Who wants to be a million Sir

In my ideal world I would have been Regimental Sergeant Major in the Black Watch (RHR) or a grumpy classicist in a Cambridge college. I would never in my wildest dreams have been a banker. Indeed for most of my real life I have fought bank managers and I loathe money so deeply that I get rid of as much as I can as quickly as I can.

For all that, I cannot see why there was such a fuss over the bonus sought for the RBS Chief Executive. He was going to get a maximum of £2,000 in cash and a million shares, half of which will go to the taxman. If you are lumbered with devalued shares in a debt ridden and failing bank you are going to do your damnedest to make a success of it.

When I got £2,000 in merit money over the years I was with the Mirror I used to wonder if I got it because the Mirror secretly felt I was not being paid enough. In the event I worked hard because on the Mirror you got sacked if you didn’t. I venture to think that doesn’t happen to bankers. But who are we to complain at their behaviour? Tube workers have turned down a £500 bonus just for doing their job in the Olympic weeks. Not because they believe bonuses are immoral but because they do not believe it is enough when 500 Docklands Light Railway workers are to get up to £2,500 simply for agreeing to work without disruption during the Olympics. DLR staff will get £900 bonuses - and will also be guaranteed five hours of overtime a week, for which they will be paid 75 per cent above their normal shift rate. In my youth in Doncaster miners got an extra shift if they went to work on Mondays.

No wonder the thrifty German worker doesn’t want his hard-earned cash to be hurled at the spendthrift Greeks and Spaniards and the Irish, whose Chancellor Enda Kenny admitted, went mad and lost the run of themselves buying up all around them while he kept an eye on the purse strings and avoided the Gucci bags and the SUVs, the holiday homes in Turkey and the shopping trips to New York.

Clearly the German have not yet bought into Merkel’s plan for a new German empire but that may change. This week the Berlin opera was forced to abandon plans for a production on his birthday of Hitler’s favourite Wagner opera.Watch this space

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The evils of TV are under debate. Evils? I dread to think what retirement would have been like without it. I have been entranced this week by a series on the lost civilizations of Africa. As a child Africans were the painted savages who boiled missionaries and chased Tarzan. Only later did I learn about the “lost” civilisation of Benin with its bronzes which were equal to the Florentine masters and Benin, I now learn, was one of many.

The twin evils the human race is heir to have been inquisition and acquisition. It wasn’t curiosity killed the cat but it certainly helped and we pillaged the world with an enthusiasm that made a Santa Claus out of Autolycus, that snapper up of trifles.

Both vices led us to intrude disastrously into the lives of the indigenous people of Africa and the” New” World. Over centuries they had worked out a way of life in which they flourished. We brought the” benefits” of Western civilisation to them by trying to wipe them out. The subject people were quick learners. In Egypt this week five people were killed in riots protesting against a football riot that killed 75 people. In other parts of that basket case continent we have enabled deaths in tribal wars to escalate into millions by replacing the assegai with the Kalashnikov.

We killed uncounted American Indians by selling them blankets impregnated with killer diseases, introducing them to alcohol and resettling them in areas where their survival was impossible. The less said about the genocide of aboriginal people the better. Black chieftains introduced slavery by selling their own people, but only to satisfy western markets. How much better the world would have been if Columbus and Raleigh and Livingstone had stayed at home.

From our lofty perch we look down on the corruption of the countries to which we brought the fine qualities of which we British were so proud.

What shining examples we are. A Cabinet minister is charged with perverting the court of justice. Top civil servants have managed to avoid paying tax or insurance for years, but do not hold your breath waiting for them to be similarly charged.

If there is a Creator, we are told, you can tell what HE/SHE/IT thinks about money because of the people H/S/I gives it to. Has anyone watched a Nature documentary and failed to remark how beautiful the wild things are - and then looked in the mirror at the comic creation which is mankind?

I read this week about a treatise, “Divina Proportione” (1509), in which the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli echoed fashionable opinions of the day by declaring that our body measurements express “every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.” Not the first thought that springs to my mind. Apparently he got the idea from a Roman engineer Vitruvius who insisted that a temple could not be built properly “unless it conforms exactly to the principle relating to the members of a well-shaped man.”

All I can say is that he had never shopped in a Fenland supermarket.

NEVER SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves largesse from the public treasury.

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates
promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result
that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship…

The average of the world’s greatest civilisations has been two
hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:-
From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great
courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence; from dependence back to bondage.”

–Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813)– Recalled by Blog reader Peter Reece

Delighted to read this glowing review of my chum William P. Cross’s book in the New York Times;

“...................This account differs somewhat from that in a biography of Lady Almina that came out last year. William P. Cross’s “Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon” tells of a woman who traded her money for a prestigious but arid marriage, took lovers young and old (including her husband’s best man) and burned through Rothschild’s dowry, leaving her feckless son enraged and penniless when he finally inherited the estate. Lady Almina did, in fact, open her home to the wounded, and went on to open a series of tony nursing homes (and discreet abortion clinics) for the rich and famous. But the homes never paid for themselves, and she and her second husband, a military officer named Ian Dennistoun, whom she married a few months after Lord Carnarvon’s death, ended up in bankruptcy court. Almina died in greatly reduced circumstances in Bristol in 1969, at the age of 93.”

Budget? BODGET

People who pay cash in hand to tradesmen are “diddling” the economy and diverting money from hospitals and schools. So says, Dave Hartnett, the country’s most senior taxman.

Let’s see now. That is the man who let Tesco off millions and had a mountain of meals on Big Business that Red Rum couldn’t jump over.

Listen up, Dave. The Government owes £1 trillion. Used, presumably, to pay £9.3 billion for the Olympic Games (including £23 million for the opening ceremony which stars a procession of underpaid nurses), plus several millions a year for upkeep of the sites; £32 billion for the HS2 High Speed train; heaven knows how many billions in bonuses for the bosses of nationalised banks; £1 billion to shore up the Houses of Parliament against chronic subsidence, its moral subsidence remaining unchecked; £150 billion to replace lost revenue on London properties placed offshore; £7.6 million owed by foreigners who reneged on their NHS bills and more millions lost on overseas students who renege on university loans; £400 million aid to Pakistan to be spent on protecting women; and £32 million to demolish Middlesbrough Arts Centre that nobody wanted.

There could be 750,000 (one in five) fraudulent council and housing association tenancies in England, vastly outstripping the Government’s estimate of 50,000.The cost to the taxpayer could be as much as £13.5 billion a year.

MPs get a £5 million subsidy on meals and drinks. BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten wants management NOT to cut £15m from the budget of the BBC's 40 local radio stations. The BBC spent more than £11 million ferrying staff around Britain and putting them up in flats and hotels during the past two years as part of its efforts to move production outside London. The £2 billion move to Media City in Salford has resulted in only 16 new jobs, eight of them temporary.

We are not alone. “Free” Scotland faces a bill of £140 billion as the cost of independence.

That’s life in austerity UK but hold your foot up...

If we are borrowing so much, surely there is more than enough left to buy 85-year-old Our Gracious and her 90-year-old ailing husband a £60 million yacht? Just think of the peerages it would earn. By the same token, two thirds of councils have slashed their budgets for elderly care homes and a third of our old people cannot afford basic household items. Wouldn’t Our Gracious, who promised to dedicate Her Life to Her People, prefer it if we spent the £60 million on caring for poverty stricken and sick pensioners? Look after the “trillions”, Dave, and the “pennies” will look after themselves.

There will always be an England - which when you see how it has turned out is a pity. There won’t always be a Scotland, which would be no bad thing, but the greatest loss would be Great Britain.

Great Britain came about as a result of an ill advised Scottish overseas venture. In 1698 William Paterson tried to launch a Scottish Trading Colony in the Americas. Its failure bankrupted the Company of Scotland and the Scottish nation. At Queen Anne’s urging, England paid off the Scottish debt. The price was joining the Union as a junior partner. England did not want it because it meant accepting Scottish MPs and the Scots did not want it because they valued their independence. The Scots Establishment can hardly be blamed for trying to dissolve the partnership. Sensibly the Scots population still don’t want it, though on this side of the Border there is overwhelming support. It is the Establishment which opposes it.

Perhaps they fear the solution which Salmond really wants. An independence where Scotland gets the oil but England continues to pay the bills. The last things the SNP wants are the debts of the Royal Bank of Scotland, compulsory conversion to the Euro, ownership of the bankrupt ship yards. They are keeping the nuclear submarine base because we cannot afford to build another in England.

Much is made of Voltaire’s view that Edinburgh was the most civilised city in Europe. So it was, in the middle class drawing rooms of that city. The tartan myth was invented there, practically single-handedly by Walter Scott, a bankrupt novelist with delusions of grandeur. He invented the Highlands, though much of the area was aboriginal, living at a subsistence level which shocked Dr Johnson.

A more recent Boswell, Neil Oliver, a young man with long hair and a short memory, has recently dominated our TV screens with a history of Scotland. That is a contradiction in terms. The history of Scotland is a recital of betrayal of a subdued lower class by its leaders. The chiefs sold their clans to the English; the Jacobite revolution began the decimation of the Highlands which the Clearances completed. Prebble in his history of Culloden writes of the clansmen, many of them mere boys, who were forced to fight for far-from-bonnie Prince Charlie, a half Polish drunk and wife beater. In the Clearances what was left of the clansmen were exported to make room for sheep and sporting estates.

Good came out of Evil. It was those expatriate Scots who made the Empire work. A combination of Scottish industry and English luck was irresistible. But then, as now, as Sam Johnson pointed out, “The noblest prospect a Scotsman sees is the High Road that leads to England.”

They colonised the Inns of Court and Grub Street whilst the English filled the ranks of the Highland regiments. When I joined the Black Watch (RHR), a CSM, two corporals and a piper came from the same Manchester suburb as I did. Most Scotsmen went into Corps where they learned a useful trade. My Scottish relatives were horrified at my choice. A shrewd bunch, I doubt if they are members of the SNP.

I was interested to see that the gaffed Salmond wants to claim the Scottish regiments as his defence force. Fine by me. I am sick of seeing Jocks wasted in unnecessary wars but there is a slight problem. Any time now the MOD axe is going to fall on another highland regiment because they are having trouble recruiting and are seriously under strength. So much trouble in fact that they are now recruiting in Fiji and the ranks are filling with exotics from faraway places. They are still Jocks, of course, because when you join a highland regiment you join a family and they are “bonnie fechters”, witness the medals they win. Will Fiji, one wonders, get a vote in the Salmond ruffle?

DON'T BE ALARMED

can never work out whether my lawfully wedded is consciously funny or whether she provokes hilarity through some genetic mesalliance.

This week we have been setting the burglar alarm. Like most things she does, this begins with her unshakeable belief that all things are sensate and – worse - malevolently so.

Thus the burglar alarm has its eye on us. It waits to mock us if we put a foot wrong. It knows if we are trying to trick it by remaining in the house when it has been set. It is not enough for my lawfully wedded to set it, step outside and return. I have to put on my duffle coat, the dog has to put on its body warmer and we all have to troop outside. The alarm is set and gives of the self important bleep which tells the world that guard mounting is taking place. All well and good.

Well, no, it isn’t because it continues to bleep as we stand shivering on the garden path. It knows, in my lawfully wedded’s view, that we are attempting a subterfuge. It senses we are standing in a shivering knot on the other side of the front door and continues to bleep to warn us it knows exactly what we are up to and it is one too many to be so easily duped.

So we go in again and remove the dog’s lead, have a cup of tea and go to the lavatory. Over the day this becomes a ritual, much to the confusion of the dog who cannot work out why its daily walk has been shortened to two strides down the path. He whimpers uneasily. My lawfully wedded feels she must reassure with a lengthy explanation of what we are doing and why. None of which the dog understands, even when she repeats it. We go in and out so often we resemble the old couple in the weathervane.

A well ordered family at this point would summon “Tich”, our Italian electrician. No use. “Tich” is the son of a Sicilian POW whom centuries of Mafia domination have taught wariness. When he hears the sound of our alarm, by Pavlovian response he switches off his mobile and hides.

When we finally reach him he is totally baffled but he does tell us there is no need to leave the house to test the alarm. He says you just have to stay still. No problem because by this time I am frozen stiff.

What is particularly provoking is that the house is only rarely empty and then only for the length of a statutory dog walk, which is the only time I ever leave it.

Trips? Not on your life. My lawfully wedded joined my daughter on a visit to the da Vinci exhibition. I stayed at home and was not even safe there. As regular readers will know, I am too fat to fit into a scanner so that my inside is still a mystery to the medical profession.

My wife returned from her visit to Town triumphantly waving a copy of the Evening Standard which told how London hospitals are coping with the obese. They are sending them to London Zoo to put them through giant scanners which will take elephants. It is not very nice that when one’s lawfully wedded has home thoughts from abroad elephants spring to mind.

Holidays????? I assume you are joking since wherever one looks liners are overturning. It’s obvious why. They are built like me. There is not enough below the plumb line to keelhaul Tom Thumb and a great deal too much above the line just waiting to tip over.

In any case I hate cruises. The nearest I have been to one is an overnight voyage to Sweden. I had more fun in an army prison and a great deal more freedom. Cruise ships are S.S. Stalag Lufts with punishments like deck quoits and dancing.

Not that there is much fun at home what with the burglar alarm, the Olympic Games and the Diamond Jubilee. The London Olympics will be a health minefield according to the Lancet. We can look forward to stampedes, heatstroke and mass infections. We are all paying a fortune to get cholera.

Queen Victoria refused to pay the cost of her diamond jubilee in 1897. As Arthur Bigge, the Queen's private secretary, told the Treasury, "the Queen may abandon the whole celebration if she finds that the Privy Purse is likely to be called upon to again pay as in 1887."

He continued: “Her Majesty is not personally desirous of any festivities. They are going to take place solely because the nation evidently expects them. It would certainly be ungenerous to mulct the Queen for the cost."

As it was the Prince of Wales cut the Diamond Jubilee celebrations to just 10 days so he could go to "an important Newmarket week". The queen refused to offer bed and board to foreign royalty: they had to be put up by the public purse.

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Bigge wrote: "The Queen has spoken so very strongly to me about what Her Majesty had to pay 10 years ago for the last Jubilee and everything has gone so well that I shall indeed be sorry if Her Majesty is annoyed by a disagreeable finale to her efforts to please her subjects and the world at large."

In the end Parliament agreed to fund the whole party.

Oh that Our Majesty would take the same view. No such luck. An MP in pursuit of a knighthood has suggested we bribe her with a new Royal Yacht. It’s not the cost I worry about. I have turned down one invitation to party on the royal yacht when it visited Holyhead. A second refusal might block me forever from the Birthday Honours.

I wasn’t being anti-monarchical. Some years ago a dining club of which I was a member had a function on a liner in Liverpool where I was awakened from a post-prandial drunken slumber by a Lascar steward. Convinced we had sailed, I believed I had been white slaved, bound for the harem of some pederastic Eastern potentate. No foot of mine has touched a deck since.

I DON'T CARE TO WHOM GLASGOW BELONGS

I am not surprised that twice as many people in England and Wales than in Scotland would vote for Scottish Independence. Hell is being forced to listen to James Naughtie interviewing Alex Salmond about it. Independence? I would even give them the oil so long as they promised to march those particular blue bonnets back over the border. What is it about Salmond that reminds one of Harry Lauder and that endless line of unfunny Scottish comedians? He has an air of a man in a polystyrene kilt about to break out with “I Love a Lassie”.

Of far greater moment was the admission about the Olympic Park. The former Mayor of London, newt fancier Ken Livingstone, you will recall, valued the 500 acres including stadium, aquatic centre, press HQ and development land at two billion pounds. He promised the money would repay the Treasury and the National Lottery. A more expert valuation this week estimated its worth as less than £160 million, a 75 per cent drop. One developer warns that the park will need hundreds of millions of pounds, a huge drain on the taxpayer, for any regeneration scheme to work.

I do hope it was nothing I said.

Not the only money worry for Lord Coe. He must have congratulated himself for the wheeze of a 50 pence Olympic piece which carried an explanation of the offside rule in football. According to some experts, the explanation is wrong. The coin shows two players, one apparently offside and the other onside. Because of an intricacy to the rule introduced in 1995, both players could be considered onside, some say. Not so, insists Neil Wolfson, a referee and coin designer. I don’t know who is right but I question the PR sense of designing a coin with a subject that has been provoking boring arguments since the days football was played with pigs’ bladders by players who were overpaid at £11 a week.

Many of you share my concern about The Games. Blog reader Perry discloses that Olympic organisers have set out social media rules for the 70,000 Games Maker volunteers, including a ban on pictures or posts featuring backstage VIPs.

Old broadcasting chum Allan Barham writes: “In one radio comedy show of the time I remember a government minister going abroad and saying to another minister, ‘Don't worry, if anything goes wrong just hold a festival.’ I suppose holding a festival is a better distraction than holding another war.“

Not much cheaper, though.

My cousin Jean had an interesting story to tell about an earlier, more dignified Games:

“I am a volunteer at a local charity shop. Another volunteer's father, Harold Langley, trained at Sparkhill Harriers in Birmingham. He won a medal at Much Wenlock in 1923 (where a earlier Game was held), represented GB in the 1923 Olympics in Paris and was a judge at the 1948 Olympics. He was a true athlete. He was given a blazer depicting the emblem of the Games. He used to put his hand over the emblem because he was so modest, and certainly made no money from it.

“’His daughter has no children and she generously gave me his scrapbook and numerous photographs of his achievements and his races, including at Much Wenlock. I had relatives living in MW and my cousin's husband put me in touch with the secretary (an ex teacher) of the Society. They were over the moon with the photographs and the scrapbook is being revived professionally by an archivist. They have also received a grant to extend their museum and I imagine the town of 2,500 inhabitants will be awash with visitors in the summer. “

On Jean’s advice I bought “The British Olympics” and was not surprised to find this profitable spin off of the British Games was printed in Croatia.

The notion of the Games being a tradition handed down from Ancient Greek takes a bit of swallowing. Greece was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century after a thousand years as part of the Roman Empire. Tourkokratia (Turkish Rule) lasted until 1821, by which time the entire Greek aristocracy who claimed ancient Hellenic ancestry had been wiped out.

Like most other things, the Games was a British invention that was taken over by foreigners intent on making a swift buck. The first British Olympics were held on Dover’s Hill in the Vale of Evesham in the 1620s and still continue to this day. The original competitions included shin kicking, single stick fighting, bear baiting and a tug of war. Like most wars they were caused by religion. Robert Dover who founded them was a lawyer and intended them as a fight between “puritans and pleasure seekers“. He was firmly on the pleasure seekers’ side. He even wore a suit of King James I’s cast-off clothing, borrowed from a friend who was groom of the bedchamber to the king.

The Olympic Games at Much Wenlock in Shropshire were a spin off organised in 1850 to “improve the morals of the working class”. Events included football and cricket matches and a race for old women with a prize of a pound of tea. The founder was a local doctor William Penny Brookes.

Among the early visitors was Pierre de Coubertin who went on to found the Olympics as we know them today. He admitted: “The Olympic Games which modern Greece has been unable to restore....is due not to a Hellene but to Dr W.P. Brookes.”

Why, one wonders, are we loading ourselves with debt, traffic jams and bomb attacks by importing a foreign version of an English original ?

FOR THE WHY JUMP?

Crowds flocked to a beach in Norfolk for a New Year treat- ogling the rotting corpse of a sperm whale. It seemed somehow symbolic.

The Cultural Olympic is even sillier. In Liverpool an underwater machine will send a column of steam 65 feet into the air. It will cost £500,000 and its maker is not even sure it will work. It will depend on the weather. It may also not work because the creator forgot to seek planning permission.

Planning permission will not be needed for the barge filled with Norwegian rock which is to be towed round our coasts at a cost £550,000, reminding us of climate change. One hopes it does not bump into the wooden sailing ship made from donated pencils and piano lids.

No costing is available for the cost of thirty cyclists travelling from Coventry to London towing a 30 ft statue of Lady Godiva FULLY CLOTHED. Wales will thrill to the sight of a wingless bird (the fuselage of an old DC9) “nesting” in various towns and hopefully avoiding the flying football field cut from turf near Edinburgh. Two matches will be played on it. In the interest of harmony, let us hope not by perpetually warring Hearts and Hibs.

In keeping with our straitened times, London 2012 was welcomed in by a short 15- minute ceremony. It still involved burning £1.5 million of fireworks, a sum which would have paid for permanent homes for the city’s homeless. Instead it was a gift to the shameless.

New Year’s Day saw another costly parade. This one launched The Yawn of the £9 billion Olympics, the most costly sports days in history. Lord Coe announced that it was a victory for sportsmanship at roughly the same time the Culture Minister warned that the biggest betting fix in history was already threatening every event. We had already been alerted that this triumph of sportsmanship was such an obvious terrorist target the army has been called in to defend it.

All in all it was a funny way to celebrate what both Empress Merkel and Napoleon Sarkozy warned could be the year capitalism collapsed in Europe. All Nero did was fiddle while Rome burned and he has been vilified for two thousand years.

How much more favourably would future generations have viewed us if the Mayor of London had announced, as the then mayor did before the 1948 Olympics, that there would be no opening ceremony, no firework display. Not only are tax payers being required to fund the biggest betting scam in the history of sport. Libraries are closing, care services for the old and sick are being cut and our soldiers march from the front line to the redundancy queue. Yet we are required to fund the delusions of grandeur of the organisers. We get little in return. The government has conceded the costly games do NOT encourage anyone to join the huffers and puffers.

London will provide the IOC and the ‘Olympic Family’ (including the Committee members, staff and officials) with 40,000 hotel-room bookings for the entire duration of the Games. This includes 1,800 four- and five-star hotel rooms for the IOC elite. Six Park Lane hotels have been booked out for the duration of the Games, including the Dorchester, the Grosvenor and the Hilton. The 40,000-room booking does not, of course, include accommodation for the competitors themselves - they are having an Olympic Village built for them at a cost to taxpayer of £325 million. Nor is any accommodation being reserved for spectators. On the evidence of the documents, visitors to the Games will probably find that any hotel within a 50-mile radius of London is already fully booked.

It now emerges that there will also be 3,000 air-conditioned limos for officials, whose drivers must wear hats and uniforms. The enormous fleet will include more than 3,000 BMW 3 and 5 Series saloons. Parked end to end, this would equate to a ten-mile tailback.

However, traffic should not be a problem for the VIPs who will cruise along specially reserved ‘games lanes’ near the venues. The IOC will be given 250 miles of so-called ‘Zil’ lanes - named after the old Soviet limousines that enjoyed traffic-free passage. They will stretch from London to Weymouth, where the sailing games are being held.

The IOC does love its little details. The hat stipulation is one of literally hundreds of examples of its micro-management. London must provide a ‘dance café’ in the Olympic Village, so that the athletes can boogie together. A flower shop is also required, which the IOC insists ‘should provide a range of flowers and gifts for customers in the Olympic Village’. British taxpayers will be relieved to know that ‘a balloon rental service is optional’.

The guidance given by the Olympocrats can be bewildering. It offers pages of information about the employment of housekeepers for the athletes, for example. ‘It is recommended that the same housekeeping staff perform their duties for the same teams daily’, because this will ‘build relationships and trust’, ‘give confidence’ and ‘maintain standards’. Making the bed is not enough.

British authorities have cravenly agreed to let the IOC create what is, in effect, a state within a state. During the Games, normal London life, including ordinary commerce and the right to basic freedoms, must be subordinated to the five-ring circus that is the Olympic ‘brand protection’ policy.

The IOC is paranoid about what it calls ‘ambush marketing’, which it claims is a ‘serious potential threat to the Olympic Movement’ even if it admits that it has, in fact, ‘not been a significant problem in the past’. Ambush marketing, in the Olympocrats’ eyes, appears to be any branding or promotion for an organisation which has not paid large amounts of money to the Olympics organisers.

Candidate cities, the manuals say, ‘are required to obtain control of all billboard advertising, city transport advertising, airport advertising etc. for the duration of the Games and the month preceding it to support the marketing programme’. The cost of hiring these billboards alone will surely be vast.

Beware of Greek traditions requiring gifts, especially since London, like many another Olympic host, will be left with a massive debt and a host of unwanted buildings. Millennium Dome, anyone? (Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2081005/Olympic-VIPs-whisked-London-4-000-BMWs--green-www.spectator.co.uk/essays/6526463/the-true-cost-of-the-olympics )

NEWS ITEMS

Olympic organisers are set for a backlash after the synchronised swimming was oversold by thousands of tickets.

London 2012 have admitted an error has led to 10,000 too many tickets being sold for sessions.

Many of those people who have bought tickets for the Aquatics Centre events have been asked to return them. They will now be offered tickets to other events at the Olympics.

(Reuters) - London Olympic organizers suspended the official ticket resale website on the day of its launch (Friday) following computer problems that left would-be purchasers frustrated and angry.

(Guardian)The BBC has warned its London Olympics coverage could see it forced to cut back the length of some editions of BBC1's 6pm and 10pm news bulletins in the summer.

Live coverage of the London Games will be broadcast on BBC1 and BBC3, with comprehensive coverage on the corporation's flagship channel due to run from 6am to midnight – close to 18 hours of daily coverage throughout the two-week event.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2082213/London-2012-Olympics-Synchronised-swimming-tickets-oversold.html#ixzz1idHdEPzX

LET US PREY

I have just celebrated my 82^nd Christmas. Well perhaps celebrated is putting it a mite strongly. Apart from a delicious lunch with our favourite neighbours on Boxing Day and another in a country pub on Christmas Eve we spent it sipping champagne, watching some splendid TV – little of it current productions which plumbed new depths of banality. Even banality can have depth in TV land.

In place of a paper hat I wore the livery of the S.A.S. (The Scrooge Appreciation Society which I founded many years ago), a woolly hat emblazoned ”Bah Humbug”, carpet slippers and capacious track suit bottoms.

It would not be true to say that I dislike Christmas. Dislike? No. Loathe? Yes.

Christmas is a children’s festival which over the past half century grown-ups have gradually corrupted. Only a child has the perception to accept the duality of Santa Claus and loving fathers or the whole fairy fiction of Christ’s birthday. No shepherds would be watching their flocks in the depth of winter: there is no nutritious new grass to chew; sheep spent the winter corralled in sheep folds. It is impossible to collect taxes in December because there is nothing left to tax. Taxes are collected in September when the granaries are full and the fruit and vegetables have been gathered in and sold. Finally there was no comet showing the way to the manger. Chinese astronomical charts go back through recorded time and the only major comet activity was in September 4 AD when historians believe Christ was born. House of David? Very likely. In the highlands clan members were traditionally related to their chief, literally the Father of His Clan.

Virgin Birth? That was tried as a defendant’s plea in a High Court divorce court in London in the ‘20s. It was thrown out by the judge. One of my princely Welsh ancestors raped a nun and St David was the result. The nun was later canonised as St Non and in St David’s in Pembrokeshire there is the ruin of a chapel at the place where the rape took place. Latin authors claimed a similar fate befell Mary. The Talmud claims Jesus's actual father was a Roman soldier called 'Panthera' .The union occurred during a punitive expedition led by the general Varus.

The Jewish historian Josephus mentions three characters who people thought were messiahs and who were crucified by the Romans: Yehuda of Galilee (6 CE), Theudas (44 CE), and Benjamin the Egyptian (60 CE). It is possible that the Jesus story is partly based on their lives.

People are still rewriting religious truths. A Welsh chum of mine, the Reverend Geraint ap Iorwerth, was never happy with a Holy Trinity of “two he’s and an it“.

Forty years ago he founded the Order of Sancta Sophia which sees God as the Divine Feminine. Believers from all over the world visit first his website and then make pilgrimages to the Church of Wales’ St Peter ad Vincula at Pennal, near Aberdovey, where he is rector. ap Iorwerth told me: “People are fed up with traditional religious structures. The church is dying because most people live outside the old religious commitments. Less than eight per cent of people in Wales go to church or chapel on Sundays so there has got to be something wrong.

“I still function as a traditional Anglican priest for those who see me in that role, but I promote the ancient Celtic church as well. It was gentler and more tolerant. They are more in touch with the feminine and more akin to the Eastern Church. Praise and thanksgiving rather than doom, gloom and hell fire.

“The Wisdom of God, always feminine, can bring people together. She is almost like a Divine Consort. Pennal is where Christ and Sophia dance together.”

They dance in greatly altered surroundings. Next to the altar is a sanctuary dedicated to all religions with an icon of the Divine Wisdom from the Byzantine church. A barn has been converted into an Ashram. There are sacred trees in the churchyard and a slate picnic table which doubles as an altar. Nearby is a barbecue and a bonfire site where, on all major feast days, fires are lit as they would have been in pre-Christian times to celebrate Midsummer (Feast of St John the Baptist) and the Celtic New Year (All Hallows’ Eve).

The Rector says: “I don’t think there is one true faith. The Cosmic Christ is beyond all religions. Who are we to limit his Person? He came to teach humility and we are arrogant to say there is no True Love in other religions.

“How can we claim an exclusive line to God when every religion gives you a different perspective of Truth? God would have been daft to leave it all to Christianity.

“I am on the fringe of orthodox religion and content to stay there following the Celtic tradition of going out to help where help is needed.”

SECOND HELPINGS

I read where this reporter had a friend who bought a turkey and it was run over twice. That beats my turkey which was only run over the once. But I never miss a chance to repeat the story at this time of the year:

I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out of work and this pal of mine said: "Don’t suppose you will be having much of a Christmas?"

I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than it is in the house. I have promised the kids we will go to Radio Rentals to watch the Queen's Speech through the window. Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their breadcrumbs."

"Not having a bird on The Day then?"

"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its breadcrumbs."

He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away. Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental Cinema."

So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last fifty pence and went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free scotch and eating vol-au-vents that remained unbroken for many years.

Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."

Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."

A third guest said: "Yes, we have," and grabbed the parcel of chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.

Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my parcel between his legs.

I was less pleased than anyone when another guest followed through with a drop kick.

It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre of a passing bus.

They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got for tea on Boxing Night.

For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of eighteen scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.

At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he said.

It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.

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From one of my favourite writers, the incomparable Geoff Mather, comes this Xmas cheer...

Concert review from the Bangkok Post 27/08/98:

The recital last evening in the chamber music room of the Erewan Hotel by US pianist Myron Kropp can only be described by this reviewer as one of the most interesting experiences he has witnessed in a long time.

With sparse, sandy hair, a sallow complexion, and a deceptively frail looking frame, the man who has re-popularised Johann Sebastian Bach approached the Baldwin Concert Grand, bowed to the audience, and placed himself upon the stool. As 1 have mentioned before, the Baldwin Concert Grand, while basically a fine instrument needs constant attention, particularly in a climate such as Bangkok. In this humidity, the felts which separate the white keys from the black tend to swell, causing an occasional key to stick, which apparently was the case last night with the D in the second octave.

During the "Raging Storm" section of the D Minor Toccata and Fugue, Mr

Kropp must be complimented for putting up with the awkward D. However, some who attended the performance later questioned whether the awkward key justified some of the language which was heard coming from the stage during the softer passages of the fugue. During one passage, Mr Kropp turned around completely so that, whereas before his remarks had been aimed largely at the piano and were therefore somewhat muted, to his surprise and that of those in the chamber music room, he found himself addressing himself directly to the audience. But such things do happen, and the person who began to laugh deserves to be severely reprimanded for this undignified behaviour.

Unfortunately, laughter is contagious, and by the time it had subsided and the audience had regained its composure Mr Kropp appeared to be somewhat shaken. Nevertheless he swivelled himself back into position facing the piano and, leaving the fugue unfinished, commenced on the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor. Why the concert grand piano's G key in the third octave chose that particular time to begin sticking I hesitate to guess. However, it is certainly safe to say that Mr Kropp did nothing to help matters when he began using his feet to kick the lower portion of the piano instead of operating the pedals as is generally done.

Possibly it was this jarring that caused the right front leg of the piano to buckle slightly inward, leaving the entire instrument listing at a 35-degree angle from that which is normal. A gasp went up from the audience, followed by a sigh of relief as Mr Kropp slowly rose from the stool and left the stage. A few men in the back of the room began clapping, and when Mr Kropp reappeared a few moments later it seemed he was responding to the ovation. Apparently, however, he had left to get the red-handled fire axe which was hung back stage, and began chopping at the legs of the piano.

When the weakened legs finally collapsed altogether and Mr Kropp continued to chop, it became obvious to all that he had no intention of going on with the concert. The ushers came rushing in and, with the help of the hotel manager, two Indian watchmen, and a passing police corporal, finally succeeded in disarming Mr Kropp and dragging him off the stage.

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The passing of Christopher Hitchens did little for my Xmas spirit.

From the New York Times I pass on some of his invariably wise words:

On what gives life meaning:
“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.” (“Hitch-22″)

On friendship:
“One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.” (Harper’s magazine, 1999)

On public speaking:
“If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone.” (“Hitch-22″)

On alcohol:
“On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis – and all gin drinks – that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few, and three is one too many. Do try to eat the olives: they can be nutritious.” (Vanity Fair, 2003)

My friend Mike Flynn whom many will remember from Radio Wales writes;

Hi Ian

I hope you are feeling well and fully primed for the festivities.

My wife was in Tesco's yesterday and was trying to check out with three packs of aspirin and a pack of Strepsils.

It appears they are not allowed to sell you that combination. Three packs of aspirin are the limit but not with Strepsils. Or you can have three packs of Strepsils but no aspirin.

However if you want to drink yourself to death there no limit.