I am not anti American. Indeed when I served with the 8th United States Air Force on the Berlin Airlift some of my best friends were Americans; though of course I would not like some of them to have married my daughters.
The Yanks - as they liked to be called- were warm, witty and loyal; pathologically generous, though sadly sexually obsessed ....which I find the defining American characteristic. This is after all the country that gave us the pin up, the knickerless film heroine and Frank Sinatra. Not to mention AIDS and during World War 2 a rapid increase in the incidence of social diseases.
What I am against is the Hollywoodisation of not only British culture, but their own. America is a country where everyone seems to want to be reborn as John Wayne; that draft dodging icon who sold his colleagues down the Red River during the McCarthy period.
Where New Labour is not aping generations of conservatives it is recreating the White House in our green and increasingly unpleasant land and aping that Land of the Unfree.
From America we have imported the tribal rhythms of Chubby Checkers and improved on them, if that is the word I want.
Yet this is also the land that gave us the world’s finest entertainers, the moving picture - at its height, in my view, in the animated cartoon and the spectacular musical; who gave us in Hemingway, an author who changed the language of literature and journalism; the great wits of the thirties, and so much else.,
Without American scholarship we wouldn’t have Boswell’s journals, a library at Yale devoted to Walpole. There are more of our literary artefacts stateside than there are here. But it’s a notoriously long winded scholarship and it has swamped our publishing industry. That can’t be good.
We seem ashamed of our own culture. There was a lot of good in our Empire; the D’Oyly Carte was a unique British tradition, abandoned by the Arts Council. Pageantry is going; blimey, even beef eating was illegal.
What is the attraction of American culture? Copeland, the Algonquin wits, Norman Rockwell the American musical film, Disney?. But they are all pre 1950
What is to be admired now about a culture that is symbolised by an unwashed hippie with flowers and lice vying for possession of his hair, riding a Harley Davidson to the music of Chubby Checkers? Ought we not to take a leaf out of the French book and enact laws to preserve the British way of life ?
The political press in this country was pretty united in criticising David Davis. It was obvious the inhabitants of the Westminster village could not understand why anyone would give up the privileges which abound in the neighbourhood on a mere matter of principle. That is when I realised we really are in a bad way and are yet again clutching to our bosom the worst aspects of America
TEN COMMANDMENTS
At the non-mystical level at which I can appreciate them, the Ten Commandments seem to me nothing more than bye-laws. We would only have to adhere to them to live civilised and happy lives. Or at least the last six.
I believe in a single creator because nothing else makes sense; but sculpture, swearing and keeping the Sabbath are all, it seems to me, matters of personal decision.
However, if we did no murder, adultery, false witness bearing or coveting other men’s wives, life, though a great deal duller, would at least be peaceful.
Are the commandments still as relevant to our times as they were to the desert tribes?
One of them contravenes race relations legislation. If someone took Moses to a tribunal for insisting there was only one god he would lose. The graven image ban would close all the art galleries and how could you swear an oath without taking the name in vain?
Are we to believe that the Commandments were handed down from heaven or was that a device for making them binding on primitive desert tribes?
Perhaps religion itself is old-fashioned? I heard a Rabbi on R4 dismiss the notion that God answers prayers and calling them superstitious juju.
CADS
Gladstone claimed he had known eleven prime ministers and nine of them were adulterers.
But can you imagine Mrs Gladstone being forced to go public on her pious husband’s nightly street patrols to save fallen women? “Save one for me!“ was the popular cry.
For my money the so-called Clinton scandals were the non-stories of the year, Entirely manufactured by the American Press with our uncreative media joining in the barking like starving street curs. Believe me, as a member of that media for half a century our eagerness to commit adultery would make Clinton appear monk like.
The British have their own Cads Cartel which began with Palmerston, included Wellington and is at present enthusiastically indulged in by much of the House of Commons.
Surely, as the home life of our own dear Lloyd George demonstrates, powerful men have powerful urges.
Jefferson’s daughter brought a teenage slave girl to the White House. And it wasn’t long before she was Jefferson’s. Palmerston harnessed naked women in silken reins and drove them round the drawing room; Wellington gave his name to a number of old boots. Didn’t make any of them less able. Disraeli said that if people found out that in old age Palmerston had fathered a child they would never get him out of Downing Street.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
Calling it a conflict of interests is putting it lightly. The Los Angeles Times reports that a closely watched obscenity trial in a Los Angeles federal court was suspended after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.
Alex Kozinski said in an interview with the paper that he had posted sexual content on his site.
"Among the images were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as 'funny' but conceded that other postings were inappropriate," the LA Times reports with a very straight face.
HOW LONG BEFORE IT HAPPENS HERE AND I BECOME AN OUTSIZE OUTLAW?
Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.
Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.
The campaign started a couple of years ago when the Health Ministry began beating the drums for a medical condition that few Japanese had ever heard of — metabolic syndrome — a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol. In no time, the scary-sounding condition was popularly shortened to the funny-sounding metabo, and it has become the nation’s shorthand for overweight.
The mayor of one town in Mie, a prefecture near here, became so wrapped up in the anti-metabo campaign that he and six other town officials formed a weight-loss group called “The Seven Metabo Samurai.” That campaign ended abruptly after a 47-year-old member with a 39-inch waistline died of a heart attack while jogging.
Still, at a city gym in Amagasaki recently, dozens of residents — few of whom appeared overweight — danced to the city’s anti-metabo song, which warned against trouser buttons popping and flying away, “pyun-pyun-pyun!”
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
NY Times
end
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Saturday, 14 June 2008
A.D of SEA
I read that famines have brought down civilisations all the way back to the Natufians of Syria 14,000 years ago. How come it is still happening to us in the 21st century? Surely there has been time enough to find an answer?
Aeons ago a soothsayer in a Paris estaminet, made of animal skin no doubt, warned his fellow customers about climate change. “Mark my words,” he would have said, “the time will come when walking to Leeds will be out of the question. There will be water from Calais to Dover. So much of it we will call it Sea because we won’t be able to take our eyes off it.“
No doubt he persuaded them to hold back the future by human sacrifice.
Nothing changes. The soothsayer exercised his power by pretending he could control his surroundings and was prepared to shed blood to maintain power. The British Government is always ready to lay on really spectacular human sacrifices, which are now called wars, for no other reason than to “sit at the top table among nations”.
The Queen famously did not accept the crown to preside over a break up of the United Kingdom. True it was several monarchs ago that Royal Families started wars to maintain power. But as her great-grandfather George V demonstrated when he refused to rescue his cousin the Czar from the Bolsheviks, abandoning the Russian Royals to rape and death, a little human sacrifice within the family is permissible if it gives job security.
I will go further and bet the other punters in that estaminet all those aeons ago rushed to press packets of mastodon chops on the soothsayer to finance his research into the cause of climate change. But it would be a little chap in the corner, planning a Wakes week in Blackpool, who said, “Why don’t we invent boats?”
Back to the cowry shells for the soothsayer. But he won’t give up easily. When he is running out of mastodon chops he will make another announcement: “The time will come when there are neither mastodons left, nor dinosaurs, and the only pterodactyls will be in Zoos. Then the world will starve.”
Once more he will be showered with mastodon chops until one of Eve’s kids remembers how her mother used to tell her how nice an apple was and what interesting people you met when you ate one.
Think of me as the chap in the cap because I know what will make this world a much more peaceful and gentle planet to inhabit.
Uninvent TV, which teaches us violence, greed and what fun it is humiliating people.
In my non-violent childhood we took our lessons in life from the Saturday matinee and walks with Romany. I learned my gentlemanly ways by a passionate study of George Sanders. The “goodies” in our Westerns wore white hats; the “baddies” wore black ones and were always defeated. If people of opposing sexes got into bed together, they had to keep a foot on the floor.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
You need a license to wear a sporran. Under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland people wearing any part of a protected animal need to obtain a licence. The laws have been drawn up to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers. Scotland News
A COLUMNAR SALUTE
To David Davis, that unique being, an MP of principle.
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DIET
More in wonder than in anger, a doctor I once had in Wales looked at my latest health tests and said, “I don’t know how with your life style you are so well.” And the nurse said, “That is easy, he bribes the lab staff.”
The doctor said I was a racing certainty for a heart attack. He was wrong there, as I discovered last week, but at the time I said I thought it a nice respectable way to go but I was worried that some interfering jackanapes would bring me back.
Should I, I mused, have DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattooed on my chest, provided I could find a tattooist who could spell resuscitate?
“What chest?” the nurse asked. And the doctor said, “I am never sure whether that is your stomach or a hernia.”
The nurse said, “Have it tattooed on your stomach, then you can have it in really big letters.” To which I replied that if she was at my death bed I would have no chance of getting a last word in.
Anyway, they told me about this scheme called a Living Will where in certain cases no one strives officiously to keep you alive. The doctor said the only snag was that you might collapse in the street and be leaped upon by someone who had just done a first aid course and was too polite to look in your wallet.
That really hit me where it hurt. I have this recurring nightmare that I find this diary and am just taking it to a police station when I am knocked over. A super efficient paramedic looks in the diary and pumps me full of Rhesus negative because that is what it says under personal memoranda in the diary I have just picked up.
That would be terrible, the doctor agreed. They would have killed the wrong man. I sometimes wondered if he had Irish blood. He certainly had a bitter turn of Gaelic wit, that doctor. "Don't sit down," he once said, “I don't want you dying in the surgery. Bad for the image.”
“Is it as bad as that?” I asked.
“Bad? Diabetic and eight stone overweight? I couldn't get better than evens on you getting home upright...."
He was he one who put on my records: “Growing old, disgracefully.”
ends
Aeons ago a soothsayer in a Paris estaminet, made of animal skin no doubt, warned his fellow customers about climate change. “Mark my words,” he would have said, “the time will come when walking to Leeds will be out of the question. There will be water from Calais to Dover. So much of it we will call it Sea because we won’t be able to take our eyes off it.“
No doubt he persuaded them to hold back the future by human sacrifice.
Nothing changes. The soothsayer exercised his power by pretending he could control his surroundings and was prepared to shed blood to maintain power. The British Government is always ready to lay on really spectacular human sacrifices, which are now called wars, for no other reason than to “sit at the top table among nations”.
The Queen famously did not accept the crown to preside over a break up of the United Kingdom. True it was several monarchs ago that Royal Families started wars to maintain power. But as her great-grandfather George V demonstrated when he refused to rescue his cousin the Czar from the Bolsheviks, abandoning the Russian Royals to rape and death, a little human sacrifice within the family is permissible if it gives job security.
I will go further and bet the other punters in that estaminet all those aeons ago rushed to press packets of mastodon chops on the soothsayer to finance his research into the cause of climate change. But it would be a little chap in the corner, planning a Wakes week in Blackpool, who said, “Why don’t we invent boats?”
Back to the cowry shells for the soothsayer. But he won’t give up easily. When he is running out of mastodon chops he will make another announcement: “The time will come when there are neither mastodons left, nor dinosaurs, and the only pterodactyls will be in Zoos. Then the world will starve.”
Once more he will be showered with mastodon chops until one of Eve’s kids remembers how her mother used to tell her how nice an apple was and what interesting people you met when you ate one.
Think of me as the chap in the cap because I know what will make this world a much more peaceful and gentle planet to inhabit.
Uninvent TV, which teaches us violence, greed and what fun it is humiliating people.
In my non-violent childhood we took our lessons in life from the Saturday matinee and walks with Romany. I learned my gentlemanly ways by a passionate study of George Sanders. The “goodies” in our Westerns wore white hats; the “baddies” wore black ones and were always defeated. If people of opposing sexes got into bed together, they had to keep a foot on the floor.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
You need a license to wear a sporran. Under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland people wearing any part of a protected animal need to obtain a licence. The laws have been drawn up to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers. Scotland News
A COLUMNAR SALUTE
To David Davis, that unique being, an MP of principle.
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DIET
More in wonder than in anger, a doctor I once had in Wales looked at my latest health tests and said, “I don’t know how with your life style you are so well.” And the nurse said, “That is easy, he bribes the lab staff.”
The doctor said I was a racing certainty for a heart attack. He was wrong there, as I discovered last week, but at the time I said I thought it a nice respectable way to go but I was worried that some interfering jackanapes would bring me back.
Should I, I mused, have DO NOT RESUSCITATE tattooed on my chest, provided I could find a tattooist who could spell resuscitate?
“What chest?” the nurse asked. And the doctor said, “I am never sure whether that is your stomach or a hernia.”
The nurse said, “Have it tattooed on your stomach, then you can have it in really big letters.” To which I replied that if she was at my death bed I would have no chance of getting a last word in.
Anyway, they told me about this scheme called a Living Will where in certain cases no one strives officiously to keep you alive. The doctor said the only snag was that you might collapse in the street and be leaped upon by someone who had just done a first aid course and was too polite to look in your wallet.
That really hit me where it hurt. I have this recurring nightmare that I find this diary and am just taking it to a police station when I am knocked over. A super efficient paramedic looks in the diary and pumps me full of Rhesus negative because that is what it says under personal memoranda in the diary I have just picked up.
That would be terrible, the doctor agreed. They would have killed the wrong man. I sometimes wondered if he had Irish blood. He certainly had a bitter turn of Gaelic wit, that doctor. "Don't sit down," he once said, “I don't want you dying in the surgery. Bad for the image.”
“Is it as bad as that?” I asked.
“Bad? Diabetic and eight stone overweight? I couldn't get better than evens on you getting home upright...."
He was he one who put on my records: “Growing old, disgracefully.”
ends
Saturday, 7 June 2008
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO GAIN BUT YOUR CHAINS
The Fens is a land of endless horizons and clouds down to the floor. To make any impression on this blank canvas man has created soaring cathedrals, housing estates where every house is different, enchanting streetscapes, magical gardens, fine restaurants and intriguing palaces. Nowhere in the country celebrates Christmas with such a blaze of civic lights and it seems that every village has its festival. Man has created a new art form called ‘Landescape’.
Molly Dancing was practised by farm hands who took a plough round villages to dance for the landowners. If they were not given money they would plough up the landowner’s garden. They blacked up their faces so that the landowners would not recognise them when they later came round seeking work.
Funded by a £125,000 lottery grant, the Cambridge Roots Project exists to revive such folk events. This year it is the turn of the Molly Dance, which is to be revived by primary school children.
There will be one omission.
The children will not be allowed to black up.
Gordon Phillips, who coordinates the project explained:
“They wanted to blacken their faces but they will only be allowed two black dots. We know its not racist BUT SOMEONE MIGHT PERCEIVE IT THAT WAY.”
I ws heartened by the much under rated John Major’s plea for personal liberty in The Times on Friday. Central to Government thinking since the Seventies when our Rulers felt society was breaking down, has been the subtle enslavement of the populace. Since Blair swept into power, proving the British always vote conservative as long as it has a different name, until last June, when I stopped counting, 2,685 new laws had been created. A new law every three and three-quarter hours, or seven laws a day. That did not include the 2,100 laws introduced by Brussels. Worse: according to a report by legal information providers Sewers and Maxwell, 98 per cent of the new laws were introduced by statutory instrument which does not require debate.
By definition, only law abiding people obey the law so the new laws which had not been sought by parliament served no practical purpose.
The way this monstrous mountain of legislation has been accepted is just one more example of the eagerness with which the British public is leaping into servitude. Political correctness, which began as a bad joke, is not only enforced by a swarm of laws: punishment also fits the perception of crime where no crime exists.
Existing laws are both draconian and absurd. It is against the law to stand in a first class carriage, there is legislation governing the importing of bed linen and the availability of free runs for poultry. It is going to be illegal for an adult to teach offspring to drive.
The RSPCA has warned schools they can no longer keep pets. The children might be too noisy, the lighting could be wrong and the care pets receive during school holidays may be variable.
If my children drink in the street, I will be fined. If I drink in the street, I won’t. If my son carries a knife, he could be imprisoned for four years. If the knife folds, he will walk free. Seventy years ago as a nine-year-old, I and most small boys had sets of three throwing knives which we carried in a sheath in our socks in imitation of the Saint, a fictional hero of the time. When I was 11, I was one of thousands of boys who wore a sheath knife as part of my Scout uniform. We also had bowie knives, knives with accessories for taking stones out of horses’ hooves and faux Commando daggers. As a teenager in a Highland Regiment, I carried a dagger tucked into my sock.
In all those years I did not attack, was not attacked, and did not know anyone who had been attacked with a knife.
Our behaviour was conditioned by a fear of authority. But in those days fear was considered an appropriate emotion and quite manly. Not, as it is now, “a bad thing”.
Parliament has removed all restrictions to juvenile behaviour. So what is surprising about juveniles behaving badly?
In our safer society I will be summonsed if my dog chases a rabbit. Possession of an air gun on the street is an offence, yet buying a gun has never been easier. In truth, it is not the armed stranger we must fear. So trigger happy is our police force that hourly I expect a motorist to be shot for speeding.
Thanks to European legislation, people are being fined large sums if their dustbin lids aren’t closed - and the waste disposal system is breaking down. This week the Government has hinted it would like to make it illegal to display cigarettes, which are themselves legal, or sell them in packs of ten.
Does that mean the greater the quantity you sell, the more legal it becomes? What good news to drug importers. How can selling ten cigarettes be illegal when selling twenty is not? How can it be illegal to advertise the legal contents of anything on the package it contains? And how can it not be illegal to profit by millions on the sale of a killer drug, when it is illegal to profit from the sale of other killer drugs?
There was an interesting letter in this week’s Spectator:
"Please let's not miss the nellie in the room, which in this case is EU Directive 2001/37 (“This Directive concerns the manufacture, *presentation and sale* of tobacco products in the Member States of the EU, in particular the use of warnings on packets, the prohibition of descriptions such as ‘mild’ or ‘light’, the maximum tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields”). The EU - as with so much else - is behind this latest nannying. Ministers are merely presenting Brussels' legislation as their own.
It is the dishonesty which appals. The Government cannot be honest even about the danger nicotine imposes. I have told here how statistics were managed to support the abolition of hanging, against the wishes of a vast majority of the electorate. The decision to ban smoking in public places must rate as one of the greatest victories ever for mass-hysteria. We were told this would save thousands of lives; how the evidence for the damage done by passive smoking is overwhelming; how, since bans were imposed elsewhere, as in Ireland, pub trade has been booming.
One study after another showed that health risks from passive smoking were nonexistent. One 1998 study concluded that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant".
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a "higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
A study by Insight Research showed that 67 per cent of Irish pubs have lost trade following the ban, and that for two thirds the losses have been significant. The only pubs bucking the trend are those which have created outdoor "smoking areas", such as heated patios.
With uncharacteristic honesty, the Government did admit that the number of units of alcohol which it claimed were harmful were figures plucked out of the air, with no basis in truth. Yet last week saw the launch of a massive and costly campaign warning us of the number of units which will kill us on the spot.
We are told the figures for drunken driving deaths are appalling. They are not. The statistics which are designed to make our flesh creep include the number of road deaths in which drink is a factor. That includes the number of drunken pedestrians who walk in front of a car; accidents where the victim, not the driver who caused it, had been drinking.
The latest flesh creeper is global warning. A cursory study of history demonstrates that climate change is cyclical. There have only been 25,000 years since the beginning of time when life could survive on the planet. Our coasts have more drowned villages than lighthouses.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this is that the lawmakers believe themselves to be above the law. People have gone to prison for less serious expenses frauds than our MPs commit with impunity. Yet they demand a £23,000 annual bribe to conform. This week yet another MP resigned because of “confusion” over his £500,000 expenses. He was the one whose job it was to seek out expense frauds. The Speaker of the House, whose own expenses have been questioned, led the costly court fight to keep MPs’ expenses sub rosa. The MP charged with overseeing MP's expenses used hers to pay her nanny's wages, two more Euro MPs paid huge sumns into firms in whuch they had an interest
Local Government refuses to return the millions it has made from illegal parking signs. A spokesman for London Councils told a BBC News reporter that to return the money stolen would be “an improper use of public money”. A defence for the Great Train Robbers?
When we train a dog we get it do all sorts of things which have no real purpose, to instil a habit of obedience. Clearly, it works with people too.
******************************************************
"The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons. They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you."
MAHMOUD ABU DUMOUR, A former detainee, on the thousands of American detainees who are set to be turned over to the Iraqi government.
INCH BY INCH I AM DISAPPEARING
Yet you will scarcely credit it, but she is still banging on about my weight. Who? The Head Ferret, who else?
“It is your cooking, bewitching minx,” I said, hoping to turn the attack. No use.
“It’s all that booze,” she insisted.
“Come, come,” I said. “I only graze in public once a week and take a modest slurp for the joy of having my fellow man around me.”
“The camel only goes to the watering hole every three months,” she countered with bitter cruelty, “but he can still put away enough liquid at one visit to last till his next.” “I often think,” mused the Moon of My Delight, “you display some of the characteristics of the camel.“
It was at this point I began to pout. Prettily, of course. Any hint at humps sends me off. Most pear-shaped chaps are the same. We cannot help feeling that if our humps had been on our backs and not fastened to our waists no one would dream of mentioning them. Much less patting them as though they owned them. Try patting them back, these indiscriminate patterers. If you don’t get landed with a sexual harassment charge, at least you get a dirty look.
As if being patted isn’t bad enough, it comes with the same weary witticisms. “Bet this cost you a fortune,” they say.
There is really only one reply to that and I offer it to come to the aid of all stout parties. You fix the patterers with a beady eye and you say: “If your parents had spent on your education what it cost me to achieve this contour, you would know that it is very rude to draw attention to other peoples’ appearances.”
Of course, the truth is that it is the burden of being an endomorph - round, soft and cuddly - as psychologists have perceptively defined us.
Better than being a squat, muscular mesomorph like Mussolini or a lean, bony ectomorph like Hitler.
Endomorphs of the world unite! Look who marches in our ranks: Sam Johnson, John Falstaff, Winston Churchill, Peter Ustinov, the glorious beer-stained G K Chesterton. During the First World War a woman demanded, “Why aren’t you out at the front?” “Madam,“ said Chesterton, “if I turn sideways you would see that I am.”
Our list is endless, but who have the ectomorphs got? I’ll tell you. Twiggy. Mesomorphs? Rambo. Rambo? Sounds like a dog food.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
The Sultan of Oman’s two Pipe Bands are a magnificent sight. They play their bagpipes in white uniforms on the backs of bedecked and braided camels.
They look spectacular until they open their mouths. None of them have any front teeth – the consequence of their mounts lurching unexpectedly and thrusting 18 inches of hardwood chanter into the pipers' mouths.
MacCallum Bagpipes, pipe makers from Kilmarnock, have come up with a chanter that flexes as the animals sway.
Stuart MacCallum from the company explained: “It’s a flexible plastic tube that bends as the camel moves and can be adjusted in length depending on the height of the piper. There is a padded bit on the tip for added comfort.”
Mr MacCallum has offered the improved pipes to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, a Scottish group which plays rock tunes and dances about on the stage, incurring occasional mouth injuries.
From ‘The Times’ (rapidly becoming the last of the real newspapers and I don’t care who owns it. He can be no worse than Beaverbrook, King or Kemsley. Monsters all.)And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Molly Dancing was practised by farm hands who took a plough round villages to dance for the landowners. If they were not given money they would plough up the landowner’s garden. They blacked up their faces so that the landowners would not recognise them when they later came round seeking work.
Funded by a £125,000 lottery grant, the Cambridge Roots Project exists to revive such folk events. This year it is the turn of the Molly Dance, which is to be revived by primary school children.
There will be one omission.
The children will not be allowed to black up.
Gordon Phillips, who coordinates the project explained:
“They wanted to blacken their faces but they will only be allowed two black dots. We know its not racist BUT SOMEONE MIGHT PERCEIVE IT THAT WAY.”
I ws heartened by the much under rated John Major’s plea for personal liberty in The Times on Friday. Central to Government thinking since the Seventies when our Rulers felt society was breaking down, has been the subtle enslavement of the populace. Since Blair swept into power, proving the British always vote conservative as long as it has a different name, until last June, when I stopped counting, 2,685 new laws had been created. A new law every three and three-quarter hours, or seven laws a day. That did not include the 2,100 laws introduced by Brussels. Worse: according to a report by legal information providers Sewers and Maxwell, 98 per cent of the new laws were introduced by statutory instrument which does not require debate.
By definition, only law abiding people obey the law so the new laws which had not been sought by parliament served no practical purpose.
The way this monstrous mountain of legislation has been accepted is just one more example of the eagerness with which the British public is leaping into servitude. Political correctness, which began as a bad joke, is not only enforced by a swarm of laws: punishment also fits the perception of crime where no crime exists.
Existing laws are both draconian and absurd. It is against the law to stand in a first class carriage, there is legislation governing the importing of bed linen and the availability of free runs for poultry. It is going to be illegal for an adult to teach offspring to drive.
The RSPCA has warned schools they can no longer keep pets. The children might be too noisy, the lighting could be wrong and the care pets receive during school holidays may be variable.
If my children drink in the street, I will be fined. If I drink in the street, I won’t. If my son carries a knife, he could be imprisoned for four years. If the knife folds, he will walk free. Seventy years ago as a nine-year-old, I and most small boys had sets of three throwing knives which we carried in a sheath in our socks in imitation of the Saint, a fictional hero of the time. When I was 11, I was one of thousands of boys who wore a sheath knife as part of my Scout uniform. We also had bowie knives, knives with accessories for taking stones out of horses’ hooves and faux Commando daggers. As a teenager in a Highland Regiment, I carried a dagger tucked into my sock.
In all those years I did not attack, was not attacked, and did not know anyone who had been attacked with a knife.
Our behaviour was conditioned by a fear of authority. But in those days fear was considered an appropriate emotion and quite manly. Not, as it is now, “a bad thing”.
Parliament has removed all restrictions to juvenile behaviour. So what is surprising about juveniles behaving badly?
In our safer society I will be summonsed if my dog chases a rabbit. Possession of an air gun on the street is an offence, yet buying a gun has never been easier. In truth, it is not the armed stranger we must fear. So trigger happy is our police force that hourly I expect a motorist to be shot for speeding.
Thanks to European legislation, people are being fined large sums if their dustbin lids aren’t closed - and the waste disposal system is breaking down. This week the Government has hinted it would like to make it illegal to display cigarettes, which are themselves legal, or sell them in packs of ten.
Does that mean the greater the quantity you sell, the more legal it becomes? What good news to drug importers. How can selling ten cigarettes be illegal when selling twenty is not? How can it be illegal to advertise the legal contents of anything on the package it contains? And how can it not be illegal to profit by millions on the sale of a killer drug, when it is illegal to profit from the sale of other killer drugs?
There was an interesting letter in this week’s Spectator:
"Please let's not miss the nellie in the room, which in this case is EU Directive 2001/37 (“This Directive concerns the manufacture, *presentation and sale* of tobacco products in the Member States of the EU, in particular the use of warnings on packets, the prohibition of descriptions such as ‘mild’ or ‘light’, the maximum tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide yields”). The EU - as with so much else - is behind this latest nannying. Ministers are merely presenting Brussels' legislation as their own.
It is the dishonesty which appals. The Government cannot be honest even about the danger nicotine imposes. I have told here how statistics were managed to support the abolition of hanging, against the wishes of a vast majority of the electorate. The decision to ban smoking in public places must rate as one of the greatest victories ever for mass-hysteria. We were told this would save thousands of lives; how the evidence for the damage done by passive smoking is overwhelming; how, since bans were imposed elsewhere, as in Ireland, pub trade has been booming.
One study after another showed that health risks from passive smoking were nonexistent. One 1998 study concluded that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant".
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a "higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
A study by Insight Research showed that 67 per cent of Irish pubs have lost trade following the ban, and that for two thirds the losses have been significant. The only pubs bucking the trend are those which have created outdoor "smoking areas", such as heated patios.
With uncharacteristic honesty, the Government did admit that the number of units of alcohol which it claimed were harmful were figures plucked out of the air, with no basis in truth. Yet last week saw the launch of a massive and costly campaign warning us of the number of units which will kill us on the spot.
We are told the figures for drunken driving deaths are appalling. They are not. The statistics which are designed to make our flesh creep include the number of road deaths in which drink is a factor. That includes the number of drunken pedestrians who walk in front of a car; accidents where the victim, not the driver who caused it, had been drinking.
The latest flesh creeper is global warning. A cursory study of history demonstrates that climate change is cyclical. There have only been 25,000 years since the beginning of time when life could survive on the planet. Our coasts have more drowned villages than lighthouses.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this is that the lawmakers believe themselves to be above the law. People have gone to prison for less serious expenses frauds than our MPs commit with impunity. Yet they demand a £23,000 annual bribe to conform. This week yet another MP resigned because of “confusion” over his £500,000 expenses. He was the one whose job it was to seek out expense frauds. The Speaker of the House, whose own expenses have been questioned, led the costly court fight to keep MPs’ expenses sub rosa. The MP charged with overseeing MP's expenses used hers to pay her nanny's wages, two more Euro MPs paid huge sumns into firms in whuch they had an interest
Local Government refuses to return the millions it has made from illegal parking signs. A spokesman for London Councils told a BBC News reporter that to return the money stolen would be “an improper use of public money”. A defence for the Great Train Robbers?
When we train a dog we get it do all sorts of things which have no real purpose, to instil a habit of obedience. Clearly, it works with people too.
******************************************************
"The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons. They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you."
MAHMOUD ABU DUMOUR, A former detainee, on the thousands of American detainees who are set to be turned over to the Iraqi government.
INCH BY INCH I AM DISAPPEARING
Yet you will scarcely credit it, but she is still banging on about my weight. Who? The Head Ferret, who else?
“It is your cooking, bewitching minx,” I said, hoping to turn the attack. No use.
“It’s all that booze,” she insisted.
“Come, come,” I said. “I only graze in public once a week and take a modest slurp for the joy of having my fellow man around me.”
“The camel only goes to the watering hole every three months,” she countered with bitter cruelty, “but he can still put away enough liquid at one visit to last till his next.” “I often think,” mused the Moon of My Delight, “you display some of the characteristics of the camel.“
It was at this point I began to pout. Prettily, of course. Any hint at humps sends me off. Most pear-shaped chaps are the same. We cannot help feeling that if our humps had been on our backs and not fastened to our waists no one would dream of mentioning them. Much less patting them as though they owned them. Try patting them back, these indiscriminate patterers. If you don’t get landed with a sexual harassment charge, at least you get a dirty look.
As if being patted isn’t bad enough, it comes with the same weary witticisms. “Bet this cost you a fortune,” they say.
There is really only one reply to that and I offer it to come to the aid of all stout parties. You fix the patterers with a beady eye and you say: “If your parents had spent on your education what it cost me to achieve this contour, you would know that it is very rude to draw attention to other peoples’ appearances.”
Of course, the truth is that it is the burden of being an endomorph - round, soft and cuddly - as psychologists have perceptively defined us.
Better than being a squat, muscular mesomorph like Mussolini or a lean, bony ectomorph like Hitler.
Endomorphs of the world unite! Look who marches in our ranks: Sam Johnson, John Falstaff, Winston Churchill, Peter Ustinov, the glorious beer-stained G K Chesterton. During the First World War a woman demanded, “Why aren’t you out at the front?” “Madam,“ said Chesterton, “if I turn sideways you would see that I am.”
Our list is endless, but who have the ectomorphs got? I’ll tell you. Twiggy. Mesomorphs? Rambo. Rambo? Sounds like a dog food.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
The Sultan of Oman’s two Pipe Bands are a magnificent sight. They play their bagpipes in white uniforms on the backs of bedecked and braided camels.
They look spectacular until they open their mouths. None of them have any front teeth – the consequence of their mounts lurching unexpectedly and thrusting 18 inches of hardwood chanter into the pipers' mouths.
MacCallum Bagpipes, pipe makers from Kilmarnock, have come up with a chanter that flexes as the animals sway.
Stuart MacCallum from the company explained: “It’s a flexible plastic tube that bends as the camel moves and can be adjusted in length depending on the height of the piper. There is a padded bit on the tip for added comfort.”
Mr MacCallum has offered the improved pipes to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, a Scottish group which plays rock tunes and dances about on the stage, incurring occasional mouth injuries.
From ‘The Times’ (rapidly becoming the last of the real newspapers and I don’t care who owns it. He can be no worse than Beaverbrook, King or Kemsley. Monsters all.)And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Friday, 30 May 2008
The Wages of Gin........................."May I play through, my husband is dying?"
If you are going to be ill it is important to pick the most convenient place. So I came over all queer in my local clinic, surrounded by the nurses who, three times a week, dress my Henry VIII ulcerous legs. They produced an oxygen cylinder and a doctor, took my house keys and rang a neighbour - because Celia, the Head Ferret was, of course, playing golf near Cambridge in the lovely Gog Magog hills.
The doctor was followed by a paramedic in green battle dress, festooned with stay-alive kit. A large man, who, in my confused state, I took to be the Jolly Green Giant. He was immediately joined by an ambulance crew, two delightful ladies still a little startled because the last patient they had gone to pick up had told them to F…. off.
These poor girls began the paperwork on my case as the ambulance left the surgery and had just completed it as we drew into Peterborough District Hospital half an hour later.
My neighbours meanwhile were slightly put out because, having gone to enormous trouble to find out where the Head Ferret was playing, they rang the club house to break the bad news and were told: “Could you ring back in ten minutes, she is just on the last hole?”
Peterborough District Hospital was a revelation. It shone with cleanliness and on every wall there was a hygienic hand spray with a notice to medical staff: “Do not pass this”. On the ward, constant hand washing. It was like kibitzing on a convention of Uriah Heeps but very comforting since I have lost two friends to MRSA.
I was disconcerted by a notice on the lift which said: “If you are not well, do not enter this ward.” I pointed out to the ambulance crew that this pretty well ruled me out but they said not to worry, it was for visitors, not patients. Incredibly, suffering from infectious diseases does not suggest to some visitors that their visit is unwise.
I had not been tucked up in bed long when the Head Ferret arrived, with the observation that it would have been much more convenient if I had gone to Addenbrookes which she could see from the 18th tee. It was reassuring to learn that she had dropped off at home to feed the dog.
Plainly this had exhausted her. Because when the first doctor arrived to assess me, Celia was relaxing on the bed and I was sitting in the visitor’s chair, where I should not have been, according to the notice, because I was not feeling well.
The process from admission to release took seven hours but this is in no way a criticism of the doctors and nurses. There were only two doctors to deal with sixteen patients, who were all emergencies, and in the wards a nurse to every sixteen beds. The two doctors on the assessment ward were also responsible for the other patients in the wards surrounding.
When I commiserated with the Registrar on being so short staffed, she put me right at once: “We are not short staffed,” she said, and she had a smile which lit the ward. “That is the establishment for the wards.”
So the next time you complain about the Health Service, remember the Registrar with the smile that lit the ward, the ambulance driver a patient told to F… off, the overworked nurses, cheerily washing their hands at every conceivable moment, rushed off their feet and still caring and kind.
We may have a lousy Health Service but, by God, we should be grateful for the people who staff it.
P.S. Friends will be relieved to hear I cannot die before next weekend: Celia, The Head Ferret, has a very full golf programme. But she has instructed me to be taken ill in the morning when, with luck, she will be at home. Being ill in the afternoon is the sort of thoughtless thing that husbands do
YOU THINK IT IS BAD HERE?
In Germany, a Volvo dealer has been ordered by the court to compensate a buyer around 20,000 euros because the man’s feet were too big to be able to use the new vehicle’s accelerator pedal properly. The money was to allow him to buy snug sports shoes and to compensate for him having to change in and out of them every time he drove the car.
In Sweden, they are proposing to install pedestrian walk control lights in the streets, which show both a man and a woman. This is to provide better gender equality. I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women can walk across the intersections whenever they like as the red lights only show that men cannot walk – or am I being blonde?
In Sweden (again), they passed a law in 1999 that punishes the buyers of sexual favours with up to six months in jail, but they do not prosecute the prostitutes. When you think about it, it probably makes a lot of sense.
At the White House last week, President George Bush signed a proclamation declaring Malaria Awareness week. There was an awkward moment during the ceremony when Bush said: “This is a great day for all Malarians.”
BRUGES BEER CAPITOL OF THE WORLD
A friend has called Bruges the most boring city in Europe. Such sauce! What bacon is to the butty, MPs to mortgages and new kitchens, Bruges is to the beer house. If you gave up sleep, you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over a year.
The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden in which customers are ignored. Burghers who went on opening night are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it, with generous saucers of cheese.
Then there is “t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro.
The “Little Bear” has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale, the walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world.
It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel, but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults - and even then you would fail a test for walking upright.
The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.
What can I tell you? The amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy run a Beer Academy in the back room, where they share their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I went. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier” means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.
If they had sprayed Iraq with Trappist beer Baghdad could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s wise words, here is ale would make a cat speak.
Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I hope to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground. To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying."
MARK V. ROSENKER, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Quoted in the NY Herald Tribune.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
The doctor was followed by a paramedic in green battle dress, festooned with stay-alive kit. A large man, who, in my confused state, I took to be the Jolly Green Giant. He was immediately joined by an ambulance crew, two delightful ladies still a little startled because the last patient they had gone to pick up had told them to F…. off.
These poor girls began the paperwork on my case as the ambulance left the surgery and had just completed it as we drew into Peterborough District Hospital half an hour later.
My neighbours meanwhile were slightly put out because, having gone to enormous trouble to find out where the Head Ferret was playing, they rang the club house to break the bad news and were told: “Could you ring back in ten minutes, she is just on the last hole?”
Peterborough District Hospital was a revelation. It shone with cleanliness and on every wall there was a hygienic hand spray with a notice to medical staff: “Do not pass this”. On the ward, constant hand washing. It was like kibitzing on a convention of Uriah Heeps but very comforting since I have lost two friends to MRSA.
I was disconcerted by a notice on the lift which said: “If you are not well, do not enter this ward.” I pointed out to the ambulance crew that this pretty well ruled me out but they said not to worry, it was for visitors, not patients. Incredibly, suffering from infectious diseases does not suggest to some visitors that their visit is unwise.
I had not been tucked up in bed long when the Head Ferret arrived, with the observation that it would have been much more convenient if I had gone to Addenbrookes which she could see from the 18th tee. It was reassuring to learn that she had dropped off at home to feed the dog.
Plainly this had exhausted her. Because when the first doctor arrived to assess me, Celia was relaxing on the bed and I was sitting in the visitor’s chair, where I should not have been, according to the notice, because I was not feeling well.
The process from admission to release took seven hours but this is in no way a criticism of the doctors and nurses. There were only two doctors to deal with sixteen patients, who were all emergencies, and in the wards a nurse to every sixteen beds. The two doctors on the assessment ward were also responsible for the other patients in the wards surrounding.
When I commiserated with the Registrar on being so short staffed, she put me right at once: “We are not short staffed,” she said, and she had a smile which lit the ward. “That is the establishment for the wards.”
So the next time you complain about the Health Service, remember the Registrar with the smile that lit the ward, the ambulance driver a patient told to F… off, the overworked nurses, cheerily washing their hands at every conceivable moment, rushed off their feet and still caring and kind.
We may have a lousy Health Service but, by God, we should be grateful for the people who staff it.
P.S. Friends will be relieved to hear I cannot die before next weekend: Celia, The Head Ferret, has a very full golf programme. But she has instructed me to be taken ill in the morning when, with luck, she will be at home. Being ill in the afternoon is the sort of thoughtless thing that husbands do
YOU THINK IT IS BAD HERE?
In Germany, a Volvo dealer has been ordered by the court to compensate a buyer around 20,000 euros because the man’s feet were too big to be able to use the new vehicle’s accelerator pedal properly. The money was to allow him to buy snug sports shoes and to compensate for him having to change in and out of them every time he drove the car.
In Sweden, they are proposing to install pedestrian walk control lights in the streets, which show both a man and a woman. This is to provide better gender equality. I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women can walk across the intersections whenever they like as the red lights only show that men cannot walk – or am I being blonde?
In Sweden (again), they passed a law in 1999 that punishes the buyers of sexual favours with up to six months in jail, but they do not prosecute the prostitutes. When you think about it, it probably makes a lot of sense.
At the White House last week, President George Bush signed a proclamation declaring Malaria Awareness week. There was an awkward moment during the ceremony when Bush said: “This is a great day for all Malarians.”
BRUGES BEER CAPITOL OF THE WORLD
A friend has called Bruges the most boring city in Europe. Such sauce! What bacon is to the butty, MPs to mortgages and new kitchens, Bruges is to the beer house. If you gave up sleep, you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over a year.
The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden in which customers are ignored. Burghers who went on opening night are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it, with generous saucers of cheese.
Then there is “t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro.
The “Little Bear” has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale, the walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world.
It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel, but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults - and even then you would fail a test for walking upright.
The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.
What can I tell you? The amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy run a Beer Academy in the back room, where they share their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I went. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier” means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.
If they had sprayed Iraq with Trappist beer Baghdad could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s wise words, here is ale would make a cat speak.
Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I hope to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground. To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying."
MARK V. ROSENKER, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Quoted in the NY Herald Tribune.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Sunday, 25 May 2008
LETTER FROM.....................................
LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
Living in a village the name of which I could not pronounce played
havoc with my social life. Pub crawls were impossible. Imagine
ringing for a cab at closing time and trying to tell the driver where
to take you. I have had trouble in the past with Oswestry, and
Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but at least it
is shorter than LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH, where we used to live during the happiest time in my life.
The name reminds me of the English writer at the Hay-on-Wye
Festival where the green room, where the artistes assemble, is an infants' school and the drawers are all labelled in Welsh. "Is that where they keep the vowels?" he asked, with persuasive innocence.
A great place to live but a constant humiliation.
I was reminded of this dilemma by the news just in of the death of my number one fan in Australia, Tony Shapley of Queensland, a splendid argumentative man with whom I enjoyed a long email friendship.
I used to do these broadcasts on Australian radio and always signed off
".....good night from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll............."
Shappers emails were warm and friendly but every week, without fail, after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in a rage from Brisbane: "If yer caint pronounce the name why don't you move to f......... Rhyl?"
He was lucky to get through. Another Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly year but his letters all come back from the Australian post office marked "no such place". I know about this because he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he had the address right and she rang me to find out.
It was not just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the
parish church in Upton Scudamore, in Wiltshire, sought a
contribution to the restoration of my ancestors' tomb. He sent the
letter to the Isle of Anglesey by air mail. It came by road from
Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to
the mainland.
The Post Office in Chester refused to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. "Do you mean Wales, Yeovil, or Wales, Sheffield?"
I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising
when, at a Tandy shop in Wrexham, my application to buy a PC
on the drip was turned down. The manager was surprised too. He
rang his finance office in Leeds. They said: "It's the address.
There is no such place." The manager said: "There must be. He
has just come from there."
The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the
Royal Bank of Scotland was always addressed to me at Virgin and
Child Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which, so far as I know, is the Welsh Brigadoon because it does not exist. But the bill arrived every month at my house in Brynsiencyn.
The whole name LlanfairPG is a con. I do not know a Welshman who
couldn't give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off the table. Most Welsh history pre-1800 is invented. Outsiders are not told that Owain Glyndwr was a general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that his legitimate children married into the English aristocracy. Only his nine bastards had Welsh spouses.
Edward I invaded North Wales with an army of 15,000, of which 11,000 were Welsh. Even the ‘Welsh Not’ (the label said to have been tied round children’s necks if they dared to speak Welsh at school) is not. Though the English Not is widespread.
Our village was for centuries called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a lovely name which means the "Mary church by the white hazel pool". When Stevenson brought the railway to Anglesey there were no plans to build a station there. That meant the lucrative tourist trade would pass by and they weren't having that. A local cobbler simply added a description to the name and wrote it on slips of paper which he put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure for lock-jaw. It became overnight, and irrevocably, the
village with the longest name in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
The addition means "near the fierce whirlpool with the church of
St Tysilio by the red cave".
As a result, the village became so famous our local draper's shop was the size of a bus depot and we had coach-loads of visitors from all over the
world. So much so that the shop has a signpost which shows the
distance from Llanfairpwll to the North Pole and cities the world
over, including New York and Tokyo, all the homes of customers.
I just wonder how Japanese coach drivers cope when they get lost.
I suspect a lot of our oriental business ends up as day trips to
Bangor.
*************** ************************ **************
The cliché runs: “Journalists meet lots of interesting people but they are usually other journalists.”
It is my experience that clichés are truths in familiar clothing, but to this one there should be a caveat. It does not follow that other journalists are necessarily among the nicest people one meets. It’s a competitive trade and dog is usually on the table d’hote.
Vincent Mulchrone was the exception. I cannot remember a time when we were not friends - and that included the time when he was very famous as a columnist. Which, to say the least, was unusual.
He was on the Manchester City News when I met him. He got the job, like I did, because he could spell recommend and accommodate. That was the only test would be reporters were given by the proprietor, an illiterate called Harold Geldeard. The proprietor could not spell the words himself. Before every interview his secretary wrote them on a piece of paper.
Mulchrone moved to the Mirror and we all had a party. We had another party when he was sacked by the Mirror on a trumped up charge - because he liked having parties.
There was yet another party when he joined the Daily Mail but he was soon translated to London where he became the finest columnist that paper has discovered. It is a matter of chagrin that though it discovered three of my friends, Keith Waterhouse, John Edwards and Vincent, it never bothered to discover me.
I am sure the other two will agree that Vincent gave the lie to another cliché which is that “You may like the writing, but the chances are you will be disappointed by the writer“, a truth which is borne out by most of the literary biographies that poison our shelves.
Vincent was beloved by everyone who met him. He wrote what he was: witty, urbane, sensitive, funny and all the good things you could think of. He died tragically early of leukaemia because God is selfish and wants to keep all the good people to himself.
Happily you can meet him again. Another mutual friend, Revel Barker, has just republished a dazzling collection of his columns, “The Best of Vincent Mulchrone”, which is a lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow human beings by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter.
You can order a copy online from revelbarker@gmail.com. It will cost you £9.99, plus postage, and all royalties are going to research into the fight against leukaemia, the disease which robbed the world of a man it could ill afford to lose at the woefully early age of 54.
The last paragraph in this funny, loving book is: “When I go, give me a Basin St funeral band, Belgian black horses with plumes, a stop at the tap room of The Hermit, and lots of ham. It won’t bother me, mate. But it might just take the miserable look off your face.”
And if it doesn’t, his book certainly will.
FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER
“Melvin Buckhart, aged 94, was a fairground sideshow performer known as the Human Blockhead because of his ability to drive a five-inch nail or an ice pick into his head without flinching.
The Human Blockhead worked under a number of alternative titles, depending on which of his extraordinary repertoire of physical contortions he happened to be performing at the time.
As the Anatomical Wonder he could inflate one lung at a time and dislocate his shoulders; as the Man Without a Stomach, he could suck his stomach back into his spine; as the Two Faced Man, he could frown with half his face and smile with the other half. Among many accomplishments he swallowed swords, threw knives and ate fire.
He was universally admired by his fellow performers, one of whom observed: “Anyone who has ever hammered a five-inch nail into his nose owes a large debt of gratitude to Melvin Buckhart.”
Daily Telegraph, Novdmber 2001
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
Living in a village the name of which I could not pronounce played
havoc with my social life. Pub crawls were impossible. Imagine
ringing for a cab at closing time and trying to tell the driver where
to take you. I have had trouble in the past with Oswestry, and
Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but at least it
is shorter than LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH, where we used to live during the happiest time in my life.
The name reminds me of the English writer at the Hay-on-Wye
Festival where the green room, where the artistes assemble, is an infants' school and the drawers are all labelled in Welsh. "Is that where they keep the vowels?" he asked, with persuasive innocence.
A great place to live but a constant humiliation.
I was reminded of this dilemma by the news just in of the death of my number one fan in Australia, Tony Shapley of Queensland, a splendid argumentative man with whom I enjoyed a long email friendship.
I used to do these broadcasts on Australian radio and always signed off
".....good night from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll............."
Shappers emails were warm and friendly but every week, without fail, after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in a rage from Brisbane: "If yer caint pronounce the name why don't you move to f......... Rhyl?"
He was lucky to get through. Another Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly year but his letters all come back from the Australian post office marked "no such place". I know about this because he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he had the address right and she rang me to find out.
It was not just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the
parish church in Upton Scudamore, in Wiltshire, sought a
contribution to the restoration of my ancestors' tomb. He sent the
letter to the Isle of Anglesey by air mail. It came by road from
Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to
the mainland.
The Post Office in Chester refused to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. "Do you mean Wales, Yeovil, or Wales, Sheffield?"
I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising
when, at a Tandy shop in Wrexham, my application to buy a PC
on the drip was turned down. The manager was surprised too. He
rang his finance office in Leeds. They said: "It's the address.
There is no such place." The manager said: "There must be. He
has just come from there."
The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the
Royal Bank of Scotland was always addressed to me at Virgin and
Child Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which, so far as I know, is the Welsh Brigadoon because it does not exist. But the bill arrived every month at my house in Brynsiencyn.
The whole name LlanfairPG is a con. I do not know a Welshman who
couldn't give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off the table. Most Welsh history pre-1800 is invented. Outsiders are not told that Owain Glyndwr was a general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that his legitimate children married into the English aristocracy. Only his nine bastards had Welsh spouses.
Edward I invaded North Wales with an army of 15,000, of which 11,000 were Welsh. Even the ‘Welsh Not’ (the label said to have been tied round children’s necks if they dared to speak Welsh at school) is not. Though the English Not is widespread.
Our village was for centuries called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a lovely name which means the "Mary church by the white hazel pool". When Stevenson brought the railway to Anglesey there were no plans to build a station there. That meant the lucrative tourist trade would pass by and they weren't having that. A local cobbler simply added a description to the name and wrote it on slips of paper which he put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure for lock-jaw. It became overnight, and irrevocably, the
village with the longest name in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
The addition means "near the fierce whirlpool with the church of
St Tysilio by the red cave".
As a result, the village became so famous our local draper's shop was the size of a bus depot and we had coach-loads of visitors from all over the
world. So much so that the shop has a signpost which shows the
distance from Llanfairpwll to the North Pole and cities the world
over, including New York and Tokyo, all the homes of customers.
I just wonder how Japanese coach drivers cope when they get lost.
I suspect a lot of our oriental business ends up as day trips to
Bangor.
*************** ************************ **************
The cliché runs: “Journalists meet lots of interesting people but they are usually other journalists.”
It is my experience that clichés are truths in familiar clothing, but to this one there should be a caveat. It does not follow that other journalists are necessarily among the nicest people one meets. It’s a competitive trade and dog is usually on the table d’hote.
Vincent Mulchrone was the exception. I cannot remember a time when we were not friends - and that included the time when he was very famous as a columnist. Which, to say the least, was unusual.
He was on the Manchester City News when I met him. He got the job, like I did, because he could spell recommend and accommodate. That was the only test would be reporters were given by the proprietor, an illiterate called Harold Geldeard. The proprietor could not spell the words himself. Before every interview his secretary wrote them on a piece of paper.
Mulchrone moved to the Mirror and we all had a party. We had another party when he was sacked by the Mirror on a trumped up charge - because he liked having parties.
There was yet another party when he joined the Daily Mail but he was soon translated to London where he became the finest columnist that paper has discovered. It is a matter of chagrin that though it discovered three of my friends, Keith Waterhouse, John Edwards and Vincent, it never bothered to discover me.
I am sure the other two will agree that Vincent gave the lie to another cliché which is that “You may like the writing, but the chances are you will be disappointed by the writer“, a truth which is borne out by most of the literary biographies that poison our shelves.
Vincent was beloved by everyone who met him. He wrote what he was: witty, urbane, sensitive, funny and all the good things you could think of. He died tragically early of leukaemia because God is selfish and wants to keep all the good people to himself.
Happily you can meet him again. Another mutual friend, Revel Barker, has just republished a dazzling collection of his columns, “The Best of Vincent Mulchrone”, which is a lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow human beings by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter.
You can order a copy online from revelbarker@gmail.com. It will cost you £9.99, plus postage, and all royalties are going to research into the fight against leukaemia, the disease which robbed the world of a man it could ill afford to lose at the woefully early age of 54.
The last paragraph in this funny, loving book is: “When I go, give me a Basin St funeral band, Belgian black horses with plumes, a stop at the tap room of The Hermit, and lots of ham. It won’t bother me, mate. But it might just take the miserable look off your face.”
And if it doesn’t, his book certainly will.
FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER
“Melvin Buckhart, aged 94, was a fairground sideshow performer known as the Human Blockhead because of his ability to drive a five-inch nail or an ice pick into his head without flinching.
The Human Blockhead worked under a number of alternative titles, depending on which of his extraordinary repertoire of physical contortions he happened to be performing at the time.
As the Anatomical Wonder he could inflate one lung at a time and dislocate his shoulders; as the Man Without a Stomach, he could suck his stomach back into his spine; as the Two Faced Man, he could frown with half his face and smile with the other half. Among many accomplishments he swallowed swords, threw knives and ate fire.
He was universally admired by his fellow performers, one of whom observed: “Anyone who has ever hammered a five-inch nail into his nose owes a large debt of gratitude to Melvin Buckhart.”
Daily Telegraph, Novdmber 2001
Saturday, 17 May 2008
It is a tonic...so far
A little late in life, two decades from my century in fact, I have discovered the pleasures of listening to music. I have always enjoyed music as a background to reading, and occasionally to writing, but was constitutionally incapable of listening when unoccupied.
Oddly enough, my wife’s polymath uncle Sidney had the same block, as he once confided to me.
Uncle Sidney was fortunate: he had two supremely musical friends, Arnold Haskell, the man who invented the word Balletomane and founded the Royal Ballet School and Harry Edwards, a languages master at Clifton College with a wide knowledge of music.
My teacher has been David Mellor, a former Minister for Culture who now has a Sunday programme on Classic FM, “If you liked that, you will like this”, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Listening to him is costing me a fortune. My CD collection grows apace.
If there is a hierarchy in art, the crown must go to music. Both in creation and execution it leaves the other arts far behind.
The fine poet, and singularly unpleasant man, R.S. Thomas once observed to me that contemporary poetry was clever but it wasn’t poetry. He said it was copy writing. It plays with words in much the same way as a car ad. The painter Sir Kyffin Williams described the painting tradition as being like building a house. Each generation added a room but developed it from the rooms that had already been built by earlier generations. Alas, he said, modern painters were wreckers, not builders. My own trade of writing has long since run out of things to say. By far the best and most imaginative writing today is the detective novel. Music alone dazzles with its imagination and logic.
It was not always thus. Music acted on me like Mogadon. Especially opera. I have fallen asleep in every major opera house in Europe: in Rome during the overture to a particularly enervating production of “La Vestale”, to the dismay of other members of the audience.
“Don’t worry,” my wife reassured them, “he will wake up the moment the bar opens for the interval.”
My first experience of opera was a Carl Rosa 1950s' production of “Aida”, a story of war between Egypt and Ethiopia and the only occasion in military history when the Egyptian army won a battle.
By the fifties Carl Rosa was in decline. More your Carl Sinka. The Egyptian army in the production was down to platoon strength; the tomb in which hero and heroine are immured collapsed under the weight of a soprano. The company's scenery made the cardboard walls of Prisoner Cell Block 'H', that jewel among programmes, granite-like in comparison.
In “The Flying Dutchman” the eponymous tenor was instantly grounded
when the flies fell on him. So pinched were the productions that in “La Boheme” it was the audience's imagination and not Mimi's tiny hand that was frozen.
It is not that I did not try. I went to Birmingham to see my third production of "Aida" - the second in Bielefeld was memorable mostly for a tomb the size, and indeed the thickness, of a golf umbrella. This third production was in the Sports Arena, which holds fourteen thousand people and is the size of a large village. Massive cast, including an army, which had it been available to the Egyptians in the Six Day War would have got them a result; and a River Nile in which I swear I saw trout.
I was converted.
I do not claim I will ever become as attached to opera as my late Uncle Tommy, a road digger in Edinburgh who discovered grand opera late in life when my father played him a recording of Bjorling singing "None Shall Sleep", at which he could give Pavarotti three blacks. Uncle Tommy blew his life savings, amassed over the previous week because he was sadly improvident, on a radiogram and all the arias he could cram into a carrier bag.
I do have one musical connection. When I met the great baritone Geraint Evans I asked him how he created his famous stage make ups. He said he based them on people he had met.
" If I had known you at the time I would have based Falsaff on you"
I think it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
DANGEROUS CUTTING FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER: Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978:
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Me Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr Thirsty. “Telling him the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died.”
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Oddly enough, my wife’s polymath uncle Sidney had the same block, as he once confided to me.
Uncle Sidney was fortunate: he had two supremely musical friends, Arnold Haskell, the man who invented the word Balletomane and founded the Royal Ballet School and Harry Edwards, a languages master at Clifton College with a wide knowledge of music.
My teacher has been David Mellor, a former Minister for Culture who now has a Sunday programme on Classic FM, “If you liked that, you will like this”, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Listening to him is costing me a fortune. My CD collection grows apace.
If there is a hierarchy in art, the crown must go to music. Both in creation and execution it leaves the other arts far behind.
The fine poet, and singularly unpleasant man, R.S. Thomas once observed to me that contemporary poetry was clever but it wasn’t poetry. He said it was copy writing. It plays with words in much the same way as a car ad. The painter Sir Kyffin Williams described the painting tradition as being like building a house. Each generation added a room but developed it from the rooms that had already been built by earlier generations. Alas, he said, modern painters were wreckers, not builders. My own trade of writing has long since run out of things to say. By far the best and most imaginative writing today is the detective novel. Music alone dazzles with its imagination and logic.
It was not always thus. Music acted on me like Mogadon. Especially opera. I have fallen asleep in every major opera house in Europe: in Rome during the overture to a particularly enervating production of “La Vestale”, to the dismay of other members of the audience.
“Don’t worry,” my wife reassured them, “he will wake up the moment the bar opens for the interval.”
My first experience of opera was a Carl Rosa 1950s' production of “Aida”, a story of war between Egypt and Ethiopia and the only occasion in military history when the Egyptian army won a battle.
By the fifties Carl Rosa was in decline. More your Carl Sinka. The Egyptian army in the production was down to platoon strength; the tomb in which hero and heroine are immured collapsed under the weight of a soprano. The company's scenery made the cardboard walls of Prisoner Cell Block 'H', that jewel among programmes, granite-like in comparison.
In “The Flying Dutchman” the eponymous tenor was instantly grounded
when the flies fell on him. So pinched were the productions that in “La Boheme” it was the audience's imagination and not Mimi's tiny hand that was frozen.
It is not that I did not try. I went to Birmingham to see my third production of "Aida" - the second in Bielefeld was memorable mostly for a tomb the size, and indeed the thickness, of a golf umbrella. This third production was in the Sports Arena, which holds fourteen thousand people and is the size of a large village. Massive cast, including an army, which had it been available to the Egyptians in the Six Day War would have got them a result; and a River Nile in which I swear I saw trout.
I was converted.
I do not claim I will ever become as attached to opera as my late Uncle Tommy, a road digger in Edinburgh who discovered grand opera late in life when my father played him a recording of Bjorling singing "None Shall Sleep", at which he could give Pavarotti three blacks. Uncle Tommy blew his life savings, amassed over the previous week because he was sadly improvident, on a radiogram and all the arias he could cram into a carrier bag.
I do have one musical connection. When I met the great baritone Geraint Evans I asked him how he created his famous stage make ups. He said he based them on people he had met.
" If I had known you at the time I would have based Falsaff on you"
I think it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
DANGEROUS CUTTING FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER: Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978:
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Me Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr Thirsty. “Telling him the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died.”
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Friday, 9 May 2008
SOME NECK……………………………………………………….
Churchill is accused of enjoying the war in “Human Smoke”, Nicholas Baker’s controversial history of World War 2 which was published this week. It would be surprising if he had not. His career until that date had consisted of a series of spectacular mistakes. To end it in a burst of martial glory which eclipsed that of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough was a gift many a pensioner would envy.
It is some years since the historian Noble Frankland pointed out that Churchill believed air support on a battlefield would add a complication without conferring an advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable.
According to Frankland, Churchill thought that neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that aerial mines would be better defence than radar. He was responsible for Gallipoli in 1915 and for the disastrous campaign in Norway in 1940. He sent the “Prince of Wales” and the “Repulse” to Singapore, ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it. On the eve of Victory in Europe he summoned the Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for an alliance with the German Army for an attack on Russia. He famously agreed to a plan to bomb defenceless tribesmen and said he would not object to the use on them of poison gas.
Biographies of his mother show him to have been constantly urging her to further his career. Only her intervention saved him from involvement in a homosexual scandal in his regiment and his odious son recounted with glee how his father had slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle when a fire necessitated guests sharing a bed. Asked how it was he replied, according to Randolph, “Very musical.”
Difficult not to believe that with him the pen was mightier than the sword when he got in first with his History of the War, making him his own most passionate advocate.
Another chum from broadcasting days is the Earl of Norwich, who every Christmas sends his friends “Christmas Cracker”, a collection of cuttings and quotations which have amused him during the year. On payment of a fiver to John Julius’s favourite charity ‘Venice in Peril’, for which he works tirelessly, I am allowed to reproduce them here. This one is worth every penny.
From an Exeter newspaper:
Donna Challice, a thirty-year-old single mother of three from Devon, has appeared in court accused of failing properly to recycle her household waste. Mrs Challice was being prosecuted for “contaminating recyclable rubbish” under the Environmental Protection Act. She has now been released on bail and will next appear on 5 June 2006 for a pre-trial review.
The Environmental Protection Act specifically states which types of recyclable items must be cleaned and placed in which containers on which days. Mrs Challice has been accused of putting items in the wrong bin on six separate occasions over the last year. She claims that the rules are confusing and that any offence that she may have committed was completely by accident.
Arthur Dimson, Director of Waste Disposal for the Exeter City Council, has dismissed Mrs Challice’s claim saying that:
“It’s quite simple really. On the second and fourth Monday of each month, plastics go in the red bins and aluminium in the blue bins. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month - providing there has already been a first Monday - paper goes in the red containers and other non-aluminium metals go in the blue containers. If there hasn’t been a first Monday, the schedule is pushed back a week. On alternating Wednesdays, glass goes into the red cans and miscellaneous recyclable refuse goes into the blue cans. On Thursdays, non-recyclable refuse may be put into either the red or the blue receptacles. All discards must be washed except clothing – which may be either washed or dry-cleaned depending on the fabric – and paper. Paper with coloured printing should only be placed in the red cans on the first Tuesday of each month. Paper with only black ink may be placed in the red containers on any other qualifying Tuesday. On weekends the bins are to remain empty for cleaning. These rules are all posted on the bottom of each recycling bin. So it’s not as if people have to memorise them.”
He added:
“Mrs Challice could wait until the weekend and look in the bottom of the empty bin to refresh her memory on the rules.”
MY OWN DANGEROUS CUTTING
It began as an April Fool’s joke. An online poll asked villagers of Audlem, Cheshire, whether they would like to break away from England and become Welsh. So far more than 66 per cent of the 333 respondents have registered support for the motion.
The village is nine miles from Wales and residents have long looked with envy at their neighbours’ free NHS prescriptions.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
It is some years since the historian Noble Frankland pointed out that Churchill believed air support on a battlefield would add a complication without conferring an advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable.
According to Frankland, Churchill thought that neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that aerial mines would be better defence than radar. He was responsible for Gallipoli in 1915 and for the disastrous campaign in Norway in 1940. He sent the “Prince of Wales” and the “Repulse” to Singapore, ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it. On the eve of Victory in Europe he summoned the Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for an alliance with the German Army for an attack on Russia. He famously agreed to a plan to bomb defenceless tribesmen and said he would not object to the use on them of poison gas.
Biographies of his mother show him to have been constantly urging her to further his career. Only her intervention saved him from involvement in a homosexual scandal in his regiment and his odious son recounted with glee how his father had slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle when a fire necessitated guests sharing a bed. Asked how it was he replied, according to Randolph, “Very musical.”
Difficult not to believe that with him the pen was mightier than the sword when he got in first with his History of the War, making him his own most passionate advocate.
Another chum from broadcasting days is the Earl of Norwich, who every Christmas sends his friends “Christmas Cracker”, a collection of cuttings and quotations which have amused him during the year. On payment of a fiver to John Julius’s favourite charity ‘Venice in Peril’, for which he works tirelessly, I am allowed to reproduce them here. This one is worth every penny.
From an Exeter newspaper:
Donna Challice, a thirty-year-old single mother of three from Devon, has appeared in court accused of failing properly to recycle her household waste. Mrs Challice was being prosecuted for “contaminating recyclable rubbish” under the Environmental Protection Act. She has now been released on bail and will next appear on 5 June 2006 for a pre-trial review.
The Environmental Protection Act specifically states which types of recyclable items must be cleaned and placed in which containers on which days. Mrs Challice has been accused of putting items in the wrong bin on six separate occasions over the last year. She claims that the rules are confusing and that any offence that she may have committed was completely by accident.
Arthur Dimson, Director of Waste Disposal for the Exeter City Council, has dismissed Mrs Challice’s claim saying that:
“It’s quite simple really. On the second and fourth Monday of each month, plastics go in the red bins and aluminium in the blue bins. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month - providing there has already been a first Monday - paper goes in the red containers and other non-aluminium metals go in the blue containers. If there hasn’t been a first Monday, the schedule is pushed back a week. On alternating Wednesdays, glass goes into the red cans and miscellaneous recyclable refuse goes into the blue cans. On Thursdays, non-recyclable refuse may be put into either the red or the blue receptacles. All discards must be washed except clothing – which may be either washed or dry-cleaned depending on the fabric – and paper. Paper with coloured printing should only be placed in the red cans on the first Tuesday of each month. Paper with only black ink may be placed in the red containers on any other qualifying Tuesday. On weekends the bins are to remain empty for cleaning. These rules are all posted on the bottom of each recycling bin. So it’s not as if people have to memorise them.”
He added:
“Mrs Challice could wait until the weekend and look in the bottom of the empty bin to refresh her memory on the rules.”
MY OWN DANGEROUS CUTTING
It began as an April Fool’s joke. An online poll asked villagers of Audlem, Cheshire, whether they would like to break away from England and become Welsh. So far more than 66 per cent of the 333 respondents have registered support for the motion.
The village is nine miles from Wales and residents have long looked with envy at their neighbours’ free NHS prescriptions.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
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