The Ross-ing disgrace

A great week for those of us who believe the least interesting things on TV happen on the screen.

The Ross-Brand saga was disgraceful.  What worried me most was the insistence of  BBC "suits" that this untalented pair were brilliant broadcasters on the top of their game.  If that is so, I assume the BBC is now playing in the Fourth Division.

 

Their defenders claimed the massive reaction to their obscene telephone call  was the result of a Daily Mail campaign.  Rubbish.  It was the BBC which kept it in the public eye by constantly showing clips and transcripts of the item.  The News Division carries a lot of clout and someone was getting his own back.  Ross's £18 million contract upset a lot of broadcasters and his claim to be worth more than a thousand jounalists was unwise.

The resignation of the Controller has been heralded as a noble gesture.  It was an act dictated by petulance.  She had sought to protect her staff by threatening to resign if they were disciplined.  Dangerous tactic. She might have been wise to remember the former Director General Greg Dyke who has never quite got over having his own dramatic resignation accepted.

Brand has form.  In 2002 he was kicked off a radio programme for reading pornographic material.  The two pretend to be yobs but Ross is a graduate and Brand was privately educated at the Conte School. 

If possible, the TV critics are worse than the programmes.  After a documentary by the former Deputy Prime Minister, one Billen, in The Times, mocked the luckless John Prescott and suggested that his wife Pauline had been less than tactful in drawing attention to the fact that Lord Onslow, their host at a luncheon, had left his flies undone.  Had it been Prescott and not Onslow who appeared on TV  with his flies unbuttoned what a glorious time would Billen have had with it.  

Had it been Onslow and not Prescott who, according to Billen,  had been "an able  minister" how joyfully and not grudgingly would Billen have recorded it.  Had it been Prescott and not Onslow who repeatedly used the 'f' word on TV in the presence of ladies, his guests at the luncheon, how Billen would have sneered.

Idiots do not become Deputy Prime Ministers or perhaps a greater number of aristocratic Old Etonians would achieve that office.

What we saw was a devoted couple who had got over their matrimonial problems enjoying the sort of marriage which is rare in the political classes.  We saw a glamorous wife, proud of her working class origins, of whom any husband would be proud.  And a bruiser of a  husband who worked hard as a union official and, by dint of long nights of after work study, got to Ruskin College and was awarded a degree in Economics.  Certainly the most grown up of the Trinity which led Labour and one of the few socialists in the cabinet.

Finally, why has the BBC sent so many of its "stars" to America to cover the Presidential election?  The BBC always believed in "oversend".  I have been on stories for them where ALL the other reporters have been from BBC programmes.  Their combined expenses would re-finance a bank.  Nothing like Obama's, of course.  He, we are told, has an unlimited budget.  But no one has yet said where he got the money.  Gore Vidal has frequently written that America gets the President that Big Business wants and finances.  Big Business holds the only vote that counts.

What, one wonders, has attracted it to Obama? 

                                                      

                                    

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

I am standing over the nest with the insecticide and my friend Ronnie Knox Mawer is saying to the wasps within, “Prisoners at the bar, have you  anything to say?”

Ronnie, a retired judge, first used these words when, at 26, he put on the black cap and sentenced a man to death.  Subsequently, as Chief Justice of the South Sea Islands, he handed down many more such sentences.  So I was puzzled to know why I had  been lured seventy miles  to kill wasps.  Then I recalled my friend has a fine legal sense of precedent and my family has a long connection with executioners.

My old man was the official driver to Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous public hangman.  My old man  did not mind his macabre role.  

It was a rest from his  unofficial job whilst serving in the wartime police, running a black market cartel.  Though he did find it a touch strange the way Albert, who had a fine baritone voice, liked to lead a singsong in pubs on the way home from work.

Albert had a pub himself near Blackpool called “Help the Poor Struggler“, which even my old man thought was not in the best of taste. 

Though the coachloads of trippers who called there every day thought it a great joke and all wanted their photographs taken standing under the sign with Albert.

Another hangman I knew called Wade had a cafe in Yorkshire called “Rest Weary Pilgrim“, so maybe a macabre sense of humour went with the job.  A third hangman, Harry Allen, was different: he kept a pub called "The Junction".

In the days of which I speak even bars on the road to Blackpool not run by hangmen did a roaring trade.  Gin and orange was the staple drink and glasses of it stood, ready poured, in rows on the bar top waiting for a charabanc to arrive.  Unscrupulous landlords filled the 

glasses with orange juice and wiped a gin stained finger round the rim.  No one ever noticed.  Another scam after a punter had drunk three genuine gin and tonics was to serve him plain tonic for subsequent orders.  The punter would still taste gin.  It works.  Try it.

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I knew a man once who advised his friends of a change of address by writing the sort of letter to The Times it could not fail to print.  I use the Letters column to find out which of my friends is still with us.  So I was delighted to read a letter from Michael Senior.

Laid back and leisurely, the elegant Dr Michael Senior is the archetypal Victorian Man of Letters, attached to the 20th century for purposes of rations and accommodation only.

He lives in style in an elegant mansion on a hilltop, with views up, down and across the Conwy Estuary.  Every window a seascape.  Sunday afternoons he hosts a croquet party for his friends; he farms, chairs historical societies, dines out and knowledgeably wine tastes.  Even 

his house has a relaxed name, Bryn Eisteddfod - in English the 'sitting down place'.

Do not be fooled.  He is like the swan, relaxed on the surface but beneath going like hell.  A driven man.  He is a compulsive Open University degree collector, has written at least twenty-five books and has published prize-winning poetry and learned articles on folklore.  He paints at a furious rate, studied for his doctorate in philosophy in what he laughingly calls his spare time and gardens tirelessly.  His day is planned to the minute.

Although he is primarily an historian, he has written ten unpublished novels and began as a playwright.  His first play, “The Coffee Table“, was broadcast on Radio 3 and in Canada and New Zealand.  It had a stage production at the Toronto Playhouse.  He thought he was on the threshold of a glittering career.  

“The Literary Advisor of the Royal Shakespeare Company rang and asked if I had any other plays," he said.  "I hadn’t, but I said ‘yes’, and he asked me to send an example.  The company was putting on a season of new plays at the Barbican and he thought I might be one of 

the chosen playwrights.  I quickly wrote four or five and sent them off.  They were liked but, before they could be put on, the company’s policy changed and they were never done.  Kenneth Tynan encouraged me to write film scripts but they were never made into films.”

Heart-breaking?

“I am reconciled to that sort of thing.  Being a writer is like playing the one-armed bandit.  You get a trickle of luck and you think the next one is going to be the big one.  The next book is always the best.   It’s an addiction, like gambling.”

He toured Greece to write a book on “Greece and its Myths”.  That was the book he enjoyed most of the many.  The most scholarly was his “Tales of King Arthur”, a rendering in modern English of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal and largely incomprehensible “Morte d’Arthur”, out of print in the UK but still a big seller in the US.

“ It is the best story ever told but it gets bogged down in the detail of jousts and genealogies, essential to the medieval reader but lost on us.  I wanted to make it more accessible to the ordinary reader.

“I believe the subject matter is related to Wales.  Dinas Bran at Llangollen, for instance.  Bran relates to the classic gods and there are early stories about it closely related to the Holy Grail.  Bran in the Mabinogion possessed a holy vessel which I see as a grail prototype.  

There are several reasons to classify Dinas Bran as the Castle of the Holy Grail.  For one, a Celtic scholar R.S. Looms has suggested it was the castle of the Fisher King, who was traditionally the keeper of the Grail.  Bran may well have been a river god.  Parsifal is Percival, who is also connected with the Mabinogion.  British myths have been neglected and I see it as my job to bring them back to the public.”

His “Figures in a Landscape” is the second in a series of eight books which tell the story of all the great men and women in northern Welsh history.

  “I have written about the places.  Now I am putting the people in the places.”

It is a labour of love, not money.  His UK and international books made money but he writes mostly for a small Welsh publisher, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, which brings him a few hundred pounds a year. 

“They are read and people enjoy them and that satisfies my reason for writing - to communicate.  People write and phone me from all over the world to say they have enjoyed my books.  That gives me a very good feeling and is really the only reward  I want.”

Painting he also does for fun.  “I paint four pictures a year.  I am Chairman of the Friends of the Royal Cambrian Academy and we have open exhibitions which allow us to put up our paintings there, which is a  great privilege. “

Another privilege is the situation of his house in the Conwy Gap.

“The Conwy Gap extends from Conwy to Deganwy; it is a sunshine trap.  I can sit in my window and see it raining on Anglesey and up the valley at Rowen whilst my garden is bathed in sunshine.”

Symbolic of a man whose life is suffused with the stuff.  

   

ends.

DON’T EAT, DRINK….AND YOU TRY BEING MERRY

 

 

It has been a funny sort of week. Last Saturday I was a guest at my grand-daughter’s deeply romantic wedding; on Sunday her sister got engaged on the top of the Brunelleschi tower in Florence and shopped for the ring on the Ponte Vecchio; on Monday my wife and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary; and on Thursday her seventieth birthday. The only other anniversaries I can think of which are celebrated at this time of the year are the battle of Hastings, El Alamein and Trafalgar, which is somehow fitting.

 

At all our celebrations not a drop (well perhaps just a drop) passed my eager lips. But it is not the drink I miss so much as the cut and thrust of the family battles which it provoked. I sometimes think it is no coincidence that our time of celebration should end in Hallowe’en, the Witches’ Sabbath.

 

“Come, come,” I once said in answer to unkind criticism from Madam, “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. And 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 patters 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! You have nothing to lose but your weight. Just look who marches in our ranks: Sam Johnson, John Falstaff, Winston Churchill, Peter Ustinov. And 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.

 

· 

·A NOVEL WAY TO EARN A LIVING

 

If you think of life as a theatre, it is a great relief to have moved to the seat near the emergency exit. For one thing, the creative people I read about today are so much smaller than the ones I once knew.

 

Like a lady called Maureen Peters, who when I interviewed her had already written 168 novels, 25 magazine serials and 150 short stories. Her musical “Maid of Judah”, for which she wrote the book and lyrics, was about to have its British premiere after a successful American debut.

 

She filled her spare time knitting, tapestry making, studying the Cabala, travelling and reading at least six books a week. She had three children and nine grandchildren.

 

She confessed: “My head is full of ideas and I just have to get them out. At the moment I have ideas for sixteen novels either in my head or jotted down in note books. I don’t use real people as characters consciously, but my mum always said she recognised some of my characters from people we had known when I was a child.”

 

The practical mechanics of her writing life would make your head spin.

 

“When I finish a novel I give myself a day off and then I start the next one. I have to write. I couldn’t bear to sit around in the morning talking about the price of tea. It’s not an escape from life, because I am quite happy with my life, but I am just not a social animal,“

 

She had just come back from an extended holiday. Two days in Hawarth, the capital of Bronte Country.

 

“I love it. It’s still the nineteenth century there with cobbled streets. It’s where they made the Hovis advertisement. In the apothecary’s - NOT the chemist’s - they still sell Dolly Blue and wear 19th century dress. I was disappointed they didn’t have laudanum when I asked, but they said they weren’t allowed to sell it.”

 

Magic mushrooms had been found in Top Withas, the setting for Wuthering Heights, and Maureen wondered if Heathcliffe and girlfriend got their kicks from chewing them. Alas, the discovery came too late for her biography of Emily Bronte, “Child of the Earth”, which took her three years of research and is written in novel form from Emily’s letters.

 

Maureen wondered if Emily was an early euthanasia case. “She was bitten by a rabid dog and could have caught hydrophobia. There was some mystery about her death. Her Uncle Hugh was brought over from Ireland when she was ill and went back a totally changed man when she died. He would never talk about her death and the family maid at that time was left £300 in Pastor Bronte’s will, which was a fortune in those days. I wonder if Uncle Hugh assisted the death. The Parson couldn’t and Emily would not have been allowed to take her own life. It’s all fascinating.”

 

Everything is grist to the Peters’ mill. She has set family sagas in Kent, Anglesey and Manchester. She has written 12 thrillers about a detective nun. You might know her under her other names, Veronica Black or Catherine Darby.

 

The musical? “I was on the train coming home from seeing Billy Liar in the West End. I didn’t think much of it. I thought I could write a better musical than that. I had just published a novel about a little orphaned Jewish girl who is on the streets in the 1870s when there were 30,000 child prostitutes in Manchester. She is rescued by a pavement artist. Perfect plot. So I started to jot down some lyrics.”

 

 

A DEFINITE ARTICLE

 

According to H. V. Morton in the best guide book to Wales "In Search of Wales", Taffy is a corruption of the Dutch “Tayf” which is the name of the tall black hat worn by Dutch clergy. They were notorious for arriving at parishioners’ houses at lunchtime and devouring the beef.

 

“Tayf je was er wee hetsh naen, Tayf je was er drief,

“Tayf je gee em t’oom hye huys, Een stole er leech af beef.”

 

According to my Slang thesaurus (because of course I have no other knowledge of the activity), copulation at lunchtime is known as a nooner; the act itself is known as horizontal jogging, indoor sledging and parallel parking. The excreta of the butterfly is frass.

 

I cannot think why, but I am glad to know all that.

 

 

A WARNING

 

My wife had a Debenham’s Gift Voucher stolen from a letter. It came with a letter from the Post Office Customer Service Manager admitting it had been damaged “whilst in our care” and offering “for an investigation to be made”.

 

Debenham’s said there was nothing they could do to prevent the voucher from being cashed, even though the sender had the receipt. The Post Office refused to offer compensation because the letter was not sent by special delivery, thus giving a charter to the thieves they employ. And finding the Post Office Ombudsman proved more difficult than it would have been apprehending the thief, had anyone bothered to try.

 

A postman told me that there is one offence which, if repeated, is automatically sackable.

 

Leaving the Sorting Office without a cycle helmet.

 

Not all giants are tall men

Ernest Naish was 88 when he gave up sheep farming. He could still travel between his three farms at Cwm Pennant, Trawsfynydd and Anglesey but he was too tired to work when he arrived.

When he joined the pre-war Navy he was a dagger man, the fast track naval elite. He dismissed it.

“My only distinction is I hold the naval record for going on courses. Ten years. Alas, the day I joined my first ship I went for my typhoid inoculation and was jabbed with a dirty needle. I became seriously ill.”

Ashore, he commanded a trials party which inspected submarines on maiden voyages. He was about to board one when he was taken ill again. The submarine was HMS Thetis which sank in the Irish Sea on its first trial.

“My successor is buried in Holyhead. A very painful thought that is with me all the time.”

Invalided out, Naish bought an Anglesey sheep farm and weaving mill, though he knew nothing about either trade. “I just asked my neighbour what to do next.” Good neighbours, obviously. He became an international authority on sheep, and when he found his property included a disused mill, he restored it and wove tweed of such beauty it was taken up by fashion houses in London and Paris. The war intervened. When he came back, the tweed market had been wiped out by an 80 per cent purchase tax.

Fortunately he found a part-time job to boost his farm income. He set up and ran the Ty Croes Guided Missiles Station at RAF Valley, commanding 15 jet fighters and a staff of a hundred. In his spare time.

He remembered it was great fun: “I would do the morning milking; then fly down to the Air Show at Farnborough, say. Then fly back in time for the evening milking.“

The Air Ministry asked him to go to Woomara in Australia to report on a new pilotless plane. He barely had time to buy his second farm from a small advert in the Guardian. ”Five hundred-acre farm on Cwm Pennant, with cottages and fine Victorian villa, built by wealthy father of quarry owner, £4,500.“

He only had time to look at it from the road. He bought it the same day.

The bard asks: “Oh Lord, why did you make Cwm Pennant so lovely and the life of a shepherd so short?” Naish made a liar out the bard but agreed with the sentiment: “I am part of this farm, just like the pigs and the sheep. This is the worst land in the Cwm, a foot of peat on rock. But it is a lovely place to live. It is a hard place to make a living but my heart is here. In forty years I have only spent four nights away. That is why I have a hobby that keeps me at home.”

The hobby was painting. He wouldn't sell his paintings or exhibit them either. He did once and regretted it ever after.

“My arm was twisted to take part in this touring exhibition sponsored by the Countryside Commission. I put four or five in. They were valued at £500 a piece and I thought, that’s fine, they are safe, no one will pay that. Blow me if I didn’t sell two. I made a resolution never to do a silly thing like that again. I am a non-profit-making water-colourist because, frankly, I don’t need the money. I paint purely for my own pleasure. I get an idea by walking round the farm and looking at things; then I come back and ruin a lot of old envelopes sketching on them. I cannot start painting until the picture is complete in my head. I start in one corner and work across the paper. I don’t know any of the rules. Never had a lesson. Don’t know why I paint and why I paint such big pictures. It is very exacting. It takes hours and hours. My eyes and my limbs are going so I can only manage twenty minutes at a time.“

There isn’t space to tell how he designed a water-driven Aga in which an electric heater was powered from a generator he built which was fed from his stream. Nor about the machine he designed and built which extracted heat from cold air. As he said, “Nothing really. Just reverse the principle of the fridge.”

Just an ordinary bloke............and I am the Queen of Roumania.


ON THE CULTIVATION OF WEEDS

I am not an obsessive gardener. When I lived at Tattenhall on the Welsh border I had to remonstrate with an enthusiastic neighbour whose flower seeds blew over the fence and choked my weeds. At a subsequent flat on the Rows in Watergate Street, Chester, the single window box was tended by a firm of jobbing gardeners which was also responsible for the hyacinth bowl. So there is no need to warn me that lawn mowing brings on heart attacks. More active gardeners may wish to know that it is the first cut of the season that is the unkindest cut of all and does the damage. Doctors call it lawnmower angina and I can take a hint. When my doctor said I was so far overweight the slightest exertion could kill me, I acted at once. I gave up exertion. It is the same with the first lawn mowing of the season. That is the one I gave up. In fact I gave it up right through to November. At our property on the Isle of Anglesey I was proud of my traditional Cottage Garden. You would love it. Right in the middle of my land I grew this traditional cottage; the rest was nature, red in tooth and claw. I am sure Conan Doyle had my bindweed in mind when he wrote “The Speckled Band". I wouldn't go out after dark in case it had me by the throat and dragged me off to its lair in the ivy which was gradually dismembering the garden wall. The dog wouldn't go near the place. One summer she was so covered in burrs she was four times propositioned by kerb-crawling hedgehogs. And the cat was mugged by a robin. I had convolvuli that could bring down a running rabbit in their own length and dandelions that were bred from real lions. When you pulled my nettles they pulled back. Soil? I had nettle-strengthened soil so vitamin choked you could plant a seedling in the garden and by the time you reached the back door it was six foot tall and waving at you. Tendrils from my peas plucked passing pigeons out of the sky. The real trouble with gardening is that whatever you grow you always have two hundred over. Especially lettuce. Breed like triffids and there is no sight in nature more terrifying than a lettuce gone to seed. Mind you, I love gardens. Other people's, where someone else does the weeding and you can stretch out on a lawn without that nagging worry that it is growing so fast you are levitating. If you don't rush in for the mower you are going to have an angry giant fee-fo-fumming at you. Also you don't have to buy packets of seed which cost you more than the Indians were paid for Long Island. Can you understand it? Every year you weed away annuals that have sown themselves. Every marigold has enough seeds on its stem for the deposit on a house. Yet when you buy a packet the only variety you get is King's Ransom - because that is what it cost. And now we have something else to worry about. Killer tomatoes from outer space. Did you read where American schoolchildren projected 12.5 million tomato seeds into space? After six years they came back and no sooner had they been planted in schools across America than NASA warned that their exposure to cosmic radiation meant they could be toxic. All part of an experiment, I read, to find the effect of space exposure on living tissue. Now we know. Lethal tomato butties. On top of which I do not understand why grown men want to float around on their backs doing unmentionable things into plastic bags just to get to the Moon. I would almost rather go to the Costa Brava.

BOOK REVIEW

When I was a reporter for a BBC Wales magazine programme, the star of the network was a merry imp of a man called Allan Barham. If there was a forest fire, Barham was in the middle of it, interviewing firemen. An angry crowd at a strike meeting? Look for him under the banner, fearlessly waving his microphone at the most militant striker.

I could forgive him being braver than I am. What I could never forgive was his dexterity with a tape recorder. He was to the BBC issue Uhers what Kennedy is to the violin and Blumenthal of the Fat Duck Hotel is to whisky-flavoured ice cream.

The worst part of being a radio reporter was editing the magnetic tapes on which programmes were recorded. It was a fiddly business, best carried out in a studio with all the editing equipment the BBC could muster. It involved cutting out superfluous words, inserting linking narrative and generally making a broadcastable item the precise length needed for the programme.

The BBC ran a course where trainees were taught how to cut the “ums” out of interviewees’ responses, Barham needed no training in cutting out a section of tape, spooling on and then putting it back in logical sequence. But he did it on his tape recorder in his car, with clothes pegs to hold the tapes he had cut until he needed them. He took the tape from the play back head, kept his eye on the exact spot and cut it with a razor blade.

Comparatively poorly paid, he was nevertheless the uber loyal servant who lived and breathed BBC Radio Wales. For 32 years he covered an area from Chester westwards to Holyhead, down to Aberystwyth, then east to the English border. With a heavy tape machine on his shoulder, he climbed mountains and burrowed underground over an area of many thousand square miles. He interviewed heroes and villains, adventurers and the barking mad. He seemed to know everyone in Wales.

His reward? When we got a new nationalist editor, he was, like me, made redundant, because he wasn’t Welsh enough. He wrote to the Controller of BBC Wales to ask if there were odd spots in any programmes he could fill. Five years later he is still waiting for a reply.

Amazingly, he doesn’t bear grudges.

He says: “A letter saying ‘Goodbye’ would be nice and a party would have been even better. So to all Heads of Departments I say this……….if you didn’t appreciate my thirty two years completely loyal and unbroken service, it’s a pity, and if you didn’t enjoy my career as much as I did, then never mind - I enjoyed it and that’s all that matters.”

The good news is that he has written those biting words in a book “Radio Reporter”, published by Toby Books (enquiries@tobybooks.co uk or www.tobybooks.co.uk) at £10.99, in which he has reprised the best of his stories. It is a nice fat book, an hilarious, tender account of sometimes highly improbable people doing strange and wonderful things. It should be required reading on all Media Studies courses and at everyone’s bedside. Especially those bedsides which are occupied by what passes for interviewers in today’s radio.

I was interviewed about my recent book for Radio Manchester. The only question I was asked was “Have you met any famous people?”

Pretty well all the famous people I have met have been boring in the extreme. Barham knew more than most how far from ordinary, ordinary people are.

end

One per cent is all it took.......................

 

For 99 per cent of the world’s history, I read, man did not exist. It is a tribute to his energy that he has only needed one per cent to ruin it.

 

For all that time before his arrival, neither welcome nor opportune, the world had been a tropical paradise in which magnificent animals roamed freely without a single war. They ate each other, it is true. But only when they were hungry.

 

When it first swung out of the trees, man was timid. Well, it was the smallest and the least equipped to defend itself. Naturally it became another tasty morsel in a vast delicatessen. So its first priority was to duck and dive.

 

Like the other animals, it ranged the tropical earth looking for nuts and fruits and the occasional animal which was either smaller or less equipped to duck and dive. Then some fool invented territory and an even bigger fool invented religion to explain the natural phenomena which puzzled and frightened them. Warfare was an inevitable consequence. We became the only species on the planet which brought mass production to killing perfect strangers.

 

Since then the evolutionary escalator has been programmed ever downwards. We reached the basement in the 18^th century, in what we had the nerve to call the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us among other horrors the Industrial Revolution.

 

True, we invented music and painting and told ourselves stories to pass the time. We learned how to create beautiful buildings and pleasing artefacts; but spent most of our time destroying them by ever more sophisticated methods. Science has discovered many wonders, most of which produce ever more efficient ways of destroying ourselves. Medicine has learned to keep us alive long after our sell-by dates; yet has not learned how to care humanely for the old. It has banished many of the diseases which were Nature’s way of maintaining a healthy balance.

 

It is one hell of a price to pay for daytime TV

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

 

My chum Revel Barker, a former Mirror Group Managing Editor, shares my view on climate warming. He writes:

 

An Intuit Chief Aqqaluk Lynge is particularly worried about "an authoritative report by 250 scientists" that the climate in his region would change between 4C and 7C over the next 100 years - "which would be twice the global average."

 

Which is true, provided that the global average increase over the next 100 years is 2C to 3.5C.

 

On the other hand, Mr Lynge [; for all I know it might be Mr Aqqaluk] could listen to 250 different scientists who say the climate isn't noticeably changing at all, or 250 others who say that if there are any changes they will not be caused by mankind, or - far more comforting for him, presumably - the thousands of scientists who warned, authoritatively, in the 1970s that we would have another Ice Age by 2020.

 

As far as we can tell, the earth's temperature increased during the last 100 years by an average of slightly less than 0.7 of one degree centigrade. In other words, by an amount smaller than could be measured on most thermometers.

 

That was a century that saw the introduction and popularisation of the motor car, the aircraft, the jet engine, world-wide air travel, two highly mechanised world wars, the explosion of the atom bomb (and several test explosions of it), the bombing and deforestation of Viet Nam, space travel, and more coal dug and burnt, and more industry pumping out smoke, than ever before or since.

 

This century has cleaner air than ever before, and a slow-down on deforestation, but according to the warm-mongers things are gonna get worse, far worse.

 

If Inuits are taught Eskimo history, they will know that their country is colder today than it was just over 1,000 years ago when it was discovered by Erik the Red and his Viking chums.

 

They called the place Greenland, which might be a bit of a clue. And they settled there to hunt and to farm - which might be another clue.

 

I have no idea what their impact might have been on the local environment, a bit of ploughing perhaps, the firing of wooden missiles into the air during hunting, but 500 years later came the "Little Ice Age", which made the place what it is today: covered in ice. The region's polar bears - presumably hitherto gathered in the frozen wastes around the north pole like May dancers in an English country village - must have thought that Christmas had come early. And then that it had come for good.

 

Wake up and smell the melting blubber, Aqqaluk. The climate changes. It always has. That's what it does.

 

What serious scientists have found is that the main land mass at the south pole (the Antarctic) is actually getting colder, while at the north pole the western Arctic is - yes - getting warmer, but the eastern Arctic is getting colder. Mother Nature (don't you find?) seems often to find a way of levelling things out, somehow.

 

In Washington DC earlier this year I learnt from a jubilant Greenpeace-US that the organisation had been successful in having the polar bear classed as a "threatened" species under the federal Endangered Species Act, "due to the meltdown of its sea-ice habitat caused by global warming."

 

When I asked whether there was, in fact, any actual evidence that the number of polar bears was decreasing, or that their continued existence was under any threat, the Greenpeace representative replied (and readers who are being scared out of their wits by the doomsayers might like to consider this): "Maybe not. We don't actually know. But the classification is a temporary measure, while we try to find out the facts."

 

Well, that's one way of approaching science - declare a situation as true and scary, and then set about checking it out.

 

The documentary "evidence" to support this claim appears to be one photograph of one polar bear on one tiny ice flow. Other pictures show wiser bears moving off small pieces of ice onto more solid ground. That, presumably, is how the species continues to survive.

 

The Greenpeace argument also claims to be supported by "NASA findings that the polar bear is at risk."

 

Exactly why NASA (that's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - the people who send people to the moon, vehicles to Mars, and run the space shuttle) should be interested in polar bears is a different matter for concern, but Greenpeace says that it (NASA) had announced "measurements showing Arctic sea ice is hitting major lows... This is more bad news on the impacts of global warming effects and bad news for the polar bear." 

 

Only the first of those two statements was actually from NASA. And where did the spacemen get their data about Arctic ice? Oh... From Greenpeace-US.

 

American travel agents who specialise in Arctic ventures are meanwhile advertising excursions on the basis that it is nowadays easier than ever to guarantee polar bear sightings - "possibly" (being no more scientific than that) because of an increased population.

 

So perhaps we should be more concerned about the finders, than about the findings.

 

Meanwhile, if the polar bears (presumably currently enjoying the most immense acreage ever known to their species) are worried about survival, they'll need to move around a bit, something that's not normally beyond the wit of even the dumbest animals. Similarly, if Inuits are worried about their property falling into the sea, they'll have to learn not to build so close to the edge.

 

If they can't survive a small temperature change, well, maybe they were not intended to survive at all. Or maybe they were intended and expected to shift camp, as Erik the Red did, when he fetched up in the place around 982... having fled Norway, as you will remember, following a dispute with a neighbour over the non-return of a borrowed shovel.

###

Thought for Today

 

From the splendidly named Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, secretary of state for war nearly a century ago: "If the Arab population realised that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I'm very doubtful if we shall gain that acquiescence of the fathers and husbands of Mesopotamia to which the Secretary of State for the Colonies looks forward." He was referring to Iraq in the 1920s; he could have been talking about Afghanistan or Iraq now.

Blogger Me ?

Why does the Blog get such a bad press? It is a genre which goes back to the very beginnings of the essay as invented by Montaigne. He chose to write about the only subject of which he was the greatest expert, Himself. Which pretty well defines the Blog.

Writing one is a great source of pleasure. The first time in my life I have defied Dr Johnson who claimed that no-one but a blockhead writes, except for money. If you write for money you are limited by what your paymaster wants to read. I wrote a vituperative column on the death of Princess Di when a fever of hypocrisy gripped the world.

The page one splash of the National Enquirer online that morning was all about the secret love life of the randy Princess. By lunchtime it had changed to some slush about the Queen of Hearts and how she was mourned by the world.

The Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post refused to publish my observations.

I get great pleasure from reading the blogs of other people. I particularly enjoy the blog of an “old” chum, Daily Express reporter Mary Duffy(marydloughrea.blogspot.com.). I also enjoy Mary Beard; Revel Barker’s weekly trip into newspaper nostalgia (Gentleman Ranters); Cathy Buckle on the horrors of life in Zimbabwe; the intermittent despatches from a girl in Baghdad; Azelea, a delightful American girl whose Blog title is a quotation from Cicero “To Each His Own is Beautiful”. This week she is worried that she is going to die. I commend to her my good friend Geoff Mather’s Perspective Blog.

Mather, who has an exotic acquaintance we would all covet, was Features Editor of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper. He is both entertaining and erudite. A thoughtful Buddhist, he writes this week of the white light which we are supposed to see at the moment of death. It is a well known Buddhist concept and is the pure mind of Enlightenment. He also quotes the Tibetan Book of the Dead which says we have 49 days before we are reborn.

I received news this week which suggests, in Noel Coward’s words, that “Time’s winged chariot is beginning to goose me”. I have to say that 49 days isn’t very long for R and R before I have to go through the whole tiring business of another life. Possibly on the pavement of some crowded Indian city.

I have lived a life of vast entertainment, enjoyed some success and experienced moments of great happiness. I would not go quite so far as Gilbert Harding who confessed in a television interview that he would be glad when the future is over.
However, I am living in a world where I increasingly feel a stranger. This week on You Tube I watched great comics like Rob Wilton and mourned their surly successors whose idea of fun is to be rude about everyone upon whom they can lay their scrofulous tongues I also heard on You Tube an interview from Radio Birmingham so inept it made me ashamed of my once and only trade.

I have watched the laughter leave the face of once Merry England. Frankly, 49 days is not enough. Not perhaps oblivion but certainly a good lie in.


COOKERY CORNER
A traveller to strike envy into the heart of Marco Polo, the time approaches for the Head Ferret’s Great Expedition. In December she redistributes the nation’s wealth taking costly gifts round her family like some transvestite Magus. In her absence Plas Skidmore goes on a war footing. Plates, nil; spoons, one. Oxtails, two. Eaten from the pan. Despite Christmas, December is my favourite month, gastro-wise.
There was for a while, you may recall, a ban on oxtails but my tradition was not interrupted. Black market connections were established by my policeman father when he joined the wartime crime squad designed to eradicate it. Within weeks, our house was so full of groceries I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer. Since then I have established my own naughty network and contraband tails continued to wag.

Should you be minded to try a carnivore’s Ambrosia, here is the definitive recipe for a ragout. Two oxtails are required. Remember second helpings.

First make five gallons of cider. True, a litre is sufficient for the ragout but, in matters of drink, the wise err on the safe side.

My ancestor Viscount Scudamore brought the first red streak apple to Herefordshire from his Paris Embassy, prompting the poetic tribute in Evelyn’s Pomona: “Of no regard till Skydmore’s courtly hand, taught it its savage nature to subdue.” I use cider in his honour. He also bred the first Hereford cattle; designed by heaven to provide tails that swish with a cry of joy as they leap into the frying pan.

Water can be used; but never by me, except for pre-cooking, soaking and boiling. If water IS used, adding two tablespoonfuls of red wine is essential.

After boiling and draining, put oxtail pieces into a large paper bag with seasoned flour. Shake and transfer to bacon-scattered pan for flash frying in butter. Remove. Replace with onion stuck with cloves, bouquet garni, carrots, seasoning. Flash fry. Mix tomato juice, beef stock, plump garlic and cider with meat and veg. Casserole gently for four hours. Cool. Skim fat.
Add carrots, turnips, leeks, potatoes and - a personal preference - haricot beans. Cook for three quarters of an hour.

Now comes the magic bit. Thirty minutes before serving, add a tablespoon of raisins which have been swollen and two dessert spoons of pine kernels. Just before serving, correct seasoning and sprinkle with bitter chocolate. Attack with spoon. Trust me. It gets better every day.

No Comment!

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. "—Thomas Jefferson, 1802

Seeing is Never Believing

.:
" I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."

Czeslaw Milosz (He lived in Warsaw during the German occupation, writing for Polish underground publications and translating T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land.")


If you reach eighty and still think anything in this life is important then you haven’t been paying attention. Set aside that everyone on the planet will be dead in a hundred years, the fact remains that the Horsemen will continue to trample us under their horses’ Apocalyptic hooves. There will always be wars and there will always be famines because they are the most efficient forms of birth control. There will always be dramatic life- ending changes of climate because that is the nature of climate. At best we can only tinker with the engine, like clumsy mechanics.

WE are toy makers. We can divert ourselves with art, delude ourselves with politics, make our stay comfortable with invention and manufacture, prolong it with medicine. The engine will run its pre determined course.

The American Indian says that life is a circle; Marcus Aurelius that it is a river and the only reality is that part of the river which lies at our feet. The river that has still to flow and the river that has flowed past do not exist. The same principle is central to Zen, to Buddhism. You can hear it in Chinese poetry of the classical age. It is implicit in the hedonism of “drink, for tomorrow we die“.

Yet we are what we have been and we carry the seeds of what we will become. How many centuries of musicians lived in Mozart? Why does each of us have skills that seem to come naturally?

The Buddhist denies death. Other religions have invented paradise. I prefer The Way

With great age comes the revelation that Government is like horse riding. You are assumed to be in charge so long as the horse behaves but if it bolts you have no other course than to hang on grimly, pretending the horse is under control. Governments need wars. Not only do they cull the surplus males who might be disruptive. Wars bring prosperity and jobs for all.

The realisation dawns that banks are not good with money. From the South Sea Bubble onwards, every century has its money crisis, which commonsense would have avoided. We are witnessing the collapse of banks who have been constantly lecturing us about prudence and punishing us, illegally, if we misbehave. Yet they have lost billions loaning money to banks they knew were investing in lenders demonstrably unable to repay.

I have a chum who is Lloyd George’s grandson. As a child he met all the world leaders and was surprised how ordinary they were. They pose as supermen and we believe this despite the evidence.

Bad decisions by so-called statesmen at Versailles have managed in less than a century to make enemies of the Muslim world, which once looked up to us as men of honour. Over the same period we have witnessed the end of Merry England and its replacement by a grey and unpleasant land.

We have a drunken evening during a visit to Paris by Mrs Thatcher to thank for the Channel Tunnel, which was closed and blazing brightly as I mulled over this rant. A major factor in the binge drinking which defaces our society is the smoking ban. It was based on faulty research but has driven thousands out of the pubs into the supermarkets and the cheaper booze. Its only achievement has been to kill the English Pub, for centuries the heart of our communities.
Privatising our public utilities has seen them disappear into foreign hands. Now our nuclear industry is owned by the French Government. Privatising hospital cleaning resulted in lower standards of cleanliness and near epidemics.

We look to those most puissant Princes, William and Harry, to restore the monarchy. Yet I remember meeting Prince Charles when he was their age and being so impressed with him I almost wrote to the Queen to congratulate her, on the grounds that all mothers like to hear well of their sons.

I look at him now, wrecked by a lifetime of cosseting, and am reminded of the golden youth of Henry VIII and of many another Royal Head swollen by a glass hat.


A TRIBUTE

I was delighted to see that a bronze statue of my old friend, the lifeboat coxswain Dick Evans who won two lifeboat VCs, now stands on the cliffs at Moelfre, on Anglesey, looking out triumphantly at the sea which tried so hard to take his life.

I wish Wales was as generous to its literary giants. Some weeks ago I wrote of Howard Spring, her greatest novelist. Now I turn to Gwyn Thomas.

Gwyn Thomas was not just a novelist. He was a talker. The Master of the Moving Mouth. He raised talking to an art form. The novels he published were, in reality, a series of brilliant conversations he put into the mouths of his fictional characters.

I treasure my recordings of every broadcast Thomas made. I regret I met him only once. At the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen I was confronted by this face like a gnarled fist, glowering under the worst trilby hat ever made. Yet, compared to the sports jacket it surmounted, the hat was a sartorial triumph. The jacket was to clothing what computer instructions are to the English language. It looked as though it had been knitted from a Welsh Assembly Mission Statement.

Midway between trilby and jacket, there was a muscular mouth, which, at the moment of introduction, was manoeuvring like a wrestler for the best of three falls out of a cigarette.

It seemed the cigarette was winning. It leapt nimbly from side to side of the mouth, until the lips did one of those scissor grips so beloved of that great wrestler of my youth, ‘Angel Face’ Joe Batten, and the cigarette slapped its submission.

Triumphant, Gwyn Thomas dimped the defeated cancer stick and began to talk.

I know about talkers. I have listened to Dylan Thomas spouting like a grubby whale in the bar of the King’s Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea. I have heard Nye Bevan and Lady Violet Bonham Carter woo, in their different ways, an audience of miners. I have been enchanted by Wynford Vaughan Thomas. As a child I was steeped in the wit of Oscar Wilde. I have earned my living for half a century in a trade that used to produce talkers with the tongues of blasphemous angels.

Gwyn Thomas was the best. I have never met a man who used words so readily, so cosily, so wittily, so profoundly. Somewhere in heaven, please God, there is a deeply-cushioned rustic bench, with a tray for drinks, where Alcibiades is ignoring Socrates, Boswell shushing Dr Johnson, Haroun el Rashid giving Scheherazade the elbow. They all want to listen to Gwyn Thomas.

Earthbound, we have one consolation. We have his works, which are valuable beyond price. Not just his novels. Novelists are two a penny. Gwyn’s Gift is rarer. You can hear him in every word he writes.

TAIL WAG

Hospital car parking is free in Wales so a friend was puzzled at the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham when he was asked by a car park attendant to take a ticket from a machine and post it on his windscreen.
He said " I thought parking was free"
"It is," he was told. " But you still have to show a ticket"

If yer knows of a better 'Ole

Evelyn Waugh founded Friends of the Neutron Bomb when he heard it wiped out people but left buildings and their contents standing. On balance, he thought that a very good thing.

He would have shared my disappointment when the Hadron Collider in the Cern experiment did not, as promised by some, send our planet scuttling down a Black Hole like some White Rabbit in our increasingly Alice in Wonderland times. It would have been ironic if Switzerland, which has assiduously kept out of European wars in order to collect money from both sides, had provided the force that ended it all.

Instead, in Stephen Hawkins’ memorable phrase, the Big Smash was like two mosquitoes colliding.

My understanding of scientific matters is, to say the least, patchy but I thought that the experiment was meant to replicate the Big Bang that created the World.

In which case, how do we know it didn’t?

How do we know that at this moment a parallel world isn’t forming and its inhabitants beginning the long and weary journey to being US?

I hope they do not send out a team of market researchers. I imagine them with Bristol boards and pencils distributed among their eight arms stopping a passer-by and asking him what he is about.

He might be going to one of the few pubs still open after the Government’s draconian smoking ban.

He will explain he is going to a pub

“???????”

“A pub. A building with a wooden divider,” the passer-by will explain. “I stand on one side and a man stands on the other side selling me drink.”

“???????”

“A drink is a liquid. I have to be careful not to drink too much of it because it will make me sick and cause me to do silly things before falling over.”

“You are being punished??????????????????????????”

“No, no. No. It’s a pleasure and it costs me a lot of money.”

“?????????????????????????????”

“Money. Every day I spend eight hours locked in a building staring at a machine and at the end of the week I am given money.”

“??????????????????????????????Which you give to a man who gives you in return a substance which makes you sick and causes you to do silly things until you fall over………………………Is there a Black Hole we can go to, do you know?”

The other day four of the newspapers I read online carried pictures of Victoria Beckham's new hair-do. The Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page - and three more inside - to the "shock pixie cut" and declared that this was "literally the biggest thing to happen to hair since the Moss Fringe of '07". A smaller story disclosed that doctors and most secondary school teachers will no longer be recruited from outside the EU. But there will be exceptions for sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand - and ballet dancers.

Black Hole, here I come*****************************************************

******************* +++++++++++++++ ***********************



For my money there is nothing more frightening at the front door than a builder going, “FFFFFFFFFF”. I am sure you recognise the sound. It is the noise a workman makes when he comes into your house for the first time and sees any bit of work at all that has already been done by another workman. “FFFFFFFFFFFF,” they go. “Who put that in for you? Must have been drunk. That cross-piece there. See. Pulling on the contra-levels of the stays.”

“Could you take it down then?” you ask. And have you noticed how they always repeat what you say. Scornfully.

“Take it down? Take it down? No need. Come down of its own accord before the year’s out.”

I have a friend who is a master plumber. And if there was an Eisteddfod competition for the solo “FFFFFFFF” he’d walk it. Not only does he have a “FFFFFFFF” that is the envy of the Federation of Master Plumbers; he can do it backwards. Straight up. Backwards. I’ve heard him.

“FFFFFFFFFF,” I’ve heard him say, time and again. “I don’t like the look of that universal joint.”

He is a man who only has to be confronted with a universal joint to become instantly racked with doubt.

“Can it be put right?” the more foolhardy would ask.
“FFFFFFFFFF. Put right? You’re joking. You’d have to rebuild the bathroom.”

And, do you know, in forty years of admiring friendship I have never once seen his lips change their conformation.

It’s not only plumbers. Motor mechanics, joiners, plasterers and bricklayers, they all do it. “FFFFFFFFF”. I don’t know why. But “FFFFFFFFFF” they go. And a century of Trades Union solidarity bites the dust. Nothing kindred about trades today. There are those workmen who would rather pour scorn than tea.