The Queen of Sheba asked Solomon for a ring inscription which would always be true whatever the circumstances. He offered: “This Too Shall Pass”.
That hilarious physical cartoon which is the nearest we have to a Defence Secretary tells us he has a dilemma - and I must say he looks it.
The generals are telling him he must increase the defence budget, whereas his constituents want him to cut it. The inscription I would offer him is equally simple: “We Can No Longer Afford Aggressive Warfare”.
I am currently reading “Danger Close; Commanding 3 Para in Afghanistan” by its former C.O. Stuart Tootal DSO. He warns that we will be in Afghanistan for decades. Why?
Mr Brown said in December: "Three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Our aim must be to work together to do everything in our power to cut off terrorism."
No one showed him an atlas so he could see that for the second time we had invaded the wrong country. Predictably, his claim angered Pakistanis because he was on a goodwill visit to Pakistan at the time.
A senior diplomat there said that in seven plots no Pakistani person was involved. “True, a Briton of Pakistani origin, but a third-generation, born and bought up in Britain. We don't agree with Brown's claims that three-quarters of these plots originate in Pakistan. We don't have a magic wand to turn these people into extremists. These people were born in Britain, taught there, bred there."
The terrorists who planned to blow up airliners were all British. It would appear we need our soldiers nearer home. The idea that we should invade a foreign country in order to protect the homeland is risible.
“Attack State Red”, the story of the Anglian Regiment in Afghanistan, is probably the greatest book on war I have ever read. It is so obviously true and written in such detail, and indeed with such controlled passion, readers should automatically qualify for a campaign medal. It's so real I could not finish it. Those magnificent young men with such qualities of bravery and loyalty to each other remind one of the Spartans at Thermopylae, who were, according to a tablet there, "a shining example of belief and dedication to duty and higher moral values and ideals."
Their memorial on the battlefield by the poet Simonides reads: "Go tell the Spartans, passerby/ That here by Spartan law we lie."
Ruskin thought them the noblest words ever uttered by man and they also apply to those Anglian soldiers.
I keep thinking how desperately we need such men to grow old in their service to their country. Not blown to bits in a squalid post-colonial adventure, the stated aim of which is to keep in power a corrupt government. That is a new aim because the original one was “to rid the country of al-Qaeda” (which is next door in Pakistan) and to rid the country of its opium (when the sensible aim would be to pay a higher price for the poppy juice, purchasing the entire crop and using it for medicine). Further aims, we are told, are to bring democracy and establish equal rights for women (in direct defiance of an age old corrupt culture run by War Lords, who, anyway, we are bribing). And in that endeavour our young men risk capture and being skinned, as has happened to scores of Russians, the skin from their stomachs being pulled over their heads.
Not in my name.
One other thing. There is no disciplined army called al-Qaeda. That is spin. The enemy is the Wahabi, a desert tribe recruited by Ibn Saud to win his new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi price was that he adopted their perverted interpretation of the Koran as the national religion of the kingdom which was foreign to the mainstream Arab thought. It was Wahabi warriors who were partly responsible for the Indian Mutiny and for fermenting anti-West behaviour ever since. I assume the reason they are not identified springs from a reluctance to offend the Saudi Royals.
============================ ===== ============================
I think we have much to fear from our mis-government which is clearly not on our side. Look at us in Our Land of Hope and Glory, groping our way in the half light thrown by those EC bulbs, desperate for a cigarette, no doubt bumping our knees on the slop bucket which by law we will be required to keep in the kitchen. Fingers numb with cold because we cannot turn the heating up, we sort through our other rubbish to make sure it is in the right bin; terrified of taking the dog for a walk in case it chases a rabbit; faced with a £5,000 fine if we take next door's kids to the shops; and watching powerless as the banks we have just bailed out with £60 billion of our hard earned money refuse us an overdraft whilst awarding themselves bonuses, despite bringing the World Economy to near collapse.
We Unhappy Few are ruled by a government that sells Rover cars for £10,000 to a group of men who award themselves millions and give another million to a girl friend. They won't get away with it, of course. Lord Meddlesome sternly hopes they will apologise and promise not to do it again.
If our island home is Mother of the Free, then I, for one, want to get adopted.
_______________________ ___________________________ ______________________
== ========== ============ ============== ========= ================
Were you to ask, I would describe myself as an elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits, academic leaning and pleasing contours. Why tailors do not share this view is beyond me.
When I ordered a cashmere duffel coat from Thailand, the tailor telephoned me at enormous expense from Bangkok because he didn't believe my measurements. A Scottish tailor, who was making me Highland dress for my grand-daughter's wedding, refused to believe I was 55 inches both round the chest and what I laughingly call my waist. “Have you never heard of all round reporters?” I asked witheringly.
Many years ago in Doncaster when I was still 10 stone I was being measured for one of those fashionable Edwardian suits with the drainpipe trousers, the cuffs on the five button jacket and the velvet collar, a style later stolen by the Hoi Polloi.
“I don't believe it,” said the tailor. “Your measurements. Amazing. Would you mind if I called in my colleague from next door?”
When the other tailor came in, he too was invited to measure me. He was astounded. “One shoulder higher than the other, the legs are different sizes and so are the feet.”
I have since learned that 99 per cent of us have a slightly lower right shoulder and most of us have different foot measurements. But by then the damage had been done.
This week I suffered the final indignities.
I want to have a tweed sports jacket built. My own man in March can only get the duller tweeds. Because of the credit squeeze, and the action of a millionaire who has bought the Harris mill on the Isle of Harris, only four dull weaves are being offered. Eventually I found a tailor in Ross on Wye with the sort of tweeds that would stun a bookmaker. I explained my situation to him and had my man in March measure me so there could be no error. When the new tailor read the measurements he emailed me, querying them and offering to sell the tweed direct to my own man, so that he could build the jacket.
Spotting a vintage velvet smoking jacket on E Bay, I sent off my measurements to the seller. I got a one word reply. It was:
“WHAT??”
___------------------------ ------------------------ -------------------------
THE END IS NIGH.....................................
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Golden Age Concerns
A fusillade of blank bullets is the final salute to the recently deceased Golden Age in which we have lived since it was ushered in by Attlee's government over half a century ago. Blank bullets because the MoD is billions of pounds in debt.
A symbolic salute because it has been A Fool's Golden Age. When the benefit society was launched we were poorer than we had ever been in our history. The war had left us deeply in debt to America, a debt that generous country insisted should be paid back immediately, thus achieving one of its war aims which was the destruction of the British Empire.
I do not complain about the notion of a Benefit Society. It was that rare thing in politics, a generous gesture, and I have benefited from it.
My great-grandfather was so rich he bought a separate house for his children and hired servants to look after them. Thanks to an unwise marriage, my grannie ended her life living in one room in Moss Side, sharing kitchen and bathroom.
Since I became eighty I have had Rolls Royce medical service and am still visited regularly by district nurses. I have pensions which meet my needs; I qualify for an an attendance allowance; my TV licence costs me nothing; I am not charged for chiropody treatment, optical examination or medical prescriptions. I have a disabled pass which entitles me to park almost anywhere and the key to disabled lavatories, worldwide. Thanks to the Internet, I am in touch with my circle of much valued chums. Grannie's only sources of entertainment were her books and the accumulator powered radio. The Internet is my club, my shopping centre, my research library, my concert hall, my Citizen's Advice Bureau and my secondhand bookshop. I can listen to the radio on it, watch TV programmes and write blogs and books.
Sadly, the talentless crew who run TV networks are only creative in assessing their own salaries. The technology over which they have no control is brilliant, the programmes they air are not. They are largely repeats. Happily, viewers have at last tumbled to this confidence trick.
ITV1 and BBC1 suffered their worst ever month of ratings in August, whilst Channel 4 clocked up its poorest score for 25 years as viewers turned off lack-lustre summer schedules on the main networks. ITV1 pulled in an average all-day share of just 15.15% for the whole month, eclipsing its previous worst figure of 16.1% in July. BBC1 also had its worst monthly all-time share, at 19.51%. Channel 4 had a share of 6.47% for August, down on its performance in August 2008.
Predictably the talentless ones have found a new way to waste millions. Not by making better programmes. They say they cannot afford that. We will soon be able to switch on High Definition making it possible to watch programmes we have demonstrated are not worth watching on old- fashioned TV.
For all that, as Oscar Wilde observed, I am dying beyond my means and I wonder if my grandchildren, nay, my children, will be able to boast a similar end-of-life style?
I can remember when our policemen were wonderful, when politician were honourable and when the House of Lords was staffed by gentlemen. I can also remember music. How different are things now. The tribal chant has replaced music. The nation's dpoctors have signed on o crew the ship of fools. They say we can cure a our feral young of binge drinking by banning adverts. I wonder how many were encouraged to become drug addicts by adverts.
Moonlighting MPs have admitted their spare time jobs are bringing fifty times the average salaries of their constituents. Yet in hundreds of pages of submissions they made to Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. they expressed continued resentment at the public's anger over the abuse of expenses. They continued to argue that they should be allowed to sell taxpayer-subsidised homes at a profit; insisted they should be allowed to employ family members. One backbencher said he should not even be required to submit receipts for expenditure and claimed: "This makes MPs into petty accounting clerks."
Only nine MPs responded to a consultation on the siting of eco-towns and none responded to consultations on human embryo research and compensation for crime victims.
In one thing the MPs were correct. They have done nothing wrong in charging excessive expenses. Their crime was much greater. They passed the fraudulent legislation that made their claims tenable. Every MP who voted yes should be barred from office.
The banks which all but wrecked Western civilisation are using the money borrowed from tax payers to continue to pay themselves massive bonuses. Quangos proliferate, Council executives are wildly overpaid, though the services they provide are being reduced. We are committed to wasting more young lives in an unwinnable war to support a corrupt government which is incapable of ruling Afghanistan. The only thing our Establishment has learned from its mistakes, apparently, is that it can continue to get away with making them. Even when they accidentally get something right, they alter it to make it look wrong.
On inadequate evidence, that Libyan got a life sentence. Cancer has ensured he served it. Of course Brown did not want him to die in a British prison. Think of the excuse that would give the terrorists.
Brown denies he extracted commercial gain out of the repatriation. More fool him. A BP team were given permission to survey for oil of which the West stands in desperate need. If the agent's death has been parleyed into a new source of oil then those luckless passengers who died over Lockerbie have been martyrs in a good cause.
Parenthetically, the Scottish Nationalist Party is calling for Scottish Independence. I believe more Englishmen than Scots are in favour of this historic change. Scotsmen see the UK has been ruled by their fellow countrymen and are aware what a mess they have made.
The government policy-makers should spend some time reading Carl von Clausewitz. Echoing the great 19th-century Prussian military theorist, nation-building advocates must always keep in mind that military strategies are formulated to reach political outcomes, and not the other way around.
Mr Brown, who has achieved the impossible by being an even worse prime minister than his bloodstained predecessor, has recently given a superb example of this kind of muddled thinking. He says we cannot leave Afghanistan until the Afghan army is able to hold the country against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. That means a revival of the Hundred Years War. I have a friend who has earned his living writing about wars from the Falklands on. He knew most of our generals when they were junior officers and keeps in close touch with them. He has close ties with our Special Forces. He recently sent me this email:
“............The problem is the politicians who will not listen to the generals, brigadiers and colonels on the ground. The soldiers are patrolling day after day and returning exhausted and have to leave the ground - even that just outside their bases - to the enemy. The Afghan Army cannot be trusted and the police are a fifth column. Another brigade will allow the British Army to do what it does best and that is fight and dominate ground at night while the Special Forces of the SAS and SBS can be inserted deep, deep into the badlands - assuming, of course, they have the helicopters - to attack the leadership and the real bad boys in their own midden. The technology for calling in air strikes is so advanced nowadays that the Special Forces can call in the raid and vanish without having to fire a shot themselves. Boots on the ground mean that the soldiers can watch for the bombers and either deal with them themselves or call in a drone or Apache or even an American B-1 bomber. Another brigade and the proper number of helicopters and you will see a drastic downturn in casualties caused by IEDs. But the politicians won't listen and, if they do, won't do what they are advised. The days of Colonel Blimp are long, long gone. Today's generals are incredibly clever men as are the brigadiers. Most double their money in civvy street as soon as they leave the Army. To the politicians it is all about fighting war on the cheap. They don't cut off the money to the idle dossers who won't work or the leeching drug addicts who can't work through their own stupidity or the families of illegals who seem to have more rights here than the natives. Hard decisions have to be taken and if they want to win a breathing space to sit and talk the Taliban round - after killing off a few of the drug barons - then they're going to have to give the commanders the tools they need to do the job. The politicians don't seem to understand the cultural differences between the Afghans and their stone-age mentality and that of the West. Democracy in Afghanistan. That means doing what the Elders decide, not what some half-cock corrupt politician like Karzai and his cronies want as they skim off millions and zillions of foreign aid.
Mr Tory Blair, who ordered our youth into both Iraq and Afghanistan so he could sail to world glory on a sea of the blood of our children, has at least two children of his own of military age, but neither is serving. One, Euan, has led a gilded life, university, internships in Washington, at banks etc and the fat daughter who could also serve. Neither does. It also begs the question: How many children of the politicians who took us to war are in uniform? The answer - NONE. How many of the politicians who took us to war have ever served? Answer, you've guessed it, NONE.”
I don't think I can usefully add to that.
A symbolic salute because it has been A Fool's Golden Age. When the benefit society was launched we were poorer than we had ever been in our history. The war had left us deeply in debt to America, a debt that generous country insisted should be paid back immediately, thus achieving one of its war aims which was the destruction of the British Empire.
I do not complain about the notion of a Benefit Society. It was that rare thing in politics, a generous gesture, and I have benefited from it.
My great-grandfather was so rich he bought a separate house for his children and hired servants to look after them. Thanks to an unwise marriage, my grannie ended her life living in one room in Moss Side, sharing kitchen and bathroom.
Since I became eighty I have had Rolls Royce medical service and am still visited regularly by district nurses. I have pensions which meet my needs; I qualify for an an attendance allowance; my TV licence costs me nothing; I am not charged for chiropody treatment, optical examination or medical prescriptions. I have a disabled pass which entitles me to park almost anywhere and the key to disabled lavatories, worldwide. Thanks to the Internet, I am in touch with my circle of much valued chums. Grannie's only sources of entertainment were her books and the accumulator powered radio. The Internet is my club, my shopping centre, my research library, my concert hall, my Citizen's Advice Bureau and my secondhand bookshop. I can listen to the radio on it, watch TV programmes and write blogs and books.
Sadly, the talentless crew who run TV networks are only creative in assessing their own salaries. The technology over which they have no control is brilliant, the programmes they air are not. They are largely repeats. Happily, viewers have at last tumbled to this confidence trick.
ITV1 and BBC1 suffered their worst ever month of ratings in August, whilst Channel 4 clocked up its poorest score for 25 years as viewers turned off lack-lustre summer schedules on the main networks. ITV1 pulled in an average all-day share of just 15.15% for the whole month, eclipsing its previous worst figure of 16.1% in July. BBC1 also had its worst monthly all-time share, at 19.51%. Channel 4 had a share of 6.47% for August, down on its performance in August 2008.
Predictably the talentless ones have found a new way to waste millions. Not by making better programmes. They say they cannot afford that. We will soon be able to switch on High Definition making it possible to watch programmes we have demonstrated are not worth watching on old- fashioned TV.
For all that, as Oscar Wilde observed, I am dying beyond my means and I wonder if my grandchildren, nay, my children, will be able to boast a similar end-of-life style?
I can remember when our policemen were wonderful, when politician were honourable and when the House of Lords was staffed by gentlemen. I can also remember music. How different are things now. The tribal chant has replaced music. The nation's dpoctors have signed on o crew the ship of fools. They say we can cure a our feral young of binge drinking by banning adverts. I wonder how many were encouraged to become drug addicts by adverts.
Moonlighting MPs have admitted their spare time jobs are bringing fifty times the average salaries of their constituents. Yet in hundreds of pages of submissions they made to Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. they expressed continued resentment at the public's anger over the abuse of expenses. They continued to argue that they should be allowed to sell taxpayer-subsidised homes at a profit; insisted they should be allowed to employ family members. One backbencher said he should not even be required to submit receipts for expenditure and claimed: "This makes MPs into petty accounting clerks."
Only nine MPs responded to a consultation on the siting of eco-towns and none responded to consultations on human embryo research and compensation for crime victims.
In one thing the MPs were correct. They have done nothing wrong in charging excessive expenses. Their crime was much greater. They passed the fraudulent legislation that made their claims tenable. Every MP who voted yes should be barred from office.
The banks which all but wrecked Western civilisation are using the money borrowed from tax payers to continue to pay themselves massive bonuses. Quangos proliferate, Council executives are wildly overpaid, though the services they provide are being reduced. We are committed to wasting more young lives in an unwinnable war to support a corrupt government which is incapable of ruling Afghanistan. The only thing our Establishment has learned from its mistakes, apparently, is that it can continue to get away with making them. Even when they accidentally get something right, they alter it to make it look wrong.
On inadequate evidence, that Libyan got a life sentence. Cancer has ensured he served it. Of course Brown did not want him to die in a British prison. Think of the excuse that would give the terrorists.
Brown denies he extracted commercial gain out of the repatriation. More fool him. A BP team were given permission to survey for oil of which the West stands in desperate need. If the agent's death has been parleyed into a new source of oil then those luckless passengers who died over Lockerbie have been martyrs in a good cause.
Parenthetically, the Scottish Nationalist Party is calling for Scottish Independence. I believe more Englishmen than Scots are in favour of this historic change. Scotsmen see the UK has been ruled by their fellow countrymen and are aware what a mess they have made.
The government policy-makers should spend some time reading Carl von Clausewitz. Echoing the great 19th-century Prussian military theorist, nation-building advocates must always keep in mind that military strategies are formulated to reach political outcomes, and not the other way around.
Mr Brown, who has achieved the impossible by being an even worse prime minister than his bloodstained predecessor, has recently given a superb example of this kind of muddled thinking. He says we cannot leave Afghanistan until the Afghan army is able to hold the country against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. That means a revival of the Hundred Years War. I have a friend who has earned his living writing about wars from the Falklands on. He knew most of our generals when they were junior officers and keeps in close touch with them. He has close ties with our Special Forces. He recently sent me this email:
“............The problem is the politicians who will not listen to the generals, brigadiers and colonels on the ground. The soldiers are patrolling day after day and returning exhausted and have to leave the ground - even that just outside their bases - to the enemy. The Afghan Army cannot be trusted and the police are a fifth column. Another brigade will allow the British Army to do what it does best and that is fight and dominate ground at night while the Special Forces of the SAS and SBS can be inserted deep, deep into the badlands - assuming, of course, they have the helicopters - to attack the leadership and the real bad boys in their own midden. The technology for calling in air strikes is so advanced nowadays that the Special Forces can call in the raid and vanish without having to fire a shot themselves. Boots on the ground mean that the soldiers can watch for the bombers and either deal with them themselves or call in a drone or Apache or even an American B-1 bomber. Another brigade and the proper number of helicopters and you will see a drastic downturn in casualties caused by IEDs. But the politicians won't listen and, if they do, won't do what they are advised. The days of Colonel Blimp are long, long gone. Today's generals are incredibly clever men as are the brigadiers. Most double their money in civvy street as soon as they leave the Army. To the politicians it is all about fighting war on the cheap. They don't cut off the money to the idle dossers who won't work or the leeching drug addicts who can't work through their own stupidity or the families of illegals who seem to have more rights here than the natives. Hard decisions have to be taken and if they want to win a breathing space to sit and talk the Taliban round - after killing off a few of the drug barons - then they're going to have to give the commanders the tools they need to do the job. The politicians don't seem to understand the cultural differences between the Afghans and their stone-age mentality and that of the West. Democracy in Afghanistan. That means doing what the Elders decide, not what some half-cock corrupt politician like Karzai and his cronies want as they skim off millions and zillions of foreign aid.
Mr Tory Blair, who ordered our youth into both Iraq and Afghanistan so he could sail to world glory on a sea of the blood of our children, has at least two children of his own of military age, but neither is serving. One, Euan, has led a gilded life, university, internships in Washington, at banks etc and the fat daughter who could also serve. Neither does. It also begs the question: How many children of the politicians who took us to war are in uniform? The answer - NONE. How many of the politicians who took us to war have ever served? Answer, you've guessed it, NONE.”
I don't think I can usefully add to that.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
DISPATCHES FROM THE WAIST LINE
This DNA business continues to alarm.
I have been reading the startling story of our first single-cell ancestor. A merry little chap who lived in boiling springs and ate nothing except sulphur.
Not my idea of a good time. The boiling springs I could live with. Could? I have. I've been in hot water for the best part of eighty years now. But I cannot help wondering what dieters would have made of the sulphur diet. About twenty column inches of superficial rubbish in the national dailies, I suspect. No doubt bringing the conversation round to an attack on the defenceless and harmless chip buttie.
Harmless, do I hear you cry? Harmless, I answer firmly. Because I've noticed one thing about these diet nuts. Anything that they start by saying is bad for you always ends up being good for you within ten years at most. And anyone who doubts me should think about the potato. It's not all that long since we were being led to believe that a mouthful of potato would produce an instant heart attack at Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. Now we are being encouraged to shovel the stuff down.
I can't think why dieticians have such a down on chips. They have had more publicity out of them than the entire Association of Fish Friers. But I don't worry. Any day now a group of doctors who are in need of a bit of free advertising are going to discover the nutritional value of the chip and it will be lettuce that sends you blind. Can't stand the stuff myself. Just makes me sorry for cows who are doomed to a lifetime of uncooked greenery. But I'm a carnivore. I think heaven will be a vast, eternal agricultural show where the elite meat will meet, the pork does everything but talk, sheep dog your every step and collies flower.
Vegetables I am fond of. Straight from the garden, of course. And when I've dug them out of the ground I always run with them to the kitchen. Because the reason they taste better fresh is that the moment a pea or a bean dies all the sugar in its cuddly little body starts turning into starch.
Which is why, if you looked out of my back door, you would see beans practically within hand's reach of the chair I'm sitting in writing this. Because when you are stepping in the ring at my weight, well, the shorter the short dash, the better.
Though I cannot claim the fine tuning of this man I met in the South of France who was heavily into wild boar. He was in the right place for catching them, of course. But, like me, he was the wrong shape. His problem was as follows: He lived as far up a Pyrenee as you could decently reach by public transport. But the boars very perversely chose even higher slopes as desirable residences. It was the Mohammed and the Mountain syndrome and, as he couldn't reach them without a fork-lift truck, he had to think of a way of bringing the boar to him. It was at this point he learned that, fond as he was of wild boar, it was as nothing to the mania wild boar have for sweet corn. From then on, he said, it was easy. He planted two rows of sweet corn against his garden fence and sat in the bedroom window with his shot gun. Word soon got around among the wild boar, as it does about new places to eat, and before you could say “Pass the marinade” it was wild boar for all.
And talking of France, why do we write menus in French? You go Chinese or Indian, you don't expect to know what you are eating and it wouldn't make much sense even if you did. Who has ever seen a water chestnut? You just hope when you order from the menu it isn't anyone you know. But 'poisson' in a pub? Boeuf Wellington? Who beat who, for goodness sake? And crepes Suzette? Pancakes. Crepe is what dresses used to be made from in the happy days before denim.
Consoling Consultation (Chinese style)
Q: Doctor, I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?
A: Your heart only good for so many beats, and that it – don't waste on exercise. Everything wear out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take nap.
Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A: You must grasp logistical efficiency. What does cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So steak is nothing more than efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef also good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And pork chop can give you 100% of recommended daily allowance of vegetable product.
Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: No, not at all. Wine made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!
Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two bodies, your ration two to one, etc.
Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise programme?
A: Can't think of single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain – good !
Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food are fried these day in vegetable oil. In fact, they permeated by it. How could getting more vegetable be bad for you???
Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.
I have been reading the startling story of our first single-cell ancestor. A merry little chap who lived in boiling springs and ate nothing except sulphur.
Not my idea of a good time. The boiling springs I could live with. Could? I have. I've been in hot water for the best part of eighty years now. But I cannot help wondering what dieters would have made of the sulphur diet. About twenty column inches of superficial rubbish in the national dailies, I suspect. No doubt bringing the conversation round to an attack on the defenceless and harmless chip buttie.
Harmless, do I hear you cry? Harmless, I answer firmly. Because I've noticed one thing about these diet nuts. Anything that they start by saying is bad for you always ends up being good for you within ten years at most. And anyone who doubts me should think about the potato. It's not all that long since we were being led to believe that a mouthful of potato would produce an instant heart attack at Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. Now we are being encouraged to shovel the stuff down.
I can't think why dieticians have such a down on chips. They have had more publicity out of them than the entire Association of Fish Friers. But I don't worry. Any day now a group of doctors who are in need of a bit of free advertising are going to discover the nutritional value of the chip and it will be lettuce that sends you blind. Can't stand the stuff myself. Just makes me sorry for cows who are doomed to a lifetime of uncooked greenery. But I'm a carnivore. I think heaven will be a vast, eternal agricultural show where the elite meat will meet, the pork does everything but talk, sheep dog your every step and collies flower.
Vegetables I am fond of. Straight from the garden, of course. And when I've dug them out of the ground I always run with them to the kitchen. Because the reason they taste better fresh is that the moment a pea or a bean dies all the sugar in its cuddly little body starts turning into starch.
Which is why, if you looked out of my back door, you would see beans practically within hand's reach of the chair I'm sitting in writing this. Because when you are stepping in the ring at my weight, well, the shorter the short dash, the better.
Though I cannot claim the fine tuning of this man I met in the South of France who was heavily into wild boar. He was in the right place for catching them, of course. But, like me, he was the wrong shape. His problem was as follows: He lived as far up a Pyrenee as you could decently reach by public transport. But the boars very perversely chose even higher slopes as desirable residences. It was the Mohammed and the Mountain syndrome and, as he couldn't reach them without a fork-lift truck, he had to think of a way of bringing the boar to him. It was at this point he learned that, fond as he was of wild boar, it was as nothing to the mania wild boar have for sweet corn. From then on, he said, it was easy. He planted two rows of sweet corn against his garden fence and sat in the bedroom window with his shot gun. Word soon got around among the wild boar, as it does about new places to eat, and before you could say “Pass the marinade” it was wild boar for all.
And talking of France, why do we write menus in French? You go Chinese or Indian, you don't expect to know what you are eating and it wouldn't make much sense even if you did. Who has ever seen a water chestnut? You just hope when you order from the menu it isn't anyone you know. But 'poisson' in a pub? Boeuf Wellington? Who beat who, for goodness sake? And crepes Suzette? Pancakes. Crepe is what dresses used to be made from in the happy days before denim.
Consoling Consultation (Chinese style)
Q: Doctor, I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?
A: Your heart only good for so many beats, and that it – don't waste on exercise. Everything wear out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take nap.
Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A: You must grasp logistical efficiency. What does cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So steak is nothing more than efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef also good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And pork chop can give you 100% of recommended daily allowance of vegetable product.
Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: No, not at all. Wine made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!
Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two bodies, your ration two to one, etc.
Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise programme?
A: Can't think of single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain – good !
Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food are fried these day in vegetable oil. In fact, they permeated by it. How could getting more vegetable be bad for you???
Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.
Saturday, 29 August 2009
I grow, I prosper; Now, gods, stand up for bastards - King Lear
I feel like something out of East Lynne, but may I make a plea from the wintry doorstep? I like to think I may have entered the family via the Duchess of Beaufort (nee Frances Scudamore) who was accused of adultery with William Lord Talbot of Hensol by whom she was said to have an illegitimate daughter. She married the Duke in 1729. I was born in 1929. Significant, eh?
The Duke sued in the Ecclesiastical Court for permission to divorce Frances by Act of Parliament. She counter-sued claiming that the Duke was impotent. In a letter to the Court in 1742 she wrote: "The privy members of the Duke were never to my knowledge turgid, dilated or erected in such a way as may be usual or necessary to perform the act of carnal copulation. As a result the Duke never did penetrate or enter my body."
When he heard the news of the Duchess's claim, the Duke cried, "The bitch has got us. She'll stop my divorce and put that bastard child in line for my fortune. You see a ruined man...."
As she had given birth to an illegitimate child, the Duke agreed to prove HIS virility before a distinguished panel which included Horace Walpole, the Dean of the Court of Arches, two physicians, three surgeons, an ecclesiastic court and several other gentlemen.
His manservant James Phillips suggested the potency test which had last been used in York in 1433. Indeed it was Phillips who started the hare. Another manservant at Holme Lacey, the Duchess's Herefordshire home, beckoned Phillips to follow him on tiptoe and peep through the keyhole of Her Ladyship's dressing room. Inside, Phillips saw her sitting on Lord Talbot's knee. He entered the room - “she jumped up and smoothed down her petticoats, but I saw her lace cap was tumbled and her bosom exposed. Talbot crossed his legs and turned away to stop me from seeing his trouser buttons were undone.”
Phillips deposed that whilst the Duke was away Lord Talbot visited the house three times a week.
An undermaid reported that five of the six chairs in the dining room had been set side by side to make a couch. On the chairs and floor they found bits of silver lace, rubbed off the back of the gown the Duchess was wearing.
She was heard to say on another occasion: “You make me very hot. I am not able to bear it. What would you have me do, my precious lord? I fear the servants suspect us.”
The proving took place in a Dr Meade's London home. When Walpole arrived, his friend the actor and playwright Colley Cibber said: “Good thing you are here. You are Controller of the Pipes. Let's hope the good Duke can control his. His Lordship's member is on everyone's lips.”
Thomas Grey, the poet, sighed: “That things like this should be done for money. Simply to be revenged on Talbot for four score thousand pounds.”
Lord Orrery observed: “Alas, what money can recompense for such injuries?”
The General Consensus was that the the Duke should have openly demonstrated his virility in a brothel. However, as Walpole said, “This man at the age of seven acceded to one of the noblest titles in England. A Plantagenet, direct descendant of John of Gaunt, he has royal blood in his veins. He is the Duke of Beaufort, Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan and Barons Herbert, Raglan and Beaufort of Raglan Castle. One of the richest noblemen in Europe.”
Sir Horace Man, the Ambassador to Florence, said: “... and about to be humiliated in a way not seen in England since a case in York in 1433.”
That case was tried in open court with seven women. The Duke performed behind a screen. He was dressed in a powdered wig with side curls, his hair gathered at the back in a bow from which a ribbon went round his neck, rimmed shirt, lace cravat and knee-breeches, fitted over stockings with gold buckle shoes.
As he approached the screen looking frail and weak for his 36 years, he turned and bowed to the company. “When I knock on the screen, come to me speedily at that moment.”
Ten minutes later there was a knock, the sound of happy gasps......................Beaufort had proved his case.
JUST A THOUGHT...........................
Why should other departments and agencies of the state transform themselves and the way they do things, while the vast, creaking NHS structure - the world’s third largest employer after Indian rail and the Chinese army - stands intact and protected?
Nigel Lawson famously observes in his memoirs: ‘The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.’ ...................... Mr Cameron, desperate to prove his theological orthodoxy as a worshipper in the church of St Aneurin Bevan, condemns heresy unambiguously.
Yet what the NHS religion needs now is not unquestioning doctrinal traditionalism but its equivalent of the Reformation: a revolution in practice and the distribution of power within the faith, away from the ‘priesthood’ to which Lawson refers, and towards the parishioners - that is, the patients themselves...(The Spectator Aug 19)
And remember:
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand - chocolate in the other - body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO-HOO, what a ride!!"
The Duke sued in the Ecclesiastical Court for permission to divorce Frances by Act of Parliament. She counter-sued claiming that the Duke was impotent. In a letter to the Court in 1742 she wrote: "The privy members of the Duke were never to my knowledge turgid, dilated or erected in such a way as may be usual or necessary to perform the act of carnal copulation. As a result the Duke never did penetrate or enter my body."
When he heard the news of the Duchess's claim, the Duke cried, "The bitch has got us. She'll stop my divorce and put that bastard child in line for my fortune. You see a ruined man...."
As she had given birth to an illegitimate child, the Duke agreed to prove HIS virility before a distinguished panel which included Horace Walpole, the Dean of the Court of Arches, two physicians, three surgeons, an ecclesiastic court and several other gentlemen.
His manservant James Phillips suggested the potency test which had last been used in York in 1433. Indeed it was Phillips who started the hare. Another manservant at Holme Lacey, the Duchess's Herefordshire home, beckoned Phillips to follow him on tiptoe and peep through the keyhole of Her Ladyship's dressing room. Inside, Phillips saw her sitting on Lord Talbot's knee. He entered the room - “she jumped up and smoothed down her petticoats, but I saw her lace cap was tumbled and her bosom exposed. Talbot crossed his legs and turned away to stop me from seeing his trouser buttons were undone.”
Phillips deposed that whilst the Duke was away Lord Talbot visited the house three times a week.
An undermaid reported that five of the six chairs in the dining room had been set side by side to make a couch. On the chairs and floor they found bits of silver lace, rubbed off the back of the gown the Duchess was wearing.
She was heard to say on another occasion: “You make me very hot. I am not able to bear it. What would you have me do, my precious lord? I fear the servants suspect us.”
The proving took place in a Dr Meade's London home. When Walpole arrived, his friend the actor and playwright Colley Cibber said: “Good thing you are here. You are Controller of the Pipes. Let's hope the good Duke can control his. His Lordship's member is on everyone's lips.”
Thomas Grey, the poet, sighed: “That things like this should be done for money. Simply to be revenged on Talbot for four score thousand pounds.”
Lord Orrery observed: “Alas, what money can recompense for such injuries?”
The General Consensus was that the the Duke should have openly demonstrated his virility in a brothel. However, as Walpole said, “This man at the age of seven acceded to one of the noblest titles in England. A Plantagenet, direct descendant of John of Gaunt, he has royal blood in his veins. He is the Duke of Beaufort, Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan and Barons Herbert, Raglan and Beaufort of Raglan Castle. One of the richest noblemen in Europe.”
Sir Horace Man, the Ambassador to Florence, said: “... and about to be humiliated in a way not seen in England since a case in York in 1433.”
That case was tried in open court with seven women. The Duke performed behind a screen. He was dressed in a powdered wig with side curls, his hair gathered at the back in a bow from which a ribbon went round his neck, rimmed shirt, lace cravat and knee-breeches, fitted over stockings with gold buckle shoes.
As he approached the screen looking frail and weak for his 36 years, he turned and bowed to the company. “When I knock on the screen, come to me speedily at that moment.”
Ten minutes later there was a knock, the sound of happy gasps......................Beaufort had proved his case.
JUST A THOUGHT...........................
Why should other departments and agencies of the state transform themselves and the way they do things, while the vast, creaking NHS structure - the world’s third largest employer after Indian rail and the Chinese army - stands intact and protected?
Nigel Lawson famously observes in his memoirs: ‘The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.’ ...................... Mr Cameron, desperate to prove his theological orthodoxy as a worshipper in the church of St Aneurin Bevan, condemns heresy unambiguously.
Yet what the NHS religion needs now is not unquestioning doctrinal traditionalism but its equivalent of the Reformation: a revolution in practice and the distribution of power within the faith, away from the ‘priesthood’ to which Lawson refers, and towards the parishioners - that is, the patients themselves...(The Spectator Aug 19)
And remember:
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand - chocolate in the other - body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO-HOO, what a ride!!"
Friday, 21 August 2009
HATCHED.MISMATCHED AND DISPATCHED
I was pained to learn that I am not, after all, descended from a sister of the Virgin Mary. Nor am I a sprig of Owain Glyndwr, an echo of Edmund Spenser. No Boleyn blood flows in my veins and, saddest of all, I cannot claim kinship with the only ambassador to France who refused to speak French and brought back to England the red streak apple which started the commercial cyder industry and the Hereford cattle which made beautiful our meadows. That non -ancestor was involved in a diplomatic dispute at home when his five-foot vicar, who could not be seen over the rim of the pulpit in his living at Abbey Dore, refused to stand on a box during services. It was, the vicar claimed, “not consonant with the dignity of my office.”
I shall miss being connected to the Skidmore mentioned in Treasure Island, who was a doctor on a slave ship which was captured by pirates. By the custom of the day, he was only forced to spend a limited number of days as a pirate. He so enjoyed it he refused to leave when his time was up and ended, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, dangling from a rope in Execution Dock. “Sir Amoret” in the sixth book of “The Faerie Queen” is based on another non-ancestor who was Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Henry VIII, a heavy responsibility, I should have thought. He was a “parfait gentil knight”. Curious, because when he left his home in Herefordshire he always chained his wife to the wall.
Sad, too, that I can no longer boast a connection with that unfortunate lady in waiting, a Boleyn girl who so offended Queen Elizabeth I by secretly marrying a Skidmore that the Queen threw a silver candlestick at her and broke her finger.
Alas, none of them have anything to do with me.
It's all down to DNA. My family history group took an exhaustive DNA test and mine shows that somewhere in the last 350 years - how can I put it delicately? - a Skidmore wife dropped a cuckoo into the family nest. I cannot complain. Between the ages of fifteen and forty I scattered my seed pretty generously about Western Europe and blood will out.
My former relatives have been kind. Warren Skidmore, an American academic of towering intellect who is the chairman of our Family Group, has adopted me.
Consoling me, the secretary of our group said I might turn out to be descended from the Churchills. I do hope not. In my view, Winston was a war monger every bit as enthusiastic as Hitler and his alleged connection with his aristocratic ancestors is as dubious as mine. According to George Moore, his mother Jennie had 280 publicly acknowledged lovers, including her great love, a Portuguese diplomat known as “Monkey”. Connections which Churchill relentlessly pressured her to use to aid his upward flight and, incidentally, get out of a homosexual scandal in his regiment.
As I have written here, the historian Squire Bancroft has pointed out that the ultimate disaster of Norway, Gallipoli, the pathetic “invasion” of Greece and the Ottoman debacle were not his only blunders. His great talent was for Spin. His heirs are Blair and the TV advertising industry. Though not even Lord Meddleson approaches the heights to which Churchill soared. He ensured his place in the history of the war by writing it himself from papers he had no right to acquire. Typically, the actual work was done by a team of researchers. He just supplied the high octane spin. He also backed the traitor King Edward VIII and later threatened to court martial him. Although a champion of Empire, he sold it as the price of bringing America into the war.
Which angry rant reminds me that I have been very rude about Stephen Fry. I still think he is a lousy actor because he only ever plays himself. I cannot stand the way he parades his knowledge on what are supposed to be comedy programmes and I find his proselytising about his proclivities nauseating. However, I listened to his radio programme on accents and I was bowled over. The man is a brilliant teacher, clearly in love with language. I might have known from the superb book he wrote on the appreciation of poetry. What a waste.
ANOTHER SOLDIER POET WRITES:
AFGHANISTAN (with apologies to Kipling)
When you're lying alone in your Afghan bivvy,
And your life it depends on some MOD civvie.
When the body armour's shared (one set between three),
And the firefight's not like it is on TV,
Then you'll look to your oppo,your gun and your God,
As you follow that path all Tommies have trod.
When the gimpy has jammed and you're down to one round,
And the faith that you'd lost is suddenly found,
When the Taliban horde is close up to the fort,
And you pray that the arty don't drop a round short.
Stick to your sergeant like a good squaddie should,
And fight them like Satan or one of his brood.
Your pay it won't cover your needs or your wants,
So just stand there and take all the Taliban's taunts.
Nor generals nor civvies can do aught to amend it,
Except make sure you're kept in a place you can't spend it.
Three fifty an hour in your Afghani cage,
Not nearly as much as the minimum wage.
Your missus at home in a foul married quarter,
With damp on the walls and a roof leaking water.
Your kids miss their mate, their hero, their dad;
They're missing the childhood that they should have had.
One day it will be different, one day by and by,
As you all stand there and watch, to see the pigs fly.
Just like your forebears in mud, dust and ditch,
You'll march and you'll fight, and you'll drink and you'll bitch.
Whether Froggy or Zulu, or Jerry, or Boer,
The Brits will fight on 'til the battle is over.
You may treat him like dirt, but nowt will unnerve him,
But I wonder sometimes, if the country deserves him.
POSTCRIPT
Brown, the only politician I have ever hated, continues the calumny that such soldiers as those are dying to keep Britain safe from Terrorism. He is employing the tactics advised by Machiavelli in his instruction book for leaders, “The Prince”. If you invent an enemy, the people will rally behind you. Brown conjures up a Terrorist army with formations and long term strategies. I can accept there are terrorist training camps in the Tribal Territories. The idea that we are facing an organised enemy is rubbish. It is a view that I was honoured to see has been endorsed by the supreme military historian Corelli Barnett who wrote this week unequivocally that we should get out of Afghanistan. More importantly, this view accords with that of the mother of a dead soldier who said last week she thought her son had wasted his life and we should come out of Afghanistan. I suspect the majority of people would agree with her. In the middle ages Froissart, a Frenchman, said that the British made the best soldiers in Europe and I believe that still to be true. As I believe is the maxim of our army, coined in the First World War, demonstrably accurate in World War Two and in every war since, “Lions led by Donkeys”. Donkeys who wait until they are safely retired before they criticise our strategy.
We spend billions on sophisticated aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines of marvellous complexity. Why cannot we perfect a simple device to identify and disable a few sticks of dynamite, tied together and buried at the roadside? Perhaps because its production wouldn't make enough money.
DON'T PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED
Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counter-terrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World”, should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale Press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí. - Book review in New York Times.
A LITTLE (VERY LITTLE) LEARNING
Madam and I spend Sundays visiting gardens, in which Fenland abounds. In my case mainly for the cream teas. The Fellows Garden at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, is only open to the masses one day a year, so we went. As. I sat on a bench waiting for the Herself to park the car, I was surrounded by a Feral of the young, students on a tour of the city. Their guide first told them: "This town is called Cambridge," which they might have gleaned. Then he said: "King's College is a hundred years old” (it is 800) and went on to say, "If you want to buy computers, it's that road over there. If you want souvenirs, it's that road behind you. McDonald's is the second on the left. But don't go anywhere on your own." He was corrected in that - and only that - by a teacher: “Go in threes!”
So ended their only lesson.
I shall miss being connected to the Skidmore mentioned in Treasure Island, who was a doctor on a slave ship which was captured by pirates. By the custom of the day, he was only forced to spend a limited number of days as a pirate. He so enjoyed it he refused to leave when his time was up and ended, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, dangling from a rope in Execution Dock. “Sir Amoret” in the sixth book of “The Faerie Queen” is based on another non-ancestor who was Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Henry VIII, a heavy responsibility, I should have thought. He was a “parfait gentil knight”. Curious, because when he left his home in Herefordshire he always chained his wife to the wall.
Sad, too, that I can no longer boast a connection with that unfortunate lady in waiting, a Boleyn girl who so offended Queen Elizabeth I by secretly marrying a Skidmore that the Queen threw a silver candlestick at her and broke her finger.
Alas, none of them have anything to do with me.
It's all down to DNA. My family history group took an exhaustive DNA test and mine shows that somewhere in the last 350 years - how can I put it delicately? - a Skidmore wife dropped a cuckoo into the family nest. I cannot complain. Between the ages of fifteen and forty I scattered my seed pretty generously about Western Europe and blood will out.
My former relatives have been kind. Warren Skidmore, an American academic of towering intellect who is the chairman of our Family Group, has adopted me.
Consoling me, the secretary of our group said I might turn out to be descended from the Churchills. I do hope not. In my view, Winston was a war monger every bit as enthusiastic as Hitler and his alleged connection with his aristocratic ancestors is as dubious as mine. According to George Moore, his mother Jennie had 280 publicly acknowledged lovers, including her great love, a Portuguese diplomat known as “Monkey”. Connections which Churchill relentlessly pressured her to use to aid his upward flight and, incidentally, get out of a homosexual scandal in his regiment.
As I have written here, the historian Squire Bancroft has pointed out that the ultimate disaster of Norway, Gallipoli, the pathetic “invasion” of Greece and the Ottoman debacle were not his only blunders. His great talent was for Spin. His heirs are Blair and the TV advertising industry. Though not even Lord Meddleson approaches the heights to which Churchill soared. He ensured his place in the history of the war by writing it himself from papers he had no right to acquire. Typically, the actual work was done by a team of researchers. He just supplied the high octane spin. He also backed the traitor King Edward VIII and later threatened to court martial him. Although a champion of Empire, he sold it as the price of bringing America into the war.
Which angry rant reminds me that I have been very rude about Stephen Fry. I still think he is a lousy actor because he only ever plays himself. I cannot stand the way he parades his knowledge on what are supposed to be comedy programmes and I find his proselytising about his proclivities nauseating. However, I listened to his radio programme on accents and I was bowled over. The man is a brilliant teacher, clearly in love with language. I might have known from the superb book he wrote on the appreciation of poetry. What a waste.
ANOTHER SOLDIER POET WRITES:
AFGHANISTAN (with apologies to Kipling)
When you're lying alone in your Afghan bivvy,
And your life it depends on some MOD civvie.
When the body armour's shared (one set between three),
And the firefight's not like it is on TV,
Then you'll look to your oppo,your gun and your God,
As you follow that path all Tommies have trod.
When the gimpy has jammed and you're down to one round,
And the faith that you'd lost is suddenly found,
When the Taliban horde is close up to the fort,
And you pray that the arty don't drop a round short.
Stick to your sergeant like a good squaddie should,
And fight them like Satan or one of his brood.
Your pay it won't cover your needs or your wants,
So just stand there and take all the Taliban's taunts.
Nor generals nor civvies can do aught to amend it,
Except make sure you're kept in a place you can't spend it.
Three fifty an hour in your Afghani cage,
Not nearly as much as the minimum wage.
Your missus at home in a foul married quarter,
With damp on the walls and a roof leaking water.
Your kids miss their mate, their hero, their dad;
They're missing the childhood that they should have had.
One day it will be different, one day by and by,
As you all stand there and watch, to see the pigs fly.
Just like your forebears in mud, dust and ditch,
You'll march and you'll fight, and you'll drink and you'll bitch.
Whether Froggy or Zulu, or Jerry, or Boer,
The Brits will fight on 'til the battle is over.
You may treat him like dirt, but nowt will unnerve him,
But I wonder sometimes, if the country deserves him.
POSTCRIPT
Brown, the only politician I have ever hated, continues the calumny that such soldiers as those are dying to keep Britain safe from Terrorism. He is employing the tactics advised by Machiavelli in his instruction book for leaders, “The Prince”. If you invent an enemy, the people will rally behind you. Brown conjures up a Terrorist army with formations and long term strategies. I can accept there are terrorist training camps in the Tribal Territories. The idea that we are facing an organised enemy is rubbish. It is a view that I was honoured to see has been endorsed by the supreme military historian Corelli Barnett who wrote this week unequivocally that we should get out of Afghanistan. More importantly, this view accords with that of the mother of a dead soldier who said last week she thought her son had wasted his life and we should come out of Afghanistan. I suspect the majority of people would agree with her. In the middle ages Froissart, a Frenchman, said that the British made the best soldiers in Europe and I believe that still to be true. As I believe is the maxim of our army, coined in the First World War, demonstrably accurate in World War Two and in every war since, “Lions led by Donkeys”. Donkeys who wait until they are safely retired before they criticise our strategy.
We spend billions on sophisticated aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines of marvellous complexity. Why cannot we perfect a simple device to identify and disable a few sticks of dynamite, tied together and buried at the roadside? Perhaps because its production wouldn't make enough money.
DON'T PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED
Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counter-terrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World”, should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale Press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí. - Book review in New York Times.
A LITTLE (VERY LITTLE) LEARNING
Madam and I spend Sundays visiting gardens, in which Fenland abounds. In my case mainly for the cream teas. The Fellows Garden at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, is only open to the masses one day a year, so we went. As. I sat on a bench waiting for the Herself to park the car, I was surrounded by a Feral of the young, students on a tour of the city. Their guide first told them: "This town is called Cambridge," which they might have gleaned. Then he said: "King's College is a hundred years old” (it is 800) and went on to say, "If you want to buy computers, it's that road over there. If you want souvenirs, it's that road behind you. McDonald's is the second on the left. But don't go anywhere on your own." He was corrected in that - and only that - by a teacher: “Go in threes!”
So ended their only lesson.
Friday, 14 August 2009
FOLLIES BIZARRE
My chum Blaster Bates defined expert thus: “X is an unknown quantity and spurt is an uncontrollable drip.”
I thought of his dictum this week when I heard a panel of experts agree that war is inevitable. It isn't.
Indeed there are many signs that the taste for war is diminishing. People are rightly shocked at the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the combined losses in both wars amount to less than the deaths in a single battle of a battalion in world war one.
That war was far from inevitable. Had Churchill not refused an offer of alliance from the Ottoman Empire, hijacking two Turkish battleships which were being built in British yards, the Turks would not have gone on to form an alliance with Germany, thus encouraging the Kaiser to take on what was then Great Britain.
If Lloyd George, whose family firm of solicitors represented Christian Zionists, had not pushed through the Balfour Declaration, thus ruining negotiations that were going forward between the Zionists and new Arab kings, Feisal and Ibn Saud, for land in Palestine, the seeds would not have been planted of the Israeli/Arab wars. Nor would there be the visceral hatred of the West which dates from the day the Allies went back on their promise to return Arabia to the Arabs. Had the Allies not insisted on unconditional surrender, the First World War would have ended in 1917 and thousands of wasted lives would have been saved. The economy of Germany would not have been wrecked; nor would it, in consequence, have been possible for a corporal called Adolf Hitler to take over a fringe political party and turn a bankrupt country into the Nazi war machine.
It would be a bold strategist who claimed Iraq was inevitable or the campaign in the Afghan Tribal territories. At the time of the Falklands I pointed out that we were sending ships we no longer owned transporting troops to fight for a land owned by British Coalite against an enemy most of whose officer class we had trained. In this I was supported by the great Dr Johnson whose tri- centenary year this is. In1771 he wrote a pamphlet “On Falklands Islands”:
“Beyond this what have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island, thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island, which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smile upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future bucaniers. To all this the government has now given ample attestation, for the island has been since abandoned, and, perhaps, was kept only to quiet clamours, with an intention, not then wholly concealed, of quitting it in a short time.
“ ........With what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, resign their lives amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death."
Johnson went on to offer a reason that periodically mankind finds war, if not inevitable, then certainly irresistible.
“ The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroick fiction. .............. . If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy......... how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations!
“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.”
I can think of a number of other self induced wars to which Dr Johnson's wise words might apply.
One wonders what he would make of our present government and the choice we will presently have between Mandelson's malefactors and Cameron's car salesmen. He would be amused, I think, at the assertion of MPs that unless we show we love them, the brightest talents would not be willing to serve in the House of Ill Fame. Ignoring the fact that the Conservatives have a queue of 5,000 for any available seats and jobs in the top five per cent of salaries.
Among them is Rory Stewart. Eton and Oxford educated, he has been a tutor to royalty, an officer in the Black Watch, the deputy governor of an Iraqi province, has founded a charity in Afghanistan and has written two critically acclaimed books, as well as walking across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. A cert for High Office? Future Foreign Secretary? Not likely. He has dismayed his Tory bosses by saying publicly the Afghan war is unwinnable and we should get out.
Reticence and a TV profile might have helped Stewart to secure a Government post . The dazzling talent of Joan Bakewell for boring an audience has been harnessed to lead the Elderly to the Frequently Promised Land. Arlene Someonorother has become the first Ballroom Dancing Czar who aims to have us all doing Tai Che in the few parks which are not infested by the Feral Young.
Admittedly it will pass the time for the four million about-to-be unemployed.
To be fair, those ladies cannot make a bigger hash than the Government they join.. I have been looking over my files and the record of this misgovernment is a sorry one.
The Home Office lost its political antennae over 42-day detention without trial. Its immigration statistics are chaotic and a plan for three "titan" prisons was revealed as unfunded, suggesting a serious cabinet failure.
The health department lurched from overspend to underspend as it slid down Europe's hospital infection league table. Education built academy schools at five times the cost of equivalent local council schools, with no noticeable rise in standards. Transport is under lobbyist capture. Environment's most ambitious planning initiatives are in disarray. The Olympics project appears beyond budgetary control.
A survey in the Guardian rated Britain bottom of seven western governments in using computers - everything from procurement to "scrap rates" and negotiating weakness. Whitehall's response was to double spending on consultants by the Office of Government Commerce.
Costs on the ID card and NHS computer projects accelerated beyond the power of audit. And there is no sign of improvement. In areas such as child support, doctor recruitment, defence coordination, illegal immigration and farm subsidies, not millions, but billions of pounds are being wasted.
More recent mistakes have been even more spectacular. Difficult to see how a less talented future government could do worse. It might even curb executives in the City who claim that if bonuses are not paid the best talent will go overseas. In the light of the mess they have made of the economy, I would suggest earlier bonuses did not exactly attract dazzling talent and their mass emigration may be no bad thing. Iceland or Ireland anybody?
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN............................
It was the 7th of the 8th of 09 and a man in Car Phone Warehouse, who had just taken my camera phone for repair, noticed the date and said “lucky day.”
I did not think so. We had just come from a camera shop to which I had taken my Olympus in which the telescoping lens keeps going in and out. I was told Olympus would charge me a minimum of £120 for repairs or I could buy a new one for £80. In the end I bought a Panasonic FS25 because it was the easiest to operate. My lucky day had already cost me £180. I later sold the camera to my wife for £50 and then discovered that all it needed was a new battery.
We were late getting to the shop because the computer man, who two days ago charged me £80 to install a wireless computer (another £80), did not turn up to speed the machine which is slower now than it was before I got broadband.
I was already upset because I had spent an hour on the phone to India after the Broadband on the main computer rejected my password. I was given a new one but my mail rejected it. Even so, my day wasn't as bad as this one....................
My friend the opera singer Colin Hills, who finds amazing emails, sent it from Germany.
“Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to a radio station in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.
" Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea, heats it to a delightful temperature, then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my bum started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my bum started to burn! I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my bum was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my bum. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totalling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my bum as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poo for two days because my bum was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your arse. Now repeat to yourself, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job. Remember whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!
I thought of his dictum this week when I heard a panel of experts agree that war is inevitable. It isn't.
Indeed there are many signs that the taste for war is diminishing. People are rightly shocked at the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the combined losses in both wars amount to less than the deaths in a single battle of a battalion in world war one.
That war was far from inevitable. Had Churchill not refused an offer of alliance from the Ottoman Empire, hijacking two Turkish battleships which were being built in British yards, the Turks would not have gone on to form an alliance with Germany, thus encouraging the Kaiser to take on what was then Great Britain.
If Lloyd George, whose family firm of solicitors represented Christian Zionists, had not pushed through the Balfour Declaration, thus ruining negotiations that were going forward between the Zionists and new Arab kings, Feisal and Ibn Saud, for land in Palestine, the seeds would not have been planted of the Israeli/Arab wars. Nor would there be the visceral hatred of the West which dates from the day the Allies went back on their promise to return Arabia to the Arabs. Had the Allies not insisted on unconditional surrender, the First World War would have ended in 1917 and thousands of wasted lives would have been saved. The economy of Germany would not have been wrecked; nor would it, in consequence, have been possible for a corporal called Adolf Hitler to take over a fringe political party and turn a bankrupt country into the Nazi war machine.
It would be a bold strategist who claimed Iraq was inevitable or the campaign in the Afghan Tribal territories. At the time of the Falklands I pointed out that we were sending ships we no longer owned transporting troops to fight for a land owned by British Coalite against an enemy most of whose officer class we had trained. In this I was supported by the great Dr Johnson whose tri- centenary year this is. In1771 he wrote a pamphlet “On Falklands Islands”:
“Beyond this what have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island, thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island, which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smile upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future bucaniers. To all this the government has now given ample attestation, for the island has been since abandoned, and, perhaps, was kept only to quiet clamours, with an intention, not then wholly concealed, of quitting it in a short time.
“ ........With what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, resign their lives amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death."
Johnson went on to offer a reason that periodically mankind finds war, if not inevitable, then certainly irresistible.
“ The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroick fiction. .............. . If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy......... how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations!
“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.”
I can think of a number of other self induced wars to which Dr Johnson's wise words might apply.
One wonders what he would make of our present government and the choice we will presently have between Mandelson's malefactors and Cameron's car salesmen. He would be amused, I think, at the assertion of MPs that unless we show we love them, the brightest talents would not be willing to serve in the House of Ill Fame. Ignoring the fact that the Conservatives have a queue of 5,000 for any available seats and jobs in the top five per cent of salaries.
Among them is Rory Stewart. Eton and Oxford educated, he has been a tutor to royalty, an officer in the Black Watch, the deputy governor of an Iraqi province, has founded a charity in Afghanistan and has written two critically acclaimed books, as well as walking across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. A cert for High Office? Future Foreign Secretary? Not likely. He has dismayed his Tory bosses by saying publicly the Afghan war is unwinnable and we should get out.
Reticence and a TV profile might have helped Stewart to secure a Government post . The dazzling talent of Joan Bakewell for boring an audience has been harnessed to lead the Elderly to the Frequently Promised Land. Arlene Someonorother has become the first Ballroom Dancing Czar who aims to have us all doing Tai Che in the few parks which are not infested by the Feral Young.
Admittedly it will pass the time for the four million about-to-be unemployed.
To be fair, those ladies cannot make a bigger hash than the Government they join.. I have been looking over my files and the record of this misgovernment is a sorry one.
The Home Office lost its political antennae over 42-day detention without trial. Its immigration statistics are chaotic and a plan for three "titan" prisons was revealed as unfunded, suggesting a serious cabinet failure.
The health department lurched from overspend to underspend as it slid down Europe's hospital infection league table. Education built academy schools at five times the cost of equivalent local council schools, with no noticeable rise in standards. Transport is under lobbyist capture. Environment's most ambitious planning initiatives are in disarray. The Olympics project appears beyond budgetary control.
A survey in the Guardian rated Britain bottom of seven western governments in using computers - everything from procurement to "scrap rates" and negotiating weakness. Whitehall's response was to double spending on consultants by the Office of Government Commerce.
Costs on the ID card and NHS computer projects accelerated beyond the power of audit. And there is no sign of improvement. In areas such as child support, doctor recruitment, defence coordination, illegal immigration and farm subsidies, not millions, but billions of pounds are being wasted.
More recent mistakes have been even more spectacular. Difficult to see how a less talented future government could do worse. It might even curb executives in the City who claim that if bonuses are not paid the best talent will go overseas. In the light of the mess they have made of the economy, I would suggest earlier bonuses did not exactly attract dazzling talent and their mass emigration may be no bad thing. Iceland or Ireland anybody?
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN............................
It was the 7th of the 8th of 09 and a man in Car Phone Warehouse, who had just taken my camera phone for repair, noticed the date and said “lucky day.”
I did not think so. We had just come from a camera shop to which I had taken my Olympus in which the telescoping lens keeps going in and out. I was told Olympus would charge me a minimum of £120 for repairs or I could buy a new one for £80. In the end I bought a Panasonic FS25 because it was the easiest to operate. My lucky day had already cost me £180. I later sold the camera to my wife for £50 and then discovered that all it needed was a new battery.
We were late getting to the shop because the computer man, who two days ago charged me £80 to install a wireless computer (another £80), did not turn up to speed the machine which is slower now than it was before I got broadband.
I was already upset because I had spent an hour on the phone to India after the Broadband on the main computer rejected my password. I was given a new one but my mail rejected it. Even so, my day wasn't as bad as this one....................
My friend the opera singer Colin Hills, who finds amazing emails, sent it from Germany.
“Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to a radio station in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.
" Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea, heats it to a delightful temperature, then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my bum started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my bum started to burn! I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my bum was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my bum. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totalling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my bum as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poo for two days because my bum was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your arse. Now repeat to yourself, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job. Remember whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!
Saturday, 8 August 2009
The Very Moveable Feast
You are not even safe when you are dead. I always believed that “A Moveable Feast”, Ernest Hemingway's account of his early days in Paris, was, “Fiesta” and his short stories apart, one of the best things he did. But his descendants aren't happy with it. They claim he was unfair on his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. They have re-written it and plan to publish it this week.
I didn't believe everything in it, of course. He was never as poor as he claimed: he was the Paris staffer for a Canadian newspaper. Scott Fitzgerald might have been reassured about his minute private parts after Hemingway took him to see the nude Greek statues in the Louvre or Hemingway could have made it up. But you could still smell the new bread in the boulangerie he described and hear the stairs creak in the attic he rented next to a timber yard. When I was last there, the timber yard was still open and you could still rent rooms in the slum next door; and I had a drink in his local on the corner, with its statue of Marshal Ney everlastingly prancing his horse on the pavement outside.
The book described the dream that all young would- be authors play over and over in their minds of a bohemian life with a lovely companion in that most romantic of cities. That is until they discover that the greatest fiction about Paris IS Paris.
Hemingway claimed Paris was a moveable feast that stayed with you all your life. I think he was talking about the bars.
A favourite pub is the same pub in different cities. When I introduced Hoagy Carmichael to the Liverpool Press Club, he said: “I have been here before in New York and San Francisco.”
It need not even be a pub. For me, in Montmartre, it was a wine shop. In Trastevere, Rome, a grocer’s where I went to buy a bottle, stayed to taste and was still leaning on the counter four hours later. In Amsterdam I had two: the Fockine, where tradition demands you pick up your gin glass in your teeth and if you can't find it do not like to ask for it by name. The other, Harry’s Bar, a Brown Cafe, owned by Christina, a hospitable, torrentially talkative, deliciously dotty Dickens’ devotee. In Bruges, the Cafe Chagall where the menu is bigger than the bar.
In Vienna I added another. A champagne bar, the Reiss, not far from the Cafe Mozart, where the ghost of Karas is probably endlessly playing that damned zither. It hides behind a twenty-foot high champagne bottle and sells sekt, excellent Austrian champagne at g and t prices, with Sinatra, Ella and Armstrong playing quietly in the background to the chic and shapely clientele.
You can tell when you strike a favourite bar. The surroundings look familiar, and the first time you go in, the barman, in this case called Hans, treats you as though you have been a regular for years; the other customers nod amiably and make room at the bar.
My first favourite pub was the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester, where I was a regular from the age of five. My father always took me with him when he went to play bowls before Sunday dinner. He would allow me to sip from his pint. My mother was very shocked but he reassured her by telling her I wouldn't rush into the pub when I was 18 to satisfy my curiosity. Little did he know that I couldn't wait until I was 18 when I could get the full pint rather than a dainty sip. It was the pub where I constantly expected to see the late President Eisenhower. His press secretary Jimmy Hagerty, a pal of mine, was impressed when I told him how my old man once fell out with his friend Albert Turtle because he believed Albert was letting the side down by bringing his wife out for a drink every Thursday in the Red Lion. Not that Albert brought her into the vault. That would have been unthinkable. He put her in the best room whilst he sat in the vault with my dad, sending her an hourly milk stout. Hagerty asked if I minded him passing on the story to the President, who was heavily henpecked by his formidable missus Mame. The next night Hagerty told me that Eisenhower, if ever he came to Manchester, would like to shake my old man by the hand.
A POEM FROM A SOLDIER POET
Tommy Atkins (with apologies to Kipling) Written by Patrick Campbell
They flew me 'ome from Baghdad with a bullet in me chest.Cos they've closed the army 'ospitals, I'm in the NHS.
The nurse, she ain't no Britisher an' so she ain't impressed.It's like I'm some street corner thug who's come off second best.
Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "You're not welcome 'ere".But when Saddam was collar'd, they was quick enough to cheer.
They're proud when Tommy Atkins 'olds the thin red line out there,
But now he's wounded back at 'ome, he has to wait for care.
Some stranger in the next bed sez, "Don't you feel no shame?You kill my Muslim brothers!"
So it's me not 'im to blame!
An' then the cleaner ups an' sez "Who are you fightin' for?It ain't for Queen and country 'cos it's Bush's bloody war!
"It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, what's that smell?"But it's "God go with you, Tommy," when they fly us out to 'ell.
O then we're just like 'eroes from the army's glorious past.
Yes, it's "God go with you, Tommy," when the trip might be your last.
They pays us skivvy wages, never mind we're sitting ducks,
When clerks what's pushing pens at 'ome don't know their flippin' luck.
"Ah, yes" sez they "but think of all the travel to be 'ad.
"Pull the other one. Does Cooks do 'olidays in Baghdad?
It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, know your place
But it's "Tommy, take the front seat," when there's terrorists to chase.
An' the town is full of maniacs who'd like you dead toot sweet.
Yes, it's "Thank you, Mr Atkins," when they find you in the street.
There's s'pposed to be a covynant to treat us fair an' square
But I 'ad to buy me army boots, an' me combats is threadbare.
An' 'alf the bloody 'elicopters can't get in the air
,An' me pistol jammed when snipers fired. That's why I'm laid up 'ere
.Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, "We 'ave to watch the pence
";Bold as brass the P.M. sez, "We spare them no expense.
But I'll tell you when they do us proud an' pull out all the stops,
It's when Tommy lands at Lyneham in a bloomin' wooden box!
AND FINALLY
After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:
"Let me see if I've got this right.'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride 'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?
"
I didn't believe everything in it, of course. He was never as poor as he claimed: he was the Paris staffer for a Canadian newspaper. Scott Fitzgerald might have been reassured about his minute private parts after Hemingway took him to see the nude Greek statues in the Louvre or Hemingway could have made it up. But you could still smell the new bread in the boulangerie he described and hear the stairs creak in the attic he rented next to a timber yard. When I was last there, the timber yard was still open and you could still rent rooms in the slum next door; and I had a drink in his local on the corner, with its statue of Marshal Ney everlastingly prancing his horse on the pavement outside.
The book described the dream that all young would- be authors play over and over in their minds of a bohemian life with a lovely companion in that most romantic of cities. That is until they discover that the greatest fiction about Paris IS Paris.
Hemingway claimed Paris was a moveable feast that stayed with you all your life. I think he was talking about the bars.
A favourite pub is the same pub in different cities. When I introduced Hoagy Carmichael to the Liverpool Press Club, he said: “I have been here before in New York and San Francisco.”
It need not even be a pub. For me, in Montmartre, it was a wine shop. In Trastevere, Rome, a grocer’s where I went to buy a bottle, stayed to taste and was still leaning on the counter four hours later. In Amsterdam I had two: the Fockine, where tradition demands you pick up your gin glass in your teeth and if you can't find it do not like to ask for it by name. The other, Harry’s Bar, a Brown Cafe, owned by Christina, a hospitable, torrentially talkative, deliciously dotty Dickens’ devotee. In Bruges, the Cafe Chagall where the menu is bigger than the bar.
In Vienna I added another. A champagne bar, the Reiss, not far from the Cafe Mozart, where the ghost of Karas is probably endlessly playing that damned zither. It hides behind a twenty-foot high champagne bottle and sells sekt, excellent Austrian champagne at g and t prices, with Sinatra, Ella and Armstrong playing quietly in the background to the chic and shapely clientele.
You can tell when you strike a favourite bar. The surroundings look familiar, and the first time you go in, the barman, in this case called Hans, treats you as though you have been a regular for years; the other customers nod amiably and make room at the bar.
My first favourite pub was the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester, where I was a regular from the age of five. My father always took me with him when he went to play bowls before Sunday dinner. He would allow me to sip from his pint. My mother was very shocked but he reassured her by telling her I wouldn't rush into the pub when I was 18 to satisfy my curiosity. Little did he know that I couldn't wait until I was 18 when I could get the full pint rather than a dainty sip. It was the pub where I constantly expected to see the late President Eisenhower. His press secretary Jimmy Hagerty, a pal of mine, was impressed when I told him how my old man once fell out with his friend Albert Turtle because he believed Albert was letting the side down by bringing his wife out for a drink every Thursday in the Red Lion. Not that Albert brought her into the vault. That would have been unthinkable. He put her in the best room whilst he sat in the vault with my dad, sending her an hourly milk stout. Hagerty asked if I minded him passing on the story to the President, who was heavily henpecked by his formidable missus Mame. The next night Hagerty told me that Eisenhower, if ever he came to Manchester, would like to shake my old man by the hand.
A POEM FROM A SOLDIER POET
Tommy Atkins (with apologies to Kipling) Written by Patrick Campbell
They flew me 'ome from Baghdad with a bullet in me chest.Cos they've closed the army 'ospitals, I'm in the NHS.
The nurse, she ain't no Britisher an' so she ain't impressed.It's like I'm some street corner thug who's come off second best.
Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "You're not welcome 'ere".But when Saddam was collar'd, they was quick enough to cheer.
They're proud when Tommy Atkins 'olds the thin red line out there,
But now he's wounded back at 'ome, he has to wait for care.
Some stranger in the next bed sez, "Don't you feel no shame?You kill my Muslim brothers!"
So it's me not 'im to blame!
An' then the cleaner ups an' sez "Who are you fightin' for?It ain't for Queen and country 'cos it's Bush's bloody war!
"It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, what's that smell?"But it's "God go with you, Tommy," when they fly us out to 'ell.
O then we're just like 'eroes from the army's glorious past.
Yes, it's "God go with you, Tommy," when the trip might be your last.
They pays us skivvy wages, never mind we're sitting ducks,
When clerks what's pushing pens at 'ome don't know their flippin' luck.
"Ah, yes" sez they "but think of all the travel to be 'ad.
"Pull the other one. Does Cooks do 'olidays in Baghdad?
It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, know your place
But it's "Tommy, take the front seat," when there's terrorists to chase.
An' the town is full of maniacs who'd like you dead toot sweet.
Yes, it's "Thank you, Mr Atkins," when they find you in the street.
There's s'pposed to be a covynant to treat us fair an' square
But I 'ad to buy me army boots, an' me combats is threadbare.
An' 'alf the bloody 'elicopters can't get in the air
,An' me pistol jammed when snipers fired. That's why I'm laid up 'ere
.Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, "We 'ave to watch the pence
";Bold as brass the P.M. sez, "We spare them no expense.
But I'll tell you when they do us proud an' pull out all the stops,
It's when Tommy lands at Lyneham in a bloomin' wooden box!
AND FINALLY
After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:
"Let me see if I've got this right.'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride 'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?
"
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