbrookes which she could see from the 18th tee. It was reassuring to learn that she had dropped off at home to feed the dog.
Plainly this had exhausted her. Because when the first doctor arrived to assess me, Celia was relaxing on the bed and I was sitting in the visitor’s chair, where I should not have been, according to the notice, because I was not feeling well.
The process from admission to release took seven hours but this is in no way a criticism of the doctors and nurses. There were only two doctors to deal with sixteen patients, who were all emergencies, and in the wards a nurse to every sixteen beds. The two doctors on the assessment ward were also responsible for the other patients in the wards surrounding.
When I commiserated with the Registrar on being so short staffed, she put me right at once: “We are not short staffed,” she said, and she had a smile which lit the ward. “That is the establishment for the wards.”
So the next time you complain about the Health Service, remember the Registrar with the smile that lit the ward, the ambulance driver a patient told to F… off, the overworked nurses, cheerily washing their hands at every conceivable moment, rushed off their feet and still caring and kind.
We may have a lousy Health Service but, by God, we should be grateful for the people who staff it.
P.S. Friends will be relieved to hear I cannot die before next weekend: Celia, The Head Ferret, has a very full golf programme. But she has instructed me to be taken ill in the morning when, with luck, she will be at home. Being ill in the afternoon is the sort of thoughtless thing that husbands do
YOU THINK IT IS BAD HERE?
In Germany, a Volvo dealer has been ordered by the court to compensate a buyer around 20,000 euros because the man’s feet were too big to be able to use the new vehicle’s accelerator pedal properly. The money was to allow him to buy snug sports shoes and to compensate for him having to change in and out of them every time he drove the car.
In Sweden, they are proposing to install pedestrian walk control lights in the streets, which show both a man and a woman. This is to provide better gender equality. I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women can walk across the intersections whenever they like as the red lights only show that men cannot walk – or am I being blonde?
In Sweden (again), they passed a law in 1999 that punishes the buyers of sexual favours with up to six months in jail, but they do not prosecute the prostitutes. When you think about it, it probably makes a lot of sense.
At the White House last week, President George Bush signed a proclamation declaring Malaria Awareness week. There was an awkward moment during the ceremony when Bush said: “This is a great day for all Malarians.”
BRUGES BEER CAPITOL OF THE WORLD
A friend has called Bruges the most boring city in Europe. Such sauce! What bacon is to the butty, MPs to mortgages and new kitchens, Bruges is to the beer house. If you gave up sleep, you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over a year.
The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden in which customers are ignored. Burghers who went on opening night are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it, with generous saucers of cheese.
Then there is “t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro.
The “Little Bear” has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale, the walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world.
It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel, but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults - and even then you would fail a test for walking upright.
The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.
What can I tell you? The amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy run a Beer Academy in the back room, where they share their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I went. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier” means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.
If they had sprayed Iraq with Trappist beer Baghdad could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s wise words, here is ale would make a cat speak.
Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I hope to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground. To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying."
MARK V. ROSENKER, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Quoted in the NY Herald Tribune.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
The doctor was followed by a paramedic in green battle dress, festooned with stay-alive kit. A large man, who, in my confused state, I took to be the Jolly Green Giant. He was immediately joined by an ambulance crew, two delightful ladies still a little startled because the last patient they had gone to pick up had told them to F…. off.
These poor girls began the paperwork on my case as the ambulance left the surgery and had just completed it as we drew into Peterborough District Hospital half an hour later.
My neighbours meanwhile were slightly put out because, having gone to enormous trouble to find out where the Head Ferret was playing, they rang the club house to break the bad news and were told: “Could you ring back in ten minutes, she is just on the last hole?”
Peterborough District Hospital was a revelation. It shone with cleanliness and on every wall there was a hygienic hand spray with a notice to medical staff: “Do not pass this”. On the ward, constant hand washing. It was like kibitzing on a convention of Uriah Heeps but very comforting since I have lost two friends to MRSA.
I was disconcerted by a notice on the lift which said: “If you are not well, do not enter this ward.” I pointed out to the ambulance crew that this pretty well ruled me out but they said not to worry, it was for visitors, not patients. Incredibly, suffering from infectious diseases does not suggest to some visitors that their visit is unwise.
I had not been tucked up in bed long when the Head Ferret arrived, with the observation that it would have been much more convenient if I had gone to Addenbrookes which she could see from the 18th tee. It was reassuring to learn that she had dropped off at home to feed the dog.
Plainly this had exhausted her. Because when the first doctor arrived to assess me, Celia was relaxing on the bed and I was sitting in the visitor’s chair, where I should not have been, according to the notice, because I was not feeling well.
The process from admission to release took seven hours but this is in no way a criticism of the doctors and nurses. There were only two doctors to deal with sixteen patients, who were all emergencies, and in the wards a nurse to every sixteen beds. The two doctors on the assessment ward were also responsible for the other patients in the wards surrounding.
When I commiserated with the Registrar on being so short staffed, she put me right at once: “We are not short staffed,” she said, and she had a smile which lit the ward. “That is the establishment for the wards.”
So the next time you complain about the Health Service, remember the Registrar with the smile that lit the ward, the ambulance driver a patient told to F… off, the overworked nurses, cheerily washing their hands at every conceivable moment, rushed off their feet and still caring and kind.
We may have a lousy Health Service but, by God, we should be grateful for the people who staff it.
P.S. Friends will be relieved to hear I cannot die before next weekend: Celia, The Head Ferret, has a very full golf programme. But she has instructed me to be taken ill in the morning when, with luck, she will be at home. Being ill in the afternoon is the sort of thoughtless thing that husbands do
YOU THINK IT IS BAD HERE?
In Germany, a Volvo dealer has been ordered by the court to compensate a buyer around 20,000 euros because the man’s feet were too big to be able to use the new vehicle’s accelerator pedal properly. The money was to allow him to buy snug sports shoes and to compensate for him having to change in and out of them every time he drove the car.
In Sweden, they are proposing to install pedestrian walk control lights in the streets, which show both a man and a woman. This is to provide better gender equality. I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women can walk across the intersections whenever they like as the red lights only show that men cannot walk – or am I being blonde?
In Sweden (again), they passed a law in 1999 that punishes the buyers of sexual favours with up to six months in jail, but they do not prosecute the prostitutes. When you think about it, it probably makes a lot of sense.
At the White House last week, President George Bush signed a proclamation declaring Malaria Awareness week. There was an awkward moment during the ceremony when Bush said: “This is a great day for all Malarians.”
BRUGES BEER CAPITOL OF THE WORLD
A friend has called Bruges the most boring city in Europe. Such sauce! What bacon is to the butty, MPs to mortgages and new kitchens, Bruges is to the beer house. If you gave up sleep, you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over a year.
The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden in which customers are ignored. Burghers who went on opening night are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it, with generous saucers of cheese.
Then there is “t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro.
The “Little Bear” has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale, the walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world.
It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel, but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults - and even then you would fail a test for walking upright.
The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.
What can I tell you? The amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy run a Beer Academy in the back room, where they share their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I went. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier” means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.
If they had sprayed Iraq with Trappist beer Baghdad could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s wise words, here is ale would make a cat speak.
Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I hope to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground. To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying."
MARK V. ROSENKER, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Quoted in the NY Herald Tribune.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
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